Brian Slattery Photos
Heather and Ed Gendron shared a table at Cafe X on the corner of Whalley and Blake. Outside, throughout Westville, the 22nd annual ArtWalk was in full swing, with studios thrown open upstairs at West River Arts, vendors attracting customers to their booths on Central Avenue and Fountain Street, and bands regaling audiences in Edgewood Park. Together, the Gendrons were making art.
“It’s not an organized event,” Ed joked. “There’s no manifesto involved.”
“It’s called, ‘day off,’” Heather said.
Yet both of them had been to art school. Ed is a filmmaker and animator with a home studio in Westville. Heather is an art librarian. “So I get to do this on the weekend,” she said, then corrected herself.
“Every waking hour, when I’m not in a library,” she said. “ArtWalk needs some love from the weather, and it finally got it.”
After a few years in a row of cold and rain for the annual festival in Westville’s commercial corridor, excellent weather prevailed for both Friday and Saturday, drawing crowds early and keeping them late. Edgewood Park was buzzing with people well before noon, visiting the food trucks parked near the bandstand and checking out what was happening in the tents set up around the lawn.
Edgewood School’s jazz band created an appreciative audience for itself.
In a nearby tent, people created inspirational poetry from giant-size fridge-magnet words.
In front of Aquila Motors, a silk-screening booth churned out T‑shirts in a multitude of animal-based patterns.
And pedestrians strolled the closed streets, checking out what the vendors this year had to offer, as a DJ from Elm City Sounds pumped out old-school R&B and Ethiopian jazz.
At the corner of Fountain and Central, Reinaldo Cruz — who billed himself as a carpenter, timber framer, furniture builder, organic gardener, permaculture designer, and artist — had set up shop, fashioning a piece of wood into a spoon to join the wares he had laid out for sale on a table behind him.
“If you show what you know, other things open to you,” he said.
He explained that the spoon he was carving had started as a jagged fragment taken off a much larger piece of wood that he got from City Bench, the sawmll located in East Rock Park. He was friends with Zeb and Ted Esselstyn, the brothers who run the mill. “Any time you need wood, come see us,” they told him, and so he took large chunks of wood that were just scraps to them but ample material for Cruz.
“I’m not asking for a lot,” he said. “One or two logs makes many spoons.”
Once he obtained the wood, he used a combination of hand tools and machines to make the final product. The results were laid out behind him, but he was happy to keep answering questions from passersby. No one should hide their talent, he added; “there’s room for everyone in this world.”
Sister and brother Jemma Williams Nussbaum and Chris Williams shared a booth on Fountain Street, where Jemma sold handmade plush toys from her line of Jemmanimals and Chris sold custom-made action figures under the name Squirrelhouse Customs.
“We’re a family of makers,” Jemma explained. She had begun making plush animals in 2006, when she was living in Westville (she has since moved to Cheshire, and works in the communications department at Hopkins). The giant narwhal was the first animal she made; the others followed. “They’re not just for kids,” she said. “They’re for humans of all ages.”
She has been going to one or two markets a year with Jemmanimals in addition to selling them online. “It’s a fun way to show your creativity and make art that makes people smile,” she said.
For this ArtWalk, she convinced brother Chris to join her. He was selling his figures in a market for the first time. Chris makes his figures starting with a 3D printer and then finishes the details with hand sculpting and clay. The results are often fantastical creatures, such as one might find in video games, but also range to cult figures like Tommy Wiseau in The Room.
Chris “has had a lifelong love of action figures,” said wife Ananda Box-Williams (not pictured). “He made it for the love of doing it.”
“I just made a couple that I was inspired to make and put them up on eBay, and they were snatched up in minutes, so I thought, ‘why not make more?’” Among the Tommy Wiseaus from the room was one from a specific scene in that now infamous movie. Williams referred to the figure as his “I‑did-not-her Tommy, I‑did-naaht.”
“You’ll never find another like it,” Box-Williams said of Chris’s figures, adding that he could design pretty much whatever action figure he wanted. Box-Williams said one woman had stopped by earlier with a specific request.
“Can you make me into a superhero?” she asked.
