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Brian Slattery |
Nov 20, 2024 8:09 am
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Raheem Nelson
The Alchemy of Art.
The small portrait of New Haven arts maven Ann Lehman welding in her studio is instantly recognizable to anyone who visited “The Alchemy of Art,” the show devoted to her work last year at Creative Arts Workshop. But New Haven-based artist Raheem Nelson’s graphic surrounds that portrait with a constellation of ideas that distills much of that complex exhibition and the various reports of it. In less than 10 seconds, we get a snapshot of who Lehman was, what her contributions to Creative Arts Workshop and the city were, and why we continue to celebrate her legacy. And our curiosity, perhaps, is whetted for more.
by
Brian Slattery |
Nov 19, 2024 8:17 am
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Bill Healy
Self Portrait, King Nothing, Princess Leia.
Bill Healy’s three collages cover three subjects, from the real to the imaginary, but are united by their distinctive personalities, half playful, half unsettling. In each face, there are a few delightfully recontextualized shapes. In Self-Portrait, the grimace is an Amazon smile turned upside down. One of King Nothing’s eyes is a bowl of soup. The middle of Princess Leia’s face is a tire. It’s the kind of lateral thinking that marks the most engaging collage art, and in another place, another space, the artist might be parlaying it into a social media following. But Healy — along with the rest of the artists in the show — isn’t on social media, and the work might not have made it to a gallery wall without a keen eye paying attention.
by
Karen Ponzio |
Nov 15, 2024 9:36 am
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A still from the film "Madame Sata."
Grit and glitter played equal parts in Thursday night’s Yale Film Archive presentation of Karim Ainouz’s Madame Sata, the 2002 film based on the true story of Brazilian legend Joao Francisco dos Santos, who fights his way through the streets and onto the stages of 20th-century Rio de Janiero to become a prominent trans performer who considers himself a “disciple” of Josephine Baker.
by
Jabez Choi |
Nov 14, 2024 11:40 am
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Jabez Choi photo
Lala McClain (right), with Will Tuttle: "This is a beacon of hope for me today."
Kevin DeSilva seemed to experience the impossible — he was in and out of the DMV in under an hour, and he didn’t even have to leave New Haven’s city limits.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 13, 2024 10:58 am
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Abdullah Ibrahim.
Jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim waited at the piano, listening intently, while his bandmates, Cleave Guyton on flute and Noah Jackson on bass, finished a quietly acrobatic rendering of a Duke Ellington classic that was also a nod to Ibrahim’s past. Guyton and Jackson finished, and left the stage. Then Ibrahim began, slowly, deliberately, with exquisite touch and gorgeous dynamic control, the product of decades of playing. He took his time working through his theme, and as the large audience at the Shubert Tuesday was struck silent, seemed to stop time itself.
Ibrahim’s performance — organized jointly between the Shubert and the Schwarzman Center — was part of a string of performances carrying the venerable College Street theater through the end of the year.
by
Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2024 8:57 am
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NHTC Photos
Ralph Buonocore.
It’s been years since Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met, and in that time, the literary stars of both poets have risen. They have each moved from place to place in the United States and beyond, and chased and acquired romantic partners. They are living lives, on one level, that seem full of realized ambitions. And yet none of that stops Lowell from writing to Bishop, long into their correspondence, that “I seem to spend my life missing you.”
by
Karen Ponzio |
Nov 7, 2024 9:32 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Velapatino, Caicedo, Tortora, Atehortua, and Diaz Costa.
Two Colombian films, both made of film fragments, gave audiences insight into the history of not only the country, but cinema itself, as the Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY) held its third night of screenings.
In its 15th year, the festival — which runs Nov. 4 to Nov. 10 — has over 40 films from 16 countries shown both virtually and in person as well as panel discussions and Q&A sessions to offer attendees, all of which are free and open to the public.
Parks Department carries away belongings-turned-"trash."
The city’s Parks Department has officially cleared the homeless encampment on the Upper Green — amid a debate over when unattended belongings become discardable “trash.”
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Jabez Choi, Nathaniel Rosenberg and Abiba Biao |
Nov 5, 2024 10:47 pm
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Jabez Choi photo
Debby Sauls and Rae Dehal, with Sauls's dog Jules: Nervous about the election, glad to be in community.
MSNBC election updates blared across TV screens at queer space and pan-Asian restaurant Blue Orchid, while upbeat music played throughout the bar at around 8:50 p.m.
A couple dozen people sat at the counter and around the restaurant eating and drinking, some with a blue shot that they could get for free if they showed an “I VOTED” sticker.
At Church St. between Crown and Center Friday morning.
(Updated) One person has been arrested and one remains in critical condition following an early Friday morning downtown shooting that injured two men and two women between the ages of 19 and 22.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 31, 2024 10:09 am
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Without knowing anything about them, on viewing Windy Day, Summer by Vivaldi, and the series of paintings that surround them, it’s possible to imagine that they’re all the work of a singular, bold hand, unafraid of the canvas, expressing a singular vision. In fact, those paintings are the result of a group effort.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 30, 2024 8:44 am
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Effy Gray Photo
Gelsey Bell: “The piece is designed so that people start off feeling apocalyptic. Then they can go on a journey that leaves them in a different place."
Over a pulsing synthesizer, musician and composer Gelsey Bell ends the final song of her opera with the line “I’m struck by morning / the orange line of light / low and fast, revolving flight.” By then, however, to the listener the meaning of that first noun is ambiguous: does she mean “morning” or “mourning”? The line carries the weight of both meanings with ease.
It’s part of Bell’s experimental opera MƆɹNIŊ [Morning//Mourning], which “inhabits a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth,” Bell writes. “An ensemble of five vocalist/multi-instrumentalists witness and guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. The piece is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature.”
by
Paul Bass and Thomas Breen |
Oct 28, 2024 1:47 pm
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Paul Bass Photo
Officers arrest homeless advocate Mark Colville.
Police made seven arrests of activists for the unhoused and removed four tents on the Upper Green Monday after a weekend of negotiations over the city’s latest homeless encampment.
Property Manager Amanda Naranjo (center) helps cut the ribbon ...
... on "the Archive" on Chapel St.
Downtown renters looking for a shiny new two-bedroom apartment can now spend $3,399-plus per month — to live in a two-building, 166-unit complex that has risen from the ashes of a pair of long-vacant Chapel Street lots.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 25, 2024 8:53 am
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At the beginning of a night of music at Three Sheets on Elm Street on Thursday, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) volunteer Andrew Zumwalt-Hathaway lauded both New Haven’s musicians and DESK as two ingredients that make the Elm City great. He noted that volunteering for DESK has become “one of the most fulfilling parts of my life.”
Mark Colville (right) and volunteers handing out food and supplies on the Green ...
... to campers like Strongbow Lone Eagle.
Though their tents are largely gone, unhoused campers have set up sleeping bags on the grassy patch behind United Church on the Green — where they continue to distribute and receive food and other aid, as an activist crew keeps up their protest of homeless encampment sweeps.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 23, 2024 9:52 am
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Edwin Austin Abbey
Compositional Study for The Hours in the House of Representatives Chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg.
It’s a painting of time, but it’s portrayed as a celebration, a dance, a whirl of energy. The artist, Edwin Austin Abbey, focused on “the dynamics among the figures and their movements,” an accompanying note states. “The transition from day to night remains unresolved, but the exuberant movement of the daylight hours is described with great clarity.” It’s a 24-hour party — a perhaps surprising way to render the ceiling of the legislative chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol.
These days, legislative bodies, state and national, are usually described as slow at best and dysfunctional, even dystopian, at worst. But the mood among public artists in Pennsylvania was different at the beginning of the 20th century, as it was, apparently, in several places across the country.
If an artist were asked to paint the ceiling of a legislative chamber now, what would they be inclined to depict?
by
Karen Ponzio |
Oct 18, 2024 1:37 pm
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Karen Ponzio photo
Olmo-Rivera, Zumwalt-Hathaway, and Werlin.
What happens when a Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen volunteer and New Haven arts and culture scene superfan decides to combine the two things near and dear to his heart? The New Haven Cares Festival of Arts and Music is born.
The brain child of Andrew Zumwalt-Hathaway, this newly created fundraising event will transform some of the city’s hottest night spots into places where donations can be collected for the annual DESK Thanksgiving For All program, offering both good will and a good time.
by
Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2024 9:27 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
Hilary, a middle-school student, has just moved to Falcon, Colorado. She wears all the wrong clothes, says all the wrong things, and most of the other students are ready to tease her for it, except one, who reminds them to ask themselves what Jesus would do. Socially, things might be looking a little bleak. But Hilary has an improbable secret weapon to get in with one group of girls — a passion for, and deep knowledge of, keeping horses. They start to get to know each other. What happens when the conversation moves from secret weapons to secrets?
Police, social workers, and unhoused activists in the final hours of Thursday morning's encampment.
(Updated) As a tent encampment on the Green came down Thursday morning, city homelessness services coordinator Velma George and Lora Weeks soon realized they had met before — at a different New Haven encampment, back in 2016.
George had been an outreach social worker. Weeks had been living outdoors.
Eight years later, they found themselves back in the same positions.
(Updated) A 24-year-old New Havener named Nicolas Baltazar-Consepcion died early Thursday morning after being hit by a garbage truck in the area of Church Street and North Frontage Road.
by
Karen Ponzio |
Oct 17, 2024 10:03 am
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A still from the film "Go Fish".
The 1994 film Go Fish opens in a classroom where the teacher asks the class to make a list of “women that you think are lesbians or that you know are lesbians.” The answers she gets are everything from Eve to Virginia Woolf to Margaret, Dennis the Menace’s next-door neighbor. One student then asks why they are making the list. The teacher responds: “Throughout lesbian history there has been serious lack of evidence that’ll tell us what these women’s lives were truly about.… lesbian lives and lesbian relationships, they barely exist on paper, and it is with that in mind and understanding that meaning and the power of history that we begin to want to change history.”
by
Brian Slattery |
Oct 15, 2024 9:24 am
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Dan Greene, sometimes of the Mountain Movers, cast a dislocating spell on a rapt audience at the Institute Library Saturday night, with a tremolo guitar and his echo-drenched voice. He was singing a song about a usual habit, of meeting friends downtown and hanging out in parking lots. But one night, he sang, “was different because / I didn’t know where I was.” The eerie sense of unease tipped into the surreal. “We all turned into birds / and flew over the town / we turned back into wolves / when we touched the ground.” Had they been wolves all along?
