The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, February 22, 2024



 
Against a canvas of despair, Gaza's artists trace their struggle

Paintings along blue walls meant to evoke Gaza’s sky and sea, at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank, Feb. 7, 2024. An exhibition in the Israeli-occupied West Bank features works evoking Palestinian life and protest. But the show is as much about the art that cannot be displayed, lost forever in the war. (Samar Hazboun/The New York Times)

by Raja Abdulrahim


BIRZEIT.- The incessant buzzing of an Israeli drone fills the room. On one large wall, scenes of death and desperate rescues by hand through twisted metal and crushed rock play out on a video loop. A large mound of rubble — metal rods, bricks and broken plaster — extends nearly the length of the exhibition hall. Along blue walls meant to evoke the Gaza Strip’s sky and sea hang paintings that mostly evoke life before Israel’s intense bombardment and invasion: Palestinian still lifes, native cactuses, music, cats and cows, and even one Catwoman. The work of more than 100 artists from Gaza lines the walls of this exhibition, which is showing at the Palestinian Museum in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a collection of protest that is as much about the art that is not there, lost in the war that rages in Gaza, as about the art that is on display. Most of the artists are trapped in the enclave, struggling to survive, much less to create. “We resist with our colors and our ... More


The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
Bahnhofstrasse, ‘Fausto Melotti. Jewelry’ is the first comprehensive survey of the Italian artist's jewelry oeuvre. Organized in collaboration with the Melotti Foundation, the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth highlights his meticulously crafted jewelry from the 1960s, ‘70s and early ‘80s, featuring exceptional creations in gold, silver and brass, complemented by a focused selection of sculptures in the same materials.





Native displays and new rules for museums   Duke shuts down huge plant collection, causing scientific uproar   An asteroid wiped out dinosaurs. Did it help birds flourish?


Nuxalk mask on display at the Field Museum in Chicago on Feb. 12, 2024. (Evan Jenkins/The New York Times)

CHICAGO, IL.- When new federal regulations took effect last month requiring museums to get consent from tribes before exhibiting certain Native cultural items, museums across the country began to remove objects from cases, cover ... More
 


Director Kathleen Pryer at the Duke Herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae established at Duke University over a century ago. (Chris Hildreth/DukeMag via The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more ... More
 


A Darwin’s Rhea in Pali Aike National Park, Chile, on Nov. 21, 2018. (Tomas Munita/The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico. The catastrophe led to the extinction of as many as three-quarters of all species on Earth, including dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex. But some flying feathered ... More


What scientists learned from the oldest wild Platypus ever found   It's alive! EC Comics returns   Bob Marley film has a strong start, but 'Madame Web' unravels


A photo provided by Alice Ewing for Ecology Australia shows a 23-year-old male platypus found in a creek near Melbourne, Australia. (Alice Ewing/Ecology Australia via The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- The platypus, a unique egg-laying mammal native to Australia, faces many threats in the wild: climate change, predators, pollution, floods ... More
 


Oni Press will revive the beloved horror and sci-fi name with new stories starting this summer.

NEW YORK, NY.- EC Comics, which specialized in tales of horror, crime and suspense, and was shut down in the “moral panic” of the 1950s, is making a comeback. Oni Press will publish two new anthology series under the EC Comics ... More
 


“One Love” landed in what has become a box office sweet spot — stories that feel both nostalgic and new — while the Spider-Man spinoff is another sign that the comics-character boom is over.

NEW YORK, NY.- The sleepy U.S. box office finally lifted its eyelids over the holiday weekend. “Bob Marley: One Love,” a feel-good musical biopic, was on track ... More



In loving memory Karl Horst Hödicke, 1938 - 2024   Tapestry suspended from gallery ceiling by rotating robotic arm that makes it 'dance' on view at Marlborough   The artist whose Oct. 7 series 'Attracts Fire'


Portrait of Karl Horst Hödicke and photo of the KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT opening by KÖNIG GALERIE. © Courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE.

BERLIN.- König Gallery recently expressed their sadness to learn of the passing of their dear friend, Karl Horst ... More
 


avaf, Corcunda atravessada, 2023. Acrylic on double corrugated kraft paper, 118 x 81 x 4.5 cm.


MADRID .- The solo exhibition 'asterisco volcanico avatar frutal' by the collective assume vivid astro focus ... More
 


Zoya Cherkassky at The Jewish Museum, in New York on Feb. 12, 2024. (Clark Hodgin/The New York Times).

NEW YORK, NY.- It was just 10 days after the Oct. 7 attack in Israel when artist Zoya Cherkassky posted a drawing on her Instagram account. The drawing, “7 ... More


How a notorious jail became a literary hotbed   Sherrie Levine's ten new monochromes inspired by Van Gogh's iris paintings   Bellevue Arts Museum welcomes Kate Casprowiak Scher as executive director


Michele Evans, who found inspiration for writing all around during an 18-month stint in Rikers, in New York, on Feb. 10, 2024. (Ye Fan/The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- A female inmate falls for a handsome guard. He’s really a former con man in witness protection. Their ... More
 


Elk Skull, 2024.

BRUSSELS.- American artist Sherrie Levine’s third exhibition with the Xavier Hufkens Gallery brings together new paintings and sculptures that reference some of the most seminal artists of the modern era. Vincent ... More
 


Kate Casprowiak Scher.

BELLEVUE, WA.- Bellevue Arts Museum’s Board of Trustees announced the appointment of Kate Casprowiak Scher as Executive Director of Bellevue Arts Museum. With a background in art history, ... More




In Conversation: Melvin Edwards on ‘No One Thing. David Smith, Late Sculptures’



More News

Works by Angela Fraleigh at the Allentown Art Museum, 'Threaded with moonlight'
ALLENTOWN, PA.- The Allentown Art Museum is presenting the exhibition Angela Fraleigh: Threaded with moonlight, on view in the Museum’s Scheller Gallery through April 21, 2024. Angela Fraleigh’s monumental paintings retrieve women from the margins of history, offering alternative, empowering visual narratives. They intertwine traditions from across centuries and cultures, honoring women’s labor and examining the possible communications, intentions, and invocations embedded in their work. In addition to being the name of the exhibition, Threaded with moonlight is Fraleigh’s newest body of work, inspired by the Allentown Art Museum’s rich textile holdings and the long history of textiles as a medium associated with female labor. This trio of large-scale paintings and accompanying suite of small works explore spinning, stitching, ... More


Peabody Essex Museum appoints Gevelyn McCaskill as chief financial officer
SALEM, MA.- The Peabody Essex Museum recently announced the appointment of Gevelyn McCaskill as the museum’s next Chief Financial Officer (CFO). McCaskill, who currently serves as PEM’s Director of Financial Planning and Business Intelligence, has held key leadership roles in the museum’s Finance department since 2016 and has more than 25 years of experience in the nonprofit finance sector. McCaskill assumes her new role concurrent with the retirement of PEM’s current CFO, Nathalie Apchin, on March 31, 2024. McCaskill is skilled in strategic financial planning and analysis and adept at optimizing resources, improving processes and incorporating business intelligence solutions that inform PEM’s financial decisions. As an effective team leader, she has fostered strong working relationships with individuals ... More


Review: Sarah Snook is a darkly funny Dorian Gray
LONDON.- A large, rectangular screen hangs from the top of the stage at the Theater Royal Haymarket in London. It is, rather appropriately, in portrait mode. Beneath it, Australian actress Sarah Snook (“Succession,” “Run Rabbit Run”), sporting a Johnny Bravo-style blonde quiff, is circulated by a small team of black-clad camera operators who broadcast her every move onto the screen in real time as she simultaneously narrates and performs the title role of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Later, several more screens descend, playing prerecorded footage of Snook in no fewer than 25 other roles. Over the course of the next two hours, the onstage Snook interacts seamlessly with these digitalized selves. There are no other actors involved. Wilde’s 1890 novel, in which a handsome rake makes a Faustian bargain with the cosmos ... More


Fashion exhibition at Newark Museum of Art, 'The Story of Newark Fashion: Atelier to Runway'
NEWARK, NJ.- The Newark Museum of Art announced the opening of The Story of Newark Fashion: Atelier to Runway, on view February 22 through June 2. In development since 2021, this is the Museum's first large-scale exhibition dedicated to contemporary American fashion. Bringing together loans from prestigious public and private collections, The Story of Newark Fashion features the work of 11 fashion designers with Newark connections. The heart of the exhibition features a simulated runway showcasing the designs of Newark-born Stephen Burrows, recognized as one of the defining designers of disco era fashion. Nine of his garments are displayed as if "walking" the runway in Paris, referencing Burroughs’s triumphant presentation at the Battle of Versailles in 1973. With historical footage of Pat Cleveland and other American models, ... More


Denis Villeneuve and Timothée Chalamet: 'Dune' dynasty
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Director Denis Villeneuve and actor Timothée Chalamet bound into the room talking at, and over, each other in rapid French. Villeneuve is from Quebec; Chalamet was born in New York City but has dual American and French citizenship. Together, they’re a dynamic tag team dressed near-identically in head-to-toe black, although Chalamet’s shiny leather layers have more swagger. The topic of the day is galactic genocide and dubious messiahs, central themes in “Dune: Part Two,” the second installment of their cerebral space epic based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. Yet, the pair are prone to giggle fits. “We didn’t see each other since a while, so it’s like a holiday,” Villeneuve, 56, said apologetically, switching to English. When coffee arrives at the room at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles, ... More


For Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin, a goth zombie comedy is cathartic
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA.- Zelda Williams never intended a teenage zombie rom-com to be her feature filmmaking debut. For one thing, the project, “Lisa Frankenstein,” was a big concept to sell, a high-camp period piece set in the fuchsia-and-teal ’80s. There was grief, violence and a floofy-haired love interest who was — not to put too fine a point on it — not only mute but dead. For another thing, Williams, 34, the daughter of Robin Williams, the Oscar-winning comic superstar, worried that making her first big step out with a comedy would inevitably draw the wrong kind of attention. “It’s the one thing I thought people are going to be particularly mean to me about,” she said. But the script for “Lisa Frankenstein” came courtesy of Diablo Cody, who found one-liners, and an Oscar, in adolescent trauma with “Juno,” and who wrote ... More


Danielle Brooks has an Oscar nomination. So why is she in mourning?
NEW YORK, NY.- Was it an interview or an unburdening? As she wiped away tears, Danielle Brooks confessed she couldn’t tell the difference. “New York Times therapy session, you got me going!” she said, chuckling as she cried. It was Valentine’s Day, and we had met on a video call to discuss the 34-year-old actress’s first Oscar nomination, for playing the indomitable Sofia in Blitz Bazawule’s big-screen musical, “The Color Purple.” Although she had been too busy filming the “Minecraft” movie in New Zealand to fly to that week’s Oscar nominees luncheon in Beverly Hills, Brooks said she had spent the past few days wrapping her head around the kind of company she now kept. “It’s been really emotional,” the supporting actress contender said. “There are five African Americans nominated in actor categories this year and only two Black ... More


Review: A former 'Riverdance' star reclaims Irish heritage
NEW YORK, NY.- For Irish dancers, “Riverdance” was cataclysmic. That 1995 production took a form of cultural heritage and, by making it sexier and showier, created a world-conquering, indestructible juggernaut that threatened to trample the gentler values of a tradition. Jean Butler, the female star of that show, has been in recovery ever since. She transformed herself into a contemporary dancer and choreographer, a postmodern minimalist whose work eschews the vulgarity of “Riverdance” through intelligence and reserve. Recently, she has turned back to her Irish dance past by leading “Our Steps, Our Story,” an imperative and overdue oral history project with the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. Out of that project emerged a new show, “What We Hold,” which had its North American premiere at the Irish Arts Center ... More


A graphic novel finds a relatable hero in a modern African woman
NEW YORK, NY.- One of the most successful African comics has no superheroes, and certainly no supernatural powers. Instead, “Aya,” a graphic novel series, is full of everyday heroes, and topping the list is Aya herself, a young woman navigating the delights and obstacles of early adulthood in the West African nation of Ivory Coast. Inspired by the childhood years that its author, Marguerite Abouet, spent in Ivory Coast and focused on daily life in a working-class suburb of Abidjan, the country’s largest city, the series mixes humor and biting takes on society, with a feminist twist — all vividly captured by Clément Oubrerie, the illustrator. In the books, Aya and her friends go on awkward first dates, hook up and share countless shenanigans that celebrate Ivory Coast’s favorite sport after soccer — “palabrer,” or talking endlessly. ... More


Overlooked no more: Pierre Toussaint, philanthropist and candidate for sainthood
NEW YORK, NY.- In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.” By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair or false hair added on — as well as the newly fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans. Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating ... More


Everyone knows Sutton Foster can sing. Now we know she can juggle.
NEW YORK, NY.- There’s busy, and then there’s bonkers. Sutton Foster, one of musical theater’s most celebrated performers, had already committed to starring in a City Center production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” on top of developing concert shows for Carnegie Hall and Café Carlyle, when she was approached last fall about stepping into the lead female role in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.” She hesitated. “Sweeney” wanted new stars in January, the same month as the “Mattress” production. Foster would have to simultaneously master two scores and two stagings while building the bespoke concert shows and learning to speak with a Cockney accent. And even if, as it turned out, “Sweeney” was willing to wait until her “Mattress” run ended, she’d still have to do double duty — rehearsing “Sweeney” during the day while performing “Mattress” at night. ... More



PhotoGalleries

Gabriele Münter

TARWUK

Awol Erizku

Leo Villareal


Flashback
On a day like today, American painter and curator Rembrandt Peale was born
February 22, 1778. Rembrandt Peale (February 22, 1778 - October 3, 1860) was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French Neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties. In this image: Rembrandt Peale (American, 1778-1860), George Washington, circa 1856. Oil on canvas, 36-1/2 x 29 in.

  
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