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Brian Slattery |
Jul 22, 2022 8:50 am
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A group of men chat on the street corner. Behind them, a hamburger rotates slowly, to serene music. An astronaut tumbles through space. Prisoners of war get anti-communist propaganda tattooed on their chests and backs. A White man muses on the fear White people have of retribution from Black people about slavery.
It’s a quiet summer night on Crown Street, but something is disrupting the flow — and in its disruption, is reminding us of the flow that we’re in almost all the time and usually don’t pay much attention to.
The disruption makes us aware of how we’re subtly being disrupted all the time, without us being entirely conscious of it. What would happen if we were to wake all the way up to that fact?
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 21, 2022 8:08 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Oliveras.
Andrew Cohen, vocalist and guitarist of the band Oliveras, mopped a little perspiration from his brow. All the doors and windows in Neverending Books were open, but a heat wave was a heat wave.
“I guess we’ll just get started,” he said.
That drew a cheer from the audience right away.
“I haven’t even done anything yet!” he responded, to laughter.
But then he became genuine, mentioning that this was the first time he and drummer Ryan Tedesco had played out, the first time he’d played songs he’d written in front of people. “Thanks everyone. This is a dream come true.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 20, 2022 8:56 am
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Ieshia Evans Protesting the Death of Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, 9 July 2016).
The source photograph — by Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman, of Black Lives Matter protester Ieshia Evans standing off against police in Baton Rouge, La., during a protest of the killing of Alton Sterling by police in 2016 — is already a capturing of opposites. The kinetic poses of the police, clearly in motion, versus Evans’s stillness. The heaviness of the officers’ body armor versus the light billowing of the hem of Evans’s dress. Marc Quinn’s treatment of the image, made in 2017, takes it all a step further. Cutting the image into quarters accentuates what’s going on, and hearkens back to triptychs and other more antiquated forms of history paintings. The streaks of paint thrown across the painting add to the immediacy of the action, but also call attention to the change in medium, from photography to painting. What does it mean to try to immortalize an image? Which is another way of asking: how do we remember history?
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 19, 2022 8:21 am
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Sylvia J. Yanez
Hi, I'm Melting.
Sylvia J. Yanez’s Hi, I’m Melting has its sense of humor, starting from the title. It exudes a friendliness that draws a viewer in. But there’s something harrowing going on, too. There are the cracked patches of paint like angry scabs, the colors bleeding and running together seeming out of control. That the paint is roughly in the shape of the United States, and that it appears to be melting down, gives it an extra push into chilling territory, though explicitly commenting on the current political situation isn’t Yanez’s stated objective. The aim of her art is more personal, more social; maybe you could say deeper.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 18, 2022 9:26 am
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On Friday evening a group of percussionists gathered on the north end of the New Haven Green. They were mostly members of the bomba group Proyecto Cimarrón, and they were there to play for the community — and honor a musical luminary who, just before coming to the Green, gave them a lesson in the heritage of the music they were playing.
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Olivia Gross |
Jul 17, 2022 10:41 am
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Olivia Gross File Photo
Leli and Darcus Henry with daughter Leila at their new restaurant.
Olivia Gross Photo.
Plaintain cups with pork: a La Isla specialty.
Leli and Darcus Henry spent their Covid-19 quarantine wishing for a Hamden-based restaurant that served authentic, home-cooked Puerto Rican food. When they didn’t find one, they opened their own.
Upon walking into Neville Wisdom Design Studio on Broadway, patrons are greeted by flowing dresses, sewing machines — and, on the front table, a creation that looks like a jacket and a handbag fused into one. Wisdom didn’t make the bag; he made the opportunity for an apprentice-turned-partner, Dwayne Moore, to find his spot in the limelight.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 15, 2022 8:43 am
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Bridget Riley
Blaze 4.
On one hand Blaze 4 is a simple design concept: a series of concentric circles, lines angled in alternating directions. The kind of thing that, in the hands of someone less attuned to detail, would be a muddled mess, or almost silly, like a picture of spiraling tweed. But in the hands of master contemporary artist Bridget Riley, it’s a buzzing, vertiginous image, the sort of thing that requires a warning label for people sensitive to strobes. It’s a perfect marriage of form and technique, and that the effect is so visceral is argument enough for why the Yale Center for British Art has dedicated two floors of the museum to a massive retrospective of the celebrated artist’s work, called “Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction” — and there are just two more weekends to see it before it closes on July 24.
The proposed configuration of the old plinth next to the new statue.
Now that the statue of Christopher Columbus is gone from Wooster Square Park, what should happen to the pedestal that once held it up?
The Historic District Commission weighed that question on Wednesday evening. It voted to keep the pedestal in place without a statue atop it, a few feet behind the new sculpture slated for the park.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 14, 2022 8:37 am
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Sheila Kaczmarek
Caterpillar Homes.
The sculpture in the window of City Gallery is fashioned almost like it could be a bouquet of summery flowers, or a piece of interesting coral — the kind of art made from natural objects that you see a lot. But the pleasing shapes are actually representations of caterpillars that look like they could crawl out of their ceramic homes at any second. Some may find it a little creepy, but it’s also about the abundance of nature, the way it moves and grows, especially in the summer.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 13, 2022 9:03 am
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“Blood on the Fitting Room Floor,” from the new album The Devil and the Deluge by New Haven-based hip-hop artists Kevlar Kohleone & DoSe, is a rumination on fashion that starts with a nod to the people who paved the way. Over a swinging, soulful beat, we hear from Harlem fashion icon Dapper Dan, who helped define the look that accompanied the sound of hip hop starting in the early 1980s. “Fresh is a word that spans generations,” Dan says. “That word is so suitable for hip hop, because hip hop has to stay fresh. And so fresh to me means that which is most hip and current to whatever’s going on at the moment.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 11, 2022 12:25 pm
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Brian Slattery Photo
Julie Smith: "Fingers crossed" on open-air concerts resuming.
A new executive has taken over at Best Video — just in time to work with her former colleagues in Hamden city government to enable one of the town’s cultural gems to resume popular outdoor concerts.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Jul 10, 2022 11:57 am
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Sadie Besocke photos
Mikaela Davis and Southern Star performing at Space Ballroom.
Hamden’s Space Ballroom ascended into a rainbow-splashed, psychedelic heaven Friday night after upstate New Yorker Mikaela Davis set the scene for a fourth-dimensional funk-folk-country-rock set list — with the help of a golden harp and angelic voice.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 8, 2022 9:25 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
The Roots.
A packed College Street Music Hall on Thursday night was treated to a three-act evening of deeply soulful music that encompassed New Haven music heroes Phat Astronaut and culminated in the now-seminal Philadephia hip hop act the Roots.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Jul 8, 2022 9:14 am
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Kimberly Wipfler Photo
After a countdown from three, Kevin Mackenzie took a bottle of champagne — and smashed it against the side of The Cannon, the new combination sports pub-plant-based eatery on Dwight Street.
“We thought,” Mackenzie said, “this was a little more our style.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 7, 2022 8:51 am
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Susan Clinard
Missing the Mark.
Susan Clinard’s sculptures are an exercise in extreme empathy, even as Missingthe Mark represents something more complex as well. It’s hard not to feel the pull of judgment in the juxtaposition of the crying face of the baby, who just needs some attention, with the blank faces of everyone else, staring at their screens. But in a broader sense, they’re all victims, of a specific mode of modernity we’re told we want. Clinard’s pieces forces us to look at ourselves, too. Are you reading these words on your phone right now? What are you missing around you?
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Thomas Breen |
Jul 6, 2022 11:46 am
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Carte-de-visite images of Frederick Douglass, from 1860 and 1865.
Local readers at the Beinecke on Tuesday: George Miles, Charles Warner Jr., Babz Rawls-Ivy, Dee Marshall, Trina Lucky ...
... Clifton Graves Jr., Erik Clemons, and Meghan Beirne.
Clifton Graves Jr.‘s voice boomed throughout the cavernous, marble-enclosed library — his eyes locked with the audience’s, his right hand raised in admonition, his words traveling 170 years from past to present.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” he asked. “I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 6, 2022 8:50 am
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A boat carrying two young families — one, a wife and husband, the other, a wife, husband, and child — steers slowly across a mist-covered expanse of river water. The woman doing the navigating sings an eerie song. The two men are talking about the fortune they expect to make. “You and I will be rich men, and our wives will be wealthy women,” one says to the other. The women, however, have more immediate concerns. “It’s good we went by boat,” one says to the other. “On foot, we’d probably be dead by now.”
As men in dark blue uniforms marched with muskets through Grove Street Cemetery, Calvin Alexander Ramsey took a headstone tour, revived the memory of a Revolutionary War soldier named John Epps — and spoke of plans to bring his own history of Black patriotism to a city stage.
New Haven photographer Chris Randall has a unique perspective on fireworks — as you can see from these photos he took at Sunday evening’s city East Rock display.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2022 8:30 am
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(1)
Critelli.
A strummed guitar. An organ’s warm, held guitar. A bent note from a guitar like an invitation. Then Frank Critelli’s declarative voice: “I didn’t know what it was called, but I was glad when you called,” he sings. “I called you back / No one could predict / one drink would lead to that kiss on your neck / And I almost didn’t recognize / A familiar look in faraway eyes / But I knew you were someone else in disguise / And there was no turning back.”
