©Pamela Landau Connolly, Columbus Drive Overview

As we prepare for the holiday season and our Thanksgiving feasts tomorrow, we will be scrambling to find a few potholders to lift our turkeys out ot the oven. So I thought what a better time to celebrate Pamela Landau Connolly’s wonderful project, Columbus Drive.  She has created a series of woven potholders using photographs from her growing up in suburban New Jersey during the 1960s and 70s. Printed on canvas, Connolly “literally re-weaves stories about her childhood” resulting in a quirky, charming, and unique way to examine personal histories. For the past 30-years, she has considered the past and her growing up, revisiting the emphera and influences that shaped her life.

I first discovered Connolly’s work through her series, Salon Studies, remarkable portraits of women in beauty salons captured with a 4 x 5 camera. She featured women with their hair covered in foils or hair dyes, but shot in a way that elevated their experience. The work went on to be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

I later featured Connelly’s portfolio, Wishmaker, of re-considered doll houses and was drawn to her photographic architectural language filled with color, shape, and form. While considering architecture in miniature, she then created her own miniature art and photography gallery: The Landau Gallery, that showcases artist’s work and occasionally travels to various locations.

An interview with the artist follows.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, First Day of School

Columbus Drive

Pamela Landau Connolly’s work investigates the domestic space and the feminine through photography, photographic sculpture, and photo books. Her recent project, Columbus Drive uses photography and weaving techniques to literally re-weave stories about her childhood in suburban New Jersey during the 1960s and 70s.

Using her archive of family snapshots, Connolly reprints the photographs digitally on canvas and slices them into strips. Warping the metal loom with colored thread, she then weaves the photographs back together. The finished piece includes both loom and woven image forming a 3-dimensional photo object. In this way, a personal history is both remembered and reconstructed-visibly imperfect and ephemeral.

During an earlier project photographing 1960’s tin dollhouses, Connolly began to think of other toys designed to prepare girls for their futures as housewives and remembered her beloved square potholder looms. At that time she was scanning square snapshots from her mother’s albums, and the two elements merged.

Columbus Drive is inspired by photographer Larry Sultan, who mines the terrain of family to address both personal and shared memory, as well as by Susanne Wellm, a Danish artist, who weds photography and weaving in her practice. The act of cutting up and reassembling images is a meditation on family, history, and an earlier era.

As Lilian Monk Rösing writes in her essay, Weaving Time, “In ancient Greek, a loom is

is called ‘histos’; to weave is to tell a story.” In Columbus Drive, Connolly unravels the unspoken details of childhood and the story of family from a new vantage point. Through the act of creating a pattern with colored thread and maneuvering  the slices of canvas under and over, under and over, a new image and vision is slowly revealed. – November 2025

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Lois’ Bat Mitzvah

Pam Connolly is a lens-based artist and book maker who has been investigating the theme of home for more than 30 years. Her photographs of tin- dollhouses, domestic spaces, and family portraits look closely at the idealized American dream, exploring childhood memory and the notion of home; the yearning between the imaginary and the real.

Connolly’s photographs are held in the collections of Brown University and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Her books, Fly in Amber and Cabriole were acquired by the Hirsch Library, Houston, the University of Michigan’s Art and Design Collection, the Beineke Library at Yale and the Museum of Fine Arts at Harvard. Connolly has exhibited her work nationally at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, Foley Gallery in NYC, and Candela in Richmond, and internationally at the Kominek Gallery in Berlin, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Most recently Connolly was included on the short list of 20 photographers to exhibit at the International BBA Awards in Berlin.

Connolly was named a 2024 Critical Mass Top 50 photographer, and is the creator and curator of Landau Gallery, a miniature art space showcasing photo- based art in 1:12 scale.

Connolly received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School’s International Program. She lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Instagram: @pamconnollyphoto

Instagram: @landaugallery

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Mom with Yellow Lamp

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography.

I grew up in a typical post-WWII suburban neighborhood in New Jersey.  We moved there in 1960 into a new, just-built house, on a just-built block.  All the houses on Columbus Drive stood very close to one another and looked exactly the same— white. I went to a very ordinary public school where little emphasis was placed on creativity or art. I was a very visual kid and at home I loved making things (like potholders!). But it wasn’t until senior year in high school when I bought myself a 35mm, Canon Ftb camera with my Bat Mitzvah savings that I found a way to describe the world around me.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Pam and Love

The fact that your parents owned a furniture store seems to be a compelling part of your personal history.

My parents owned an ‘Early American’ furniture store, W.L Landau’s Carriage House, seven minutes from our house. It was at the center of my family’s universe—everything revolved around it.  As a child I spent many hours roaming the endless maze of rooms at ‘the store’ creating stories about imagined families who lived there. Each of its 52 rooms were filled with infinite colors and patterns; shag carpets in every imaginable shade, drapes, matching wallpaper, matching bedspreads—it was quite a playground for a child! These early visual impressions are imbedded in my consciousness and are at the core of my practice.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Lauren in My Room

You have several books that have been collected into significant collections. What does the book form give you that the single photograph doesn’t…

Ten years ago I returned to graduate school to complete an MFA in Photography at the University of Hartford. The curriculum there centered on the the Photobook, and it was there that I created my first book, ‘Gone Home.’ Since then I have produced two others, and am working on a third, titled Mirror, Mirror, which will be published by Fall Line Press in 2026. I love the three-dimensional, tactile nature of books.  It invites the viewer in to stay for awhile, and explore its world slowly, page by page. In a way my books have led me to make these potholder weavings with photographs. I think of these objects as individual rooms packed with information, and a book as a house full of rooms.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, LoPaNa in Nancy’s Room

What would be your dream exhibition of the potholder work?

My dream would be to have the Columbus Drive photo-weavings shown as part of a larger exhibition that would include my ‘Wishmaker’ tin dollhouse photographs and my miniature gallery, exhibiting the same photographs in miniature! My goal is to create an immersive viewing experience. Like Alice in Wonderland, I want those walking through the gallery to travel back to this moment in time, with a playful sense of curiosity.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Miss America

Who or what is inspiring you lately?

I am looking at a lot of weaving at the moment and have been very inspired by Susanne Wellm, a Danish artist, who weds photography and weaving in her practice.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Lois, Take the Picture!

Now that you are a curator/gallerist for the Landau Gallery, what have you learned working with artists?

Creating Landau Gallery has been a natural transition for me. By designing a space where I could render photographs as miniatures, I have brought my ‘Wishmaker’ project full-circle, back to its dollhouse beginnings. It has also been exciting to curate the work of other artists in the gallery. I love offering them the same opportunity—to envision a one-person exhibition of their work, free from ‘real world’ constraints. As artists we spend a lot of time alone. These collaborations have been a way to interact and create together.

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Dad and Rembrandt

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Mom and British Officer

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Pam and Flower Girl

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Lois Hurt Me

©Pamela Landau Connolly, Trails End Camp, stool