“The Royal Court theatre in London has named Vicky Featherstone, head of the National Theatre of Scotland, as its first female artistic director. Featherstone, who kicked off her career as an unpaid assistant director at the Royal Court, will succeed Dominic Cooke when he steps down in April 2013.”
Tag: 05.11.12
Revived Arts Festival In Iraq Leaves Out Song And Dance
A spring arts festival returns to Babylon, Iraq, near the infamous “Triangle of Death” – but without its previous singing and dancing. Is that to counter memories of Saddam Hussein’s festivals or to cater to religious hardliners?
The Arts And Political Protest In Chicago
As Chicago activists turn up the heat for NATO protests, many of them are making art. It’s a messy business with uncertain results – like democracy, they say. “There really has been a resurgence in the visual culture of protest. … It is all about branding the message effectively. Whether you’re selling a product or promoting an idea, a picture really can be worth a thousand words.”
Trove Of Ira Gershwin Letters Cleared For Sale
“The typed and handwritten letters are a treasure trove of insight into Ira Gershwin’s thoughts about his family’s music and musicians of his generation in the musical theater scene.”
French Comedian’s Concerts Cancelled In Montreal After Accusations Of Anti-Semitism
“Dieudonné’s current show, titled Rendez-nous Jésus (Give us back Jesus), has been criticized in France because it features Holocaust denial, slurs against the Talmud and praise for Hitler. In France, he has to book his shows into smaller venues because established event planners won’t handle him.”
Design School Meets Urban Decay, And Shakes Hands
“The challenge is an old one in urban areas across the country: How do you resuscitate a community without condescending to it, while ensuring that long-time residents won’t be pushed aside, or worse, priced out? The partnership here in Savannah, though, is a particularly unlikely one, pairing the well-off students of a pricey art and design school with the low-income, minority residents of a community with scant interest in art and design.”
Thirty Years Of Looking At Cindy Sherman
“Sherman’s photographs evoke an idea of art as a mediated illusion, a grotesque and haunting chimera composed of different parts and pieces, of high-art and popular culture, of fantasies and uncertainties that are embedded and embodied in an array of visual cues that we encounter each day. These ideas have become our language about art and images since the late 1980s.”
A World Of Painting And Text
Artist Mira Schor: “The rectangle is a dynamic visual space, it is a dynamic compositional space, it is architectural, you have room to put something in and then something else in. … Each painting is a short story, and the paintings together suggest a narrative though not necessarily an obvious one, but at the same time, the rectangle is an interesting abstract object.”
O’Keeffe Museum Curator Leaves Abruptly
“Barbara Buhler Lynes has been recognized as the world’s premier authority on Georgia O’Keeffe, about whom she co-authored the Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne (1999), and wrote the critical work, O’Keeffe: Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929 (1989), which examined ways that O’Keeffe changed her painting after early critics insisted on reading depictions of female anatomy into her representations.”
Good News! As Dementia Sets In We Don’t Forget How To Dance
“People with dementia are constantly being told they can’t do this, they’re doing that wrong, but when they’re dancing they can suddenly move with much more confidence, they know the steps, the music triggers something in them. They might not remember the names of their spouses or children any more, but they haven’t forgotten how to dance.”