This city has for years taken a tough stance on graffiti, doling out stiff fines and sometimes jail time” – with limited success. “Now city officials are trying something different. San Francisco is partnering with street artists – who ply their wall-painting skills legally – paying them to paint buildings.”
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The Return of Colorama, Great Ghost of Kodak Past
Eighteen feet high and 60 feet wide, billed by Kodak as “the world’s largest photographs,” Colorama transparencies impressed passersby at Grand Central Station for 40 years. George Eastman House has assembled a touring exhibition of these goliaths in honor of their 60th anniversary,
The Great Palimpsest Of Damascus: The Umayyad Mosque
Syria’s greatest monument, one of the world’s preeminent mosques, sits on a site that once housed a temple to Jupiter and then a great Byzantine church. In fact, for decades after the Arab conquest of Syria, Muslims and Christians shared the building, and when a caliph finally built a dedicated mosque, he incorporated many of that church’s building materials and hired Christian craftsmen to decorate the space with Islamized Byzantine-style mosaics.
Making Theatre From South African Choral Music
Soprano Pauline Malefane, who gave a breakout performance in an award-winning Xhosa-language film of Bizet’s Carmen, and director Mark Dornford-May have founded “a Cape Town theatre company that aims to tap South Africa’s rich choral tradition, and the wealth of other artistic talent in the townships, to create a new kind of accessible drama.”
America’s Black Dance Companies Struggle Through The Recession
Fifty years ago, African-American dancers were very lucky indeed if they could find any professional company that would hire them. Since then, a wealth of black dance troupes – from the Alvin Ailey company to Philadanco to Urban Bush Women – has arisen and thrived. Yet the Great Recession has decimated funders’ endowments and made presenters skittish, and those companies are facing a more difficult environment than ever before.
Joe Deal, 62, Photographer And ‘Landscape Documentarian’
“His photographs were featured in the small but seminal 1975 photography exhibition ‘New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape’,” which arguably changed the history of photography, challenging the aesthetic of Ansel Adams. Deal and his fellows “were fine-art documentarians, capturing how man had altered the American landscape.”
Oldest Known Images Of Apostles Uncovered In Roman Catacombs
Late fourth-century frescoes of Sts. Peter, Andrew, John and Paul have been uncovered in the Catacombs of St. Tecla, underneath a nondescript office building in Rome. Arachaeologists used lasers to remove centuries’ worth of calcium carbonate deposits which had accumulated over the paintings.
World Cup Starchitecture: Cape Town’s New Green Point Stadium
“This stunning white apparition rises like a porcelain bowl from a podium set in restored parkland, between the breakers of the Atlantic and the commanding backdrop of Lion’s Rock, Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain. … [D]uring the course of the day (and depending on the weather), the building’s filigree skin glows blue at noon, rose in the late afternoon and red at sunset.”
The Bronte Sisters Power Dolls (Seriously)
“Hey, girls! Tired of fancy princesses and vaguely slutty ‘fashion’ dolls? How about something with the awesome superpowers of fiction’s greatest troika: the Brontë sisters?”
A Photographer Making His Bones
“For the past three years, Francois Robert has spent hundreds of hours arranging the bones of a single human skeleton into a series of striking iconic shapes, creating a photographic series he calls ‘Stop the Violence.’ The results are beautiful and haunting.”