The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Brightening the cityscape
Murals reflect the New Haven community where they’re created
Walking the streets of the New Haven, you never know what’s around the next corner. Chances are it’s something beautiful. Bright, cheerful, thought-provoking or simply joyful murals have been springing up throughout the city, unslowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the pandemic may be bringing more artistic vision into the open air.
“There has been this renaissance of public art and murals coming up in the city,” said Adriane Jefferson, director of arts and cultural affairs for the city. “I think these murals do a lot culturally during a time when people feel very disconnected from the world.”
There are murals inspired by the passions of the moment, like the Black Lives Matter mural on Temple Street, splitting the New Haven Green with its frankness. There is an homage to avant-garde jazz musician, poet and philosopher Sun Ra, whose visage gazes out on Crown Street behind the Café Nine building.
There is even a mural depicting Dave Higgins, a city bus driver, and Dr. Michelle Salazar, a surgical resident and Colombian immigrant, in bright orange and lilac on Orange Street in the Ninth Square.
And in the Hill neighborhood, the Courtland S. Wilson Branch Library staff is working with city artists Isaac Bloodworth and Kyle Kearson to create a mural on the Five Star Laundromat Center just down Washington Avenue.
To Jefferson, what is important about the murals is not only that they brighten up the cityscape but that they reflect and spring from the community in which they are located. “A lot of the murals can be looked at as pillars of social change and the fight that we’ve been in for racial justice and racial equity,” she said.
In the midst of the protests after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, the message that Black Lives Matter appeared on Bassett Street and Temple Street. “It’s just becoming a reflection of the times that we’re in and almost a memorial of the times that we’re in,” Jefferson said. “Ultimately it evokes conversation.”
The murals also proclaim loudly that New Haven is home to a vibrant community of artists, including muralists Bloodworth, Candyce “Marsh” John, Kwadwo Adae, Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran, M.J. DeAngelo and others.
“It’s a means of therapy for a lot of artists to be able to express themselves during this unprecedented time,” Jefferson said. Several have been sponsored by Straight Up Art, a program of the Town Green Special Services District, which is accepting requests for qualifications for 2021 until Feb. 10.
The increase in murals is not just welcomed by the residents and business owners in the neighborhoods where they appear. “It does regenerate tourism. It does bring people here,” Jefferson said. “It intrigues other people … to come to New Haven.”
Perhaps most importantly is public art’s role in “placemaking,” Jefferson said. It’s vital that people are “seeing it as a reflection of what they want to see in their community,” she said. “You see artists working in tandem to decide what art they want to make or see in their own community.”
Luis Chavez-Brumell, deputy director of the Wilson Branch Library, said the idea for a mural was born partly out of a desire to connect with the young people in the neighborhood who have been unable to come into the library during the pandemic.
“We are an institution that is about cultural equity,” he said. “Our job is to make resources available to people.” Once the library reopens, there is a plan to bring in a cloth mural from the Yale Center for British Art to add to one created by children and overseen by artist Victoria Martinez. Bloodworth is a New Haven native whose work with murals goes back about 10 years when as a student at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School he helped paint a mural on the buildings across the street. It has since been replaced.
His character Black Kid Joy, whom Bloodworth created as a puppetry student at the University of Connecticut, is a colorful, joyous symbol of Black youth, somewhat inspired by Tamar Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was fatally shot by police when he was carrying a toy gun in Cleveland in 2012. Joy can be seen surfing in three windows behind the Amistad memorial outside City Hall.
Bloodworth said his idea for the laundry wall is “having Joy jump out of [a] book on paper airplane pages from the book. … I’m kind of exploring this idea of what does it mean to be a Black kid without any ‘isms.’”
He said he and his girlfriend, Joy Meikle, have been talking about how, “back in the day, mural work was really graffiti work to give a message to the unheard. … I see mural work as a form of graffiti; it’s just accepted graffiti.”
Bloodworth said the mural “brings positivity, it can bring community engagement, it can bring conversation.” But he doesn’t see his work as limited to the community it represents.
“If I as a Black person was to go into a neighborhood that wasn’t predominantly Black and was to do a mural, the image I would decide to put up could spark a lot of conversation that may have been hidden,” he said. “It can be a first step of having an anti-racist community to have that conversation.”