Brian Slattery Photos
Artist Arizona Taylor.
On Friday evening, the small park between Shelton Avenue, the Farmington Canal Trail, and Hazel Street bloomed into a small arts festival that warmed the cool evening with an explosion of color, sound, and good conversation. It was the beginning of the Artspace-organized Open Source Festival’s weekend of making visual art appear across New Haven, not only from downtown, Westville, and East Rock, but from Newhallville and Dixwell to the Hill and Mill River.
Open Source came to Newhallville through community organizer Doreen Abubakar, who had heard that Artspace was interested in reaching deeper into New Haven’s neighborhoods for this year’s festival. “I work with lofty ideas,” Abubakar said with a smile. “I asked them” — Artspace — “if Newhallville was part of their list for them to do an exhibition.” She offered the park as a spot to host an outdoor exhibition. Gabriel Sacco, Artspace’s visual culture producer, met with Abubakar and toured the space. They cooked up the idea of installing billboards along the Farmington Canal Trail on which the artists could post their work.
Abubakar then turned to artist and Newhallville resident Arizona Taylor to contact artists to participate. “She knew some because she’s in the art arena,” Abubakar said. “Both she and I are listed as curators of the event, but I pretty much made her the main person. She’s from the community and it’s all about growing from there.”
Taylor already knew most of the artists participating in the exhibition. “I found Brianna Hopes because I already knew her mother,” Taylor said by way of example. “Of course B*wak is my teacher,” she added, citing him as a mentor and model for creating art.
Taylor’s sculptures set up in the park drew visitors and seemed like a crowd unto themselves, their faces and gestures looking like they were ready to speak. Taylor has been making art since she was a child, starting with drawing and painting. “I didn’t know nothing about 3‑D art at all,” she said. She starting making sculptures a year ago due to the pandemic, turning to three-dimensional pieces for “something different and new. I love it — I love how realistic it is.” She hit on the idea of making “homemade manniquins,” making her pieces from Styrofoam, plaster, clay, wire, cloth, and broomsticks — materials that she knows will be structurally sound as well as giving her the shape she wants. Some of her pieces have overt religious significance. Others are disco dancers and fashion models. As she continues to make pieces, she thinks about getting her own museum or a gallery.
Not far away, artist and clothing designer Edmund B*wak Comfort had set up tapestries along the Farmington Canal Trail itself, riffs on familiar characters and celebrities but imbued with his own style. He was grateful for Taylor inviting him to join the event. “To me, it’s each one, teach one,” he said of her, calling her a collaborator. “I learn, she learns, we learn from each other.” Comfort has been making art since high school — ever since he received an A in a Spanish class for making a mural of Don Quixote, he said. “This could get me places,” he recalled thinking. He started out with graffiti, and “wanted to find out a way that graffiti could benefit me. So that’s when I started making signs and wearable art, like T‑shirts, jeans, and sneakers. There was never enough money in my family to buy brand-new clothes every week — as it is today!” he said with a laugh. “So we had to create a way.”
He pulled his style from his neighborhood: “where I grew up, things I’m around, my surroundings, things I want to say, how I see things. I incorporate those into my way of speaking.” He grew up in Fair Haven and hung out in the Hill and Newhallville.
The pieces he put up for the festival were “created for people to take instant photos in front of,” he said. “So the backdrops are designed to take you to an experience you wouldn’t normally see outside of the backdrop. Step into the backdrop, take a picture — you’re here, and not outside. You’re surrounded in that world.” The picture then becomes “the keepsake.”
Briana Hopes had her own collection prints, stickers, clothing, and other objects — assembled together as Chunky’s World — ready for people to check out. She got into making art as an early teen. “As everyone knows, art is a giant field, and once I did drawing, I said, ‘I want to put it on stuff,’ ” Hopes said. “That’s what got me into making crafts,” and “ever since then, I’ve put my artwork onto everything — shirts, pins, I make jewelry.” At first self-taught, she in time went to art school, including Full Sail University and Paier College.
“I can’t have one style because I do so much,” she said, “My style is just how I feel. That’s it.” Her latest pieces, Hopes said, “show how I’m always happy, and enjoying life and small things. Some have deeper meanings, but they all equal happiness. Even this one,” she said, pointing at an image of a skull wrapped in flowers. “There’s beauty in the darkness.”
“My observation has been that lot of the minorities get overlooked because nobody has a way to get in touch with them,” Abubakar said. “Who has a list of minority artists? Nobody.” In response, Abubakar sees Friday’s event as the beginning of the Black Artist/Artisan Collaborative, which will “try to create opportunities for artists to share their artistry with the community.” She hopes, as a start, to fold that into the events she hosts in the neighborhood, and to help nurture the further organization of artists in Newhallville.
Abubakar also networked by reaching out to artists in neighboring communities, like Andre Rochester, who’s based in Hartford. Rochester manages a fellowship for the arts in Hartford and crossed paths with Abubakar while both were attending a workshop about video production. They got to talking, and Abubakar invited Rochester to participate. Rochester is interested in connecting with artists within and beyond Hartford, believing in the power of a strong artistic community to help everyone involved in it.
“Anytime I have a success, somebody has to come with me,” he said. “You got to leave the door open for the people behind you. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
One of the pieces he had brought with him, of a man’s face against a bright green background, “is actually a self-portrait. I was experimenting with house paint and acrylic paint markers. So the background is house paint. And then the scribbles you see are all acrylic marker. It was a new medium for me so I wanted to be a little more playful with it, explore a bit. There’s no particularly deeper meaning to it. You’re in the studio, and you have stuff to play with, and I brought my toys out.”
“It doesn’t always have to be deep,” he added, “but you always got to say something. And sometimes that something is to let loose, and just be. Sometimes you just need to breathe, and that’s OK. So for this, I’m just breathing.”
On Saturday, a handful of artists turned the basement of Wilson Branch Library on Washington Avenue into an art gallery. Artist Joe Fekieta had installed the provocative piece Fat and Dangerous in the center of the room, exploring the effect of obesity on climate change — but implicating American society and its propensity for overconsumption in the process. NXTHVN had a booth set up as well, advertising its exhibitions and programs and encouraging people to get involved.
Among the artists present at the library was illustrator and digital artist Edwin Mendez, Jr., whose pieces sometimes involved characters from comics and children’s books and sometimes focused on characters of his own creation. Mendez started out with traditional drawing and “dabbled” in digital art when the technology was more limited. As the technology improved, so did his interest. “Now,” he said, “you can’t get me away from my iPad.”
Among Mendez’s own characters is a large, erudite gorilla named Percival. He has developed stories around Percival, who speaks with a British accent, and his acquaintances, a scientist and a little boy, who go on adventures together. He’s looking to get an agent or a crowdfunding platform so he can get the stories (in comic or book form) in there.
“Just before the pandemic hit, I did this piece” of Percival “for a conference I went to in L.A., and when the pandemic hit nothing turned out,” Mendez said. Undeterred, “I redid the same piece with the chops that I have now as opposed to what I could do then. But I did but the old picture on the mantel in the background, just to show the growth.”
Foundry Square on East Street was also host to a few artists, including multimedia artist Stephany Brown, who is also vocalist and guitarist for the band La Tunda. Brown had on display a series of dolls with multiple faces as well as paintings. The dolls, she said, were inspired by medieval depictions of demons. “I think they’re just delightful,” she said of the source material. In some, “the angels are threatening and menacing and violent, so it seems odd to me that these are supposedly bad. So I like to play with that idea. It’s mischievous but joyful and blasphemous, all wrapped up in one.”
Brown turned to dolls for her modern riff on these older ideas. “I’ve used them in my work before, for stop motion, and for other sculptural things. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to childlike things, whether it’s colors or objects or icons,” she said. “I find it makes it all a little softer and less threatening. I also think about toys, because the things we give children to play with are the way that they learn about the world, and a doll is an effigy that you hand to a child to learn about themselves and others. So I think, ‘why not make it a little more exciting?’ They’re toys for me and also for others. It’s about fun and joy and evil,” she said with a laugh.
“All these ideas that are quite old are still quite relevant,” she added. “We’re still dealing with this baggage.” Brown also made prayer cards that are intentionally critical and “blasphemous,” using religious tropes to take aim at patriarchy and its effects.
Brown made all the paintings during Covid lockdown. “I was really exploring surface and color theory,” she said. “They’re all surrounding existential ideas. During lockdown we were all thinking about our lives in a different way — life in general,” she said. “They were all done on plywood — that’s what I had, I couldn’t go to the store and buy stretchers — but I ended up really liking working on plywood. So it worked out.”