Winsted, CT – In celebration of LGBTQ History month, The Gallery at Founders Hall located at CT State Northwestern is proud to exhibit the intimate portraits of artist Joe Radoccia titled LGBTQ Elders. His work will be on display October 5 through November 2 with an artist’s reception scheduled for Wednesday, November 1 from 5 to 6 p.m. Both the gallery and the reception are free and open to the public.
LGBTQA Elders captures the profound intimacy of creating portraits, where hours of silent observation translate into intricate marks on paper, revealing unseen aspects of a person.
“There is a profound intimacy in the act of painting a person’s portrait,” Radoccia says in his statement about the collection. “You spend hours silently looking at their face, translating what you see into various types of marks on paper, and you watch as these marks become their likeness. Over time, aspects of that person that no amount of conversation could ever convey begin to surface. And the completed portrait quietly emanates this unspoken self.”
Radoccia goes on to state he sees the oversized format as ideal for these works; a format that represents the right to be present and “at long last be as out and visible and large as we want to be,” which is an environment that did not exist for his models for most of their life.
But despite their size, the works still convey an intimacy with each subject. “The vulnerability of the exposed paper, the intricacy of the mark making, and the way these come together to form the portraits, mirror the delicate complexity of the negotiated paths that made us each who we are today,” he states.
Radoccia received his Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Buffalo and his bachelor’s degree in graphic design from Buffalo State College. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States. He has been published in numerous anthologies of male figurative art and his work resides in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City. In 2020 he was the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in the category of Drawing.
The Gallery at Founders Hall is located at 4 Park Place, Winsted. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. For more information about the exhibit please contact Gallery Coordinator Deb Kline at dkline@nwcc.edu.