- Support provided by The Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation For Public Giving, the State of Connecticut Office of film, television, and digital media and Connecticut Humanities.

(car engine starting) (upbeat rock music) (calm acoustic music) - Hi, I'm Ray Hardman.

And welcome to the final episode of season two of Where Art Thou?

Today we're in Connecticut's quiet corner.

This quaint part of the state is dotted with old mill towns, farmland and dense forest.

But when it comes to artists, the quiet corner is anything but.

Now to help us learn a little more about what's happening in this part of the state, I have our Where Art Thou quiet corner curator, Bruce John on the line.

Bruce is the co-director and co-founder of Bread Box Theater in Willimantic.

Bruce, are you there?

- I'm here Ray, excited to talk to you about all the great art in our area.

- Oh, I can't wait.

First, tell me a little bit about Bread Box?

- The Bread Box Theater is a little hundred seat theater that my wife Theresa and I founded 13 years ago.

We found out that the soup kitchen was being sold.

So we tried to help out by creating a community theater.

And in the last 13 years of doing folk programs, we've raised over 251,000 dollars in this little theater to donate, to help fight food insecurity in Eastern Connecticut.

So you can go to breadboxfolk.org and find out how to get tickets.

And every dime we make, it's all volunteer, goes right to Covenant Soup Kitchen.

- That's fantastic.

Bruce, tell me a little bit about the art scene in Willimantic.

- It's a real, real melting pot of music and of all the other arts.

Painting and sculpture and pottery.

It's just, all the artists gather around the Willimantic area and they're so well received and supported.

It's a real beautiful thing to see.

- So I'm excited to learn a little bit more about some of the artists here.

Where are you taking me today?

- Today, we're gonna take a ride up Main Street, Ray - to the Kerri Gallery.

And Kerri Quirk is the artist at the Kerri gallery.

She's a deaf woman with Autism.

For many years was frustrated because she was holding in such amazing talent.

She's a painter that has a special gift for color design and pattern.

Her paintings are magnificent.

Camp Horizons who sponsors her, are able to give her this gallery, Actually done some shows there to help pay her rent.

She's a force to be reckoned with.

Her paintings are just magnificent.

That's the only word I can use.

And then we're gonna take a ride to the Julia De Burgos Poetry Park, where we're gonna get a reading from Sean Frederick Forbes.

He's a poet, he's a writer.

He's also a professor at UConn and in charge of their creative writing program.

He does have a, a Caribbean heritage.

And what fascinated me is he co-edited a book called The Beiging of America.

He's quite a force and his work is very, very important.

- Well, this all sounds so fantastic.

I can't wait to get started.

Hey Bruce, thank you so much.

You did a fantastic job.

- My joy and keep driving.

Keep your eyes on the road, Ray, okay?

(ray laughing) - Will do, will do.

Thank you so much, Bruce.

(soft relaxing music) - [Tom] She's definitely in her element right now.

- [Ray] Yeah, yeah.

- [Tom] She just enjoys painting.

- [Ray] Mmhm, mm hm.

- She just enjoys it.

Even with us standing here.

You can tell she's comfortable.

Usually she'll make some sounds like, eh, I don't really want you here.

- [Ray] Yeah, yeah.

She has such a grasp of color.

- [Tom] She does.

- [Ray] It's amazing.

- [Tom] You walk in the gallery and it's like wakes you up.

- [Ray] Yeah, yeah.

- Then you can see she does very simple things at times.

- Mmhm.

- Like that tiger over there, but yeah.

Other ones are really complex.

So there's been different phases.

- Yeah.

So we're here on Main Street in Willimantic at the studio of Kerri Quirk.

Kerri has autism.

She's also deaf.

We're sitting down with two people very close to Kerri.

We have Chris McNaboe from Horizons.

We also have Tom Bernard, who is Carrie's coach and mentor.

Thank you for inviting us here.

Beautiful studio you have here.

- Thank you for coming.

This is a great opportunity.

- Yeah, Chris, tell me about Horizons and your affiliation with Kerri.

- Horizons and Carrie have been partnered together for over 40 years.

She was a teenager and her parents signed her up to come to summer camp, our residential camp in South Windham like many other folks were at that time.

And when we opened our very first group home, Kerri was one of the people that was a resident of the group home.

And it was because we found an adult ed art class that was happening in town, that we just tried that out.

And the, the woman that was teaching, the artist that was teaching it said, she's really got some talent, can I work with her?

And we kind of crossed our fingers and said, yes, if Kerri wants to, we'd love to have that happen.

And the rest is history, and she's really a person that expresses herself through her artwork.

And that's her voice.

Her artwork is her voice.

- [Ray] Tom, tell me about your association with Kerri.

- I came on board about 18 years ago.

We go out exploring, we go to galleries and museums and such.

I mean, she basically paints every minute of the day.

I get to paint at the same time, which she likes to see me working.

- Yeah, yeah.

And you've talked about it a little bit, but tell me a little bit more about Kerri.

- Well, she's really her own person.

And if we, if we had a nickel to know what was going on in her mind every day, we'd be wealthy.

She's got a host of things that she's always processing and it comes out in her artwork.

It really does.

We have taken her to many different places.

Tom takes her to galleries and they paint outside with other artists.

So she has a lot of exposure to other beautiful things.

And she sees what other artists are painting.

And that inspires her, I think, to want to paint certain things.

And I think Kerri has been inspired by Tom's work because you can see at certain eras in her work.

When Tom was working on things that had a lot of pointalism in it, very, very detailed, she tried that technique out herself and you can see how it worked for her in a number of her paintings.

And we've shown her other things that she can do and that she's good at, and she seems to enjoy it.

So.

- [Ray] Yeah.

- We keep, we keep it going.

- Yeah.

I've been looking at electrical boxes around Willimantic and they, and they've got, Kerri's like signature on them.

What is that?

Did she enjoy doing those?

- She did enjoy those.

That was during the pandemic when the gallery was actually closed.

And we wanted to make sure that her art work was still able to be viewed by the public.

So we had the idea to start painting outside and she really enjoyed being out there and transferring the images that she had put on canvas onto those boxes.

And people were very excited about it.

And they gave her a lot of positive reinforcement.

- What is her process?

- [Tom] What is her process?

- When she sits down, with an empty canvas?

- That's a good question because like Chris said, you know, she's so focused in her own mind.

She sets up every morning.

We come in and she has a morning cup of tea.

That's a ritual.

And uh, she gets all her paints out and everything out and spreads it all out on the table.

And like, she sits there for a few minutes and looks at what she's gonna be doing.

And, from there she just proceeds and starts, and she does this meditation kind of thing where she'll paint for a minute and then stop and then paint.

And she's literally back there the whole day.

- And some of the things you can tell about, I think how she's feeling about herself and her painting, when you see her signature and the signature on some paintings is in the corner, not really prominent.

And in other paintings, it's half of the painting and it's the color.

Sometimes the paint color that she chooses for her signature is not even in the painting.

And sometimes it's very much blends in and you can't even see it.

And sometimes, and, and the dot of the eye of, of her name is found in all different places in different paintings, which I, I find fascinating.

I think it's just a way of how she's expressing herself.

And she always dates it with the year that she's painted the painting, so, it's her own, it's her own system of keeping track of things.

- [Ray] Yeah.

She's working from a, a photograph here or, or another painting maybe, but she's added so much more to it.

- Right.

Right, yep.

That's her interpretation, you know?

- Mmhm.

- That's what's nice.

I mean, she can work from a photo, but you almost wouldn't recognize the photo on some of these, you know.

They're so different than what she comes up with in the painting.

- Yeah.

- Like that flower.

If you saw the photo of that, you would say that's the same?

- [Ray] Mmhm.

Right, right.

- [Tom] Yeah.

- [Ray] How do you coach talent like this?

- Actually I don't, I mean, she's already developed her own style and skills and um, I'm sort of her support to get where she needs to get.

You know, with paints and so forth and her daily routine to keep her comfortable, keep her in her zone.

- [Ray] Right, right.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Tom, you're an artist in your own right.

- Yes.

- I mean, where do you think this source of, of beauty comes from?

- [Tom] That's a hard question.

It's like my own art.

I would say from within her.

- [Ray] Mmhm.

- [Tom] You know, there's, she knows what she's doing and you don't have to tell her to do this or do that anymore.

She has that gift inside that she just reaches in and creates.

- Well, some truly inspiring art from an amazing artist.

Off to a great start here in the quiet corner.

Up next, it's what's in your attic?

This time we head out to Shaboo Productions and get a glimpse into Connecticut's rock and roll past.

Let's check it out.

So we're here with David Foster at Shaboo Productions.

I've known about Shaboo Inn, since I moved to Connecticut in the mid nineties, so I'm so glad to meet you.

- It's a pleasure to meet you Ray.

- Before we start looking at all the amazing stuff in here, and I gotta say, this whole warehouse is a musician gearhead dream.

- [David] We call it the toy box.

(ray laughing) - You should just have tours of people coming in to see all this amazing stuff.

But I want to get to, to Shaboo Inn.

- Okay.

- Tell me about the significance of that precious time in the seventies and, and eighties.

- It was virtually the, the real start of my musical career.

I, I was singing before that, but in the summer of 1970, I started thinking, you know, I wanna have my own club.

So in the summer of 71, I had picked a place to, to open, picked my partners and borrowed the money at 19 years old.

- That's amazing.

- That was the start of it.

And the second week I was open, I had Aerosmith there.

- Oh my gosh.

- For four nights, yeah.

- Wow, a young Aerosmith?

- This exact same band as today.

Same exact musicians.

- Same line up and everything.

- I hired Stevie Tyler myself on the side of the stage and I paid them 700 dollars for four nights.

It was a dollar to get in and we bought you the first drink.

- Yeah.

How did, how did, you know, this 19 year old kid, buys a bar and starts bringing in, I mean countless famous acts?

How did, how did that ball get rolling?

- We'd advertise in the rags, like the advocates, New Haven, Fairfield, Hartford, Springfield, the big agents in New York.

That's how they would see who was doing what.

So they went look at this place in Willimantic.

They got Muddy Waters, BB King's in there, James Cotton, you know, let's send them some contemporary stuff.

Call 'em and sell 'em Tower Power, sell him Dr John.

And then all of a sudden, the rock agents saw the same thing.

And they said, you see that place in Willimantic?

They had Aerosmith there, blah, blah.

Let's sell 'em Rick Derringer, and Danny Hartman, and Johnny Winter.

Let's start selling them some rock and roll stuff.

(ray laughing) All of a sudden, you know, they're all calling, everybody's calling.

- [Ray] So what do we have here, David?

- Here's a couple of nice shots where you get to see the club.

That was like, you know, 800 kids in that room.

- [Ray] Yeah, yeah.

- And Taj Mahal was on stage.

I mean, you know.

- [Ray] That's a big stage.

- But I mean, how about that headline?

You couldn't buy that headline for a million dollars.

- Lou Rolls, I see there.

- He was playing the cabaret at Mohegan Sun and he said, you know, I've heard you're a good singer.

Do you mind if I drop in?

And I said, yeah, come on over and sing a song.

(ray laughing) There's Muddy Waters down this way.

- [Ray] Oh, that's you on the left?

- That's me on the left.

And my drummer, Jackie on the right, yeah.

Chuck Berry was playing with my band.

- [Ray] Yeah.

- Ray Charles with my band.

- [Ray] So when did Shaboo cease to exist?

- We opened October 22nd, 71.

Closed May 13th, 1982.

- Mmhm.

- It burned on August 13th, Friday the 13th, 1982.

What it did, is it gave me a license to sing them blues.

- [Ray] Mmhm.

- Because I really had the blues after that, 'cause I was, I had to start all over again.

- Right.

- So then I took a job at the booking agency and I learned how to book, which was easy because I had been a buyer all those years and I knew what the bookers were doing and what they were saying, 'cause they were selling, saying it to me.

- [Ray] Right, right.

- But for, for 10 years I was a seller.

So I've done every side of the business and then it came to production, which is downstairs.

And this has been the most successful thing in my life.

- [Ray] Well, David let's, let's go have a trip downstairs and see some of the other stuff.

This is great.

- [David] All right.

Here's some hall of fame stuff.

The original Marshall Tucker band before anybody died.

Willie Nelson, look at how young he was.

Vassar Clements with the Fiddler.

Fleetwood Mac man.

Look at Springsteen as a kid.

- [Ray] Oh, look at him.

- 500 bucks a night I had him contracted for.

(ray laughing) Jimmy Buffett, a thousand bucks a night, he used to play my place.

- David, let me ask you a question.

Is there, is there like one memorable night at Shaboo that sticks in your brain?

- There was so many good ones, man.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean when you have a lineup like this, I mean.

- I mean, when Hall & Oates are singing in your bar and Todd Rundgren singing in your bar.

- [Ray] Yeah.

- The Cars are singing in your bar and you know, we ended up with 25 national hall of famers in a, in a bar room.

- [Ray] In Willimantic.

- In Willimantic, Connecticut.

- [Ray] Yeah.

- It's totally unheard of.

- Well David, thank you for showing us all this and telling your, your stories about the old Shaboo Inn.

I wish I lived in Connecticut during that time.

- [David] You would've loved it.

- [Ray] I would've loved it.

- You would've loved it.

I would've had you in the front row.

(ray laughing) We would've found you a farfisa organ.

- I love it.

(both laughing) - Thank you.

- Yeah, thanks so much.

- All right.

- [Ray] All the best.

- [David] Yeah.

- Well we have one last stop on this great day here in the quiet corner.

We're gonna meet up with poet, Sean Frederick Forbes.

And I think it's only appropriate that we do the interview in Willimantic.

I mean, after all Curbstone Press got its start in Willimantic in the 1970s and they've published many works by prominent poets.

Let's check it out.

So we're here with poet, Sean Frederick Forbes.

We're here at Julia De Burgos Park in Willimantic, a beautiful spot for, for poetry readings.

And you've, you've been here before.

- Yes, I read here about 11 years ago.

- Uh huh.

- And I'll be reading here the end of the month as well.

- Tell me about your journey as a poet.

Where did you get started?

How did you get started?

- So I always wrote.

When I was a kid, I was always writing, I was always doodling, I was always drawing.

And what I liked about poetry was being able to kind of encapsulate into an artifact of words and experience.

So one can create an entire experience, an entire visual mode of thought for a person in 150 words, sometimes even less.

And so I started writing poetry in college, Queens college, the city university of New York.

I studied with Kimiko Hahn there, who was an American book award winner.

And she was the first person who told me, I think you have a poetic ear and eye.

I think you should carry this on.

And I've been at it ever since, and I haven't stopped.

- How did going to school and learning from a poet inform your poetry?

- I think she opened me up to a new sense of understanding poetry that I had never really envisioned before.

- Yeah.

- She was able to teach us how one could use punctuation for dramatic pauses or to allow for a visual pause on the page, which is something I didn't realize free verse was able to do.

So there's like a metrics to it that I was able to understand.

And I think if it wasn't for Kimiko Hahn I wouldn't have had that understanding of, of free verse, which is primarily what I write in right now.

Sunny and chilly, visitors saunter through the gatehouse, infants swaddled in pinks and blues, their parents wearing lime green parkas.

The crunch and skid of loose gravel underfoot echoes as teenagers on class trips run and giggle.

Some wander off with a boy or girl, hide behind a watch tower as they grope each other, make out.

Elderly women readjust patterned silk scarves over chic cashmere coats, smokey eau de parfum waves.

Elderly men take off their woolen page boy caps when indoors, twist gold signet rings, stale cigar musk lingers.

We follow Carl, our tour guide, walking past the stone foundations of what's left of the camp barracks, built in 1937 with a life expectancy of 10 to 15 years.

We enter the crematorium, our final stop.

Some with somber contemplative faces.

After he's done speaking, a family group asks him to take their picture.

And as Carl finds the right angle, he tells them to smile.

I notice his slight horror, but they ask for different poses, goofy grins and ruckus laughter, frozen in digital time.

After having scoffed at their posing, I realize that visiting Dachau had been on my bucket list too.

- You head the creative writing program at UConn?

- Yes, I direct the creative writing program at UConn.

- What do you tell a student that shows promise as a poet?

- I tell them to read as widely as they possibly can.

And I think reading really is fundamental and it's one of the ways in which I learn to become a better writer.

Not only just poetry, but when it comes to writing an email, when it comes to writing a letter of recommendation, you have to know how to pair words down.

It allows you to understand that there are different voices.

There are different ways to present oneself on the page.

I'm a poet who loves reading non-fiction and fiction.

I go to those genres for sources of information all the time.

And, and I read as many poets as I possibly can.

Granted sometimes I read the same poem over and over and over again.

- Sure.

- Because it's like a mantra, it's this calling, it's something that summons me back to the poetic form.

- Yeah.

How do you help a student find their own voice?

- Whenever I'm teaching introduction to creative writing, that is the actual subject that we focus on, which is finding your own artistic or, or poetic voice.

And, I think it's listening to the, to one's heartbeat, trying to figure out what one wants to convey and how one convey it.

So trying to be true to your spoken voice, your everyday voice, but also trying to be true to who this voice is on the page as well or on the screen, right?

It really just depends on what their, their discipline is.

But it's, it's, it's really tapping into that source of power that comes from within.

Like the core of who one is.

In ancient Ada, bogs were sacred spots, a cool spongy wetland mirage, meters deep of peat during ill fated drought.

Greenish brown landscape of mystery.

Insufferably slow plant stocks.

What must a farmer have thought as his wife offered a vessel of golden butter to appease a merciless deity?

He plunges his hand deep into the bog, brings a handful of mossy soil to his eyes, squeezes and watches as his hairy forearms are stained to rust.

At home he listens to the tink tink of his wife's dull, bronze bracelets against her worn wrists.

He thinks about the young King's wife in all her finery.

Would that Queen of hope, sacrifice her amulets to bring good rain?

No.

He turns his sight to the King's body of regular stature, imperially slim.

Easy to force him back to the russet hill of his initiation, bludgeon him, revel in his failure, break at least two limbs, watch him writhe.

Listen, as he squeaks for help, twist his body into the fetal position, cradle him as offering.

Trust this delicate flesh will nourish the goddesses appetite.

- For me, poetry's one of those art forms that seems really daring and maybe even scary.

Would you agree with that?

- Definitely.

I think what tends to happen is that once again, you're encapsulating a moment into a small space of time on the page.

And I think what tends to happen is that, the listener or the reader is expecting so much of the poet.

- Yeah.

- On the page.

Right?

And you as the poet are expecting so much of yourself.

And you, you want to make sure you have the proper line length, you want to make sure you have the right title or the right imagery, the right metaphors.

And so there's, there's a lot on the line for a poet.

But I think, I think too, one of the things that I realize whenever I'm writing a poem is that eventually I have to abandon it, otherwise I can keep tinkering with it to the point where it just loses its luster.

- [Ray] Mmhm, mm hm.

- So sometimes just abandoning a poem is the best way for me to know that I've ended it.

- Well, Sean Frederick Forbes, thank you so much.

Thanks for letting me pick your brain today.

- You're welcome, and thank you.

This has, this has been wonderful.

- Well, that's a wrap on our great day here in the quiet corner.

Sadly, it's also a wrap on season two of Where Art Thou?

But it's been a remarkable season.

We were able to profile 13 great artists from different disciplines, different walks of life.

And we were able to check in to the storage spaces of six Connecticut institutions.

This season has been a blast.

On a personal note, I wanna thank our production team, the finest anywhere.

They not only understood the assignment.

They went above and beyond and really brought this show to a whole new level.

And for that, I'll always be grateful.

Until next time, I'm Ray Hardman.

Thanks for watching, watching Where Art Thou?

(upbeat rock music)