Art-o’-ween: Celebrating the Creativity of Lambertville’s Scary Season
by Gwenn Seemel
Some of the most artistic Halloween decorations in town are made from gourds, clay, and reworked store-bought elements.
Lambertville may be famed for the black-and-white Halloween sculptures at Dolores Dragan’s Halloween House, but those polystyrene and papier mâché figures aren’t the only creepy creations on display this October.
On Delaware Street between George and Main, there’s a more biodegradable kind of boogie man, built from a multitude of gourd varieties, including spinners, pears, and eggs as well as basketball gourds, tobacco box ones, and, of course, the calabash. It was this last kind of squash that first got Puneet Rao growing gourds back in 2012.
Puneet had been doing Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, which brings together movement and music. The audio element of Capoeira is often played on a berimbau, an instrument that consists of a single-stringed bow that’s usually attached to a dried calabash for resonance. When he broke his berimbau, Puneet—as someone who has, as he put it, “always been an artist” but hasn’t felt as able to express it until more recently—decided to learn how to make his own. That’s when he got drawn into the rhythm of these extraordinary plants.
Puneet sows the gourds in May one year and by the following spring they’re dry. “You just leave them,” he explains. “They grow this mold on them, and the mold dehydrates it from the outside. It sucks up all the moisture.”
It sounds simple, but Puneet revealed that at every point in the process—as they’re growing, molding, and drying—the fruits can rot or attract insects and end up with holes, so it’s hard to grow the big ones. And that’s just the beginning. Then the artist must figure out what he wants to make from the gourds.
Puneet connected these plants to Halloween in 2021, when he and his family moved to Lambertville and were inspired by the creativity in town. “Everybody’s got a theme. The first year we were here, we were like ‘we gotta have a theme!’ I’d been growing these gourds in different varieties for I-don’t-know-what-reason—obviously for this reason.”
This fall, Puneet is debuting his latest creation, an enormous insect called Gourdonfly, a match for 2024’s addition, Arachnigourd, who’s lurking around his display again this year. The artist acknowledges that people might not necessarily note the buggy emphasis he’s working on, and that’s okay.
For my part, I’m happy for whatever direction Puneet’s imagination takes him in. I love how different his gourdful goblins look in daylight and then lit from within at night, and I appreciate the playfulness inherent to the process as Puneet responds to whatever shapes the gourds give him.
Puneet’s sense of whimsy reminds me of Winifred Weiss, a Lambertville sculptor who describes her ceramic Halloween decorations as a stress-free way to work in clay.
“All I have to do is make some bulging eyeballs, sharp teeth, and interesting colors,” Winnie says. This is in contrast to her usual work, which is often described as “creepy,” but in a more subtle and unsettling way. The artist is known for creating figures with expressive hands, intense eyes, and ambiguous narratives, open to the viewer’s interpretation but that, for the artist, is usually inspired by emotional issues or the bizarre world of physics.
This branch of science was her focus at university, influenced by her father, who took her to hear a lecture by a famous physicist at the Franklin Institute when she was in the tenth grade. Noting her decision to major in art in high school, her dad told her: “it’s a nice hobby, but you can’t make a living that way.” Winnie jokes that she got back at him by going to college for physics, which is not noted for its value on the job market.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s, after having her first child, that she came back around to creativity, attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for a few years. And Winnie has been making art ever since, moving her home and studio to Lambertville over a decade ago now.
Most days, the artist is at work in her ground floor space on Church Street at the intersection with George. You can see her Halloween ceramics in the large picture window there and also at her home on Perry Street, between George and Main.
Of all her fearsome faces and figures, my favorites are probably her many iterations on the baby face. This repeated form is styled in a variety of ways, and that makes me eager to see where Winnie will go next with the chubby little cheeks and oversized forehead. The artist explains that somebody gave her a doll mold, allowing her to experiment with color and design without the fuss of building a sculpture from scratch. And that’s what the Halloween decorations are all about for Winnie: a low-key kind of mischief that opens up her creativity.
Kevin Griffin, for his part, rings in October in a higher key. His displays in the windows of La Chocolate Box at 39 N Union Street make it a not-to-be-missed stop for anyone wandering Lambertville’s central business district at any time of year, but it’s at Halloween that this graphic designer and 3D collage artist truly shines.
For the 2025 season, Kevin is introducing the Rat King. Purchased from a purveyor of Halloween fun, the huge animatronics rodent was billed as a mutant. Its face and feet had a greenish hue and open sores, and the fur was all wrong, so Kevin repainted and re-embodied the rat in a dignified grey to match his vision. He gave the king a black-and-white sad-clown doll as a companion—or possibly a meal—and he rounded out the royal half of the shop’s display with a menacingly beautiful hornet’s nest.
On the right side of the store’s entrance, the artist has brought to life a surreal painting, reminiscent of a goth Salvador Dalí. Kevin told me that the human figure with a head made entirely of small black roses is grieving the state of our world, and she’s positively sinister in her daintiness.
Between the two displays, the artist has added a black beaded curtain that you must pass through in order to enter La Chocolate Box. This mourning veil for the building is visually dramatic, but also pleasingly tactile and even musical, with the tinkle of the beads giving chocolate-lovers the feeling that they’re being swept onto a different plane of existence.
The richness of Kevin’s Halloween expression is, like Puneet’s gourd sculptures and Winnie’s creations in clay, special to me. They remind all who come to our town that, though decorating off-the-rack can be joyful, making a do-it-yourself kind of effort is even more so.
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