“Dutch design company Jora Vision will use Pushkin’s works as inspiration for the 17,000-square-meter Lukomorye park, named after the mythical Slavic land in which Pushkin’s fairy tales take place. … The amusement park will consist of three zones — a palace, a city and a harbor — each based on imaginary places in Pushkin’s stories. The park will also feature a swan lake, a fairytale forest and a ‘yarmarka,’ or Russian fair market. ” – The Moscow Times
Author: Matthew Westphal
This Woman Was One Of The Very First Pioneers Of Cinema — Why Has She Been Almost Forgotten?
“[Alice] Guy-Blaché was in the room when the Lumière brothers held the first-ever cinema screening, in Paris in March 1895. By the following year, she was making her own films. And while the Lumières were still hung up on cinema as a technological spectacle – ‘Look! A train!’ – Guy-Blaché immediately saw its potential for telling stories. … As time went on, Guy-Blaché helped write the rules of this brand new medium. She incorporated now-standard techniques such as editing, primitive special effects and hand-tinted colour. She might even have invented the music video.” – The Guardian
The Social Justice Wars Come To The Quilting Community
“A usually cheery online community of quilters has been ripped apart by a sewing challenge depicting a No. 2 pencil erasing the ‘in’ from the word injustice. Some members of the National Quilt Museum’s Block of the Month Club, which gives out quilting patterns from an array of artists, objected to the January block, claiming it introduced politics into the 13,400-person group. The design was created by the Social Justice Sewing Academy, a California nonprofit loosely tied to Black Lives Matter.” – The Washington Post
Special Multi-Company Auditions Offer Too-Rare Opportunity For Nonwhite Ballet Dancers
The sessions, attended by leaders from New York City Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and Charlotte Ballet, were held in conjunction with this past weekend’s conference of the International Association of Blacks in Dance. Reporter Ellen Dunkel sat in. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Van Gogh’s Weirdest Self-Portrait, Long Considered By Some A Forgery, Is Genuine
Doubts about the authenticity of the painting, which depicts the artist giving some serious side-eye, first arose in 1970. But research conducted jointly by the National Gallery of Norway (which owns the work) and the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has determined that the portrait is no forgery — and that it’s the only one van Gogh ever painted while hospitalized for psychosis. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Brazil’s Culture Secretary Fired After Quoting Goebbels In Video Speech
“A few minutes into the speech, secretary of culture Roberto Alvim said, ‘The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and it will be national, it’ll be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement and deeply committed to the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing.’ The line is a slightly modified version of a Goebbels quote … [and] the video also featured music from Lohengrin, Adolf Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera.” The subsequent outcry was huge, and Alvin was ousted within 24 hours. – artnet
Not just subconscious, but DNA deep
When we talk about organizations, or other forms of collective action by groups of people, we often speak as if we have dominantly conscious control. But evidence from a range of disciplines suggests that we’re not really in conscious control of much — individually or collectively. – Andrew Taylor
A dip into Mexico City street music and avant-garde
The metropolis does not have a high profile in generally accepted narrative of jazz and other progressive music, although it should: Mexico City has a thriving community of skilled, sophisticated and risk-taking musicians, having produced and attracted modernists and innovators in all the arts since at least the 1920s. – Howard Mandel
Fifty Black Dance Companies Are Converging On Philadelphia This Weekend
It’s the annual conference of the International Association of Blacks in Dance, which was started 32 years ago by Philadanco founder-director Joan Roberts Brown. “In the mid-1980s, she started cold-calling every dance company she could identify with the word ‘Black’ in its title, to see if they were interested in getting together to talk about the challenges they faced running African-American dance companies. ‘I thought it would be six ladies in my kitchen,’ said Brown. ‘Sixty people showed up.'” This year’s attendance figure: 1,100. – WHYY (Philadelphia)
MoMA & the Nouvel Kid on the Block: Revenge of American Folk Art Museum’s Demolished Building?
It’s been 10 years since I published what seems to have been some prescient commentary about the now (belatedly) completed Jean Nouvel-designed 1,050-foot tower (known to CultureGrrl readers as The MoMA Monster). – Lee Rosenbaum