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Brian Slattery |
Jul 10, 2024 9:23 am
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The untitled piece conveys, first and foremost, a sense of the warm, abiding joy when people come together arm in arm. The strength of the piece begins with how easily this joy is conveyed, through the simplicity of the figures. It’s all in the color and the gesture. The objects at the figures’ feet give context for the feeling. The assortment of weapons on the ground — weapons they have discarded — give a sense of the violence the figures have overcome. They’re symbols of conflict across place and time, from ancient grudges to today’s all-out wars. What would happen if we laid those weapons down? What could the world be like?
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Karen Ponzio |
Jul 10, 2024 9:19 am
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A still from Spike Lee's Crooklyn.
Hopscotch, stick ball, dominoes, and double-dutch: the 1994 film Crooklyn opens with all of this and more playing out on the stoops and sidewalks of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where people of all ages live, work, play, and play out their daily lives.
Under the direction of Spike Lee, the viewer soon comes to know and care deeply about one of the families living on this street, The Carmichaels, as well as their neighbors, friends, and extended family members at their best, their worst, and everything in between.
Tuesday night saw the film as the first in Best Video’s July screening series focusing on Lee and his storied career. Other films to be shown in the series include 1998’s He Got Game on July 16, 1989’s Do The Right Thing on July 23, and 2018’s BlacKkKlansman on July 30.
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Lisa Reisman |
Jul 9, 2024 2:26 pm
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Marcus Harvin at Saturday's doc premiere, with Bill and Kathy Carbone.
In the trunk of his car, Marcus Harvin has a rock from the parking lot of a vacant building on Bassett Street. So does his friend Babatunde Akinjobi. The two met when they were incarcerated at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield.
“Each of us carries it around, believing that one day soon we will cut a ribbon for that property,” Harvin told a spirited audience of 60 family, friends, and supporters at Peterson Auditorium at the University of New Haven (UNH) on Saturday night.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 9, 2024 9:09 am
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Patti Smith's Horses.
The powerful voice of Patti Smith emanated from the speakers in the side room of Never Ending Books Monday night, as the latest installment of Album Club met to pore over her debut 1975 punk-rock album, Horses.
In her music, Smith is a wild horse herself, powerful and untamed. Horses is the kind of album that needs to be analyzed as seriously as any novel, and the group were prepared to do just that.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 8, 2024 11:45 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
Stephanie Berluti.
Stephanie Berluti of South Haven Farm was selling vegetables and greens at her stand at the CitySeed Edgewood Farmers Market on Sunday when she was approached by a man asking if she had any arugula.
Unfortunately, Berluti hadn’t brought any arugula that day — it had been too hot for it recently. The man was disappointed, but he still left her on a note of praise.
“He said my arugula ruined him for other arugula,” said Berluti. “This time of year, in the heat, farming can get you down, so it’s nice to get compliments.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 8, 2024 9:24 am
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Love n'Co at Seeing Sounds.
Eleanor Polak photo
T!lt's Mike Scialla: “This is our last song, so we usually go crazy."
“You can do anything. That’s my main motto,” Lovelind of the local rock-pop-soul band Love n’Co told the crowd at Edgewood Park’s Seeing Sounds Festival. “It won’t be easy, but you can do anything.”
That proved a fitting tribute to the artistic accomplishment that was Saturday’s fest — which saw a swath of the park turn into a vibrant venue for beautiful clothing, delicious food, foot-tapping rhythms, and a feeling of camaraderie that lasted longer than the last notes of a song.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jul 8, 2024 9:08 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Mother Juniper.
Sunday nights find most people in the throes of anticipation of the week ahead, often lamenting the freedom of the weekend that they are leaving behind. Last night at Best Video, the crowd of people who came to see Mother Juniper, Number One Babe, and the Tines got not only a lovely lyrical ending to their weekend, but a beauty of a beginning to the week ahead.
Bleachers at the Bowl. No more of this until Sept. 21.
The city’s premier outdoor concert venue doesn’t have any shows booked for July and August — with its last concert having taken place at the end of June, and its next concert scheduled for late September.
Why no live music these peak summer months? Because of “voracious competition” from Live Nation, which pays “exorbitant” prices to keep acts from coming to the Westville Music Bowl.
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Lisa Reisman |
Jul 5, 2024 9:34 am
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Contributed photo
UNH film student Elisa Broche (second from right) with her family in Honduras.
Elisa Broche won’t be at Saturday’s premiere of her new documentary about Newhallville community activist Marcus Harvin at the University of New Haven.
That’s because the 19-year-old student filmmaker is back in her home city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras — doing everything she can to raise enough money to return to West Haven to complete her studies.
“Prepare your minds,” Marquis Brantley announced to his squad of six young athletes, “to crab.” He crouched down on all fours, alternating between his left and right limbs as he “crabbed” to the opposite side of Bowen Field.
“Just because I can do it fast doesn’t mean that you should, too. My hands are a burning mess, so slow down. Feel every moment.”
As Olympians across the globe prepare in advance of the hotly contested 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, Brantley trained the next generation of local athletic excellence on Wednesday at their home turf at 175 Crescent St., adjacent to Hillhouse High School.
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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.”
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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.
