Ninth Square
New Haven's Ninth Square — the historic commercial district centered on Orange and Crown streets — was one of the first places in the country to use mural commissions as a tool of downtown revitalization, starting in the late 1990s. Two decades of investment have produced a concentration of quality outdoor work that reflects both New Haven's cultural ambition and its willingness to commission artists who challenge as well as beautify.
Featured Artists
All artists →Swoon
"Yale Blue" uses Swoon's hand-cut paper process at six-story scale, depicting a New Haven woman whose layered garments quote the city's quilt-making tradition — a counterpoint to Yale's institutional dominance of the neighborhood's visual landscape.
HUSH
"Harbor Lights" positions a geisha figure against an abstracted Long Island Sound seascape, the waves rendered in flat woodblock style while the figure dissolves into diamond-grid geometry — HUSH's signature collision of Eastern visual traditions and Western street art aesthetics.
Conor Harrington
"New Haven Green" responds to the colonial history of New Haven's central common — one of the first planned urban greens in North America — with Harrington's characteristic collision of Baroque formal portraiture and contemporary gestural abstraction, the historical figures dissolving into the paint surface as if they're being reclaimed by the present.