Find shelter where you can

From Chiffon Thomas’s show “The Cavernous,’’ at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn., through March 17.

The museum says:

“Chiffon Thomas’s first solo museum exhibition will unveil a new body of work, including the artist’s first public sculpture. Thomas’s interdisciplinary practice, spanning embroidery, collage, sculpture, drawing, performance, and installation, examines the ruptures that exist where race, gender expression, and biography intersect. Thomas’s practice is informed by his background in education, percussion, and stop motion animation, as well as a childhood steeped in religion.’’

In Ridgefield’s rather spiffy downtown

— Photo by Doug Kerr

‘Decomposition and rebirth’

“Last Steps,” by David Shaw, in Ridgefield, Conn., in the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s Main Street Sculpture program through next April 23.

The museum says:

“Shaw’s recent work explores the indistinct boundaries that separate nature, technology, and consciousness. ‘Last Steps,’ which takes the form of a step ladder, is in a process of decomposition as well as rebirth, with gleams of spectral light appearing in gaps in the moss-like growth that has enveloped it, suggesting an alternate reality or a regenerative possibility lurking beneath the surface.”

“The artist’s use of the ladder form—but with missing rungs—speaks of the challenges we face as a civilization as we try to heal what has been lost.’’

Shaw says: “As we begin to embrace our responsibilities to the natural world, ‘Last Steps’ is both an image of our frustrated, unattainable, and perhaps misguided desire for progress, and a symbol of hope that the world wants to rebuild, that life wants to continue.”

Ridgefield’s Peter Parley Schoolhouse (c. 1750), also known as the Little Red Schoolhouse or the West Lane Schoolhouse, is a one-room schoolhouse in use by the town until 1913. The site and grounds are maintained by the Ridgefield Garden Club. The building is open certain Sundays and displays the desks, slates, and books the children used.

Blessings of age

Maple between spruce trees

“I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”

— Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), children’s author. He lived in Ridgefield in western Connecticut. The town hosts the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. (See picture below.)

Sugar maple in early summer

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art