“British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey … are elevating grass into something quite beautiful. They have been creating large-scale canvases of living grass, by tinkering with the natural growth process of this little plant in order to create impressive, photographic-like images.” (includes video)
Tag: 06.23.17
New York Congresswoman Proposes Student Loan Relief For Arts Workers
“Under the American Arts Revival Act,” introduced by Nydia Velázquez, “arts workers would qualify for $10,000 of student loan forgiveness. The program would be open to ‘cultural workers, museum professionals, artistic professionals and certain arts and humanities professors’ who work full time to provide services to seniors, children, or adolescents.”
Having No Home Stage Liberated The National Theatre Of Scotland
“For little more than a decade, [the company] has been a theatre ‘without walls’. If you want to see an NTS show, you have to find it first. The idea takes a little getting used to, but the absence of a building is fundamental to how the organisation operates. Far from being a limitation, it can be artistically liberating. This company is shape-shifting. It can be what it wants.”
The Unsung Creator Of Modern Musical Choreography: Bob Fosse
What gives the dancing in modern musicals such athleticism and power? A style that can be traced back to Fosse. “The roots of Fosse’s signature style were actually in burlesque. As a young teenager … he had a tap act that he performed in burlesque houses. He translated that style to the screen in ways that directly foreshadow modern musicals and music videos.”
‘Lack Of Professional Attitude And Practices’ Causing Serious ‘Talent Drain’ From British Theatre: Study
“A damning review of workforce practices in commercial and not-for-profit theatre has painted a picture of a sector being undermined by low pay, a damaging culture of overwork, poor treatment of freelance workers and a lack of long-term strategic thinking.”
The Strange Story Of The New American Writers Museum
“An Irish former trade association head, a German lawyer and a native-born business executive, all residents of Washington and not an author among them, decide to create a museum dedicated to American writers. In Chicago, where two of them have never lived. … The American Writers Museum lacks a resident curator. And a permanent collection of artifacts, the stuff that generally creates a museum.” For that matter, it lacks a permanent building. Karen Heller meets the three people who founded this museum and finds out what on earth they’re thinking.
Star Of Central Park ‘Julius Caesar’ Tells What It Was Like
Corey Stoll, who played Brutus: “It felt as if we were acting in two plays simultaneously – the one we had rehearsed and the one thrust upon us. The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling. At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance. … In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act.”
Why Is Yo-Yo Ma Devoting So Much Time To Outreach In Chicago?
“I love the city. There’s a lot of depth, a lot of pride in the way the city operates, and the institutions here are fabulous. … I am particularly interested in this third of the country because I think that third has a deep soul, and the soul of the country in many ways stems from what happens here.”
Hans Breder, Who Created First-Ever Interdisciplinary Arts Program, Dead At 81
“[His] minimalist sculptures were starting to attract attention in New York when his friend Ulfert Wilke, the director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, recommended him for a faculty position at the university. Mr. Breder accepted, and began teaching an experimental drawing course in 1966. Friends threw up their hands, warning him that he was leaving the center of the artistic universe for a cultural desert. He blithely replied, ‘I will bring New York to Iowa.'”
Will Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Renovation Undercut The Complex’s ‘Brutalist Truth’?
Where the brutalist designs of the 1960s meant to give the complex an aura of “high art,” the ethos of 2017 means opening up, warming up, inviting people in, including many people who don’t have tickets and never will have tickets to events inside. But Alex Bozikovic asks, “What if, 50 years from now, every public building is a glass pavilion with a humming espresso machine and slightly dated modern furniture? What if cloistered, dramatic public spaces are again in vogue”?