Courtesy Ted Salmon
A rendering of Salmon’s design.
There’s a lighthouse coming to the New Haven Green. How it’s going to get there is a whole other story.
When East Haven artist Edwin “Ted” Salmon came across the Yale Humanist Community’s (YHC) call for the Green Light Project — a temporary light-based public installation for New Haven Green — it felt like the universe was giving him a sign. After decades as a visual artist, he’d found his practice too insular, lacking a community-based point of departure that he wanted. This could be the solution: Submit a project to the initiative, slated for December 2016, and engage with New Haven’s citizens through visual art.
So he drafted a project, a nine-sided glowing, blue obelisk for the Green that would stand 15 feet high and house a time capsule with New Haveners’ pictures, words and hopes for humanity. The latter part would be opened, he envisioned, in the year 2138 — on New Haven’s 500th birthday. As people approached the obelisk, its colors would grow warmer, morphing from blues to oranges and reds. If a critical mass assembled, it would begin to pulse pink, mimicking a human heartbeat. He called it a lighthouse, because he saw those structures, beacons of light on the stormy seas, as “guiding for everybody,” regardless of race, class, or religion.
The YHC and Green Light Project board read hundreds of proposals. The board loved Salmon’s, ultimately picking it in early March. It just needed to raise the money to make it happen.
Wednesday night, a launch party at the Happiness Lab on Chapel Street signaled the formal start to that effort. Organized as part of Yale and New Haven Humanism Week, the event drew around 100 members from the city’s growing humanist community, several signing up to support Salmon’s design, which will be crowdfunded through May 11. Salmon and the group estimate that the project will cost $40,000.
“We want this to be something for the community and by the community,” said Chris Stedman, YHC executive director and Green Light Project board chair, at the event. “We want this to be something that people feel like they’ve invested in. It’s a part of them and they’re a part of it. We also want people’s contributions [to the time capsule] to inform what it becomes.”
For Salmon, who spent time during his childhood in New Haven but “has kind of lived everywhere,” the project was an extreme case of being in the right place at the right time.
“As an artist, I’ve wanted to start making work that had more to do with than myself,” he said. “I’ve been working in my studio at night on these little things or big things, and it’s all been about me. I really wanted to get into more large-scale public stuff.”
A self-identified “humanist, almost an atheist” firmly entrenched in the East Haven and New Haven arts scenes, he added that this project is helping him feel like he has a genuine home base for the first time in a long time.
“Public art is about making connections with people and being responsive to other people’s ideas and their needs,” he said. “To be the creative force for people that aren’t creative, and to try to bring everyone’s ideas. I think the unity and togetherness, the narrative imagery that will be on it, and the text … that’s key.”