On Friday, April 12, Kingswood Oxford welcomed West Hartford’s very own mixed media artist and graphic designer Amy Genser as this year’s Goodman Banks Visiting Artist.
Each year, the series invites a visual or performing artist from around the world to share their craft and expose Middle and Upper School students to a variety of artistic and creative processes. The artists have the opportunity to work closely with students in master classes throughout the week, either before or after a showcase assembly for the whole school.
Mrs. Genser is a Connecticut-based artist who has been creating mixed media artwork for the past 23 years. However, her artistic journey began when she was born and raised in New Orleans, a city well-known for its high energy and deep-rooted appreciation for the arts. At the age of 11, she and her family made the move to Connecticut when her father got a job in Hartford. According to Mrs. Genser, although she never pictured herself becoming an artist, she ended up attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she credits one class in papermaking to changing the trajectory of her entire career. She later opened up her own studio after earning her MFA in Graphic Design.
Students were particularly excited for this year’s visiting artist as they entered Roberts Theater, where they were greeted by faculty handing out small pieces of rolled up paper, similar to the material Mrs. Genser often uses for her work. Performing arts teacher and Goodman Banks coordinator Wayne Pierce opened up the assembly and thanked Sherry Banks-Cohen, a former board chair and alum for making such events possible. Seniors Avi Lohr and Ardit Zhuta, who are members of the Outside the Box 2 class taught by Visual Arts Department Chair Katie Burnett, then introduced the guest of honor.
The two seniors noted Mrs. Genser’s special talent for turning simple paper and paint into masterful and breath-taking works of art. They cited the natural world as a clear source for Mrs. Genser’s work, explaining that she is fascinated by the flow of water, the shape of beehives, and the organic irregularity of plants. “[Mrs. Genser’s] work is macroscopic, like the movement of tectonic plates, shifting waterways or ravaged land masses in slow time,” Avi said. “But it is also microscopic, mirroring duplicating cells from the tiniest whisper of complex thought.”
Mrs. Genser entered the stage and explained that as a visual artist, instead of a performance, she opted to use the next hour as an opportunity for students and faculty to get to know her better and to talk about how she ended up where she is today. “Life has a funny way of taking you places you never expected to go,” she began. “Looking back, it makes total sense that this is my career, but the process is anything but linear and organic. It was filled with a lot of internal struggle, which probably every journey to finding yourself and your career is.”
Emphasizing her gratitude to her parents, Mrs. Genser began by highlighting the heavy influence they had on her art. She said that her mother is a studio jeweler who designs and fabricates all of her own work, selling it in different galleries and shows. “I grew up watching my mom weave all of these gold fine wires into beautiful forms and combine these gemstones into beautiful combinations that just liven up any piece of jewelry,” she said.
Mrs. Genser then shouted out her father, who was in the audience, mentioning that he is a retired neonatologist. “My dad had his medical books that were just laid all around the house, and even though I was kind of grossed out by them, I always looked at them because I thought the patterns were really cool,” she said. “And you do not have to be a rocket scientist to see that this clearly has influenced my aesthetic, right?”
Despite Mrs. Genser’s lifelong exposure to and love of the arts, she maintained that growing up, she was never set on what she wanted to do in the future. She said she went through a complicated journey of self-discovery in college that involved switching her major to history and adding a minor in graphic communication, ultimately receiving her degree with honors from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. After working for several design firms in Boston, she attended RISD where she took a life-altering papermaking class. “It was like I had found the language I was meant to speak,” Mrs. Genser stated.
With an MFA now padding her resumé and her parents and husband supporting her, Mrs. Genser made the move back to Boston and opened up her own studio in Somerville, Mass. She explained that that was when she finally started to pursue art as her career, experiment with various art forms, and travel all over the East Coast for art shows, all while starting a family.
After sharing more about her experience showing her work in different cities, including several European galleries, Mrs. Genser detailed how her love of public art began with a project for the University of Iowa Health Care Center in 2019. “The goal of this particular piece was for it to be inspired by the Iowa landscape, as well as the energy and bustling movement throughout the hospital,” she said. She explained that she looked at the lines and the patterns from aerial views of the Iowa City area, came up with different combinations of compositions and colors, sketched out a sample, and then presented it to her client, the hospital itself.
With approval granted, she began to describe how she built the project out of PVC (a type of plastic) and many little rolled pieces of paper similar to the ones just given to the students in the theater. “I constructed it in four pieces so that I would be able to assemble it on site, like a puzzle, and these pieces would click together for an easy installation,” she said. She added that she then varnished the pieces so that they would become very hard.
Together with her assistant, Jenny Friedman, she put the pieces together in the hospital’s main lobby by screwing them into the wall. At that point she showed the audience what the final project looked like and told them that she is always very happy when she’s finally done with her work. “I always say it’s like putting together a puzzle that I don’t know what it’s going to look like until I see the final product, the final picture,” she said. “Making a pretty picture is by far the most fun, and the part that I love is being involved with the piece and finding out what it’s going to be and how it wants to look.”
Before transitioning into a final Q&A session with students in the audience, Mrs. Genser reiterated the importance of gaining a variety of skills and experiences in any field. “Recognize that any part of whatever it is you’re doing, you’re gonna have to … pay attention to those skills too, like the computer skills and people skills, all those things,” she stated.
Lastly, Mrs. Genser closed out the assembly by recounting her experiences with rejection and advising students to not take it to heart. “I get rejected all the time,” she admitted. “That’s just a part of it. You have to have the confidence to say, it’s not necessarily me, that I’m not a good artist. It’s not right for this project, maybe, at this time.” With that, Mrs. Genser left the KO community a comprehensive list of her favorite artists who she said inspired her and felt would inspire everyone else, too.
Ms. Burnett explained why she and the Arts Department invited Mrs. Genser and how she felt about the overall assembly. “I was drawn to Amy’s work from the first time I saw one of her pieces at the Delamar in West Hartford,” she said. “She is vibrant, smart, relatable, and passionate about her craft. I wanted to share that with our entire community. I love Amy’s message about being a creative person and following your curiosity. She also covered the business side of art in the assembly, which I think most people don’t know about. It is a lot of work and you have to market yourself.”
Today, Mrs. Genser resides in West Hartford with her husband, three sons, and two dogs. She has a studio in Hartford and can be found at her website, amygenser.com.
