- 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.

(tranquil ambient music) (upbeat ambient music) - Hi, I'm Ray Hardman and welcome to Where Art Thou?

Today, we're in the greater Danbury region, a beautiful part of the state with mountains and lush greenery as far as the eye can see.

Given its close proximity to New York City, there are a lot of artists that make this part of the state their home and I wanna learn more about them.

Now to help me do that, I have our Where Art Thou greater Danbury curator, Brigid Guertin on the line.

Brigid is the Executive Director of the Danbury Museum.

She also serves as the city historian.

Brigid, are you there?

- Yes, I am.

Thank you so much for the invitation to be on the program tonight.

- My pleasure.

So tell me a little bit about the art scene down here in Danbury.

- Well, the art scene in Danbury and our surrounding area is creative and vibrant and people are working in all different kinds of mediums.

And there are small shows and big shows and there's public art.

Danbury is just full of really talented people who express themselves in a variety of ways and that make all our lives better.

- All right, Brigid, on this beautiful day, where are you taking me?

- I am taking you to Bridgewater, Connecticut, where you are going to meet an amazing artist, her name is Pamela Sztybel.

She's a Ukrainian artist and she is inspired every day to create a new piece of art that reflects the news of the day coming out of the Ukraine and its war with Russia.

And then we're gonna go to Ridgefield where we are gonna meet Jackueline Walters, and Jackueline Walters suffered a terrible accident a few years ago, but she has turned that as into her inspiration to create art each day.

And she works with acrylics and batik, and she has some really interesting pieces to share.

- Well, Brigid, I'm really excited because this is the first time ever on the show that we are going to meet a curator live and in person, because we're coming to the Danbury Museum for what's in your attic.

Don't give too much away, but I'm guessing you've got some cool stuff to show us.

- We do, we have several fun objects we've pulled out of the collection.

We're gonna share them in the Rider House, in the Marian Anderson Studio.

And I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the fun artifacts that we have.

- Well, Brigid, thank you so much.

I can't wait to see you.

We're gonna head over to Pamela's house and then we'll meet you at the Danbury Museum.

- Looking forward to it.

Have a good time.

(tranquil ambient music) - Pamela, thanks so much for inviting us into your beautiful studio.

This must be a brilliant place to work.

- I love it here.

- You've had quite the career.

- Well.

- I looked you up.

- Wouldn't go that far.

- No, you've had quite a career and I'm just wondering, what are you most proud of?

- Well, now I am most proud of the work that I'm doing for the Ukrainian, that I'm working on the Ukrainian sketchbook, because it is raising money through social media for World Central Kitchen, which was immediately on the border helping and feeding refugees as they came over.

So I would have to say I'm most proud of that and maybe just the staying power of keeping going as an artist for all these years.

- Yeah.

It's nice that you're proudest about the thing that you're doing the latest.

- Yes, I found, I really, really do enjoy doing this and communicating with people from all over the world through social media.

I get comments from people in all sorts of places telling me that they look forward to it and it's helped them well originally through the pandemic drawings I was doing and now The Ukraine Project.

(tranquil ambient music) My grandmother, my father's mother was born in Kiev and escaped during the Russian Revolution into Poland.

As a young girl, she was put in a luggage rack of a train to keep her safe from the bullets is the way the story was told.

Went to Poland, met my grandfather, had my father and then the Germans invaded in 1939.

And she and my father and grandfather were forced to escape again out of Poland right in the nick of time through Romania and around through France and into New York.

So they left everything behind.

- Wow.

- And she left everything behind twice in her life.

- Did your grandmother tell stories?

- I was two when my grandmother died, she was very sad and became alcoholic and unhappy and had left her families and her home twice and never really adjusted to New York and America and the language and.

- Yeah.

- All of that.

- Do you feel a connection to Ukraine?

- I do because you know, I somehow have this feeling that some of these traumas and some of these historical events are kind of baked into your DNA somehow.

And you know, my father was very vocal about telling me these stories of their escape and the war and his parents.

And I was very curious, always very curious about my family history, so.

- At first Russia was potentially going to invade Ukraine, and then when they finally did.

Were you keeping up with the news?

Was this something that was high on your watch list?

- I saw president Zelensky make that first speech, I thought, okay.

I'm gonna have to draw that.

That's what started this second draw, Ukrainian Project, it was very similar to the pandemic project, the same format.

- You had already been used to drawing in this type of format with COVID.

And did you start right at the beginning of COVID with that?

- I started in February of 2020.

So it was way before the lockdown.

- Oh yeah.

- I first saw the passengers coming off the ship with their masks on and so forth.

And I just on a whim, ran down to an art material store and got a sketchbook and said, I'm gonna do a drawing of the news every day for a year, which is slightly crazy on my part (chuckles) because I thought, well, maybe I'll make it 30 days.

But anyway, I stuck to it.

And then we had the lockdown and everything was snowballing in a way that had changed all of our lives.

It took on the life of its own, other people I didn't know, like I said, all around the world started to depend on it.

Pandemic drawings had occasionally some humor built into it.

Ukrainian drawings really don't.

- Yeah.

- But I just take headlines from various news sources and then I create a drawing that illustrates the words that I'm using.

(tranquil ambient music) - Pamela, I saw some of these on Instagram.

I didn't realize how small they are.

How did you come to here from these big works that you have in your studio?

- Well, when I started this project during the pandemic, I wanted to make sure I had a portable studio, something that I could take with me so that I wouldn't miss a day.

- There's so much news that comes out of Ukraine on a daily basis.

What are you looking for?

- Well, I'm drawn to the human stories about what's happening to the people of Ukraine, the refugees, the children, the mothers, and their babies, anything having to do with the arts, with literature, with art, with painting, things that regular people are forced to do in extreme circumstances, this whole.

- Yeah.

- Same during the pandemic, I find that interesting and visually challenging.

These projects have forced me to try to draw things I never would've drawn, in any other circumstance, I didn't know how to draw a tank until I started doing this project.

- Right, right.

- And to simplify them down so that they fit into these very small four by five inch format.

It's really like miniature painting.

- Yeah.

Pamela, I'm wondering because the news is so grim coming out of Ukraine, whether this has taken a toll on you.

(tranquil ambient music) - Some days it's so disturbing, but with these drawings, because the Ukraine drawings are raising money for a charity, it makes me feel like I'm doing something and not nothing.

So that helps.

And I also feel like I'm honoring my grandparents and my father's experience by doing this.

- Thank you for inviting us in.

This has really been tremendous.

- Thank you so much for including me in your program.

(upbeat ambient music) - You know, I truly believe that art has the power to do some amazing things.

And Pamela using her talents to bring awareness to the plight of the Ukrainian people is just so strong.

So powerful up next is What's In Your Attic, this time we're headed to the Danbury Museum to see what kind of treasures they have in store.

Let's check it out.

Well, Brigid Guertin, I'm so glad to meet you in person.

- I'm so glad to meet you as well.

Welcome to the Danbury Museum.

- Yeah.

- We're all thrilled you're here.

- Oh, this is a beautiful site and you've got several buildings here.

- Yes, we have five buildings on our main street campus and they all tell different stories from different parts of Danbury's history.

So the museum was founded over 80 years ago with the 1785 John and Mary Rider House.

We added the John Dodd Hat Shop in the 1950s.

We've added the Marian Anderson Studio, Huntington Hall, and our one room schoolhouse.

- Now I would imagine a historical museum has lots of interesting artifacts, and especially here in Danbury where there's such a rich history.

- Absolutely.

We have 80 years of collecting under our belt.

So Danbury's been a center for immigration and center for the hating industry.

And so we have all of these great stories and we use our artifacts to share those stories (tranquil ambient music) with the public.

This is the only building that was built on site.

- Okay.

- All of the other buildings were moved to the campus.

- We got a little bit of everything in here.

- Welcome to the Rider House kitchen.

This was Mary Rider's domain, the heart of the house for several 100 years.

And I'm thrilled you're here today and we have a couple different objects to show you.

- Yeah.

- But we thought we'd focus on something that most of our visitors don't get a chance to see.

- Okay.

- This.

- Oh, look at that.

- Is a powder horn from the French and Indian war.

- Yeah.

- That was brought back to Danbury by Samuel John Woods.

- Uh-huh.

- And you can see it's intricately carved, it's a beautiful piece.

And it resonates with the stories of his service during the French and Indian war.

And he would've had a little downtime, and so during his downtime, he was carving into it.

- Yeah, he was good.

- That's really talented.

- He was very good.

Well, he came back to Danbury (chuckles) and became a noted physician.

- Mm-hmm.

- So I think he had multiple skill sets.

- Yeah, yeah.

What else you got?

(tranquil ambient music) - Well, welcome to our cabinet of curiosities on the second floor.

- Oh, yeah.

(chuckles) Look at this.

- This is the DAR room.

And the Danbury Museum was co-founded by the Daughters of the American Revolution 80 years ago.

And we have one room in the Rider House that we dedicate to their collections, their materials.

And so their preferred style of showing the artifacts is an older museum style called cabinet of curiosities.

Spoons and keys and coins.

- Yeah.

- And (chuckles) scissors.

You know, we can look behind us to a hair wreath, which is fantastic.

- That's made of human hair?

- It is.

- Wow.

- It's all made of human hair.

There were special little hooks, kind of like crochet hooks that would've been used to take the human hair and turn it into flowers.

And then when you had enough flowers, you created a wreath.

This is an extraordinarily large example.

We look at this through modern eyes and we kind of think, golly.

- Mm-hmm.

- It's a little different.

- Right.

- But this would've been a more common piece more than a 100 years ago.

- [Ray] And this would've been to memorialize somebody?

- Yes.

- Oh, that's so cool.

When I moved to Connecticut, there were two things I knew about Danbury, it was the home of Charles Ives.

- Yes.

- And it was the home of opera singer Marian Anderson.

And I know both of those artists are represented here in the museum.

But you have Marian Anderson's actual voice studio.

- So Marian chose Danbury, she lived here for over 50 years.

We have her practice studio that her husband had created for her behind their house, which was up on Joes Hill Rd in Danbury, moved the practice studio here.

And we used that space to really talk about her legacy, who she was, what she meant to music then, what she means to music now, what she means to the world now.

(upbeat ambient music) - [Ray] So here we are, this is where she would practice.

- Yes, so her husband Orpheus, King, was his nickname, built her this beautiful practice studio behind their house.

And it has a coved ceiling.

So as you're playing, as you're singing, you can hear the music coming back at you and she could practice and make corrections before she went out and publicly performed.

- Oh, that's interesting.

So they built this with the acoustics in mind?

- Absolutely.

- And you can certainly hear.

- Yes, the reverb.

Yes.

- Oh, that's great.

And you've got some artifacts here.

So we have, we are very lucky.

We have a large number of artifacts from Marian Anderson's time.

This particular piece is a work of millinery art.

And although in Danbury, we created mostly men's for felt hats, we had many millinery shops.

And so the story attached to this particular piece is that she bought it at one of our millinery shops downtown and proudly wore it around the city, and has a beautiful little pin on it.

- Oh, this is beautiful.

- It is, isn't it?

- It is.

And normally it's behind glass and we don't let visitors play with this.

I'm glad that you came today, (chuckles) we could pull it out.

This is a gorgeous kimono that was given to Marian Anderson.

She wore it and received it when she was on tour as a special envoy for the UN.

- Oh.

- She had many roles in her career and in her life.

- Mm-hmm.

- But her work with the UN was extraordinary.

And so we explore some of that in our tour.

It resonates, I think, with the work that she did and the life that she lived of service of community of Swan.

- Oh, look at that.

- And a presentation piece.

- That is beautiful.

And look at the inside too.

Well, Brigid thank you so much for letting us peek inside your museum and see all the treasures you have here.

- Thank you very much.

And we hope we encourage more visitors to come and see the special artifacts and stories that we have to share with them.

- Yeah.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

(chuckles) - We have one last stop here in the greater Danbury region.

Jackueline Walters does amazing things with acrylics and boutique and she has a very compelling story to tell.

I tell you what?

I'm gonna let her tell you the story, in the meantime, let's check it out.

Jackueline Walters, is so good to meet you.

- Same here and a pleasure to be here.

- Yeah, I can't wait to look at your art.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

- I am one of 13 children.

- 13.

- Yes.

(chuckles) And they are now, almost all living in the US except for one older brother that's still in Jamaica.

And I really loved art from a very early age.

My father is a photographer, was a photographer, my mother was a seamstress and together they did wedding events together.

In addition to his full-time job where he was a photo engraver at the (indistinct) Company in Jamaica.

- Mm-hmm.

- They did not encourage me to do art because we were from very humble beginnings.

- Yeah.

- And to make it out of, I would say Jamaica at the time, which was tumultus, a lot of crime, very few opportunities.

You know, they said, you got a lot going for you, try something else.

(chuckles) I had no idea what else I wanted to do, but I knew for one thing, I wanted to be an artist.

So I would play around in the meantime, but I knew I had to figure out what I need to do to migrate.

My older sister, who is 10 years older than me, she recommended if I wanna do something that could earn a living, become an accountant like her.

And she's been my mentor ever since.

She worked at Exxon as an accountant and I became an accountant and a CPA and worked for Ernst & Young for the first seven years of my career, then IBM for the next 30 years of my career.

- Wow.

- And I just retired December 31st.

- Congratulations.

- Thank you.

And decided to follow my calling to be an artist and to explore all the things I didn't try when I was much younger.

- Yeah.

- To be honest, I wouldn't be here without my older siblings.

- Yeah.

- They were the avenue for the migration into the US.

- Did you feel like during that time that your art had a chance to grow and evolve?

- You know, as an artist, you always wonder if you're good enough.

Always did.

- Hmm.

- And you always ask your siblings or your, the ones that are closest to you, how do they see you?

- Right.

- So when I said I was going planning to retire and I wanted to become an artist, I know my husband went, oh, but he knew that was something deep down I wanted to do.

- Yeah.

- And I asked my sisters, my younger sister, she goes, you're always an artist.

You were always drawing something, you were always trying to do something that was more creative with your time.

And, you know, she says, just do it.

I was very reticent to start the journey.

I'm gonna be very honest.

- Hmm.

- Because I just wondered if I still had it in me.

(tranquil ambient music) As I before I retired, five years before I retired, rushing to work, to have an important meeting, I fell in the pathway in my house and hit my head on a downward fall.

And didn't realize I had a concussion for the first 24 hours.

- Mm-hmm.

- I went to work, I gave a great presentation.

I was also doing dancing as a hobby.

I went and did a dance competition that night.

And I woke up the next day and just thought I was in, like, I was in a fight.

My head hurt.

- Hmm.

- My whole body hurt.

I just didn't realize the extent of the damage I'd done by not resting those first 24 hours.

That made me reconsider what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

You know, after two years I started to feel like I was recovering.

- Two years?

- Yes.

It took a little while for me.

I don't know, maybe I was older, but in the meantime I was creating art and it really helped to calm me and not be as anxious about what's going to happen after the injury.

- Yeah.

I've seen some of your work online.

And when we came in, I saw some of your work and the acrylic stuff is absolutely beautiful.

But tell me about the working with batik.

- Okay.

So again, I'm evolving.

- Yeah.

- And I do like to cut patterns from fabric.

Growing up in Jamaica, I worked with my mom cutting appliques and putting them on wedding gowns.

- Mm-hmm.

- We were all helpers in our workshop.

So I really didn't enjoy that detail.

So the batik gifts that I was getting from some of my friends and from family, extended family in Trinidad, they were sending me batik fabrics that they thought I would wear.

- Mm-hmm.

- But they were quite colorful and probably, you know, not suited to the Northeast.

So I decided to start creating some of my ideas with fabric, 'cause I thought the fabric gave that 3D dimension to the art piece.

- It lifted it off the canvas.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I can then mix with the acrylic paint and actually fabric paint detail to make it come alive.

- This is really your thing now.

- This is really my thing now.

- Yeah.

- Because I find, it's liberating.

I'm not constricted to the detail as much and I can truly express my emotion at that time.

(upbeat ambient music) - Well, I'm really excited to see what you're doing.

- Okay.

- And how you do this.

- Absolutely.

- With the fabrics.

Let's check it out.

- Absolutely.

- Okay.

Well, Jackueline, this looks like a really promising piece you have here, but, and before we get into talking about that, tell me about this fabric.

This is batik.

- Yes, this is, actually it's made of very thick cotton.

- Oh yeah.

- And the dyes are based, very high intensity dyes that create a very nice combination for my art piece.

So it just provides a lot of color.

- Yeah.

- To the piece.

- Yeah.

So tell me about this piece specifically.

I mean, was this something you planned out, did you decide the patterns and the shape at all or did you just start cutting and pasting?

- Well, I have a general idea of what I wanna do.

- Mm-hmm.

- When I start a piece.

And for me, I go back to some of my experiences.

One of the experiences I have is of these, what we call Moko Jumbies in Trinidad, or Junkanoo in Jamaica where you have these men or women that perform on very high stilts.

So the leg is usually exaggerated because it's on high stilts.

- Right.

- And the torsos are usually shorter, and so are the arms.

And they perform various acrobatics on the stills.

And as children, you enjoy going to watch these different Moko Jumbies or Junkanoo dance around in the carnival or in the parades.

- So tell me your process here.

- So my process is what I do is I usually try to reuse different pieces of the batik fabrics that I have.

And I try to create different combinations from different fabrics to bring the art alive.

So I will start usually with a blank canvas and I will paint a background on it that I think would bring my story alive.

- Mm-hmm.

- That's usually my hardest decision, what color to make the background.

- Ah, okay.

- For this one, I chose my golden paint, a Titan green, pale green, because I wanted to be able to enhance the color coming off the canvas.

- Mm-hmm.

- And then I go through my box of mini fabrics and I try to find different colors that would represent the different parts of the body.

And then I kind of just flow with it as I go, wherever it fits.

I try not to restrict myself based on, oh, I wanna find a perfect color.

No, I wanna show that it has a lot of different vibrant aesthetics to the art piece.

- Right, right.

- So after I then cut out my patterns, where would I like it to fit to form the part that I wanted to fit into and I would fit it right there.

That doesn't say that it's done.

After I'm done with this, I may cut out some more and fill in different pieces.

- Right, right.

- And then I carefully, after I've created my patterns with the fabric, kind of lay them out where I would like them to be.

And then I'll take my time and I will glue down each piece on the canvas.

I use regular gem-tacking fabric paint.

- Mm-hmm.

- Fabric glue.

And I attach it to the composition.

- [Ray] I gotta say, this looks really relaxing.

- Very relaxing.

You're in your own world.

And then you get the fun to see what is this gonna turn out to be when I'm done with it.

- Mm-hmm.

- And when I'm done, the glitter glue as well, when I put it around the pieces will truly bring it up.

- [Ray] Now I know you're deep into this particular form of art.

Are you gonna go back to your acrylics at some point?

- Yes I do when I have a composition that inspires me.

- [Ray] Mm-hmm.

- And when I go back to the detail art, that takes a lot more time and preparation and making sure I have the right design for what I'm going to do.

As the piece shows behind me, that was inspired by my grand niece at her performance in her dance competition.

- Yeah.

- So that I knew is something I had to do.

- Yeah.

- And that is so beautiful by the way.

- Thank you.

And that was done as an experiment as well with a pallette knife.

- Oh, is that right?

- No brush.

- The whole thing?

- The whole thing was with a pallette knife.

- Well Jackueline, thank you for inviting us in, showing us your beautiful art and showing us how you do it.

This is really beautiful.

I haven't seen anything like this.

- I appreciate it.

And I really am honored to be able to show what I've created so far.

- Oh, it shows it's just beautiful.

- Thank you.

Thank you Ray.

- Yeah.

(upbeat ambient music) - Well, we just had an amazing day here in the greater Danbury region.

You know, it's people like Pamela and Jackueline that make this part of the state truly special.

Hey, maybe there's somebody in your town, in your neighborhood that's doing amazing artistic things.

If so, I want to hear about it.

You can drop me a line, whereartthou@ctpublic.org.

Join me next week, we're gonna meet a costume designer and choreographer with deep ties to her Caribbean roots.

You won't wanna miss it.

Until then, I'm Ray Hardman, thanks for watching Where Art Thou.