Lucy Gellman Photos.
Just off Whalley Avenue, the burst of color catches a viewer off guard. Ducks swim and dive across a two-dimensional pond, bobbing in a spray of squiggly white ripples. Trees spread their round, impressionistic leaves; a pink gull appears overhead. In the lower right, three plants burst into bloom, as whimsical as Dr. Seuss’ Truffula trees. It feels like a glorious spring Sunday in Edgewood Park, but frozen in time.
So unfolds “In The Wild Places,” a new mural from artist Ana Henriques that marks the 24th installation at EastWall WestVille at 12-16 Fountain St. A love song to both the neighborhood and to Edgewood Park, it marks the first large-scale piece of public art that Henriques, an illustrator and art teacher at Cheshire Academy, has completed. As it comes to the corner of Whalley Avenue and Fountain Street, it has delighted neighbors, many of whom see the park as a sacred and beloved space.
“It’s [Edgewood Park] just been a real treasure for us,” Henriques said on a recent Tuesday afternoon, as sun drenched the mural and cars trundled by in end-of-day rush hour traffic. “I think that nature provides a lot of respite from things.”
“It's been a great project,” said Eric Epstein, who owns the Fountain Street property and started EastWall WestVille in May 2010 after seeing Candy Chang’s “Before I Die” project in New Orleans. “I have no deadlines. Everybody who participates understands that everything is temporary. It's very loose, and it continues to interest me 14 years after it began.”
For Henriques, the mural has been years in the making. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, the artist has been creative for as long as she can remember, but hadn’t tried her hand at a public installation until earlier this year. As a kid, she spent hours drawing on discarded notepads and calendars that her parents, both Portuguese immigrants, brought home from their work running a cleaning business.
She loved color animation, which bloomed into an interest in illustration. As a student at York University, she immersed herself in the visual arts and also worked on large-scale pieces, building sets for a local theater. By the time she graduated, she was ready to take on a career as an arts educator, which she did in both Canada and the United Kingdom before moving to the United States a almost exactly decade ago.
But after moving to New Haven in November 2014—her husband and high school sweetheart, Nathan Flis, had a position with the Yale Center for British Art—Henriques’ career screeched to a temporary halt. Her son was just a year and a half old, and she was pregnant with their daughter. As an immigrant, she didn’t have authorization to work right away. From where she lived on the upper end of West Rock Avenue, the park became her refuge.
“For us, going was a sort of pilgrimage,” she remembered of her family (it does not hurt that Henriques, who exudes an energy that is as bright and gentle as her quirky illustrations, is also a deep lover of animals). In an artist’s statement, she adds: “I took for granted at the time—hindsight is what it is—how important the park would be for me and would be for us as a family.”
During the following five years as a stay at home mom, she spent hours there, making long-distance friends with the herons, egrets, crabs and deer that populate the park (there is also an otter that Fils and others have spotted, she said, but she’s not yet seen it). She discovered the park’s most magical spaces, like an Edgewood Avenue lookout from which a person can see the trees unfold below.
She found and fell in love with “Nature Pals,” a kids’ program that Westvillian Holly Jermyn ran out of the park’s ranger station on weekends for years. She learned that stillness, however momentary, would reward her with the sight of deer and sound of frogs who made the park their home.
Meanwhile, she made Westville her official business. In 2019, Henriques became the program coordinator for the ArtEcon Initiative, dedicated to multimedia arts programming and collaboration in the neighborhood. The following year, she started teaching again, in a string of jobs that ultimately led to Cheshire Academy in 2022.
When Covid-19 hit New Haven in March of 2020, sending the city into lockdown, she used the time to sketch Westville’s natural landscape, from the birch trees and pileated woodpeckers on her street to the park’s knotted and soaring trees and beloved duck pond.
But she never thought about what a mural might look like, she said—even as she admired a number of new ones popping up around the city (she is particularly enamored of one by Lindaluz Carrillo that appeared in Pitkin Plaza, outside of Strange Ways, last year). Until, that is, she met Epstein last fall to talk about his work on something called the Fandex. At the end of their conversation, he mentioned casually that he was always taking proposals for EastWall Westville.
She thought immediately of her love for Edgewood Park, a place that made New Haven feel like home. She submitted sketches and ideas, then followed up with a small painting in May of this year. As summer heat rolled through New Haven, she got to work, painting the work on a series of wood panels in her driveway. Epstein, who uses a hanging support system of wood beams and metal runners, helped her install it in August.
“This mural is an homage to Edgewood Park, to life in the park and to all of us humans trying hard to be human with the hope that we find peace within ourselves (maybe in the wild spaces?) and peace with each other,” she writes in an accompanying statement.
Epstein, who estimated that he’s been in Edgewood Park “14,000 times” since moving to the city in 1986, had high praise for both Henriques’ work and for the neighborhood that has embraced it. Over three decades after moving to New Haven, he and his wife, former City Plan Chief Karyn Gilvarg, bought 12-16 Fountain St. in 2008.
At the time, it was abandoned, with no heating system and an imposing metal grate that came down in the front. On the side of the building, there was a sign advertising a cigar lounge that remained there for several years. Renovations took nine months—and made Epstein realize that the side of the building was something of a blank canvas.
Less than two years later, the first iterations of EastWall Westville bloomed into being with a mural from West Rock Avenue resident (and artist, set designer and snow sculptor) David Sepulveda. Epstein called it part of a larger neighborhood transformation that also included Arts Lofts West (ArLow) and Kehler Liddell Gallery, and later Lotta Studio and West River Arts.
The wall has since shown work by Tony Kolsloski, Caryn Azoff, Luke and Mistina Hanscom, Susan McCaslin, John Fallon, Alex Testere and Epstein himself among others. Westville, in turn, has become a core part of who Epstein is.
“I think it’s a collection of wonderful, weird, funny, fun, people,” he said. “This is like a tiny archipelago and that's how I want to be in life.”
Lizzy Donius, executive director of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA), also lauded Henriques' work—and the beloved greenspace to which it pays homage. For the past 14 years, she’s delighted in watching new works go up on the wall. Her favorites include “Welcome to Whackville,” a 2016 installation that became a fixture during that year’s Westville ArtWalk.
“That wall is a steady, lovely, ever-changing presence here,” she said. “It's always really wonderful when something new goes up. I love the surprise.”