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Brian Slattery |
Feb 27, 2020 3:26 pm
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(4)
Courtesy New Haven Museum
Guitar found in the former clock factory on Hamilton Street.
Clocks. The Sex Ball. A punk club, then an R&B club. An indoor skate park. The state’s largest LGBTQ club.
All of these are part of the past of the old New Haven Clock Company building on Hamilton Street.
In the present day, that factory complex is being cleaned up in preparation for development into housing, some of which is to include housing for artists. The reason for that concept — and the deeper history of artistic life in New Haven — is brought to sparkling, fascinating life in “Factory,” an exhibit that celebrated its opening on Friday and will run at the New Haven Museum on Whitney Avenue until Aug. 29.
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Allan Appel |
Feb 25, 2020 9:50 pm
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(1)
Laura Glesby Photo
Shhhh! Last July 4’s fireworks atop East Rock.
“Quiet” fireworks for this July 4th?
They would certainly make the birds stay in their nests and please other animals and small children. But would it add up to a good ole Independence Day bash?
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 25, 2020 1:02 pm
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(2)
Elida Paiz Pineda took her shoes off and knelt next to them, then began banging on the floor with one of them. For the crowd assembled at 26 Mill St., it was like a judge calling a court to order.
Necks craned. An audience gathered, weaving its way among enormous sculptures of lint, bandannas, and plastic.
And as Pineda continued her performance piece, Rabia Mistica, Rabia Eterna, and more people came to take it in, it brought home that this exhibit’s opening day had created a real sense of community.
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Maya McFadden |
Feb 21, 2020 8:57 am
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(6)
Maya McFadden Photo
WEB Community Management Team Chair Nadine Horton.
The Whalley, Edgewood, and Beaver Hills neighborhoods are in for a number of community engagement-driven initiatives including a literacy festival, a community mural, park trail repairs, and a community garden.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 21, 2020 8:54 am
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Marc Hors
You don’t need to know the backstory to feel the effect. The story is in the girl’s eyes, in her body language. She has too many emotions in her face for someone so young; she has seen too much already. She’s a refugee — maybe from Syria, maybe from Afghanistan — and photographer Marc Hors took her picture when he visited the camp in Athens where she was living at the time. Hors’s images from that camp are the center of “Finding Home: A Campaign for Sanctuary,” running now at the Institute Library on Chapel Street until March 14. The exhibit, curated by Stephen Kobasa, seeks to move the needle toward New Haven declaring itself officially a sanctuary city, by appealing to the head and the heart.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 19, 2020 1:15 pm
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Etcetera Collaborative
Arabesque.
True to its name, Arabesque dances. It’s a mixed media collage of human figures and architectural forms, pairing up, falling apart, melting in and out of one another. The piece reflects the method used to create it. It’s a piece arising from the work of the Etcetera Collaborative, a group of eight artists who created pieces together in the 1980s — and had a hand in creating City Gallery on Upper State Street.
Artspace can continue anchoring Ninth Square’s visual arts scene for another decade, thanks to a new lease it signed with the landlord of its first-floor 5,000-square-foot gallery space and offices at the corner of Orange and Crown Streets.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 18, 2020 11:14 am
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Gar Waterman
Proboscoid from the Planet Rhinoplast.
Gar Waterman may have called the piece Proboscoid from the Planet Rhinoplast, in honor of a certain nasal prominence that emerges from the work. But the piece is far from extraterrestrial. Waterman sourced it from Fair Haven, and from New Haven’s own long industrial history.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 13, 2020 12:57 pm
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Daniel Eugene
The lines are so close together and so meticulously drawn that they buzz by proximity to one another. The effect is disorienting, like an optical illusion, a trick, a puzzle. It gets that much more intense when you see that New Haven-based artist Daniel Eugene’s drawings can be interpreted as a maze — a series of patterns that invite you to take a closer look, and slowly but surely, have your vision rearranged just a little.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 12, 2020 1:12 pm
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The music helps create the atmosphere of floating, but the banners do the trick. Never mind that one of the windows leads to the street. With the tapestries hung in front of one wall and a stripe of color on the wall opposite them, it’s possible to think of yourself in a submarine — albeit a microscopic one, because the view outside is of plankton.
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Allan Appel |
Feb 5, 2020 10:33 pm
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(2)
Allan Appel Photo
With results far clearer than those partially reported in Iowa, residents on the east side of town completed a months’ long process and used a version of ranked choice voting to approve a wide range of projects to improve the Quinnipiac Meadows neighborhood.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 4, 2020 1:21 pm
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Abigail Wilcox
The Inner You.
Abigail Wilcox’s The Inner You is part anatomical drawing, part phantasmagoria. It somehow illustrates both the physical nature of the gray matter of the brain and the qualities of the uncountable thoughts inside it. Those thoughts could encompass just about anything: sharp cityscapes, bubbles in churned water, blue guitars, a dinosaur.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 3, 2020 1:02 pm
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Jon Kessler
It Takes a Global Village Idiot.
People walking by Artspace since December have been treated to It Takes a Global Village Idiot, the chaotic kinetic sculpture by Jon Kessler that serves as a gateway to the rest of Strange Loops, the exhibit running at Artspace through Feb. 29. Curated by Johannes DeYoung and Federico Solmi, the exhibit seeks to explore “the social and psychological impacts of rapid technological change, and the consequential ways in which contemporary notions of self might be transforming.” The exhibit itself just might prove to be as distracting as a constantly pinging cell phone — and that’s part of the point.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 30, 2020 12:50 pm
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Matthew Best
Shirley Temple Tornado.
The stripes of color Matthew Best paints are bold, yet a little haggard. It reads like quick work done by someone who knows what they’re doing. That impression continues when you see, on the walls of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street, that it isn’t alone.
Best has created a series of abstract paintings centered around the same formal themes, yet each with variations
“Matthew Best uses the painting process as a way to cope with the sheer uncertainty of life, his improvisational abstract works recording mental shifts and personal growth, move by move,” an accompanying note reads. It makes sense, and is an apt introduction to “The Daily,” a 16-person exhibition running until Feb. 16 that shows how artists can build a statement one day at a time.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 28, 2020 1:12 pm
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Kwok-hin Tang
Don’t Blame The Blossom.
A child running across a tiled plaza. The sounds of martial arts movies. The simple geography of a clock in a train station, but upside-down, so that would-be passengers scurry across the ceiling. Two men perched unaccountably high on a scaffold.
These are all fragments of life captured in “Hong Kong In Poor Images,” an art exhibit at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art — running now until Feb. 16 — that gives New Haveners a look at the teeming, changing city that lets us go deeper than the global city’s recent headlines.
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E.A. Gordon |
Jan 23, 2020 1:18 pm
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Hannah Brown
Design and binding for Lines, by William Wordsworth.
“Having books bound signifies respect for the book; it indicates that people not only love to read, but they view it an important occupation.” That’s Dostoyevsky, who would know; he had been exiled to Siberia for discussing and circulating banned books. The many ways that books can be clothed, hidden, decorated, and disguised form the spine of “Contemporary Designer Bookbindings from the Collection of Neale and Margaret Albert,” the bookbinding show now at the Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street through March 29.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 14, 2020 1:13 pm
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William Frucht
Rhinoceros House 1.
A dirty bowl next to a post covered in peeling paint. Natural forms, of leaves or coral, ready to float into space. Heaving waves under heavy winds. These three distinct artistic viewpoints are part of the same exhibit at City Gallery on upper State Street until Jan. 26.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 13, 2020 1:25 pm
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Marjorie Wolfe
In the lens of Marjorie Wolfe‘s camera, the wind roils air and water together, driving the clouds through the sky and whipping up peaked waves into foamy surf. Her image captures the moment forever. But if she’d come back the next day — or even a few hours before or after — maybe it wouldn’t be there at all.
NXTHVN Executive Director Nico Wheadon with Arts Council Executive Director Daniel Fitzmaurice outside commission meeting.
The founders of NXTHVN intend the arts community under construction in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood to be so public-facing that its art gallery will literally be transparent.
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Maya McFadden |
Jan 1, 2020 11:30 am
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Maya McFadden Photo
“iMatter” families alongside new nine-foot towers.
As darkness fell, three nine-foot tall towers lit up with the faces of 36 young people at the traffic-triangle intersection of Dixwell Avenue and Munson and Orchard Streets.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 18, 2019 12:59 pm
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Martha Willette Lewis
It’s a piece of paper, crumpled in a motion that likely didn’t take more than a couple seconds. But context is everything. There’s the coloration that highlights the form the paper took, letting us see the wrinkles and the grooves. And then there’s the jar. If this paper were on the floor, we might think it was pretty, but also a failed attempt, something the artist threw away on the road to something better. The jar makes the paper seem almost like it’s floating in formaldehyde. It’s something to be preserved, examined, part of an ongoing science experiment.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 17, 2019 12:43 pm
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Amanda Duchen
The Menagerie.
Amanda Duchen’s aptly-named artwork, The Menagerie, is alive with energy, comical and dramatic. It’s possible to imagine her creature creations all in riotous conversation with one another. Or maybe they’re individual frames in a reel of film. The only problem: One of the frames is missing, and the space is marked “sold” with a red sticker. There’s another empty space in the grid nearby, marked with another red sticker that reads “I’ve been adopted!” It’s an acute reminder that Kehler Liddell Gallery’s last group show of the year, “Deck the Walls,” is also a sale. The art looks great on the walls, but in time for the holidays, you also get to take it with you.
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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 16, 2019 12:52 pm
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Karen Ponzio Photos
AJ Keirans
Reverse Centaur, Mango Stein, and Wail of the Banshee have three things in common: First, they are all names of locally brewed beers. Second, each beer has a label designed by a Connecticut artist. And third, each of them are now pieces of art hanging on the walls of Three Sheets in New Haven as part of the December edition of their monthly Art in the Back, Music in the Front series. This installment, which opened on Saturday, features label artists who have also been guests on the 16 Oz. Canvas podcast created and hosted by AJ Keirans.
