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Brian Slattery |
Mar 17, 2017 7:36 am
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(3)
Brian Slattery Photo
Clinard in her studio.
Susan Clinard doesn’t like talking about her work, and doesn’t consider herself to be particularly political. “I shy away from politics in general,” she said, in an interview at her studio. “Many people have said my work is political, and honestly, I’ve never thought of it that way. I guess if sharing stories about humanity is political, then I’m political.”
by
Allan Appel |
Mar 16, 2017 2:17 pm
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(1)
From Fortsch’s “I Dream In Color,” in exhibit opening Thursday night.
A happy housewife greets you as you enter the main aisle of the gallery. She has a 1950s Cinderella outfit on, golden fairy tale hair, a slightly impish wink. Then you notice she is also carrying a chainsaw, color coordinated with her pinafore.
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Allan Appel |
Mar 15, 2017 12:50 pm
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(4)
Sterling Library
On a bracing March day about 40 years ago, the members of the women’s Yale crew team got tired of waiting, shivering after practice, for the boys to finish their showers. So they stripped naked in the gymnasium and wrote “Title IX” on their bodies to make a point.
New and slow to co-education, and even slower at providing facilities and equipment for its women athletes, Yale University in 1976 was on the receiving end of that demonstration, underlining the need for women’s showers and facilities equal to those of men.
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Allan Appel |
Mar 14, 2017 12:52 pm
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Allan Appel Photo
The artist with one of her asphalt crack inspired “Slip and Slide” monotypes
Say you’re bumping through a poorly maintained parking lot and you’re cursing the municipal authorities who are not repairing the surface. Then you behold a woman in shabby, dye-stained clothes sitting in front of you on a milk crate, with a roll of Japanese paper and a jar of ink beside her, perhaps with a portable radio playing. She’s peering with intense concentration at the raised lines of asphalt on the ground in front of her. That just might be artist Jennifer Davies.
She’s in the process of taking what you curse as a driver — big, axle-bothering asphalt cracks on the surface of the lots — and transforming them into what you likely will admire as an art appreciator: delicate, mysterious, old/new dance-like or calligraphic shapes on Japanese handmade paper.
by
Lucy Gellman |
Mar 10, 2017 8:32 am
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(2)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Musinski’s work.
It looks like a baby’s mobile the first time you see it: A wooden hoop suspended in midair, held there by the wide, stretching mouth of a tan panty-hose. Its mate stretched upward, tied to the building’s plumbing. Below, a constellation of soft, just-pink miniature pillows dangled on long brown strings. They are marshmallows, or fleshy breasts in a bra, or the small bow you put in a child’s hair. On the wall behind them, a smattering of gilded vulvas wink out, challenging you to come closer.
by
David Sepulveda |
Mar 7, 2017 3:00 pm
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DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTOS
A placard outside Postcard Central, signals the sentiment inside.
A group of Westville women who have heeded a viral call for White House resistance gathered to create artful messages that will be mailed on March 15, a figurative stab to the heart of President Trump’s policies and claim of widespread support.
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 7, 2017 12:49 pm
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Jessica Smolinski Photo
At the end of Artspace’s gallery a neon sign flashed “Open.” It led to a small black hallway, where there was a darkened window looking into a booth, a phone, and a slot in the wall. The instructions were straightforward: Put a dollar in the slot, the light in the booth would come on, and artist Monique Atherton would perform for you, for a minute.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 16, 2017 9:11 am
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(1)
Brian Slattery Photo
Amy Vensel, Blurt, acrylic on canvas (foreground).
From now until May 31, as you browse the shelves of the Institute Library on Chapel Street, you may find your eye drawn to a bloom of color along the library’s main thoroughfare. A pair of pen-and-ink drawings, one all serenely flowing shapes, the other frenetic activity. Other bright bursts of paint appear at the ends of the library’s stacks, like the last chocolate in the box.
Then, as if your eyes have adjusted to a new light, you start to see ways that the art and the library — one of the vibiest spaces in the city — merge, so that it’s hard to tell sometimes which things are part of the art exhibit and which are just features of the library itself. And that’s when the title of the exhibit — “Looking Then Reading” — suddenly makes sense.
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Lucy Gellman |
Feb 14, 2017 8:51 am
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(7)
Lucy Gellman Photo
At the launch.
On a plank of wood that almost looks soft, there’s a discarded quill, bent like a fern. Ink still wet and velvety at the tip. Beside it, the inkwell. Its mouth beckons, shallow cap flung open while the well of black liquid suggests there’s more inside. Beside them, a letter opener, and a sense that the table could go on forever.
It comes with a note. If you want to take it home and keep looking, you can — and not for the small fortune usually associated with buying art.
New Haven’s latest snowstorm has once again attracted excited visitors to West Rock Avenue, where a memorable snowman has risen in David Sepulveda’s front yard — this one offering a message of peace for turbulent times.
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Allan Appel |
Feb 10, 2017 9:04 am
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Johan Zoffany
“Queen Charlotte”, oil on canvas, 1771.
Charlotte heard a child prodigy perform his music and was so profoundly impressed she commissioned six sonatas from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, eight years old. His father Leopold did the negotiating.
Caroline presided over a debate between Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibnitz as these stellar geniuses tackled nothing less than the nature of the universe and how Christianity fit into the cosmos.
And Augusta, mother of George III, was crucial in shaping the character of that rigid monarch, against whom we Americans successfully revolted in 1776.
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Markeshia Ricks |
Jan 30, 2017 5:14 pm
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(15)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Porter in “solitary” Monday at the new public library exhibit.
State Rep. Robyn Porter sat inside a 10 foot-by-12 foot box looking at the blue cinderblock walls. Listening to the sounds of prison, she got a taste of what her son once experienced.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 25, 2017 4:09 pm
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(1)
Friedlander, Courtesy
Eakins Press Foundation
Untitled, gelatin silver print.
It’s not just that we see what the photographer is seeing; the way the photograph is composed, we’re there, in his shoes. We’re in the midst of a crowd, people seated in rows of chairs. The women are all in dresses. The men are wearing suits. Most are wearing hats. Most of them seem to be paying attention to whatever’s in front of them.
But then, front and center in the photograph, is a kid in a Scout uniform. His arms are crossed. His brow is furrowed. His eyes pierce the camera’s lens.
Giammona beside her 30-second video starring her smoking and finger-biting in “High Anxiety.”
Gallery Photo
Julie Fraenkel’s papier-mache pinata was the first piece to sell.
Toni Giammona’s uncle threatened to wear his “Make America Great Again” T‑shirt to her art “Inauguration Nation” art opening in Westville this weekend. Until she talked to him.
Artist Giammona — whose dad Vincent was a New York City firefighter who died on 9/11 — has made her first-ever video installation titled “High Anxiety,” about the incoming Trump administration.
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Allan Appel |
Jan 18, 2017 9:02 am
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Gilette
“Ball and Socket,” by Marjorie Wolfe, archival pigment print.
Look through the same window six times or so and see six different vistas, or possibilities.
Step back, and you get a sense that those windows, grouped in sets of two, might also be staring back, like a still-to-be-discovered species of green, square-eyed owl, right at you.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 17, 2017 9:06 am
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Halfway through Grit Rhythm’s set at Three Sheets, singer Matt Rhone introduced the next song as “a cover of a cover” and was answered by laughs, cheers, and an audience member shouting back “covers on covers on covers” — which was also answered by laughter. It was a rare moment of speaking on a cold snowy night dedicated to creative endeavors, in the week before the spring semester begins and before the president elect becomes the president in charge, and the weather once again gifted us with a reason to hide away from it all.
However, it was the second Saturday of the month, which means it was time for Three Sheets’s monthly series, “Art in the Back, Music in the Front,” which features the work of one, two, or several local visual artists in the back room of the bar — which also houses the pool table — and music from bands in the front stage area.
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Allan Appel |
Jan 6, 2017 12:00 pm
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Crowley
“Golden Light”, archival pigment photo.
Remember the fun you had as a kid, maybe early in the morning before your parents got up, and you grabbed that colorful cardboard tube, ran to the window, pointed it up toward the sky, and turned and turned the end piece, making sparkly pieces of glass, plastic, or crystal rearrange themselves, reflecting light and making new patterns?
Give it a shake or another turn, and the pieces would flow again?
by
Brian Slattery |
Jan 6, 2017 8:47 am
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(1)
Longstreth
“The Milk Can,” 1975.
In 1970s Rhode Island, and in a picture on the wall of the New Haven Museum, there’s a building shaped like an enormous milk can — a shape many adults now may not recognize immediately. In other photos, it’s hard to not notice the graceful, Art Deco-like curves on a gas station in Scranton, Pa., or the way the cupola on another gas station in Malden, Mass., makes it look like a temple to travel, and not just a place to buy beef jerky.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 15, 2016 12:50 pm
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David Ottenstein Photo
“Swiftcurrent Lake, Glacier NP, 2013.”
We’re looking over a stunning vista of rocky peaks, a few touched with snow, their outlines crisp under a blue sky rippling with clouds. A serene lake reflects those peaks, all the way from the distant shore to the one we’re standing on. A small dock, right at our feet, has six colorful kayaks on it. It couldn’t be more inviting. Except the sign says “Please Keep Off.”
And the way the picture’s taken, it could refer to the kayaks, or the dock — or to the entire landscape.
by
David Sepulveda |
Dec 14, 2016 1:12 pm
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(13)
DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
Scott Schuldt with Skinner.
A controversial work of art by New Haven artist Gordon Skinner — a basketball hoop with a backstop that depicted a pig’s head with a police officer hat — was reinstalled on the grounds of the Goffe Street Armory on County Street, the site from which it had been removed earlier in the fall after complaints that it was offensive prompted its removal and placement in the Artspace Gallery on Orange Street.
by
Sophie Haigney |
Dec 9, 2016 1:50 am
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Yale University Art Gallery
Albert Bierstadt, “Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail,” ca. 1873. Oil on canvas.
When people come back from nature, they often have a hard time with adjectives. “It was incredible, it was awesome, it was beyond beautiful,” they say, before declaring, “it’s hard to describe.” Then they reach for their iPhone and swipe through pictures: a jagged peak and blue sky, a misty waterfall, a dark green valley. They shake their heads.
