People

While she did sing some Italian roles (Gilda, Lucia, Rosina) and even a few German ones (the Queen of the Night, Zerbinetta), Mesplé won worldwide acclaim for the French concert and opera repertoire — new works by Francis Poulenc as well as such famous parts as Olympia (The Tales of Hoffman), Leïla (The Pearl Fishers), and, most of all, the title role in Lakmé. – Gramophone

Sarah Maldoror was “a Euro-Caribbean filmmaker trained in the Soviet Union” – and the director, who died of the coronavirus in April of this year, never stopped; “she kept fighting in a world heading in the opposite direction she and her comrades had fought for.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Christo, who with his wife Jeanne-Claude created massive art projects requiring dozens of years to pull off, including wrapping the Reichstag and creating The Gates in Central Park, has died. In 1972, he explained, “For me esthetics is everything involved in the process — the workers, the politics, the negotiations, the construction difficulty, the dealings with hundreds of people. … The whole process becomes an esthetic — that’s what I’m interested in, discovering the process. I put myself in dialogue with other people.” – The New York Times

Amos’s “careerlong belief in art as a form of ethical resistance carries new weight when the promises of the civil rights era seem again under threat.” – The New York Times

Dorfman began with the giant Polaroids in a pushcart in Harvard Square. When the police tried to chase her away, she won a civil rights case against them. “Her work is widely praised for showing people unguarded, and many times joyful. It wasn’t unusual for her ‘sitters,’ as she called them, to say they enjoyed the posing as much as the portrait. Those sittings would include lots of banter and Dorfman’s infectious laughter.” – WBUR

As the pandemic has wiped out all cultural programming at Lincoln Center for months, Moss has been thinking harder about something she’d been considering long before Covid-19 hit the city. She says, “Now is the obvious time,” though that may not seem true to those who would like to see strong leadership during the crisis. – The New York Times

For Kramer, who died at age 84 in Manhattan on Wednesday, not speaking up was a signal of a dishonorable combination — of cowardice, willful blindness and greed. He was constitutionally incapable of self-serving apathy, but that’s not to say that he didn’t recognize the cost of his conscience to that quieter corner of his identity as an artist. – Los Angeles Times

“Mrs. Dew emerged in the early 1980s as part of a group of prominent female novelists that included her friends Louise Erdrich, Anne Tyler and Nancy Thayer, a onetime neighbor in Williamstown, Mass. A master at breathing life into flawed and complex characters, she had … ‘a special gift for charting the subtle tidal flow of emotions that make up daily life.’ She was 34 when she published Dale Loves Sophie to Death (1981), which won [what is] now known as the National Book Award for a first novel.” – The Washington Post

“[He] is most commonly associated with the Light and Space movement, which was pioneered by a group of artists working in California during the 1960s. … Alexander wound up producing understated, sleek objects that seemed at times to reinterpret Minimalism with a less chilly aesthetic. Often, the resin works take on semi-translucent cuboidal shapes, with colors that appear to fade depending on where the viewer stands with respect to the object.” – ARTnews

An author, essayist and playwright — notably hailed for his autobiographical 1985 play, “The Normal Heart” — Mr. Kramer had feet in both the world of letters and the public sphere. In 1981 he was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization for H.I.V.-positive people, though his fellow directors effectively kicked him out a year later for his aggressive approach. (He returned the compliment by calling them “a sad organization of sissies.”) – The New York Times

A self-taught engineer, AJ virtually created the rigging industry out of a background in theatre lighting. When he began, in the early 1980s, technicians still hung their own lights, but in the era of extravagant musicals, rock concerts and spectaculars AJ saw an opportunity within the gravity-defying ambitions of designers and directors. – The Guardian

A staff conductor at the Met for 21 years, Revzen served as artistic director of Arizona Opera (2003-2012) and Berkshire Opera (1991-2005) and was, from 2012, the founding artistic director of the Nevada summer festival Classical Tahoe. – The Strad

“[He] devoted his career to studying how some of the fundamental elements of art could be manipulated to create perceptual effects. His experiments with color led him to make paintings of geometric shapes that seem to vibrate and emanate light.” – The New York Times

“[He] came from a family of griots, the dynastic West African musicians whose songs carry news and chronicle history. Steeped in those traditions, he electrified the kora, the traditional griot’s harp, and he fused African music with styles and instruments from Western pop. … [His] 1987 single “Yé Ké Yé Ké” was a hit, first in Africa and then across Europe. It became the first African single to sell more than a million copies and has been licensed frequently for commercials and film soundtracks.” – The New York Times

Macurdy’s rich voice and stage presence won him accolades over his 38-year career at the Met. “Though he achieved success in key roles like Gurnemanz in Wagner’s Parsifal, King Marke in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Sarastro in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Mr. Macurdy proved essential to the house for his standout performances of supporting roles, including the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which he sang 75 times at the Met; Daland in Wagner’s Der Fliegender Holländer; the King of Egypt in Verdi’s Aida; and many more.” – The New York Times

Dallas, who had pancreatic cancer, was a playwright, musician, teacher, and, most notably, a director. He led Philadelphia’s Freedom Theater, one of the nation’s pre-eminent African American theatres, for 16 years, and worked at New York’s Public Theater and Negro Company, among others, as he directed 25 world premieres. An actress who worked with him for three decades: “For him, joy was serious business, especially as a black man who had grown up in the segregated South. … An actor would start a passage and break into tears, and he would say: ‘There is power in sorrow and trauma, but there’s so much more power in digging deep and asking what brings you joy. Then the tears and the angst will come.’'” – The New York Times

“A hummingbird of a woman at 4-foot-8, [she] was a puppeteer whose performances were mock-chaotic, subtly cerebral and always slyly subversive. She made sure to slip in a history lesson, or a plug for conservation or social justice. She called them happenings, for the political theater she was schooled in. Her fellow puppeteers called her the Queen of Potpourri.” – The New York Times

“[He was] a co-founder and the artistic director of Repertorio Español, … [which since 1968] has reimagined Spanish classics and offered contemporary work by Latin and Latin American playwrights, always in Spanish, performed repertory-style. … And he liked to say that the playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age — Cervantes et al. — should be as well known here as Shakespeare.” – The New York Times

“A Spanish court has dismissed an appeal from a psychic who claimed to be Salvador Dalí’s long-lost daughter after DNA results debunked the outlandish theory. Pilar Abel has been ordered to pay for exhuming the surrealist artist’s body three years ago in her quest to prove he was her father.” (Exquisite? Why, yes — Dalí’s mustache remains intact.) – Artnet

“For about 10 years, between the era of Shirley Temple in the 1930s and before Jerry Mathers appeared on TV’s Leave It to Beaver in the late 1950s, Joel Kupperman may have been the most famous child in America. From 1942 to 1952, he appeared almost every week on Quiz Kids, … [where] he would put on a scholar’s cap and gown and, with a panel of other genius-level children from Chicago, answer questions about mathematics, science, history, music, literature, sports and current events.” The experience was so painful that, as an adult, he refused to speak of it in any way. – The Washington Post

Rothenberg’s paintings are spare and stark—frequently understated in their color palette and simple in their form. But through even the vague suggestion of figures, Rothenberg was able to create memorable images that tease the brain and tickle the eye. – ARTnews

“Even when he was a big name, Piccoli was never too proud to play small supporting roles or even bit parts if he liked the screenplay. But whatever the size of the role, whether playing a goody or a baddie, Piccoli would bring to the character a gravitas (with a tinge of humour) and an ironic detachment, simultaneously revealing a real, recognisable human being beneath the surface.” – The Guardian

Actor Leslie Jordan is just fine with all of the attention to his “pillow talk” tales of working with more famous – and often much more highly paid – actors and performers. “What was interesting to me was how offers started coming in to push products,” he says. “I’m telling you, I did not know the word monetise.” (He does now.) – BBC

His collaborations with Christopher Guest and Guest’s mockumentary ensemble were epic. “He played an Air Force colonel in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), then was travel agent/amateur actor Ron Albertson in Waiting for Guffman (1996); dunderheaded announcer Buck Laughlin in Best in Show (2000); Mike LaFontaine, blond-haired manager of the New Main Street Singers, in A Mighty Wind (2003); and smarmy newsmagazine host Chuck Porter (supposedly modeled on Billy Bush) in For Your Consideration (2006).” But that was far from all; his IMDb credit list runs to over 300 appearances, many of them as “self.” – The Hollywood Reporter

Shelton created and directed many small-scale, intimate indie films, funding those well-reviewed passion projects with tons of TV show work, including, recently, four episodes of Little Fires Everywhere. Her partner, the actor and podcaster Marc Maron, said, “Her spirit was pure joy. She made me happy. I made her happy. We were happy. I made her laugh all the time. We laughed a lot. We were starting a life together. I really can’t believe what is happening. This is a horrendous, sad loss.” – The New York Times

Kirchherr, a 22-year-old art and photography student, captured the young lads when they were in Hamburg, playing scruffily in the red light district. – The New York Times

Delsarte’s large-scale public murals are his best-known works, but he also painted and created drawings and prints. His murals, though, they’re the ones that everyone in New York (and elsewhere) knows. “‘Whenever I see Louis’s work, I see a bunch of black people looking good, from anywhere and everywhere in the diaspora,’ said Arturo Lindsay, an artist and professor emeritus of art and art history at Spelman College in Atlanta. ‘Just showing black people looking good and happy is a hell of a political statement.'” – The New York Times

In addition to his triumphs in Europe, he was one of the few French singers of his time to have a big career in the U.S., notably in Chicago and Philadelphia and at the Met, where he sang for 18 seasons. Also unusually for a francophone singer of the day, he was admired internationally for his command of Italian opera as well as the French repertoire. – OperaWire

“Most often associated with the Grupo Frente movement of the 1950s and ’60s, Palatnik was among the first Brazilian artists to take up a style called Concretism, which envisioned formalist geometric abstraction as a pure style of art-making that referred to nothing other than itself. … While he was a member of that group, Palatnik produced works that he called ‘Kinechromatic Devices’. … Composed of lights and industrial materials such as metal, fabric, and wood and positioned somewhere between painting and sculpture, these objects seemed to make lush abstractions lurch into motion when activated.” – ARTnews

“While he did take star turns, his many ‘comprimario’ roles, as opera’s supporting roles are known, increased his performance total to sixth among basses in Met history. He sang 62 roles with the company.” He also performed in six major world premieres at various houses, including Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. – Yahoo! (AP)