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Brian Slattery |
Nov 8, 2021 9:04 am
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Leigh Busby Photo
The ceremony for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 41st annual arts awards returned to being an in-person event on Friday, as people gathered at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University to honor several of New Haven’s artist educators: Miguel Gaspar Benitez, James and Tia Russell Brockington, Allen “Dooley‑O” Jackson, Linda Lindroth, Patrick Smith, and Bill Brown and Sally Hill.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2021 7:54 am
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Hiroshi’s Chair.
It’s a painting of a room, rendered with fidelity, but suffused with light and sadness. Even without knowing who Hiroshi is, there is a sense of loneliness to the scene, though it’s not abject; there’s comfort there, too. It turns out that Hiroshi is a close relative of the painter, Steven DiGiovanni, and the family lost Hiroshi to Covid-19. The story brings into focus what’s in the painting already. In the way DiGiovanni depicts the room, and especially the chair, well-worn, well-loved, we feel it all, both Hiroshi’s absence and his presence.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 1, 2021 9:24 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Matos at her new downtown haunt.
A customer walked into Kiara Matos’s new storefront ceramics studio and gallery on Orange Street looking to buy two matching mugs she had seen earlier on the shelf. The problem: In between visits, another customer had come in and already bought one of them.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 27, 2021 9:12 am
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On one level, Christian Curiel’s painting of the woman by the water is realistic; she’s sitting in a natural position, not like she’s posing for a picture, but like she’s just gotten out of the water. But ritual soaks the atmosphere around her, in the way her face is painted, the flowers in her hair, the candles floating on the water. Then there are the shapes in the air around her that have no place in a realistic painting, as if Curiel has made visual the intangible spiritual act that has just taken place. In the end, though, you might say the key to the whole painting is the cinderblock at her feet. It looks at first like it’s resting in the shallows, but the woman’s feet suggest the water’s deeper than that. Is the cinderblock floating in the water? Are all the rocks floating as well?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 25, 2021 8:02 am
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Roderick Topping photos
New Haven-based photographer Roderick Topping has been documenting the Elm City throughout the pandemic and before. That work is now being celebrated with a new exhibition at the New Haven Museum called “Strange Times” that, in the first week of its opening, garnered media attention from WTNH, the New Haven Register, and the Yale Daily News. What does it mean that Topping’s photos — which he’s been posting on social media as he takes them — have been collected, and now resonate so strongly?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 21, 2021 7:59 am
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Emily Herberich
Jacob’s Ladder.
The shape of a staircase crosses Jacob’s Ladder, but it offers only the suggestion of a structure. Which planes are the steps and which are the risers? The ghostly shapes using the staircase only confound the reading of the physical space, as they each follow the stairs according to their own rules, their own sense of gravity. Some appear to be using the opposite sides of the planks compared to other figures. The smoke rising from a candle is almost funny, as it moves up for neither the viewer nor the being holding the candle. What’s going on?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 20, 2021 10:23 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Minto.
At Artspace on Monday, as part of the Open Source Festival, artist Allison Minto was on hand to continue her deep dive into New Haven’s Black community, helping people preserve their own familial past while marking a moment of time in the present.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2021 8:48 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
It was quieter than in years past, for the obvious Covid-19-related reasons. The hallways of Erector Square weren’t quite so jammed, the conversations were a little more subdued.
But still, Citywide Open Studios — part of Artspace’s rebranded Open Source Festival — happened this past weekend: Artists threw open the doors of their studios, and on Saturday and Sunday people moved from spot to spot in Erector Square’s warren-like maze of hallways, visiting old friends, making fresh acquaintances, and in many cases getting the first chance since the pandemic began to see the art both longtime and new tenants of the Peck Street complex had been making since before the pandemic began.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 13, 2021 7:56 am
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John T. Hill Photos
The image — to many New Haveners, an iconic one — is so vivid it seems like you can almost hear it, a murmur of voices, maybe a cacophony. Maybe there’s a speaker’s ragged voice echoing across the Green through a bullhorn. The two men standing nearby seem like they’re having a conversation. Is it worry or sarcasm on that man’s face, or something else? The one message that seems clear is coming from the young man’s face, front and center in the picture. His mouth is closed, but his eyes convey so much — even more than the little sign he has pinned to his shirt, that reads “Human Rights Not Violence.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 8, 2021 8:27 am
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The front gallery of Artspace, right on the corner of Orange and Crown, has been made into a living room of sorts. While the pieces are displayed on pedestals, as they might be in a museum, the warm tone of the walls beckons people in from the street. The carpet on the floor looks soft and inviting — even if it is made of shells. The pieces look old and worn, as if well-loved by users before being preserved. We can’t touch any of it, but we can be in the same space, with comfort and ease.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 5, 2021 8:30 am
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Wangechi Mutu
Sentinel I.
Wangechi Mutu’s Sentinel I stands guard over its space in the Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibit “On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale,” on view now through Jan. 9. But it’s not a passive sculpture; in a way that no photograph can do justice to it, the piece appears to shift its shape as you get closer or farther away, and as you walk around the piece. The human figure morphs into something more like an animal, or maybe a plant, or maybe something more elemental, like fire or smoke. In a hall full of powerful pieces, it seems to protect and at the same time draw strength from the art around it.
Estate of Winfred Rembert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Looking for My Mother, 2019; reprinted in new book about the art and life of Newhallville’s Winfred Rembert.
The railroad tracks stretched ahead for miles and miles. Winfred Rembert walked them all day and half the night, searching.
It would take a full 60 years for him to reach his destination, to find what he was truly looking for. He found it right before he died. And laid it out for the rest of us to see.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 1, 2021 8:28 am
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The gallery space is an exercise in sensory saturation. The walls are covered in vivid drawings, other images that hover somewhere between representation and schematics for circuitry. There is music to listen to, projections to follow. There’s a video game to play, like Doom but weirder and glitchier; it’s a game that loves but also mocks other games. And over in the corner is a glassed-in booth, a fortune-telling machine.
The only issue is that, as advertised, it dispenses bad advice. Hit a button and it dispenses tickets. When this reporter tried it, half of them said “give up.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2021 8:19 am
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The collage on the walls of the bookstore is a riot of changing shapes, swimming text, faces melting in and out of form, like water in a stream. Around the collage, a series of faces, offering expressions that are both confident and challenging. They invite you in, but with an edge. You may be tested. You may be challenged. But you will be accepted. On one of the paintings is a statement hovering somewhere between a mandate and a mantra: “Be heard.”
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Thomas Breen & Allan Appel |
Sep 23, 2021 3:03 pm
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Finding A Line - New Haven image
A prefab skate park, coming soon to downtown?
Paul Bass photo
Next stop, George Street: Roberts and Joseph at their previous project, Scantlebury Skate Park.
A prefabricated skate park is one big step closer to landing in downtown New Haven, as parking authority commissioners unanimously approved a plan to host the artistic-athletic installation atop a George Street surface lot.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2021 8:03 am
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Mary Lesser
Effects of Bad Government.
At first glance, Mary Lesser’s painting is playful, almost festive, the earth a bright orange, the characters frolicking on the slope a cotton-candy pink. But then it becomes clear that the house at the top of that hill is the White House, and the sky is black, and suddenly the whole painting inverts itself. Is it a frolic or a frenzy? A rampage? Once established, that sense of ominousness can’t be shaken — which is just how Lesser wants it.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 21, 2021 12:24 pm
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Photo Courtesy Ghislane Palumbo
A new photography exhibit in Westville weaves together the harrowing and the mundane, humor and hard work, to celebrate life, family, and the strength that can come from connections to the past.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 10, 2021 7:53 am
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Marjorie Wolfe
Pavilion.
It’s a seaside pavilion, framing an island off the Connecticut coast. But the way the image is cast, it doesn’t allow for simple idyll. It’s peaceful, sure, but also lonely. There’s the tranquility of isolation, but also a sense of insecurity. It is, said photographer Marjorie Gillette Wolfe, “evocative of what I went through” during the depths of the Covid-19 shutdown, as she found herself alone and outside in “protective spaces, but in another sense, not protective at all.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 8, 2021 7:42 am
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Emily Pruitt
Anti-Romantic.
The young woman at the center of Emily Pruitt’s Anti-Romantic looks as if she has a story to tell, but she’s not going to tell us what it is. The photograph itself conveys conflicting emotions — humor and defiance, playfulness and a little bit of dread. That, as it turns out, is the point.
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Ainissa Ramirez |
Aug 30, 2021 3:09 pm
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Kwadwo Adae at work on the Bouchet mural.
As you drive through New Haven on Henry Street, you will notice something at the intersection of Dixwell: Across from a derelict lot is a magnificent mural in progress on a wall that was once pink.
The image consists of cascaded portraits of a Black man rendered in gradients of color. The man is Edward Bouchet, a New Havener who was the first Black man to get a doctorate in the United States. Bouchet got his Ph.D. in physics from Yale in 1876. Yet, most children in the Elm City don’t know about him.
Muralist Kwadwo Adae hopes to change that one brushstroke at a time.
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Lindsey Mancini |
Aug 19, 2021 8:07 am
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Nathaneil Donnett Photos
From the sidewalk, you might see it from across the street. It looks like it’s supposed to be there, a bit of straightforward wooden fencing that might contain an electrical box or some other public utility.
But if you look closely, you might notice one slat of the fencing is painted a deep blue. If you cross the street, you’ll see the wood is patterned, and that the whole object stands as an entirely different kind of public utility.
Inside the fencing is an altar that celebrates music and the celestial world within — and for — a community
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 17, 2021 7:40 am
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The woman in the picture has a look of worry and determination on her face, but what really draws the gaze is the machine gun she’s pointing a little too close to the viewer’s direction. Even if we’re not the target, we might be in the line of fire. Then there’s the words spilling out all around her. Hustle hard, they say, and keep on with a narrative about just having to provide for a family, defend home. Who is she? Are the words her interior monologue? Or are they both part of a greater whole?
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 13, 2021 8:58 am
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Lisa Toto
Can’t Sleep.
Lisa Toto’s Can’t Sleep is a portrait of insomnia familiar to anyone who has suffered from it. Its multiple exposures detail what it can be like — first being in bed unable to lose consciousness, then getting up, because why not, you’re up anyway, then thinking better of it and getting back into bed. It also captures the way time seems to split in the depths of sleeplessness, the sense that every second is passing with unbearable slowness, and at the same time, the unpleasant realization, upon looking at the clock, that it’s far too late to get a good night’s sleep. The subject is rendered more poignant by its sense of privacy. Should we even be looking? But that’s also the moment that we connect with the subject, through shared understanding.
