Steve Driffin can still remember the day he met Frances “Bitsie” Clark. It was the early 1990s, and his play, Yo’ Street, was opening at James Hillhouse High School. Around him, the crack epidemic was ravaging New Haven, and Driffin’s soaring lyricism put words to the pain so many city residents were feeling.
He didn’t know it then, but a five-foot, raspy-voiced, matter-of-fact white lady in the audience was about to become his biggest cheerleader. She would remain in that role, as she did for hundreds of artists across the region, for decades to come.
Clark, a champion of culture, public servant and steadfast mentor who brought New Haven together through the arts, died Friday at the age of 93. In nine vibrant decades—seven of which were spent in greater New Haven—she made a name for herself as an unassuming and often underestimated visionary, whose openness was matched only by her blazing sense of humor, sharp wit and ability to get things done.
Her daughter, Mary Vines, confirmed that she died of natural causes, surrounded by members of her family at the Whitney Center in Hamden, to which she moved in 2017. She is survived by her children, son Jonathan Clark and daughter-in-law Amy Clark, daughter Mary and son-in-law, Jimmy Vines, her adult grandchildren, Taylor, Ethan and Jordan Clark and Clark and Thompson Vines, and her sisters-in-law, Janet and Bunny Thompson.
She would have turned 94 on Oct. 30, the same day the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists plans to hold a reception honoring this year’s grantees, Marquis Brantley and Thabisa Rich.
“I learned more from working from Bitsie in four years than I learned in four years of college,” said NewAlliance Foundation Executive Director and Bitsie Fund co-founder Maryann Ott, who in the 1990s ran regional programs under Clark at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. “She taught me how to work with artists, how to negotiate with people … every day, I was learning from her.” The lessons weren’t just arts-related, Ott added: they included “how to be a better person.”
“I loved her. I just loved her,” said Driffin, whose friendship with Clark stretched over more than three decades, and included performances, long tête-a-têtes over breakfast, and pieces of advice and tough love he still holds fast to. “I want to be able to kick butt and knock down doors and not care what people say. I want to be that kind of pillar. I want to be that kind of goliath. I want to be that kind of loving.”
Clark at her desk during her tenure as executive director of the Arts Council. Photo Courtesy of the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists.
Clark, who grew up in New York, was a trailblazer by nature, who landed in the arts entirely by accident. As a girl, she had a role model in her own mother, Dr. Jean Archibald Thompson, a physician who became the Head of Child Guidance for the City of New York. Because of that powerful matriarch, “she always went to the beat of her own drum and authentically had a different perspective,” Vines said.
That included stepping into her nickname—her siblings called her Bitsie for her small frame, “like itsy bitsy spider,” but always with an “ie,” Vines noted—and making it entirely her own.
As a student at the Berkeley School for Girls, Clark didn’t always excel in the classroom (Vines remembers her cheekily telling her kids that "she didn't get very high marks”), but was widely adored by her peers, and in the 1940s became the president of her junior class. It was an unexpected stepping stone: with other school presidents, she had the chance to hear Eleanor Roosevelt speak at the Waldorf Astoria, a kind of intellectual meet cute that feels like the beginning of a Broadway show.
As Clark later told the story to her children, Roosevelt urged the girls in attendance to join politics, telling them that “You are all leaders,” Vines said. Clark, not yet 18, decided that she would be the country’s first female president (she never lived to see that reality, although she did see the election of a female vice president in 2020). Years later, that love of politics would shine through in New Haven, through both heavy municipal lifts at the Arts Council, and later on the New Haven Board of Alders.
It was politics that were at the forefront of a teenage Clark’s mind when she left home for higher education. But when she started classes at Vassar College in the late 1940s, her advisor pushed her to add a few courses in the arts, at least for good measure. Clark grudgingly obliged.
“She loaded up on political science courses, and her advisor said ‘Where's the art? Where’s the music?’” Vines remembered. “And my mother said, ‘I don't need that! I'm gonna be president of the United States!’”
Her advisor prevailed, at least a little; Clark did add some courses in the arts to her schedule and enjoyed them, although she kept her eye trained on politics. Years later, when she became executive director of the Arts Council, she would still laugh at the irony: Vassar had one of the best art history programs in the country, and she hadn’t taken a single course.
Matthew Garrett Photo.
When Clark finished college at Vassar, she got married, living initially at Fort Sill in Oklahoma while her husband, John Phelps Clark, served in the military. In 1956, his admission to the Yale Law School brought them to greater New Haven. Despite her political aspirations, the only job Clark could find in the area was with the Girl Scouts of America, then serving 28,000 girls in the greater New Haven region.
“It was booming,” she recalled in an October 2023 interview at Bregamos Community Theater. She trained a small army of volunteers who helped the organization run. “I was learning a skill that I could do in every single job.”
In the 1960s, Clark stepped back from the workplace temporarily to raise her children, first her son Jonathan and then her daughter Mary soon thereafter. Years later, she explained to them that she’d had “this great duck epiphany” while watching a mother and her ducklings waddle along at the now-shuttered Camp Murray, which she ran for years.
“She realized, ‘Oh! Motherhood is a job,’” Vines remembered with a kind of brightness in her voice. She held onto that epiphany as she raised them, excelling in motherhood just as she had in every other area of her life. “The amazing thing about Bitsie is that she was the same person whether she was being a mom to me and my brother” or serving the city’s arts community.
While raising her kids, Clark stayed busy, volunteering for a then-young APT Foundation, Neighborhood Music School (which would later become a fixture on a changing Audubon Street), Branford’s Montgomery Parkway Association and Camp Murray. In the region, New Haven’s arts landscape was transforming, including an Arts Council that was just starting to figure out its place. And in the late 1970s, Clark became increasingly interested in what that looked like.
“The Arts Council didn’t do a lot of thinking about where it wanted its office,” she later recalled of those years, in an interview at the Arts Council in 2015. “Our dream was that we would become sort of a living room for Audubon Street.”
What she didn’t know then, and which most New Haveners know now, was that she would be instrumental in making it happen. When a divorce forced Clark back into the workplace in 1982, developer Newt Schenck brought her onboard to envision what the Audubon Arts District, and the Arts Council itself, could be. What she managed to accomplish over two decades (and city and board leadership in many arts organizations since) was something no director of the organization has done since.
As Ott remembered in a 2012 interview with the Yale Daily News, Clark was a workhorse: she often arrived at the offices by 8 a.m., having already worked on grants for several hours. She would stay on her feet, meeting with artists, until it was time to attend the shows, concerts, exhibition openings, and panels that kept her out well after the sun had gone down. In the two decades she remained at the helm, she was warm, funny, and open to any idea that came through the door (one of the people who loved her most was Aleta Staton, and this reporter hopes they are having an overdue kiki in the clouds right about now).
“You really do value those people that are changing the world,” said Ott, who went on from the Arts Council to the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and then the NewAlliance Foundation. Clark, who didn’t often use the word “no” when she spoke to artists, spent her days dreaming up new programs, talking to artists about their needs, and figuring out how the arts would pivot with technology that was also rapidly changing.
She added video, which was then still a relatively new medium, to the Arts Council’s work. She zhuzhed up the Arts Awards, moving them to Long Wharf Theatre in 1984, and naming a lifetime achievement award in honor of Schenck six years later in 1990 (that distinction has since gone to artists including Rafael Ramos, the late Willie Ruff, Jesse Hameen II, attorney Charles Kingsley, and dynamic arts duo Liz and John Fisher among many, many others). She did cultural asset mapping and a regional needs assessment in which artists requested more space to create, still a frequent demand today.
She created a computer consortium, meant to help nonprofit workers get a handle on what was then a new form of technology, and get computers into the hands of artists who needed them. She supported young people, jumpstarting dozens of careers for artists who came through the organization's doors. Working with the late Zanette Lewis, she started a cultural development program, supporting creatives like Edmund “B*Wak” Comfort, Aaron Jafferis, the late Hazel Williams and Brian Jarawa Gray, now all pillars of the city’s arts community.
Driffin and Clark in 2023. When he thinks about those who are most dear to him (his acronym for it is LIFE, or Loving Intimate Friends Eternally), he said that night, Clark always spring to mind. “I thank you not [just] for the confirmation, but for the inspiration," he told her in 2023. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
“I think the best part for me about working with Bitsie is that she was always just so willing to help people,” said Arts Council Operations Director Winter Marshall, who started in 1999 and still works there today. “If someone came to the Arts Council and wanted to talk to her about their ideas, or their projects or getting something off the ground, she was like, ‘Yes, and’ … No matter how big or small your project was, she wanted to help you realize it.”
It’s how she had landed, in the early 1990s, in the audience at James Hillhouse High School, as the curtain opened on Driffin’s Yo’ Street. Written to chronicle, grieve, and address the crack epidemic in both New Haven and across the U.S., the play had premiered outdoors, in front of Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church on Orchard Street in 1991. “The concept behind the title was, this can be any street in America,” Driffin said in a 2022 interview with the Arts Paper.
Clark, who grasped Driffin’s clear-eyed vision and lyrical swerve right away, was moved by the play. In the days and weeks that followed, she wrote to him about how much she’d liked it, and pledged the Arts Council’s support for the show. She traveled with him to New York City, trying to pitch a version of it there. She reminded Driffin of his brilliance and talent, certain of it even on the days that he was not.
“Bitsie was a human magnet, and she just had the ability to bring people together,” he remembered in a phone call Monday evening. “That's what it's all about.”
The two, who were at turns friends, creative peers, and students and witnesses to each other’s work, remained close for decades. Then in 2022, they had a full-circle moment, as Driffin brought his show Death By 1,000 Cuts to the stage. Clark, who knew that Driffin had worked on the piece for over a decade, cheered him on. She made sure she was in the audience, first at Quinnipiac University and then—at her request—at the Whitney Center. She and Vines later helped get the show to the West Side YMCA in New York, for its Off Broadway debut.
When he saw her in the audience at Quinnipiac, “I held back my tears,” Driffin remembered. “Bitsie has been a giant, like, a giant” in his life, and to have her back in the theater made his night. When he landed a grant from the Bitsie Fund later that year to support the work, “I felt like I was an Oscar awardee,” he added. Of all the grants he's ever received, it's the most significant to him. “That remained so special to me, that meant so much to me.”
Jafferis, a poet and playwright whose work has ranged from a hip-hop opera to an "Activist Songbook" to new poetry set to Gustav Holst’s The Planets, also saw that version of Clark in full, magnificent force. While the two met in the mid-1990s—she was a guest artist in a play he was helping with at Long Wharf Theatre—they didn’t become close until a few years later, when the Arts Council landed a grant for cultural asset mapping and he signed on to do it. Clark quickly became his cheerleader both on and off the clock, attending his performances and later, inviting him to bring them to the city’s Chamber of Commerce and the Whitney Center.
“The thing that was unique about Bitsie was that she was able to challenge people, us and others, in a way that was joyful and exciting and energizing rather than deflating or critical,” Jafferis remembered in a phone call Monday morning. “She was always, like, pushing for something to be better or more effective … but it was about the joy.”
There are, of course, hundreds of artists who have felt that joy, and watched Clark work a kind of creative magic that still feels unparalleled. In the early 2000s, she helped Rafael Ramos get Bregamos Community Theater off the ground, watching it transform from an open mic night in the back of BAR Pizza to a brick-and-mortar space in Fair Haven. She saw the sharp eye and wide-open heart of photographer Harold Shapiro, who later serenaded her with Mozart on her 92nd birthday. She brought live poetry to the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and, with a brain wired for public-private partnerships, commerce to the arts. She opened the Arts Council’s doors to everyone, from a group still grieving Sacco and Vanzetti to arts fundraisers that continued well after her departure.
She was as funny as she was brilliant, remembered the journalist Paul Bass, then a reporter for the New Haven Advocate, and later the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent and head of the Online Journalism Project and its arts reporting arm, Midbrow. After Clark started at the Arts Council in 1983, Bass showed up at her office, asking to see the organization’s 990s. It was for a piece, published every few years, on salary disparities between professionals in New Haven. As Clark told it—which she did many times, including to this reporter—she often came out at the bottom, with a salary that looked miniscule alongside those of her peers.
“She loved making good trouble,” he said in a phone call Monday. He remembered watching her try to win a city-wide scavenger hunt in the 1990s, delighted with everything she was able to find and buy in New Haven. Paired with his wife, the reporter Carole Bass, she buzzed from shop to shop, finishing later than every other participant because she’d gotten so caught up in the exercise. By the end of the day, she had schmoozed with independent business owners, gotten gifts for her grandchildren, and built new relationships in the city.
Her love of the arts, and of the city, meant that she remained a vibrant part of New Haven even after stepping down from the Arts Council. In 2003, Clark joined the New Haven Board of Alders to represent Ward 7, which comprises both East Rock and downtown. During her tenure, she wore many municipal hats, including chair of the youth services committee and vice-chair of the finance committee.
“She was definitely the kind of person to get things done,” said former Westville Alder Sergio Rodriguez, who represented Ward 26 from 2003 to 2013. “She had a tendency to really sit down and talk with you about things she really wanted to get done, and she was very good at that. She had this quality about her where she would engage you on issues she cared about.”
She became known among her colleagues as a bridge-builder, Ott told the Yale Daily News in 2012, shortly after Clark stepped down and a 29-year-old Doug Hausladen took the role. In 2006, for instance, Clark encouraged discussion among city residents—including young people—when a youth curfew was proposed in response to a rise in violent city crime. When the board voted it down months later, she delivered miraculous news: she had found private funding for a street outreach program working with youth.
Hausladen, who met Clark through community work in the early 2000s, remembered that ability of hers to get things over the finish line, often with a contagious sense of humor and a see-sawing, sometimes melodious laugh that was infectious. As a property manager for the Audubon Court Condo Association, he often attended board meetings in her Audubon Street apartment, where she lived before moving to the Whitney Center.
It was “the unscripted time” with Clark that he loved most, Hausladen said. After condo association meetings, it wasn’t uncommon for her to pull out a bottle of scotch, and keep the conversation going. When she stepped down from the Board of Alders several years later, he was thrilled to inherit her team, including Ward Co-Chair Nadine Wall and future Ward 7 Alders Abby Roth and Alberta Witherspoon.
Even after leaving the Board of Alders, Clark didn’t slow down. In 2010, at a spry 79 years old, she took her last job at HomeHaven, designed to engage elderly New Haveners through programming and activities. As the organization’s executive director, she grew its footprint to hundreds of members, taking seniors on one particularly memorable trip to the Broadway musical Hamilton in 2016. For her, it fed both her love of work and her belief that isolation could be deadly.
“People saw that something had to be done,” she told a reporter for Reflections, the biannual publication of the Yale Divinity School, in 2013. “We know the demographics will overwhelm municipalities and existing facilities in future years. Even 10 years ago it was clear that people were living longer. We were seeing more and more 90-year-olds. This village concept is something everyone knows is needed.”
She ultimately opted for a version of that village herself. In 2017, Clark left HomeHaven and moved into the Whitney Center in Hamden. Even there, she was rarely still: curator Debbie Hesse, who worked under her at the Arts Council, remembered how often Clark would keep tabs on exhibitions that were going in (and sometimes lovingly boss her around just a little bit), talking to her about ideas for shows as if the two were still colleagues.
"Bitsie Chicks" Maryann Ott, Robin Golden, Mimsie Coleman, Betty Monz and Barbara Lamb with Clark. Harold Shapiro Photo with Permission from the Bitsie Clark Fund.
Outside of the Whitney Center, the love for her remained strong. In 2018, five women—self-appointed “Bitsie Chicks” Mimsie Coleman, Robin Golden, Betty Monz, Barbara Lamb and Ott, all of whom had worked with Clark—founded the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists, which since its inception has supported at least two artists per year. The fund, which will continue in perpetuity, is just one way that Clark has continued to support artists beyond her professional life.
In her later years, “I believe that kept her going,” Vines said of the fund. “She loved to work. She was always working for the good. I think that the ‘chicks’ took such wonderful care of her and the whole Bitsie Fund, that legacy was so meaningful to her, that she could continue to affect the lives of artists.”
Previous grantees include Shapiro, puppeteer and multimedia artist Isaac Bloodworth, photographer Alexandra Diaz, playwright Steve Driffin, musician Jackie Gagne, composer and musician Adam Matlock, hip-hop poet and playwright Aaron Jafferis, artists Linda Vauters Mickens and Jeff Ostergren, and musician-composers Tyler Jenkins and Damali Willingham.
Back at the center, she curated events, sat on committees, and continued to read voraciously, with a love for literature that she kept up with until the final months of her life. Driffin, who visited her about a month ago, remembered spotting a book about Jesus on her coffee table, and thinking about how perfectly that encapsulated her.
Often, he said, he thinks about how Jesus told his disciples “You will be able to do greater works than me.” For him, that’s the duty New Haven artists now have: they’ve learned from Clark, and must take that learning and that passion, and use it to better the world around them.
“When I think of Bitsie, she did great works,” he said. “I think we are charged with even greater works than her. I'm not equating her to Jesus, but what we need to do is emulate that [ethic that she brought to all she did]. If ever we want to infringe on any copyright laws, we can infringe on those.”
Ott, who visited her three times a week, said that as the news of Clark's death spreads, she’s taking solace in the fact that her friend lived a long, vibrant life, and seemed ready to take leave of her physical body. Last Thursday, the two sat side-by-side on Clark’s couch, watching Blazing Saddles for what would be the last time. It was Clark’s favorite movie.
By then, Clark was weak and not speaking very much, Ott remembered. But she mouthed along to several of the lines, and the two sat and laughed together. It felt like a date between old friends, whose love was enough to sustain the moment.
“For the rest of my life, I will think of Bitsie every day,” she said. “Every time I see a good movie or something happens in politics or I read a good book, she'll be there. I just feel gratitude for the time we spent together ... she's still living in many ways.”
A reporter’s note: parts of this article come from previous articles also published in the Arts Paper. Read those here, here, here, here, and here. Donate to the Bitsie Clark Fund for artists here.