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Gateway Students to Bring Art Across the Street

Kapp Singer | June 5th, 2024

Gateway Students to Bring Art Across the Street

Downtown  |  Public art  |  Arts, Culture & Community  |  Gateway Community College

IMG_7362Marisabel Sanchez sanding. Photos Kapp Singer.

Marisabel Sanchez inspected the surface of a large plywood panel. After finding even the smallest imperfection in the coat of white primer, she took a piece of sandpaper and carefully buffed out the blemish. Kylee Latta worked behind her, using a T-square and scale ruler to pencil a geometric design onto the surface of the board.
 
Over the course of the next month, students in Peter Bonadies and Vladimir Shpitalnik’s mural class at Gateway Community College will transform the blank panels into two vibrant mixed-media collages. When the works are complete, they will mount the pieces at the base of 101 College St., a new $250 million, 10-story life sciences laboratory and office building in Downtown Crossing with tenants such as the pharmaceutical companies Alexion (a subsidiary of AstraZeneca) and Arvinas.
 
“I want to make an impact on the community to bring more art into New Haven,” said Sanchez, who is studying art therapy at Gateway and plans to continue as a master’s student at Albertus Magnus College. She said that she hopes the project sets a precedent for other companies moving into new buildings in the city. “Instead of buying art, they can contact local community colleges, high schools, or New Haven artists,” she said. “That can be a normal thing.”

IMG_7412The class.

The idea for the project emerged two years ago, when Bonadies watched from the window of Gateway’s third-floor art studios as towering steel and glass buildings rose up along College Street. He remembers one student in particular saying that she felt no connection to these new developments, and that the city no longer felt familiar.
 
“I said ‘well what if we make artwork for these buildings?’” he recalled. “She said ‘that would help.’”
 
Bonadies reached out to Elkus Manfredi Architects, the firm who designed the building, inquiring about whether he and his students could contribute a mural. He was soon connected with Carter Winstanley, a principal at the commercial real estate firm Winstanley Enterprises, the developer of 101 College.

“From my standpoint, I’ve always been excited about these public art projects,” Winstanley said. “It was a natural fit with Peter [Bonadies] and Gateway, in part because they’re a great part of the community, and in part because they’ve been sitting and staring at the building during its construction.” 

As part of the collaboration, Winstanley Enterprises agreed to sponsor the tuition of the class. It will also provide a stipend for students to make up for wages forgone to take the class—the details of this deal are still being finalized.
 
Bonadies and Shpitalnik’s design for the murals, which they began 16 months ago, echoes the architectural elements of the building. Each will feature a lattice of thick, ochre frames that represent the structural elements of the façade. Inside the frames will be painted or collaged elements invoking imagery of science or technology, as if a viewer were looking through the windows of 101 College into the labs inside.

IMG_7318Shpitalnik with a mockup of the design.
 
Last week, students were disassembling old computers and sorting green motherboards, blue cooling fans, and gray cases into neat piles. They plan to use the parts to create sections of the mural that will gesture towards the importance of computing in biotechnological advancements. Other parts of the final work will feature old lab equipment like test tubes and pipettes.
 
For Bonadies, the project is also personal, and stretches across generations. In the 1960s, during urban renewal, his father Tony Bonadies watched as mayor Richard Lee bulldozed through downtown to build the Oak Street Connector. Tony, also an artist and art professor, made paintings of the carnage.
 
“This is a city he grew up in and they destroyed everything,” Bonadies said, gazing out the window of the studio at the thoroughfare Lee built. “There was this highway to nowhere that was just a scar on the city.”

IMG_7393Peter Bonadies looks out at the future location of the murals.

At the same time, in what almost seems prophetic, Tony was also making paintings of DNA, inspired by the discovery of the double helix in the 1950s and the unraveling of the genetic code in the 1960s.
 
For Bonadies, the project braids these two strands of history together. Along with providing office space for New Haven’s growing biotech industry, 101 College is one of several projects in the larger Downtown Crossing plan that brings some new pedestrian infrastructure and public space to the car-dominated landscape (though reckless driving has remained a problem). The building features a public plaza on its eastern side and contains a STEM classroom that will be used by area high schools.
 
“He’s redeveloping this and stitching the city together,” Bonadies said of Winstanley.
 
The students in the class said that they hope the murals bring a sense of wonder and playfulness to the austere labs in the building.
 
“I’m excited to inspire the medical professionals who will see this every day and give them a pep in their step,” said Liz Krogh.
 
“To be able to be a part of something that’s going to encourage and uplift and beautify a space is really beautiful,” added Angelica Mandumbwa.

IMG_7333Krogh (left) and Mandumbwa (right) disassemble a computer.
 
And for Bonadies, this goal hits even closer to home. Less than a month after proposing the project, his son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease for which Alexion makes the only FDA-approved treatment.
 
“In a good society, art and science are supposed to be married,” said Bonadies. “And when they’re married and they’re symbiotic, that’s when progress happens.”