Aileen Chan ’29
Vivian Jiang ’27
Benjamin Wang ’27
Photo courtesy of Kamau Kegler ’27
The Episcopal Academy’s latest gallery show, “Colors Collide,” filled the gallery’s walls with bursts of color and emotion. Running from September 15th through October 15th, the exhibition featured the work of two distinctive artists: Callie Connors, whose expressive paintings capture fleeting moments of beauty, and EA’s own lower school art teacher, Meghan Cangi, whose collage work brings dimension and texture to familiar forms. Together, their contrasting mediums created a dynamic conversation about color, memory, and the natural world.
Since she was five years old, Connors knew that she wanted to pursue a career in art, giving her time to develop a unique style. She describes her style as expressionist, driven by color rather than strict representation. “I’m…using color to kind of express certain feelings or memories,” Connors explains. Many of Connors’ garden-inspired pieces draw from personal experience. Her husband’s family has a house in Connecticut where a neighbor dedicates herself to cultivating a beautiful garden. This appreciation for someone’s devotion to beauty translates directly into her vibrant canvases.
Cangi’s artistic path, however, began in high school, thanks to one of her teachers. “He inspired me, and by my senior year, I knew art was what I wanted to pursue,” she recalls. Further, Cangi’s inspiration emerges from a completely different place than Connors: “[It] comes from the classroom and the way colors vibrate together,” she comments. Her style comes from “[her] preference for organic shapes and round forms,” resulting in floral themes dominating much of the show.
Due to a change of plans, Connors and Cangi were introduced by Visual Art Department Chair and art teacher David Sigel. “I got an Instagram message,” Connors recalls. “I guess she needed someone to fill in last minute, but she suggested doing a collaboration together, and our stuff works really well together, the bright colors and florally themes.” Cangi had been organizing an alumni show when circumstances shifted, and learning about Connors’ work, she thought her own collages would contrast and complement Connors’ paintings.
The installation resonated strongly with the EA community. Ava Munoz ’26 praises the exhibition’s immediate impact: “I think the installment is really beautiful. It’s so eye-catching every time you pass by it.” Her favorite piece, “Field of Flowers” (2023) by Connors, captures what she describes as “a sense of emotion inside of the painting where you can feel. It has a sense of sadness to it.” Meanwhile, Cyrian Foppa Tiankwa ’27 appreciates the uniqueness of the artists’ approaches. “I feel like the pieces are really unique—it’s something you never really see out of the abstract art that’s sold these days,” Tiankwa observes. Further, Elvin Lin ’26 notices that “You can see the medium really well. When you look closely at [Connors’] work, you can kind of see the texture of the paint, which I think is something that a painter should use more often. Like how you can really make it look 3D and layered by just stacking paint on top.” He also notes the contrast of the saturated colors to the strokes of black in many of her pieces: “It makes the black, which would usually be used to frame a colorful centerpiece, to kind of becoming the centerpiece, because everything else is so colorful that your eye is drawn to the like the complete darkness.”
