We Have A Winner!
Ms. Devlin with her winning design
Congratulations to Jacquelin Devlin of North Haven, CT for her winning Tag-A-Bag design! Ms. Devlin’s design, which highlights the cityscape of New Haven and the city’s local sustainability efforts, will be featured on over 500 reusable bags for purchase at Elm City Market. Proceeds raised from the sale of the reusable bags will go to support The Arts Council of Greater New Haven. For her design, Ms. Devlin received a $100 prize from the Arts Council, as well as $100 gift certificate from Elm City Market.
Ms. Devlin, a member of the Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrators, is a published author, having been published in House Beautiful, Thoughts of Home, Eclectic Literary Forum and several other publications. Her Tag-A-Bag design was one of her first endeavors into visual arts creation. “I always thought my sister had all the artist talent in the family,” says Devlin. “I think the issues of sustainability are vital to this country’s future success, and I wanted to lend my support to New Haven’s efforts.”
The Tag-A-Bag Competition is a reusable bag design competition organized by The Arts Council of Greater New Haven and Elm City Market. The competition seeks to capture a variety of sustainability and environmentally conscious elements from the New Haven community.
Do You Need Help and Advice with Your Creative Career?
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven is pleased to announce a new opportunity for artists of all media to meet with AC staff for career guidance on issues such as:
- Exhibition space/opportunities
- Finding performance/rehearsal space
- Promoting your own work or creative events and activities
Shola Cole, Coordinator of Community Programs and Debbie Hesse, Director of Artists Services & Programs will both be available for one-on-one appointments for three Thursdays in March, at the following locations:
- Studio 756, 756 Chapel Street: Thursday, March 15th from 2:00 pm to -5:00 pm
- The Grove, 71 Orange Street: Thursday, March 22nd from 2:00 pm to -5:00 pm
- Wilson Branch, New Haven Public Library, 303 Washington Avenue: Thursday, March 29th from 2:00 pm to -5:00 pm (Parking is available behind the library off Daggett Street)
Call 203-772-2788 to schedule an appointment to guarantee time with either Shola or Debbie. Walk-ins are welcome but you may have to wait for an available slot.
Debbie Hesse has curated dozens of shows for the Arts Council. A practicing artist, she formerly served as an Adjunct Professor of Art at Norwalk Community College. She received an M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the University of New Mexico.
Shola Cole engages artists and audiences in undeserved neighborhoods, advises organizations and facilitates creative opportunities. A dancer and musician, Cole has toured internationally with the Broadway sensation Stomp. She has collaborated with celebrated artists Bobby McFerrin and Clarice Assad, as well as has worked with Rennie Harris, Collective Conscious Theater and Music Haven.
Debbie and Shola will point you in the right direction, connect you with the appropriate resources and foster your own self-confidence to start engaging with the creative energy already palpable in New Haven.
TAG-A-BAG Competition 2012
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven and Elm City Market are pleased to announce a call for local artists for a reusable bag design competition. The Tag-A-Bag competition is open to Greater New Haven artists, including high school and college art students. Submissions are due by February 7, 2012, with the winning designs to be announced February 13, 2012. Winning artists will receive a $100 from the Arts Council, a $100 gift certificate from Elm City Market, and their design immortalized on 500 reusable shopping bags!
Design Requirements- Your Tag-A-Bag design must meet the following requirements:
- Can use no more than three (3) colors
- Must be sized to fit a 18” w x 15”h x 7”g bag
Suggested Design- Your Tag-A-Bag design should include at least one (1) of the following themes:
- The local food system
- Fresh, healthy foods
- Urban community & food
- Diversity of New Haven
- Green & sustainability
- Elm City Market as cooperative food store
- Natural and architectural landscape of New Haven
To submit designs, and for more information, please contact Julie Trachtenberg, Director of Development & Marketing, Arts Council of Greater New Haven, at: jtrachtenberg@newhavenarts.org
French to English, Music Edition
Musician Joe Flood translates the songs of Georges Brassens
Written by Hank Hoffman
Musician Joe Flood. Photo by Liz Grace.
For musician Joe Flood, translating the songs of French singer Georges Brassens has been a labor of love, but a labor nonetheless. Translating Brassens’ songs posed an array of challenges on linguistic, cultural, and musical levels, according to Flood.
In October, Flood began a first-Tuesday-of-each-month residency at Café Nine in New Haven to play Brassens’ songs and related works. The Guilford-based musician has also recorded 10 of his Brassens translations for a forthcoming compact disc.
Brassens, who died in 1981 at age 60, was a French singer-songwriter and poet admired for his deft, lyrically dense wordplay and anti-authoritarian attitude. Both qualities are evident in Brassens’ “Le Gorille,” translated by Flood as “The Gorilla,” about a rampaging, well-endowed primate that sodomizes a hanging judge.
The Art of Observation
Yale Center for British Art presents works by Johan Zoffany
Written by Lisa Mikulski
Johan Zoffany's John Cuff and his assistant, ca. 1772, oil on canvas, The Royal Collection, © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art
A not-to-be-missed exhibition is presently on view at the Yale Center for British Art. Such a vast and dynamic showing of the many aspects of British society is rarely seen in one artist’s work, but Johan Zoffany seems to have accomplished this effortlessly and with the skill and technical application of a master artist. The installation is elegant and beautifully executed.
Organized in conjunction with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed premieres in the United States. It will be showing at the Yale Center for British Art through February 12, at which point it will have its first London showing since 1976. The works come from private and public collections from all over world including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, and India.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of Johan Zoffany. It is not surprising. But how is it that master artists such as Zoffany fail to become widely recognized in the art world? Those such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and J.M.W. Turner seemed all to have had their share of the limelight. The Yale Center for British Art successfully corrects this oversight with Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed and brings his work and persona into the books of art history where they rightfully belong.
IN THE COMMUNITY: The Fabric of Trust
Written by OluShola A. Cole
Shola Cole. Photo by Allan Appel.
The dust will always feel like its perpetually settling. Two years after stumbling off a tour bus in Wisconsin, flying home to Connecticut, and settling in New Haven, I’m still dusting myself off and examining what it means to be a “New Havener.”
It should be no surprise to a seasoned resident that despite negative exposure due to violence and crime, the art in this town serves as an eye-opening reminder of the strong creative fabric of this town. In my brief time here at the Arts Council, I’ve seen the threads of neighborhoods, organizations, community groups woven together with great trust.
There is no need to wax poetic about the importance of relationships in this city. Maybe it’s the first time I’ve been based in one place for more than a month, so it’s something I don’t take for granted. From neighborhoods using the arts to keep families engaged, fed, and safe to numerous organizations trying to heal grief-stricken communities using creativity, the thread that weaves through all of these relationships is trust.
Speaking to this topic allows me to reflect on the tenderness of trust. I think about all the different people whose stories with which I’ve been entrusted. Trust is an essential tool in building relationships between artists and various arts organizations, and learning to use it can be a worthwhile investment.
Trust is one of those things that makes us pause during the daily grind and reevaluate how we arrived at that moment. At some point in our journeys we trusted, were entrusted, built and rebuilt trust, and became distrustful, and yet still managed to develop the relationships necessary to deliver us to where we are today.
OluShola A. Cole is the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s coordinator of community programs. This is her opinion.
Cut and Pastiche
Rita Valley holds a (wise)cracked mirror up to our culture
Written by Hank Hoffman
Rita Valley. Photo by Harold Shapiro.
Rita Valley is a cut-up. She cuts up paper, magazines, and fabric for her collage-based works. But she is also a cut-up in the other sense of the term. Humor isn’t often encountered in contemporary art, but much of Valley’s work is genuinely funny.
“It’s just who I am. One of the ways I get through things is laughing about it,” says Valley in an interview at her home studio. Valley is regularly invited to exhibit and her artwork is included in numerous public and private collections.
Valley trained as a painter but switched to collage about 20 years ago, a change she attributes to quitting smoking. When she stopped smoking, she says, she couldn’t concentrate. Collaging and sewing kept her fingers moving.
“When I’m collaging, I start cutting out lots of little pieces, lots of little circles and the same thing with sewing,” says Valley. “It is a kind of movement which is repetitive and kind of relaxing.
“Collaging comes up in so many aspects of what I do,” Valley says, noting that the collages often get compiled into her artist books. Her sewing works have their beginnings in collage. Even her large-scale installations have their roots in collage. The Bum’s Rush, a 1999 pastiche of a fashion show constructed and staged at Erector Square, was an outgrowth of I, Couture, an artist book that parodied fashion magazines.
Jafferis’s Call to Action at Arts Awards 2011
Courtesy of Judy Sirota Rosenthal
This year’s Arts Awards was yet another terrific tribute to some of the most phenomenal artistic talent we have in the Greater New Haven area, and a a great celebration of the support for our arts community. And while all of the recipients gave gracious and beautiful remarks during their acceptance speeches,we want to bring further attention to the remarks from Hip-Hop poet and Playwright Aaron Jafferis. Below is Aaron’s speech in its entirety. We hope you enjoy his moving words as much as we did.
I’m so grateful to the Arts Council for this award, and so grateful to all these other places in New Haven that I think they’re actually trying to honor with this – the places crazy enough to let me teach there: Collective Consciousness, Bregamos, the Sister City Project, IRIS, Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, Fair Haven Clinic, Connecticut Mental Health Center, New Haven Public Schools, ACES Educational Center for the Arts, and so many others.
I’m particularly grateful to all the teachers – schoolteachers, friends, coworkers, and my parents – who taught me. Because making art is easy compared to making a kid. The initial act of kid-making may be easy, but after that it gets hard. If you mess up a work of art, you revise it or throw it out or hide it in your closet. If you mess up a kid, you…send him to juvenile detention, or jail, or wait for him to kill someone or be killed. That happened a lot when I was a student at Hillhouse and ECA – there were about 30 murders a year in New Haven, just about what it is now, but then I knew the young people getting shot, or had friends who did. So I was angry as hell at all the arts institutions in New Haven that weren’t doing anything that had anything to do with us.
I’m not angry anymore, because I am those arts institutions. And I don’t know those kids anymore. And art can’t do anything about murders – that’s the economy’s fault.
Speaking of the economy, we have a Percent for Art program where 1% of funds for New Haven public buildings must go to put art in them.
What if there was a Percent for Youth program where a percentage of funds or at least efforts – from any art institution or program or multimillion dollar playwriting fund I benefit from – had to go to New Haven youth?
What if the percentage correlated exactly to the number of youth, or young adults, or people in general, killed in New Haven each year? Next year, we’d each be putting in at least 31%. What if our livelihoods were at stake – would we then bust our behinds to make art for and with New Haven’s toughest kids?
What if it’s not the economy’s job, but rather the job of art to cry out the value and beauty of life itself?
What if art’s job in this city is to teach, always and better and stronger, the value and beauty of life itself?
What if the 31 murders in New Haven this year mean we as artists are not doing our job?
What if we made art for and with New Haven’s toughest kids as if our lives depended on it?
What if they do?
Creating “appreciators of the arts”
ECA walks fine line between arts pedagogy and public education
Written by Lucile Bruce
ECA's improv theater troupe, Ever Chasing Alchemy. Courtesy of ACES.
If your timing is right, you’ll see them.
They look like typical high school students, with their blue jeans, high tops, and occasional streaks of neon-colored hair. Look closer and you’ll notice their instrument cases, art portfolios, and Capezio dance bags. Peek inside those over-stuffed backpacks and you’ll find play scripts, music scores, books of poetry, and original short stories cranked out late at night on personal laptop computers.
They are the students of ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). Around midday, they leave their regular high schools in towns across south-central Connecticut. They travel to ECA, located at the corner of Orange and Audubon streets in downtown New Haven. They come here every Monday through Thursday afternoon, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., to immerse themselves in the arts discipline of their choice. At ECA they join a thriving community of like-minded students led by first-rate faculty who are practicing, professional artists.
Recognizing Great Adaptations
Portraits by Harold Shapiro
This year’s Arts Awards recognize Great Adaptations, the creations of ambitious and industrious minds. The Arts Council is proud to acknowledge those among us for whom the pursuit of an ideal is a chase not undertaken alone, those among us whose unique experiences are made richer when shared, and those among us whose visions for a brighter future are being realized before our eyes.
2011 C. Newton Schenck III Award for Lifetime Achievement in and Contribution to the Arts
Baba David Coleman
Baba David Coleman is a storyteller who communicates lessons of life and tradition through rhythm, a percussionist whose drumming connects us all to that which lies within and beyond ourselves. Born in New York and informed by the percussion customs of Africa and elsewhere, Baba David Coleman has connected those young and older to a global and timeless vocabulary, one that knows neither borders nor bounds. Audiences in this country and abroad have been introduced to Baba David Coleman as the pulse of the multiethnic musical fusion that is the Afro-Semitic Experience. Younger generations, at the Foote School, Neighborhood Music School, and public schools, and at festivals, forums, and venues near and far, have been taught the universal language of rhythm. A man of spirit and spirituality, Baba David Coleman has shared the yield of his far-reaching experience, allowing us to appreciate the infectious music of disparate times and places.
