City-Wide Open Studios
New Haven's City-Wide Open Studios, founded by Marianne Bernstein, Helen Kauder, and Linn Meyers, is an annual celebration of contemporary art in all its myriad forms, and is Connecticut's leading visual arts festival. Over the past 13 years, art dealers and curators from the region have used CWOS as a resource to discover new artists, plan upcoming shows, and buy art. One of the largest Open Studios programs in the country, CWOS unites hundreds of local artists with the Greater New Haven community
CWOS aims to: 1) Connect visual artists to the public and each other 2) Provide a forum for showing and selling artwork that is open to all artists 3) Foster community pride in visual artists and their contributions to a thriving city. 4) Draw thousands of visitors from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and beyond to explore all that New Haven has to offer 5) Showcase vacant historic properties by using them as exhibition space, contributing to their revitalization for other uses.
This three weekend event includes a main hub exhibition featuring a representative work by each participating artist at Artspace’s gallery on Orange street; a weekend devoted to the studios at Erector Square, site of what was once the factory making Erector Sets; a private gallery weekend complete with bike tours and on occasion, guided bus tours; and, finally, the unique factor that makes CWOS stand apart from all open studios festivals, the Alternative Space weekend. At the “AltSpace,” artists without access to a studio as well as artists from elsewhere in Connecticut show their work in a vacant historic properties that Artspace adapts into exhibition spaces, aiding in their redevelopment. Past spaces have included the Olin Metals Research Laboratory, the Pirelli Building, and the former Hamden Middle School. Through the alternative space project, CWOS connects artists and the public with different neighborhoods of New Haven every year. The site for 2010's CWOS was a vacant downtown strip mall and mid-century office building, currently being redeveloped by the COOP Center for Creativity.
“No other cultural event…brings the city so close together and involves the city so intensely.”—The New Haven AdvocateRead more about this topic: Artspace
Famous quotes containing the word open:
“As to what we call the masses, and common men;Mthere are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)