CAW Show Makes Freedom Visible

Lucy Gellman, Editor, The Arts Paper newhavenarts.org

The woman is running beneath a wide open sky, a sheaf of sunlight on her face. Her eyes look out to the horizon; her arms rise and fall as she moves. Behind her, rows and rows of cotton stretch into the distance. The bolls sway and swell against the wind, some splitting open. They rise past her hips and branch out onto the wall. Everywhere, the past slams right into the present. As it unfolds, the future seems stunningly, startlingly bright.

She is part of Made Visible: Freedom Dreams, running in the Hilles Gallery at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) through March 18. Curated by nico wheadon in partnership with the bldg fund, llc, the exhibition features work by artists Linda Vauters Mickens, Jasmine Nikole, and Y. Malik Jalal. It includes programming from Inner-City News Editor and WNHH

Radio Host Babz Rawls-Ivy, who has installed work in a corner of the secondfloor gallery.

The exhibition draws its name from Robin Kelly’s eponymous book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, a copy of which is featured in the exhibition. It also marks the fourth iteration of the Made Visible exhibition series, which CAW launched in mid 2020.

“This has been three years in the making,” said wheadon, who moved to New Haven four years ago, at an opening Tuesday night. “It’s really just a look at how artists see the issues of our times, but also like, what we might do to change things for the better.”

The seed for Freedom Dreams sprouted years ago, and has been steadily growing in wheadon’s mind and curatorial eye since then. In her personal life, wheadon and her partner, bldg fund co-founder Malik D. Lewis, have been talking about what it means to freedom dream “really since we got together,” she said Tuesday. It has since taken many forms, from her book Museum Metamorphosis to her young son Nile, who is just over a year old.

Then last February, she was able to explore “what it meant to look at artists’ visions for the world and how we might change it to better reflect us” more deeply while curating a show at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. It was a short show, she said, and she left wanting to bring the same line of questioning to New Haven. The artists she selected do exactly that, at a moment when several of the city’s arts organizations find themselves in transition.

“You know, it’s been a tough moment for New Haven,” she said Tuesday. “There’s a lot of arts leaders that are no longer here, or leading these institutions, and so it feels like a really important moment for artists to reclaim center stage and the conversation around what we want our culture to look like and how we want institutions to support that.”

What makes the show so moving is that the artists—who range from a first-year graduate student at the Yale School of Art to a retired nurse to a self-taught painter with two children under three—are in constant dialogue with both their viewers and with each other. Even before a viewer enters the gallery, Jalal’s work is a part of their sightline, with an ode to Black New Haven that runs decades deep.

On CAW’s street-facing windows,

Over two floors of the gallery inside, wheadon has drawn that tension out, balancing both the bitter and the sweet of freedom dreaming. While one of Mickens’ angels welcomes viewers into the space, it is her 2022 “Redemption” that pulls a body into the room with nearly umbilical force, glowing bronze and gold beneath the gallery lights. Placed just beyond the center of the gallery, the sculpture turns her whole body to the left, her eyes squeezed shut. In her hands, she holds an assault rifle, her index finger on the trigger. Above it, her mouth opens in the wide, pained O of a silent scream. Her garments, which cling to her small and strong body, build a collage of names and faces that seem unending, sometimes cut off before a viewer can get a full sense of a full word. Nails—dozens of them, maybe hundreds—protrude from her skull, building a sort of barbed and armored crown. The mirror image of the word Knowledge, written in all capital letters, scrolls across the base of the milk crate she sits on.

Just over her shoulder, Mickens’ “Mother As First Teacher” feels completely of a piece with this tableau. In a single, pained moment, these women hold centuries of history, more resilient than they should ever have to be. They are Black women who deserve rest more than anything in the world, and instead must continue to fight in battle they never asked for, and didn’t start.

“Redemption dreams of the day when the mission has been complete, victory claimed and her well-deserved rest has been received,” Mickens has written in an accompanying label. “The day has not yet arrived, and so, Redemption marches on, ever fighting, never resting until her work is done and her people are free.” the artist has enlarged a series of family photographs from IfeMichelle Gardin, a lifelong New Havener who is now the founder of Elm City LIT Fest. In one image, a baby sits in an inflatable pool of water, looking up at the camera. Their tiny mouth is a wide, curious O. Above them, two elders embrace, a rose garden rising in the background. In front of them, Audubon Street is a sprawl of cement and asphalt. It sets a tone that is at once historic and very present, archival and familiar.

Beside it, a swath of heavy, thick red velvet drapes over a cross, synonymous with the bloodshed of Jesus Christ before his resurrection. In a sacred context, it recalls the suffering of Jesus, in a form a church-goer might see during Holy Week. But Mickens has gone much deeper, peeling back the layers of Christianity to reveal something rotten underneath. That she has chosen a red cloth—rather than purple, or black, or white—feels heavy. It’s a symbol of Christ’s pain, which here becomes the pain of generations of Black people.

John P. Thomas

Publisher /

CEO

Babz Rawls Ivy

Editor-in-Chief

Liaison, Corporate Affairs

Babz@penfieldcomm.com

Advertising/Sales Team

Keith Jackson Delores Alleyne

John Thomas, III

Editorial Team

Staff Writers

Christian Lewis/Current Affairs

Anthony Scott/Sports

Arlene Davis-Rudd/Politics

Contributing Writers

David Asbery / Tanisha Asbery

Jerry Craft / Cartoons / Barbara Fair

Dr. Tamiko Jackson-McArthur

Michelle Turner / Smita Shrestha

William Spivey / Kam Williams

Rev. Samuel T. Ross-Lee

Contributors At-Large

Christine Stuart www.CTNewsJunkie.com

Paul Bass www.newhavenindependent.org

Memberships

National Association of Black Journalist

National Newspapers Publishers Association

Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce

Greater New Haven Business & Professional

Greater New England Minority Supplier Development Council, Inc.

On the wooden body of the cross, Mickens has painted incomplete American flags, wrapped rope, hammered in nails and shackles and added the text of “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song that Billie Holiday first made famous in 1939. Taken together, it signals the abuse of Christianity as a tool of white supremacy and a disenfranchisement of Black Americans that continues today. It is powerful and arguably overdue in CAW, a secular space that has only in recent years Read More about this aricle by going to theinnercity.com

The Inner-City Newspaper is published weekly by Penfield Communications, Inc. from offices located at 50 Fitch Street, 2nd Floor, New Haven, CT 06515. 203-387-0354 phone; 203-3872684 fax. Subscriptions:$260 per year (does not include sales tax for the in State subscriptions). Send name, address, zip code with payment. Postmaster, send address changes to 50 Fitch Street, New Haven, CT 06515. Display ad deadline Friday prior to insertion date at 5:00pm Advertisers are responsible for checking ads for error in publication. Penfield Communications, Inc d.b.a., “The Inner-City Newspaper” , shall not be liable for failure to publish an ad or for typographical errors or errors in publication, except to the extent of the cost of the space in which actual error appeared in the first insertion. The Publisher reserves the right to refuse advertising for any reason and to alter advertising copy or graphics deemed unacceptable for publication. The entire contents of The Inner-City Newspaper are copyright 2012, Penfield Communications, Inc. and no portion may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.