by | Jun 18, 2024 3:18 pm | Comments (46)
Thomas Breen photo
Emerson tenants Kolokotronis, Blau, Perez, and Hinds: Unionized, and ready to fight lease-non-renewal notices.
The new landlord of a leak-damaged downtown apartment complex has told the building’s unionized renters that their leases won’t be renewed — leaving some scrambling to figure out where they’ll live next as soon as this summer.
by | Jun 18, 2024 9:17 am | Comments (0)
What would you do to keep your reality intact? This was the question posed by composer, conductor, and jazz pianist Kevin Harris to a crowd of hundreds gathered in the Beinecke Library on Monday. By the light of illuminated bookshelves, New Haveners gathered to share in a musical and educational experience, inspired by the work of writer and activist James Baldwin and part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
by | Jun 17, 2024 10:56 am | Comments (5)
Laura Glesby Photo
DESK director Werlin (center): Guided by "accessibility."
In order to operate a soon-to-be-renovated four-story hub of meals, healthcare, and gathering for unhoused clients, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) is going to need an elevator.
And in order to dig an elevator shaft, the organization first needs to shore up the foundation of the parking garage next door.
by | Jun 17, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (0)
Reena Esmail.
A tapping of a tabla, a voice lifting up Hindi poetry, a striking of a cymbal, a chorale joined in harmony: all came together to evoke the image of water and the multitude of ways it affects our lives in Reena Esmail’s Malhaar: A Requiem for Water, performed at Albert Arnold Sprague Memorial Hall early Saturday evening as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.
by | Jun 17, 2024 9:17 am | Comments (0)
A pairing of two bands steeped in traditional music — Cécilia and the Ebony Hillbillies — showed the ways in which having deep roots in a particular musical style can lead to grounded explorations elsewhere, while also getting audiences out of their chairs and onto their dancing feet, during a Sunday afternoon concert on the Green as part of the opening weekend of Arts & Ideas.
Continue reading ‘Concert Shows Diversity In Traditional Music’
by | Jun 17, 2024 9:11 am | Comments (1)
Shin Kurokawa Photos
Compagnia de’ Colombari's King Lear.
Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of King Lear at University Theatre — whose first performance was part of Friday night’s big kickoff for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — doesn’t start, so much as the audience blinks and then it’s happening.
by | Jun 12, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (1)
The pieces at first look just like abstract collages, but soon, fragments of meaning emerge. The shape of lips. A pattern of shadows. Finally, letters and words, but not enough of them to know exactly what they say, and certainly not enough to know where they’re from. The meaning and the source have been cut away, and they’re now out of reach. The viewer has to look to the accompanying labels to learn anything. It turns out the piece on the left is taken from Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one on the right is from The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. King’s book was banned in South Africa during apartheid. The Bluest Eye had been banned from schools and libraries in the past few years in over 20 states — including Connecticut.
Continue reading ‘Ulysses & Lolita & The Master & Margarita’
by | Jun 11, 2024 12:27 pm | Comments (16)
Thomas Breen photo
284 Orange, now under new ownership.
An Edgewood-based landlord has purchased a church-affiliated apartment building downtown for $2.7 million — leaving the property’s tenants to wonder whether the new owner will be any better than the last at promptly repairing leak-damaged rental units.
by | Jun 10, 2024 9:34 am | Comments (1)
Robert Eddy Photo
Composer Gwyneth Walker.
Sunday afternoon saw a wealth of appreciative music fans fill Woolsey Hall for the New Haven Chorale’s season finale that was also part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Its program filled heads and hearts with a resplendent array of selections that focused on fond memories, gratitude for those memories as well as the present moment, and an offering of comfort and peace for those of us in the here and now, even as we grapple with grief and pain.
Continue reading ‘New Haven Chorale Ends Season With Remembrance’
by | Jun 10, 2024 9:26 am | Comments (0)
Leo Slattery Photo
Cat Crash: “We’re a dancing band.”
The room was a sea of tattoos, fish nets, and dyed hair as three bands almost entirely composed of queer people performed at Witch Bitch Thrift.
Their songs about acceptance and recovery weren’t told calmly; they were screamed.
by | Jun 7, 2024 10:08 am | Comments (9)
Jabez Choi photo
Fepo Cafe storefront at 195 Church St.
Lattes on tap are coming to Church Street — as a new coffee shop plans to fill a long-empty groundfloor commercial space that was vacated by Starbucks four years ago.
Continue reading ‘New Cafe Coming To Ex-Starbucks On Church’
by | Jun 6, 2024 9:15 am | Comments (0)
Curtis Brown Photography
The photo is of Adil Mansoor when he was a child, in Pakistan. The scene was a family celebration, and a relative, on a lark, dressed the boy in a fine women’s gown. The adult Mansoor regards the picture from a few feet — and a few decades — away.
He notes the irony that this photograph perhaps best represents the fullness of who he is, as a queer South Asian man, proud of who he is and where he’s from. The irony lies in the fact that he has perhaps never been able to fully be who he is since that moment. Especially for his mother.
by | May 30, 2024 3:15 pm | Comments (9)
Dereen Shirnekhi photos
Jamal Robinson (center) joined by wife Jess Robinson and team (left) and economic development official Carlos Eyzaguirre, Mayor Justin Elicker, cultural affairs chief Adriane Jefferson, and Beachworld Senior VP Dan DeStefano (right).
Outdoor salsa nights, craft beers, and live music are coming to a long-empty lot in downtown New Haven, thanks to the efforts of a local innovator who is hoping to showcase Black and Brown brewers.
by and | May 23, 2024 2:04 pm | Comments (5)
Contributed photo
The following writeup was submitted by Hillhouse High School history teacher Kate Goodwin and Hillhouse Assistant Principal Jonathan Q. Berryman.
Continue reading ‘Witness Stone Honors Enslaved New Havener’
by | May 23, 2024 9:35 am | Comments (0)
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Women in Design: The Next Decade.
It’s a poster for a conference held in Los Angeles in 1975, “for women who work with public visual and physical forms,” as the piece advertises — that is, women artists and designers. The abstract vista suggests a wide open landscape, a distant horizon, a place of limitless opportunity. But the repeating image, the shape of the symbol of femininity derived from the Roman sign for the goddess Venus, is also quite literally about nuts and bolts.
Continue reading ‘Design & Activism Retrospective Tracks The Work’
by | May 23, 2024 9:33 am | Comments (30)
Thomas Breen file photo
45 Church: No more nightclub.
Plans to convert the former Connecticut Savings Bank on Church Street into a venue for late-night dancing and drinking have fallen apart — leading the marble-columned, long-vacant downtown commercial building to return to the rental market.
by | May 20, 2024 9:21 am | Comments (3)
Keynote speaker Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III.
“I grew up in hell a block away from heaven.”
Those are the words of the rapper 50 Cent. And that “lyrical poetic audacity,” in the words of Dr. Frederick Haynes III, senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, summed up the message of the 107th Annual Freedom Fund Dinner of the Greater New Haven Branch of the NAACP.
“There is no such thing as thriving for some and surviving for others,” Haynes, the keynote speaker, told a spirited audience of 325 at the Omni Hotel. “If we don’t thrive together, we’re going to be torn apart.”
by | May 16, 2024 8:22 am | Comments (0)
Lionel Cruet
Video installation in Sunburnt.
An entire gallery of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street is bathed in a pinkish-orange glow that streams in through tinted windows, a constant chemical sunset. The light transforms the pieces that artist Lionel Cruet has in the space, from a painting of a mangrove swamp populated by iguanas to shopping bags emblazoned with ominous faces commanding you to enjoy your life.
by | May 15, 2024 7:30 pm | Comments (27)
Thomas Breen photo
Anthony: "I'm not getting arrested."
Anthony wasn’t sure where he and his fiancee would be spending the night Wednesday.
But he did know where they wouldn’t be: in a downtown encampment proposed, and ultimately postponed, by a group of unhoused activists.
“I’m not staying on the Green,” he said. “I’m not getting arrested.”
by | May 15, 2024 8:22 am | Comments (1)
Amanda Rodriguez
Rebelled.
Rebelled is a direct yet complex image. Death looms over it, a sense of pain, from the position of the skull to the splayed black watercolor spilling out from the jawline. But the flowers growing out of the eyes and mouth aren’t just a sign of the skull’s inner decay. They suggest new life, too, rejuvenation. Those opposites come together as uneasy partners, the same sort of way the title of the piece isn’t, but sounds a lot like, the word rebuild.
Continue reading ‘Artist Looks At Mental Health From The Inside’
by | May 13, 2024 3:10 pm | Comments (4)
Paul Bass photo
C.J. Fucci crew at work Monday on Orange Street.
Two years after digging up curbs at Orange and Grove streets — and then stopping part-way — construction workers returned to the spot Monday.
by | May 13, 2024 11:22 am | Comments (16)
221, 215, and 209 Church (with green ex-bank awning), now all now owned by Biohaven.
Biohaven Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded company, bought its third building on the same block of Church Street, transforming the commercial mission of a downtown block once known for banking.
by | May 13, 2024 8:40 am | Comments (0)
Klein and DeAngelis.
“Hell is other people.” That famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit might be altered, for Jacqueline Bircher’s play Webster’s Bitch, to “hell is the other people you have to work with.”
by | May 8, 2024 3:44 pm | Comments (34)
Thomas Breen Photo
Dude, where's my building? 166 York.
Yale has knocked down a historic, dilapidated three-story downtown building that used to be home to the York Street Noodle House.
by | May 8, 2024 11:11 am | Comments (4)
Brian Slattery Photo
On the canal trail by the William "King" Lanson statue.
The history of New Haven entrepreneurship past and present. The fortunes of a neighborhood rising and falling, and rising again. The legacies of environmental depredation, and the work to create healthier, more sustainable places.
All these themes were touched upon in the latest walk from the New Haven Bioregional Group, in which Aaron Goode of Friends of the Farmington Canal Greenway led a group of about 30 walkers through the New Haven section of the urban trail that today connects almost seamlessly to Northampton, Mass.
Continue reading ‘Canal Walk Connects City's Past, Present, Future’