Connecticut Museums

RENEW YOUR SPIRIT WITH A DAY OUTING

Finally, spring, with its mix of lime green and yellow and bright bursts of color, has arrived in Connecticut. It’s been a long winter. But alongside this gift of the season is an eclectic mix of exhibitions at the state’s major regional art museums. A few day trips seem designed to lift the spirits.

It’s hard not to be charmed by “Click Clack! Ding! The American Typewriter,” one private collector’s look at the tool that transformed the American workplace, on view through June 1 at The New Britain Museum of American Art (56 Lexington St., New Britain). Be transported to the imagined site of a Katherine Gibbs secretarial pool, or perhaps a seedy mid-20th century newsroom, in this show that includes more than 20 machines, many of them manufactured in Connecticut factories between 1873 and 1966.

One early model looks as though it morphed from a Singer sewing machine; a sporty portable from the 1960s makes a nod to fashion with its pop-art-colored keys. Typewriters emerged to support an increasingly educated population. Time was money — and business needed to generate text quickly.

Stop at The Matrix 169 at the Wadsworth Atheneum (600 Main St., Hartford) from June 5-September 7 to see the newly commissioned work of Ruben Ochoa, a post- minimalist sculptor from California. Ochoa uses found and natural materials, referencing his Mexican American roots as he explores the social and political aspects of his urban background. Patricia Hickson, the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art, explains that the artist “uses vernacular materials in ways that become transcendent and much more poetic in nature.”

Kristin Nord