by | Apr 29, 2019 12:20 pm | Comments (0)
Josephine Miles Lewis
Isabel.
She was a girl sitting for a portrait, but with Isabel, painter Josephine Miles Lewis displayed the fire portraitist’s ability to render in oil pigments something of the personality of the subject — her curiosity, her intelligence.
She’s a girl about to speak, and she has something to say.
Continue reading ‘Exhibit Shows Artist Club’s Progressive Past’
by | Apr 24, 2019 6:59 am | Comments (0)
Deeply frustrated by the impact of corporate and political chaos upon our environment and society, Zoe Matthiessen rants with her dip pen in hopes of raising awareness, while reminding us of the natural beauty in our local area.
by | Apr 23, 2019 7:18 am | Comments (0)
Cara McDonough Photos
Luckey (in orange earrings).
The mothers around the table at Briah Luckey’s art studio on East Street weren’t wasting any time. There were greetings and updates before they quickly got to the task at hand, grabbing large rectangles of paper and paintbrushes for that morning’s project: “mark making” with black ink, accented by brightly colored, water-soluble crayons. There was a palpable enthusiasm in the room, perhaps born of the knowledge that this time was their own.
by | Apr 17, 2019 12:08 pm | Comments (0)
Nancy Eisenfeld
Circumstances Beyond Control.
The wall to the left draws your eye as soon as you enter City Gallery on Upper State Street. It’s covered floor to ceiling with artwork. In one sense, the works are abstract, studies of light and shade, colors that sometimes contrast and sometimes fade into each other. They’re explorations of what pigments can do. In another sense, though, they can be read as mimicking natural forms. Some could be patterns in frozen ice. Others could be portraits of moving liquid, or the details of a column of billowing smoke, the fire sparking underneath.
by | Apr 16, 2019 7:30 am | Comments (2)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
A youth empowerment project has two new faces and two new locations in Dixwell.
by | Apr 11, 2019 12:36 pm | Comments (2)
Evelyn Novoa
I’m Not There.
She says she’s not there, but it’s a trick. She’s there, somewhere in the splash of color. There’s the outline of a shoulder, the side of a head, and at last, an eye. Then the title of the piece — I’m Not There — takes on another meaning. Maybe you’ve found the artist, Evelyn Novoa, but she’s still a couple steps ahead of you.
by | Apr 10, 2019 7:40 am | Comments (0)
Julie Fraenkel
The Visit.
One figure reclines on the ground, head thrown back. The other hovers, impossibly, in the air above the first. Their only points of contact are the delicate hands of the one doing the hovering, and their lips, making contact. Julie Fraenkel’s The Visit is playful and poignant, and one of many highlights of “Re: Connecting,” a show at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville that finds, as the title suggests, works by three artists — Fraenkel, Liz Antle‑O’Donnell, and Matthew Garrett — connecting with one another in formal, thematic, and emotional ways.
Continue reading ‘Three Artists Reconnect At Kehler Liddell’
by | Apr 2, 2019 7:33 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Jennifer Rodgers and Julia Ludlow-Ortner
When you walk into the River Street Gallery at Fairhaven Furniture on Blatchley Avenue, the art is not only hanging on the walls, it is also draped over couches and tables and being worn by mannequins. “Interlacements: Artistic Expressions in Weaving” — the biennial exhibit of the Handweavers’ Guild of Connecticut — held its opening reception this past Saturday. This is the show’s fifth time at the space, the last time being in 2017.
Continue reading ‘Art And Story Interwoven at River Street Gallery’
by | Apr 1, 2019 7:30 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Lie on the floor of Creative Arts Workshop’s gallery and it’s as though you’re a bird flying through the towers of a fantastical metropolis, full of towers of every dimension, seemingly stretching for miles. It would be impressive enough as the work of one or two artists, mimicking so convincingly the cacophony of so many of the world’s major cities. It’s that much more interesting to discover that this city was built by almost as many people as there are buildings — and like a real city, it takes in something of their memories and their dreams.
by | Mar 28, 2019 7:42 am | Comments (10)
Allan Appel Photo
Martin with Atelier Cue’s Ioana Barac beneath the overpass.
These old grey concrete and frequently graffitied highway underpass walls won’t remain that way much longer.
That’s thanks to grants that the Upper State Street (Business) Association (USSA) and other neighborhood partners just received to spruce up the concrete with light and color, design and art, and remind folks of how it used to be before the highway sliced the area in two.
Continue reading ‘Art, Light, Life Coming To State/Trumbull Overpass’
by | Mar 22, 2019 7:37 am | Comments (0)
Matthew Barney
Virgins.
There’s a tree in the middle of the third-floor exhibition space at the Yale University Art Gallery. A couple trees, in fact. Copper plates hang on the wall, in various stages of chemical obfuscation of the images etched into them. And downstairs in the auditorium is a feature-length film that pulls it all together.
Or does it?
by | Mar 20, 2019 1:02 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
At auction was a celluloid butterfly. The opening bid was $50.
“Do I hear $60?” Fred Giampietro asked.
by | Mar 13, 2019 12:08 pm | Comments (0)
Emily Gordon Photos
Crystal Feimster, Rachel Kauder-Nalebuff, Joan Ditzion, Judy Norsigian, Vanessa Paranjothy, Ginger Nash at confab.
“The internet is good for some things, but not all. It’s always better to get together and talk.”
Joan Ditzion knew this well: She’s one of the original, and still active, founders of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, best known as the creators of the women’s health bible Our Bodies, Ourselves and its successors.
In a panel discussion at the opening reception for the art exhibit Our Bodies Ourselves at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street, Ditzion and fellow founder Judy Norsigian recounted chapters from the history of both the book and the movement in discussion with author and artist Rachel Kauder-Nalebuff; menstruation-product entrepreneur Vanessa Paranjothy; naturopathic physician Ginger Nash; and moderator Crystal Feimster, associate professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies at Yale University.
by | Mar 11, 2019 4:18 pm | Comments (3)
Deborah McDuff
Children Looking Inside and Outside Prison Walls.
Brian Slattery Photo
Artist Deborah McDuff at opening of ConnCAT’s mass incarceration exhibit.
Each of the faces of six children is distinct and unique. But each of them stands for something, too. Each of them is wearing a heartbreaking expression, the kind no parent ever wants to see on a child’s face.
Only one is being consoled. It’s unclear that it’s helping.
by | Mar 11, 2019 7:39 am | Comments (1)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Todd Rogers.
Anthony Apuzzo and Michael Cooper were set up next to each other at the Junk Fed Pop Culture Bazaar at the State House this past Saturday. Both of their tables were filled with items they had collected over the years but now were trying to sell to make room in their homes. They thought they had perhaps hit a bit of a snag in their plans, though. There was also a lot of stuff at the bazaar they wanted to purchase.
“Everything we make we’re gonna spend today,” joked Cooper. “I already bought something off Anthony!”
by | Mar 8, 2019 1:07 pm | Comments (2)
Joan Fitzsimmons
The Healing Arts, detail.
The scale of the photographs in Joan Fitzsimmons’s The Healing Arts — extreme close-ups blown up to beyond poster size — is disorienting. We’re used to seeing large images of land masses and cloud formations. Instead, we’re looking at bruises rising under skin, long cuts stitched shut, rendered in the sharpest detail.
It’s hard for the photographs not to be about pain. But as the title suggests, it’s not about pain alone. It’s about the long, slow road to recovering from it.
Continue reading ‘Ely Exhibit Revisits “Our Bodies, Ourselves”’
by | Mar 7, 2019 12:50 pm | Comments (1)
Jonathan Wilner
Under the El.
In one sense, the scene in Jonathan Wilner‘s painting Under the El is very quiet. Three figures each occupy their own space in a wide, vaulted hallway. They don’t seem to acknowledge each other. We can’t even discern their faces. The action is all in the architecture. Maybe the columns are encrusted with decorations. Or maybe they’re liquifying, flowing upward into the ceiling. The whole place is melting into the sky, and the three people in the painting don’t even seem to notice.
by | Mar 5, 2019 1:05 pm | Comments (12)
Shelby Head
Power Figure.
There’s a body in the hallway of the Yale Divinity School. Maybe it’s a mummy wrapped in linen, or a cast with a form inside it. Whatever the case, it’s on an ironing board, and it’s hard to miss the spikes driven into the spot where its sternum would be. Look again, and you see that a cable is wrapped around the body. One end goes to an outlet in the floor. The other to the iron itself. It is, in a sense, the embodiment of domestic violence — and standing next to it, it feels like a rebuke. Could you have done something to stop it?
by | Feb 27, 2019 8:27 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
A shape on the wall looks like a drop of slow-moving liquid that has, for a second, decided to resemble a peanut, but it’s only for the moment. On a nearby canvas, there’s a similar sense of motion caught just for the moment; if you turned your head away and looked at the painting again, maybe you’d find that the shapes had rearranged themselves in a different configuration, or left the canvas altogether to fly through the air.
by | Feb 26, 2019 5:08 pm | Comments (6)
Centerbook Architects
A rendering of the redesigned Peabody Museum, viewed from the intersection of Sachem and Whitney.
Thomas Breen photo
Yale Community Affairs Associate Karen King at last week’s City Plan Commission meeting.
The City Plan Commission has signed off on Yale’s proposed renovation of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, paving the way for significantly more exhibition space, bus parking, and pedestrian connections to Yale’s Science Hill.
The new design doesn’t include a cafeteria, so visitors made hungry by the insects and dinosaurs on display will still have to find lunch elsewhere — to the disappointment of some commissioners.
by | Feb 19, 2019 1:11 pm | Comments (0)
Tom Peterson
Hidden Mysteries 6 and Hidden Mysteries 7.
At first, artist Tom Peterson’s images, entitled Hidden Mysteries, could be abstract textures of black and white, possible rendered by computer, a pattern of repeating fractals. Then it becomes clear: they’re actually photographs of the surface of water in low light. They’re natural patterns made into more intentional shapes by the act of photographing them and processing those images.
by | Feb 18, 2019 8:30 am | Comments (1)
Penrhyn and Rod Cook Photos
The Bite.
It’s a split-second full of energy, caught with the click of a camera — two zebras running at a full gallop, the first one right behind the second, hot on its tail. The zebra giving chase extends its neck, opens its mouth, and bares its teeth, as if to bite.
We don’t know the context. How long did the chase last? Did the bite actually happen? What was the cause? What we do know is both that it’s a far cry from the static portraits of zebras we’ve seen a million times over, or from zebras the vast majority of us see only in zoos, grazing, docile, tails switching. These zebras are doing something else entirely, and photographers Penrhyn and Rod Cook of PenRod Studio are showing us their lives — lives that are in danger.
by | Feb 14, 2019 1:06 pm | Comments (0)
The Paths of Life.
The Paths of Life, a board game, uses a teetotum, a four-sided top, instead of dice, because the designers thought dice were too close to gambling for children to be using them.
Continue reading ‘It’s All Fun And Games — Until Someone Loses An Empire’
by | Feb 13, 2019 1:16 pm | Comments (0)
Sam Carlson Photos
“Snails taste with their eyes,” explained artist Martha Savage, who with fellow artist Molly Gambardella created Snail Market at West River Arts on Whalley Avenue in Westville.
Looking around the room, Savage’s metaphor seemed fitting. Every inch was filled with pieces of art and design — most of which were for sale.
by | Feb 11, 2019 8:39 am | Comments (3)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
The Westville arts scene grew a little bigger with the opening of Chapel Haven’s new UARTS program and store in the heart of the village Friday afternoon.
Continue reading ‘Chapel Haven Opens “UARTS” Store In Westville Village’