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Brian Slattery |
Oct 30, 2024 8:44 am
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Effy Gray Photo
Gelsey Bell: “The piece is designed so that people start off feeling apocalyptic. Then they can go on a journey that leaves them in a different place."
Over a pulsing synthesizer, musician and composer Gelsey Bell ends the final song of her opera with the line “I’m struck by morning / the orange line of light / low and fast, revolving flight.” By then, however, to the listener the meaning of that first noun is ambiguous: does she mean “morning” or “mourning”? The line carries the weight of both meanings with ease.
It’s part of Bell’s experimental opera MƆɹNIŊ [Morning//Mourning], which “inhabits a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth,” Bell writes. “An ensemble of five vocalist/multi-instrumentalists witness and guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. The piece is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature.”
by
Paul Bass and Thomas Breen |
Oct 28, 2024 1:47 pm
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Paul Bass Photo
Officers arrest homeless advocate Mark Colville.
Police made seven arrests of activists for the unhoused and removed four tents on the Upper Green Monday after a weekend of negotiations over the city’s latest homeless encampment.
Property Manager Amanda Naranjo (center) helps cut the ribbon ...
... on "the Archive" on Chapel St.
Downtown renters looking for a shiny new two-bedroom apartment can now spend $3,399-plus per month — to live in a two-building, 166-unit complex that has risen from the ashes of a pair of long-vacant Chapel Street lots.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 25, 2024 8:53 am
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At the beginning of a night of music at Three Sheets on Elm Street on Thursday, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) volunteer Andrew Zumwalt-Hathaway lauded both New Haven’s musicians and DESK as two ingredients that make the Elm City great. He noted that volunteering for DESK has become “one of the most fulfilling parts of my life.”
Mark Colville (right) and volunteers handing out food and supplies on the Green ...
... to campers like Strongbow Lone Eagle.
Though their tents are largely gone, unhoused campers have set up sleeping bags on the grassy patch behind United Church on the Green — where they continue to distribute and receive food and other aid, as an activist crew keeps up their protest of homeless encampment sweeps.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 23, 2024 9:52 am
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Edwin Austin Abbey
Compositional Study for The Hours in the House of Representatives Chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg.
It’s a painting of time, but it’s portrayed as a celebration, a dance, a whirl of energy. The artist, Edwin Austin Abbey, focused on “the dynamics among the figures and their movements,” an accompanying note states. “The transition from day to night remains unresolved, but the exuberant movement of the daylight hours is described with great clarity.” It’s a 24-hour party — a perhaps surprising way to render the ceiling of the legislative chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol.
These days, legislative bodies, state and national, are usually described as slow at best and dysfunctional, even dystopian, at worst. But the mood among public artists in Pennsylvania was different at the beginning of the 20th century, as it was, apparently, in several places across the country.
If an artist were asked to paint the ceiling of a legislative chamber now, what would they be inclined to depict?
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 18, 2024 1:37 pm
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Karen Ponzio photo
Olmo-Rivera, Zumwalt-Hathaway, and Werlin.
What happens when a Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen volunteer and New Haven arts and culture scene superfan decides to combine the two things near and dear to his heart? The New Haven Cares Festival of Arts and Music is born.
The brain child of Andrew Zumwalt-Hathaway, this newly created fundraising event will transform some of the city’s hottest night spots into places where donations can be collected for the annual DESK Thanksgiving For All program, offering both good will and a good time.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2024 9:27 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
Hilary, a middle-school student, has just moved to Falcon, Colorado. She wears all the wrong clothes, says all the wrong things, and most of the other students are ready to tease her for it, except one, who reminds them to ask themselves what Jesus would do. Socially, things might be looking a little bleak. But Hilary has an improbable secret weapon to get in with one group of girls — a passion for, and deep knowledge of, keeping horses. They start to get to know each other. What happens when the conversation moves from secret weapons to secrets?
Police, social workers, and unhoused activists in the final hours of Thursday morning's encampment.
(Updated) As a tent encampment on the Green came down Thursday morning, city homelessness services coordinator Velma George and Lora Weeks soon realized they had met before — at a different New Haven encampment, back in 2016.
George had been an outreach social worker. Weeks had been living outdoors.
Eight years later, they found themselves back in the same positions.
(Updated) A 24-year-old New Havener named Nicolas Baltazar-Consepcion died early Thursday morning after being hit by a garbage truck in the area of Church Street and North Frontage Road.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 17, 2024 10:03 am
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A still from the film "Go Fish".
The 1994 film Go Fish opens in a classroom where the teacher asks the class to make a list of “women that you think are lesbians or that you know are lesbians.” The answers she gets are everything from Eve to Virginia Woolf to Margaret, Dennis the Menace’s next-door neighbor. One student then asks why they are making the list. The teacher responds: “Throughout lesbian history there has been serious lack of evidence that’ll tell us what these women’s lives were truly about.… lesbian lives and lesbian relationships, they barely exist on paper, and it is with that in mind and understanding that meaning and the power of history that we begin to want to change history.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 15, 2024 9:24 am
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Dan Greene, sometimes of the Mountain Movers, cast a dislocating spell on a rapt audience at the Institute Library Saturday night, with a tremolo guitar and his echo-drenched voice. He was singing a song about a usual habit, of meeting friends downtown and hanging out in parking lots. But one night, he sang, “was different because / I didn’t know where I was.” The eerie sense of unease tipped into the surreal. “We all turned into birds / and flew over the town / we turned back into wolves / when we touched the ground.” Had they been wolves all along?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2024 9:02 am
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Robert De Matteo
Charles Island On My Mind.
The diptych, by Robert De Matteo, offers two shapes that strongly echo each other, but are from quite different models. The one on the left is easier to identify right away, as a brain scan from an MRI. The image on the right, though, might require a look at the title. Sure enough, it’s drawn from a satellite image of Charles Island, off the coast of Silver Sands State Park in Milford, the sandbar that connects it to the mainland at low tide clearly visible. The visual pun is funny. The idea that the forms would mirror each other closely says something a little deeper, about recurring patterns in nature, perhaps about how we aren’t as separate from our environment as we might like to think.
Pengyan Sun and daughter Sophie with (now retired) longtime NHFPL employee Xia Feng, at Tuesday's meetup.
English lessons for Chinese grandparents. Exercise equipment for the elderly. And a library-hosted WeChat channel for Chinese New Haveners looking to connect.
Those recommendations rose to the fore as a dozen people gathered for the city library system’s first ever meeting held entirely in Chinese — to help think through how New Haven’s public library system could improve over the next half decade.
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Maya McFadden |
Oct 9, 2024 8:43 am
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NHPS FACEBOOK photo
The inaugural 15-person BioCity cohort, excited to get behind the bench.
Fifteen public school students are now able to earn college credits by heading to one of the city’s newest labs — to witness and participate in cutting-edge research happening right here in New Haven.
State Librarian Deborah Schander and State Library Digital Inclusion Consultant Christine Gauvreau: Who has access to technology and digital tools and who doesn't?
Downtown library patrons are now able to receive free technology assistance — from connecting to the internet to making doctor’s appointments online to communicating with long-distance family members and friends — from a team of dedicated “digital navigators.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 7, 2024 8:18 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Luca McCarthy at work: “I’m very anti-garbage. Nothing is garbage.”
One view of the CAW exhibit, featuring pieces by Simmons, Giroux, McCarthy, and Brantley.
You know October is here when New Haven sidewalks are dotted with fallen leaves, and art studios and galleries are open for all to see. Open Studios 2024 began on Saturday with a variety of locations ready and waiting to share art in a variety of media, including City Gallery, The Institute Library, the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and Creative Arts Workshop (CAW).
CAW, however, had a unique set up offered to the public. While an exhibit by eight artists from the Ely Center’s 2024 open call was on view on the first floor of the Hilles Gallery at CAW on Audubon Street, those same eight artists were on the second floor, creating new pieces and greeting visitors who wanted to engage them in discussion about their work.
... will soon be turned by Yale into a pedestrian utopia.
More lighting, moveable tables and chairs, a stormwater teaching garden, and an eco-friendlier “community plaza” open to pedestrians and bikes but not cars — except during Yale move-in and move-out days.
All of that is on tap for a portion of High Street, as Yale planners unveiled early-stage designs for how a city-owned downtown block will be transformed by summer 2026.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 1, 2024 8:49 am
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Artistic Managing Director Sarah Machiko Haber.
The life and death of viral celebrity. Keeping the stories of ancestors alive. Death and rebirth.
The mythological phoenix is famed for rising reborn from its own ashes. Chosen as the title for Yale Cabaret’s 2024 – 25 season, the name is fitting — not only for the themes running through what the Cab is producing this year, but because the Cab is a student-run theater that has “died” and been reborn 55 times before. Each season has new artistic directors and managing directors who, in a manner of speaking, rise from the ashes of their predecessors.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 26, 2024 9:23 am
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In the short film Dendrostalkers, the view is from the driver’s seat of a car curving along a dirt road through a forest at night. The trees are thick and dark, then give way to a clearing, a pile of fresh lumber. The narration speaks of foreboding. The car stops, and something springs from the pile of dead trees, a new limb, animated, making shapes in the air. It’s the next step in evolution, maybe a dispatch from the future. It’s an art project that has something to say about our relationship to the forest now.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 25, 2024 11:47 am
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Brian Slattery photo
One of the many artworks on display at the first ever show hosted by a Legion Avenue mental health, addiction, and homelessness services nonprofit.
The pill bottles hang suspended in the air, a testament to their ubiquity and the damage they cause. Behind them are arrayed a series of facts and statistics about drug overdoses. Over 1,000 people die from them in Connecticut every year. Since 1999, almost 1 million have died nationwide, with opioids accounting for two-thirds of those deaths.
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Thomas Breen |
Sep 24, 2024 3:02 pm
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Thomas Breen photo
Welcome back, bus pass kiosk!
For the first time in four and a half months, downtown commuters can purchase all-day passes and ask about bus schedules in person — at the upgraded bus ticket kiosk on the Green, which is now back open.
