Rembert Mural Eyed For Bassett Building

New life may soon light up a long-dead former social services building on Bassett Street — in the form of a mural remembering the late Newhallville artist Winfred Rembert.

Representatives of the public arts nonprofit Site Projects, known for having commissioned several murals throughout the city, pitched that latest mural plan Tuesday night during the most recent monthly meeting of the Newhallville Community Management Team. 

That tentative plan is to turn the outside of the former state- and now city-owned structure at 188 Bassett St. — which will next be home to New Haven’s adult education program — into the face of the recently-passed Newhaville-based artist. 

Later on in Tuesday’s meeting, Newhallville’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist reported that a group of people had recently been found camping out at the vacant Bassett Street property and had caused significant damage to the building in the proces. (See more on that below.)

“I have no doubt that everybody in this room was aware of the brilliance of this man far before I was,” Site Projects Board Member (and New Haven Independent arts contributor) David Sepulveda said to the Zoom audience Tuesday. 

He pulled out a copy of Rembert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Chasing Me to My Grave. We’re ​“so proud of New Haven’s son, who is now considered one of the great American folk artists,” Sepulveda added.

Rembert, who settled in Newhallville after leaving his Georgia home as a teenager, was known for carving and painting evocative scenes on leather. Read more about his life and work here.

“Mr. Rembert was a great man. We loved him. We really loved him,” Newhallville Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris said Tuesday. She applauded the mural project as a start to celebrating the artist’s legacy, and tossed out ideas for additional community events down the line, such as a public reading and discussion of his memoirs. (A celebratory panel about Rembert’s life is scheduled to take place at NXTHVN Thursday night between 5:30 and 7:30.)

Sepulveda said that another local artist, Katro Storm, originally came up with the idea to commemorate Rembert with a place-based painting. Though Storm did not return a request for comment from the Independent for this article, Sepulveda said that Storm was a friend of the Rembert family and will serve as the lead artist on the project. Read more about Storm, and learn about some of his illustrations, particularly of African American figures, here.

Sepulveda said that his interest in the project grew when he heard this conversation on WNHH radio’s weekly ​“pundits” show about the possibility of ​“creating a museum in New Haven, and Newhavillville, more specifically, to honor Rembert.” 

“For now,” Sepulveda continued, ​“a mural would be a great first step toward honoring Rembert in his home community.”

"A Lot Of Damage Was Done To The Building"

The prospective project imagines not just a way to honor a genius New Havener, but to brighten a currently abandoned property that was recently damaged when a crew of people were discovered by a city official to be camping out in the Bassett Street building. 

Sepulveda said Site Projects selected the brick siding of the former Department of Social Services, known more causally now as the ​“state house,” as its first choice site for the mural because ​“of its high visibility in the Newhallville community and facing the Farmington Canal Line, and because it is only blocks from the Newhallville home of the late Winfred Rembert.”

The so-called ​“state house,” located at 188 – 206 Basset St. is currently slated for conversion into an adult education hub for New Haveners aged 17 and up to pursue high school diplomas, job training, higher education and English language proficiency — read more on that in a previous article here. The adult ed program would share that space with the American Job Center.

During Tuesday’s management team meeting, Livable City Initiative Specialist Deirdre Hamilton said that the building house had recently been broken into by a group of people in need of a place to live.

“They had broken the windows out — I had my guys go in and seal it up. We brought in the team to give them case management, but nobody took it,” Hamilton reported.

Hamilton said ​“a lot of damage was done to the building,” including to the elevator, which the individuals had apparently been using to move between floors.

That’s just another setback to a complicated city conversion that’s already faced confusing obstacles such as a contested tax foreclosure lawsuit on two adjacent lots that the Elicker Administration is looking to acquire for parking for the future adult ed center. Read more here.

Laura Clarke, the executive director and co-founder of Site Projects, said that ​“it is our understanding that the exterior structure of the building is in good shape… but confirming the structural integrity of the wall would be essential.”

“The building is owned by the city so we need to find the open door from which to get someone who will say: ​‘Why not?’” she wrote in an email to the Independent. ​“If/when the city says yes, we would then need to go to adult education and get their blessing.”

Sepulveda added that ​“while the proposal is still in the planning stage, we are confident we will be able to realize the mural sometime in 2023.”

CMT leader Kim Harris urged that the mural should relay to Newhallville youth that Rembert’s skill and genius grew out of their same, shared community.

“It’s not just local history,” Laura Clark noted. ​“His work is nationally and internationally known. But he was from here.”

That’s right, Harris said: ​“We care that he’s from here.”