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Dia Art Foundation announces the appointment of Humberto Moro as Deputy Director of Program
NEW YORK, NY.- Dia announced today the appointment of Humberto Moro to the position of Deputy Director of Program. Overseeing and amplifying the dynamic work of Dias Curatorial, Exhibition Design and Installation, Learning and Engagement, and Publications departments, Moro will play a key role in determining Dias future development and direction as it looks toward its 50th anniversary and beyond. Moro comes to Dia from the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, where he is Deputy Director and Senior Curator, and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, where he has held the position of Adjunct Curator since 2020 and was previously Curator from 2016 to 2020. In 2021, Moro completed a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship, which included a residency at Dia. Moro will begin his new role in early 2022. I am thrilled that Humberto Moro is joining the Dia team at this pivotal moment in our history, said Jessica Morgan, Dias Nathalie de Gunzbu ... More

Ron Cephas Jones has something to prove again
NEW YORK, NY.- In the spring of 2020, a recurring nightmare began tormenting actor Ron Cephas Jones. A theater veteran known for his work on the NBC drama This Is Us, Jones is 64 and wiry, with short waves of black hair and an almond-shaped face. In the dream, he is delivering a monologue onstage darkened room, white backlights when he notices something amiss. Everyone in the audience is looking elsewhere, in seemingly every direction but his. Jones waves and shouts, trying to draw the crowds attention. But no matter how desperately he screams, no one registers his presence. He is there but not there, a ghost among the living. In the new Broadway play Clydes, Jones plays a kind of spiritual leader to a beleaguered crew of recently incarcerated sandwich cooks, and he is the shows transfixing center of gravity the very opposite of ghostly incorporeality. But when the nightmares began, Jones really was in mortal peril. In May 2020, he receiv ... More

Powerhouse unveils 'Five Hundred Arhats of Changnyeongsa Temple'
SYDNEY.- The Powerhouse has unveiled its major summer exhibition, Five Hundred Arhats of Changnyeongsa Temple. The arhats are ancient stone figures discovered in 2001-02 among the ruins of the Changnyeongsa Temple in South Koreas Gangwon-do Province, believed to have been built during Goryeo dynasty (918-1392) and destroyed in mid Joseon dynasty (1392-1879). The stone statues depict arhats - nahan in Korean - known in Buddhism as one who has attained enlightenment. The arhats represent five hundred disciples of the Buddha who gathered to compile his words into scriptures after the Buddha entered nirvana. Although they have attained enlightenment, they defer entering nirvana themselves and remain in their human state in order to teach and save sentient beings. The stone arhats have been carefully restored by Chuncheon National Museum of Korea and were first presented at the Museum ... More

Who's Afraid of Public Space? opens at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
MELBOURNE.- Over the summer season, ACCA will present a multifaceted project of exhibitions and programs exploring the role of public culture, the contested nature of public space, and the character and composition of public life. Taking place at ACCA, the project will also extend across the city through a series of satellite exhibitions in collaboration with cultural partners Abbotsford Convent, Arts Project Australia, Blak Dot Gallery, Bus Projects, City of Melbourne, Footscray Community Arts, Metro Tunnel Creative Program and Testing Grounds as well as installations and projects in the public realm. Whos Afraid of Public Space? continues ACCAs Big Picture exhibition series which explores contemporary arts relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts. This major exhibition and research project will engage contemporary art and cultural practices to consider critical ideas ... More

Addison Gallery appoints longtime staff curator Allison Kemmerer as next director
ANDOVER, MASS.- Phillips Academys Head of School Dr. Raynard Kington announced today that Allison Kemmerer has been appointed as the next Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Currently the Addisons Interim Director, Kemmerer first joined the museum in 1992 and has served in its curatorial department since, most recently overseeing its curatorial program and collection as the Mead Curator of Photography and Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. With an intimate knowledge of the museums history and nuanced understanding of its educational role within the local, regional, and national arts ecology, Kemmerer will continue to advance the Addisons standing as a premiere museum of American Art. Kemmerer will assume her new role effective December 1, 2021. "As we considered our search for the Addisons next director, we quickly realized the best person for the job was with us al ... More

The great 'West Side Story' debate
NEW YORK, NY.- Since its Broadway premiere in 1957, West Side Story a musical based on Romeo and Juliet and created by four white men has been at once beloved and vexing. The score, featuring such Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim classics as Somewhere and Maria, is considered one of the best in Broadway history. The cast album was a No. 1 smash. The 1961 movie won best picture and nine other Oscars. The show has been regularly revived, most recently on Broadway last year in a short-lived radical rethinking by Belgian director Ivo van Hove. And now, this month, a movie remake by none other than Steven Spielberg. And yet, from the beginning, the show (directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Arthur Laurents) has discomfited some audience members and critics for its violence, its mix of tones and, especially, for the way it underscores stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as gang members. Not to mention that the 1961 movi ... More

Every object was a canvas
NEW YORK, NY.- Throughout his life, Virgil Abloh was obsessed with the idea of collaboration, and many of his partnership projects were cornerstones of hypebeast culture. This makes sense for a cross-disciplinary artist who sharpened the visions of other artists, including Kanye West and ASAP Rocky. As founder and CEO of Off-White and, later, artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, he expanded the idea of what a collaboration could be. Evian water bottles, Ikea furniture, Warby Parker frames, compostable Cha Cha Matcha cups. To Abloh, every object was a canvas. Today collaborations have become, in the eyes of many, a runaway train. The glut of partnerships inevitably means that they often feel void of emotional connection. This was never the case for Abloh, whose personal and artistic interests always acted as his compass. One day he would work with the vegan cafe he frequented for lunch, the next with a multinational brand. And the products almost always became instant totems. Many shoes to com ... More

'The Mood Room' review: 1980s anomie, California style
NEW YORK, NY.- The first thing we learn about the five sisters gathering in their childhood home in Annie-B Parsons The Mood Room is that it has been a year since their parents died. One of the sisters tells us that. They all talk a lot, though very little about grief. Something is clearly wrong. The sisters are anxious and depressed. They cannot always tell one another apart; their own identities are not stable. One sister has become allergic to the sun. The water is not clean. They have many ideas about how to fix the problems: doctors and diets, new lighting and other purchases and changes of scene, vacations to exotic locales or just a retreat to the room of the title. Even without a program note, you might guess from the sisters speech and from the interior dÃ©cor that we are in the early 1980s a 1980s that has not ended. The production, which Big Dance Theater debuted at BAM Fisher Tuesday, takes its text from Five Sisters, a 1982 work by conceptual art ... More

Cherished words from theater's encourager-in-chief
NEW YORK, NY.- In the fictionalized movie version of his life, Jonathan Larson ignores the ringing phone and lets the answering machine pick up. Crouched on the bare wooden floor of his shabby apartment in 1990 New York City, he listens as Stephen Sondheim leaves a message instant balm to his battered artists soul. Jon? Steve Sondheim here, the voice says in Lin-Manuel Mirandas biomusical Tick, Tick Boom!, and it really is Sondheims voice we hear, offering a bit of badly needed praise for the prodigiously talented, profoundly discouraged Larson. Sondheim scripted that voicemail for the film himself, and goodness knows hed had decades of practice, offering just the right words to buoy the spirits of Larson and countless other young artists. When Sondheim died on Nov. 26 at 91, the American stage lost not only a composer and lyricist nonpareil but also its longtime encourager-in-chief. The story of his own early tutelage under Oscar Hammerst ... More