Hugged by scaffolding and sea green mesh, the Elizabethan-style home of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, lately New Haven’s liveliest visual arts space, looks like a skeletal body wrapped in a shroud. The suggestion is stronger if you know that the building is being prepared for its next life, and that these are ECOCA’s final days in its founding location at 51 Trumbull Street.
Open from noon to 5 on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday (with Thursday, the 18th, being the final viewing date), the space remains alive inside, hosting multiple exhibitions fitting a wide range of work between archways, moldings, partitions and even the tight walls of the vestibule. Yet you can’t forget the shroud and its restless sighing, nor the bones to which it draws your gaze through the windows.
ECOCA lives on after this amicable departure. The announced plan is to room up with CitySeed at 162 James Street before establishing a more permanent new home. But it’s worth visiting the original once more while you can—and appreciating, as these images attempt to do, its unique marriage of luxury domestic architecture with curated fine art.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
