So Your Child is a Visual Artist

Join Artspace New Haven for a conversation about supporting children and teens through their art-making journeys with artists Leo Smolinski, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, and Joseph Smolinski. The artists will discuss forging artistic communities, resources such as summer and school-year art programs, application processes, and personal experiences that shaped their formation as developing, emerging, and mid-career artists. We invite parents, teens, and children of all ages to join us for this conversation. Refreshments will be provided.

So Your Child is a Visual Artist is a free public program held in conjunction with the exhibition Footnotes and other embedded stories, on view April 30–June 25, 2022 at Artspace New Haven, featuring the five Happy and Bob Doran Artists in Residence, Leonard Galmon, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Allison Minto, Julia Rooney, and Joseph Smolinski concerning artist research and art-making processes. As an in-person program, capacity will be 50 audience members in compliance with COVID-19 safety.

Please note that this event is on the same day as the Festival for Art & Ideas downtown, so plan accordingly with parking and travel.

Leo Smolinski is a teenage artist living and working in Westville, New Haven, CT. He currently attends Edgewood School and will be starting at ACES Educational Center for the Arts in the Fall of 2022. Leo is interested in jewelry, fashion design, digital art and ceramics. His work can be found at the Westville Art Walk and The Smolinski Family Store.

Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez is an Indigenous Zapotec artist, educator, and curator born on Quinnipiac land (New Haven, Connecticut). As a lens-based artist, she uses photography as a tool in printmaking, woodworking, and other media to dissect and create language for: religious exploitation, spiritual salvation, redemption, oppression affecting BIPOC, and more. She is passionate about work that serves the New Haven community and the grassroots arts ecology, and currently runs an annual international print exchange to serve those aims called Lunch Money Print. Ruby’s work has been supported and recognized by the National Basketball Association, Facing History and Ourselves, United Way, and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. In her curatorial practice, she organizes exhibitions concerning themes and ideas surrounding community solidarity. Ruby is currently working towards an exhibition for the Yale Gallery of Art and Artspace, New Haven 2021–2022 Happy and Bob Doran Connecticut Artist-in-Residence program, opening at Artspace in April 2022.

Joseph Smolinski is a multidisciplinary artist and educator that lives and works in New Haven, CT. His practice questions the shifting roles of technology within communication networks, energy and oil companies, and the industrial agricultural infrastructure, which indelibly shape the so-called natural environment. Smolinski received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin (1999) and his MFA from the University of Connecticut, Storrs (2001). Group exhibition venues include Diverse Works, Houston, TX; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Aldrich Museum of  Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Solo exhibitions include Mixed  Greens Gallery, NY; Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; and  ArtSpace, New Haven, CT. His work has been discussed in Art in America, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Art Papers. He is a recipient of the Connecticut  Commission of the Arts 2012 Artist Fellowship, the 2014 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University, and a 2012 Artist Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. He has been an artist in residence at Wassaic Projects and is currently a 2021–2022 artist in residence at Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace, New Haven through the Happy and Bob Doran Connecticut program.