At The Aldrich In Ridgefield, A Curator Dabbles In Cookie Dough

RIDGEFIELD, CT —At the not-well-traveled-at-all intersection of contemporary art and confection, is Caitlin Monachino.

The Curatorial and Publications manager for The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield is also an accomplished baker. Now those two worlds are colliding, and the result is a gloriously caloric confab between her day job and off-hours side gig.

Monachino worked at a Greenwich bakery "decorating high-end cakes" while in grad school at SUNY Purchase. She thought that the full-time job she scored at The Aldrich after she graduated would put an end to her pâtisserie pursuits.

Along came COVID-19, and like many other Ridgefield residents, Monachino found herself working from home, with all that new free time that went along with the Life Pandemic.

"And so I started making cookies, kind of just for fun at first, and then I started posting them on my social media page," she told Patch. "And I don't know, it just kind of took off…"

Social media will do that. The baker-curator's CM Cookies Instagram page now has over 1,200 followers, many of them using the platform to place orders and track her appearances at area fairs and farmers markets.

She's back on site in the museum about half the week now, and her curating has curtailed the time she can spend sifting flour and piping out icing. Still, she's found a way to make her time working in the museum work for her. The curator said she has begun drawing inspiration from the museum's exhibits, which have taken her baking designs into deliciously uncharted territory.

The Aldrich, of course, doesn't make that easy. The contemporary art museum's current main exhibition is "52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone," and it's notoriously difficult to work those themes into a snickerdoodle.

But work them she does. Beginning with the Karla Knight show in 2021, the museum began selling Monachino's exhibit-inspired edible artworks in its gift shop, and fine art fans can't seem to get enough.

Just as importantly, Monachino has had "only positive responses from the artists" whose blood, sweat and tears she's reimagined as snacks.

Ridgefield residents will get a closer look at her cookie decoration and thought processes when Monachino gives a workshop at The Aldrich on Dec. 3. Attendees will learn how to decorate cookies inspired by artworks on view in"52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone," along with some less thought-provoking snowmen and reindeer. No prior experience in cookie baking or modern art will be required.

The cookies weren't the curator's first artistic outlet, and ultimately may not even be her most lucrative. Before her COVID-inspired baking jag, Monachino expressed herself by sketching, continuously. That ramped up quickly, and led to her first secondary income source, creating coloring books.

"Why not? It was really just something that I saw that I could do and kind of just wanted to challenge myself." She said her job as the museum's publication's manager gave her enough insider info to hit the ground running, leading to her first release, a children's dinosaurs coloring book.

A self-proclaimed "Christmas fanatic," her second effort had a yuletide theme. After a little bit of market research — an Amazon search for "'Gilmore Girls' Coloring Books" unremarkably yielded no hits — she based her third publication, and current bestseller, on her favorite TV show.

And how does her employer and primary source of revenue feel about Monachino's growing celebrity and independent entrepreneurship?

"Well, I think they really love it," she speculated. "Because, for example, today I had some leftovers from the market yesterday. And guess where they all go? My co-workers."