Brian Slattery Photos
A man in a silver mask. A face in extreme closeup, features twisted in what could be laughter, could be discomfort. Someone else looking skeptical.
Maya Vulinovic’s photographs were crowded on a wall very near the entrance to the warren of offices and hallways that comprised City-Wide Open Studios’ Alternative Spaces weekend at Yale’s West Campus in Orange, the final event capping a month of activity that had ranged across New Haven, nearly reflecting the crowd of faces looking back at them.
“They” — that is, the CWOS organizers at Artspace on Orange and Crown — “gave me the space,” Vulinovic said on Saturday of her position as de facto welcoming piece to Alternative Spaces weekend. “They said it would work well with the theme.”
That theme, “Older But Younger,” was the driving principle behind Artspace’s commissioned pieces this year, as the arts organization encouraged artists of different generations to collaborate on pieces, emphasizing what people of different ages could learn from each other.
Vulinovic, who lives in Branford, said that the photographs on the wall spanned 20 years of photographs. “They’re not posing, they’re not pretty. It’s not a good hair day picture — including the ones I took of myself.”
Some photographs were taken locally. Some were taken in New York City. Some were taken in Europe (Vulinovic is from Croatia). “My children are easy targets. They hate me for it. I don’t care,” she said with a laugh. The photographs took in “meltdowns and disasters,” she said, but also a lot of “happiness.”
“It’s all ages, the perfect imperfection in all of us. I love it,” she added.
The oldest photograph was a picture of a black man’s face, wearing a blindfold. “It’s as relevant as ever,” Vulinovic said. “He’s telling us something.” Each of the pictures had a story behind it that Vulinovic could recall. One, of a “ragged-looking” man on his phone, was taken at a bus stop in Guilford. “Can’t you see I’m busy?” Vulinovic recalled him saying when she asked permission to take his picture. He let her do it as long as she didn’t interrupt his call.
In another instance, she found a man wearing a mask. “Do you mind taking your mask off?” she asked him. “No problem!” he responded. “And there was a mask underneath the mask.”
“That person was reading poetry,” she said of another photograph, of a woman walking along a street. “She said, ‘You can only take my picture if you let me recite some poetry.’ I said, ‘sure.’”
Along the bottom of her display, Vulinovic had added a row of pictures of people’s feet. “We keep going,” she said. “That’s the idea.”
Just down the hall from Vulinovic, another crowd mostly blocked the hallway to watch Strange Fruit, one of Artspace’s commissioned collaborations between New Haven-based artists Howard El-Yasin and Dymin Ellis. “They share a mutual interest in exploring the intersectionality of queer identity and the contemporary Black experience through an engagement with everyday materials and language forms,” the artists’ statement explained. “Through the addition of participatory elements, their work will raise the questions: ‘What happens when someone or something is erased?’ ‘Are people and their stories ever really erased?’ and, ‘Where do these erased souls go?’”
El-Yasin danced slowly in colorful clothes to a moody, insistent beat, beneath a canopy of banana peels. His performance had drawn the crowd.
But they stayed to watch Ellis draw. The words born screaming emerged from a torrent of words that flew out from a spiral and across the wall. I don’t need society I don’t need the public I don’t need love I don’t need the police I don’t need men I don’t need help I don’t need a doctor I don’t need family I don’t need him…
Children and adults flocked to Memory Edit a commissioned installation by Megan Craig, Ralph Franklin, Nick Lloyd, and Kyle Goldbach. It began with the artists and four residents of the Whitney Center retirement home, who made four quilts together. Craig interviewed the residents about their lives and used their memories as the basis for quilt designs. At West Campus, participants could sew the pieces into the quilt with help from volunteers, learning the residents’ stories and creating tactile memories for themselves.
Artist Eric Iannucci’s spot likewise enjoyed a steady stream of visitors, young and old alike, to delight in his “toys.”
Individual artist spaces could become places for conversation.
Milford-TV was streaming live from its space.
Artist Tim Sway gave bass lessons at his space devoted to his New Perspectives Music project, which makes stringed instruments out of reclaimed wood.
Meanwhile, the Middletown-based Artists for World Peace had an array of paintings for sale donated by artists from all over the country, the proceeds from which would go to supporting an eye clinic on the Lakota Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.
The paintings came from 48 states, said founder Wendy Black-Nasta, and from nearby. “To date, we have 2,560 artists who have participated. They mail them, they drop them off,” she said. “Somebody left four paintings on the back porch.” Artists for World Peace was selling the paintings for $50 each. “It’s really good for artists who don’t have money and they want to help,” Black-Nasta said. “To me that’s currency.”
The program at the Lakota reservation has been running for two years. In 2018, it brought 32 doctors to the reservation, which has a population of about 40,000. The doctors — optometrists and ophthalmologists — saw 1,328 patients.
“Everybody donates their time,” Black-Nasta said. “They help us for the value of being kind.”
Two women who were best friends for years actually saw each other for the first time after receiving care. A boy who was struggling in school get glasses and, suddenly able to read and see the blackboard in class, turned his grades around. This year the team involved 42 doctors, including eight surgeons. There are plans to expand the work to the Eastern Pequot reservation in Uncasville (next to the Western Pequot reservation, which runs Foxwoods).
The Lakota eye clinic is just part of what Artists for World Peace does. Started in 2003, spurred by the international interest in the International Peace Belt, it provides farm and agriculture loans in Tanzania. It offers student scholarships. It also runs an orphanage in Kibosho-Umbwe, a Tanzanian village where Black-Nasta has now spent a lot of time. The orphanage came about after an artist hiked up Mount Kilimajaro with the International Peace Belt. On that trip she met a fellow climber who explained that Kibosho-Umbwe had been ravaged by AIDS, leaving children without their parents. The organization took in its first child in 2003. But “kids kept walking in, and what are you going to do?” Black-Nasta said. The orphanage now cares for 24 children.
With a robust social media presence, Artists for World Peace is able to keep growing, a multigenerational effort that makes art and does some good in the world.
“This work is so sacred,” Black-Nasta said. “It’s making art that’s sacred.”
