Real Art Ways

02/13/2025

To everyone who joined us for the first (presented by The Hartford Film Company, made possible by Greater Hartford Arts Council) - thank you for spending your Saturday with us.

It was beautiful to witness and be part of newly formed friendships, discoveries and memories made.

It's a privilege for us to be a partner and platform for this inaugural event. We hope to host many more down the road - especially once we have FOUR movie screens and a CAFE to nourish you all between screenings! 👩🏻‍🍳

Feel free to tag/comment on these pics if you see someone you know!

Big shout out to Red Rock Tavern + Fuego Picante food truck for keeping us fed that day. Kudos to the chefs!

(All photos taken by Ed Shin)

02/12/2025

🎶 This Sunday, 2/16, 2:30 pm, Improvisations NOW LIVE in our Gallery!

🎯 Always a transcendent experience, Sunday’s concert will feature:

William Parker-bass, flutes, n’goni
Taylor Ho Bynum-cornet, flugelhorn
Jerome Deupree-drums, percussion
Joe Morris-guitar, banjouke

$15 GA I $12 Members I $8 Students w/ ID

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor Street
Hartford CT

🎫 available now at realartways.org

📸 of William by Anna Yatskevich
📸 of Taylor by Michael Roger
📸 of Jerome by Ben DeFlorio
📸 of Joe by Rob Miller

02/11/2025

🎨 You're invited to an opening reception on Thursday, February 20, at 6 pm, for "Shadows Taller Than Our Souls," a solo exhibition by Christa Whitten. 🎨

🪨 Cairns have long served as way-finding constructions in terrain where the trail may become unclear. These carefully stacked rock piles act as navigational aids and are trusted to guide the way in critical conditions, such as when dense fog or storms obscure the path. They provide direction in uncertain times. These cairns are offered as places to pause and reflect, reminding us to focus on the waypoints in the storm and move with them. When we act in line with a purpose, the resulting shadows are long and contain a multitude of ripples.

--

About the artist:
Christa Whitten is a visual artist known for vibrantly colorful, evocative work, often utilizing paper in two-dimensional and sculptural applications. Her work intends to provide an opportunity to access the intangible inner landscapes we carry within and explore their relationships to broader contexts.

Christa has exhibited at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Silvermine Art Center, ArtWalk Hartford, and the Anchor House of Artists in Northampton, MA.

Christa enjoys collaborating with other artists to produce work for publication, such as ‘snffbx press’ artist books and illustrations for a children’s book entitled “Reach for the Stars.” She lives and works in northern Connecticut.

--

This exhibition will be on view from February 20-April 22. We hope you can join us for the opening with Christa on 2/20 (during our next CCH!)

Curated by David Borawski

02/10/2025

"In adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel to make the historical drama Nickel Boys, director and co-writer RaMell Ross quite literally reinvented a form of cinema. That’s because Ross approached his fiction feature debut with a singular vision in mind: to tell the story through the eyes of the protagonist."
- The Hollywood Reporter

NICKEL BOYS continues its run in our cinema (if you didn't catch it this past weekend). Playing daily at 1:40 and 4:20 pm.

https://www.realartways.org/event/nickel-boys/

02/08/2025

Don't have plans next Friday? Join us for A Night of Surrealist Games!

Friday, Feb. 14 I 7 PM
Real Art Ways
56 Arbor Street, Hartford

Roger Clark Miller (Mission of Burma, Alloy Orchestra AND Anvil Orchestra) will host an evening of drawing and word games that were developed during the heyday of surrealism.

Games include "Exquisite Co**se" (drawing game that doesn't require advanced drawing skills!), "Dream Game" (board game), and other varieties of surrealist word games.

"Everyone creates - I merely define the concept of a blank slate and the surrealist methods. Hilarity and at times profound meanings appear as they can only do in these games.

It’s a safe space to unload your unconscious." - Miller

Bring a friend, flame or family. Come with an open mind and a sense of play.

$10 General Admission
$5 RAW Members
Free for students and kids!

Advance 🎟️ available:
https://www.realartways.org/event/a-night-of-surrealist-games-2025/

Or get them at our Box Office/Concessions the night of!

02/08/2025

We've been getting calls and emails about this for weeks and are finally able to announce showtimes for the OSCAR NOMINATED SHORTS opening in our cinema on Friday, 2/14! Make a date night out of it...friendly competition calls for predicting the winners.

--

The 20th annual Oscar® Nominated Short Films theatrical release, presented by SHORTS, is coming to Hartford next week.

We will be screening all short films nominated for Best Live Action, Best Animated, and Best Documentary Short.

This is the ONLY opportunity for our audience to watch all of these nominees before the 97th Academy Awards® ceremony on March 2nd.

--

Tickets are on sale now:

Documentary (1:45p daily) - https://www.realartways.org/event/2025-oscar-nominated-shorts-documentary/

Animated (5p daily) - https://www.realartways.org/event/2025-oscar-nominated-shorts-animated/

Live Action (7p daily) - https://www.realartways.org/event/2025-oscar-nominated-shorts-live-action/

$12 General Admission I $7 RAW Member I $8 Senior/Student

We hope to see you in our lobby soon!

02/07/2025

🎨 You're invited to an opening reception on Thursday, February 20, at 6 pm, for "Distant Bystander," a solo exhibition by Priya N. Green. 🎨

Priya's work explores the fragile interplay between sight, perception, and reality. Anchored in the relentless repetition of images from the 24-hour news cycle, her paintings grapple with the tension between agitation and desensitization. This constant barrage of mediated visuals shapes her response: a search for emotional connection amidst the noise.

--

About the artist:
Priya N. Green is an artist whose layered oil paintings explore ideas of reality and perception through pervasive news images. She often uses found images and film stills as the source material for her paintings. Her work responds to the phenomenological impact of absorbing information and seeking truth through the screen. She uses the materiality of paint to address the veracity of the photographic images that have penetrated the 21st-century psyche. As the granddaughter of a Bollywood screenwriter, Green believes her fascination with images is an inherited trait. By extracting and manipulating images through paint, she forms an
emotional connection to these events that are otherwise intangibly experienced through a screen.

Green received a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Green has shown her work nationally at many institutions, including the Jersey City Museum, University Museum of Contemporary Art, Zimmerli Art Museum, and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

--

This exhibition is now on view in our gallery. We hope you can join us for the opening with Priya on the 20th!

Curated by Peter Albano

02/06/2025

🖼️ On View Now 🖼️

Real Wall: Bethani Blake

Blake translates a present-day world that depicts personal nostalgia, recontextualizing appropriated and personal images.

A first-generation Black person in an immediate family of white Americans, she grew up surrounded by iconography and other paraphernalia specific to American culture and first-world consumption.

Conflicting agency as a consequence of existing between contradictory circumstances, she acknowledges this connection, driving her to depict an experience in contemporary society with subject matter related to cultural movements specific to the turn of the 21st century and the present day.

--

About the Artist:
Bethani Blake is an artist, curator, and educator. She received a BFA in Painting and Performing Arts at and has exhibited work in Connecticut, Georgia, and Ohio. She is currently the Associate Curator for the The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, where she organizes exhibitions and heads an artist residency.

Our galleries are open daily from 1-9 pm and free to the public. We are so excited to share this ruminative work with you!

Photos:

"Janelle (In the Ebony Test Kitchen)," 2023.
Acrylic on yupo paper
26.85" x 19.75"

"@/krsnrsd," 2023.
Acrylic on gessoboard
10" x 8"

"Moony," 2021.
Acrylic on yupo paper

"The Girl with the Pearl (Vivienne Westwood) Earring," 2023.
Acrylic on gessoboard
14 in x 11 in

Bethani Blake and guest at January 2025 CCH by Tyler Cave

02/06/2025

🎉🎉🎉

Join us in celebrating Zaccai Curtis, Jazz Piano Faculty member at The Hartt School, for his 2025 Grammy win over the weekend! 🏆

Curtis, a pianist and composer, took home the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album with Cubop Lives!. Congratulations from all of us at the University of Hartford!

02/05/2025

🍿🎥🍿 Opening this Friday, February 7, screening at 1:40 and 4:20 pm daily for one week only is NICKEL BOYS!

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, 2025 Oscar nominee for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, NICKEL BOYS chronicles the powerful friendship between two young African-American men navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.

"It’s a stunning achievement." - NYT

"It’s a mesmerizing, uniquely told story — of memory, of injustice, of friendship, of survival." - Seattle Times

"This is story that should be remembered, and it is a movie that marks a remarkably original and at times daringly avant-garde feature debut for director and co-writer RaMell Ross."
- Chicago Sun-Times

Get your advance 🎟️ today:
https://www.realartways.org/event/nickel-boys/

02/04/2025

From the GRAMMYs to Sundance, the creative community from Connecticut is on fire!🔥 Maybe Hartford as "Hollywood East" is a thing.

Thanks Dan Haar and CT Insider for recapping some of the panel conversations from Saturday's Hartford Film Showcase and shouting out the event.

We are super excited for Rashad Frett and his recognition at Sundance, winning the Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic for his feature film RICKY. Many thanks to Executive Producer Mark Manson for attending the showcase and representing the short film that led to the making of the feature! We loved hearing your insights and appreciate you sharing BTS stories with our audience.

Full story here:
https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticut/article/rashad-frett-ricky-sundance-movie-award-20145093.php

02/03/2025

🍿🎥🍿Opening this Friday, February 7 and screening 7 pm daily through Thursday, February 13 is SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT!

😎 Be the first audience to see this in Hartford!

Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, NYT Critics' Pick and ranked #4 in the NYT Top 10 Movies of 2024, Winner of the Special Prize for Innovation at 2024 Sundance...this documentary is a stunner.

🎶🕵🏿‍♀️📚 SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT explores a moment when jazz, colonialism, and espionage collided. Johan Grimonprez’s film illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent story that resonates now more than ever.

Get your advance 🎟️ today!
https://www.realartways.org/event/soundtrack-to-a-coup-detat/

02/03/2025

🏆 ¡Felicidades! Luques Curtis, Zaccai Curtis, Willie Martinez, Camilo Molina and Reinaldo Dejesus for winning BEST LATIN JAZZ ALBUM at the GRAMMYs last night for "CUBOP LIVES!”

Luques and Zaccai (from Windsor) first played at Real Art Ways when they were kids, in a group called Latin Flavor with our beloved friend Nelson Bello, and have performed here many times over the decades. Reinaldo and Willie have both played with Papo Vázquez & The Mighty Pirates Troubadours at our annual Parranda event as well.

We are so incredibly happy for them and hope they are celebrating this major achievement. ¡Bravo! 🫂

Watch Zaccai Curtis, Luques Curtis, Willie Martinez, Camilo Molina & Reinaldo de Jesus' acceptance speech as they accept the GRAMMY for BEST LATIN JAZZ ALBUM...

01/29/2025

THE BRUTALIST is held over in our cinema for another week, screening at 1:30 and 5:30 pm daily through Thursday, Feb 6.

(Please note: We will not be showing this on Saturday, Feb 1, due to the Hartford Film Showcase happening in our theater that day.)

For advance tix: https://www.realartways.org/event/the-brutalist/

Come see what the Oscar buzz is all about!

01/29/2025

Congrats to Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award!
https://creative-capital.org/press/announcing-the-2025-creative-capital-awards/

Jeremy's work was exhibited in "Speaking Sentences Backwards," a group exhibition curated by our former Visual Arts Manager, Cody Boyce, at Real Art Ways in 2023.

We’re thrilled for Jeremy and this recognition!

Below photo: ..And Drive (Far Away). Texas Edit, 2023. Two-channel video with audio

01/24/2025

You're invited to an opening reception on Thursday, February 20, at 6 pm for "Thin Ice," a solo exhibition and video installation by Joseph Smolinski in our gallery.

About Joseph:
I was born in the 1970s, shortly after the oil embargo that brought our country to a halt. The years between 1975 and 1980 were a missed opportunity to learn from our unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels and embrace new green technologies. In hindsight, this inaction set us on a course of grave danger, all while corporate marketing campaigns steered popular culture away from the environmental movement of the time.

I remember watching 80s car commercials from Ford, Dodge, and Chevrolet featuring rugged trucks ripping through the landscape and performing off-road feats in slow motion.

Phrases like “Built Ford Tough” and “Like a Rock'' were designed to perpetuate toxic masculinity with little regard to sustainability. These tropes come from a long line of colonial views of the environment in which a landscape must be tamed and conquered.

--

"Thin Ice" is a digital animation project that draws from formulaic American truck commercials and Smolinski's memories of growing up in Minnesota. Each spring, the evening news would report on the latest automobile stranded and sinking through the thinning ice of area lakes.

Fueled by automotive fetishism and masculine folly, this moving image is a striking metaphor for the state of the environment.

--

This work could not be more timely. See it now on view or when we open Joseph’s exhibition on February 20 during our next CCH. You’ll have a chance to meet the artist that night!

Curated by David Borawski

01/24/2025

Many thanks to Christopher Arnott at the Hartford Courant for spreading the word about this upcoming celebration of filmmaking talent in our region - The Hartford Film Showcase (presented by The Hartford Film Company, in partnership with Real Art Ways) on Saturday, 2/1, in our cinema.

Many people may not know that short films, narratives, and documentary features are written, directed, and shot right here in Hartford. There is an active filmmaking community that is continuing to put Hartford on the map. The Hartford Film Showcase was conceived to highlight these creative efforts and recognize the talent behind these projects.

Read the full story here:
https://www.courant.com/2025/01/24/hartford-film-showcase-at-real-art-ways-celebrates-local-filmmaking-achievements/

Register for free tix for this all-day event (they are going fast!)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-hartford-film-showcase-tickets-1095375099409?aff=oddtdtcreator

(This showcase is made possible with generous support from Greater Hartford Arts Council)

The Hartford Film Showcase at Real Art Ways on Feb. 1 will screen eight shorts and three features, all made in Hartford and released in the last year or so.

01/22/2025

🍿🎥🍿 Opening Friday, 1/24, with two showtimes daily, THE BRUTALIST is a "thrillingly ambitious 3 and 1/2 hour character study and portrait of mid-century America."

Filmed in VistaVision and commanding 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and nominations for actors Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, and Felicity Jones - we are thrilled to present this film for our audience.

--

Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Toth arrives in America to rebuild his life, work, and marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes.

On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost…

--

Experience this epic on the big screen, with no distractions (and an actual 15 min intermission!), as it's meant to be seen.

For advance 🎟️: https://www.realartways.org/event/the-brutalist/