by | Nov 17, 2022 8:56 am | Comments (6)
Take a last look: Sign changes to "G Cafe" next week.
Keeping the joe flowing: Andrea Corazzini.
New Haven may still be part of a blue state, but it is no longer a safe space for Blue State Coffee.
by | Nov 17, 2022 8:47 am | Comments (0)
Susan Clinard
In Fear We Trust: Pandemic Family Portrait.
Susan Clinard’s In Fear We Trust: Pandemic Family Portrait is a snapshot of a harrowing moment. The figures in the bed show an astonishing range of emotion, from anger to worry to terror. But the piece itself isn’t an incitement to anger, but compassion. The family may be up late at night, their emotions eating away at them as they surely did for many in the depths of 2020. But Clinard makes sure we see that together they’re drawing strength from one another too. When times are hard, they gather together.
Continue reading ‘Artists Go Home And Abroad At The Ely Center’
by | Nov 16, 2022 2:18 pm | Comments (17)
Thomas Breen photo
Yale's Peabody Museum, still closed for renovations, set to open in 2024.
A new lab and classroom building that will be nearly as large as Yale’s football stadium — at least in terms of square footage — is in the works for East Rock’s “Science Hill,” while a new hub for Yale’s performing arts is planned for a university-owned downtown corner.
Those are two of Yale’s largest new development projects slated for the years ahead, as announced in a recent building update sent out by one of the local Ivy Leaguer’s top officials.
by | Nov 16, 2022 9:41 am | Comments (6)
Contributed photo
Barbara Thomas's "Broken Is Mended" panel installed at Grace Hopper College this summer.
Allan Appel photo
Yale art student Paul Jordan with artist Thomas at Monday's library discussion.
Imagine 10 years from now someone in a Yale dining hall gazes up at a stained-glassed window with jagged graphic banderoles reading “Broken is Mended” and inquires: What in the world does that mean?
Then someone can explain that that’s the very window, the very place where way back in 2016 Yale cafeteria worker Corey Menafee shattered a slave-themed image in a residential college — inspiring a campus wide reckoning with history and race, as well a renaming of that college from an infamous segregationist to a pioneering mathematician.
Continue reading ‘Ex-Calhoun Broken Window "Mended" At Yale’
by | Nov 16, 2022 8:33 am | Comments (0)
The layers of overlapping textures, patterns, and colors are, in truth, abstract. But they evoke much of what we see in our lives. Maybe it’s a picture in a magazine of the surface of an insect leg, magnified a thousand times. Maybe it’s a close up of fabric, or water running down a window. For the painter, Judy Atlas, the connection between the painting and the world is the viewer’s to make. For Atlas herself, the connections between the paintings tell their own story, too.
by | Nov 14, 2022 11:30 am | Comments (0)
Lindsey Skedgell photo
Skater / moviemaker Thomas Purtell at Plush screening Saturday.
Skaters rolled down the blacktop of a partially closed Orange Street, gathering in a large group. They were there Saturday night to see the premiere of Sucker, a new skate film by Thomas Purtell.
by | Nov 14, 2022 8:31 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photo
Ghost Lot.
Two three-piece bands shook up Best Video on Saturday. One was fairly new to the New Haven scene. The other was a couple years in, but with deep roots. Both had enough hard-hitting sound to get the crowd riled up and ready for more.
by | Nov 14, 2022 8:20 am | Comments (2)
Aleks Karjaka Photo
Orli Shaham.
It is one thing to go to a performance by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, or any other orchestra, to witness a subdued spectacle — 50 to 60 musicians on one stage, working to convey a piece of art with sometimes dizzying levels of interconnected parts. That was of course on display in Friday’s performance, featuring works by Coleridge-Taylor, Chopin, and Brahms, featuring Orli Shaham as the soloist for Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor.
by | Nov 11, 2022 3:07 pm | Comments (8)
Paul Bass Photo
Steve Mednick at WNHH FM.
Steve Mednick emerged from this week’s elections with two more charter revisions under his belt, and a new album of politically inspired original music.
Continue reading ‘Charters, Chords Emerge From Election Trail’
by | Nov 11, 2022 8:45 am | Comments (1)
Jon Veleas Photo
The Bargain.
“There’s something in the moon / I feel it in my bones / The end is coming soon / Repent and be reborn / Don’t be broken into pieces / Cast into the fire / Don’t walk in slippery places / And fall into the mire.”
Thus begins “Garden of Sorrow,” the first song off the new album ’22 by The Bargain. Heady topics, but delivered with the most heavenly of sounds by the three singer/songwriter/musicians who make up the band: Frank Critelli, Shandy Lawson, and Michael “Muddy” Rivers. The 11 songs on the record feel like lightening in a bottle — an empty bourbon bottle perhaps? — captured at sunset on a crisp fall day.
Continue reading ‘The Bargain Strikes A Balance On New Album’
by | Nov 10, 2022 8:47 am | Comments (0)
Fazal Sheikh
Silver Bell Mine, Arizona.
Even in italics, on a placard in an art museum, the voice of Peter, a Navajo miner, comes through loud and clear. “I worked in the uranium mines for more than 14 years, until the mid-1970s,” he says. “While the other men in our family were serving in the military, I needed to provide for the family by working; the mines were close to our homes, and we were told that we were helping to support our country.” There is already a sense of dread — a sense that turns out to be well founded.
Continue reading ‘Fazal Sheikh Moves In Place At Yale Art Gallery’
by | Nov 8, 2022 9:53 am | Comments (3)
Marc Massaro design
The proposed new Wooster Square Park monument.
A laborious and sometimes controversial process to replace the long-gone Christopher Columbus statue in Wooster Square Park took a big step closer to completion — as alders favorably recommended a new Italian-American-heritage-celebrating monument, which could cost $250,000 in privately raised funds to build.
Continue reading ‘Alders Endorse Columbus Statue Replacement’
by | Nov 8, 2022 9:25 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery photo
“We rise by lifting others,” reads a phrase from 19th-century writer and orator Robert Ingersoll, which now adorns a colorful mural on a wall on Fair Haven’s Grand Avenue.
As if in literal demonstration of the quotation, on Friday morning, a woman hefted a small child into the air to paint a butterfly on the mural that otherwise would have been just out of reach.
by | Nov 8, 2022 9:22 am | Comments (0)
Cailin Alcock
Exposure and Perspective 2.
Cailin Alcock’s Exposure and Perspective 2 — part of “Unusual,” a show of Alcock’s works running now at Blue Orchid on Court Street for a few weeks — can be understood to act as a tutorial for the rest of the show. The piece itself is abstract, hanging from a metal pipe on a chain, but the shapes and shades in it are evocative enough that one’s brain might begin to try to make sense of it, as a portrait, as landscape, as something. Alcock has anticipated this. “These images may be reminiscent of a face, but not one that is recognized. These can be interpreted as faces based on what is known. Eyes, nose, mouth. But is that enough to say this is a face?”
by | Nov 7, 2022 4:00 pm | Comments (5)
Noel Sims photo
Editor Rachel Kauder Nalebuff with contributor Sofiya Moore ...
... reading from Our Red Book on Saturday.
“We all know womanhood can be very challenging; that’s why it’s good to start it off with a sweet taste of support and a little cream cheese frosting,” Lily Grace Sutton read aloud to celebrate a new New Haven-rich book all about menstruation.
by | Nov 7, 2022 9:39 am | Comments (2)
Lindsay Skedgell Photos
At Saturday's ULA-hosted fest.
Mill Street danced to life with jewel-painted faces, neon-colored skulls, and at least one hairless dog and its golden-spike-crowned owner, as over 100 people gathered for Fair Haven’s annual Día de Muertos parade.
Continue reading ‘Día De Muertos Parade Lights Up Fair Haven’
by | Nov 7, 2022 9:21 am | Comments (6)
Tom Breen photo
Greenberg outside 80 Hamilton: "It'll be a magical place for New Haven."
A local artist and historian with a knack for finding lost artifacts has won a key city approval to convert a former Hamilton Street warehouse into his next curatorial space for Elm City ephemera.
Continue reading ‘Warehouse-To-Museum Conversion OK'd For "Lost" City Treasures’
by | Nov 7, 2022 8:50 am | Comments (1)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Movimiento Cultural
The world-renowned Shubert Theatre was home to some of New Haven’s own on Saturday night, as a show entitled Elm City’s Finest brought artists performing everything from bomba to dramatic monologues to rock ‘n’ roll to this first-of-its-kind event. The evening also included work displayed by local visual artists, food from local restaurants, and wares from local vendors.
by | Nov 4, 2022 4:00 pm | Comments (6)
Michael Jefferson.
Allow me to apologize in advance for giving credence to this particular subject matter. Experience dictates it is unhealthy emotionally to allow oneself to become consumed by the words and drama of ignoramuses, haters, idiots, etc. Particularly the opportunistic ones who crave attention and joyfully bask in the glare of the light that sometimes accompanies it.
But there comes a point, not often, when even the most disciplined among us must abandon restraint and forsake sound customary habits. A clear and present danger cloaked in celebrity demands a response. Here is mine.
by | Nov 4, 2022 9:11 am | Comments (0)
Films and filmmakers from Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, among other places, are coming to New Haven next week as the Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale — known to all as LIFFY — returns for its 13th year of free and open-to-the-public films and events, in person with an online component after being virtual only for the past two years. No one could be happier about that than its founder and executive director Margherita Tortora, senior lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese at Yale, who is looking forward to the return of in-person events, but has also kept the online opportunities available due to audience demand.
Continue reading ‘Latino & Iberian Film Fest Returns In-Person’
by | Nov 4, 2022 9:03 am | Comments (0)
In the first scene of Bekah Brunstetter’s Going to a Place Where You Already Are — now on at New Haven Theater Company as a staged reading through the weekend of Nov. 3 through Nov. 5 — Roberta (Susan Kulp) and Joe (Ralph Buonocore) are sitting in the pews of a church, chatting amiably as the service starts. What they’re talking about is, in some ways, not as important as the fact that they are talking, with the ease and camaraderie of a couple happily together for years. They forget where they are, have to apologize to the people around them. After a minute or so, it finally occurs to Roberta to ask: whose funeral are they attending, again?
Continue reading ‘NHTC Finds Heaven Is A Place On Chapel Street’
by | Nov 3, 2022 1:18 pm | Comments (0)
Ted Littleford image
Reinaldo Goyenechea/La Voz Hispana image
by | Nov 3, 2022 1:09 pm | Comments (2)
Noel Sims photos
Tacos Los Gordos, bustling with culinary activity on Wednesday.
The shop's "Day of the Dead" ofrenda.
A downtown taco shop has reemerged from its temporary fire-induced closure with new life, plenty of pozole and quesadillas, and a Día de los Muertos altar remembering lost loved ones close to the head chef’s heart.
by | Nov 3, 2022 8:16 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Pocket Vinyl.
Eric Stevenson leaned hard over the piano, his arms spread like wings, his hands like spiders. Intricate figures of notes poured from his fingers, and he sang in a high clear voice, as unironically advertised, about “defiant hope.” Nearby, her back turned to the audience but her work plain to see, Elizabeth Jancewicz deftly began with a blank canvas and began painting a bird in woods. Then she set it all on fire. The people in the audience sat in near-complete silence, giving the music and the artwork all their attention. It was that kind of night at Cafe Nine, one in which the crowd gave the musicians free rein of the room, and got, in return, a show of rare intimacy.
by | Nov 2, 2022 8:43 am | Comments (0)
The cast of Songs for a New World.
At a recent rehearsal at Picasso Parties in West Haven, the company of Fuse Theatre of CT was going through “The River Won’t Flow,” one of the songs from composer Jason Robert Brown’s musical theater piece Songs for a New World, which Fuse is preparing for a run at Bregamos Community Theater on Jan. 6, 7, 14, and 15. “The River Won’t Flow” centers on Brian Meltzer and Ty Scurry, who play panhandlers jostling for control of a street corner while trading sentiments about how their luck has run out. It’s a fun song about a serious subject, and the company wanted to make sure they got the balance of humor and heartache right.
Continue reading ‘Fuse Theatre Of CT Gets Ready For A "New World"’