The Rochester Contemporary Art Center brings together two distinct artistic practices while also celebrating a long history in Rochester’s art community with “Anne Havens / Sue Havens.”
The exhibit features artwork from both multidisciplinary artists and reveals parallels, even with diverging approaches. Both artists embrace experimentation and treat material itself as a collaborator in the process.
Sue Havens grew up in Rochester with her mother, Anne, and is now based in Florida. She roots her work in painting, but playfully applies it across sculpture, printmaking and ceramics with an irreverence and experimentation toward form.
This means there is often a balancing act between structure and chance in her work. For example, “Brick and Mortar: MASSIVE” is her largest work; a mural covering 52 feet, which explored geometric forms in the former factory space of the Knockdown Center in Queens.
“I usually go pretty blindly into making something,” Sue Havens says. “I start with only the vaguest preconception, and then follow what the work is asking me to do. It’s a lot of process, with many iterations and wreckage, you have to be willing to lose it all.”
Over decades in the Rochester art community, Anne Havens has also worked with a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, printmaking, drawing, ceramics, photography, video, and artist’s books. Her artwork invites viewers to reflect on lived experience and personal symbolism through playful introspection.
“Accumulate,” for example, is a series of works on paper that features the visual motif of interconnected shapes gradually increasing in number and intensity. On her artist website, the work is accompanied by a quote from Joseph Francois Michaud’s 1852 book, “History of the Crusades”: “From the heart of one who endeavors, a valiant flower will spring.”
“Art making is my way of dealing with life,” says Anne Haven. “Letting me act out, exorcise, focus, resist disintegration and, most of all, be surprised.”
Beside her vast and widely exhibited creative output, RoCo notes that Anne Haven is also recognized as a generous leader and advocate in the local arts community.
She has assisted emerging artists with shared studio spaces, supported printmaking via the Rochester Print Club, helped design the first 6×6 exhibition at RoCo, and sponsors the annual Bill Havens Award, an award given to a local artist in memory of her son. With her late husband, Steward Davish, Anne Haven has also donated many artworks by local and national artists to RoCo, prompting the establishment of the Davis-Havens fundraising sales gallery.
“RoCo is honored to present these two artists together, offering audiences the opportunity to experience the depth, individuality, and breadth of their respective bodies of work within a single exhibition space,” RoCo says in a statement about the event.
“Though their practices diverge in many ways, Anne Havens / Sue Havens reveals compelling parallels: an embrace of process, a willingness to experiment across disciplines, and an enduring trust in material as collaborator,” the gallery notes. “Presented together, their works create a dialogue across generations, geographies, and sensibilities—highlighting the vitality and range of contemporary artistic inquiry.”
“Anne Havens / Sue Havens” opened last week with a First Friday event reception. A partner exhibition is also on display at Mercer Gallery at RoCo with “Anne Havens: Echoes and Variations,” a collection showing Anne Havens’ career-long evolving creative work.
In addition, RoCo is also displaying Paul Nicholson’s “Lifelong Bills Fan” art piece. The work was inspired by Mary, the artist’s mother, whose final request was to share one last Buffalo Bills game from her room at Roswell Park, and it confronts macabre elements of grief with humor and heart.
The installation centers on a folding tailgate table, propped to mimic an adjustable hospital bed, that displays several items as a kind of memento mori. Frank’s RedHot sauce is administered via a medical IV pump, and obituaries cite “team loyalty” as a defining life trait.
“In Western New York, being a ‘Lifelong Bills Fan’ isn’t just a hobby, it’s a shared vocabulary for joy, hope, and heartbreak,” Nicholson says. “My mother’s final request wasn’t for something grand, it was to watch the game, to spend a normal Sunday afternoon with family. It was a request for normalcy in the face of uncertainty and I think it’s really powerful that sport can be that scaffolding to build connection.”
“Anne Havens / Sue Havens” and “Lifelong Bills Fan” will be on display from March 6 to May 9. “Anne Havens: Echoes and Variations” will be displayed until March 27.
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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