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Virtual exhibition features seminal work by Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong - who has fled to Taiwan
LONDON.- VOMA, the worlds first virtual museum, and GIANT, the largest artist-led space in the UK, presents the major new hybrid exhibition, Why We Shout: The Art of Protest. Curated by Lee Cavaliere across physical and virtual galleries, the show explores the ways in which artists have, and continue to, engage with protest and activism. Central to the show is important work by Kacey Wong, who recently fled his native Hong Kong to take himself into self-imposed exile in Taiwan. Before he left, he sent to be exhibited the performance film work 'The Loveliest Person', alongside the featured Chinese military uniform and an impassioned email, writing: dear Lee, i got good news and bad news for you.. the good news is i was able to evade and successfully relocated in taiwan now. the airport was closely monitored by the police, at the gate where ... More

The 20/20 Photo Festival is a month-long, citywide celebration of photography in all its forms
PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The first of its kind in Philadelphia, 20/20 Photo Festival will offer virtual and in-person exhibitions and programming for photographers and the general public. With the theme History Informs the Contemporary, 20/20 will bring together a wide range of perspectives from emerging and established photographers from Philadelphia and beyond. The Festival will take place in Philadelphia and online during the month of September, with a core weekend of programming September 2226. Programming will include exhibitions, workshops, artist talks, a community darkroom gathering, photo/book fair, collections visits, public cyanotype-making events, and gallery walkthroughs. 20/20 is producing three core exhibitions: Kei Ito: Road to Recovery at The Halide Project; Michael Froio: From the Mainline at Gravy Studio; and 20/20 ... More

'Last Night in Soho' brings MeToo to 1960s London
VENICE (AFP).- Romantic notions about Swinging Sixties London were slashed to pieces at the Venice Film Festival Saturday with the premiere of "Last Night in Soho". It is a very different role for Anya Taylor-Joy, the breakout star from last year's Netflix hit "The Queen's Gambit", who finds herself doused in gallons of blood in the new psychological horror. But at its heart, the movie has a serious point to make about our rose-tinted views of the past, director Edgar Wright told journalists in Venice. "It's dangerous to romanticise the past," he said. "As you get further away from a decade, you tend to concentrate on the good things. The Sixties become about the fashion or Carnaby Street and reduced to, like, Austin Powers fancy dress. But everything bad that's happening now was happening then." Wright made his name with comedies "Shaun of the Dead" ... More

Girls Aloud star dies of cancer aged 39
LONDON (AFP).- Singer Sarah Harding, whose group Girls Aloud was one of Britain's most successful female bands, died on Sunday aged 39 just over a year after revealing she had breast cancer. Her mother Marie announced the news on Instagram, alongside a black-and-white photograph of the English singer smiling. "I know she won't want to be remembered for her fight against this terrible disease - she was a bright shining star and I hope that's how she can be remembered instead," the post said. Harding announced in August 2020 that she had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, and later said that the upcoming Christmas was likely to be her last. She released an autobiography in March 2021, explaining she had decided to reveal her illness to encourage others to seek medical advice if needed even during the Covid-19 pandemic. "As scary as it was to go public ... More

When opera livestreams became live performances
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- I should start with a confession: Rarely during the pandemic have I been able to watch an entire livestream through. Work is one thing: If Im attending something for an assignment, I try to bring to it the focus of a before-times performance phone off, sound system on, ideally in the dark. But nearly all my extracurricular experiences online have been nothing like my old days off. I would never walk in and out of Carnegie Hall during a recital or pull out my phone mid-Schubert to scroll through Instagram or write an email. Yet thats exactly what the past year and a half has been like. Life and livestreams are inherently incompatible; there is always a dog to walk, a dinner to cook, a meeting to join. I have seen the greatest musical artists in the world in fragments from the seat of a Peloton; in a small window ... More

The roots of Joan Mitchell's greatness
NEW YORK.- In 1948, Joan Mitchell was a 23-year-old artist living in a drafty apartment in Paris. She had arrived in France in the aftermath of World War II to a nation that was still reeling from rations and riots. A newly minted graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mitchell had come to Paris to study the history of French painting and learn the techniques of the masters but found that her workaholism had frayed her nerves and rendered her too anxious to take part in the bustling social life of the city. Mitchell spent her nights awake, feverishly trying to improve her craft, huddling around her stove for warmth. Im where Ive always wanted to be stove bread & wine & canvases Im not depressed even just arrived at a real knowledge of where I dont belong which is everywhere, she wrote in October of that year in a letter to her lover, Barney Rosset. ... More

The 1970s brought change to the Beach Boys. A new boxed set celebrates it.
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- As the 1970s dawned, the Beach Boys were in crisis. The quintessential American rock band of the 60s, whose sun-kissed harmonies and string of girls-cars-and-surf hits soundtracked the myth of California as paradise, had lost its lock on the charts. Brian Wilson, its leader, was withdrawn and unstable after an attempt at a super-ambitious album, Smile, collapsed in 1967. Facing irrelevance, the band even considered changing its name, to simply Beach. When you put out a record and its not successful like youre used to, you start questioning yourself, vocalist Mike Love said recently. Are you doing things right? What do we need to change? What the Beach Boys did next is the focus of a new boxed set, Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surfs Up Sessions, 1969-1971. In purely commercial terms, the bands ... More

5 design books that are easy on the eyes
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Design details that serve no utilitarian purpose but help lift spirits can become obsessions for craftspeople and authors. These five volumes explain why anyone would embed polished conches in stucco walls, engulf cellphone towers in plastic pine needles or inlay woodworkers benches with images of woodworkers at work. In "Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe" (Princeton University Press, $49.95, 214 pages), seven scholars dissect why Renaissance-era collectors braved maritime hazards to beachcomb. Finding the pearliest treasures at shorelines called for avoiding crocodiles, spiny urchins and burning sea slime, Claudia Swan, one of the essayists, points out. The poet Petrarch recorded how trolling for seashells could help people feel unconscious of depressing ... More

A museum of everyday art extends a welcome mat
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- The word mingei, meaning folk craft, was coined in 1925 by Japanese philosopher and art historian Soetsu Yanagi to celebrate the beauty of everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople. Yanagi was a founder and the first director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, which opened in Tokyo in 1936. Forty-two years later, his philosophy inspired the creation of the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, which contains objects from 140 countries and many eras (as well as works by known artists and designers) and defines mingei as art of the people. It reopened Sept. 3 after a three-year renovation. Located since 1996 in a Spanish colonial building in Balboa Park that was constructed for the 1915-17 Panama-California Exposition, the revitalized museum is recommitting itself to the idea ... More

A sanctuary takes shape, framed around migrants
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- The CaÃ±Ã³n de AlacrÃ¡n (Scorpions Canyon) is a rough and craggy valley that butts up to the U.S. border wall just west of Tijuana, Mexico. It winds through an arid landscape of garbage-strewn arroyos, yucca and sagebrush, without paved roads or sewerage. Roughly 93,000 inhabitants, many of them refugees from Central America, live there in illegal squatter settlements inside roughly built lean-tos, tents and ad hoc shacks made from scavenged refuse. Until now, the areas impoverished population has made do with these rudimentary shelters. But deep within the fractured landscape, a bold new experiment in social housing is being realized. Its called El Santuario Frontera, or the Border Sanctuary, a live-work collective for homeless refugees. The sanctuarys designers, Teddy Cruz, a Guatemalan-born architect, ... More

Signature moves with Sean Bankhead
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Last year, when Cardi Bs team reached out to choreographer Sean Bankhead to help create dances for the Up music video, he asked if she had two months to dedicate to learning them. As it happens, she did. Bankhead didnt waste any time. The dance, with its lunges, jumps and squats, seems straight out of a high-intensity interval training class. I pushed her, and thats a really hard thing to learn the balance when youre working with a high-profile celebrity like that, he said. You need to know how to push, but not overly push them off the cliff. Pushing has become one of his hallmarks. Bankhead, 32, is the choreographer behind some of the years biggest music videos including Lil Nas Xs Industry Baby and Normanis Wild Side and he is in high demand, despite the time commitment ... More