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National Portrait Gallery awards first prize for its national, triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition
WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery has announced artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor as the first-prize winner of the sixth national Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Her prizewinning artwork Anthony Cuts under the Williamsburg Bridge, Morning (2020) depicts Brooklyn, New York-based hair groomer Anthony Payne in a process that Taylor developed and named marquetry hybrid. Using vivid paints, inkjet prints and the natural grains of over 100 veneers, Taylor created the multilayered portrait after encountering Payne in her Brooklyn neighborhood. With his workplace shuttered as a result of the pandemic, Payne was offering donation-based haircuts to support Black Lives Matter, and Taylor was struck by the way he embodied perseverance and solidarity. She made drawings of him from ... More

Jacques Perrin, French film star and producer, is dead at 80
NEW YORK, NY.- Jacques Perrin, a comely and soft-spoken veteran French actor he didnt smolder so much as twinkle who went from starring in musical and dramatic films to directing and producing them, most notably the political thrillers of Costa-Gavras and his own poetic documentaries about the natural world, died April 21 in Paris. He was 80. His son, Mathieu Simonet, confirmed the death. No cause was given. Perrin was a lonely and gallant teenager in the Italian melodrama Girl With a Suitcase (1961), in which he tries to rescue a down-and-out beauty played by Claudia Cardinale who has been ditched by his lout of an older brother. He was a dreamy sailor in Jacques Demys The Young Girls of Rochefort, a giddy, candy-colored 1967 French musical (now considered a camp classic) that starred Catherine Deneuve ... More

Klaus Schulze, pioneering electronic composer, is dead at 74
NEW YORK, NY.- Klaus Schulze, a German electronic musician whose hypnotic, pulsating, swirling compositions filled five decades of solo albums, collaborations and film scores, died Tuesday. He was 74. His Facebook page announced the death. The announcement said he died after a long illness but did not provide any details. Schulze played drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. But he largely abandoned them in the early 1970s and turned to working with electric organs, tape recorders and echo effects, and later with early analog synthesizers. His music thrived on every technological advance. He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, The ... More

Catherine Spaak, darling of Italian cinema in the '60s, dies at 77
NEW YORK, NY.- Catherine Spaak, a French-born actress who made her name crossing genres in Italian, French and occasionally American films, acting alongside stars like Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor, died April 17 in Rome. She was 77. Her son, Gabriele Guidi, confirmed her death. Born outside Paris, Spaak went to Italy as a teenager and began a long film career there. Her first major role in a feature film was as a 17-year-old student who has an affair with a middle-aged man in Sweet Deceptions, from 1960 (originally Dolci Inganni). Four years later she appeared as a Parisian shopgirl in La Ronde, a French drama about marital infidelity directed by Roger Vadim, in which she acted alongside Fonda (who went on to marry Vadim). The film, a remake of Max Ophuls 1950 version based on an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler ... More

In a new 'Macbeth,' something wonky this way comes
NEW YORK, NY.- Macbeth, the character, is full of compunction, as well he should be, having murdered a king to get to his throne. But why should Macbeth, the play, be just as uneasy about its authority? Despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, the overthought production that opened Thursday at the Longacre Theater seems unsure of its welcome, as if a classic that has enjoyed nearly 50 Broadway revivals since 1768 might no longer find an audience willing to meet it halfway. I could understand that attitude if we were talking about the utterly unlovable Troilus and Cressida. But Macbeth is the most instantly accessible of Shakespeares tragedies: violent, elemental, familiar, short. No matter which way the story is bent, it maintains its recognizable human core of ambition and regret. Directors ... More

Making dance out of survival skills and reckoning with grief
NEW YORK, NY.- How does dance persist in trying times? When she began to sketch out the first live platform event at Danspace Project since the shutdown of 2020, Judy Hussie-Taylor, the organizations executive director and chief curator, had a question: With so much of the dance world on lockdown and the line between art and life more blurry than ever, how were artists being influenced by what they were doing outside of making dance? Certain choreographers came to mind for the platform, a selection of performances and conversations organized around a particular theme. Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, partners on and off the stage, bought a 1970s house in upstate New York before the pandemic. They basically remade the home and became carpenters in the process. Dance artist Ogemdi Ude works as a birth ... More

AGO renews its Signature Partnership with RBC, helping to secure an additional three years of art, access and learning
TORONTO.- Today the Art Gallery of Ontario celebrates the renewal of its Signature Partnership agreement with RBC. A national leader in arts and culture philanthropy, RBCs renewed, three-year commitment will further the AGOs mission of presenting important art, as well as facilitating learning and engaging audiences through various programs, including select exhibitions, Free Wednesday Nights, and the AGO X RBC Emerging Artist Program. RBC has a proud history as a sponsor of the AGO for more than 50 years, says Mary DePaoli, Executive Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer, RBC. We are excited to continue to work with art museums like the AGO, who play ... More

Collezione Maramotti presents a new commissioned project by artist Carlo Valsecchi
REGGIO EMILIA.- The 2022 Fotografia Europea festival is dedicated to the theme of an invincible summer: a quote from Albert Camuss Return to Tipasa, which celebrates the capacity to weather adversity and respond with new reflections on human existence. In conjunction, Collezione Maramotti will be presenting Bellum, a new commissioned project by artist Carlo Valsecchi. The forty-four large-scale photographs in this series all of which can be seen in the book accompanying the exhibition, and about twenty of them in the show itself tell the story of the ancestral conflict between man and nature and man and man; nature used as a defence from others, and nature as something to defend ourselves from. The Alps are a symbol of all this, as nature at its most extreme, yet also the site of the last war of position. ... More

Miller & Miller Auctions, Ltd. announces highlights included in May 14 online-only auction
NEW HAMBURG.- Original oil paintings by Canadian artist Maud Lewis (1901-1970), marvelous bronze creations by Romanian sculptor Demetre Chiparus (1886-1947), and a group of cold-painted naughty bronzes by Austrian artist Franz Xaver Bergman (1861-1935) are just a few of the expected highlights in Miller & Miller Auctions, Ltd.s online-only Canadiana & Decorative Arts auction scheduled for Saturday, May 14th, at 9 am Eastern time. The auction is an exciting offering of fresh-to-the-market Canadiana antiques, highlighted by folk art and decorative art from the late 19th century through to the 1970s, featuring selections from the Alan Emerson collection. The Alan Emerson collection ranges from Canadiana to folk art to Pairpoint lamps, said Ethan Miller of Miller & Miller Auctions, Ltd. The quality, authenticity ... More

Sotheby's Geneva Luxury Week returns with its highest valued multi-category live and online auction series to date
GENEVA.- From Thursday 5 May, Sothebys is to present its flagship Geneva Luxury Week, a bi-annual multi-category auction series which showcases the finest examples of products created at the highest intersection of art and luxury. Dedicated to serving the fast-growing increase in the trend for cross-collecting within the wider luxury markets, Sothebys multi-category luxury auctions staged twice a year in Hong Kong, Geneva and New York have grown by more than four times year on year since their inception in 2020. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, Sothebys Luxury Division, which includes jewellery, watches, handbags, accessories and more, registered a record-breaking growth ... More

Kristen Lorello opens a solo exhibition of drawings and paintings on paper by Nadia Haji Omar
NEW YORK, NY.- The gallery opened a solo exhibition of drawings and paintings on paper by Nadia Haji Omar. This is the artist's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and the first dedicated exclusively to her works on paper. The exhibition will include twenty-six intimately scaled works made from 2017 to 2022. They reveal Haji Omar's ongoing thematic concerns, such as the flexibility and malleability of language, geography and mapping, as well as the development of a distinctive pattern-based abstract idiom. The artist derives inspiration from a range of sources that include architectural and decorative elements of traditional Islamic art, studies of language and scripts, textile design, observations of plants and flowers, and bodies of water in their various forms. Haji Omar's drawings are intricate and devoted compositions ... More