New Haveners have noticed, enjoyed, and sometimes stolen signs put up by artist Matthew Feiner. His most recent design is especially eye-catching: “SLOW DOWN,” it reads, over a stencil of Audrey Hepburn. The colors and stencils vary, but each sign features Hepburn in the center with her beehive haircut, staring straight at the viewer.
There are around 240 Audrey Hepburn signs made by Feiner in Connecticut. She glares from street signs near Feiner’s studio in West Haven, near his girlfriend’s place in Hamden, around bike routes, and across downtown New Haven.
“They’re a bright spot on the urban landscape,” Feiner proudly remarked. “They’re a calling card from an artist that says ‘cars slow down, everybody slow down, take an assessment of your life.’”
When asked how long ago he started making the signs, Feiner’s tall scruffy face smirked, and responded in his slightly raspy voice. “I guess the question really is, how long ago did I start admitting that they were mine?”
This coyness is characteristic of Feiner. Bill Kurtz, a local teacher and longtime friend of Feiner’s, points to the square black tattoos on each of Feiner’s knuckles that cover up what was once a tattooed phrase across his hands. Kurtz has heard Feiner give different people different answers when asked what word was covered up. More often, he just won’t tell people. “He kind of resists the easy answer,” Kurtz said.
Behind the signs is the eccentric persona of an artist motivated to connect New Haven and its people.
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Standing in his cluttered studio with shades on and hands in pockets, Feiner gazed up at the four large stenciled signs adorning the wall. Feiner’s distinct repertoire has had dozens of designs over the years. He collages six or seven images “that work well together” on crosswalk signs, erects “weird little sculptures,” and spray-paints the phrase “say hello” on sidewalks. His work is often taken down or stolen, which frustrates, amuses, and flatters Feiner. “I’m honored if someone takes that and brings it back to their world––that’s getting the message out,” he said.
But Feiner’s “SLOW DOWN” signs are distinct from his others because they are directed at a specific problem: people driving like “assholes.” The signs have more implicit meaning, too. Feiner worries about the growing need for instant gratification. “You have an entire generation of people coming into driving that have just spent their entire lives playing Grand Theft Auto.”
But why Audrey Hepburn? “Divine intervention,” he said, matter-of-fact. One day, in 2020, while working on the original “SLOW DOWN” signs alongside a project requiring an Audrey Hepburn stencil, he threw the stencil behind himself out of frustration—something just wasn’t working. When he went to retrieve the stencil, a mark remained.
Feiner was taken by Hepburn’s intimidating, expectant stare enlivening the direct messaging of his signs. “She’s looking at you saying, ‘Hey, I know your mom,’” he said. An added bonus to the new design was that signs with only the words “SLOW DOWN” looked too official, and were likely to face removal by the city government.
Audrey Hepburn is one of Feiner’s idols. He speaks about her on a first-name basis. As a kid, he often watched Hepburn’s movies with his mom, and he was moved by her World War II survival story. Her body’s development was inhibited after starving in Hungary at the hands of Nazis, as was Feiner’s due to frequent ailments growing up.
Feiner has deep-seated visions for the way things should be arranged. Near the door of his studio, there are three hanging strings with corners of potato chip bags next to a wind chime. Over the course of a year, he filled the strings with the corners. He does not usually plan his pieces at all, but he says he can see the end product and can tell when things look right. He builds his art—slowly.
“The child gets beaten out of most people,” he said about his artistic mindset. “Mine’s right in the fucking back of my head all the time.”
For example, he has placed roughly forty pieces of rusted metal silk-screen-printed with the word “pervert” in bus stops and other random places around town. While the word carries loud inappropriate sexual connotations, Feiner believes it maintains a widely applicable meaning. “I’m a pervert,” he declares. “I pervert bike riding to its extreme.” In fact, the word applies to many things in his life, he says: the way he watches films, the way he makes art. “It’s healthy,” he resolves.
It seems his free-ranged creative vision doesn’t only take place in public. “He never used to present gifts directly,” said Elaine Lewinnek, Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and Feiner’s longtime friend. “He’d just casually leave artwork in my bathroom or atop my coat rack after he and a group had been over.”
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After graduating high school in Madison, CT, Feiner moved to New Haven, where he has been ever since, except for some years teaching art at the University of Texas in Austin.
“New Haven’s my city,” Feiner said. His family was in New Haven before Yale was founded, he pointed out. His friends christened him “the mayor,” a nod to his network in town and the care he offers the community.
Before his more abstract artistic advocacy with the “SLOW DOWN” signage, Feiner advocated for biker safety in New Haven for many years. He started Devil’s Gear Bike Shop in 2001, stepping down as owner in 2021, and then joining a community of bikers and bike advocates called Elm City Cycling.
Feiner brings an element of creativity and kindness to both his art and his advocacy. With this strategy, he has a way of bringing people together and to get things done. When Lewinnek, during her time as leader of Elm City Cycling, mentioned that she hoped to gather a “critical mass” of New Haven bikers, Feiner suggested that their advocacy would go further if they “make it a kinder, less critical mass.”
When a city planner was fired in the early 2000s, Feiner decided Elm City Cycling ought to go on a bike ride to the city planner’s house and have one hundred bikers serenade him with kazoos. Lewinnek said this was a turning point.
“After that, City Hall got stuff done for us,” Lewinnek recalled. “The rest of the city planners, the ones who were left, were like, ‘Wait, we like you biker people.’”
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Feiner has been unable to continue putting up any signs since last year, but plans to leave out more in the future, including “SLOW DOWN” signs, for which he still sees a need. In September 2017, Feiner and his colleague Johnny Brehon entered a burning building to save neighbors. This event, several biking accidents, and a mishandled police incident in Hamden, CT, have left Feiner with injuries to the wrist, elbow, brain, and other parts of his body.
Though his signs have been occasionally construed as aggressive or confusing, Feiner believes “more people take it the right way.”
While putting up a “SLOW DOWN” sign one time, Feiner recalled a car racing past him, then hitting its brakes and reversing back toward him. Feiner expected an angry driver. Instead, the driver rolled down his window and said, “You know, you’re absolutely right.”
When that driver slowed down, it was a perfect example of what Feiner wanted people to learn from his signs. For that minute, Feiner explained, the driver’s “whole life” slowed down. He noticed where he was and acknowledged the other people around him. Then he drove off with more care.
–Harry Lowitz is a first-year in Ezra Stiles College.
Photos courtesy of Harry Lowitz.
