Westport Arts
Advisory Committee
Committed to increasing public awareness of Westport's cultural resources.
The Art of The Place: Historical Art Markers
WAAC’s initiative, The Art of The Place, is intended to bring attention to Westport's history and continuing importance as an arts community. Perpetuating Westport's vibrant and strong history is a key element of WAAC’s mission. All of the images featured in this ongoing series are drawn from the Westport Public Art Collections.
Helvetica Light is an easy-to-read font, with tall and narrow letters, that works well on almost every site.
Larry Silver' Beach Showers at Compo Beach
Compo Beach has evolved with generations of beachgoers since it became a town-owned public park in 1910. A bathing pavilion was erected in 1919, and by 1927 the expansive compound included 750 bathhouses, dining and dancing pavilions, and a lifeguard station. All that remains today is the open-air picnic pavilion, a yacht clubhouse added in 1929, and this brick bathing pavilion built in 1931 to replace the earlier wooden structure that had burned.
The print is now part of the Westport Public Arts Collection
For more information click here
Larry Silver
A member of the Photo League, Larry Silver began his career by photographing the streets and subways of New York City and has continued to capture the lifestyles and social landscapes that surround him for more than fifty years. From his images of local weightlifters, body builders, and acrobats populating the beaches of Santa Monica, to his documentation of the isolated relationship between the inhabitants and the physical landscape of the evolving metropolitan suburb of Westport, Connecticut, Silver’s compositions are embedded with a lyricism and balance that define his trademark style. In 2003 Silver broke away from documentary work, and began to create altered landscape images through experimental dark room techniques and paper manipulation. The artist’s new direction would result in series such as From the Medium to the Message, capturing water abstractions that bear witness to the effects of people in their environment, and New Vision, featuring one-of-a-kind compositions that relate most readily to Abstract Expressionist works and experimental imagery from the Bauhaus School.Bauhaus School.
Born in 1934 in New York, Silver studied photography at the High School of Industrial Art in 1949. The school's proximity to Peerless Camera Store enabled Silver to meet numerous members of the prestigious Photo League, including W. Eugene Smith, Weegee and Lou Bernstein. In Silver's senior year, he won first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards, and was granted a full scholarship to the Art Center School in Los Angeles. He has had three solo exhibitions with Bruce Silverstein in 2002, 2007 and 2011.
Stevan Dohanos' The Honor Roll at Veterans Green
The painting was the first of Stevan Dohanos's 136 published covers for The Saturday Evening Post, the Curtis Publishing Company's popular magazine.
Visit Westport's Town Hall Room 309 to View the Original
Stevan Dohanos (May 18, 1907 – July 4, 1994) was an American artist and illustrator of the social realism school, best known for his Saturday Evening Post covers, and responsible for several of the Don't Talk set of World War II propaganda posters. He named Grant Wood and Edward Hopper as the greatest influences on his painting.
Dohanos was born in Lorain, Ohio and attended the Cleveland School of Art. He worked in fine art as well as in commercial art. In the 1930s he briefly experimented with lithography and wood etching. He was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters and the Society of Illustrators. He was a founding faculty member of the Famous Artists School of Westport, Connecticut.
Dohanos worked for the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the U.S. Treasury Department, painting several post office murals, including those for West Palm Beach and Charlotte Amalie.
His first magazine illustration was for McCall's in 1938. In the early 1940s, he moved to Westport, Connecticut, and in 1942 he sold his first cover painting to The Saturday Evening Post. Dohanos went on to paint over 125 Post covers during the 1940s and 1950s. He also illustrated for Esquire and other magazines.
In the 1960s he became chairman of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, which selected art to appear on United States postage stamps. He selected art for over 300 postage stamps during the administration of seven Presidents of the United States and nine Postmasters General. In 1984, the Postal Service's Hall of Stamps in Washington was dedicated in his honor.
His easel paintings and prints have been displayed in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Dartmouth College. He was nationally known as an illustrator and magazine cover artist, particularly for his work appearing in The Saturday Evening Post.
Dohanos died July 4, 1994, 87 years old.
Read more about the artist here: