“Tunnel Vision,” by Lady J The Artist. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo For nearly eight minutes straight at Nolo’s Pizza, DJ KamaKaze manipulated records and turntables, scratching, cutting, and backspinning, all the while transfixing the roughly 100 in attendance. “You’re not listening to a laptop,” DJ Marcus “Marc Mecca” Carpenter told the crowd after the performance. “The scratches, the skips, the flaws, that’s what makes it alive. What he’s doing is an art form.” Those skips and flaws, it seemed, were the theme of “Re-Imagine,” an interactive art exhibit pairing painters, rappers, poets, and photographers. “I believe that within all these artists is excellence, an excellence that has been frustrated because it has not been afforded the resources and opportunity to be fully appreciated,” host and organizer Marcus Harvin told the guests, dressed to the nines, as they enjoyed pizza, appetizers, and specialty drinks in the mellow-lit space at 687 State St. last Tuesday night. The black-tie affair, which was sponsored by Phil Bartels, a member of the University of New Haven’s Board of Governors, benefitted Newhallville Fresh Starts. According to Harvin, its founder and president, the nonprofit in 2025 delivered a projected 56,000 meals to homeless and domestic violence shelters, a complex that houses formerly homeless veterans, and warming centers. “This is about re-imagining a world where everyone has enough to thrive instead of just survive,” Harvin added, before introducing the legendary rapper, producer, and artist DJ Dooley-O. “I am Dooley-O. I am New Haven,” he began, standing beside a canvas of his art showing an abstract cityscape. “I am a DJ, a graffiti artist, a recording artist, and I can put your windows in your house if you let me.” He started doing graffiti at 13. “Certain art schools wouldn’t let me in, so I said ‘okay, the streets of New Haven can become my art gallery,” he said. At a certain point, he started doing more work on canvas. B*WAK at work. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo. He gave a shout-out to B*WAK, otherwise known as the Edmund “B*WAK” Comfort, who was perched on a stool working on an air-brushed portrait of the event. “If you remember the old Lee High School, that was our playground, that’s the Yale Nursing School now, and that’s where we started way back in the day,” he said. Comfort nodded with a smile. An artist, playwright, and teacher, he’s known for his color-saturated murals and vibrant tapestries on New Haven buildings, as well as an art business, Whalley Avenue’s B*WAK Productions, a neighborhood hub specializing in custom-designed creations.   He knew he was an artist in seventh grade. “It was in art class,” said Comfort, who went on to intern at Long Wharf Theatre building set designs; that led him to the Yale Repertory Theatre and, after a short stint at the Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles, to Lyric Hall and the Broken Umbrella Theater company. “Art is how I express who I am.”  With that, Harvin welcomed to the stage Patrick Stenson, otherwise known as Off Brand Budd. “I ain’t gonna lie, this moment is different,” Stenson said. “It’s my first time performing in front of this type of crowd, with everybody looking so good, in a place like this. I pour my heart and soul into my music, it’s not about fame for me, it’s about the passion.” He then performed a song about his experience with epilepsy: At 17 I lost 20 seconds of my lifeA grand mal showed a brotha what the heavens looking likeAt first I was skittish from the feeling I’m aliveThen I started talking bout itPutting rhythm in my lines . . . The crowd burst into applause and whoops. Hector “Bori” Rodriguez. On the upper level, visual artist Hector “Bori” Rodriguez was showing a triptych of surreal  botantical forms in luminously tropical colors. Rodriguez served 27 years and two months in New York State Prison. While there, he took a visual arts class, which led him to detail his early life in the Puerto Rican countryside with his mother.    “Art became a way for me to escape into nature,” said Rodriguez, who enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative during his 18th year in prison, finding inspiration in Salvador Dali and Jean-Michael Basquiat, before transferring to the Yale Prison Education Initiative on his release in 2023. Back on the main floor, Jade Streater, otherwise known as Lady J The Artist, was discussing one of her paintings. In it, a one-way sign, reads SUCCESS!! Beneath it another sign, red and white: Tunnel Vision. “I have to have tunnel vision to do this,” she said, adding her weekdays begin at 2:30 a.m. for her 4 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. shift as a member of Yale’s custodial staff. It’s when her three kids, ages 11, three, and one are asleep that she gets out her palette. Lady J The Artist For Lady J, who credited her two art teachers at Co-Op High School for encouraging her to paint—“it was freeing,” she said—the dream is to be a full-time artist with a walk-in studio. For now, she said, “I feel like I’m showing my kids that there’s always a way out, especially being African American with the odds against you, and this is my way out.” Painting by Tyree Hughey. The post Pizzeria-Hosted Exhibit Pairs Painters, Rappers, Poets appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less