Marking our second, non-consecutive year of artist professional development in Connecticut, A4A is thrilled to welcome ten new Connecticut artists into our matched savings program. Learn more about these amazing art-makers below!
Using found wood, old paintings and discarded objects, Olivia Baldwin’s (Mansfield Center) work operates three-dimensionally, but arrives through the language of painting. It feeds on immediacy, but takes time to surface. Density and chroma figure prominently as she builds configurations until the assembled parts settle. Terrain, both familiar and foreign, is a constant in her work.
Olivia looks forward to re-documenting her work for her new and improved website. With an improved portfolio and site, she will pursue exhibition, grant, residency, and publication opportunities.
Heidi Kirchofer (Harwinton) is a full-time circus performance and teaching artist. After street performing throughout Central and South America for two years, she has now settled in Connecticut. Over the years, Heidi has refined her artistic skills in circus, performance, costumes, sets, design and teaching that fuses academics with art.
After years of hard work to polish her artistry, craft, and business, Heidi feels it is time to push her success by updating her website and marketing materials, including social media.
Vocalist Sache - Gaye Y Marshall (Enfield) exhibits her craft through musicals, open mics, and showcases. She earned her BA in Arts and Entertainment Management from Dean College and in 2018 she worked with Connecticut Public Broadcasting (CPTV) on YUPntwk, where she provided insight on how to help, engage and support creatives such as herself.
In the next year, Sache hopes to create and distribute merchandise, develop a strong marketing plan, and increase the quality of her recording and mixing sessions. Not only does she want to improve the quality of her work, but expand her audience and reach.
Over the last year, Erika Santos (Bloomfield) discovered her work had developed into an exploration of the photographic process. She has been distressing photo negatives with everyday chemicals to play with the ideas of light and color, and accident vs. intentional destruction. The resulting images are more like paintings than portraits.
Erika aims to continue to grow her project, Dismantled and explore larger paper sizes, as well as hardware that allows her work to hang from the ceiling. She looks forward to expanding her online presence and learning how to market herself in new and innovative ways.
Kevin Bishop (Norwich) is a professional violist, violinist, composer, and conductor. He is the Executive Director of Cuatro Puntos, a Connecticut non-profit dedicated to intercultural dialogue and universal access through the performance, writing, and teaching of music. Kevin is also the founder and a primary member of the Golden Scroll Soloists. They provide music for over 150 private events each year, but also perform concerts publicly.
After thirteen years of preparation, Kevin feels the time has come to elevate Golden Scroll Soloists from a local to a national/international level. This will begin by producing a professionally engineered album of eighteen of their best-sounding, pop music arrangements. The group will also produce videos for each track to increase their overall reach.
Writer Amity Gaige (West Hartford) is the author of three novels: O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder. Her novel Schroder has been translated into eighteen languages, and she has received a plethora of prizes and recognition for her work. Amity’s short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Amity now teaches at Yale and conducts the Squam Lake Novel Writers Retreat. In the coming year, Amity looks forward to publishing her fourth novel Sea Wife.
Artist Aly Maderson-Quinlog (Essex) is drawn to natural materials, forgotten objects, and myth. They use an eclectic range of cultural sources, processes, and handcraft techniques to create prints, books, and sculpture. Storytelling is at the core of their work, and sometimes Aly finds that their hands understand what they want to communicate before their eyes and mind can catch up.
Recently, Aly opened a bookbinding and arts education studio in New London, CT. They look forward to maintaining a sustainable practice that comes with this venture. Their hope is to support their non-profit work through teaching workshops and sales of art, zines, and bespoke bookbinding.
Throughout her filmmaking, Mitch McCabe (New Haven) has continually focused on the peculiarity of macro-trends in American culture. With themes rooted in self-identity and the clash between personal truth, materialism, and the visual world, her work reflects on social constructs of normalcy and the economy of social norms.
Moving forward, Mitch plans to upgrade to a new editing system and convert all of her current projects to AVID and Adobe Premiere. Not only would this addition advance her artistic practice; it would help attract freelance work. After these enhancements are made, Mitch hopes to re-frame her film- and art-making brand.
With a broad background in art, Colin McMullan’s (Hartford) work includes a variety of humorous, conceptual, research-based, public, sculptural, performance, and installation forms. He prioritizes collaborative, social projects and reflects back on them through printed matter, films, and exhibitions.
Colin aims to improve marketing, publicity, and outreach for his projects. He hopes to create a website for his Tree Spa project, bring this work to more physical sites, and increase the overall visibility of his work.
Monica Ong (Trumbull) is a visual poet whose new work fuses poetry with astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. These experiments seek to rewrite the sky from a female perspective and examine the power struggles that myth-making elicits. Recreating pages from historical astronomy books, she remixes diagrams and scientific syntax into lyrical poems.
As a visual poet who takes poetry off the page, Monica looks to produce poetry installations and limited edition broadsides that utilize special processes like letterpress and foil stamping. She is also looking forward to prototyping several works-in-progress for wall installations and light boxes to lend a sculptural dimension to her poems for exhibition spaces.
Our work in Connecticut is possible because of our wonderful funders & partners, including MASS MoCA, ArtBuilt, Northwest Connecticut Arts Council, Southeastern Connecticut Cultural Coalition, Windham Arts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Business Development Grant Program, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Assets for Independence Program (in partnership with the Midas Collaborative), and the State of CT’s Office of the Arts