Amiruddin Shah, 15, was spotted by a visiting ballet instructor who saw him doing backflips and cartwheels and found that his feet have “perfect arches.” Now, after less than three years of study, Shah is headed to American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Hans Breder, Who Created First-Ever Interdisciplinary Arts Program, Dead At 81
“[His] minimalist sculptures were starting to attract attention in New York when his friend Ulfert Wilke, the director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, recommended him for a faculty position at the university. Mr. Breder accepted, and began teaching an experimental drawing course in 1966. Friends threw up their hands, warning him that he was leaving the center of the artistic universe for a cultural desert. He blithely replied, ‘I will bring New York to Iowa.'”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.26.17
Art for ____________’s sake. What would you fill in?
A few weeks back I was in NYC and had the opportunity to attend a Public Forum event featuring the brilliant Jeremy McCarter … Toward the end of the evening McCarter turned to the rather large panel of activists and artists he had assembled and asked them to reflect on the phrase “Art for Art’s Sake.” There was an awkward silence. … read more
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2017-06-25
A New American Home for Italian Contemporary Art
There’s a new kid on the art block in the Hudson River Valley–Magazzino, in Cold Spring, about an hour and 45 minutes north of New York City. I went up to attend its opening on … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2017-06-26
“On Deadline with Gabe Pressman”: My Starstruck 1973 Profile of the Late Dean of NYC TV Reporters
Back in 1973, clutching a masters degree in journalism from Columbia, I decided to take the class that Gabe Pressman gave at the New School. This “indefatigable dean of New York’s television reporters” (as described … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-06-26
Monday Recommendation: A Captivating Book Of Photos
Jean-Pierre Leloir, Jazz Images (Elemental)
Jean-Pierre Leloir, who died in 2010, left a remarkable legacy of photographs from his work in the years when France was a destination for, and in a … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-06-26
Butterflies in the spotlight
Like many other major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal has started presenting special events for its subscribers. The editors approached me a few weeks ago about taking part in a theatrical event, a post-show talkback … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2017-06-26
Critic Edit DeAk, 68, Champion Of Outsider Artists
“[She] made it her mission in the 1970s and ′80s to cover art and artists overlooked by the mainstream press through the journal Art-Rite, which she helped found, and in the pages of Artforum.”
A ‘Bechdel Test’-Style Rating To Cover Gender Stereotyping
“Founded in 2003, Common Sense Media provides parents with an online rating system that suggests age-appropriate shows for children, highlighting those that underscore admirable character traits like courage, empathy and perseverance. On Tuesday it will introduce a new metric: the portrayal of gender. At its website, a symbol with the phrase ‘positive gender representations’ will appear with a film or TV show, meaning that reviewers judged it to prompt boys and girls to think beyond traditional gender roles.”
The First Female Photographer – And Her Exquisite Botanical Images
Born in 1799 in Kent, south of London, Anna Atkins “made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. … She created the first book to contain photographs.”
Is Square Dancing The World’s Whitest Dance Form? Actually, No
As early Americans adapted the country dances of Europe, African-Americans (often enslaved, alas) were right there – first as musicians, then as callers. Erin Blakemore gives us the history.
Competitive Punning: It’s Not Just A Thing, It’s An Entire Subculture, And This Guy Went Inside It
Joe Berkowitz: “Picture someone practicing for a pun competition. It’s the saddest Rocky training montage of all, isn’t it? In my case, the image entails a man firmly in his midthirties, sitting alone in his bedroom with the door shut, making puns about colors. (‘Is having the blues what made Matthew Perry wrinkle?’) The thought of my dead relatives and pets looking down from another plane of existence as I do this is mortifying.”
The First Known Poet In History – Why Have So Few People Heard Of Her? (Yes, Her)
“Though hardly anyone knows it, the first person ever to attach their name to a poetic composition is not a mystery. Enheduanna was born more than 4,200 years ago and became the high priestess of a temple in what we now call southern Iraq. She wrote poems, edited hymnals, and may have taught other women at the temple how to write. Archaeologists discovered her in the 1920s and her works were published in English beginning in the 1960s. Yet, rarely if ever does she appear in history textbooks.”
‘Sleeping Beauty’ – Why Is Such A Socially Retrograde A Ballet So Perennially Popular? Here’s Why
“Isn’t this the most royalist of all ballets? King Florestan XXIV and his queen have a daughter, you see, and the story hinges on her finding Prince Right. Dynastic succession is the name of the game. … So why is this classic danced so regularly and well across America? Is royalism merely its surface?” The answer, says Alastair Macaulay, is this: “The fairy godmothers whom the monarchs invite to the heiress Aurora’s christening in the Prologue take the drama into a new, larger dimension: pure classicism. They make this a ballet about ballet itself – ballet as a language of harmonious idealism.”