A reflection on my Open Studio at Erector Square, New Haven, CT in October 2016, and what it means to make art in a city with this much history.
A Weekend That Stayed With Me
My Open Studio at Erector Square back in October 2016 was, simply put, a blast. The building hummed with energy, art collectors, enthusiasts, and a wonderful cross-section of local New Haven artists all moving through the space, looking, talking, connecting. I exhibited new work from my current series "From Within", including The Temple Within (36" × 36", Oil on Canvas), and the conversations that unfolded around the work were exactly the kind that remind you why you show your art publicly in the first place.
But beyond the event itself, I kept thinking about where we were, and what it means to make art in New Haven.
Erector Square: Industry Transformed
Erector Square is not a purpose-built arts center. It is a repurposed industrial complex, the former home of the A.C. Gilbert Company, which manufactured the iconic Erector Set toys that shaped the imaginations of generations of American children. That history is embedded in the walls. There is something fitting about artists occupying a space once devoted to building, assembling, and constructing. The impulse is not so different.
New Haven has always been a city where making things matters. That tradition runs deep, deeper, perhaps, than most people realize.
Eli Whitney and the Culture of Making
You cannot talk about New Haven's history of craft and innovation without invoking Eli Whitney. Whitney lived and worked in the New Haven area and is best known for the cotton gin, but his more lasting contribution may be his development of interchangeable parts and early manufacturing systems that laid the groundwork for American industrial production.
What strikes me about Whitney's legacy, seen from an artist's perspective, is the underlying philosophy: that precision, repeatability, and craft are not opposites of creativity. They are its infrastructure. Every series I work in, every geometric form I return to, carries something of that logic. The discipline of the system is what makes the expression possible.
Standing in Erector Square, itself a monument to American manufacturing ingenuity, with my own work on the walls, that lineage felt very present. That connection to New Haven's creative institutions deepened further when I had the opportunity to work at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art as an artist-in-residence, an experience that brought the city's layered history of making into direct conversation with my own practice.
Josef Albers and the Yale Legacy
New Haven's artistic heritage is equally formidable. Josef Albers came to Yale in 1950 to chair the Department of Design, and his influence on American art education, and on the way artists think about color, form, and perception, cannot be overstated. His Homage to the Square series, developed largely during his Yale years, remains one of the most rigorous and beautiful investigations of color relationships in the history of modern art.
Albers taught that seeing is a skill, that color is never absolute, always relational, always dependent on context. That lesson has shaped my own approach to palette and composition in ways I continue to discover. I've written more about his influence in How Josef Albers Shaped the Way I See Color.
To show work in New Haven, in a city where Albers walked, taught, and made, carries a weight I don't take lightly.
Art Philosophy: What Connects It All
What ties Whitney's legacy, Albers' color theory, and the energy of an open studio together is, I think, a shared commitment to intentional making. Whether you are designing a system for producing rifle parts, investigating how a yellow square changes when surrounded by grey, or building a body of work around the idea of what lies within, the discipline is the same. You show up. You look carefully. You make decisions with rigor and with feeling.
But intentional making doesn't always mean control. Sometimes the most honest work comes from knowing when to let go, when to follow the painting rather than lead it. I explored that tension in Ebb and Flow Abstract Painting: When Surrender Becomes Creation, which gets at something essential about how I work.
That is the philosophy I try to bring to my own practice. If you want to go deeper on that, I'd point you to Artist Philosophy: Minimalist Landscape Art, where I lay out the principles that guide my approach to abstraction and form.
What's Coming
A lot is happening in my art sphere right now, and I look forward to sharing more. The From Within series continues to evolve, and events like this one, where the work meets real people in real space, are essential fuel for that process.
One of the directions I've been thinking about deeply is the relationship between art and social history, how the work we make reflects the world we inhabit. I explored that directly in Women's Rights: An Artist's Perspective, Why This Exhibition Matters More Than Ever, which speaks to why showing up and making visible work on difficult subjects is, for me, inseparable from the practice itself.
Thank you to everyone who came through Erector Square. The conversations meant everything.
Explore the Work
If the ideas here resonate, I invite you to explore the original paintings and collage works currently available. If you are new to collecting geometric abstract art, the complete guide to collecting geometric abstract art is a good place to start.
Follow along on Instagram for studio updates and new work.
