The city’s zoning board unanimously rejected a local landlord’s plan to build 23 apartments atop a vacant former Edwards Street firehouse after a marathon hearing saw skeptical neighbors and pro-housing advocates debate over how much density should be allowed in this stretch of East Rock, and across the city at large.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 7, 2025 9:47 am
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William Frucht
Packard Plant, Series 2 #18.
On the day this reporter visited “Making and Unmaking” — a group show running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Jan. 26 — artist Barbara Harder’s installation intentionally drew attention to its incompleteness. Three pieces of decorated and textured paper, Harder’s chosen medium for decades, were artfully arranged into a collage of soft colors and jagged edges. But on it was also a sign, written on a piece of scrap paper: “In progress as usual!”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 13, 2024 9:21 am
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Altered Futures.
This month there’s a small stretch of forest in City Gallery on Upper State Street — evergreens, ferns, moss — surrounded by a patch of dirt. It might take a moment to see that the plants aren’t rooted in the dirt, however. Rather, they’re planted in a woven aluminum boat, redolent of an ark. It will allow them to leave the gallery alive; maybe it will protect them from what’s coming.
Tory Sansing at Spruce Coffee meetup: "We simply want the city to recognize the value of the zoning rules."
Might the 15 Edwards old firehouse soon look like this?
An East Rock landlord’s plans to convert a vacant historic firehouse into a five-story apartment building has sparked a debate around preserving character vs. creating new places to live in a vibrant mixed-use stretch of Upper State Street.
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Maya McFadden |
Dec 2, 2024 2:27 pm
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MAYA MCFADDEN Photos
At Booker T. Washington Academy's Balloons Over State Street parade.
Aaliyah Staton, with Cherish and Kai: Showing up now helps kids when they're older.
Aaliyah Staton cheered on her son, Kai, and her niece, Cherish, as they marched in Booker T. Washington Academy’s first-ever Balloons Over State Street celebration.
As the sun prepared to set, John Torello worked with Joe DeLucia and Joe Neagle on the finishing touches on a soon-to-open neighborhood tavern. Down the block, Joseph Jenkins and Keiry Pena were taking Thanksgiving orders from loyal customers of their new Spanish grocery. Rory Ballachino poured Silk soymilk into an evolving matcha latte inside a new coffeehouse preparing for the fifth — sixth? — community event of its first week in business. Blair Daniels was in the kitchen scooping white flour to prepare the dough for a batch of country loaf to be baked the next morning in time for the steady stream of bread-buyers.
None of these businesses was operating a year ago. They are among six setting up shop this year on just three blocks of Upper State Street, maintaining the momentum of one of New Haven’s signature “new urbanist” neighborhoods.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 14, 2024 9:33 am
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Robert Jacoby
Essence 13, Essence 15, Essence 9.
The three paintings are a celebration of abstraction, and abstraction of a particularly kinetic variety. The canvases convey the energy of a brush moving fast, decisions made at speed, less like deliberation and more like reaction, like a skier weaving through the woods. But the painter’s experience shows in the overall decisions made about the painting. The color choices set them off from one another, making each hue vibrate just a little more intensely. Most important is the decision of when to stop; even moving fast, the artist kept an eye on the whole, and in this case, let all that white space speak for itself.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 10, 2024 9:35 am
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Rita Hannafin
Rita Hannafin's Float, on display for Open Studios.
Rita Hannafin’s Float hangs in the midst of City Gallery’s latest show on Upper State Street, a quilt of bright, shifting colors, surprising shapes, dynamic contrasts, and ultimately, cohesion.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 18, 2024 9:20 am
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Judy Atlas images
Mykonos 2 and Mykonos 3.
They’re abstractions, but still connected to something in the real world. Even without knowing the original inspiration, the signs are there. The blue the artist, Judy Atlas, has chosen is one that occurs in nature, in the sky and water. The pristine white a common color in manmade structures around the world. Then there are the architectural features, the arches and doorways, that suggest something of a maze, but one you might want to get lost in.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 13, 2024 9:20 am
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At Lawrence Street Plaza Thursday night.
In the city’s latest experiment in closing a road to vehicle traffic to better boost community, Lawrence Street Plaza shone on Thursday night — with music, pizza, bean bags, picnic tables, and car-free safety.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 14, 2024 11:00 am
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Ariel Bintang’s pieces can be understood as abstractions of figurative landscapes. The color choices, of vivid greens, blues, and oranges, don’t happen much in the real world, and when they do, not in the way that Bintang uses them. But Bintang also deftly outlines recognizable features into the pieces — buildings, cliffs, rocks, islands, clouds — that show them as landscapes, reduced to their essentials and manipulated. It makes sense, as Bintang, like fellow artists Uzayr Agha and Ethnie Xu, is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. In “Mosaic,” the show running now through Aug. 25 at City Gallery, the three artists transfer their eyes for the landscape and the built environment around them to two-dimensional canvases.
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Laura Glesby |
Aug 2, 2024 10:46 am
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Laura Glesby Photo
Alders-For-A-Day Ada Akdağ and Melissa Rodriguez at work learning about Keiry Pena and Joseph Jenkins' deli dreams.
Two “alders” checked in on a couple’s revived East Street deli, talked street improvements with a development official, blasted the news to constituents — and dreamed about what they want to be when they grow up.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 17, 2024 9:30 am
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Boeing by Joyce Greenfield.
When you enter City Gallery, located at 994 State St., the first thing you notice is the vibrant painting in the window. Joyce Greenfield’s Boeing resembles an abstract plane, done in bright greens and blues. The colors evoke the natural tones of the earth, but the plane itself is manmade and mechanical, creating a dichotomy of natural versus human creation. There is a sense that the plane is a miniature planet, orbiting the earth.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 27, 2024 9:15 am
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Jennifer Davies
Silent Translation (1), (2), and (3).
Jennifer Davies’s Silent Translation series is, on one level, a study in texture and layers, an engagement of the artist with materials they love. But — especially taken together as a series — they’re more than a technical exercise. They invite the eye to see the depths in the layers Davies creates, depths that have their analogies to the natural world: a row of hills spreading off into the distance with clouds behind them, the canopy of a forest. It doesn’t have to have an explicit meaning to be meaningful.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2024 9:33 am
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Joy Bush photo
Bethlehem.
It’s the shape of an ancient Middle Eastern cityscape, verandahs and towers, arched doorways and windows like peeping eyes. But it’s not anywhere near the Middle East; it’s on a rock hilltop in Waterbury, and it’s part of Holy Land USA — to some, a roadside attraction, to others, a place of serious pilgrimage, and for Joy Bush, the subject of an almost 40-year-long series of photographs.
Some of those photos are up now at City Gallery in a show called “Ruins of a Holy Land,” running through April 28, with a reception on April 13.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Mar 22, 2024 3:57 pm
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Nora Grace-Flood Photos
Milling your own grain is like grinding coffee to order, according to Frisch, who does both.
Bill Frisch signed up for the city’s DNA of the Entrepreneur program — and found the right recipe to make his business, East Rock Breads, rise to the top.
City officials joined Frisch outside his shop at 942 State Street Friday to cut a formal ribbon for the new shop and publicize the secret ingredient to that shared success: $15,000 in funding from the city’s Leaseholder Improvement Program.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 14, 2024 9:24 am
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Esthea Kim
White Field 2.
Esthea Kim’s painting White Field 2, at first glance, could be a photograph of clouds or smoke, but its complex surface asks the viewer to take more than just one glance, to be drawn in. The more you look, the more you see: variations in colors and textures, bordering on movement. The sense of space and depth within the painting suggests something huge could be obscured by the smoky veil. What’s behind there? Threat or serenity? Or are the clouds all there is?
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 6, 2024 10:00 am
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William Frucht
From the series Coney Island.
WIlliam Frucht’s photograph from Coney Island combines rigor and humor to make for an engrossing image. On the rigorous side, there’s the strict geometry of the workout equipment, the thin band of ocean separating tan sand from slate sky. On the humorous side, there’s something entertaining about the poses; they’re exercising, but they’re also like kids on playground equipment. More generally, there’s the juxtaposition of the handful of people working out with the multitudes in the background lounging in the sun. For every person working to get their heart rate up, there are 10 more who maybe think they’re trying too hard.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 11, 2024 10:03 am
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Judy Atlas
Blue Flux.
Judy Atlas’s Blue Flux can evoke dozens of things if you let it: a cityscape in the rain, a snow field, the inside of an ice crystal, with just a little sun streaming through. But that’s not the game the painting asks you to play. It can also just be taken on its own terms, as color and texture, a composition that is satisfying because its elements are well balanced, without having to mean anything in particular. Or maybe put another way, it can evoke a few meanings at once, without ever needing to land on a single one; it’s the impression it leaves on the viewer that matters.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 19, 2023 9:45 am
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Harder with J Topog Rivulets 231.
After decades of printmaking, Barbara Harder revels in embracing the accidents. “I’m trying to make things the way I’m making them,” she said, but “sometimes I almost like tripping up,” because sometimes she likes the images she creates better. “You don’t have to beat yourself up more than you need to,” she continued. “It’s really nice to have the space as an artist to do that exploration, and wrestle with yourself, and the paper, and the ink.… It’s the hope that at times in the studio, I can have this spark… whether it’s done, or whether it’s perfect, or whatever it is, it just makes me happy. It’s something to keep after.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 19, 2023 9:08 am
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Roberta Friedman
Aglow.
Aglow has been given the right name. It’s an abstract of shapes and colors, but the vibrant yellow in the background suffuses it with sun, with life, as if the viewer is looking upward through something — the slide of a single cell, or a lattice of bridges — into a summer sky. The way the colors keep separate, yet flow together, makes the effect possible, and that is the result of the technique the artist uses. That technique, it turns out, is the focus of the show.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 15, 2023 8:36 am
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Linda Mickens
Unclaimed.
Linda Mickens’s sculpture Unclaimed stands at the back of City Gallery like an altar, a centerpiece. “This piece gives voice to the countless victims who died, isolated and alone, to a disease that devastated the world,” Mickens’s accompanying statement reads. “Their angels claim them, forever ensuring that their souls do not languish, nameless and faceless in mass graves for eternity.” The note clarifies what Unclaimed is about. But it’s not necessary to bring home the work’s emotional message. The pile of shoes, the tattered wings, the angel’s sad, caring expression are more than enough to bring out the artist’s concern for suffering, and her call for compassion and understanding.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 14, 2023 7:39 am
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Eleanor Polak Photos
The Jawns perform at Gather.
Gather, the coffee shop and restaurant located at 952 State St., ran wild with drums, guitars, sound systems, and more from the four bands that performed there on Friday night. With a combined 17 band members and double that amount of audience members, the shop felt like it could burst at the seams. Instead of exploding outward, the energy in the room folded in on itself to create a volcanic mass of writhing bodies and whirring rhythms.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 24, 2023 7:33 am
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Eleanor Polak Photos
Mustafe Mussa performs for audience at Gather.
Outside of Gather, the cafe at 952 State St., rain poured down in torrents. Wet-haired and clutching their umbrellas like lifesavers, people filed in, ready to dry off and cheer up. Fortunately, this Friday evening Gather could offer both. Nine performers — two musicians and seven comics — were busy setting up for a show. As Jake Strom sold tickets to the incoming audience members, his fellow comedian Mustafe Mussa stood ready and waiting with a roll of paper towels.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 18, 2023 9:24 am
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Esthea Kim
Textures and Elements.
The ribbon that winds its way through Esthea Kim’s four paintings — each titled as a series, Textures and Elements — presents itself as a mystery. The light cloudscapes Kim has painted on each of the canvases are ambiguous enough, as they suggest both peace and a sense that they conceal something. The ribbon connects them all, invites the viewer to understand the four paintings as a whole. But to what end? Is there a meaning to be sussed out? Or is the connection itself the meaning?
