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The Metropolitan Opera hires its first Chief Diversity Officer
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Marcia Sells a former dancer who became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and the dean of students at Harvard Law School has been hired as the first chief diversity officer of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States. Her appointment, which the Met announced on Monday, is something of a corrective to the companys nearly 140-year history and a response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Its also a conscious step toward inclusivity by a major player in an industry in which some Black singers, including Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman, have found stardom, but diversity has lagged in orchestras, staff and leadership. Since last summer, cultural institutions across the country have made ... More

Junior Mance, jazz pianist who played with giants, dies at 92
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Junior Mance, a buoyant, bluesy jazz pianist who worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington, before establishing himself as the leader of his own groups, died on Jan. 17 at his home in New York. He was 92. His wife, Gloria Clayborne Mance, said the cause was a brain hemorrhage caused by a fall last month. He also had Alzheimers disease. Mance had a strong affinity for the blues he wrote a book, How to Play Blues Piano (1967) but he also played the standard repertoire with aplomb. The blues ooze through his performances, even when he is not actually playing a blues, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote in a review of a performance by Mance in Manhattan in 1982. Mances career took off in the late ... More

Christie's to offer the Collection of Lucien and Edmonde Treillard
PARIS.- Christie's presents Man Ray and the Surrealists, Collection Lucien and Edmonde Treillard on March 2, 2021 at 2pm. This exceptional sale, consisting of 203 lots for a total estimate of nearly 3 million, will highlight the world of Man Ray through the unique collection of the man who worked alongside him until the end of his life: Lucien Treillard. In 1960, Lucien Treillard became Man Ray's assistant, following in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors such as Berenice Abbott, Jacques-AndrÃ© Boiffard, Bill Brandt and Lee Miller. His role, central to the artist's career, was above all to promote Man Ray's work. Alongside Juliet, the artist's companion, Lucien Treillard continued his efforts to promote Man Ray's art even after the artist's death. His mission also led him to organise Man Ray's first monographic exhibitions such as the one at the Photokina ... More

Song Yoo-jung, South Korean actor, is found dead at 26
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- A 26-year-old actor was found dead Saturday in Seoul, South Korea, the latest loss of a young performer in the countrys entertainment industry, which has faced a reckoning over the mental health burden on its glamorous stars. The death of the actor, Song Yoo-jung, who appeared in several television dramas, was confirmed in a statement by the company that represented her, Sublime Artist Agency. The agency did not disclose the cause, but the suddenness of Songs death brought to mind the series of suicides that has plagued Korean pop music in recent years. Alarms have long been raised over the pressures imposed by South Korean management companies on young entertainers, many of whom are groomed starting as teenagers to be pop idols. Their looks are closely scrutinized, and their tightly ... More

Shulamit Nazarian presents a series of new paintings by New York-based artist Michael Stamm
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Shulamit Nazarian is presenting so super sorry sir! , a series of new paintings by New York-based artist Michael Stamm. This is the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery. The paintings in so super sorry sir! revel in their idiosyncratic, contradictory attitude toward morality, sexuality, mental health, and contemporary cultural politics. They feature an unlikely cast of charactersranging from the Devil to an anthropomorphic hand whose disparate senses of virtue and spirituality often clash with societal convention. At once clinging to life and hurtling toward annihilation, the artist questions what self-actualization looks like in the face of an overly righteous and emotionally precarious world. The Devil appears as a surrogate for various archetypesa conspiratorial friend, a scorned enemy, or at times, the artist himself. He is at once a foe to be v ... More

Marianne Boesky presents a selection of recent paintings from Suzanne McClelland's MUTE series
ASPEN, CO.- Marianne Boesky Gallery is presenting a selection of recent paintings from Suzanne McClellands MUTE series, which is on view on the first floor of our Aspen location from January 22nd to April 18th. Systems of communication and exchange are at the center of Suzanne McClellands practice. The artist explores the inherent interdependence between abstraction and representation as it appears in painting and the printed, written and spoken word. In large-scale canvases as well as collaborative books and prints, McClelland has opened new avenues for painting, investigating its linguistic and acoustic dimensions and reflecting our broader cultural and political concerns. Built from visual as well as auditory observations of this world, her works underscore the ways in which language itself is gendered and politicized by its ... More

ASU Art Museum opens "Body/Magic" a new exhibition by artist Liz Cohen
TEMPE, AZ.- Body/Magic: Liz Cohen presents all aspects of Phoenix-based artist Liz Cohens well-known Bodywork series for the first time. The exhibition at ASU Art Museum offers new and never-before-seen video, photographs, performance and ephemera related to this tour-de-force project. For the original Bodywork series, Cohen merged two cars, the American El Camino and the East German Trabant, into one customized lowrider. Simultaneously, she transformed her own body to become a bikini model for her car, which she presented at lowrider shows in and around Phoenix, Arizona. In the car show, there are really three kinds of people, said the artist. There are the car owners, the car builders and the models that represent the cars. I want to be all three. This ongoing project examines the artists own identity, in-betweenness as a first-generation Colombian and a child of th ... More

Collectors go bananas and pay nearly $400,000 for Del Monte-stickered $20 bill
DALLAS, TX.- Collectors broke out into a banana bidding war Friday evening and pushed the auction price of a $20 bill featuring a Del Monte banana sticker to nearly $400,000 at a public auction of rare, U.S. currency held by Heritage Auctions. The coveted banknote error sold to a bidder competing on Heritages' live bidding platform, HA Live. Pre-auction bidding lifted the bids to $210,000. From there, the winning bidder outlasted a determined phone bidder and two other live internet bidders, to push the final winning auction price to $396,000. The price sets a world record for any error banknote ever sold. This was just the third time the note had been offered at public auction since its discovery in 2004. "The Del Monte Note is considered perhaps the most famous of all U.S. error banknotes and now it holds a world record as the most valuable ever ... More

Elias Rahbani, Lebanese composer who sought new sounds, dies at 82
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- On Friday evenings, before the coronavirus came to Beirut, a pulsing crowd of partygoers would stomp on the roof of a warehouse overlooking the port dancing to music at once retro and fresh. Its beat was unstoppable, its sound a mix of lush Arab diva melody, French 1960s pop and disco. The musical blend required no modern adaptation by a DJ. It was simply another Elias Rahbani experiment. From the 1960s through the 80s, Rahbani, a Lebanese composer and lyricist who died of COVID-19 on Jan. 4 at 82, wrote instant classics for the Arab worlds most idolized singers, commercial jingles, political anthems, film soundtracks and music for underground and experimental Arab artists. The Rahbani sound was ubiquitous. Many Lebanese remember the jingles he wrote for Picon ... More

A monument honoring Brooklyn abolitionists stalls under scrutiny
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- When the artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed was commissioned to conceive of a project honoring Brooklyn abolitionists, she wanted to turn the idea of a monument on its head. She proposed to reinvent the design of the anticipated Willoughby Square Park in Downtown Brooklyn with pavement engravings and bronze placards, which would offer questions and prompts to highlight the boroughs antislavery movement and its legacy. But the preservationists and activists who, for 20 years, have pushed the city to honor Brooklyns abolitionist roots were displeased with Rasheeds designs, complaining they were too abstract at a time when women and people of color are fighting to see themselves figuratively represented in New Yorks monuments. We are not going to settle for plaques and engravings, which people ... More

Climate change is worsening. So the weather station is singing about it.
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Some musicians are compelled to write a song after a lovers quarrel, an encounter with a great work of art or a particularly resonant overheard exchange. Tamara Lindeman, the 36-year-old Canadian singer and songwriter who records under the name the Weather Station, was recently driven to write one immediately after reading an article about oil and gas corporation Exxon Mobil. When I say that, it sounds very esoteric or political or strange, but its very personal to me, she said on a video call from her Toronto home one Monday morning in January, her sandy-blond bangs hanging as long as the fringe on her brown suede jacket. Call the songs on her piercing record Ignorance, due Feb. 5, anthems of ambivalence: Lindeman wrote most of them over what she calls a weird winter where I was obsessively ... More