WEST CORNWALL, CT - New York City art world veteran, Margaret Bodell, culminates 20 years of gallery experience with an Inaugural Summer Salon Exhibition “Contemporary Antiquarians” opening at the new Art at the Bridge gallery in historic West Cornwall. The show will feature the most recent work of contemporary emerging artists and artists outside the mainstream that uniquely combine contemporary ideas with antiquated and traditional techniques.

Contemporary Antiquarians will highlight artists that represent the “slow movement” in art, New Impressionists of our time working with labor-intensive processes, nostalgic materials, and strongly influenced by the artist’s sense of craft. The artistic talent will take form in a variety of media including: 19th century photographic tintypes, oil paintings that reinvent the sites of 18th century British landscape painters, hand-whittled sculptures, and works influenced by turn of the century decorative styles.

Art at the Bridge, housed in a pink Victorian with a front porch overlooking the West Cornwall village and the Housatonic River, will be a getaway site for artists looking for community, conversation, and a place for the incubation of new work. The space will be a summer “coffee klutch” for artists, a retreat from the city, open seven days a week, in one of the last of the undeveloped areas of Connecticut’s countryside.

West Cornwall has long been a community and home to many artists and writers with a tradition of handmade craftsmanship, from furniture and pottery, to the architecture of the famous covered bridge. Art at the Bridge will be a meeting place continuing in this tradition and will provide a home for a contemporary dialogue of the issues of our time.

Bodell’s art ventures began in her native Connecticut with her first gallery in New Haven in 1984, Art in Heaven. Margaret Bodell Gallery in NYC’s East Village launched many emerging artist’s careers and was known for the inclusion of underrepresented artists such as those artists living with disabilities. Bodell founded numerous art programs and artist residencies as well as social venture businesses throughout New York and New England. Art at the Bridge continues to bring both the historical and the contemporary to the Tri-State community.