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Cannes Film Festival: The director of 'Showgirls' takes on lesbian nuns
CANNES (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Forgive them, Father, for they have sinned. Repeatedly! Creatively! And wait until you hear what they did with that Virgin Mary statuette. The bad girls Im referring to are Benedetta and Bartolomea, two 17th-century lesbian nuns at the center of the new drama Benedetta, which debuted Friday at the Cannes Film Festival. Its a delicious, sacrilegious provocation from Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Elle, and at age 82, Verhoeven proves himself to be as frisky as ever. Based on the Judith C. Brown nonfiction book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, the film follows Benedetta (Virginie Efira), a young nun so convinced that she is the bride of Christ that she even dreams about a hunky, bare-chested Jesus flirting with her. And why wouldnt he? Benedetta is a blond bombshell ... More

'How do I become happy?' Advice from a professional fool
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Everyone has a Sept. 11 story. The pages of Stanley Allan Shermans, a one-man show called September, sat propped on a music stand in his apartment the other day, amid a room full of leather masks. Something about the text was vexing him. Ive got to find a way to make it funny, he said. Sherman, 70, is an Orthodox Jew, a professional clown and sometime playwright and director. But mainly, he is one of the small army of niche artisans who make New Yorks theater world the anything-is-possible place it is. In a city that has everything, he is one of the few makers of custom leather masks of the sort used in commedia dellarte, a form of theater that uses stock characters denoted by their masks. He also makes them for the occasional pro wrestler or rapper. Its a living. He started writing the Sept. 11 monologue ... More

The schlock-horror drive-in that rose from the grave
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- It was about 2 a.m. on a Sunday when the gross-out horror-comedy Class of Nuke Em High started playing at the Mahoning Drive-In. This was the last screening at TromaDance, an annual showcase of low-budget horror and sex comedies produced by Troma, a movie studio based in the New York City borough of Queens. Earlier that evening, about 600 cars had piled into the drive-in in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, but by 2 a.m., only the die-hards remained. Kevin Schmidt, an extra in the film, was among them. He had driven to the Mahoning from Summit, New Jersey, and hadnt seen the movie projected on screen since it was first shown in Jersey City in December 1986. This is the only time I can justify driving 100 miles to see a movie, Schmidt said much earlier in the evening. By the time the evening was over, it had ... More

In the Austrian Alps, post-Holocaust escape is re-enacted
KRIMML (AFP).- Sidestepping a roaring waterfall and stumbling over rocks, an Austrian amateur theatre group re-enacts the treacherous Alpine escape of thousands of Jews seeking a new home after the Holocaust. Surrounded by Austria's snow-capped peaks, two dozen spectators hike alongside lay actors who perform scenes based on the real experiences of as many as 8,000 Holocaust survivors who traversed the Alps to reach the Italian harbour of Genoa, where they hoped to board ships to Palestine in 1947. "The special thing about the play is that you experience it and you get an idea of what people went through back then," says actor Celine Nerbl of the Pinzgau region group Teatro Caprile, which has been staging the theatre hike in summer. After the end of World War II, thousands remained stuck in camps for displaced Holocaust survivors ... More

Intuit staff, board and friends mourn loss of founder Susann Craig
CHICAGO, IL.- Susann Eickmeyer Craig, visionary Chicago art collector and a founder of Intuit, passed away peacefully on June 28, 2021, at Providence St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. Born on Dec. 27, 1936, in Youngstown, Ohio, Craig spent her childhood in Madison, Wis., and Greenwich, Conn., where her father, Robert Eickmeyer, was the director of the YMCA and her mother, Viola, was an executive secretary. A family story that serves as a harbinger of her lifelong interest in other people relates that upon hearing laughter outside her room, two-year-old Susann shouted, Im missing something! That desire for participation and connection led her to seek out under-recognized talent and voices in the art world throughout her life. An entrepreneur from a young age, Craig was known as someone who could sell anything from bouquets ... More

Artangel's Co-Directors James Lingwood and Michael Morris to step down in 2022
LONDON.- Artangels Co-Directors James Lingwood and Michael Morris have announced their decision to step down from the organisation which they have led for 30 years. Since they became Co-Directors in 1991, Artangel has generated some of the most widely discussed art of recent times and is one of the most consistently admired cultural organisations, respected by artists and audiences alike in Britain and beyond. Since 1991, James and Michael have produced over 125 projects including Rachel Whitereads House, Michael Landys Breakdown, Jeremy Dellers The Battle of Orgreave, Gregor Schneiders Die Familie Schneider, Francis Alyss Seven Walks and Roger Hiornss Seizure, and drawn audiences to a wide range of places from the empty Reading Prison to the Palace of Westminster, the west coast of Iceland and the ... More

Light Art Space presents Jakob Kudsk Steensen at Halle am Berghain
BERLIN.- LAS opened an exhibition by Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b. 1987) at Halle am Berghain, Berlin, from 10 July 26 September 2021. Berl-Berl is the artists first major solo exhibition in continental Europe and transforms the legendary venue with a vast digital installation of lost and existing natural worlds. Working at the vanguard of art and technology, Kudsk Steensen is known for creating innovative projects which combine extensive field research with the latest in digital technologies. Visitors will experience a journey through a virtual wetland that covers Halle am Berghains 1,435-square-metre space. Berl-Berl revitalizes lost perspectives on wetlands, presenting a combination of Berlins current marshes, extinct species and ancient swamp mythologies. The exhibition also includes an online virtual experience, hosted on the LAS ... More

Thomas Cleary, prolific translator of eastern texts, dies at 72
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Thomas Cleary, who translated scores of Buddhist, Taoist, ancient Chinese and other texts into English, greatly broadening access to these works in the West, died June 20 in Oakland, California. He was 72. His brother J.C. Cleary, who is also a translator, said the cause was complications of heart and lung damage from previous illnesses. Cleary, who lived in Oakland, published more than 80 works, which in turn have been translated into more than 20 other languages, his publisher, Shambhala Publications, said in a post on its website. The breadth of his work, in terms of both linguistics and subject matter, was remarkable. He translated works from Arabic, Sanskrit, Japanese and a half-dozen other languages, and while his interest in ancient texts began with Buddhism, it grew to encompass Taoism, Islam, Greek ... More

Exhibition features a series of new portraits, still lives, and a single landscape by Arcmanoro Niles
NEW YORK, NY.- Lehmann Maupin is presenting Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me: Failure Is A Part Of Being Alive, the gallerys first exhibition with New York-based painter Arcmanoro Niles. Featuring a series of new portraits, still lives, and a single landscape, this exhibition continues the artists critical investigation into the function and form of historically revered genres in painting. Niles is best known for his vivid, brightly-hued canvases that illustrate the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life―a man about to get into his car, a father and daughter sitting on their stoop with their dog, a woman waiting at a bus stop. His subjects are drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past, offering a highly personal record of contemporary life. The paintings, though autobiographical, engage with universal subjects of desire, ... More

A Black American designer disrupts the French couture
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Villa Lewaro, the Palladian estate built in Irvington, New York, by Madam C.J. Walker, a child of slaves who became a beauty mogul and the first female self-made millionaire in the United States, is pretty far, geographically speaking, from Paris about 3,605 miles. But thats where the couture shows came to a close, with a what to call it? installation, performance piece, happening from Pyer Moss, courtesy of Kerby Jean-Raymond, the first Black American designer to be officially invited to show on the couture schedule. Or to be livestreamed on it, to be accurate. Thats where they concluded two days late, because the originally scheduled Pyer Moss debut had been rained out by the aftereffects of Hurricane Elsa. And where a model was strutting down a raised runway in a satin rust-colored ... More

Shulamit Nazarian opens group exhibition 'Intersecting Selves'
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Shulamit Nazarian is presenting Intersecting Selves, a group exhibition featuring Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Maria A. GuzmÃ¡n Capron, Amir H. Fallah, Wendell Gladstone, Julie Henson, Ellen Lesperance, Ebony G. Patterson, and Tori WrÃ¥nes. Each of the artists in Intersecting Selves considers the body as a barrier between the mind and the outside world. Recognizing our competing desire for privacy and awareness, and the often thin boundary that intersects our public and private selves, these artists dictate what gets revealed, to whom, and on what terms. From the quietly personal to the urgently political, each artist engages with depictions of the body while withholding crucial information and context. In doing so, they maintain a position of power and restraint over the viewer and, simultaneously, beckon for a closer ... More