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Annet Gelink Gallery has opened the exhibition 'I'M AT 4%' by Ryan Gander
AMSTERDAM.- Annet Gelink Gallery has now opened I’m at 4%, Ryan Gander’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. For this exhibition, Gander ﬁlled the space with objects not generally classiﬁed as ‘art’. Whilst most objects on view are reminiscent of a gallery or museum space, they are usually overlooked. It is not the ﬁrst time that supposed ‘non-art’ is displayed in an exhibition space, however, I'm at 4% is more a proposition for a new way of thinking than a comment on the much-discussed distinction between art and non-art. Gander shifts the focus to the parts that make up an exhibition instead of hiding them. As such, he enables an inventive and associative way of interacting with the works that draw on the viewer’s imagination in their quest for meaning. Upon entering the gallery, the visitor ... More

'Purple Prose: Queer Illiteralism & a Flowering Cacophony' now on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery
NEW YORK, NY.- Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Purple Prose: Queer Illiteralism & a Flowering Cacophony, a summer group featuring works by Felix Beaudry, John Burtle, David Gilbert, Borna Sammak, Marisa Takal, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Taking its title from the literary term for an overly embellished writing style, Purple Prose is a queer celebration of the fanciful, the excessive, the transgressive. Organized by Kory Trolio, the exhibition embraces the artist’s rambling plight and the tortuous journey of queer being, foregrounding playful narratives of evolving selves. Beaudry, Burtle, Gilbert, Sammak, Takal, and Yearwood-Dan rely on their idiosyncrasies, sensibilities, and extravagances, all "over-responding" and "intolerably vivid”—to borrow a pair of phrases from “In Defense of Purple Prose,” Paul West’s influential 1985 essay advocating for ... More

Turning 100, the New Jersey Symphony sticks to home
NEWARK, NJ.- When the New Jersey Symphony was planning this season’s centennial celebrations, which come to a close this weekend, a question kept coming up: Would the orchestra be going to Carnegie Hall? After all, appearing at Carnegie — even if that means renting the hall — is a mark of excellence and validation, an exclamation point on a tour or a special occasion. Like a 100th birthday. While the New Jersey Symphony has given many Carnegie performances over the years, most recently in 2012, it decided this was not the right time to return. “Sure, we can go to Carnegie,” Gabriel van Aalst, the orchestra’s CEO, recently recalled thinking. “We could have hired it out; we could have done it. But I strongly felt that this major tentpole celebration should be us in our state. Our supporters are here, our audiences are here.” These were striking words ... More

Penicillin pioneer's Nobel Prize at Bonhams
LONDON.- Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 was a revolutionary step in the treatment of bacterial infection. Its widespread practical application was not, however, immediately realisable. It took the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in the late 1930s and early 1940s to isolate and concentrate the element in penicillin that kills the bacteria; and make it into an effective and manufacturable drug. All three men were awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Sir Ernst Chain’s Nobel Prize medal is to be sold at Bonhams Fine Books and Manuscripts sale in London on Wednesday 21 June 2023. It is estimated at £300,000-500,000. Ernst Chain (1906-1979) was born in Berlin into a prominent Jewish family. He graduated in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1930 but left Germany for the UK three ... More

Sarah Sze transforms Victorian waiting room in Peckham with large-scale installation
LONDON.- Acclaimed New York-based artist Sarah Sze has transformed a disused Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye train station in south London with a new site-specific sculptural work, Metronome. Co-commissioned by Artangel, the exhibition, titled The Waiting Room, opened on Friday 19 May 2023, taking over a large, vaulted space above the main ticket office that has been boarded up for sixty years. Sze employs painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and video to build immersive works that explore our relationship to images, materiality, time and entropy. In recent years, she has created a new form of sculpture that offers an extraordinary model of our fragile world. These large-scale installations – which she refers to as Timekeepers – integrate everyday materials, torn photographs and a multitude of flickering videos in immersive ... More

Anna Shay, star of Netflix's 'Bling Empire,' dies at 62
NEW YORK, NY.- Anna Shay, an heiress and Los Angeles socialite who became a breakout star of the Netflix reality show “Bling Empire,” has died. She was 62. Her family confirmed her death to The Associated Press in a statement, which said the cause was a stroke. It was not immediately clear when or where she died. “It saddens our hearts to announce that Anna Shay, a loving mother, grandmother, charismatic star, and our brightest ray of sunshine, has passed away,” said the statement provided to the AP. “Anna taught us many life lessons on how not to take life too seriously and to enjoy the finer things. Her impact on our lives will be forever missed but never forgotten.” “Bling Empire,” which ran for three seasons on Netflix starting in 2021, centered on wealthy Asian and Asian American fun seekers in Los Angeles and was billed as the real ... More

Ancient human relatives buried their dead in caves, new theory claims
NEW YORK, NY.- In 2015, scientists reported an astonishing discovery from deep inside a South African cave: more than 1,500 fossils of an ancient hominin species that had never been seen before. The creatures, named Homo naledi, were short, with long arms, curved fingers and a brain about one-third the size of a modern human’s. They lived around the time the first humans were roaming Africa. Now, after years of analyzing the surfaces and sediments of the elaborate underground cave, the same team of scientists is making another splashy announcement: Homo naledi — despite their tiny brains — buried their dead in graves. They lit fires to illuminate their way down the cave, and they marked the graves with engravings on the walls. Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg ... More

Review: In 'The Comeuppance,' a bigger, chillier big chill
NEW YORK, NY.- School reunions, like work and family ones, are fertile ground for dramatists, offering an excuse to gather disparate characters with a catalog of ready-made conflicts. (There’s always someone who got dumped, dissed or disowned x years ago.) Add alcohol or pot to fuel the resurgence of old feelings and loosen the tongue, then let the heavy compression of the timeline, just a weekend or even a night, do the rest. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins juggles all of these elements in “The Comeuppance,” which opened Monday at the Signature Theatre. But if he’d merely updated the formula of “The Big Chill” — now ready for a 40th reunion — this world premiere production, directed by Eric Ting, would have been not much more than sentimental and funny. Instead, invoking the litany of violence and disaster that has punctuated the lives of its characters, ... More

Ama Ata Aidoo, groundbreaking Ghanaian writer, dies at 81
NEW YORK, NY.- Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died Wednesday. She was 81. Her family said in a statement that she died after a brief illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died. In a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a Cabinet minister in Ghana, Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa. Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. It was one of several ... More

Review: In 'Days of Wine and Roses,' two souls lost in an ocean of booze
NEW YORK, NY.- If not for the unbridled drinking, it might easily have been a screwball comedy. Just look at them: Kirsten, blondly beautiful with a tolerant smile and a quick riposte; Joe, curly-haired cute but too arrogant to grasp that he’ll have to up his game to win this woman. Within moments of their meeting in 1950 in New York City, he bursts suavely into song — some presumptuous romantic blather about the two of them together under “a chapel of stars.” Whereupon she teases him right back down to earth. “Wow,” she says. “Who are you wooing? It can’t be me; you don’t know me.” This is the addiction-canon classic “Days of Wine and Roses,” though, so some of us already know them. In JP Miller’s luridly frank 1958 teleplay, starring Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson, and in Miller’s somewhat defanged 1962 film adaptation, starring Lee Remick ... More