Artdaily.cc - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

Franklin A. Thomas, pathbreaking Ford Foundation president, dies at 87
NEW YORK, NY.- Franklin A. Thomas, who rose from working-class Brooklyn to become, as president of the Ford Foundation, the first Black person to run a major American philanthropic organization, died Wednesday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 87. Darren Walker, the foundations current president, confirmed the death. Thomas was already a highly regarded nonprofit and corporate leader in 1979, when the Ford Foundations board of trustees chose him from among some 300 candidates to succeed McGeorge Bundy as the organizations president. Unlike Bundy, who had come from Massachusetts wealth and academia with a stop at the White House as national security adviser, Thomas grew up in near poverty. But driven by his hardworking immigrant mother, he won a scholarship to Columbia University and then worked for the city and ... More

Beyond the books: Joan Didion's essays, profiles and criticism
NEW YORK, NY.- Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87, is best known for her essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and After Henry, to name a few though she also wrote blazingly original narrative nonfiction (Miami, The Year of Magical Thinking, Salvador) and novels (Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer). Her work for The New York Times is as eclectic and insightful as you might imagine, ranging from a profile of Joan Baez to a review of John Cheevers Falconer. Didions 1966 profile of Joan Baez and the community opposition to the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence the folk singers school in Californias Carmel Valley is a classic. Scum, hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as a veteran of two wars and who is a regular at such meetings. Spaniel. ... More

Ballet's disciplined rebel moves on
CANNES.- The Carolyn Carlson Company had just finished the final performance of the two-week Cannes Dance Festival on Dec. 11, and the festival director, Brigitte LefÃ¨vre, went onstage to begin a post-show conversation. But Carlson is not much of a talker. Instead of discussing her piece, she began a little mime routine, to which LefÃ¨vre responded with Chaplinesque comedic timing, mimicking bashful reluctance and deference to Carlson as the audience roared its approval. It was a fitting conclusion to LefÃ¨vres final turn as the director of the Cannes festival, a low-key but vibrant biennial that offers both well known and experimental work. She took on the role in 2015, soon after retiring as director of the Paris Opera Ballet. LefÃ¨vre, 77, looks pretty much as she did in 1992, when she arrived at the Opera: a redhead with a gamine cut and an unaffected ... More

A guide to Joan Didion's books
NEW YORK, NY.- Joan Didion, who died Thursday at age 87, was a prolific writer of stylish essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs. Here is an overview of some of her works, as reviewed in The New York Times. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968): Didions first collection of nonfiction writing, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, brings together some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years, wrote Times critic Dan Wakefield. Play It as It Lays (1970): John Leonard wrote of Didion and this novel, She writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it, and yet the characters go on bleeding afterward. A Book of Common Prayer (1977): Like her narrator, she has been an articulate witness ... More

All human experience, colour, history and portraiture is here: Compton Verney reveals 2022 exhibition programme
COMPTON VERNEY.- Portraiture, painting and photographs are at the fore in a compelling mix of historic and contemporary exhibitions at Compton Verney in 2022. The Warwickshire art gallery and park will also unveil two outdoor installations, by renowned artists Luke Jerram and Morag Myerscough. The spring season begins with a celebration of eight years of Sky Arts most successful TV series, Sky Portrait Artist of the Year. This commemorative exhibition is curated by one of the programmes guest judges, Kathleen Soriano, and will feature over 120 works, selected from submissions to the competition by more than 1,000 artists, who have taken part since it was launched in 2014. Showcasing the sheer diversity of the different ... More

Thomas Kinsella, evocative Irish poet, dies at 93
NEW YORK, NY.- Thomas Kinsella, an Irish poet and translator whose quest for coherence and meaning in a dark and precarious world engendered a body of work likened to the prose of James Joyce for its sense of place, died Wednesday in Dublin. He was 93. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Rom Massey & Sons funeral home. In his early days, Kinsella was feted as what one critic called probably the most accomplished, fluent and ambitious poet of his generation. Later, though, Kinsella came to occupy an ambivalent position in the Irish canon: central but somehow marginalized, honored but insecure, like a dethroned god, said David Wheatley, a fellow Irish poet. Kinsellas work was frequently described as difficult, inviting or forcing the reader to complete what Kinsella regarded as a central process of his poetry. A ... More

Kunsthalle Basel presents the 22nd edition of the Regionale exhibition
BASEL.- Artists are often credited with world-building, or at least with helping to change our views of the contemporary world. Using a variety of strategies and approaches, they create visible evidence that there is more than one way of understanding and thus shaping our complex present. The twenty-four artists selected for this 22nd edition of the Regionale exhibition work in varied genresdrawing, installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video. They make use of readymade images or construct narratives from memory. They send us on treasure hunts or trace fraught histories. They find sense in abstraction or zero in on societal clichÃ©s. In short, they draw from the external world as well as from their own internal worlds. von mÃ¶glichen Welten ( of possible worlds) already starts on the street, with a map by Fabio Sonego painted on the entrance ... More

Region-wide programme of cultural events announced to coincide with the display of the Gospels at Laing Art Gallery
NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE.- A year-long series of cultural events inspired by the display of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the North East in autumn 2022, will take place in towns and cities across the region, beginning in January and peaking in autumn with two new visitor attractions for the region and the focal exhibition of the Gospels at the Laing Art Gallery, in a landmark loan from the British Library. From Hartlepool to Hexham, Berwick-upon-Tweed to Bishop Auckland, multiple venues and locations will invite visitors to explore, experience and enjoy a wealth of events, all drawing inspiration from different aspects of the 1300-year-old manuscript. Beginning in January and running through to May 2022, the programme opens with Monogatari: ... More

Hastings Contemporary launches first ever exhibition crowd sourced by Instagram
HASTINGS.- Artist Support Pledge is moving from our screens and onto real life gallery walls with the first ever exhibition crowdsourced from Instagram opens at Hastings Contemporary. More than 300 works, created by artists from around the world as well as from just around the corner, are being featured in A Generous Space. Paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography, basket-making, weaving and needlework have travelled to the UK from countries including America, Canada, India, Republic of Moldova, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, and the Republic of Ireland. There is also strong representation from local and regionally based artists. There were more than 3600 submissions for A Generous Space, all made via Instagram using the #aspshows hashtag, with ASP founder artist Matthew Burrows ... More

Two more Broadway shows close as omicron takes a toll on theater
NEW YORK, NY.- Two more Broadway shows announced Thursday night that they had closed as the spike in coronavirus cases fueled by the omicron variant takes a growing toll on the theater business. Thoughts of a Colored Man, a new play about a day in the life of a group of Black men in Brooklyn, said it had closed after two days in which it was so short of performers that it had kept going only because the playwright, Keenan Scott II, stepped in to perform. The play, which began previews Oct. 1 and opened Oct. 13, had been scheduled to run until March 13. While this is not the outcome we had hoped for, being part of this historic season on Broadway has been the greatest privilege of our lives, the plays producers, led by Brian Moreland, said in a statement. A return engagement of Waitress, which began performances Sept. 2 and was scheduled ... More

Christine Rebet's first monographic museum exhibition on view at macLYON
LYON.- The macLYON offers Christine Rebet her first monographic museum exhibition, entitled Escapologie [Escapology], inspired by the art of evasion or escape. Fascinated by the magic and optical illusions that inhabited the landscape of precinematographic entertainment, as well as by late 19th-century spiritualism, Christine Rebet combines history and fiction in fantasized realms, playing with the viewers subconscious through deceptive devices still used in contemporary politics and the media. Whether testifying to early 20th-century dictatorships or current upheavals in the Middle East, the artist creates connections between the mechanisms of entertainment and propaganda, between the powers of the mass media and oppressive regimes, exploring with ambivalent fascination the seductive power of illusory techniques. Drawing is at the heart ... More