Artists Mourn Loss Of Community Hub

“It is a disaster for our block. We LOVE this store. I am so angry.” ​“It’s my life’s blood.” ​“This is a huge bummer … I’m there weekly with buying materials for my work or for my class at CAW.” ​“I feel bad for us but also the wonderful staff who have always been so great.” 

These were a few of the many outcries from New Haven artists and citizens as news spread yesterday that Artist & Craftsman Supply, at 821 – 825 Chapel St., had announced it would be closing in early March.

Artist & Craftsman Supply is a national chain based in Portland, Me., with 21 locations across the country. ​“We could never really get enough sales to make it all make sense,” said Director of Retail Operations Trevor Webster about the decision to close its New Haven location. However the numbers were crunched, what wasn’t in doubt was the importance of the store for the New Haven arts scene, not only as a place for artists to buy affordable art supplies, but as a place to meet one another, learn about art shows happening around town, and be part of the network of artists that help make New Haven the culturally vibrant city that it is.

Jisu Sheen, who is a sales associate, has worked at Artist & Craftsman since the summer of 2021; before that she worked as a freelancer. She decided to work at Artist & Craftsman because ​“I liked the friendly atmosphere I noticed in the workers here, and how comfortable people seemed to be.” 

“This has been a great place to get to know a lot of artists and people in the arts community,” she continued. ​“We definitely get regulars that we love. A lot of friendships have started between regular customers coming here.”

Those friendships have extended to the store’s staff. ​“We have all kinds of little traditions and inside jokes” Sheen said, that involve former and current employees, who have stayed in touch with one another. ​“We get together and watch movies. We went to see one of our old co-worker’s play all together. It’s a real tight-knit group.”

Among the staff traditions have been to write, on a pole behind the register, the names of all the items would-be customers have come into the store asking for that Artist & Craftsman didn’t carry, from snacks and shampoo, to wigs, underwear, and porn magazines, to cigarettes and vacuums. 

For the past few years, the staff have also kept group sketch pads that the employees have collectively added to a page at a time. Some pages are quick, deft cartoons, about insects, or, say, a misogynistic rabbit. Some pages feature elaborate cutouts. Another page, labeled ​“for emergencies,” includes a coupon for puppies and kittens.

Others are about some of the supplies in the store, such as this one, about a kneaded eraser. One page features a blot of expired ink that looks like a Rorschach test. Another features a cartoon about a character labeled an ​“artist and crabman,” who is painting his greatest fear: butter.

And then there’s the Artist & Craftsman Cemetery, created metaphorically for all of its past employees by employee Melissa Cummings.

“Now we’re all going to be in it,” joked sales associate Shannon Sanders, who went on to say that the employees have been talking about whether they want to be buried or cremated.

Sheen noted that the store feels friendlier because the prices are ​“a bit cheaper” and ​“it’s a bit further from Yale, so there are a lot of people who feel comfortable here. They feel a community vibe.”

Sheen is ​“really concerned about artists, especially who need specific things that are hard to ship.” A wood panel of a certain size, for example, ​“is easy to find here” but difficult to ship on account of its size. ​“I’m worried about where people are going to get their stuff.” 

She noted that Artist & Craftsman also moved out of Bridgeport in 2020, where it once had a location, and that EcoWorks, once located in New Haven, has moved to North Haven. She is grateful for Hull’s, which, when Artist & Craftsman closes, will be the only dedicated art supply business in downtown New Haven.

Sheen said a few customers have come in with tears in their eyes upon hearing the news. The regulars are sad to ​“not have the excuse to see each other.” Others ​“remember this place from years prior. They’re asking if there’s anything they can do. They’re asking what we’re going to do, what the workers are going to do. It’s hard to have anything to say to them” because ​“it’s pretty certain that the store is closing.… It’s a corporate decision,” and so far the employees are just starting to look for their next job.

Samuel Ernest, a Ph.D. student at Yale, has been buying supplies at Artist & Craftsman ​“once or twice a week,” he said. ​“I’ve only started doing art in the past few months.” He came across the store ​“just walking the dog,” he said. ​“They had dog treats, so Eva came to expect that we would stop,” he said with a laugh.

“I used to do art when I was a kid. I had materials from then and I started to run out.” He started by trying out watercolors on pieces of cardboard, and graduated to buying fresh supplies. ​“People here are always helpful if I have questions,” pointing him to good brands and good sales. ​“It’s been a nice place.”

“I did my first portrait this past weekend of one of the people I’m writing about for my dissertation, so it’s been a different way of engaging with my work.” He’s writing about gay theology and AIDS; the subject of the painting is a gay theologian who died in 1989. ​“I’m writing a chapter about him.” Painting is ​“a different way of sitting with him.”

Ernest lives in Wooster Square and plans to get his supplies from Hull’s when Artist & Craftsman closes. But it won’t be as convenient. He won’t be able to ​“just stop in. It’ll be more of a trip.”

Many of New Haven’s established artists feel the closing of Artist & Craftsman acutely. ​“When I heard the news I felt like I’d been punched,” said artist Martha Lewis, reached by phone. Losing Artist & Craftsman was ​“like losing the local bookstore, or the local bakery. Having it on that section of the block was spectacular. I made a point of only buying my art supplies there.”

Artist Susan Clinard, who was in the store buying supplies, felt a similar sense of loyalty. ​“It’s truly one of the best art stores in the region, and it services all kinds of artists. I can buy stone in here, all my painting stuff, sculpture supplies. It’s one of those last-standing real art stores.” Before Clinard moved to New Haven, ​“I remember Pearl Paint was the thing in Chicago and New York, and this was very much like that. When they first opened up I felt like I was being transported back home to Chicago. I just had this great feeling.”

Clinard recalled Titus Kaphar running an after-school painting group in the back for a while. ​“It’s always been deeply connected,” especially with ​“what they’ve done for young people.”

Both Lewis and Clinard pointed out that the store employs artists as staff, who have ​“always been really helpful and responsive,” Lewis said. Both also mentioned the store’s reasonable prices, reachable for young artists, and discounts for teachers, students, and nonprofits. ​“Unlike a lot of art supplies stores,” Lewis said — she meant large box stores geared toward hobbyists — ​“they really focused on materials that someone seriously making things could use.”

That seriousness is one reason why a brick-and-mortar store works better than shopping online. It’s important ​“to be able to look at the object and see the size of it and the shape and color, and then choose it.” From paint pigments to paper to brushes and beyond, ​“it’s not just the color, it’s the texture.… The thingness of it, the concreteness of it, is important. The details aren’t just little details.”

The store has also functioned as a community space, with a bulletin board for announcements about art shows, things for sale, and even lost cats. ​“There’s a wall where artists would put up announcements and things about lost cats and exhibits and things for sale.”

To Lewis, the closing of the store is ​“a loss to the neighborhood” — and part of a longer trend of downtown New Haven losing practical businesses like shoe repair places and hardware stores, as well as beauty supplies and fabric. ​“I miss Sassy Beauty,” which closed on Chapel Street in 2017, ​“and the Horowitz Brothers,” which closed in 2004.

Artist Bill Saunders saw a similar arc. ​“I can think of the long list of defunct art stores in New Haven,” he wrote in an email. After decades of business, Kaye’s Art Supply moved from Chapel Street to Church Street in 2002 and then closed. Before that was Koenig Art Emporium and Charette. Now, Saunders said, New Haven is ​“down to one” — Hull’s Art Supply, farther down Chapel Street between Park and York. 

“I got no gripes” with Hull’s, Saunders said. ​“Everyone is friendly, and it is convenient for me a lot of the time.” But ​“A&C offers a wide array of materials and supplies that you are lucky to find anywhere, at great prices.” Like Clinard, he pointed out that ​“it’s like having the old Pearl Paint on Canal Street in our own backyard, in a small city with a lot of working artists facing less and less opportunity.”

With Artist & Craftsman closing, ​“it’s harder and harder to get the raw materials to make things,” Lewis said. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street from Artist & Craftsman, ​“they’re building these ginormous new luxury condos. We artists are not being asked to do anything with those. It’s only a matter of time before people start eyeing our studio spaces a little differently.”

“New Haven’s getting a little tricky for artists,” Lewis said. ​“And probably everyone.”

Lewis would like to see the city pursue ​“a different form of urban development,” one that includes having businesses like hardware stores and art supply places in the middle of town. ​“I’d like people to think a little more about how the city is going to be built,” and who it is being built for. At the moment, ​“almost everything seems to turn into some place that you can hang out with your laptop.”

Sheen saw the same pattern as Lewis and Saunders, of ​“construction happening across the street for luxury apartment buildings” and the way it felt like a signal for artists. ​“Rents are rising. It’s kind of an old story.” So ​“people are emotional because it feels like another loss in that battle.”