James Ransome just won the Gold Award. He's "well-known and loved for his illustrations, especially for his many children's books. But at age 60 he recently earned an MFA, and is developing a parallel career as a painter. His Gold Award was for Who should own Black Art -- a painting and book jacket — and his acceptance speech acknowledged some...
The final pre-9/11 Oscars (can that be real?), the Oscars where Gladiator beat Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and where Marcia Gay Harden won (deservedly! but perhaps cursedly?) for Pollock ... what else should, or could, have happened? - Los Angeles Times
Julie Mehretu, who has a solo show opening at the Whitney: "There is a deep consideration of who you show and who comes to the museum and how do you shift that. There is a lot that has to be challenged." - The New York Times
Jessie Buckley is playing Juliet, and Josh O'Connor is playing Romeo, but there's no audience - and there's a huge audience. "When news first broke that Buckley and O’Connor would appear together in a contemporary version of Romeo & Juliet, there was huge excitement among theatregoers. The idea was for a short autumn run at the Lyttleton theatre, in...
Arts venues are dying while waiting for their entertainment venue relief. Not great: "A far longer than expected build-out of the application process by the Small Business Administration — which only had its new head, Isabel Guzman, confirmed by the Senate last week — has meant serious delays in the disbursement of funds. And a buildup of anxiety, debt...
And the confrontations - and revelations about who on MoMA's board and who on MoMA PS1's board are implicated in "security firms" in Iraq, not to mention ties to Jeffrey Epstein - are ongoing. Iraqi American art scholar Rijin Sahakian: "The denial of the artists’ right to peacefully protest through their work — on an active war actively accumulating...
TikTok might not be the place we think of immediately for book reviews - but a lot of bookbuyers - that is, young women - do. "Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released The Song of Achilles , said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually...
California labor law doesn't allow for pay secrecy. Disney denies the claims by the plaintiffs that "Disney prohibits employees from disclosing their own wages, discussing the pay of others or inquiring about another employee’s compensation. ... Some of the plaintiffs also claim to have been instructed multiple times not to talk about their compensation, with one alleging that another...
The plan: Audacious, but careful. The space: The Park Avenue Armory, with an extremely limited audience. The issue: "The eagerly anticipated performances, which were set to begin on Wednesday for a sold-out seven-day run, had to be postponed after several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company tested positive for the virus." - The New York Times
And many Black authors resent the implication. Yaa Gyasi on her time touring the United States after her book Homegoing came out: "I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that...
The intense responses to the R. Kelly, Britney Spears (who, unlike the others on the list, is not portrayed a predator but rather a woman much preyed upon), Michael Jackson, and Woody Allen documentaries have surprised filmmakers - after all, most of the info was already part of the public record. One producer: "The loudest and most impactful documentaries...
Pandemic-related shutdowns mean that the people who need help printing, filling out, and scanning documents - "There are lots of forms, which demand lots of one-on-one help from library staff to find and complete" - can't get it directly, but there's still Wi-Fi in the parking lots ... and long lines of people each time the libraries re-open. -...
Van Gogh died in 1890. By 1909, Anna, the oldest Van Gogh sister, "wrote of selling a picture that he had given Willemien, enabling her to pay for medical costs: 'I remember when Wil got the painting from Vincent, but what a figure! Who would have thought that Vincent would contribute to Wil’s upkeep in this way?'" - The...
Cepillín, whose non-performing name was Ricardo González Gutiérrez, was a Mexican clown with a half-century-long career. He "hosted TV shows broadcast from Mexico, sold millions of copies of his albums of children’s songs, and later drew millions of viewers to his videos on TikTok and YouTube. And he toured Mexico and the United States with circus companies including his...
Even weeks after the Golden Globes, Hollywood isn't relenting; this reckoning has been a long time coming. "Now, with the very survival of the Globes hanging in the balance, some in Hollywood remain unconvinced that the insular and notoriously fractious group has the capacity, or perhaps even the self-awareness, to undertake the sort of transformational reforms it has vowed." - Los...
