Allan Appel Photo
Co-founder Ann Lehman is still around to celebrate the half-century anniversary of Creative Arts Workshop.
Turning up the oxygen is sometimes a good thing. Ann Lehman did just that in her metal sculpture class, showing students how to manage the oxy-acetylene torch in order to fashion a strong weld. She’s been at it for more than four decades at the arts institution she helped found.
Lehman (pictured) is one of the founders of the Creative Arts Workshop (CAW), which this year is marking its 50th birthday. Some of her own work will be featured in CAW’s 42nd Annual Celebration of American Crafts show that opened this past weekend and runs right up to Christmas.
Lehman and several other artists, including Kiki and Harold Rabinowitz, founded the Creative Arts Workshop in 1960 because they were being asked to teach others and their own studios were too small.
At that time the only art school in the area was Paier College, and that was commercially oriented. From 1960 to 1964 Lehman and company rented the basement of the John Slade Ely House. Then space in the building were ACES is today on Audubon Street.
For the first four years, Lehman didn’t teach but organized all the classes. In 1972 CAW was able to buy the current building.
CAW currently has about 3,000 students of all ages from the greater New Haven area. According to Program Director Kate Parentau, the need today is the same as it was 50 years ago, with many who are interested in a medium like metal sculpture or printmaking being unable to pursue it without CAW classes and equipment.
On a recent Wednesday Lehman led one of the three classes she teaches per week, with a maximum of 12 students per class.
On this day all the students happened to be women, including Marilyn Braginsky of Westville. She’s been Lehman’s student for 40 years.
“It isn’t because she’s slow,” Lehman quipped.
“You learn these techniques and then you are on your own,” said Braginsky.
Lehman teaches those techniques through lecture and demonstration in a methodical manner, one each week of class: first welding, then a sculptural system that shows how each variation opens new possibilities; then hammering, armature building, soldering, and the lost wax technique.
Wini Colleran of North Haven was working on a somersaulting young girl. Lehman genially patrolled the women, who were adjusting their blue, red, and yellow flames.
“She teaches us, but she also lets us discover,” Colleran said of her teacher. “That’s the fun of it.”
Lehman studied art history and painting at Smith College but didn’t learn to weld till she came to study at Yale. From early in her life, she said, she was impatient with representations on a flat surface.
“I was never satisfied with things flat down. I always showed action.”
“I teach direct metal sculpture,” she said, which is using the torch to fuse metals together without casting or armature.
While she provides materials, students like Virginia Wylie bring in stuff she has scrounged from in this case a junkyard in Essex. Such scraps and industrial materials have become the stuff of her rooster, on which she’s been working with Lehman for two years.
“I have a general idea of where I’m going. But materials always intervene and send you in a new direction,” she said as she and Lehman brought down the chicken or rooster from its storage and assembled the pieces.
“She says ‘interfere,’. You could use another word. ‘Inspire,’” added Lehman.
Sometimes Lehman intervenes when there are other technical problems.
“Your oxygen is down. Fix your flame,” she called out to one student during an interview.
She advised other students how to handle the valves from the four large green tanks that leaned against the tables where the women were working.
Other times she intervenes aesthetically. Wylie’s chicken, for example, still had no base. That’s not the way you’re supposed to go about it. Base comes first, but Lehman let it go so Wylie could end up with what she wanted.
“She didn’t know what it was going to be.”
Wylie’s working on the piece for a grandchild who lives in a house in Vermont where they keep chickens.
“The chickens are going to have a heart attack when they see this. Or maybe it’ll scare away a hawk,” Lehman said.
Word has gotten out that there’s a lot to learn here and in a genial style. One semester a year Yale undergraduates can take metal sculpture as an elective with Lehman. It’s rare that Yale undergraduates leave campus for a class, but for years now they have loyally trooped over to CAW on Audubon Street.
Last semester for the 12 open spots, 62 students applied.
“You’re finally learning something at Yale,” one student’s parent reported, according to Lehman.
A second dad had a different reaction: I’m spending all this money at Yale and you’re learning to weld!
Parantau was at pains to point out that among Lehman’s other students are surgeons and dentists. “It’s not just for artists. It’s for midwives who do pottery. For people who do lots of other things.”
A new direction for CAW in its second 50 years will be expanding its work with artists with disabilities. This is not art therapy, Parantau pointed out, but artists who need one-on-one or other special assistance to try to make a career or serious avocation.
Next September CAW will be mounting “Accelerate,” a traveling exhibition of such work and supplementing it with an exhibition of CAW’s own successful artists who are working through autism or other obstacles.
About 8 percent of the CAW student population is in need of special emotional or physical help, and that is now on the way.
Just a short note, which I hope Ms. Lehman might enjoy; Harold Rabinowitz was my senior year high school art teacher who told me that if I only continued my drama club set building and painting during class time, he would give me a B but if I came to class I would get an A. The only downside was his record player. He had only one record: Surrealistic Pillow, played over and over. I loved him but grew sick of the album. I was really ready for Blows Against The Empire!
After I graduated, I once ran into him in the lower Whitney neighborhood and he told me with great pride of his wife and her friend's founding of the then-being built CAW. He took no credit for himself. Typical. I never knew.
Thank you, young lady, for your great lifelong contributions to our community!