by | Oct 26, 2020 9:52 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
Zacatelco.
A team of Fair Haven-based artists brought some color — and some comfort — to the Veterinary Wellness Center on State Street, with the addition of outdoor seating for the center’s waiting area that doubles as public art.
by | Oct 23, 2020 10:25 am | Comments (0)
On Thursday night artist Margaret Roleke smiled from her home in her garage studio, at an audience of 20 who had gathered virtually to hear her talk about her art practice and her show at Creative Arts Workshop — the first installment of CAW’s “Made Visible” series.
“I didn’t set out to be an activist artist,” she said. “I was creating work just to make people think.”
by | Oct 21, 2020 10:42 am | Comments (0)
Joyce Greenfield
Dystopian Sunflower I-III, Dystopian Lily.
The plants in Joyce Greenfield’s paintings are exquisitely rendered, but the paintings are more than just still-life studies. Something’s afoot in the composition. It’s a little eerie, maybe a little unsettling, and at the same time, the plants look tired. The titles of the paintings — Dystopian Sunflower, Dystopian Lily — offer a clue. The mood isn’t in the subject, but in the mind of the painter. If they weren’t painted during the pandemic, they might as well have been. They reflect the exhaustion many feel. And at the same time, they also reflect a dogged persistence — not only flowers growing in drought, but painters continuing to paint — that emerges as the theme of City Gallery’s contribution to City Wide Open Studios this year, running now in the gallery’s space on Upper State Street through Nov. 1.
by | Oct 20, 2020 12:25 pm | Comments (4)
Laura Glesby Photos
Final dots filled in; finished product outside Brick Oven Pizza (below).
Redbootsali leaned in to paint his 34,000th black dot (give or take a few hundred) on an Elm Street pizzeria wall — and brought the late boxing great Muhammad Ali to life among newly-forged neighborhood friends.
by | Oct 16, 2020 9:24 am | Comments (2)
Covid-19 has killed, for now, the public’s return to the Yale University Art Gallery.
by | Oct 13, 2020 10:27 am | Comments (12)
Raffael DiLauro: Half a century later, still finding the joy.
Group W Bench, the venerable Chapel Street head shop, art gallery, and psychedelic boutique that has operated continually in New Haven for 53 years, is in negotiations to be sold.
It’s not because of Covid-19. It’s not because the rent is too high. Health complications are part of the equation, but owner Raffael DiLauro has been contemplating the move for a long time.
by | Oct 12, 2020 9:35 am | Comments (1)
Melanie Crean
If Justice Is A Woman.
The group stands on the steps of the courtyard. It means something that the women are occupying that space. It also means something that they’re not inside. Each of them exudes strength and resilience on her own. Bound together, their power seems to multiply. Melanie Crean’s If Justice Is A Woman is the final commission for Artspace’s “Revolution On Trial,” an exhibit running until Oct. 17 examining the Black Panther trials and May Day protests in 1970. Crean’s photograph received an unveiling on Friday at Artspace on Orange and Crown. That reception was another chance to revisit the legacy of the trials and protests, which continues to shape the city to this day.
by | Oct 9, 2020 9:30 am | Comments (1)
Faces and butterflies, shapes and colors. Messages and spirals, dresses and sculptures. The USPS Project, running at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street through Nov. 15, is the riotous result of hundreds of collaborations for a cause.
by | Oct 8, 2020 11:19 am | Comments (0)
Ted Littleford
Reinaldo Goeyenechea/ La Voz Hispana
by | Oct 8, 2020 8:43 am | Comments (1)
Cindy Tower
Protest Pile.
There’s a protest in the backyard of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Cindy Tower’s piece is so chaotic and colorful that you can almost hear it. The seriousness of the subject is never in doubt, but the rendering is playful enough to be inviting — which is part of the point. The bench placed in front of the piece isn’t just for contemplation; on the bench are art supplies that let observers make and add their own signs, their own voices, so that the piece grows over time.
by | Oct 7, 2020 9:07 am | Comments (1)
Amira Brown
I’m Lost, Red Directions.
The style of the painting could be celebratory or frantic. Some of the exclamations painted onto the canvas — “dangit,” “crap,” “oh poop!” — could be seen as jokes. But there is something truly piteous about the posture of the figure in the middle. “I’m lost,” the words above her read, and suddenly we’re in the mind of a child who has lost her way, buffeted by the world. That disorienting, somewhat scary sense we all had as children has its echoes in the current state of the world, as the news doesn’t look good and we don’t know what’s coming next.
by | Oct 4, 2020 8:17 pm | Comments (4)
Contributed Photo
A second Black Lives Matter street mural drew in yet another large crowd of New Haveners from all over to help bring the message to life, this time on Temple Street.
Continue reading ‘Temple Street Painted “Black Lives Matter”’
by | Oct 2, 2020 10:55 am | Comments (0)
Lori Petchers
Garden Party 8.
The arms reach up from the foliage in a surreal way that seems both playful and unsettling. The disembodied nipples they may be throwing around seem almost like eyes, ready to blink. As the title of the piece — Garden Party 8 — by artist Lori Petchers suggests, it’s supposed to be fun. But it goes deeper than that, too. Most of all, it feels like a new discovery, which is what City Wide Open Studios is all about.
Continue reading ‘Artspace Unveils Virtual City Wide Open Studios’
by | Sep 30, 2020 9:34 am | Comments (4)
Y&R New York
Feminist Letters Typeface.
The message is clear enough. It’s the letters themselves that bear a closer look, because it turns out the T is built around the shape of a uterus, the P around a raised fist, the S around a dollar bill, the E around a ballot. The letters appear to comment on what they’re spelling; the message is to smash the patriarchy, but it’s the letters that suggest what’s needed to make it happen.
by | Sep 28, 2020 3:24 pm | Comments (3)
Courtney Luciana photos
Colorful fish, tadpoles, and other marine life took over the intersection of Quinnipiac Avenue and Hemingway Street Saturday, thanks to 30 volunteers who painted an environmental awareness project that also aimed to calm traffic.
by | Sep 27, 2020 9:32 am | Comments (10)
Maya McFadden Photo
After seven years of planning, New Haven Saturday unveiled a 700-pound bronze monument to one of the seminal and no-longer forgotten figures of the city’s Black history, William Lanson.
by | Sep 25, 2020 9:20 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
The bear’s mouth was agape, wide enough to snap up two people. Its head, neck, and shoulders were made of scrap. But its eye was tenderly rendered, imbuing the bear with surprising emotion. It didn’t seem like it was hunting; maybe it was even crying. The emotion was all the more powerful for the bear’s location, in a building amid the former Cedar Hill Rail Yard straddling the New Haven and North Haven lines, and just off the Tidal Marsh Trail, which began in North Haven.
The bear was the work of New Haven-based artist M.J. DeAngelo. Finding it took three tries, in a journey that felt like a trip into both the past and the future.
by | Sep 24, 2020 4:41 pm | Comments (4)
Ram Vishwanathan Photo
Aili Maimaiti at work outside Brick Oven Pizza.
Dot by dot — by tens of thousands of dots — a public portrait of the late boxing champion Muhammad Ali is coming into focus at the corner of Howe and Elm, at the hand of a warehouse worker looking to take the art world by storm.
Continue reading ‘On Dwight Corner, Aili Brings Ali Into Focus’
by | Sep 21, 2020 9:04 am | Comments (3)
Brian Slattery Photos
A crowd descended on Bassett Street in Newhallville, ready with brushes, rollers, and cans and cans of paint. They were there to make art that delivered a simple, powerful message — Black lives matter — by spelling it out on the street for all to see.
by | Sep 16, 2020 3:04 pm | Comments (2)
Thomas Breen / NHFPL images
Clockwise from top left: City arts director Adriane Jefferson, Stetson Librarian Diane Brown, and the public library notice for Dana King’s and Lisa Dent’s talk about William Lanson.
When young Black New Haveners walk by the new statue of William “King” Lanson, Dana King hopes they think to themselves, “That looks like me.”
Continue reading ‘“Gov” Sculptor Urges Kids To Claim History’
by | Sep 16, 2020 10:23 am | Comments (0)
Judy Atlas
Southwest Memories 2, Bryce.
On one side of the gallery, the shapes are recognizable as landscape, and desert landscape at that. The rocks are rusty colors, the sun brightening them where the light touches them. The sky is a bright blue. On the other side of the gallery, the shapes are simpler, more abstract, the colors more varied. Following the paintings from left to right across the gallery, you can trace where the artist, Judy Atlas, began — and where she ended up — in City Gallery’s latest exhibit, “The Landscape Real and Imagined,” running now through Sept. 27.
by | Sep 15, 2020 10:38 am | Comments (0)
Sven Martson
Street Food Vendor, Juliaca, Peru; Man in Restaurant Window, New Haven CT; Three Men in a Truck, Havana, Cuba; Antique Car Show, Torrington, CT.
In one photograph, a man lounges against a food cart; in an adjacent picture, a man rests at a counter. In one photograph, three men sit in an antique car; in another, the car is similar, but now there’s no one in it, though there is a man standing next to it. Maybe one can detect a hint of pride in his stance.
The pictures are separated by time and distance. The street food vendor is in Peru, the man at the counter in New Haven. The men in the truck are in Havana, the man standing in front of the car in Torrington. But they are unified by form — first, by the photographer’s eye, and second, by the echoes of one picture in another, whether it’s the bend of an elbow or the shape of the car’s hood.
Continue reading ‘Photographs Find The Ways The World Rhymes’
by | Sep 10, 2020 10:11 am | Comments (1)
Activist Angela Davis told activist Ericka Huggins that she remembered when they met, in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She met Huggins’s husband John when Davis joined the Black Panthers. She remembered when John was murdered. She had made sure that Huggins’s young daughter was in good hands when Huggins was arrested, and she was there when Huggins was released.
The connection between the two women was deep and strong. Both had been Black Panthers. Both had spent time in jail. And both had spent the past decades continuing to work for social justice.
On Wednesday night, in a Zoom talk hosted by Artspace — and filled to capacity — as part of its programming for “Revolution on Trial,” Davis and Huggins connected again, to talk about education.
Continue reading ‘Artspace Talk Brings The Revolution To The Classroom’
by | Sep 7, 2020 10:02 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
At the intersection of Orange and Crown on Sunday afternoon, artist Michael DeAngelo (pictured) stood on a ladder, a can of spray paint in his hand, putting shading touching onto a blue figure that seemed to float across the black wall in front of him.
A few addresses north on Orange Street, artist Alexander Fournier was on a ladder of his own, sketching out the ghosts of skyscrapers on a blank white wall in front of Ninth Square Market.
Around the corner on Center, Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran was putting down the linework for an intricate mural that turned the city into a blueprint and back again.
by | Sep 2, 2020 8:38 am | Comments (6)
On a sunny day, the trees above the frames on the wall on Wooster Street dapple the art those frames contain. For the latest installment of Studio Duda’s outside art gallery — begun in May as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic — this interaction with nature is particularly apt.
Continue reading ‘Environmental Art Comes To Wooster Street’