After a week of debate in Kyoto, and pushback ahead of the International Council for Museums’s annual conference in the historic Japanese city, delegates voted overwhelmingly against a contentious new definition that its critics argue is “too ideological.” – artnet
Tag: sj
This Off-Broadway Play Was So Fraught, It Hired Post-Show Counselors For The Audience. Now It’s Headed To Broadway — Can Broadway Handle It?
Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play “often funny and pervasively unsettling, examines that lingering wound [of American slavery] through the frustrated sex lives, and taboo sexual fantasies, of three contemporary interracial couples. … An internet-based backlash, seemingly fueled by people who had not seen the play, was threatening enough to require stepped-up security” for its Off-Broadway run. “Many of the participants still can’t quite believe this play, on Broadway, is happening.” – The New York Times
Saving Endangered Indigenous Languages By Digitizing Them Is A Tricky Business, And Not Just Technically
“New technology like smartphone keyboards, language-learning apps, and digital databases makes revitalization work easier than ever, but it also requires hard conversations about which parts of a language must be kept offline.” – Slate
There’s One American TV Show That Depicts Labor With Real Dignity
“On its face, [The Science Channel’s] How It’s Made is arguably about science and engineering rather than the vicissitudes of the working class, but its depiction of the everyday worker nonetheless makes it a kissing cousin to socialist realism — or at least a kissing cousin to social realism, which is itself a kissing cousin to socialist realism.” – The Baffler
How Can A World Run By Big Data And AI Better Reflect The Real World, Including People Of Color?
To put it in the most basic ways, AI doesn’t see color – even when it should. “Errors from incomplete AI training data already affect people of color. For one, facial recognition software has a history of misidentifying black citizens. – Wired
At 93, Betye Saar Is Finally Achieving Mainstream Art-World Stardom
“After a latish start as an artist — she was in her 30s — she made steady initial headway in a male-dominated Black Power movement and a white-dominated feminist movement. And she has held her own in a mainstream art market that has been, until very recently, unwelcoming to African-American art.” Now she has solo shows at flagship museums on both coasts: MoMA and LACMA. Why now? “Because,” she says, “it’s about time!” – The New York Times
Advice For Dance Companies On Creating Outreach Programs That Actually Reach Out
“By offering vulnerable populations the opportunity to make choices, work collaboratively and express themselves creatively, dance has the power to be transformative.” Writer Rachel Caldwell offers examples of how that happens from Urban Bush Women, Dimensions Dance Theater, Keshet Dance Company, and Gibney. – Dance Magazine
Adrienne Kennedy, An American Original
A special package on the great African-American playwright as she approaches her 88th birthday (Sept. 13), including a Q&A with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a feature on the undergraduate playwriting seminar she taught at Harvard in 1997 (a class which is said to have changed many of the students’ lives), and tributes from a dozen colleagues and former students, including Natalie Portman, Ishmael Reed, Michael Kahn, Robert O’Hara, and Aleshea Harris. – American Theatre
How Change Happens – With A Million Tiny Steps
“The unknown becomes known, the outcasts come inside, the strange becomes ordinary. You can see changes to the ideas about whose rights matter and what is reasonable and who should decide, if you sit still enough and gather the evidence of transformations that happen by a million tiny steps before they result in a landmark legal decision or an election or some other shift that puts us in a place we’ve never been.” – Literary Hub
At DC’s Libraries, Homeless Patrons Served By Outreach Officers Who Were Once Unhoused Themselves
“In 2014, the D.C. Public Library system hired Jean Badalamenti as assistant manager of health and human services to help the city’s 25 libraries better serve as a resource for the city’s roughly 6,500 homeless residents. Early last year, she pulled three ‘peer specialists’,” all with personal experience of homelessness, to help guide unhoused library patrons to services. – The Washington Post