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'The Democracy Project' puts America onstage, warts and all
NEW YORK, NY.- Tourists who pause outside Federal Hall, a Wall Street memorial maintained by the U.S. National Park Service, will find its neoclassical facade covered in scaffolding. Its front steps, which host a bronze statue of George Washington, are occluded, too. But until July 22, the man himself can be found inside, fussing over his dentures, his sleep and his coming inauguration. Oh, hon, his wife, Martha, says. Dont lead with your anxieties. George (Tom Nelis) and Martha (Erin Anderson) are characters in The Democracy Project, a collaboration among five playwrights and two directors with a song composed by Michael R. Jackson. Commissioned by Federal Hall, the 45-minute site-specific performance, offered free of charge in the halls grand Greek Revival rotunda, is both a pageant-style survey of significant events at the ... More

April Kingsley, curator who championed unsung artists, dies at 82
NEW YORK, NY.- April Kingsley, who as a curator and a critic gave important exposure to Black and women artists in the 1970s and 80s, a period when it was often difficult for them to draw mainstream attention, died June 13 at a nursing home in Harwich, Massachusetts. She was 82. Her daughter, Grace Hopkins, said the cause was Alzheimers disease, which Kingsley had for 12 years. In a career that began in the mid-1960s, Kingsley, working for various museums and as an independent curator, mounted or consulted on numerous shows. Among the most important was Afro-American Abstraction, featuring works by 19 Black artists, which opened at the PS1 art space in Queens in 1980. One of those artists was James Little, who was then struggling for recognition; last year his work was in the Whitney Biennial. There is no person more important ... More

'Tal R: How to Count to Tree' now on view at Victoria Miro
VENICE.- Victoria Miro is presenting today an exhibition in Venice of new paintings by Tal R. Tal R often employs apparently simple compositional devices and motifs from everyday life to create complex, atmospheric worlds that, beginning with the recognisable and known, expand or collapse into spaces of enchantment or ambiguity, heady with atmosphere and colour. The works in this exhibition are the result of an extended consideration of a clearing in a Danish forest. A curious, eye-shaped space created by felled trees, it compelled the artist to make a series of drawings en plein air, which he later worked into larger works on paper and paintings in his studio. The paintings on view here further distil this experience, bringing into play what Tal R describes as artists mathematics while criss-crossing the boundaries between depiction and invention, life and art, ... More

Katinka Bock explores the omnipresence of water at Crac Occitanie
SÃTE.- Katinka Bocks sculptures, made of ceramic, stone, wood or metal, now on view at Crac Occitanie, have deep links with the sites in which she exhibits, the architecture of the place that welcomes her, or even sometimes the cultural, historical or social context of a city. When she first visits the place where she will exhibit, she sounds out the space, observing its shape, the interconnection of its rooms, the circulation of the buildings lighting and fluids, but also the way it integrates into a district or city, what use is made of it by the people who pass through or inhabit it. How it is shaped from the inside and outside. In SÃ¨te, Katinka Bock explored the omnipresence of water. The sea on one side, the lake on the other, and the canals that structure the city: all of these deeply infuse its imagination and culture. The new film produced for the exhibition, made on SÃ¨tes beaches and canal ... More

What it's like to play Putin in 'Patriots'
NEW YORK, NY.- On a recent evening, British actor Will Keen was onstage at the NoÃ«l Coward Theater in London playing one of the worlds most divisive men: Russian President Vladimir Putin. For much of the first half of Patriots, which is largely set in the 1990s after the Soviet Unions collapse, Keen portrays the character sympathetically, as a minor politician who could only afford cheap suits and whose success depended on a friends largesse. Later on, when an adviser suggests that Putin, now president, should keep his enemies close, Keens portrayal becomes chilling. Why would I want to do that, he replies, when I can simply destroy them? Written by Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown, Patriots stars Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky, a real-life oligarch who made a fortune in post-Soviet Russia, only to fall out with ... More

Yalingwa exhibition 'Between Waves' is now opening at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
MELBOURNE.- Between Waves, that opens today at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, is the third edition of the Yalingwa exhibition series that supports the development of outstanding contemporary First Peoples art and curatorial practice in Southeast Australia. Curated by Jessica Clark, the exhibition features new works by Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Cassie Sullivan, this mob, and Mandy Quadrio. It is a major new exhibition featuring ten ambitious commissions by emerging and established First Nations artists that embrace the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing. Through a range of multidisciplinary frameworks including video, installation, poetry, projection, sculpture and sound, each of the artists respond to concepts expressed ... More

London Art Week Summer 2023 now open
LONDON.- A remarkable collection of five bronzes by the legendary renaissance sculptor Giambologna, and a group of extraordinary works by the Aymara Bolivian artist and revolutionary Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c.1960) which have not been seen for the last 30 years, are just two of the impressive exhibitions being staged by eminent art dealers for London Art Week Summer 2023, which opened this Friday 30 June to Friday 7 July. The UKs leading fine arts selling event, London Art Week, is held both in galleries around central London and as exhibitions online. This summer it features 53 participants, all internationally-acknowledged specialists in their chosen fields. Expert dealers offer museum-quality examples of decorative arts, paintings, sculpture and works on paper of all periods from antiquity to contemporary, as well as - for ... More

A queer revolutionary classic book, now onstage with music
MANCHESTER.- Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with Warren and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage. Both can be found in The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, a new piece of music theater by composer Philip Venables and writer-director Ted Huffman. After premiering at the Manchester International Festival on Thursday, it will travel, with its original roster of 15 performers, to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in early July, then elsewhere, including NYU Skirball in New York this fall. Venables and Huffmans two previous collaborations the operas 4.48 Psychosis, based on Sarah Kanes play about mental illness and suicide, and Denis & Katya, about ... More

'The Great Gatsby' review: Raising a glass to an American tragedy
NEW YORK, NY.- There aint no party like a Jay Gatsby party in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgeralds debonair poster boy of American ambition and the nouveau riche never lets the festivities stop. Neither does Immersive Everywheres The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show, a jovial feast for the senses that never, in its lagging two-and-a-half-hour running time, truly rises above the status of a mere attraction. In Fitzgeralds classic book, Gatsby is a man who successfully, if shadily, works his way to a fortune, which he spends on a Long Island mansion where he hosts extravagant soirees. Gatsbys neighbor, Nick Carraway, narrates Gatsbys tragic and, ultimately, fatal fall from the world of the rich and famous. Gatsby hopes to woo Nicks cousin Daisy, with whom he had a love affair that hes never forgotten. But Daisy has married the brutish Tom ... More

Review: A drowsy night at 'Grief Hotel'
NEW YORK, NY.- Absurdist theater is like the naturalistic plays overachieving older sibling. Traditional theater attempts to describe the chaos of the human condition, but absurdist works dare to enact it. Liza Birkenmeiers Grief Hotel is one of those enactors, a strange, snack-sized play that closes out Clubbed Thumbs 2023 Summerworks series a proud incubator for strange plays. Birkenmeiers deft writing (in previous works such as Dr. Rides American Beach House) and her affinity for morbid humor return here, and despite its title, Grief Hotel doesnt simply dwell on the grim; its actually a dark comedy. And although all of the amusing oddness successfully depicts the madness of grief and the complexities of millennial relationships, it does so to the detriment of the plays message and the productions intrigue. Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) ... More