On the third floor of Gateway Community College, eight students were hard at work with sandpaper, paint, and screwdrivers.
Their project: to build a pair of murals to hang on facades outside the 101 College St. bioscience building on the rise at MLK Boulevard, College Street, South Frontage Road, and Temple Street.
Artists Peter Bonadies and Vladamir Shpitalnik led the class to make art pieces that represented creativity, community, and giving back to the people of New Haven.
“I was new to Gateway, and this new building was going up, and there had been a scar on the landscape for so long,” said Bonadies, recalling the inception of the project. A student in his class observed that she felt disconnected from the construction, even though it was happening in her own city. Her statement led Bonadies to a realization: “We need to be more involved in the community as a community college.” He wrote to the architects, and after some back and forth, got them to agree to the students creating a mural for the building.
Bonadies had three main inspirations for the project. First, the idea of “repairing a scar in the land, stitching the city back together.” Second, the influence of his father, a fellow artist whose work focused on the dismantling of New Haven as a city and on the idea of DNA as “rebuilding people.” The third motivation was his youngest child’s diagnosis with Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), an uncommon genetic condition. The company Alexion, which resides right next door to the 101 College building, recently got FDA approval for the only treatment for NF1.
“As a parent and as an artist, I can help inspire the researchers with the symbiotic relationship between art and science,” said Bonadies.
“This is our version of a laboratory,” Bonadies said, pointing to where his colleague Shpitalnik was mixing paints. Shpitalnik created the plans for the mural, which will be an abstract piece incorporating bright colors and multimedia collage. The final project will include medical laboratory equipment like test tubes and pipettes, as well as research equipment like circuit boards from computers. Shpitalnik designed the mural with a “structure of lighter, yellowish-ochre colors like windows, to present different parts of the labs,” he said. “It’s very colorful, so I’m trying to represent the explosion of science.”
101 College LLC — an affiliate of the Massachusetts-based lab and office builder Winstanley Enterprises — funded the project, providing class materials, student tuition, and hopefully, a merit award to help compensate the students for the working hours they lose. The class gives students at Gateway — which is now officially known as CT State Community College Gateway – a chance to practice real-world art skills, like working with a client, selecting materials, managing a budget, and more.
“The group ended up being an awesome mix that represents the diversity of our student body,” said Bonadies. “It’s a really magical team.”
In the first of two classrooms dedicated to the project, students painted geometric blocks of color on large boards. Kylee Latta used a wide roller to spread green paint across a taped-off rectangle. “What drew me to this project would probably be Peter and Vlad,” she said. “They’re great teachers and I’m happy to be an apprentice to them.”
Latta is a liberal arts and sciences student hoping to work in speech pathology, and she considers art an important medium for communication. The mural had her exercising her artistic skills, as well as practicing new ones. She recalled the challenge of using math to scale the final project from the designs, saying, “I was surprised with how able I was.”
Across the room, Marisabel Sanchez sanded down the edges of a board and painted it with primer, making it ready for the coat of colored paint. “I really like [this project’s] community aspects,” she said. “I really value how art ties together people, spaces, places.… It opens doors for other schools to do something like this, and more.” Sanchez studies art therapy, and she sees the mural as a form of therapy in itself. “Community art pieces are very personal, they provoke feeling,” she explained. “This piece can lead to self-exploration.”
In the second classroom, students dismantled computers and took out the circuit boards, making them ready to stick on the mural. They also removed the pointy parts from the boards so that passersby wouldn’t accidentally injure themselves on the artwork, which was designed to be what Shpitalnik called “people-proof.” Elisabeth Krogh enjoyed the process of working with the circuit boards. “It was like a big puzzle,” she said. “It was really fun to gut them and find out how they work and take all the pretty parts.”
“I love working with Peter and Vlad,” she added. “It’s been very interesting to see how Vlad has turned his watercolor into an acrylic, multimedia presentation.” Krogh also studies art therapy, and has found the process of working on the mural to be very therapeutic. “With art therapy it’s about getting your emotions out in an artistic way, and there’s no better way to describe this,” she said.
Ariana Silva screwed down pieces of circuit boards to set up the collage. Silva majors in art, but the mural is a departure from her usual style and medium. She has enjoyed the process of creating art as a collective, for the collective that is the New Haven community. “Working with a group of artists is really cool, you’re all working on an artistic problem together,” she said.
Angelica Mandumbwa and Adrian Farro agreed that the best part of the mural project was its community aspect. Mandumbwa loved “getting to work collaboratively with creative students and professionals.” For Farro, the draw of the class was “getting to really connect more with my community.”
“I was really intrigued by this project and the idea of helping out the community,” he said.
“We’re growing daily,” added Mandumbwa.
The mural will be completed by July 3, and unveiled in the early fall. After that, it will be on display for passersby to see and enjoy.
When it’s up, “3,000 people per day see this art,” said Shpitalnik. It will be a presence in their daily lives, and an influence on their moods, bright and eye-catching and hopefully inspiring.
For the students, the mural helps them to “develop a connection with their community, so they feel like they are a part of something,” said Bonadies. By giving back to the people of New Haven, these students are developing not only as artists, but as members of the community that art enriches and connects.
Awesome project! I can’t wait to see it installed.