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Brian Slattery |
Jul 23, 2024 9:26 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 19, 2024 9:12 am
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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.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 17, 2024 9:30 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 16, 2024 9:05 am
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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.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 12, 2024 8:31 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 10, 2024 9:23 am
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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?
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 8, 2024 9:24 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2024 8:31 am
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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?
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2024 8:26 am
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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.
“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.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 3, 2024 9:20 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 27, 2024 9:15 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 25, 2024 9:11 am
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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.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 12:32 pm
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 24, 2024 9:05 am
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(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.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 12, 2024 9:12 am
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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.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 10, 2024 9:41 am
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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.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 7, 2024 9:15 am
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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.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 3, 2024 8:16 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2024 8:14 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
May 29, 2024 9:24 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
May 23, 2024 9:35 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2024 9:16 am
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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?”
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Brian Slattery |
May 16, 2024 8:22 am
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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.
