Brian Slattery photo
Isaac Bloodworth.
His characters grace New Haven’s walls and windows. His puppets appear on New Haven’s stages. Now and again, he himself appears at community meetings and labor events, helping facilitate the conversation while also keeping an eye on the goal of creating more equity, more inclusion, and more compassion. In his art and action, Isaac Bloodworth has had a hand in shaping the direction the Elm City is moving in.
“I’m silent and loud all at the same time,” the 27-year-old Bloodworth said. “I tell people that’s why I picked puppetry, because you can be behind the scenes but still make an impact.” That impact shows up first in his art. “It’s fun to be able to put your artwork up and people interact with it, but you don’t have a keep a stage presence. You don’t have to take up space because the art is doing that for you.”
Bloodworth studied visual arts for years, at Amistad Academy for middle school, then Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. His art and his consciousness as a Black person developed hand in hand. He still recalls going to Nature’s Classroom at the end of the year in fifth grade. “We did an Underground Railroad activity, which is really weird, because one, our school was named after a slave ship, and two, 99 percent of the students were Black and Brown, the majority of our teachers were White, and they had us reenact slavery.” The parallels between the activity and the structure of his school, and society, struck him even in fifth grade as too close.
Meanwhile, “I used to get in trouble for talking a lot, and when I stopped talking, I would just draw. People thought I was distracted, but I was paying attention.” He maintained good grades and got into Coop. There, he recalled, an art teacher said “you should do theater because you talk too much.”
He felt the friction of that. “Art doesn’t have to be silent,” he said. In hindsight, he also has come to appreciate that “the way I entered into art was very White, and very academic, structured in a certain way. I’m Black, and we listen to music, we talk with each other, and art is a very experiential thing amongst the Black and Brown community. It’s not in a studio, in solitude, in silence. It’s a whole bunch of beautiful processes.”
For Bloodworth, navigating that maze led to puppetry. His parents “always wanted me to be busy during the summer,” he said. The summer before his senior year of high school, he enrolled in a program at UCONN called Mentor Connection because “my mom wanted me to follow in her footsteps and become a doctor.” (His mother is Jamaican; his father is Black and from New Haven, and more driven by the arts and social justice.) He stayed at the UCONN campus at Storrs for three weeks and studied puppetry, the most arts-focused course the program offered. At the end of the three weeks, the director informed him that his performance there had been an audition, and he was accepted into the puppetry program at UCONN should he apply there. He did.
The puppet arts program at UCONN, part of the university’s theater school, has been around since 1964 and offers BFAs and MFAs. It was “where I blossomed the most,” in both his art and his “racial analysis, my structural analysis,” with students and professors. “I just started making a lot of art about racial oppression, which then put me into a big racial de-pression,” he said with a sardonic laugh. He found himself watching videos of Black people being killed by police for research for his pieces. In his senior thesis, Metamorphosis, he had Tamir Rice getting shot to Nina Simone’s version of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” The focus of his art, and the stresses of college generally, had an effect on his mental attitude.
“I came out of college and told myself, ‘I want to focus on health and wellness’ ” — financial, mental, and physical. It had been important to him to create Metamorphosis, but he realized that “this isn’t bringing me joy” to perform it. “I realized that I didn’t need to metaphorically kill a Black kid. That happens in real life. Why would I need to do it in my art?… The purpose of art for us isn’t to re-traumatize ourselves, and re-traumatize other people.”
He created a second piece, Curled, based on an experience at Amistad in which a teacher asked an administrator to tell Bloodworth to cut his Afro. Bloodworth transformed that into a story about a young Black girl who gets in trouble for having an Afro in school, which ends up being a catalyst for reconnection to family and heritage. He created a character called Joy da Black Boi, and “created a world where Joy can exist.” He has been expanding on that concept ever since, including more “Black kids in there, whether they’re queer or disabled — whatever that is, because Black people are not a monolith.” He is working on creating a world where all “Black and Brown kids can see themselves.”
Bloodworth with his mural Soda Surf in 2020.
Since graduating, Bloodworth has been a prolific muralist, with pieces adorning windows at City Hall and the walls of the Hill, in addition to creating a permanent mural for the Black and Brown Power Center on Chapel Street. (He also works as a museum technician at the Yale Center for British Art.) He is after a bigger goal as a Black artist: “How do we just create art without it having to be political?” he asked. “White people don’t create political art, they just create art. Black people don’t have a chance to just create art — or if they do, it gets politicized.”
For Bloodworth, there is a path forward for himself and other Black artists to create and communicate art that doesn’t just “emulate Whiteness” but also gets at the complexities and deeper questions beyond the simplistic dichotomies of “joy” and “pain” that Black artists are often shoehorned into. Those expressions of joy and pain are, of course, “needed,” Bloodworth said; he has created them himself, “and I love the people who do one of them” when it’s their choice to do so. But Bloodworth wants to be able to do something different, too. Based on a love of comic books and anime, he finds it by creating characters. “It’s still political, but it’s my creation, me just having fun — a character doing a character thing.”
He has found inspiration in recent TV series like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, as well as Black horror — like Jordan Peele’s movies, and his trajectory from Get Out, which focuses explicitly on racial identity and racial politics, to Nope, which asks a different set of questions. “It felt free, and that was really nice,” Bloodworth said. It has also created possibilities for people like himself, who want to “be behind the scenes, but also still wanting to visible enough.… wanting to do art, wanting to process all the trauma,” in the workplace, in the city, to try to create a community where Black and Brown people of all kinds feel safe and welcomed.
Forging a different path lay at the heart of Bloodworth’s approach to making puppets for Hillhouse’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, staged at New Haven Academy this spring. Ty Scurry, who helmed the production, wanted to do something different with the musical, which has become something of a warhorse. As Bloodworth recalled, he wanted a different color scheme, a different look for each of the pieces. Scurry had told him to make the plant anything but green. Bloodworth picked bright pink and yellow. As he continued to design it, he put some of himself into the puppet. His girlfriend pointed out that “it’s still very you because it’s cartoony,” Bloodworth said.
It was a challenge; “to scale to something that big was new for me,” he said. “Figuring out those movements and the decorations was all new.” But “I wanted to produce something different,” Bloodworth said, “and give the audience something really cool for a high school production.”
As he casts about for his next puppetry project, he’s considered developing a show with his girlfriend about Black notables in New Haven. Last year he received a grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund to make toy figures of his character, Joy da Black Boi, “and giving them out to 30 Black kids for free, just for representation,” he said.
He’s also considering a couple ideas that will “probably cause a lot of controversy,” he said with a laugh. Ideas include an exhibition that welcomes all kids to the exhibition but, in the end, only gives toys to Black and Brown kids. Another idea involves a dual show, in which White people have to view art drawn from “first-hand experiences of Black trauma that White people have to be uncomfortable with, while Black people get to Black boy joy land, and eat candy and just have fun.” The name of that exhibition might be The New Minstrel Show.
Bloodworth brings the same direct approach to his involvement in community. “I think I find myself in those spaces because I’m being as blunt as possible about where I stand on a lot of issue, and not trying to waver as much,” he said. “I’m definitely open to getting new information and changing my mind around something, but there are a lot of things that don’t need new information on them to know that they were wrong, or that we need to change it and do better.” He is “trying to be up front about how I feel, and as a marginalized person that’s already hard, but I told myself if I have the space, I’m going to say something. I don’t want that 10 years from now, we’re in the exact same space because I had the power to say something and I didn’t. That’s what I’m holding myself to at this moment.… if I have the money, if I have the resources to say something, do something, I will.”