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Jamil Ragland |
Jun 20, 2025 1:47 pm
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The Lost Tribe feat. dancers from the Movement of the People Dance Company
The Lost Tribe feat. Movement of the People Dance Company Hopgood/Lord Summer Music Series Bushnell Park Hartford June 19, 2025
Juneteenth 2025 featured some wonderful celebrations of African American culture around the Capital city, but few were as impactful as hearing the past, present and future of African American music performed by the Lost Tribe in Bushnell Park.
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Allan Appel |
Jun 20, 2025 10:30 am
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Allan Appel Photo
Friends Center's Allyx Schiavone and Flint Street Theater Manager Trey Moore. To quote one happy filmgoer: "We have a childcare center and a movie theater?!”
The secret is out.
There’s a new/old movie theater in town, screening free flicks for kids on Saturdays and reels for adults and a more general audience on Sundays.
That shiny new 120-seat theater, which has been making a soft debut over the past month, is preserved and renovated from the former Cine 1234, and is part of Friends Center for Children’s newest campus at 25 Flint St.
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Alexandra Martinakova |
Jun 20, 2025 10:13 am
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Alexandra Martinakova Photos
The Regional Water Authority's water treatment plant at 900 Whitney Ave. takes water from the nearby Whitney Reservoir.
Assistant Chief Operator Jesse Culbertson has been working at the company for the last 19 years, and served as their "tour guide" for the last seven.
Despite facing the impact of a cut in federal funding and having to compress a month-long festival into two weeks, Arts & Ideas still partnered with the Regional Water Authority (RWA) to give the community another free tour of the local water treatment plant Thursday morning.
“We’ve really tried to step it up over the last few years. It’s always good to reach out and get the public informed about what goes into treating water,” said Jesse Culbertson, RWA’s assistant chief operator, who has 19 years with the company under his belt. “We also do a lot of outreach with schools in the neighborhood: UNH, Southern, Quinnipiac, Yale … Anybody who wants to do a tour, you get a group of people and we will provide one.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 20, 2025 10:12 am
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Mark Mulcahy.
Mark Mulcahy Space Ballroom Hamden June 19, 2025
Between songs at the Space Ballroom, Mark Mulcahy asked me if I was writing about the show. Standing almost directly in front of him with my notebook and pen in hand I smiled and said, “Yes.” He then asked me how he was doing. I told him that I loved it.
“I’m not surprised,” he responded, and the audience responded to that with laughter and cheers. If you are a fan of Mark Mulcahy — whether it be from his time with the ’80s/’90s regional rock sensation band Miracle Legion, Polaris (house band for Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete), his solo work, or most likely all three — you would not have been surprised either. Few artists can offer up a catalogue of songs as he can, and on Thursday he chose twenty from that catalogue for a ballroom full of his faithful fans, each song as exquisite and exciting as the one before.
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Laura Glesby |
Jun 19, 2025 8:10 pm
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Angel Hubbard Photo
New Haveners enjoy the ride.
Laura Glesby Photo
The Waverly contingent, including RJ and Lyric, after a full day at the amusement park.
The best part of Quassy Amusement & Waterpark, according to six-year-old RJ, is “the black slide” — a waterslide tunnel that feels at first like “a black void,” until after a few twists and turns, “we saw the outside.”
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Adam Walker |
Jun 19, 2025 4:30 pm
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Adam Walker Photos
Dr. Hanan Hameen-Diagne leads dancers in a joyful Juneteenth hip-hop workshop.
Hip-hop pioneer DJ Tony Crush shares stories from the culture’s early days at the Visions of Truth conference.
Dooley-O's Juneteenth mural.
“Shake, shake, shake!” echoed like a chorus of empowerment Thursday as Dr. Hanan Hameen-Diagne led a packed room through the raw energy of hip hop and breakdancing.
The real power of the Juneteenth workshop wasn’t just in the footwork — but also in the history that pulsed behind every beat.
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Alina Rose Chen |
Jun 19, 2025 12:11 pm
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Alina Rose Chen Photos
Softwalls, a solo project of Allie Tracz, opens "It's Right to Rebel" fundraiser event.
Huellas by Andrés Madariaga.
A golden heart, holding ground amongst chaos: the startling center of Andrés Madariaga’s Huellas—“footprints” — shimmered against a backdrop of fragmented figures, blown-out footsteps, and distorted figures that appeared to be straining at the confines of the canvas.
Rendered in the flag colors of Madariaga’s native Colombia and incorporating the additional black and green of Palestine, the painting’s fluid, surrealist style captured a sense of displacement and the panic of assimilation in a world where borders are more than just lines on a map.
Huellas was one of several pieces on view at Wednesday night’s “It’s Right to Rebel” fundraiser at Café Nine, a celebration of visual art and live music that raised over $1,000 for families impacted by deportation. The event featured performances by Softwalls, Sickpay, and Missed Cues, alongside work by Madariaga, Drew Keefer, Eduardo Alvarez, Alexandra Shaheen, Brian Timko, and Alex Schwindt.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 17, 2025 10:53 am
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David Goldblatt
Children on the border between Fietas and Mayfair, Johannesburg.
David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive Yale University Art Gallery New Haven Through June 22
It’s a portrait of action and fun, as if the kids were already laughing in the street and the photographer told them to look up for just a second. It’s also startling in its intimacy. The camera is so close, the kids so unaffected even as they’re posing. Look closer, too, and it’s not all joy. The kid on the ground isn’t smiling. Why is one of the other kids holding up a ball?
And yes, though it’s Black and White kids in the same picture, and everyone seems fine being there, they’re not exactly playing together.
Gary Grippo and his trio took the stage Saturday afternoon downtown at Cafe Nine. They were the feature that week for the regular jazz jam, a free, all-ages open session that stands as one of the bar’s oldest traditions. The trio were obvious pros, staying in tune with every little riff, going hard with ease and, above everything, leaning into the moment with each other.
I met 24-year-old Sax, who plays sax, by the sign-up sheet for the open jam and asked what he thought of the group. He said they sounded great together. “Can’t wait to play with them.”
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Jisu Sheen |
Jun 16, 2025 12:23 pm
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Jisu Sheen photo
Marie Chen and daughter and author Anelise Chen.
A book talk by New Haven author Anelise Chen’s Saturday took an intergenerational turn as she called her mother, Marie/Su Ling Chen, to the front. In moving the spotlight to her mother, she figured she might as well “take advantage of the fact that she’s here and grill her maybe.”
A clear-eyed, honest writer, Anelise didn’t shy away from a nice charring. She got right into the meat of the story, inviting Marie to open up about decades of familial stress and inner emotional turmoil.
“And then you would like, hide in the room,” Anelise prompted. “Luckily, we had a clam room. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know anything about that.”
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Jamil Ragland |
Jun 16, 2025 8:00 am
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Miki Yamanaka looking cool as hell.
The Miki Yamanaka Trio Sunset Sounds Butler-McCook House and Garden Hartford June 12, 2025
The Sunset Sounds concert series is back at the Butler-McCook House and Garden on Main Street in Hartford, kicking off Thursday with the Miki Yamanaka Trio. Pianist Yamanaka easily stands out in a jazz world full of eclectic artists. Born in Kobe, Japan, Yamanaka has made New York City her home since 2012. In Hartford, She wore a plum-colored kimono decorated with flowers, a wide brimmed hat and shades that made her look cool as hell.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 13, 2025 11:44 am
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Yale
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings By James C. Scott Yale University Press
In Praise of Floods, the final published work by the late Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, is a fleet, searching book, with the laudable ambition to change people’s minds about how they relate to the rivers around them, in the hopes of creating a more sustainable future for all plants and animals. It’s built on a lifetime of experience, a strong sense of accumulated wisdom, laced with a sly sense of humor that often aids its goals.
And yet none of that prevented me from putting the book face-down on the table when I was reading it in a barbecue joint in western North Carolina, a place still struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which wrought havoc on the region in September 2024. People in the booths around me could have lost families and friends, homes and jobs. If the title of the book made them angry, I wouldn’t have blamed them. And if they’d gotten past the title and asked me what the book was about, I couldn’t have brought myself to defend it.
Owen Whang hit some tough multiple-choice questions the other day in the midst of a 90-minute ninth-grade final exam in his “Revolutionary Freedoms” history course. He decided to exercise a particular freedom of his own — removing the coils of his cochlear implants.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 13, 2025 7:30 am
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Pride & Prejudice.
Longing looks, dramatic entrances, misunderstanding of motives, and a hearty dose of … humor? All of this awaited the “sold out” crowd Thursday at Yale’s Humanities Center for a screening of Pride & Prejudice, the beloved 2005 film celebrating its 20th anniversary. It was the second of the four films being shown as part of the Yale Film Archive’s summer series. Its dedicated followers entered and exited the screening abuzz about this memorable film, and remained enraptured by it throughout.
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Maya McFadden |
Jun 12, 2025 2:24 pm
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MAYA MCFADDEN Photos
Adult Ed's Milane Williams, Lamar Lawrence, Christina Arnold, and Mark Landow at Wednesday's Vision 2034 art exhibit.
Art by Paul Linton: "My picture shows challenges like poverty and crime. The overall picture shows the downtown area where people from different backgrounds come together to enjoy the city's offerings and build a strong community."
Too many potholes. Too much gun violence. Not enough affordable housing.
Adult Education students identified those problems in a new art exhibit now up at City Hall as they thought through, and interviewed fellow New Haveners about, how to improve the city over the next decade.
The following write-up was submitted by Site Projects.
In the center of Fair Haven, a patient audience sits on the ground in the shade of a tree watching the artists — three of them — work paints and brushes, sometimes from ladders, sometimes sitting on the sidewalk. A mash-up of black scribbles covering parts of the wall is being transformed into recognizable figures: the legs of a horse, perhaps the front end of a trolley.
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Jamil Ragland |
Jun 11, 2025 7:50 am
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A painting by Bonni McKenney
Mini Canvas Painting Hartford Public Library Albany Avenue Branch Hartford June 10, 2025
Most of my experiences with public painting have been evening paint-and-sips, so I was intrigued by a daytime painting event offered by the Albany Avenue branch of the Hartford Public Library Tuesday morning.
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Sonia Ahmed |
Jun 10, 2025 3:55 pm
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Sonia Ahmed photo
Martina Perez with her daughter, Jocelyn Perez, at the Atitlan food truck.
On a rainy Tuesday morning on Forbes Avenue, Martina Perez roasted black pepper, cumin, and cinnamon in a pan. She then boiled tomatoes and chilies in a pot before blending them with the spices and straining the resulting stew over the cooked chicken.
The dish, Guatemala’s national food, is pepián – and it’s now for sale at one of the city’s newest food trucks.
Carter, Costantini, and Scialla of T!LT at the warehouse studio where they record and practice.
There it was, written in bold, black letters on a shipping label, with an ‘x’ in the exclamation mark of T!LT and all-caps for emphasis, style, or both.
T!LTHATESTHE N.H.I.
Driving the point home was another sticker in the same handwriting:
T!LTHATESFREEPRESS
To be fair, there was also T!LTEATSBIGGREENSNOT, T!LTMADEPANDASSNEEZE, and the heaviest blow in my opinion, T!LTISNOTINTERESTIN’.
“Every story you hear about us is true, even the good ones,” said Mike Scialla, singer and guitarist for New Haven punk band T!LT. He makes the stickers himself to pass out at shows. “We’re slandering ourselves so we can stay true to who we are.”
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Maya McFadden |
Jun 10, 2025 12:21 pm
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MAYA MCFADDEN Photo
Singing fondly about the past, in Harriett Alfred's class.
Nostalgia found its way into one of Harriett Alfred’s final music classes at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School as students sang about fond childhood memories — as well as about the time they’ve spent learning from a cherished, soon-to-retire educator.
Before her death, one that would be immortalized in a new documentary by filmmaker Sandra Luckow, writer Cai Emmons introduced Luckow to the Country Fair in Eugene, Oregon, an Eden of tie-dye and hippie vibes.
When it came time to edit the footage of a psilocybin trip Emmons took during her last few months alive, Luckow thought back to the Country Fair for inspiration.
In a rare exploration of animation for the seasoned documentarian, swirling splashes of purple, pink, and green spilled beyond that scene and onto the edges of the documentary’s official poster. When I met Luckow at a screening of her documentary Vanishing Friday evening at Dwight soccer pub The Cannon — part of the debut weekend for New Haven’s new Lighthouse Film Festival — her shirt looked just as trippy as the poster. Turns out, she’d bought it to match.
