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Brian Slattery |
Dec 22, 2022 9:05 am
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Bill Brandt
Liverpool Street Extension.
The image of people huddled together in a dark, circular tunnel could be coming from Kyiv or Mariupol, ripped from any number of newspapers covering the war in Ukraine. The expressiveness of the image, undoubtedly the work of an experienced photographer, conveys the misery, the desperation, the desire for it all to be over, in a single snapshot. But it’s not from Ukraine. It’s from London, in 1942.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 16, 2022 9:12 am
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Julie Fraenkel
Party Girls.
The subjects of Julie Fraenkel’s Party Girls are as the subject says. One after the other, they’re portraits of fun, leisure, unwinding. One of them dances with a lampshade on her head. Another arrives with a large piece of cake and an expression on her face that suggests that she knows the recipient of that slice is going to first politely refuse such a large slice, then acquiesce and eat the whole thing. A third is being borne aloft by balloons. The general public will never know what one party girl was doing, however, because that piece has already been sold.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 14, 2022 8:45 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Tuesday evening at Three Sheets on Elm Street found not a band onstage, but a vast assortment of paper with arrays of compelling images on them — from owls to goat people to skeletal horses, as well as letters, dingbats, and geometric shapes — along with scissors, pieces of cardboard, and glue sticks. The tables and chairs in the room were full of people using those materials to make collages — and try what Three Sheets and Hershey, Penn.-based brewer Tröegs Independent Brewing had to offer.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 12, 2022 9:07 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
New Haven-based ska band The Simulators had finished the second song of its skank-filled set at College Street Music Hall on Saturday afternoon when bassist Zachary Yost had a question: “Who’s enjoying spending all their money on all these lovely local vendors?” He meant the dozens of artists and artisans who had jammed into the place for the College Street Punk Rock Holiday Flea, which, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., changed the College Street performance space into a bazaar for original art, thrift clothing, instruments, records, and much more.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 8, 2022 9:12 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
On Wednesday evening, dozens gathered in KNOWN, the co-work space in the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St. It was part of KNOWN’s Wind-Down Wednesdays, a chance for people to exchange ideas and just relax. But the art on the walls — like Daniel Ramos’s Monk at the Ojo de Agua — wasn’t there as a coincidence; this particular Wednesday evening was a chance to celebrate the opening of “Assemblage,” a show put together by Kim Weston of Wábi Gallery. As it turned out, the gathering of humans at KNOWN was mirrored by the exhibition itself, which Weston conceived of as its own gathering of artists, and the ideas and spirit they share.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 23, 2022 9:09 am
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Njideka Akunyili Crosby
"The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born" Might Not Hold True For Much Longer.
We can’t read the expression on the subject of the painting, but that’s not where the eye goes anyway. Maybe we look first at the vibrant clothing she’s wearing. Or maybe we’ve already seen the element that makes the painting one to stop and linger at: that the carpet is in fact an elaborate collage of photographs. Whether we know the people in the pictures or not, we recognize them as people representing a place, a past, a culture. There’s commotion beneath the calm, questions beneath the assertiveness.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 22, 2022 8:43 am
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Sara Scranton’s “Spider Girl” partakes of old circus posters and underground comics from a generation past, but it has a modern twist that tweaks the formula. “Don’t get caught in her web,” the caption warns. It gives Spider Girl a little say in the matter.
That say is brought out in the poem by Karen Ponzio of the same title. “You speak of webs woven / Though your version of a trap is / My version of home. / Should I be punished for being hungry? / Is every ‘should’ a lure / Towards my demise? / Break my heart if it feeds / Your appetite or / Brings you joy. / I can rebuild anything / You attempt to destroy.” The poem, written in response to the painting, twists the painting even further, turning it inside out. Each piece amplifies the other.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 17, 2022 8:47 am
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Susan Clinard
In Fear We Trust: Pandemic Family Portrait.
Susan Clinard’s In Fear We Trust: Pandemic Family Portrait is a snapshot of a harrowing moment. The figures in the bed show an astonishing range of emotion, from anger to worry to terror. But the piece itself isn’t an incitement to anger, but compassion. The family may be up late at night, their emotions eating away at them as they surely did for many in the depths of 2020. But Clinard makes sure we see that together they’re drawing strength from one another too. When times are hard, they gather together.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2022 8:33 am
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The layers of overlapping textures, patterns, and colors are, in truth, abstract. But they evoke much of what we see in our lives. Maybe it’s a picture in a magazine of the surface of an insect leg, magnified a thousand times. Maybe it’s a close up of fabric, or water running down a window. For the painter, Judy Atlas, the connection between the painting and the world is the viewer’s to make. For Atlas herself, the connections between the paintings tell their own story, too.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 10, 2022 8:47 am
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Fazal Sheikh
Silver Bell Mine, Arizona.
Even in italics, on a placard in an art museum, the voice of Peter, a Navajo miner, comes through loud and clear. “I worked in the uranium mines for more than 14 years, until the mid-1970s,” he says. “While the other men in our family were serving in the military, I needed to provide for the family by working; the mines were close to our homes, and we were told that we were helping to support our country.” There is already a sense of dread — a sense that turns out to be well founded.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2022 9:25 am
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Brian Slattery photo
“We rise by lifting others,” reads a phrase from 19th-century writer and orator Robert Ingersoll, which now adorns a colorful mural on a wall on Fair Haven’s Grand Avenue.
As if in literal demonstration of the quotation, on Friday morning, a woman hefted a small child into the air to paint a butterfly on the mural that otherwise would have been just out of reach.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2022 9:22 am
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Cailin Alcock
Exposure and Perspective 2.
Cailin Alcock’s Exposure and Perspective 2 — part of “Unusual,” a show of Alcock’s works running now at Blue Orchid on Court Street for a few weeks — can be understood to act as a tutorial for the rest of the show. The piece itself is abstract, hanging from a metal pipe on a chain, but the shapes and shades in it are evocative enough that one’s brain might begin to try to make sense of it, as a portrait, as landscape, as something. Alcock has anticipated this. “These images may be reminiscent of a face, but not one that is recognized. These can be interpreted as faces based on what is known. Eyes, nose, mouth. But is that enough to say this is a face?”
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 7, 2022 8:50 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Movimiento Cultural
The world-renowned Shubert Theatre was home to some of New Haven’s own on Saturday night, as a show entitled Elm City’s Finest brought artists performing everything from bomba to dramatic monologues to rock ‘n’ roll to this first-of-its-kind event. The evening also included work displayed by local visual artists, food from local restaurants, and wares from local vendors.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 1, 2022 9:13 am
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Graham Honaker
Wren 1842.
The repeated image of a women’s face, in what could be a space helmet. A school of fish. Household objects. A spiraling line of red, moving across it all. It feels like graffiti, like Andy Warhol a little. It has some pop art in it, but there’s texture and grit to it, too, a sense of dirt. What does it mean? What do we want it to mean?
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Allan Appel |
Oct 31, 2022 9:52 am
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Melissa Bailey file photo
The late Winfred Rembert at his Newhall St. home.
Allan Appel photo
Prof. Erin I. Kelly with Rembert book and art on Thursday.
His tale of triumph through art, grit, and love in Georgia’s 1960s cotton fields, including seven years on a chain gang and a near lynching, is already taught at Yale — and well might become required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the country.
And a major motion picture should also be a consideration to get the story out far and wide.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 31, 2022 9:33 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Artist Arizona Taylor.
On Friday evening, the small park between Shelton Avenue, the Farmington Canal Trail, and Hazel Street bloomed into a small arts festival that warmed the cool evening with an explosion of color, sound, and good conversation. It was the beginning of the Artspace-organized Open Source Festival’s weekend of making visual art appear across New Haven, not only from downtown, Westville, and East Rock, but from Newhallville and Dixwell to the Hill and Mill River.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 31, 2022 9:25 am
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Calendar cover.
Three Sheets New Haven is well known for its dog-friendly patio, and some of the dogs that frequent there have become as familiar to its patrons as some of the human regulars.
For the third time since the bar/restaurant’s inception, a calendar featuring 13 of those patio pups was created to help raise money for Friends of the New Haven Animal Shelter. On Sunday night, Three Sheets threw a Pup-O-Ween-themed release party to celebrate the 2023 edition of that calendar, complete with the first look at this year’s edition, raffles, and, in keeping with the holiday, costumed pooches.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 28, 2022 9:19 am
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On Thursday evening, the storefront space at Never Ending Books was filled with shadows — not only in the images lining the walls, but from the people who came to visit the dimly lit spot, transformed into a gallery as part of the Open Source Festival organized by Artspace. The show on display was “Spectral Musings,” by artists from the Bridgeport-based URSA Gallery, now up at the State Street arts collective through Oct. 31. That date isn’t an accident; in time for Halloween, the art on the walls features artists investigating the darkness that lies within — and ways to move into the light.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 27, 2022 8:49 am
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Brian Slattery photos
On one side of Kehler Liddell Gallery is a panoply of children’s faces, caught in a thousand different expressions, a snapshot of both the feelings of dozens of different people at any given moment and the range of emotions that all of us are capable of across time. On the other side of the gallery are more abstract pieces, forms with faces that appear to be mid-transformation, the expression of something more interior.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 26, 2022 8:56 am
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Antonius-Tín Bui
Không Có Gì Bãng Mà Với Con.
Even from the outside of the building, it’s clear that the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop has been transformed, by a gigantic, shimmering web of fabric. The piece is by artist Antonius-Tín Bui, and it’s made from traditional Vietnamese garments, and as a note explains, they are “a safety net of embrace, the promise of renewal, and an undeniable statement of the Vietnamese people’s vibrancy and connectedness throughout past, present, and future generations.” The piece is also a flag welcoming visitors to not one, but two shows at CAW — “Băng Qua Nước: Across Land, Across Water” and “Common,” both running now through Nov. 26, with a reception scheduled for this evening at 5:30 p.m. — that are part of the ongoing Open Source Festival organized by Artspace.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 24, 2022 8:44 am
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Dennis Carroll.
The process of moving from drawing and painting to working with fiber. The limitations — and the opportunities — presented by fabrication machines, and the connection of that to old Atari video games. The ways that the materials an artist uses can deepen the theme of the art, about climate change and impending extinctions. Such were a few of the conversations on offer for those who visited Erector Square this weekend, as dozens of artists in the warren of studios in the former factory building in Fair Haven threw open their doors to visitors for the first full weekend of Open Source, the citywide visual arts festival organized by Artspace.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 19, 2022 9:23 am
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Diane and Tim Nighswander
Uterus.
The poster isn’t trying to be subtle. It’s an expression of protest, and the anger underneath it. That the message is delivered so clearly is a testament to the people who made it — professional visual artists, photographers and graphic designers Diane and Tim Nighswander.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 14, 2022 9:09 am
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The Queen's Artillery
Ascension to the Throne — Wassup and Coronation Day — Sequel to the Queen.
The paintings are as entertaining as they are provocative. It’s not just in the mixed materials that give each of the canvases three-dimensional elements, and bring the clothing to dazzling life, nor is it just in the knowing glances on the subjects’ faces. The titles of the paintings — Ascension to the Throne — Wassup and Coronation Day — Sequel to the Queen — give a clear sense of the inspiration behind the paintings. The old order, the paintings say, is coming to an end. A new aristocracy is coming; one that’s younger, Blacker, and, well, maybe more fun, too.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2022 8:59 am
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Rita Hannafin’s quilt, front and center on the back wall of City Gallery, is at first glance a piece immersed in a folk tradition. But look closer and Hannafin’s more playful nature comes out. The first of the nine boxes in the center is full of patterns and colors — among the more abstract shapes are prints of cars, glasses, leaves, and helicopters. In the next box over, one of the sections of the box is replaced by a white box with a square peephole in it, from which a small pattern peeks out. In the next large box over, another white box appears. This plan repeats all the way through the piece; there’s a sense of those peepholes taking over, each iteration making it more geometric and more abstract. And in veering away from old patterns of quilting but establishing a new one, Hannafin is stretching the form without breaking it. She’s showing what else can be done.
