Tag: sj

They’re Both Native Americans And Native New Yorkers, And For 50-Odd Years They’ve Been Performing Native Dance In The City

The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers were formed in downtown Brooklyn in 1963 by a group of mostly Mohawk neighbors who were the first generation in their families born off the reservation. Now the group preserves and performs indigenous dances from across North America. Reporter Siobhan Burke talks with the Thunderbirds’ director, 82-year-old Louis Mofsie. — The New York Times

Provocation: Was Modernism Intended To Exclude The Masses?

“If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader did not understand it.” – JSTOR Daily

New Mellon Foundation Study: Leadership In The Museum World Is Getting More Diverse, But It’s Slow

The takeaway: “At a high level, the study has found some meaningful progress in the representation of people of color in a number of different museum functions, including the curatorial. We also found an increase in the number of women in museum leadership positions from 2015 to 2018. Nevertheless, the data also shows that progress has been uneven. While trends in recent hiring are encouraging, certain parts of the museum appear not as quick to change, especially the most senior leadership positions.” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

There’s Considerable Evidence That Theatre Can Make An Impact In American Justice. Here’s How

“Given that 85 percent of U.S. counties are home to some number of incarcerated individuals, it’s likely that most of our nation’s theatres are close to at least one correctional facility. In those facilities about two thirds of the incarcerated are people of color. As theatres work to diversify their audiences along lines of income and ethnicity, a growing percentage of those attendees will have a personal connection to mass incarceration, opening up new opportunities for relevance to communities. In short there seems to be great room and reason to expand this field of work.” – American Theatre

This Really Was An Evil Plot By The Patriarchy: Art Dealers Erased Female Old Masters And Sold Their Paintings As Works By Men

Jordana Pomeroy, director of the Frost Art Museum in Miami and a specialist in the history of women artists, says that some dealers went so far as to paint over a female artist’s signature and replace it with that of a male one “so that you can ask more money for a Frans Hals than you could for a Judith Leyster. And this kind of thing went on for many, many years.” — The Art Newspaper (podcast)

Mellon Foundation Gives $1.25M To Increase Diversity In Academic Publishing

“The [four-year] program offers apprenticeships in acquisitions departments at six university presses: the University of Washington Press, the MIT Press, Cornell University Press, the Ohio State University Press, University of Chicago Press, and Northwestern University Press. The grant will provide for three annual cycles of editorial fellows at those presses.” — Publishers Weekly