This falls into the category of what you’ve learned that you wish you’d known when you started out as an artist.
Colonial America’s Most Notorious Poet Was An Enslaved Teenage Girl
Phyllis Wheatley was abducted from the West African coast and sold to a Boston couple at roughly age seven. Their daughter taught the young slave to read, and within two years, Phyllis fluently read and wrote English and started learning Latin. When she was 18, her owners took her to London to publish a book of her poems, and – once disbelieving publishers and others were convinced that Phyllis had written them herself – she became famous on both sides of the Atlantic.
How The Arts Are Being Harmed By The Scarcity Trap
Most of us believe we’re working smarter not harder. The fact is though, we’re caught in scarcity’s flywheel and it’s cascading a fire fighting, scarcity mindset throughout our organizations, magnifying the problem as things become worse for everyone. We’ll never “catch up.” Worst of all, we’re often oblivious to what will help us out of the bind as we focus on the fires, or assume if we just score that big grant — come onnnnn, lucky major foundation grant! — or sell out our season, we’ll finally be able to get ahead.
Turns Out ‘Salvator Mundi’ Was Not The Last Leonardo Da Vinci In Private Hands
“It turns out there is another – even two – out there. And at least one dealer thinks they could be worth as much as $200 million each. Both are smaller-scale, devotional paintings depicting the same image: the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap. The baby is holding a cross-shaped stick used to wind yarn, which has inspired the shared name, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder.”
Why Is ‘Nutcracker’ So Popular Everywhere? Because It’s So Adaptable
Not only does the scenario offer interpretative possibilities ranging from a simple child-oriented extravaganza to a sexual awakening for young Clara, it has proved flexible enough for localized versions everywhere from China to Hawaii to South Africa. (Not to mention Mark Morris’s trailer-trash Americana.)
The Forgotten Story Of How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Was An Ugly Business)
“Lincoln Center was the crown-jewel project of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, which was overseen by Robert Moses, the man who reshaped the city in the mid-20th century.” As Robert Caro wrote, “Moses was not making even a pretense of creating new homes for the [7,000-plus] families displaced.”
Explaining The New Tax Bill’s Potential Effect On The Art Market
Anna Louie Sussman looks at the implications of the legislation.
Can The Arts Really Help Repair A Broken, Divided Society? This Research Grant Aims To Start Answering That Question
Intuitively, most of us arts types sense (or at least want to believe) that the answer is yes. Now the Mellon Foundation is funding a study to get real data to back up that answer (or not).
Artists Heap Scorn On UK Government’s Report Of Impact Of Brexit On Creative Industries
Commenting primarily on the structure of the sector and noting that 6.7% of the workforce in 2016 were EU nationals and there were 2 million jobs in the creative industries, the publication has been met with scorn from the arts sector for glossing over issues such as freedom of movement and refusing to include ‘sector views’. The Committee received these from the Government but “decided not to publish”.
Why Today’s College Campuses Are Looking More Like Hogwarts
“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, was published in 1997. The film version of that novel appeared in 2001. This year’s crop of college freshmen was born between those two cultural milestones, which means a huge number grew up reading the Potter books or watching the movies or both. Many of them have an expectation (or perhaps a hope) that going off to college means going off to a campus that resembles the Hollywood version of Hogwarts, full of peaked roofs, gargoyles, stone floors, stained glass and huge dining halls warmed by multiple fireplaces.
One Week Of Made For TV Christmas Specials Is A Special Kind Of Joy, Or Maybe Torture
Basically: “These aren’t just Christmas movies: They’re like Kay Jewelers commercials on steroids; movie-length advertisements for small-town America, capitalism and twinkle lights.”
The Guardian Claims That It’s Time For ‘Woke Cinema’
This year (2017) was just of taste of what’s to come, the paper says. There’s political entertainment on its way, including A Wrinkle in Time and Black Panther, but that’s not all (not by a long shot). “If Trump is agreed to have killed off political satire, political history could well be taking its place.”
The Artist Who Discovered A Massive E. Coli Outbreak In Michigan Waters
Artist Bridget Quinn and a friend were getting ready to do some improvisational singing in abandoned tunnels when they noticed something seriously wrong. “The smell was really bad. And I’m familiar with non-point-source pollution, which is, like, oil coming off of the street after the rain, but this seemed like a constant flow.” Then a fire department tested the water …
Charles Dickens Made Boatloads Of Money In The United States, But He Couldn’t Stand The Country’s Manners
Basically, fame did him in. “His love affair with an idealized America was short-lived and hard-felt. Apart from the country’s great writers, he found Americans malodorous, ill-mannered and invading his privacy.”
Two Pranksters Who Sneaked Into London’s National Theatre And Spent The Night Have Theatre Security On Edge
Of course, they were two men, and of course, they made a YouTube video. “In the video, the two males are seen gaining entry into the building through an unlocked door that gives them access to the set of the National’s production of Follies. They are then seen leaving the London complex the following morning after spending the night sleeping backstage.”
Marcelo Gomes, One Of The World’s Best-Known Ballet Dancers, Has Resigned Over Sexual Misconduct Allegations
Gomes resigned as a law firm investigation the allegation of behavior from eight years ago. Neither American Ballet Theatre “nor the law firm that was handling the investigation would give further details about the accusation against Mr. Gomes. ‘A.B.T. does not tolerate the alleged behavior,’ [the chairman of the board of trustees] said in his statement. ‘I am profoundly disheartened by this matter,’ he added.”
In Toronto Plays Are Getting Much Shorter
Plays running at 70 or 80 minutes are, according to Company Theatre’s co-artistic director Philip Riccio, “a newer phenomenon,” perhaps connected to the fact that “most of our playwrights come up through the Fringe festivals”; the majority of Fringe shows need to come in at under an hour.
Kindle’s Next Act: Reinventing The Book?
“In a world filled with distractions and notifications and devices that do everything, the Kindle’s lack of features becomes its greatest asset. But readers also want to read everywhere, in places and ways a paperback can’t manage. They want more tools, more features, more options, more stuff to do. Amazon’s still working out how to satisfy both sides. Whatever route it takes, the next decade of Kindle is likely to be even more disruptive than the last. First it changed the book business. Next it might help change books themselves.”
How A Fight Over Attending The Theatre Fueled Civil Rights Battle In the 1800s
“Across America, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, the races were kept separate at the theater. Black people sat apart in the upper galleries or were excluded entirely, by custom and, in some southern cities, by law. As hybrid places—private associations open to the public—theaters were subject to municipal authority, but property owners possessed the liberty to exclude or restrict at will. The common law recognized no right of amusement seeking. After emancipation, statehouses controlled by Radical Republicans banned distinctions of race and color in public conveyances and resorts. But the legislation was evaded simply by tickets stating that proprietors had discretion to exclude anyone. Nor did it carry a positive grant of rights; it regulated places rather than entitling persons.”
Montreal Music Critic: How Charles Dutoit Got A Pass On Abuse?
“Rumours about Dutoit’s behaviour were rampant for years. I confess straightaway to having done precisely nothing with them. Possibly the first reference in the Gazette to the Dutoit dark side, thickly veiled, was in the column I wrote last week on the case of disgraced former Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine.”
How Do You Build A Dance Center In San Francisco? Buy Derelict And Package It With Affordable Housing
The dilapidated 1919 structure, a former furniture store that was remodeled with an Art Deco flair in the late 1930s, has been on and off the market for more than a decade as a succession of owners unsuccessfully attempted to redevelop it as a dialysis center, a vegan restaurant, a brewery and an organic grocery store.
New Visions For A New Generation Of American Public Monuments
“This new school of public sculptures, monuments and plaques range from lifelike portraits of millennial rappers to boulders honouring the lives lost in the Orlando massacre. It proves a new vision is under way to commemorate America’s updated values.”
New York Times’s 12 Small Gifts To Be Grateful For From The Arts In 2017
From the leotards in the Netflix comedy GLOW to a Janet Jackson backup dancer who got cheers of her own to the single-take episode of Mr. Robot, “these 12 blink-and-you-might-have-missed-them cultural moments of 2017 brightened up a year otherwise defined by the threat of nuclear war, natural disasters – from hurricanes to wildfires – that left hundreds of thousands homeless, a string of sexual harassment charges against some of the country’s most prominent political and entertainment figures and yet more terrorist attacks.”
500 Academics Protest Polish Government’s “Repurposing” Of WWII Museum
“The museum, which opened to the public in February, has been at the centre of an ongoing battle over national memory. The right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), elected to government in Poland in 2015, is determined to use the museum displays to present the “Polish point of view” while its critics argue for the autonomy of historians and museums.”
A ‘Herculean Task For An Actor’: Playing An English Pantomime Dame
“What may seem disarmingly simple is actually incredibly complex. The dame is definitely a man in a dress, and one who needs to combine a character with strong maternal instinct, a mouth that’s full of broad innuendo and ensure that the joke is always on them. The great dames also form the bridge between the audience and the action on stage. … A great frock and wig can only take you so far.”