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Brian Slattery |
Feb 22, 2024 9:41 am
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A giant squid seems to erupt from the floor of the gallery. Not far away, another wooden figure, more abstract, takes on a shape that could be leaning into the wood’s natural form and could have deviated far from it; from the finished product, it’s hard to say. Close by, there’s an abstract canvas with the contours of a cityscape, the hulking buildings rising from streetlights into darkness, all of it reflected in water. Unifying these works — by William Kent and Leo Jensen — are both the aesthetic sense of the era in which they were created and a more universal spirit of exploration. They’re what happened when the artists making them tried new things.
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Paul Bass and Laura Glesby |
Feb 16, 2024 2:54 pm
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Builder Clay Fowler (at center): Market's back, but construction costs rose too.
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The vacant lot where a hotel is slated to rise.
A developer has revived the idea of building a hotel, rather than apartments, on the vacant lot that once housed Webster Bank. The city gave him some extra time to decide.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 16, 2024 9:28 am
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Shaunda Holloway’s Nature’s Children greets viewers as soon as they enter the second floor of the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop. Over the shoulder of that piece, Aisha Nailah’s HERstands ready, like an ally. From the doorway, it’s easy to see that the pieces in the show, by multiple artists, share affinities in form and color, as well as subject matter. The diversity of the voices is vast. But they’re all in the same cause together.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2024 9:23 am
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New Haven artist Sarahi Zacatelco.
On the walls of Atticus on Chapel Street, just above diners’ heads, is a row of mixed-media artworks that brighten and enrich the space, making it feel both more vibrant and more homey. But a closer look suggests complication, symbolism, layers of meaning.
As accompanying labels explain, the pieces are loaded with significance. The first encapsulates a prayer from the culture of the Huichol in Mexico for health, home, and a long life. In the second piece, the flower — associated with the Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli — was used to remedy fever and burns. The third represents the Aztec and Mayan god Quetzalcoatl and his abilities as a seer. It only gets richer from there.
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Donald Brown |
Feb 14, 2024 9:07 am
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Guevara, Stamm, and Ouf.
The 56th season of the Yale Cabaret, the audacious theater in the basement of 217 Park Street on Yale’s campus, is called “Sandbox.” The Cab’s team for the 2023 – 24 season — co-artistic directors Doaa Ouf, a projection designer, and Kyle Stamm, a lighting designer, both in their second year at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and managing director Annabel Guevara, now completing her fourth year in theater management at DGSD — said “the mission of Cab 56 is to create theater that invokes a sense of curiosity and playfulness, giving artists permission to dig and unearth treasures within themselves.”
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 13, 2024 9:14 am
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It’s not just the large paintings covering the walls that suffuse the gallery with color, though they go a long way toward transforming the space around them by themselves. The balloons making their way around the gallery floor help out a lot, too. Even if the gallery is quiet — has a party just finished, or is one about to start? — they encourage a different way of engaging with the art, a little less formal, a little more festive. Maybe, in another sense, they help us let our guard down, and be more open to what the art has to say.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 13, 2024 8:58 am
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Qween Kong share the love.
While many were getting ready for the last big football game of the season this past Sunday, a local music series was getting restarted over on Elm Street, as Three Sheets welcomed back the first of its popular Unplugged shows in a long while. Presented by Booger Z. Jones in conjunction with series creator Sara Scranton, two bands — on this day, the New Haven-based Hell Fairy and Qween Kong — would present a selection of their songs in a more stripped-down fashion than usual, acoustic and accompanied by stories of how they were made and what inspired them.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 12, 2024 9:05 am
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James Ivory and Brian Meacham
Friday night’s installment of Yale Film Archive’s The World of James Ivory series offered another type of double feature: a viewing of the 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah, followed by a Q&A with the series’ namesake, James Ivory. Fans of the legendary director, who gifted the Archive with selections from his personal film collection in 2023, were treated to the 35mm version of Shakespeare in all of its black and white glory, in the presence of Ivory himself. Afterward, they had the opportunity to hear Ivory discuss the film with managing archivist Brian Meacham, and ask him questions of their own.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 9, 2024 9:07 am
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Suzu Sakai on the Shubert set she designed.
A member of the stage crew was doing some last-minute cleanup of the set at the Shubert, in preparation for a rehearsal of Yale Opera’s The Rake’s Progress, the opera by Igor Stravinsky set to run at the venerable College Street theatre Feb. 17 and 18. At first glance, it may have looked like he was vacuuming a vast Persian rug. A second glance, however, might show the design on the floor for what it really is: the back of an enormous playing card. More than just an arresting visual pattern, the scintillating floor is part of a set design decision that, for the opera’s director, was the key to opening up Stravinsky’s work to better connect with audiences.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 8, 2024 9:16 am
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Dallas Ugly Wednesday night at Cafe Nine.
Cafe Nine on Wednesday night was the scene for delicate ballads, bright harmonies, and gritty rhythms as three bands — Pyramid Rose, Dallas Ugly, and the Split Coils — played sets with passion and commitment to the cause of country, rock ‘n’ roll, and keeping live music rolling in the Elm City.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 5, 2024 9:21 am
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A scene from "Queen of Katwe."
How does a young girl from Uganda go from beginning chess player to champion? Disney’s Queen of Katwe documents the journey from one to the other as well as the struggles and triumphs in between. The 2016 film was the first entry in this month’s “Free Film Fridays: From Stage to Screen: Celebrating Black Yale School of Drama Alumni” at the Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 2, 2024 9:17 am
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Gregory Crewdson
Untitled (from the series Beneath the Roses).
Gregory Crewdson’s arresting photograph is nearly five feet tall and eight feet across, large enough for a viewer to get completely engrossed in the details. The scene at its most basic is simple enough: A man standing by a river bank, shirtless; a makeshift shack behind him, lit from the inside; beyond a stand of trees, a row of houses.
But the mood, the lighting, and the details all set the wheels for any number of stories in motion. Does the man live in the shack? Or does someone else? Or does anyone? Do the people who live in the houses know someone’s down there by the river, or is the man truly isolated? And what has brought him to the water’s edge at night? Is he lost in contemplation? Is he waiting for someone else to arrive? Or, perhaps, is he watching intently as something’s happening, maybe on the opposite shore, maybe in the water itself? Maybe this is actually a scene of ferocious action, only just out of frame.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 30, 2024 9:00 am
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The Haints.
Are you the type of music fan who wishes there were more shows that started before 8 p.m., but wants the feel of a late Friday or Saturday night out? Are Sunday brunches too early for you, but you also don’t want to stay out too late? Three Sheets has something perfect for you the last Sunday of every month: a matinee that promises you an onslaught of punk music that is at just the right time for the late-to-rise-on-the-weekend, early-to-bed-for-work-on-Monday crowd.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 26, 2024 9:34 am
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Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove.
The return of Yale students to campus for spring semester means a new class schedule for them, but it also means a new spring screening schedule for the Yale Film Archive, one that is free and open not only to those students, but to the general public.
This week the first two films of their “Treasures from the Yale Archive” series — Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on Tuesday and Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Thursday — were screened to full rooms of film fans in all of their 35 mm glory. And according to managing archivist Brian Meacham, this is only the beginning. The Treasures series is one of three film series the Archive presents each semester.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 25, 2024 4:21 pm
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Contributed Photo
Sarah Kane.
The plays of British playwright Sarah Kane (1971 – 99) are notoriously difficult — for staging, and for what they put an audience through. The warning distributed by the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, for the production of Cleansed, running through Jan. 26 at the University Theater, reads: “Cleansed contains nudity; graphic simulations of sexual and physical violence, sexual intimacy, suicide, incest, death, and drug use; as well as coarse language. These actions are enacted by and on Black people. This production also contains loud sounds, extended gunfire, live flame, fog, bright lights, and strobe lighting effects.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2024 9:15 am
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Howard El-Yasin
Blue Velvet Suitcase.
Blue Velvet Suitcase is simple: a wooden chair, a small suitcase, a shirt from a uniform, neatly folded. It’s unassuming enough that it almost — almost — invites the viewer to sit in the chair. But the text printed on the facing wall tells us we’re looking at so much more.
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Dereen Shirnekhi |
Jan 23, 2024 3:31 pm
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Alder Rodriguez makes a dent in homelessness.
Alder Carmen Rodriguez donned a hard hat and struck a sledgehammer into a wall — and urged her counterparts in other cities to break down metaphorical walls as well to support the “cold, wet, and hungry.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 22, 2024 9:44 am
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Jeff Fuller and Friends.
Jazz can be found practically every night of the week in New Haven: at cigar bars, alongside pizza, and amidst videos and DVDs, among other places. For a jazz fan who wishes to partake of live music even during the day, Elm City Market has brought back its popular weekly jazz brunch on Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., which means not only do you get tunes, but you can have a meal (or a muffin or a mug of coffee or both) as well.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 18, 2024 9:05 am
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A third of the way through the latest concert in the Kallos Chamber Music Series — held Wednesday evening at the New Haven Lawn Club — cellist Daniel Hamin Go had a little insider’s tip. “In order for this to be the best concert you’ve ever been to, this is what you have to do. During the intermission, which will begin in about 16 minutes, there is lots of wine!” The audience laughed. “And some good food. I highly recommend you either get drunk or you stuff yourself, because then we will sound amazing.” The audience laughed again. It was a fitting encapsulation of the tone of the evening, in which the music was serious but the mood informal and festive, making for a night of serious fun.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 16, 2024 9:42 am
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Slam host Ngoma.
Memories of the Children’s Crusade. A vision of alien visitations in the future. Invocations of superheroes. Fist-raising calls for change. These were all part of the 28th annual Z Experience Poetry Slam on Monday, part of the Yale Peabody Museum’s celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s legacy of social and environmental justice.
