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Brian Slattery |
May 18, 2021 8:29 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Giant birds in flight. Trees swaying in a light breeze. A child dancing in a dinosaur costume. A fading mural restored. They’re part of Here’s Another Story, a project that uses a virtual-reality phone app to allow people to walk the streets of Ninth Square and, through their phone screens, watch the public art there bloom into festive, fun, and meaningful animation.
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Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2021 8:42 am
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Vincent Calenzo
Bike.
The boy in Vincent Calenzo’s Bike wears an expression of wariness and awe. Before him stands a masterpiece — of engineering, sound, and speed. Not everyone is into motorcycles; most of us don’t know enough about them to appreciate them. But the way Calenzo, through his technique, renders the bike, we get to see it through his and the boy’s eyes. We get to feel some of its power.
In this way, Calenzo shows how, even in the age of easily manipulated digital photography, painting still has a lot to say, and let us see the present day in new ways.
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Brian Slattery |
May 10, 2021 9:01 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Thabisa’s band, augmented by members of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, was in the full flower of the music it was making. Thabisa herself took a moment to pause in her singing and instead turn and dance intricate, powerful steps on the Edgewood Park stage set up for ArtWalk.
The people on the ground in front of her followed suit.
Friday night’s concert, uniting two institutions of New Haven’s music scene, kicked off the annual ArtWalk fest in Westville. It set the mood for Saturday’s events, a celebration of the ability of people to gather again, as the weather warmed, vaccinations continue, and masks were ubiquitous.
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Brian Slattery |
May 7, 2021 10:17 am
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Ransome
Coming Out.
Ransome’s Coming Out manages to be comforting and confounding at the same time. The artist’s use and rendition of a quilt makes it feel like safety.
But the men under the quilt don’t feel safe.
“It’s a painting about two gay slaves who were lovers,” said curator Howard el-Yasin, “which in itself speaks to rupture. One is looking at the arrows and the street, the other at the gallery. One is calling, and one is silent.”
Ransome’s painting tells a more complicated story of slavery and Blackness than one we might usually see in public, and it’s part of “Legacy and Rupture,” the show running at City Galley on Upper State St. through May 30. Curated by interdisciplinary artist and educator Howard el-Yasin, in addition to Ransome, it features artists Nathaniel Donnett, Sika Foyer, Merik Goma, James Montford, Kamar Thomas, and Marisa Williamson.
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Sophie Sonnenfeld |
May 1, 2021 11:15 pm
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Sophie Sonnenfeld Photo
“Yale: Respect New Haven” painting in front of Yale President Salovey’s Office.
Armed with paint, roughly 150 organizers, union members, and New Haveners Saturday gathered to call on Yale to “pay their fair share” for tax-exempt properties and honor a local hiring commitment.
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Maya McFadden |
Apr 26, 2021 8:52 am
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Maya McFadden Photos
Rae’gean Oakley with park’s new barrels.
Technically, the annual festival was canceled. Crowds still turned out for the second straight weekend to enjoy Wooster Square Park’s cherry blossoms — with the addition of a year-round tribute to their brilliance.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 21, 2021 9:06 am
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It’s a soft, gentle sculpture, of a woman sitting next to a body of water. But the context in which that woman sits — an Afro pick — is nearly as old as civilization itself.
For artist Yvonne Shortt, it’s a connection to her personal history and to her African heritage. It’s also a way for her to connect with the struggles of other ethnicities — and reach out to everyone.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 20, 2021 8:44 am
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A drunk monk. A woman plagued by ghosts from the past. And a Sleeping Beauty much more in charge of her own story than the traditional fairy tale let on. These were a few of many ideas and arresting images swarming around the films of Kihachirō Kawamoto, a Japanese animator of puppet maker who was the subject of the latest installment of the New Haven Free Public Library’s “Animation Celebration,” hosted by Library Technical Assistant Haley Grunloh.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 19, 2021 10:00 am
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Maps of the United States in a patchwork of colors. A graph like a coiled spring. A diagram like a bullseye, creased with bright spikes. Hanging on the walls of Artspace’s gallery, they can read immediately as abstract art. They are, in fact, a series of data visualizations — charts, graphs, geographic and population information — that famed Black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois and a team of researchers created to convey some of the realities of the Black experience in America over 100 years ago.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 16, 2021 9:14 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
The works in “Portals and Memories” — up now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through April 25 — are, on one level, simply the latest series of paintings by artist Joyce Greenfield, done in the past two-and-a-half months. On another level, however, they represent a breakthrough, for Greenfield, to a new way of making art.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 15, 2021 8:47 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
The Nympho and Other Maniacs. The Sun Is My Undoing. I Who Should Command All.
All three are book titles from the far-flung collection of the Institute Library on Chapel Street, and all three catch the eye through the sheer absurdity of their language.
In another part of the collection, the books Oil for the Lamps of China and The Ghost Book draw the gaze by virtue of their dazzling cover art. And then there are books like Never Fire First and Raising Demons that manage to do both.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 13, 2021 8:27 am
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Chris Ferguson
Blue Lights at Night.
The profile of the Q Bridge is unmistakable to anyone who lives in New Haven, but it rarely gets the treatment painter Chris Ferguson gives it. Under his eye and brush, the bridge feels hazy and gauzy, a distant mirage. Ferguson’s choice to highlight marsh and beach in the foreground adds to the sense of the bridge as an object to find beauty in. His generous eye, warm and inviting, is a thread that runs through all his work in “Looking Up!” a show he shares with artist Amanda Duchen at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville, running now through May 9.
Winfred Rembert at work in his Newhall Street home.
WInfred Rembert
“Cotton Field Rows,” 2009.
Winfred Rembert, a nationally renowned artist who depicted vivid scenes of Southern cotton fields and chain gangs and juke joints, died Wednesday inside the Newhall Street home where he carved his leather masterpieces.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 22, 2021 9:04 am
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Kane with Momi.
Kimono: many people are familiar with it as an article of traditional Japanese clothing. But as artist Kathy Kane points out, it’s also “such a beautiful word.” The juxtaposition is apt. In conjuring up the practical and concrete with the aesthetic and the abstract, Kane has made a series of pieces that allow her to express her most recent ideas as a thoroughly abstract painter, while marrying it to a familiar form.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 18, 2021 9:53 am
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In April last year, Tank and the Bangas headlined at College Street Music Hall, supported by local favorites Phat A$tronaut, Jelani Sei, and Nikita. The next week, Ian Sweet anchored a show at Cafe Nine, with Jay Som, Audio Jane, and Daniprobably opening. The next month, Farewood, Violent Mae, Passing Strange, and Sarah Golley shared a bill at Best Video.
We know that none of these shows happened. But since September, local musician Dan Deutsch has constructed a kind of alternate reality in which they did.
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Julia Gill |
Mar 17, 2021 10:04 am
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Julia Gill Photo
Cunningham and Keen.
Standing in her Erector Square studio on a recent afternoon, New Haven-based artist Jan Cunningham recalled a bodily reaction to a series of charcoal drawings she had made.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 16, 2021 9:33 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
On Friday evening, Elena Augusewicz, Peter Cunningham, Jared Emerling, Jessica Larkin-Wells, Conor Perreault, and Charli Taylor — a.k.a. six of the Never Ending Books Collective — met in the storefront at 810 State St. They talked about how the beloved bookstore, music spot, and community space, which announced it was ending its decades-long run in December, may turn out not to be ending after all.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 12, 2021 10:50 am
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Deborah Ramsay
A Week in Times
Deborah Ramsey’s A Week in Times appears at first like an exercise in stillness. Pale colors, simple geometric shapes, an attention to texture. But the lines written in faint pencil across the bottom of each page tell a different story. “A new pier on Sunday in St. Petersburg, Fla. The state has one of the nation’s worst outbreaks,” reads one. “Many schools are unequipped to ventilate spaces properly,” reads another. A third pivots: “Portland, Ore. has had 50 consecutive days of protests.” A fourth: “Police officials say there were ‘isolated cases’ of inappropriate force. But 64 videos show seemingly unwarranted attacks.” Each line is followed by a date from last year — a line pulled from that day’s headlines.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 3, 2021 10:49 am
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Pages from journals are frozen in midair, as if caught in a photograph of them flying away in a windstorm. A figure emerges from a book, a look of concern on her face. A mirror captures the skyline of a city. They’re all part of a larger show and puppet theater piece called Sueños, by artist Anatar Marmol-Gagné, running in the project room at Artspace through March 20. Together, the elements combine wonder and gritty, emotional realism to tell a story about family chaos and the wrenching effects of immigration that make the political deeply personal.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 19, 2021 10:22 am
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Leigh Busby Photos
The figures in the gallery space at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street stand tall and proud, majestic and welcoming. They draw you toward the gallery window. Once there, though, there is more to see. There is the way the figures hearken back to Africa. A line of bricks, each embossed with the word “freedom.”
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Julia Gill |
Feb 18, 2021 11:09 am
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Jason Farago and Linda Friedlaender, head of education at the Yale Center for British Art.
Are people still interested in reading about art?
The rise of Instagram and demise of print publications might suggest that the days of the learned art reader are behind us. No need to subscribe to a high-brow magazine when that #artsy selfie your friend took at MoMA conveys everything you need to know about the latest Jackson Pollock exhibition, right?
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 12, 2021 11:24 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Artist Meg Bloom looked over the pieces in “Buried in the Bones,” her new show at City Gallery on Upper State Street, running now through Feb. 28. “I love rotted trees and dead flowers,” she said. “I’m always interested in that, things decaying and falling apart, but with a touch of life in there.” If it sounds like she’s responding to current events, she is. But it’s also a statement about the way the New Haven-based artist has been doing art for decades.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 9, 2021 11:01 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Ty Scurry.
“I have so much stuff planned for this place, and everybody’s like, ‘you’re crazy, you’re only 19 — how are you going to get all this done?”
So Ty Scurry — actor, singer, Wilbur Cross graduate, and theater director at Hillhouse High School — said with a humble chuckle about assuming ownership of Family Music Center in Hamden, which he hopes to not only rebuild out of its Covid-19 shutdown, but expand into a community-based center for students of the visual and performing arts.
