Tag: 03.20.19

Instead Of Trashing Or Replacing Its Old-Style, Stereotyped Colonists-Meet-Indians Diorama, This Museum Is Interrogating It

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a 1939 diorama purporting to show a diplomatic meeting between governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam (today’s Manhattan) and some Lenape Indians, and — not everything in it is wrong (Stuyvesant really did have a pegleg), but in 2019, you can’t call it accurate. So the Museum decided to make the diorama an exhibit on old stereotypes, with labeling explaining the differences between what’s shown and what’s known of the site’s actual history. Reporter Ana Fota has a look. – The New York Times

Old Photos Of Enslaved African-Americans Should Belong To Their Descendants, Not Museums, Argues Lawsuit

Just as the law now requires that Native American remains and artifacts should be returned to today’s Native tribes, the descendants of a pair of slaves seen in historic daguerreotypes now owned by a Harvard museum claim that they’re the rightful owners of those slaves’ images, which are, says their lawsuit, “spoils of theft.” – The New York Times

Keeping Professional Theatre Going For 30 Years In A Far-Flung Pacific Archipelago

Wan Smolbag Theatre in the 70-island nation of Vanuatu is the only professional stage company in the entire South Pacific made up entirely of Pacific Islanders. Three decades after its founding, it’s now the largest locally-based NGO of any kind in Vanuatu: with over 100 employees, Wan Smolbag has expanded into film and into providing social services. – The Stage

Hudson Yards Owners Modify Policy After Claiming They Owned Any Pictures You Take

Now visitors “retain ownership of any photographs, text, audio recordings or video footage depicting or relating to the Vessel” that they create. But if you want to send that photo out to your Instagram fans, you still “hereby grant to Company and its affiliates the right to repost, share, publish, promote and distribute the Vessel Media via such social media channel and via websites associated with the Vessel or Hudson Yards (including my name, voice and likeness and any other aspects of my persona as depicted in the Vessel Media), in perpetuity.” – The New York Times

Pioneers Of Post-Modern Dance Reflect On What Happened, 60 Years Later

Part of postmodern dance’s power lay in the fact that, for all of its foreignness, it was also familiar. Here were movements taken from the street or home and performed by able but merely human bodies in intimate settings — namely at downtown galleries, lofts or the freewheeling Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, either in the main sanctuary or upon the painted lines of the basement basketball court.  – The New York Times

My Particular Beef

One day, Edythe called me into the bedroom and said it was time for us to have a real meal, a roast beef. “You can do it, it’s easy.” That’s the first thing I cooked all by myself, a year or so before my bar mitzvah. And it’s what I cooked yesterday, for the second time in my life, 60 years later. – Jeff Weinstein