Host Babz Rawls-Ivy beamed from the offices of the Arts Council at the over 100 people gathered virtually Wednesday evening to celebrate the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 40th annual arts awards. She noted that it was an historic occasion — but not because pandemic restrictions had prevented the audience from gathering in person at the New Haven Lawn Club, as they have in years past.
“Forty years,” she said, “and all the awardees are Black. I love to see it.”
The ceremony featured not only this year’s awardees and the Council’s lifetime achievement award, but music performances, discussions, and short films that showed how Black artists are responding to the current moment and leading the way, in words, images, and song.
First in the ceremony was the granting of C. Newton Schenck III Award for Lifetime Achievement in and Contribution to the Arts to Liz and John Fisher. Liz began her artistic career as a circus performer and then manager. For more than 20 years she has worked at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, most recently as managing director. John is stepping down this year as executive director of the Shubert Theater, having joined the theater in 1997 as managing director. During his tenure the theater recovered from financial hardship, got renovated, and created relationships with New Haven schools and libraries.
The couple estimated that together they’d been working in the arts for more than 90 years. “We started young — very young,” John said. They set the tone for the evening by acknowledging that, though they worked very hard, they also benefited from their privilege as educated White people to be able to find constant employment in a difficult field.
“The arts are the first things cut from any budget” and “one of the only universal consumables, like air and water,” John said. Art, he continued, “speaks to us when we are unable to hear, and for us when we are unable to speak.”
“How proud we are to have used these many years of our lives in this work,” Liz said.
Painter, illustrator, cartoonist, teacher, and activist Amira Brown was recognized for her fusing of artistic and political work, delving into her own personal narratives while also exploring immigrant and refugee rights, critiques of inequality, and voter mobilization. In June 2020 she created the Bailout Gallery, using the arts to raise legal funds for people arrested and jailed for protesting the killing of George Floyd.
To attend to pandemic restrictions, each recipient of an award could gather a very small group together as witness in the Arts Council’s offices, and the awarding itself was pre-recorded. This made the ceremonies a family affair, as siblings were likely to give out the award, and the awardees themselves spoke as much to the family in the actual room as the audience gathered virtually later. Brown thanked “everyone who has helped me through this creative cha cha” — especially her family, who she thanked for always encouraging her to “make my own door.”
Lynn Waters, a.k.a. Bubbles or Bubblicious, was noted as an artist, founding member of New Haven’s drag community, and a tireless worker for social justice for Black artists in New Haven. She is a mentor and activist, and a pillar at the New Haven Pride Center and of New Haven’s LGBTQ+ community.
Waters took time at her awards ceremony to thank her mother. “When you think of resilience and strength, she’s where I get it from,” Waters said. To the artists in the room with her, she said, “what’s here is my family, whether it’s blood or not. If I didn’t have a community of people — I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself…. I don’t know what more to say, so I’ll just say thank you.”
Musician and organizer Paul Bryant Hudson works at Co-Op High as the director of its after school program. Pre-Covid, he also organized and hosted The Jam at the State House, a monthly night for musicians to gather and play R&B, soul, funk, and jazz. He also opened The Kitchen, a coworking space by and for people of color, and participated in Artspace’s summer-long exhibit about the Black Panther trials.
Hudson talked about his upbringing in New Haven, attending the Helene Grant School as a child, where he felt nurtured by Black students and staff alike. He said it was there he learned “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem; the last four lines of that song, he reminded the audience, are “shadowed beneath Thy hand / may we forever stand / true to our God / true to our native land.”
“It’s the song that repeats most throughout my life,” he said, from his childhood to his wedding to the present day. “I think of myself as a person who’s been shadowed beneath the hand of God” for his entire life, he said. But the hands that “shaped and cared for me and molded me,” he said, were the women in his life, from great-grandmothers “who are ancestors now” to his grandmothers, mother, aunts, and wife.
“I think about what it’s meant over the years to grow up in the care of such deeply loving Black women, and what it means to grow up with such tangible support — and because of that care and support, to be recognized…. This award is for me. My name is on it, and there’s a picture of me, and it’s only possible because of these beautiful Black women who held and covered me under the shadow of their hand.”
Painter, printmaker, curator, and writer Shaunda Sekai Holloway started taking art classes as an adult at Creative Arts Workshop and is now an exhibiting artist around the world and a frequently published writer.
Holloway told a story of driving across the Grand Avenue Bridge with family as a young person. She recalled an uncle telling her, “nO matter what you do, just don’t ever give up.” She did not — but she didn’t do it alone. “I want to thank people who know true sisterhood,” she said. She thanked a cousin who, she said, answered whenever she called by asking “what do you need me to do?”
She also thanked Creative Arts Workshop; “when my grandmother gave me the money to enter that class, little did I know I was entering a community,” she said. She concluded by recalling the words of a friend that guided her: “This is not a wait-for-it world,” the friend told her. “This is a go-get-it world.”
“The arts in New Haven has come a long way,” she said in conclusion, “and I’m grateful to be a part of it.”
IfeMichelle Gardin, founder of the Elm City LIT Fest, was recognized for decades of arts organization work, from outdoor festivals to youth services to programming at Long Wharf Theatre to collaborations with the Yale School of Drama, Arts Council, and Shubert Theatre. In 2009, she created Arts@Work to teach youth about job opportunities in the theater.
“I’ve never won an award and I didn’t think about it until this happened,” Gardin said. “I just thought about doing what I do…. I always loved writing and reading from my family.” She also learned about political activism, watching the Black Panther rallies on the Green and having family involved in community work.
She revealed that she found the name Ife while looking for a name for her daughter. She named her daughter Raven; she gave herself the name Ife. It “means ‘love of art, love of culture,’” she said, and when she came across it, she recalled thinking, “that’s how I want to live.”
It continues to be the word she lives by. In her parting words, she exhorted the audience to “go forward in culture.”
The ceremony also featured collaborations among previous awardees. Dancing Through Pregnancy Founder and Director Ann Cowlin (1983) and former Artspace Executive Director Helen Kauder (2012) teamed up to create “Fountain of Resiliency: Art that Nurtures,” looking back on four decades of the community built around Cowlin’s program. Kauder herself drew parallels between being an arts organizer and being a parent; both, she said, involved “letting go of your own agenda” and embracing the fluidity that real collaboration and community could provide.
Site Projects (2004) and New Haven Promise collaborated on a program called “Emancipation Takes a Knee,” produced by Patricia Melton and Laura Clarke and involving David Sepulveda (2016), Susan Clinard (2015), Jamie Burnett (2005), and Travis Carbonella (2016). Sculptor Clinard and facilitator Salwa Abdussabur brought New Haven high-school students Kaatje Welsh, Alissa Jones, Zoe Eichler, Jermaine Pugh, and Ayo Engel-Halfkenny into Clinard’s studio to discuss and ultimately reshape a model of the Emancipation Monument, one of the problematic statues under scrutiny this year — a statue meant to commemorate Abraham Lincoln that was also denigrating to Black people by portraying them, still, as grateful, subjugated slaves.
The students first began reshaping the model to refashion the slave so that he was taking a knee, in the form of Colin Kaepernick’s protest on the football field. After further discussion, it was decided that the statue should stand next to Lincoln, proud and strong. This led one of the participants to a startling conclusion, as she noted that all of their work had been concentrated on reshaping the Black figure in the statue while barely touching Lincoln at all.
It was, she said, a “brutal process. I’m just thinking about how we had to undo and bring down and cut up this Black man in order to get him even to a place where he’s standing next to Lincoln, and all Lincoln got was a couple plug-ins here and there, still in the same position he’s at.”
“We had to break down everything in order to lift this man up,” she added. “That is so representative of where we’re at right now.”
The evening ended with a musical perfomance by New London-based musician Kolton Harris, who performed recent songs that celebrated Black uplift and joy. But before his performance, he sat down for a conversation with Adriane Jefferson, the city’s arts czar, to talk about his project. In the context of that conversation, he had something to say about where the arts could go from here that was both provocation and guidance.
“The arts are not doing enough art,” he said. “We’re talking so much to the point that we’re not doing art.”
“We love seeing the events, but when are you going to put on a show?” he added. In changing people’s minds and attitudes, he said — and thereby in really changing society — “the art is what leads the way.”