Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | West Haven | ArtsWest CT
Zaneta and Aaron Nicholson.
Siblings Zaneta and Aaron Nicholson walked down a long hallway just off West Haven’s Main Street, pausing to take in the artwork. Inside one frame, Kelvia Mitri-Meda danced at the water’s edge, her red skirts flapping behind her as her arms flew out to her side. In another, a young man looked out directly at the viewer, his eyes soft and understanding beside the words Every Heart Has a Story To Tell. Beside it, nine couples kissed passionately, each enclosed in their own vignette.
The artworks, which comprise the exhibition Creative Economies, are a warm welcome to the new brick-and-mortar home of ArtsWestCT and Umbrella Impact, both women-run nonprofits that are sharing the lease on a 425 square foot, two-room office space at 377 Main St. in West Haven. Helmed by Elinor Slomba and Nasiyra Clayton respectively, the organizations seek to build community in the city, one through arts and culture and the other through youth empowerment and financial literacy.
After announcing the space on Make Music Day earlier this year, the two officially cut a ribbon behind the building Tuesday afternoon. Outgoing Mayor Nancy Rossi, as well as several elected West Haven city officials and close to two dozen artists attended.
“It’s fantastic,” said ArtsWestCT President Elinor Slomba, whose quest for a permanent space is now several years in the making. Already, she and Clayton have heard from creative entrepreneurs, vendors, and artists who want to use the space for rehearsals, pop-ups, and meetings. “This feels like a win-win.”
Nasiyra Clayton and Elinor Slomba.
The organizations, which are co-leasing the office for two years, arrived at 377 Main St. through a shared need for a home, and a struggle to find it. For well over a year, Slomba worked with both state and local legislators on a plan for an arts center at the old Masonic Lodge at 304 Center St., only to watch it stripped of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding and put on hold at a City Council meeting earlier this year. That put her back at square one.
Clayton, meanwhile, has long wanted a space to expand Umbrella Impact’s mission, but wasn’t sure where that might be. After starting her work out of the Christian Love Center and Barnard Environmental Science & Technology School in New Haven, she started thinking about how to open the program up to more youth. Then she met Slomba, who asked if she had ever considered West Haven. The longer the two talked, the more sharing a location made sense.
“Elinor has always been there,” Clayton said. She added that it’s a sort of homecoming: she grew up in Harlem and for years worked in New Haven, but has lived in West Haven for 18 years, close to Slomba’s 20. “She’s like my mentor—it’s more than just a partnership. It’s a friendship and a trust.”
Creative Economies runs in the space through mid-November. Included are artists Kelvia Mitri-Meda, Day Alston, Corey Hudsonn, Ionnis, Raheem Nelson, Ellen Cochise Corso, Craig Gilbert, Elizabeth Earle Depiero, and Elaine Kolb.
Tuesday, several artists, friends, and supporters echoed that excitement as they came through the space, stepping gingerly around each other as they navigated the narrow hallway and two-room office. Nicholson, a tap dancer, theatermaker and educator who met Slomba in 2020, said she’s thrilled to see the space come to life—even if it isn’t what Slomba originally had in mind.
Before reaching the offices, she and her brother Aaron took their time beside a series of framed works from West Haven artists in the hallway, soaking it all in. She burst into a smile when she reached stills from Ellen Cochise Corso’s The Kissing Project, watching as couples smooched and canoodled across the page. Aaron, who likes to draw, said he’s equally glad to see the space open.
“It’s a space, and that’s what we were fighting for and looking for,” Zaneta said. “Just for now, we have a little home base.”
“It’s about the collaboration and the ability to meet artists,” chimed in Dabar Ratupenu, a longtime volunteer with ArtsWestCT who had appeared seemingly out of thin air behind Nicholson. He pointed to the upcoming mayoral election, in which Rossi is not seeking another term. “I just hope that whoever is in office next will help us to further this work and all these ideas [that ArtsWestCT has].”
Nelson, with his artwork.
Throughout the afternoon, Tuesday’s tone remained upbeat. There with Paige Miglio, executive director of the Milford Arts Council (MAC), artist and MAC Marketing Director Raheem Nelson buzzed through the building, pausing to take in the artworks, including one of his metal prints. After knowing Slomba for close to a decade—the two met at The Grove when it was still a coworking space in downtown New Haven—he said he was thrilled to hear about 377 Main St.
“I have a huge respect for Elinor,” he said Tuesday, standing beside a metal print of a Manhattan cocktail inspired by the Anchor Spa, and set against the twinkling lights of Central Park West. In one hand, he held a rock that Corso had painted in bands of prismatic color. “She has always been a champion of the arts, and I’m really happy to see this space open.
He added that he’s touched to have one of his artworks in the space. A year and a half ago, he and his wife, the artist, advocate and clinical social worker Rahisha Bivens, moved to West Haven to be close to the water. While Nelson grew up one town over in New Haven, he and Bivens love their adopted home, he said. He often goes to the beach to draw, or to unwind after a particularly stressful day. “It’s therapeutic,” he said.
Naeem Mills: It's about meeting other artists.
Nearby, Umbrella Impact’s Naeem Mills showed off a video he’d created for an upcoming collaboration between the West Haven Senior Center and Ora Mason Branch of the West Haven Public Library, opening to the public on October 2. As he pulled it up on his phone, fellow artists and content creators formed an impromptu huddle around him, murmurs of delight floating through the hallway as the video rolled. Every so often, a student trying to get to the driving school down the hall would careen past, taking note of the new artwork and animated chatter in their midst.
“For me, it’s beautiful to go to a place and meet different artists,” Mills said, praising both Slomba and Clayton for their work together. “Elinor, she really knows how to bring things together.”
Indeed, Slomba’s greatest gift may be convening artists themselves, and making them feel welcome in the space. Inside the office’s back room, strains of Elaine Kolb’s 1978 song “Let’s Get Together” rang out across the desks and carpet, drawing attendees around a table, into chairs, and back to corners where they could stand and sing along. By the time singers had reached a third chorus, there were enough people for a small choir.
On the table, a basket of candies sat like an invitation, their wrappers glimmering in the light. Beside them, a phalanx of squat water bottles, roll of blue-green ArtsWestCT stickers and large collection of multicolored yarn made the room feel homey and bright despite a basement location. While it’s intimate—Slomba has also made space for artist prints and a donated printer—Slomba and Clayton have made it work.
Elaine Kolb with a framed copy of "Let's Get Together," written in January 1978.
“This is a dream come true! And dreams really are essential,” Kolb said, wheeling out into the hallway where a framed copy of “Let’s Get Together” hung on the wall. “Things that I have been visioning for decades are finally happening.”
For Kolb, who met Slomba at “Poets Are Not A Luxury” last year, it feels momentous for both ArtsWestCT and for her as a poet, singer-songwriter, activist and longtime Westie. In 1992—following the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990—Kolb and her then-partner Patti Deak moved into West Haven’s John Prete Apartments, then the only ADA-accessible housing in the city.
For years, she’s dreamed about a cultural hub where artists, activists, thinkers and makers of all abilities and backgrounds are able to congregate and exchange ideas. In the absence of such a space, she’s often created them herself, rolling up to events from library talks to Memorial Day Parades to marches that unfold from West Haven to Hartford.
Three decades after moving to West Haven and over four after writing the song, “Let’s Get Together” still holds a very special place in her heart: it was the first song she wrote after sustaining a spinal cord injury in September 1977, the result of a violent stabbing that took place close to her home. To have it on display 45 years later gives her the chance to share it with a wider public.
“This song was such a gift,” she said, adding that the 30th of this month will mark her 46th “re-birthday.” At the time of her injury, Kolb spent months in the hospital, and returned to a home that seemed foreign, with 22 stairs she could barely fathom. “I had no idea how I was going to manage anything. This song was given to me as other songs are … coming to me and through me for everyone.”
“It’s been such a long time coming!” she added of both the song and the space to Slomba, wiping away tears that flowed freely. “So I guess my message to everyone is to dream big and be patient, because sometimes dreams come true.”
Following Tuesday’s ribbon cutting, Slomba said that ArtsWestCT has already heard from several older artists offering to volunteer and fundraise for the organization, as well as residents of the city’s West Shore neighborhood, a disabled artist looking for accessible space, and a cello choir “looking for a home for rehearsals.” Sometimes, she said, the demand seems so high that she worries that ArtsWestCT has already outgrown its new space.
And yet, she’s trying to focus on what she can do with what she has. Most immediately, she said, next steps include weekly meetings with Clayton, recruiting young and teenage volunteers that become regulars in the space, and centering the work of “younger, emerging leaders and artists who can benefit from the networks that have been built up over the years.”
“I am very proud of Elinor and all that she has accomplished,” Rossi said on her way out of the building, adding that she hopes to see the city assist ArtsWestCT in the weeks, months and years to come. “No project gets off the ground without extremely hard work. Elinor is to be commended. She wasn’t going to give up, and I admire that.”