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Benefit Shop Foundation, Inc. to offer Janine Metz estate over two days
MOUNT KISCO, NY.- Provenance, connection with royalty and a wide range of antiques sourced from around the world are the hallmarks of a specialty two-day auction that The Benefit Shop Foundation, Inc., will host January 20-21, starting at 10 am each day. The auction features the estate of the late Janine (nee Spaner) Metz, who was Social Secretary to the Duchess of Windsor from 1962 to 1972 and lived with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their Manhattan penthouse. This is the first multi-day single-estate auction to be hosted here and necessitated because of the size of her estate. Born to a French couturier, she lived and worked for a time in the 1950s before returning to Paris, where on a lark she answered a newspaper ad placed by a diplomatic couple seeking a secretary. That ad changed her life and even after marrying in 1964, she continued ... More

Guild Hall announces new Chief Creative Officer Amy Kirwin
EAST HAMPTON, NY.- Guild Hall announced the appointment of Amy Kirwin as the institutions inaugural Chief Creative Officer. This key leadership role was created to support Guild Halls 90th Anniversary in 2021, and to oversee brand marketing, communications, and multi-platform promotional content. Kirwin, who is presently Artistic Director at Southampton Arts Center, will assume her new role on February 1, 2021. I had the good fortune to work with Amy Kirwin on public engagement at the Parrish Art Museum, and as founding members of Hamptons Arts Network. Amys creativity and stamina are par excellence, and her blended background in theater and visual arts lends itself perfectly to Guild Halls interdisciplinary framework. She will be a vital member of our 90th celebration, foregrounding joy and community participationhallmarks ... More

JoAnne Artman Gallery opens an exhibition of works by Swan Scalabre and Jenna Krypell
LAGUNA BEACH, CA.- JoAnne Artman Gallery is presenting, Women on the Verge, an exhibition introducing Swan Scalabre and Jenna Krypell. Addressing the thematic concept of being pushed to the brink, Women on the Verge explores both the conceptual and physical suggestions of the title. Highlighting their ability to create works that uniquely define the world around them, Scalabre and Kyrpell interpret the verge as a point of departure for their respective practices, allowing for the confrontation of any and all limitations in their complementary forms of expression. For French artist Swan Scalabre, the verge is defined through the charged vulnerability of her subjects and the psychology behind the series. Poetic and nostalgic, the work communicates a constant desire to escape reality and temporality, while illustrating the common plights of women ... More

Ved Mehta, celebrated writer for The New Yorker, dies at 86
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Ved Mehta, a longtime writer for The New Yorker whose best-known work, spanning a dozen volumes, explored the vast, turbulent history of modern India through the intimate lens of his own autobiography, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. The cause was complications of Parkinsons disease, his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, said. Associated with the magazine for more than three decades much of his magnum opus began as articles in its pages Mehta was widely considered the 20th-century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India. Besides his multivolume memoir, published in book form between 1972 and 2004, his more than two dozen books included volumes of reportage on India, among them Walking the Indian Streets (1960), Portrait ... More

Brandywine Conservancy & OAF acquire 577-acre property for use as a public nature preserve
CHADDS FORD, PA.- The Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art, in partnership with the Oxford Area Foundation (OAF), has acquired 577 acres of the Glenroy Farm situated along the Octoraro Creek in Chester County, PA. This land will be owned and managed by the Oxford Area Foundation for use as a publicly accessible nature preserve. This is an outstanding achievement for the Brandywine Conservancy, working in partnership with the Oxford Area Foundation, and state and local government, said Ellen Ferretti, director of the Brandywine Conservancy. The acreage and diversity of resources made this property a high priority of permanent protection in southeastern Pennsylvania. The transition of the Glenroy Farm property from the Thouron family to a public preserve will create a unique, contiguous area of public open space that ... More

Pat Loud, reality show matriarch of 'An American Family,' dies at 94
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Before The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, before the Kardashians, before the idea of living large and unscripted on camera became a TV staple, there was a startling program on public television called An American Family with a startling female character named Pat Loud. Loud was a California mother of five. She drank; she plotted her divorce; she adored, and accepted, her openly gay son. She did it all in Santa Barbara, California, and all on camera in 1973. Loving, boisterous, witty, resilient and sometimes angry and hurt, she did not act like most women on television at the time. But she was, ostensibly, not acting at all. She was the first reality television star on the first reality show and she paid a price for breaking new ground. Critics called her materialistic and self-absorbed. An affluent ... More

Delaware Museum of Natural History and Winterthur create new partnership
WINTERTHUR, DE.- Visitors to Winterthur will likely run into some special guests this year: members and other visitors from the Delaware Museum of Natural History. Winterthur will host many of DMNHs perennially popular events and programs while the museum is closed for renovation until early 2022, when it will reopen as the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science. DMNH members will enjoy discounted or free admission to Winterthur in 2021, including discounts in its store and cafe, and Winterthur members will enjoy free or discounted admission to many DMNH events, with some exclusions. DMNH events at Winterthur include Murder Mystery Night, Saturday, February 13; School Day Off Camp, Monday, February 15; All-Scout Evening (with optional overnight), Friday, March 19; Breakfast with the Birds, featuring Animal ... More

"What Was That?" New paintings by Eva Goetz at Moss Galleries
FALMOUTH, ME.- When the world stopped due to the pandemic in the spring of 2020, Portland-based painter Eva Goetz put paint to canvas and began documenting our collective COVID-19 experience. "What Was That?" New Paintings by Eva Goetz features 19 works that visually report, reflect, and transcend the hurt and confusion that played out within us all during 2020. The exhibition is on view at Moss Galleries from January 8 through February 6, 2021. Ten percent of sales will benefit Spurwink, a Maine nonprofit that provides behavioral health and education services to adults and children. None of us could have predicted how the world would change during the pandemic, but artist Eva Goetz found inspiration from this historic moment in time. From reports of daily infection rates to the Black Lives Matter movement and the presidential ... More

Forced online, an opera festival searches for intimacy
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- The annual Prototype festival of new opera and music theater thrives on intimacy. Its chamber-scale offerings often politically charged, emotionally brutal and just plain loud vibrate the viscera. Prototype has become known for screaming, moaning works like Angels Bone and Prism, which both went on to win Pulitzer Prizes and were clench-your-jaw immersions in suffering, put on in tiny theaters that magnified their effect. Watching a performance alone in bed on a laptop should, in theory, feel even more intimate. And yet, as I have discovered time and again over the past year, the screen tends to add immeasurable distance: the distance of my distractibility, of subpar picture quality, of the experience seeming like a pale reproduction of the thing rather than the thing itself. In other words, very ... More

The New School receives $5.5 million from Mellon Foundation
NEW YORK, NY.- The New School has received two grants totaling $5.5 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance demographic and intellectual diversity and politically engaged art, scholarship and public engagement at the university. Together, these grants represent the largest Mellon Foundation gift to The New School and will significantly impact initiatives that will further its long-held values of equity, social justice and the political agency of art. Dwight A. McBride, President of The New School, expressed gratitude for the Mellon Foundations support and recognition: The Mellon Foundation has an unparalleled role in funding pioneering programs in the arts and humanities. These awards are a wonderful affirmation of the role of equitable and open scholarship and of The New Schools distinctive heritage of progressive education ... More