On View: March 16 – April 18, 2026
Gallery Reception: Friday, March 20 / 5 -7 pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, April 12 / 1 – 3 pm
Creative Arts Workshop presents Passages, an exhibition featuring works by Susan Clinard and Fethi Meghelli, on view from March 16 through April 16, 2026. Bringing together sculpture and mixed media, Passages explores themes of displacement, memory, and material transformation through a deeply human and resonant visual language.
In their work, both artists engage the emotional complexities of movement—across borders, histories, and inner landscapes. As curator Judy Birke observes, “In their intensely moving works, both Clinard and Meghelli convey a timeless emotional content in conjunction with meticulously crafted authority and formal strength. Strength and vulnerability, pain and joy, hope and sorrow all come together in memorable experiences of a shared humanity that tug at one’s heart and point to the complicated essence of what it means to be alive.”
Clinard and Meghelli first met in 2008, when Clinard relocated from Chicago to New Haven. “There was an immediate and visceral connection between our work,” Clinard recalls. The two artists pledged to one day exhibit together, and eighteen years later, that promise has come to fruition. Creative Arts Workshop Gallery was an intentional choice for this collaboration: its expansive two-story space, abundant natural light, and significance as a place where both artists taught for many years make it an ideal setting for Passages.
Looking beyond individual experience, Clinard and Meghelli engage shared histories and collective narratives, seeking connection rather than division. Their work stands in quiet resistance to contemporary currents of fear and separation, offering instead a vision rooted in empathy, continuity, and human resilience.
About the Artists
Susan Clinard is an award-winning contemporary American sculptor whose work has been widely exhibited and collected internationally, including a recent acquisition by the Fenix Museum in the Netherlands. Translating raw human emotion into sculptural form, Clinard creates works that invite sustained reflection, encouraging viewers to pause, engage, and connect beyond themselves.
Fethi Meghelli is an Algerian-American artist whose career spans more than five decades and three continents. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses printmaking, masks, found objects, painting, sculpture, and collage, often blending the urgency of social realism with the expansive imagination of surrealism.