by | Aug 16, 2024 8:39 am | Comments (0)
Sarah Groate with her two photos.
Sarah Groate’s photographs, Duke’s Arrival and Waiting at The Rainbow Bridge, married two of her great loves: photography and horses. Groate works at the CT Draft Horse Rescue, and she uses the horses there as both inspiration and the subjects of her art. “I just found that I loved photographing them,” she said. “They’re the true gentle giants.”
by | Aug 14, 2024 11:00 am | Comments (0)
Ariel Bintang’s pieces can be understood as abstractions of figurative landscapes. The color choices, of vivid greens, blues, and oranges, don’t happen much in the real world, and when they do, not in the way that Bintang uses them. But Bintang also deftly outlines recognizable features into the pieces — buildings, cliffs, rocks, islands, clouds — that show them as landscapes, reduced to their essentials and manipulated. It makes sense, as Bintang, like fellow artists Uzayr Agha and Ethnie Xu, is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. In “Mosaic,” the show running now through Aug. 25 at City Gallery, the three artists transfer their eyes for the landscape and the built environment around them to two-dimensional canvases.
by | Aug 13, 2024 2:35 pm | Comments (1)
Thomas Breen photo
Signs of the times, outside of Wexler Grant's polling place.
Ponytails and pairs of glasses have been popping up all over parts of Dixwell and Newhallville, in a show of support for candidates in a race not many might typically pay close attention to — a summer primary for state representative.
by | Aug 9, 2024 9:41 am | Comments (0)
Howardena Pindell
Katrina Footprint.
Howardena Pindell had already created the spiraling mess of oranges, yellows, blues, and greens, footprinted with red arrows indicating the path of the swirls, when she realized that the lithograph resembled a hurricane tracking map. She titled the piece Katrina Footprint, memorializing the over 1,800 people killed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. What was once a relatively simple design of colors and shapes became a political statement. In hindsight, it feels as if the politics were already embedded in the art. Pindell only had to bring them to the surface.
Continue reading ‘"Everything Is Political In America," Including The Art’
by | Aug 5, 2024 8:33 am | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photo
Ashley the Creator and her painting Emotional Orange.
According to legend — and poet Christina Rossetti — one should never eat fruit offered by fairies. It’s considered illicit, otherworldly, and so good that one taste will leave you hankering for more for the rest of your days. But in her new exhibition, “Pomology,” artist Ashley the Creator makes fruit seem more tempting than it’s ever been before. The fae, inhuman faces in her paintings wear fruit as a part of their own bodies, and the effect is both eerie and mouth-wateringly good.
by | Jul 30, 2024 9:10 am | Comments (1)
Eleanor Polak photo
Shaunda Holloway and her pyrography piece, "One Thousand Faces."
For Shaunda Holloway, art is all about getting yourself a seat at the table. It’s a way to be seen, to be heard, to express yourself and then have other people respond to your expression.
Those are the themes of her latest exhibition, “Faces at the Table,” in collaboration with Jasmine Nikole, which has been on display at Atticus Bookstore & Cafe from June 6 through Tuesday.
by | Jul 25, 2024 9:25 am | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photos
At the gallery: Sonal Soveni and her Blue Vein Mural.
On the table: a Kale-Caesar salad.
On the wall next to the entrance of The Table & Gallery, located at 1209 Chapel St., is the “Blue Vein Mural,” which encapsulates everything that the culinary and artistic space is all about.
The mural is made out of pages taken from two eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books on patriarchy and the oppression of women, covered by flowing blue shapes that recall water droplets flung into the air. An educational message is transformed into a work that evokes cleansing and freedom, as well as the idea of going with the flow.
by | Jul 24, 2024 9:19 am | Comments (1)
Even though the signs are in sync with one another, not offering contradictory information, the photograph conveys a sense of disorientation. You have to read them twice, maybe, to see that they line up. The inclusion of the house matters, too; it gives the disorientation context. What does it mean for the people who live on that block, that multiple signs tell people unfamiliar with the street layout that they’re not supposed to go there? What does it mean that there’s only one way off the block for the residents, a sense of limited options? Who made these decisions in the first place?
The picture is unsigned, but it was shot by one of 17 students from Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School and High School in the Community for “New Haven Revisited,” a photography show running through July 31 in the gallery on the lower level of the Ives Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
Continue reading ‘Student Photographers Roll Out (Un?)Welcome Mat’
by | Jul 23, 2024 9:26 am | Comments (0)
Can Yağız
Not today either, detail.
It’s not entirely clear what New Haven-based artist Can Yağız’s image is of, though in its first iteration it has just enough shape to suggest a prone human form. If it’s a person, are they sleeping or dying? In either case, the image itself is about decay, the loss of light, shape, defined borders. But there’s acceptance in it, too, an embrace and investigation of change.
by | Jul 19, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (0)
Shula Weinstein
The Architect.
Even without knowing the name of the piece, the figure represented there looks like a mythological personage, a character freighted with symbols. It’s there in the decorations on her boots, and the way she walks through and astride the town at the same time. It’s there in the way she holds a building in her hand. In the artist’s style, she could be a giant, holding an actual building; she could also be showing us the vision she has in her head. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.
by | Jul 17, 2024 9:30 am | Comments (0)
Boeing by Joyce Greenfield.
When you enter City Gallery, located at 994 State St., the first thing you notice is the vibrant painting in the window. Joyce Greenfield’s Boeing resembles an abstract plane, done in bright greens and blues. The colors evoke the natural tones of the earth, but the plane itself is manmade and mechanical, creating a dichotomy of natural versus human creation. There is a sense that the plane is a miniature planet, orbiting the earth.
Continue reading ‘Theory Becomes Practice Becomes Abstract Art’
by | Jul 16, 2024 9:05 am | Comments (0)
Horacio Marquinez photo
Gallup, New Mexico.
It’s a road in the Southwest, and the photograph’s exposure emphasizes the blasting sun and shadows it makes. The weathered face of the subject, the cast of his eyes, makes him seem as though he has a thousand stories, and maybe he’ll tell us one. But, the photographer reveals, he never did.
“At the height of the summer of 2020, we landed in Gallup, NM empty streets. An eerie desert silence mixed with the constant whistle and screeching metal on metal wheels and track of the never-ending present locomotive,” the photographer writes. “Here I encountered these two Native American gentlemen. We never spoke a word.”
by | Jul 12, 2024 8:31 am | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photo
Alice Matthews, Jasmine Keegan, and Chris Chew clean a reproduction of Child with Dog.
There’s a lot of work that goes into curating and maintaining an art collection like that of the Yale Art Gallery, located at 1111 Chapel St., and usually, the public only gets to see the finished product. But on Thursday, the gallery offered a glimpse behind the curtain to see some of the conservation work that goes into taking care of its artwork in a Sidewalk Studio workshop.
by | Jul 10, 2024 9:23 am | Comments (0)
The untitled piece conveys, first and foremost, a sense of the warm, abiding joy when people come together arm in arm. The strength of the piece begins with how easily this joy is conveyed, through the simplicity of the figures. It’s all in the color and the gesture. The objects at the figures’ feet give context for the feeling. The assortment of weapons on the ground — weapons they have discarded — give a sense of the violence the figures have overcome. They’re symbols of conflict across place and time, from ancient grudges to today’s all-out wars. What would happen if we laid those weapons down? What could the world be like?
by | Jul 8, 2024 9:24 am | Comments (2)
Love n'Co at Seeing Sounds.
Eleanor Polak photo
T!lt's Mike Scialla: “This is our last song, so we usually go crazy."
“You can do anything. That’s my main motto,” Lovelind of the local rock-pop-soul band Love n’Co told the crowd at Edgewood Park’s Seeing Sounds Festival. “It won’t be easy, but you can do anything.”
That proved a fitting tribute to the artistic accomplishment that was Saturday’s fest — which saw a swath of the park turn into a vibrant venue for beautiful clothing, delicious food, foot-tapping rhythms, and a feeling of camaraderie that lasted longer than the last notes of a song.
by | Jul 5, 2024 8:31 am | Comments (0)
Jennifer Knaus
Jennifer Knaus's Oval, now showing in "Artist as Curator."
Jennifer Knaus’s portrait pulls in the viewer in five different ways. There’s the vivid color choices, the exquisitely rendered, phantasmagorically fecund hair. But perhaps more than anything, there’s the element as old as portraiture itself: the gaze of the subject of the portrait back at the viewer, direct yet complex. What is the subject thinking? And with a painting like this, it’s possible to take that question a step further: What is the subject thinking about us?
Continue reading ‘Artists Become Curators At Kehler Liddell’
by | Jul 5, 2024 8:26 am | Comments (0)
Sarah Zapata
A Resilience of Things Not Seen.
Sarah Zapata’s installation, at NXTHVN on Henry Street in Dixwell, is as fantastical as it is welcoming. From the various seating options (beanbag chairs!) to the thick carpet to the choice of colors for all of it, the installation invites the viewer to chill. But there’s something surreal about it, too, the way it crawls up the walls and onto the ceiling, so the rugs hang down from overhead instead of being underfoot, like most rugs. It’s possible to imagine sitting down in the chairs, and having gravity change on you, so you’re sitting on the ceiling, looking at the floor. So Zapata’s installation encourages imaginative exercise while relaxing. In short, it lets us dream.
by | Jul 3, 2024 12:26 pm | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photo
At Tuesday's pottery class at CAW.
“I feel like failure is a really bad word, but there’s a lot of failure in pottery,” said Megan Smith, the teacher of Centering With Clay: Focusing on Pottery Foundations, a seven-week-long class for adults at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street.
Smith’s goal for the first class on Tuesday wasn’t that her students make the perfect pot; that seemed unlikely, seeing as most of them were beginners. Rather, it was to lay the foundations, and instill in them a fundamental truth of all art: practice makes progress, and failure can be fun.
by | Jul 3, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (2)
Tatiana Jackson
Clothed in Christ.
“Life could be black and white like the old TVs. Instead, God made it like an art gallery.” These are the words of Msgr. Paul Steimel on Aug. 27, 2020, hanging beside his portrait, Clothed in Christ, in the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center’s new exhibit, “Do This In Memory of Me: National Sacred Art Exhibit,” running now through Aug. 25.
The show — its title taken from the words of Jesus during the Last Supper, before he was crucified — demonstrates the ways in which humans represent and interpret that which they hold sacred, showing how people relate to Christianity and how they can share it with others through the medium of art.
Continue reading ‘Religious Artists Make The World A Gallery’
by | Jun 27, 2024 9:15 am | Comments (0)
Jennifer Davies
Silent Translation (1), (2), and (3).
Jennifer Davies’s Silent Translation series is, on one level, a study in texture and layers, an engagement of the artist with materials they love. But — especially taken together as a series — they’re more than a technical exercise. They invite the eye to see the depths in the layers Davies creates, depths that have their analogies to the natural world: a row of hills spreading off into the distance with clouds behind them, the canopy of a forest. It doesn’t have to have an explicit meaning to be meaningful.
by | Jun 25, 2024 9:11 am | Comments (5)
Brian Slattery Photos
Cruz.
“You are visiting, and I live in, the most diverse neighborhood in New Haven,” said community activist Lee Cruz. “You walk around this block, you will hear English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hebrew, and French. Just on this block.”
He was talking about Fair Haven, and the occasion was a bike tour — part of Sunday’s programming for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — that led 30 participants through the neighborhood to discover the range and depth of public art projects there. Along the way, they learned about history, struggle, and the pride that binds the people in one geographical area into a community.
Continue reading ‘Public Art Tour Illustrates Community Pride’
by | Jun 24, 2024 12:32 pm | Comments (0)
Eleanor Polak photo
The Legacy Mobile Exhibition inside the cARTie museum bus.
A small white bus was parked outside of NXTHVN, at 169 Henry St., its walls decorated with handwritten definitions of the word “legacy”: “legacy is saying cheers to the next generation,” “legacy is taking actions with purpose, and not stopping when faced with failure.”
The bus was part of the cARTie program, housing the Legacy Mobile Exhibition, which will be touring New Haven through Aug. 13.
by | Jun 24, 2024 9:05 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
Agnete Wisti Lassen and Mohamad Hafez: "I cannot think of a more fulfilling engagement."
Mohamad Hafez
Eternal Cities.
“I don’t like to speak,” artist Mohamad Hafez said to a packed audience at the Peabody Museum on Friday night. Since he became a public artist, he said, “I wanted my art to speak on my behalf,” and “I love it when institutions take the artwork, and they talk.”
by | Jun 18, 2024 4:26 pm | Comments (1)
East Rock neighbors came together — to invite more of their neighbors to come together. With a new poster celebrating East Rock.
by | Jun 12, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (1)
The pieces at first look just like abstract collages, but soon, fragments of meaning emerge. The shape of lips. A pattern of shadows. Finally, letters and words, but not enough of them to know exactly what they say, and certainly not enough to know where they’re from. The meaning and the source have been cut away, and they’re now out of reach. The viewer has to look to the accompanying labels to learn anything. It turns out the piece on the left is taken from Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one on the right is from The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. King’s book was banned in South Africa during apartheid. The Bluest Eye had been banned from schools and libraries in the past few years in over 20 states — including Connecticut.
Continue reading ‘Ulysses & Lolita & The Master & Margarita’