Harrison Blume and Perez at the mural. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The dogs look out onto the lot, expectant, smiling. Around them, it’s prime time for pickleball: animals jump and swivel for the ball, some striking power stances as their tails trail behind them. To one side, a poodle surveys Valley Street with big, doe eyes and a flip of blonde curls. Beside him, a basket of balls forms a rounded pyramid, their holes comically wide.
The mural at 1 Valley St. is the work of the artist Perez, a son of Fair Haven and the Hill whose pieces adorn highway underpasses, baseball academies, and at least one daycare center across the city. As it covers the mural As In The Light Of Marielle by the artist Faring Purth, it has ignited a conversation about who gets to make decisions around public art, and what they owe to a community.
The mural is part of Pickleville CT, a two-story indoor pickleball complex from developer Harrison Blume set to open in the fall (read more about that here, here, and here). To get it over the finish line, Blume has worked with both the City of New Haven, which owns the wall, and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA), dedicated to the growth, development, and culture of the neighborhood. A portion of the mural is also funded by WVRA, Perez said.
“I completely understand the pushback,” said Perez, who now lives in Meriden with his wife, sons, and two-year-old Bichon/Toy Poodle mix, Waffle. “I get that the mural had sentimental value, that it had been there for so long. But let me say, on my part, that it’s getting hard for local artists to find these projects, as if there’s no talent in New Haven. As if there’s no talent in Connecticut.”
“If he [Blume] was going to cover it anyway,” Perez continued, isn’t it better that Blume chose to work with and compensate a local artist?
The question cuts deep in Westville, where the neighborhood boasts half a dozen clothing shops, independent galleries, immigrant-owned restaurants, artist studios and yarn-bombed trees. Over a year ago, Blume began to work towards Pickleville CT, which replaces a surface lot his family has maintained for 60 years. The complex will hold indoor pickleball courts.
Almost immediately, he said, he knew he wanted to replace the mural that ran along the lot’s back wall, which Purth completed with young Westvillians in 2016. He was aware that the community loved it, he said—but he didn’t think it gelled with his vision for the business. He started looking for New Haven and Connecticut-based artists, checking out Perez’ 2023 Fair Haven mural before ultimately deciding to work with him.
“I wanted to fund a local artist and come up with a new design that everyone was happy with,” Blume said. “I felt that it needed a revamp. I wanted to lighten it up, to brighten that corner up.”
He felt a sense of ownership there too: his family has done business in Westville for three generations. His grandfather, Dr. James Blume, opened a podiatry office at 505 Blake St. in 1957. His dad, Dr. Peter Blume, now runs it in the same space. (If a podiatrist can be iconic, “he’s iconic,” said Carlos Eyzaguirre, a Westville resident and dad who is also the city’s deputy economic development administrator.) In 2016, it was Peter Blume’s $2,000 sponsorship of WVRA that made the initial mural possible.
Originally, Harrison Blume envisioned a wall or fence with the words “Pickleville CT” in 125-foot letters.
But when he approached WVRA for the first time—the city likes to work with neighborhood partners, said Eyzaguirre—it was a non-starter. WVRA Executive Director Lizzy Donius challenged him to find a design that was linked more closely to art than to commerce.
“We had two parameters,” she said in a phone call Tuesday afternoon. “We said, ‘It’s gotta be art, and we were committed to the idea of a local artist.’”
Then “I wanted poodles,” Blume remembered. He was inspired especially by his Goldendoodle, a one-year-old named Bennie (the complex’s cafe, Bennie’s Beanery, will open in his honor). Perez, whose art often riffs on animation and pop culture, suggested that it was a starting place. He began drafting a sort of larger-than-life comic strip, with humanoid animals inspired by Disney films of the early 1990s.
“I don’t draw a lot of animals,” Perez said, so he started to do his homework. For days, he sat in front of the t.v., his hands dancing over an iPad as he took visual notes on 90s-style animation, from MGM’s 1989 All Dogs Go To Heaven to Disney’s The Lion King, 101 Dalmatians and Lady and the Tramp.
He also drew inspiration from real life, including his dog, Waffle, and a German Shepherd named Dylan who lives down the street. Working together, he and Blume worked through seven potential versions of the mural. After a draft that WVRA approved earlier this year, the final design featured multiple dogs, including a Terrier mix, Husky, and doe-eyed, excitable Poodle for Blume.
Last month, Perez and his youngest son, Kevin, started work on the mural beneath an unrelenting July sun, arriving at the lot by 6 a.m. to get priming and painting done before the heat of the day.
After priming, Perez said, he worked nearly nonstop for three weeks. Sometimes, the temperature would get into the 90s, making it hard to stay outdoors for long stretches of time. “I was exhausted,” he said. But he finished.
In the work (part of which is still obscured by a Porta Potty), four larger-than-life cartoon dogs now play pickleball, frozen in positions of furry athleticism. Across the wall where Marielle once stretched out, her toes pointed toward Blake Street, “it’s very animated, very cartoony,” Perez said.
At the far left, three more dogs stand together, waiting for their turn to play. In the center of the group, a friendly Poodle cocks his head and looks out of the frame, a sparkle in his huge, animated eye. He is inspired by both Waffle and Bennie, Perez said.
When he completes a work—this marks his 37th commission in three years—“I always have the same feeling,” Perez said. “I step back, I look at it, and I still question, like, did I do that?”
What he didn’t expect was blowback from the Westville community.
“That’s How Public Art Works”
Racquet Coop Owner Chris Gaudreau. “Who cares?”
Within a week of finishing the project, Perez said that he started hearing criticism of the work, often online and from people who did not know that a local artist had completed it. Neighbors were frustrated that Marielle had disappeared overnight. Some mourned her absence; others just wanted more context.
They weren’t specifically mad at the artist: they were mad the neighborhood hadn’t been consulted. Unlike a Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) hearing—where neighbors did show up to voice their support and concerns for the pickleball facility—there was no sort of public process. Blume never publicly announced his plans to replace Marielle. Then one day, she was gone.
Donius, who has helmed WVRA for eight years, suggested that maybe that’s the nature of public art—it may be ephemeral, outlived by its emotional heft (had Blume not wanted to paint over it, she clarified, she would have been content with Purth’s work there for the foreseeable future). Ultimately, she didn’t want to be the thing standing between a decades-long family business and its plans to develop land that it already owned.
“It’s the kind of development I feel like we should be encouraging,” she said. “There’s a little … it’s a broader neighborhood story and consideration for us.”
Audrey Rakozy.
On Friday afternoon, Westville neighbors, business owners and new transplants to New Haven weighed in. Seated at a cozy corner table at Pistachio, newly minted Edgewood resident Audrey Rakozy remembered seeing the pup-pickleball mural for the first time, and having half a dozen questions about what it was and why it was at the corner. Later this month, she will begin her doctoral studies in molecular biology at Yale.
“I’m confused as to what it’s trying to convey,” she said. “It’s well done! It’s just a little silly.”
Nearby, partners Anthony Orfino and Stephanie West picked up their iced coffees, ready to walk around the neighborhood on a mid-afternoon date that also included Lower Forms and Elm City Sounds. As residents of Derby, they aren’t super familiar with the mural or the plan for Pickleville, they said—but they’re generally onboard with the idea of public art.
“The more public art, the better,” Orfino said, West practically finishing his sentence. “It’s always a good idea.”
Anthony Orfino and Stephanie West.
Just across Whalley Avenue, Racquet Coop Owner Chris Gaudreau said he was surprised that there had been any controversy around the work. As a business owner for 33 years, he’s watched Westville transform around him, and then transform again, and again. For him, Perez’s work is just part of the inevitable change that he sees in the neighborhood.
“Cool!” he said of the mural as he re-strung a tennis racket on a swiveling platform. To him, the work makes sense in the context of the project. “It’s a pickleball place! With pickleball! Who cares?”
Artist Howard El-Yasin, who lives nearby on Springside Avenue and practices at West River Arts, said he’s not enthused about the development on the whole. Already, he dislikes the complex as a piece of architecture. He also worries that it will make parking in the neighborhood harder than it already is, particularly for events like Artwalk.
“I just think that there’s so much greed around how land is used, and it doesn’t really take into consideration the people who live in these communities,” he said. “I don’t think the people who live here are considered, clearly, as much as the people who own the land.”
Howard El-Yasin.
“I was very saddened to see the other mural gone, painted over,” he added, noting that he’d love to see a public mural program like the one that the City of Baltimore runs. “But you know, again, I haven’t paid close enough attention to it [the new work] to make an aesthetic assessment of it. I think it speaks to who owns the land, and that’s one of my main critiques: That people who live in communities, if they don’t own the land, they’re not considered part of the land.”
Lotta Studio co-founder and co-owner Mistina Hanscom, whose friendship with Purth helped bring her to New Haven (and in 2018, helped bring her back for a second Westville mural), had a more nuanced take. Whatever her own feelings may be—she described Purth’s work as “a piece of my heart up on that wall”—she’s not one to stand between public artists and commissions that come their way.
“We are not ones to dictate what artists do,” she said of herself and Donius in a phone call earlier this week. “We are here to provide a platform or space or support for artists to create here in Westville. To elaborate on that, I’m not going to control the type of art that is being created.”
“I’m glad it was a local artist,” she added. “You’re going to have mixed emotions on the type and quality of art that is up, and that’s how public art works.”
