This Story Is Hers
by | Aug 16, 2019 12:56 pm | Comments (6)
There once was a boy named Abdul. He loved to read books.
He noticed that he almost never saw someone who looked like him in those books.
Visual Arts
YCBA Opens The Door Wider
by | Aug 15, 2019 7:30 am | Comments (0)
Tracey Moffatt
Plantation (Diptych No. 6).
Tall plants wave in wind whipped by fire. Someone approaches an old house. A hand grasps a tree branch with determination. Tracey Moffatt’s Plantation images seem like stills from an old documentary, of an episode in a colonized place that didn’t necessarily end well for the colonizers. It’s part of the Yale Center for British Art‘s exhibition of its latest acquisitions — entitled “Photographs | Contemporary Art: Recent Gifts and Acquisitions” — running at the museum on Chapel Street through Sept. 8.
When Public Art Made The Walls Talk
by | Aug 8, 2019 7:51 am | Comments (4)
Path of the World, Richard C. Lee gymnasium high school, summer 1977.
It’s a riot of color and design, a range of faces representing every human emotion from happiness to concern. The city swirls behind the people, the perspective almost creating a sense of vertigo. And the people’s hands reach out to us still, across four decades and through a paint job that erased them.
Path of the World, which at one time graced the walls of the gymnasium at Richard C. Lee High School, is just one mural brought back to life in “Celebrating CETA: A Look Back At New Haven’s Community Mural Program” — a fascinating exhibit that has something to say about New Haven’s proclaimed place as the cultural capital of the state today.
Photos Make CAW Swing
by | Aug 6, 2019 12:00 pm | Comments (0)
Maurice D. Robertson
Hugh Masekela, trumpet, Infinity Hall, Hartford, CT 2014; Melvis Santa, vocals, Maqueque Band, Side Door Jazz Club, Old Lyme, CT 2018.
Side by side, they’re studies in coolness and heat, like the music they play has often been. They’re examples of how far jazz has traveled; one is Afro-Cuban composer Melvis Santa and the other is South African trumpet player Hugh Masekela. They’re brought together by the lens of Maurice D. Robertson, a photographer who, in capturing them and dozens of other jazz musicians practicing their craft, shows an astonishing range of expression in the world of jazz — and finds New Haven’s place in it.
Art At Fussy Gets Messy
by | Jul 25, 2019 7:49 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
Above tables where people sip lattes, eat lunch, do work, and chat with friends, there’s a person with a large head whose body is made entirely of other heads. Next to that person is another person who has just one head for a body; that person’s legs emerge from the smiling mouth of the body-head. Unsettling? Maybe. But in the context of Marcella Kurowski-Cavaliere‘s artwork, it’s also a lot of fun.
Eileen Hogan Paints A Map Of The Mind
by | Jul 23, 2019 1:15 pm | Comments (0)
Eilieen Hogan
Chelsea Physic Garden 2, 8 September 2016.
It’s a sprinkler, an embodiment of summer, spraying bright water over a field, and the image of it seems to capture nearly everything about it — the velocity of the machine, the sparkle of the water in the sun, the heat that’s already turning some of it to mist. It would be an exemplary photograph, but it’s more than that. It’s a painting, and the exacting image is rendered, it turns out, using the kind of forceful, painterly brush strokes more and more in abstract, experimental art. The artist, Eileen Hogan, captures the exact speed of water out of a sprinkler by ceding some control, and showing us the speed of paint itself.
The Beat Goes On At City Gallery
by | Jul 16, 2019 12:20 pm | Comments (0)
Tom Peterson
Beach II.
It’s not your typical beach photograph. For starters, you can’t see the beach. All you see is a wash of blue sky — and then, below, a jagged white fence, but abstracted just enough that it takes the eye a minute to see it for what it is. Tom Peterson’s Beach II is more like a painting than a photograph, and that’s part of the point.
YCBA Gets Tangled Up In Blue
by | Jul 15, 2019 7:36 am | Comments (0)
Anish Kapoor
Shadow IV: Dark Blue.
Maybe it’s a light seen through a window at twilight, far away. Maybe it’s the light at the end of a tunnel. Or maybe it’s something more distinct rendered blurry. Something’s coming, but we don’t know what it is.
Fireworks Dazzle Above East Rock
by | Jul 5, 2019 8:54 am | Comments (0)
Laura Glesby photo
Two new friends connected over a board game, and others reflected about the meaning of the holiday, as hundreds gathered at Wilbur Cross High School’s athletic field Thursday night for a view of the Fourth of July fireworks display at East Rock Park.
At CAW, The Art Is The Word
by | Jul 1, 2019 11:58 am | Comments (0)
Karen Cipolla
Loose Leaf Notebook.
The book is rough-hewn, with bark for a cover, sticks for a spine. The pages are made of leaves. The title that artist Karen Cipolla gave the piece — Loose Leaf Notebook — is an enjoyable pun. But it’s not just entertaining. The piece itself reminds you of where books, or at least physical books, come from. If there’s thread binding the book’s pages together, it used to be plants. The paper used to be trees. In time, as physical books fall by the wayside, many existing books may become plants again.
That is, if we really think they’re falling by the wayside.
History Found At Lost In New Haven
by | Jun 28, 2019 7:32 am | Comments (17)
ALEXIS GAGE PHOTO
Greenberg, center of group, points to a display.
Billed as “an adventure into the Elm City’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” around 35 tourgoers braved rainy conditions to attend a second, sold-out visit to New Haven’s newest depot of historic artifacts and memorabilia. “But don’t call it a museum,” said Robert Greenberg, tour guide, owner and curator of the thousands of objects on display.
“It’s really a sculpture,” he said.
Teens “IMatter” At City Hall
by | Jun 26, 2019 8:06 am | Comments (5)
Maya McFadden Photo
Photographer, founder, and director of “IMatter” Rob Goldman thanks the youth for their courage.
New Haven teens saw themselves when they entered City Hall Tuesday — in banner-sized portraits.
Artists Are In Their Elements
by | Jun 20, 2019 7:49 am | Comments (0)
Hayward Gatling
Moon Pie.
The image is easy enough to read. It’s a plane with exhaust trails streaking past the moon. But under Hayward Gatling’s gaze the two objects in the sky are not as dissimilar as they first appear. The moon’s and the plane’s hues are the same. Both, under closer scrutiny, seem almost as luminous and ephemeral as the exhaust trails, which will soon dissipate in the wind. Gatling’s treatment of all the elements of the photograph as simply objects in the sky, like clouds, brings them together.
Artist Captures The “Future History” Of New Haven
by | Jun 13, 2019 12:24 pm | Comments (2)
Daniel Eugene Photos
Self Portrait with Madison Sapphire Duchanne, Partners Café – New Haven, CT – August, 2018.
Daniel Eugene was dressed down. Classical music played over the speakers on a recent visit to his Westville live and work space, periodically punctuated by the ping of incoming emails.
Eugene is, after all, a busy person, especially as he shifts his art from pens to lens.
Continue reading ‘Artist Captures The “Future History” Of New Haven’
Opposites Attract at Kehler Liddell
by | Jun 11, 2019 12:55 pm | Comments (0)
Alan Shulik
Quiescence — Crescent Moon, Totem Rock, Dawn, Utah.
The background colors seem too vivid, and the shapes in the foreground too stark, to be real. But they are. It’s a photograph from Utah. It’s photographer Alan Shulik’s heightened sense of reality that makes it pop. But as the title of the image — “Quiescence” — suggests, Shulik isn’t drawing out the details to excite it. He wants us to drink, long and slow, from his images, and maybe feel our heart rates drop a little in the meantime.
Never mind that on the opposite wall, there’s a party going on.
Art Of Darkness
by | Jun 7, 2019 7:42 am | Comments (0)
Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Fritz Horstman
The words are surrounded by billows of shade that could be smoke, or clouds, or particles moving through water. The color seems both kinetic and serene at the same time, capturing light and shadow. The words are written by hand: “Scooping up handfuls of fresh / silence from a mirror of oblivion, / I gather from the well / that night disguises his guests. / It pleases him that wind / must wait. Even rain. Misled / the tempered dark takes a false / step. So many shadows. / So few ghosts — I was lonely / but curious / in this imperfect end.”
Disposable Cameras, Indispensable Images
by | Jun 6, 2019 7:48 am | Comments (0)
The flash of the camera goes off, but reveals very little. The back of someone’s head, long braids. But there’s not quite enough information in the picture to take all that in even at first glance. It could be mistaken for the front of someone’s head, the braids obscuring the face. It’s impossible to tell whether the subject of the picture is female or male, and maybe that’s part of the point. It all stays hidden. But like every other snapshot in “The Indispensable Project” — running for a short time in the first floor gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through June 11 — it’s vital.
Peabody Connects Early Middle East To Today
by | May 30, 2019 7:40 am | Comments (0)
Klaus Wagensonner Photos
Seals from the city of Uruk dating to the second half of the 4th millennium frequently depict a prominent figure, probably the ruler, feeding the temple flock.
The students in school have become lazy, and parents are resorting to bribing teachers to give them good grades. A political leader is building a wall to keep out foreigners, but it doesn’t seem to be working. A couple people are considering avoiding an import tax by hiding precious metals in their underwear.
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Artists Talk To The Past
by | May 24, 2019 7:40 am | Comments (0)
Erin Lee Antonak
Sky Woman, Relative(ity), and Cosmic Joke.
The works on the wall are made of bright concentric rings, like tree trunks or onions, but also like astronomical objects, orbits. They’re things to enter, things to fall into. There’s a sound in the room, faraway and soothing, and there’s something different even about the air of the room. It’s hard to place exactly how it all adds up, but it does. And the overall effect is that rare thing in today’s politically charged art world: It’s soothing. Which is all the more impressive when you discover that there’s meaning behind the solace.
Artspace Gets Perverse
by | May 22, 2019 7:38 am | Comments (2)
Bernadette Despujols
Bimbo Chair 1 and I Chose Not to Be a Mom Chair.
Two chairs face each other in the window of Artspace’s gallery on the corner of Orange and Crown. One is interwoven with hair. The other one is occupied by an enormous, amorphous pink blob. In another part of the gallery is a schematic of the plans highway developers really had for the city of New Haven decades ago — plans they may well have implemented if the federal funds hadn’t run out.
The chair and the highway plans are connected. How?
Photographer Marks A City’s Memory
by | May 21, 2019 12:01 pm | Comments (0)
William Frucht
Tools, Humberstone and Window, Humberstone.
A room with no lights on, the only illumination coming from the windows. Tools hang on the walls. A window rotting in its frame. An abandoned wheelbarrow baking in the sun. These and many other images are the result of travels photographer William Frucht made to South America, where he turned his camera to the things people left behind.
Ely Center Takes To The Sea
by | May 15, 2019 7:29 am | Comments (0)
Laura Barr
Ocean Elegy 20.
Laura Barr’s painting covers the wall and makes it teem with life. It’s a trip into warm, blue water, a document of how snorkeling or scuba diving is like visiting another planet, a place radically different from the one we inhabit in the air. And its title — Ocean Elegy 20 — reminds us of just how fast it’s dying.
Artist Captures Action At Da Silva Gallery
by | May 14, 2019 12:33 pm | Comments (0)
Michael Quirk
Molotov Cocktail.
It’s a lone figure against an undefined background, but the details of the silhouette are crisp enough to make the figure an individual, a real person frozen in mid-action. And that action happens to be throwing a Molotov cocktail.
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How LeWitt Made It
by | May 7, 2019 4:15 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Lary Bloom with his new biography of LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt was so self-effacing that when an Italian magazine asked him for a picture, he sent a photograph of his dog.
His colorful geometric drawings take up the walls of an entire 27,000 square foot factory building, comprise the longest-running temporary exhibition in American art history, going on for 25 years. But it may well be painted over or destroyed, like a Tibetan sand mandala, when the show concludes.
Artists Have 2020 Vision
by | May 6, 2019 1:46 pm | Comments (1)
Janet Warner
Carry Us Away Again.
The buildings in the middle are New Haven’s downtown, there’s no doubt about it. But now the downtown has become an island unto itself, floating off into a gray sky, trailing vines and tree roots as it rises. Carry Us Away Again, artist Janet Warner’s portrait of the Elm City, feels weighty in one sense — it’s New Haven as sanctuary city, New Haven as an oasis. But there’s also no denying the fun in the image, its surreal playfulness.
That combination runs rampant throughout “2020,” Kehler Liddell’s latest show — running through May 26 — which challenged 47 artists to take that titular number and tell us what it meant to them.