Muralists Bring Life To Public Walls

At the intersection of Orange and Crown on Sunday afternoon, artist Michael DeAngelo (pictured) stood on a ladder, a can of spray paint in his hand, putting shading touching onto a blue figure that seemed to float across the black wall in front of him.

A few addresses north on Orange Street, artist Alexander Fournier was on a ladder of his own, sketching out the ghosts of skyscrapers on a blank white wall in front of Ninth Square Market.

Around the corner on Center, Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran was putting down the linework for an intricate mural that turned the city into a blueprint and back again.

DeAngelo, Fournier, and Del Carpio-Beltran had applied and been selected to be the first cohort of artists to participate in Straight Up Art, a collaboration among Town Green District, CTNext, and New Haven Innovation Collaboration that describes itself as ​“partnering with property owners to invite artists to transform nondescript walls and other vertical surfaces into sites of public art making that stimulate excitement, thought, and desire to take care of each other and the Downtown environment we share.” (Artists who might like to be a part of the program are encouraged to sign up to be informed when the next call for artists goes out.)

The artists had begun their work on Friday and will proceed at least through next weekend, in an effort that hopes to support creative artists, foster business development, and stimulate interest in even more public art in New Haven.

“There aren’t enough murals downtown,” said Elizabeth Bickley, manager of public space planning and development for the Town Green District. She said there are ​“different hurdles behind that,” and ​“there needs to be a breakthrough.” She noted that murals were more common in neighborhoods in other parts of the city. Murals grace the walls of buildings in Fair Haven, Newhallville, and Goatville, as well as I‑91 underpasses in East Rock and Cedar Hill (DeAngelo had a hand in the Under 91 project creating one of those murals). In June friends of hip hop pioneer Stezo created a mural of him along Route 1 as a memorial to him. And in August, DeAngelo completed a mural of Sun Ra on the side of the Cafe Nine building, just down Crown Street from where his Straight Up Art mural is.

In the case of the Sun Ra mural, however, that was fostered by connections to the landlord. ​“It’s not always the case that artists have an in with property owners,” Bickley said. Downtown property owners needed help in being able to ​“trust their wall spaces” to artists, and ​“Town Green wants to be the one to help create those inroads.”

Bickley said the project has its origins in a conversation at Barcade among policymakers, community leaders, and Orange Street small business owners, including Ben Berkowitz (of SeeClickFix) and Matt Fantastic (of Elm City Games) after a MakeHaven event. ​“We all love public art,” she recalled them agreeing. ​“Why aren’t there murals?” From there the partnership among Town Green District, CTNext, and New Haven Innovation Collaborative began to take shape. The partner organizations had the connections to artists and community to get the word out and find candidates to create murals. Town Green agreed to be the liaison with property managers.

The breakthrough on Orange Street came when the Ninth Square properties were bought by Beacon Communities last year (the developer has continued to buy property around the city). Bickley credited Beacon CEO Dara Kovel, Director of Development Thacher Tiffany, and Regional Vice President Kristie Rizzo with being open to the idea of public art on their properties. Town Green had already worked with the company in hosting Windowed Worlds in its storefronts, and Beacon was amenable to more collaborations. They also took inspiration from Beyond Walls, a nonprofit that facilitated the creation of murals in Lynn, Mass.

“Everyone helps feed the mission,” Bickley said. ​“We’re already seeing that this is proving a concept. Once you can show it works, others are open to it.” The collaboration is already working on creating more public art projects next summer.

Meanwhile, the first round of projects was well under way. DeAngelo’s mural featured Dave Higgins, a CT transit worker, and Michelle Salazar, a surgery resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital. DeAngelo said that his original proposal had pitched an image of two figures in relation to each other the way they appeared in the mural — ​“a health care worker and a transit worker” — but suggested they use actual residents of New Haven.

“I could have picked people I know” to be subjects for the mural, DeAngelo said, ​“but that’s a more biased thing.” Town Green, on the other hand, is ​“a community organization, so their choice should be better than mine. I’m good at the idea part, the painting part.”

“I said, ​‘Find me residents who are willing to work with me,’” DeAngelo continued. Upon accepting his proposal, Town Green took him up on that challenge. DeAngelo met with and photographed Higgins and Salazar. He reported that Salazar had stopped by the day before to see how things were going, and seemed pleased so far. Though he was keen to render Higgins and Salazar in a way that people who knew them would recognize him, he also wanted to keep their depictions general. ​“I want a nurse to walk up and say, ​‘that’s me,’” he said.

DeAngelo said he hopes that this mural will be just the start of more public art projects, for him and other artists.

“I could do the whole street,” he said, noting that his mural of Sun Ra was just down the block. ​“I just need to get permission…. I would love to do murals of residents — people who live in New Haven,” he said. ​“You don’t see a lot of that, and that’s what people appreciate.”

A man walking by affirmed this, nodding as he watched DeAngelo’s work come to life. ​“Nice job, nice job!” he said.

“For me, this is something I can do — I can paint, in oils, with spray paint. I have that ability. Public murals are a really good way to give that to people,” he said. In an urban environment, he said, ​“90 percent of what you see are advertisements.” Public art has ​“a different intent…. Every time I paint a mural, people stop and tell me how much they like it. It makes their day a little better.”

Up the block, Fournier was settling on the final outline for his mural, which was to depict a cityscape that took its architectural cues from the Victorian era and the Gilded Age. Pointing to his ornate buildings in his sketches, he said, ​“I think a lot of New Haven used to look like this.” Some buildings in New Haven still do, but ​“a lot of it is in decay, which makes me sad.” He pointed to the demolition of the former pawn shop on Chapel Street as a recent example. In his mural he sought to depict ​“the world we left behind, and it’s not just in the Northeast. It happens everywhere, all over the world…. Once you knock something down, future generations don’t even know that it existed. The only way you can find it is if you dig.”

He cited the razing of older buildings and the building of block housing in metropolitan areas across the United States and Europe. ​“Over time, people found it more efficient to create less detailed, more utilitarian structures.” The architectural details that were lost in more ​“imaginative buildings,” and the beauty of them, were what he was hoping to ​“bring back to the city.” Monotonous architecture, he felt, ​“does something to the psyche. I’m trying to reverse that.”

About public art, he said, ​“when it’s not cool, it can seem like noise pollution. If I can do something that is cool, I can inspire others to say, ​‘hey, I can do this.” Looking at his mural in progress, he said, ​“I just want to put it up to interact with the public. I want to engage people to study our history — the people who came before us and walked the same streets. And just imagine.”

Where Fournier drew inspiration from the past, on Center Street, Del Carpio-Beltran was looking to connect past, present, and future in one gesture. The intricate mural, created by Svigals + Partners with Del Carpio Beltran as lead artist, was alive with figures playing music and socializing — and that was only half of it. On the other half, the block would give way to the greater city of New Haven, then become a blueprint that, it was revealed further down the block, was drawn by a single hand.

But first, he said, ​“we showcase what happens around here — the music, bars, restaurants.” Ninth Square, he said, was a place ​“where people meet.” The riotous flowers blooming among them captured the neighborhood’s growth. ​“These places used to be empty and now they’re not,” he said. ​“it’s the present and the future.” His mural, he said, could be read from either left to right or right to left; the hand in the corner could be the ​“architect, the designer” or ​“whoever is helping the cause” right now. ​“Any person trying to do something for the greater good.”

Del Carpio-Beltran’s view of Ninth Square is shaped by over a decade working on that block, for Svigals and Partners. Now 30, he began there as an intern while still in high school. He got a job there when he graduated, and it helped him fund college, first at Gateway, then at Western Connecticut State University. In its subject and its execution, his mural is also a pushback against the grand-vision central plan that dominated the city’s development in the second half of the 20th century.

Noting that his elaborate design was going to take a couple weeks to finish, Del Carpio-Beltran said people who were interested were welcome to come down to Center Street and pitch in. ​“Everyone who has come to visit us, we’ve let them help paint,” he said. Through their work, ​“they’re part of the mural, and the mural is part of them. Anything you do for the city becomes part of you.”

Del Carpio-Beltran extended that attitude to the wider mission of community and economic development. ​“At the end of the day, we’re the ones in control of this,” he said. ​“We decide whether a business grows just by going to it. If you want things to succeed, it’s your choice.”

This was the first time Del Carpio-Beltran, a trained illustrator and graphic designer, had attempted a piece of art on this scale. He admitted to a little trepidation at trying something so large. But ​“once you put down the first line, you think, ​‘I got this,’” he said.