by | Apr 19, 2022 4:17 pm | Comments (2)
Alison Cofrancesco's painting of the Pinskymobile.
Jake Dressler photo
Artist+lawyer+truck on Sherman.
Alison Cofrancesco brought iconic New Haven storefronts — including mobile ones — to canvas, then reconnected with the humans behind them in real life.
Continue reading ‘Iconographer Returns To The Scene Of The Sign’
by | Apr 12, 2022 9:05 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Anne:Gogh
The concept of time has had its way with all of us in the past two years, leading many to redefine its more linear aspects and reimagine a new framework. On Saturday night five poets made their way through Artspace New Haven to pose and present their own interpretations of time, influenced and inspired by the “Dyschronics” exhibit currently displayed there, as well as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The event was part of One City, One Read, an ongoing International Festival of Arts and Ideas program series that continues now through June throughout New Haven, focusing on Butler’s all-too-prescient novel.
by | Apr 8, 2022 9:25 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
Lewis.
Here Come Swords. I Married a Ranger. Heaven Has Claws. Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It. All through the pandemic — and for years before that — these curious titles were hiding in plain sight on the shelves of the Institute Library, before being plucked off by a staff member, volunteer, or patron for inclusion in “Cover Story II: Return to the Stacks,” the latest art exhibit in the Chapel Street library’s gallery that invites viewers, once again, to judge books by their covers, though this time with a twist.
Continue reading ‘Institute Library Offers Another "Cover Story"’
by | Apr 5, 2022 8:58 am | Comments (1)
The colorful digital artwork on the walls brought sparks of light to the space at Never Ending Books. In one piece, swirls of darkness and fluorescence together ripped across an undulating landscape. In another, the dark forms of buildings, lit from within by explosions of brightness, melted into one another, suggesting vastness and a riotous amount of life. In still another, the forms of leaves and pale branches draped across the view of a passing stream. They and many others are part of visual artist and musician Shula Weinstein’s show “The Sun Rises on a Coastal Town,” running now at the State Street spot for the next few weeks.
Continue reading ‘Shula Weinstein Brings A Coastal Town To Life’
by | Apr 1, 2022 3:21 pm | Comments (1)
Maya McFadden Photo
Students get to creating in new art space.
A new home for student art making, self-expression, and relaxation opened Thursday at the Boys and Girls Club of New Haven.
by | Mar 31, 2022 9:14 am | Comments (1)
Matthew Garrett
Acorn.
It’s just a picture of an acorn, but the lens makes all the difference. Under Matthew Garrett’s eye — and, apparently, his phone — the seed becomes a landscape of detail. The bed that it lies on brims with life. It’s a study of an intricate surface we don’t pay attention to very often, but given its subject, it’s also an image about possibility, the chance for vast growth.
Continue reading ‘At Kehler Liddell, Artists See Into The Myths Of Time’
by | Mar 29, 2022 2:48 pm | Comments (2)
Published illustrations (above) by New Haven's Merle Nacht (pictured below), subject of a new career retrospective at Merwin's Art Shop.
Frank Rizzo/ New Haven Arts Paper
One summer day in 1985, the illustrator Merle Nacht boarded a Metro-North train at Union Station, and carried with her a big dream and a portfolio of anxiety.
Her goal was to arrive where few freelance artists ever find themselves: on the list of regular cover artists for the prestigious New Yorker magazine.
by | Mar 28, 2022 4:34 pm | Comments (3)
Maya McFadden Photo
New Haveners gathered to “Connect Da Love” through fashion and music Saturday night.
by | Mar 25, 2022 9:33 am | Comments (7)
Clockwise from upper left: ECOCA board members Suneet Talpade, Jeanne Criscola, Debbie Hesse, Jeanne Ciravolo.
The Ely Center of Contemporary Art is officially buying the John Slade Ely House, the Elizabethan mansion on Trumbull Street that has served as a hub for the New Haven visual arts community since 1961. It’s purchasing the building from ACES for $800,000, fending off a bid from a developer for the same price.
“All the people that have been supportive of us are ecstatic that we’re in this position,” said Jeanne Criscola, ECOCA’s board president.
by | Mar 24, 2022 9:19 am | Comments (0)
Mark Rothko
Untitled.
It’s only the form of it, the broad bands of color, that might give away that the painting above is by Mark Rothko, famous for his much more abstract work. The faces, the shapes of waves, of limbs, the fact that there are lines at all, aren’t Rothko’s style at all — or at least not the style we know him for. It’s all too tempting to map the general narrative of art history in the 20th century, from representational to abstract art, onto Rothko’s own personal history. In that context, we might think this is a painting Rothko made early in his life, before he discovered abstraction. We’d be wrong — he made it a year before he died. We think of Rothko and his contemporaries as abstract painters, but they were more than that. The story is more complicated.
Continue reading ‘YUAG Exhibit Complicates The Midcentury Modern Story’
by | Mar 17, 2022 9:02 am | Comments (0)
Sarah Schneiderman
The State of Health Care in the United States of America #4.
The title of Sarah Schneiderman’s piece at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street — The State of Health Care in the United States of America #4 — makes the target of the artist’s intentions clear, and it gets at something about the overall effects of certain aspects of our healthcare system, creating a country awash in prescription medication and, as recent high-profile lawsuits have shown, far too many addicts in the process. But Schneiderman’s piece also gets at something even broader than that. Its depiction of the flag itself It aptly illustrates the way the past couple years has seen the nation change shape, bending and warping, struggling to turn into something else under the most fractious politics seen in a long time. Schneiderman kept her eyes on her intended subject, but touched on something deeper as well.
Continue reading ‘In Ely Center Exhibition, Artists Explore What Lies Beneath’
by | Mar 9, 2022 8:54 am | Comments (0)
Since its first exhibition opened in March 2020 — and despite the pandemic — NXTHVN has managed to mount show after show that makes great use of its wide gallery walls, whether it’s by nearly covering them or using their white space to make distance between the pieces. Its latest exhibit is the first to give the viewer a sense of having entered and perhaps become a part of the art on display, the first to impart a feeling of bringing people somewhere else, if only for a little while.
by | Mar 2, 2022 4:55 pm | Comments (5)
Brian Slattery Photo
Ely Center board members Rashmi Talpade, Valerie Garlick, Jeanne Criscola, and Debbie Hesse.
The Ely Center of Contemporary Art is busy not just putting art on its walls — but looking for the money to keep the walls themselves. It has two weeks.
by | Feb 28, 2022 12:13 pm | Comments (5)
Courtesy Ely Center
The John Slade Ely House at 51 Trumbull St. — home to the Ely Center of Contemporary Art — is up for sale.
ECOCA founder Jeanne Criscola made the announcement Sunday evening.
by | Feb 28, 2022 8:43 am | Comments (0)
Daniel Shoemaker Photo
Bridge & Tunnel Crowd booth: Sometimes wi-fi doesn't reach the loo.
The buzz and joy around the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op in East Rock was palpable, from the crowds of jacketed chatters outside to the low hum of many people inside the communal space. The community turned out for the NHV Zine Fair — the first such event in years.
by | Feb 18, 2022 9:09 am | Comments (3)
Kehler Liddell Gallery is suffering an infestation — of metal beetles and painted moths, courtesy of the work of artists William Kent and Gar Waterman. Together, in the show “Pest Control,” running at the Westville gallery through March 13, they offer commentary on another kind of pest problem altogether.
by | Feb 17, 2022 8:42 am | Comments (0)
On a street in London, a woman walks draped in an impossibly long, radiantly blue textile. The fabric gives her the air of a queen, but a queen out of place and out of time. She seems to move at a completely different pace from her bustling urban surroundings. Nobody notices her, as if she’s a ghost. It’s a visitation of the colonized to the colonizer. She has an almost untouchable strength, but seems also powerless; she can protect herself, but not anyone around her.
by | Feb 16, 2022 8:50 am | Comments (17)
Thomas Breen Photo
English Station: From eyesore to cultural draw?
The former English Station power plant, located in the middle of the Mill River on Ball Island in New Haven Harbor, occupies eight acres of abandoned land. Its unique location would make a perfect Museum of Contemporary Art.
by | Feb 15, 2022 8:33 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Sack.
A crowd of colorful figures are running amok on a table in City Gallery. Their surfaces swirl with patterns, their forms just reminiscent enough of people or animals to endow them with a great deal of personality. They are, above all, fun — and part of “Phantasmagoria: Art to Amuse and Amaze,” a collection of mostly wax-encaustic paintings and sculptures by Ruth Sack running now at the gallery on Upper State Street through March 6.
by | Feb 10, 2022 4:16 pm | Comments (6)
Marc Massaro
New version of proposed monument.
Cristoforo Colombo was always aloft on his pedestal, looking out toward the harbor and sea, to catch the next ship and to sail off to his next conquest.
His replacement – the Italian, or perhaps universal, immigrant family – will have come from the sea, from far away, and to stay, to put down roots and to begin their American success stories.
That’s why they’re not going to be aloft on a plinth but at eye level, facing inward toward the park and the city they are helping to build. The viewer will be able look them in the eye.
by | Feb 10, 2022 8:47 am | Comments (1)
Courtesy Octavia E. Butler Estate
Butler.
A new art exhibit, and a panel on migration facilitated by Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). The screening and discussion of the “first-ever ethnographic acid Western.” A Sun Ra tribute concert.
All these events and more, happening between now and the middle of May, are organized around a single novel by a science-fiction visionary that is the focus of this year’s One City: One Read, a campaign organized by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, in partnership with Yale’s Schwarzman Center, the New Haven Free Public Library, Artspace, and Best Video.
by | Feb 9, 2022 8:36 am | Comments (9)
Brian Slattery Photo
McDonagh.
There’s a statue by sculptor Glenna Goodacre in the entryway to Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum on Whitney Avenue in Hamden that captures the desperation of people fleeing the famine of 1845 to 1852, yet only hints at the horrors they were fleeing, or the struggles they faced ahead. “She has a bag she’s carrying that has all her worldly possessions,” explained Joseph McDonagh, a representative of the nascent nonprofit Save Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, who was a docent at the museum before it closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic. “She used to be upstairs, but then they brought her down” to welcome visitors in — and give them a chance to brace themselves for what was coming.
Continue reading ‘Organization Rallies To Save Irish Famine Museum’
by | Feb 8, 2022 9:28 am | Comments (0)
Yvonne Shortt’s Material Investigations at the Ely is simple yet evocative — a system of ropes that Shortt is slowly transforming over time into something else. The patterns she’s creating remind one of braids, or farther toward the floor, maybe cascading dreadlocks. The knotting she’s doing is a simple macrame, but also the pattern for the beads on a shekere. All these evocations are in play; she “investigates hair and cultural mindsets using rope, repetition, various other materials, and historical context,” she writes. But the rope serves another purpose, to bind together all the artwork around it, in form, process, and function.
by | Feb 3, 2022 8:27 am | Comments (0)
Three long, heavy bags of salt snake across the wall in one of the galleries in the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and their goal is empathy. To artist Ying Ye, who created them, they evoke fortune cookies. But their weight — 50 pounds each — is meaningful, too; as Ye writes, that “represents the average physical weight … restaurant workers need to lift up in the workplace.” The salt “implies their sweat and pains have transformed into delicious tasty food.”
Continue reading ‘Art Exhibit Makes Compassion A New Year's Resolution’
by | Jan 27, 2022 4:52 pm | Comments (8)
Marc Massaro
New version of proposed monument, with plaque.
Gone are the benches, planters, flood lights, and gravel walking paths.
The sculpture itself — of an aspiring immigrant family — remains in the picture, as a controversial plan to replace the former Wooster Square Christopher Columbus monument moved to a new stage.