Thomas Breen photo
Mayor Justin Elicker (center) posing with Joann Wilcox, Oliva Martson, Mike Brown, and Jason Burns at Three Sheets Thursday.
Local creatives turned out to Three Sheets bar not for a hardcore punk show or an underground art fest, but to petition the newly elected mayor to keep city dollars and cultural opportunities open to those who already live, work, and perform here.
Mayor Justin Elicker heard that call for supporting, drinking, and listening local during a “Have a Beer with the Mayor” event Thursday night at the 372 Elm St. bar on the Dwight/Downtown border.
Around 30 people filtered from the gastrodive’s front bar to its music venue backroom over the course of the hour-and-a-half meet up to talk with the mayor about everything from his favorite beer to what he can and should do to celebrate New Haven’s vibrant arts and culture scene.
“The only difference between Austin and New Haven is that Austin is behind its musicians,” Shame Penguin front man and local punk rocker Dustin Sclafani told the mayor. New Haven’s musicians are as talented and ambitious and diverse as those from that central Texas musical mecca. They just need to be recognized for their work.
Dressed in a suit and tie amidst a sea of bushy beards and hooded sweatshirts, Elicker saddled up to the bar and ordered a local brew, his only alcoholic beverage of the night: a Rhythm Lager by New Haven salsa dance instructor and craft brewer Alisa Bowens (pictured above at right with Elicker).
“I’m an IPA guy,” Elicker told a cameraman for Channel 8. But he made an exception to his penchant for bitter and hoppy beer to go for the local lager.
In addition to encouraging Elicker to support more after school programs and skilled trade training opportunities for New Haven youth, Joe Ugli radio producer Preston Wilson and Sclafani (pictured above) urged the mayor to make sure that New Haven musicians get opportunities to perform at citywide celebrations, on the Green or elsewhere.
“I want everybody to know how incredible this city is,” Sclafani said. He called out a city-sponsored concert at Hillhouse High last year that brought in the national hip hop star PnB Rock.
“For a third of that cost, we could have invested in local hip hop,” he said.
Elicker pointed out that earlier that day he had appointed the city’s new arts and culture director, Adriane Jefferson, a former state arts program manager who has touted cultural equity and celebrating local artists as two of her priorities.
Mike Brown and Jason Burns (pictured with the mayor) came out Thursday night to ask the mayor to support artists of a different kind — not just musicians, but students who have grown up with incredible challenges who look to arts and engineering and woodworking and other crafts to develop professional skills and explore their creative capacities.
Both lead a robotics and carpentry shop at Riverside Academy where they teach students how to build everything from bikes to aquariums. “It would be nice for people high up to shift provisions and funds” to programs like that, Burns said, so that the students in the shop recognize that the city cares about them too.
Brown and Burns applauded Elicker for coming by their shop on his second day on the job. “That’s inspiring,” he said. “He seems like someone who cares.”
Towards the end of the night, local artist and frequent New Haven Independent commenter Bill Saunders (pictured) — who pointed out that this was likely the first mayoral event ever to feature a soundtrack by Hüsker Dü—called on Elicker to make sure that New Haven artists have ample opportunities to show off their talents.
“I would love to see something like the New Haven Street Festival again,” he said.
New Haven musicians and visual artists and local creatives of all stripes need more opportunities to show their work, he said.
“The idea is less about money and more about opportunity,” he said.