Amuse’s new partner Site Projects New Haven celebrates its 20th anniversary and the completion of a new public mural.
At Amuse, we believe in the power of public art to impact a community. We are thrilled to partner with Site Projects New Haven, a non-profit organization that has been commissioning and producing site-specific public artworks in their community to promote “a healthy, democratic society” for 20 years. Just in time for their 20th anniversary, the Amuse platform is improving the discoverability of Site Projects’ artworks around New Haven through our interactive map and providing easy access to interesting information about each project for the casually curious city explorer.
Site Projects began as a vision for a single project. In 2004, founding Executive Director Laura Clarke saw New Haven’s historic central green as the perfect canvas for a lightshow. She and other passionate New Haveners saw the project as a way to serve a need for the city — to draw more attention to the downtown area — and make something beautiful and delightful for residents’ enjoyment. They were able to commission Mexican-American visual artist Leo Villarreal and he created Chasing Rainbows/New Haven, and thousands of people witnessed the mayor turn the lights on for the first time. Afterwards, Laura and her compatriots swore they’d never do anything so hard as producing a huge outdoor light installation again. And yet, two years later, they were at it again, bringing Jason Hackenworth to New Haven to create giant balloon sculptures that hung in the Yale Peabody Museum among their renowned dinosaur collection.
Project by project, site by site, Site Projects has continued to commission and produce public artworks like Square with four circles and Born to Explore in New Haven for 20 years. And the organization has finished up their latest commission just in time for their anniversary: a 9,600 square foot mural by Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn (aka Jessie and Katey) that has transformed the gray back wall of an industrial warehouse into a colorful, welcoming bridge between neighborhoods in eastern New Haven. The mural, titled Blue Moon Chapel, was officially unveiled on November 17th and will be brightening the days of passersby for many years to come.
Amuse is excited to be a part of Site Projects’ next chapter and to make discovering public artworks like Blue Moon Chapel easier for New Haven visitors and locals alike. Amuse approaches arts and culture exploration with a seamless indoor/outdoor digital experience that puts public art, architecture, and parks on par with the collections inside museums, turning city streets into exhibition spaces with easy-to-access information about the sites around you.
We hope you check out Blue Moon Chapel and other Site Projects’ commissions around New Haven with Amuse!
