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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 30, 2023 9:33 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
David Sepulveda at work in his Westville studio.
The last weekend of October finally gifted the city a warm and sunny Saturday, but nowhere was it hotter than Westville, where a two-day neighborhood event — part of the artist-led City-Wide Open Studios — encompassed everything from galleries, creative collectives, and private residences to Edgewood Park and even pods on Central Avenue.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 27, 2023 8:39 am
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Cynthia Beth Rubin
Orange Interplay with Diatoms, Salt, and Seaweed.
Cynthia Beth Rubin’s collage crackles with energy, as colors vibrate off one another and forms within forms, textures within textures, rub against each other. Keen senses of both aesthetic freedom and control of technique suffuse the piece — which, it turns out, hearken back to a famous artistic ancestor.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 26, 2023 2:59 pm
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Brian Slattery Photos
Patrick Scalisi and Valerie Ruby-Omen.
New Haven and Connecticut overall have a vibrant history, from the indigenous cultures that flourished here, to the religious zealots that founded the New Haven Colony, to the creation of the modern city as we know it in the 20th century. Weaving in and out of that is a folklore that includes sea serpents in the Long Island Sound, monsters in the woods in Winsted, Hamden, and elsewhere, and dragons in Fair Haven. All these and more are chronicled in Connecticut Cryptids: A Field Guide to the Weird and Wonderful Creatures of the Nutmeg State, written by Patrick Scalisi and illustrated by Valerie Ruby-Omen. The duo celebrated the book’s release with a party at Strange Ways this weekend, in which partygoers were invited to dress as their favorite fanciful creatures.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 26, 2023 8:37 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Miguel Loor.
Three musical acts brought calming sounds on a warm fall evening to Cafe Nine on the corner of State and Crown, leaving smiles, deep breaths, and camaraderie in their wake.
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Maya McFadden |
Oct 25, 2023 4:40 pm
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Maya McFadden Photo
Wilbur Cross' Hispanic heritage panel Wednesday.
What do a retired educator, the city school district’s superintendent, an information technology director, a nonprofit program manager, a former New York City Councilman, and a social justice activist all have in common?
For one, they all love their Hispanic heritage.
They also all visited Wilbur Cross High School Wednesday morning.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 25, 2023 9:12 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Xiu Xiu at the Space Ballroom.
The Space Ballroom doubled up on the musical magic Monday night as the mind-blowing and meditative Mountain Movers shared a bill with longtime purveyors of passion and intensity Xiu Xiu. The crisp fall air held the promise of Halloween, only a week away, and this line up, whose music almost defies description, was so good it was almost scary.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 24, 2023 8:53 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Advertisement outside University Theater.
“A small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” where abortionists are tolerated but forced to wear clothes that reveal the scarlet A seared to their flesh, where there are more people in prison than aren’t, where sex workers can sell exclusive rights to their persons to the highest or most powerful bidder, where hunters run down anyone accused of anything and submit them to vicious forms of torture, for money and amusement. Is this fiction or simply a slight exaggeration of current tendencies?
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Laura Glesby |
Oct 23, 2023 9:45 am
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Laura Glesby Photos
Drag performer Judah brings outer space to Orange Street at Sunday's Pride fest.
Luis Rios and Bubbles: “You’re a legend.”
In a flurry of Pride flags, handmade crafts, and pedestrians-turned-dancers that filled the end of Orange Street in the Ninth Square, Luis Rios caught a glimpse of Tia Waters and had to say hello.
“Excuse me, is your name Bubbles?” he asked. “You’re a legend.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 23, 2023 8:35 am
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Chelsea M. Rowe
Chelsea Rowe's Symposium-inspired art.
Artist Chelsea M. Rowe marries festive colors to a violent act in her art, a contrast that opens up the possibilities for interpretation. There’s no getting away from the pain, the blood spilling from both figures as they split from one another. But it’s not just a portrait of torture. It suggests a form of creation and change, too: the chance to survive, make something different.
The sense of energy, connection, and a little bit of revolution in Rowe’s piece was in the air at the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios’ Erector Square weekend.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 23, 2023 8:21 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Jo Kremer.
The top floor of the Marlinworks Eagle building in East Rock was the setting for the opening of the studios of a small but dazzling array of artists on Saturday afternoon, with a display of works as eye-grabbing as the foliage of East Rock Park right outside their windows. The five artists — Linda Lindroth, Nancy Karpel, Craig Newick, David Margolis and Jo Kremer — were participating in the artist-organized City-Wide Open Studios weekend this past Saturday and Sunday, which also included events in Erector Square and City Gallery.
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Babz Rawls-Ivy |
Oct 23, 2023 8:15 am
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Steven Pisano photo
Highly praised for her unique work, sonic artist Ash Fure is coming to New Haven and bringing a week-long interactive art installation with her, “ANIMAL: A Listening Gym.”
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Oct 20, 2023 5:17 pm
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Say Cheese...
... Gioia is open!
The long line outside Pepe’s pizzeria might soon extend across the street, now that Gioia — a new Italian restaurant, bar, gelateria, and market — has opened its doors at 150 Wooster St.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 20, 2023 8:55 am
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Sarah Goodridge
Rose Prentice (1771-1852).
Prentice looks like a no-nonsense woman. The depiction of her is simple, but it appears to capture some of her essential nature. Prentice looks smart, curious, and strong. But she also looks a little tired, like she’s been carrying a lot of weight. That she can bear it doesn’t make it any less heavy.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 19, 2023 9:34 am
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Among the digital video detritus of Kit Young’s installation at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art is a cracked screen with a sign rarely seen in a gallery: “Please touch.” With the first hesitant brush of a finger, there’s almost no effect. But press a little harder, and the cracks bloom with almost bioluminescent patterns. Whether this effect is something Young designed or discovered is beside the point. In pressing into the screen, the viewer has helped make the art happen —even if, just as quickly, it starts to fade.
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Marisa Torrieri |
Oct 18, 2023 8:32 am
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Paul Wolfer Photo
Chaser Eight.
Saturday night’s Cafe Nine show — starring New Haven-area rock ‘n’ roll favorites Chaser Eight, pop-punk Gen X‑ers The Dollyrots, and Maryland-based newcomers Kings of The Wild Things — brought a much-needed serotonin boost to the week’s end. Concertgoers drove hours, from places as far away as Syracuse, N.Y. and parts of Wisconsin, to join New Haveners in packing the nightclub, leaving little room between the front door and the stage.
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Maya McFadden |
Oct 17, 2023 12:12 pm
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Maya McFadden Photo
Student broadcasters on set, ready to report.
John S. Martinez School eighth graders perfected the lights, turned on their camera, and were ready for the action of bringing back the school’s Sea Sky News broadcast.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 17, 2023 8:49 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Jeremiah McCullough, Christopher Samuels, Azaad Mamoon.
All through the play Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau — running at New Haven Academy from Oct. 19 to Oct.21 — trumpeter Blue struggles with his music. He’s trying to play just the right note. Some days he gets close. Some days he’s a million miles away. But he’s starting to think he’s never going to get it. It’s an encapsulation of the conditions of his life, the way everything he has is starting to slip away from him. And it’s driving him a little crazy.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 16, 2023 8:49 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Karimah Mickens admires Jasmine Nikole's work at this weekend's Amplify the Arts festival at Eli Whitney Barn.
Susan Clinard's sculptures on display, for Amplify the Arts.
The soul-stirring sculptures of Linda Mickens, both large and small, anchored one corner of the Eli Whitney Barn. Across the room, Michael Jackson’s iconic Off the Wall album cover in the style of Saint Phifer faced portraits of women dancing and laughing as seen through the eyes of Jasmine Nikole.
Those neighbored the dazzling array of faces created by Shaunda Holloway, while between them lay stairs leading to the open studio of Susan Clinard, where a seemingly endless number of her own sculptures that one could see themselves and just about anyone else in the world in stood, sat, and hung from the rafters.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 16, 2023 8:40 am
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Joan Marcus Photo
Vaneh Assadourian, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Anita Abdinezhad, Bahar Beihaghi, and Shadee Vossoughi.
Five female friends prepare for the wedding of one of them. High-spirited, vivacious, thoroughly at home with one another. They are Iranian, in Karaj, Iran, and it’s 1978, just before the monumental change that occurred when the Shah fled Iran and the country was taken over by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Muslim fundamentalist, in 1979. Much of the poignancy of Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here — now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through Oct. 28, directed by Sivan Battat — stems from that introductory scene. We won’t see these five together again, and none of them will ever again be this light, vain, frivolous, raunchy, and comfortable with one another. It’s a scene that becomes, in hindsight, more and more rich in possibility the further the play goes into these women’s occluded futures, eventually reaching 1991.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 13, 2023 9:00 am
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Linda Mickens.
If the works of artist Linda Mickens — one of the recipients this year, along with fellow artist Jeff Ostergren, of a grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists — were to all appear in one gallery at the same time, you could line one wall with a choir of angels, in various poses, heads tilted toward the sky or downward, wings folded or unfurled.
On the other side of the gallery, though, would be a woman with nails for hair, screaming, a machine gun in her lap; faceless statues in hoodies, the victims of police shootings. Light and darkness, held in suspension, with the artist always moving from one to the other and back again. And maybe, with the piece she’s about to create, finding just the right balance between them.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 13, 2023 9:00 am
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Jeff Ostergren
Redpilled/Bluepilled (Stamford, Connecticut; Rainy Day - After Caillebotte).
It’s a street scene in psychedelic colors, pointilism with an extra point, as though you’re walking down an urban street with your mind thoroughly altered. But If the overall composition of the painting looks familiar, that’s because it’s explicitly taken from Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 painting Paris Street; Rainy Day. The figures in that painting, however, are replaced with figures from contemporary pharmaceutical ads. The building in the background is the former Purdue Pharma building in Stamford. It’s the beginning of unpacking what artist Jeff Ostergren’s project is about.
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Lisa Reisman |
Oct 12, 2023 4:00 pm
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Regina Winters-Toussaint.
While a student at the Yale School of Architecture in 1992, Regina Winters-Toussaint created her own summer internship. As one of the first counselors for LEAP, then a new youth enrichment program in New Haven, she moved into Westville Manor public housing, where she mentored the young people living there.
That willingness to steep herself in the experience of those who would live and work in the structures she built is among the reasons for the induction of Winters-Toussaint, who died of cancer at 47 in April 2016, in the CT Women’s Hall of Fame, according to its executive director Sarah Lubarsky.
Slattery, Goldfield, Sanneh, Hughes, and Rawls-Ivy at Wednesday's panel.
Like in-person local news reporting, local arts and culture reviewing is going through a paradigm shift from old-school corporate for-profit media to new-media nonprofit models. A panel of old-school panelists shared perspective on that shifting landscape Wednesday with purveyors of the new.
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Asher Joseph |
Oct 12, 2023 8:51 am
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Asher Joseph photo
The TV Girl All-Star Traveling Band.
A line snaked around Toad’s Place into the courtyard off of York Street on Monday evening as “Lonely Girls” and “boys who act their age” filed into the venue, headlined by TV Girl, a California-based indie pop band that took the internet by storm this year with a series of viral hits.
