by | Sep 6, 2022 4:43 pm | Comments (6)
Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Pedestrians of the world unite! Stalls and Weber make synchronous TikToks on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.
Two TikTok phenoms concerned with pedestrian safety set out from the outskirts of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard Sunday morning — with the intention of spotlighting one of New Haven’s, and the state of Connecticut’s, most dangerous stretches while on a viral walk.
by | Aug 30, 2022 8:48 am | Comments (0)
Lindsay Skedgell Photos
Your Queer Plant Shop.
The outer edge of Pitkin Plaza on Sunday was lined with rare plants, bursts of pollinators, handmade leather goods, zines, and two birthday cakes of four different flavors. Nestled between vibrant murals, performers sang and folks from all around New Haven filled the brick park. One man next to a mural waved a cigar around in circles, dancing to the music Love n’ Co played. The band’s singer — Lovelind Richards — had various shades of blue painted across her eyes in thick bands. A leather worker from Beacon Craft Studio stitched a deep maroon leather piece with thick thread. It was East Rock House’s first birthday.
Continue reading ‘A Year After 1st Queer Open Mic, East Rock House Celebrates Milestone’
by | Aug 29, 2022 9:27 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
The music poured onto Temple Street all the way from the plaza in the middle of the block, directing and enticing a steady stream of pedestrians and shoppers to the long rows of canopies set up for the Black Wall Street Festival, an afternoon-long event designed to showcase a wide range of Black entrepreneurs.
Thanks to the robust turnout, a live band, and a pervasive sense of cheer, the festival was true to its name, turning Temple Street Plaza into something like bazaar meets block party.
Continue reading ‘Black Wall Street Festival Brings Out The Artrepreneurs’
by | Aug 29, 2022 9:17 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
Rev. Jeremiah Paul.
The Rev. Jeremiah Paul, pastor for Hamden Plains United Methodist Church, held his hand high as he spoke to the crowd assembled to hear him at Hamden’s Town Center Park on Friday evening. His audience were members of his congregation, but also from the greater New Haven community, a mix of languages, ages, cultures and creeds. Among them were artists selling their pieces and food truck vendors feeding the people.
“We had a little rain shower, which I consider a blessing from the heavens,” he said amiably. With the sun out, the show was ready to start.
by | Aug 26, 2022 8:36 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
A dozen students gathered around a long table in a second-floor studio in Creative Arts Workshop on Thursday evening, busily preparing strips of white fabric with woodblocks, clothespins, and rubber bands. CAW instructor Annie Trowbridge moved from one student to the other, pouring on ideas, humor, and enthusiasm. On the other side of the room, smelling of ammonia, was a bucket containing one of the most well-known and beloved natural dyes in the world. Before the class was over, that color would transform several yards of fabric and maybe change a perspective or two.
by | Aug 25, 2022 8:55 am | Comments (0)
There’s a reason for the vibrant colors in Sarahi Zacatelco’s self-portrait. “That’s how I feel now,” Zacatelco said. “I’m a survivor,” she said, and those colors mean “freedom” — freedom from a bad situation she left behind, and freedom to accept the support of others she has found in New Haven. It’s also a celebration of the freedom “to work on myself and to work on my art. I left everything behind. All the depression. All the hard feelings. Everything.” It’s the same impulse that led her to make a painting of a pair of wings. “Now I’m flying,” she said. “Now I’m free.”
Continue reading ‘Art Brings Freedom — And Business — To Blue Orchid’
by | Aug 23, 2022 8:55 am | Comments (3)
Brian Slattery photo
The gloriously trashy wonderland of garage-art "Auto."
A garage full of treasures. A squirrel on a tightrope. A tree full of wishes. These are among the discoveries that await those who embark on The Exchange, a treasure hunt of an art show that is the brainchild of New Haven-based artists Suzan Shutan and Howard el-Yasin of SomethingProjects.
by | Aug 18, 2022 5:50 pm | Comments (10)
Olivia Gross Photo
New mural on the side of the Hillside Community Shelter.
Kwadwo Adae, center, with his son Kwasi and Katherine Tombaugh, assistant muralists.
Artist Kwadwo Adae unveiled a new 45-foot-high mural in The Hill neighborhood on Thursday -– and this one is there to stay.
by | Aug 15, 2022 9:16 am | Comments (1)
New Haven became an island on Saturday, but no man was left standing alone.
Continue reading ‘"Yo Soy Boricua!": Puerto Rico Festival Keeps Hearts Beating On The Green’
by | Aug 11, 2022 8:55 am | Comments (5)
Karen Klugman
Jerry at Jerry's Antiques, 928 State.
Jerry stands with his hand on his hip, a cigar angled improbably out of his mouth. He’s wearing a hat from another time. The shop behind him is from another time, too, an older New Haven that’s increasingly hard to catch a glimpse of. The photograph is accompanied by a quote from Jerry, addressed to the photographer: “Say, you ain’t Polish, are ya? John here said you might be Polish. You’re Italian, ain’t ya? You look Italian.… Lithuanian? Romanian? Well, at least you ain’t a Jew. Say, you ain’t Jewish, are ya? Old John, he and I just like to kid around. What are you anyway?”
by | Aug 10, 2022 9:09 am | Comments (0)
Vasilisa Gladysheva
Melting Face.
Vasilisa Gladysheva’s potted plant at first looks precarious, perched on the edge of its podium, but that’s the point. The piece is, in a very real sense, about balance. There’s tenuousness versus serenity. There’s the combining of the whimsical and the functional, while also having something to say about the thoughts of the mind, or perhaps imagination. Is the figure in the vase sleeping and dreaming the plant into existence? Or is it about how all thoughts can grow? Regardless, what is clear is both the artist’s playful intentions and the skill with which the piece is made.
Continue reading ‘Artists Breathe A Sigh Of Relief In CAW Exhibit’
by | Aug 1, 2022 9:08 am | Comments (1)
Jordan Ashby Photo
Summer Artspace Program students, instructors, and TAs.
Artspace New Haven celebrated the culmination of the free Summer Artspace Program (SAP) with a community exhibition highlighting the work of six high school artists.
Continue reading ‘High Schoolers Find Their Voices At Artspace’
by | Jul 26, 2022 8:46 am | Comments (0)
It’s a chicken leg, mounted on a wooden board like a hunting trophy or a piece of taxidermy. But then something else is going on with it, a cascade of white circles, dynamic enough to almost seem to be moving across its surface. For some, the circles might seem like soap, the leg being washed clean. For other, they might look like mold; the chicken left out of the fridge too long. Or what if someone decided not to interpret it at all? To just accept the shapes and shades for what they are, just patterns across the chicken’s skin?
Continue reading ‘In Neverending Exhibit, Artist Craig Gilbert Keeps Riding The Wave’
by | Jul 22, 2022 8:50 am | Comments (1)
A group of men chat on the street corner. Behind them, a hamburger rotates slowly, to serene music. An astronaut tumbles through space. Prisoners of war get anti-communist propaganda tattooed on their chests and backs. A White man muses on the fear White people have of retribution from Black people about slavery.
It’s a quiet summer night on Crown Street, but something is disrupting the flow — and in its disruption, is reminding us of the flow that we’re in almost all the time and usually don’t pay much attention to.
The disruption makes us aware of how we’re subtly being disrupted all the time, without us being entirely conscious of it. What would happen if we were to wake all the way up to that fact?
by | Jul 20, 2022 8:56 am | Comments (1)
Ieshia Evans Protesting the Death of Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, 9 July 2016).
The source photograph — by Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman, of Black Lives Matter protester Ieshia Evans standing off against police in Baton Rouge, La., during a protest of the killing of Alton Sterling by police in 2016 — is already a capturing of opposites. The kinetic poses of the police, clearly in motion, versus Evans’s stillness. The heaviness of the officers’ body armor versus the light billowing of the hem of Evans’s dress. Marc Quinn’s treatment of the image, made in 2017, takes it all a step further. Cutting the image into quarters accentuates what’s going on, and hearkens back to triptychs and other more antiquated forms of history paintings. The streaks of paint thrown across the painting add to the immediacy of the action, but also call attention to the change in medium, from photography to painting. What does it mean to try to immortalize an image? Which is another way of asking: how do we remember history?
Continue reading ‘In YCBA Exhibit, Artist Marc Quinn Wrestles With History’
by | Jul 19, 2022 8:21 am | Comments (0)
Sylvia J. Yanez
Hi, I'm Melting.
Sylvia J. Yanez’s Hi, I’m Melting has its sense of humor, starting from the title. It exudes a friendliness that draws a viewer in. But there’s something harrowing going on, too. There are the cracked patches of paint like angry scabs, the colors bleeding and running together seeming out of control. That the paint is roughly in the shape of the United States, and that it appears to be melting down, gives it an extra push into chilling territory, though explicitly commenting on the current political situation isn’t Yanez’s stated objective. The aim of her art is more personal, more social; maybe you could say deeper.
Continue reading ‘In Solo Exhibit at Blue Orchid, Artist Sylvia Yanez Teaches How To Breathe Better’
by | Jul 15, 2022 11:18 am | Comments (6)
Photos by Olivia Charis
One idea for motif for court mural.
Michelle Turner File Photo
Andrew Smith changes the net between games at a basketball tournament in Goffe Street Park.
Artists and friends came together to dream about how to reimagine a basketball court — and a community.
by | Jul 15, 2022 8:43 am | Comments (0)
Bridget Riley
Blaze 4.
On one hand Blaze 4 is a simple design concept: a series of concentric circles, lines angled in alternating directions. The kind of thing that, in the hands of someone less attuned to detail, would be a muddled mess, or almost silly, like a picture of spiraling tweed. But in the hands of master contemporary artist Bridget Riley, it’s a buzzing, vertiginous image, the sort of thing that requires a warning label for people sensitive to strobes. It’s a perfect marriage of form and technique, and that the effect is so visceral is argument enough for why the Yale Center for British Art has dedicated two floors of the museum to a massive retrospective of the celebrated artist’s work, called “Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction” — and there are just two more weekends to see it before it closes on July 24.
Continue reading ‘YCBA Exhibit Maps Artist Bridget Riley's Journey From Tension To Release’
by | Jul 14, 2022 4:44 pm | Comments (28)
The proposed configuration of the old plinth next to the new statue.
Now that the statue of Christopher Columbus is gone from Wooster Square Park, what should happen to the pedestal that once held it up?
The Historic District Commission weighed that question on Wednesday evening. It voted to keep the pedestal in place without a statue atop it, a few feet behind the new sculpture slated for the park.
Continue reading ‘Historic District Commission Approves Revised Columbus Statue Replacement’
by | Jul 14, 2022 8:37 am | Comments (0)
Sheila Kaczmarek
Caterpillar Homes.
The sculpture in the window of City Gallery is fashioned almost like it could be a bouquet of summery flowers, or a piece of interesting coral — the kind of art made from natural objects that you see a lot. But the pleasing shapes are actually representations of caterpillars that look like they could crawl out of their ceramic homes at any second. Some may find it a little creepy, but it’s also about the abundance of nature, the way it moves and grows, especially in the summer.
Continue reading ‘At City Gallery, Artists Revel In The Fun Of Figuring It Out’
by | Jul 7, 2022 8:52 am | Comments (1)
Jordan Ashby Photo
Shauniqua Davis brought her daughter Ivana Lewis for a community paint session.
Hill neighbors came into the Wilson Branch Library to make art — and walked out ready to wear it.
Continue reading ‘The Clothes Make The Canvas At Wilson Branch Library Community Event’
by | Jul 7, 2022 8:51 am | Comments (2)
Susan Clinard
Missing the Mark.
Susan Clinard’s sculptures are an exercise in extreme empathy, even as Missing the Mark represents something more complex as well. It’s hard not to feel the pull of judgment in the juxtaposition of the crying face of the baby, who just needs some attention, with the blank faces of everyone else, staring at their screens. But in a broader sense, they’re all victims, of a specific mode of modernity we’re told we want. Clinard’s pieces forces us to look at ourselves, too. Are you reading these words on your phone right now? What are you missing around you?
Continue reading ‘65 Artists Contemplate What They've "Lost And Found" In KLG Exhibition’
by | Jul 5, 2022 8:57 am | Comments (2)
Chris Randall Photos
New Haven photographer Chris Randall has a unique perspective on fireworks — as you can see from these photos he took at Sunday evening’s city East Rock display.
Continue reading ‘Through A Lens, Brightly: Chris Randall's 4th’
by | Jun 27, 2022 3:50 pm | Comments (0)
Olivia Charis Photos
"Hispanic Identity: Between Two Words"
As viewers walk into NXTHVN gallery to view a new group exhibit, Sofia Carrillo’s contribution stands out as one of the only artworks not on the walls. Carrillo’s sculpture consists of two armchairs tied together by woven flags. Atop each chair rests a telephone. The chairs, Carrillo said, represent “the new versus the old generation.”
Continue reading ‘Next Generation Opens Lines Of Communication At NXTHVN’
by | Jun 24, 2022 9:04 am | Comments (1)
Cassides' Diner.
Cassides’ Diner sits everywhere and nowhere; it could be on any number of city blocks around the Northeast, and at the same time, it’s hard to say from the picture where on that block it is situated. The building itself is also a little improbable. It carries the signs of both tough economic straits and real ingenuity, the result of someone taking what’s at hand and making something better out of it.
Continue reading ‘In City Gallery Exhibit, Tom Peterson Ruminates On Life After Industry’