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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 3, 2024 8:14 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
Ponybird & Co.
The music room in Never Ending Books at 810 State St. was cluttered but homey. A collage of brightly-colored abstract art and painted records decorated the walls, which were lined by well-worn musical instruments. It recalled a grandparent’s house, a place where one might go to hear wise truths and rambling stories. On Friday night, two groups of musical storytellers gave the audience just that.
Messer Chups performing this weekend in New Haven.
Spooky sounds emanated from Cafe Nine Saturday night. Instead of sending shivers up spines, it kept a crowd smiling and shuffling from side to side for a nonstop hour.
Armando Acevedo clicked on a file from his phone. He unrolled a taped-together 10-page scroll. He started rapping the printed lyrics, summoning the insights of a noted 20th century Swiss psychologist married to 21st century beats.
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2024 8:14 am
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Frank Bruckmann
I-95 East Norwalk.
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.
by
Dereen Shirnekhi |
May 30, 2024 3:15 pm
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Dereen Shirnekhi photos
Jamal Robinson (center) joined by wife Jess Robinson and team (left) and economic development official Carlos Eyzaguirre, Mayor Justin Elicker, cultural affairs chief Adriane Jefferson, and Beachworld Senior VP Dan DeStefano (right).
Outdoor salsa nights, craft beers, and live music are coming to a long-empty lot in downtown New Haven, thanks to the efforts of a local innovator who is hoping to showcase Black and Brown brewers.
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Lisa Reisman |
May 30, 2024 9:31 am
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Lisa Reisman photo
Susan Clinard with beribboned figure in new West Haven studio.
When New Haven-based sculptor Susan Clinard moved from her longtime digs at the barn at the Eli Whitney Museum to a studio in West Haven earlier this year, she brought along with her hundreds of people — sculptures of people, to be precise, made of wood, clay, wire, and found objects.
“I’m always looking for materials to speak about the many things I want to speak about, but above all our common experience,” she said at a recent, well-attended open studio at her new space in the Gilbert Street Studios.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 30, 2024 9:28 am
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Peter Soriano
Untitled (Wave).
“Year of the Dragon” — an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery celebrating the year 2024 and running now through Nov. 10 — begins with two artworks of waves. One of those artworks happens to be the beyond-famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai, dating from the 19th century. The other, printed only in 2023, is by the Philippines-born American artist Peter Soriano.
In the difference between the two pieces lies the angle of the show overall, which offers a taste of the rich history of East Asian art and shows how more contemporary Asian artists have embraced the modern move toward abstraction while staying true to the techniques and aesthetic sensibilities they’ve inherited.
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Brian Slattery |
May 29, 2024 9:24 am
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Beloved New Haven.
It’s a simple idea with big consequences. The picture of East Rock is the sort you might see on a postcard. The message is easy to digest, a salute to a city the artist loves, a message of solidarity. But it’s also an acknowledgment of struggle, and that’s where the fact that the art is made on a record comes into play. Give the record a spin, and everything gets blurred, both the place and the message. In the midst of the struggle, the hardship can be dizzying. It’s hard to know sometimes which end is up. But that’s also when the music plays.
4th-generation Louis' Lunch burgermeister Jeff Lassen tends to lunchtime crowd in between hosting elected officials.
Fresh off planting New Haven’s pizza flag in D.C., Mayor Justin Elicker led an official delegation to Crown Street Tuesday to lay claim to yet another round-and-flat New Haven original.
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Eleanor Polak |
May 28, 2024 8:32 am
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Dan Soto performs "Deep Dark Heart."
Best Video Film & Cultural Center was alight on Friday night with movies, music, and general merriment. Three acts — Dan Soto’s Natural Fool, Katy Pinke, and Sallow Friend — performed live music to a crowd of 30 to 40 people, sandwiched together between shelves of video tapes. Before the night was over, the walls would seem to shake with the combined sound of instruments, vocals, and thunderous applause.
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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!”
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Brian Slattery |
May 23, 2024 9:35 am
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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Women in Design: The Next Decade.
It’s a poster for a conference held in Los Angeles in 1975, “for women who work with public visual and physical forms,” as the piece advertises — that is, women artists and designers. The abstract vista suggests a wide open landscape, a distant horizon, a place of limitless opportunity. But the repeating image, the shape of the symbol of femininity derived from the Roman sign for the goddess Venus, is also quite literally about nuts and bolts.
Plans to convert the former Connecticut Savings Bank on Church Street into a venue for late-night dancing and drinking have fallen apart — leading the marble-columned, long-vacant downtown commercial building to return to the rental market.
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Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2024 9:16 am
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City of Meriden.
New Haven-based artist Michael Miglietta has a visual style that leans into the surreal and the cosmic, creating dizzying, shape-shifting images with bold linework and vivid color. Under the moniker Parlay Droner, he’s also an experimental musician, exploring the harsher edges of sound. For a show of his artwork at the Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden, however, he faced a more pragmatic problem: “What do I have to do to get people to see a great band from Ireland on a Monday night?”
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Brian Slattery |
May 20, 2024 9:06 am
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Still from video for "My Holy Shrine."
A chiming guitar, light percussion from bongos, an ambling bass, a laconic vocal describing a trip down a city street evocative enough that one can visualize the dim sulphur lights, shadows shortening and lengthening as the voyage proceeds. The journey begun, a wavering, fuzzed-out guitar strides onto the scene, taking its time to develop its ideas. The second guitar switches to a fuzz of its own, and together they take the song farther out. Another vocal break, this one taking things in a more surreal direction. “The sun shines on the moon,” two voices sing, and the band keeps going, keeps searching.
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Brian Slattery |
May 17, 2024 9:42 am
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Trashing Violet; "Put your earplugs in deep."
Marisa B. of Trashing Violet was nearing the end of her set, but in another sense, she and her band were just getting warmed up. “Put your earplugs in deep. You’ve been warned,” she said, as the band tore into its most visceral original yet, a song that started and ended with screams that the audience couldn’t help but respond to in kind.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 17, 2024 9:37 am
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A still from But I'm a Cheerleader.
Best Video welcomed the return of a popular film screening series Thursday night as Queer Film Club, a collaboration between the film and cultural center and East Rock House, screened the first of four queer comedies to be shown each month from May to August.
The 1999 cult comedy classic But I’m A Cheerleader led the way, as an exuberant audience filled every chair in the space and then some for the story of Megan, played by Natasha Lyonne, who gets sent to a “sexual redirection” school when her parents suspect her of being a lesbian.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
May 16, 2024 12:07 pm
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In the back room hookah lounge of the Mediterranea Cafe, Love n’Co gave a sneak peak into their musical take on chocolate and hope, a week before it lands on the band’s first-ever EP.
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Brian Slattery |
May 16, 2024 8:22 am
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Lionel Cruet
Video installation in Sunburnt.
An entire gallery of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street is bathed in a pinkish-orange glow that streams in through tinted windows, a constant chemical sunset. The light transforms the pieces that artist Lionel Cruet has in the space, from a painting of a mangrove swamp populated by iguanas to shopping bags emblazoned with ominous faces commanding you to enjoy your life.
The Synergists -- music promoter Keith Mahler and restaurateur Claire Criscuolo -- with city's Cathy Graves outside College Street Music Hall for Wednesday's presser.
Downtown boosters stood outside amid the rain Wednesday to proclaim the start of outdoor dining season.
by
Maya McFadden |
May 15, 2024 12:01 pm
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
May 15, 2024 8:22 am
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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.
by
Karen Ponzio |
May 15, 2024 8:21 am
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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.
by
Abiba Biao |
May 14, 2024 11:34 am
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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.
