![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/THEALDRICH_DECENNIAL_002.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>2026, Courtesy of the artist and Derosia, New York), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,
June 7, 2026 to January 10, 2027. Photo: Olympia Shannon.<\/span>Olympia Shannon<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n\tThere has been a lot of hand-wringing lately about whether artists can still afford to live in New York. Late last year, the artist Josh Kline gave this problem a name in a much-talked-about essay titled \u201cNew York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art.\u201d Kline argued that the city\u2019s housing and studio costs weren\u2019t simply driving artists out of New York, but changing the art that could be made there, pressuring artists into making easily marketable work so that they could sell enough to afford small studios. Experimentation and large-scale production, in Kline\u2019s estimation, have disappeared in response. The essay kicked off a frothy argument in the art world, but the diagnosis was hard to ignore. A more interesting question may be what comes next. If artists can no longer afford New York, do they actually need to live there?.<\/p>\n
\n\tThomas is one of a growing group of artists in Connecticut, and especially New Haven, who believe they\u2019ve found the remedy for a metastasized New York real estate market.<\/p>\n
\n\tSome arrived for Yale and never left. Others came for residencies and decided to stick around. A few, like Thomas, trod the well-worth art world path that passes through New York and Los Angeles, before deciding to move back. New York is still a short train ride away, after all.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe New Haven experiment isn\u2019t new. Dominic Chambers, an artist represented by Lehmann Maupin with works in multiple museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, moved there in 2017 for Yale\u2019s MFA program. Like plenty of young artists, he assumed New York would come next.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cEvery artist that goes to grad school, we all have dreams of going to New York,\u201d Chambers said. \u201cNew York\u2019s a fucking dynamic city. There are so many reasons to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBut he\u2019d also heard the horror stories: artists losing studios, rents jumping, people spending huge portions of their income simply holding onto enough room to work. New Haven offered a less glamorous proposition. It was practical.<\/p>\n
\n\tChambers\u2019s first studio in New Haven was 1,200 square feet and cost $1,000 a month. His current studio is 1,700 square feet and runs between $1,500 and $1,800, depending on utilities. He lives about 20 minutes away in Meriden, where he owns a house. At first, staying was mostly about money. That isn\u2019t really true anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cA lot of artists have really moved here,\u201d Chambers said. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen a lot of these kinds of people leave.\u201d Connecticut, he said, feels \u201cless isolating\u201d than it did when he arrived.<\/p>\n
\n\tThere are obvious tradeoffs. A curator in Manhattan cannot decide at three in the afternoon to swing by the studio on the way home. Chambers is aware of that. His answer is to make the trip worth taking: \u201cWe hope that people take a train ride up to visit us,\u201d he said. \u201cBut really we let our work do the talking.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThere is also something to be said for not having the art world outside your front door.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/THEALDRICH_DECENNIAL_001.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>2025, Courtesy of the artist and HESSE FLATOW, New York; right: Enrique Figueredo, Una<\/em>
enfermedad que solamente el oro puede curar (A Sickness Only Gold Can Cure)<\/em>, 2026,
Courtesy of the artist), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, June 7, 2026 to January 10,
2027. Photo: Olympia Shannon.<\/span>Olympia Shannon<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n\tChambers thinks he might have been more distracted, or simply more anxious, had he moved to Brooklyn after grad school. New York offers extraordinary access to exhibitions and people, but access comes with its own pressure: openings to attend, dinners to go to, people to meet, a studio that must always be ready for someone to drop by.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cYou go to New York, you invest so many years and so much capital into that city,\u201d Chambers said. \u201cYou just feel like your dreams have not manifested materially yet, despite everything you poured into it.\u201d Failure, or even just the normal slow development of a career, feels different when the rent is $1,000 than when it is $4,500.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd New Haven has affected the work itself. Chambers wanted a yard. He wanted dogs. He hikes. The woods and landscapes around him have gradually found their way into his paintings. New Haven, Chambers said, has given him \u201ctime to catch up with yourself in a way that New York doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tOf course, it is difficult to talk about artists in New Haven without eventually arriving at Yale. For decades, Yale has brought a steady supply of ambitious young artists into a city of roughly 140,000 people. The traditional assumption was that many of them would leave after graduation, often for New York. What seems to have changed is the number who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\n\tAmy Smith-Stewart, chief curator at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, noticed that shift while organizing the museum\u2019s inaugural decennial survey of artists living and working in Connecticut.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe show, \u201cI Am What Is Around Me,\u201d takes its title from a line by Connecticut poet Wallace Stevens and is meant to be the first in a series the Aldrich will repeat every 10 years. Smith-Stewart organized it with curator Caitlin Monachino after more than 100 studio visits across Connecticut, eventually choosing 40 artists ranging in age from their thirties to their eighties. Geographic breadth was a focus. So was avoiding the easy version of a Connecticut show, one dominated by recent Yale MFAs or famous artists with country houses up north in the bucolic Litchfield hills. Artists who had already had solo museum shows in the state were nixed, as were people whose connection to Connecticut amounted to spending a few weekends there each year.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/THEALDRICH_DECENNIAL_015.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>Museum, June 7, 2026 to January 10, 2027. Photo: Olympia Shannon.<\/span>Olympia Shannon<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n\tThe idea is partly to correct for Connecticut\u2019s strange place in the cultural imagination. Maine has artists. The East End has artists. Connecticut has hedge funds and nice schools, or so the stereotype goes. In reality, the state has a long artistic history and an unusually dense institutional one, from the Wadsworth Atheneum and the New Britain Museum of American Art to Yale and, more recently, NXTHVN (pronounced Next-Haven). New Haven\u00a0itself is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse cities in the state, with Latinos, Blacks, and whites each making up about 30% of the population, accoding to 2020 U.S. Census data. Smith-Stewart said the influx has become especially noticeable since the pandemic.<\/p>\n
\n\tThen there is Erector Square, an old toy factory in New Haven\u2019s Fair Haven neighborhood where A.C. Gilbert once manufactured Erector Sets and American Flyer trains. After the factory closed in 1967, its new owners began carving the sprawling industrial complex into artist studios. Today, eight of its 11 buildings contain more than 175 studios, over 150 of them occupied. It is the sort of slightly battered former industrial space that artists once found all over New York, and that has become increasingly difficult to afford there.<\/p>\n
\n\tChambers described a burgeoning community in non-Yale New Haven: Artists stay, meet other artists, invite people into town, and give the next person one more reason not to leave.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cNew Haven is a thinking person\u2019s community,\u201d Chambers said. \u201cIf people are interested in engaging and participating with ideas in a smaller community at a smaller scale than somewhere like New York, New Haven is a good place to start.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tNXTHVN has helped widen that circle.<\/p>\n
\n\tFounded in 2018 by artist Titus Kaphar and investor Jason Price, the nonprofit runs a ten-month fellowship that brings artists and curators from around the world to New Haven. Fellows receive studio space, housing, and a stipend, along with mentorship and professional development. The latter was important to Kaphar, who wanted to provide the sort of practical education about sustaining a career that art schools often neglect. In other words, how to be an artist once school is over.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/4.-NXTHVN-Cohort-06-Orientation_Photo-by-John-Dennis.-Courtesy-of-NXTHVN.jpeg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\u201cThere is a different type of community out here,\u201d said Marissa Del Toro, NXTHVN\u2019s director of programs and exhibitions (and a former curatorial fellow there). \u201cObviously a slower speed, but it\u2019s still moving.\u201d She said that around 15 alumni of the program, some of whom come in from overseas, now live in New Haven.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tKristy Hughes is one of them. Unlike many of the artists who have settled in New Haven, she has no Yale connection. Hughes, who grew up in Texas and had most recently been teaching at the University of Vermont, came to the city through an NXTHVN fellowship. She had been deliberately applying to long-term residencies that could provide the community and access to a larger art world she wanted without requiring her to live in New York. \u201cI can\u2019t afford to move to New York City,\u201d she said. It was a particularly bad fit for an artist making large sculptures.<\/p>\n
\n\tTwo years later, Hughes has stayed in New Haven. She now has two studios there, one for fabrication and another for painting, and says some warehouse space can still be found for around a dollar per square foot. More importantly, the space has allowed her work to grow. After visiting Hughes\u2019s studio, Smith-Stewart asked her to make an outdoor sculpture for the Aldrich show. Hughes had wanted to work at that scale for years; suddenly she had a studio with 16-foot ceilings and enough room to actually do it. Another outdoor commission followed, and she has another coming up. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t stay in New Haven, that wouldn\u2019t have been possible,\u201d Hughes said.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hughes_What-If-You-Were-Absolutely-Straightforward__2024_HighRes.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>Hughes still goes into New York and has friends there, but the old choice between access to the art world and enough space to make her work no longer seems quite so stark. She has artists nearby for studio visits, fabricators who can help build the work and New York a train ride away. \u201cI think I should just stay, you know, instead of keep chasing this thing,\u201d Hughes recalled realizing. \u201cOh, I think we found it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe result is not exactly Brooklyn-on-the-Sound, nor does anyone seem particularly interested in making it that. Smith-Stewart sees New Haven as distinct from some of the other Connecticut communities that have attracted artists. Someone moving to Litchfield County may want acreage, solitude, or a barn that can be turned into a studio. New Haven still feels like a city.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt also has Metro-North. The city works as an alternative to New York partly because it doesn\u2019t require artists to abandon New York. \u201cIf people are willing to come to my studio and I don\u2019t have to be in New York City and people will still come, then what am I doing?\u201d Smith-Stewart said, describing the calculus she\u2019s heard from artists. Outside the city, she added, they can put more money into materials and make work that would be harder to afford in New York.<\/p>\n
\n\tSECTION BREAK<\/p>\n
\n\tThere are signs that the art world itself has not entirely adjusted to this new geography.<\/p>\n
\n\tThomas still maintains a room in Brooklyn and travels between New York and Connecticut. Part of the reason is practical. Some grants and residencies require artists to be New York residents, creating a paradox in which artists priced out of the city can also find themselves cut off from opportunities designed to support artists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_7911.jpeg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\u201cThese are people who formerly resided there and now no longer can,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cWhy are these opportunities snatched away from them?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThomas also admitted that returning to New Haven did not initially feel like some triumphant discovery of a better way to live. Quite the opposite. \u201cI was incredibly resentful moving back here,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cI felt like I failed at something.\u201d For generations of ambitious artists, New York was not merely a place to live. Getting there was part of the career itself. Leaving could look and feel like retreat.<\/p>\n
\n\tThomas is only now beginning to shake that feeling. Familiarity helped. So did returning to a studio building from the Yale years and finding a broader community nearby that were barely visible from the Yale orbit: working-class neighborhoods, Latino communities, taco trucks, people whose daily lives have very little to do with the university. \u201cThere\u2019s a real culture here,\u201d Thomas said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Chambers_Trilogy.jpg?w=1024″] Chiffon Thomas discovered pretty quickly that New York wasn\u2019t going to work. An artist and sculptor who moved to the city after three years in Los Angeles, Thomas needed a studio with room to weld metal and a parking spot for his van. New York real estate was prohibitively expensive and he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2115954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2115954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2115954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2115954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2115954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}