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'Lempicka' to end Broadway run a month after opening
NEW YORK, NY.- “Lempicka,” a new musical about an artistically and sexually adventurous painter, announced Thursday evening that it would close May 19, just a month after opening. This is the first show to fall after this year’s Tony nominations were announced Tuesday. “Lempicka” scored three nods — for actresses Eden Espinosa and Amber Iman, as well as for scenic design — but was shut out of the best musical category. It really needed a boost, because its grosses have been anemic — last week it grossed $288,102, which is unsustainably low for a Broadway musical. The musical, which has been in development for years, had productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival and the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego before arriving on Broadway during a crush of openings this spring; it began previews March 19 and opened April 14. ... More

Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, who helped Timothy Leary turn on, dies at 90
NEW YORK, NY.- Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, the energetic scion of a storied wealthy family who funded Timothy Leary’s psychedelic adventures — and famously helped him find the spot to do so, at her brothers’ estate in Millbrook, New York — died April 9 at her home in Tucson, Arizona. She was 90. The cause was a stroke, said her daughter Sophia Bowart. Hitchcock had been suffering from endometrial cancer. Timothy Leary hadn’t yet been thrown out of Harvard for his experiments with psychedelic drugs when he met Hitchcock one weekend at the apartment of Maynard Ferguson, the jazz trumpeter and bandleader, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx borough of New York City. “Pretty Peggy Hitchcock was an international jet-setter,” Leary wrote in his 1983 autobiography, “Flashbacks,” “renowned as the colorful patroness of the livelier arts and confidante of jazz musicians, racecar drivers, ... More

'Pokémon,' 'Magic: The Gathering' cards share rare uncut test sheet in Heritage's Trading Card Games Auction
DALLAS, TX.- When the Pokémon trading card game was launched in 1996, it enjoyed immediate success in Japan. But any effort to expand to a global audience had to begin with selling the concept to a Western audience. Part of that sales pitch was a Magic: The Gathering/Pokémon Test Print Uncut Sheet with Notes (Wizards of the Coast) that will find a new home when it is offered to the game-playing world in Heritage’s May 17-18 Trading Card Games Signature® Auction. The intriguing story lines are as numerous as the cards that appear on the sheet. “This is as unique as any lot Heritage has offered,” says Jesus Garcia, Consignment Director of Trading Card Games at Heritage. “It is a sheet of test prints from ... More

Museum of Graffiti announces the grand opening of a new fine art gallery
MIAMI, FLA.- On May 11, 2024, Wynwood will become home to a brand new luxury art gallery from the founders of Museum of Graffiti. The gallery will open in a 3,700 square foot converted warehouse space located at 2521 NW 3rd Ave., adjacent to the Museum of Graffiti and its sister exhibition space the Art of Hip Hop. The gallery, once located around the corner from its new flagship location, was originally dubbed The Private Gallery as it started during the COVID-19 pandemic as a place for friends, family, and members of the Museum to collect art in a safe, private environment. The Private Gallery quickly earned a long list of celebrity clientele from Quest Love and Diplo to Miami’s own Pitbull because of its intimate nature and rare selection of original post-graffiti works. The gallery represents a diverse group of global contemporary ... More

Chazen Museum of Art names Cat Birk as winner of 2024 Panczenko MFA Prize
MADISON, WIS.- The Chazen Museum of Art has selected artist Cat Birk (b. 1994) as the 2024 Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize winner. A current MFA candidate in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s art department, Birk’s work is the focus of a solo exhibition at the Chazen open through July 14. “My mother is a horse. An exhibition by Cat Birk” presents paintings, silicone surfaces, prints and sculpture in an exploration of how images and objects serve as catalysts of identity formation. Birk emphasizes t4t (trans for trans), the vital network of transgender solidarity and mutual aid, in an examination of embodiment and relationships. With references to organizing structures such as the grid, minimalist sculpture and queer politics, Birk presents connections between material objects and intangible social networks. In the installation, abstraction is used in part to symbolize ... More

Lesley Lokko receives King's Royal Gold Medal for Architecture
LONDON.- Presented by RIBA President, Muyiwa Oki, on behalf of His Majesty the King, the Medal recognises Lokko’s commitment to championing diverse approaches to architectural practice and education. For over two decades, Lokko has devoted her career to amplifying under-represented voices and examining the complex relationship between architecture, identity and race. Her work to “democratise architecture” was hailed by the RIBA Honours Committee as a “clarion call for equitable representation in policies, planning, and design that shape our spaces”. Professor Lesley Lokko is the 45th recipient of the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, which has been awarded since 1848. Acknowledging the achievement, RIBA President, Muyiwa Oki, said: “Lesley Lokko is a true agent of change who has successfully shifted the dial and pioneered ... More

How Rachel Khong conjures worlds, in her books and beyond
NEW YORK, NY.- By the time Rachel Khong was finishing her latest novel, “Real Americans,” in 2022, interest in the book was so high that it sparked a 17-way bidding war among many of the country’s top publishing houses. Among the interested parties was John Freeman, the writer, literary critic and executive editor at Knopf, who was teaching in Paris that summer and planning to fly to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, for a book festival. He learned Khong was on vacation in Istanbul, which he thought was sort of on his way (“I didn’t really look at a map,” Freeman confessed). Maybe the two could meet? They got together at a cafe in Istanbul — a dog cafe, to be precise, where they were greeted at the door by a resident basset hound. The whole scene, he said, felt like a page out of the novel that Khong had been writing, “where you see people blown ... More

She wrote 'The History of White People.' She has a lot more to say.
NEW YORK, NY.- As historian Nell Irvin Painter has learned over the course of her eight decades on this earth, inspiration can come from some unlikely places. In 2000, she happened across a news photograph of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which had been bombed into rubble during the long stretch of devastating wars between Russia and the Caucasus. The photo prompted Painter to wonder how “Caucasian” became a term for white people; that in turn led her to an 18th-century German naturalist who picked out five skulls to embody the five “varieties” of mankind. What he deemed “the really most beautiful form of skull” belonged to a young Georgian woman and would therefore represent Caucasians, whom he called “the most beautiful and best formed of men.” From a photograph of bombed-out Grozny to the absurd methodology ... More

The wartime music of Debussy and Komitas, still resonating today
NEW YORK, NY.- Kirill Gerstein, a Soviet-born pianist whose parents sold their only proper asset — a garage — so that they could afford plane tickets to the United States for their son’s education, approaches music in a way that recalls something his countryman, conductor Kirill Petrenko, once told him: “I sacrificed so much in my life to not do things by default.” The career of Gerstein, 44, is filled with moments that defy a belief in doing things “by default.” There was the time when he devoted a significant portion of his $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award to commissioning new piano music from composers across jazz and classical music, placing Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau alongside Oliver Knussen and Alexander Goehr. Or there was the time, in 2017, when Gerstein championed a new, shockingly modest critical edition of Peter Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto ... More

Tim Kent disrupts traditional depictions of the interior space in his enchanting exhibition at JD Malat Gallery
LONDON.- Acclaimed New York-based painter Tim Kent presents Histories in Flux, a solo exhibition at Mayfair’s JD Malat Gallery this May. Having exhibited in international galleries and collections, Kent returns to London for a second time to showcase his new body of work. On view from the 2nd of May until the 1st of June, Histories in Flux unveils Kent’s depictions of vast architectural spaces which harbour deeper narratives of human history and our struggle to address self-implemented power structures. Histories in Flux presents twelve psychologically charged portraits, architectural depictions of estates, and cultural institutions that highlight key issues pertaining to class, access, privacy and consumption. Kent resists and highlights the conformity presumed in traditional painting genres, attuned to the issues of the contemporary. His work sees Baroque ... More

After a long stretch of darkness, the Bay Bridge lights are returning
NEW YORK, NY.- The gray Bay Bridge, the region’s workhorse bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland, has never gotten as much acclaim as its splashy red neighbor to the northwest. But lately, it’s been even more muted than usual. For the past 14 months, the bridge’s Bay Lights art installation — 25,000 LEDs that twinkled across 300 cables on the western span of the bridge — has been turned off. Now, fans of the 1.8-mile stretch of sparkle can rejoice. The team behind the installation says it will be coming back with nearly twice as many lights. The target date is next March. “I feel like there’s a hole in the night sky,” said Ben Davis, the founder of Illuminate, the San Francisco public arts nonprofit behind Bay Lights. “It’s going to feel so good when we bring them back.” Davis surprised Bay Area residents in January 2023 when he announced that the installation had deteriorated so badly after 10 ... More