 | This image is one of the black-and-white photographs Terry Dagradi will show in the Alternative Space during City-wide Open Studios. Dagradi will exhibit her work in a group called 10 Photographers. |
Numerous Yale affiliates are participating in the annual City-wide Open Studios
(CWOS), a 20-day celebration of the arts presented by Artspace. ? “For me, it’s all about community, having this community of
artists — from beginners to people who have been doing it forever and
ever — who gather for this big, open event. It connects artists to artists,
and the public to us. Having the chance to see and talk about each other’s
work is also sometimes very helpful in periods where we might be feeling we’re
not moving along; on occasion, this sharing of work helps us get to where we
want to be going next with our own work.” Donald Green While painter and printmaker Jo Kremer has been a participant in CWOS nearly
every year since the art festival started 10 years ago, she admits that opening
the doors of her private studio in Ninth Square to the public still makes her
feel a bit jittery. — By Susan Gonzalez
T H I S
Yale affiliates to exhibit photographs,
games and paintings at art festival
Yale is a co-sponsor of the festival, and its faculty, staff and students are
among the more than 400 artists featured in CWOS, which is taking place Oct.
8-28.
Artists will show their work during three weekends. On Oct. 13 and 14, artists
who work in the studio complex known as Erector Square, at 315 Peck St., will
exhibit their work; on Oct. 20 and 21, artists will greet visitors in their private
studios in neighborhoods in New Haven and nearby towns; and on Oct. 27 and 28,
hundreds of artists will be showcased in the Alternative Space at the former
Hamden Middle School, 550 Newhall St. in Hamden.
In addition, one representative work by each participating CWOS artist is featured
Oct. 8-12 in a main exhibition at Artspace, 50 Orange St., New Haven.
For exhibition hours and information about bus and bike tours during CWOS, visit
www.artspacenh.org/cwos/2007 or see the Oct. 4-10 issue of the New Haven Advocate.
The following are profiles of three of the Yale affiliates participating in this
year’s event.
Terry Dagradi
Photographer/Image specialist ITS-Med Media
CWOS Weekend 3 — Alternative Space
Photography is a part of Terry Dagradi’s daily life, whether she is taking
portraits of Yale medical school faculty or images of their scientific research
as part of her job; capturing snapshots of her seven-year-old son and other family
members or friends; or creating images of sights that captivate her along her
travels.
In an artist statement for CWOS, Dagradi described her love of the artistic medium
by saying, “I collect images as another might collect insects, at times
attracted to obvious beauty, often to the people in my life, and sometimes to
the bizarre or abandoned. It’s my intention for photographs to reflect
a reverence for life’s fleeting gifts and souvenirs.”
The photographer, who predominantly shoots with a digital camera for her job,
will show black-and-white film images in the Alternative Space.
“While in my work life the technology has flipped from the darkroom to
digital, I still love black-and-white film photography,” says Dagradi. “I
love silver printing, even though digital photography makes you realize just
how labor-intensive it is to make each image. I think I like the slowness of
the darkroom — its contrast to a life where everything is rushed. The darkroom
is a refuge for me.”
Dagradi first became interested in photography in high school and graduated from
the Tyler School of Art (part of Temple University) with a B.A. in fine arts.
Before coming to Yale almost 20 years ago, she worked as an assistant to various
photographers and in advertising, and then for a while operated her own greeting
card company. While doing that, she realized that she “needed to get back
to photography,” the Yale staff member says.
Now in her 10th year of participating in CWOS, Dagradi has often exhibited collectively
with other members of the Photo Arts Collective, an organization she helped found
a decade ago. The collective’s members share an interest in the art of
photography and help promote and support it in the local community. This year
she is exhibiting at the Alternative Space with a group called 10 Photographers,
and says she most enjoys CWOS for the sense of community it creates.
In creating her own pictures, Dagradi says that it is not necessarily the subject
in her vision that captivates her interest or curiosity but, rather, shapes and
a particular “presence of light.”
Dagradi has also worked as curator and technical adviser of Art Place, an ongoing
art exhibition at the Yale Physician’s Building that features the work
of artists from the region with the goal of enriching the experience of visiting
patients and their families and others who use the building. More recently, she
has been engaged in a project with the medical school’s Facilities Office
to help create exhibits in lab areas using images reflecting the scientific work
of medical scientists and researchers. Dagradi advises in the selection and installation
of the images for the ongoing exhibits.
“In ways one might not expect, scientists have some beautiful images of
their research — such as of DNA sequences, light microscopy or of folding
proteins — that is art in its own right,” comments Dagradi.
The Yale staff member is also the “unofficial keeper” of some 15,000
glass-plate images in the Harvey Cushing Brain Registry that were taken for Cushing,
a famous neurosurgeon and pioneer in brain surgery who spent the latter part
of his career at Yale.
“These images are beautiful and powerful portraits of his patients as he
cared for them and as a way for Cushing to keep records of their recovery or
in some cases their death,” explains Dagradi, who hopes to one day see
to the scanning and archiving of the massive collection of images. “It
is, essentially, a medical archive, but I look at it, in a way, as contemporary
art.”
Dagradi says CWOS allows her home city to show off the myriad talents of local
citizens.
“It provides a way of for New Haven to fill up its studios with people
interested in art and to say ‘Go look at what we’ve got.’ It’s
an amazing event.”
"Who Let the Dogs Out?" is one of the wooden games by Donald Green that the Yale professor will be exhibiting during City-wide Open Studios
Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) and the A.
Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science
Weekend 3 — Alternative Space
Donald Green, a first-time participant in CWOS, hopes visitors to his exhibit
in the Alternative Space will touch and play with the objects he has on display.
He will be showing a variety of games he has created, mostly from wood, for
a range of age groups, including one designed mainly for children that he has
tentatively named “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
In this game featuring six dogs and a fire hydrant made out of Sculpey and
a wooden board, players score points by moving their dogs so they can “mark
their territory” and “sniff” and “lick the noses” of
their opponents’ dogs, explains Green.
“I’m hoping a lot of kids will come to visit because kids are fun
in the way that they will just jump into games,” says Green.
Green is also the creator of an award-winning board game called OCTI, first
marketed by The Great American Trading Company in 1999 and now played around
the world. A hybrid of several classic board games such as chess and checkers,
this game of strategy features wooden octagonal-shaped pieces called pods and
a wooden board. Players eliminate their opponent’s piece by jumping over
them, as in checkers, with the object of landing on their competitor’s “home” squares.
His other creations include “Jump Java,” which he calls a “coffee-house
game” featuring coasters, cups and saucers that is now marketed in France,
and “Razzle Dazzle,” which Green describes as an “abstract
version of Ultimate Frisbee.”
The Yale political scientist says that the artistic part of his game creation
came about when he realized that he needed to have prototypes of the board
games that he developed in his head. He initially rented time in a woodshop,
learning how to use a lathe as well as other woodworking tools. He now has
his own workshop in his home.
“I strive for simplicity and elegance in both [my woodworking and game
design]: minimal rules but deep games; simple construction techniques but attractive
woods and finishes,” says Green in his CWOS artist statement. He says one
aspect of woodworking that he particularly enjoys is that for each of his creations,
he knows where the wood originated — often from felled or fallen trees
donated by friends.
His CWOS exhibit will include the prototypes of both published and soon-to-be
published games, says the political scientist, “ranging from the light-hearted
children’s games to more sophisticated strategy games.”
Green is a life-long lover of games, and recalls how he and his brothers always
had games set up as children, often putting them in spots around the home where
they wouldn’t have to be dismantled. “We enjoyed games so much
that when we got in trouble and were sent to our rooms, we figured out how
to play games in a shared anteroom outside of our bedrooms — so we could
play without being disobedient and leaving our own bedrooms,” recalls
the Yale professor.
While he appreciates the allure of modern electronic games, he is more attracted
to old-fashioned-style games, such as chess, that have a “sitting and
waiting aspect,” Green says.
“I think that games where you have to really think hard about a move — and then wait for your opponent to make his or her move — teach a valuable lesson to kids,” says
Green, who tests game inventions out on his own children.
Green’s academic research is concerned with public opinion, voting behavior,
campaign finance, hate crime and rationality. His books include “Pathologies
of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science” (with
Yale colleague Ian Shapiro) and “How To Increase Voter Turnout” (with
Alan S. Gerber), the second edition of which was recently published.
The political scientist says that he is lucky to be in an environment such
as ISPS, where there are “a lot of game players.”
“I like the social engagement of playing games with friends and seeing
a side of them that would normally be hidden,” adds Green. He is also interested
in the way games are a form of cultural expression “even though they are
not often appreciated as such.”
While Green has been at many game fairs, this is the first time that he will
be showing his games as a form of art, and he is looking forward to “presenting
games in an ocean of art” at the Alternative Space, he says.
“I don’t expect there to be many games among my fellow presenters,” Green
quips. “So I’ll be in a unique position.”
Yale psychiatrist Dr. Jo Kremer says Mother Theresa was the inspiration for this painting.
Dr. Jo Kremer
Assistant clinical professor of psychiatry
CWOS Weekend 2 — 39 Church St., New Haven
“Working in my studio is a very private, almost isolated experience,” explains
Kremer, who will show her creations on Sunday, Oct. 21, in her New Haven studio. “It
always makes me a bit anxious to have all these visitors coming in because I
wonder how they will react to what I am showing. But I always look forward to
CWOS because it makes me organize my work, and it lures me into talking about
it with those who come to visit.”
In fact, it is only more recently that the Yale staff member has had the opportunity
to devote large chunks of time to her painting and printmaking. Until four
years ago, she divided her time between teaching at the medical school, working
in a Yale-affiliated mental health clinic and running a private practice. During
much of that same period, she was also raising three children.
In 2001 Kremer began auditing undergraduate art classes at the University,
an experience she describes as “a privilege.” Two years later,
she took a nine-month sabbatical, closing her private practice to be able to
devote more of her energy to painting. She has been working in the public sector
since, most recently in a program for young adults.
“Other than taking some classes at the Creative Arts Workshop, I really
didn’t have any consistent formal training in art until I started auditing
art classes at Yale,” says Kremer. “When you are auditing studio
classes, you have to do all the work that enrolled students do. I have learned
so much in them, and the classes have been awesome.”
Just this year, Kremer has moved on to graduate-level classes at the School
of Art, where she is currently auditing two classes, one on color and one on
formalism.
“I feel kind of like I have ‘graduated’ in the sense that I
feel I am starting to develop my own identity as an artist — that I am
finally ‘getting there,’” says the Yale staff member. “I
used to just be in awe of everyone; now I feel like I am putting to use the concepts
and techniques that I have learned.”
Still, Kremer considers herself very much a student of art, and says that her
own work is a process of “exploration” and “discovery.” As
she converses about the ideas and inspirations behind the colorful paintings
hanging on her studio walls — which range from an expressionist-style
cityscape showing Ninth Square, to a realistic portrait of a typewriter, to
a more abstract vision of a post-9/11 world — Kremer identifies one common
thread in her eclectic body of work. “I love color, enjoy abstract play,” she
says. “I think of my work as storytelling. I’m usually expressing
or capturing something that is happening in my life or the world or my reactions
to it.”
In fact, her conversation about her art repeatedly meanders around her other
passions: her 30-year career in medicine and mental health; her work with a
group of cycling advocates to make New Haven a more bike-friendly city; the
ways in which the city is changing (just outside of her studio the long-vacant
Macy’s building is being noisily demolished); her children; philosophy;
and her love of looking out upon New Haven from the rooftop of her urban apartment,
to name just a few.
It is all these seemingly disjointed facets of her life that ultimately connect
to ignite her creative energies, says Kremer.
The psychiatrist, who has been at Yale since 1984, now works two days a week
at a University-affiliated mental health clinic for young adults based in West
Haven. There are times, she says, that her career and her art do intersect;
some of her paintings have explored the issue of trauma, for example. But for
most of her career, Kremer says the she felt she was straddling “two
distinct worlds”: one as a psychiatrist and one as an artist.
“With potentially more time in my studio now, I hope I can find balance,” she
says.
W E E K ' SS T O R I E S
New facility is place where ‘future of medicine’ can unfold
Facility balances researchers’ needs with environmentally friendly features
Alumnus’ gift supports ‘critical’ work at F&ES
Yale affiliates to exhibit photographs, games and paintings at art festival
Yale’s United Way fundraising goal set at $1.2 million
SCHOOL OF MEDICINE NEWS
Yale to take part in national study examining children’s health
Three members of faculty elected to Institute of Medicine
Dr. David Fiellin receives NIH grant . . .
Chronic Lyme disease does not exist, researchers report
Spouses follow suit in health behaviors, study reveals
Museum honorees to ponder ‘The Future of Life on Earth’
‘The Greening of Yale and Beyond’ is topic of symposium
Symposium to examine the intersection of faith and politics
‘21st Century Democracy’ is the theme of Law School reunions
IN MEMORIAM
Deno Geanakoplos: One of world’s foremost Byzantine scholars
Felix Zweig: Former dean’s impact still felt in Yale engineering today
Exhibit examines post-war effort to halt the spread of communism . . .
Campus Notes
Bulletin Home|Visiting on Campus|Calendar of Events|In the News
Bulletin Board|Classified Ads|Search Archives|Deadlines
Bulletin Staff|Public Affairs|News Releases|
E-Mail Us|Yale Home