New Haven-based artist Michael Miglietta has a visual style that leans into the surreal and the cosmic, creating dizzying, shape-shifting images with bold linework and vivid color. Under the moniker Parlay Droner, he’s also an experimental musician, exploring the harsher edges of sound. For a show of his artwork at the Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden, however, he faced a more pragmatic problem:“What do I have to do to get people to see a great band from Ireland on a Monday night?”
For Miglietta, the answer was an evening of visual art, music, and food that started at dinnertime and ended early enough to get some sleep for work the next day, yet felt like a weekend night in the flurry of activity going on. He marshaled the musical forces of Connecticut band City of Meriden and the Irish band Moundabout. He rustled up Detroit-style pizza (!) from Jam City Pizza. And he enlisted fellow artists Thomas Drew and Erin Altobello to set up tables. The result was a blowout to Miglietta’s first big art show of 2024, of his“original works and framed prints of my meticulously purposeful universe-building,” as the Cellar was full of people by 6:30.
