Our 2024 Top 10: Taking It (Back) To The Grassroots

Top: Lauren Canalori's third grade class at L.W. Beecher with LaundroMax's Chris Walker. Kapp Singer Photo. Bottom: Michael Zief and Ian "Scooby" Rossman at a New Haven Pride Center Community Dinner. Lucy Gellman Photo.

Sparklers crackled and hissed atop a sweet chocolate cake, letting off ribbons of bright light in the New Haven Pride Center. Outside on Orange Street, temperatures dropped close to freezing, and dark fell across downtown New Haven. Inside, the words to "Happy Birthday" filled the space, loud enough to reach the high ceilings. It was a party, right on time for anyone who needed it.  

That sense of wonder, resilience, and celebration—often alongside and in the face of extreme grief—helped pull us through this year, from high school auditoriums and dance studios to art museums, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and presentations from poets, historians, and literary nerds. We danced the night away with Club C*nt and savored summer festivals, we listened as storytellers shared their work across the city and the region, we grieved those we lost and kept each other moving forward. 

This is not an exhaustive list; it never is. For every event that we make it to, it feels like there are a dozen that we miss—and all of them are worthy of an article (this story, for instance, which we were thrilled to see in the New Haven Independent). This list could have been a top 20, or a top 30, or a top 100, and we would still have more to write about. Our youth arts journalists are worthy of their own list, as are the vibrant young people making art in this city. 

For instance, school theater soared this year, with performances that ranged from In The Heights and The Wiz to Much Ado About Nothing. So did professional shows, with a standout performance of The Niceties at Collective Consciousness Theatre that we are still thinking about. This was a year that we learned through plays too, including Hadestown at the Shubert Theatre and Macbeth In Stride at the Yale Rep. 

Sian Mackall (in white and jeans, at center) jumps in to dance with friends at BWS Fest (i.e. Black Wall Street) in August. "I think it's really fun and a blessing," she said of the festival, which she's attended all three years. Lucy Gellman Photo.

It was a year for municipal triumphs in the arts too, often with resources that were stretched to a shoestring. In New Haven, Black Wall Street became a weeklong celebration of arts and culture, in part thanks to the city's Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism.  The Pride Center saw a new line item in the city budget, which has allowed it to expand programming. City Hall itself became a cultural haven, with a celebration honoring activist Fred Harris and monthly open mic nights from the city's first poet laureate. And in between, the city supported arts events large and small, from summer music festivals to the second artist-led City-Wide Open Studios.

One town over, ArtsWest CT began the year with action and advocacy at West Haven City Hall, and continued to bloom in the most exquisite way. Over the summer, a new ARPA-funded microgrant program yielded community-focused events, from a meeting of arts and basketball to a string quartet playing Latin music on the city's green. All year long, arts advocates have banded together to keep bringing the city events, like an “All Neighbors Day” in November that honored cultures from Sudan to Mexico to Jamaica. 

All Neighbors Day in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photo.

It was also a year that artists helped get us through deep grief. This was a year of immeasurable loss, including the extraordinary Emalie Mayo, Aleta Staton, Tia Lynn Waters and Alder Tom Ficklin, who was a staunch and steadfast advocate for the arts. It was artists who saw us through memorial services, who helped hold space when the world felt too heavy to hold. 

As we reflect on this year, we are grateful to them for helping shoulder some of that weight, and teaching us that there are many ways to honor and remember a person's legacy. 

We could go on, but we won't—because we already have our work cut out for us in 2025. Thank you to the dozens of culture-bearers, artists, activists, and sweet readers who carried us, lifted our spirits, and filled our hearts this year. We are forever grateful.   

And with that, here’s the Arts Paper’s top 10 arts, culture, and community events from 2024.

Diana Henderson and Benny Saldana at the New Haven Pride Center. Lucy Gellman Photo.

Born as a way to break bread together earlier this year, the dinners have evolved into laughter- and conversation-filled evenings in which friendships are made, secrets are exchanged, and cake is inevitably devoured before the end of the night. In January, Arts Paper writer Kapp Singer attended the first dinner in the Center's 50 Orange St. home, to which it moved at the end of last year. 

In the year since, the dinners have become a space to build community, celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride, create some serious bookjoy, and reflect on Trans Day of Remembrance. 

It is just one of the ways that the Pride Center has continued to show up for the greater New Haven community this year. In the past months, other highlights have included a revived LGBTQ+ Youth Summit at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), drag queen story hours with the New Haven Free Public Library, a gender-affirming back-to-school "shopping spree" and a Pride-centered block party. Read more about those here. 

Lucy Gellman Photo.

A commemoration of the National Day of Corn (el Día Nacional del Maíz) fêted across Latin America, the Semilla Collective's fourth annual Festival de la Resistencia in September became a celebration of migration, indigeneity and rootedness, from the Conchera dance tradition and on-the-fly zapateado workshops to husk-wrapped tamales with cheese and vegetables waiting inside.  

"More than a meal, corn is part of our cosmology, the way that we understand the world," said Javier Villatoro, a founding member of the Semilla Collective and co-founder of Tortilleria Semilla. "We think of ourselves as people of the corn, and what we are doing today is not just feeding people with cornmeal, but also sharing a little bit about the tradition, the cosmology."  

Yaira Matyakubova and Fatima Rojas at Music Haven's inaugural "Untold Stories" event. Lucy Gellman Photo.

In September, members of Music Haven and the Haven String Quartet brought their rich sound to the Fair Haven Branch Library, in a Hispanic Heritage Month concert that doubled as the first installment of “Voices: Untold Stories.” The series amplifies New Haven’s immigrant and refugee voices alongside work by the Haven String Quartet.

As it began with storyteller and immigrant Fatima Rojas, it was a stunning reminder that people must embrace their shared humanity, because they are nothing without it. Read about it here and more about Music Haven here. 

Zoe Jensen Photo.

In February, Cafe Nine hosted the seventh edition of Club C*nt, a techno dance party orchestrated by Zoe Jensen of the arts zine Connectic*nt. Since launching last spring, the bi-monthly show has struck a chord in New Haven’s nightlife scene, quickly becoming a popular, beloved event.  

The night featured performances by 5 different DJs: Lil Colibrí, Kalabi Yau, Moneycatt, DJ If You Dare, and DJQT, Jensen’s alter-ego. To cap off the show, Jensen pulled out a flute and began soloing atop a high-tempo track and dancing around the stage—a move that has become a signature for her. Read about it here. 

Lucy Gellman Photo.

In July, close to two dozen New Haveners attended “Roses for Gaza,” a liturgy from poet Michelle Phương Hồ with the support of Antonius-Tín Bui, Dani D’Oliveira, Judah Lopez, Faisal Saleh, and the Elm City Vineyard nonviolence group led by Josh Williams and Kim Espinal. 

Organized nine months into the Israel-Hamas war—the same amount of time it takes to gestate and birth a child—the event became a space not only to grieve the very human toll of war but also to feel deeply, and in so doing find a way forward.

“This is not actually a call to action, but a call to feel,” said Hồ at the time. “We were never meant to fathom this scale of loss … It exceeds language.”   

Since Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s retaliatory, indiscriminate bombing campaign, over 45,000 people have died in Gaza, according to the United Nations. It is now the deadliest place in the world to be a child.

Part grassroots movement, part cultural hub, and all love-letter to music and musicians, the third annual Seeing Sounds Festival brought out over 1,000 people, with a final performance from Monaleo that kept the crowd bopping well into the steamy July night.

Seeing Sounds is the fuzz-kissed brainchild of musician Orion Solo (a.k.a. Trey Moore), who first dreamed it into being in 2022. Since that time, it has grown into a sprawling music festival with multiple stages, clothing and art vendors, an over-21 beer and wine garden, and indie artists from both New Haven and across the country. Read about it here. 

It was part of a joyful summer of festivals, including the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Vivan Las Autónomas, Black Wall Street, Puerto Rican Festival, fifth annual New Haven Black Pride and LGBTQ+ Pride Block Party that made the city feel vibrant and alive. 

Photo by Matt Fried, courtesy of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

Last month, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) staged a thrilling, audacious, and fully reimagined take on Beethoven's The Creatures of Prometheus with poetry, dance, and healing drums at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. A collaboration with New Haven’s inaugural poet laureate Sharmont “Influence” Little and Tia Russell Dance Studio, the work became a conversation made for the moment, in which artists pushed back at a world upturned by violence.

“It’s a really gory story—but in the Beethoven ballet, he doesn’t focus on Prometheus,” said NHSO Music Director Perry So, who began his tenure earlier this year. “The title of the ballet is ‘The Creatures of Prometheus.’ The thing that Prometheus created, which is humankind. Us. With language, with culture, dance, poetry, music.”

Kapp Singer Photo.

In May, the New Haven Museum opened Amistad: Retold, presenting the Amistad revolt and its historical consequences with a focus on the captives themselves. Amistad: Retold updates the museum’s previous exhibition about the slave revolt, which opened in 1989 on the 150th anniversary of the ship being taken over and has been a fixture of the New Haven Museum ever since. (It was renovated in 1997 to include new material in the museum’s collection.)

The goal of the new permanent exhibition, which is also available in an online format, was to incorporate new scholarship that has been published over the last three decades, and to expand the purview of the show beyond its previous focus on the trials that occurred in Connecticut.   

“We wanted to center the stories of the people who led the Amistad revolt, know more about their lives in Sierra Leone, and know much more about the global context,” said Joanna Steinberg, the director of learning and engagement at the New Haven Museum.

Three months earlier, it had set that tone of truth-telling with the exhibition “Shining Light on Truth,” which examines the “essential role of enslaved and free Black people in New Haven and at Yale.” Curated by City Historian Michael Morand and Amistad Committee Member Charles Warner, the show has since been extended into 2025. 

Lucy Gellman Photo.

If you've driven, walked or cycled downtown lately, you've likely seen an unlikely and delightful collaboration at 101 College St., where two new student murals now adorn a soaring, $250 million bioscience tower from developer Carter Winstanley and his firm, Winstanley Enterprises. The result of a months-long, public-private partnership, the pieces seek to demystify some of the research taking place inside the building. They are the bainchildren of Gateway professor Peter Bonadies and Vladimir Shpitalnik, who worked with students to realize the pieces. 

They aren't the only art evolving at CT State Gateway, formerly known as Gateway Community College. Throughout the year, curator  Noé Jimenez has grown his creative footprint at the NewAlliance Foundation Art Gallery, which stands at the corner of Crown and Church Streets downtown. Read more about exhibitions here, here, and here.    

CCT's Dexter Singleton at LIT Fest in October. Lucy Gellman Photo.

Authors, artmakers, academics, activists, and avid readers came together in early October, for the fifth annual Kulturally LIT Fest (formerly Elm City LIT Fest), celebrating writer, activist and intellectual James Baldwin on what would have been his hundredth birthday. Held at the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT) for the first time in its history, the festival lifted up Baldwin's long legacy, from his cutting and prescient critique of America to how to teach his work today.

The fest was part of The Year of Baldwin, a months-long centennial celebration that also includes Baldwin reading groups and book clubs, film screenings, poetry readings, theater performances and over a dozen community collaborators. Read more about that here and here. Our peers at the New Haven Independent named LIT Fest founder IfeMichelle Gardin their person of the year—an honor that is long overdue. 

It feels related—enough to link them here—that this year also saw the unveiling of 10 little free libraries from the Edgewood Avenue bookstore Possible Futures, starting with a Whalley Avenue LaundroMax that is now a surprise haven for young bibliophiles. The project is funded by a grant from Read in Color, a program administered by the St. Paul, Minn.-based nonprofit Little Free Library, which aims to increase access to books by and about people of color.