by | 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.
Continue reading ‘Quinnipiac Riverfest Brightens Fair Haven’
by | 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.
Continue reading ‘Biotech Build Needs Some Art. Gateway's On It’
by | 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 | 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.
Continue reading ‘Artists Find The Beauty In Paying Attention’
by | 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.
Continue reading ‘Art Explores The Importance Of Being Soft’
by | 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.
Continue reading ‘Design & Activism Retrospective Tracks The Work’
by | 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 | 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 | 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.
Continue reading ‘Artist Looks At Mental Health From The Inside’
by | 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.
Continue reading ‘Farm Celebrates Spring With Artist Fairy House Walk’
by | 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 | 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 | 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.”
Continue reading ‘Inaugural Art Show Cracks Open The Questions’
by | 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 | 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 | 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.”
Continue reading ‘Artists Open Path To Grappling With Climate Change’
by | 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 | 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.
by | Mar 21, 2024 11:44 am | Comments (1)
Portrait of a Lady — Spilling the Tea; La Artillería De La Reina — Gimme My Flowers Now; Nefertiti of House Nubia — Bamboo Earring Only 1 Pair.
Sandy Clafford’s trio of paintings take over the space near the window of the Institute Library’s upstairs gallery for the show “Look Book” — running now through May 23 in the Chapel Street library, with an opening reception tonight. They make a bold fashion statement, though not one that follows easy rules.
by | Mar 19, 2024 10:18 am | Comments (4)
John McDonald Photo
Ball & Socket Arts front view.
When asked to name the cultural hubs of the Northeast, most people would not consider Cheshire, Connecticut a part of that list. A group of enthusiastic artists and supporters of the arts are hoping to change that over the next few years, as Ball & Socket Arts, a complex located on West Main Street right along the Farmington Canal Linear Path, continues its efforts to create a central location aimed at encouraging ongoing creativity and attracting New Haven County residents and beyond to its galleries, performance venue, art education center, and more.
Continue reading ‘Ball & Socket Arts Turns Factory Into Gallery’
by | Mar 14, 2024 9:24 am | Comments (0)
Esthea Kim
White Field 2.
Esthea Kim’s painting White Field 2, at first glance, could be a photograph of clouds or smoke, but its complex surface asks the viewer to take more than just one glance, to be drawn in. The more you look, the more you see: variations in colors and textures, bordering on movement. The sense of space and depth within the painting suggests something huge could be obscured by the smoky veil. What’s behind there? Threat or serenity? Or are the clouds all there is?
by | Mar 12, 2024 9:54 am | Comments (1)
Oluseye
Good Luck Totem.
An antiquated candy vending machine sits atop a wooden stand in the lobby of NXTHVN, its faded signage and weathered hardware still beckoning the visitor to give it a coin. But it doesn’t work, and what’s inside it isn’t candy, but a multitude of cowrie shells, from sea snails found in tropical oceans. They’ve been used as money, as jewelry, and as rattles for instruments. But here, they can’t be used at all — not for any price.
by | Mar 5, 2024 9:45 am | Comments (0)
Students Monday outside the parked cARTie bus.
cARTie museum educator Nicole Pappo reads to students outdoors.
When asked “does art matter?” second graders Mercedes, Mason, and Elia agreed “yes.” Then they showed some of the reasons: Mason drew a sign reading “art = peace.” Elia drew a self-portrait. And Mercedes drew a rainbow, reading “I love art.”
by | Mar 5, 2024 9:14 am | Comments (0)
T!lt.
“Castes,” the lead single from the New Haven-based T!lt’s new album, Death Do Us Part, starts with guitars weaving around each other, while drums and bass drop in to give the song a steady pulse. Mike Scialla’s plaintive vocal unspools a gentle song about heartbreak. “Was it something stuck inside my head?” he sings. “Was it something left unsaid?” Slide guitars swoop above and below like seagulls. It’s heartfelt and country-inflected, without entirely landing straight into country music.
by | Feb 28, 2024 9:34 am | Comments (2)
niko w. okoro and Erik Clemons.
A new art gallery is coming to the Lab at ConnCORP, on Newhall. The Orchid Gallery, organized by nico w. okoro of the bldg fund, is born out of conversations with area artists, with the goals of making a space for Black and Brown artists in the community to be seen and heard, supporting them in their professional development, and making a place where artists can come together.
Continue reading ‘Orchid Gallery Prepares For Inaugural Show’