NEW CANAAN — Longtime Sandy Hook resident Liz Fay will be featured in a one-artist exhibition at Silvermine Arts Center this month and next.

From June 25 until July 5, Fay’s “Ordinary/Extraordinary Women” collection of large-scale, multidimensional portraits honoring 16 extraordinary yet often overlooked women, celebrating their individuality and the artist’s evolution, will be one view for the first time. It also represents the first time Fay is being honored with a solo show in a major museum or gallery.

A reception is planned for Sunday, June 29, from 2 to 4 pm. A gallery talk is scheduled for 3 pm.

For decades, Fay built her oeuvre crafting beautifully functional rugs, many abstract in design. That changed in 2004 following a visit by Fay and daughter Chelsea to Ruth Spring, “a relative by marriage,” according to Fay.

The artist and her daughter visited Spring, then 93 and suffering with arthritis. They found her amid her garden, sitting proudly in an upholstered easy chair set in the middle of the natural setting within New York’s Adirondack Mountains region.

Spring’s family and friends would often move the chair outdoors for the nonagenarian, which allowed her to “oversee and direct the planting, weeding, or harvesting that needed to be done,” Fay wrote in the catalog for “Ordinary/Extraordinary Women.”

The catalog — a very enjoyable collection of essays and beautiful full-color photographs — accompanies the exhibition of the same name about to open in New Canaan.

Spring had invited the two women to visit her in her organic garden, and encouraged them to harvest some of the vegetables there.

That visit ultimately led to the creation of “Ruth Spring: In Her Garden,” a hand hooked work Fay made using hand-dyed and recycled wool on linen that measures 58 by 47 inches. Twenty-one years after that visit to Ruth Spring and her garden, Fay has completed a truly larger-than-life collection celebrating women in her life. While each portrait continued Fay’s use of wool fabric cut into strips, hand hooked onto a linen background, subsequent pieces began incorporating novelty fabrics, clothing from family and friends, yarn, beads, and other items with a significant connection to the featured subject.

The choice of women occurred organically.

“It was just whoever was in my life at the time,” she told The Newtown Bee recently.

Finished last year, the final work created for the collection is a self-portrait of the artist. “Liz Alpert Fay: Dreaming on Blue Mountain Lake” will hang next to “Joan Alpert Rowen: Woman of the Woods,” the portrait of the artist’s late mother, in New Canaan. The presentation, according to Fay, will show how the mother and daughter “share common imagery while showing each woman’s individuality.”

In addition to the exhibition catalog, the presentation at Silvermine will offer a biography of each subject written by a close female friend or relative of the subject. The biographies, Fay shares in the exhibition catalog, “are both surprising and honest and bring a wider perspective and dimension to the project.”

After viewing the collection, she recently shared, Fay hopes visitors "will leave thinking about the women in their own lives. Women are so often overlooked and taken for granted, and I think it’s important, especially in today's world, to take the time to appreciate those around us."

A full feature on Fay and this career-defining project will be presented in the June 27, 2025 issue of The Newtown Bee and online at newtownbee.com.