“Watch Out Brooklyn:” MINIPNG Breathes Life Into Audubon Street Storefront

By Lucy Gellman, The Arts Paper

The clothes communed with each other from the sun-kissed racks, each telling the story of their
former lives. By the door, a pair of overalls got a second wind with a striped, sleeveless bodice
over an adjustable waist. Across the room, a green-and-yellow swirl stretched across a cropped,
quilted fall jacket. Wooly, knitted purses waited for new owners by a window. Sweaters peeked
out with splashes of thick pink and blue yarn. Around them, humanoid figures on the walls
stretched their arms out toward the sky, floating in space.
Welcome to the first-ever MINIPNG storefront, now open at 77 Audubon St. Tuesday through
Saturday from noon to 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. The brainchild of 23-year-old
artist Eiress Hammond, the store marks a brick-and-mortar milestone years in the making. As it
lands on Audubon Street, it joins a flourishing slow fashion landscape and proliferation of
independent Black-owned businesses across the city.
The building is owned by Yale University Properties, which controls most of the storefronts in
the Audubon-Whitney Retail district and so-dubbed “Audubon Arts District.” It marks the first
Black-owned, woman-owned business on Audubon Street since stylist Luvena Jones moved her
curly hair salon to Grand Avenue several years ago.
“I’ve been dreaming about this since I was a kid,” Hammond said at a ribbon cutting
Wednesday, standing beside representatives of Yale University Properties, city officials, and
Audubon Street neighbors who came out to cheer her on. “I’ve always been super artistic, and
this is something that I’ve always dreamed of. Doing so, I’m really happy that I get to share it
with you guys, and share it here.”
“We are so lucky to welcome you here on Audubon Street,” said Lauren Zucker, associate vice
president for New Haven affairs and Yale University Properties, as she sported a MINIPNG
jacket with fringe at the neck and cuffs. She added that introducing a Black-owned, woman-
owned, grassroots fashion business to the neighborhood “is like one of my favorite sentences to
say.”
Hammond, who grew up with her grandparents in Middletown and now lives in East Rock, has
been working toward the storefront for years. Even as a kid, she was entrepreneurial: she sold
bows and matching shorts to her classmates, then expanded her reach as she learned more
about sewing in high school.
After high school, Hammond grew her design footprint as a student at Wittenberg University,
ultimately putting her studies on hold in 2020. It was there that she freehanded her now-
recognizable “In The City” tank, an eye-catching design that became part of a copyright dispute
two years ago. Her now-viral following comes from years of hustle, and her frequent trips
between Connecticut and New York to source and thrift materials, hold pop-ups, and participate
in fashion shows.
In that time, she has become a champion of small, independent artists, taking fast fashion
brands like AliExpress, Shein, and Zara to task for stealing artists’ work including her own.
Wednesday, her grandmother Christine Sherwood radiated light as she watched Hammond cut
a thick blue ribbon, receive praise from city officials, and then glide into a store of her own.
Outside, Handsome Dan enthusiastically slobbered in the autumn sunlight.

Artistry runs in the family: Sherwood’s father was an artist, and she is a vocalist when she’s not
working in waste management and recycling. As she entered the store, she delighted in the
racks of salvaged, reborn cotton, denim and wool, all made new in her granddaughter’s careful
hands. She paused to admire the hangers, wrapped in delicate, bright yarn.

For her, it also marked a sort of full-circle moment. Born and raised in New Haven’s Dixwell
neighborhood, Sherwood spent years of her youth on Audubon Street, attending the
Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). Back then, she said motioning to the street, “this was our
sanctuary.” Outside of school, Audubon Street and downtown bustled with independent
businesses. The shop “brings me back to the days when I was a kid,” she said.
There’s one big difference, she added: Sherwood believes that young people are freer to
express themselves through their clothing now than she was as a teenager. She sees her
granddaughter taking that trend and running with it in explosively creative ways.
“This is an outlet for her that allows her to be the best person she can be,” she said. “I’m just still
amazed. I think of her humility as well as her artistry … it also gives back to the community.”
Inside the store, customers gravitated toward racks of wool sweaters, quilted jackets,
Frankensteined, color-block sweaters and wide-legged pants with hand-painted designs.
Delicate stitching wove across a denim vest; shiny pink ribbon emerged from the knitted collar
of another. The upcycled, secondhand nature of the clothes is baked into Hammond’s brand:
she is part of an increasingly vocal movement against fast fashion, and the tremendous
environmental and public health hazard that it creates across the globe. Her clothes, by their
very nature, breathe new life into garments that would otherwise be headed for the landfill.
She isn’t doing it alone, she said. In the store, she has help from her partner Elijah Blanchard,
who runs the brand Thrifted Hugs and also has merchandise in the store. She plans to hold
pop-ups in the space, celebrating other brands and multimedia artists that she knows. When
she isn’t in New Haven, she said, she’s usually running pop-ups and collecting secondhand
clothes and fabrics in New York City or elsewhere in Connecticut.
Modeling a quilted brown, orange, and white coat, Mazela Dolotina-Lopez said that she was
excited to visit the long-awaited storefront, and would almost certainly be back. A child
psychiatric nurse in her professional life, Dolotina-Lopez was originally a classmate of
Hammond’s in high school, and has kept tabs on the MINIPNG brand in the years since. In her
work, she said, she often sees kids who have an artistic bent, but don’t always feel empowered
to create freely.
“I love it,” she said. “It definitely brings me optimism, especially for the population I work with. It’s
so great—I think of how my patients can see this and be like, ‘I can do this, too.’”
During the ribbon cutting, city leadership and economic development officials had also lauded
the store. Joking that his could-you-be-more-normie pressed blue button-down had definitely not
come from the shop, Mayor Justin Elicker noted how calm Hammond seemed in the midst of
opening a business.

That is itself a feat, he said: small business owners are constantly “putting out fires” as they
become their own HR, finance, and marketing departments. And yet there she was, rocking a
baseball cap and leg warmers, “cool as a cucumber.”
Moments before customers flooded her store, East Rock/Downtown Alder Eli Sabin also called
it exciting for both the city and for Ward Seven. Both Hammond’s business and her Pearl Street
apartment fall within his ward, and he thanked her for choosing New Haven as the place to grow
her business. He called it “a great example” of support and collaboration within the city’s
expanding, ever-morphing business community.
“Thank you to everybody who is putting their back behind, their shoulder behind making sure
our business community is thriving here,” he said. “We’ve got a thriving arts scene in New
Haven, especially in this corridor. So watch out Brooklyn, we’re getting pretty cool here in
downtown New Haven.”