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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2024 8:31 am
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Jennifer Knaus
Jennifer Knaus's Oval, now showing in "Artist as Curator."
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?
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2024 8:26 am
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Sarah Zapata
A Resilience of Things Not Seen.
Sarah Zapata’s installation, at NXTHVN on Henry Street in Dixwell, is as fantastical as it is welcoming. From the various seating options (beanbag chairs!) to the thick carpet to the choice of colors for all of it, the installation invites the viewer to chill. But there’s something surreal about it, too, the way it crawls up the walls and onto the ceiling, so the rugs hang down from overhead instead of being underfoot, like most rugs. It’s possible to imagine sitting down in the chairs, and having gravity change on you, so you’re sitting on the ceiling, looking at the floor. So Zapata’s installation encourages imaginative exercise while relaxing. In short, it lets us dream.
“I feel like failure is a really bad word, but there’s a lot of failure in pottery,” said Megan Smith, the teacher of Centering With Clay: Focusing on Pottery Foundations, a seven-week-long class for adults at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street.
Smith’s goal for the first class on Tuesday wasn’t that her students make the perfect pot; that seemed unlikely, seeing as most of them were beginners. Rather, it was to lay the foundations, and instill in them a fundamental truth of all art: practice makes progress, and failure can be fun.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 3, 2024 9:20 am
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Tatiana Jackson
Clothed in Christ.
“Life could be black and white like the old TVs. Instead, God made it like an art gallery.” These are the words of Msgr. Paul Steimel on Aug. 27, 2020, hanging beside his portrait, Clothed in Christ, in the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center’s new exhibit, “Do This In Memory of Me: National Sacred Art Exhibit,”running now through Aug. 25.
The show — its title taken from the words of Jesus during the Last Supper, before he was crucified — demonstrates the ways in which humans represent and interpret that which they hold sacred, showing how people relate to Christianity and how they can share it with others through the medium of art.
Arts & Ideas techies offered those takeaways on Monday as they worked hard to dismantle the festival’s main stage on the Green — and reflected on their work coordinating events, arranging sound production, and providing lighting that illuminates the artists for the people of New Haven to see.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 1, 2024 9:39 am
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Eleanor Polak photos
Repping "Trinbago" on the Green: "Come out and learn about other people’s culture."
Gammy Moses: "When we play the drums, we are paying tribute to our ancestors."
Michelle Cave, Allison Lewis, Anthea Bartholomew, and Allison DeRoche of the Trinbago American Association of Southern Connecticut showed up to the Green to show off their heritage.
Their table at Saturday’s Caribbean Festival was lined with cultural objects from Trinidad and Tobago, including a steel pan, local drinks like Trinidad rum and Sole Apple J, and sweets like tamarind balls. They also had a large flag with the Trinidad and Tobago coat of arms, featuring a scarlet ibis, two hummingbirds, and a bird called a cocrico above the motto, “together we aspire, together we achieve.”
“This is great because people can come out and learn about other people’s culture,” Lewis said. She expressed that most of the time, we are fully immersed in our own experience, and don’t look outside of ourselves. The festival provided an opportunity to change that. “It’s like traveling without having to go somewhere.”
by
Karen Ponzio |
Jul 1, 2024 9:27 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos.
A still from Oxide.
A woman on the run shares a cigarette with a chicken. A family portrait elicits a daughter’s memories of familial tensions. Three friends navigate the challenges of working to pay the rent when they would rather party. All of these stories and more were told in various animated styles, including stop motion, painting, and Procreate at the 2024 Womanimation event, presented this past Saturday by MergingArts Productions at Best Video in Hamden.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 1, 2024 9:12 am
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At the very beginning of the evening on the New Haven Green on Friday night, percussionist Nino Ciampa asked a fundamental question: what is salsa? “Salsa is flavor and spice,” he said. “Salsa is Latin soul. The essence of salsa is ritmo — rhythm — and it started in Africa and the Caribbean with the conga, skin on wood.”
The conga in the Hartt Salsa All-Stars began, laying down a steady percolating groove that, it turned out, did not let up for nearly three hours. For one of the final nights of this year’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, the All-Stars and Grammy-winning artist Dobet Gnahoré, from Côte d’Ivoire, luxuriated in the power of African and Afro-Caribbean rhythms to create joy and connection.
No one rushing by the commerce-crossroads of Church and Elm Streets could hear the Sean Paul beats coursing through the headphones of a woman commanding the corner as her stage. They could see her hips keeping the beat — and keeping a hula hoop suspended above the sidewalk.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 27, 2024 10:19 am
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Meredith Truax Photo
Samara Joy.
Samara Joy wowed the crowd at College Street Music Hall Wednesday night with her powerhouse vocal stylings as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. A rising star in the jazz world who has already won three Grammys, including 2023’s Best New Artist, she offered 90 minutes of musical magic, calling to mind the classic jazz vocalists who came before her but wholly commanding the stage with her own range and flair for making the personal universal through songs and stories.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 27, 2024 9:23 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
CONTRA-TIEMPO's Ruby Morales: "We’re gonna practice ancestral technologies.”
Bennie Morris was not having a good day. Somebody had hacked his bank account, and he was on the way back from the bank to cancel any outgoing checks. Not to mention, it was 88 — and felt like 92 — degrees out, and he had to walk through the New Haven Green under the burning sun, wearing a full suit.
But then Morris passed the Arts and Ideas tent where CONTRA-TIEMPO, an activist dance theater, was holding a dance workshop in anticipation of its show, ¡AZUCAR!, this weekend. As he was about to walk right on by, somebody waved him over and invited him to join. Suddenly, Morris’s day changed drastically for the better.
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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 |
Jun 26, 2024 11:08 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Sherry Pocknett: "We've been here for 12,000 years and we're not going anywhere."
Catching and cleaning eels with relatives. Learning about the migratory patterns of birds and fish. Deciding that snapping turtle soup might be your favorite dish.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 25, 2024 9:11 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Cruz.
“You are visiting, and I live in, the most diverse neighborhood in New Haven,” said community activist Lee Cruz. “You walk around this block, you will hear English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hebrew, and French. Just on this block.”
He was talking about Fair Haven, and the occasion was a bike tour — part of Sunday’s programming for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — that led 30 participants through the neighborhood to discover the range and depth of public art projects there. Along the way, they learned about history, struggle, and the pride that binds the people in one geographical area into a community.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 12:32 pm
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Eleanor Polak photo
The Legacy Mobile Exhibitioninside the cARTie museum bus.
A small white bus was parked outside of NXTHVN, at 169 Henry St., its walls decorated with handwritten definitions of the word “legacy”: “legacy is saying cheers to the next generation,” “legacy is taking actions with purpose, and not stopping when faced with failure.”
The bus was part of the cARTie program, housing the Legacy Mobile Exhibition, which will be touring New Haven through Aug. 13.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2024 12:15 pm
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Brian Slattery Photos
Thank you, water, on Whitney Ave.
Part architectural stunner, part essential public utility, the silver and glass structure of the Regional Water Authority’s water treatment plant was even more impressive up close than seen from Whitney Avenue across the street from the Lake Whitney Dam.
Just as impressive, as it turned out, were the inner workings of that plant and how it provides water to the city and elsewhere — as a group of 30 participants learned on a tour of the facility, guided by Jesse Culbertson, RWA water treatment team lead, as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 9:21 am
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Contributed photo
The 7 Fingers in "Dual Reality."
The 7 Fingers, an acrobatic and theatrical company, was about to begin its performance of Arts & Ideas’ Duel Reality, a circus-like retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when a fight appeared to break out in the audience.
The ushers had split the crowd down the middle and given half the attendees a red wristband while the other half received blue. The problem: two audience members noticed that a third “audience member” was seated in the wrong section, wearing a blue wristband in the red half. They asked him to move. He resisted. Just as the audience started to get nervous that a real physical altercation was occurring, all would-be combatants ran up onto the stage. The show had already begun.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2024 9:05 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Agnete Wisti Lassen and Mohamad Hafez: "I cannot think of a more fulfilling engagement."
Mohamad Hafez
Eternal Cities.
“I don’t like to speak,” artist Mohamad Hafez said to a packed audience at the Peabody Museum on Friday night. Since he became a public artist, he said, “I wanted my art to speak on my behalf,” and “I love it when institutions take the artwork, and they talk.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 21, 2024 12:00 pm
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Eleanor Polak Photos
Re-X Clinic attendees with their pickles.
The kitchen of MakeHaven was cramped and filled to the brim with the strong smell of vegetables, oil, and brine. Eight people gathered with Young Le Do on Thursday night to participate in a pickle-making workshop called Re‑X Clinic: In a Pickle!
Some people brought the contents of their fridge. Others darted across the street to Elm City Market to purchase vegetables and herbs. The group shared ingredients between them, until the air was as filled with camaraderie as the jars were filled with salt.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Jun 21, 2024 11:47 am
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At the onset of the summer’s first heat wave, the beat and the vocals were heating up inside as a new project took the de facto stage in a backroom hookah lounge.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 21, 2024 8:17 am
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Haitian-American band Jo. L. & Friends started their Thursday evening set on the Green with a barrage of drums, tight and pounding beats. An hour and a half later, the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha announced its presence on the stage by ripping out rhythms on multiple drums.
Both musical gestures had the same effect. They were calls to gather. They set the tone for each band’s set. And they were a promise, that each band would stir the feet and heart, even as the sources of their musical traditions were over 5,000 miles apart.
Villains abound in Steven Brill’s new call to arms to rescue truth from internet disinformation agents and “pink slime” peddlers. My favorite villain is a piece of legislation.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 20, 2024 9:15 am
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A still from "Black Moon".
Cult Night! With Anthony, the newest monthly series at Best Video, offered its third showing Wednesday night and cultivated not only a discussion of what the film was about, but also multiple discussions of what constitutes a “cult” film in the first place.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 19, 2024 9:18 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Shrapknel.
Dying in hospice. Shedding the uniform known as your body. Name-checking Milford. All these topics and more flew through bar after bar of hip hop, as six acts from near and far burned through their sets to the delight of a good-sized audience who had come to hear them at Cafe Nine.
