Arts & Culture | Visual Arts | Public Health | Elicker Administration
Lynda Stannard’s painting “Lids Closed." Lucy Gellman Photos; all work by ArtShip artists.
The figure tilts her head to the side, eyes closed. Her lids are relaxed, brow unfurrowed. It seems like she’s been crying: thick smudges of paint, rendered the same blue as her eyelids, drip down each cheek. Beneath them, her mouth hangs open, her lips the color of lavender. From her face, painted a delicate green, bands of red and blue spread out towards the edges, forming a starburst of color behind her head.
Lynda Stannard’s painting “Lids Closed” is part of Healing Through Art, an exhibition of artists in Fellowship Place’s ArtShip Program now running at City Hall in downtown New Haven. A collaboration between Fellowship Place and the City of New Haven, it both celebrates and brings attention to the fact that May is National Mental Health Awareness Month.
It runs through May 31 in the first-floor atrium of New Haven City Hall, 165 Church St. The ArtShip Program is a cooperative of artists who are also facing mental health issues. It is offered at no cost multiple days per week through Fellowship Place.
Marisabel Sanchez: A way to bring awareness to mental health in the community.
“At Fellowship, we don’t teach art—so all the artists are just really talented or self-taught, and are very good at drawing despite their mental illnesses.” said Marisabel Sanchez, expressive arts coordinator at Fellowship Place and a visual artist herself. “The exhibition seeks to break down stigma around mental health by sharing the voices and visions of those on a journey of healing.”
“Everyone in the world has struggled with some mental health issues,” added Lorena Mitchell, community mental health initiatives coordinator in the city’s Department of Community Resilience. The show is proof positive that “these challenges can be overcome.”
This year, the show grew out of a partnership between Sanchez and the Department of Community Resilience, which started its work under Mayor Justin Elicker in 2022. Several months ago, Mitchell reached out to Sanchez, interested in potential collaborations. To place the show at City Hall—in the civic heart of the city—felt right, and also gave it a built-in audience.
The result is nearly two dozen works of art, from ground-level views of foliage and book-worthy illustrations to tender, intimate portraits of artists with members of their families. In Do Walker’s “Convergence,” for instance, the artist pictures a field parting on either side of a river, the watery blues flowing forward. Above the water, the sky is the same bright turquoise, punctuated with streaks of purple that feel like summertime.
Work from Do Walker channels bright color and evokes a range of emotions.
Walker’s touch is gentle, impressionistic: he paints flowers dotting the grass, dirt walking paths, deep red and pinks rising in the distance. In the foreground, dark objects dot the water, inviting a person in for a closer look. These patterns feel spontaneous and free-flowing, and it gives the viewer a chance to explore.
“[I] used an unusual technique and felt as though painting with spontaneity brings positive outcomes for my mental health,” Walker writes in an accompanying label.
It’s a way of close looking that extends to many of the pieces in the show. In a series of mixed-media pencil drawings, artist Sadeek Mustafah chronicles the beginning of his son’s life in the NICU, or the neonatal intensive care unit. Born three months premature, his son spent weeks in the NICU before ultimately coming home. Now “these particular pieces bring so much emotion to me,” Mustafah writes.
It’s easy to see why. In one image, Mustafah and his infant son both look out at the viewer, a clear bassinet, striped baby blanket and the wiring of a machine all unfolding behind them. A string of prayer beads flows from Mustafah’s neck into the foreground; he holds a tiny, matching bracelet beside his son. Both of them wear vivid colors: an eye-catching emerald green suit and skull cap for Mustafah and a sunflower-yellow pair of footed pajamas for his son.
In another, Mustafah’s son appears even smaller, with tubes snaking beneath his nose and around his little body. A large but careful hand, likely that of a healthcare professional, hovers over him; a finger reaches out and strokes his back. Mustafah is clearly interested in color and contrast: the baby lies on a bright blanket, while the tubing sparkles with glitter that Mustafah has sprinkled on.
Another ArtShip Program member, Jason Bayard, blends science fiction, illustration and earthly reality in his work “Remission.” In the piece, a marker-on-paper drawing, an alien-like being stands comfortably on top of the earth, while strumming a guitar that sends a red beam out into the universe. Given the title—which suggests that disease or illness is at bay—the beam may symbolize Bayard’s own thoughts or a form of communication to a powerful energy source.
“Top of the world,” Bayard writes in an accompanying label. “Even though I still feel like an alien in an alternate universe, with white space and dark stars, just like you squeezed through a wormhole, (because I missed out on ten or more years of my life due to mental illness).”
In exhibition labels that accompany their pieces, many of the participants write and speak openly about their works, and their struggles with mental illness. Stannard expresses her love for Fellowship Place, explaining that they’ve been a safe haven for her to recognize, articulate and address her own struggles and being around others who are also experiencing struggles with mental health.
“I close my eyes to what’s around me,” she explains in a label. “My external world is painful thus creating tremendous pain within my being. Inside myself is where I can hide with my eyes closed. Make it go away.”
That was also for artist Joanna Stewart, who has included multiple colored pencil drawings in the show and spoke about her work at a city press conference earlier this month. Explaining that she has struggled with mental health issues since 1989, when her older brother was killed and her father was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.
In the decades since, she struggled with her trauma largely alone—until finding Fellowship Place and the ArtShip Program in 2017. For eight years, she has found a sense of healing, value, and community in the program, she said. The practice of art, meanwhile, has helped her regulate her emotions, manage her anger, and find resolution.
“Each and every staff member has helped create a sense of belonging, acceptance, develop lasting, healthy and I believe lifelong friendships,” she said. “[They] also helped me to identify, process and express emotions I have not tapped into for years, decades even. Artship in itself has significantly increased my self-worth, my self-esteem, self … everything.”
“In some of my art, you may see darkness, you may see lightness,” she added. “Art is to be embraced. Whatever you may see, more importantly, helped me to feel.”
Mya DeBerry is the Arts Paper's 2025 New Haven Academy (NHA) intern. The New Haven Academy internship is a program for NHA juniors that pairs them with a professional in a field that is interesting to them. From now through the end of the month, look out for her byline! Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.