The Aldrich has never done art like this.

On June 6th, the Ridgefield-based contemporary art museum opened The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me, the first ever ten-year survey of artists living and working in Connecticut. Clearly people were excited: the galleries were packed, the energy high, and the air tingled with the excitement of summer and creative turning points. It felt like an acknowledgment of something that’s been building more and more over the years — artists leaving New York for bigger studios, more light, and more space.

In other words: The art scene in Connecticut is alive and it is serious, and the Aldrich show makes that clear.

The title, I am what is around me, comes from Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive-poet who lived in Hartford for forty years and believes that place is not just a backdrop, but a shaping force. 

To really get a feel for how that looks in person, Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and Curatorial and Publications Manager Caitlin Monachino prepared for the show by visiting over 100 artists’ studios, guided by a narrow but meaningful parameters: the artists had to live in Connecticut, had to have never had a solo museum exhibition here, and the work had to be made here, too.

From that 100, they had the difficult task of narrowing down, ultimately selecting 40 artists, the oldest of whom, Lucy Sallick, was born in 1937, the youngest, Remy Sosa, in 1995. 

Considering the scope, it’s appropriate the show spans beyond The Aldrich’s two floors into the museum’s newly renovated three-acre sculpture garden. Despite its size, the show is well organized, clearly the work of curators who took a thoughtful, room-by-room approach.

Some pieces pull you in, such as the one containing Danica Lundy’s enormous painting of a car interior fractured across multiple viewpoints, figures folded into dashboards and seats, a rearview mirror with a single eye staring back – I couldn’t look away, wondering what had happened, and how did it look so beautiful.

Another gallery lured me with Lizzie Gill’s large nocturnal still life: red ceramic vessels spilling fantastic botanical forms across a striped table lit by full moon. Lush and slightly unhinged, this is a still life that has decided the rules no longer apply. 

Other rooms shift away from story toward fluid experience and process. Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll’s small, concentric circle of red dissolving into deep violet blurs the viewer’s eye like a hologram, the same way Beck Lowry’s wooden, multi-hued biomorphic forms blur the line between painting and sculpture. Are they both? Neither?

Step outside and Kristy Hughes’ first public sculpture awaits: two colorful, ten-foot rings made of paper pulp sealed with poems, found objects, notes, and letters — “soft” acts of gratitude and memory made solid. Hughes calls it Portal: Hope as Practice.

These works and others in I am what is around me truly exhibit, pardon the pun, how strong the arts scenes are in Connecticut. Like the artists mentioned here, little Connecticut has more than meets the eye – it’s a wide spectrum that blurs lines in the most beautiful, magnetic, unique way. 

Visit The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me, on view through January 10, 2027. Go more than once. You’ll notice something different each time.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield

June 7, 2026 – January 10, 2027