Category: issues

“In part, this policy of promoting relationships with other fields and interest areas stems from our strategy that our alliances with other sectors is a way for us to advance our interests and our agendas, and demonstrate our value over and apart from the intrinsic value of the arts. And while those who decry that too much emphasis is placed on the value of the arts as a handmaiden to other values, and perhaps not enough emphasis on what the arts do for individuals, communities and society by just being the arts, the advance of the promotion and involvement of the arts where they intersect with other areas, and where they spur partnerships, is a genie not likely easily put back in the jar.”

Actor and writer Tania Richard: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf “is not about a dysfunctional couple who is also possibly racist. It’s not about a Black man trying to make it in academia either. Mr. Streeter’s casting of a Black actor within the time period, on a small campus with two predatory characters cannot happen unless the Black actor’s skin color is ignored, overlooked and ultimately sacrificed for the story. Theatre is not the place where minority actors need to be sacrificed. It’s been done.”

And that’s true anywhere: “It’s not just the dragon-haunted South. Everywhere I have visited or lived — in Eugene, OR; Albuquerque, NM; St. Louis, MO; Chapel Hill, NC; New Smyrna Beach, FL —
history of this sort is right at a visitor’s feet, etched into earth and rock, embodied in churches and homes, and interred in tombs.”

“When Zoe Lister-Jones decided to direct her first movie, ‘Band Aid,’ she embraced her power as the director-producer and focused on results instead of promises. She hired an all-female crew, from the cinematographer to the boom operator to the grip.”

“The question comes back to who the city is for. … Today, the measure of ‘success’ in urban development should be the rate at which democracy rather than money predominates in determining what a city is and what it should become. Activist groups around New York meet on a regular basis to insist on this. But mainstream newspaper accounts cynically reduce real estate coverage to tales about treasure hunts by a lucky few.”

The not-for-profit organization was established in 2003, “dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts.” It was started by William Kalush, who developed a love of magic from the card tricks shown to him by his father, a Marine wounded in World War II. This love of card magic turned to a love of collecting magic books, which now form a wondrous collection of over 15,000 books—some dating to over 600 years old—housed in this hidden location.

Greg Miller, who has worked at the theater for 27 years, said he was blindsided by the decision. But in retrospect, he should have have predicted changes were afoot — especially after he was told he no longer had to attend the annual board retreat. “I found it that odd since I’m the head artistic officer in an arts organization [and] I was no longer required to come speak at board meetings when my job description states that that’s required of me.”

“In today’s America of drastically reduced civic expectations, Snøhetta’s quietly brilliant reconfiguration of Times Square is an exemplar of how much can be achieved in city planning without the gigantic financial outlays and dire social displacements that typified American postwar urban renewal projects.”

It was different from the calls for “resistance” art we have been seeing in other Western countries because, this time, the existential threat being responded to was not part of out own culture; it was from outside. One could talk of a difference between “protest art” (aimed at Western-generated political problems) and “solidarity art” (designed to lift morale in the face of terrorism). And although the solidarity art is not a complaint directed at any particular state or policy, it nevertheless serves a uniting and inspiring function.

Joanna Walters visits a choreographer in Ohio who created dances based on ailing seniors’ life stories, the director of a literary center in Idaho that gives writing classes and workshops to low-income kids, an award-winning poet and novelist in New Mexico whose early-career NEA grant kept her and her husband off food stamps, and the community arts center in Florida that taught the writer of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight.