A Year Of Reckoning In The Arts

Organizational chaos. Art spaces closing their doors. And new collectives of artists forming to take matters into their own hands. 

For many in the New Haven arts scene, the year 2023 was a time of transformation — some of it painful, but much of it promising. The roots of that pain reached back into the past few years, into the pandemic shutdown, but beyond it as well. In artists healing, the chance has opened up to build something better, that lasts well into the future.

Ghosts Of The Past

Back in April 2020, as the pandemic shutdown was just getting underway, I interviewed David Johnson, a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma, about a school program he was working on. At that time we didn’t how long the shutdown would last; in the article, it’s clear both he and I believed everyone would go back to school that fall. I asked him about how he expected the pandemic shutdown to look from a psychological perspective.

“Our best guess is that we’re in the middle of coping with the direct threat,” Johnson said at the time.​“When this happens, people call on every coping strategy they can call on .… This has not been a time for people to express their anxiety. They’re containing their anxiety.”

Then he said something else; he was already thinking about recovery, the time after the immediate threat from Covid-19 had subsided.​“I do believe that once the physical threat has dropped, you’re gong to see a widespread concern about people’s emotional health …. When things start to return to normal, there’s going to be emotion and stress that comes out,” he said.​“It may come out in creative ways.” But he cautioned that it might not.​“It’s going to be a lot of interpersonal strain.”

At that time, Johnson was talking about a time frame of several months. But as the shutdown continued well past that — lasting a lot longer, and having a much longer tail, than we thought in April 2020 — his idea remained lodged in my brain. I found it useful to try to see if I could feel the inflection point, when we collectively switched from the fight-or-flight-like response of containing emotion and stress to releasing it instead. At the end of 2022, I wrote about the arts scene’s exhaustion. Last year, I remember thinking that perhaps because the recovery had been so slow, the emotional release Johnson talked about on an individual level didn’t manifest in a broader way. 

In hindsight, in the arts scene, the inflection point I was looking for arrived this year. 

It’s a messy idea, spread out unevenly across the months and across the various facets of the arts. It doesn’t explain everything, and it didn’t show up everywhere. The music scene, first to get back on its feet when places reopened, lost the State House, not to the pandemic, but to a construction project. Cafe Nine switched owners, but that was a change that had been in the works for several years, long before the pandemic arrived, and several months into its new ownership, it’s now booking shows months ahead. Space Ballroom, College Street and Westville Music Bowl enjoyed capacity crowds for older (Flaming Lips, The Postal Service) and newer (Ezra Furman, boygenius) acts. Firehouse 12 relaunched its jazz series after renovating its space. That music life in New Haven and elsewhere is more precarious now than it was in 2019 — inflation and the slow return of audiences have made those sometimes razor-thin profit margins even thinner — is at least as much a function of long-term trends as pandemic disruption. 

Similarly, the theater world — the art form that took the biggest hit during the shutdown and has had the most difficult recovery, in New Haven and elsewhere — is inexorably getting back onto its feet, adjusting to increasing costs of doing business and audiences still making their way back. But the Shubert and Yale Repertory Theater have both returned to full seasons, Long Wharf is settling into its new itinerant model, and Collective Consciousness and New Haven Theater Company are back up and running.

In the visual arts, however, the sense of pent-up emotions released — sometimes in creative ways — manifested itself literally and figuratively. The cleanest version of this story lay in the implosion of Artspace and the resuscitation of Citywide Open Studios. In January, executive director Lisa Dent announced that she was leaving Artspace for a job in Massachusetts, citing lack of support from the arts community and flagging finances. In June, Artspace announced it was closing its doors. This happened alongside tumult at the Ely Center and rumblings at Creative Arts Workshop. Speaking off the record, artists spoke of a sense that the entire scene was collapsing.

Left hanging was the fate of Citywide Open Studios. Before the pandemic, the yearly event had been the capstone of Artspace’s efforts as an arts organization, bringing throngs of artists and crowds to take over spaces like Yale’s West Campus and the Goffe Street Armory as the anchor for a month-long series of events in Erector Square, Westville, and elsewhere. The pandemic shutdown prevented it from happening in 2020, and the series of events in 2021 and 2022 — which Dent restructured and rebranded as Open Source — failed to draw the kinds of crowds or artist participation that previous years had. Without a central coordinating organization, could it happen at all?

Facing The Future

In August, Fair-Side — the organizational project of artist Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez — convened an Artists’ State of the Union at Bregamos Community Theatre on Blatchley Avenue. Dozens of artists, Black, Brown, and White, young and old, attended. They voiced anger, years upon years of anger, at arts organizations in New Haven (Artspace, the Ely Center of Contemporary Art) and beyond for toxic work environments, for failing to address systemic racism and sexism, for failing to put artists first. The meeting ended without a concrete plan for action, but that hadn’t been the point. It had been an outlet for the outpouring of grief, for the expression of collective trauma, and it ended with a stronger sense of community.

Meanwhile, a group of artists centered in Erector Square had been steadily putting the pieces together to re-create much of what Citywide Open Studios had been before the pandemic. A flagship event at a place like the Armory was beyond reach. But working in coordination with artists in Westville and all over town, the Erector Square crew organized dozens of working artists to throw their studio doors open all month in October. They got the word out that it was happening. And the crowds returned.

For Martha Lewis, one of the artists in the organizing team, the lesson for artists was clear: ​“I don’t think we need arts administrators for this,” she said. ​“I think we can focus on what we want, what’s helpful to us as artists. There’s such a hunger for this.”

Lewis was echoing the sentiments of musician Trey Moore, who organized the music and arts festival Seeing Sounds in the skate park in Edgewood Park in the summers of 2022 and 2023.

The communities of artists and people who wanted the arts in their lives ​“will always exist and thrive, despite clubs closing and venues closing,” he said. ​“Many of those spaces don’t let us in anyway, when all we’re trying to do is this.” In the July heat, he gesticulated to the two stages with music scheduled all day, the rows of vendors and artists’ booths, the people milling about, skating, and dancing. ​“Communities thrive even when they’re underground. The difference is we’re not underground. We’re not in a basement anymore. But we’ve always been around.”

“Things are going to change,” he said, regarding the future of Seeing Sounds and, in a broader sense, the arts ecosystem.​“Change is coming.”

Reckoning For Who?

The movement in the arts scene this year involved the release of a lot of pent-up anger, grief, trauma, and frustration, in private conversations and public forums. Much of that anger was directed at existing arts organizations and arts administrators, who were seen as part of the problem. There was a lot of validity to that. Even setting aside the often harrowing accounts of toxic work environments aired during the Artists’ State of the Union, it’s more than fair to ask pointed questions about what arts organizations are really doing to help artists, whether the expense of running them justifies the amount of help they give, whether more of that money wouldn’t be better served going directly to artists themselves. 

But in practice this year, the role of arts organizations and the relationship between those organizations and artists was more complex, as often collegial as confrontational. Both the Erector Square crew and Moore at Seeing Sounds singled out city arts czar Adriane Jefferson and the city’s Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism for its support of their efforts. The work of organizations like the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance was a thread running through cultural events around the city. Nonprofits remain a key part of any mechanism for artists to receive real money from governments and foundations. Whatever shape the arts scene takes in 2024, arts organizations will be a part of it.

From trauma, then, there’s a chance for a better way. Many of New Haven’s artists across disciplines are moving into 2024 with a stronger sense of their own power, individually and collectively. They have learned how much they can do together, leading their own way. Arts organizations could more explicitly follow that lead, amplifying those organizational efforts, helping get the word out, and figuring out more ways to — to put it bluntly — make sure artists get paid. For its part, the city could do more to support its arts scene, the bustling network of creative people that makes New Haven the cultural capital of the state, an integral part of the equation of the city’s continuing economic development. That could start with a stronger arts office (that is, with a bigger budget and more staff), and proceed to more funds for and coordination with arts organizations and artists directly, helping make more opportunities for artists to practice their art and enrich the city around them.

But many artists have made it clear that they’re not waiting for that. Like Moore said, change is coming. Artists are making new and better places for themselves. And who doesn’t want to be a part of that?