Arts & Culture

Open Studios 2024 Begins

by | Oct 7, 2024 8:18 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos

Luca McCarthy at work: “I’m very anti-garbage. Nothing is garbage.”

One view of the CAW exhibit, featuring pieces by Simmons, Giroux, McCarthy, and Brantley.

You know October is here when New Haven sidewalks are dotted with fallen leaves, and art studios and galleries are open for all to see. Open Studios 2024 began on Saturday with a variety of locations ready and waiting to share art in a variety of media, including City Gallery, The Institute Library, the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and Creative Arts Workshop (CAW).

CAW, however, had a unique set up offered to the public. While an exhibit by eight artists from the Ely Center’s 2024 open call was on view on the first floor of the Hilles Gallery at CAW on Audubon Street, those same eight artists were on the second floor, creating new pieces and greeting visitors who wanted to engage them in discussion about their work.

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Do We Know Each Other? Do We Know Ourselves?

by | Oct 1, 2024 8:50 am | Comments (1)

Do you have a mind’s eye, the ability to not just remember, but visualize the past? Do you have an interior monologue? Rich childhood memories, full of sights, sounds, and smells? For science writer Sadie Dingfelder — speaking to an audience of about a dozen Monday night at the Edgewood Avenue bookstore Possible Futures — the answer to all these questions and a few more like it were a clear no.

And until just a few years ago, she thought the same was true for everyone else. Until a fateful trip to the grocery store led her to become the subject of a few lab studies, and to the work of New Haven-area science journalist Carl Zimmer, and on and on — heading toward the edges of neurologists’ understanding of how varied the human experience can be.

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Yale Cabaret Rises Again For 2024-25 Season

by | Oct 1, 2024 8:49 am | Comments (0)

Artistic Managing Director Sarah Machiko Haber.

The life and death of viral celebrity. Keeping the stories of ancestors alive. Death and rebirth. 

The mythological phoenix is famed for rising reborn from its own ashes. Chosen as the title for Yale Cabaret’s 2024 – 25 season, the name is fitting — not only for the themes running through what the Cab is producing this year, but because the Cab is a student-run theater that has died” and been reborn 55 times before. Each season has new artistic directors and managing directors who, in a manner of speaking, rise from the ashes of their predecessors.

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The Word On Chapel & East: Swirling Colors Hit The Wall

by | Sep 30, 2024 4:13 pm | Comments (22)

Paul Bass Photo

Jessie Unterhalter at work Monday.

Beautiful!” a passing motorist called out while heading downtown Monday on Chapel Street.

Thank you!” Jessie Unterhalter said for the tenth? 20th? time of the day.

Unterhalter didn’t want to be rude. People passing by the once-blank warehouse wall at Chapel and East Streets have brightened to see the swirling bright colors Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn have been painting there for the past three weeks. Unterhalter appreciated their appreciation.

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Cornet-Piano Duo Frees Up The Space

by | Sep 30, 2024 8:37 am | Comments (0)

Kelly Jensen Photo

Taylor Ho Bynum.

Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum smiled from the stage at Firehouse 12 Friday night, explaining how good it was to be back there. I cannot imagine my life without it,” he said, from his collaborations with Anthony Braxton to his numerous performances there with other groups. On Friday, however, he was there with UK-based pianist Alexander Hawkins, as part of the Crown Street bar- recording studio-performance space’s fall jazz series, running now into December.

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Megalopolis Brings Arthouse To Cinemark

by | Sep 27, 2024 9:23 am | Comments (6)

Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis, which feels at times like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad.

The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall. 

It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?

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Artists Tap Into The Roots

by | Sep 26, 2024 9:23 am | Comments (0)

In the short film Dendrostalkers, the view is from the driver’s seat of a car curving along a dirt road through a forest at night. The trees are thick and dark, then give way to a clearing, a pile of fresh lumber. The narration speaks of foreboding. The car stops, and something springs from the pile of dead trees, a new limb, animated, making shapes in the air. It’s the next step in evolution, maybe a dispatch from the future. It’s an art project that has something to say about our relationship to the forest now.

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Art Helps Clients Cope At Continuum’s First Show

by | Sep 25, 2024 11:47 am | Comments (2)

Brian Slattery photo

One of the many artworks on display at the first ever show hosted by a Legion Avenue mental health, addiction, and homelessness services nonprofit.

The pill bottles hang suspended in the air, a testament to their ubiquity and the damage they cause. Behind them are arrayed a series of facts and statistics about drug overdoses. Over 1,000 people die from them in Connecticut every year. Since 1999, almost 1 million have died nationwide, with opioids accounting for two-thirds of those deaths.

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Exhibition Shows All The Hues Fit To Print

by | Sep 24, 2024 9:22 am | Comments (0)

Carol Strause FitzSimonds

Flora and Fauna #23.

My art is a living thing, a labor of birth, exasperation, growth, change, and joy. Printmaking has always been my primary passion, from exploring traditional Old World techniques to new 21st-century materials and technologies. Wanting to expand my art into a more sculptural tactile experience led me to experiment with altering published books and to crafting one-of-a-kind books from my original prints and drawings. I find my image inspiration in the everyday of nature, ordinary places and things, and the human form.”

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Deerlady Distills The Rage

by | Sep 23, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (0)

Magdalena Abrego crouched over her pedalboard Sunday evening at Never Ending Books on State Street, and unleashed a lush, complex soundscape, a series of guitar-made tones layered over one another, now vibrating together.

As the sounds continued pulsing around her, she began to play simple chords, laying down a rhythm, a chord progression. On the downbeat, Mali Obomsawin and Willis Edmundson joined Abrego. The soundscape switched off in a second, and the band — Deerlady — sounded, suddenly, like a rock band. But the impression was left, and a point made, that the trio was drawing from a broad musical vocabulary. Which made sense; the last time Abrego, Obomsawin, and opener Allison Burik were in town, in May 2023, they were playing music that brought together elements of traditional Abenaki song and free jazz at Firehouse 12. Deerlady deployed a different sound, but still had the same searching sensibility.

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Sleeping Giant Readers Come To Best Video

by | Sep 20, 2024 11:16 am | Comments (0)

Series co-organizers Shelton, Mattison, Czepiel, and Jessen.

A room full of writers and fans of the written word gathered Thursday night at Best Video for the first installment of the Sleeping Giant Reading Series, an event aimed at creating a space where authors not only share their works, but gather in community with others to offer support, make connections, and have a little fun.

Co-organizers Alice Mattison, Sandi Shelton, Kathy Czepiel, and Heather Jessen — all New Haven-based writers — will be curating a two-hour event every third Thursday of the month. The first hour will feature professional readings by published authors. The second hour will be dedicated to shaking away that oft-felt sense of isolation many writers have by sharing a Writer’s Happy Hour” where they can chat with each other about their work and writing in general.

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The Fiddler Was Playing -- & Praying

by | Sep 20, 2024 9:42 am | Comments (0)

Paul Bass photo

Austin Scelzo and fiddle at WNHH FM.

Austin Scelzo hit the two bottom strings of his violin, struck a couple higher notes, launched a high-lonesome lament that seemed to stretch back eight decades to rural Appalachia.

Trouble in my soul
I know it’s wrong
But it’s feeling so good …

Did Bill Monroe originally sing this? Was it a gospel number repurposed for bluegrass barn dances? It sounded as though it leaped from an old vinyl 78, minus the scratches.

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Artist Takes Abstract Trip

by | Sep 18, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (0)

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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Dinner & A Movie Served Up At Fair Haven Shelter

by | Sep 17, 2024 4:07 pm | Comments (4)

courtesy Marcus Carpenter

From left, servers Big Don McDaniel, Marcus Harvin, Greg Altieri, Adam Rawlings, Marcus Carpenter, Babatunde Akinjobi, and Bradley Woodworth.

One group brought a full-course dinner, complete with a choice of jerk chicken or fried chicken. Another brought a Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” DVD, a movie projector, and popcorn. Then a half-dozen smartly dressed servers showed up. 

And just like that, with the inaugural Dinner and a Movie” hosted by Best Video and the Newhallville nonprofit Fresh Starts, a dream, seven years in the making, saw its realization at Life Haven women’s shelter in Fair Haven.

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When The Light Tricks The Mind

by | Sep 17, 2024 8:59 am | Comments (0)

Sven Martson Photos

Rochester Truck Door.

The profile, of a cartoon crone, is easy to see — easier than seeing what it really is. Keep looking and you might see other faces as well. But keep looking, and you see that it’s all something else, that your mind is finding patterns, meaning, in a chance encounter. I was walking around in Rochester one day, and before crossing a street, I looked to the right, and down at the end of the alley was a shiny truck door reflecting the distorted image of the building across the street,” Sven Martson notes. My point of view was all important. Just a few inches to the right or left and the image broke up and disappeared.” It’s only a reflection of a building. But it also reflects something else, in the way we find so much else in it.

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Gogol Bordello Unleashes Positive Fury

by | Sep 16, 2024 10:09 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Gogol Bordello.

In an election cycle marked by acrimony and fractious divisiveness, the music at Toad’s on Friday — featuring international punk band Gogol Bordello, supported by label mates Puzzled Panther and Crazy and the Brains — amounted to a ragged, full-throated cry for action and greater community, with a sharp edge.

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"Union Square" Sketches Revealed

by | Sep 13, 2024 4:22 pm | Comments (65)

Contributed Rendering

Renderings for the future of the Church Street South site, including a "central green" pictured here, were revealed...

Laura Glesby Photo

...at a packed meeting on Thursday.

Townhomes shift into high-rises as the buildings transition from the Hill to Downtown, anchored by a central green.” In the mix is a coffee kiosk, an outdoor theater, and a pedestrian promenade.

A team of architects and designers sketched out those ideas on Thursday for a future mixed-use, mixed-income development at the vacant site of the former Church Street South housing complex and the current Robert T. Wolfe public housing apartments.

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And The Weekend-Film Winner Is ... ?

by | Sep 13, 2024 3:00 pm | Comments (0)

Lisa Reisman photo

"Nightmares" cast and crew: D. Jeff Bell, Ann Bell, Darrell Bellamy Jr., Clifton Bey, Myron Attoh, and Ian Mann, at Armada Brewing for awards night.

Director-producer Darrell Bellamy Jr. was in a creative slump — but he had already signed up to participate in the New Haven 48 Hour Film Project, an annual summer competition to make a short movie over the course of just two days.

I had to go for it,” said Bellamy, co-creator of the upcoming thriller Marblehead,” as well as Get Yer Mind Right,” a coming-of-age YouTube series.

Several weeks later, he found himself at a raucous 48 Hour Film Project awards ceremony at Armada Brewery — buoyed by two award nominations, and waiting to see if he and his team would make it out on top.

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Artists Make Light At Gateway

by | Sep 12, 2024 8:53 am | Comments (0)

Liah Sinq

For a split second, the kid is in the hands of gravity, but you just know he’s going to be all right. Maybe it’s the matching pajamas that give it away. It’s Christmas morning, perhaps, and the kids want to play with a father, or an uncle. But what really seals the deal on the tone of the piece is the quality of the sunlight, streaming through the window behind them. It lets us see the care the adult is putting into it, lets us see the way the kid is enjoying the ride. He may be falling, but the landing will be safe.

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