Arts Awards Fetes Creative Futures Amid Arts ​“Crisis” And ​“Renaissance”

On Saturday night, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 43rd annual Arts Awards honored six of New Haven’s creative minds — Juanita ​“Sunday” Austin, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Adrian Huq, Sun Queen, Possible Futures/Lauren Anderson, and William Graustein — at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University.

In the shadow of a multitude of changes this year in the city’s arts scene, which continues to be reimagined and restructured, these six recipients — who have each added to that scene in multiple ways far beyond their own creations and personal accomplishments — offered speeches that touched upon the personal, the profound, and the importance of caring for one another in the local arts community and around the world.

The theme of the night was ​“Creative Futures,” a topic not only addressed in the speeches but in many of the outfits the attendees wore. Arts Council Executive Director Hope Chávez and Board of Directors Chair Babz Rawls-Ivy hosted a pre-show red carpet event in the lobby that was also recorded live for virtual attendees. The hosts spoke to the awards recipients as well as arts lovers of all ages about their fashion choices, the future of art, and so much more, having an absolute blast of a time getting the ever-growing crowd ready for the night ahead.

The ceremony began with a four-song set by the New Haven-based Love n’ Co, performing as a duo with vocalist Lovelind Richards and Lamar Smith on guitar. They offered the audience a sweet and spicy cup of soulful stirrings that warmed everyone up for the rest of the night. Richards also offered gratitude as well as inspiration to the crowd.

“I say you can do anything … tonight’s a beautiful remembrance of that,” she said.

Hosts F.L.Y. Ty and Arleny Abreu welcomed everyone with an abundance of joy and enthusiasm, working throughout the night to raise the vibe and introduce each recipient before each award. In addition to the introduction, each recipient had a short film shown in their honor. Those films included family and friends singing their praises interspersed with snippets of the photo shoot each took part in with Lotta Studios for this event. 

Curator and cultural producer Juanita Austin was first to be honored. She said that being there felt ​“surreal” after finishing her latest project, the two-month long 6th Dimension Festival in New Haven, only last week. 

“To be here celebrating creative futures … the way the world works and comes around is beautiful sometimes,” she said.

Austin, who came to New Haven from New London, called the community ​“so welcoming, so refreshing, so inspiring.” She added that she was ​“excited to be here to create, to innovate, and to contribute to this arts community.” 

After thanking her friends, family, and the Arts Council, she added, ​“here’s to the future.”

Indigenous Zapotec artist Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, who also works as an educator, youth mentor, community activator, and curator, came to the podium with words of gratitude for her mother, who she thanked for ​“understanding why this work calls me”; her friends, ​“who remind me that living is breathing”; and the team at CCEIO (Co-Creating Effective & Inclusive Organizations), who ​“have walked me to doors I didn’t know I could open on my own inside.” 

She also offered that it was ​“hard to celebrate” this evening with what was going in the world, mentioning that she wanted to put the need for a ceasefire in Gaza at ​“the forefront of your mind,” for which she received applause. An audience member responded during the silence with one word: ​“fearless.”

Gonzalez Hernandez elaborated on her concerns about local issues in the art community as well.

“I’m concerned about the safety of artists in Greater New Haven in nonprofits and art institutions,” she said, adding she was ​“deeply concerned” about places not believing artists ​“when they say they are being harmed,” and the use of non-disclosure agreements ​“to keep harm from being known instead of recognizing, reckoning, and bearing the work that need to be practiced in order to exist in a new way.” 

She was here ​“regardless” because she knew that the artists in Greater New Haven and in Connecticut ​“want better” and will continue to create in other safer spaces.

Gonzalez dedicated the award ​“to every artist in CT who has needed to fight against these institutional structures to be believed, to be heard, to speak up.” She specifically dedicated the award to artist Maxim Schmidt, whose story at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art has been documented in the Independent, and who she said she believed and supported. She also once again expressed her belief in the power of the artist and the art to persist.

“I am not here to say all nonprofits are bad, but I am here to say that artists are the solution. We already have what we need in us,” she added. After saying she believed there was an ​“arts crisis” in the city, she also noted that the city was in an ​“arts renaissance” because ​“we are providing exactly what we need for ourselves and each other.” She left the podium to thunderous applause and cheers.

Climate activist and organizer Adrian Huq thanked Gonzalez Hernandez ​“for saying the words that needed to be said,” noting that they were ​“truly humbled and honored to be one of the awardees tonight alongside these five distinguished changemakers.”

“When I first heard the news of my selection I immediately thought of so many other local artists, cultural workers and community leaders who deserve the same honor. That speaks to the level of excellence that we have in our greater New Haven community, whether or not they have been recognized for their important contributions,” they said.

From bringing home their friends’ recyclables in middle school to becoming the youth coordinator of the Climate Health Education program and cofounding the New Haven Climate Movement Youth Action Team, Huq has continued to help the local climate change movement grow and flourish.

“Grassroots organizing on the city scale provides me with a sense of connection, joy, and passion which I feel I cannot derive if I went and organized on a larger scale,” they said. 

“In New Haven I’ve learned the true meaning of community. It is not a word I throw around or take lightly, or is something that is abstract for me. I feel it when we show up at Board of Alders and Board of Education meetings to demand change. I feel it in the crowd of protestors when we organize on pressing social issues and call out injustices whether local or global. I feel it when we create channels through mutual aid and show each other love. I feel it when we support each other’s movements, businesses, and endeavors, and right here, I can feel it as we support and foster a vibrant arts and culture scene.”

Poet, artist, activist, and organizer Sun Queen (a.k.a. Lauren Pittman) asked everyone to take a minute before her speech ​“for all the Black women and Black girls who had dreams and never made it home, never got to fulfill their dreams and passions.” Offering words as poetic as the verses she regularly shares live throughout the community and in her book It Happened Within the Sun, she spoke of gratitude and strength, but also of the occasional trepidation.

“Sometimes I feel lost and I get lost in this journey, but I never give up and I never will,” she said.

“I hope we all continue to inspire, dream big, and create. Create a better world through art. Creativity for me has been my waterfalls, my sun rays, and my therapist.” 

She ended by reminding the audience — many of whom shouted out their support throughout her speech — that everything they do (“you live, you breathe, you walk, you talk, you communicate”) is creating art. 

“Art is everything, and everything is art,” she said. ​“Peace.”

Lauren Anderson, founder of Possible Futures, the Edgewood Avenue bookstore that has become a vital meeting and event space as well as treasured ​“third place” for the community since its inception in 2019, immediately acknowledged the audience and supporters. 

“We aren’t here without you choosing us when you could choose otherwise, so really this award is for you too,” she said.

She also offered gratitude to a long list of supporters, including the ​“book nerds” who help to keep the store ​“the fountain of joy” it has become, the neighbors who helped the space make it through the rough patches during the pandemic, the children who come to the space, and the artists and makers who use the space and whose ​“offerings bring beauty to the book space and our lives.”

She noted that Possible Futures works ​“because it’s rooted in the practice of neighborhood in the way that activist Grace Lee Boggs meant it when she said we need to bring the neighbor back to our neighborhoods, in the way that Nipsy Hustle meant it: all money in, investing in us, neighbor as a verb.”

Anderson ended on another note of gratitude: ​“I’m so grateful for all that we have here in New Haven: beautiful neighbors, deep connections, abundant book joy, ambitious dreams. Possible futures.”

The final awardee of the night, William Graustein, was the recipient of this year’s C. Newton Schenck III Award for Lifetime Achievement in and Contribution to the Arts. A former geologist, Graustein went on to co-found the Community Leadership Program and Co-Creating Effective and Inclusive Organizations. He currently serves as a trustee of the Willam Casper Graustein Memorial Fund. On this evening, he spoke of an ​“experience of a lifetime impact of arts” as a performer with Long Wharf Theater in 1997 that helped him ​“merge the stories of me in New Haven with the story of us in New Haven.” It taught him the lesson that ​“many people yearn to be part of the larger story of us.”

He said he took that with him and it ​“tuned not only what my mind would think, but what I would feel, when I started to talk to others in New Haven in the nonprofit sector.” 

“What I heard was … a yearning to be a part of something greater than myself, to work for the common good beyond the boundaries that I’m familiar with and manifest more clearly the values in my heart,” he said.

He added that hearing these stories led him to cocreating the CLP and CCEIO programs. 

“So, thank you, good people of New Haven, thank you to the arts for creating those places where we can imagine something that is different, and realize even if we just make it real in a small space, it can grow to a much larger space.” 

He also turned to the other awardees on the stage and thanked them for what they have done ​“to manifest that love for New Haven.”

Before the crowd dispersed to enjoy pizza, drinks, and DJ Ch’Varda’s music, Rawls-Ivy and Chávez returned to the stage. Both acknowledged each awardee individually, with Rawls-Ivy reminding everyone that ​“art is the lifeline and lifeblood of who we are.” She added that she liked to see art as ​“an economic driver so that cities and towns really put some money behind artists.” She also reminded everyone to enjoy themselves that night, but to also keep in mind that the loss of people around the world to violence — including people from Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and Newhallville — included artists ​“that will not see the light of day.”

“Go, enjoy each other, be in community,” she said, and added with a fist raised: ​“Art forever.”