As Yale and its host city celebrated the inauguration of Yale President Maurie McInnis this weekend, they threw open the doors to some of the most innovative and iconic spots in town.
At open houses across the city and campus, visitors went backstage (at the David Geffen School of Drama), backcourt (at Payne Whitney Gymnasium), and back to the age of dinosaurs (at the Yale Peabody Museum). Their explorations took them from farm (Yale Farm) to table (the Hume American Furniture Study Center at Yale West Campus) and from high in the sky (Yale Carillon) to below the ground (the crypt at Center Church on the Green).
In all, there were more than 50 open houses, tours, exhibits, demonstrations, and talks on Friday and Saturday (with a few continuing Sunday) — something like a New Haven all-access pass —with many of them highlighting the close ties between town and gown.
At NXTHVN, visitors took in art-filled studios and galleries, and took part in a family program.
“I’m grateful for this space and this platform,” said Christopher Paul Jordan, M.F.A. ’23, at a Saturday open house at NXTHVN, an unique arts incubator with studios, a fellows program, arts education spaces, and exhibit galleries located in a former factory building on Henry Street, near Hillhouse High School.
Jordan, who hails from Tacoma, Washington, has a studio at NXTHVN and specializes in a process called “strappo” — a technique, often used in art preservation, for lifting paint from a surface. Jordan uses it as a metaphor for the things people carry with them and the things they leave behind.
“The people here have banded together to connect to the local creative scene,” Jordan said. “NXTHVN gives us a nice petri dish to do our experiments in connection.”
NXTHVN was founded in 2019 by Yale graduates Titus Kaphar ’06 M.F.A. and Jason Price ’07 M.F.A., with a mission to create a new model for art mentorship and develop opportunities for local entrepreneurs.
At the open house, visitors engaged with dozens of artworks that filled the galleries and studios, including colorful cactus plants reimagined in blown glass by Salvador Jimenez-Florez and powerful wall hangings of used shoes, animal horns, and hides by Anindita Dutta.
“We work with the whole artistic community, sharing information and bringing awareness,” said Marissa Del Toro, assistant director of programs and exhibitions at NXTHVN. “That’s the energy we’re putting out there.”
A similar sense of community was in cultivation at the Yale Farm on Edwards Street.
On Friday, dozens of students, staff, and visitors took part in a combination open house and workday at the farm, which is home to the Yale Sustainable Food Program. They weeded, watered, prepared compost, planted peas, admired some frisky chickens, and showed newbies around the place.
At the Yale Farm during its Friday open house.
“I love days like this when we make first contact with someone new and open these gates to conversation,” said Jeremy Oldfield, manager of field academics at the farm. “For decades, we’ve been using this space to show people from the university and the city that everyone is a full participant in the larger conversation about food systems.”
Near the chicken coop, farm managers and Yale undergraduates Raina Sparks and Brody Nies gave a tour to Nicole Bernardo, a second-year MBA student at the Yale School of Management, and Jennifer Imamura, assistant director for teaching development and initiatives at the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.
They talked about tomato trellises, indigo plants that an art student will use to make dye, and the farm’s work with Common Ground High School and the nonprofit group Loaves & Fishes, which provides clothing and food and advocates for equitable food systems.
“We try and connect as many people as possible,” Nies said.
At 63 Audubon, community artists exhibited a wide range of styles and methods of art.
Meanwhile, at 63 Audubon Street, a pop-up art exhibition, “Origins,” brought together nearly a dozen Connecticut artists — plus dozens of appreciative gallery-goers.
New Havener Matthew Watson brought three of his children to see the exhibition. They started with a colorful light sculpture created by their neighbor, Jason Ting, who combines art with computer coding.
“I like how he’s integrated his programming into the art,” Watson said, rounding up his kids for a closer look around the room. “It’s pretty cool. We get to see so many kinds of art, all in one place.”
“Origins” came together with the help of many city and university groups, including the Yale School of Art and the Yale School of Management, in collaboration with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, the Center for Inclusive Growth, the Creative Arts Workshop, the ACES Educational Center for the Arts, the Neighborhood Music School and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Kymberly Pinder, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the School of Art, was on hand to greet artists and visitors as they took in the space.
The works included paintings, photography, collage, sculpture, and combinations of found objects such as neon signage.
Ting’s piece, a generative light sculpture of six tubes that morph into 15 color schemes based on Ting’s coding, is a “campfire” for a technology-oriented society. “It’s a meeting place,” Ting said, “a place for calm, contemplation, and healing.”
Back on campus, Sterling Memorial Library’s Gates Classroom offered contemplation of another sort, with an open house event devoted to Yale presidential inaugurations from the past three centuries.
Among the items on display were a list of dignitaries in the procession for the 1778 installation of Ezra Stiles; the printer’s plate for the invitation to President Arthur Twining Hadley’s 1899 inauguration, fashioned into a metal tray; and fabric samples from the robe worn by Peter Salovey at his 2013 inauguration.
At Sterling Memorial Library, artifacts of previous inaugurations were on display.
“I’m fascinated by that metal tray, and by the way that pomp and circumstance have evolved from hand-written passages in Latin to instructions for using technology,” said Shah Khan, a 2019 Yale College graduate who now attends Yale Law School.
Indeed, one of the most popular items in the exhibition is a set of instructions for using a cell phone, from the 1993 inauguration of Richard C. Levin:
“To answer an incoming call, pull the antenna up to its fullest extension, flip open the mouthpiece towards you, and depress the SND key (note: some phones will automatically answer when you flip open the mouthpiece portion of the phone)”
Other items on display, however, remained timeless, as Kimberly Goff-Crews, secretary and vice president for university life, noted as she read from the 1871 inauguration address of Noah Porter:
“I need make no apology for selecting as my theme the Higher Education of the country. An occasion like the present would, under any circumstances, require me to speak of this subject in some of its aspects. It cannot be avoided at the present time, when the entire theory of Higher Education is so generally and so actively discussed.”
“As you look at these things from the past, there are recurring themes that are just so strong,” Goff-Crews said.
