by | May 15, 2024 12:01 pm | Comments (3)
Maya McFadden Photo
Holly Maxson: From Waterbury to New Haven.
A former digital arts teacher and school musical theater director who currently serves as the top arts admin for Waterbury Public Schools will soon step into a similar supervisory role in the New Haven Public Schools district.
by | May 15, 2024 8:22 am | Comments (1)
Amanda Rodriguez
Rebelled.
Rebelled is a direct yet complex image. Death looms over it, a sense of pain, from the position of the skull to the splayed black watercolor spilling out from the jawline. But the flowers growing out of the eyes and mouth aren’t just a sign of the skull’s inner decay. They suggest new life, too, rejuvenation. Those opposites come together as uneasy partners, the same sort of way the title of the piece isn’t, but sounds a lot like, the word rebuild.
Continue reading ‘Artist Looks At Mental Health From The Inside’
by | May 15, 2024 8:21 am | Comments (1)
Craig Gilbert Photo.
Fairy house made by Craig Gilbert.
When one thinks of places to view art, a farm does not typically come to mind. Dylan Vitale is hoping to change that as Celebrate Spring, an annual event held this Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. at Massaro Community Farm in Woodbridge, heads into its fifth year. The event features not only seedlings and farm products for sale, but also a vendor fair showcasing local artists and their work, as well as a fairy house walk that has become a way for artists of all ages and skill levels to be creative.
Continue reading ‘Farm Celebrates Spring With Artist Fairy House Walk’
by | May 14, 2024 11:34 am | Comments (1)
Abiba Biao photo
Elizabeth Laconi, Anne Hartjen, Shayla Streater, and Amayah Smith.
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.
Continue reading ‘Westville's ArtWalk Cultivates New Artisans’
by | May 14, 2024 8:29 am | Comments (0)
Sean Patrick Gallagher
These Wine-Dark, Warming Currents, Rising.
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.
by | May 13, 2024 8:40 am | Comments (0)
Klein and DeAngelis.
“Hell is other people.” That famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit might be altered, for Jacqueline Bircher’s play Webster’s Bitch, to “hell is the other people you have to work with.”
by | May 10, 2024 8:47 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photo
Corpse Flower at Cafe Nine.
Grace Yukich picked up her first acoustic guitar in high school, in Opelika, Alabama, in the mid 1990s. Women like Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love ruled the burgeoning alt-rock music scene. But Yukich didn’t personally know any non-famous women, let alone moms, who also played rock music — and certainly none who wanted to start an all-woman punk band.
So, perhaps subconsciously, Yukich put guitar playing on the back burner to pursue other things —theater, a PhD in sociology, marriage, and, in her 30s, a move to Hamden, and the birth of her daughter.
Things seemed to be going fine, until early 2020, when her marriage started falling apart.
Continue reading ‘Moms In Bands, Outnumbered By Dads In Bands, Chase Rockstar Dreams’
by | May 9, 2024 1:35 pm | Comments (3)
Maya McFadden Photo
Miriam Camacho, back at FAME with her new book.
Former Principal Miriam Camacho returned to her old school in Fair Haven to encourage students to always hold on to their home cultures — and, when possible, to make sofrito from scratch.
by | May 9, 2024 9:19 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery photo
Ceschi (center) at Cafe9 Wednesday.
Hip hop and folk punk came together Wednesday night at Cafe Nine to offer stories of persistence, hope, and detective work as DJ Halo, Tommy V, MJ Bones, Indigaux, MC Homeless, and Ceschi performed for an enthusiastic audience in a show organized by Ceschi.
Continue reading ‘Hip Hop And Folk Punk Bring Hope To The Stage’
by | May 8, 2024 11:11 am | Comments (4)
Brian Slattery Photo
On the canal trail by the William "King" Lanson statue.
The history of New Haven entrepreneurship past and present. The fortunes of a neighborhood rising and falling, and rising again. The legacies of environmental depredation, and the work to create healthier, more sustainable places.
All these themes were touched upon in the latest walk from the New Haven Bioregional Group, in which Aaron Goode of Friends of the Farmington Canal Greenway led a group of about 30 walkers through the New Haven section of the urban trail that today connects almost seamlessly to Northampton, Mass.
Continue reading ‘Canal Walk Connects City's Past, Present, Future’
by | May 8, 2024 8:04 am | Comments (0)
A still from The Truman Show.
What would it feel like to suspect that your whole life was a lie? Actor Jim Carrey famously plays out that scenario in a comedic-dramatic-dystopian-existential tour de force as Truman Burbank, the star of The Truman Show — both the film and the TV show within the film that follows his character’s life on a 24/7 live feed, unbeknownst to him until, well, it isn’t. The 1998 film, screened Tuesday evening, was the first in Best Video Film and Cultural Center’s May screening series, which this month will feature a retrospective of Carrey’s career.
Continue reading ‘Jim Carrey Steals The Show At Best Video Film Series’
by | May 7, 2024 1:51 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass Photo
Regicides Lou Mangini, Ruben Ortiz, Frankie Douglass, and Andrew Elliott at the WNHH FM Wall of Shame.
One guy had a stack of pizzas to deliver — on each floor. Another needed to go — badly.
It wasn’t looking good for the third occupant on the elevator.
by | May 7, 2024 11:05 am | Comments (0)
Dexter Singleton and Austin Dean Ashford.
It was just a read-through of a scene, without a costume or stage blocking, but the switches in writer and actor Austin Dean Ashford’s tone of voice were more than enough to convey switches in character: a wistful, optimistic young teacher, and an older, weathered but hopeful mentor. Later on in the reading, a harried school principal, and four students with whom that young teacher was going to have to prove himself. Director Dexter Singleton listened intently, and took notes.
by | May 7, 2024 9:30 am | Comments (1)
Courtesy Bitsie Clark Fund
Frances “Bitsie” Clark.
The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists, dedicated to enriching Greater New Haven by investing in its artists, has announced plans for its 2024 award process. The Bitsie Fund will award two $5,000 grants this year.
One will again be awarded to a Black artist; the other will be open to any artist. The Bitsie Fund Advisory Board explains: “We remain committed to being more intentional about ensuring that our grants are accessible to Black artists.”
by | May 6, 2024 9:35 am | Comments (2)
More music. More vendors. More sunshine.
Grand Avenue in front of Fair Haven School closed on Saturday to accommodate a bigger and more boisterous Fair Haven Day, as the neighborhood celebration — part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas and a product of a broad, neighborhood-wide coalition — marked its second year post-pandemic shutdown and hearkened back to Fair Haven festivals of a generation ago.
by | May 6, 2024 7:57 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
The Decemberists' Colin Meloy ...
... and opening act Ratboys, at College St. Music Hall.
The Decemberists brought May to a magnificent start on Saturday night when they returned to College Street Music Hall for the fourth show of their 2024 A Peaceable Kingdom North American tour.
Fans filled the room from floor to balcony, up the stairs and to the edges of the stage barrier, to bask in the multicolored hues of the lights and lofty sounds of some of their favorites, mixed in with new material from the band’s aptly titled upcoming album As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
by | May 6, 2024 7:43 am | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Zheng and Shih.
“Sometimes the memory is more sad than the forgetting.” Gee (David Shih) is an ailing man, plagued by forgetting, when he says this to a pregnant woman named Yuen (Joyce Meimei Zheng) in Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country, playing through May 18 at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Ralph B. Peña.
The scene is 1930s San Francisco, and Yuen is married to Moon Gyet (Hao Feng), who Gee brought from Hoisan, their native county in China, claiming him as his son for immigration — and exploitation — purposes. The textures of memory and forgetting suggest the vast scope of the hardships, fears, lies, and hopes for the future of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from 1909 to 1930 in Suh’s ambitious, episodic play.
by | May 3, 2024 8:41 am | Comments (1)
Melida McKenzie-Alford
From Across the Waters.
From its subject to its materials to its execution, Melida McKenzie-Alford’s From Across the Waters partakes of the aesthetic and techniques of traditional African art, hearkening back to the origins of culture. But in the end it’s the overall shape of the piece (which isn’t and perhaps can’t be captured in a photograph) that draws the viewer’s attention. It starts high on the wall and cascades downward, a serene waterfall.
In the place where it’s currently hung at Known, on the fourth floor of the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St., it bids the viewer to stop for a moment and take a minute for contemplation. Which, as it turns out, is part of the point.
by | May 2, 2024 10:33 am | Comments (1)
Moshopefoluwa "MO" Olagunju
Blue (Affection).
The figure stares out from the canvas, her pose ambiguous. Does it connote strength or vulnerability? Or both? Something more? There’s a sense of intrusion, of the viewer having discovered her. But the painter insures that we, the viewers, come bearing an offering; those are our hands in the lower part of the canvas. But still more is afoot. The blue rope twining out from the figure are intestines, but she’s none the worse for losing them. All of the elements in Blue (Affection) are potent images, but their relationships to one another aren’t clear. Meaning shifts as we construct it.
The painting, by Moshopefoluwa “MO” Olanguju, is part of a larger series of artworks “designed to evoke varied narrative interpretations based on the arrangement of surrounding paintings,” MO writes. “Throughout the series, roses and guts emerge as recurring motifs, contributing to a thematic continuity within the narrative.”
Continue reading ‘Inaugural Art Show Cracks Open The Questions’
by | May 1, 2024 11:47 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photo
Brian Meacham and student archivists.
Yale Film Archive turned one of its screening events over to students Tuesday night as members of the Spring 2024 Film and Media Studies 604 class shared their archivist projects — which included everything from a not-so-silent Dutch short that focused on the rain to a Looney Tunes cartoon that focused on a not-so-cool cat — with a room full of appreciative movie fans.
Continue reading ‘Yale Film Archive Showcases Student Archivists’
by | May 1, 2024 8:10 am | Comments (0)
Orpheus is smitten with Eurydice before they even speak. Hermes, Orpheus’s wingman, helps him work up his courage to ask her out. “Orpheus,” he warns, “don’t come on too strong.”
Orpheus extends his hand to Eurydice, offers flowers. “Come home with me,” he says, to audience laughter. “Who are you?” Eurydice responds. “The man who’s gonna marry you. I’m Orpheus,” he says.
Continue reading ‘"Hadestown" Keeps Up The Fight At The Shubert’
by | Apr 30, 2024 12:24 pm | Comments (0)
Stagger.
A photographer encountering the supernatural. Forty days of rain after the loss of a son. A six-decade love note to Hong Kong. According to playwright Danielle Stagger, the Carlotta Festival of New Plays 2024 — running May 2 to May 10 at the Iseman Theatre on Chapel Street — features three “funky plays” that are “not what you might imagine coming from Yale playwriting.”
Continue reading ‘Carlotta Festival Takes On Love, Grief, And Ghosts’
by | Apr 30, 2024 8:28 am | Comments (0)
Eva Skewes Photo
Stacey Strange, Dani Bobbi Lee, Nicholas Strange.
Exploring the malaise of being caught in travel limbo. Examining the foibles of other people and yourself, and the way they can begin to grate. Satisfying the desire to keep learning and growing as circus performers. All these factors went into Layovers, the latest show from Air Temple Arts, which will appear for two shows on May 4 at the ACES ECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
by | Apr 30, 2024 8:24 am | Comments (2)
Rainbow or Bach, that is the question...
by | Apr 29, 2024 9:42 am | Comments (0)
"Addiction."
The arts and sciences, the movement and stillness, the rhythm of breath and step: on Saturday afternoon, all came together in the performance space at St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church on Olive Street for Creative Circle, a delightful dance and music performance that saw two dance companies — the New Haven-based kamrDANCE and the New York-based SYREN Modern Dance — engage each other as well as the audience in their latest works in progress.
Continue reading ‘Creative Circle Asks Community To The Dance’