Culture & Community | Design | East Rock | Arts & Culture | New Haven Free Public Library
Top: Daniel Hunt, Caroline Smith, Sophie Duncan, Ming Thompson, and Celia Poirier. Bottom: GG King, a sixth grader at East Rock Community Magnet School. Lucy Gellman Photos.
GG King parked herself in front of a dozen designs, taking them in one by one. On one, the letters N H V floated in midair, bisected by long blocks of blue, pink and yellow. On another, a cheesy, limp-looking slice of pizza reclined in the corner of a page, suddenly anthropomorphic. A third reimagined the city as a massive black-and-white pie, with a neighborhood contained to each slice. Nearby, a sheet of paper read simply Tax Yale in large, clear black script.
GG, who is a sixth grader at East Rock Community Magnet School, is one of over 70 budding artists featured in a pop-up show at Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, showcasing the designs from a New Haven T-Shirt Competition announced earlier this year. The brainchild of designer Ming Thompson and East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, the competition brought in over 70 submissions, from professional graphic designers to 10-year-olds who live in the East Rock neighborhood.
Designs from two winners, graphic designer Bree Brennan and Central Connecticut State University student Rohan Green, will be featured on limited-edition t-shirts available in the next several weeks. Proceeds, which are donations-based, will benefit the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. For the sake of transparency, the Arts Paper is a program of but editorially independent from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.
Smith with New Havener Ethan Rodriguez-Torrent, co-founder of Escape New Haven.
“I feel really inspired,” said Smith at a celebration of the competition Wednesday evening, as attendees milled around with cans of seltzer and bags of potato chips. “I fell in love with New Haven because people love this city. I think there are so many things we can do to help celebrate civic pride.”
The contest is very much one of them. Earlier this year, Thompson started thinking about the competition as a way to boost New Haven pride and civic engagement in the city that she calls home. T-shirts felt like a logical fit: Atelier Cho Thompson, of which she is a founding partner, already sells New Haven merch out of its State Street location.
People also like t-shirts that represent their city, she said. Part of Thompson’s mission is understanding how design is applied in the real world, and this was a real time example.
But she didn’t want to do it alone. Enter Smith, who has worked with Thompson on projects like the Lawrence Street Plaza and is also her neighborhood alder. As the two launched the project, they were able to secure funding from the New Haven Equitable Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (NHE3), which provided funding for both printing and compensation for artists and programming.
Both Brennan and Green will receive a $500 honorarium as part of their award. The funding from NHE3 also funded multiple art workshops at the NHFPL and at MakeHaven’s Ninth Square space.
“We just feel like the more people who can support New Haven, the better,” Thompson said.
Desiree Pina, who was delighted by the exhibition.
Both she and Smith recognized the help of four judges: ConnCORP Community Liaison Daniel Hunt, Connecticunt Founder Zoe Jensen, Fair Haven organizer Kiana Cintron, and Arts Council Executive Director Hope Chávez.
Wednesday, all 70-plus submissions were on display, bringing viewers over as they made their way past the reference desk and through the first floor of the library. No sooner had Sophie Duncan finished hanging the last of them up then Desiree Pina rolled in, taking her time to look over each submission.
A New Haven transplant, Pina has become a regular at the library, where she relies on many of its services. So she was excited—and a little surprised—to see an exhibition pop up among the first-floor tables and stacks. Before leaving, she took a small, round pink sticker to vote on the design that was her favorite.
“I love New Haven,” she said, shouting out the Quinnipiac Meadows neighborhood where she lives. “I like to see things like this in the community.”
So did GG, a fan of the library who learned about the competition through her art teacher, Melissa Frobel (thanks to Frobel, many of the submissions came from young artists who are students at East Rock Community Magnet School). As she was working, GG drew inspiration from the city’s skyline, its gothic buildings, the major research university downtown and the thin-crust, perfectly charred pie for which the city has become known.
In her finished piece, she has drawn a pink-and-black homage to New Haven, with four triangles that build a tall, architectural block on which the skyline stands. Beneath the words New / Haven, which fill the first two triangles, a neatly rendered slice of pepperoni pizza occupies the space, its crust clearly marked off and shaded in.
Beneath the slice, she has written the word Yale in thick, black bubble letters. It feels like a nod to the city’s original design, the nine squares that started the Elm City, and to the town-gown divide that is palpable in nearly every room in New Haven. And, of course, to pizza—of which her own favorite is the downtown restaurant BAR.
“I like it!” GG said of the competition. “I think all of them are awesome.”
It was ultimately not pizza, but two very different depictions of community and the built environment, that rose to the top as winners. Brennan, who recently graduated from Susquehanna University with a degree in graphic design, opted for three figures planting seeds, crouching over what appears to be a plot in a community garden.
Behind them, the words New Haven explode in the background, in big bubbly teal letters over which a skyline rises. A yellow-winged seagull flies overhead; another perches on a skateboard on the ground, as if it is curious to see how they are nurturing their city. The New Haven Lighthouse rounds everything out, emerging from above the final N in New Haven.
Bree Brennan: “I wanted to focus on community.”
“It feels very young,” Brennan said of the city, recalling how quickly she became interested in events like the city’s Night Market and its diverse skateboarding community. While Brennan grew up in Pennsylvania, Connecticut is now her adopted home; she currently lives in Bridgeport’s Black Rock neighborhood, but frequently visits friends in New Haven.
“I wanted to focus on community” while also flexing her design skills, she said. While the final result used Adobe, her process is decidedly old-school: she uses markers and pencils to draft her original design, and then works on a computer only in the final stages of the process. She ultimately chose to cast the image in an eye-catching, 80s-esque teal and yellow.
Green’s image, meanwhile, depicts the Q Bridge, which reopened to the public in 2015 and ferries thousands of drivers in and out of New Haven every day. Given two colors to work with, the artist kept it classic, submitting a high-contrast image in black and white.
Smith, who just last week filed for reelection, said that she can already see repeating the competition in the future. There appears to be enough community interest to do so; attendees Wednesday spent time voting on an “Audience Choice Award,” which will be announced later this week. Thompson said that the exhibition will remain up through Saturday.
“I feel pride,” Smith said. “I feel inspired, touched and excited by how many submissions we got.”