Students curate Katro Storm portraits at HVRHS

The Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village is once again host to a wonderful student-curated exhibition. “Once Upon a Time in America,” ten portraits by New Haven artist Katro Storm, opened on Nov. 20 and will run through the end of the year.

“This is our first show of the year,” said senior student Alex Wilbur, the current head intern who oversees the student-run gallery. “I inherited the position last year from Elinor Wolgemuth. It’s been really amazing to take charge and see this through.”

Part of what became a capstone project for Wolgemuth, she left behind a comprehensive guide to help future student interns manage the gallery effectively. “Everything from who we should contact, the steps to take for everything, our donors,” Wilbur said. “It’s really extensive and it’s been a huge help.”

Art teacher Lilly Rand Barnett first met Storm a few years ago through his ICEHOUSE Project Space exhibition in Sharon, “Will It Grow in Sharon?” in which he planted cotton and tobacco as part of an exploration of ancestral heritage.

“And the plants did grow,” said Barnett. She asked Storm if her students could use them, and the resulting work became a project for that year’s Troutbeck Symposium, the annual student-led event in Amenia that uncovers little-known or under-told histories of marginalized communities, particularly BIPOC histories.

Last spring, Rand emailed to ask if Storm would consider a solo show at HVRHS. He agreed.

And just a few weeks ago, he arrived — paints, brushes and canvases in tow.

“When Katro came to start hanging everything, he took up a mini art residency in Ms. Rand’s room,” Wilbur said. “All her students were able to see his process and talk to him. It was great working with him.”

Perhaps more unexpected was his openness. “He really trusted us as curators and visionaries,” Wilbur said. “He said, ‘Do with it what you will.’”

Artist Katro StormNatalia Zukerman

Storm’s artistic training began at New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts. His talent earned him a full scholarship to the Arts Institute of Boston, then Boston’s Museum School, where he painted seven oversized portraits of influential Black figures — in seven days — for his final project. Those works became the backbone of his early exhibitions, including at Howard University’s National Council for the Arts.

Storm has created several community murals like the 2009 READ Mural featuring local heroes, and several literacy and wellness murals at the Stetson Branch Library in New Haven. Today, he teaches and works, he said, “wherever I set up shop. Sometimes I go outside. Sometimes I’m on top of roofs. Wherever it is, I get the job done.”

His deep ties to education made a high school gallery an especially meaningful stop. “No one really knew who these people were except maybe John Lennon,” Storm said of the portraits in the show. “It’s really important for them to know James Baldwin and Shirley Chisholm. And now they do.”

The exhibition includes a wide list of subjects: James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, Redd Foxx, Jasper Johns, Marilyn Manson, William F. Buckley, Harold Hunter, John Lennon, as well as two deeply personal works — a portrait of Tracy Sherrod (“She’s a friend of mine… She had an interesting hairdo”) and a tribute to his late friend Nes Rivera. “Most of the time I choose my subjects because there are things I want to see,” Storm said.

Storm’s paintings, which he describes as “full frontal figuratism,” rely on drips, tonal shifts, and what feels like emerging depth. His process moves quickly. “It depends on how fast it needs to get done,” he said. “Sometimes I like to take the long way up the mountain. Instead of doing an outline, I just start coloring, blocking things off with light and dark until it starts to take shape.”

He’s currently in a black-and-white phase. “Right now, I’m inspired by black and white, the way I can really get contrast and depth.”

Work happens on multiple canvases at once. “Sometimes I’ll have five paintings going on at one time because I go through different moods, and then there’s the way the light hits,” he said. “It’s kind of like cooking. You’ve got a couple things going at once, a couple things cooking, and you just try to reach that deadline.”

For Wilbur, who has studied studio arts “ever since I was really young” and recently applied early decision to Vassar, the experience has been transformative. For Storm — an artist who built an early career painting seven portraits in seven days and has turned New York’s subway corridors into a makeshift museum — it has been another chance to merge artmaking with education, and to pass a torch to a new generation of curators.