The first time I knock on Winfred Rembert’s front door, his son answers. “I think Dad’s asleep,” he says, but lets me inside while he checks. I wait in the hallway and peer into the room to my left.

Stacks of paper, leather strips, paint cans and books cover a desk in the center of the space, and two chairs face each other, their seats heaped with tools and brushes and newspapers. The shelves are lined with old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys; train sets; action figures. A toy sailboat dangles by a string from the ceiling, hovering above a carton of fireworks, stacked atop the box set of Harry Potter books one through four. A small canvas leans against the wall, covered in thick streaks of red and blue and green paint, punctuated with small dollops of white.

“That’s his office,” his son says, returning to find me staring at the clutter. He confirms that Winfred’s still sleeping—it’s only 9 a.m., so I can empathize. “Come back tomorrow,” he suggests.

When I come back the next day (at 10:45 a.m., this time), Winfred comes to the door right away, and leads me into the room. It’s transformed—the chairs are clear and ready for sitting; the collectibles are confined to the shelves; the papers have been cleared from the table. The only things covering the surface now are dried flecks of paint, and a wooden box filled with neat rows of metal tools.

Winfred’s daughter, Lillian, ducks underfoot, straightening one of the newly stacked towers. She gestures at a chair. “Sit down and you guys can talk.” I realize I’d caught the family off guard yesterday—today, they’re ready for me.

Winfred tells me he’s usually up and working by now every day, but it’s been an exhausting few months. One of his seven children had recently passed away, turning most of the fall into an extended mourning period. Then came Winfred’s birthday—he turned 70 this November. Aging has brought a worsening eye condition makes things that used to be easy, hard.

By December, Winfred has been slowly getting back to his normal routine: working on projects most hours of most days, and touring the country the rest. In the past fifteen years, he’s become nationally renowned for his art, which ranges from intricately etched leather tableaus, to painted portraits, to hand-crafted bracelets. He’s been profiled for a documentary, published a book, displayed his art at the Yale University Art Gallery. He travels to schools and gives lectures on art, history, and Civil Rights activism.

But for decades, he’s managed to live relatively undercover here in Newhallville, tinkering away in his basement or his office on viscerally colorful, brutally honest portrayals of black life in the South.

Winfred sits across from me and crosses his legs. He’s a large man, with a kind smile, deep dark skin, and a shock of white hair.  He’s wearing sweatpants and a Star Wars shirt, the words “Don’t Fail Me Again” printed above Darth Vader with arms outstretched. Winfred loves Star Wars—I can tell by the Lego Death Star hanging above the doorway and the pair of three foot tall Storm Troopers that guard his living room, and because he tells me so. “It’s just a really great story,” he explains.

Winfred certainly knows what makes a good story.

***

Winfred likes to begin his own with the cotton fields of Georgia of the 1940s, where he began working alongside his mother when he was three years old. He was far too young then to be picking cotton under the hot sun, so he’d create art, instead: he crafted animals out of cotton fibers and maypops, small green egg-shaped buds that grew on vines and turned yellow as they bloomed. He’d use sticks as feet, and a rock as a head, and play pretend for hours.

When Winfred got older and began working in the field, he graduated to drawing people and landscapes for fun. It wasn’t a “skill” he “developed,” he tells me. He just liked to make pretty things.

As Winfred speaks, his words paint a swirling portrait of Georgia and cotton and pain, dotted with the same white orbs that illustrate the backgrounds of many of his pieces. I spy the canvas leaning against the wall again and realize what it depicts: black workers on the cotton plantation, backs sweating under the heat and the strain.

When he was 15, Winfred ran away from those cotton fields, and from his family, to Cuthbert, Georgia. He didn’t know what he hoped to do: “I just knew I wasn’t going to pick any more cotton. Cotton for me was out of the question,” he says. After sleeping in cars and on streets, Winfred was taken in by a man named Jeff, the owner of a pool room, who let him nest in the back with the balls in exchange for work.

Jeff’s pool room was on Hamilton Avenue, an all-black neighborhood of Cuthbert and the center of the Georgia Civil Rights movement. Each night, every civil rights leader would congregate at Jeff’s to meet and discuss plans for action. Winfred would listen.

“I had never heard no talk like that,” Winfred remembers. “Talking about civil rights, talking about blacks owning things: their own businesses, and their own stores. And having money and a savings account and that type of thing. Good things.” So Winfred decided to join the movement.

“I was a big talker. I was 16 and I talked a lot—sometimes I just literally would take over a meeting from the adults,” he says. Together, they planned sit-ins and protests and non-violent demonstrations. It was dangerous work—Klan members threatened their lives, and white police officers persecuted first and asked questions later. “They were all the same, back in those days. You go in these protests movements marches, you have to be prepared to die,” Winfred says. “Because sometimes that’s exactly what’ll happen: you’ll get killed. A black life didn’t matter.”

By the time Winifred was 17, everyone on Hamilton Avenue, black and white, knew Winfred’s name. But because of his activism, he was a target: one day, he was pursued by two white men with guns. “There was a car sitting there with the keys in the engine, so I took it,” he says, matter-of-fact. When he went to jail, he was seen as a martyr for the cause.

Winfred’s son interrupts to bring him his breakfast, setting a McDonald’s sandwich and a large Coke down on the table beside us. Winfred thanks him, gulps, and continues. He’s told this story before, but it doesn’t get easier—maybe he needs the liquid courage.

In 1963, only a year and a half after being detained, Winfred escaped prison. “I was just mad because they had kept me in so long without a trial,” he remembers. “So I took a roll of toilet paper, and I put it in the john, and flushed it.” The jail flooded, and the sheriff was furious. He unlocked the cell and began beating Winfred; they wrestled; the sheriff unsheathed his gun; Winfred grabbed it.

Winfred ran straight from the cell to a friend’s home, but the friends promptly called the police to turn him in. When he woke up the next morning, 100 white people had circled the house. He was beaten, handcuffed, and driven back to jail.

Winfred recounts all this with the slow drawl of memory, tracing and retracing the lines around his ancient bloodstains and bruises. But when he mentions the ride back to prison, he gets up abruptly, reaching for something behind his desk. His large frame takes awhile to maneuver, but he emerges with a thick sheet of leather shaped like the interior of a car.

“He beat me,” Winfred says, pointing to the police officer etched in the left side of the leather. He’s painted a shocking blue, and looking backwards at the man sitting behind him. “That’s me. Handcuffed. And that’s the blood,” he points. Red seeps from Winfred chest, flowing down onto the backseat and to the hand of the other police officer sitting shotgun.

“Now I tell my kids, never argue with a police officer.” We’re silent for a second, thinking about 1960, and about 2016.

***

Winfred’s wife, Mary, tiptoes into the room and shakes her head. “You need to wear this,” she says, handing him an eye patch. She’s perfectly perfumed, spritzing fragrance from room to room with her presence, and wears a shiny pearl necklace layered over her black long-sleeved shirt. She’s thrilled I’m here, she says. So proud of him. So honored students are taking an interest.

Winfred met Mary when he was in prison. He was given a fair(-ish) trial this second time around, and stayed in jail for only seven out of the 27 years he was given, four of which he spent getting to know the pretty young 16-year-old who lived near the prison. “It took me a long time to get her to accept my letters and things,” he smiles. “But she finally did, and we started talking.”

When Winfred wasn’t flirting with Mary, he was learning the craft that would become his passion—leather work. A fellow inmate, imprisoned indefinitely, spent his days making pocketbooks and billfolds from leather. Winfred quickly picked the practice up from him.

Winfred and Mary moved to New Haven in 1970, and were married on December 28, 1974—Winfred recites the date without hesitation. They started having children, and building a life far from Georgia.

“One day we were sitting at the dinner table and my wife said to me, ‘I know what we can do with these stories—you put them on that leather and make pictures out of them!’” he remembers. “‘When you’re gone, the stories gonna be gone with you. But if you leave something, people will know about these stories.’”

***

Winfred settles onto his work bench and lays out a strip of light brown leather. It’s etched with the face of a man, mouth wide in song. Winfred runs his thumb over the thin grooves of his cheeks and lips, and carefully pours a few drops of water in the corner by the clasp. Then he reaches for a sharp metal tool, and carves out the five letters that spell my name. It’s a bracelet, Winfred says. It’s one of a kind, and it’s for me.

In 2000, years after moving to New Haven, Winfred’s artistic gifts were discovered by Jock Reynolds, the head curator of the Yale University Art Gallery. Winfred had heard about a meeting planned between leaders in the New Haven art community, and had showed up dressed up like a businessman, a picture of a cotton field rolled up in a scroll under his arm. “Next thing I know, Jock Reynolds is giving me a show.”

“I think I’m the only living artist that had a show there,” he smiles, adjusting his eye patch. “From there, things went smoothly.” His work has been featured in the Hudson River Museum, Adelson Galleries in Boston, small New Haven exhibitions, and within private collections.

But these days, Winfred is happy to spend his afternoons sitting outside in his garden with his wife, looking out onto Newhall Street. He loves New Haven: the people, and the museums, and the restaurants downtown. He loves his house, filled with antique tchotchkes and Star Wars memorabilia. He collects toys because he never had any growing up, he tells me.

Winfred doesn’t like to think about how similar 1960 was to the present. The police might not bind and whip, and the Klu Klux Klan hasn’t come to New Haven, but he knows that new forms of racism have emerged, new forms of violence. New injustices that stem from old roots. He paints and he lectures to illustrate those roots, and offer solutions. “I don’t know,” he sighs. “Today, honey, it’s just a mad world. And I don’t know how to get through it.”

Later in the week, Winfred has plans to fly to Minnesota and speak with a school there, but what he says he really wants to do is speak to the kids in his own neighborhood. “New Haven won’t invite me to any school,” he says. “I haven’t been to one school in New Haven. Not one.” He wants to tell the students to remember how lucky they are—most of them don’t have to worry about getting to school with two shoes, or how much cotton they’d have to pick to get by, or whether they’ll find a place to spend the night. He’d remind them not to use the N-word—“There’s a price we pay for being free, and for being free of that word”—and to pay attention in class—“The teacher has to get all the curriculum done!”

Winfred doesn’t paint much of his life after Georgia: he’s got too many stories to tell—all seventy years’ worth. “I wake up in the morning and I think, am I going to do a picture about Miss Mary? About Black Masterson? Or something about Bubba Duke n’ Pete? Or Ranko Red? Or Butch Jordan? And on and on,” he says. “Those are people that I knew growing up on Hamilton Avenue.”

He excuses himself for a second, and hobbles back inside. He emerges with a book, and signs it carefully. “For Sarah, From Winfred.” I leaf through the pages. There’s All Me II, which layers portrait of dozens of prison stripe clad African Americans in a dizzying collage; The Lynching, where three men dangle limply from a tree; The Dirty Spoon Café, an homage to a Hamilton Avenue restaurant filled with dancing pairs wearing knee-length skirts and bowler hats.

And then there’s Amazing Grace. Rows of cotton stretching upwards from the center of the frame, white fields reaching towards sky, black hands reaching to gather the crop. A little boy sitting between the bushes, maybe playing with a maypop. Dreaming of freedom.

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Hi hi hi guys!

The Herald is back and better than ever. Our New Year’s resolutions were “go to Woads more,” “eat a pizza from all of the pizza places,” and also “set attainable goals,” so that’s all going pretty well so far. The snow is melting, the sky is blue, and we got to watch the sun rise while making this paper! It’s great to be home.

The Yale we’ve returned to this semester has undergone a transformation of its own over the past few months. Through marches, protests, songs, teach-ins, and painful conversations, student activists have pushed for a more inclusive campus, and many of their demands have been heard. Next Yale is a group of students of color that has taken the lead in organizing and galvanizing the campus community in these efforts—in this week’s front, David Rossler, SM ’17, listens to organizers and tracks Next Yale’s emergence and structure. What’s next for them? And what’s next for Yale?

For the Herald, change is also in the air: we have a new Audio section! Stream, download, and listen to fun podcasts online.

But don’t forget to pick up the good old-fashioned print issue for more new news. In Opinion, Anna Lipin, ES’ 18, campaigns for a new female President. In Culture, Jacob Potash, DC ’17, worries for Kanye West’s new baby, and Magda Zielonka, SY ’17, Charlie Bardey, SM ’17, and Josh Isenstein, BK ’16, make new friends in Ubers. And in Features, Emily Patton, DC ’17, highlights a new solar energy initiative will ensure that no New Haven families live in fear of their homes going dark.

Spring semester has sprung, and we couldn’t be more excited for whatever comes next. We hope you are too.

Happy reading,

Sarah Holder

Editor-in-Chief

The corner of Starr and Newhall Street smells like wet paint.

Many of the other street corners seem to, today. It’s a beautiful October afternoon, and I’m driving through Newhallville with Jim Pepitone, the Construction and Energy Specialist at Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven. Pepitone, or “Pep,” as practically everyone calls him, started working with NHS about a year ago, after managing a New York-based housing development operation for most of his life. On almost every block, he slows down or reverses to show me a home that NHS has renovated, or is in the process of renovating.

Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven is a non-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing New Haven neighborhoods. NHS takes blighted and abandoned homes—those that are deemed unlivable—and gives them a complete rehabilitation. NHS began working in the city in 1979, helmed by Executive Director Jim Paley. Since then, the organization has renovated and sold almost 450 units to low and middle-income New Haven residents.

Originally, the organization took all of New Haven under its scope, but in the past 10 years, they’ve directed their focus primarily to the neighborhood of Newhallville, Paley says. To date, according to an interactive map on their website, they have completed 28 renovations there, and will finish four more this year.

“The real story is what’s been happening to the people here in Newhallville without jobs,” Pep tells me, when I ask more about the work NHS does. He gestures out the window of his car at the big concrete building disappearing behind us. “One hundred guys a month are dropped off at that prison with no job, no money, no place to go—that’s the story here in Newhallville.”

The Newhallville story mirrors that of many neighborhoods in post-industrial cities. In the 1800s, the area served as a bedroom community for employees at the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory, and was filled with flourishing shops, grocery stores, and local businesses. But Winchester Arms started a slow decline in the 70s and finally closed in 1979, taking 26,000 jobs with it. After that, residents of Newhallville began to leave, businesses began to shutter, and the incidences of crime and poverty began to rise. Gang violence pervaded, incarceration rates skyrocketed. Insurance rates rose with the decline of the neighborhood, preventing new businesses from opening up and new families from settling down.

Other neighborhoods in New Haven were similarly hard-hit, but Newhallville has emerged with the worst reputation, said Donald Morris, the leading community organizer at the Life Kingdom Outreach Ministry. Together with his ministry, he is working to change that perception.

Morris spent last summer conducting a door-to-door survey of Newhallville residents, asking them which improvements they wanted to see in the community. Number one, they wanted gangs off the streets; number two, they wanted better lit sidewalks; number three, they wanted more activities for young people. And, number four, they wanted the city to get rid of the abandoned and dilapidated houses.

Lieutenant Herbert Sharp, District Manager for Newhallville, explained that gangs and drug-dealers use these abandoned houses as headquarters, and are more prone to violence on empty streets. By fixing, and filling, these homes, NHS hopes to bring life back to the neighborhood.

***

“For 20-something years, this house was vacant,” Pep says. We’re in the midst of the busy construction zone on the corner of Starr and Newhall Streets: tiptoeing past power tools and wood shavings, stepping over cardboard boxes of kitchenware, and climbing up sturdy new steps covered in a film of white dust. “The roof was rotted out, this whole corner was rotted right out, the stairs were rotted out, and the interior was totally rotten. This house was in pretty bad shape,” he says.

Two years ago, the only living residents of 141 Newhall Street were pigeons, and a nice family of raccoons. Both Paley and Stephen Cremin-Endes, NHS’s Director of Community Building and Organizing, described it as “the most blighted house in Newhallville,” and the two of them have seen their fair share of neglected houses. Now, the three-story home is finally nearing completion, more than halfway through a construction process that typically takes six to eight months.

The old house has been completely gutted, but since the area is a historic district, all new houses must retain their distinct Newhallville character. In keeping with the neighborhood’s strictly defined color palette, the outside paneling is painted a rich maroon, and small geometric brown squares line the top floor windows. Inside, the staircase railing is made of the intricately carved wood from the original interior.

Still, NHS brings 21st century quality to all the homes they renovate—every home is Energy Star rated, with efficient heating, well-insulated windows, and low-intensity flush toilets. And outside every NHS home stands a lamp post, providing a beacon of light to illuminate sidewalks and backyards after dark.

All around Newhallville, more houses like 141 Newhall Street are cropping up—on Starr Street, three out of five homes in a row owe their shiny new paint job to NHS. The organization focuses on turning around several houses in concentrated areas, renovating houses block by block, cluster by cluster.

In order to make homes more affordable, NHS acquires the homes below market value. Sometimes Paley buys homes on the open market with donations from institutions and individuals, and sometimes banks donate homes that have been foreclosed. A different package of government grants and subsidies covers each property.

By keeping purchasing costs low, NHS avoids grappling with the issues of gentrification many developers face. The homes they renovate are state-of-the art, filled with expensive amenities, and packaged in a fresh sheen of paint. But instead of pricing out residents by raising property values, NHS makes sure these homes are affordable for the average New Haven homebuyer.

After NHS works with the state and the city to acquire as many homes as they can, they work with home buyers to develop packages they can afford. According to the 2010 census, the average income of a family of four on Lilac Street is $13,000, Pep says—the standard price for a six-bedroom, two family NHS house is around $175,000. The organization also offers homebuyers’ education programs to teach potential tenants how to financially prepare. “We give housing opportunities to people who maybe wouldn’t be able to afford to under other circumstances,” Pep says, pointing out one new house that, through a combination of loans, subsidies, and the already low NHS price, cost the resident only $1,000 up-front. “Her mortgage payment is less than paying rent,” he says.

NHS’s goal is to provide higher quality housing to current Newhallville homeowners, as well as attract new residents who will lay down roots and make long-term investments in the community.

“One of the really cool things about a block turning around is, look—” Pep says, pointing at a maroon house with brown trim. “They copied the colors! Isn’t that pretty cool?” As we continue to drive, he points to other houses on other blocks: lush flowerbeds bloom, piles of leaves are raked neatly, Halloween decorations adorn front porches. “That, to us, says that somebody else is starting to care.” Small businesses will follow, educational systems will improve, and children will feel safe playing on the streets, the thinking goes.

“We call Newhallville the ‘Promised Land’ now,” says Morris, the pastor. “That’s what we want to see it become.”

***

“Oh boy, that’s not good,” Pep says. He’s standing at the back door of 706 Huntington Street, an NHS project that is nearing completion. The grey building has been converted from a three family home to a two family home, and looms large next to a small grassy yard. The door has been left ajar.

“Don’t come in,” Pep tells me, and enters the building. I hear his voice call through the house, “Hello? Hello?” He walks up and down the stairs, peeks into each empty room. Finally, he comes out and assures me: all clear. “I think we’re okay. The fact that the door was open, and the alarm was off, and the keys are still here…very strange.” he says. I ask sheepishly if we can skip this house and tour another, and he agrees. “Somebody could be hiding.”

Even behind the walls of renovated homes like this one, the elimination of violence, vacancy, and systemic poverty isn’t guaranteed. As we drive, Pep slows down at the corner of Newhall and Ivy, where two one-way streets have been paved so the cops can intercept the flow of gang traffic. Later, he points out a building that he says houses prostitutes on the first floor and drug dealers on the second; he shows me the sidewalk where he once watched a little boy drop a live gun; he indicates houses that have exteriors peppered with bullet holes.

But we also pass the house of an old couple he calls “the heart of Newhallville,” who sit on their front porch and talk when the weather is nice, one man working in his make-shift community garden, and two colorful homes where a daughter and mother live side by side. On Lilac Street, Cynthia Johnson has started a community baking club—“One of them could be the next Julia Child!” she insists. Farther down the road, lilacs bloom from flowerbeds made of tires painted purple. Pep is greeted by almost everyone on the street with a “Hey, neighbor!” and a smile.

Newhallville was, and is, a vibrant and historic community, Paley says. All NHS does is embellish what the neighborhood already has to offer, one house at a time.

When I was four years old, my mother announced we were moving to New Haven. Not for forever, she insisted, just for the weekdays when she needed to juggle a full-time job and a tiny child. I started daycare in the neighborhood Monday through Friday, and on weekends we’d shuffle back home to New York.

But daycare only occupied me for three-quarters of the workday. While I was napping and trading peanut butter sandwiches (this was before allergies were a thing, I think), my mom was worrying about whether she’d be able to pick me up when work ran late. When things were especially busy, my grandmother would make the trek up from North Carolina and stay with us for weeks at a time—after school, we’d eat black raspberry Ashley’s and go to the park and wait until my mom came home.

Not every mother (or daughter) is fortunate enough to have family to turn to, or the resources to access daycare at all. For a lot of Yale faculty and staff, finding childcare during work hours is difficult or impossible, and almost always expensive. In this week’s front, Libbie Katsev, DC ’17, follows parents left without systems of support, struggling to balance a full-time job at Yale with the fulltime job of being a parent.

We honor parents in Voices, too: in the interview, Ava Orphanoudakis explains how her father’s wisdom shaped her art, and Coryna Ogunseitan, TC ’17, illustrates her father’s journey to America. In Culture, Emma Chanen, TD ’19, celebrates Claire of Claire’s Corner Copia, the mother of New Haven coffee cake.

But this paper isn’t just kid stuff—check out Reviews for rare skin diseases and Muppet innuendo, Opinion for scary clowns (read: politicians), and Features for poisonous abandoned factories (NSFW. Literally).

This Parents’ Weekend, we hope you spend time with family—whether it’s the family you grew up with or the families you’ve grown into here. From our family to yours, here’s the Herald. Enjoy.

Hugs,

Sarah Holder

Managing Editor

On a December 2006 afternoon, light shone through the gallery’s glass-paned entryway and landed on a sun-dappled collection of contemporary sculptures at the unveiling of Louis Kahn’s latest New Haven building. The Yale University Art Gallery staff took the Kahn opening as an opportunity to celebrate the YUAG’s close involvement with Yale students, choosing a group of seven to put together the sculpture exhibit for the new space’s lobby. “We weren’t thinking of it as one project for a larger program at that point,” said Pamela Franks, the YUAG’s Deputy Director for Exhibitions, Programming, and Education. But eight years later, the plans have changed.

Today, the program is thriving: Hand-picked groups of students start with an empty gallery floor and, over the course of a year, work through every aspect of developing an exhibition in collaboration with museum staff in each department. Each project is unique, but the general trajectory involves choosing the works of art, explaining the argument the exhibit puts forth, writing chat labels and wall text, designing the installation, arranging objects in the space, publishing brochures, organizing talks and programming, and publicizing the event. In the first half of the 2014-2015 semester alone, four student-curated exhibits have already opened at the YUAG.

***

Odd Volumes

I headed into the YUAG looking to escape a cold New Haven drizzle and hundreds of pages of reading. But after warming my hands in the elevator, I found myself surrounded on all sides with my Sunday afternoon nightmare: endless books.

To my left, bright orange fungus envelops sheets shaped like tree bark, and tall blades of grass extended from beds of dirt in Plexiglass pages. To my right, a dead turtle, shell cracked and decaying, was pressed into a paper grave like some morbid reptilian flower. Repurposed novels lined the edges of a center table, shredded and cut and soaked and painted.

I’d stumbled upon Yale’s new counterculture library — Odd Volumes.

A baseball bat plastered with the writings of Sigmund Freud is mounted on the wall; tiny texts molded into pebbles sit in a shallow glass case; burned books hang from the ceiling on a meat hook; singed Encyclopedias lean against each other, their spines brown and charred. Pages of Mark Twain’s Mississippi Writings flutter, a tiny fan whirring to turn the pages. Lucky for me, in this odd library: Books aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be seen.

***

A week later, I looked up from the l-shaped couch in the YUAG’s lobby and recognized Sinclaire Marber, MC ’15, by the side of her face. “I’m the one sleeping on the pillow,” she admitted, and I remembered: Upstairs, the exhibit features a photo of her lying on a book shaped cushion. She and the other student curators of Odd Volumes are all featured in photographs depicting their interaction with the pieces. One wears a red skirt made out of the fairytale Wizard of Jeanz; another holds an axe covered in articles on postmodern art criticism. Marber is in her third year as a gallery guide at the YUAG, but this is the first time she’s been part of her own tour, snuggled between pages six and seven of Daniel Gantes’s zzzbook.

Marber applied and interviewed a year ago to be a part of the student team charged with developing the exhibit, which now displays about 100 of Allan Chasanoff’s 300 contributions of “Book Art” to the YUAG. Chasanoff, DC ’61, a renowned art collector, became fascinated in the 1990s with the rise of the digital age and the changing landscape of publication. Together with Doug Beube, an artist who deals with books as his primary medium, he began collecting pieces by artists who were responding to the growing obsolescence of printed publication and engaging with its decline. “Delving into this collection has highlighted how the written word and the visual experience both intersect with and inform knowledge,” Franks said. “The visual objects [incite] a visceral experience.”

Franks was the lead curatorial mentor to the eclectic mix of six students who collaborated on Odd Volumes, including History of Art majors like Marber, an English and African American Studies PhD, Ashley James, and an MFA candidate for Fine Arts and Sculpture, Andrew Hawkes. The team met every Friday at the West Campus Center for Conservation and Preservation, where Allan Chasanoff’s collection resided. They would go through 15 or 20 pieces each week, researching artists, developing a thesis upon which to base the exhibit, forming connections with each other and with the art.

Marber was drawn to a small red copy of Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great. It’s open to a passage and portrait of Manet’s 1863 portrait of Olympia, who reclines, breasts exposed, above the caption “Portrait of a vulgar demi-mondaine.” A hole carved into the center of the book holds a golden egg, nestled between Olympia’s splayed legs. Marber notes how the artist Lisa Waters subverts the male-dominated gaze of traditional Eurocentric, Western art: a female artist reclaiming the male artist’s depiction of Olympia’s nude body.

Hawkes gravitated to a destroyed bible found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Terri Garland’s Square Bible, which is stiff, caked in mud. “There was such a power to this book when I first saw it,” he said. “All this history is imbued into the book—the contents weren’t telling us the story, it was all in the context.” The artist’s only intervention was to find it.

***

Odd volumes takes these book forms and reshapes their context again and again. Artists suffuse their works with a singular theme, upon which collectors such as Chasanoff impose their own interpretations. The students discovered that curation is often about embracing the freedom to reconfigure and present these meanings in new, sometimes dissident ways.

In a talk at the exhibit’s opening, Chasanoff explained how before the dawn of the digital age, he felt trapped in a “bound world” where books were objects of idolatry. He sees the sculptural books he collects as symbols of freedom and expression, books repurposed to liberate the contents from their suffocating spines. “I love books,” he said. “But once you have 4000 of them you don’t have to handle them as if they’re going to disappear.”

James and the other students recognized this as Chasanoff’s main thesis, but James said that “rather than put forth one argument as to what book art is, which is going to fail no matter what, we took a holistic approach to how people are connecting and interacting with books.” Because of their generational differences, students viewed the books more as sculptures than as symbols, bridging the gap between the realm of books and the realm of art.

Chasanoff grudgingly admits how happy he is with the students’ work. “If I would have graded them, they picked 90% of what I would have picked,” he says.

“That’s an A-,” Marber said, laughing.

***

Many things placed here and there

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel’s tiny Upper East Side apartment held one bedroom, two people, eight cats, and twenty turtles. By the 1960s, it also held almost 5,000 works of art. When the National Gallery learned of the couple’s massive collection, they convinced the Vogels to donate half to their Washington, DC museum archives. The other 2,500 works were distributed throughout the country in a national gift campaign: Fifty Works for Fifty States. Connecticut’s 50 ended up at Yale, and by 2013 they were placed in the hands of six student curators.

“A lot of collections focus on the couple because they’re so compelling,” Emma Sokoloff, TC ’13, said of the other states’ interpretations of the Vogel collection. A History of Art major, Sokoloff, whose sister is one of the managing editors of this newspaper, was one of the six graduates and undergraduates who developed Many Things Placed Here and There, an exhibit featuring the YUAG’s Vogel acquisitions in conversation with around 50 other pieces from the permanent collection. “We had to strike a balance between giving the works the attention they deserve and telling [the Vogels’] story.”

This story centers around the lives of the Vogels as eccentric forces in the Manhattan visual arts community, tracking their weekends in the downtown studios of now-famous artists including Sol Lewitt, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle. The childless couple subsisted for most of their lives on Dorothy’s salary as a Brooklyn librarian, setting aside Herbert’s postal worker checks to feed their addiction to collecting. They plastered their walls, stuffed their mattresses, and stacked their coffee tables with hundreds of paintings, drawings, and objects. Eventually, they just ran out of space.

“Intimacy was a common thread throughout the collection,” Sokoloff said, describing small-scale paper illustrations, birthday cards, sketched self-portraits, and soft line drawings created by removing the threads from a paper’s fabric. “Their closeness with the artists was reflected in works they were attracted to: they ended up collecting works that were close and personal to the artists themselves.”

Franks finds this sense of intimacy inherent to the process of curation, as well as collection. “Art is part of our culture, and it should be something we have in common,” she said. “It’s something we connect with each other over and through.” “Molleen guided our cadence,” said Sokoloff, referring to Molleen Theodore, lead curatorial mentor on the Vogel exhibit and Assistant Curator of Programs at the YUAG. Still, ultimately students were given near complete liberty in shaping what was produced “They invariably come up with compelling ideas on their own,” Theodore said. “There’s an innovation and openness and kind of evolution in the way work gets done.”

“We dive into the show together, help each other see art through different eyes,” said Franks, having directed five student curatorial teams over the years. “This is my favorite program. I love it.”

***

Photography at Yale

As I headed to the YUAG’s central elevator, my eyes locked with an older blonde woman dressed in all white, clutching an oversized purse and standing in front of a chipping white wall. She’s Anonymous, the subject of a photograph by Katy Grannan, ART ’99, wordlessly beckoning me into the small corner room on the gallery’s fourth floor. The space is filled with the curatorial work of Maggie Neil, ES ’14, whose senior thesis explored the history of Yale’s Photography program and whose exhibit, Photography at Yale, features works produced by Yale students since the program’s inception in 1979. Couples lay in varying states of undress on rumpled sheets; black-and-white children wade through the Eno River in North Carolina; a voyeur stares through the open window of a Manhattan apartment.

“There’s a visual logic, a narrative,” Neil said of the exhibit. Neil’s personal narrative took a different trajectory than that of other student curation projects. After working in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs for two years, Neil received the A. Conger Goodyear Fine Arts Award, which granted her the chance to collaborate with Joshua Chuang, then the Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media at the YUAG. Neil was given access to the Gallery’s entire photo collection, and she ultimately decided to work individually with Chuang (instead of a group of students) to choose 24 works she found particularly striking. “Pam [Franks] was really into it,” Neil said, but “Jock [Reynolds] gave me some of the harshest criticism I’ve ever received in my life.”

Reynolds is known for being extremely adamant in encouraging student involvement in the gallery, offering young people the same responsibilities as adults and pushing them to deliver professional work. This vision is the impetus behind each student curation project at the YUAG, regardless of format. “Honestly, in that hour, I feel like I learned to curate,” Neil said. “He taught me so much about the importance of visual connections, not just theoretical ones. [Curation] really is an art.”

Neil will be in southern China through most of the exhibit’s run, from October through January, teaching writing and American history at Sun Yat-sen University, but she is returning in December to deliver a talk. “It feels kind of weird for me now to be so far away from it,” she said over a late-night Skype. “It had a huge impact.”

***

We often talk about existing in a “Yale bubble”: living in gothic castles, rushing to extra-curriculars, operating in some bizarre alternate universe perpendicular to reality. In this student world, “things kind of end up feeling like a game,” Neil says. In college, you’re in a student world, writing papers and delivering presentations and producing work for an audience of one professor, usually. Curating an art exhibit at a professional gallery is different. There’s a discrete goal, a tangible result, and a broad audience: at the end of the process, hundreds of people will be immersed in the gallery you’ve spent months working to perfect.

Though curating at the YUAG is more of an extra-extra-curricular, it’s still a program operating within the college structure. Since the program’s inception, The Yale Center for British Art began a student curation program modeled after the YUAG’s, offering students the same high level of authorship and access. For many aspiring curators, this is the most agency they’ll have over an exhibit of this magnitude for a long time—most entry-level museum jobs are purely administrative.

“It was one of the most important things I did at Yale,” Neil says. “Being given real responsibilities feels so empowering.”

–Photographs by Chris Melamed

The temperature-controlled room was set to 70 degrees, but the man couldn’t stop sweating. His eyes darted around the dimly-lit space, and rested hungrily on the yellowing books laid in front of him. He reached for his blazer pocket, as if to take out a handkerchief—then simply patted his lapel nervously. E. Forbes Smiley III had just stolen a map from Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. But he hadn’t gotten away with it yet.

A few floors above him, the library’s security team huddled around a screen showing grainy footage of the reading room below. One librarian clutched an X-acto blade she had found on the Beinecke’s floor earlier that afternoon: the first sign that June 8, 2005 wouldn’t be a typical Friday. In the search to find out who was responsible for the blade, Smiley had already piqued their suspicion on camera.

***

On Wednesday, October 8—nearly a decade after Smiley’s thievery—a crowd of book lovers and art historians gathered in the lobby of the Beinecke Library. In front of them, on a large presentation screen, was a familiar image. “Usually, I start with this slide,” Michael Blanding said with a chuckle, and pointed to the screen, which showed the distinct marble geometry of the Beinecke’s walls.

Blanding had returned to the scene of Smiley’s crime to discuss his new book, The Map Thief, which chronicles Smiley’s life before and after his rise to infamy. Blanding described how, when Smiley left the Beinecke that afternoon, a plainclothes Yale police officer followed him into the lobby of the Yale British Art Center, where he asked Smiley “if perchance by mistake he had taken anything from the library.” Smiley agreed to return to the Beinecke for investigation, and, there, drew from his blazer pocket a folded-up copy of one of the Beinecke’s prized acquisitions: Jon Smith’s 1631 Map of New England.

The FBI was summoned to campus, and Smiley spent the night in jail. E. C. Schroeder, current director of the Beinecke and, at that time, head of technical services, also called in Bill Reese, YC ’77. Reese, a rare book dealer and the chair of library associates for Yale, had helped the University with library theft in the past, dealing mostly with inside jobs that students carried out.

When Reese examined Smiley’s briefcase, he immediately noticed Gerard de Jode’s incredibly rare 1578 Terreni Globi. More importantly, he noticed the wormholes. Four tiny spots in the corner of Smiley’s map lined up perfectly with four moldy counterparts on the spine of Yale’s atlas.

During Wednesday’s talk, Reese sat in the lobby of the Beinecke, listening to Blanding, nodding along, smiling with the familiarity of the story. “This was something later on that the judge seemed to think was hilarious,” Reese told me later on the phone. “But it was like a fingerprint.” After he matched the wormholes, it was clear Smiley had cut the map from a book in the library’s collection.

Terreni Globi turned out to be one of the nearly 100 maps Smiley stole over the course of his four years as a robber. “Smiley really, really knew his stuff. That made him a very dangerous thief,” Reese said. “He knew what the great rarities were, and the institutions they were in.” According to Reese, Smiley had also worked hard at ingratiating himself with librarians, displaying genuine enthusiasm for the material. “A lot of people felt personally betrayed for those reasons,” Reese added.

Reese had already been betrayed by Smiley once before. “Yes, I’d known him for many years,” he said ruefully: in the 1980s, Reese had sold the first American coastal navigation atlas to Smiley for 50,000 dollars. When Reese tried to cash the check, however, it bounced. Reese recalls phoning Smiley and demanding his money back. “I’m afraid I just don’t have it,” Smiley had replied. “And I’m afraid your atlas doesn’t exist anymore.” Smiley had already aggressively disassembled the antique document and sold the New England maps to a prominent dealer. Eventually, Reese got his money back, but the map lovers’ relationship never warmed past “cordial.”

By June of 2006, a year after the Beinecke incident, Smiley had admitted to stealing from institutions such as the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and Chicago’s Newberry Library, in addition to Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke. Because of his cooperation, he was only sentenced to three years and four days in prison. By the time Blanding began research for The Map Thief in 2011, he was back living in Martha’s Vineyard, making 12 dollars an hour working as a landscaper.

***

“That wasn’t much of a detective story, was it?” Harry Avakian, a New Haven resident who attended Michael Blanding’s talk, complained. True, Smiley seemed to have returned to the cushy life of a law-abiding citizen—he’d taken up watercolor painting in prison, and still lived minutes from the beach. But à la Nicolas Cage, he’d set himself up for a Map Thief: Part II.

“I do believe that Smiley stole more maps than he admitted,” said Reese. Schroeder, too, told me he is skeptical that Smiley only stole from five or six institutions, and that the list of buyers he had instructed the FBI to track down may have been incomplete. Schroeder says a question remains about what Smiley would have remembered at all, in his testimony. “He’d certainly remember maps, but I can see him forgetting who he sold them to,” Schroeder said.

Blanding himself holds suspicions about Smiley, especially after Smiley abruptly stopped agreeing to interviews for The Map Thief two years ago. After doing a few sessions, Smiley started stalling, canceling the night before, and not showing up to meetings. He finally claimed that his family counseled him against cooperating. “Maybe he realized he was in over his head, or that there were things that would get him into trouble if he revealed them,” Blanding mused. They had once chatted for hours at cafes on Martha’s vineyard, but had not talked in years. “If anyone has a chance to talk to him, I would love to hear what he thought of the book,” Blanding added, with a shake of his head.

As for the Beinecke, the librarians happily welcome Smiley’s self-induced exile. But Reese and Schroeder say that, if he—or someone like him—were to return, they would be ready. According to Reese, Beinecke has vastly increased security measures since 2005, employing a full-time librarian in the rare book reading room, improving their security surveillance cameras, and establishing a more comprehensive electronic cataloging system. Most libraries are prevented from tracking patrons who check out their books due to civil liberties issues; rare book institutions like Beinecke, however, now have data on every individual who reserves a piece. “You’re always struggling between wanting people to have access to material and protecting it,” Schroeder said.

It was on an ordinary day a decade ago that Smiley’s saga of theft first began, as he stood staring at a fading atlas in Sterling Memorial Library. His heartbeat quickened, as it usually did when he saw an especially beautiful map. In that moment, he realized something. Only one stretch of his fingertips, one swift ripping motion, one subtle cough separated him from this priceless artifact. The thought had been planted; there was no turning back.

The temperature-controlled room was set to 70 degrees, but the man couldn’t stop sweating. His eyes darted around the dimly-lit space, and rested hungrily on the yellowing books laid in front of him. He reached for his blazer pocket, as if to take out a handkerchief—then simply patted his lapel nervously. E. Forbes Smiley III had just stolen a map from Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. But he hadn’t gotten away with it yet.

A few floors above him, the library’s security team huddled around a screen showing grainy footage of the reading room below. One librarian clutched an X-acto blade she had found on the Beinecke’s floor earlier that afternoon: the first sign that June 8, 2005 wouldn’t be a typical Friday. In the search to find out who was responsible for the blade, Smiley had already piqued their suspicion on camera.

***

On Wednesday, October 8—nearly a decade after Smiley’s thievery—a crowd of book lovers and art historians gathered in the lobby of the Beinecke Library. In front of them, on a large presentation screen, was a familiar image. “Usually, I start with this slide,” Michael Blanding said with a chuckle, and pointed to the screen, which showed the distinct marble geometry of the Beinecke’s walls.

Blanding had returned to the scene of Smiley’s crime to discuss his new book, The Map Thief, which chronicles Smiley’s life before and after his rise to infamy. Blanding described how, when Smiley left the Beinecke that afternoon, a plainclothes Yale police officer followed him into the lobby of the Yale British Art Center, where he asked Smiley “if perchance by mistake he had taken anything from the library.” Smiley agreed to return to the Beinecke for investigation, and, there, drew from his blazer pocket a folded-up copy of one of the Beinecke’s prized acquisitions: Jon Smith’s 1631 Map of New England.

The FBI was summoned to campus, and Smiley spent the night in jail. E. C. Schroeder, current director of the Beinecke and, at that time, head of technical services, also called in Bill Reese, YC ’77. Reese, a rare book dealer and the chair of library associates for Yale, had helped the University with library theft in the past, dealing mostly with inside jobs that students carried out.

When Reese examined Smiley’s briefcase, he immediately noticed Gerard de Jode’s incredibly rare 1578 Terreni Globi. More importantly, he noticed the wormholes. Four tiny spots in the corner of Smiley’s map lined up perfectly with four moldy counterparts on the spine of Yale’s atlas.

During Wednesday’s talk, Reese sat in the lobby of the Beinecke, listening to Blanding, nodding along, smiling with the familiarity of the story. “This was something later on that the judge seemed to think was hilarious,” Reese told me later on the phone. “But it was like a fingerprint.” After he matched the wormholes, it was clear Smiley had cut the map from a book in the library’s collection.

Terreni Globi turned out to be one of the nearly 100 maps Smiley stole over the course of his four years as a robber. “Smiley really, really knew his stuff. That made him a very dangerous thief,” Reese said. “He knew what the great rarities were, and the institutions they were in.” According to Reese, Smiley had also worked hard at ingratiating himself with librarians, displaying genuine enthusiasm for the material. “A lot of people felt personally betrayed for those reasons,” Reese added.

Reese had already been betrayed by Smiley once before. “Yes, I’d known him for many years,” he said ruefully: in the 1980s, Reese had sold the first American coastal navigation atlas to Smiley for 50,000 dollars. When Reese tried to cash the check, however, it bounced. Reese recalls phoning Smiley and demanding his money back. “I’m afraid I just don’t have it,” Smiley had replied. “And I’m afraid your atlas doesn’t exist anymore.” Smiley had already aggressively disassembled the antique document and sold the New England maps to a prominent dealer. Eventually, Reese got his money back, but the map lovers’ relationship never warmed past “cordial.”

By June of 2006, a year after the Beinecke incident, Smiley had admitted to stealing from institutions such as the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and Chicago’s Newberry Library, in addition to Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke. Because of his cooperation, he was only sentenced to three years and four days in prison. By the time Blanding began research for The Map Thief in 2011, he was back living in Martha’s Vineyard, making 12 dollars an hour working as a landscaper.

***

“That wasn’t much of a detective story, was it?” Harry Avakian, a New Haven resident who attended Michael Blanding’s talk, complained. True, Smiley seemed to have returned to the cushy life of a law-abiding citizen—he’d taken up watercolor painting in prison, and still lived minutes from the beach. But à la Nicolas Cage, he’d set himself up for a Map Thief: Part II.

“I do believe that Smiley stole more maps than he admitted,” said Reese. Schroeder, too, told me he is skeptical that Smiley only stole from five or six institutions, and that the list of buyers he had instructed the FBI to track down may have been incomplete. Schroeder says a question remains about what Smiley would have remembered at all, in his testimony. “He’d certainly remember maps, but I can see him forgetting who he sold them to,” Schroeder said.

Blanding himself holds suspicions about Smiley, especially after Smiley abruptly stopped agreeing to interviews for The Map Thief two years ago. After doing a few sessions, Smiley started stalling, canceling the night before, and not showing up to meetings. He finally claimed that his family counseled him against cooperating. “Maybe he realized he was in over his head, or that there were things that would get him into trouble if he revealed them,” Blanding mused. They had once chatted for hours at cafes on Martha’s Vineyard, but had not talked in years. “If anyone has a chance to talk to him, I would love to hear what he thought of the book,” Blanding added, with a shake of his head.

As for the Beinecke, the librarians happily welcome Smiley’s self-induced exile. But Reese and Schroeder say that if he—or someone like him—were to return, they would be ready. According to Reese, Beinecke has vastly increased security measures since 2005, employing a full-time librarian in the rare book reading room, improving their security surveillance cameras, and establishing a more comprehensive electronic cataloging system. Most libraries are prevented from tracking patrons who check out their books due to civil liberties issues; rare book institutions like Beinecke, however, now have data on every individual who reserves a piece. “You’re always struggling between wanting people to have access to material and protecting it,” Schroeder said.

It was on an ordinary day a decade ago that Smiley’s saga of theft first began, as he stood staring at a fading atlas in Sterling Memorial Library. His heartbeat quickened, as it usually did when he saw an especially beautiful map. In that moment, he realized something. Only one stretch of his fingertips, one swift ripping motion, one subtle cough separated him from this priceless artifact. The thought had been planted; there was no turning back.