Category: people

Among the writers she worked with, first at Simon & Schuster and then at Random House, are Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ruth Reichl, Salman Rushdie, Lena Dunham, Gary Shteyngart, Allegra Goodman, Tom Rachman, and Elizabeth Strout. Says Random House editor-in-chief Andy Ward of her work, “It was like a magical transference of belief, and I’ve never seen anybody do it better. She made writers believe in themselves.” – The New York Times

Frank’s images weren’t exclusively solemn, but a person could nonetheless get lost in them, trying to figure out what was going on. – The New Yorker

“For all the achievements, one gets the sense that Gagosian still enjoys the hustle. He’s certainly in no rush to retire. He’s still signing new artists, still staging exhibitions, still offering the kinds of insights that only a lifetime spent at the highest echelon of the art world can produce.” – GQ

“[His] book, The Americans, published in this country in 1959, inspired generations of photographers, writers, filmmakers and musicians and made Mr. Frank one of the most important visual artists of the 20th century. … His images of lonely people, lonesome roads and smoldering tensions of urban life were a riposte to the honey-hued picture essays of popular magazines of the time such as the Saturday Evening Post and Life.” – The Washington Post

“Every weekday [for four decades], 650,000 commuters and visitors who jostled through the main concourse could gaze up at Kodak’s Coloramas, the giant photographs that measured 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, each backlit by a mile of cold cathode tubing, displaying … the wonders of color film.” Neil Montanus shot more of those photos than anyone else. – The New York Times

“Over a period of 15 years, from 1967 to 1982, [he] wrote some of the most brilliant and distinctive plays on the British stage. Yet he became sour and paranoid about the failure of the artistic establishment to pay him his rightful due.” – The Guardian

Sesto, writer and performer who also brought Broadway musicals to Spain with Jesus Christ, Superstar, had more than 50 pop hits go to number one on the worldwide charts. Though El País reports that he was practically forgotten in Spain, he was still beloved in the U.S., and he had a (second) farewell tour planned for next year after he released a retrospective album in 2018. – The New York Times

Nora Lum – that is, Awkwafina – is everywhere in Hollywood now, including some new Disney properties. But she got her start through fangirling actress Lucy Liu – the only visible Asian American woman in Hollywood when Awkwafina was young. (Oh, and she also got her start as a self-taught trumpet player, that traditional path to acting stardom, going to LaGuardia High School in Manhattan.) – The Guardian (UK)

Toledo’s art met social activism at every turn. For instance, “in December 2014, from his studio in Oaxaca, Mexico, he made a series of kites adorned with portraits of the ’43,’ or the 43 college students who were missing — disappeared allegedly by criminal and state forces in the neighboring state of Guerrero that year.” – The New York Times

“[She] overcame sexist attitudes and outright hostility to earn a place on the bandstand alongside such musical stars as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.” – The Washington Post