by
Eleanor Polak |
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.
by
Brian Slattery |
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
Brian Slattery |
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.
by
Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 12:32 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Eleanor Polak photo
The Legacy Mobile Exhibitioninside 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
Brian Slattery |
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
Brian Slattery |
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.
by
Eleanor Polak |
Jun 10, 2024 9:41 am
|
Comments
(2)
Eleanor Polak photos
Lynette Devore and Lisa Bellamy Fluker (below) at Riverfest.
The June sunlight sparkled off the smooth waters of the Quinnipiac River beside the Quinnipiac River Marina in Fair Haven, where people of all ages gathered to participate in the Quinnipiac Riverfest this Saturday.
by
Eleanor Polak |
Jun 7, 2024 9:15 am
|
Comments
(2)
Eleanor Polak photos
Peter Bonadies and Gateway students Elisabeth Krogh and Ariana Silva, at work making art for ...
Eleanor Polak photo
... 101 College St. The mural will be where the wooden slats are.
On the third floor of Gateway Community College, eight students were hard at work with sandpaper, paint, and screwdrivers.
Their project: to build a pair of murals to hang on facades outside the 101 College St. bioscience building on the rise at MLK Boulevard, College Street, South Frontage Road, and Temple Street.
Artists Peter Bonadies and Vladamir Shpitalnik led the class to make art pieces that represented creativity, community, and giving back to the people of New Haven.
by
Eleanor Polak |
Jun 3, 2024 8:16 am
|
Comments
(2)
Eleanor Polak photo
Aly Maderson Quinlog and Ty/Tyasha Pace at Pride Center's Zine Fair.
The New Haven Pride Center at 50 Orange St. was decked out this Saturday with colorful flags and even more colorful artwork.
Magik Press, a micro-press and arts studio run by Aly Maderson Quinlog and Ty/Tyasha Pace, was hosting its first-ever zine party and punk show. It was an event, the two stressed, about community, and the community was out in full force, from the vendors showcasing their creativity to the buyers eager to share in it.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2024 8:14 am
|
Comments
(2)
Frank Bruckmann
I-95 East Norwalk.
Frank Bruckmann paints the sky to convey a sense of the clouds roiling overhead; perhaps it’s getting dark, or threatening rain, or both. In the dimness, the lights in the painting are blurred by atmosphere. Metal signs gleam in the reflected light. Bruckmann gives it all emotion and loving attention, which makes it all the more interesting that his subject isn’t a beautiful landscape, or an important person, but a snarl of traffic on I‑95.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 29, 2024 9:24 am
|
Comments
(0)
Beloved New Haven.
It’s a simple idea with big consequences. The picture of East Rock is the sort you might see on a postcard. The message is easy to digest, a salute to a city the artist loves, a message of solidarity. But it’s also an acknowledgment of struggle, and that’s where the fact that the art is made on a record comes into play. Give the record a spin, and everything gets blurred, both the place and the message. In the midst of the struggle, the hardship can be dizzying. It’s hard to know sometimes which end is up. But that’s also when the music plays.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 23, 2024 9:35 am
|
Comments
(0)
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Women in Design: The Next Decade.
It’s a poster for a conference held in Los Angeles in 1975, “for women who work with public visual and physical forms,” as the piece advertises — that is, women artists and designers. The abstract vista suggests a wide open landscape, a distant horizon, a place of limitless opportunity. But the repeating image, the shape of the symbol of femininity derived from the Roman sign for the goddess Venus, is also quite literally about nuts and bolts.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2024 9:16 am
|
Comments
(0)
City of Meriden.
New Haven-based artist Michael Miglietta has a visual style that leans into the surreal and the cosmic, creating dizzying, shape-shifting images with bold linework and vivid color. Under the moniker Parlay Droner, he’s also an experimental musician, exploring the harsher edges of sound. For a show of his artwork at the Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden, however, he faced a more pragmatic problem: “What do I have to do to get people to see a great band from Ireland on a Monday night?”
by
Brian Slattery |
May 16, 2024 8:22 am
|
Comments
(0)
Lionel Cruet
Video installation in Sunburnt.
An entire gallery of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street is bathed in a pinkish-orange glow that streams in through tinted windows, a constant chemical sunset. The light transforms the pieces that artist Lionel Cruet has in the space, from a painting of a mangrove swamp populated by iguanas to shopping bags emblazoned with ominous faces commanding you to enjoy your life.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 15, 2024 8:22 am
|
Comments
(1)
Amanda Rodriguez
Rebelled.
Rebelled is a direct yet complex image. Death looms over it, a sense of pain, from the position of the skull to the splayed black watercolor spilling out from the jawline. But the flowers growing out of the eyes and mouth aren’t just a sign of the skull’s inner decay. They suggest new life, too, rejuvenation. Those opposites come together as uneasy partners, the same sort of way the title of the piece isn’t, but sounds a lot like, the word rebuild.
by
Karen Ponzio |
May 15, 2024 8:21 am
|
Comments
(1)
Craig Gilbert Photo.
Fairy house made by Craig Gilbert.
When one thinks of places to view art, a farm does not typically come to mind. Dylan Vitale is hoping to change that as Celebrate Spring, an annual event held this Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. at Massaro Community Farm in Woodbridge, heads into its fifth year. The event features not only seedlings and farm products for sale, but also a vendor fair showcasing local artists and their work, as well as a fairy house walk that has become a way for artists of all ages and skill levels to be creative.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2024 8:29 am
|
Comments
(0)
Sean Patrick Gallagher
These Wine-Dark, Warming Currents, Rising.
In Sean Patrick Gallagher’s series of paintings, the sea roils red. The image is clear enough, but the title brings home the allusions the artist is leaning toward. “Wine-dark,” the famous moniker for the ocean in Homer’s classical Greek epics. The others are more contemporary, pointing to the effects of climate change. The series of paintings together act almost like a film. Move through the gallery fast enough, and the floor might feel like it’s surging beneath your feet.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 3, 2024 8:41 am
|
Comments
(1)
Melida McKenzie-Alford
From Across the Waters.
From its subject to its materials to its execution, Melida McKenzie-Alford’s From Across the Waters partakes of the aesthetic and techniques of traditional African art, hearkening back to the origins of culture. But in the end it’s the overall shape of the piece (which isn’t and perhaps can’t be captured in a photograph) that draws the viewer’s attention. It starts high on the wall and cascades downward, a serene waterfall.
In the place where it’s currently hung at Known, on the fourth floor of the Palladium Building at 139 Orange St., it bids the viewer to stop for a moment and take a minute for contemplation. Which, as it turns out, is part of the point.
by
Brian Slattery |
May 2, 2024 10:33 am
|
Comments
(1)
Moshopefoluwa "MO" Olagunju
Blue (Affection).
The figure stares out from the canvas, her pose ambiguous. Does it connote strength or vulnerability? Or both? Something more? There’s a sense of intrusion, of the viewer having discovered her. But the painter insures that we, the viewers, come bearing an offering; those are our hands in the lower part of the canvas. But still more is afoot. The blue rope twining out from the figure are intestines, but she’s none the worse for losing them. All of the elements in Blue (Affection) are potent images, but their relationships to one another aren’t clear. Meaning shifts as we construct it.
The painting, by Moshopefoluwa “MO” Olanguju, is part of a larger series of artworks “designed to evoke varied narrative interpretations based on the arrangement of surrounding paintings,” MO writes. “Throughout the series, roses and guts emerge as recurring motifs, contributing to a thematic continuity within the narrative.”
by
Brian Slattery |
Apr 22, 2024 11:13 am
|
Comments
(0)
Amartya De
Sequoia.
The photograph is from northern California, and photographer Amartya De said it was his roommate’s favorite of his pictures at the time because “it shows the landscape.” It was a city, but not really a city; it was a place close to the redwoods. De was there from Calcutta, learning how to become an artist, and learning that the practice of making art and the practice of surviving weren’t all that different.
by
Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2024 9:33 am
|
Comments
(9)
Joy Bush photo
Bethlehem.
It’s the shape of an ancient Middle Eastern cityscape, verandahs and towers, arched doorways and windows like peeping eyes. But it’s not anywhere near the Middle East; it’s on a rock hilltop in Waterbury, and it’s part of Holy Land USA — to some, a roadside attraction, to others, a place of serious pilgrimage, and for Joy Bush, the subject of an almost 40-year-long series of photographs.
Some of those photos are up now at City Gallery in a show called “Ruins of a Holy Land,” running through April 28, with a reception on April 13.
by
Brian Slattery |
Apr 2, 2024 8:45 am
|
Comments
(0)
Susan Hoffman Fishman
The Earth Is Breaking Beautifully.
Susan Hoffman Fishman’s painting seems at first to be an abstract, full of brilliant colors and bold lines. Soon, though, one can see how it’s derived from natural forms — but at what scale? It could be a cross-section of a tree or a landscape viewed from space. It turns out that it’s more the latter.
“As a result of climate change, the extraction of minerals and the damming of the Jordan River, which once provided a source of new water to the Dead Sea, over 8,000 sinkholes have developed along its shores. Seen from above via satellites and drones, the sinkholes are brilliant cobalt blue, lime green, white, yellow ochre and rust red,” the artist writes. “The Earth is Breaking Beautifully emphasizes the contrast between the horrifying destruction around the Dead Sea and the beauty of that destruction.”
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 27, 2024 9:59 am
|
Comments
(0)
Mark K. St. Mary
Study #1108.
Mark K. St. Mary’s Study #1108 looks almost like it could be a double exposure, an image of light and shadow laid over a photograph of a hallway. Viewed another way, it can feel almost intrusive, a view from inside a house at night when the lights are off. Should we, the viewers, be there? What is going on?
by
Brian Slattery |
Mar 22, 2024 11:08 am
|
Comments
(2)
Madonna.
The Yale University Art Gallery’s show “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression” — running now through June 23 on the gallery’s fourth floor at 1111 Chapel St. — begins with a moment at an art gallery over 100 years ago that feels like it could happen today, or any time. In 1912, the text relates, there was a “monumental exhibition of modern art” in Cologne, Germany that “aimed to illustrate how the most cutting-edge groups of the day drew inspiration from the work of a slightly older generation.” That big-tent approach, however, turned out to be fraught.
