NEW CANAAN — Longtime Sandy Hook resident Liz Fay is having her new collection of work featured in a one-artist exhibition at Silvermine Arts Center.

Through 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, is on view for the first time. The largest and most time-intensive project of Fay’s career to date, 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 naturalist, landscape painter, organic gardener, and “a relative by marriage.”

The artist and her daughter visited Spring, then 92 and suffering with “really bad arthritis,” according to the artist. They Spring within her organic garden, sitting proudly in an upholstered easy chair set in the middle of the natural setting of 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 for her exhibition catalog.

Spring had invited the two women to visit her, and to harvest some of the vegetables there. Before they began their return trip home, Fay found herself sitting in her car, her daughter in the passenger seat, thinking about the day, the woman they had visited, and how extraordinary it was to have Spring in their lives. The 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 later, Fay has completed the collection celebrating women in her life. Sixteen majestic large-scale works — the smallest dimension 37 inches tall, the largest a three-panel piece cumulatively measuring 18 feet wide; the works average nearly 75½ inches wide by just shy of 69 inches tall — fill the eyes and imagination of those who make the time to see them in person.

Beyond Traditional Hooking

"Ordinary/Extraordinary Women" represents a determined step away from the functional rugs with abstract designs, often award-winning, Fay had previously devoted her time to. While she further mastered the rug hooking technique she has utilized for more than a quarter century — using wool fabric cut into strips hand hooked onto a linen background — Fay continued to challenge herself during the 21 years of working on the series.

Each portrait has traditional hooking, plus something different, from punch needle embroidery or hand embroidery to spool knitting or hand appliqué. “Jessie Turbayne: At Work in Her Studio” represents the first time Fay incorporated a 3-D pincushion into her work, “something I’d never done before,” she said.

“Francine Even: At Snow Farm” depicts the fellow rug hooking enthusiast holding a partially woven basket Even was creating while attending a workshop at Snow Farm Craft Program in Massachusetts. Fay snapped a photo of her friend, seated at a table, material in her hands, two sets of windows breaking up the wall behind her.

In creating the 84- by 59-inch portrait, Fay cut material away from the backing to form the windowpanes along the left and right side of the wall hanging. She pushed herself, she shared in the exhibition catalog, to see how much material she could remove while still having the rug hold its shape.

“It’s very unusual with rug hooking to cut away so much backing material,” she wrote.

The presentation of some of the portraits are nearly as creative as the artist behind them. The portrait of landscape designer Kimberly Day Proctor starts on the floor, has a 90-degree crease, and then continues on the wall. Fay incorporated a photo of Proctor and a line drawing depicting her home and yard into the hooked piece.

Proctor has been hooked in Fay’s traditional style, yet the work’s background is an unhooked, flat surface. Additionally, the 78½ by 102 by 27½-inch piece, “The Magical World of Kimberly Day Proctor,” features just three areas with color, another detraction from Fay’s usual hue-filled presentations.

“The only pops of color,” Fay wrote for the catalog, are the flowers, trees, and butterfly, which stand out bright and bold alongside the monochrome piece.”

Set in the lower panel, the tree is a three-dimensional addition to the otherwise two-dimensional plane.

“These untraditional choices give the impression that the drawing is coming to life, emerging into space, transforming from black and white to color and from 2-D to 3-D.

“I made these choices to highlight Kim’s incredible ability to create life and color where at one time there was none.”

The unusual design also includes more than a dozen hand embroidered and appliquéd labels, re-creating Proctor’s labels from the line illustration. The finished product is another very clever and impressive piece crafted by Fay’s talented hands.

The hooked portraits also 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 recently shared. Fay worked closely with each woman to determine her approach to the work.

“I would interview them, and photograph them, before creating each image,” she said. While each rug's timeline varied, Fay says the average was four months per portrait.

Many incorporate elements representative of each woman. “Ruth Spring: In Her Garden” shows Spring in her chair within the garden, surrounded by her favorite vegetables. To her left is a basket from which plants emerge, and in her hands some onions, a red pepper, and other vegetables. Fay added an apple tree arching over the elderly woman.

The tree is real, but it lived in front of Spring’s childhood home, not the garden in which she is pictured.

“It was planted there when she was a little girl, and by the time I knew her it was bent over the front door, and you had to duck to get inside the house,” Fay said.

“Some of the final portraits are a collage, like Ruth’s,” she said.

Creating “Ordinary/Extraordinary Women” also pushed Fay to try something else she had rarely done before: asking someone to create a design for her.

For her celebratory collection, however, Fay invited her friend and children’s book author and illustrator Marisabina Russo to create the drawing that was used for Russo’s portrait. The result of that collaboration was a learning experience for each artist, and the multi-panel design that is “Marisabina Russo: Memoir Synopsized.”

Mother & Daughter Portraits

Finished last year, the final work done for “Ordinary/Extraordinary Women” was a self-portrait.

“Liz Alpert Fay: Dreaming on Blue Mountain Lake” hangs next to “Joan Alpert Rowen: Woman of the Woods,” the portrait of the artist’s late mother, in New Canaan. Each measuring 83 by 47 inches, the juxtaposition of the two portraits shows how the mother and daughter “share common imagery while showing each woman’s individuality,” the artist said.

The catalog for “Ordinary/Extraordinary Women” was a family and friends effort.

“It started as a family collaboration,” she said. Son Aron, a graphic designer in New York, and daughter Chelsea, a writer and metalsmith, both encouraged Fay to create the catalog. Each then worked with their mother, with Aron handling the book’s design and Chelsea serving as one of two editors.

Photographer Dave McCaughan spent time with Fay in June 2024, driving her around the Northeast while photographing each of the women in the collection. Retired photographer Brad Stanton, Fay’s photographer for nearly 30 years, also provided many of the professional photos in the catalog.

Artist and book editor Nancy Moore helped Fay collect her thoughts, and edited the final catalog. Rich Kaplan of Allied Printing then “went above and beyond,” said Fay, “making sure the limited run was ready and delivered to me. Everything just came together beautifully.”

In addition to the exhibition catalog, the presentation at Silvermine offers a brief 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.” They are also included in the exhibition catalog, following the essays written by Fay about each woman.

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."

Silvermine Arts Center, 1037 Silvermine Road in New Canaan, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am until 4 pm. For additional information call 203-966-9700, email info@silvermineart.org, or visit silvermineart.org.

=====

Managing Editor Shannon Hicks can be reached at shannon@thebee.com.