Window Art Transforms Vacant Storefronts

Vacant downtown storefronts are filling up —not with new businesses, but with temporary art installations designed to showcase local talent and encourage landlord maintenance in an increasingly gap-toothed retail landscape.

The window display design project is the brainchild of Elizabeth Bickley, a project manager with the Town Green Special Services District. The project is funded by Town Green in collaboration with the Elm City Innovation Collaborative and the New Haven Police Department.

There are nine art installations currently in place in empty storefronts along Chapel Street and Church Street on the edges of the Ninth Square, as well as five more planned for vacant storefronts in Pitkin Plaza, Chapel Street, and Orange Street. The first went up in February, the latest in July. The next are slated to open in the old Devil’s Gear bike shop space in Pitkin Plaza on Sept. 2.

“We wanted to propose a community-based solution to a problem that we’re seeing,” Bickley said on a recent walking tour alongside longtime Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) teacher and New Haven native Johanna Bresnick, whose own work and whose students’ works make up nearly half of the current installations.

The Ninth Square has struggled in recent years with crime and retail vacancies, even as investors and developers seem to be lining up to pour their money into new apartments to be built atop surface parking lots.

“It’s always been intended to be temporary,” Bickley said about the new art installations, but in a way that results in present joy and long-term productivity for the currently empty spaces.

By encouraging landlords to take care of their properties even after retail tenants move out. By providing a colorful and creative background for pedestrians to enjoy as they’re walking through the Ninth Square. By building positive associations with otherwise empty street-level spaces that may help attract the attention of new businesses interested in setting up shop.

Previous entrepreneurial ventures like Project Storefronts that sought to give short-term leases to innovative new businesses. By contrast, Bickley said, this project requires a lower upfront landlord commitment to ​“transform darkened windows.”

Bickley said that she has been thinking of, and dreaming up, this venture for some time: She studied material culture and public art at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music. She completed a Dwight Hall and Tsai City-led intensive on placemaking and tactical urbanism. Then she was hired by Town Green last August specifically to make this public art project a reality.

Four of the new storefront installations are at 900 Chapel St., the office building where Town Green is located on the southern edge of the Green. Bickley said that, after the installation of local artist Brittany Solem’s toothpick-coffee filter-plastic cup siren sculptures at the old SportsPark at 770 Chapel St. in February, Downtown top cop Lt. Sean Maher challenged her to fill in the series of tall, empty glass storefronts at 900 Chapel next considering their proximity to the Green.

“If you could have 900 Chapel be something other than black-out windows,” she recalled Maher encouraging her, ​“it would do a lot for this area.” She described the motivating impulse for beautifying the location as ​“crime prevention through environmental design.”

Now those storefronts on Chapel Street between Temple and Church are filled with four different installations.

Paper Over III, by former Ives Squared artists in residence Jacquelyn Gleisner and Ryan Paxton, fills its window display with a wall of recycled paintings and drawings on paper, all brightly colored and pointing out towards the Green like, as Bickley described it, stalagmites. ​“It’s like you’re looking at the other side of a cave,” she said.

In an adjacent storefront are a dozen laser-cut lanterns, created by participants at the downtown public library’s new maker space, under the tutelage of Gleisner and Paxton.

Next to that are two installations by local artist and ECA graduate Molly Gambardella, whom Bickley met at last year’s City Wide Open Studios (CWOS).

One of Gambardella’s windows shows Mail Art, dozens of highly decorated envelopes mailed to the artist by strangers from around the world interested in contributing to her installation. And next to that is At The Center, which features cardboard replicas of the Trinity, Center and United Churches on the Green.

Bickley said she saw images of these city church replicas on the business card that she picked up from Gambardella at last year’s CWOS. She called the artist soon thereafter and they started planning how to get Gambardella’s work on display just feet away from the iconic downtown churches themselves.

Around the corner on Church Street, in the vacant storefront recently abandoned by Buffalo Wild Wings, is Bresnick’s contribution to the window display project: Expired Systems VI.

Bresnick, who grew up in New Haven’s Beverly Hills neighborhood, attended Wilbur Cross High School and ECA, and now teaches at ECA and at Gateway Community College, said that as a teenager she worked in this very Church Street building when it was still a mall.

After Buffalo Wild Wings left, she said, she would walk by the storefront every day on her way to teaching at Gateway and would take pictures of the scarred exterior left behind by the bar’s former sign and logo.

Now, she’s filled those jagged holes with small, foam-core-and-plaster sculptures of other New Haven architectural landmarks that have subsequently gone by the wayside.

Here local history buffs will find replicas of the New Haven Coliseum, English Station, the former public housing complex Masonic Gardens, and the bush-hammered concrete typical of Brutalist buildings like the city police and fire headquarters.

“I wanted to have something historic tied in with New Haven,” Bresnick said, that also speaks to the ​“sort of economic entropy” that results when buildings are vacated and torn down.

A little farther down Church Street are window displays filled with the work of Bresnick’s ECA students, both current and recent graduates.

Audrey Knight’s Light Cycle features dangling, kaleidoscopic pinwheels made of foam board and colored gels.

“I liked the idea of something playful,” Knight said about her installation. Working with light as an artist feels like working with something truly elemental, she said, pointing out that a colorful array of filtered light transforms the space everytime the sun comes out.

Right next door is fellow ECA student Joshua Gonzalez’s Gen 2, a sculptural assemblage of a variety of textiles and fabrics and colorful household objects, like a pink ladder leaning in the window display’s corner.

And just beyond Gonzalez’s work are five paintings by ECA students Amber Ventura, Fetty Brockenberry, Milton Coburn, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, and Yadavi Patil.

“This is huge for a high school kid,” Bresnick said about the opportunity to display their work in public downtown, ​“to feel like they’re part of a city. To be alongside actual practicing artists.”

The next three installations, Bickley said, will go into the old Devil’s Gear space in Pitkin Plaza on Sept. 2. They’ll include everything from repurposed pool noodles to magazine collages to artworks on a ​“striking, monumentalist scale.”

“I’ve always loved a well-done window display,” Bickley said, recalling time spent as child with her mom going window shopping in downtown Atlanta. With this new project, she said, she hopes that artfully constructed vacant storefronts will not just spruce up buildings in between retail tenants, but also attract new businesses to town to fill those storefronts for good.