URSA Coffee Roasters & Gallery, #20
247 Fairfield Ave, Bridgeport, CT
IG: @ursa.gallery
Contact: Lauren Callahan
lauren.ursa@gmail.com
(203) 644-4839
Artist/entrepreneur - Cris Dam and Master Coffee Roaster - Mark Munday have transformed a downtown storefront into an artists’ Shangri La café. Their hard work, vision and commitment to the arts and community have created a destination for an excellent cup of coffee and casual interaction with the current arts scene. The space is emblazoned with local art, from ceiling to floor, complemented by Cris’ signature interior design. It’s truly full of eye-candy. When you visit you will see for yourself... 'eyes' are a fun motif throughout the cafe. There is a backroom gallery too, regularly open on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00pm to 6:00pm. Below are the BAT weekend hours. Ursa Coffee Roasters is Bridgeport’s newest arts venue, local roaster and coffee shop.
Artist Reception for POW WOW at
Colorblends House & Spring Garden
Saturday April 18, 2026 | 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
893 Clinton Avenue, Bridgeport
URSA Gallery is proud to present POW WOW, the annual spring exhibition at the Colorblends House and Spring Garden, curated by looketha. Opening March 31 and on view through May 10, the show brings together a wide-ranging group of contemporary artists within one of Connecticut’s most distinctive cultural settings, where landscape, architecture, and artistic practice meet in a shared atmosphere of exchange and discovery.
The title POW WOW evokes gathering, collective presence, and the energy created when artists and audiences come together in one space. It also carries an older resonance, tracing to the Algonquian-rooted phrase pau wau or pua wua, often interpreted as “he who dreams.”
In this exhibition, those meanings converge: POW WOW becomes both a meeting place and a space of vision, shaped by imagination, conversation, and the communal force of art.
Set at the Colorblends House and Spring Garden, POW WOW draws much of its character from the site itself. Renowned for its spectacular spring bloom, Colorblends offers a setting in which gardens, architecture, and contemporary art exist in direct dialogue. The artist reception on April 18 will take place as the tulips and other flowers reach full bloom, making the landscape an essential part of the experience. As visitors move from the vivid expansiveness of the gardens into the intimate interior of the restored Victorian house, the exhibition unfolds through changing registers of color, light, texture, and space.
Featuring artists Christian Miller, Clymenza Hawkins, Thomas Mezzanotte, Susan Reinhart, Andrzej Dutkanicz, Scarletchild, Carlos B. Biernnay, Cris Dam, Eliana Mesa, looketha, George Perham, Scott Richter, Susan Clinard, Yolanda Vasquez Petrocelli, Todd S. Rogers, Frank Foster Post, Kelly Mastronardi, and John Bright.
In Dialogue: Iyaba Ibo Mandigo/Frank Foster Post
Opening January 31st, 2026 | 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Bridgeport, January 2026––URSA Gallery is proud to present In Dialogue: Iyaba Ibo Mandigo/Frank Foster Post, a duo exhibition bringing together two Connecticut legends whose practices have shaped the region’s cultural landscape. Opening January 31, the show places their work in direct conversation—distinct art historical languages meeting around shared explorations of identity, rhythm, memory, and humanity.
Iyaba Ibo Mandingo moves fluidly between painting, performance, and poetry. His visual practice carries the same urgency and lyricism that define his writing and stage work—layered, symbolic, and deeply rooted in lived experience. In the present exhibition, Mandigo’s paintings act as vessels of history and presence, drawing on pattern, figure, and gesture to confront themes of ancestry, displacement, and resilience.
The paintings of Frank Foster Post are immediately recognizable: bold, cartoon-like figures rendered in bright color and heavy black outlines. Influenced by music—particularly the blues—and cinematic soundtracks, Post’s characters function as metaphors for human emotion and behavior. Playful on the surface, his work carries an undercurrent of solitude and introspection, using humor and rhythm to explore vulnerability and tension.
In Dialogue is less about contrast and more about interplay. The exhibition highlights how two artists working from different traditions and developing along separate trajectories can arrive at similar questions—how we see ourselves, how we perform identity, and how art translates feeling into form. For more information on URSA, visit ursabpt.com or contact Cris Dam at cristobal.dam@gmail.com
Bridgeport Art Trail 2025 Schedule
BAT Weekend Hours
Thursday, November 6, 12pm - 6pm
Friday, November 7, 12pm - 8pm
Saturday, November 8, 12pm - 6pm
Sunday, November 9, 12pm - 5pm
On display: Parallel Cosmologies
Parallel Cosmologies is an exhibit curated by Helen Kauder, an expansive survey of collages by Connecticut’s growing community of collage-makers. Featuring over 60 works, Parallel Cosmologies proposes collage as a cosmological practice—an act of mapping realities, simultaneous yet divergent, intimate yet infinite. On view from November 7 - December 31, 2025.
Friday, November 7
5:00 PM - 8:00 PM | Opening Reception for Parallel Cosmologies
Meet the artists, enjoy samples from the Ursa café menu with DJ sets by Steve Brock. If you can’t make the opening, stop in during the BAT weekend, view the art, grab a bite and get supercharged for the Art Trail with a perfect brew to go!
Spring Bridgeport Art Hop 2025 Events
Saturday, April 19
3:00 PM - 6:00 PM | La Belle Epoque: Artist Reception at Colorblends House
This spring, URSA Gallery transports visitors to an era of opulence and artistic flourishing with La Belle Époque, an exhibition set against the vibrant bloom of Colorblends House & Spring Garden (893 Clinton Ave, Bridgeport). Steeped in the grandeur of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, La Belle Époque reimagines the era’s aesthetic splendor in a modern context, drawing a line between the golden age of cultural prosperity and today’s ever-evolving creative landscape.