by | Jun 21, 2022 1:54 pm | Comments (1)
Artspace Executive Director Lisa Dent shows Sen. Blumenthal New Havener Leonard Galmon's Gloria.
New Haven’s annual “Open Studios” festival will have a farther reach and more space to display local artists’ work this year thanks to a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
by | Jun 21, 2022 8:53 am | Comments (0)
The image of a young Black person behind bars is freighted with decades — centuries — of cultural hurt, and artist Mosho knows it. As an accompanying note explains, the artist “deploys paint, plastic sheeting, and other materials to construct installations that explore issues of identity, community, and belonging.” Here Mosho takes the image and subverts it. Give the image more than a cursory glance and you see that the bars are melting away before the subject’s gaze. And that the hand that holds that dissolving bar, and is perhaps doing the dissolving, contains a galaxy within it, a sign of universal power and also nearly unknowable complexity. It’s an image that hints at liberation through exploration, of the universe and of the self at the same time.
Continue reading ‘Mining Themes From Parable Of The Sower, Artists (Re)focus On The Future’
by | Jun 16, 2022 10:16 am | Comments (0)
Olivia Charis Photos
Security guard Eskarie Tellez, Del Vaani's friend, wearing one of the latest designs at Wednesday evening's fashion show.
Jozif Del Vaani and Paola Salvador with one of their designs.
A budding New Haven fashion designer named Del Vaani brought his latest avant-garde line to a crowd gathered in Westville Wednesday night.
by | Jun 16, 2022 8:55 am | Comments (1)
Origins and Future, detail.
Origins and Future spreads out across the floor of an upper gallery at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street. It’s composed of shapes that are fascinating and uncomfortable in equal measure. Are they the result of biology or technology? The stranger ends of the plant and animal kingdoms or something that was created in a lab? Or perhaps are they a mixture of both? Or, is it that the line between the natural and technological world is a lot more porous than we usually think it is?
Continue reading ‘Artist Imagines A Future After Climate Change’
by | Jun 15, 2022 9:12 am | Comments (4)
David Sepulveda and Frenemy Photos
Corner of new mural facing Exchange Street.
Frenemy: Man with a can, and a message.
A sharp-eyed osprey peers over the edge of its densely woven nest of thick branches. A frog, dressed in patched coveralls and top hat, sits comfortably on a tree stump, reading to a school of attentive rainbow trout. Only the moon seems to have dozed off, its exhalations producing cottony-white night clouds with every breath.
These are some of the vignettes of animated plants and wildlife that have taken residence on the exterior walls of a previously faded and graffiti-marked industrial property adjacent the John S. Martinez Sea & Sky STEM Magnet K‑8 School in Fair Haven — thanks to the work of a globe-trotting muralist and illustrator who goes by the name Frenemy.
by | Jun 8, 2022 10:15 am | Comments (1)
Olivia Charis Photo
Officials cut ribbon Tuesday at Mindless Clothing.
Examples from MTC's line.
Homegrown entrepreneur LaDrea Moss is putting her stamp on New Haven’s clothing — and on a neighborhood that also benefits from a fresh look.
Continue reading ‘Streetwear Star Has Designs On Cedar Hill’
by | Jun 8, 2022 9:30 am | Comments (4)
Brian Slattery Photos
Kotcher (aka Frenemy) and Bernblum at 162 James.
The latest mural from public art organization Site Projects is transforming a building in Fair Haven — just as the projects it’s connected to, from Save the Sound and the Mill River Trail, are hoping to transform the surrounding community’s relationship to the river nearby, and the nature all around them.
by | Jun 3, 2022 9:07 am | Comments (0)
A cluster of paintings on the wall of the gallery all border a central piece, as if feeding it, which in a sense they do. The central piece holds the others together. In it, a yard bordered by trees is the site of some kind of excavation, roped off. Something is being unearthed there, the ruins of a house, or something still older, maybe. But instead of a crew with tools, the only animals in sight are a cardinal and a bluejay, watching over the proceedings in a moment that’s both funny and a little magical, a flight of fancy on the part of the artist, though very much grounded in reality.
by and | May 27, 2022 8:24 am | Comments (1)
Kaitrel West photo
Student Saanon Dyahatou.
Hamden High students crowded the school courtyard this week to illustrate through colorful chalk artworks the ways they are “Proud to Be.”
Continue reading ‘Hamden High Schoolers Chalk It Up To Pride’
by | May 26, 2022 4:41 pm | Comments (2)
A sculpture by artist Yvonne Shortt on display outside 51 Trumbull St.
Clockwise from upper left: ECOCA board members Suneet Talpade, Jeanne Criscola, Debbie Hesse, Jeanne Ciravolo.
A downtown visual arts nonprofit has closed on its purchase of the John Slade Ely House — warding off the building’s potential sale to a residential developer, with the help of a loan from two Fair Haven businessmen.
Continue reading ‘Property Roundup: Nonprofit Buys Ely House For $800K; LCI Buys Blighted 3-Family’
by | May 25, 2022 8:47 am | Comments (1)
The foggy, paranoid view through the peephole of a door to an apartment. A painting of a container ship erupting into flames. A gas can looking ready to be ignited. They come across as a dislocated parts of a whole, tiny fragments of something too big to comprehend all at once. They’re part of “Proximity,” a show running now in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through June 8, in which artists come to grips with the war in Ukraine, producing an exhibit that conveys the conflict’s harrowing immediacy and something of its historical context at the same time.
Continue reading ‘Artists Meditate On The "Proximity" Of War’
by | May 24, 2022 8:14 am | Comments (26)
You may have seen the signs at the exit ramps of I‑91 or I‑95 around town, or on long straightaways on Whitney Avenue, or that particular curve of road on Mather Street in Hamden. They say “Slow Down,” and they’re clearly directed at car traffic. Neatly stenciled and uniform in size, some of them look quasi-official. But they’re not.
Continue reading ‘Artist Makes Own Traffic-Calming Measures’
by | May 17, 2022 8:36 am | Comments (0)
Julia Rooney
Scrollscape.
Julia Rooney’s Scrollscape hangs in the front window of Artspace, serving the dual purpose from the street of inviting people to come in while also obscuring what’s going on within. Inside, Scrollscape reveals itself as a piece that one is allowed to wander within. When you’re inside it, you can only see out in bits and pieces; likewise, someone looking at you from outside the piece — or, for that matter, from another part of the piece — would only be able to see you a little bit at a time. It’s a little disorienting, obfuscating, playful on one but tinged with a little menace. If someone comes looking for you in there, or if you go looking for them, is it hide and seek or stalking?
by | May 16, 2022 8:31 am | Comments (12)
Brian Slattery Photo
The Town Green District’s New Haven Night Market once again drew throngs of people, as the event closed the intersection of Orange and Crown and its surrounding streets to car traffic, turning those city blocks into a bustling bazaar of food, art, and crafts. But there was also evidence that the event was expanding more informally, as artists and businesses beyond those blocks threw events to attract their own parts of the crowd.
by | May 12, 2022 8:44 am | Comments (3)
Inside the Sandbox — a new space for art events at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven on Audubon Street — there’s a small garden growing, made not of plants, but fiber. There are ropes of vines fashioned from T‑shirts, leaves of pressed polyethylene, mossy mats of yarn. The project, titled “Unclassified,” is the work of artist Yolanda Davis, who, as the Arts Council’s artist in residence, started it in the fall. It now hangs in the Sandbox space like an enormous divider, a waterfall of foliage. Soon it will be taken down. And to Davis, it still isn’t really complete.
by | May 11, 2022 3:31 pm | Comments (7)
Melissa Bailey Photo
"The guy keeps winning": The late Winfred Rembert in the Newhall Street apartment where he made the magic happen.
Estate of Winfred Rembert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Looking for My Mother, 2019; reprinted in Chasing Me To My Grave.
Lillian Rembert dropped her mail sack on Shelton Avenue to see why her phone was blowing up with alerts — to discover that her late father won a Pulitzer Prize.
by | May 11, 2022 8:37 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery photos
Davies.
The surface of Jennifer Davies’s Blue Accord, part of “In Mind and Hand” — a show of Davies’s work up now at City Gallery on State Street through May 29 — is a panoply of textures, and not just visual ones. There are the endless variations on indigo, wrought by applying the dye in unpredictable ways. But look closer, and you can tell the material itself has a tactile life of its own, sometimes punctuated by string. Davies may be a visual artist by training, but her art appeals to more than one of the senses.
by | May 9, 2022 8:22 am | Comments (0)
El-Yasin and Shutan.
New Haven-based artists Suzan Shutan and Howard el-Yasin have a vision of creating an art treasure hunt across the state of Connecticut. It’s about opening up private spaces. It’s about pushing back and against commercialism and oppression. But it’s also about having fun, exploring where we live, and tapping into the sense kids have that maybe, just maybe, there’s an adventure to be had around the next corner if we just know where to look.
by | May 3, 2022 8:33 am | Comments (0)
Florian Carle, Martha Lewis, Jason Bischoff-Wurstle.
In Martha Lewis’s illustrations, the stacked spirals of wires and other metal pieces have no obvious sense of scale. They could be of a structure the size of a skyscraper, or the miniature contents of a vacuum tube. In this, the pieces of technology rendered in Lewis’s sketches echo the theories and the math that underpin them. They’re parts of quantum computers used at the Yale Quantum Institute, and the sketches — as well as some of the computers themselves, plus the tools employed to keep them running — are part of “The Quantum Revolution: Handcrafted in New Haven,” an art exhibit that shows how the current wave of innovation in computing connects seamlessly to New Haven’s long industrial past of inventors creating breakthroughs not through climatic moments of “Eureka!,” but by getting their hands dirty and figuring things out.
by | Apr 28, 2022 8:35 am | Comments (0)
Frank Bruckmann
Skull Right.
A skull is so synonymous with death that our brains make it into a cliché, but Frank Bruckmann’s painting gets us to look through the symbol to the object itself — the shapes of the teeth, the perhaps unexpected delicacy of the animal’s cheekbone and jawbone. Bruckmann is, in short, inviting us to slow down.
by | Apr 27, 2022 8:14 am | Comments (0)
A piece exploring resonant frequencies; plucking a string makes a cymbal vibrate, and striking a cymbal makes a string vibrate.
The Earth vibrates at a frequency of 7.8 Hertz. Tuning forks can be used to tell time. A stretched-out Slinky can be used to produce a Star Wars-style laser-blast sound.
by | Apr 25, 2022 4:29 pm | Comments (1)
Eric Vidro.
Eric Vidro was headed to Chapel Street Monday morning during his morning shift — as a budding clothing designer — before his third-shift gig in a factory.
The latter pays the bills. The former fuels his dreams.
by | Apr 25, 2022 1:12 pm | Comments (2)
Maya McFadden Photos
Comic fans leave the pages to meet real-life superheros.
Javon Stokes at DiasporaCon.
A justice league of comics creators, collectors, and historians were all signaled to gather for a first annual African DiasporaCon.
Continue reading ‘"DiasporaCon" Brings Black Heroes To Life’
by | Apr 25, 2022 8:54 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Mural by Rose Martin in the newly remodeled Three Sheets.
Questlove pondering musical notes in mixed media. Three womxn expressed in acrylics. A snarling yet sparkling cat out of hell.
These were all part of the return of longstanding monthly event “Art in the Back,” at Three Sheets this past Saturday night. Though on this evening it did not include the “music in the front” portion — in which bands once played as part of the opening — the promise of it was in the air.
by and | Apr 20, 2022 3:57 pm | Comments (3)
Nora Grace-Flood photos
Eddi M. photographs Alina ...
... in flower-filled Wooster Square Park.
Wooster Square’s cherry blossoms served as a fitting seasonal backdrop Wednesday morning — for a photographer aiming to turn the trees’ ephemeral beauty into immortal crypto wealth.
Continue reading ‘Cherry Trees & NFTs Blossom In Wooster Square’