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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Jan 31, 2023 11:38 am
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Nora Grace-Flood photos
Rahaf Sayet about to press another pistachio halloumi panini.
Rahaf Sayet took two slices of blended whole wheat and sourdough bread from Whole G Bakery, layered on Cyprus-made cheese, and placed the sandwich in a panini press — crafting a local-foreign fusion meal that’s selling fast at a new Chapel Street Middle Eastern eatery.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 31, 2023 9:05 am
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The pieces, by Carol Boynton, Frank Bruckmann, Todd Lyon, and Diane Chandler, are hung side by side by side by side in the gallery. Even though the subjects are looking in the same general direction, in their animation and expression, they could be talking with one another. Each subject — women, men, Black, Brown, White — has been filtered through the eye and mind of the artist. Each artist has rendered the subject with the same care and attention, the same eye toward humanity, toward capturing something like the truth.
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Thomas Breen |
Jan 30, 2023 10:46 am
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Artist Matos and Gov. Lamont: Talking ceramics, and Venezuela.
Inside Matos's studio.
All-star Orange Street ceramicist Kiara Matos got a high-profile visitor — but not a customer — on Friday, as Gov. Ned Lamont swung by to marvel at her pottery workshop, catch up on her small-business story, pose for a photo with one of her brightly hued bird sculptures, and then leave empty-handed.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 26, 2023 8:53 am
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The improvisational jam duo P(x3) was on the stage of the State House Wednesday creating great grooves to dance to. But the figures leaping and spinning on the screen behind him weren’t dancing; they were fighting, in kinetic and ludicrous ways — as is the style of Super Smash Bros., the hit fighting video game from Nintendo that’s now almost a quarter-century old and still going strong. The audience members gathered to watch were in rapt attention. On a couch pulled up close to the stage, two players, their eyes glued to the screen, were in mortal combat, though one that would end with a smile.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2023 8:50 am
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Still from "Forever 17."
One artist heads straight into the complexity of being queer in Hong Kong. Another heads out into the desert. And another heads into the dismal future. What all three artists — Kit Hung, January Yoon Cho, and Gary Sczerbaniewicz — have in common is a willingness to explore things that make them uncomfortable. And all three have solo shows at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, running now through Feb. 19 concurrently with a few other shows after ECOCA took a brief holiday hiatus.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Jan 19, 2023 5:54 pm
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Paul Bass file photo
Krikko Obbott: “We’ve been wanting to do this for years."
The "warehouse" at 212 West St. Obbott is looking to convert into apartments.
A Hill illustrator and museum owner is moving ahead with plans to attract more creative talent to West Street, after winning a first slate of approvals needed for turning part of his property into artist apartments.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 12, 2023 8:43 am
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William Frucht
Ellis Island Island #6 and Ellis Island Hospital #1.
Everything in William Frucht’s photographs is having its layers peeled away — of paint, varnish, wood, metal — by time and neglect. At first glance they could be of century-old buildings anywhere in the Northeast, until a certain famous statue appears in the window of one of the buildings. Then the pictures snap into focus; they’re of the buildings on Ellis Island, the famous point of arrival for the great wave of immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century, when U.S. immigration was perhaps the most open it has been in its history as a global power.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2023 8:29 am
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The centerpiece of Lisa Toto’s part of the latest show at Kehler Liddell Gallery — running now through Feb. 5, and also featuring works by Hank Paper and Chris Ferguson — is two prints of the same image, of a young girl in a dress running by a relief. She exudes joy, but there’s something wrong.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Jan 9, 2023 9:00 am
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Kimberly Wipfler Photo
Lauren Sellers working on her vision board (below) along with other members of the public at a library-hosted 2023 visioning event.
Lauren Sellers made short, careful cuts through shiny magazine paper, tracing along the edges of an image of an ice cream cone — all while mapping out a vision for how to be her best self in the year ahead.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 5, 2023 8:51 am
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The intersection of Orange and Crown can be quiet this time of year, as it gets cold and the street has opened up again to traffic. But there’s still foot traffic, a passing car, a man flitting by on a bicycle. And now, in the windows at Artspace, a series of projections, of shapes that move and change, looking first like crystals, then reflections in glass, and sometimes perhaps like physics experiments. They invite anyone to stop and linger, and maybe even get a little lost. But maybe the most intriguing thing about them is that they’re not films; they’re digital animations. They’re just lines of code.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 3, 2023 9:02 am
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The image of beloved New Haven photographer David White, Jr. is an image that plays with time. It starts with the obvious anachronisms, from the instrument in White’s pocket to the sepia background, even as it’s clear that White is a modern man. The melted edges of the image, though, are another layer of history. They’re not digital artifacts, but the blurred edges of a process few people see anymore: the development of a Polaroid, and in this case, an especially hefty one — a 20 x 24 camera, “so rare only five were initially manufactured,” an accompanying note explains. The photograph was taken in 1993. Why the Polaroid? Why the anachronistic style? And why is it paired with an image from 1815?
Fred White Thursday outside the Whalley Wells Fargo.
A retired tool-and-die maker named Fred White kept moving Thursday, hopping on his music-amplified Kent Cruiser two-wheeler to navigate the busy Norton-Whalley intersection.
