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Solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by the artist Kesha Bruce pens at Morton Fine Art
WASHINGTON, DC.- Morton Fine Art is presenting Take Me to the Water, a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by the artist Kesha Bruce. An intuitive combination of painting, collage and textile art, Bruces work represents the culmination of a holistic creative practice developed by the artist over several decades. Her eighth exhibition with the gallery, Take Me to the Water will be on view from September 17 to October 11, 2022 at Mortons Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302). The wall works of Kesha Bruce are less discrete executions of a concerted vision than the steady accumulation of a long creative process. Referred to by the artist simply as paintings, these mixed-media compositions are in fact patchworks of painted fabric, individually selected from Bruces vast archive and pasted directly onto the canvas in a textile collage ... More

Rommy Hunt Revson, creator of the Scrunchie, dies at 78
NEW YORK, NY.- Rommy Hunt Revson was renting a house in Southampton, New York, in 1986, stressed from her recent divorce from a Revlon heir, John Revson, when she conceived of a hair band to hold a ponytail without damaging the hair. I dont know why, but I became somewhat determined to figure out an invention that used fabric instead of plastic for the hair, Revson told Talk Business & Politics, a news website in Arkansas, where she lived briefly, in 2016. My friends tried to get me to put that down and go with them to the beach as summer was about to end, she added, but something told me to keep working on this hair accessory. She bought a used sewing machine, taught herself to sew and combined fabric and elastic (like those in her pajamas) into a prototype of what she called a scunci (pronounced SKOON-chee), naming ... More

Galleria Continua opens 'In The Heat' in Dubai's iconic Burj Al Arab Jumeirah
DUBAI.- Galleria Continua announced its new exhibition, continuing the gallerys programme in Dubais iconic Burj Al Arab Jumeirah. In The Heat is the second chapter of a series of group shows, paying tribute to the heritage of the Burj Al Arab, and providing contemporary response to the context of its opulent interior designs. The new exhibition, In The Heat, connects with the theme of fire, one of the four elements forming the visual aesthetics of the Burj Al Arab developed by Khuan Chew of KCA International, and follows the show New Wave (7 July 1 September 2022), which was themed on water. The context of the exhibition, which opened just as summer temperatures in Dubai reach their peak, makes the theme of fire manifest in a variety of ways. Some artworks presented in the show explore fire as the element of creation, ... More

Can 'Hamilton' speak German? Jawohl!
HAMBURG.- Hamilton is a mouthful, even in English. Forty-seven songs; more than 20,000 words; fast-paced lyrics, abundant wordplay, complex rhyming patterns, plus allusions not only to hip-hop and musical theater but also to arcane aspects of early American history. So imagine the challenge, then, of adapting the story of Americas first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience preserving the rhythm, the sound and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the shows subject matter. For the past four years a timeline prolonged, like so many others, by the coronavirus pandemic a team of translators has been working with the Hamilton ... More

Jorja Fleezanis, violinist and pioneering concertmaster, dies at 70
NEW YORK, NY.- Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Michigan. She was 70. The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was a cardiovascular event. The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Fleezanis was a cornerstone player in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003-22, said in a phone interview. You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor, Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways ... More

Alan Alda on 'M-A-S-H': 'Everybody had something taken from them'
NEW YORK, NY.- When we think of the default mode of much of contemporary television mingling the tragic and the offhand, broad comedy and pinpoint sentiment we are thinking of a precise mixture of styles, emotions and textures first alchemized by M-A-S-H. Created by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, M-A-S-H aired on CBS from 1972-83. (It is currently available to stream on Hulu.) Over the course of its 11-year run, it featured alcohol-fueled high jinks and other shenanigans alongside graphic surgical sequences and portrayals of grief, blending comedy and drama in a fashion rarely seen before on television. Set among the doctors and nurses of a Korean War mobile surgical unit, M-A-S-H made use of the mockumentary episode decades before The Office ever tried it, featured blood-drenched storylines long before The Sopranos ... More

3 decades after a law to return Native remains, still waiting
GRAND FORKS, ND.- The tribal leaders arrived at the University of North Dakota last month for a somber, secret task. For three days, they scoured storage rooms, recited prayers and hauled boxes. The move required closing hallways, pausing construction projects and turning off smoke detectors so that the burning of sage or sweet grass would not trigger an alarm. It was a first step in the long process of returning artifacts and the remains of Native American people from the university to tribes. More than 30 years ago, Congress passed a law requiring colleges and museums to return Native remains and artifacts in their possession. But a generation later, the returns have been slow and halting, when they have happened at all. Many institutions have dragged out the process, questioning tribes links to artifacts and, in some cases, disputing ... More

Attempts to ban books are accelerating and becoming more divisive
NEW YORK, NY.- Attempts to ban books are accelerating across the country at a rate never seen since tracking began more than 20 years ago, according to a new report from the American Library Association. So far this year, there have been attempts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different titles, the group found, up from challenges to 1,597 books in 2021, the year with the highest number of complaints since the group began documenting book challenges decades ago. Book-banning efforts have grown rapidly in number and become much more organized, divisive and vitriolic over the past two years, splitting communities, causing bitter rifts on school and library boards, and spreading across the country through social media and political campaigns. Public libraries have been threatened by politicians and community members with a loss of funding for their ... More

'Phantom of the Opera,' Broadway's longest-running show, to close
NEW YORK, NY.- The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running show in Broadway history and, for many, a symbol of musical theater, will drop its famous chandelier for the last time in February, becoming the latest show to fall victim to the drop-off in audiences since the pandemic hit. The closing is at once long-expected no show runs forever, and this ones grosses have been softening but also startling, because Phantom had come to seem like a permanent part of the Broadway landscape, a period piece and a tourist magnet that stood apart from the vicissitudes of the commercial theater marketplace. But in the year since Broadway returned from its damaging pandemic lockdown, the theatergoing audience has not fully rebounded, and Phantom, which came back strong last fall, has not been selling well enough to defray ... More