Eight-year-old Choupette Powell didn’t wake up expecting to win “best shag carpet impression” in all of Westville Village. But when he did, he had a camera-ready grin and short, slobbery speech prepared, complete with his favorite humans in tow.
Saturday, Powell joined hundreds of warm-blooded mammals at the 27th annual Westville ArtWalk, held across Edgewood Park, Fountain Street and West Rock Avenue. From a pet parade and rubber duckie race to a vendor market, the celebration highlighted the quirky and yarn-bombed neighborhood, lifting up dozens of its artists before the day was over. It marked the festival’s culminating event in a week-long lineup, including a neighborhood block party and festive annual fashion show.
“It feels crazy and wonderful,” said Lizzy Donius, executive director of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA) and the anchor of ArtWalk’s annual organizing committee. “It really is a neighborhood festival—we had designers in the fashion show who I remember as 5-year-olds. This year is really great because we spread everything out and have space [to celebrate].”
Top: John Johnson (a.k.a. Ryan Gardner) on the beat with WVRA. Bottom: The New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative performs.
Around her, the festival sprang into full bloom, attendees reveling in the just-crisp-enough weather and sun-soaked park. On a rarely-empty mainstage, members of the New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative (NHCCC; video at the bottom of this article) warmed up, filling every corner with their sound. As she stepped up to the mic, NHCCC President Lely Evans introduced the group, a still-fledgling ensemble that performs traditional Chinese and Tiwanese music in New Haven.
“It’s almost time for the beautiful music!” a mom told her kids from where they were laid out on the grass, sprawled on a picnic blanket. Almost instinctively, people in the audience brought their conversations to a temporary halt. A gaggle of belly dancers still in their costumes looked on.
Then musicians were off, the sound carrying across the park and back toward a trio of food trucks in the parking lot. When they opened with “Peach Blossom Fairy,” strings burst forward, unfolding into a clean, spirited call-and-response. As more musicians joined in, the sound became layered, woodwinds and strings dancing around each other in the day’s rising warmth.
Top: Loren Jefferson, Thema Haida, Gizmo Haida, and Travis Carbonella. Bottom: Students from the West Haven-based Middle Eastern Dance Academy.
No sooner had they finished it than Evans introduced “A Rose for My Beloved,” a favorite that artistic director Chia-Yu Joy Lu has brought from Wesleyan University’s Chinese Music Ensemble to New Haven. At the center of the stage, a zheng made a rushing, vibrating sound, the strings undulating over the stage and into the audience.
Beyond the group, a quartet of kids ran beneath a clothesline draped with tie-dye shirts, flitting past button-making stations and a tent filled with magnetic poetry. Friends and families milled about, some transforming into pint-sized dancers. Back on stage, Evans introduced a third piece, inviting the audience to listen for the sound of roosters and grasshoppers woven into the music.
In the grass, several dogs and their owners were still basking in the glow of the Westville pet parade. As Guzheng and Erhu drifted over the grass, Choupette sat patiently in a pool of sunlight with his humans, Heather Powell and her kids, Ellis and Maisie.
While Heather has lived in the neighborhood for seven years, it was the first time that her faithful pup, a walking mop named after the French for “sweetie,” had the chance to compete. Awarded a ribbon from newscasters Pat Patterson and John Johnson (a.k.a. Westvillians Lou Mangini and Ryan Gardner), Choupette accepted graciously.
“I’m just so dang happy,” Choupette said between hot, damp breaths that smelled like the city’s streets after the Faxon Road Race.
Just feet away, Gizmo Haida was equally euphoric after taking home the prize for best leg strength, memorialized in a green and gold ribbon that fluttered in the wind. A five-year-old French bulldog, he called the pet parade a chance to flex his doll-sized limbs and celebrate his owner, longtime Westvillian and WineDown CT co-founder Thema Haida.
“He gives me something to look forward to,” Haida said of Gizmo. “For a while, I had two cats, but I always felt like something was missing. He has such a personality.”
Saturday marked a milestone, she added: five years with her canine bestie (and the first in the pet parade), and a decade attending ArtWalk. In that time, she’s built a life and a career in the neighborhood she now calls home.
Frank Bruckmann and Muffy Pendergast at "West Rock Fringe," which gave activities like the Spin Art Bike more space than previous years.
Across the street on a block of West Rock Ave., a new-old “Westville Fringe” festival unfolded on the pavement and surrounding porches, marked with a candy-colored row of flags and tables of flowers for sale. In the street, artist Frank Bruckmann studied rows of tents that filled Central Avenue and Fountain Street, enjoying the chance to paint outdoors in the open air.
“I just love the atmosphere of having people around,” he said. “Normally, I’m just painting in my studio. This gives me the chance to get out and see people.”
ArtWalk is very close to his heart, he added: he and his wife, the artist and educator Muffy Pendergast, are part of the team that founded ArtWalk in the late 1990s. That first year, the couple had just moved to the neighborhood, and “it was just six of us in the old Kehler Liddell Gallery space,” Bruckmann remembered. A few years later, Pendergast helped plan and host the event just a week after their daughter Jorgie was born.
It’s special to watch something take on a life of its own, Bruckmann said as he filled in a low-hanging smear of blue sky on the canvas. As ArtWalk has evolved into a week-long neighborhood festival, their two children have grown up and become integral parts of it themselves. Friday night, Jorgie walked the runway in some of her own creations—a feat neither she nor her parents could have dreamed up in those first few years.
Down the avenue, Pendergast walked (and more often, pedaled) attendees through her now-famous Spin Art Bike, the crafty marriage of a stationary bike, discarded lazy susan and some bright paint that has become an ArtWalk staple. Years ago, Pendergast got the idea after spotting a lazy susan on the side of Goffe Street, bound for the garbage dump. After saving it with artist Susan McCaslin, she worked with mechanical engineer Kieran Coleman to put the bike together.
“This is V Two,” she said matter-of-factly Saturday, pouring yellow and red paint into squeeze bottles when the colors ran low. At the bike, Wilbur Cross High School sophomores Jamar Williams and Caritza Rodriguez helped Joslynn Hebrank hop on, and begin to pedal.
Top: Joslynn Hebrank. Bottom: Brendan and Matthew Burke keep West Rock Ave. jamming.
“I just like all the rainbow colors,” said Joslynn minutes later as she admired her creation, a thick starburst of swirling, marbled paint set out to dry in the sun. After waiting patiently for her turn, her friend Aurora Simmons said she was excited to see how the bike worked. “I like how they do their own creative thing,” she added of ArtWalk.
That enthusiasm echoed through the vendor market, as attendees wove through over 60 booths sporting zines, jewelry, handmade clothing and dyed fabrics, and fine art. Fresh off Strange Ways’ April Flair Fair, Dreamy Punk founder Shannon Sanders showed off an array of stickers, pins, earrings and buttons inspired by the Japanese Kawaii aesthetic.
Born in Bridgeport and raised between Bridgeport and Orange, Sanders moved to New Haven in 2019, after studying at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). After vending at ArtWalk for the first time last year, she said she was excited to return.
“It’s my joy,” she said of her work as a pair of soft, cartoonish doe eyes peeked out from a pair of ghost earrings. While Sanders was born in 1997, her art is most directly inspired by 1980s nostalgia, from pastel-colored earrings to stickers of sweaters in chunky wool knits.
Top: Shannon Sanders. Bottom: Maker Alisha Moten.
Saturday, she said she was excited to sell alongside such a diverse group of makers—something she doesn’t always get at Anime or comic conventions, where there’s a narrative sameness to the art.
Nearby, maker Alisha Moten leaned into the day’s vacation-like vibes, showing off hand-poured candles and skincare products from her small business, Golden Adorns Artistry. Inspired by a bout of “post-vacation blues” that she suffered after a trip to Capetown, South Africa, she started creating scented candles that reminded her of travel destinations.
Left to her own devices, she said, she’d be on vacation all the time. For now, Golden Adorns Artistry is the next best thing. “It’s sort of like a getaway between our vacations,” she said.
Top: Westvillian Quinn Machesney. Bottom: Artist Erin Michaud, an educator at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, with their dog Daisy.
For others, like lifelong Westvillian Quinn Machesney, this year’s ArtWalk festivities felt like a full-circle moment. A student at James Hillhouse High School, “I’ve come to ArtWalk since I was born,” they said. As the festival evolved, so did they, falling in love with both artmaking and the natural world.
After watching their mom volunteer for years, they started vending at the event in 2019. Their work, which breathes new and often vibrant life into secondhand clothing, is meant to marry their interest in artmaking with a sustainable practice. Now, it feels like a natural part of the year.
“I think it’s super awesome to be more a part of something that I’ve always been around,” Machesney said. As the artist chatted with passers-by, an infant-sized denim jacket beckoned from overhead, its back sporting a trio of stumpy red-capped wild mushrooms. Beneath it, waves of green and purple crested on a repurposed chess board. A life-sized owl opened its big eyes and peered out from a tote bag.
Caritza Rodruguez and Allison Guerra, both sophomores at Wilbur Cross High School.
Back in the park, Choupette and Gizmo had long disappeared, but the party showed no sign of stopping. Onstage, bands from the Rock House School of Music sang their way through the 1990s, bringing it back to some of the songs that scored those first planning ArtWalk meetings nearly three decades ago.
In between songs, friends caught up for the first time in months. Everywhere, there were young artists, some still bounced in carriers and others only as tall as their parents’ knees. It was the next generation of ArtWalk, still in the making.
To listen to the NHCCC, listen to the video above.