Lucy Gellman Photos. All artwork by members of FACE and the New Haven community.
It’s the tree, rendered in crayon beside a sturdy brick column, that first catches a viewer’s eye. Above the trunk, spindly but certain, a canopy of leaves stretches out in lush greens and blues. At the top, where vegetation reaches toward the clouds, the words See me / Greet me sprawl across the paper in burnt orange. Back at the roots, a shock of turquoise meets the tangle of brown, yellow and red that plants itself firmly in the New Haven soil.
On all sides, a spray of white notecards goes in every which direction, each printed with a handful of words. We are all stronger together!! reads one. Greet people with LOVE and RESPECT, reads another with blue and red crayon that glows from the paper. One is simply a heart, emblazoned with the pink, blue and white of the Trans Pride flag.
The mural is one of several now vibrantly on display at New Haven City Hall, thanks to a collaboration between the community group Focus Act Connect Every-day (FACE) and the city’s Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism. Installed in the wide, first-floor atrium of 165 Church St., the exhibition both showcases the growth of FACE, an arm of the Citizens Community Collaborative (CCC) that turns 10 this year, and honors Mental Health Awareness Month, which since 1949 has taken place annually in May.
The exhibition, titled We Are All Beautiful: Reflections of our Community, runs through May 29. It is the second annual exhibition of its kind at City Hall: the first, called Healing Through Art, took place in May of last year. Read about that here.
“At first, it [FACE] was to bring neighbors together,” said Mark Griffin, one of the founding members of FACE and a lifelong artist who has called New Haven home for 32 years. “To say good morning to each other, to say hi … Art, you know, gives people a chance to express how they feel about themselves and show that inner piece of themselves.”
Top: Billy Bromage, director of community organizing in the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and the Connecticut Mental Health Center, and a founding member of FACE, reads the group's mission statement. "We are by the people for the people. We are community members with a variety of experiences. Like everyone, we are all in recovery from something. Some of us are also artists, activists, and recovery supporters. We are all family members and friends," part of it reads.
It’s a story that has been many years, and just as many artworks, in the making. In 2015, Griffin and other members of the CCC—an initiative of the Yale Program for Recovery & Community Health (PRCH)—began talking about new ways to engage members of the community, who seemed increasingly siloed and equally overwhelmed by the world. At the time, “New Haven was on a downslide,” Griffin remembered: the state was struggling with a spike in deadly overdoses that left communities devastated.
New Haven was no exception: substance use disorder felt omnipresent. Resources were (and are) often surprisingly hard for people to access in a timely manner. Griffin was acutely aware of how few people simply paused to say hello to and check in with each other. “So we decided, we’re gonna get a mural up and see how people feel about their neighborhoods," he said.
Working with organizers from the West River Neighborhood Services Corporation—Griffin had high praise for longtime West River champions Stacy and Virginia Spell, as well as neighborhood boosters Frank and Paula Panzarella and Ann Greene—FACE members attended the 11th annual West River International Day of Peace Festival, setting out art supplies, index cards and lengths of blank paper for community members to weigh in on.
They did, in spades: dozens of people added their thoughts about the neighborhood, from three- or four-word phrases to whole sentences. In the completed 2016 piece, which is still pristine a decade later, words and phrases are accompanied by a drawing in marker or crayon; others stand completely alone, thoughts bobbing in this shared space and time.
In one, for instance, someone has scribbled “Human is being whole,” a sentence that a person can feel somewhere in their ribcage. In another, written in black pen, the well-loved maxim “They tried to bury us … they didn’t know we were seeds” appears amongst bright flowers and delicate, emerald-colored tendrils that weave in and out of the words. Some people opted to draw directly on the paper: a perfect rainbow extends over an orange-and-red tulip, a block of text about self-worth and positivity written neatly in cursive in between. There are no names attached to the images, giving the project a sense of simply belonging to New Haven.
Bridgett Williamson, Shannon Smith and Tammy Imre.
After that first iteration in the city’s West River neighborhood, FACE’s footprint continued to grow, with a steady and creative presence at neighborhood festivals in Dwight, Dixwell, Fair Haven and the Hill, as well as at the Q House’s now-annual Mental Health Awareness Fair. Often, members of the group brought blank paper, artmaking supplies like crayons, pencils, and markers, and an openness to talking about the work they do.
It always comes back to the idea that “like everyone, we are all in recovery from something,” according to a mission statement co-written by members of the group. “Some of us are also artists, activists, and recovery supporters. We are all family members and friends.”
For years, all of FACE's public art lived with Billy Bromage, the director of community organizing in the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH) and the Connecticut Mental Health Center (Bromage, who is a founding member of FACE, joked Tuesday that it helps that his wife is a former archivist, meaning that it was important to him to keep the pieces pristine). Then in 2023, FACE’s work expanded to more permanent public art on Grand Avenue, with “Las Flores De Esperanza,” a bright, explosively joyful mural of flowers from artist Kwadwo Adae, Yale PCRH, and and New Haven’s Department of Community Resilience. Members of FACE were integral to that process: Adae spoke to many of them about what mental health meant to them on a personal and a community level.
Fellow FACE member Tammy Imre, who is also a Witness To Hunger and member of the theater troupe Survivors of Society Rising, noted that FACE is not just collaborative when members are doing community-facing work: the group meets twice a month, at locations that have jumped around from the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) and Fellowship Place to Book Trader and now Panera Bread. After learning about the group through the CCC, Imre joined in 2018.
“It’s like a second home,” chimed in FACE member Shannon Smith, who recently graduated from the Drug & Alcohol Recovery Counselor (DARC) program at CT State Gateway (formerly Gateway Community College). Smith grew up in New Haven, close to St. Rafael’s Hospital in the city’s Dwight neighborhood. Several years ago, she had her own battle with substance use disorder, from which she is now in recovery. She explained that she sees FACE as a way to both connect with the community and help others who may also be struggling.
“If you’re having a hard time, we stop the meeting to talk about it,” she said. “We say, ‘We give hand ups, not hand outs.’ And if someone’s celebrating something, we all celebrate.”
Around her and Imre, murals from across a decade of work beckoned. One, dated to September 2018—the United Nations designated September 21 as the International Day of Peace in 1981—asked What Can You Do To Show Respect and Live In Peace? in thick, bubbly blue letters. Beneath it, red and blue fruit hung from the wide, bright branches of a tree. A peace sign floated through the lower register. Phrases danced around it: Pray for your enemies. God Is Good / All the Time. Plant A Tree.
Across the atrium, a patchwork of drawing and collage leaned against an easel, asking people to come closer. By the lower righthand corner, where a woman’s face bobbed in the center of a webbed dreamcatcher, the words Kindness, Community and Peace floated beside the acronym for FACE, the words spelled out in multicolor crayon.
As she soaked it all in, founding FACE member Bridgett Williamson savored the moment. Williamson has loved the arts for as long as she can remember, including as a kid growing up in the Ashmun Street projects. For years, she was a student in Dixwell UCC’s Creative Arts Center, where she studied piano and cello. “And I can paint my ass off,” she quipped with a warm, gentle smile that instantly made her feel like family.
“It [FACE] was a place where I could drop some of what I was carrying,” she later added during a short speaking program. She knows that across the city, so many residents are still holding those unbearably heavy burdens. “As I rise, I’m bringing them [others] with me.”
During their remarks, multiple attendees echoed that enthusiasm and deep belief in FACE’s work. Nancy Navarretta, commissioner for the state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DHMAS), pointed to the group’s 10-year anniversary as a significant milestone, during which members have focused on lifting people up, “turning pain into purpose,” and building a framework with empathy at the center.
“You have built a space where people feel like they truly belong,” she said.
Dr. Chyrell D. Bellamy, a professor of psychiatry and the director of PRCH, looked to the poet Maya Angelou, who spoke and wrote passionately about the appearance of rainbows in the clouds as metaphor for the kindnesses humans show to one another. The idea, Angelou explained in a 2011 interview, is that even in the darkest and stormiest of times, there are vivid rainbows, in the form of our shared humanity.
“When I go to teach my classes, when I go to direct a movie, I bring everyone who has ever been kind to me with me,” Angelou said during that interview. “Black, white, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American, gay, straight, everybody. I say, ‘Come with me. I’m going on the stage. Come with me, I need you now.’”
Back in City Hall, Bellamy felt that message. “When I see all these words, it reminds me of Maya’s rainbows,” she said.
As she buzzed around, greeting attendees and checking in with fellow members of the group, Imre took a moment to take in the work, grateful for the eight years she’s spent with FACE. A decade in—and in a time that can feel extremely divisive and hopeless—she sees the work that members do as more critical than ever.
“FACE is family to me,” she said.