If you have ever stood in front of a contemporary painting and thought "I have no idea what I'm looking at," this is the class. "Getting" Contemporary Art returns this fall as a three-part mini art history course built entirely around the current exhibition, The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me. Through close looking, conversation, and connections drawn out to art history, literature, and contemporary culture, you spend real time with selected works and pick up new ways of approaching art that does not explain itself.

Each Tuesday takes a different theme, and you can take them individually or as a series. September 15 covers cultural legacies, journeys, identity, and displacement, asking how place, memory, and heritage shape what an artist makes. September 22 turns to domesticity, memory, and heirlooms, and the stories carried by the objects and spaces around us. September 29, titled "Gorgeous Nothings," looks at the Decennial artists who draw on poetry, fiction, and storytelling, and how language gets translated into image.

Leading all three is Kristen Erickson, an art history teacher and Director of the Luchsinger Gallery at Greenwich Academy. She has been teaching and curating for three decades, including eight years in the curatorial field at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art before she turned to teaching. She holds degrees in French and art history from Vassar and Oxford, and she lives right here in Ridgefield.

Good to know. Register for the full three-class series or for a single class. Sessions run 5:30 to 6:30 pm on September 15, 22, and 29.