Three hundred and thirty-three artists begin moving their paints, clay and imaginations into a largely abandoned Shelton Avenue factory Monday for a month-long stay. They’ll bring temporary new artistic life to long-silent labs where scientists once experimented with metals. The crowds they draw may boost a New Havener’s long-term dream of reviving an anchor of the Newhallville neighborhood.
The art invasion takes place at 91 Shelton Ave., a five-story monolith at the entrance to Newhallville and in the hidden northwestern edge of Science Park. It’s part of Artspace’s City-Wide Open Studios, the celebration of local visual arts that brings thousands of people into artists’ garrets and industrial buildings for three weekends each October. (Click here for the schedule.)
The first two weeks of Open Studios events take place in Fair Haven, then individual artists’ studios and homes all over town. Meanwhile, the 330 statewide artists invited to 91 Shelton Ave. will have the run of the upper floors of the testing facility once run by the Olin Corporation. They will move into former offices and labs and create artwork to display the final weekend of Artspace, Oct. 29 – 30. This is the “alternative space” portion of Open Studios, always an exciting convergence of music, people-watching, and massive displays of art from the sedate to the way out.
You might think barrier-challenging modern artists make for unusual bedfellows with the man who bought 91 Shelton earlier this year, Schneur Katz. He’s a Hasidic Jew. You won’t find Katz scouring Soho galleries for abstract triptychs. His personal tastes are straightforward: He likes Norman Rockwell.
Katz’s professional passion is rebuilding and reimagining rundown old commercial buildings in New Haven. He buys them, guts them, brings them back to life with new missions. He turned 1184 Chapel St. into luxury lofts, for instance. He’s also working on 218 State St. and 900 Grand Ave.
Katz, who’s 37 and grew up in the Beaver Hills neighborhood, bought the late 19th-century era Shelton Avenue building in March for $1.6 million. In its heyday the building hummed with scientists testing metallic reactions for products to be manufactured in other nearby buildings of what now constitutes Science Park. Katz is pouring money into renovating the building and hopes to find businesses to move in to the upper floors. (He has some lower-floor small-business tenants already.) He’d like to see artists occupy the 25,000-square-foot 5th floor, with its panoramic views of the city.
So when Helen Kauder, the energetic director of Artspace, approached Katz with an appeal to turn over the building for Open Studios, he cut her pitch short. He understood right away that an opportunity had come knocking at his door. Crowds, energy, attention… What’s not to like?
“It gets a lot of publicity, which I need right now,” Katz says. “A lot of people will say, ‘Wow, we’ve never been in this part of Science Park before.’” And who knows? Maybe some small business owners will see the possibilities of locating there.
The building, meanwhile, is an artist’s dream world of possibilities, as a walk through its time-frozen halls demonstrated last week. The exposed plumbing, the labs with old equipment left behind and “Corrosives Lab” and “Polymers Lab” door signs still in place, the offices with ’70s-era fake wood paneling and blue wall-to-wall carpeting, practically scream, “Start riffing!”
Already, the Artspace energy has spilled outside the building. Volunteers have cleared a path that connects to the Farmington Canal bike trail. The city plans to pave it this summer. Visitors to Open Studios who venture behind 91 Shelton will get a first glimpse at the stretch of trail. They’ll marvel at how you can always find a new perspective on the same city you’ve traversed for decades, and marvel at how compact New Haven really is, how connected our community can become with a little vision and imagination.
Art’s supposed to do that, right?