Public Art Makes Grand A Bit More Grand

“We rise by lifting others,” reads a phrase from 19th-century writer and orator Robert Ingersoll, which now adorns a colorful mural on a wall on Fair Haven’s Grand Avenue.

As if in literal demonstration of the quotation, on Friday morning, a woman hefted a small child into the air to paint a butterfly on the mural that otherwise would have been just out of reach.

The designer of the mural is artist Madelyn LaRose. The wall was part of the building that housed students in Centro San Jose’s preschool program. 

On the other side of Grand Avenue, artist Daniel Pizarro was about to present his own public art to students at the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (FAME), whose art Pizarro had drawn inspiration from. 

Both pieces of public art came together from a collaboration among artists, educators, city officials, and Fair Haven businesspeople, in the firm belief that enlivening a neighborhood through visual art that reflects the strengths of the community can lift everyone around it.

LaRose’s mural was designed in partnership with Centro San Jose on Grand Avenue, and was sponsored by the locally-owned McDonald’s on Ferry Street and the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association. Pizarro’s posters — which now appear in kiosks at the intersections of Grand and James, Grand and Blatchley, Grand and East Pearl, and Ferry and Lombard — were developed in collaboration with Junta for Progressive Action, the City of New Haven’s Department of Economic Development, and the Grand Avenue Special Services District, and sponsored by the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association and Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development Office of the Arts. 

LaRose got into visual art in 2020. ​“The pandemic had started, and I was painting every day for fun, and people were liking my art and telling me that I should sell it. So I started doing commissions. I made a few original pieces, and that’s when I met Perez” — as in, New Haven-based artist Carlos Perez — ​“and started doing murals. In August she worked on a mural on Grand Avenue designed by Perez, where she met Sarah Miller, one of Fair Haven’s alders. ​“She told me they were looking to do a mural here for Centro San Jose, something that would represent the community,” LaRose said.

This mural is ​“my first mural by myself — first time designing one,” LaRose said. She had meetings with Miller and Sylvia Velez of Centro San Jose, who detailed their goals to reflect Fair Haven, but the elements of the design itself were all LaRose. ​“The saying I was inspired by — I’d seen it somewhere else, but then I thought about putting my own elements into the words,” elements ​“that I thought would represent the community. And I love painting flowers and nature. That’s part of community, too, and it’s very beautiful to me, so I thought it would go well together.” In the images of books, maracas, rulers, basketballs, pencils, rainbows, fruits, and paint palettes, LaRose sought to represent both the kinds of youth services Centro San Jose offers and the Fair Haven more generally, a place of sports, arts, education, food, and tolerance. She included ​“everything that brings together the community, things that I enjoy,” and ​“things that represent a little bit of everyone.” 

As an artist, LaRose said, ​“I get my inspiration from things that I see” — the people in Fair Haven she’s surrounded by. She also likes ​“for people’s eyes to be drawn to what I’m doing,” which factored into the design. She originally conceived of the letters in the mural as black and white, but on further consideration, ​“that seemed boring to me,” she said. She made a visual mockup on her phone and played with it to see what else she might come, and the color flowed in. LaRose is now lining up work for other murals, too — for a church, for the back of someone’s garage, for the insides of stores.

But first, on Friday, LaRose got help from some preschool students who were there to put some final touches on LaRose’s design.

She gave each of them a paint color to work with. On the mural’s face, she had already traced the outlines of butterflies. It was up to the students to put their own mark on them.

The students’ brush strokes blended with LaRose’s style.

When they were done, the students were encouraged to sign their work with a colorful handprint on the door of the property.

The mural, Miller said, came out of the fact that ​“we just kept driving by here and were frustrated that there was nothing” on the blank wall. There had been in the past; when the storefront was a taqueria called El Charro Alegre, it boasted a colorful mural. ​“We’re trying to work on improvements of Grand Avenue in general, and public art is a big part of that, so this seemed like a really obvious place to start.” Upon meeting LaRose, Miller knew ​“she was really ready for something like this. And she was really motivated, because she lives here and knows the neighborhood.” Miller is hopeful to secure funds to allow LaRose to touch up the mural periodically. 

“We love supporting the community, and we love supporting youth,” said Sarah Amato, who with Roger Facey owns and operates the Ferry Street McDonalds that co-sponsored the project; Amato lives in Fair Haven Heights. ​“Our founder, Ray Kroc, said that we have an obligation to give back to the community that gives so much to us, and that is what we continue to do.… This Ferry Street McDonalds will always have a partnership and we look forward to having a partnership in Fair Haven for years to come.”

On the sidewalk next to FAME, Daniel Pizarro (pictured above) was explaining to a group of students how their artwork had been the fuel for the posters Pizarro designed for the kiosk in front of the school.

“You all are amazing artists,” he said to them. ​“I was not as good as you guys are when I was your age, trust me.… What I saw in your artwork is that you’re proud to be from Fair Haven. So I wanted to bring that same energy, the love you have for Fair Haven, into the work.” He latched onto a phrase that appeared in the artwork that ​“Fair Haven welcomes the world” — a statement borne out by the dozen or so countries that the students themselves were from. ​“I tried to capture little bits and pieces of all these different cultures.”

Pizarro’s family is from Chile and he was raised in Los Angeles. His parents were undocumented. ​“So I grew up in an immigrant household,” he said. ​“Fair Haven feels very much like home to me.” 

He explained that the city ​“had initially approached me with the idea to bring a cultural branding to Grand Avenue.” He had been thinking about ​“how the pandemic hit this community really hard economically, so I thought this could be an opportunity to start playing with cultural identity that could … start to bring more economic opportunity to the strip here on Grand Avenue.” He thought about ​“how other cultures also create cultural branding around specific streets and roads in a neighborhood. How can we start thinking about Fair Haven and Grand Avenue” in those terms, ​“and start capturing the multitude of Latinx identities?”

So his poster encompasses nods to San Felipe del Morro Castle in Puerto Rico, musical instruments — ​“iconography that speaks to something universal,” he said. In thinking along those lines, ​“there’s so much inspiration that I pulled” from the FAME students’ artwork, from the way they used text in their artwork to the imagery they used. ​“A lot of the work has a simplicity to it that’s really beautiful, so I wanted to mirror that and bring in simple shapes that could relate to the work they were developing.” That geometric style of art, perhaps, ​“makes it accessible to a lot of folks, and I’m big on bright colors.” He also drew inspiration from flags across Latin America, which many use to express their pride in where they’re from. 

Pizarro came to New Haven to attend the Yale School of Art; he is married to Bruni Pizarro, executive director of Junta for Progressive Action, who also attended Yale. ​“We both decided to stay in New Haven because we’re both very community-oriented folks,” he said. While at school, ​“we had been building so many community relationships that it felt like a natural progression” to stay. ​“Those networks opened the doors to us.”

“I came from L.A. and my wife is from New York, and these are big cities,” Pizarro continued. ​“But I love the proximity of New Haven to seeing your work actually have an impact on the community. You see it almost immediately. I really love that.… Projects like this,” he said, motioning to the posters, ​“you see the relationships. Everything’s within proximity.” For Pizarro, that meant a great deal of satisfaction. ​“Being able to have an opportunity to go to a place like Yale, and then be able to come back and serve my community, is so central to how I see my creative practice,” he said.