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Emma Talbot's c.20:21 commission celebrates International Women's Day on Piccadilly Lights
LONDON.- Emma Talbot, the London-based artist of sensuous visual poems becomes the next CIRCA artist, presenting a new body of four animated films in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, Collezione Maramotti and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Following a woman at the gateway between the old world and a new world to be made, Talbots Four Visions for a Hopeful Future tells the story of a protagonist in search of answers to guide both her own journey and the development of society to a spiritual and political rebirth, on the iconic Piccadilly Lights screen. Coinciding with International Womens Day (8 March), Talbots animations represent our current moment as a universal space of fluid nature, punctuated with direct appeals to the viewers emotional reasoning, where past sadness can be transcended. Quoting Indian novelist Arundhati ... More

PinchukArtCentre opens an exhibition of works by Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy
KYIV.- The PinchukArtCentre presents Tailings Dam, a solo exhibition by Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy as a part of PAC UA. It is PinchukArtCentres programme aimed at commissioning new works by Ukrainian artists by investing in creation and providing curatorial and institutional support. The new work by Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy takes the shape of a Museum of Human Civilisation which is established in the future after humans go extinct. The Museum is dedicated to the future archaeology of a tailings dam in Kryvy Rih. A tailings dam is a system of special facilities for storing radioactive, toxic and other non-recyclable waste from mineral processing. The work touches upon the issue of man's responsibility for natural resources and chimeric forms that the imprint of human activity on Earth may acquire. This ... More

A director returns to the home he longed to leave
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In 2018, about a decade after his first feature, the Rwandan drama Munyurangabo, opened to rave reviews at Cannes, Lee Isaac Chung was this close to ditching the capricious life of an indie filmmaker for the presumably more comfortable life of a film professor. I was hitting 40, and I realized I needed to just move on in life and do something practical, he said. Chung had already taken a position teaching screenwriting at the University of Utahs South Korean campus in Incheon, but he felt he had one last screenplay in him. I tried to put everything I could into that script, he said. That supposedly final hurrah became Minari, a coming-of-age story inspired by Chungs experiences growing up the son of Korean American immigrants in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. In the film, Steven Yeun (The ... More

Exhibition surveys approximately 30 years of Shirin Neshat's video works and photography
FORT WORTH, TX.- The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again, a survey of the internationally acclaimed artists work. Organized by and originating at The Broad, Los Angeles, this unprecedented exhibition is on view in Fort Worth through May 16, 2021. Curated by Ed Schad, curator at The Broad, this exhibition surveys approximately 30 years of the multidisciplinary artists video works and photography, investigating Neshats passionate engagement with ancient and recent Iranian history, the experience of living in exile, and the human impact of political revolution. Taking its title from a poem by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (19341967), I Will Greet the Sun Again begins with Neshats most famous body of work, Women of Allah, 199397. The exhibition then features her early iconic video works ... More

rodolphe janssen opens an exhibition of works by Emily Mae Smith
BRUSSELS.- Painting is often seen as an act of thaumaturgyan act of working form into wonders. This process is similarly performed through the material manipulation of paint on a canvas. As space akin to a site of piety often reserved for the veneration of the holy, or as a container for associated artifacts of praxis, the artists studio is considered a sacred space for studied acts of speculation and imagination. A place for giving form to ideas, equal parts conceptual maneuvering, visual expression and ardent periods of isolation. Similar to the lone sorceress breathing life into a broom as assistant to her bidding, the artist employs equal tactics of imbuing objects with speculative tools for critical, and at times individual, reflection. In the exhibition Speculative Objects, the paintings of Emily Mae Smith evoke a transfiguration of art historical allusions ... More

Woodmere unveils exhibition telling story of Tom Judd's new subway mural
PHILADELPHIA, PA.- On Saturday, February 27, 2021 Woodmere Art Museum unveiled its latest exhibition, History in Motion: Tom Judds Subway Mural. Judds mural is an important addition to the citys rich landscape of public art. Woodmeres exhibition includes preparatory studies for the mural as well as in-process photographs of the installation. In connection with the reconstruction of the 5th Street-Independence Hall Station on the Market-Frankford Line, artist Tom Judd was selected to create a permanent installation for the station. Portal to Discovery, Judds mural on the eastbound and westbound platforms, presents figures who contributed to the founding of the United States as well as those who fought for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Transit consultant David Seltzer explains, Whats so amazing ... More

How Negro History Week became Black History Month and why it matters now
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Black History Month has been celebrated in the United States for nearly 100 years. But what is it exactly, and how did it begin? In the years after Reconstruction, campaigning for the importance of Black history and doing the scholarly work of creating the canon was a cornerstone of civil rights work for leaders such as Carter G. Woodson. Martha Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, explained, These are men [like Woodson] who were trained formally and credentialed in the ways that all intellectuals and thought leaders of the early 20th century were trained, at Harvard and places like that. But in order to make the argument in order to make the claim about Black genius, about Black excellence you have to build the space in which to do that. ... More

He was a 'bad boy' harpsichordist, and the best of his age
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Nicolas Bomsel was a radio producer in Paris when he had lunch with Scott Ross early in 1984. Ross, then in his early 30s, was already one of the most eminent harpsichord players in Europe. He had burst onto the scene in 1971 with a rarely awarded first prize at the prestigious Bruges competition, then released a series of sprawling, sparkling recordings of French Baroque music: a four-LP Rameau set in 1975, 11 hours of Couperin a few years later. A moody, troubled, brilliant American who had moved to France as a boy, Ross dressed for classes and even concerts sometimes in leather jacket and jeans, sometimes in lumberjack-plaid flannel. His clothes jarred with the buttoned-up reputation of his instrument, a courtly ancestor of the modern piano that sounded tinny and harsh under many hands, but silky, lush and ... More

Loretta Whitfield, creator of a doll with a difference, dies at 79
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In the early 1980s, Melvin Whitfield was working for a health nonprofit in West Africa when he came to a realization: Few of the children he encountered had dolls, and the dolls he did see were modeled after white European faces and bodies. Whitfield, who is Black, returned to Washington in 1983, around the time his girlfriend, Loretta Thomas, was coming to her own doll-inspired despair after trying to find a toy for her niece. It was the height of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, and toy stores were filled with their cherubic white faces; the few Black dolls scattered among them were made with the same shape and features but used brown fabric. The Whitfields, who married in 1984, decided to design an alternative to the Cabbage Patch Kids. After three years of development and experimentation, they released Baby ... More

Kosovo drama captures the rebellious work of war widows
KRUSHE E MADHE (AFP).- After being driven out of her village in the midst of Kosovo's war two decades ago, Fahrije Hoti returned several months later to find her home destroyed and her husband gone. The mother of two was suddenly one of 140 new widows in the farming village of Krushe e Madhe, whose soil was the site of a massacre by Serb forces in 1999 that left 500 children without fathers, including Hoti's own. What happened next is now the subject of an award-winning film, titled Hive, that traces Hoti's struggle to rebuild a life amid the double injury of her personal loss and social prejudices about how widows should behave. "The movie took me back 20 years," Hoti, now 51, told AFP from the southern village where she still lives. "The movie was not only about me, it was about all Kosovo Albanian women," she added warmly. "It showed the situation ... More

As third wave rages, show goes on at Sofia opera
SOFIA (AFP).- With an orchestra spread out across the entire parterre, audiences limited to the balconies, and no breaks but plenty of disinfectant, the Sofia Opera is one of the few music venues still hosting live performances in Europe. Across the continent, a third wave of Covid-19 infections is keeping opera houses and other cultural venues closed -- loud singing poses a particular risk as the virus spreads through droplets -- but in Bulgaria, classical music plays on, from "Tosca" to "La Traviata". "I am hungry for music. And the risk, why think about it? It's not riskier here than in the supermarket or the subway," says 81-year-old Petya Petkova, who attended Verdi's "La Traviata" with her daughter last week. Despite the disinfectant, social-distancing and staff taking people's temperature, a festive spirit reigns at the historic opera ... More