For a young Brechin Morgan in the 1950s, the mile-long beach between what’s now Harkness Memorial State Park and Seaside State Park in Waterford was a playground.

It’s where he and his brother would fill their bathing suits with rocks and sand, run into the water, and sink to the bottom for a tea party with breath held strong. It’s where they’d float around on the water’s surface pretending to be turtles, and from where he’d gather seaweed for his grandmother to concoct into pudding with sugar and vanilla for dinner dessert.

“I lived in the salt water from the time I can remember,” Morgan, a Bridgeport-based artist, says of the stretch along Long Island Sound. “It’s where I realized as a kid that this little piece of beach here extends to every other piece of beach in the entire world. If you can get on a floating piece of something or other, you can reach every other beach in the world.”

Morgan and the 13 other artists with work on display in “Sight and Sound: Artists Consider Long Island Sound,” the latest exhibition at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art at UConn Avery Point, each have had unique introductions to the body of water just off the Connecticut coast, but they all share an affinity for its beauty and history, and the way they say it makes them feel at home.

Ecology, Cultural History, Geology

“Sight and Sound” is the work of curator Richard Klein, himself a Connecticut-based artist, who brought the show to UConn with support from the Connecticut Sea Grant Arts Support Awards Program. It’s a project, he says, that was born in 2024 when he started to think about how other artists, specifically contemporary artists, considered the sound in their work.

“I’m drawn to projects where I’m learning something, where it’s something I don’t know about,” he said during a panel discussion at the show’s opening reception this month. “I’ve lived most of my life along Long Island Sound. I’ve swum in Long Island Sound. I’ve boated in Long Island Sound, fished Long Island Sound – I never really thought about Long Island Sound.”

For the last two years, as he’s talked with artists about how the body of water that empties into the Atlantic Ocean at the Rhode Island border has affected their work, he said he’s learned about its ecology, how it’s home to 120 species of fish and 1,200 kinds of invertebrates; its cultural history, how prior to the 19th century people on the shore used mostly boats to get from place to place; and its geology, how the watershed spans 16,820 square miles.

“I had no idea about the number of wrecks on the bottom of the sound,” he said. “Most of them are on the Connecticut side where the lighthouses are because of the fact it’s rocky. … Everyone thinks this is a placid body of water, and it’s incredibly treacherous.”

Artist Martha Willette Lewis, who with artist Marion Belanger has on display several archival pigment prints with hand marbling, said she’s most fascinated by the marshes that sit just a bit inland and serve as a filtration system for the streams and rivers that eventually empty into the sound.

She described during the discussion the canoe trips she takes to see the “huge quantity of life in there” and how marshes often are seen as worthless property, merely breeding grounds for insects and collection sites for garbage.

“Personally, I love getting lost in there,” she said, noting the abandoned bridges and roads she often comes across. “It’s human history in there … and it’s like this ever-changing labyrinth, so that to me is the most amazing part about the sound.”

Morgan said the three pieces of his in the show depict a place that until two years ago he hadn’t known much about: Little Liberia in Bridgeport, where in the 1800s thousands of African Americans lived in 10 square blocks of the city and made their living working on the water.

His paintings “Little Liberia Triptych, Oyster Fleet Returning to Bridgeport Harbor,” “Little Liberia Triptych, View of Bridgeport Harbor from Little Liberia,” and “Little Liberia Triptych, Whaling Ship Atlantic Unloading at Wharves in Bridgeport Harbor” imagine what the now redeveloped area might have once looked like.

Much the same as Herman Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick” features a diverse crew from many nations, so did real life aboard whaling and fishing vessels, Morgan said.

For artist Francine Ashforth, the sound is a place where she practices close observation, yes, looking off into the distant horizon but also studying what’s near one’s feet.

Her “Four Rock Collection Drawings,” a set of four pencil sketches of beach rocks, is a commentary, she said, on getting away from screens and other technology to spend time studying something up close.

Her seascapes – what she referred to as her “big blue pieces” – including “Estuary,” “Wide Water,” and “Surfline,” monotypes in blue and white, are about “awe and beauty and trying to be quiet in a world that’s not quiet,” she said.

Seeing Things Differently Through Art

Syma Ebbin, Connecticut Sea Grant’s research coordinator who’s also interim director of UConn’s Maritime Studies Program and a professor-in-residence in the agricultural and resource economics department, told the group gathered for the panel discussion that she conceived Sea Grant’s art program about 15 years ago after visiting a Stonington-based artist and seeing how she used marine debris in her artwork – “human debris morphed upon by nature, so maybe a shoe with barnacles.”

After spending an afternoon learning about that artist’s work, “I realized when I went to the beach the next time that I did not look at that beach the same way, that there had been a transformation in me,” she said. “I’m a person who can read a scientific journal [and] if I could have that [kind of] transformation, there’s something super powerful about the ability of art to get us to see things differently and to think about things differently.”

She explained that she soon thereafter approached her colleagues at Connecticut Sea Grant about the possibility of starting an arts grant program similar to the one Rhode Island Sea Grant operated, which funded that Stonington artist who had initially moved her.

Bill Lucey, who sits on the Sea Grant Senior Advisory Board and who serves as soundkeeper for the nonprofit Save the Sound, told the group that as a biologist he most often looks at the sound in scientific ways – think, water temperature and habitat classification – so seeing an exhibition highlighting its artistry has had almost a “calming effect.”

“If you don’t care about a place … you’re not going to spend any time defending it. You’re not going to be attached to it, and … society’s going to leave things behind, kind of what happened to Long Island Sound in the ’70s. I mean, it was a mess,” he said.

‘The sound has always tied us to the rest of the world’

About 20 years ago, Matthew McKenzie said he washed ashore at UConn Avery Point, where he’s a history professor and American Studies Program coordinator, after a childhood on Cape Cod and early career studying coastal southern New England from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Peconic Bay, Long Island.

“There’s a lot of continuity in this region, and there’s a lot of parallels in historical development [and] people in it,” he told the group, noting that the works of two artists in “Sight and Sound” particularly resonated with him.

First, he said he was taken by Morgan’s interpretation of Little Liberia. Second, he was moved by a series of water drawings from artist Christopher Coffin, in which GPS plot points form irregular patterns of white lines on blue backgrounds, much like a walking or running route on a smartwatch. For him, the series represents the difficulty of water navigation, even if it looks easy on paper.

“There’s human intention,” he said of navigation, “but the second you get out onto the water in whatever vessel or boat or paddleboard you’re on, you’re not going to go where you think you’re going to go. It’s not a straight line.”

Navigation is an “imprecise art,” he continued. “You’ve got to figure out what the boat wants to do, what the wind wants to do, what the water wants to do, and all four of us have got to come around to some sort of agreement to get us to go more or less in the direction that we hope to go in. … These seemingly precise lines [in Coffin’s work] are actually reflecting a very imprecise way of going about the world.”

Save a contact paper and resin “Map of Hellgate,” where the East River in New York City meets the sound, by artist Duke Riley, McKenzie noted he was surprised Klein didn’t choose to use any maps in the show.

“I’ve always looked at Long Island Sound … from a navigational working waterfront, mariner’s perspective, and the fact that there were no pieces that were zeroing in on charts for the most part, I thought it to be liberating,” he said. “It was a totally different way of looking at the sound.”

Remember, Lucey described it as “calming.”

“The thing that I love about being at this campus is that we have shows like this,” McKenzie added. “We have sciences, we have humanities, we have social sciences. And what I say to my students is the sciences and the social sciences tell us what we need to do to basically [fix] the world that we’ve messed up. But what’s going to get us to [care] enough … to actually do something about it is the art that you all produce.”

And much like Morgan realized when he was a boy that the beach between Harkness Memorial State Park and Seaside State Park connects to the rest of the world, McKenzie said the same of Long Island Sound.

“It links all of us to one another. Our rivers empty into it, its waters allow millions of dollars of cargo to be economically and efficiently transported along our shores, but most importantly, the sound has always tied us to the rest of the world. What one does in one end of the sound affects those at the other end,” he said after the discussion. “The Long Island Sound watershed links us all together in very real, material, spiritual, and cultural ways. Anything that can do that should probably be talked about.”

 

“Sight and Sound: Artists Consider Long Island Sound” is open at the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art at UConn Avery Point through Sunday, Dec. 6.