Westville Celebrates Sunny ArtWalk

Luxuriating in a warm spring day, ArtWalk — organized by the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance — brought out a crowd on Saturday for a full afternoon of art, craft, music, theater, food, and community.

Saturday was the culmination of a solid week of ArtWalk programming that had begun on Monday. It featured several musical performances, a show from the improv comedy troupe The Regicides, an art opening at Da Silva Gallery, a beer garden, and a fashion show featuring Tea Montgomery and other designers. Saturday itself involved a full day of acitivites all over Westville, with music pouring from a stage set up in Edgewood Park all afternoon, food trucks and stands offering lunch, arts vendors lining the corner of Fountain Street and Central Avenue, and crowds moving from the park to the center of Westville to take it all in.

Hillhouse High School’s marching band kicked off the day with a performance that began with a parade through the center of Westville, down Whalley Avenue, and into Edgewood Park. With a phalanx of tight drums, rumbling sousaphone, and big sound from flutes, saxophones, trombone, and trumpets, they ripped through a series of songs that got people in the park cheering and dancing.

The lawn in Edgewood Park featured a host of family-friendly activities, from a roster of musical performances to the annual duck race, to a range of arts and crafts activities.

The giant magnetic poetry tent seemed to be a particular hit this year.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre served up three lively performances of its show Where the Rubber Met the Road, which drew from the history of the paving of Whalley Avenue to tell the story of two families — the Blakes (of Blake Street fame) and the Goodyears — comedically reminiscent of the Hatfields and the McCoys, except eschewing gunfire in favor of squabbles over public works projects.

The vendors who set up shop enjoyed a steady stream of traffic throughout the day. Among them, James Lee had a booth set up for his line of clothing, 203tree, covering everything from T‑shirts and sweatshirts to hats and shorts. ​“With this concept of 203tree, I wanted to give back to the community,” Lee said. He was born and raised ​“everywhere in New Haven,” from the Hill to Fair Haven to Dixwell. As he got to know places throughout the state, he noticed that people in different cities and towns felt separate from one another. 

“The slogan speaks for itself — ​‘let nothing stop the growth’ — because I’m trying to bridge the gap, the separation between everybody, so we can grow together stronger,” Lee said. 

Lee has a background working in several clothing stores, where he ​“learned my fabrics, learned the marketing and merchandising.” He started 203tree about a year ago and imagined a clothing line that represents ​“the inner city and the state,” not ​“just one section.” He settled on the image of an elm tree for its connection to where he was from. Then ​“we just simplified it,” he said. ​“We wanted to make sure the colors represented the culture, and the earthy tones. We carefully thought of it, but we kept it simple.”

The 203tree crew self-presses some of the clothing items. ​“Some we outsource within Connecticut,” he said. ​“We manufacture a lot of them right here.” The bucket hats ​“have been doing really good — guys and girls,” he said, with the white T‑shirts following close behind. 

The brand launched its website a couple months ago and Lee has taken the clothing line to fairs around the area in the past year and noted that people have responded to it. ​“Whatever they get out of it, the tree of life, spirituality,” Lee said, ​“everything’s mixed into the culture of this brand. Hopefully we can take this to the next level and have it represent Connecticut” to places outside the state.

“Everything is growth,” he said. ​“We started from a seed, and we’re just expanding. We’re listening to the customer. We’re supplying what they like.… We’re just going to keep generating what people want.”

Aly Fox, of Foxspark Design, was selling shawls and scarves made from organic cotton and natural dyes. She got into fabric designs using natural dyes last year when she ​“just happened upon a class that was in New Hampshire at a traditional craft center” — Sanborn Mills Farm — that teaches everything from fiber arts to woodworking and plowing with oxen. She learned about it from Feedback Friday, a bi-weekly show from Botanical Colors, a natural dye center on the West Coast. ​“It was purely a gamble,” she said, following a whim. But it stuck. ​“I got into it, came home, and just had to continue to explore,” she said. ​“I haven’t looked back since.”

Fox gets her fabrics and some of her dyes from Maiwa, a supplier of organic cotton and related materials. From there, she experiments with making different colors, from sources as diverse as onion skins, rhubarb, indigo, pomegranate and chlorophyll. ​“I put them all in mason jars in my fridge,” she said. Some are trickier than others, she has found, and she has sometimes found herself at the mercy of international commerce, as when trade sanctions against Iran interrupted the global supply of dye thickener. 

“Some you just have to boil. Some you have to strain. Some you have to put in a water bath,” she said of her sources. She developed her indigo from bananas and mangos. ​“It’s like sourdough,” she said. ​“You can keep these vats for years, as long as you feed it and keep the chemistry right.”

ArtWalk marked Fox’s first time getting a vending booth to sell her pieces. ​“I made all of this stuff probably in the last couple months,” she said. She works at United Way, and natural dyeing marked her ​“first foray into creative space like this.”

Fox describes her dyeing sessions as ​“the complete definition of flow. You lose track of time. It’s effortless. Every mistake is something that you learn from, learn about something else.” She creates some of her pieces using painter’s tape to block off geometric shapes; some have been created from scraps and snips of that tape. She finds herself drawing inspiration from shapes everywhere — an archway, a flower, or the design of a grate in a coffee shop. 

“It’s just play, absolute play,” she said.