RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- Kristy Hughes' vibrant abstract sculptures and paintings, "reclaim agency, visibility, and joy through color, form, texture, and found materials." Inspired by her Hispanic and Indigenous ancestry, many of her works incorporate reclaimed materials and hidden elements that give voice to "resistance and preserve memory," merging art with lived experience.

For The Aldrich, Hughes is debuting Portal: Hope as Practice, 2025, her first public art sculpture and her largest work to date. Standing over ten feet tall, two multicolored rings meet to form a dynamic threshold of possibility. Many of Hughes' works integrate "thank you love letters," found poems, private messages, and tributes to people or ideas that have inspired her, along with found objects such as rocks, driftwood, string, clay, and more. These acts of gratitude and recovery transpose the energies of a specific place or moment in time, transforming them into symbols of continuity.

Hughes creates her sculptural forms and reliefs with steel, insulation board, fiberglass, Aqua Resin, and handmade paper pulp. The softness of their surfaces allow the artist to carve directly into them. Within the hand formed pockets, she stows away notes and acquired items, imbuing her works with memory and trace. The buried poems, notes, and gifts in Portal: Hope as Practice, 2025, includes excerpts from writings by Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Maree Brown, Tracy Fuad, Janan Alexandra, Mariame Kaba, Ross Gay, and Octavia E. Butler; a gifted collage from poet and visual artist Kieron Walquist; a gifted feather found at the Golden Foundation for the Arts in New Berlin, NY, and gathered rocks from Clayton, NM and Provincetown, MA. She seals and covers them up with striated patterning in bright acrylics. Her charismatic abstractions represent promise and collective agency.

Kristy Hughes was born in 1987 in Waxahachie, TX and lives and works in New Haven, CT. Hughes earned an MFA in Printmaking from Indiana University and a MA and BA in Studio Art from Eastern Illinois University. She has exhibited her work at James Cohen Gallery, New York; Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and The Sculpture Center, Cleveland. She has been an artist fellow at NXTHVN, New Haven, CT; The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, GA; and Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY, among others.