“Creative expression is a deeply human impulse—deeply human,” says Michael Moore, a member of the East Haven Arts Commission. “I think in so much as they’re sort of entities in place that preserve and display the arts, I think you need to find ways to include everyone across audiences and everyone with means, interests, and abilities to make art, to explore it, or to display it.”

This is the guiding light for Michael when it comes to ensuring that the arts thrive in East Haven, while providing entertainment, opportunity, and a sense of community for its residents.

Michael moved to East Haven in May 2021, determined to build a “social net and get more involved with all sorts of things in town.”

“So, I actively sought out the Arts Commission. As it so happened, they had a posting out, looking out for folks who had some experience in digital arts, and I have a fair amount of background with that, so I reached out,” says Michael. “It was a very quick, easy sort of auspicious fit.”

Being a part of the Arts Commission means overseeing the unique position East Haven occupies as far as towns on the shoreline go in the area of the arts, explains Michael.

“We have New Haven on one side, which is, in many respects, the cultural capital of the state, and then we have the shoreline that has a really robust arts community. I think East Haven is able to pull from both of these words and is its own unique creature,” says Michael. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity for various arts-related ventures for sure, but certainly, I think there’s a lot of space for finding ways to make visual arts specifically, really accessible, and something that people feel like they can engage with across abilities and experiences.”

Like any other commission or board with the town government of East Haven, the Arts Commission provides a service to residents that is meant to enrich their lives and provide a sense of belonging. That can be through beautification, encouraging local businesses to take part in this season’s Art Trail initiative, and holding its summer theater programs. There’s a lot of entertainment through those efforts and programs, but it’s more than just that, says Michael.

“Quite a lot of what we do through the summer theater program is creating opportunities for children and young adults to experience the arts in a really deep way,” he says. “Yes, it’s entertaining, but it’s also tangential to the educational experience of these kids and creating opportunities for them to experience things.”

Like with beautification, there are also economic benefits to embracing the arts.

“I think that the Arts Commission broadly has an opportunity to increase the sort of cultural offerings in the town and in doing so...has a real opportunity to impact the economic development of the city,” Michael says.

When there are places with “a thriving arts scene and a thriving cultural scene,” Michael believes that “drives economic development” and can thus boost a sense of community and pride in East Haven.

“I think that’s something that the theater program does very well with the Arts Commission. It’s also part of what I think we’d like to see with the Fall Festival exhibition that we do,” he says. “There’s buy-in from across ages, across abilities, and across interests in terms of producing the artwork that gets put up, and it’s really fascinating to see how many unique viewpoints there are in the city.”

Seeing the diversity of displays at the Fall Festival was a point of pride, specifically for Michael, given his heavy involvement in the visual arts aspect of the commission. He was mesmerized by artists’ enthusiasm for showing their work to their peers.

“That was as fun as seeing the artwork,” he says. “That’s more of what I’m excited about—the way that people are interfacing with the artwork and the way that it’s making them feel and the way that it’s making them think.”

Outside of the Arts Commission, Michael has been involved with the community and nonprofits, working at the Yale University Art Gallery for almost seven years.

“One of the things that I really love about that [is] because it’s free. We get to really welcome people to interface with art, regardless of whether they’re a scholar or if they happen to be, you know, walking by because they were shopping downtown,” Michael says. “I think that’s one of those guiding values that you want everyone, regardless of experience, to be able to interface with the art world in whatever way and with whatever perspective they bring to it.”