BLM 860 is a community activist group in Hartford, Connecticut that came together in July 2020 as part of the national response to the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. With the assistance of the City of Hartford, BLM 860 organized the painting of the Hartford Black […]

Vincent Stryeski is an architect who practices and resides in Avon, CT. From 2000 to 2009 he was Associate Director of Design with Kaestle Boos Associates of New Britain when they received the commission to design the West Hartford Veterans’ Memorial. Stryeski was the principal designer of that war memorial. He was trained at Kent […]

Born in Portland, Oregon on October 25, 1870, Benjamin W. Morris studied to be an architect at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, Columbia University, and at the École des Beaux-Arts in France. He completed an apprenticeship with Carrère & Hastings in NYC during which time the firm won the competition to design the New York […]

Born in Thompson, Connecticut on October 3, 1784, Ithiel Town trained under the notable architect Asher Benjamin in Boston. Town gained attention for his work on churches in New Haven. He focused largely on engineering and in 1820 patented a wooden lattice bridge now known as a Town bridge. Some examples of Town bridges still […]

Landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1829. He was educated as an engineer and architect at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der bildenden Kunst) in Vienna, Austria. He worked in Munich, Paris, London, New York, Panama and Peru as a young man before settling in the United States in […]

Architect Richard M. Upjohn was born in England on March 7, 1828 one year before his father Richard Upjohn (1802-1878) emigrated with the family to the United States to pursue his career in architecture first in Boston and after 1839 in New York. Upjohn Senior was an influential Gothic Revival architect who had a thriving […]

Richard Meier, known for his design of the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1988-1997), had a much earlier commission to design the Hartford Seminary Foundation building in 1981. Meier is one of the “New York Five” who were identified in 1969 by the Committee of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE) for their […]

Frank Gaylord was a World War II veteran who took up sculpture and stone carving as his profession. He was commissioned to make the statue of Governor Ella Grasso for a niche on the Connecticut State Capitol building in 1981. He was also the artist of the 1990 Korea War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. […]

John Quincy Adams Ward was born in Urbana, Ohio in 1830. At the age of 19 in 1849 he was apprenticed to the Brooklyn, New York sculptor Henry Kirke Brown with whom he stayed until 1856. In 1861 he opened his own studio in New York seeking ambitious commissions for life-size figures. His first important […]

John W. Scott is the principal stone carver working for the High Cross Monument Company of Texas. He executed the Bobby Sands Memorial Celtic Cross (1997) which is in Hartford, Connecticut.