Painter, Photographer and Community Activist: Hannah Hurwitz
By Celeste Roche | Correspondent at March 6, 2024 | 9:45 am | Print
The New Britain City Journal is currently running a series of articles introducing residents of the New Britain Artists’ Cooperative. This article is the first of the series.
Hannah Hurwitz, 32, is well known in New Britain as a community activist, but not many people are aware that she is also a gifted painter and up-and-coming photographer.
After earning a degree in interior design and working in fashion for three years, Hurwitz came to New Britain to serve as an AmeriCorps VISTA at CCSU. She ran Community Central for a couple of years, but has since moved on to employment with the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy. She is committed to remaining in the city and has been living in the New Britain Artists’ Cooperative for two years.
“Art has always been a part of my life, and I’ve always made time for it,” says Hurwitz. Yet, she credits her living in the Cooperative with a renewed interest in producing works of art. While she has been painting for years, she says she gets “tired and obsessive” and no longer has the patience for it. Studying photography as part of her graduate program at CCSU kindled an interest in the process. Her greatest artistic achievement, though, is in neither medium: “I’m proud of the mosaic at the YMCA,” she says. She led the creation of the piece on the façade.
Hurwitz says her art is informed by the people around her. She hopes that her art makes people think and inspires them, and she cherishes the ability the arts have to tell stories and bring people together.
Personally, she said she enjoys impressionism, noting Renoir and Bernini as some of her favorite artists.
She said she wishes the Cooperative had “more structure” and “clarity about what is going on.” Hurwitz also mentions that it “would be nice if [the Co-op] had an independently wealthy benefactor who wanted to help” with the costs of incorporation and possibly with acquiring gallery space the Cooperative would have primary use of.
Hurwitz insists that the arts assist in place-making and that New Britain could become more of a tourist destination through the growth of the arts community. For this to happen “people need to understand that artists have a lot to offer, deserve to be paid fairly and to not be used.”
“There are some people in power who don’t value art as much as they should,” she says, but cites projects such as the Streetscapes and the presence of the Arts Commission as evidence that plenty of people in New Britain do “get it.”
Other residents describe her as “very giving,” “nice” and “structured.”
“I keep teasing her for being a workaholic, but really I’m just jealous of her energy and her work ethic,” says neighbor Sean Vivier.
“Hannah is one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met, but I worry that she trusts other people too much,” says another resident of the Co-op. “That’s not exactly a fault, but it definitely enables other people to justify uneven participation.”
