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How Liesl Tommy Carved Out A Career For Herself As Director, Tony Nominations And All

It was, in her words, “a fucking compulsion,” says Tommy, a mixed-race native of Cape Town who came to Massachusetts with her family at age 15. “I believed the lie that the reason that there weren’t more of us [directors of color] working was because they didn’t believe we were qualified. So I was like, ‘Here I am! Here are the reviews, here’s the sales, here’s the work.'”

In A Florid Suit, Collector Sues Jeff Koons For Not Delivering

In the 53-page complaint that includes lines that reference Shakespeare (“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”) and that are almost Dickensian, New York litigator Aaron Richard Golub charges, “Behind the ostensible façade of Jeff Koons’ art world triumphs and record-breaking auction prices . . . lurks a well-oiled machine, more specifically an established, archaic System as old as the hills applied to the art world to exploit art collectors’ desire to own Jeff Koons sculptures.

Collecting All The Music Written In Nazi Concentration Camps

“Jewish Italian musicologist and pianist Francesco Lotoro has devoted his life to unearthing thousands of songs and scores written during the Holocaust. … Lotoro has catalogued symphonies, operas, scores and songs written on everything from coal sacks to toilet paper and by anyone who composed it in the captivity of a concentration camp: Jews, gypsies, prisoners-of-war. He has collected more than 8,000 pieces of music, with the goal of both preserving them for posterity and repairing a ‘gap’ in music history, a time when innumerable composers were murdered in the Holocaust.”

Ohio Arts Funding ED Steps Down In “Challenging” Climate

Cuyahoga Arts and Culture CEO and executive director Karen Gahl-Mills has resigned, effective June 7, according to a press release sent this morning, April 18.  In a challenging atmosphere of funding cuts, the leader of one of the nation’s largest public funders of the arts became embattled on several fronts: first in an attempt to address racial inequity in grantmaking to individual artists, and subsequently by  choosing to  significantly reduce operating support to nonprofit organizations all at once, rather than gradually, in the hope of keeping grant amounts stable for a period of years despite a projected continual decline in cigarette tax revenue.

Solresol, The 19th-Century Invented Language Based On Music

“Jean-François Sudre, a music teacher in 19th-century France, … [had a] vision of a universal language [that] transcended linguistic boundaries. From written and spoken word to melody, gesture, number, and even color, there are few ways that one can’t express Solresol, the language that Sudre spent more than three decades developing. But after his death in 1862, it was largely forgotten. Fittingly, the global connections made possible by the digital age have forged a 21st-century life for Solresol.”

A New Boom In Ceramic Art

Call them potters, ceramicists, or clay sculptors, but there are getting to be more of them, amateur and professional – and their work is fetching higher prices. Reporter Amy Fleming looks at how the trend has developed and the reasons for it.

The Difficult Birth Of The Tate Modern

“The Tate briefly flirted with the idea of splitting in two and setting up an entirely separate Museum of Modern Art, inspired by the success of MoMA in New York. This was in the early 1990s, before the gallery decided to remain a single institution with two London venues: Tate Britain and Tate Modern. The behind-the-scenes efforts of Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director from 1988 and 2017, to create Tate Modern are revealed in the gallery’s trustee minutes for 1991-92.”

‘Disney For A Despot’: How Saddam Hussein Turned The Ruins Of Babylon Into A Propaganda Vehicle

“For Saddam, the ruined city of Babylon had always held a special fascination. He ordered an ambitious reconstruction of the city’s walls, costing millions of dollars at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. … When archaeologists told him that ancient kings like Nebuchadnezzar had stamped their names on Babylon’s bricks, Saddam insisted that his own name be stamped on the modern bricks used in the reconstruction. … In 1981, Babylon was where celebrations took place to commemorate the first anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Iran, with officials using the slogan, Nebuchadnasar al-ams Saddam Hussein al-yawm (yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein).”

Marcia Hafif, Painter Of Exuberant Monochromes, Dead At 89

“By the mid-1960s, it was assumed in some circles that all of the possibilities for painting were exhausted – that the medium had, more or less, died. But some painters pushed back against that idea, arguing that painting could reset itself, and one was Marcia Hafif. … [She] was overlooked by many art institutions for much of her career, only to be recently rediscovered and hailed as one of the essential painters working during a time when her chosen medium was considered highly unfashionable.”