Dr. Douglas Arbittier with items from his large collection of medical antiques in Mendham, N.J., on May 16, 2024. When he found that many medical-themed woodblocks he bought were fake, he began an intense effort to catch the forger. (Bryan Anselm/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Earl Washington loves wood. He loves maple wood from Wisconsin and boxwood from Turkey. He loves running his hands on its surface, feeling its heft and texture. But most of all he loves carving it. Thoughts about carving, he says, consume his waking moments. “If I’m looking at your face when I’m talking to you, I’m literally looking at how I’m going to carve your eyes and carve your nose on a piece of wood,” he said in an interview. For decades, beginning in the late 1990s, Washington, 62, created thousands of ornate woodblocks and used them to make intricate prints of all kinds of things: biblical imagery, erotica, anatomical illustrations, the stark motifs of German expressionism. ... More
Jason Cooper, a commercial paleontologist, in Lindon, Utah, on May 18, 2024, showing Apex, a stegosaurus that he unearthed on his property in Dinosaur, Colo. (Nina Riggio/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s sold an unusually complete stegosaurus fossil at auction Wednesday for a staggering $44.6 million, toppling the record fossil price that had previously been set by the king of the dinosaur world, Tyrannosaurus rex. The unexpectedly high price — which was ... More
First English edition, limited issue copy of James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses, published in London and Paris in 1922 by John Rodker for the Egoist Press, #1631 of 2,000 copies (est. $2,000-$3,000).
DAVENPORT, WASH.- An important collection of rare books, maps and atlases from the recently closed Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama will be sold at auction on July 31st and August 1st by Grant Zahajko Auctions, online and live in the Grant Zahajko gallery located at 510 Morgan ... More
Artists at Stoneleaf Retreat in Kingston, N.Y., July 13, 2024. (Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- The list of official participants in this year’s fifth edition of Upstate Art Weekend, a sprawling festival that embraces nearly every art event or exhibition happening north of New York City over the next four days, has reached 145. It’s a dramatic rise from an informal band of some two dozen arts centers and galleries just four years ago, and it now spans 10 counties in ... More
The Apollo Theater in Harlem, in New York, Feb. 11, 2022, which has been a debut venue for many Black performers at its famed amateur nights. (Donavon Smallwood/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- When Bonnie Raitt heard she had been chosen as a Kennedy Center honoree, she kept asking her manager: Are they sure? Raitt, whose song “Just Like That ...” beat out higher-charting pop acts last year to win the Grammy for song of the year, said the honor was a surprise because after years of recognition mostly confined to blues and Americana spaces, she did ... More
HOUSTON, TX.- Celebrating the acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs from the Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the medium’s evolution in Cuba over nearly six decades -- from promoting the Revolution following Fidel Castro’s 1959 ... More
COLOGNE.- Fluxus and Beyond: Ursula Burghardt, Benjamin Patterson at the Museum Ludwig takes a fresh look at a 1960s art movement that continues to exert its influence. The exhibition focuses on Ursula Burghardt (1928–2008) and Benjamin Patterson (1934–2016), two artists who despite their involvement in the Fluxus network remained on its periphery. As a result, ... More
Jeremy Couillard, Zede’s Dream (still), 2023. Video game simulation, color, sound, loop; run time variable. Courtesy of the artist.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- This summer, the MIT List Visual Arts Center will present Jeremy Couillard’s first solo museum exhibition. Trained as a painter, Couillard is self-taught as a coder and digital artist. His projects exist as playable games, web projects, and video installations—often spanning multiple forms simultaneously. His games are defined by inventive character design and absurd premises: in one, alien terrorists steal the machine that powers reincarnation, trapping the player in the bardo (Alien Afterlife [2017]); in ... More
CINCINNATI, OH.- The Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) will premiere an unprecedented exploration of the early career of Ansel Adams, demonstrating how, between 1916 and the 1940s, Adams developed from a teenage tourist with a camera into the country’s most celebrated photographer. Drawn from the definitive Adams archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), ... More
Lisha Bai, View of Estudo para Palmeira Sonhando, 2024. Linen, ramie and voile, 74.50h x 57w in. 189.23h x 144.78w cm.
NEW YORK, NY.- Asya Geisberg Gallery is presenting “Cover Band,” a group exhibition of 14 artists creating homages, satires, ripoffs and paeans to those they admire. Art history is full of references to previous artwork, from subtle nods to full-on appropriation. For this exhibition, each artist was invited to create a work that considers this practice from the perspective of the cover song, a term borrowed from the pop-music world. A cover can shed new light on an iconic work. It can bring it back from obscurity. Sometimes ... More
Deborah Butterfield, Two Seas, 2023-24 Cast Bronze, 34.5 x 40 x 17 inches, Unique.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Haines Gallery presents Material Matters, a group exhibition bringing together eight artists whose highly inventive use of materials is central to their practices. The exhibition includes works by Deborah Butterfield and Matthew Brandt, who take the natural world as a site of inspiration and transmutation. Each channels the tactile, tangible beauty of nature, while incorporating evidence of its imperilment. Ai Weiwei and Zhan Wang substitute one material ... More
CLEVELAND, OH.- Featuring more than four dozen photographs, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images the exhibition shows that Latinx, ... More
LONDON.- Six Tudor queens – Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr - travelled across London today, convening at the National Portrait Gallery to visit the summer blockbuster exhibition, Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens. Members of the public encountered the characters at Waterloo Station, before the queens made their way to the Gallery to surprise Tudor fans and visitors to the exhibition. This ... More
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'UnPrisoned' depicts the burden of incarceration with a light touch NEW YORK, NY.- “UnPrisoned” on Hulu is the rare show to focus on the aftermath of incarceration and its ongoing effects on families rather than on imprisonment itself. Created by Tracy McMillan and loosely based on her 2011 memoir, “I Love You and I’m Leaving You Anyway,” the series stars Delroy Lindo and Kerry Washington as Edwin and Paige, a father and daughter trying to repair their relationship when Edwin comes back into Paige’s life after serving 17 years in prison. The first season explored the emotional injury that Edwin’s long absence inflicted on Paige, an avid Instagrammer, therapist and single mother who struggles with a string of unhealthy romantic partners. The second season, which premiered Wednesday, delves deeper into how the issues of abandonment, anxiety and mistrust have been passed down through three ... More
Evan Wright, award-winning reporter and author of 'Generation Kill,' dies at 59 NEW YORK, NY.- Evan Wright, an award-winning journalist whose reporting from the Iraq War formed the bestselling book “Generation Kill” and whose work illuminated the lives of those on the fringes of society, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59. His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office and was confirmed in a statement released Monday night by his family. Wright was known for his immersive journalism that often focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage, including traveling with anarchists behind the Battle of Seattle in 1999, covering the 1996 Aryan Nations World Congress and riding with the Marines leading the United States’ invasion of Iraq. His reporting on crime, war and American subcultures was published in Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing ... More
The poets have taken Governors Island. (Don't worry, they gave it back.) NEW YORK, NY.- Aspiring poets working up the courage to try an open mic. A couple on a surprise date. At least one veteran of verse looking for inspiration to help get through a dry spell. And far more than one person selling poetry collections. A tranquil green expanse on Governors Island enveloped by yellow 19th-century houses was transformed into a scene of creative exchange last weekend as poets and poetry lovers descended on Nolan Park for the 13th annual New York City Poetry Festival, hosted by the nonprofit Poetry Society of New York. Professional poets, first-time poets and many falling somewhere in between gathered at the two-day festival to take in one another’s verse in the sweltering, leafy outdoors. Lyrics and impassioned rhymes echoed from the festival’s various stages across ... More
With a killer onstage and a body part in a bag, the show went on NEW YORK, NY.- Fourteen years ago in Orange County, California, Daniel Wozniak killed two people: Sam Herr, a 26-year-old Army veteran and neighbor, and Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old student and Herr’s close friend. Wozniak was convicted of the murders, received a death sentence and is serving time on death row, though California has a moratorium on executions. Those circumstances alone would be enough to adapt the case into a play in our true-crime-loving era. But additional details about the heinous murders shoot a cold dose of evil through that old theater maxim “The show must go on.” Wozniak performed twice in the same day in a community theater production of the musical “Nine” as Guido, the ladies-man lead, in the hours after the separate shootings of Kibuishi and Herr, whom he also dismembered and whose ... More
In 'Life and Trust,' the details are in the devil NEW YORK, NY.- What’s the going rate for a soul these days? A little more than $200 on weekends, less on weekdays, handling fees included. That’s the ticket price for “Life and Trust,” the new show from Emursive, the producers of “Sleep No More,” and arguably an even more ambitious undertaking. A version of the Faust legend (well, several braided versions of the Faust legend), “Life and Trust,” which opens Aug. 1, occupies 100,000 square feet over six floors of a financial district skyscraper in New York that was once the home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Co. In a brief introduction, which is set on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, a financier makes a deal with the devil: damnation in exchange for the chance to relive his youth. The show then ushers audiences back to 1894, plunging them into a Gilded Age delirium. “It’s ... More
Bob Newhart, soft-spoken everyman who became a comedy star, dies at 94 NEW YORK, NY.- Bob Newhart, who burst onto the comedy scene in 1960 working a stammering Everyman character not unlike himself, then rode essentially that same character through a long, busy career that included two of television’s most memorable sitcoms, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. His publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the death. Newhart wasn’t merely unknown a few months before his emergence as a full-fledged star; he was barely in the business, though he had aspirations. In 1959, some comic tapes he had made to amuse himself while working as an accountant in Chicago caught the ear of an executive at Warner Bros. Records, which in 1960 released the comedy album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” The record shot to No. 1 on the charts, and at the 1961 Grammy Awards it improbably ... More
It's a pretty marvelous team-up NEW YORK, NY.- If there’s a magic formula for Hollywood success, “Deadpool & Wolverine” would appear to have refined it to a simple calculation: Just add Hugh Jackman’s “X-Men” superhero to the hit comic franchise anchored by Ryan Reynolds and reap the sure-to-be-lucrative dividends. So why did a film that’s projected to be the summer’s biggest live-action blockbuster prove so difficult to get off the ground? Although Reynolds had pitched a team-up to his close friend for years, Jackman initially resisted, preferring to let the well-reviewed “Logan” (2017) stand as his swan song with the gruff mutant Wolverine. And while the merger of Disney and Fox allowed Reynolds to set the third “Deadpool” movie starring his R-rated mercenary in the previously off-limits Marvel Cinematic Universe, he struggled to come up with a story that could capitalize ... More
The 'Converse conductor' fighting elitism in classical music BALTIMORE, MD.- The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had just finished performing Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” on a recent evening when the ensemble’s new music director, Jonathon Heyward, returned to the stage at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Rugs and chairs had been brought out to evoke a living room, for an intimate, late-night conversation with the audience about music and life. Wearing Converse sneakers and sipping from a glass of Scotch, Heyward, 31, discussed Respighi, his first season as music director and becoming a father. (His daughter, Ottilie, was born in May.) It was the kind of casual gathering that Heyward, who takes the helm of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center this month, has championed as he works to expand the audience for classical music. “This art form is for everyone,” he said in an interview later. “We want everyone ... More
BAMPFA commissions new body of work from Young Joon Kwak BERKELEY, CALIF.- The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will unveil a new exhibition of a commissioned installation by the Los Angeles-based artist Young Joon Kwak. Kwak’s immersive sculptural installation marks the latest MATRIX exhibition, a signature contemporary art series at BAMPFA that provides artists with an experimental platform to make and show new work. For their first solo museum exhibition, Kwak presents a series of works exploring new ways to imagine and represent the human form. The show is anchored by three sculptures, each composed of a series of fragmented body parts made using a mixture of resin, metal, and other synthetic and organic materials. Cast from the artist’s own body and those of their friends and collaborators, these individual forms come together in dynamic sculptures ... More
'You think, so you can dance?' Science is on it. NEW YORK, NY.- How does an art of the body affect the mind? “Epiphany Machine,” a performance that’s also a scientific study, paints a picture of the brain on dance — onstage and in data. Two dancers move through a simple sequence of steps while wearing electroencephalography caps, which track their brains’ electrical activity. Lab technicians monitor the caps’ data on laptops. And on a large screen, kaleidoscopic projections illustrate the performers’ brain activity for the audience, in real time. Feathery fractal trees grow, branch and recede. Chains of numbers snake around in circles, turning blue, then black. It is beautiful and eerie: a pas de quatre for two dancers and their busy minds. “Epiphany Machine,” performed last month at Virginia Tech, is a product of the young field of dance neuroscience, which explores dance’s unusual brain-body connection. Sophisticated imaging technology ... More
Historic Bidding Battle for Stegosaurus Fossil Sets New Auction Record at $44.6 Million
Flashback
On a day like today, French painter Edgar Degas was born
July 19, 1834. Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 - 27 September 1917), was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draftsman, he is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half of his works depict dancers. In this image: An auction house worker poses for the photographers behind a sculpture by Edgar Degas, ahead of an auction sale in central London, Friday, June 15, 2012.
