The Christopher Steiner’s Collection

Located in the glass vitrine in Room 1, The Christopher Steiner’s Collection of vernacular and anonymous photography explores the curious space between evidence and illusion. A professor of art history and anthropology at Connecticut College, Chris has amassed nearly 20,000 photographs that invite a suspension of disbelief. This selection focuses on the wonderfully strange tradition of “headless” photography. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, photographers used multiple exposures, photomontage, composite printing, and staged scenes to detach heads from bodies and turn apparent acts of violence into visual jokes. Macabre yet playful, these vintage photographs reveal how easily photography’s promise of truth can give way to fantasy, humor, and delightful deception.

Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience
Brian Cattelle’s work explores the uneasy space between what we see and what we think we know. In his black-and-white street photography series Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience, long exposures transform passing figures into fleeting presences, merging light, motion, and time within a single frame.

Corrupted Cognition
Brian Cattelle’s work continues his exploration of the uneasy with his collaged masks. From the Corrupted Cognition series, he takes this disruption further, reconstructing the human face into something familiar, funny, and unsettling. Across both bodies of work, Cattelle balances intention with chance, embracing imperfection and unpredictability as opportunities for discovery. As he puts it, “I am lost and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Peter Levinson creates black-and-white drawings of figures caught in vivid, uncanny situations, each suggesting a fragment of a larger, untold story. Drawing on archaic tales, myths, and symbols, he invents a world where bodies and heads separate, scale shifts, and ordinary logic gives way to imagination. His current Afterhours series includes more than 95 folio-scale works in ink on Bristol. A Brooklyn-based artist with a practice spanning more than four decades, Levinson has worked across drawing, relief, and installation, consistently creating mysterious spaces and forms that invite viewers to imagine what might have happened—or what happens next.

Claudia Renfro’s intuitive, process-driven practice spans mixed media, textile art, and sculpture. Her eccentric characters emerge from a single feature, maybe a head, lips, or a foot. They may showcase the good, the bad, the ugly, and the absurd, each character a moment captured in their own universe. Crafted from found and recycled materials and often cast in bronze, her works suggest humorous, irreverent conversations within their own peculiar universes.

Brazilian artist Tales Frey works across performance, dance, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video, with the body at the center of his practice. His work often challenges conventional ideas of identity, gender, and the ways bodies are expected to behave and appear. In Conductor Wire, Frey uses movement and black Lycra forms to transform dancers into shifting, seemingly headless figures, blurring distinctions between body, sculpture, and abstraction. Born in Catanduva, São Paulo, Frey now lives and works in Portugal, where he is also a researcher and professor. His performances and visual work have been presented internationally in museums, galleries, and experimental spaces.