In 2024, We Were In It Together

In a restaurant, art about environmental catastrophe. A music show in a bike shop. A tap-dancing demonstration in a bakery. A full-fledged musical in a transformed gymnasium. An opera in a museum. 

From large, multi-organization efforts to team-ups between artists and local businesses, in 2024 New Haven saw a lot more collaborations across its arts scene.

What's Going On

It happened at the small scale, leading to art in unusual places, with ongoing visual art exhibitions in Blue Orchid Cafe and occasional music shows at Devil’s Gear and the Institute Library, which continued to expand its own programming in an ever more community-minded way. Just recently, tap dance ambassadors kamrDANCE held a fundraiser in Katalina’s Bakery. Witch Bitch Thrift made good on its promise to be a community gathering space with music shows and puppet shows.

It happened between individual organizations as well. As the Criterion Theater closed on Temple Street in 2023, leaving New Haven without a first-run movie theater, Best Video dipped its toe into doing film screenings at the Institute Library and Lyric Hall, which in turn is scheduling a concert series for 2025 organized by area musician Frank Viele. Wábi Gallery mounted shows at the co-work space Known, on Orange Street.

A similar pattern emerged among larger organizations and more complex efforts. For its latest theater production, Collective Consciousness Theatre moved out of its own small space in Erector Square and instead staged its latest production at the larger and more accessible Bregamos Theatre in the same building complex. The New Haven Zine Fest expanded beyond the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op to encompass more vendors and multiple locations across East Rock. The inaugural New Haven Cares Festival raised funds for Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen with multiple music shows across multiple venues for a week in October. The intensely collaborative Seeing Sounds Festival, spanning music, art, and local businesses and organizations, had its third successful year in Edgewood Park, under the continued direction of Orion Solo (f.k.a. Trey Moore).

Meanwhile, Long Wharf continued to develop its itinerant model, working with the city for a production at Canal Dock Boathouse, with Yale, and with ConnCORP in perhaps its most transformative production yet. The Schwarzman Center brought its programming to spaces outside of its own facilities to do shows at the Peabody Museum and in collaboration with the Shubert Theatre. The New Haven Symphony mounted a performance of a little-heard Beethoven piece that also involved the Tia Russell dance studio and New Haven poet laureate Sharmont ​“lnfluence” Little at Southern Connecticut State University. Even larger events on the New Haven Green — from the ever-growing Black Wall Street to the Caribbean Festival and the Puerto Rican Festival — felt collaborative in the network of organizations that had made them happen and the panoply of vendors and artists involved.

Perhaps the largest examples of the move toward collaboration emerged from the International Festival of Arts and Ideas and Open Studios, this year marking its second being wholly artist-run.

Decades ago, A&I was dogged enough by accusations of not being embedded enough in the New Haven community that an alternate festival, Ideat Village, organized by Nancy Shea and Bill Saunders, ran for a few years in nearby Pitkin Plaza to showcase New Haven artists and musicians. In recent years, A&I has included more New Haven artists in its programming and organized programming across the city, not just downtown. This year was its most collaborative yet. Fair Haven Day in May was the result of a 15-person committee representing multiple organizations across the neighborhood, with A&I acting more as a facilitator and supporter.

This fall’s Open Studios, meanwhile, completed its transformation into a collectively run event. Once centrally organized by Artspace, the programming put in place by a network of artists (with artist Eric March as MVP) spanned the city, including a packed weekend at Erector Square and spillover into West Haven. It concluded with a standing-room-only event of improvised music and live artmaking at NXTHVN in Dixwell. In its focus on community and working together, it was an encapsulation of what Open Studios — and to some extent, the year in arts in New Haven — was about.

What It Means

The arts scene’s move away from the top-down organization of the past and toward more lateral organization, and toward collaboration rather than competition, on one level, is a show of strength, a reason to celebrate. 

“I don’t think we need arts administrators for this,” artist Martha Lewis said in 2023 of the first year Open Studios was artist-led. ​“I think we can focus on what we want, what’s helpful to us as artists. There’s such a hunger for this.” A collective of artists, who met once a month, could do the organizing work Artspace had done in the past.

Artist Maxim Schmidt agreed: ​“Artists completely recognize the shift in attitude in not having a parent organization. It has fostered a deeper community among the artists.… It’s doing what Open Studios is supposed to do.”

Orion Solo echoed this sentiment the same year at Seeing Sounds. The arts community​“will always exist and thrive, despite clubs closing and venues closing,” he said.​“Many of those spaces don’t let us in anyway.” Artists​“thrive even when they’re underground. The difference is we’re not underground. We’re not in a basement anymore. But we’ve always been around.”

“Things are going to change,” he added. ​“Change is coming.”

The past year and a half has largely borne out that sentiment. But some things have been lost, too.

While the fluorescence of multiple festivals across the city has given New Haven a vital energy, especially in the wake of the pandemic, the arts scene has also lost some of its tentpole events. Under the aegis of Artspace, years ago, Open Studios centered around blowout events at the Goffe Street Armory, Yale West Campus, and Hamden Middle School. The artist-run Open Studios hasn’t yet put together an event at that scale. Likewise, while people are at last returning to outdoor concerts on the New Haven Green, even A&I hasn’t mustered the kind of concert that packs the Green, as, say, P. Funk did in 2016. Big concerts on the Green, supported by the city, used to be a staple of summer programming in the Elm City. We haven’t seen their like since the pandemic shutdown ended, now three years ago.

Of course, maybe the tradeoff from a few huge events to several more spread-out and slightly smaller events is fine; the Independent doesn’t have attendance numbers to compare, but it’s even possible that on balance, the level of participation is the same once all the heads at all the events are counted.

What remains cause for concern is that the collaborations, the lateral organization in the face of a lack of top-down support, is also possibly a symptom of necessity, even precarity. ​“Ultimately what we’re finding is that it’s about survival,” said Jennifer Harrison Newman, associate artistic director at the Schwarzman Center at Yale. ​“It’s comnunity building​‚ caring for one another.… You’re not going to survive alone. You need a community.” For artists and institutions,​“it’s one of the things we take away from 2020 to 2022 — we have to come together and we have to work together.” Best Video staffer Raizine Bruton echoed Newman at that organization’s screening at Lyric Hall. ​“We are stronger together,” she said, adding that​“places like this and Best Video will only last if we work together.” 

And sometimes it’s not enough. Wabi’s run of art shows at Known ended with the coworking space closing in October. The Criterion’s 2023 closing, in hindsight, was the tipping point in ending the New Haven Documentary Film Festival, which couldn’t run effectively in the multiple venues it had across downtown without the official movie theater as an anchor. With rents and other costs of living in New Haven rising, spaces to practice art are becoming more precarious, as January’s closing of Artist & Craftsman Supply attested.

Viewed this way, the collaborations in 2024 can be understood as the arts scene figuring out, yet again, how to keep doing more with less. But how long can they keep it up? Meanwhile, the city continues to attract developers and revenue based on the idea that New Haven is the cultural capital of the state. It is an acute irony that these developments have made it more difficult for the artists who create the city’s culture in the first place. 

What If ...

The city government could be playing a much greater role in actually supporting the arts scene it claims to value.

It begins with the city’s Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism. The arts community continues to recognize Director of Cultural Affairs Adriane Jefferson for her organizational work. But her department has three staff members, including herself; compare that to the 19 staff members on the city’s Economic Development Administration (which also includes Jefferson and fellow Arts, Culture, and Tourism staffer Kim Futrell).

What might the city accomplish if the arts department staff were doubled, or tripled?

What if there were substantial subsidized artist housing to keep artists in New Haven, creating its culture? What if there was a small city-run gallery and performance space? What if the city created more opportunities for artists to connect with the public? Some current programs offer a glimmer of what’s possible. New Haven’s Night Market, hosted by the Town Green District, has proven to be wildly popular, drawing over a hundred vendors and thousands of people to throng city blocks full of art, food, and music. The New Haven Grand Prix also drew thousands to its ninth annual bike race with street closures and an apizza fest. The Night Market only happens twice a year, and the Grand Prix once. What if similar events were held four times a year? Once a month during warmer months, with full schedules of music and expanded arts programming?

Not every event needs to be a highly organized blowout, either. The Westville Patio — a single short closed block — draws people to it all summer long. This summer, East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Smith organized the closing of the short block on Lawrence Street between State and Mechanic, creating a mood that was less festival than block party, a ​“diffuse but also coordinated group of people are rallying together,” Smith said, with music, street games, picnic tables, and a couple food vendors. It was more than enough to bring people out.

“We’re at a moment in time where there’s a lot of energy and enthusiasm to utilize our public space in innovative ways, that actually address the broader city challenges we might have,” Smith said at the time — issues such as​“loneliness, mental health, and spaces for connection.” She spoke of​“ripple effects,” of​“people building friendships and knowing each other on the street,” and​“knowing more about their local businesses.”

Whereas a festival is about organization and marshaling resources, a block party is more about permission; it’s about closing a street and allowing things to happen, making even a temporary place for culture to thrive, by hiring musicians to play and giving other artists a chance to show and sell their work. What if there was a block party like that, somewhere in the city, every weekend from April to October? What if, in the cultural capital of the state, some of that capital flowed to the culture?

Last year, many of New Haven’s artists and arts organizations entered 2024 with a sense of their own collective power, and didn’t wait for city and state support to exercise it. They could use that support now, as they continue to make the Elm City a vibrant place. Artists have shown what they can do for the city. What can the city do for artists?