WSHU's Randye Kaye has lived in Connecticut for years, and until a few months ago, she had never been to The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield.
The museum was founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964. Mr. Aldrich was a fashion designer and an art collector. They’ve been in Ridgefield for over 60 years doing this work.
Emily Devoe is the director of Marketing and Communications at The Aldrich. The Aldrich stands apart from other museums. It doesn’t have a permanent collection, and it’s the only museum in the state dedicated entirely to contemporary art.
ED: We are a museum that is showing primarily emerging and mid-career or underrecognized artists, often giving them their first solo museum exhibitions, their first publications. So we’re sort of an incubator for contemporary art here in the state of Connecticut.
WSHU: I have to tell you that I went to one modern art museum. Well, now more than one, but my first one, I was in Phoenix, Arizona, and I was like modern art. That's not art. It's just contemporary art. It doesn't look like anything. But it changed my mind when I took the audio tour and understood that art is more than just being able to create a picture that looks like the thing that you're looking at. So tell me a bit about the mission of the museum, sure.
ED: So we're an institution presenting contemporary art. So art made by living artists today, and if you think about it, all art was once contemporary art, right? It was made at a time by artists who were living. So we are presenting the art of artists living and working today, and they're responding to what's going on in the world today, things that are important to them, things that are happening, politically, culturally, systemically. So it's really an opportunity for our audience to come and to kind of see how artists are responding and looking at the world that we're living in today. We have a lot of opportunities for the public to come and engage with us on a deeper level, one of which is our free third Saturday program. So the third Saturday of every month, admission to the museum is open to the public for free, and we host an all-ages discovery tour at 1 p.m. that day, where folks are invited to come and explore and learn, no previous art or art history experience required. We want you to come with your questions. We want you to challenge us and let us help you explore and discover the work that we're presenting here.
WSHU: So what is the name of this sculpture?
ED: This is a work by Estefania Puerta called Garganta Cueva. It's a rather large sculpture with a neon green leucite base and...
WSHU: And a sleeping dog? A clock. Blue bubble plants the pages of a book, a piece of hair. This is so interesting. What do people say about this?
ED: People love to spend time with this. It's almost like a sense of discovery, seeing what you can find within it, because there are just so many objects and items embedded in it, some of which are very easily recognizable, and others require one to perhaps reference the wall label to kind of figure out what they might be.
WSHU: Well, when art starts conversations, that's fantastic.
Then we enter the gallery featuring the work of the artist Uman.
WSHU: Oh, my goodness, the colors. This is amazing. Tell me. Tell me a bit about the artist and the artist's work. Sure.
ED: So we're standing in a gallery of work by Uman. She is an artist who's originally from Somalia and who lives currently between upstate New York and Provence, France. She is primarily a painter, although this exhibition also includes her first video work and a few large-scale sculptural pieces. She is a really excellent colorist, and her work really centers her lived experience as well as her relationship to nature, her relationship to light, her relationship to living across various cultures and continents.
WSHU: I have to say that what I learned in the Phoenix Modern Art Museum is that art makes you feel something, and the colors themselves bring me a sense of, you know, delight. I don't know how else to describe it.
ED: One thing I'll note about these works, too, is just the scale. They're very, very large. They're between six and seven feet wide and tall, these canvases, and they're brightly colored. And in the particular gallery we're standing in right now, the walls are painted a deep oxide, red oxide color, which references one of the earliest pigments that humans were making art with. So there's this kind of real connection to color and art making, even in the installation design of this show.
There’s an untitled video playing in a darkroom.
ED: It's untitled, and it's footage of snow falling that the artist has taken between 2012 and 2025.
WSHU: So 13 years of snow falling outside someone's window in a darkened room, and it's very meditative. You can just sit here and watch the snow fall for over 13 years. Do people enjoy this room?
ED: They do. I think it offers visitors an opportunity to kind of take a pause and really feel enveloped in this space.
Education and Access Specialist Holly Lapine SAID Uman’s work is also part of the School Programs at The Aldrich.
HL: The school groups do all kinds of activities related to our current exhibitions. So, for instance, today, we have a group of teenagers who are looking at artwork by one of our featured artists, Uman. Some of her artwork has scribbles incorporated. So these teens, after exploring the work and talking about it, do so very much from their own perspective. They will come into the studio, and they are going to be making a very meditative artwork today that I will lead them through, as far as taping off edges of paper, scribbling, pulling off the tape, and exploring different emotions that come with all of that. In addition, they'll be listening to Amapiano music, which is something that Uman listens to herself.
2026 will be a big year for The Aldrich. Emily Devoe said the museum will debut a special event that will become a tradition.
ED: Opening in June of 2026 will be the Aldrich Decennial - "I Am What's Around Me", which is a group show of art made by all artists based in Connecticut. So it'll be about 40 artists. The artists range from all over the state. Connecticut's really vibrant, rich artistic community, and we're just looking to highlight that. So this will be an exhibition that we'll put on every 10 years at the museum and it will be the museum's biggest exhibition that we've ever organized. Also, take over our entire museum, building our galleries and our three-acre Sculpture Garden and campus, which was recently renovated last year.
