Thursday, August 18, 2016
The home-office in New Haven where Crystal Emery lives and works is full of inspirational messages. Her front door bears the sign "'I Can't' Doesn't Live Here Anymore." Above her desk reads …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:54PMThursday, August 4, 2016
Art aficionados have collected paintings of female nudes for centuries. Philip II and Philip IV, the 16th- and 17th-century kings of Spain, were no exceptions. They were, however, in an awkw…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 09:00AMSunday, July 31, 2016
German filmmaker Wim Wenders first became known to American audiences with "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick." Peter McMorris remembers it well. "It was a great title, not the usual …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 03:00AMTuesday, July 19, 2016
Cecil the lion became a worldwide celebrity a year ago this month, for a horrible reason. The lion, who lived in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, was killed by a Minnesota dentist and big-g…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:58PMEvery year for the past six years, Suzanne Kachmar has held a summer exhibit, "SAMESEX," to showcase LGBT artists and work with LGBT themes, at her City Lights Gallery. This year, around the…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:12PMThursday, July 14, 2016
In the world of fashion, the '80s was an era of excess: bright and shiny fabrics, wild patterns, gaudy sweaters, big neck bows, bigger shoulder pads and even bigger hair. Women took cues fro…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 11:28AMTuesday, July 12, 2016
Jampa Tsondue was trained as a youth in thangka painting, a traditional Tibetan spiritual art form. As a young man living in a Tibetan refugee village in India, he painted professionally. "A…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 10:59AMMonday, July 4, 2016
If you're wondering about the man with the wayward flop of yellow hair who is always in the news, comedian Michael Ian Black offers an explanation in a new off-beat book: "The beasty is call…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:00AMWednesday, June 29, 2016
"Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom." Prospero made that statement in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," but it could just …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 02:51PMAbout a decade ago, southeastern Connecticut had a Whale Trail, a public-art project of 46 fiberglass, artist-decorated whales scattered around the area that celebrated the area's whaling pa…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:18PMMonday, June 20, 2016
What's the difference between a huge Macy's parade-style character balloon and a piece of large-scale inflatable art? It's the hidden meanings. A giant parade Spider-Man is just Spider-Man. …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 09:31AMThursday, June 16, 2016
World Refugee Day is Monday, June 20. An exhibit at New Haven Museum focuses on the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee experience, with work by six artists based in New Haven. Another exhib…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:58PMMonday, June 13, 2016
The artwork created by Ian Trask that is up now at ArtSpace New Haven is made of spools of multicolored elastic ribbon drilled into the wall, configured in a machine-like arrangement that re…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 11:55AMThursday, June 9, 2016
John Hassan, who has worked with ESPN, has been hired as the new director of marketing and public relations at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, succeeding Jacques Lamarre. For 11 y…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 02:33PMPaul Mariani began reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens when he was in graduate school, about 50 years ago. Over the years, he went back to Stevens over and over again. "Whether the weather…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:20PMMonday, June 6, 2016
Kelly DiMauro founded a festival he called 5 Arts — an evening of film, music, stage, poetry and visual arts — and presented it in 2010 and 2013 at Buttonwood Tree arts space in Middleto…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 11:21AMWednesday, June 1, 2016
An artist's goal, when participating in fairs like Art in the Park in Manchester, isn't just to sell a work of art. It's to lure customers into their studios to see what else the artist has …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 01:51PMTuesday, May 31, 2016
There is an old Haitian proverb, "If you're old enough to walk, you're old enough to carry water." And Haitians do carry water, sometimes for miles, starting at a very young age, because wat…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 10:56AMFriday, May 27, 2016
At the first Connecticut Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in 1988, two of its co-founders, William Mann and Terri Reid, stood in the back of Cinestudio on the opening night to gauge the audience …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 08:44AMTuesday, May 24, 2016
Turkey is a predominantly Islamic country, but that wasn't always the case. For more than 1,000 years during the Byzantine Empire, Eastern Orthodox Christianity thrived. That empire ceased t…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:00AMThursday, May 12, 2016
In 1975, a two-story building at 197 Asylum St. in downtown Hartford with an upholstery shop, an appliance store and a sheet-music store on the ground floor became the unlikely epicenter of …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 01:30PMWednesday, May 11, 2016
Sidewalks will come alive with art in the next few weeks as artists present original works and performances outdoors every Tuesday and Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. until June 16 at …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 08:44AMWednesday, May 4, 2016
Yayoi Kusama first created "Narcissus Garden" 50 years ago, at the 1966 Venice Biennale. The installation of 1,500 mirrored globes clustered together on the ground created a controversy, whe…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 01:57PMFriday, April 15, 2016
Earth Day is Friday, April 22, so it's time for Trashion Fashion. The Hartford-based organization's sixth annual choreographed runway show will be Saturday, April 23, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 09:56AMMonday, March 28, 2016
Lizzie Wills has a lot of fun stories to tell about Mark Twain. She should know. She lived in his Hartford house. "He once said, 'I would rather show off any time than save a human life,'" W…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 02:39PMThursday, March 24, 2016
HARTFORD — Jacques Lamarre, one of Hartford's most beloved cultural boosters, is leaving his job at Mark Twain House & Museum on April 16 to become a senior account manager at BuzzEngine, …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:45PMEvery year, the Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival shows movies in a wide range of topics, as monumental as the Holocaust and as intimate as a relationship between mothers and childre…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:16PMSamba Gadjigo grew up in Senegal reading books written by French-language authors that marginalized black characters, if they depicted them at all. "They devalued everything that is African …
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 12:16PMFriday, March 11, 2016
Since 2011, the internal conflict in Syria has killed more than a quarter of a million people and forced more than 11 million from their homes, according to United Nations estimates. Million…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 10:45AMThursday, March 3, 2016
When Alice fell down the rabbit hole in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," she landed in a world that in the 20th century might be referred to as Dalí-esque. Alice shrinks and grows and sh…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 09:04AMFriday, February 26, 2016
Spring training is underway and another baseball season is upon us. There's no better time to revisit a historical event that happened in Hartford in 1918: Babe Ruth visiting for an exhibiti…
SOURCE: Hartford Courant at 01:42PM 
