Culture & Community | Painting | Arts & Culture | Yale University Art Gallery | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative
Dionte and Jada. Kiara Guevara-Cragwell Photos.
A Black family gathers together on the top middle floor of a fire escape. A mother covered in a light blue dusted jumpsuit, holding her blue-clad baby against the railing, faces away from the woman to the right. She peers over the railing on her tippy toes in her mustard yellow heels. They’re all facing opposite directions from each other, but they are sharing a space that holds them close.
For New Havener Dionte, it’s a work of art that speaks directly to the diversity of the Elm City—and why he loves working at the Yale University Art Gallery, or YUAG.
Dionte, who declined to give his last name, is a guard at YUAG, where he’s worked among sweeping Renaissance masterpieces, ornate Dutch still lives, painstakingly preserved sculptures and modern and contemporary art for a year. In that time, he’s begun to gravitate toward works like Martin Wong’s La Vida, which feels like a reflection of New Haven even though it’s set on the Lower East Side of New York.
“I like working here because of the people that come here,” he said during a recent interview at the gallery, as this reporter walked from room to room surrounded by artwork. “The people here are very cool … I say that it’s a mix of people here, with all cultures, so I kind of appreciate that.”
In pieces like Wong’s La Vida, painted in 1988, those words come to life. At the time, Wong lived on New York’s Lower East Side, in a vibrant and polyphonic, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood that was filled with talented (and like him at the time, relatively poor) artists. His work is a singing homage to a neighborhood’s strength and diversity: it freezes a moment in time, asking viewers to witness the magic and brightness and struggle of the space with a full breadth of feeling.
In the painting, the relationship between characters creates a sense of being home. Take, for instance, the couple playing together on the second floor, where the bubble gum pink of a women’s shirt echoes her smile, capturing a moment of bliss that she shares with her partner. Or the mother with her child, so full of life as she maneuvers her body around the fire escape.
“There’s somebody famous in there. Mr. T., he’s like an old celebrity, and he’s in the painting, so that’s one of the main reasons [I like it],” Dionte said.
In fact, there are many notable figures from a specific moment in time: Wong included the likenesses of not only neighbors, but also graffiti artists, Black truth-teller Amiri Baraka and Wong’s own partner, the late Miguel Piñero, who died the same year that the painting was completed.
In the finished work, Piñero—who was just 41 years old when he passed—appears in triplicate, like a memory that won’t leave Wong alone. Wong himself passed away 11 years later in 1999.
Dionte now thinks of the piece as part of coming full circle at YUAG. After visiting the gallery as a guest with one of his friends, he looked around at the security guards and figured he could do their job.
“I’ve seen some cool things and that was intriguing at the time,”he said. While he isn’t an artist, Dionte said he enjoys admiring art, and working at the art gallery has given him more appreciation of the craft.
On a recent Tuesday, that was true for this reporter. When a person walks through the gallery, it’s not just an exercise in looking at the paintings, sculptures, and multi-media pieces that fill the walls. It’s as much about the people, who all gather to look at and interpret works of art. People stop in front of paintings to soak in the art, as if the art is their entire world.
And for that moment, it is.
They look at each painting as if they turn away for just a second, it might disappear. They talk softly to each other to not disrupt the tranquility of the gallery.
Jada, another security guard at the Yale Art Gallery, had a different connection to the works on display, particularly those that are hundreds of years old. Jada has been working at the gallery for almost a year, but still continues to be fascinated by each floor she works on, she said. She said she enjoys discovering something new every time she’s at work, no matter what floor she is on.
“My artistic path is acting and writing. So just being here, and being around the different people and different experiences, it helps me with my writing,” she said.
Jada said she is especially drawn to two paintings at the gallery, an 1875 portrait of Commodore Edward Tyng in oil that bears his name, and Emil Holm’s 1861 View of Palermo and the Monte Pellegrino from the Monastery of Santa Maria di Gesu.
“It’s just very realistic,” she said. In the gallery, the level of detail in the work often makes visitors come to a halt. The greens don’t overpower the browns, but make each other stand out in a way that makes people appreciate the two colors. The three men standing to the center right of this painting wear long brown cloaks, and look as if they are locals of the scene.
“The detail behind it is just incredible to me. So now it’s kind of my favorite piece of the entire gallery.”
This article comes from an alum of the ninth (and most recent) cohort of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). Kiara Guevara-Cragwell is a recent graduate of Branford High School and is in her freshman year at the University of Connecticut.