Eleanor Polak photo
Christina Duan, Jess X. Snow, Sheri, Sonja John, Aaron Jafferis, Sarah "TW" Tracy-Wanck, and Rheo June painting Possible Futures.
The outside wall of Possible Futures, the bookstore located at 318 Edgewood Ave., stood blank and dull against the street, devoid of inspiration and creativity. That was about to change.
Tuesday marked the beginning of a 10-day-long painting project to design a mural, a tribute to New Haven local and celebrated prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The blank wall became a canvas, as muralists and community volunteers worked together to explore all the possible futures the space could hold.
Serendipitously, Tuesday also marked the first anniversary of the bookstore’s opening. The owner, Lauren Anderson, recalled asking at the time she leased the space about the possibility of a mural in the future.
“I couldn’t have imagined something this big, though!” she said.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore's books.
Anderson explained that the mural served less as a tribute to the bookstore and more as a representation of a community-wide hope.
“I don’t think its point is to say anything about Possible Futures, the bookstore, but about possible futures, the idea,” she said. Anderson referenced a quote from Gilmore, a renowned geographer, prison abolitionist, and prison scholar who grew up in New Haven: “We can make freedom out of what we have.”
“That’s a big part of the idea,” she said. “Imagining things that might not exist yet but could be different from what they are, and things that might not change in our lifetimes but will in future generations.”
Jess X. Snow and Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn lay down a tarp.
Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, the project manager for the mural, believes that it serves as a collective representation of New Haven abolitionists. The project started with a group of young people and educators who formed the Intergenerational Abolition Project, and studied the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore. “The idea is that we often have murals about people who have passed away, but she’s a living legend and we should celebrate her now,” said Cutipa-Zorn.
Jess X. Snow and Sonja John mixing paints.
The mural will start on one side with images depicting radical New Haven history, and then transition to showing imagined ideas of what the future could look like. In designing the plan, muralist Jess X. Snow incorporated notes from multiple specialists and sources, as well as ideas — certain colors and birds, for example — acquired through a neighborhood feedback form. Cutipa-Zorn said that they wanted the local residents to “have a stake in what is being created here.” Designing a mural, he explained, “is never about one artist or one individual, it’s about a community.”
“This came out of work that had happened even before I became a part of it,” said Cutipa-Zorn. “This is about the years of teacher struggle … people call New Haven a union town, but it’s also an abolitionist town.”
Volunteers and muralists.
Once Cutipa-Zorn and Snow had finished setting up the area, the volunteers began to paint the primary coat, a shade lighter and more vibrant than the actual brick. Adults and children, people with all different levels of experience, worked together to transform the outside of the bookstore. Dave Weinreb, a magnet resource teacher at Elm City Montessori and a self-proclaimed “deep lover of mural arts,” brought his 20-month-old daughter, Dalia, to help out with the painting.
Dave and Dalia Weinreb.
“Walls are meant to be spaces of shared beauty,” Weinreb said. “Murals beg questions. Murals are one of the most accessible forms of art. Murals are available. We notice them in transit and they invite us to stop and linger. I think anything that has the power to make us stop and think has the ability to teach.”
This particular mural will convey a message of freedom and hope, well suited for a bookstore called Possible Futures.
“If we’re trying to create freedom out of what we have here, we have a lot in New Haven to go on,” said Cutipa-Zorn. The mural will teach its audience — an ever-changing and transitory audience consisting of anyone who passes by Possible Futures — a lesson about possibilities and opportunities for change. If a blank brick wall can become a work of art, what else can we transform when we put our minds to the task?
I love all the murals and art projects going up all over our little city. Blank walls are a canvas that everyone can enjoy looking at art for free. They make the city friendlier and less desolate under the overpasses and along long stretches of blank brick walls.