From 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. last Saturday, Feb. 10, a zine fair took place at the community center. Organized by members of the local zine Connectic*nt, the event featured 14 art vendors. These vendors sold zines ranging in content from visual art and creative writing to political advocacy.

“In 2021, we were invited to a zine fair in New York to sell our third issue of Connectic*nt,” Jensen said. “We wished there was something like this in New Haven, so we were like ‘let’s just freaking do it.’”

Since then, they’ve been hosting fairs in Connecticut, bringing together a community of local artists and creators.

At Saturday’s event, Jensen and Pelaez sold the latest edition of Connectic*nt, a Valentine’s Day-themed issue including poems, essays, photographs and sketches focused on love.

“The magazine was created during quarantine when we couldn’t really go to events in person,” Jensen said. “So it was born of that desire to look at people’s art and connect with people outside of just doom-scrolling.”

Today, Connectic*nt’s Instagram presence has grown to around 5,000 followers. Jensen uses the platform to advertise events like Saturday’s zine fair, which was the fifth of its kind that she helped organize.

Zine creators interested in seeking their goods at the fair apply through a Google Form, and Jensen works to ensure that each fair includes vendors she hasn’t worked with before.

On Saturday, that included Jasmine Jones, the founder of Aislin Magazine, a publication highlighting emerging artists.

“I started my magazine because I wanted a publication that focused on new artists, and underground artists — not necessarily people who are already big names,” Jones said.

Jones published the first issue of Aislin Magazine in 2018 and has steadily expanded its reach since then. She said that working on the magazine alone in addition to having a full-time job is difficult, but she ultimately finds the experience rewarding. In fact, Jones said that she credits her current job at a publication to her zine.

Aislin Magazine’s scope extends beyond printed issues: the magazine also includes online elements like curated lists of creative opportunities and video interviews with local artists. Jones said she has not attended many zine fairs, but she hopes that more start happening in Connecticut.

“It’s very much a magazine for the artists,” Jones said. “So I would love to make sure I’m benefiting them.”

Saturday’s zine fair itself was an event by artists, for artists. Growing up in the state, Pelaez said that she often felt she was missing a creative community. 

That changed when she matriculated to the University of Connecticut, or UConn, where she said she felt like her artistic inclinations were met by a diverse collective of artists. When she graduated in 2021, she feared losing that artistic community once again. That desire to find and facilitate a creative community galvanized her to join Connectic*nt. 

“We love collaborating with other creative powerhouses in the state,” Pelaez said. “There’s some really cool shit going on and we’ve been able to build an even wider audience and connect a lot of creatives that may have never interacted with each other.”

One manifestation of that collaboration came when Connectic*nt hosted a craft night at Bradley Street Bicycle Co-Op. They have also held pop-ups at Atticus Market and Orange St. Art Market and clubbing nights at Diesel Lounge and Cafe Nine.

According to Jensen, Connectic*nt transcends its role as a printed magazine. By hosting events in physical spaces, Jensen and other members of the zine facilitate a physical, tangible space for creatives to connect with each other.

“It’s just so cool that there’s so many people that want to celebrate this stuff and come out and show support for it,” she said.

The bicycle co-op is located at 138 Bradley St.

The post Artists and enthusiasts convene at local zine fair appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The installation — curated by Freyda Spira, the Robert L. Solley Curator of Prints and Drawings, Lisa Hodermarsky, the Sutphin Family Curator of Prints and Drawings, Joseph Henry, their Florence B. Selden Fellow, and various undergraduate Yale students who work in the department — is on view in the YUAG’s fourth-floor James E. Duffy Gallery through early June 2024. 

“Although the pandemic put a lot of things on hold, the Department of Prints and Drawings continued to accept amazing gifts from our generous donors, we also made targeted acquisitions of works on paper that underscore our inclusive approach to collecting across histories and cultures,” Spira wrote to the News.

The installation features the works of two contemporary indigenous artists, Raven Chacon and Lehuauakea; a variety of European artists including Camille Pissarro, Kazimir Malevich, and Edgar Degas; and various American artists such as Franz Kline and Titus Kapur ART ’06. 

Two accordion-folded books, made with color lithograph and woodcut on handmade ivory Amate paper, are displayed within a glass case at the center of the gallery. “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals” and “Histoire Naturelle des Espécies: Illegal Alien’s Manuscript” by Enrique Chagoya are made in the style of Mayan and Aztec “codices” and address issues of politics, religion and race through satire. 

“The new Jean-Michel Basquiat acquisition was the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the elevator — the figures’ sardonic grins felt almost confrontational,” said Grace Zhou, editorial and production assistant at the Gallery. “The title of the work, ‘Famous Negro Athletes,’ comes from a 1964 book of the same name, which chronicled the lives of sportspeople like Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson. By drawing his athletes with mask-like faces, Basquiat seems to gesture toward the dehumanizing blend of racism and hypervisibility imposed on Black public figures.”

To the right of the Basquiat is a large inkjet print and charcoal work on paper and cardboard titled “Dad on DI”, which depicts a Black father and his daughter on a train as a part of Dáreece J. Walker’s series titled “Black Fathers Matter, Series II.”

Facing Walker’s work, on the opposite wall, is David Wojnarowicz’s 1990-91 photostat “Untitled (One Day This Kid),” which takes a picture of himself as a younger boy and surrounds it with a poem he wrote in the last two years of his life, once he was diagnosed with HIV.

“The poem, addressed in part to his younger self, details what happens to queer children in a deeply homophobic culture,” Henry said. “It has been powerful to introduce Wojnarowicz to a younger generation and to teach with this work, especially at this moment in America when so much legislation has been targeting queer culture and gender self-determination.”

The installation also features a work by Jane Hammond, “Champagne Bucket with Tree Fern, Emerald Cuckoo, and Desert Bluebells,” that combines lithography, relief printing, digital printing, colored pencil, watercolor and gouache, all hand-cut and assembled on a mosaic of hand-painted papers over painted cotton rag to create an eye-catching floral arrangement over a silvery, tiled background.

Some of the older works of prominent European artists in the installation, such as “Gloucester” by Maurice Prendergast, “Suprematist Composition” by Kazimir Malevich, and “Baigneuse debout et baigneuse agenouillée (A Bather Standing and a Bather Kneeling)” by Camille Pissarro, appear to be sketches or studies for what later could become more well-known works.

“This kind of exhibition, which puts a lot of disparate works together into the same space, is an opportunity to think creatively about how works of art speak to each other in different ways,” Sprira wrote to the News.

On Feb. 16, 2024, the Gallery will unveil “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression,” another product of its prints and drawings department, which will be the first to place the prints of two of the most prominent German expressionists alongside one another.

The post New installation highlights the YUAG’s recent prints and drawings acquisitions appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Since then, the theme of memory has been recurrent in her strikingly vibrant watercolors. The News sat down with Park to discuss her upbringing, recent works and goals as an artist. Before coming to the School of Art, Park had worked extensively as an editorial illustrator, creating watercolor illustrations for the New York Times and Vice News. Now, as a first-year master’s student, Park said she hopes to renegotiate the terms of memory, seeking to remember moments of personal trauma and excavate moments of the past –– even those that no longer exist. In particular, Park remembers Munhwa-dong, a village where she lived with her grandparents until age five. 

“This mind palace is where I’m from,” Park said. “Now, that village is gone. Like the whole village is gone. It’s getting redeveloped, where most of the land will become apartments. I don’t have a photo of it. My mom went there, and she also decided to not take a photo of it because it wasn’t what we remember. But it stays in my memory, in a mind palace.” 

“Mom don’t leave” 

Park recalled her childhood growing up in what she described as a poor, rural neighborhood in Cheonan, a city 50 miles south of Seoul. To seek better economic prospects, both of Park’s parents worked in Seoul –– traveling for an hour and a half from their home. While they worked and lived in the city during the weekdays, Park stayed at her grandparents’ house who looked after her.  

At times, Park was separated from her parents for at least seven, and sometimes up to 14 days. The memory of her parents saying goodbye and leaving for work at the end of every weekend has lingered as a form of trauma for Park, she said. 

“The scene that I’m telling you is like, I’m in the doorway and she’s leaving. She’s saying ‘Bye, I’ll be back.’” said Park. “My dad has already left, he leaves first and he’s a couple steps away from the door.” 

Recently showcased in the Yale School of Art’s first-year thesis exhibition, Park’s work “엄마 가지마 (Mom Don’t Go)” depicts this memory of her mother’s departure through a multi-faceted installation that involves a water-color painting, painted blue tapes, a pedestal and a door. 

A thin string is tied to the handle of the door and draws out to the surface a white rectangle — which, according to Park, is supposed to invoke the imagery of an outstretched arm. Whenever someone enters or leaves through the door, the string is pulled out of the hole on the rectangular pedestal and drags across the floor.

Caption: “엄마 가지마” (Mom Don’t Go).” Watercolor on paper, door, pedestal, painted blue tapes / Courtesy of Pat Garcia ART ’24. 

When Park turned five years old, her family, along with her newly-born brother, finally reunited and collectively moved to Seoul. 

“Teddy Bear Hospitals: Season 6, Episode 1” 

Park, as well as her family, is no stranger to goodbyes. Throughout her early childhood and adolescence, Park’s family moved more than 20 times. At the heart of these relocations was money: the family moved when they did not have enough money or when they suddenly had more.

Then, when Park was 15, she moved across the Pacific Ocean, with her mother and brother, to Los Angeles. There, she confronted the difficulties of adjusting to an American school system, while facing interruptions in her education due to visa-related issues. 

On the eve of her senior prom, after recently being accepted into Rhode Island School of Design, Park experienced a psychotic break, she said. She said the exact cause of the breakdown is still unknown. Perhaps it was the rift with her best friend, high levels of stress running in her family or the huge shifts caused by the move to America, she said. 

Regardless of the cause, the memories of this psychotic breakdown have prominently influenced and motivated Park’s work. In particular, the three weeks following the incident have served as the backdrop to her book, which was also displayed at the thesis exhibition, “Teddy Bear Hospitals, Season 6, Episode 1.”

“I found myself returning to the memories in mental illness, in what happened during that three weeks of intense breakdown,” Park said. “The book is about what happened on the first day. That’s when I, again, separated with my mom, because I’m in the hospital, and my mom is at home. And I’m here, but she can only visit me for like an hour, and she has to leave.” 

Caption: Book with the cover of “Teddy Bear Hospital”. Watercolor on paper, string, painted blue tapes / Courtesy of Pat Garcia ART ’24. 

Cute and spooky: Haejin’s colorful world

When there were no children’s books at her grandparents’ house or when high-schooler Park was still learning to adjust to the English language, she turned to color. However, Park’s relationship with hues and shades is a bit more complicated than that of other artists. 

Park said that her therapist had diagnosed her with synesthesia: a perceptual phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, according to Cleveland Clinic. In some instances, people with synesthesia see shapes when smelling certain scents or perceive tastes when looking at words. In Park’s case, she can see colors at the thought of certain individuals and memories. 

As a person walked past during the interview, Park said that the person emanated a pale shade of blue. 

“For me, color is a mother,” said Park. “We all drink water and we produce color. I am a watercolor, on paper. I draw with my tears. I drink water, I paint with water, I make blood when I make period art. And I am told always that this is never enough because I’m not painting on oil on canvas.”  

It is not merely incidental that Park describes color in gendered terms. While Park’s work centers around memories and events that are specific to her personal history, she aims to tell a much larger story about, and for, Korean women. 

Park addressed the intergenerational struggles of Korean women. In particular, she pointed to the internalization of misogyny, the Korean War’s legacy of mental illness among women and the invisibility and silencing of Korean women throughout history. 

“I asked my mother, ‘Why didn’t you like me more than my brother?’ or ‘Why did my grandmother cry when I was born?’” Park said. “When I asked her why, she said that it’s because her mother also favored her brothers over her. There was a lot of mental illness because of the war. I also studied East Asian art history last semester [and] I learned about what it meant to be a Korean woman when there is no record. That made me think about motherhood, in the sense of mother country or mother language.” 

Even though Park’s art carries weighty ghosts, her work is marked by vibrant drips of pink and orange, images of smiling faces hidden in flowers and huge “anime-inspired” eyes that return the viewer’s curious gaze. These jubilant and almost youthful elements may seem jarring to the viewer, considering the darker source material that has inspired the piece. 

Yet, the simultaneity of cuteness and spookiness is one that Park associates with the experiences of being a Korean woman in America. 

“(The anime-inspired eyes) are not just cute,” Park said. “It’s cute but a little scary. There’s something behind the eyes. There are a lot of scary, spooky things that happened in real life to me, that didn’t happen to other people.”  

Caption: The back and front cover of“Teddy Bear Hospital”. Watercolor on paper, string, painted blue tapes / Courtesy of Pat Garcia ART ’24. 

For Taína Cruz ART ’25, the merit of Park’s work comes from this very complexity and mystery. According to Cruz, she has found excitement in uncovering the multiple layers of Park’s work, which she does not always fully understand or know how it was created. The complexity of Park’s work is especially apparent in her use of color, said Cruz. 

“It’s just really wonderful how Haejin is using color and the vibrancy to display womanhood, to display emotions, to display aboutness, our beings and what it means to be just like consciously alive in this world,” said Cruz. “Haejin has really found a wonderful language to communicate all these questions that we’re pondering ourselves, in a way that is fun. And as someone who is just constantly seeking out play, I have fun playing and exploring within Haejin’s work.” 

According to Ryan Brooks, Park’s partner, her current work centers her identity and emotions, in ways her past commissioned pieces did not. Incorporating her personal narrative in her art has been the key to “unlocking so much growth,” said Brooks. 

Park noted the intense emotional attachment she feels for her works. Following the performance of the door opening in “Mom don’t go,” she said she “could not stop crying.”

“Her work is about this relationship with color to paper,” said Brooks. “A lot of her work, I think, is using these mediums to talk about her experience, both externally as a Korean woman and internally in processing complex trauma. This process is almost like a gradual uncovering, if you will. By exploring more into the work, she can use this process as a way to unpack things that have maybe been packed away in her memory.”

Considering the many times Park has moved around and begun anew, it may come as no surprise that Park envisions herself taking on new challenges around the world.

Particularly, she said, she wants to attend the Venice Biennale — an annual international cultural exhibition — 10 years from now. 

“I would invite all my family from Korea and show Italy to them and eat tomato spaghetti with some red pepper flakes on top and strawberry wine with the bubble water,” Park said. “Probably feeling happy but planning what’s next.” 

In 2021, Haejin was selected as a finalist in the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

The post PROFILE: Haejin Park explores childhood memories and womanhood through watercolor appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Titled “and the forms which linger / humming in our ears,” the thesis exhibit held a public general reception on Jan. 26 in the School of Art’s Green Hall Gallery. While Green Hall’s exhibit spaces are not usually open to non-Yale-affiliated people, the public reception gave all viewers the opportunity to engage with the displayed art and to speak with the artists involved.

“We try to have an overarching theme that we all resonate with,” said Michael Cuadrado Gonzales MFA ’24, an artist with four pieces in the show, about the exhibit’s curation.

Many of the works, which took months to bring to life, were created specifically for the exhibit. Alongside the umbrella themes of perspective and nontraditional form, Cuadrado Gonzales mentioned that the show’s artists also incorporated their own individual themes into their work. 

Junyan Hu and Orlando Porras, Graphic Design MFAs ’24, worked on the exhibition identity, ensuring that the visual elements outside the showroom complemented the works and their themes inside.

The painting and printmaking MFA theses are divided into two parts, or “phases,” each having its own gallery showing and thematic overtone. This first phase was on display from Jan. 20 to Jan. 30 and contains work from Creighton Baxter, Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire, Earthen Clay, Haleigh Collins, Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez, Irisol Gonzalez-Vega, Eloise Hess, Mei Kazama, Mike Picos, Nadir Souirgi, and V Yeh — all MFA ’24.

While united in their approaches to broadly similar subject matter, each artist brought perspectives that came from their own experiences in the MFA program. The piece “Tenderness of Untruth,” from Cuadrado Gonzales, for example, is an abstract wood wall installation sculpture, upon which there are prints of doors. The doors hang in the liminal spaces between the existing and non-existing within the overall composition.

Baxter spoke about how the works on display reflected various aspects of the viewer-work relationship, including orientation, appearances and “the mediation between thought and object.”

“Hiss the name,” Baxter’s contribution to the collection, is a large interior with her drawings and prints plastered on the wall and various objects strewn along the ground to draw the viewer through their own created story.

“I think there are multiple fragments of a story within the structure of the installation,” Baxter said. “So I think it’s actually more about narrative itself than a specific narrative. I’m more thinking about how linear narrative structure is not a thing that is really possible. There’s always something that upends the appearance.” 

Other pieces on display also encouraged the viewer to interact with the creation of their meaning. Yeh, for example, presented “Introduction (Nothing heard, nothing said / We’re hand in hand, chest to chest, and now we’re face to face / You got me tossing and turning, can’t sleep at night)” in the form of three vertical paintings — beside which was a ballot box that invited viewers to submit answers to questions. 

Among the questions asked include “Please rate your current pain” and “Please describe what is and is not familiar.”

Yeh said about the work: “Overall, my exhibition is a lot about states of transition and transience.” The accompanying paintings included an abstract portrayal of several faces and bodies caught in a whirlwind of blue, red and purple lines, a cadaver which was painted from life at Yale’s anatomy lab, located in the Anlyan Center, and a resting doctor. cq

Each year, the MFA program hires curators to visit the artists and help organize the show. Kari Rittenbach, Assistant Curator at MoMa PS1, and Sophy Naess, lecturer and senior critic in painting/printmaking, worked with the MFA artists to decide on where to display each art piece in relation to each other.

The effect of artwork placement was pronounced to those walking through the gallery. 

The space’s first room contained sculptures from Clay, which experimented with the relationships between materials like metal, plastic and fabric to produce various textures and spatial orientations. His piece “Untitled,” included a constructed wireframe box held up in the air against the wall and pipes on the ceiling.

Through an array of hand-crocheted flowers, Gonzalez-Vega’s “Flor de 7 Colores in Mami’s Garden creates a feeling of immortalization of her roots and culture alongside a blooming tulle spiral flowing from the exhibition floor. The piece brings attention to the natural, organic process that went into hand-making the flowers. 

The rest of the exhibition similarly embodied a subversion of the traditional.

“I’m thinking about perception, how to disorient perception,” Cuadrado Gonzalez said. “Thinking about broadly queerness. I’m thinking about race, sexuality, all those things. How architecture and perception can take away from these ideas of gender and race and how disorientation functions as a tool to counteract patriarchal neoliberal white systems.” 

The second group of artwork for the MFA thesis show will be on display from Feb. 7 through Feb. 17, with a public reception on Feb. 9.

The post MFA’s showcase 2024 painting and printmaking theses appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The installation opened in early January 2024 and is on view on the fourth floor of the Gallery through June 2. The installation is centered around the concept of narrative photography, the idea that a single image can convey a captivating story.

“The atmosphere in these photographs are sometimes playful, sometimes foreboding — both familiar and otherworldly,” Gabriella Svenningsen, senior museum assistant in the gallery’s photography department, wrote to the News. “I am especially thrilled about Echo (2023), an intimate moment between a mother and a daughter, by Genesis Báez, a Yale alumni from Puerto Rico; and Coyote Tales, No. 1 (2017), by the Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, which evokes both surrealism and classic fairy tales, with a compelling twist.”

From the bright pinks of Tina Barney’s “Jill and Polly in the Bathroom,” taken in 1987, to Edward Steichen’s dark and moody “Self-Portrait with Brush and Palette,” taken in 1903, the installation presents a variety of photographic styles and techniques.

These techniques include staging, lighting, posing and composition, which photographers use to fabricate their narratives and invoke emotion within the viewer. 

“The permanent collection galleries for photography are a relatively new feature in the museum, and it has been so exciting for us to be able to share some works from the collection that we did not have an opportunity to show in the past,” Svenningsen also wrote to the News. “I am especially excited about showing large, framed colorworks, which are usually stored offsite and often difficult to show to classes and individual scholars because of their scale and the logistics that goes into pulling, packing, shipping and handling.”

Stepping off the elevator and walking past the Prints and Drawings galleries, visitors are met with a large image of an Iranian woman staring out of a train window — “Shadi” from the series “Goftare Nik/Good Words” by Shirana Shahbazi. 

Across from it, another 2000 photograph, Wang Qingsong’s “The Night Revels of Lao Li,” is a modern adaptation of a scroll painting from the Tang Dynasty, comparing historical and contemporary power structures. The approximately one-by-eight-foot image includes various scenes in a continuum, with women adorned in bright outfits, carrying out tasks for men such as playing instruments, massaging their shoulders and cutting their hair.

“For the series Untitled Film Stills, made between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman put on guises and photographed herself in cinematic settings. She deliberately selected props to mimic scenes from film stills used to promote B movies of the mid-twentieth century. Images in the series immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain Sherman’s best-known works,” Judy Ditner, the associate curator of photography and digital media at the gallery, wrote to the News.

Ditner was primarily responsible for curation of the installation, deciding the character of the installation and planning where the works would be displayed.

Svetlana Frazeur, a security guard at the gallery, told the News that a work by Gregory Crewdson ART ’88 depicting a young man with a makeshift outdoor shelter “sticks out” to her due to some of her friends’ struggles with homelessness. 

Crewdson’s “Untitled” from the series “Beneath the Roses,” is set along a woody riverbank, where the faint glow of a house’s back porch light can be seen at the top left of the image.

“The rotation presents photographs that show the unique but always changing relationship between photography and storytelling, staging, and narration … A photograph is often valued historically or artistically for its ability to document or capture whatever was in front of the camera; but what about those instances in which a photographer constructs or stages (sometimes in elaborate ways) the “scene” in front of the lens?” Daniel Menzo, a fellow at the gallery, wrote to the News.

To complement the installation, a selection of photographs by Allan Chasanoff ’61 is on display at the Gallery’s lower lobby, alongside the display of the book “Seeing and Not Believing: The Photography of Allan Chasanoff” — the first catalog to survey his work.

The post ‘Photographic Storytelling: Photographs from the Permanent Collection’ installed at the YUAG appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Sculptures, prints, installations and more adorned the walls of the three-floor gallery space in the School of Art for their bi-annual show. The show, which will be open through Dec. 8, features works by all seniors majoring in Art, with juniors in the major given the opportunity to participate as well.

“For me, this project—and exhibition as a whole—was an exploration in reflecting my identity and consciousness in the pieces of media that I feel have defined—or guided me through—my development into who I am today,” Lily Campbell ’24 wrote to the News.

Campbell’s works formed an installation featuring “In My Room” (2023), “Burden of Contraception” (2022) and “Untitled” (2021), as well as a rug resembling the one in her childhood bedroom, a wooden record organizer complete with some of her favorite records and chair she found discarded in the senior studio.

The exhibition features works by Alana Liu ’24, alexander rubalcava ’24, Cate Roser ’25, Chiara Hardy ’24, Cleo Maloney ’25, Dora Pang ’24, Ellika Edelman ’24, Ethan Shim ’24, Eunice Kiang ’24, Flores Espinosa ’24, Hannah Foley ’24, Jacob Feit Mann ’24, Kaci Xie ’25, Kaia Mladenova ’24, Karela Palazio ’25, Leo Lee ’25, Lily Campbell, Mazie Wong ’25, Megan Graham ’24, Mikiala Ng ’24, Nathan Puletasi ’24, Olivia Marwell ’24, Stephanie Wang ’24, Talia Tax ’24, Tilman Phleger ’24 and Whitney Toutenhoofd ’25.

For many members of the class of 2024 who are majoring in Art, this exhibition provided an opportunity to display portions of what will be their senior theses. 

“Conceptualizing this work along with my current use of western culture had been an exciting process—drawing inspiration from ranchers back home in Spokane, Washington, famous outlaws, western figures like the Marlboro Man, country artists like Riddy Arman, and much more, all as research pertaining to my thesis, while also creating a narrative of how we interact with Mother Nature and how she prevails in reclamation,” Nathan Puletasi wrote to the News.

Puletasi’s work, “I Can’t Hear My Duck Call Over All These Damn Taxis,” includes a battered animal hide hung on the wall above the engine of a 1977 Chevrolet Camaro stuffed with hay. On top of the engine sits an empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

Some students expressed concerns about the lack of opportunities presented to undergraduate students in the Art major.

“For the seniors, this is the first time we have gotten to show our work since being at Yale,” Campbell said. “While we are constantly creating for both our personal practice and our classwork, it isn’t until this first, mid-year show that we actually get a space to feel our work is appreciated and seen.”

The undergraduate Art department has long battled complaints of inaccessibility and limited resources, from insufficient space in their courses to high expectations of investment in both time and materials, even without the recently eliminated course fees. 

Other works in the exhibition include “Ivàn” (2023) by Kaia Mladenova. Using wood, acrylic and LED lights, she designed an apparatus that measures time with light based on the sun and the moon.

“I wanted to create an object that could become a part of someone’s living environment and serve a purpose. I did not aim to create an art piece. I think of my work as an experimentation—a process of creating something useful and beautiful that is also a conversation starter,” Mladenova wrote to the News.

“The host will let you in soon” is open to the Yale community in the Green Hall Gallery from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, through Dec. 8, 2023.

The post ‘The host will let you in soon’ opens at the School of Art appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The conservation project, slated to finish before the museum’s reopening in 2025, includes replacing the roof of the museum and its 224 skylights, according to Building and Preservation Manager Dana Greenidge. These skylights were a standout feature of the original architecture and were famously dubbed by building architect Louis I. Kahn as the “building’s fifth elevation.” 

Nonetheless, Greenidge wrote to the News that the current project is an opportunity to “take advantage of the many advances in technology since the 1970’s, including materials that are more durable and environmentally sustainable than their predecessors.”

In addition to these replacements, the museum will be transitioning its entire lighting system, which uses halogen lights, to LED lighting with financial support from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, or FCI. 

Founded by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in 2021, the FCI supports clean energy use for the visual arts.

“FCI was established by the Foundation in association with RMI and Environment & Culture Partners in 2021, and it is the largest private national grant-making program to address climate change action through cultural institutions,” the Foundation wrote in a statement to the News.

In 2022, the YCBA and the Yale University Art Gallery each received $100,000 grants from the FCI to undergo an LED lighting conversion project. 

To date, the FCI has garnered over $10 million in funding to support 175 energy efficiency and clean energy projects at 147 institutions across 34 states, according to spokesperson Shea Sherry of the initiative. According to Sherry, clean energy projects such as that of the YCBA speak to a “trend” of accountability for museums to have climate-friendly infrastructure — which not only includes the efforts of the FCI, but also an international Gallery Climate Coalition that aims to reduce the art sector’s carbon emissions by a minimum of 50 percent by 2030. 

To ensure that these new climate design choices preserve the aesthetics of the museum, the YCBA consulted with Yale-affiliated faculty and greater industry experts, such as School of Architecture Dean Deborah Berke. For Greenidge, the conservation project is an infrastructure upgrade that must be approached “holistically” because of the cultural and historical significance of the Louis I. Kahn building. 

Khan was a modernist architect known for designing massive, heavy buildings. The architecture of the YCBA is renowned for combining these characteristics with a simplistic interior that, during the daytime, is illuminated without artificial light. The building was the architect’s final project and was completed two years after his death in 1974.

“One of our priorities is to select high functioning materials and products while also preserving the essence of Kahn’s aesthetic vision for the building,” Greenidge wrote to the News. 

In light of the museum’s closure, the YCBA has introduced online and in-person events, off-site exhibitions and art loans to continue engagement with the Yale and Greater New Haven communities, and also to reach a broader international audience. 

Throughout closure, the YCBA continued its online Artists in Conversation series and has also offered in-person events in collaboration with other campus institutions. In September, the YCBA co-presented a concert with Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae, celebrating her fourth studio album “Black Rainbows.” In November, the museum held the annual Norma Lytton Lecture featuring former president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daniel Weiss Yale MPPM ’85. 

In addition, over 60 works from the YCBA’s collection have been moved to the YUAG as a part of a special exhibition titled “In A New Light: paintings from the Yale Center for British Art.” Since March, the exhibition, running until Dec. 3, has featured works by John Constable, Gwen John, Angelica Kauffman, George Stubbs and J. M. W. Turner. 

According to YCBA Deputy Director and Chief Curator Martina Droth, the museum’s education department coordinated weekly tours of the exhibition with YCBA docents and student guides, and after the exhibition’s conclusion, some paintings will remain on view at the Gallery into the new year. 

The YCBA has also loaned its works to national and international institutions in order to preserve audience engagement and reception of the museum’s collection. Over the summer, drawings and paintings by William Blake, John Linnell and Samuel Palmer were included in a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. The museum has also lent works to the Baltimore Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum in New York. In addition, Sir Reynold’s painting, “Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue, in ‘Love for Love’ by William Congreve,” was spotlighted in an exhibition titled “Crown to Couture” at the Kensington Palace in London.

In preparation for the museum’s reopening in 2025, the YCBA is working on two special exhibitions that will accompany their collection reimagined by the conservation project’s renovations. The special exhibitions will celebrate the 250th anniversary of Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner’s birth and will present drawings and paintings by contemporary artist Tracey Emin. Citing the audience turnout of a symposium on J. M. W. Turner, hosted by the YCBA in September, the museum anticipates similar reception with their reopening exhibitions. 

“The phenomenal turnout is indicative of interest in and excitement about one of Britain’s most celebrated painters, who will be the subject of an exhibition at the YCBA in 2025,” YCBA Associate Director of Research Jemma Field wrote to the News. 

The YCBA will be making a formal announcement about the reopening in January 2024.

Correction, Nov. 30: A previous version of this article stated that the YCBA is set to reopen in 2024, but it is currently set to reopen in 2025. The article has been updated accordingly.

Correction, Dec. 6: A previous version of this article misspelled Dana Greenidge, Deborah Berke, William Blake, Louis Kahn. The article has been updated accordingly.

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KLG is an art collective located in the Westville neighborhood at 873 Whalley Ave. The gallery represents 22 of New Haven’s notable and emerging artists. The latest exhibitions that closed earlier this month were “HEDGE,” by photographer Marjorie Wolfe, and “CLAY,” by ceramic artist Amanda Duchen.

“This gallery has been great for women,” Wolfe told the News. “We’ve had all kinds of wonderful people represented here who no longer show their work here but have done amazing things — Emilia Dubicki, Susan Clinard. I mean, these are big names in New Haven art.” 

Wolfe grew up in Beaver Hills, the neighborhood just beside Westville, where KLG is located.

Wolfe’s idea for HEDGE began two years ago when she was visiting Martha’s Vineyard. There, she photographed a hedge on the island. She later returned to it in the following months to find that, after the season change and a huge snowstorm, the hedge looked drastically different.

In this way, Wolfe’s work is reminiscent of Monet’s “Rouen Cathedral” series. The intentions of both artists are the same: to photograph a static object as the world around it changes.

For Wolfe, this exhibition is also nostalgic and personal. 

“I first had an experience with hedges when I was about four years old. I lived on a street exactly one mile from [KLG] and to get to my best friend’s house I would [go through]  a hedge with an opening in it just big enough for a little girl to crawl through,” Wolfe said. “So [with this exhibition] I was kind of coming back to something that was in my mind all along. It struck me this morning [that] this little girl, my best friend who I would crawl through the hedge to visit, it would be her birthday. She’d be 75 today.”

As a child, art was always a part of Wolfe’s life. At an early age, her parents encouraged her to take art lessons outside of school.

It was this love for art that led Wolfe to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her bachelor’s in painting and took her first photography class.

“Junior year I had one class in photography as an elective,” Wolfe told the News. “It was that slap upside the head moment, aha, too late.” 

While it was have been too late for her to switch majors, that did not stop Wolfe from pursuing photography. She said that many of the art techniques that she learned from painting were directly transferable to this new medium. 

Studying painting allowed Wolfe to learn composition, which could then be applied to her photography, to determine “what belongs in the frame,” as she put it.

Wolfe has gone to great lengths to capture the perfect composition. Once, when photographing a sports car in front of a gigantic hedge in California, she laid down on the road to get the shot.

She recounted another time when she ran — camera bag and all — to chase a composition for her photograph “Ocean Park Hedge.”

“[And so I’m] running up the hill thinking ‘get this picture before that cloud goes away’ because the cloud makes it. So that was a lucky photograph,” Wolfe recalled.

The photo, “Ocean Park Hedge,” demonstrates repetition of shape. In the foreground, there is a group of round hedges off to the left. In the background, the clouds in the sky mirror the shape of the hedges.

Repetition is pervasive in Wolfe’s photographs. In “Wainscoting” the sharp edges and repeating vertical lines of a staircase create a compelling composition. Similarly, in “The Road to San Galgano” the perspective provides the viewer with a diverging path lined with trees, which creates a linear structure and a repeating pattern of the trees on either side.

Wolfe taught photography to high school students for 37 years. She said that finding perspective was something she always instilled in her students. 

“I would teach my kids if you find something that you think is going to make a good image, before you release the shutter, just step to the right or left or just kneel down a little bit and see how it changes through the viewfinder,” Wolfe said. “Stand on your toes. Just make sure you have the best composition.” 

The second exhibition on display was the work of Amanda Duchen. Duchen is a trained architect from South Africa. In addition to architecture, she also creates works of art using clay.

A common technique that Duchen utilizes is raku. Raku is a Japanese firing technique for pottery where it is first fired at a lower temperature and then moved while hot. Transferring the pottery from the kiln while it is still hot causes a shock to the clay. As a result, the glaze crackles. The next step is putting the pottery in a container filled with combustible material which causes a reaction within the pottery that creates unique colors and patterns.

“What’s so lovely about raku [is that] it’s so unpredictable,” Duchen said.

Though Wolfe and Duchen are working with different materials and subject matter, there is some overlap with the nature motifs present in their works.

Duchen’s exhibition consists of several of her wheel-thrown ceramic bowls and other vessels, many of which use the raku technique or a variation of the technique, called naked raku. This variation creates a different effect due to the second porcelain slip that is added to serve as a barrier glaze. The slip eventually peels away to reveal a smoke-like design as the combustible material is able to permeate through.

Another technique Duchen uses in her work is inscription. Carving into the clay while it is still malleable allows Duchen to write quotes and phrases on the inside of the bowls.

In one instance, she inscribed the words of Rudyard Kipling, “I am by calling a dealer in words and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Beside the bowls were a set of seed-shaped vases. Within them were South African protea flowers.

When asked about the influence of South African culture on her work, Duchen said, “There’s definitely a strong connection with Africa. The gourds, or seed-like vessels, are very African.” 

She also mentioned that the smoke-firing technique is a common practice among South African potters.

Another feature of Duchen’s exhibition, aside from the ceramic bowls, was a series of hand-molded figures. The figures were animalistic, resembling goats and canines. 

The animal figures incorporated used objects and little trinkets that Duchen had collected, such as miniature light bulbs and sugar tongs.

The News spoke with another KLG artist Eddie Hall, who was helping manage the closing reception for Wolfe and Duchen’s exhibits, about his time at the gallery. 

“It’s been a great experience,” Hall said, “It’s a lot of artists working together. We share the responsibilities. It’s a great combination of artists and brings a lot of diversity of art.” 

KLG exhibited their annual Deck the Walls event starting Nov. 16 and will remain up until Dec. 24.

The post Kehler Liddell Gallery presents CLAY and HEDGE appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The exhibition “FACTORY” chronicles the post-industrial history of the building that once housed a world-renowned brass clock company, while “Portraits: Ruth McIntosh Cogswell and Dorothy Cogswell” showcases the art and work of a mother and daughter from the 20th century. These two exhibits are expected to be on display until Dec. 30.  

“My favorite [exhibition] at the moment is ‘FACTORY’ because it explores how artists in the city took a vacant factory space and repurposed it into a creative collective … For decades the space was the site for music, performances, academic discourse and an LGBTQ+ subversive space,” Eve Galanis, an educator and researcher at the New Haven Museum, wrote to the News.

New Haven Clock Company Factory was founded in 1853 and produced millions of watches until its demise in 1959. The abandoned building became a refuge for artists seeking space, including hosting the Papier Mache Video Institute’s activist art, the School of Architecture’s “Sex Ball” and drag shows. The space was also home to a pioneering artistic community, which coexisted alongside a series of music and adult entertainment clubs that featured a diverse music scene and performance spaces.

In 2018, a developer proposed a plan to create live-work lofts for artists in the building. However, the city refused to allow residential housing in the industrial zone, hindering these efforts. 

“I jumped at the opportunity to speak, document and share these histories, as often underground history falls through the cracks and has rarely been deemed ‘museum-worthy’ in the past,” Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, director of photo archives at the New Haven Museum and curator of the exhibition, wrote to the News. “This exhibit is a testament to years of underground energy and ingenuity and the years of all of our lives when nothing was impossible.”

The exhibit, “Portraits: Ruth McIntosh Cogswell and Dorothy Cogswell” also explores the origins of the contemporary New Haven arts community, encouraging visitors to consider the role that 20th-century women played in establishing its legacy. It documents the lives of a mother and daughter who both studied and taught art in the New Haven community, featuring photographs, watercolors, pencil drawings and silhouettes by the two women.  

Mary Christ, former collections manager of the New Haven Museum and current campus art collection registrar at Yale, curated “Profiles” alongside Katy Rosenthal, a former intern at the Museum. 

“Ruth [McIntosh Cogswell] was a very skilled silhouette artist, and she created hundreds of silhouettes of New Haveners and people from other places in Connecticut,” Christ wrote to the News. “Visitors can view her original silhouettes in the exhibit and delight in the way a simple, solid profile of a subject can capture personality and experiences.”

Hung around the upstairs rotunda of the museum, and also curated by Christ, the exhibit, “Signs of the Time,” features 19th- and 20th-century signs from local businesses, including the now-extinct Yale Brewing Company. 

Another ongoing exhibit at the museum, “Form and Function: Decorative Arts in the Exhibition,” showcases an assortment of its historic design and decorative arts holdings. Objects ranging from baroque furniture to mid-century modern designs are categorized into thematic groups: politics, childhood, business and eclectic homes. 

“From Clocks to Lollipops: Made in New Haven” also surveys New Haven’s corporate history. Curated by museum consultant Elizabeth Pratt Fox and featuring over 100 advertisements, trade cards, photographs and other objects, this exhibition explores the local production of consumer goods since New Haven’s colonial days.

Alongside these featured exhibitions, the museum’s permanent collection features a wide array of art, memorabilia and artifacts from New Haven’s colonial to contemporary periods. The museum also hosts a variety of events aimed at encouraging public engagement in the city’s ongoing historical record. 

Cynthia Riccio, who recently joined the museum staff as the director of programs and planning, was drawn to the museum’s connections and work within the New Haven community. She said she plans to further these efforts in her role. 

“We have a program on December 3, ‘A History of Victorian Dolls’ House,’ followed by a tea reception and a special tour of the museum’s Levy Dolls’ House. We are once again partnering with the Peabody on a program for MLK Day on January 14 and 15 and look for programs in February with Connecticut Explored, The Yale & Slavery Project, Lunarfest with Yale-China and a book talk by Eric Jay Dolan, author of Privateering in the American Revolution,” Riccio wrote to the News.

The Museum is open to the public Wednesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays from 12 to 5 p.m.

The post What’s on view at the New Haven Museum? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The installation, commissioned by the Schwarzman Center and curated by artist-in-residence Bryce Dessner, offered an immersive experience that blurred the boundaries between sound art, physical engagement and live musical performance. From Oct. 21 to Oct. 28, visitors had the opportunity to “work out” in the listening gym and immerse themselves in the visceral sounds of Fure’s ANIMAL performance. The installation was open to the public, with specific live performance times requiring prior registration.

Participants navigated through a room filled with innovative sound equipment, finding themselves able to shape and influence the soundscapes around them. The visitors were not just working out their muscles. They were working out their visual and auditory senses, too.

“It’s definitely not a normal show. There’s a lot of sound happening — you walk around and you fight with the machines to manipulate the sound,” said James Egelhofer, an audience member and New Haven local.

The show was built in collaboration with stock-a-studio, an architectural design practice that represents the intersection of extended realities, illusion, material recirculation and sustainability.

Egelhofer said his favorite piece was created using a unique sound-manipulating tool incorporating fabric, metal balls and a doily structure that mimicked raindrops hitting a roof. 

Ted Lucas, another audience member said that he had felt “like a well-oiled gear in a palace of perception. It was a psychoacoustic blur.” Lucas told the News that his favorite piece in the installation was a wind machine.

Jiaqian Dai ART ’25 assisted Ash Fure with their work, making promotional material by hand and helping develop a visual system that complemented Ash Fure’s work. Dai said that the collaboration was an “excellent” opportunity to do something experimental that broke the traditional rules of what constitutes art.

“This is a pioneering installation by an astonishing artist and educator known for breaking musical boundaries and blurring the lines among aural, visual and physical art disciplines,” Rachel Fine, executive director of the Schwarzman Center, told the News.  

While the listening gym was open to all, the live performances attracted a great deal of interest, according to Fine. Registration for the final show on Oct. 28 was filled and even had a waitlist. 

Fure is an associate professor of music at Dartmouth College and holds a doctorate in music composition from Harvard University.

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