Art

The Blazing Talent (And Mental Illness) Of Pianist Oscar Levant

“To read about Levant is to be struck by how his seeming compulsion to blurt the details of his mental illnesses into the nearest microphone foreshadowed the modern-day “oversharers” who chronicle each twist and turn of their private lives. Even so, there was more to him than his madness, and the story of his career as a musician, sometime actor, and media figure avant la lettre will be of interest to anyone curious about what it meant to be famous in America at midcentury.” – Commentary
Tags: Art, America, People, Levant, Oscar Levant, 02.19

What Does The Jussie Smollett Saga Reveal About 2019 America? Victimhood Chic

John McWhorter: “Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack — if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.” – The Atlantic
Tags: Art, America, Issues, John McWhorter, Smollett, 02.20.19

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is seeking a Director of Education

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is America’s foremost repertory company for chamber music, and one of eleven constituent members of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Through informative and entertaining educational programs; live, recorded, and televised performances; extensive commissioning; radio broadcasts; new music series; and young artists’ programs, CMS actively promotes a love and appreciation for a body of music that stands among the finest achievements of our civili...
Tags: Art, Jobs, America, Cms, Microsoft Office, Lincoln Center, NYC Department of Education, Chamber Music Society Of Lincoln Center

Armory Show Announces List of Live Programs

The Armory Show has announced its list of talks and programs for its Live section, set to open with the fair on March 7th. The program has targeted a number of hot button issues in modern America, including identity, politics and feminism.  Read more at Art News
Tags: Art, News, America, Art News, Minipost

Senate approves major public lands bill

On Tuesday the U.S. Senate reversed the trend of shrinking protected space by approving a public lands bill that adds 1.3 million acres of wilderness, creates five new national monuments, expands some national parks and reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This major new public lands bill is a hodgepodge of more than 100 individual bills related to conservation and outdoor recreation. Now more than 350 miles of river will attain the designation “wild and scenic,” which safeguards ...
Tags: Utah, Design, Mississippi, Congress, California, Montana, Washington, Senate, America, Barack Obama, Mike Lee, National Park Service, U S Senate, Bureau of Land Management, Sen Richard Burr, Sen Maria Cantwell D Wash

The Naked Pharaoh Speaks! Anthony Roth Costanzo On How Playing Philip Glass’s Akhnaten Has Changed Him

“In fact I have the show to thank for discovering electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), which uses electric current to amplify your workout and actually builds muscles much faster than I could on my own. I liked it so much that I gathered investors and started one of the first EMS companies in America (seriously).” – The Guardian
Tags: Art, Music, America, EMS, Anthony Roth Costanzo, 02.12.19

Things to do in the San Fernando Valley, Feb. 15-22

    Lynne Fearman’s ‘Purple Haze.’ Fearman demonstrates her oil painting techniques on Feb. 18 at a meeting of the Santa Clarita Artists Association in Santa Clarita. (Photo courtesy of Lynne Fearman)   There’s always something fascinating to do in the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles area. Here is a sampling of entertainments this week and also save-the-date events to put on your calendar.   EVENTS     Bianchi Planetarium at Cal State Northridge: “Winter Sky” show, 7:30, an...
Tags: Local News, Art, Books, Comedy, Dance, Homeless, Lunar New Year, Movies, Museum, Music, San Fernando Valley, Theater, Things to Do, Top Stories LADN

Leonard Pitts: On Writing About Race In America

“A simple thought experiment illustrates the point. If asked to define black literature, you would likely—and promptly—invoke Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison or some other dark-skinned giant of the written word. But what if you were asked to define “white” literature? The mind quails and resists, does it not?” – LitHub
Tags: Art, America, Issues, SJ, Leonard Pitts

Mel A. Tomlinson, Who Danced With Three Of America’s Great Ballet Companies, Dead At 65

A performer “of powerful, regal demeanor,” Tomlinson was a member, in turn, of Dance Theater of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and New York City Ballet. He was most celebrated for his performance in the Balanchine-Stravinsky ballet Agon, which he learned from its originator, Arthur Mitchell, at DTH and from Mr. B. himself at NYCB. – The New York Times
Tags: Art, America, People, NYCB, New York City Ballet, Tomlinson, Arthur Mitchell, 02.13.19, Mel A Tomlinson, Balanchine Stravinsky

Revealed America’s Big Three National Park Flying Safari

Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon in a week When traveling with Revealed America, or even reading about their extensive tours, it makes sense that the tour company was established just after founder Marty Behr traveled America’s National Parks for more than two years. Behr, today Revealed America’s Chief Development Officer, had already retired from a life in the adventure tourism industry, but hearing of challenges to …
Tags: Travel, Outdoors, Design, Hiking, America, National Parks, Grand Canyon, Behr, Hikes, Yellowstone Yosemite, Reveal America, Marty Behr

The Video Game That Lets You Fight Back Against Jim Crow And The KKK

“[Video game company] Rockstar’s version of American history is not for the fainthearted. The developer took pains to make Red Dead Redemption 2 as historically accurate as possible. Someone at Rockstar was clearly paying attention in history class, because Red Dead Redemption 2 unflinchingly confronts America’s ugly racial history throughout the game.” – Slate
Tags: Art, Media, America, Kkk, Jim Crow, SJ, Rockstar, Red Dead Redemption, 02.04.19

Robert Ryman, Abstract Painter Who Had A Way With White, Dead At 88

“Over the course of the more than half-century of relentless experimentation that followed, Ryman radically expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, continuously rethinking how it could be made and what it could look like, even while seeming to confine himself to a single color: white. His death … brings to a close one of the singular careers in postwar America art.” – ARTnews
Tags: Art, America, People, Ryman, Robert Ryman, 02.09.19

How A Teenager’s Lecture On The US Constitution Made It To Broadway

“Much as Hamilton gave America’s founding a progressive cool factor and became the quintessential Obama-era musical, [Heidi Schreck’s] What the Constitution Means to Me captures the mood of a time when institutional protections feel shockingly vulnerable and the country is getting an unwelcome crash course in constitutional arcana. (How many Americans knew about the emoluments clause before November, 2016?)” – The New Yorker
Tags: Art, Obama, Theatre, America, Broadway, Hamilton, Heidi Schreck, 02.18.19

New York Times Map of Every Building in...

New York Times Map of Every Building in America, and Map of Every Building in Your City (LA, NYC, SF, Boston, Dallas) (Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com) [Author: submitted]
Tags: Design, America, New York Times, Submitted, New York Times Map of Every Building, LA NYC SF Boston Dallas Want

Anti-opioid protesters target New York's Guggenheim over Sackler family link

Demonstrators call on museum to refuse donations from the owners of OxyContinUS art photographer and activist Nan Goldin brought the Guggenheim Museum in New York to a standstill on Saturday night as thousands of fake prescriptions were dropped into the atrium to protest against the institution’s acceptance of donations from the family who owns the maker of OxyContin – the prescription painkiller at the root of America’s opioids crisis.Tourists and locals gawped in confusion as Goldin and fellow...
Tags: Art, New York, Drugs, America, US news, Guggenheim, Guggenheim Museum, Nan Goldin, Purdue Pharma, Goldin, Opioids, Sackler, Opioids crisis

Robert Ryman, Minimalist Painter Who Made the Most of White, Dies at 88

Self-taught after discovering art as a museum guard, he became one of America’s most important postwar artists, reaching beyond Abstract Expressionism.
Tags: Art, News, America, Museum of Modern Art, Ryman, Robert, Robert Ryman, Deaths (Obituaries, Minimalist art

Things to do in the San Fernando Valley, LA area, Feb. 8-15

    Samantha Indrieri’s “Second Take” is part of the “Unusual Views” exhibit opening on Feb. 11 at the Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. (Photo courtesy Samantha Indrieri)   There’s always something fascinating to do in the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles area. Here is a sampling of entertainments this week and also save-the-date events to put on your calendar.   EVENTS   Hello Kitty Cafe Truck: Fans of “Hello Kitty” products find limited-edit...
Tags: Local News, Art, Books, Comedy, Dance, Lunar New Year, Movies, Museum, Music, San Fernando Valley, Theater, Things to Do, Top Stories LADN

Harvard Art Museums Opens Their Bauhaus Archives, Starting This Week

Happy Birthday Bauhaus! It's hard to believe, but 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus' founding. To celebrate the Centennial, Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum is throwing open their extensive Bauhaus-related archives to present 200 pieces--original works, furniture, textiles, architecture and even classroom assignments--by over 70 artists and designers. Featuring works by major artists, including Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky...
Tags: New York, Design, Germany, America, Harvard, United States, Cambridge, New Orleans, Anni, Weimar, Design.edu, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Walter Gropius, Anni Albers, Dessau, Gropius

A Graphic Explanation of Why Boarding Airplane Passengers from Back to Front is Not the Fastest Method

Because I played The Oregon Trail as a child, I greatly appreciate air travel. For a few hundred bucks I can traverse America in hours, not months, with no fear of breaking my leg, starving to death or contracting dysentery. So I consider the hassles of air travel minor, although they are glaring.The largest problem, as I see it, is a lack of 1:1 storage. The plane is going to leave at the same time whether I board first or last; all I care about is that there's space in the overhead compartment...
Tags: Games, Design, Youtube, America, Grey, Oregon Trail

Joseph Scapellato's 'The Made-Up Man' Brings Forth 21st Century Absurdism

None At the turn of the 20th century, an attitude set in among European intellectuals, an overwhelming feeling that everything being done in the name of "modernity" was absurd. Humanity was imprisoning itself in ever more elaborate systems and social structures: the empire-building, warmongering, and bureaucratic administration of everyday life that had defined the previous century were just futile attempts to create meaning in an indifferent universe. As "progress" marched on, civilization see...
Tags: Art, Music, Review, Fiction, America, Book Review, Chicago, Prague, Poland, Satire, Kafka, Northwestern University, Farrar, Chandler, Stan, Stanley

China's $9,000 Electric Pickup Truck is Coming to the U.S.

Pickup trucks are big business in the U.S. Never mind annual statistics, which can be mind-numbing; consider that 6,500 brand-new pickup trucks are sold in America every day. The math shows that Ford sells a pickup truck about every 30 seconds, while GM and Dodge each average roughly one pickup truck sale per minute. (Toyota and Nissan lag behind but are still significant players, together moving about 500 trucks per day.)Is there room for another competitor in this space? China-based Kaiyun ...
Tags: Design, China, Cars, America, Ford, Gm, Dodge, Honda, Nissan, Detroit, Wang, Wang Chao, Pickman, Electric Pickup Truck, U S Never, Kaiyun Motors

From Nothing to Fort Nelson: Inside Michter’s Decades-Long Resurgence

A brand born from 'America's Oldest Distillery' is investing in its future In the 266 years since Michter’s was founded in Pennsylvania, the brand (first known as Shenk’s and then Bomberger’s) has battled prohibition, closure and abandonment. But since its resurrection in the 1990s (and its relocation to Kentucky), the brand has hired the first woman Master Distiller in the Kentucky Distiller Association’s history, invested millions of …
Tags: Design, Kentucky, America, Pennsylvania, Whiskey, Bourbon, Louisville, Food + Drink, Shenk, Michter, Fort Nelson, Andrea Wilson, Bomberger, Joseph Magliocco, Master Distillers, Michter's

Catching Up to the Past

Buckle your seatbelt and fire up your time machine. You are about to blast yourself back nearly fifty years to a simpler time when America was at war, the country was polarized, a crazed and despised president of the United States was in charge, cops were considered racist pigs, cannabis was omnipresent, and young radicals feared that racism was imminent. — Jan Herman
Tags: Art, America, United States, Ajblogs, 02.04.19

A Short Look At The History Of Minstrelsy

Wesley Morris, on Ralph Northam’s press conference: “The governor wasn’t arguing that his young self came to see that blackface was wrong because he had learned how minstrelsy wasn’t some cultural niche but was once America’s popular culture and how that popularity helped cement the nation’s perception of black people as hideous and stupid and freakish and dumb and lusty and unworthy of more than torture, exploitation, derision, oppression, neglect and extermination.” – The New York Times
Tags: Art, America, Issues, Wesley Morris, Ralph Northam, 02.03.19

Things to do in the San Fernando Valley and LA area, Feb. 1-8

  Lunar New Year celebrated on Feb. 2 at The Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles. (Photo, at the 2018 event, courtesy of The Original Farmers Market)   There’s always something fascinating to do in the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles area. Here is a sampling of entertainments this week and also save-the-date events to put on your calendar.   EVENTS   Bianchi Planetarium at Cal State Northridge: “Winter Sky” show, 7:30, and “Light Years from Andromeda: A Journey Between T...
Tags: Local News, Art, Books, Comedy, Dance, Lunar New Year, Movies, Museum, Music, San Fernando Valley, Theater, Things to Do, Top Stories LADN

How An Out-Of-Work Ballerina In The Great Depression Became One Of America’s Most Famous Women

The young lady née Helen Gould Beck found herself stranded in Chicago when the ballet company she was touring with collapsed, and the only job she could get was as a stripper at a nightclub in the Loop. She ended up as a star attraction at the 1939 World’s Fair, known for her fan dance and her “bubble dance” with a 65-inch balloon (and nothing else) — an act she toured with for years afterward as Sally Rand. — The Oregonian
Tags: Art, America, Chicago, Dance, 01.31.19, Helen Gould Beck, Sally Rand

Frida Kahlo Wasn’t Just An Artist, She Was A Brilliant Self-Marketer

“The painter meticulously crafted her own image on a par with Cleopatra. If she were alive today, she’d probably be teaching a branding class at Harvard. Now it’s America’s turn to see how, and, more important, why she did it.” — The New York Times
Tags: Art, America, People, Frida Kahlo, Harvard Now, 01.31.19

Superman: America's Jewish superhero?

Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the children of Jewish immigrants, right when the world was contending with growing anti-Semitism.The experience of Jewish immigrants in America and Superman's own fictional origins have striking similarities.Though this theory has its critics, there seem to be too many parallels to dismiss it out of hand. None In the mid-19th century, an immigrant fleeing horrific violence arrived in America. He quickly assimilated, adopting an American-sou...
Tags: Art, Europe, New York, Entertainment, Germany, Nazis, Religion, Superman, America, History, Earth, Prague, United States, Innovation, Hitler, North America

Florence Knoll Bassett, Who Designed American Offices Into Modernity, Has Died At 101

Knoll Bassett was “a pioneering designer and entrepreneur who created the modern look and feel of America’s postwar corporate office with sleek furniture, artistic textiles and an uncluttered, free-flowing workplace environment.” – The New York Times
Tags: Art, America, People, 01.25.19, Florence Knoll Bassett, Knoll Bassett

Toxic Masculinity

Have you seen the Gillette ad that inexplicably has conservative America's panties in a twist? It's amazing that this ad charges into our already toxic public discourse just as we New Liners are in rehearsal for La Cage aux Folles, containing a song called "Masculinity." Imagine what the right-wingers would think of Albin! Oh, right, we don't have to imagine. That's our story.Yes, M. and Mme. Dindon are alive and well and living in America. After all, we've all seen the many and various indignit...
Tags: Gender, Musicals, Wikipedia, Robin Hood, Theatre, America, Gay, Broadway, Theater, Lgbtq, John Wayne, Gillette, Stew, Robert, Anne, Zaza