These students were the most recent cohort of a collaborative program between the Yale Center for British Art and the Lens Media Lab at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, titled “The View From Here: Accessing Art Through Photography.” After working together on a photography exhibition, Paul Messier, Pritzker Director of the Lens Media Lab and chair of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, and Martina Droth, YCBA deputy director and chief curator, decided to create a program through which students from local high schools and colleges could learn more about the art form. 

James Vanderberg, educator for high school, college, university and community outreach at the YCBA, told the News that the program was originally launched in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“Our goal was to create a program that would engage high school students in a meaningful, creative experience while they were home and isolated from friends and activities,” Vanderberg wrote. 

Inspired by the Studio Museum in Harlem’s program “Expanding the Walls,” program leaders built an innovative curriculum around digital images and their role in a world in which any cell phone owner can become the maker of pictures.

“The principle spark that made The View From Here different, and defined it, was that we were just going to lean into people’s smartphones,” Messier said. “I’ve always thought the smartphone camera is one of the most powerful instruments on the planet.” 

This year, the program took place in person for the first time. “Having everyone together helps to build bonds,” said YCBA photographer and instructor Robert Hixon. 

For four months this fall, 11 students from the greater New Haven area came together at the YCBA to share their passion for learning more about photography. 

“The program is built on three principles: technical understanding, looking at photographic material, and understanding photography as a career in both museums and beyond,” Vanderberg explained. 

The organizers shared how they wished for the course to offer resources to students that would help them achieve their goal of improving at their shared passion. 

Mia Coppola, a student in this year’s cohort, told the News how much she valued the guest speaker aspect of the program, describing how speakers “went through how they started working with photography and their experiences with meeting people and throughout their lives what influenced them to make their artwork.” As an aspiring wedding photographer, she felt compelled by the advice she received.

This power of art to foster community in a city like New Haven is exemplified by this program, organizers said. 

“A common thread that ran through both sessions is that students want to have an impact, whether it’s showing people the beauty that surrounds them in New Haven or working towards social justice,” Hixon said. “They want their images to make a difference here in New Haven.” 

Hixon and other instructors said they felt like they were not only teaching the students, but also learning from them. 

Through this program, a passion for photography allowed for people of all backgrounds to form bonds, according to Messier.

“Creativity belongs to everyone,” Messier said. “There are more and less creative people, I suppose. But it’s universally available.”

When asked what could have been done differently, Coppola responded, “It was such an amazing program that the only thing I would do is make it longer.”

“The View From Here: Accessing Art Through Photography” exhibition is available on the Yale British Art Center’s website. The photographs were also on view through April 3 on the High Street windows of the YCBA.

Correction 4/4: A previous version of this article misstated that a quote from Messier was written instead of said.

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Kymberly Pinder GRD ’95, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, curated the panel discussion, which centered around the role of public art and the question of what it means to “belong” in a community or space.

“You have an idea and you act on it, you work really hard with good collaborators to make things happen,” Strachan said about his partnership with Wu Tsai. 

Strachan’s work exists at the intersection of art, science and questions of identity — his pieces often incorporate extensive historical and scientific research, addressing the power of human ability. Strachan received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA from Yale University in 2006. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at various national and international venues, including the Frye Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2022, he received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, more commonly known as the “Genius Grant.”

Wu Tsai, founder of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, centers her social justice work around economic mobility and racial justice. In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, the foundation established a Social Justice Fund focused on addressing these issues in Brooklyn, New York.

 “A big focus of our social justice fund work is access to capital, because I do believe that entrepreneurship is a definite pathway to wealth creation,” she explained during the talk. 

As part of a campaign by this new fund called #YouBelongHere, Strachan created his public art installation “You Belong Here/We Belong Here,” which is displayed in the plaza outside of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The two large neon signs reading “You Belong Here” in white and “We Belong Here” in pink could not go unnoticed by any individual passing by. 

Tamar Szabó Gendler ’87, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, introduced the conversation by welcoming the range of individuals in the crowd: students, artists, professionals and members of the New Haven community. 

Pinder stated in a conversation prior to the event that she hoped that this panel could reflect how individuals with different backgrounds can meet and work together on projects that mattered to them. 

“You never know what kind of natural collision happens in environments where people have different interests and what can come out of those collisions,” Pinder said. “There are intersections and overlaps that you may never expect but happen at a place like Yale.”

The panel discussion then addressed questions of place and belonging. Wu Tsai discussed her background as the child of Taiwanese immigrants growing up in Kansas. 

“It’s important to think about how fragile belonging is,” Wu Tsai stated. “Even though I grew up in Kansas, and I belong to that place, there were a lot of times in that community, as a woman of color, where I didn’t really feel like I belonged.” 

Strachan was born in Nassau, a small island in the Caribbean, and moved to the United States for his studies. 

He said that growing up, he had a “very subconscious way of feeling that I like I didn’t belong.” 

“You start realizing that all of the architecture in the island and in the city is telling you that you don’t belong,” Strachan said. “Or that the curriculum in the school is reinforcing the idea that you’re a second. Or that the way that the town is laid out, is reinforcing the idea that you don’t fit in.”

Through its words, Strachan’s installation attempted to directly address this concept, telling passersby that they belong. However, as a member of the audience — who claimed to be “very confused” about the piece — pointed out, the construction of the Barclays Center displaced many Brooklyn inhabitants, creating a dichotomy between the work’s message and the place it is situated in.

Wu Tsai acknowledged this displacement and noted that the work was made to pay homage to organic protests. 

“I think it’s a perfectly fine position to have to not get it. I think it’s a part of public discourse,” Stratchan added.

The Yale School of Art was founded in 1869. 

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Through this program, Altman was given $10,000 to create a collaborative work with students, who also make their own artworks, around the central question of the residency: “When and How does speech become violence?” 

Aviva Green, the Social Justice and Arts Springboard Fellow and engagement coordinator, who oversees student engagement, service, social justice and arts opportunities at Slifka, described the goal of the Blanksteen program as a way “to create a real investment in Slifka’s part in the arts and in Jewish arts specifically.”

“We wanted to be able to support an artist, either emerging or already established, in the work that they do as well as give students who are interested in artistic endeavors a chance to meet with, learn from, and be inspired by a contemporary Jewish artist as well as empower them to create their own work,” Green wrote to the News.

Altman lives in Boston and comes to New Haven for a week about every six weeks. During her visits, she participates in discussions with the selected student groups but also in a number of events open to the community that Green organizes.

In both December and January, Altman participated in Shabbat afternoon learning sessions with photography prints and books. This January, Altman visited the Prints, Drawings and Photographs study room at the Yale University Art Gallery. Accompanied by students part of the cohort, they discussed artworks from the collection such as an etching by Faith Ringold, “Under a Blood Red Sky #9.” The same evening, she also presented her previous work and the upcoming project she has been working on at the Slifka Center.

Back home, she creates photographs which are centered around Jewish culture, storytelling and the body. At the center of her images is the idea of collective memory. 

“All Jewish people share a past, passing down heirlooms and sharing stories and performing rituals,” she said during her talk at Slifka, “the ways in which we use Judaica in imagery can further ideas of collective memory with a photographic link.” 

She uses both material symbols from Judaic culture as well as in the immaterial representations of Jewish thought. Even though some of her photographs are object-based and other narrative, all her images share the world of Judaica. 

“They’re speaking the same language, they share the same universe and whether it can be pointed to or not, Judaism is the world they inhabit and the outlook through which we view them,” Altman said.

To address the central question of the residency, Altman explores how Jewish narratives build tensions and how individuals share fictional stories that are often a painful reflection of the truth of the writer and their surroundings. 

The photographs she has been creating for the residency try to uncover what builds tension in Jewish folk tales and how different individuals engage with these stories.

Hannah Altman has exhibited with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Filter Photo and Athens Photo Festival. Her work has been featured in publications including Vanity Fair, Artforum, Huffington Post and British Journal of Photography. She received the Lensculture Critics’ Choice Award 2021 and the Portraits Hellerau Photography Award 1st Prize 2022. Her photobook “Kavana” (2020), published by Kris Graves Projects, is in the permanent collections of the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J. Watson Library.

Throughout the hybrid residency, Altman engages in conversations around the residency’s central question with a cohort of Yale students who have some involvement with Slifka and an interest in arts. Together they converse about their artistic creations and discuss their different points of view on this poignant interrogation.

Netanel Schwartz ’25, a member of the student group, talked about how, as the program and the discussions continue, he imagines that all of their art will “be in dialogue with each other and build off of each other.” He explained how each student had different approaches to the central question as well as to artistic making. 

“All these different ideas being thrown out help you get more creative,” he added. 

The project Schwartz is planning on making will be building on his own family history, the history of Sephardic Jews in Israel. Schwartz will be taking iconic photographs in Israeli history and drawing the faces of Sephardic people on these images, including in them what he calls “cultural memory.”

Flora Ranis ’24, another student part of the cohort, who wishes to become a full-time artist, chose to be part of the program with the goal to create more art and experiment with new mediums. She also believes in the importance of discussing ideas in a group. She said her ideas shift by the end of every meeting.

“It’s really cool because if I had been alone in my room going through these emotions, I don’t think I would have come up with the ideas that I have,” Ranis told the News.

Ranis’ final project will be expanding on the central question of the residency, she explained, asking herself, “Who gets to define violence? Who is both allowed to be in pain and a victim of violence? Who is believed to be a victim of violence? Who is allowed to scream? And whose screams are heard?” She hopes to take inanimate objects and inscribe human-connoted pain to them, pushing people’s empathy and pushing viewers to question if they can extend their notion of empathy and violence.

The Blanksteen Artist in Residence at the Slifka Center will culminate in a public exhibition of Hannah Altman’s photographs and the students cohort’s artworks at the Slifka Center, 80 Wall Street, on March 30, 2023. 

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Apart from their work in the Yale College, these students also share rooms, corridors, elevators, professors, conversations and friendships with students at the Yale School of Art, one of the highest-ranked art graduate programs in the country. Doruk Eliacik ‘23 volunteered to curate the exhibit, making this the first undergraduate show at Yale curated by an undergraduate art student. Rudd Fawcett ‘23 stepped forward as the designer of the identity of the exhibit, a role typically taken on by MFA students that involves making all the signage and catalogs.

Previously, this fall exhibition was named “The Yale Undergraduate Midway Show.” However, Director of Undergraduate Studies Lisa Kereszi said that students this year “felt like they didn’t want to have lower expectations of a work in progress show.”

“They really upped the ante and pushed one another to put final pieces in the show as much as possible,” Kereszi said. 

The mediums of the works range from ceramics and pastel on paper to digital video, acrylic, electronics and mixed media installations. The subject matter depends on each of the students’ interests. Unlike in some exhibitions, the works were not selected based on a common recognizable attribute or theme. 

The title “SCREENED,” which was chosen by Eliacik, stemmed from the logistical organization of the works. Artworks displayed on electronic screens were sectioned off from those pieces that Eliacik said were “materially more complicated and communicated much more slowly.”

As guests walked through Green Hall and entered the first room to their right, the works of the seniors presenting their theses welcomed them to the show. 

In the second room of the top floor, Eliacik pointed out that “bodies are absent…what had a more gentle touch floated to the top.” 

The mezzanine, the space between the top floor and the lower gallery, served, according to the curator, as a “transition into the basement, where we don’t have screens yet in terms of digital screens but there is something present in all of these works about how information gets mediated.” 

Finally, in the basement, the screens and electronic materials appear around a piece by Rosa Chang ‘23 that reconstructs a bedroom. 

The idea of “screens” led Eliacik to think about how artists in his cohort represented “a transitional generation between people who were born and grew up in an analog world and those who grew up with iPads.”

The works of art were not specifically collected to fit this theme. All senior art students — except for computing and the arts majors — were required to be part of this show. Nevertheless, despite the differences between all the pieces, participating students agreed that these works had a lot in common in terms of the creative process used to develop them. 

The students who made these works all participate in a senior seminar at 9:25 AM every Friday, where they present and discuss their art with their classmates, professors and critics. When creating in their studios, a semi-communal space, the collaborative conversations also continue, said Kereszi. 

“We have true friendships that go beyond being art majors,” said Diego Miró-Rivera ‘23. “We want what is best for each other, in and outside the gallery.”

Starting in September, Eliacik visited the artists’ studios and encouraged collaborative thinking. Every step of the curation was then workshopped with the artists. Miró-Rivera said that Eliacik, his classmate and curator, “did a great job of balancing everyone’s emotions and their work but not making too many decisions too quickly.” 

Miró-Rivera’s piece, Hay Poncho in Green Hall, took shape inside the gallery. At first, the hay creature stretched across the space, but as the other artists installed their work, Miró-Rivera curved his own around the other pieces in the room to create a sense of cohesion. 

He said of the process, “these are things that you don’t really plan ahead.” 

Eliacik and Miró-Rivera both attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art residency over the summer, and Eliacik helped transport some of the hay Miró-Rivera cut from his land art installation, “Between the Boulders,” back to New Haven. Earlier this semester, in their shared studio building, fellow art student Hannah Neves ‘23 cut Miró-Rivera’s hair so that he could weave it into his work “Hay Diego,” which is displayed in the basement of the gallery. Miró-Rivera’s favorite T-shirt is weaved into Neves’s piece, “waiting for the ferryman,” along with many of her close friends’ and art major colleagues’ clothing. 

Chang’s bedroom installation also interacts with the surrounding artwork. As demonstrated during her performance at the opening reception, when the overhead gallery lights are dimmed and the lights inside the installation are on, visitors can look into her reconstructed bedroom while whoever is inside can only see their reflection. 

“Everything gets blacked out except for the screens,” Chang said. “You just see these floating rectangles all around.” 

After past years of COVID-19 restrictions, this show also brought back together Yale students, faculty and community members who share a passion for art. Artists and visitors alike showed their excitement during the opening event on December 7. 

“It is beautiful for the entire community to come out to see the works and to see so many people here for the opening,” said Benjamin Jenkins ‘24, who visited the exhibition.

The final thesis show for undergraduate art majors will take place from May 7 to May 23 in Green Hall Gallery and 32 Edgewood.

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Using research, collaborative methods and public space interventions, at the intersection of art and science, he pushes the boundaries of traditional artistic practices. His work — a piece of Villares’ vision of terra ignota, the unknown land — will be displayed in the “Blanket Statement: 1st-Year MFA Fall Exhibition”  at Green Hall Gallery at the Yale School of Art until Nov. 11.

“I like to work with data a lot,” said Villares. “I am fascinated by the idea of how things that we feel are always transforming data and how data is so ‘unfeeling’. It’s a number so we do not have a sensation.”

Through his work, Villares translates the invisible meaning of data into approachable artworks with the goal to sensitize individuals to their relationship to nature. He defends the role of contemporary artists in raising awareness about climate change in works like “Topographic Paradox.”

“The most important part of the art is to give a space for people to rethink their lives and the multiple realities,” he states. 

Before joining the Yale School of Art Sculpture Department this year, Villares received artistic training in his hometown from the Instituto Superior de Arte, the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and the Centro Experimental de Artes José Antonio Díaz Peláez. Cuba, the island he was born and raised on, has shaped his work and his focus on landscape. 

“If you live on an island you think differently than if you live on the continent,” said Villares. In one of his first pieces “Finisterre” — which means end of the Earth in latin — he explores how the sea is the first frontier for someone growing up on an island. “Even with the political restrictions in the moment,” he declares, “what shapes you first is the landscape.” 

He has now settled in New Haven with his wife and two daughters for the two years to come. Coming to the Yale School of Art, a drastic change from living in Cuba, he believes that he is starting over which he considers “as a good sensation” as he hopes to connect with new ideas to build his art.

Aki Sasamoto, professor in the Sculpture Department of the Yale School of Art, explained how engaging it was to have students, like him, who already have thought through works but are willing to come back to school and approach their art in a new way. 

“I am excited that people like him can benefit from being at Yale,” Sasamoto concluded.

She hopes that Villares will be able to develop his projects in collaboration with other departments, a wish that the artist also shares. 

His work has been widely exhibited in Cuba and internationally including at the Chazen Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Bolivia and the Vancouver and Havanna Biennales. This year, alongside works by Kcho and Giuseppe Stampone, Rafael Villares presents his work at the Cuban Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale in the exhibition “TERRA IGNOTA, (proposals for a New World)” curated by Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde. 

When asking the curator of the exhibition how it was to work with Rafael and his art, Conde responded that the Cuban Pavilion was centered around Villares’ works. 

“The concept of Terra Ignota was born as a fruit of a collaboration among Rafael and I, the other two artists are there for multiple reasons, and they complete the concept but are not, from my point of view, indispensable as Rafael is,” Conde wrote to the News. 

Villares’ works, Topographic Paradox Series, Paradigm Series, World’s Fragment Series, Immersion Series, and Morphology of Echo Series are shown in Venice until Nov. 27. 

Staying true to his artistic mission, one of Villares’ local artworks, “Immersion Series” involved the receiving of information from oceanographers about the sea floors from which he created surreal fictionalized digital landscapes. 

The Yale School of Art was established in 1869.

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