Raheem Nelson’s graphic recording on New Haven’s place in the ranking of the New York Times’ top 52 places to visit.  Photo courtesy of the artist.                                                                                                 

It’s the New Haven skyline, rising from a band of steel blue, that catches a viewer’s eye. In the center of the canvas, buildings rise shoulder to shoulder, the bricks nearly touching. Words and phrases swirl around them: We love our city and each other. We welcome everyone. The world is shining on New Haven. Just left of center, red squiggles explode from a heart outlined in black. It’s clear that the artist, and maybe the other people in the room, are very much feeling the love.  

The work belongs to artist and illustrator Raheem Nelson, whose graphic recording style has become a staple in New Haven’s contemporary visual culture. Decades after first discovering art in the Elm City, he is giving back to the city through his artwork, telling the story of what it means to live, work, learn and play in New Haven one vignette at a time. After wearing many hats—paraprofessional, marketing director, illustrator, dad, and husband—it’s one of his favorites. 

“With the world we live in, art is my North Star,” he said on a recent episode of “Arts Respond” on WNHH Community Radio, a collaboration between WNHH and the Arts Paper. “Art is my therapy, both my professional work and my personal work. I do a lot of political cartoons to make sense of the world—I’m going to be doing more soon, too, because it feels like the world is on fire, to be honest—so that is how I make sense of everything.” 

This period of growth marks a full-circle moment for Nelson, a self-described “geeky kid” who grew up in New Haven, and found his voice at West Hills Elementary School and later the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). A lifelong lover of comic books, Nelson has been drawing for as long as he can remember, using illustration as a form of storytelling. As a kid, he began self-publishing his own line of superhero-inspired comic books in the second grade, pushing himself to release a new issue every month. 

It was “this long-running history of superheroes versus super villains,” he recalled. After a few years of doing it casually, Nelson got serious, with character arcs that sometimes went on for years. The comic ran through the artist’s time in college, with references that ranged from Sonic the Hedgehog to Lord of the Rings (it later became his thesis project at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he earned his BFA in 2007). 

Nelson (center) with his wife, Rahisha Bivens, and the artist Kim Weston. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In part, he credits Joseph Stinson and Eric Yacko, the team behind the comic book store Alternate Universe on Chapel Street, with nurturing his passion. For years, he also spent hours among the towering stacks at the New Haven Free Public Library, which he credits for his enduring love for books and for knowledge today.  

But it was at ECA that he was able to spread his wings, branching out into sculpture, life drawing, painting in oils and acrylics, and film photography. At the school, a former synagogue that rises from Audubon Street with a sort of grace and grandeur, he learned to feel comfortable in his own skin. He would later return to the block many times, for both the Arts Council of Greater New Haven (the late Aleta Stanton, who was there in the early 2000s, was one of his early champions) and later for Creative Arts Workshop, which sits just across the street and frequently collaborates with the school. 

“It was really art college before it was art college,” he said of the arts school with a smile. “ECA was a place I could go and just be myself, and I was able to take that and transport it into other areas of my life. ECA was the start of me being comfortable just being me.”

As a student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) after high school, he combined his love for the visual arts—particularly cartooning, which became his major—with an interest in the crusades. Working to tell a story, he mapped the fantasy and drama of the medieval times onto colonial history, ultimately folding it into his thesis project. That sense of weight, history and narrative layering still often exists in his work. 

Then a few years ago, he became interested in graphic recording, a style of visual notetaking that distills the core ideas from a gathering and puts them in illustrated form. While the art form has its roots in the Bay Area, where David Sibbet was an early practitioner in the 1970s, Nelson picked it up much more recently, as a way to present information to visual learners. 

What hooked him—and still does—is the nuance and empathy he’s able to bring to gatherings and community conversations.

Nelson at Visual Notes at Creative Arts Workshop earlier this year. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“It enhances the meeting, it supports the speaker, and it really supports attendees too,” he said of the art form. “If you’re a visual learner, especially, you might absorb information differently. So that’s really cool.”

For a time, he was doing graphic recording for a company in Brooklyn. But the job—including a long commute from New Haven—”ended up being kind of crazy.” Friends and family took a look at what he was doing, and encouraged him to harness the skill for work closer to home. 

Nelson began reaching out to people, picking up work with ArtsWestCT, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and Black Hog Beer (read about some of that here). He loved being able to be in the room for discussions that sometimes became deep and emotional, a part of his work by which he is still humbled. 

“Whenever I work with a client, no matter who they are, I’m always trying to help them tell their story, whether that’s through words, pictures, colors, I’m having those conversations way before the job starts, just so they can get everything that they need,” he said. “Really, so I can just be sensitive as an artist. It’s just really important to me to be able to help others through my art.” 

“I try to go in as an observer,” he later added. “As somebody that has their own experiences … I try to leave room for people to share themselves, and I have some time before getting onsite to have my coffee, have my food, and prepare for the mental work that I have to do.” 

That’s also where the seed for Visual Notes, a solo exhibition that recently ran at Creative Arts Workshop and closed earlier this month. Last year—he credits Cultural Affairs Director Adriane Jefferson—the City of New Haven awarded him a grant through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), from which New Haven received a total of $115 million. 

New Haven had just been named one of the top 52 places to visit in the New York Times, and it felt like the city’s star was on the rise. Nelson was charged with recording the work of 20 cultural organizations in New Haven, from Artspace New Haven (then in a period of transition) to Kulturally LIT to the New Haven Climathon. 

Nelson does two types of graphic recording, both of which require close listening. In the first, he maps out a given meeting or gathering, illustrating in real time as conversation swirls around him. In the second, which he calls a “social listening mural,” he collects answers from participants around a shared prompt—the question “what do you love about New Haven,” for instance—and works those responses into the graphic. 

“That is probably my favorite style of graphic recording, because it’s really organic,” he said. “The energy is high. People are excited and they’re directly engaging with me to create the art.” 

It’s a balancing act, he added. In addition to the design elements one might expect from an illustration gig, Nelson is expected to listen closely, respond in real time, keep up with a conversation, and wrap up with a finished drawing that documents the core of what’s been said. “All that comes secondary to the empathy, because I have to lead with empathy to create this level of work,” he said. 

While graphic recording may be what he is best known for, Nelson is immersed in several creative projects, from book illustration to political cartoons to commissions for individual clients (he is also the marketing director at the Milford Arts Council, all of which amounts to a juggling act that he does with grace). On the heels of the most recent presidential election, he expects to create more political cartoons and illustrations, as a way to both cope and make a statement.

He’s disappointed with the country, he added. Even before the election, he had worked on an illustration of Vice President Kamala Harris, and had even gotten a copy of the piece to Harris through a friend working on her campaign in North Carolina. He imagined being able to bring Harris to Milford and New Haven, “to not only uplift people, but to put Connecticut in a place where we’re interacting directly with the current administration—which I clearly don’t want to do now!”

The current moment has inspired him to think about forthcoming illustration projects. He can envision a design with the Statue of Liberty, for instance—but stuck in The Handmaid’s Tale. He’s already been illustrating Donald Trump as Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, for his seemingly permanent puerile and asinine state.  

“I want to create artwork that doesn’t just speak to what I believe, but also speaks to a lot of big issues in the world,” he said. “I have to get this out of me at some point.”    

Listen to the full episode of “Arts Respond” with artist Raheem Nelson above. Check out more of Raheem’s art here.