Elm City Beat

A fun-filled summer season is planned for the Pardee-Morris House in the East Shore neighborhood of New Haven. The New Haven Museum will kick off the 2013 summer season at the Pardee-Morris House, located at 325 Lighthouse Road, on Sunday, June 2 from 1 to 4 pm. The Pardee-Morris House is one of the oldest surviving historic structures in Connecticut. Originally built by Amos Morris around 1750, the house was burned by the British during their raid on New Haven in 1779 and was rebuilt by the Morris family the following year. In 1915, William Pardee, a descendant of the Morris family, willed the property to the New Haven Colony Historical Society, today the New Haven Museum.

On June 2 from 1 to 4 pm, there will be free family-friendly activities to celebrate the start of the summer season. Children will be able to make and decorate tricorn hats and play lawn games that date back to the colonial and Victorian eras. Historic photos of the East Shore neighborhood will be on display, and children can complete a scavenger hunt inspired by the photos for prizes. Guided tours of the Pardee-Morris House will also be available. The Pardee-Morris House will be open free of charge on Sundays from 12-4 pm through August 25, 2013. This year, look for special events at the House throughout the summer season, including special talks and family programs.

“In Season,” a series of talks that take place on the second Sunday of each month (June 9, July 14, August 11) at 2 pm, explore locally grown food. On the fourth Sundays of each month ( June 23, July 28, August 25), colonial arts and crafts for kids will be available on a drop-in basis. Crafts include yarn dolls, figure silhouettes, and counted cross-stitching. On select Wednesdays throughout the summer season, the Pardee-Morris House will host its second annual Twilight Concert series on the lawn. Enjoy food from local eateries and music from local bands and music groups.

New Haven is once again heading into a stimulating summer season filled with a range of city-wide events that bring cultured travelers, art lovers, foodies and sports enthusiasts to this charming New England city. Boasting extraordinary cultural offerings and award-winning dining, New Haven provides an ideal setting for vibrant performances, unique events and remarkable festivals throughout the summer.

“We are pleased to offer residents and visitors another exciting summer filled with festivals and events, many of which are free to the public,” says Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. “From the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, to free music concerts and the New Haven Open at Yale, there is certainly something for everyone to enjoy.”

Among the diverse events taking place this summer, highlights of New Haven’s sensational, engaging and thought-provoking events include:

Project Storefronts Grand Opening: June 15, 2013 Project Storefronts is an award-winning program that brings fresh, innovative arts-related businesses to life in formerly vacant retail spaces in New Haven, by encouraging artists and entrepreneurs to test the viability of art and creative-inspired businesses. Project Storefronts provides access to empty storefronts as well as a technical support network of business and creative professionals. The program's newest creative entrepreneur, Sara Scranton, will officially open her new business called Lipgloss Crisis. Part art gallery, part photography studio and creative workshop space, Lipgloss Crisis is an exciting new addition to the Project Storefronts family. The grand opening is free and open to the public, and Lipgloss Crisis' hours of operation are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. For more information about Project Storefronts, Sara Scranton and Lipgloss Crisis, visit www.ProjectStorefrontsNewHaven.com.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas: June 15 – 29, 2013 Some of the most inspirational and engaging art and discussion in the country will take place in New Haven during the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Bringing over 100,000 art enthusiasts to New Haven, this year’s18th annual Festival will prove once again to be a premiere event for the city, offering an array of art, theater, dance, music, culinary and family-friendly events. The two-week series will open with a free performance by iconic soul and R&B vocalist Aaron Neville, followed by an impressive lineup of programs and performances including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a new production from the creators of War Horse; Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet with special Guest Wu Man; and the U.S. premiere of a new dance from Shantala Shivalingappa, a classical Indian dancer widely acclaimed for her brilliantly musical performances. Over 80 percent of this year’s programming is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.artidea.org.

Annual Juried Show: How Simple Can You Get: June 29 – July 26, 2013

The Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven’s nonprofit center for education in the visual arts, will present its annual juried show with Juror Robert Storr, acclaimed artist, critic, curator and Dean of the Yale University School of Art. From abstract to figurative, this exhibition will focus on images and objects in which complexity has been reduced to its most essential and visually arresting expression. This exhibition will be free and open to the public, and the gallery will be open Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., and Saturdays from 9 a.m. until noon.

Music on the Green presented by Yale-New Haven Hospital: July 20 & July 27, 2013

New Haven’s very own summer concert series will once again take place on the historic New Haven Green in the heart of downtown. Performance highlights include the celebrated New Haven Symphony Orchestra on July 20, where they will perform Dueling Divas. On July 27, the ever-popular KC and the Sunshine Band will take the stage and are sure to get the audience grooving to favorite hits including, “Get Down Tonight,” “That's the Way (I like it)” and “Boogie Shoes.”

Flights of Fancy: July 25, 2013

Wine-enthusiasts can enjoy New Haven’s popular wine tasting and shopping event, which will return on Thursday, July 25 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. This event features in-store wine tastings, special discounts, and extraordinary giveaways at over 25 Downtown shops in New Haven. Flights of Fancy is sponsored by the shops at Yale, The Wine Thief and The Study at Yale, and the event is organized by the Town Green Special Services District and Yale University Properties.

New Haven Jazz Festival: August 12 – 18, 2013

This year’s expanded Jazz Festival will include even more venues, live performances in Temple Plaza, street performers, family-oriented events, youth activities and more. The main-stage performance will take place on Saturday, August 17. Among an array of impressive local and national musicians, Saturday’s stage will feature the return of Wayne Escoffery and his sextet from New Haven, as well as the Curtis Brothers featuring Natalie Fernandez and an eight-piece Latin jazz orchestra.

New Haven Open: August 16 – 24, 2013

This year, fans will be closer to the action than ever before, as the New Haven Open consolidates all seating into the Box Ring of the Connecticut Tennis Center at Yale. This enhanced proximity to the players and on-court action as well as increased in-stadium entertainment is available starting at just $24. Tickets for the 2013 tournament are on sale now, so fans will want to buy early to secure their seats in this new, enhanced format. For more information and to secure tickets to the 2013 tournament, log on to www.newhavenopen.com or call the New Haven Open Box Office at 855-464-8366.

Comfort Food & Cocktails: August 21, 2013

New Haven Open attendees will find culinary and libation needs satiated at Comfort Food & Cocktails taking place in the Courtside Club overlooking stadium court. New this year, Comfort Food & Cocktails is an opportunity to sample the culinary skills of some of New Haven’s most exciting chefs as they put their own spin on comfort food. From sweet to savory, foodies will enjoy their favorite dishes reimagined by: Zinc, Ibiza, Heirloom, Union League Café, Caseus, Claire’s Corner Copia, Basta Trattoria, John Davenport’s and L’Orcio and cocktails by 116 Crown and Ordinary.

Yale Summer Cabaret: SUMMER OF GIANTS: May 30 – August 18, 2013

The 2013 Yale Summer Cabaret will feature twelve weeks of fun-filled, colorful and exciting performances as audiences are invited on a journey through hundreds of years of history, from the French Baroque to Revolutionary Spain to Modern England. The SUMMER OF GIANTS delivers high-impact programming featuring expressive, theatrical works that embody the time in which the plays were created. The line-up includes Tartuffe by Molière (May 30-June 15), Miss Julie by August Strindberg (June 20-29), The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife by Federico García Lorca (July 11-20), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel by Tennessee Williams (July 25-August 3), and Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You by Caryl Churchill (August 8-18). For more information, please visit www.summercabaret.org.

Special Exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art: Now – September 29, 2013

The Yale Center for British Art is presenting Art in Focus: St. Ives Abstraction, a special exhibit this summer which will run through September 29. This exhibit focuses on paintings and sculptures by artists working in the Cornish town of St. Ives in the mid-twentieth century, and is curated by Yale undergraduates in the Student Guide Program. Notable artists featured include Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, John Wells, Roger Hilton, and Patrick Heron. Admission is free and open to the public. For a full list of New Haven summer happenings and additional information, please visit www.infonewhaven.com.

LEAP is now accepting applications for our two robust summer programs available to New Haven children aged 7-12.

The Children’s Program

· The Children’s Program operates out of four sites during the summer – providing services to families from Farman Courts, lower Dixwell, Church Street South and Dwight.

· Senior Counselors (college students) and College Prep Scholars (high school students) are paired to mentor a group of 10 to 15 children grouped by gender and age. They implement the LEAP-designed literacy-based academic and enrichment curriculum.

· Children have the opportunity to engage in enrichment activities such as rock climbing, sewing and dance as well as attend at least one camping trip per summer.

The program is free but there is a $50 registration fee for the summer. More information and an enrollment form can be found at https://www.leapforkids.org/Content/Join_Us.asp

The Roslyn Milstein Meyer LEAP Community Center Program · The Community Center Program operates out to the Roslyn Milstein Meyer LEAP Community Center located at 31 Jefferson St.

· Children ages 7-12 may attend regardless of residence.

· Summer offerings include healthy cooking, gardening, computer literacy, athletics, arts and crafts.

The program is $25 per week or $100 for the entire summer. To learn more and register visit https://www.leapforkids.org/Content/Comunity_Center.asp

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven presents an exhibition of works by Connecticut artists Anita Soos and Ken Lovell at Gallery 195 at First Niagara Bank, 195 Church St., 4th floor, New Haven. The exhibition will be on display during bank hours from June 18th to September 20th, 2013. An artists’ reception is scheduled for Tuesday, September 10th, from 5 to 7 p.m. The public is invited to attend and meet the artists at this closing reception. Curated by Debbie Hesse, The Arts Council’s director of artistic services & programs, the exhibit pairs the artists because both create abstract rhythms through the use of color, texture and pattern.

“While Anita Soos creates painterly prints that are atmospheric and reference the landscape, Ken Lovell, a digital painter, programs random elements from computer generated templates,” Hesse said. “Both artists explore the balance of chance and choice, as dictated by the processes and materials inherent in their respective mediums.”

Anita Soos graduated from Endicott College in 1968 and is the owner of Anita Soos Design, Inc., a Connecticut-based design company specializing in mail order, product development, greeting card design and advertising for a select group of clients.

In her artistic pursuits, Soos’ primary medium is paint, but also uses pastel, printmaking, drawing and mixed media. In her artist’s statement, she says that she has created bodies of work based on the observations of water and photographic studies for the past 25 years.

“I am continually struck by the notion that the chaos in nature is perfectly ordered. The quality of light, the movement of the water, the time of day, low tide, high tide, wind, calm, sun, rain, clouds, storm. These all converge into a single moment that is singular, never to be repeated,” Soos says.

Lovell received his MFA in painting from Yale University in 1992 and currently works at the institution as the technical director of the Digital Media Center for the Arts.

“My working method involves both digital means and traditional fine art concerns,” Lovell explains in his artist’s statement. “Random elements and research material are programmatically combined using a digital collage technique of my creation. With these computer-generated templates as a starting point an image evolves, serially, with printed matter being altered by subjective physical performance. This mechanism of production allows elements of chance (the voice of the medium) to co-exist with painterly choices.”

David Sacks                          First Prize
(Greenwich, CT)                    Elementary/Middle School Division

Jordan Groff                           Tie-Second Prize, Commissioned Work
(Hamden, CT)                        Elementary/Middle School Division

John Alstott                           Tie -Second Prize, Commissioned Work
(Hamden, CT)                        Elementary/Middle School Division

Claire Chang                          Third Prize
(Madison, CT)                        Elementary/Middle School Division

Noah Lee                               Honorable Mention
(Woodbridge, CT)                   Elementary/Middle School Division

Gilbert Tsui                            Best Performance of Commissioned Work
(Weston, CT)                         Elementary/Middle School Division

Anna Pan                              First Prize
(Burlington, CT)                      High School Division

Corey Chang                         Second Prize
(Woodbridge, CT)                   High School Division

Ming Wilson                           Honorable Mention
(Wallingford, CT*)                   High School Division

Nina Knight                            Honorable Mention    
(Westport, CT**)                     High School Division

Anna Pan                              Best Performance of Commissioned Work
(Burlington, CT)                      High School Division 

Victor Markiw began taking piano lessons at age eight and gave his first public recital—performing works by Bach, Chopin and Mozart—when he was nine.

But he spent his high school years on the football and baseball fields at Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge and didn’t return to music until college.

Today, music is his job, his passion and his means of communication.

This fall, Markiw will embark on a new adventure: a semester in the Ukraine as a 2013 Fulbright Scholar. He will study Ukrainian composers, teach music theory and lecture on American music. The Ukrainian Fulbright office is working on securing a host institution.

“Music means everything to me,” said Markiw, a full-time lecturer in music at the University of New Haven. “I can’t imagine going through life without being involved in some sort of music- making and study. Sharing ideas with others makes it that much more rewarding.” Markiw, a graduate of the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, earned an MFA degree from the State University of New York at Purchase and a DMA degree in music from the University of Connecticut. He has performed extensively throughout the United States and abroad and is a sought-after recitalist and chamber musician who frequently performs and lectures at national venues. He has performed on Voice of America, appeared on television and served as resident pianist for the music therapy program at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn.

Markiw said he is eager to educate Ukrainian students about American folk music as well as life and attitudes in America.

“I look forward to learning more about Ukrainian culture, music and life and collecting important materials to further my research and publish a second book on the renowned Ukrainian composer, Myroslav Skoryk,” Markiw said.

His first book, “The Life and Solo Piano Works of the Ukrainian Composer Myroslav Skoryk,” explores the contemporary composer whose work contains stylistic traits from Ukrainian folk traditions.

The Fulbright experience will also serve as a sort of “homecoming” for Markiw, whose parents immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine after World War II.

When he isn’t interacting with his students, preparing lectures, grading papers, working on grant proposals, or coordinating concerts, one can find Markiw hard at work learning new repertoire for his third CD project. In 2010, he released an album with soprano Jennifer Litwin titled “The Litwin-Markiw Duo.” In February, his solo album containing works by Skoryk, Villa-lobos and Mompou was released.

“My first year at UNH teaching full time coincided with writing and defending my dissertation,” he recalled. “To top it off, I also performed solo piano recitals. I often joke to family, friends and colleagues that the experience was a trilogy of terror.”

The Yale University Art Gallery presents works from one of the nation’s finest collections of wood art in the exhibition Conversations with Wood: Selections from the Waterbury Collection. The exhibition features more than 70 objects from the 500 works in the collection of Minneapolis collectors Ruth and David Waterbury. Ranging from exquisitely turned wood bowls to large, sculptural pieces, these objects are complemented by select works given by the Waterburys to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Conversations with Wood reflects the evolution of the field over the past 25 years, from one with a focus on the lathe and wood turning to an artistic field that now includes many more processes. The exhibition is on view from May 17 through August 18 and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, Conversations with Wood: The Collection of Ruth and David Waterbury.

Exhibition Overview

Artists working in wood have produced increasingly diverse examples of their craft. The first practitioners used a lathe to turn the wood while the artist shaped it; thus, the early name of “wood turning.” In the late 1990s the field came to be known as “wood art” as it began to include the various processes practiced today—carving, piercing, and painting among them. The Waterburys have embraced the changing field of wood art and its artists since the late 1980s, collecting pieces from simple turned bowls to objects highlighting irregularities in the wood to works that explore imaginative ways to manipulate the medium. Founding members of the organization Collectors of Wood Art, the Waterburys not only have built one of the nation’s premier collections but also have given support to and forged enduring relationships with many wood artists.

“As leading collectors, Ruth and David Waterbury have played a central role in raising the visibility of wood art nationally and building a collection here at Yale,” says Patricia E. Kane, Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts, Yale University Art Gallery. “This exhibition is a rare opportunity to view a collection of this caliber, and to learn more about the recent history and innovation of contemporary wood artists.”

Both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue feature the artists’ voices, which gives another dimension to understanding the works of art in this collection. These “conversations” came from the nearly 130 living artists represented in the collection; they shared comments or memories about their Waterbury Collection pieces. Prominent international artists in the exhibition include Michelle Holzapfel, Robyn Horn, Todd Hoyer, William Hunter, Ron Kent, Michael Mode, Hayley Smith, Alan Stirt, and Bob Stocksdale.

The exhibition also reflects the great variety of artists and the multiple scales of objects that define the field today. For example, the show includes works as diverse as Christian Burchard’s Torsos, which covers a large expanse of wall with ethereal floating forms; Jack R. Slentz’s table sculpture, carved cube On the Edge; and Michael Hosaluk’s amusing Family. Stunning sculptures, such as William Hunter’s Garden Songs and Derek Bencomo’s Shadow Dancer, Fourth View, showcase remarkable technical and artistic skill combined with exceptionally beautiful specimens of wood. Mark Sfirri’sRejects from the Bat Factory and Giles Gilson’s Gravity Bottle are among the exhibition’s more playful pieces.

Related Programs

These programs are free and open to the public.

Exhibition Tours

Friday, May 17, 1:30 pm
Friday, June 28, 1:30 pm

A Conversation with the Collectors

Thursday, May 30, 5:30 pm
Patricia E. Kane, Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts, talks with Ruth and David Waterbury about collecting wood art and the highlights of their collection.

Artist Talk: Turning Yale Trees into Yale Bowls

Thursday, June 6, 5:30 pm

Scott Strobel, artisan, professor, and Vice President for Yale’s West Campus, talks about the art and business of crafting bowls from reclaimed wood yielded by felled trees on Yale’s campus.