Adae Fine Art Rings In 20 Joyful Years

Artist and educator Kwadwo Adae in his studio on State Street in September. Lucy Gellman Photo.

Stepping into Kwadwo Adae’s studio off State Street, the first thing a person notices is the light. It streams through the street-facing windows, scatters across the floor and stretches all the way to a back room up a few stairs. Around the space, the scent of paint lingers in the air. Brushes and books line the shelves. Often, music filters through the rooms, soft and meditative.

Paint-streaked tables, open sketch books and canvases decorate the space. Beside a doorway, six bodies dance euphorically, in a riot of purples and blues. If a person leans in close enough, they can almost hear the music that inspired it. 

That space belongs to the artist and educator Kwadwo Adae, who this fall is celebrating 20 joyful years of teaching in New Haven, and six at his airy, bright space at 840 State St. Five years after almost losing his brick-and-mortar school during Covid-19, he’s reflecting on two decades of artmaking in the Elm City, and the relationships he’s built in the process. During that time, he’s taught hundreds of students, with a self-directed approach that is largely unique to his studio. 

“I've learned a lot about failure and how important it is to continue to grow with it,” he said. “I've learned about persistence and I've also learned how gentle you have to be with yourself and in touch you have to be with things.”

Adae painting in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven in 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photo.

Adae first fell in love with art as a kid, during a childhood in New York, and later in New Haven (he moved to Connecticut with his family when he was eight). Because his mom worked for Xerox selling copy machines, there was always extra copier paper lying around the house. At first, his dedication to art was just a series of doodles on the blank spaces of his homework and school exams. 

Then, at age seven, he enrolled in formal classes in Monroe, taking lessons under artist Bill Carney for the first time.

Those lessons, which happened like clockwork each Saturday, unlocked something within him. It wasn’t just about creating art, he remembered: it was Carney’s whole approach. Each week, students were given the freedom to choose from a variety of media and fully engage in creative expression. 

It was like a lightbulb going off. Adae quickly found that making art gave him a way to make sense of feelings, thoughts, and the world around him.

As he got older, Adae’s desire to pursue artistry grew, but his parents encouraged him to study subjects they considered more practical. Adae heeded their advice: he double majored in public health and Asian history at the University of Rochester while making art on the side. After college, he worked as a customer service representative for a health insurance company.

It didn’t stick: Adae found that he wasn’t truly happy unless he was also creating artwork. He tried out a number of different jobs, from the culinary arts to construction and retail, including, in a pet store. None of them made him feel satisfied. He knew that he had to find a way to balance the need to make a living and the joy of making art. 

Adae starts work on his Women's Empowerment Mural in 2018. Lucy Gellman File Photo. 

After putting himself through graduate school at New York University in the early 2000s—while he was also learning how to be a dad to two young sons—Adae founded his own art school in New Haven in 2005. 

Initially, the space was a second-floor walk up on 817 Chapel St. in the heart of downtown, where artists all seemed to find each other at just the right moment. Alisa’s House of Salsa was just down the hall, and Adae would take dance breaks during quiet classes or down time. Then the yoga studio Breathing Room moved in, and Adae learned about practices like yoga, meditation and sound baths that he later helped lead at One Village Healing. 

During his time there, he also saw many tenants come and go: there was Hope Gallery Tattoo, Love 146, a pizza restaurant, and a hair braiding studio, as well as the beloved shop Artist & Craftsman. Overall, “it was wonderful,” he remembered.    

Meanwhile, Adae also dipped a toe—more aptly, a paintbrush, or many—into public art in New Haven. He enlivened the walls of Marjolaine's Pastry Shop, the old B-Natural Cafe on Sherman Alley, the short-lived 9th Note jazz club, and for the first time in 2016, outdoors on the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail. He traveled with his art, from the Himalayas to Banos de Agua Santa, Ecuador. 

“No matter where you go around the world a language is always being spoken visually,” he said.

Adae's sparrows, which adorn the side of a market on Dixwell Avenue and Division Street. 

He also used his work as a way to speak about social justice, including in a larger-than-life 2018 piece about women’s empowerment that brought him back to the Farmington Canal, and onto the New Haven/Hamden town line. He kept teaching, too, in senior centers and studio classes that sometimes brought back students year after year. 

Then in 2019, he moved to State Street. Outside of his classes, Adae was still doing public art, including a mural dedicated to victims and survivors of gun violence just off Dixwell Avenue. He dedicated himself to his students, with no idea of the public health crisis that was on the horizon. He kept painting, with a sense of heart and vibrancy that still stuns many New Haveners years later. 

When Covid-19 hit New Haven in 2o2o—less than a full year into renting the studio on State Street—Adae had to stop teaching in person, both at his school and in the memory care unit at an assisted living facility where he works (because of the lives lost there, he said, it has been too painful to return). To make rent each month, he began selling his paintings, surprised by the community’s generosity.

What keeps him teaching, he said, is his unwavering belief that creativity is something everyone has; he’s simply there to help people unlock it. He finds joy in watching others discover what they're capable of and he feels that teaching gives him a sense of purpose.

Jasmine Calhoun, now 28, has been taking his classes for 15 years. Calhoun described Adae as “someone who just meets you where you’re at” and “the most understanding person that you’ll ever meet.” 

Students Edith Roundy and Arthur Aiken with Jinx, a studio cat, in 2019. Lucy Gellman File Photo. 

He makes art for everybody,” she said. When Calhoun started making art as a young adult, Adae was there to cheer her on, with advice like “don’t draw what you think, draw what you see.” Fifteen years later, she has followed that in her own creative career, which led to the founding of Blue Screen Designs LLC  earlier this year. 

While Adae is now more of a peer, she still considers him an inspiration and mentor.   

“I take the things that he says for general art and life advice,” she said.

That’s an approach Adae is still wholeheartedly dedicated to. As Covid-19 entered a new phase in 2021, he was able to reopen his studio and start teaching in person classes, which he holds on Monday mornings, Thursday nights and Saturday from the morning into the afternoon. 

He was also able to return to public art in New Haven, including an homage to Dr. Edward Bouchet at Henry Street and Dixwell Avenue, and a soaring wall of orchids on Sylvan Avenue, where the Hillside Family Shelter provides essential support and services to families fleeing domestic violence. 

Just as in the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, he created room for the community to join him, from Dixwell to the Hill to Fair Haven. He also branched out, with his first solo show at the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT) in the summer of 2022. 

Adae's mural celebrating queer icons at Elm City Montessori School. Lucy Gellman File Photo.

In recent years, he has also worked with several of the city’s schools to push back against gun violence, spread mental health awareness, and celebrate both nature and LGBTQ+ icons when both are under increasing threat on a national level.

Close to Elm City Montessori School, where multiple murals grace the walls, a new piece of his also pays tribute to Major Robert Allen Jr., a second baseman and son of New Haven who played for the Negro League's Brooklyn Royal Giants, Lincoln Giants, and Baltimore Black Sox in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

“I’ve been concentrating my efforts on the communities in New Haven that have been hard,” he said. “I try putting murals in Dixwell, Fair Haven, and just the places that just don't have a lot of wealth." 

On a recent Saturday, Adae personified that love for New Haven, buzzing between two students and the plants that he lovingly cares for in his studio. Outside, he pointed to a spot where the Urban Resources Initiative plans to plant a tree in celebration of his anniversary, the eighth sapling that he has requested and nurtured alongside his art. 

Carina Chock. 

In a seat by the light-flooded windows, Amity Regional High School senior Carina Chock looked from her phone to the easel and back again, studying a photo of her friends getting ready for junior prom night. In the image, five friends have formed a lopsided semicircle, a chain of care that seems to be studded with laughter and grace. 

One extends her hands, separating out the smooth plaits that will make a braid. Another applies her friend’s eye shadow. Another lifts her palms, ready to get to work. Chock remembered the moment the photo captured, as the five rushed to get to prom on time after a full day of school. 

Chock, who has been studying with Adae for four years, said she values the school’s focus on self-directed learning. Adae is always there if she needs help, Chock explained—but he never tells her what to depict, or that she’s doing something wrong. That positive reinforcement has helped her deepen her passion for the arts. 

“I’m not good with words, and doing art kind of helps with that,” she said as she worked quietly. 

A junior at Wilbur Cross High School, Jarelis Calderon is an alumna of the 2025 summer cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper. 

This year, YAJI advisors included Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and reporter and YAJI alum Abiba Biao. Lucy Gellman contributed reporting for this article.