Creative Arts Workshop

On 80 Audubon St. toward the end of downtown New Haven’s historic arts district, where there once stood a birdhouse factory, you can peer through the windowed portico of The Creative Arts Workshop’s stylish Susan B. Hilles gallery, at an impressive array of finished work on sale to the public.

The Creative Arts Workshop is a community based visual arts school that offers three hundred different courses in fine arts and crafts, including among others, drawing and painting, printmaking, pottery, photography, fiber, ceramics, jewelry, design and sculpture. They are additionally one of the few institutions around to offer workshops in book art, and the various aspects of binding.

The history of the Creative Arts Workshop goes back over forty years. The 1960’s saw a period of growth and restructure in Downtown New Haven, with Audubon St. earmarked for redevelopment. A progressive bill was passed wherein organizations devoted to the arts were the only ones that could purchase the now vacant land. CAW’s parent organization, founded in 1960, bought the land at 80 Audubon St. and moved into their newly renovated building in 1972.

With neighbor institutions such as the Educational Center for the Arts, an art driven magnet high school, as well as the New Haven Ballet, New Haven Arts Council and the Neighborhood Music School, The Creative Arts Workshop rounds out a kind of Campus-like aesthetic and feel on Audubon St., separate from that of the Yale branch of New Haven’s fine art scene.

Classes and workshops generally fill up fast, though anyone with a passion for the arts, desire for top instruction and access to specialized studio space is welcome and encouraged to become part of the CAW community, regardless of age or artistic background.

“It never occurred to me that I’d be in an art community, or that people would see me as an artist,” says Lianne Audette, whose specialty is metal smithing.

“There was a social, productive, and aesthetic connection here that really spoke to what I needed at the time,” says Audette, was just looking for something to do after moving back from California to be with her ailing mother. “It was the first time I could totally invest all of my time and my passion into just me.”

Audette plans to open her own studio soon, and credits the Creative Arts Workshop for awakening her latent artistic passions.

Each year the Hilles, and the smaller Creative Works galleries play host to one faculty and two student shows, an annual themed August showing, as well as an invitational juried exhibition.

“The primary function is education, and the exhibitions should serve to augment that mission,” says Executive Director Susan Smith.

Currently, the Hilles Gallery is hosting the “41st Annual Celebration of American Crafts”, an exhibition open to the public that began Oct. 31 and will run through Dec. 24 of this year. As its name implies, it is a celebration of the best in American contemporary crafts, with a variety of ornate pieces made by over three hundred artists from Connecticut and across the country.

“It’s the melding of fine art and craft—well made and designed,” says Smith.

The exhibition offers a modern philosophy on the relationship between the fine arts, and craft making.

“Functionality is no longer a criterion through which we distinguish fine art from craft,” Smith explains. “It’s the form of the piece rather than the function; the process that distinguishes them both.”

The arts come together provide us with a context; a sense of community, a collective like-mindedness whereby our creative proclivities and processes manifest themselves into something personal, and beautiful, be it hewn from metal, molded from clay, or captured under just the right slant of light. For over forty years, The Creative Arts Workshop at 80 Audubon St. in New Haven has been that context.

For more information about The Creative Arts Workshop, class schedules and purchasing information, and The 41st Celebration of American Crafts, visit www.creativeartsworkshop.org