A n unusual sort of release party, receptions for well-traveled photography and a posh fashion show are some of the highlights this week in New Haven.
Monday, June 5
At 6 p.m., Mitchell Library (37 Harris St, New Haven; 203-946-8117), the Westville branch of the New Haven Free Public Library system, is hosting a family-friendly, rain-or-shine Ladybug Release Party. Featuring “Park Ranger Harry and his reptiles, ladybug crafts and popsicles,” kids’ll be tasked with distributing the insects through the library’s garden, since ladybugs eat other, less desirable garden insects. Free.
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Tuesday, June 6
Today and tomorrow, College Street Music Hall (238 College St, New Haven; 877-987-6487) hosts double-bills with heavy indie rock appeal. Tonight at 8 ($26.50-32), Foster the People, best known for washy group vocalizations and the 2011 mega-hit “Pumped Up Kicks,” tops a show opened by Miya Folick, whose marketing tries much too hard to make her sound apathetic, but whose interesting if mercurial musical voice seems hard-won. Tomorrow night, also at 8 ($27-32), the headliner is Franz Ferdinand, whose brash indie rock is, at least aesthetically, a little bit punk, while the opener, Omni, says it plays “lo-fi pop that channels the specter of the late ’70s and early ’80s,” which made more sense the longer I listened.
Wednesday, June 7
At the Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel St, New Haven; 203-432-0601), lunchtime can be fine arts time—like this afternoon at 12:30, when art history Ph.D. candidate Key Jo Lee and the gallery’s associate conservator of paintings, Cynthia Schwarz, discuss “The Emergent Norman Lewis.” Using as their catalyst an untitled piece Lewis painted in 1973—which the gallery acquired in 2011 and recently displayed after “extensive conservation treatment”—the pair draws insights into “the complexity of Lewis’s work as a black Abstract Expressionist at the height of the Civil Rights era.” Free.
Thursday, June 8
From 5 to 7 p.m., photographer Roy Money’s exhibit Scotia in New Haven, featuring images of Scotland (like the one pictured above) “drawn principally from locations on the Isles of Skye and Mull, the largest islands of the Inner Hebrides,” gets an opening reception at its nontraditional venue, the Center for Bioscience and Technology (300 George St, New Haven). In trying “to fully inhabit” the places he photographs, “and in so doing be inhabited by the place itself,” Money says “his hope… is to realize the expression of a close encounter—in which boundaries between self and other become entangled and blurred.” Free.
Oh, and the legendary novelist John Grisham is coming to R.J. Julia (768 Boston Post Rd, Madison; 203-245-3959) for a 5 p.m. discussion and Q&A surrounding his latest book, Camino Island, and while that bit is sold out, there are still $35 tickets to get a book and a spot in the signing line, which inches along from 1 to 5.
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Friday, June 9
Local designer Neville Wisdom’s Spring/Summer 2017 Fashion Show promises “a fabulous night in New Haven at the gorgeous new apartment complex, The Corsair” (1050 State St, New Haven). With doors opening at 5:30 p.m., a $30 ticket gets you Italian-style food from Da Legna, Asian-style bites from Mecha and dessert from Katalina’s Bakery; champagne from The Wine Thief and cocktails from Mecha; music and emceeing from DJ Dooley-O; and, of course, a seat at the fashion show, which starts at 7:15.
Saturday, June 10
This year’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas, officially active since June 3, turns from a trickle to a brook this weekend, before it swells into a river during the next couple of weeks. Today’s itinerary includes a free group bike ride to and from Cheshire, which leaves at 9 a.m. from the New Haven Green, and a $10, 6 p.m. performance by Alison Cook Beatty Dance, “a New York-based contemporary dance company [performing] an exciting hourlong program” at First & Summerfield Church (425 College St, New Haven). Tomorrow’s schedule includes a 9 a.m. bike tour of “New Haven’s community gardens and nature preserves,” as well as a $10, 6:30 p.m. show by the jazzy Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet—which’ll eventually expand into “a cross-generational creative orchestra” featuring “New Haven music students who’ve been working with Bynum on principles of improvisation and creative music”—at Center Church on the Green (250 Temple St, New Haven).
From 3 to 6 p.m. at Kehler Liddell Gallery (873 Whalley Ave, New Haven; 203-389-9555), photographers Matt Garrett and Hank Paper enjoy a joint opening reception for their concurrent exhibits Signs of Life Continue and How You Travel Is Your Destination. Garrett, who says he seeks to track “life as it unfolds,” has turned the lens towards his own existence, calling Signs “an incomplete, but compelling, sketch of my life.” Paper, who in general tries “to capture what escapes notice,” says How You Travel “presents a detour from the usual photo travel essay”—and if the teaser photo is any indication, that departure involves a sense of humor and a surreal sort of realism. Free.
Sunday, June 11
The final screening of the 2017 New Haven Documentary Film Festival happens today at 1 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St, New Haven). The film is Unlocking the Cage (2016), directed by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker (who are giving a post-screening Q&A), and it tracks “lawyer Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project” as they “file lawsuits to give animals such as chimpanzees, whales, dolphins and elephants limited personhood rights”—in other words, as they try to usher a vital justice movement past the “then they laugh at you/then they fight you” phases of social change. Free.
Written by Dan Mims. Photo provided courtesy of Roy Money. Readers are encouraged to verify times, locations and prices before attending events.
