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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2024 8:31 am
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Jennifer Knaus’s portrait pulls in the viewer in five different ways. There’s the vivid color choices, the exquisitely rendered, phantasmagorically fecund hair. But perhaps more than anything, there’s the element as old as portraiture itself: the gaze of the subject of the portrait back at the viewer, direct yet complex. What is the subject thinking? And with a painting like this, it’s possible to take that question a step further: What is the subject thinking about us?
Jacquelyn Crenshaw isn’t new to spotting breast tumors. Having worked in mammography for more than 40 years, she urged a crowd of over a dozen women to get their annual mammograms, perform monthly breast self-examinations, and above all, “know your breast density.”
Liam Brennan’s elderly parents will be able to live just steps away from their grandchildren — while maintaining the independence of residing in their own detached home — now that the city’s zoning board has approved the conversion of the former mayoral candidate’s backyard garage into a two-story accessory dwelling unit (aka “ADU”).
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 4, 2024 9:11 am
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On Monday night, members of A Broken Umbrella Theatre gathered in the theater company’s rehearsal and performance space in Westville to roll the clock back to 1929, close to the origins of New Haven’s apizza culture.
In the scene they rehearsed, Pete Jr. (Otto Fuller) wants to introduce his friend Charles (Jonah Alderman) to the rest of his family: mother Lucrezia (Susan Kulp), Cousin Mike (Matt Gaffney), and Uncle Jimmy (Lou Mangini). Mike and Jimmy, behind the counter, roll out dough and slide apizza in and out of a brick oven. Charles isn’t there just to make friends; he wants a job.
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2024 8:14 am
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Frank Bruckmann paints the sky to convey a sense of the clouds roiling overhead; perhaps it’s getting dark, or threatening rain, or both. In the dimness, the lights in the painting are blurred by atmosphere. Metal signs gleam in the reflected light. Bruckmann gives it all emotion and loving attention, which makes it all the more interesting that his subject isn’t a beautiful landscape, or an important person, but a snarl of traffic on I‑95.
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Brian Slattery |
May 24, 2024 9:26 am
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Allie Bee stood in front of an admiring audience in the downstairs space of Westville’s Third Space. Tracks they’d made themself played behind them as they took their time unfurling melodies they’d written on bass. The first one, groovy, insistent, they said, was called “Wayward Giant.” The second one, hazier and jazzier, was called “Blue Moon,” named after a smoothie of the same name that they’d made at work.
“Inspiration comes in weird places,” they said.
An enthusiastic voice came from the back: “Yeah it does!”
A late-night argument over a microwave oven Sunday led to a gunshot — and then, 14 hours later, police surrounding a house and blocking off the street until the alleged shooter came outside.
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Abiba Biao |
May 14, 2024 11:34 am
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Amid the sea of vendors and artisans on Saturday afternoon at the 27th annual Westville ArtWalk neighborhood festival and arts market, 11-year-old Amayah Smith looked around in awe at the multitude of goods people had to offer, from handmade soaps to crochet plushies. Amayah could imagine herself taking part, so folks better watch out at next year’s ArtWalk for a new business — “‘Mayah’s Joy” — bringing homemade stickers to you.
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Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2024 8:29 am
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In Sean Patrick Gallagher’s series of paintings, the sea roils red. The image is clear enough, but the title brings home the allusions the artist is leaning toward. “Wine-dark,” the famous moniker for the ocean in Homer’s classical Greek epics. The others are more contemporary, pointing to the effects of climate change. The series of paintings together act almost like a film. Move through the gallery fast enough, and the floor might feel like it’s surging beneath your feet.
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Maya McFadden |
Apr 26, 2024 8:48 am
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As Mauro-Sheridan math teacher Sheila Lamb knocked on her seventh graders’ desks to urge them to participate in class, math coach Cortney Costa used her phone at the back of the classroom — not to play games, but to record Lamb’s model lesson.
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Thomas Breen |
Apr 15, 2024 1:33 pm
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The redeveloper of the former Doyle’s Cleaners on Alden Avenue has ditched plans to build a new specialty food store and will now construct six, instead of four, apartments there instead.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 27, 2024 9:59 am
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Mark K. St. Mary’s Study #1108 looks almost like it could be a double exposure, an image of light and shadow laid over a photograph of a hallway. Viewed another way, it can feel almost intrusive, a view from inside a house at night when the lights are off. Should we, the viewers, be there? What is going on?
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Mar 19, 2024 4:25 pm
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Mother and daughter Hinasta L and Celeste Burrell left Family Dollar with Rockin’ Protein, hand sanitizer, period pads and heavy hearts — as they prepared for potential closure of the only store in the city keeping their pockets lined with more than lint.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Mar 8, 2024 2:28 pm
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Scientologists will have to pay taxes after sitting on plans to resurrect Ron Hubbard’s spirit inside the deteriorating doors of a former furniture store — now that the city revoked the church’s tax-exempt status.
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 5, 2024 9:45 am
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When asked “does art matter?” second graders Mercedes, Mason, and Elia agreed “yes.” Then they showed some of the reasons: Mason drew a sign reading “art = peace.” Elia drew a self-portrait. And Mercedes drew a rainbow, reading “I love art.”
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Maya McFadden |
Mar 4, 2024 2:18 pm
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In a second-grade classroom at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School students danced along to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” after learning about the “Queen of Soul.”
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Kamini Purushothaman |
Feb 29, 2024 2:58 pm
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(21)
Skateboarders young and old envisioned stairs, an awning, and 24/7 lights as they met with city officials to map out a plan for a $250,000 renovation of their park.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 21, 2024 9:34 am
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The view of a mountain in Sichuan, China is breathtaking, though not for the usual reasons. Photographer Roy Money doesn’t train his camera on the usual kind of tourist pictures — the highest peak, the widest vista, the prettiest temple. Instead, he has an eye for the beauty in the details, the shape of the land, a mat of vegetation, curls of fog. Pictures of famous vistas might make us want to go there. Pictures like Money’s might give us more of a sense of what it’s like to already be there.
A national Jewish organization called on Mayor Justin Elicker Friday to take disciplinary action against a city employee over an Upper Westville encounter that laid bare local tensions over the war in Gaza.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 9, 2024 4:50 pm
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A plethora of pizza, pom-poms and politicians flooded Upper Westville Friday morning amidst a pair of symbiotic popularity contests – in which every party was a winner.
The slices of of za and strings of plastic were featured in two separate city celebrations taking place around the corner from one another.
Over at Davis Academy, students screamed out of ostensible excitement or, perhaps, excess energy as their principal announced that both The Magnet Schools of America and the University of Connecticut have recognized the school for “innovative excellence.”
Down the street on Whalley Avenue, politicians and thin-crust fanatics packed like anchovies inside Ernie’s Pizzeria for National Pizza Day and a proclamation by the governor naming New Haven the “Pizza Capital of America.”
“If you had to either quit or work with Donald Trump as president, what would you do?”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal faced that question and others about his role in the future of American democracy — not at a press conference, or on the Senate floor, but in Lauren Bitterman’s fifth-grade classroom at Mauro-Sheridan school.