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Penrith Regional Gallery presents 'Diana Baker Smith: This Place Where They Dwell'
EMU PLAINS.- Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest, launched a major new commission, inspired by the life and legacy of acclaimed 20th Century Modernist artist Margo Lewers (1908 – 1978). Sydney artist Diana Baker Smith works at the intersection of performance and moving image, her artistic practice examining the politics of art history through methods of archival research, collaboration, embodiment, and fiction. In her new commission, This Place Where They Dwell, she engages with the personality enshrined within the historied buildings and heritage gardens of Penrith Regional Gallery, re-animating the spirit of one of the most important Australian artists of the post-war period, who once called the gallery site home. A four-channel video installation, presented in ... More

David Shapiro, who gained fame in poetry and protest, dies at 77
NEW YORK, NY.- David Shapiro, a cerebral yet deeply personal poet aligned with the so-called New York School, whose highly lyrical work balanced copious literary allusions with dreamlike imagery and intimate reflections drawn from family life, died Saturday in the Bronx. He was 77. His wife, Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospice facility, was Parkinson’s disease. Shapiro published 11 volumes of poetry during his six-decade career. His book “You Are You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art and the New York School” is scheduled to be published this fall. His 1971 collection, “A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel,” was nominated for a National Book Award. He was also an art historian, producing monographs on Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and other painters. And he maintained a career in academia that included decades as an art history professor at ... More

Bill Holman, whose arrangements shaped West Coast jazz, dies at 96
NEW YORK, NY.- Bill Holman, an arranger and composer whose work with Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan and other jazz greats established him as a transformative figure in the cool jazz sound associated with 1950s California, died Monday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 96. Kathryn King, his stepdaughter, announced the death. Holman’s longtime collaboration with Kenton, first as a saxophonist in his band and later as an arranger, provided the foundation of his reputation, but he also went on to arrange for Maynard Ferguson, Count Basie, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Michael Bublé and many others, and to lead his own 16-piece ensemble. He won three Grammy Awards — for his arrangements of “Take the A Train” (1988) for Doc Severinsen’s band and “Straight, No Chaser” (1998) for his own, and for his ... More

'Sally & Tom' frees Sally Hemings from being a mere footnote
NEW YORK, NY.- Sally Hemings might be a household name these days, but we still know little about the relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Yet Hemings endures as a figure of endless fascination: American writers aspire to tell her story, and there remains a yearning for a deeper understanding of the enslaved woman who left no firsthand accounts of her inner thoughts. In “Sally & Tom,” Suzan Lori-Parks is the latest writer trying to fill in the gaps in order to present Hemings as a multidimensional character and, in the process, rescue her personhood onstage. “We don’t know what happened,” Sheria Irving, who portrays Hemings in the play, said, adding that Parks is “building on this factual account.” (The play has been a hit for the Public Theater and runs there through June 2.) She continued: “We do not have to reimagine, we ... More

SculptureCenter opens an exhibition of works by Tolia Astakhishvili
LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- For more than two decades, Tolia Astakhishvili has worked across sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video. At scales that both augment and seemingly disappear into gallery spaces, Tolia’s environments posit architecture as an unfixed and transforming entity shaped by those who live through it. At the same time, her sculpture attends to disavowed space and the overlapping markers of use, authorship, and social position that produce different settings of decay. Writer Kirsty Bell has described Tolia’s installations as a form of “simultaneity – whereby a space exists as a plan, a model, a projected vision, a memory and a real place.” [1] Tolia’s work unsettles a building’s ability to designate and distribute its own space, instead overriding it with new structures, layers of used things, and other detritus. To this performed ... More

In 'The Big Cigar,' a Black Panther stars in a fake movie
NEW YORK, NY.- When movie producer Bert Schneider met Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton, he swooned. Schneider, who had helped revolutionize the movie industry (and made a lot of money) as a producer of films like “Easy Rider,” wanted to shake up things off the screen as well. He saw Newton, who had already done a prison stint for the killing of a police officer — Newton denied that he shot the officer, and the conviction was eventually overturned — as the real deal, a star on the front lines of the actual revolution. Their unlikely partnership is now the heart of the new limited series “The Big Cigar,” which premiered last month on Apple TV+. It’s a caper about how Newton (played by André Holland) fled to Cuba in 1974 after he was arrested and charged with the murder of a prostitute (also a crime he claimed he ... More

Are floating cities the solution to rising seas?
NEW YORK, NY.- Worldwide, rising sea levels and increasing urbanization represent a formula for disaster, with more and more people seeking to live on land that will, at some point, be swallowed up by the sea. But a futuristic-sounding solution — the construction of full cities on top of the water — is poised to become a reality. One project in particular, off Busan, South Korea, is roping in a combination of high and low technology to create a large-scale, on-water town, which will be able to house more than 10,000 people. Strictly defined, floating communities already exist in the Netherlands, Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. But these are typically clusters of houseboats moored close to one another. What sets the new concepts apart is a matter of scale. Rather than comprising an agglomeration of smaller vessels, each ... More

A party for the haters
NEW YORK, NY.- “What’s Hate Reads?” a patron at the River, a bar on Bayard Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, asked early one evening this month. She and a friend had no idea they had wandered into the beginning of a party. It was perhaps the perfect question to kick off the evening’s event: a reading to celebrate the limited run of Hate Reads, a pop-up newsletter within a newsletter and the brainchild of Delia Cai, a writer for Vanity Fair. (Hate Reads was published as a limited run on Cai’s regular newsletter, Deez Links, which she publishes on Substack, the sponsor of the evening’s fete.) In a call back to the juicy blogging style of a bygone era (2010), contributing writers anonymously wrote essays railing against their least favorite things. They hated on things like Taylor Swift’s outfits, goldendoodles, media parties and, in a meta-commentary, the Hate ... More

The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art presents On Location in Malibu 2024 and Rediscovering Constance von Briesen
MALIBU, CALIF.- The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University announced two exhibitions that explore diverse dimensions of the natural beauty of California: On Location in Malibu 2024 and Rediscovering Constance von Briesen. A juried exhibition organized by the historic California Art Club (CAC), On Location in Malibu 2024 celebrates the continued vitality of California Impressionism and plein air painting. Inspired by the beauty and scenic diversity of Malibu's canyons and beaches, this exhibition is the ninth in a triennial series organized since 1999. This year’s presentation was juried by CAC executive director and CEO Elaine Adams, President Emeritus Peter Adams, and president ... More

A boat designed to be a breath of fresh air
MILAN.- In the middle of Milan Design Week last month, in the middle of the Bagni Misteriosi — a historic bathing complex in the Porta Romana neighborhood — Italian luxury shipbuilder Azimut Yachts hosted an unusual exhibition. It was a celebration of the company’s latest offering: the Seadeck 6, which made its debut last year and features interiors by the design team of Matteo Thun and Antonio Rodriguez. Having been lowered into the facility by crane, the nearly 60-foot vessel was set afloat in an outdoor swimming pool. There it bobbed, traversed by hordes of well-coiffed guests while a concealed apparatus shrouded it in bursts of atmospheric steam. Surreal, elegant, not a little absurd, it was a scene straight out of Fellini, with overtones of Werner Herzog’s boat-hoisting epic “Fitzcarraldo.” But the thing that made it most unusual? ... More

Exhibition of new work by Lisa Oppenheim opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is presenting At the Lace Shop and Other Light Drawings, an exhibition of new work by Lisa Oppenheim, on view in Los Angeles from May 11 through July 13, 2024. This is the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery and second in Los Angeles. At a time when considerable attention is being given to repatriation and restitution of cultural objects, Oppenheim turns her critical eye to artworks stolen by various arms of the Nazi regime from Jewish collections. Specifically, she looks at artworks and objects whose whereabouts remain unknown or are known to have been destroyed. These absences allow her to think through particular histories and materials to produce artworks that are constitutive of both. For this exhibition, Oppenheim presents a new series of Jacquard woven textiles that expand ... More

The Evolution of Style: Embracing the Sun with Prescription Sunglasses

Places for Art Lovers to Visit in Toronto