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.

• 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 15^th from 2:00 pm to -5:00 pm
• The Grove, 71 Orange Street: Thursday, March 22^nd from 2:00 pm to -5:00 pm
• Wilson Branch, New Haven Public Library, 303 Washington Avenue: Thursday, March 29^th 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.

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

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.

While Flood, who is 51, had long entertained the idea of translating and covering Brassens songs, he initiated the effort as an independent study project related to his master’s degree in romance languages. From there, it blossomed into “a huge undertaking,” becoming the basis for his master’s thesis.

Flood grew up marinated in music – folk music in particular. He had 10 older siblings, all of whom were music fans – and many of whom played music. His mother, he says, was “a frustrated singer” and instilled in him a love of old jazz and swing music. He played folk music with his brothers and sisters and gravitated toward the blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

Known for his work in the roots-rock and country milieus, Flood plays guitar, fiddle, mandolin, five-string and tenor banjo, double bass, and slide guitar. He started his professional career busking on the streets of Paris when he was 18. Among his career highlights have been playing with singer-songwriter Eric Anderson, Garth Hudson, and Rick Danko of The Band and New Orleans luminaries Dr. John and Allen Toussaint. Flood has composed songs with Levon Helm of The Band and written songs for and played with the roots-rock group the Bottle Rockets.

In an interview at his Guilford home, Flood says his first encounter with the music of Brassens was serendipitous. He had been living in France for about three years, busking and playing in groups like Billy Hills and His Hootin’ an’ Hollerin’ Hillbillies, a country combo led by a musician from Kentucky. Rodolphe Raffali, a guitarist in the group who played in the gypsy jazz style of Django Reinhardt, booked the band in the south of France where Raffali’s parents lived. Along with half the band members, Flood stayed in a small place that Raffali’s parents had in town. On the coffee table was a Georges Brassens songbook, which Flood began perusing. At that point, having lived in France for several years, Flood believed himself to be pretty fluent in the language.

“But I could see there was stuff going on with the language but I couldn’t understand all the vocabulary. And there were pictures of Georges Brassens – out there splitting wood, digging ditches in the countryside. I said, ‘This doesn’t look like any French singers I’ve seen,’” recalls Flood.

Raffali played some Brassens recordings for Flood, explaining the songs to him.

“When I came back to the States, I had one tape with 10 songs on it, and I listened to it all the time,” says Flood. “The thing about his songs is that they are all really well constructed. He would have a form and vary it slightly in every verse but the variations made all the difference.

“They are lyrically dense songs. In the years when I was not really involved in French, Georges Brassens was my French teacher, because I’d be listening to these songs and saying, ‘I get that, but what is that part? What is he really saying?’” Flood tells me. “And I didn’t have the texts, so I was just listening really hard.

“I have an affinity with him because I admire his attitude. He’s doing a lot of things I aspired to do with songwriting. His lyrics are very poetic but also humorous. They’re political in a way without being topical,” says Flood.

I ask Flood how he would compare his songwriting style to that of Brassens. One big difference, Flood says, is the respective cultural traditions in which each was immersed.

“Where his style is rooted in French culture, literature, and folk music,” explains Flood, “my style is based on American folk music and old pop and jazz music.

“Brassens doesn’t seem influenced by pop songs – I mean classic pop songs – whereas I spent a lot of time in my younger days listening to and playing standards as a way of honing my craft as a songwriter, although I’m more known as a roots, rock, and country kind of writer,” says Flood.

Flood sees similarities between Brassens and American troubadour Woody Guthrie.

“People make a big deal out of Woody Guthrie’s politics, but my connection to Woody Guthrie was a spiritual one – he sounded like nobody else,” says Flood. “His lyrics speak up for the common man, but he was anything but common. And the same thing for Brassens – he’s against all ideologies, he’s in favor of the little guy always. He doesn’t like authority, but he’s always charming and always poetic, and I find that to be the case with Woody Guthrie.”

Flood notes that Brassens used a lot of poetic devices in his songs. But, Flood adds, “devices in French poetry are not the same as in English,” which creates challenges in crafting translations that are true both to literal and poetic meanings. One stumbling block is the French affinity for rime riche, or rich rhyme. According to Flood, with rime riche, “If you make a rhyme and it’s exactly the same but in doing that you’ve twisted the meaning – using the same sound but using it with a different meaning – that sort of turn of phrase is the essence of wit. We have a whole other convention of rhyming. It’s a very basic difference when trying to translate these songs.

“You want to capture the spirit of it, the wittiness. If I went around using the same rhyme, people would say, ‘He doesn’t know how to rhyme,’” says Flood.

Another problem: Latinate words like “information” and “relation” that have direct English translations “sound very natural” in French, a Latinate language. But in English, Flood says, the same words “sound hoity-toity and intellectual.” Flood notes that those words are seldom used in songs in English except for comic effect, “like you’re trying to talk above the matter.”

“You have to throw out a lot of those Latinate words that translate directly to English and find more monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon ways of saying them,” Flood notes, adding that the monosyllabic alternatives can also “be manipulated to make the line fall more musically. It’s very challenging, to say the least, and that’s just on the linguistic side.”

Not only do his translations need to be accurate on both literal and poetic levels, but they also have to fit musically. Flood says that in typical French song construction, verses feature lines with feminine endings alternating with those with masculine endings.

“We almost never do that in English. It creates a musical dilemma, because we would normally end something on a beat,” Flood says, gesturing with his fist.

“Brassens is also completely steeped not just in French culture, but in French literature, so all through his work you find literary allusions as well as cultural allusions. Some of his songs are written as though in direct conversation with the French folk tradition,” Flood says.

As an example, Flood cites Brassens’ song “La Route Aux Quatre Chansons,” which translates as “The Route of the Four Songs.” Each verse refers to a particular French folk song about a different place. The singer visits each of the towns hoping to meet the girl about whom the song was written.

“But instead, he discovers the local prostitutes,” Flood says, laughing. “They’re a little different nowadays from the ones in the song. It’s really clever, really charming, typical of his attitude and outlook but completely untranslatable because the allusions being made are completely incomprehensible to an American listener.”

Flood, with his own lifelong immersion not only in folk music but also English and American literature, says he could sometimes substitute a similar allusion from the Anglo-American tradition for one of Brassens’ cultural references. But when the whole song is based on a particular reference, “you either have to find a cultural equivalent you could manipulate in the same way or it’s not going to work.”

Rather than try to play the songs in Brassens’ French rhythm, Flood found “the rhythm that felt closest to what I could do naturally. And when I did that, I often found a way into the voice that would work to translate the lyric.”

Flood recorded 10 of his translations for eventual CD release in sessions in New York City and Woodstock, New York. Garth Hudson, a member of The Band, played accordion, piano, and melodica at the latter sessions. Flood’s recordings are fuller than those of Brassens, who most often sang and played acoustic guitar, accompanied just by an upright bass player and, less frequently, a second guitarist. While Flood didn’t play guitar in Brassens’ style, he also varied his approach from his own normal style, working in more of a Doc Watson fingerpicking style. The presence of Hudson’s accordion playing on several cuts imbues the songs with a jaunty sensibility that evokes both French cafés and the French-influenced Zydeco music of New Orleans.

Flood sees his first-Tuesdays residency at Café Nine as not just an opportunity to play Brassens songs but as a “night that is an homage to Brassens and can touch a lot of different things,” including the work of other French artists and American singer-songwriters like Flood’s friend Eric Anderson. Additionally, Flood hopes to invite not only his local musician friends but also Brassens-fluent visiting artists and translators to sit in during performances.

“When I started my professional career, I was a busker. It’s how I spent most of my 20s – on the street and most of that in Paris. Brassens spent most of his 20s living underground, on the street, off the kindness of strangers,” Flood says, while noting that it wasn’t until he was in his 30s that Brassens was discovered as a songwriter. “I feel a connection with him because we spent our 20s scuffling on the streets of Paris.”My thrust in doing this is to introduce an American audience – and specifically one that listens to the kind of music I generally play – to the songs of Georges Brassens because I think they have an integrity that translates musically,” says Flood.

For more information about Joe Flood and to stream some of his Brassens translations, visit www.joeflood.net.

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.

From the Yale Center for British Art: “Of all the major artists working in eighteenth-century England, none explored more inventively the complexities of Georgian society and British imperial rule than Zoffany. Born near Frankfurt, Zoffany moved to London in 1760. Despite achieving considerable success in England, he remained in many ways an outsider, looking dispassionately at British society.”

Perhaps this explains the oversight in embracing the artist as one of the eminent artists of the time, but also might also explain his unique ability to look objectively inside the lives of British society and record them.

That is not to say that Zoffany was unsuccessful in assimilating into the various cultures in countries in which he traveled. He spent extended periods in Italy, India, Germany, and Austria. The artist adapted well to different cultures and depicted them with the virtuosic skill. His work was well accepted and was in demand from a wide range of patrons.

There is humor in his work, which scored points with me, as I always enjoy wearing a smile in what can sometimes be a rather dry gallery experience.

In Britain, Zoffany’s works were generally thought of as portraiture.

“One of the revolutions of this exhibition is in the variety and diversity in his work … for instance his early works are not portraiture, they are mythology and religious subjects. But the variety of the work shows that the artist was always observing and that is why we titled the show Society Observed. The work he makes is very distinctive, and this exhibition shows the little known work,” explains Gillian Forrester, the Yale Center for British Art’s curator of prints and drawings.

The exhibition is presented according to themes that correspond to the artist’s interests and points in his career. Each area provides a compelling glimpse into its subject matter and the social morays thereof. I found this work to be in some ways a step above some other British artists of renown. Zoffany’s work is interesting. It is fun. It is exquisitely executed. Also of interest is that the Yale Center for British Art elected to display several unfinished works, allowing visitors to ponder why he decided to “move on” to something else.

Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observedwas curated by Martin Postle, assistant director for academic Activities at the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art. The organizing curators are Gillian Forrester at the Yale Center for British Art and MaryAnn Stevens, director of academic affairs, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

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.

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.

“It became one of those things that runs away,” says Valley. (Runs away on a runway? Puns are second nature to her.) “If you make your own fashion magazine, the next step is to collage the actual outfits my model artist friends could wear on the runway.

“It comes out of the whole recycling/repurposing thing that I feel very strongly about,” she explains.

Valley doesn’t subscribe to a plethora of publications. She scavenges raw materials from library castoffs and the local recycling center, gathering fashion, news, and financial magazines.

“Our popular culture is so full of raw material. I think a lot of artists hold mirrors up and say, ‘This is what you’re presenting me.’”

In the past few years, Valley created a series of collages inspired by the economic crisis and riffing on “throwaway phrases” like “zombie banks” and “predatory lending.” The rough symmetry in Valley’s cut-paper imagery evoked both Rorschach inkblots and – more central to her practice – old-fashioned samplers. Like repurposing materials, playing off the concept of “women’s work” is important to Valley.

“I grew up with a mother who sewed. It kind of dawned on me one day – I went into a fabric store to get beads and the material was fabulous, like collage, because it is printed already and colorful and has tactility,” say Valley.

“(Women) used to make fancy cut -paper things like silhouettes, things ladies could pass their time with,” says Valley. But by creating works that are “a little more political in tone,” Valley’s pieces cross boundaries of expectations.

“I tend in my life to respond to things with my work,” says Valley. Losing her job in 2004 prompted Valley to create Color Me Jobless, a coloring book dealing with the vicissitudes of unemployment. Not surprisingly, Valley has recently seen a renewed interest in that work.

“What do you do as an artist?” she asks. “Well, you make it into something.”

In 2009, Valley composed her entire income-tax return as a collage, copied it, and submitted it to the IRS.

“If I have to spend all this time working on my taxes, then they should be beautiful,” says Valley, who characterizes herself as “mathematically and financially challenged.”

“So instead of sending in the ugly tax form, I actually made my own, which took me way longer,” she says. “They said my taxes should take me four hours. It took me four months; I started in January.”

Valley even collaged her W-2 form. Every word, every piece of information on the official government form, was collaged into Valley’s creation. She consulted her accountant as to the legality of her project. He told her there was nothing in the tax code prohibiting taxpayers from making their own forms. But, Valley adds, “He thought I was crazy.”

“I wanted some publicity. I wanted to get in trouble,” Valley says, laughing. “I thought, ‘This will be good. They’ll come and get me, they’ll handcuff me.’ But they didn’t.”

Valley received her refund check without comment. She will sell a copy of her form for $182 – the amount of her refund.

“I keep getting assured by people that somewhere at the IRS somebody has my income tax return above their desk.”

Along with the collages, sewn works, and artist books, Valley is known for her large, engaging, participatory installations. Besides The Bum’s Rush, which she created with Ben Westbrock, Valley also produced Be ReBorn Thru Art, a giant fabric birth canal that was installed in the City-Wide Open Studios alternative space at Science Park in 2003. Visitors could have Polaroid pictures taken of them as they emerged.

“I spend so much time in my studio making things, and I love that, I like the solitary time. But then I like to turn around and say, ‘Here’s the spectacle.’ People like to walk into a big space and every square inch has been animated, activated, and you can go up to it and it’s hands-on. With a lot of art, it’s about keeping hands off,” explains Valley.

“A lot of people are never going to make art. And I’m lucky – you can’t stop me from making it — it’s something I do every day. So it gives people who might not be confident enough with their own creativity an opportunity to say, ‘Look, I stood here and got my picture taken and I’m art of her artwork.’ They can take it home with them and it’s not going to cost $1,000 to take a Polaroid home,” says Valley.

Most of Valley’s artist books combine “mass production” – high-quality laser prints of her collages – with handwork. Her bestseller, she says, is God Hates Artists. A sardonic look at both religion and the impecunious existence of most artists, God Hates Artists was produced in an edition of 30; Valley has sold 10 copies so far. The collage prints are hand-sewn to the pages and then framed with black electrical tape, which gives a “leathery finish” to it. Valley has had one book professionally printed. A response to her intense math anxiety as a child, Math 4 Artists was produced in three volumes – collages of the numbers one through 10, charts and graphs, and “magic squares.”

“I like having something slick,” Valley says of Math 4 Artists. “We worked on every page to make sure they were cleaned up from my collages but not too cleaned up.”

Although Valley has a job three days a week photographing antiques, she works on her art every day. She has created several artist books based on collages of the letters of the alphabet. One year, Valley made a face collage every day – 365 collages compiled into a volume for each month.

“I just got up and did a collage no matter what I was doing that day. It was great discipline,” recalls Valley. “If I was going to work, if I was going to a party, if I was going to New York for the day, I had to do a collage before anything else.”

Her irrepressible creative work ethic has been invaluable in coming to terms with a freak accident earlier this year in which she blinded herself in one eye. (Valley has hopes that the blindness can be surgically reversed.) Because her impaired depth perception makes the detailed cutting work of collage difficult, Valley is concentrating her artistic efforts on larger sewn works.

On the wall of her studio is a series of miniature tapestries with eye imagery as a theme. An eye in the palm of a hand plays off the concept of hand-eye coordination, a notion intrinsic to Valley’s artistic practice. There is an eye on top of a capital letter “I.” Numerous eyes like leaves adorn the two drooping branches of a tree that evokes a weeping willow, an unintentional allusion, according to Valley. She is so drawn to puns that she creates them even when not aware of it.

“Obviously, there are so many puns about seeing. What is art? It’s about seeing,” says Valley. “Things come out of my work that I won’t notice until after the fact. You may think you know what you’re doing, but there is so much stuff that you are channeling. It’s wonderful.”

Valley is very serious about the subjects she tackles, whether they are political or personal. But the element of humor comes naturally to her.

“If I can make myself laugh while working on something, that’s a good thing,” she says.

“If you walk into a gallery and see a work that’s dead-on earnest and somebody asks, ‘What do you think about it?’ it can be a little off-putting,” says Valley. “But if something is funny in it, you might start laughing and be a little more receptive to it.”

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?

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.

ECA is a part-time arts magnet high school — a public school run by ACES, Area Cooperative Educational Services. ACES, a “RECS” or Regional Educational Service Center based in Hamden, serves 25 school districts in south-central Connecticut. According to the ACES website, a RECS is “a public education agency created under Connecticut state statute for the main purpose of ‘cooperative action to furnish programs and services’ to public school districts.”

Since its founding in 1972, ECA has walked a fine line between arts education and public education, between the state-governed world of certified classroom teachers and the studios and stages of practicing, professional artists.

That line has never been finer than it is today, with educational standards mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the ensuing emphasis on teacher accountability and student assessment, and the ongoing state budget crisis. While ECA students are privileged to receive a high-caliber arts education, it isn’t happening in a vacuum. Those paying attention also have the opportunity to learn civic and political lessons.

Lesson No. 1: Past is present. ECA was founded during a time of social upheaval and broader support and funding for the arts. Today, viewed through the lens of contemporary public education, it’s a radical vision: take kids who are serious about the arts out of their regular academic classrooms and give them the opportunity to study with artists. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a school being established in 2011.

Yet ECA endures, successfully navigating a complex education landscape while remaining true to its mission.

Today the five department chairs at ECA — Johanna Bresnick (visual art), Amy Lachance Christman (music), Mariane Banar Fountain (dance), Caroline Rosenstone (creative writing), and Ingrid Schaeffer (theater) — are certified teachers. It wasn’t always this way.

Following the 2001 passage of No Child Left Behind, core academic teachers in Connecticut were required to become “highly qualified” by June 2006. Highly qualified meant, in part, state-certified. Historically, ECA teachers identified themselves as artists first and had not followed the path to teacher certification.

The new rule threatened to wreak havoc at ECA. As ECA Director Alice Schilling explains, “It violated the whole premise of the school, that kids would work with practicing professional artists.”

According to Robert Parker, director of marketing and public information at ACES and a former director of ECA, it meant hiring two teachers — one certified and one professional artist — for each classroom. This was financially unfeasible.

ECA faculty, administrators, parents, and students became political activists, testifying at state hearings about the effectiveness of ECA and the importance of retaining professional artists as teachers. In 2007, the Connecticut State Board of Education agreed to a compromise: ECA department chairs would be certified, while part-time instructors could continue to teach without certification. Department chairs work part-time (three quarters of a full schedule) and oversee all aspects of their departments. Currently, 45 part-time instructors, all practicing professional artists, deliver the majority of classroom teaching at ECA.

In 2009, the ECA community returned to the state legislature to advocate for the passage of a bill that would create an adjunct instructor certificate so that artists could continue to teach at ECA without full certification. That bill passed. Beginning this year, according to Schilling, non-certified instructors must have a college degree and a minimum of 180 hours accrued teaching high school-age students. It’s a win-win for ECA, its students, and the state.

Schilling, a visual artist and former chair of the fine arts department at a newly established high school in Region 16 (the Beacon Falls area), has been the director of ECA since January 2008. She says the faculty is working hard to document its curriculum.

“When I arrived here, there wasn’t much on paper,” says Schilling. “There are fabulous things being done here. When push comes to shove and someone wants to see the validity of our program or someone wants to question it, we had nothing to hand off to people. So I’m working on getting some documents ready that really put us in line with what’s going on at other high schools in the state.”

Schilling explains that she isn’t referring to standards but rather written curriculum and assessment tools.

According to Parker, ACES has a five-year curriculum cycle; this year the arts curriculum is being reviewed across all ACES schools. Leadership teams are paying special attention to national standards for arts education and making sure their curriculum aligns with those standards.

For Fountain, the new chair of the dance department who has taught at ECA for 18 years, the documentation process has been helpful.

“We’re realizing that we are current with what’s going on, and we understand the way kids learn. In the arts, we do ‘authentic assessment’ every day. It’s partly about documenting what we’re doing all the time.”

Fountain says, “I think this will help to validate us. The more we speak that language, the more the school districts will understand what we’re doing. And that’s going to be the key to bumping us forward.”

“We’re a public school,” says Schilling. “We have to meet the needs of every student, and we want to see growth in every student.”

Parker says ECA’s tuition for the 2011-12 academic year is $8,746 per student. Approximately half of tuition is covered by a state grant. The remaining half must be paid by participating school districts. In years past, if a district declined to pay, parents were permitted to pay the difference. This year, Schilling says, the law changed to ensure equal access. Now districts must pay the remaining balance or face financial penalties.

School districts are not allowed to opt out. They’re required to make slots available to students based on a three-year rolling enrollment average. Currently, Schilling reports, New Haven students claim 100 of 310 total slots at ECA.

The admissions process is complicated. Prospective students must participate in an interview process, but extensive experience in the arts is not required.

“We try to see if the students have a passion to be here,” explains Schilling.

Once a student passes the audition process, they enter the magnet school lottery. Admission depends on several factors: a student’s place in the lottery; the number of ECA slots allotted by a given school district; and the number of slots available in a given ECA department.

Parker says ECA enrollment has been climbing gradually for years. At 300 students, the school’s budget is stable, but having this many students places a strain on school facilities. ECA rents space at Neighborhood Music School and other nearby venues. This fall, Schaeffer went knocking on doors to find a space suitable for an upcoming theater department show. The Little Theater, an ACES-owned venue between Audubon and Temple streets, awaits renovation. According to Schilling, funding has been secured but ACES is still working out “some variance issues,” including negotiations with neighbors, which have delayed the project indefinitely.

Now that ECA department chairs are certified, they’re also eligible for tenure. ACES follows state rules; according to Parker, Connecticut teachers are tenured after four years of teaching and favorable reviews. How will tenure rules affect the composition of ECA faculty? Following the departure this spring of two longstanding teachers —Susan Matheke, the dance department chair who retired after 27 years at ECA, Judy Caldwell, the music department chair whose contract was not renewed — it remains to be seen whether the school is entering a period of high faculty turnover or newfound stability.

Current ECA department chairs are optimistic about the future and enthusiastic about their work. Fountain, who succeeds Matheke as dance department chair, says Matheke “had really done a fabulous job of establishing the curriculum. Susan has been the matriarch of modern dance in the New Haven community for so many years. … The transition is really just refining and crystallizing the vision that Susan had.”

Christman, the new chair of the music department, has taught the music elective course at ECA and is familiar with the program.

“I really respect and admire the work that’s been done here and I hope to continue in that tradition,” she says. “My goal is to maintain the wonderful things that students are doing and what the faculty are doing.”

The ECA program is rich and varied, with new projects and guest artists every year. It’s here in the rehearsal halls and classrooms that you’ll find the emotional core of ECA, driven by the energy and creativity of its faculty and students.

“Every year it changes, and that’s what makes it exciting,” says Schaeffer.

In December, for its annual “theater for social change” project, the ECA theater department presents David and Lisa, a drama about teens with mental illness. The Green Bird by Carlo Gozzi, an 18th century commedia dell’arte play, will be staged in the spring. Also this spring, the well-known New York-based director Kim Wield will teach a class, and theater students will compete in the Moss Hart competition for the first time.

“In the past I’ve stayed away from competitions,” says Schaeffer, “but this one believes in theater for social change, so we decided to try it.”

Schaeffer has taught at ECA for 20 years and was an ECA student.

In dance, ECA adjunct faculty members include top-tier professional artists such as Freddie Moore and Earl Mosley, both affiliated with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. This year the ECA dance department will host a two-week residency with Adele Myers and Dancers, a modern dance company. Nazorine Ulysse is teaching a site-specific improvisation class that challenges students to create dances in various outdoor locations around town.

The music department has consolidated its theory and musicianship classes into one course that brings theory into the realm of practice. From “Super Sax” and Latin guitar ensembles to the performance by ECA orchestra and chorus at the local tree-lighting ceremony on the New Haven Green, ECA musicians will be busy this year. Christman plans to continue the annual New Music Festival, a tradition started by Caldwell, and Fountain will continue “Rough Edges,” an annual performance started by Matheke that showcases evolving work in the dance department. Throughout, visual artists will be making art and writers writing. Students in those departments, like many at ECA, consistently win state and national awards for their work.

Schilling wants to expand the culture of collaboration at ECA.

“Right now we do some collaboration between and among departments,” she says, “but most of the work is done within departments.”

The challenge is for faculty to find time for collaborations while still meeting curriculum benchmarks.

Ultimately, Schilling says the school is also working on helping kids become “appreciators of the arts, no matter what discipline they are in.”

“There are so many wonderful things that are going on that we just have to continue with,” says Schilling. “Kids just blossom here. They feel at home. They can be themselves.”

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.

Will Baker

Will Baker, in his brief but galvanizing tenure as executive director of the Young Men’s Institute Library, has rescued the organization from the dust of history and reestablished this urban sanctuary as “a center of literary life, education, and social debate in New Haven.” Established in 1826 as the Young Apprentices’ Literary Association, and committed to the “intellectual and moral improvement of its members,” the organization represented the collective capital of New Haven’s intellectual class. Once a beacon attracting to the city the likes of Dickens, Douglass, Emerson, and others, the Institute Library’s vitality atrophied in time’s shadows. In the confluence of Will Baker’s erudite experiences, which have included working with the William Reese Company – a rare-book purveyor here in New Haven – and scholarship in museum studies and library science, the Institute Library found the ideal individual to re-establish the organization’s relevance. Armed with input from current members, Will’s vision for a reinvigorated Institute Library includes new programming – including lectures, writing and reading groups, and exhibitions – that mirrors the social and intellectual activity that marked the organization’s earlier years. Today, we are all beneficiaries of Will Baker’s earnest desire to reinvent the organization as one whose doors are open not to a select few, but to all of us who hold a stake in the future.

Thea Buxbaum

Thea Buxbaum has, over the balance of two decades, provided artists with space in which to live and create, and, in doing so, has transformed New Haven’s Westville neighborhood into a place where the arts flourish and a cultural destination marked by the yield of its creative community. When Thea arrived in New Haven a decade and a half ago, it was with a vision to create an artist studio for her husband, sculptor Gar Waterman, and a home that would nourish their common appetite for inspiration. After purchasing from the City of New Haven, for $1, a tired and abandoned warehouse on West Rock Avenue, Thea, with Gar, created an environment that met those needs and saw in Westville Village the promise of more. With an approach to real-estate development that has focused on the fostering of a thriving artist community, Thea Buxbaum has led the revitalization of that neighborhood. From out-of-use commercial properties have grown spaces in which artists can both live and create. The lives of residents and visitors alike have been enriched by Thea’s vision and involvement with the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance, the organization’s annual ArtWalk, and the village’s designation as a Connecticut Main Street Community. From the establishment of the West Rock Studio and Kehler Liddell Gallery to the opening of Arts Lofts West and the Austin Street Inn, Thea Buxbaum has engineered the renaissance of Westville Village and given that community an inimitable character and identity.

Eileen Carpinella

Eileen Carpinella, as executive director of Young Audiences Arts for Learning Connecticut, has tirelessly and spiritedly ensured that the lives of the state’s youth are imbued with the promise of possibility that is inherent to the performing and visual arts. Through the Connecticut chapter of Young Audiences Arts for Learning, and under Eileen’s impassioned leadership, children throughout the state, as part of their formal education and experiences in their communities, have engaged with and participated in the fruitful exercise of artistic expression. During Eileen’s tenure, the benevolent reach of Young Audiences Arts for Learning Connecticut has extended, through VSA – The International Organization on Arts and Disability, to young people for whom avenues for artistic expression and enthusiastic audiences might otherwise be locked in unrealized dreams. Eileen Carpinella’s commitment to the enrichment of young people’s lives through the arts is as much a profound benefit to society at large as it is to the extraordinary minds she helps to mold.

Aaron Jafferis

Aaron Jafferis is a nationally recognized and award-winning hip-hop poet and playwright whose work mines the human condition and whose involvement in the local community has inspired younger generations to explore, though language and art, the cultural lessons and ideals that reside in every corner of society. Aaron Jafferis’ celebrated achievements, which include recognition from such iconic organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Sundance Institute, promise a future of seemingly limitless artistic success. Equally impressive has been the influence Aaron has had on countless youth here, in his native New Haven. With the written and spoken word, and in more languages than one, Aaron has inspired young people at various educational institutions, including ACES Educational Center for the Arts, here in New Haven, and has brightened the days of those in treatment at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, through that facility’s Child Life department. With Aaron Jafferis, emerging artists and engaged audiences have explored the societal struggles of yesterday and today and the isolating experiences that haunt our lives. Through his work and his innate social consciousness, Aaron Jafferis has graciously directed our attention to the hope that hides behind doubt and the beauty that exists in the telling of our common stories.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre is dedicated to sharing with its audiences, by way of off-the-beaten path, site-specific, and thought-provoking productions, the legends, lore, people, and places that have contributed to the compelling history of New Haven and the lives of those who have long called the city home. A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s original productions have charted, for audiences of all ages, journeys both compelling and captivating, giving faces to those who have informed New Haven’s hidden past, locating the landmarks in which the city’s personality is steeped, and recounting anew the stories that lend character to this place. Taking New Haven as its muse, A Broken Umbrella Theatre has called on community partners to help realize its unique mission, presenting theater that is both intimate and accessible, and introducing us time and again to the previously unfamiliar men and women and the otherwise unnoticed settings that have added intrigue to this, our home.

The 2011 Arts Awards Luncheon is scheduled for Friday, December 2, 2011, at the New Haven Lawn Club, 193 Whitney Ave., New Haven. Call the Arts Council at (203) 772-2788 or visit newhavenarts.orgfor details and ticketing information.