You may have seen the signs at the exit ramps of I‑91 or I‑95 around town, or on long straightaways on Whitney Avenue, or that particular curve of road on Mather Street in Hamden. They say “Slow Down,” and they’re clearly directed at car traffic. Neatly stenciled and uniform in size, some of them look quasi-official. But they’re not.
They’re the work of Matthew Feiner, artist, cyclist, and owner of Devil’s Gear Bike Shop on Chapel Street.
“I’ve been putting stuff outside and doing acts of good trouble since 1990,” Feiner said about mixing art and activism. He recalled with fondness a comment that Christopher Arnott, then an arts reporter for the New Haven Advocate, made about his work in the ’90s. “He was referring to me as a ‘pointer,’ as an artist — I point out things that are wrong and bring it to people’s attention.”
Feiner.
Feiner’s brand of public art isn’t usually geared toward a specific cause (although he did recently make a sign for No Mow May, an initiative to get people to stop mowing their lawns for a month to encourage wildflowers and pollinators). Rather, he appeals to a more basic sense of humanity, of connection, of paying attention to and caring for others.
“For the last couple years I’ve been spray-painting ‘Say Hello’ on the sidewalk, because I think people just need to look up and say hello,” he said. Similarly, he made a “Look Up” stencil simply to get people to pay more attention to their surroundings and those around them. In the era of pussy hats in response to Trump’s election, he made a stencil that read “… Lois Lane is Mad, Mad as Hell …” He also may be responsible for the signs on the Farmington Canal Trail instructing cyclists to “call your pass,” that is, alert pedestrians (and, for that matter, slower cyclists) as to when they’re going to pass them, on the right or the left.
“Riders don’t get it — you’re silent and you scare the crap out of people,” Feiner said.
Recently Feiner has turned his attention to reckless drivers, and he’s not alone in thinking it’s a problem. It’s a years-old issue with enough support for the state legislature to pass a safe streets law in 2021 with the goal of curbing unlawfully fast driving and making streets friendlier to cyclists and pedestrians. Pedestrian safety is also a part of the latest round of city redevelopment plans.
But dangerous driving persists. In 2021, officials reported, New Haven saw 6,000 collisions, with 4,245 of them resulting in injuries and 19 resulting in fatalities. In March of this year, the Independent reported that Raekwon McLean was hit by a car and killed on Dixwell Avenue, and just last week, a Hamden woman was killed in a hit-and-run crash. Many more than that have been injured. And then there are the many, many anecdotes of near misses, and witnesses to reckless driving. They are a steady refrain on SeeClickFix and in various neighborhood social media forums. In April, community organizer Aaron Goode stood at the intersection of Orange Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard — newly redesigned to implement traffic-calming measures — and counted 27 cars running the red light there in 20 minutes. Feiner himself recently watched a group of seven cars run the red light at the intersection of State and East Streets.
“People are driving like nuts, and it’s across the board. I see parents with kids in the back of their cars running lights. And it’s only escalating,” Feiner said. These days, in his experience, when a light changes, sometimes “you have to wait for three cars” to run their red light before proceeding across the intersection. He has also seen a relatively new behavior (which this reporter has also seen) of drivers who are stopped at a red light deciding to simply go, sometimes by going around other cars that are waiting. On a recent drive-through, “every time I stopped at a light, someone elected to go around me and go through the intersection.” He’s also noticed people driving without their headlights on at night.
Feiner is aware of the city initiatives but feels it’s not enough. “Our alderpeople, our mayor, the police chief, they need to be called to task,” he said, to actively enforce the traffic laws on the books and impose penalties for lawbreakers.
More broadly, the driving problem, as he sees it, is part of a much larger issue. “Our social contract is breaking down,” he said. “We’re watching the richest of the rich get richer and everybody’s pissed off, whether they feel it or not. We’re still divided and we’re not being nice to each other anymore.” It’s perhaps a trickle-down effect of the political mood at the national level; people “see our leaders acting poorly and inappropriately,” he said, and feel they have license to do it, too.
“I think it’s simple psychology,” he added. “They’re not even aware they’re doing it. They just know it feels good.”
Feiner started making the signs last year, “and I slowly started putting them up.” He began with the highway exit and entrance ramps to New Haven “because I felt they looked more official,” but gradually began expanding along the Whitney Avenue corridor of New Haven and Hamden, in places where he noticed people driving especially fast. On the stretch of Livingston Street along East Rock Park, for example, “I put a couple up there because people really gun it.” He looks at roads “where people are speeding in and out of town, where they open it up,” though he also noted that “I’m getting passed downtown now.”
That he makes the signs is something of an open secret — he posts publicly about them on social media — and he has thus gotten requests from people to put up signs in their neighborhoods. “People have approached me over Facebook and Instagram,” he said. “That’s where I’ve been taking my cues now, because we’re going into summer and there are going to be more kids in the neighborhoods.”
He now has about 24 signs in rotation, with the message painted on the front and back. “I put them on single posts so you can see them from both directions,” he said. He’s also making more. “I try to maintain them because if they get hit with too much light they bend,” he said, and “a lot of them disappear.”
Feiner traces his impulse toward civilly disobedient art to his own psychology and past. “I have anger issues,” he said, and was abused as a child. “I have a hard time with people abusing other people and scaring children, so a lot of my signs go up in child-heavy neighborhoods.”
Feiner is also dealing with the effects of a brain injury suffered years ago, as well as a shoulder injury, which limit the amount of time and capacity he has for work and art. “It’s daily on the phone with doctors and insurance people, just trying to get them to accept what’s happened to me,” he said. But he’s also working on a large installation in his studio in West Haven dedicated to his mother, who died in November. “She was a woman of the ’40s and ’50s and wasn’t a feminist by any measure, but in the final years of her life, she expressed that she never got to decide what she wanted to do,” Feiner said. Feiner asked her what she may have done differently if she could have.
“‘You know, it’s hard to think like this,’” he recalled her saying. But then, “she stated coming up with stuff.” He recalled her saying that “I would have liked to have moved to New York City for a year, but my mom wouldn’t let me.” His brain injury, he said, makes it difficult to hang onto the fact that his mother is gone. He’s hopeful that, when the installation is complete, he’ll show it to people in conjunction with his mother’s memorial service, being held at the end of June. “Maybe it’ll finally push the button that I realize in my deeper memory that she’s passed,” he said.
In the meantime, “I’m working on this project steadily and trying to get healthy,” he said. “There’s got to be some new initiative to get people to slow down,” Feiner said. “Everyone’s accountable for everybody else.… No one wants to say anything because there’s so much going on that’s more important than this, but there really isn’t,” he said. “Our society says no man should fear another man, and that’s not true anymore.”