The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Using public art to bring people together
Artist to display 7-foot-high faces of immigrants on the Green
NEW HAVEN — Joe Standart never met a face he didn’t like.
In his long successful career, the commercial photographer did high-end assignments for corporate leaders and advertisers the likes of Sony and American Express.
He wondered what it would be like to take elegant portraits of normal people on the street — the window washer, the gallery owner — rather than executives “trying to make themselves look important.”
Standart opened a storefront studio on Bank Street in New London and took some 300 portraits that were mounted on the wall at the shop with a copy given to the subject. At the request of the city, he incorporated them into two 27-foot-tall murals at the New London train station and filled downtown New London with about 100 portraits.
“It was a huge success,” Standart said of the 2004 project. “Thousands of people came to the opening. It was a real celebration of individuals, of a city and of civic unity,” Standart said.
He said it was purely accidental, but that is how he came to realize “that public art can be a catalyst for enhancement, for bringing people of different backgrounds together,” Standart said. “It was a wonderful revelation.”
His next project in New London featured portraits of
immigrants, which is the subject of his newest public art, “We Are A Nation of Immigrants,” that will take place on the New Haven Green itself, in the windows of the three churches there, as well as some city buildings, and the Pirelli building next to IKEA that will be seen daily by the 200,000 drivers streaming past it on Interstate 95.
The official opening in New Haven is June 8, but Standart plans to have the subjects on the Green up by mid-May before the Yale University graduation.
“We would like to take advantage of that international audience coming to celebrate their kids. We’d love to give the parents something to talk about,” Standart said.
He has finished 55 portraits, each 7-feet high, all but three of them immigrants or refugees living in New Haven or a surrounding town.
In his professional work, Standart said he was very technically oriented, generally photographing large scale sets where he would use 30 to 60 lights. “It was very complex,” he said.
For the New Haven show, he said he chose “a Rembrandt style of using only one light. It has a very dramatic presentation.”
The portraits, which are intense facial closeups, will be in steel frames on the Green. They are a mix of black and white and color.
He said the idea behind the extreme closeup was to “try to establish a strong link between the subject and the viewer so you really wanted to say ‘what is this guy all about? What is their history and how do we relate?”
The immigrants in the New Haven show, for the most part will be a surprise, but Standard described them in general terms.
There is the architect turned artist/sculptor; the dressmaker from Iraq; a mother and son who took the harrowing trip on “The Beast” train across Mexico to the U.S. border; an Afghani who started a school for women when she was in a camp in Syria.
In his career, he said he traveled broadly where he would meet impoverished people with dreams, but no way to realize them. He said he started to think of people in America who don’t travel and take what we have here for granted, “in terms of our freedoms and opportunities.”
“I started to think about immigrants as a way to tell the story — to sort of share the story of the American promise,” Standard said in an interview in the New Haven office he set up as he worked on this project for the past eight months.
The New London immigrant exhibition, which he did in 2016, used the windows of empty storefronts as gallery walls with 28 murals on 16 buildings.
“We really filled up the whole downtown. So what was a fairly empty looking deserted, blighted urban landscape became enlivened somewhat,” the artist said.
Sam Quigley, director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, said people were entranced by Standard’s project in 2004, as well as when he did a reunion of some of the same people in another exhibit a decade later.
“He has a way of putting people at ease and getting them to express who they are,” Quigley said.
Standart said all these portraits come out of an experience he had in college. As part of a political science course on America, he lived and worked for six weeks with different people from across the country as representatives of middle class and poorer households.
This included an auto worker in Detroit, a hog farmer in Iowa and a coal miner in Kentucky.
Seeing the face of America was something he was always interested in and the New London project was the start of what he thought would be a trip across the country. That game plan, which was being formulated when the Great Recession of 2008 hit, proved to be too expensive, too physically demanding and time consuming to accomplish.
The people in these photos are our city residents and when we see them, what we are left with is a sense of their dignity, their humanity and their courage.”
Kica Matos, Center for Community Change
Locally, Standart called on Jennifer Aniskovich, who works with numerous nonprofits and is someone he has known since she was the executive director of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, to help him make contacts for the New Haven project.
He said John Lugo of Unidad en Accion, Duo Dickinson of Trinity Church, Kica Matos of the Center for Community Change, the Rev. Kevin Ewing of the Center Church on the Green, Ann O’Brien of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services and Junta for Progressive Action were hugely helpful.
“From the outset, Joe has had an incredible vision — and the drive to make this project happen. At a time when the Trump administration has demonized and denigrated immigrants — Joe is doing the exact opposite, in a city that prides itself as a welcoming place for immigrants and refugees. The people in these photos are our city residents and when we see them, what we are left with is a sense of their dignity, their humanity and their courage,” Matos said.
Standart said he has a small team of workers and volunteers that helped put it together, but the missing link was a full-time fundraiser.
They have raised about 85 percent of their goal, starting with a generous donation from the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, but they need a total of $130,000 to extend the portraits to the other city sites that Mayor Toni Harp’s office has suggested.
They have a KickStarter fund in their appeal to businesses and others who see the value of the exhibit. He said much of the philanthropic donations, so far, have come from people familiar with his earlier work.
As part of that fundraising effort, for a $100 donation, they are offering a private reception with those featured in the exhibit and Standart, as well as a limited poster signed and numbered by him for a $60 contribution.
Standart said he was sensitive about the expense, but he is “hoping we can make a statement about tolerance, understanding American values — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — all those things that seem to be flowing in the wind at the moment.”
“What better way to honor the people of New Haven and our history of migration and immigration than to showcase their faces. Joe’s photography is magnificent and truly captures the intensity, curiosity, passion and hope in the faces of the people who make this city and this country special. WE ARE: A nation of immigrants. Don’t believe it ... come see our photos in New Haven,” said Ewing, who also runs Baobab Tree Studios, an audio and video media studio.
The exhibit will be up until Aug. 15 and may go on the road.
As an architect, Dickinson had a special take on Standart.
“Joe uses shape and shadow to attract and draw attention, but the depth of humanity in each portrait is what sustains interest. By popping these great images up to a civic scale, the impact is transformative, and by being set in the downtown of New Haven and expressing the diversity of the international flavor of a Sanctuary City, Standart’s show, “We Are”, is as unique as his talents. That power and sustaining presence is why I, as a lover of architecture, New Haven and Trinity Church on the Green, am over the moon over the show’s progression from idea to reality,” he said.
The show is separate from the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, but there is an easy symmetry between the theme of the festival — citizen — and the theme of the immigrant in the photo exhibit. Because of that, the festival will feature Standart’s art on the cover of its program guide and use a lot of his images throughout their presentations.
The exhibit officially kicks off the day before the festival, which opens on June 9.