by | Oct 7, 2016 8:27 am | Comments (5)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Friends and fellow artists B*Wak Comfort, Jug Visconti, and Leslie and Troy Mozell wanted to give back to the community they’ve lived in all their lives, so they pooled their talents and started a business.
by | Oct 6, 2016 8:08 am | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Mines’s “The Evolution of David,” mixed media.
More than a dozen years ago the abstract nature photographer Hayward Gatling had not shown any of his work. Many of his friends didn’t even know he was a photographer.
Until his then-girlfriend threw a surprise party for him, in which his works were to be displayed. He tried to resist even that, but “I couldn’t back out or I’d be a total ass,” he said.
Many of the compositions, however, sold, and Gatling’s artistic life changed forever.
by | Sep 28, 2016 3:10 pm | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photo
The OneWorld Radio Crew.
• Parental involvement in schools.
• Open Studios 101.
• Israeli salads.
• City GOP check-in.
by | Sep 23, 2016 11:56 am | Comments (0)
David Sepulveda Photo
Detail from the new Corsair “New Haven” mural.
Though not quite Philadelphia, considered by some as the “mural capital of the world,” New Haven is seeing a flowering of the ages-old form of visual communication, community engagement, education, and storytelling on its buildings.
by | Sep 21, 2016 11:56 am | Comments (0)
Allan Greenier Photo
“Smiling Politician,” 12-color serigraph by Greenier.
Sharon Lovett-Graff takes so much delight in the community space at her Mitchell Branch Library, you’d think it were a room in her own home that she’d recently decorated.
“Look at the room. It’s so different!”
Continue reading ‘Westville Library Makes Space For Artists’
by | Sep 21, 2016 8:17 am | Comments (2)
Artist Bob Gregson wore an enormous yellow foam puzzle piece around his waist to Barcade on Orange Street Tuesday afternoon. Next to him, reporter Cassandra Basler of WSHU wore a similar blue puzzle piece.
“We have to decide which area we’re going to connect,” Gregson said. They chose the corner of Basler’s piece, which, with some encouragement from Gregson, fit into the side of Gregson’s piece.
“That was part of the design of it,” Gregson said. “How would we connect?”
Continue reading ‘City Wide Open Studios Brings Its A-“Game”’
by | Sep 20, 2016 3:50 pm | Comments (33)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Greenberg in the soon-to-empty artifacts room.
The last of the old Ninth Square merchants, ACME Furniture, is in the process of closing to make way for new apartments — while a third-generation member of the family is scurrying to preserve much of the New Haven history inside the building.
by | Sep 16, 2016 12:02 pm | Comments (0)
Luis G. Luna’s photos hanging in the backroom in Three Sheets.
The back room at Three Sheets buzzed as people played pool, drank craft beer and $3 Narragansetts, and looked at two series of newly-hung photographs. One one wall, there was a series of framed portraits, mostly black and white: a man in a pea coat crossing the street, a bearded older man in Egypt. On the other were smaller snapshots, mostly of landscapes, urban and rural — but only slices of them, framed by a dashboard or the top of a table.
by | Sep 15, 2016 11:54 am | Comments (2)
Pride, excitement, and gratitude were some of the emotions face and body painter Lauren Wilson of Westville had in response to learning that one of her painted mermaids had landed on the cover of SkinMarkZ Magazine, the first U.S.-based magazine dedicated to face painting, body art, illusion, and special effects.
Continue reading ‘Westville Body Painter Makes Her (Mermaid) Mark’
by | Sep 14, 2016 2:37 pm | Comments (1)
Lucy Gellman Photo
Abdussabur.
• East Rock’s Anna Festa.
• Health in Our Hands.
• Orchard Street Shul.
• Sabir Abdussabur on masks.
• Fall Free for All.
by | Sep 14, 2016 8:26 am | Comments (1)
Yale Center for British Art Photo.
“Shipping in the English Channel,” 1755, oil on canvas, YCBA, Paul Mellon Collection.
“Make me standing about the 3[rd] rowlock and three men in the bow wounded and one killed. One fellow striking me with oar, another trying to bayonet me.”
That’s how one young officer in His Majesty’s Navy — who later became arctic explorer Sir John Ross — asked artist Nicholas Pocock to portray him in a sketch for a painting illustrating the 1805 battle in which he had been wounded.
True? False? Or somewhere in between, in the self-aggrandizing manner of a constructed story?
Continue reading ‘YCBA Investigates The Truthiness Of Cannon Fire’
by | Sep 12, 2016 11:06 am | Comments (0)
Official exhibition logo
Half the students studying at Yale in 1830 were summarily expelled for one grievous, not-to-be-tolerated offense: They refused to accept or use the blackboard — the new technology that was being introduced to teach math. That event — the biggest student revolt that Yale had experienced to date — went down in history as The Conic Sections Rebellion.
That fact emerges in “An American Orientalist: the Life and Legacy of Edward E. Salisbury (1814 – 1901),” a fascinating new exhibition in the memorabilia room of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.
by | Sep 9, 2016 8:07 am | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Barbara Marks‘s new paintings are attired in bright, warm colors and shapes that seem to invite you into the room to hear what they’re saying to each other.
She has an idea what they’re chattering about, but she’s not about to tell you. That’s your job.
by | Sep 8, 2016 8:23 am | Comments (17)
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Donius, Sherban at BAR’s parking “tap” event.
Imagine downtown drivers pulling into parking garages instead of first circling the block looking for spots. Imagine that inside these garages parkers also pick up locally grown fruits and vegetables or read poetry on the walls.
by | Sep 6, 2016 11:53 am | Comments (0)
Yinka Shonibare, “Fake Death Picture,” now on display.
Inside a gallery on Chapel Street, there’s a dead man draped on a bed in a dark room, a bottle of poison on the floor near his limp hand. Shredded papers spill from a box nearby.
There’s also a dead man in another bed, this time a gun in his hand, the neat self-inflicted wound in his side.
by | Sep 2, 2016 12:13 am | Comments (0)
Reynolds’ Sandy Hook Flock, oil on linen. Photo courtesy of Robert Reynolds.
The inspiration for Robert Reynolds in designing a mural for the new and newly opened Sandy Hook Elementary School was a long time in coming.
Fifteen years ago on an overcast day, the New Haven gallery owner and fine artist stood on Middleburg Beach in Holland with his then girlfriend as he received bad news of her medical status; stage 4 cervical and ovarian cancer. Moments later, Reynolds recounted, a flock of sea birds descended, enveloping the couple in what seemed a protective gesture and hopeful sign.
Continue reading ‘Sandy Hook Mural Salves Unspeakable Wounds’
by | Aug 31, 2016 2:40 pm | Comments (1)
• Daggett St. Swan Song.
• Dan Klau’s Dreams
• Recruiting more black officers.
• Summer sports redux.
• Female, Muslim, and concerned.
by | Aug 26, 2016 8:15 am | Comments (0)
Duo Dickinson Photo
The library, before reopening.
Set to reopen to the public Sept. 6, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, built not only to house books but to glory in their beauty and physical presence, is at a crossroads. Will the stacks, designed as a celebratory exhibit in a glass inner cube for all who enter, take on a different life in an increasingly digital age?
by | Aug 25, 2016 8:10 am | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
Into the hat dropped the 600. The brave, the anonymous 600.
Not the soldiers of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade, which poem of my youth I simply can’t can’t eradicate from an echoing memory; the 600 or so artists of all media and levels of experience, who are members of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.
Curator Debbie Hess wrote their names on small slips of paper and dropped them in a hat, both literal and figurative. The hat, once again, was Dr. Seussian and purple.
Then out came the names of 16 artists who comprise “Shuffle & Shake,” the two-part show of artists randomly chosen to show their work in the last exhibit of the summer at the council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery on Audubon Street.
by | Aug 25, 2016 7:00 am | Comments (0)
Lucy Gellman Photos
More than a year after Wells Fargo announced that it was closing the John Slade Ely House and curator Paul Clabby lost his job — and his home — the building will open its doors to take on a new artistic future, while stopping to acknowledge its embattled past.
by | Aug 16, 2016 12:04 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
The kids of Adventures in Art in Whackville.
In the art world there are group shows. Then there are group shows. Try one with 242 artists.
Continue reading ‘Creative Arts Workshop Goes To Whackville’
by | Aug 11, 2016 12:50 pm | Comments (1)
Courtesy The Grove
The Grove coworking space on Chapel Street has new tenants living by its downstairs window. Close to 65 of them, and growing.
After moving in quietly at the beginning of this month — just a few at a time, until suddenly they packed the space, in plain view during the day and well into each night — they have begun to attract an audience, shimmering scale-like in the sunlight before growing a little despondent when the sky clouds over or dusk falls.
by | Aug 8, 2016 8:11 am | Comments (3)
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Dakoulas with designs allegedly taken by Zara’s.
Dakoulas’ post last week.
Alex Dakoulas recognized the cursive letters outlined in orange and blue on major clothing retailer Wet Seal’s website, and realized: his store had been ripped off.
Wet Seal was selling an iron-on patch that used the exact design of independent artist Vaughn Fender — an exclusive design found only at Dakoulas’ store Strange Ways in Westville.
by | Aug 4, 2016 8:16 am | Comments (0)
Chris Randall Photos
Summer apprentices, lead artists, and Curator Sarah Fritchey.
The exhibition “Stages and Kingdoms of Exile” — the latest annual installment in which high-school artists take over Artspace, this year until Sept. 10 — was the culmination of the students’ work over three weeks with lead teaching artist and acclaimed painter Wardell Milan as part of Artspace’s 2016 Summer Apprenticeship Program (SAP).
In addition to cultivating New Haven’s emerging visual art talent, the program helps groom the city’s crop of burgeoning actors and playwrights; these students were taught and mentored by hip hop poet and playwright Aaron Jafferis, Executive Artistic Director Dexter Singleton of Collective Consciousness Theatre, and Jeremy O. Harris, an incoming playwriting student at the Yale School of Drama.
by | Jul 25, 2016 12:11 pm | Comments (9)
This window panel remains in Calhoun College.
Now-gone panel.
Twenty-seven shards of glass: That is what remains of a stained-glass pane at Calhoun College depicting slaves picking cotton after Corey Menafee, an African American employee at Yale University, knocked it down with a broomstick. Mr. Menafee explained his act with great clarity, stating that “… I don’t know, something inside me said, you know, that thing has to come down … It was a picture that just — you know, as soon as you look at it, it just hurts.”