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Brian Slattery |
Jun 8, 2021 8:32 am
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Sheila Kaczmarek’s English Sycamore grabs the eye as soon as you enter City Gallery on Upper State Street. Viewed one way, it appears almost as if it could move, like a mobile. Viewed another, it’s possible to imagine it’s growing out of the wall. Its organic forms add up, fully, to an enveloping composition — and it’s possible to imagine it could have kept growing, or that the pod in the middle of it might hatch. That sense of completeness and open possibility isn’t just part of the finished piece, but also is present in the way it’s made.
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Thomas Breen |
May 21, 2021 10:41 am
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City of New Haven
That small triangle at bottom right now belongs, again, to the DOT.
The city has officially handed back to the state a vacant triangle of land on Mill River Street — with the hopes that that small parcel may one day grow into 70+ new apartments.
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Brian Slattery |
May 7, 2021 10:17 am
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Ransome
Coming Out.
Ransome’s Coming Out manages to be comforting and confounding at the same time. The artist’s use and rendition of a quilt makes it feel like safety.
But the men under the quilt don’t feel safe.
“It’s a painting about two gay slaves who were lovers,” said curator Howard el-Yasin, “which in itself speaks to rupture. One is looking at the arrows and the street, the other at the gallery. One is calling, and one is silent.”
Ransome’s painting tells a more complicated story of slavery and Blackness than one we might usually see in public, and it’s part of “Legacy and Rupture,” the show running at City Galley on Upper State St. through May 30. Curated by interdisciplinary artist and educator Howard el-Yasin, in addition to Ransome, it features artists Nathaniel Donnett, Sika Foyer, Merik Goma, James Montford, Kamar Thomas, and Marisa Williamson.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 16, 2021 9:14 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
The works in “Portals and Memories” — up now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through April 25 — are, on one level, simply the latest series of paintings by artist Joyce Greenfield, done in the past two-and-a-half months. On another level, however, they represent a breakthrough, for Greenfield, to a new way of making art.
The city plans to ditch a vacant lot (bottom right in photo) to facilitate the development of next phase of Corsair.
Thomas Breen pre-pandemic photo
City’s Carlos Eyzaguirre: Lot is currently empty and trashed.
Forty-four years after first acquiring a triangular sliver of highway-adjacent land from the state, the city plans to give it back — with the hopes that the parcel could soon sprout roughly 70 Upper State Street apartments as part of “Corsair II.”
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 22, 2021 9:04 am
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Kane with Momi.
Kimono: many people are familiar with it as an article of traditional Japanese clothing. But as artist Kathy Kane points out, it’s also “such a beautiful word.” The juxtaposition is apt. In conjuring up the practical and concrete with the aesthetic and the abstract, Kane has made a series of pieces that allow her to express her most recent ideas as a thoroughly abstract painter, while marrying it to a familiar form.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 16, 2021 9:33 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
On Friday evening, Elena Augusewicz, Peter Cunningham, Jared Emerling, Jessica Larkin-Wells, Conor Perreault, and Charli Taylor — a.k.a. six of the Never Ending Books Collective — met in the storefront at 810 State St. They talked about how the beloved bookstore, music spot, and community space, which announced it was ending its decades-long run in December, may turn out not to be ending after all.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 12, 2021 11:24 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Artist Meg Bloom looked over the pieces in “Buried in the Bones,” her new show at City Gallery on Upper State Street, running now through Feb. 28. “I love rotted trees and dead flowers,” she said. “I’m always interested in that, things decaying and falling apart, but with a touch of life in there.” If it sounds like she’s responding to current events, she is. But it’s also a statement about the way the New Haven-based artist has been doing art for decades.
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Courtney Luciana |
Jan 21, 2021 6:29 pm
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Courtney Luciana photo
Mayor Elicker (second from right) helps cut the ribbon at The Neighborhodo Cafe on State Street.
City and state officials looking for a sign of small business hope amidst the ongoing pandemic found one — well, four — on Upper State Street, in the form of local restaurants still open during Covid.
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Dylan Sloan |
Jan 15, 2021 4:07 pm
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Dylan Sloan Photo
Chef Isaiah Perez applies the finishing touches.
Since adding the “Prison Reformer” hot dog — spicy mustard and his signature sauce — to the menu at Jordan’s Hot Dogs and Mac on State Street, Corey Spruill has gotten plenty of questions from customers.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 6, 2021 10:18 am
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Ruth Sack
There’s a clock on the back wall of City Gallery. It doesn’t have hands, and the numbers by and large have been replaced by abstract shapes. It’s a sign of how time has drifted away, and the expression on its face gives an unmistakable sense of mixed feelings. The piece, by artist Ruth Sack, is about the election season, the sense of anticipation and worry it has brought, but in another sense it sums up how so much of the last year felt — and how we look to this coming year with beleaguered hope.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 7, 2020 10:38 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Crowley.
Dried fish like graceful plant life. A chunk of gray liver that looks like a “silver ingot,” as a visitor to the exhibit put it. A photo that captures the energy and the sadness of an overcrowded pen of fish. With “Thinking Twice” — on view now through Dec. 27 at City Gallery on Upper State Street — artist Phyllis Crowley asks us to both appreciate the fascinating forms that nature creates, and examine our own relationship to it, particularly in how we eat.
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Thomas Breen |
Dec 1, 2020 5:37 pm
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Thomas Breen photo
Fred & Patty Walker, & freshly made sandwich.
Thirty-four years.
That’s how long Fred and Patty Walker have been married. That’s how long they’ve run Chestnut Fine Foods & Confections. And that’s how long they’ve graced New Haven with a creamy, crunchy, not-too-sweet, and all-too-satisfying Brie on baguette sandwich — which packs a particular punch in a pandemic.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 13, 2020 11:22 am
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There’s a quote from Spanish artist Joan Miró, written when he was 85 years old, sitting in the window at the entrance to City Gallery on Upper State Street: “I painted in a frenzy so that people will know I am alive, that I’m breathing, that I still have a few more places to go and I’m heading in new directions.”
“That’s how I felt,” said artist Roberta Freidman — whose exhibition, “Breathe: 2020,” is up now at City Gallery through Nov. 29. As the pandemic and its associated lockdown descended on the country and the social aspects of artistic life ground to a halt, “I could slink off into the studio and find some light in the day.”
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Thomas Breen |
Nov 12, 2020 2:11 pm
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Google Maps
Parlor at 918 State.
An Upper State Street tattoo parlor won permission to convert the back half of its shop into two new apartments, in the latest example of ground-floor commercial space transforming into housing.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 21, 2020 10:42 am
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Joyce Greenfield
Dystopian Sunflower I-III, Dystopian Lily.
The plants in Joyce Greenfield’s paintings are exquisitely rendered, but the paintings are more than just still-life studies. Something’s afoot in the composition. It’s a little eerie, maybe a little unsettling, and at the same time, the plants look tired. The titles of the paintings — Dystopian Sunflower, Dystopian Lily — offer a clue. The mood isn’t in the subject, but in the mind of the painter. If they weren’t painted during the pandemic, they might as well have been. They reflect the exhaustion many feel. And at the same time, they also reflect a dogged persistence — not only flowers growing in drought, but painters continuing to paint — that emerges as the theme of City Gallery’s contribution to City Wide Open Studios this year, running now in the gallery’s space on Upper State Street through Nov. 1.
A little triangular orphan lot across the street from the successful Corsair complex on State Street might become the site of another 60 units of spiffy apartments.
The proposed new project would incorporate an old existing building, add on to it on an adjoining surface parking lot, and toss “affordable” units in the mix.
Provisions on State — opening on Upper State Street in September — will be New Haven’s only whole-animal butcher shop that uses regional animals; it also plans to have “everything you’d need for a simple, excellent meal,” said chef Emily Mingrone, who is busily readying the shop for its opening with business partner Shane McGowan.
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Ko Lyn Cheang |
Jun 25, 2020 2:26 pm
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Ko Lyn Cheang photo
Recaffeinating, on East Street.
Six days after the state of Connecticut commenced Phase 2 of reopening the economy during the pandemic, allowing coffee shops and restaurants to resume indoor dining at 50 percent capacity, Michael Sakelarakis had just finished taking the final exam for his pediatric advanced life support certificate. He decided to head to The Coffee Pedaler, his favorite neighborhood coffee shop.
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Allan Appel |
Jun 23, 2020 1:56 pm
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Bradley at State.
If there were a touch of poetic justice to street design in New Haven these days, Bradley Street, home of the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-Op, should have been given its own bike lane as part of the recent repaving operations conducted by the Public Works Department.
