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.
by | Jan 27, 2022 8:44 am | Comments (0)
Matthew Dercole
Remnant 16.
Matthew Dercole’s artwork dramatizes a phase of biology that many find uncomfortable. His pieces are in a sense fungal; they’re full of life, but the kind of life that sprouts from death, that transforms flesh into something else. It’s the kind of reminder of mortality that many find unsettling. Dercole knows this; with his exquisitely detailed pieces, he seeks to both attract and repel.
Continue reading ‘Artists Take It Uneasy In Ely Center "Solos" Exhibit’
by | Jan 25, 2022 12:04 pm | Comments (0)
Author Megan Shaughnessy with her new children book.
Megan Shaughnessy remembers the day her son came home from kindergarten “embarrassed” to show his artwork with his family.
As she watched his confidence in his artwork dissipate, she thought back to her childhood. when her art teacher “selected students” to be in an advanced class. Shaughnessy was not chosen.
But she didn’t give up.
Continue reading ‘Her Book Aims To Nurture "Lost" Imagination’
by | Jan 25, 2022 9:02 am | Comments (0)
Allison Hadley Photos
Romei.
It was a cold Saturday afternoon when they started shuffling in, limbs held stiffly, in small groups. They pushed the door open to the Cellar on Treadwell. There was no escape. That’s right: it was Drawn of the Dead night for “It’s Alive,” a new art show running at the Hamden music club through the end of the month that’s fit for guys and ghouls.
by | Jan 14, 2022 2:06 pm | Comments (7)
Augustine in his Hillhouse art classroom.
Elm City Comics
A masked superhero has walked the halls of Hillhouse High School for almost a year, mostly in secret.
by | Jan 12, 2022 11:00 am | Comments (0)
Bloom, Kane, Crowley, and Friedman.
“Convergence” — the show at City Gallery running now through Jan. 30, and featuring the work of Meg Bloom, Phyllis Crowley, Roberta Friedman, and Kathy Kane — celebrates not only the ways in which the four artists have continued to make art during the pandemic, but how the City Gallery artists have maintained the bonds of their community even while being, once again, forced apart by Covid-19.
by | Jan 10, 2022 9:07 am | Comments (0)
Ana Henriques’s Forest I partakes of recognizable natural shapes — spreading tree branches, a mirrored sun, the ripples of water and hills — without being beholden to them. There’s a push toward the abstract that sets the shapes and colors free from the viewer giving it the easy designation of a forest scene. She makes us see those shapes and colors again, as if we’re seeing them for the first time. Just as important in the context of “Reflections,” the new group show running now at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through Feb. 6, if viewers look closely in the glass that frames the work, they can see the works of Mark St. Mary and Liz Antle O’Donnell — the other two artists in the show — reflected in the glass.
by | Jan 2, 2022 10:53 am | Comments (2)
Maya McFadden Photo
Honda Smith, Nijaya Brown, Barbara Hawke-Lopez, Rhieanna Rubertone, Nashali Nieves, and Rebecca LeQuire by new mural at spruced-up Shack.
With the help of four high school students who found a fun way to spend part of their Christmas break, the late New Haven rapper known as Stēzo has been brought back to life on his home turf of West Rock/West Hills.
by | Dec 23, 2021 11:15 am | Comments (2)
Maya McFadden Photo
Student celebrate new donated gifts.
Kindergarteners at Wexler-Grant School got a colorful donation Wednesday from an 11-year Danbury artist.
Continue reading ‘Soror Santa's Surprise Sparks Early Holiday Joy At Wexler-Grant’
by | Dec 22, 2021 3:58 pm | Comments (19)
Mark Massaro's design for a new statue in Wooster Square Park.
Is the art too saccharine? Obsolete on arrival?
Does it tell only an Italian story and not one that reflects the diversity of Wooster Square today?
Has the community not truly been engaged in the process?
And where in the original charge to artists a year ago was there permission to pave over more than a thousand square feet of precious green space?
Continue reading ‘Neighbors Pillory Design For Columbus Statue Replacement’
by | Dec 17, 2021 1:15 pm | Comments (2)
A new 50-year retrospective exhibit displays works by artist Bruce Oren (below), including the above sculpture of Moses.
Artist Bruce Oren renders the face of Moses in fine detail in marble, from the wrinkles worn into his face to the weight of his eyelids. He conveys the heaviness of the tablets on his shoulders by the angle of his elbow, the definition of the muscles. But as we move away from Moses’s face, the details begin to grow coarser, until we see the edge of the block that Moses came from.
The figure emerges from the marble, but Oren leaves room for the stone to have its say, too. We get to see not just the finished figure, but the path Oren took to get there.
by | Dec 10, 2021 10:45 am | Comments (0)
The crisp, heightened color and the vertical symmetry immediately draw the eye to Penrhyn Cook’s photos, Mexican Tub and VW at Sunrise, side by side on the wall at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville. They’re just normal manmade objects, and in the world there are many like them, but Cook’s treatment of them imbues them with substance, meaning — even dignity.
by | Dec 9, 2021 9:10 am | Comments (0)
A darkened room filled with luminous yet ruinous shapes. A wavering eye at the top of a crooked tower, never blinking but always bleary. One wall has been transformed into a pale blue screen. The words “I wouldn’t do this to you if you didn’t deserve it” are typed out in a primitive font. Across the room is a chair with the word “guilty” projected onto it; on the wall behind it, a more expansive message: “Everybody’s guilty of something.”
Continue reading ‘Ely Center Exhibit Is A Light In The Dark’
by | Dec 8, 2021 10:02 am | Comments (0)
Susan Newbold
Island Magic
The vivid colors make the title of Susan Newbold’s piece — Island Magic — appropriate enough, but Newbold’s treatment of the subject moves the image well beyond a travel postcard. There’s enough information in the texture of the painting that, with a small imaginative leap, the viewer can be on that coastline, feel the grit of the sand, the roughness of the rocks, the cool water. It’s not just a picture of a place; it’s a record of Newbold’s experience of being there.
by | Dec 6, 2021 1:23 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Stewart and Taylor.
The Wandering, an event organized by artists Anika Stewart and Elizabeth LaCroix Taylor, turned Bregamos Community Theater into an arts bazaar, music venue, and burlesque stage all at once on Saturday night.