Category: people

In the late 1950s, Northern joined the Metropolitan Opera symphony, “where, he later recalled, as the only African-American member he was often subjected to racist abuse — reminiscent of what he had endured from white officers in the military.” He also played “on some of the most storied orchestral recordings in jazz history, including The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall, John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.” – The New York Times

Edwards started writing when she was 7, but published her first novel almost 50 years later. She wrote six detective novels, “mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz,” and also became director of the Harlem Writers Guild for nearly a decade. – The New York Times

His tenure as a senior administrator in the Florentine Republic saw many more failures than successes; he was bounced into prison and then exile after the Medici returned to power; when he finally got back into their favor, he was commissioned to write a great history of the city, only to see the family booted once again and die himself a couple of months later. “That hallmark of his work, Fortune, shined upon him only posthumously.” – History Today

“Mr. Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies Stir Crazy and Splash, was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture. … [His] early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, making dark but giggle-inducing sport of the deep, if not pathological, insecurities of his white, male, middle-class and often Jewish protagonists.” – The New York Times

“[She] first became known in Cambridge when she started selling her photos in a pushcart in Harvard Square. When police tried to chase her away, [her husband], a civil rights attorney, successfully argued that photographs are not ordinary merchandise that required a peddler’s license but were an intellectual product protected by the First Amendment. … Far from a pushcart, at the height of her career a 20-by-24 inch Polaroid portrait by Dorfman cost thousands of dollars.” – WBUR (Boston)

“Hoffman was one of the first book retailers to employ aggressive marketing techniques in the service of creating mass market bookselling. Despite occasional criticism from authors and publishers that Walden emphasized the sales of commercial books over more literary ones, Hoffman never backed down on his belief that more books should be published with mass appeal.” – Publishers Weekly

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