Arts & Culture

Exhibit Driven By Black History Data

by | Apr 19, 2021 10:00 am | Comments (1)

Maps of the United States in a patchwork of colors. A graph like a coiled spring. A diagram like a bullseye, creased with bright spikes. Hanging on the walls of Artspace’s gallery, they can read immediately as abstract art. They are, in fact, a series of data visualizations — charts, graphs, geographic and population information — that famed Black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois and a team of researchers created to convey some of the realities of the Black experience in America over 100 years ago.

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Artist Breaks Through To Abstraction

by | Apr 16, 2021 9:14 am | Comments (3)

Brian Slattery Photos

The works in Portals and Memories” — up now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through April 25 — are, on one level, simply the latest series of paintings by artist Joyce Greenfield, done in the past two-and-a-half months. On another level, however, they represent a breakthrough, for Greenfield, to a new way of making art.

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Reinaldo’s Corner

by | Apr 15, 2021 5:08 pm | Comments (0)

I’ll punish you …”
You will pay for the damages!”

Library Doors Swing Back Open

by | Apr 15, 2021 1:47 pm | Comments (4)

Zshekinah Collier Photo

Main branch’s Sharon Lovett-Graff and Alana Delgado: Please come back! We missed you.

The doors were wide open again at the public library’s main branch — and two patrons were found browsing through the wide variety of nonfiction books in the stacks.

Staffers are trying to get the word out so more New Haveners come back inside.

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“Movies in the Plaza” Rocks Into Another Season

by | Apr 15, 2021 8:52 am | Comments (3)

Karen Ponzio Photos

School of Rock rocking.

Pitkin Plaza Wednesday evening played host to a rock n’ roll show, not live on stage, but in a film celebrating the fun and excitement of being part of that world.

School of Rock, the beloved 2003 comedy starring Jack Black, was the second of this year’s weekly Movies in the Plaza,” the free outdoor film series presented every Wednesday at 8 p.m. by the Town Green District.

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New Exhibit Judges Books By Their Covers

by | Apr 15, 2021 8:47 am | Comments (1)

Brian Slattery Photos

The Nympho and Other Maniacs. The Sun Is My Undoing. I Who Should Command All.

All three are book titles from the far-flung collection of the Institute Library on Chapel Street, and all three catch the eye through the sheer absurdity of their language.

In another part of the collection, the books Oil for the Lamps of China and The Ghost Book draw the gaze by virtue of their dazzling cover art. And then there are books like Never Fire First and Raising Demons that manage to do both.

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Mighty Tortuga Comes Out Of Its Pandemic Shell

by | Apr 14, 2021 9:51 am | Comments (0)

Soul Searching,” the first song from Mighty Tortuga’s Live from Lockdown, shows right from the start how the band members work together to make their sound. Guitars, bass and drums all have interlocking parts that, in themselves, are all sparse enough to make space for the music to live in — and for the vocals to be heard. Can you be honest? / At least enough that you can keep a promise? / Are you sure?” The way the singer’s voice bends upward on the last word — sure? — sticks the phrase, lacing its earnestness with humor, and showing that the band has spent the pandemic further honing its craft.

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Artists Celebrate Spring Awakening

by | Apr 13, 2021 8:27 am | Comments (1)

Chris Ferguson

Blue Lights at Night.

The profile of the Q Bridge is unmistakable to anyone who lives in New Haven, but it rarely gets the treatment painter Chris Ferguson gives it. Under his eye and brush, the bridge feels hazy and gauzy, a distant mirage. Ferguson’s choice to highlight marsh and beach in the foreground adds to the sense of the bridge as an object to find beauty in. His generous eye, warm and inviting, is a thread that runs through all his work in Looking Up!” a show he shares with artist Amanda Duchen at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville, running now through May 9.

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Chris “Big Dog” Davis Plays One For The Books

by | Apr 12, 2021 9:43 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Chris “Big Dog” Davis.

Delores Willams and Lauren Anderson of the Whalley Avenue community bookstore People Get Ready beamed in front of the small, rapt audience seated in front of them Sunday evening.

Give yourselves a hand,” Williams said. We’re so grateful that you’re here.”

The bookstore, she said, was getting ready to reopen after a long, necessary hiatus” — but before that, it hosted a concert by beloved musician Chris Big Dog” Davis, back in New Haven on the heels of his latest release, the single Heal The World.”

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Kevin’s Corner

by | Apr 9, 2021 9:39 am | Comments (0)

Kevin Sanchez Walsh

Reinaldo’s Corner

by | Apr 8, 2021 4:34 pm | Comments (0)

They call me … homophobic, racist, torturer, and now I am genocidal .… the virus will not go …”

Skappo Adds “Bottega” To Eatery

by | Apr 7, 2021 2:07 pm | Comments (4)

Emily Hays Photos

Anna models a tie-turned-headscarf.

“La Bottega” has opened within the Skappo storefront.

Anna Sincavage will sell dresses in the morning and lasagna in the evening — all from 59 Crown St.

That’s the plan now that the family behind Skappo Italian Wine Bar is taking advantage of lower indoor dining demand to convert one corner of their restaurant into a new mini-shop, La Bottega.

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Urban Renewal Reexamined Through Architectural/Preservationist Lens

by | Apr 2, 2021 3:17 pm | Comments (4)

Crawford Manor before redevelopment.

A manor — and a huge swath of neighborhood — erased to make room for a highway.

A housing project gone awry, now demolished as well, while its former occupants win a class-action settlement over the poor living conditions they endured

Architectural historian and preservationist Marisa Angell Brown kept stories like these alive as she explored the architectural history of post-World War II New Haven in a lecture at the Yale Center for British Art, recalling some of New Haven’s most contested issues of the mid-20th century that continue to reverberate today.

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Ceschi And Phat A$tronaut Take The State House Stage

by | Apr 2, 2021 8:50 am | Comments (0)

Ceschi stood alone on the stage of the State House Thursday night, surrounded by another band’s gear.

I’m from here, New Haven, Connecticut, and I’m here live at the State House,” he said.

The other band in question was the New Haven-based experimental neo-soul band Phat A$tronaut, as the two acts were splitting a bill, livestreamed from the State House, to help raise money for the Semilla Collective, an organization that has focused on getting food during the pandemic to migrant families in New Haven who need it.

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Co-Op High Puts Its Stamp On Pandemic Theater

by | Apr 1, 2021 9:30 am | Comments (1)

Two murder mysteries. A string of love letters. A Choose Your Own Adventure-style story. And testimony after testimony of the things lost and found during the pandemic.

Co-op High School’s theater department has joined a national theater-by-mail festival, and in doing so, will have a chance to show New Haven and beyond how a high school theater program can continue to make art even when stages have to stay dark.

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