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Brian Slattery |
May 9, 2023 8:40 am
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(2)
Milena Alvarez
Luz.
Luz, by Milena Alvarez, gets its effect first and foremost from the atmosphere the artist captures. It’s a picture that looks hot, a blazing afternoon. The people are keeping cool. The artist is part of the painting, as all three subjects are aware of her, which complicates things. Was the artist just taking their picture? Or was the artist interrupting something? The ambiguity is heightened by the subjects’ blurred faces. They seem relaxed enough, but we’ll never know what they’re thinking.
Elm City Montessori students lead a tour of Elm City Montessori's newest murals.
James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, and Harvey Milk are now watching over the halls of Elm City Montessori School — in newly unveiled mural portraits that fit in well with the Blake Street charter school’s anti-bias and anti-racist values.
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Brian Slattery |
May 5, 2023 9:13 am
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Keith Johnson
Flying Untied (detail).
The sky is full of planes. Not like it is at an airport, or ever an air show. No, in Keith Johnson’s Flying Untied, the atmosphere is littered with planes, as if they’ve been shaken all at once out of a gigantic cosmic bag, or as if a dozen air traffic controllers messed up at once and we’re in for the biggest cumulative air disaster the world has ever seen. Flying Untied succeeds in being both somewhat comical and a little threatening in this regard, an effect amplified by the fact that — apart from their proximity to one another — the planes seem totally natural.
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Brian Slattery |
May 4, 2023 8:42 am
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Carla Lia’s postcard-size piece, at first glance, seems altogether pleasant, a depiction of a girl with a heart-shaped balloon. But coming in close reveals layers of sharp humor. The picture is slipping out of the frame, which seems to be acting as a shredder to the image. Soon, it seems, girl and balloon will be in tatters. Which is where the text at the bottom comes in, feeling like a well-earned punchline: “from my cold, dead hands.”
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Karen Ponzio |
May 2, 2023 8:38 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Painting by Ben Cannan.
Sunday morning may have been gray and rainy outside, but inside Never Ending Books a group of artists was bringing color and shape to the State Street space with pencils, pens, clay, watercolors, and acrylics. Arts Meet Up, a twice monthly event, provides an open area for creatives of all kinds and all levels. According to Ryan Licwinko, a member of the Volume Two collective that runs the space, the event has been going strong since June of last year with a simple and straightforward goal: to give artists a space to create.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2023 8:45 am
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A small sculpture hangs from the ceiling of City Gallery on Upper State Street and floats, as if it’s alive and capable of hovering in midair, or perhaps is a bit of plant life floating in the ocean. All around it, the walls are decorated with pieces that read like fungal growth, or the traces of growth, or perhaps the tracks left by some land or sea creature. They and the rest of the pieces in the gallery are so thoroughly integrated that it would be possible to believe that they were made by a single artist. But it’s really the work of two artists — Meg Bloom and Cyra Levenson — working in conversation with one another. And as the title of the show — “Regenerations,” running through April 30 — suggests, that conversation has been nothing but fruitful.
Sandy Birner cut through the Courtyard Marriott parking lot on Howe Street Tuesday morning with two Stop & Shop bags filled with sneakers and hats, in search of the right place to show them to the world.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 24, 2023 8:38 am
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(2)
MO
transformation.
The painting, titled transformation, is literally visceral, but fantastical at the same time. It is an act of carnage, though not necessarily one of violence. Are we witnessing creation or destruction? Are they part of the same thing?
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 13, 2023 8:25 am
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Greg Aimé
Sir MacArthur and Pope Francis
Greg Aimé’s Sir MacArthur and Pope Francis are already intricate enough from a visual perspective. They are riffs on, even explosions of, classic European portraiture. They are collages to get lost in, places where cultural signifiers blend and collide. They capture the scrum of history, the messy generation of culture, where suffering, celebration, experience and investigation commingle. Aimé then adds a layer for anyone with a device that can read a QR code; there’s music, narration, that gives more context, broadens and deepens the themes. The layers of aural and visual components are a statement in themselves. There’s always more to learn, always ways to dig deeper.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 11, 2023 4:46 pm
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(42)
Brian Slattery File Photo
Now-former Ely Center employee Max Schmidt: "I think we can do better."
A now-former employee at a Trumbull Street visual arts gallery left his job after finding out about a board member’s decade-old child pornography arrest.
That employee is now speaking out about what he describes as an insensitive and unsupportive workplace, as well as an alleged exodus of board members sparked by their former colleague’s criminal record.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 10, 2023 12:47 pm
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(6)
Brian Slattery Photo
Conversation facilitator Kim Weston: "I want young people, and children, and anyone who walks into this space to be safe."
A downtown visual art gallery has kicked off a public reckoning with how to become a “safe” workplace in the wake of resignations by several board members and an employee.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 29, 2023 8:41 am
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(0)
PenRod
Elephant Profile with Sun.
It’s an elephant in the valley of the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe, but it has been pulled out of time. It could be an image from the early history of photography, or a film still, or a postcard. But the image is actually quite recent, the years added to convey an urgent message.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 28, 2023 8:24 am
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(1)
Emmanuel Massillon
Drill Music.
Emmanuel Massillon’s trumpet doesn’t have a mouthpiece. It can’t play. That’s the first hint that there’s a problem. Linger and look a little more, and you see that the misshapen bell of the horn is actually made from bullet casings. The title of the piece, Drill Music, suggests the indictment the artist is handing to that particular form of music. But something bigger and deeper is afoot as well.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 23, 2023 8:54 am
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Joseph Keckler’s video installation Ghost Song (which can be viewed in its entirety here) describes an erotic encounter with a spirit that is made hilarious by the multiple layers of incongruous media Keckler uses to create the story. It is funny enough that the encounter — “I had sex with a ghost,” the subtitles plainly read — is described in ludicrous detail (“different poses, like elderly aerobics. My ghost was a body worker. I held my arms in the air like a lost raver”). Funnier still that, after a more traditional ghost story opening, Keckler conveys the story in Italian, sung as light opera. The more seriously he emotes, the funnier it gets.
Women paying tribute at Sunday's event (clockwise from top left): Ethnic Heritage Center Walk New Haven Coordinator and JHSGNH Past President Rhoda Zahler Samuel, close Schiff friends Rachel Leff and Sara Fraim, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford Executive Director Elizabeth Rose, JHSGNH President Marjorie Drucker, Yale Alumni Magazine Editor Kathrin Day Lassila (holding Yale Medal awarded to Schiff).
The Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven (JHSGNH) kicked off a tradition Sunday: An annual Judith Ann Schiff Women’s History Program. The event took place at New Haven Museum in conjunction with an exhibit about “Trailblazing Jewish Women” from New Haven and Connecticut. The first event honored Schiff herself, the “people’s historian” who served the City of New Haven as well as Yale and helped found the JHSGNH, and who died last year at the age of 84. Following is the published JHSGNH tribute to Schiff, written by Carole Bass.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 15, 2023 8:55 am
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(1)
Amelia Maurer
Maeve and the Monsoons.
Amelia Maurer’s surreal image evokes power and magic, a sense of fearlessness. The viewer is the intruder in this scenario; the subject is a guardian, and she’s holding all the cards. The piece is striking enough on its own. Presenting it as the cover art for an imaginary album only magnifies its allure. It suggests that the associated music is strange and visionary. You haven’t heard anything like it, but you want to.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 9, 2023 8:39 am
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(0)
The paths of light streak across the darkness, like the afterglow of the sun across your retina after you close your eyes on a summer day. Or perhaps like the smoky path in the air left behind by a kid waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, or a flashlight. It’s actually the sun dancing across water, but for artist Phyllis Crowley, it’s not the source of the light that matters. It’s the shapes the light leaves behind, a record of the way it moved — and the way it suggests a meaning, just out of reach.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 2, 2023 9:25 am
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Haley Grunloh’s rendition of dragonflies shows off, first, her technical skill as an artist, as the insects are depicted with all the attention to their form a viewer could want. But she has also chosen to depict them mating, one of the most fascinating and also slightly awkward moments in a dragonfly’s life cycle, as it’s one of the few moments when they’re not capable of the aeronautics we usually associate with them. It’s a hint at Grunloh’s attraction to the unusual, and a doorway into her artwork — assembled as a show running at Never Ending Books on State Street.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 27, 2023 9:13 am
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“O my dove, thou art in the cleft of the rock, in the secret crevices of the cliff.” The words from Song of Songs, poetic as they are, could be interpreted any number of ways. But in artist Margaret Shepherd’s hands, that interpretation tilts in a certain direction. The gracefulness of the letters themselves, the sensuousness of the details, the flower seemingly on the verge of opening a little wider, all suggest that, whatever other meanings the passage may have, one meaning is right on the surface, and not to be ignored.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 22, 2023 8:42 am
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Linda Mickens
Sisters (detail).
Sisters is a sculpture that gets its effect in its details. Its creator, Linda Mickens, has the obvious skill to capture the girls as individuals, the contours of their faces, the wry, open expressions that are the gateway to seeing their personalities. Keeping the finest details a little vague has its own effect; it’s as though we’re seeing them in motion, just two girls walking down the street. What’s the nature of their kinship? Do they share a biological mother? Are they close friends? Or have they just met, but already feel a familial bond between them? The sculpture suggests the distinction is unimportant; what matters is that they’re sisters because they call each other that.
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Maya McFadden |
Feb 21, 2023 10:55 am
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(0)
Maya McFadden Photo
Sixth grader Mahki in Platt's art class.
A “House of Video Games” took shape line by line beneath sixth-grader Mahki’s pen — as Edgewood School students brought Detroit’s fabled Heidelberg Project into their New Haven classroom.
In the process, the students discovered how public art can transform blighted homes into objects bursting with color, life, and beauty, and they continued their monthlong celebration of contemporary Black artists and changemakers.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2023 8:39 am
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(0)
Rita Hannafin
Sanctuary in the City.
The scene depicted in Rita Hannafin’s Sanctuary in the City could be of several places in the New Haven area, places that seem wilder than they should be given their proximity to people, whether it’s a stretch of the West River, or the Quinnipiac River before it reaches Fair Haven, or a part of the shoreline in West Haven.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 10, 2023 9:12 am
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(0)
Erich Davis
Illumination
Erich Davis’s Illumination floats in the air at Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Ave. as if it were suspended in water, creating an atmosphere somewhere between cloud and kelp forest. It has a way of pulling in the works around it, making them feel a little more weightless as well, even more than they already are. This is entirely in keeping with the theme of the show — “Light” — running now at Kehler Liddell Gallery through Mar. 12, with an opening reception this Sunday, Feb. 12 at 2 p.m.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 8, 2023 8:54 am
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(2)
The woman sits with a long gun in her hands, mouth open, part battle cry, part scream from the soul. In her tense stance, she looks ready to fight, but the sculpture is more than just a call to duty. The nails that are part of the sculpture are a clue: they connote neat dreadlocks, but are, in a literal sense, also metal being driven into the scalp. It’s clear she’s prepared for a long struggle, but also, she wonders why she has to do it, and perhaps from where she will draw the strength to carry on. That dichotomy extends to the gun she holds: does her fight involve using it or melting it down? Is it her tool or part of the source of the problem? Or both?
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 6, 2023 8:50 am
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(5)
Brian Slattery photos
Photographer Ian Christmann with mural-size work in Mary Wade.
On Saturday afternoon, residents, families, and neighborhood dignitaries streamed in and out of Chatman Place at Mary Wade on Clinton Avenue in Fair Haven. They were there to check out an art show — and along the way, learned how art can create concrete connections to place and wellbeing.
