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Jamil Ragland |
Mar 26, 2025 8:00 am
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Peter Brown Photos
Cracked Open gallery.
Love, Loss and the Book of Walks by Deb Todd Wheeler, 2025.
Cracked Open Artspace Gallery Hartford March 24, 2025
I found the most striking piece of the "Cracked Open" exhibit currently at Artspace Gallery, to be Love, Loss and the Book of Walks by Deb Todd Wheeler, which was co-created as a community grief ritual. Her 18-year-old son died in 2017. She invited her community to share and light candles, and Wheeler played a song that she wrote. They left behind the artifacts of their ceremony, forming a collage of a life I never interacted with, yet still feel like I know in some way.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 25, 2025 10:39 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Hannafin: Exploring natural, hidden connections through art quilts.
Connections and networks run through artist Rita Hannafin’s work on a few different levels.
First literally, as her chosen medium is the art quilt, which deploys thread itself in complex ways. Hannafin’s art for decades has also drawn strength and inspiration from the networks and communities of artists around her, as she finds advice from friends and fellow practitioners helps guide her work. Finally, in Hannafin’s latest show — "Whispering Forest and Other Conversations," running now at City Gallery through March 30 — she has chosen as her subject the book Finding the Mother Tree, which details the science behind trees and how they cooperate and communicate through fungal networks running under the forest floor.
Gallery co-owner Inger DaSilva, art framers Jonathan Peterson and Libby Boyd, and gallery co-owner Gabe DaSilva.
Miami is Coming to New Haven DaSilva Gallery Through March 25
At Miami is Coming to New Haven, the current group show at DaSilva Gallery & Frame Shop in Westville, you can tell the pieces are full of stories, seeming to whisper among each other about who will get your ear, your eye, first.
You can also tell the show is in a working frame shop and busy gallery, with the active energy of a system that never stops.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 14, 2025 12:55 pm
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Timo Fahler
it's happening, can you feel it (my inheritance).
The plaster hand protrudes from the wall, dangling the gun from its trigger guard. It’s a precarious situation. Were it a real gun, there’d be a danger of it going off. But the gun is actually fashioned from glass; as a symbolic gesture, the gun is dangerous to others, even as it is also in danger of being broken. With a flick of that finger, a bullet could fly, or the gun could fall to the ground and shatter — or both.
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Jamil Ragland |
Mar 12, 2025 11:15 am
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The Igneous Element, 2024, by Frantz Patrick Henry
Echoes and Collisions Widener Art Gallery Austin Arts Center Trinity College March 10, 2025
The Widener Art Gallery at Trinity College has a unique exhibition on display. Called Echoes and Collisions, the exhibit pairs the art of F. Patrick Henry, an artist of Haitian origin, with the Edith A. Graham Collection of Haitian Art, which was donated to the school in 2008. The purpose is to put the artworks "in conversation" with each other; it served to give me a new look at a place I know very little about.
Sometime in the ’90s, a woman in cracked, green crocodile skin, gold booty shorts, and a hat of crocodile heads and rolls and rolls of red tickets posed as the camera snapped. Decades later, New Haven artist Edwin Gendron would pick up the black-and-white photo he took, hand-paint the colors in, and make it into something new.
The piece was among several, all transformations of some kind, that Gendron had on display at a pop-up event Saturday afternoon at Fussy Coffee in Science Park.
by
Maya McFadden |
Mar 10, 2025 9:46 am
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Maya McFadden Photos
Drawing partners Omar and Rosa Gonzales with finished renditions of Pikachu and Sonic characters ...
... in a class that brings Cross art students together with East Rock kindergartners.
Wilbur Cross sophomore Rosa Gonzales and East Rock School kindergartener Omar put pencils to paper to draw Sonic and Pikachu — as part of a monthly class-to-class collaboration focused on cartooning and literacy.
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Jamil Ragland |
Mar 10, 2025 8:00 am
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Real Wall: Bethani Blake
Real Wall: Bethani Blake Real Art Ways Hartford Through March 17
Real Wall: Bethani Blake features the artwork of the titular artist, Bethani Blake, who works additionally as a curator and educator in Hartford. I enjoyed her overall exhibit, but there was one piece that especially spoke to me, in a way I couldn’t have predicted.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 7, 2025 1:39 pm
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The three posters are faded, aged, and wrapped in plastic, but the conviction in the messages — and the strength of the design — remain intact. Notes fixed to the wall, as aged as the posters themselves, offer context for non-Spanish speakers.
One translates the slogan on the left-hand side: "Mother: Wherever your name is spoken, victory is said."
"For the blood of our dead and the future of our children, we defend the revolution," the center one reads. "AMNLAE, the national women’s organization, is named for a woman killed by the National Guard under Somoza." At the time of writing, the organization had 60,000 members and influenced "policies related to health, education, child care, adoption, family law and employment. In León, the Sister City Project was instrumental in opening a women’s legal office under the auspices of AMNLAE."
The third poster is perhaps the most direct: "The Nicaraguan people will never surrender."
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 19, 2025 2:45 pm
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Lois Conner
West Lake, Hangzhou, China.
At first glance, Lois Conner’s image might read as a great mid-century abstract painting, full of bold shapes, strong lines, and vivid contrasts. But it’s not; it’s a photograph of desiccated plants and their reflections in a still body of water. The image collapses the line between observing nature and interpreting it. It has both documented a moment in time and also given us some commentary on it, a way to feel about it, and to be drawn in.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2025 9:32 am
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Though the style of the paintings is utterly contemporary, the mood somehow evokes both family photos in the living room and a formal ancestral shrine, cozy and familiar yet also reverential. The paintings are of the artist’s family, their humanity captured and elevated by the painter’s keen eye and steady hand. The photographs help in showing what the artist is up to, how he sees the people he loves through the way that he works. They’re also a first step in understanding, in the context of his artistic practice, what the artist means by "family."
While a NIMBY-stalled building plan leaves a stretch of Grand Avenue covered in blight, two grassroots artists picked up their brushes Wednesday to offer the neighborhood some temporary respite.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 7, 2025 10:31 am
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Scott Azevedo
Untitled (A Delightful Children's Room).
Scott Azevedo’s Untitled (A Delightful Children’s Room) appears somehow both peaceful and volatile. Peaceful because of what it depicts, a woman sitting in a cozy room, and the colors chosen — warm and vibrant. But something in the execution makes the image unstable, like a half-lost memory, full of glitches and errors. The lines emanating from the figure might be flames. The person in the painting may be cherished, but the perception of her is somehow shot through with difficulty.
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Mickey Mercier |
Jan 27, 2025 1:30 pm
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From an Askew album cover.
Ed Askew, a Yale-educated painter who achieved wider renown as a singer-songwriter, died in New York City on Jan. 4 at age 84. The venerable music publication NME described him as a "psychedelic folk musician." People magazine called him a cult figure.
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Jamil Ragland |
Jan 20, 2025 7:15 am
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God's Kiss, 2021
In the Dark Night, 2021
Spirited Franciscan Inspired Quotes Clare Gallery St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church Hartford January 17, 2025
I once locked myself in a dark closet and said I was going to pray there until I finally heard the voice of God. Instead, my mother found me asleep, sweating underneath a blanket a few hours later. I’ve still never heard the voice of God, although I feel like I’ve seen the banks of God’s river every now and again.
I thought of my experience with faith when I views "In The Dark Night," one of the pieces on display at my favorite gallery, the Clare Gallery at St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church in Hartford.
Despite the title, the image is quite bright and colorful. I thought that the streaks of light blue, white and aquamarine represented a flame at first, burning eternally as a representation of faith. But when I read the text, the image of a river became clear.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 14, 2025 9:30 am
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The tower is made of small wooden pieces. But as assembled on the floor of Kehler Liddell Gallery, it echoes natural forms, created by ants or bees. Not far away, an abstract piece reveals itself to involve not just pigment, but mirrors, so that the piece changes from every angle you look at it. Not far away, a small sculpture of a figurine in a sled is made, partly, from the shape of a gas mask.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 7, 2025 9:47 am
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William Frucht
Packard Plant, Series 2 #18.
On the day this reporter visited "Making and Unmaking" — a group show running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Jan. 26 — artist Barbara Harder’s installation intentionally drew attention to its incompleteness. Three pieces of decorated and textured paper, Harder’s chosen medium for decades, were artfully arranged into a collage of soft colors and jagged edges. But on it was also a sign, written on a piece of scrap paper: "In progress as usual!"
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Lisa Reisman |
Dec 23, 2024 4:12 pm
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Santana Brightly's "You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are."
A camera, held by a man in a hoodie, dominates a scene of seeming chaos. Two more hands help hold it up. Someone else’s finger rests on the shutter button. Still another hand shifts the lens. Look more closely and virtually everyone in the crowd is shooting pictures.
The piece, "You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are" by Santana Brightly, was among the works spotlighted at the opening of an exhibit on Saturday at Stetson Library. Santana, a seventh-grade student at Hamden’s Sahge Academy, produced the piece while taking part in a month-long graphic arts workshop in AI Art this summer at Stetson.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 18, 2024 9:45 am
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Constance LaPalombara
New Haven 1 (Harbor).
It’s a misty day and there aren’t a lot of details to go on — no buildings or inland rock formations as landmarks. But because of painter Constance LaPalombara’s eye for including the right and necessary details, the scene is recognizable if you’ve ever been along the shore in, say, Morris Cove, and looked northward into the mouth of New Haven Harbor. With the defined sense of place comes a deeper appreciation for what LaPalombara is doing. She’s not capturing every detail, but she gets the details that matter. She grounds the viewer in a specific spot and then doesn’t just paint what the viewer might see through a camera lens. You could say she paints the atmosphere itself, the feeling of the air; if you concentrate enough, you can almost feel it.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 13, 2024 9:21 am
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Altered Futures.
This month there’s a small stretch of forest in City Gallery on Upper State Street — evergreens, ferns, moss — surrounded by a patch of dirt. It might take a moment to see that the plants aren’t rooted in the dirt, however. Rather, they’re planted in a woven aluminum boat, redolent of an ark. It will allow them to leave the gallery alive; maybe it will protect them from what’s coming.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 12, 2024 9:47 am
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Merik Goma
As I Wait, Untitled 6.
A man stands in front of the bathroom mirror in a towel. He’s just getting in the shower, or just getting out. At first glance it might appear he’s shaving, or putting on cologne. But the object in his hand isn’t a razor or a bottle. It’s something else. And maybe that’s when you also notice the sink is overflowing with fruit. "Some people may not recognize it as an old fire extinguisher," artist Merik Goma said of the object the man is holding, or "they may be drawn to the fruit."
"Where is he going? What is that thing supposed to be? Is it a symbol? Is it literal?" Goma said. "It can mean a lot of things." And that’s part of the point. Goma starts the story. It’s up to us to finish it.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 4, 2024 9:23 am
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Craig Frederick
Breath.
Craig Frederick’s Breath looks lighter than its materials. If it were a sea creature, it appears like it could be spiraling through the water. If it were in flight, it could seem like it was made of paper, corkscrewing through the air. It makes space for itself in the gallery, as if it’s just passing through, and we happen to be there when it stops for a minute.