Allan Appel Photo
Weiss, on the far right, with GNHTD’s Donna Carter and AASCC’s Ted Surh hailing art, presenting check.
If you see some of our shoreline marsh moving along area highways, it shouldn’t be cause for environmental worry. Well, at least not yet. It’s there for artistic and fundraising purposes.
You’re seeing a romantic image of the waters, tall grass, and breeding ground for ibises and plovers all captured in “Mood of the Marsh,” a four-paneled work by artist Cathy Weiss.
The painting (pictured) is the first ever to decorate the side of one of the 68 vans operated by Greater New Haven Transit (GNHTD), the state-funded transportation program for qualifying elderly and disabled folks. It offers them rides, usually for visits to doctors or grocery stores. It serves folks from Madison to Milford to Waterbury — and, of course, elderly New Haveners.
Why the art?
At the start of the year, state lawmakers raised the GNHTD trip cost from $2.60 to $3.00. (Click here for the WTNH full story on the 40 cent each-way raise in the required fare.)
Those 40 cents add up to a lot of money for seniors, said Weiss, who is also a gerontologist by training.
She was approached by Donna Carter, president of the GNHTD, who had set up the Greater New Haven Transit District Foundation to help make up the approximately $50,000 shortfall.
With fiscal austerity a given and the increasing graying of the population, Carter said that while her group is advocating a rollback of the raise, they are not passively waiting around for it to happen. They’ve created a campaign called It Makes Cents both to lobby for a rollback of the raise, but also to raise private funds through the foundation to buffer the blow to needy seniors until the rollback happens.
Hence the mobile marsh.
Weiss not only created the work pro bono — four separate panels on cold pressed watercolor paper that will adhere to the vehicle — she also found sponsors for it, that is, friends who gave money directly to the GNHTD Foundation.
Another group, the Agency on Aging of South Central Connecticut, used the occasion of the recent art exhibition by seniors to donate $5,000 toward the foundation.
Carter said that the organization’s 68 vans provide 800 to 1,000 trips every day in the Greater New Haven area.
With Weiss’s evocative painting on one, that leaves 67 other artists to step forward and use their skills, as she has done, to generate additional sponsorship. Copies of the painting are available from her, with profits going to the “It Makes Cents Program.”
“In ‘Mood of the Marsh’ we see a house that seems to be hidden among the beauty and expansiveness of the world around it,” Weiss said in a statement. “The feeling of being able to have so much open to you is what the GNHTD transportation programs provide to our local residents.”
For more information, contact Weiss here or the GNHTD here.
