Category: people

“[Her] powerful, quietly beautiful photographs explored the lived realities of members of various marginalized groups, including women, lesbians, Latinas, the working class, overweight people, and those with learning disabilities.” (She was especially known for her nude self-portraits taken in desert landscapes.) “Long under-recognized by mainstream institutions, her work had a sudden resurgence in popularity last year thanks to her traveling retrospective and the inclusion of her work in several group exhibitions across the Pacific Standard Time program.”

He began his career as a singer/composer/arranger in the 1950s and ’60s, working with (among others) Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. “Then, in 1971, with the jazz money running thin, Dorough was asked by his boss at the advertising company where he had a day job to set the multiplication tables to music; his boss cited his children’s ability to remember Hendrix and Rolling Stones lyrics, but not their school lessons.” And so it began …

He began his career at the Boston Phoenix, went on to the San Francisco Examiner (1989-2002; he left as a result of the merger with the Chronicle), and spent seven tumultuous years (2003-2009) at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “during which he developed both a national reputation for arts criticism and more than a few foes in the St. Louis art world.”

A vast quantity of Leonardo’s notes and manuscripts survives, filled with his thoughts on such themes as the motion of water and human anatomy. But there are no intimate letters; there is no emotional self-revelation.

There are slip-ups, and then there’s the CNN Incident. “Many of the obits were filled in with text from Britain’s Queen Mother, who had died the year before, including a description of Dick Cheney as ‘the U.K.’s favorite grandmother.’ Castro was listed as ‘lifeguard, athlete, movie star,’ a description lifted from Ronald Reagan’s bio.”

He led the museum through competing curatorial arguments, staff strikes, and more, while also getting a massive expansion and a boost to the endowment. But it all began with books, and a close relative: “Mr. Oldenburg — whose older brother is the Pop Art sculptor Claes Oldenburg — was a publishing executive when MoMA hired him to run its publications department in 1969. The job allowed him to work closely with curators and artists on catalogs and books, an experience that proved critical when the board of trustees named him director three years later.”

Jaina Lee Ortiz is starring in a show about firefighters, so naturally, she “signed herself up for the firefighter’s Candidate Physical Abilities Test as soon as she landed the Station 19 role, running up flights of stairs in weighted gear, dragging a 165-pound dummy out of a building.” And going on climbing walls for “moving meditation,” of course.

When I do concerts I often give talks to students. They get them together, and I talk to them in the afternoon, and we talk about music. Not too long ago one young fellow, he said, “Tell me one thing that I can take away from this talk that I’ll remember and that’s important.” And I said, “No, I’ll give you one word.” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Independence.”

“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.”

The director of Moscow’s acclaimed Gogol Center theater, Serebrennikov has been under house arrest since last August, awaiting trial on embezzlement charges that his allies call absurd and trumped-up. Seemingly in response to the news that Serebrennikov’s latest film, Summer, will be screened in competition at the Cannes Festival next month, authorities in Moscow extended his house arrest into July.