New Haven Reads Paints A Love Letter To Literacy

Amanda Brown Photo.

The figure lies on their belly, legs kicked up behind them as they dive into a book. Maybe it’s a copy of Ada Twist, Scientist or Mae Among The Stars or The Boy Who Met A Whale: the cover is hidden, so a viewer can imagine infinite titles. Around them, universes start to take shape: an astronaut reaches out their hand, an explorer balances on a raft and grips a huge telescope, a tiny scientist swirls a mixture around a beaker until it glows red.

A small cloud floats overhead, outlined in the same neon pink as the young reader. Sharing The Joy and Power of Reading, reads a block of text to the side, written in towering, bright letters that animate the street. 

Those words accompany a new mural at New Haven Reads’ 45 Bristol St. home, where the late Christine Alexander launched the organization over two decades ago. A collaboration with RiseUP for Arts and the artist Candyce “Marsh” John, it celebrates the power, delight and potential of reading at a time when the city is still working to solve a literacy crisis, and has enlisted the organization as a partner on that work. 

Saturday, NHR staff, students and tutors gathered with Marsh to inaugurate the mural, which looks out onto Ashmun Street and Scantlebury Park in the city’s Dixwell neighborhood. 

New Haven Reads Education Director Hayley Herrington, the artist March (a.k.a. Candyce John) and NHR Executive Director Kirsten Levinsohn. Lucy Gellman Photos.

“This mural was, like, a really important project for me, because it was one of my bigger projects in New Haven,” Marsh said Saturday, greeting attendees with a peace sign from two raised fingers. “My roots are here. And so for me, it felt like I was kind of giving back to my community, the place that helped build me up, that made me believe in myself, all of those kind of things. So it was really nice.”

The mural has long been on New Haven Reads’ wish list, said longtime Executive Director Kirsten Levinsohn. For years, neighbors, parents, and tutors would tell her that they had no idea what was inside the building, which boasted white brick walls and powder-blue trim, until they found themselves among the cozily packed shelves and dedicated students. It was then, inevitably, that they fell in love with the organization, and began to champion its work just as staff, volunteer tutors, students and alumni have for years. 

Bristol Street also holds a special place in NHR history: it was the first of five sites that are currently open for weekly tutoring (the others are 5 Science Park, 85 Willow St., Fair Haven School and Bishop Woods School), and has also been home to Christine Alexander Corner since 2018. Over 21 years, hundreds of tutors and thousands of kids have passed through its doors. 

Some of New Haven Reads' students accompanied Marsh and NHR staff and tutors for the unveiling. 

“We also wanted to share our exuberance about reading, the joy and power of reading,” Levinsohn continued. Normally, New Haven Reads does quiet work: its thousands of hours building better readers go on without much fanfare, despite the vital role that literacy plays in personal and professional milestones. So after securing the funds to cover the mural—Levinsohn said that the money comes out of the organization’s general operating budget—NHR turned to its summer students to ask what they would like to see on the outside of the building. 

There were dozens of responses, many of which Marsh has worked to incorporate into the finished mural. One student proposed “a dinosaur with pink whiskers,” Levinsohn recalled to a smattering of gentle laughs. Another wanted to see dragon slayers. Another still suggested a celebration of nature, from flowers to the sun and moon above. 

In almost every survey, students focused on how happy they were while working with their tutors, a response so universal that it felt like a refrain. It was for that reason that staff decided that the final work had to include a nod to the “Joy and Power of Reading,” to emphasize and center both takeaways at the same time.

Marsh and Amber Cohens. Cohens, who joined as the assistant on the project, is now the assistant education director at the organization. 

The rest was up to Marsh, a self-taught artist whose murals now enliven schools, public gathering spaces, state buildings, New Haven underpasses, and the Hamden Youth Services Bureau among other sites. Saturday, the artist recalled dreaming up a design in her apartment (which is also her workspace), with student feedback forms fanned out all around her. It helps that she can identify with students at New Haven Reads: she struggled with reading as a kid, and credits the help she got outside of school with helping her become the bookworm she is today. The graphic novels she picked up informed the art she makes today. 

As she worked, she could imagine a young person reading, a book splayed open in front of them. As they read, whole universes came to life. The resulting designs—a superhero, astronaut, explorer, newly minted college graduate, scuba diver and young Black scientist—are all meant to represent the worlds that reading can open, without a person ever having to leave the room where they are reading. The mural’s vibrant colors, meanwhile, are intended to breathe life into the neighborhood, where cars zoom by on Ashmun Street.

“I feel like I made my grandma proud,” she said (her grandmother, the late Ella Nora Price, passed away in 2013). “She loved pouring back into the community, and everything like that, so I feel like this is my opportunity to do the same in a different way. So I’m really grateful.” 

In October, she began to paint, enlisting the help of artist Amber Cohens when she needed an assistant. As the two painted, they split the wall into a number of vignettes, each meant to represent a different literary adventure. In the upper left, for instance, a superhero charges forward, a voluminous mess of curls around her head like a sort of contemporary halo. Her arms spread out, muscles visible as her mouth parts and her eyes widen with a curious, excited glint.

Just to her right, an astronaut reaches out with one hand, as if to touch the viewer standing in front of her. The galaxy stretches out behind her, cut off by a ribbon of blue paint. Beneath the bubble, a graduate lifts a diploma triumphantly in the air. 

“It’s just a place that we could be,” Marsh said Saturday, shivering from a December cold as she stood in front of the mural.

It was, unexpectedly, also a sort of homecoming for Cohens. Long before she was part of RiseUP’s creative leadership program, she was a tutor for New Haven Reads. She got to know the organization during her time at Albertus Magnus College, where she studied English and visual arts. For four semesters, she spent her Monday and Wednesday afternoons on Bristol Street, absorbed in books with her young charges. She went on to work as an art teacher at multiple schools, including Achievement First Providence Mayoral Academy Middle School.  

So when she learned that New Haven Reads was hiring an assistant education director, she applied, interviewed, and got the job within about 72 hours—all while still working on the mural. It feels like exactly where she’s supposed to be, she said: Where The Wild Things Are and If You Give A Mouse A Cookie remain some of her favorite books today (along with age-appropriate fiction, especially psychological thrillers). It’s a kind of sweet full-circle moment.  

“I’m grateful to return back home,” she said. She added that she sees it as an homage to her grandmother, who taught at Conte West Hills Magnet School for four decades. 

“We always like to have that personal connection to the communities that we work in and the art that we do, because we believe that public art is more than just art,” said RiseUP Executive Director Matt Conway. “It’s what it can do for a community, what it does for artists, the opportunities it opens up for people.”