The Lobby of the Quick Center has been transformed into a showcase for contemporary artists, working in a variety of media this season.
The Future is Handmade—an art exhibition curated by Bridgeport-based artist Linda Colletta—is a community showcase of emerging artists. Organized by the Center for Arts & Minds and featuring eight women artists with regional roots, the exhibition opened on February 20, prior to a dance performance by the Los Angeles-based contemporary dance company BODYTRAFFIC. The colorful, large-scale, mixed-media work will be on display throughout the season.
At a buzzy opening night reception, the artists and their friends gathered with the over 400 patrons who had come for BODYTRAFFIC – converging in a lively celebration of color and community.
At the reception, University Provost Christine Siegel, PhD, said: “At Fairfield University, we are keenly aware of our obligation to serve our community as a center of hospitality, and as a beacon—a beacon for the arts, for intellectual development, for meaningful conversation, and most of all as a place that brings us together. Whether it’s in the classroom or here in the Quick Center, we ask ourselves: ‘How can we bring people together in a life-enhancing and life-affirming way?’ The Quick Center is very much at the center of this work. We like to think of it as the threshold—the place where we open our doors to everyone, where everyone can feel welcome.”
The work – in a variety of media – is large-scale, playful, and colorful. The show announces itself to any guest arriving in the lobby immediately with an enormous waterfall of neon pink canvas cascading down the lobby’s towering wall. This piece, made by artist and curator Colletta, was created over six weeks, in a process of painting, weaving, and tearing that feels both meticulous and unruly. The surface appears soft, almost plush, yet its scale and saturation are bracing. It makes a splash, quite literally, as you step inside—an audacious assertion that this is not a neutral corridor between parking lot and performance hall, but a place transformed.
Across the room, over the box office windows, a sculpture by Emily Silver—who grew up locally and now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at nearby Santa Monica College—stretches along smooth wooden planks shaped like skis. Over them arcs a rainbow of woven textile, taut and buoyant at once.
Elsewhere, tapestry works looped with neon LEDs by Denise Treizman glowed over the crowd, casting a futuristic hum. The exhibition gathers artists Amanda Russo Rubman, Crystal Heiden, Elena Kalkova, Emily Weiskopf, Roxy Savage, Treizman, Silver, and Colletta herself—women working across sculpture, textiles, installation, and experimental materials. Many have roots in the region; several are connected to the American Fabric Arts Building in Bridgeport, a quietly generative hub of studio practice. The effect is less a survey than a conversation—between neighbors, between media, between past and possibility.
The Future Is Handmade is mindful of the nation’s 250th anniversary—the birth of the United States and the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and nods to the women who once sewed national symbols by hand. At a moment when automation and digital production accelerate at dizzying speed, these artists return to touch: weaving, mending, binding, casting, layering, crushing.
Their works reveal how connection is built through process, and how unity is not a fixed concept but an ongoing practice—something shaped through repetition, care, and the bringing together of many parts. The pieces on view illuminate the limitless potential of form when guided by curiosity and imagination.
The exhibition remains on view and is free and open to the public during Quick Center Box Office hours.
