Hundreds Honor Arts Shakers

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by Allan Appel | Dec 10, 2007 10:53 pm

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Posted to: Arts

“When I was growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, New Haven was a must-stop place for theater and lots else,” said jazz musician and Neighborhood Music School teacher Jesse Hameen II, one of the six recipients of the 2007Arts Council awards for being movers and shakers of the Elm City arts scene. A sold-out crowd of nearly 300 appreciators gathered at the Lawn Club Friday afternoon to shake it up for the shakers.

p(clear). Why are the arts, movingly celebrated at the gathering, specifically crucial to New Haven? The past and potentially future centrality of New Haven as an arts powerhouse—halfway between Boston and the Big Apple—was one of reasons, but there were many others offered by this year’s award winners and others in an informal Independent survey.

p(clear). Award winner Linda Friedlander, curator of education at the Yale Center for British Art, said, “I’m happy to tell you that the arts are really the essence of our humanity. Look at New Orleans post-Katrina. Look how they use music and the arts to rebuild and bridge parts of the city. We haven’t had a disaster here, but arts and arts education are continually bridging, and there’s so much more to do.”

p(clear). Rafael Ramos (pictured below with Arts Council Executive Director Cynthia Clair) also won—there were 63 nominees—a 2007 award for himself and his Bregamos Theatre Company. “The arts are critical,” he agreed, “to New Haven continuing to feel like a small town in a big city and a big city in a small town.”

p(clear). “You know you live in a remarkable community,” said Ramos’s presenter, Michael Morand, “when your housing inspector is also a great theater producer.” Ramos thanked his colleagues and announced that Kingdom, Bregamos’s show of two years ago, was selected to go to an international festival in Holland.

p(clear). “When people in our audiences talk during the show,” he said, “people who might never have been in a theater before, some of our actors complain. But that tells me the audience is engaged, and I know we’re doing the right thing.”

p(clear). Architect Herbert Newman (left in photo with Cheever Tyler) was the recipient of the most coveted annual honor, the C. Newton Schenck III Award for lifetime achievement. The architect of many buildings at Yale, the Audubon Street arts district, Union Station, and much else, said, “The arts are crucial because they are the poetry of life. As to architecture, specifically, my feeling has always been that the art is New Haven, the city entire, the city as a whole. Each building is a unit within that whole and its responsibility, our responsibility working on it, is to add to that whole.”

p(clear). Tyler said the arts are critical to New Haven (and anywhere) because “they inspire people to be better. And a community with those aspirations attracts investment, and investment leads to jobs. So art is essential not only to be civilized but because it in some sense lays the basis for economic prosperity, without which you wouldn’t have much art.”

p(clear). Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who was attending specifically in praise of his friend Newman and in honor of C. Newton Schenck, echoed remarks of Sally Glick. Glick (not pictured) and her company Coordinated Financial Resources were among the sponsors of the event, along with Ruth Lapides. Glick had said, “We don’t need an economic impact statement to know the importance of the arts to New Haven. Our economy here is dependent on them. So I ask you, when you consider candidates running for anything, ask them what their arts policy is.”

p(clear). Attorney General Blumenthal said, yes, the arts and culture are essential to who we are, and Newman’s buildings and settings “in particular promote bringing people together. Believe me, Herb Newman has asked his representatives what their arts policies are, and I encourage you to do the same.”

p(clear). Louise Endel, arts board member extraordinaire , was another of the recipients who said arts do indeed bring people together. She urged everyone to see Tartuffe at the Yale Rep. “Best show I’ve seen in years.”

p(clear). The other winner, The New Haven Chorale and its principals, was not reachable for comments during the many standing-ovations and the joyous sounds.

p(clear). Lydia Bornick, an Arts Council member back in the early 1980s when it was established by Bitsie Clark and others (pictured on the far left, with Susan Smith, executive director of the Creative Arts Workshop, and Arts Council staffer Winter Marshall) said of New Haven and the arts: “I think creativity defines the essence of this community. Sure, it’s possible to live in New Haven and go practice your craft in New York. But it’s also possible to be in New Haven and be who you are. Every year I am continually impressed by these winners, by how deep the arts community is here, so many people doing so much good and risking their existence, really, for the sake of their art. This place has a deep artistic heart.”

p(clear). During remarks of Charles Kingsley, board chair of the Arts Council, Bitisie Clark was quoted as counseling C. Newton Schenck to slow down and to take it easy towards the end of his life when that arts dynamo—he had more or less established the Long Wharf Theater and much else—was ill. “I can’t, Bitsie,” he said. “We have a city to build.”

p(clear). For full citations and biographies of the 2007 Arts Awards Honorees of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, click here.

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