Art of Aging Advances

It began four years ago with 50 paintings contributed by 12 artists from 20 towns in southern Connecticut.

Roll the clock ahead to today, as the annual Art of Aging exhibition, organized by the Agency on Aging of South Central Connecticut, celebrates older folks’ creativity and contributions. It now attracts 78 artists, contributing 180 works, from 43 separate towns.

Also new among the several hundred people who assembled at the agency’s headquarters at One Long Wharf Drive for the gala opening reception were ​“Stop Ageism Now” buttons, pinned to the shirts, lapels, and hats of artists, families, and admirers.

This year’s art show, part of the agency’s way of participating annually in Older Americans Month, featured a sub-contest for the best poster to help launch new awareness and ultimately a campaign to change legislation to address ageism in the workplace and other areas of interpersonal relationships.

One of the attendees at the opening this past Thursday was the poster contest winner, Milford’s Herb Portnoy, whose winning poster was on view. As visitors entered and absorbed the arresting obituary quotation, many also donned a campaign pin.

Thursday’s show was about creativity — at any age — and yet agency staffers like Bev Kidder, the director of the aging and disability resource center at the agency, was not shy about explaining the reason for the pins.

“We are seeing more and more the impact of ageism on older peoples’ economic station, an increasing rate of poverty for older folks. Research shows it’s discrimination by employers,” she said.

The campaign was launched in October and will unfold in three stages, she said. The first year focuses on raising awareness — thus the pins, the poster, advertising, and op eds, for starters. A second year of activities may include advocacy training to help older folks more easily recognize the gestures of ageism that come their way. Finally, and most ambitiously, Kidder said she’d like to see legislative changes on the federal level to toughen the anti-discrimination legislation, already on the books. ​“We’re hoping to enlist Sen. Murphy and Sen. Blumenthal to allow old people to sue as a group. That’s where all the change has to take place,” Kidder said.

Thursday, however, was for celebration, and Kidder took me to the first-prize winner, Rita Kelly’s watercolor composition Blue Irises.

Most of the artists participating were not professional, but amateurs who had taken up brushes, charcoal, or colored pencils after retirement.

That was the case with Portnoy, who spent nearly 20 years creating advertising for Stop & Shop when it was a family-owned business. Given that background, it’s not surprising that the Stop the Ageism poster he created won the day’s laurels.

Portnoy, who grew up in Boston before moving to Milford, signed on to an art class in Woodbridge ten years ago and has been going ever since. He had a landscape and a couple of portraits of a fat oriole in the exhibition, which he has entered now four years running.

Down the crowded hallway, smiles broke out on the face of 91-year-old Harriet Held when her daughter Roberta and their friend Betty Pilch surprised the artist by showing up.

“They’re gamblers,” declared Held, and said she thought they were at the casino for the afternoon. Little did she know they had decided to come down to celebrate at the art exhibition instead.

Held, whose tropical flowers composition is titled Mother Nature’s Children, said it was an ​“attempt at modern art.” Then she took me to another one of her pictures done earlier in a far more modern, abstract style. She explained that she had painted it in 1984 shortly after she and her husband had come back from a trip to Egypt.

In Egypt, she said, ​“it got to me, that sense of superiority the men had that the women were nothing.”

Most of the works in the show, which snaked down a long dog-legged corridor and filled up several adjoining rooms at the agency’s offices, were representational and realistic: lots of still lives, flowers, landscapes, and animals.

More than one conversation was overheard in which people expressed admiration that a spouse or grandmother or great aunt had such talent. That didn’t surprise Jane Wisialowsky, the agency’s director of business development, who was one of the lead organizers of the exhibition.

The artists, she said, ​“really feel appreciated that there’s a place that wants to show their work. It’s not just in their home. Here [there is ] a whole, another level of pride and dignity. You don’t look at a painting and know the age of an artist. It’s vibrant. You hear so much about the needs of the elderly. This is what they contribute. It’s a celebration that creativity doesn’t stop with the years,” she said.

Except for pieces such as Held’s Egyptian women composition and others that were marked too personal to have a price on them, the works were all for sale. Several had already sold within the first 30 minutes that the show was officially open. Ninety percent of revenue from the sales go to the artists, with a very modest 10 percent going to the agency to fund its non-grant-funded programs.

Like those Stop Ageism Now buttons.

The show runs through June 16, with a closing reception and awards ceremony at the Agency on Aging of South Central Connecticut, 1 Long Wharf Dr., 2 p.m.-4 p.m.