West Hartford film studio Elmwood Productions makes movies starring a cast of puppets for a strictly grown-up audience. Imagine a Muppets movie written by Kevin Smith, and you’ll probably get a decent idea of what’s going on at Elmwood Productions, a puppet-focused film production studio in central Connecticut. Jon Bristol founded the company (named after his hometown) in 2002, around five years after he started building his own puppets. Elmwood’s work embraces humor in the absurd and the uncomfortable, aided by the additional reality-bending possibilities (what Bristol calls “the Looney  ..read more

Getting to know ceramicist/activist Ayumi Horie through eight (or so) objects in her Portland, Maine, home. Portland-based potter, civic activist, and native Mainer Ayumi Horie is carving her own space, as a creator, as a lesbian, and as a person of color, in a mostly white, historic colonial New England neighborhood. She’s a full-time studio potter, and her work is inspired by folk traditions from American and Japanese cultures, and adamantly defined by its utility—you’ll see more ramen bowls and mugs than decorative objects, and she expects them to be used—and the process by which ..read more

Thousands of unconventional and underrepresented creatives have a welcoming outlet in Wrong Brain on the New Hampshire Seacoast. Out-there art’s New Hampshire home Wrong Brain, a Dover, New Hampshire, nonprofit, gets a lot right about art. Whether it’s hosting discussions like “Art & Mental Illness” and exhibitions like This Is What TRANS Feels Like, or producing the Wrong Brain Bizaare, an alternative arts and crafts fair, Wrong Brain is an outlet for unconventional and underrepresented artists, writers, and musicians. “It exists to fill a void in the creative community,” says founder Sam ..read more

When she’s not playing in symphonies, cellist Laura Cetilia leaves melody behind to explore improvised, experimental sound. Ask many of today’s classically trained musicians to improvise, and you’re likely to be met with fear and anxiety. Not so for Providence, Rhode Island, cellist Laura Cetilia. She revels in living in the musical in-between. Cetilia still loves her Mahler and Britten—she plays in the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra and the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra—but her real passion is improvised and conceptual music. “Conceptual music is not about melody or even rhythm,” she ..read more

It takes a tight-knit village of growers and foragers to make the hip, eccentric dishes of Vermont’s Misery Loves Co. On the island of North Hero, Vermont, one turn off the main road, is an unassuming house with a sizeable garden. There is a bush bearing slender purple beans. There are fuzzy stalks of borage, with blue flowers that taste of cucumber. Plump tomatillos dangle from lush plants, their delicate husks turning from green to brown, becoming desiccated and lacy. Nearby is a flower patch, with blossoms in sunny yellow, salmon, pumpkin, and crimson. “We planted all of this nasturtium las ..read more

Megan and Murray McMillan collaborate to build playful, fantastical worlds in spaces steeped in age and history. This is the story of two people who build mystical worlds from plywood, metaphor, and the electricity of collaboration. Megan and Murray McMillan construct sets in gritty, forgotten places, then stage and record performances that read like dreams. Their videos unspool inside art installations. In the beginning—the late 1990s—Megan was a writer, and Murray was a sculptor. Now, they’re both more like multimedia producers—or kids building a treehouse to play in on a ridiculously sophis ..read more

Public artwork created by Cedric “Vise” Douglas and Julz Roth for the Beyond Walls Mural Festival in Lynn, Massachusetts. Photo courtesy of Beyond Walls and Christopher Gaines of The Littlest Astronaut The post Street Take: Black Madonna appeared first on Take Magazine ..read more

Sculptor and architect Mohamad Hafez uses detailed miniatures to create a visual lament about the Syrian war. Mohamad Hafez papers the walls of his New Haven, Connecticut, studio with printouts of news photos. The pictures show old women weeping and gesticulating; piles of rubble in narrow, ancient streets; young boys with a look of shock and sadness on their faces; rows of tanks; views from inside blown-out interiors; half-demolished apartment buildings; and throngs of huddled refugees awaiting food or rescue. The photos are from Syria, Hafez’s birthplace. Hafez, 33, works as an architect, de ..read more

A snippet from a longer work in progress by Sonya Larson, about a woman returning, reluctantly, from the brink of death. The following is from a novel by Sonya Larson called The Last Date, about a woman returning from the brink of death, but unhappily so. The novel is a work in progress. When I was dying, Shui was nicer to me. He used to pull my undies from the dryer—three days’ forgotten and hardened to crinkled cocoons—then dump them on our bed in a rocky heap for me to sift through. My lacy briefs! My thongs! You’d never guess that at one point these delicates had made Shui’s eyes roll back ..read more

A R E A Gallery opens a new home in Boston and Take was there to capture photos. On December 1, Cambridge-based gallery A R E A opened a second home in the SoWa neighborhood of Boston. Below, A R E A’s creative producer Nick Medvescek and founder and director David Guerra; artist Frank Floyd; and Amanda Accardi, owner of Around the Corner Framing, toasted the achievement. A R E A’s creative producer Nick Medvescek; its founder and director, David Guerra; artist Frank Floyd; and Amanda Accardi, owner of Around the Corner Framing, at the opening of A R E A’s new SoWa location. Photo by Melissa ..read more