Steve Hamm Photo
David de la Mano at his emerging mural on Crown Street.
On the side of 33 Crown St., an eagle is spreading its wings, taking flight. The silhouettes of people can be seen riding on its back. Other birds rise in formation around it. There is an element of freedom, but also struggle.
And behind them, a familiar coastline — not as it appears today, but as it appeared over 100 years ago, when Black entrepreneur William Lanson was making his mark on the Elm City and moving it into the future.
The mural is the result of a collaboration between Uruguayan artist David de la Mano and the New Haven-based public art nonprofit Site Projects.
De la Mano, who arrived in town this week to begin the work, said that he and Site Projects started talking a couple years ago about the prospect of a mural inspired by Lanson. The problem — and the jumping-off point — was that “we don’t have photos” of Lanson, de la Mano said; we aren’t sure what he looked like. (Click here for a story about the recent installation of a King Lanson statue in the Dixwell neighborhood.)
So de la Mano started working on a more “poetic, metaphorical idea.” In de la Mano’s hands, the figure of Lanson became an eagle, to convey a sense of both his overall vision and his ability to overcome obstacles. The bold lines criss-crossing the wall arose from de la Mano considering the hurdles Lanson had to overcome. Other images, such as the spindly branches of a red tree, grew from his contemplation of how the city-building labor that Lanson was a part of continues.
When this reporter mentioned that the bold lines could be understood as like the bars of a jail cell — through which the viewer is looking — de la Mano smiled.
Brian Slattery Photo
David de la Mano at work this week on the mural.
“It’s all open to interpretation,” he said. But amid the figurative and abstract ideas are the unmistakable lines of New Haven’s coastline, complete with the 1,350-foot extension to the city’s Long Wharf, which Lanson and his crew built.
Bringing de la Mano to New Haven is a years-long story in itself.
Four years ago, said Westville gallery owner Gabriel Da Silva — who was instrumental in making it happen — Site Projects commissioned artist Faring Purth to do a mural in Westville. “We used to paint at night all the time,” Da Silva said. Purth told Da Silva about de la Mano, who she knew through her mother, who was living on a farm in Uruguay. (Da Silva is from Uruguay.)
“I think you’ll like him,” Da Silva recalled Purth saying about de la Mano. Da Silva looked up de la Mano’s work and agreed. “I really, really liked what he did, his style,” Da Silva said. “It didn’t matter the theme — the style was very unique.”
Da Silva contacted de la Mano and explained that Site Projects would love to bring him to New Haven to do a mural. De la Mano was game. So was the board of Site Projects. Site Projects scouted locations and came across the eastern wall of the Acme building at 33 Crown St. Alan Greenberg, then owner of the building, was amenable to the project.
At the time, Da Silva said, the idea for the mural was “a celebration of the Quinnipiac” and other Native American nations that lived in the area before colonization. But “it became a bit complicated. Even though this was an artistic interpretation, we wanted to be accurate and fair,” and “it was very hard to find active members to give us guidance in what we should be depicting.”
In 2017, Greenberg sold the building to developer Jeff Spiritos, who plans to convert the building into apartments with a ground-floor commercial space. Spiritos was just as interested in hosting the mural as Greenberg had been (Spiritos “has been wonderful,” Da Silva said).
Meanwhile, the Site Projects team latched onto Lanson and his huge contributions to New Haven as the subject for the mural. The concept developed quickly. “We loved his aesthetics,” Da Silva said of de la Mano. “We just gave him the idea and he created the work to go with that.” De la Mano sent the board mockups of what the mural could look like. In 2019, Da Silva visited Uruguay and met de la Mano in person. “I kept reassuring him, ‘I think this is going to happen.’”
Plans were finally made for de la Mano to come to New Haven and begin painting in April. Then the Covid-19 pandemic started. “We kept pushing the ball forward,” Da Silva said. De la Mano was in Spain and could not come directly from Spain to the United States due to travel restrictions. One return home to Uruguay and a couple self-imposed quarantines later, de la Mano is at last painting his poetic take on a New Haven icon on Crown Street.
“We are in a very interesting time in our lives,” Da Silva said of the conditions under which de la Mano is practicing his art. “We are in the middle of a world pandemic. We need to adapt to a lot of things.” Indoor art spaces, including Da Silva’s own gallery, are closed out of concerns for health. But still, “art has to be part of everyone’s lives. We need to bring it out.”
In speaking of the trend — from the Town Green District to individual property owners — toward making more public art, it’s “very good that all the New Haven organizations have taken the initiative to put artists to work,” Da Silva said. “It’s what the WPA did during the Great Depression.” And “for a lot of artists, it’s great to have the ability to do something outdoors.”
“Other big cities have an amazing culture of murals” and it’s “just wonderful to see them,” Da Silva continued. “The art gallery comes out to the street.”
Beautiful mural, and I'm so glad buildings owners are allowing murals and artwork to be installed on the outside of their buildings all over the city. It all makes New Haven more interesting and attractive.