by | Feb 19, 2021 10:22 am | Comments (0)
Leigh Busby Photos
The figures in the gallery space at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street stand tall and proud, majestic and welcoming. They draw you toward the gallery window. Once there, though, there is more to see. There is the way the figures hearken back to Africa. A line of bricks, each embossed with the word “freedom.”
Continue reading ‘Exhibit Finds The Gold Within The Struggle’
by | Feb 18, 2021 5:30 pm | Comments (0)
“If you don’t get vaccinated, you will be fired …”
by | Feb 18, 2021 1:29 pm | Comments (2)
Taylor at work on a squirrel.
Maya McFadden Photos
Mural in progress, wrapping around the order area and kitchen.
New Haven artists Edmund “Bwak” Comfort and Zona Taylor joined forces to bring the forest indoors at a deli soon to open on … Forest Road.
by | Feb 18, 2021 11:11 am | Comments (0)
On Tuesday evening, Michael J. Morand, president of the New Haven Free Public Library Foundation, stood in the almost empty main room of the Ives branch of the library. In years past, that space had been transformed into a raucous Mardi Gras party that functioned as the library’s annual blowout fundraiser. Not this year.
“Welcome to the first and hopefully last virtual celebration,” he said to his online audience — with firm hopes of reuniting again in 2022, and with plenty of festivities and good news regarding how the city library system adapted and continued to develop during the Covid-19 pandemic.
by | Feb 18, 2021 11:09 am | Comments (2)
Jason Farago and Linda Friedlaender, head of education at the Yale Center for British Art.
Are people still interested in reading about art?
The rise of Instagram and demise of print publications might suggest that the days of the learned art reader are behind us. No need to subscribe to a high-brow magazine when that #artsy selfie your friend took at MoMA conveys everything you need to know about the latest Jackson Pollock exhibition, right?
by | Feb 18, 2021 11:06 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Kevin MF King
Wednesday night Holberton School on James Street was once again the place to find live music, as the District Arts and Education series that began last fall continued with New Haven-based musician Kevin MF King, livestreamed through the organization’s Facebook page.
by | Feb 17, 2021 10:50 am | Comments (0)
Kevin Sanchez Walsh
by | Feb 16, 2021 12:57 pm | Comments (2)
Lisa Reisman Photos
Devil’s Diet beet salad with goat cheese panna cotta.
Leave it to Alba Estenoz, widely known in these parts as the celebrated pastry chef at Zinc, to feature a beet salad with goat cheese panna cotta as a way of introducing The Devil’s Diet, the new dessert bar on the Howe Street side of The Novella apartment complex at the corner of Chapel.
Continue reading ‘Today’s Special: Alba’s Beet Salad With Goat Cheese Panna Cotta’
by | Feb 16, 2021 11:12 am | Comments (0)
Studying Talmud on the morning commute.
The documentary Why The Jews opens with a recollection from controversial lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who once gave a speech to the Hamburg Bar Association in Germany. He asked the assembled audience of 1,000 lawyers who among them considered themselves to be victims of the Holocaust. “Six or seven people raised their hands,” he says. “I said, ‘Mo, it’s many, many more of you. How many of you have lost a relative to heart disease, to cancer?’ And then I went through various illnesses and everybody raised their hand. I said, ‘How do you know that the cures for those diseases didn’t go up in smoke at Auschwitz, at Treblinka? You don’t know what you lost with the killing of six million Jews, many of whom were among the leading scientists, doctors, innovators, artists in the world.”
Continue reading ‘Beckerman Film Series Asks The Hard Questions’
by | Feb 15, 2021 1:46 pm | Comments (2)
Emily Hays Photos
Sandra Pittman with her blackened salmon platter.
The oil sizzled as soon the salmon fillet hit the pan.
That noise was the hint that the fish would turn out crispy but not overcooked, explained Sandra Pittman, chef and co-owner of Sandra’s Next Generation.
Continue reading ‘Today’s Special: Sandra’s Bourbon-Glazed Salmon’
by | Feb 15, 2021 10:53 am | Comments (2)
Emily Hays Photos
Kristina Powell, Blaize Levitan under the chuppah at Book Trader.
What do you wear to a wedding during a pandemic?
Blaize Levitan and Kristina Powell and their guests wore matching face masks — pink and red, custom made — in a Covid-conscious Valentine’s Day ceremony held Sunday at Book Trader Cafe.
by | Feb 15, 2021 10:13 am | Comments (0)
Two sisters played a piece from a Puerto Rican composer. A young maestro showed what the violin could do. And a quartet revisited — and reintroduced — a classic. The Saturday evening virtual performances and the Q&A that followed were all part of Music Haven‘s third Album Drop, an ongoing concert series that shows how the New Haven-based organization continues its work of nurturing its students and bringing more music to the Elm City.
by | Feb 12, 2021 1:40 pm | Comments (0)
Charred Chicken bowl.
You can watch Gabi Merayo make one of B‑Natural Kitchen’s signature healthful dishes in the above video. You can actually pick up the dish — and stay healthy — through a contact-free system the restaurant is pioneering in town.
Continue reading ‘Today’s Special: Gabi’s Charred Chicken Bowl’
by | Feb 12, 2021 11:29 am | Comments (0)
ZOE FEINSTEINFile PHOTO
The author, at Lanman.
I recognized one old friend walking with a cane and stoop
Beneath the inviting basketball hoops
by | Feb 12, 2021 11:24 am | Comments (3)
Brian Slattery Photo
Artist Meg Bloom looked over the pieces in “Buried in the Bones,” her new show at City Gallery on Upper State Street, running now through Feb. 28. “I love rotted trees and dead flowers,” she said. “I’m always interested in that, things decaying and falling apart, but with a touch of life in there.” If it sounds like she’s responding to current events, she is. But it’s also a statement about the way the New Haven-based artist has been doing art for decades.
Continue reading ‘Artist Meg Bloom Finds Response In Persistence’
by | Feb 11, 2021 11:21 am | Comments (1)
Courtesy Jill Marie Snyder
The Snyder family in 1969.
When New Haven-based author Jill Marie Snyder found the letters detailing the romance between her parents when they were young, it was the beginning of a journey that led her to learn more about not only her own family, but the history of the Black community in New Haven, and how both contended with the racism they faced in their lives.
by | Feb 10, 2021 2:21 pm | Comments (5)
Maya McFadden Photo
Ricky Evans with Brisket Kansa-Lina Fries creation.
For Ricky Evans, owner of Ricky D’s Rib Shack, cooking up comfort food behind a grill totally beats wearing a suit and working in Corporate America.
Continue reading ‘Today’s Special: Brisket Kansa-Lina Fries’
by | Feb 10, 2021 10:32 am | Comments (0)
NHDocs: The New Haven Documentary Film Festival returns this month with a sweet little slice — or is it putt? — of American life called Through the Windmill, a film by Amanda Kulkoski that looks closely and lovingly at the game of mini golf throughout its 100-plus-year history as a form of entertainment that offers as many opportunities for artistic innovation as it does for family and friendly fun.
Continue reading ‘Mini Golf Looms Large in “Through The Windmill”’
by | Feb 9, 2021 11:01 am | Comments (3)
Brian Slattery Photos
Ty Scurry.
“I have so much stuff planned for this place, and everybody’s like, ‘you’re crazy, you’re only 19 — how are you going to get all this done?”
So Ty Scurry — actor, singer, Wilbur Cross graduate, and theater director at Hillhouse High School — said with a humble chuckle about assuming ownership of Family Music Center in Hamden, which he hopes to not only rebuild out of its Covid-19 shutdown, but expand into a community-based center for students of the visual and performing arts.
Continue reading ‘New Owner Keeps The Family In Music Center’
by | Feb 8, 2021 1:21 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
Nicole Ellis, owner of Around The Clock Restaurant and Bar on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden, said new customers looking for Jamaican food often have two questions.
First: “Do you sell oxtail?”
And second: “Is it soft?”
by | Feb 8, 2021 10:38 am | Comments (1)
by | Feb 5, 2021 11:21 am | Comments (0)
Solid State, the title of New Haven-based musician Shandy Lawson’s new album, “refers to solid state in electronics terms,” he said, a nod to the gear he currently has in his studio — amplifiers that are cheaper and more reliable than those that use vacuum tubes. It also refers to the “three states of matter,” he said, solid, liquid, and gas. “At this point in life I feel like I’ve found my solid state,” he said. But another way, it could also refer to the state of Connecticut, and New Haven in particular, for the songwriting talent Lawson drew from to make the record. Of the 13 songs on the album, fully five of them were written by Lawson’s songwriting peers in the New Haven music scene — longtime friends that Lawson played live shows with before the pandemic, and hopefully will again when it’s over.
by | Feb 4, 2021 10:20 am | Comments (1)
by | Feb 4, 2021 10:20 am | Comments (0)
Yawen Zhang
Eating in Front of Fish.
Yawen Zhang’s Eating in Front of Fish manages to feel like a documentary and like a bit of surrealist humor. At first glance the fish appear to be swimming in midair. And while there’s nothing weird about eating fish in front of fish — some restaurants have aquariums in them — there is also something deeply weird about eating dead specimens of animals while the live specimens of those animals are watching. What happens to the diner who stops to think about this midway through their meal?
by | Feb 3, 2021 5:38 pm | Comments (2)
Carole Bass Photo
A certain senator and former presidential candidate is still sitting out in the cold — only now on West Rock Avenue, not at the presidential inauguration in D.C.