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    Irish Dance for All Levels, All Bodies, All Genders

      March 15, 2024
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    Under the multicolored lights of a Brooklyn pub on a recent Monday night, a small crowd skipped and swung in circles, scrambling to keep up with the tempo of an Irish reel. Some were seasoned professionals; others were dipping a toe into Irish social dancing for the first time.

    People came close to colliding as they advanced and retreated in rows of four, hands linked, or spun with partners in the tightly packed space. A formation that was supposed to resemble a square, with one couple stationed neatly on each side, wound up looking more like a wavy half-circle. Faces were flushed with confusion and joy.

    In Irish dance, a form known for its upright posture and exacting rhythmic footwork — as well as its culture of high-pressure competition — precision is prized. But perfection is beside the point at Gayli, a series of L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly ceili classes in March at Mary’s Bar, a queer Irish pub on the border of Greenpoint and East Williamsburg. (The Irish word “ceili,” pronounced KAY-lee, refers to a social gathering with dance and music; Gayli is an affectionate play on words.)

    “It’s pure chaos, in the best way possible,” said Rocco Lujan, a bartender at Mary’s who can be found bopping along to the music while pulling a pint. “It brings a lot of goodness to the space.”

    Hosted by Brooklyn Irish Dance Company, a women-led troupe founded in 2018, Gayli is open to anyone who wants to join; picking up the steps is secondary to mingling and having a good time. At recent sessions, the demographic skewed young, the room full of people in their 20s and 30s who had answered the event flyer’s call: “All Levels & All Bodies Welcome!”

    In a tradition with stringent rules and customs, including many that reinforce a gender binary, Gayli offers more than just fun. It offers a kind of freedom, an invitation to show up as your full self, that’s not always guaranteed in Irish dance, especially for L.G.B.T.Q. dancers.

    “There’s absolutely no judgment of body, sexuality, gender, anything,” said KJ Campbell, 22, a transgender member of Brooklyn Irish Dance and a Gayli regular. “Everyone is here because they love to dance and hang out with other people.”

    While traditional ceili dancing has clear-cut roles for “ladies” and “gents,” the hosts of Gayli use gender-neutral language as they teach and call out the steps. They might refer to the roles as “Xs and Os,” “the tall and the small” or “the one twirling and the one being twirled.”

    Ceilis can be done socially or in Irish dance competitions, a tightly regulated world where dancers compete in categories for girls and boys, ladies and men, with corresponding expectations for costuming (far more elaborate for the ladies and girls). The Irish Dancing Commission, or An Coimisiun Le Rinci Gaelacha — the main governing body of competitive Irish dance — has an inclusive policy for transgender dancers, who may compete in the category consistent with their gender identity, although this position has not gone unchallenged.

    The first Gayli, in October, came about when Brendan Donohoe, a co-owner of Mary’s, was looking to program more live events. A sister establishment to Ginger’s in Park Slope — a lesbian bar that’s been around for more than 20 years — Mary’s opened in April 2023 with the intention of embracing “what a pub really is meant to be: a public house, a house for the public,” said Donohoe.

    Having grown up in Ireland at a time when he didn’t feel comfortable coming out — “the Catholic Church and all the rest of it,” he said — Donohoe also wanted to highlight the country’s progress on issues of L.G.B.T.Q. equality, like its referendum to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015. Mary’s is a celebration, he said, of “how far Ireland has come.”

    Brooklyn Irish Dance had done some St. Patrick’s Day gigs at Ginger’s, where they proved popular, so Donohoe asked the dancers if they had ideas for an event at Mary’s. Alexandra Owensby — a founder of the company, along with Erin O’Donnell, Mallory Silliere and Stacey Cox — thought back to the monthly ceilis she had attended growing up in Portland, Ore.

    “In high school we would choose to go Irish dance on a Friday night because we had that much fun,” she said. “I wanted to share that and create that space for my queer community.” (Outside of Brooklyn Irish Dance, Owensby performs in drag under the name Pete Zaparty.)

    Not all Irish dancers have such positive ceili associations. Campbell trained at a demanding school in the Midwest, where his teachers made transphobic jokes and pressured him into maintaining a waiflike physique, he said. He grew up competing in the girls’ categories and, as a teenager, was part of two “senior ladies” teams in figure dancing (similar to ceili dancing) that won the world championships.

    Those wins were “amazing accomplishments,” Campbell said, “but it was like dancing in a body that wasn’t yours, because it was senior ladies, and I have never felt like a lady.”

    In solo dancing, too, Campbell found the gender conventions restrictive, especially when it came to the slip jig, a dance required only in the girls’ or ladies’ competitions. Known for its lilting grace, it didn’t appeal to Campbell. “I never want to do a slip jig again,” he said, laughing.

    Gender in Irish dance has been in the public spotlight lately. In December, at the southern regional Irish dancing championships in Dallas, a 14-year-old transgender girl competed in the girls’ category and won, qualifying for the world championships. She faced a wave of ridicule online. A petition from a group called Concerned Irish Dance Teachers, Adjudicators, Parents and Dancers began to circulate, as did a counter-petition, led by the dancer Gabrielle Siegel, each gathering thousands of signatures. In response, the Irish Dancing Commission ruled that it would uphold its inclusive policy on transgender competitors.

    “Seeing this, it only reinforced what’s important for us as a company,” said O’Donnell, a founder of Brooklyn Irish Dance who also runs her own school. “We’re trying to create a safe space not only for something like Gayli, but also in our main stage productions.”

    Her students sometimes lead the way. While learning ceilis in class, she said: “They’re like, ‘Why? Why does it have to be a gent and a lady?’ And we’re like, ‘You know? It doesn’t. You’re right.’ These little Brooklyn kids are so much cooler than us.”

    While Gayli appears to be the only Irish dance event of its kind in New York City, it’s part of a growing constellation of gender-inclusive folk dance gatherings around the world.

    “Queer folk dance events have been on the rise for a long while,” Nic Gareiss, a dancer and dance researcher who studies traditional arts, said in an email, citing gender-neutral ceilis in Limerick, Ireland, and queer square dances hosted by the Detroit Square Dance Society. (There are also the line-dancing and two-stepping parties of Stud Country, which calls itself “The Queer Church of Line Dance,” in California and New York.)

    In a phone conversation, Gareiss noted that L.G.B.T.Q. people have been Irish dancing for a long time but haven’t always been so visible or supported. “This is a moment where overt queer-affirming messages are being sent in Irish dance,” he said, “and that hasn’t historically been the case.”

    At Gayli, those messages are drawing new people into an often insular world.

    “Mostly what brought me here is a queer group of people and just having fun dancing,” said Kyra Miles, 23, who attended a recent session with friends. “None of us really know what we’re doing, so we’re basically goofing around and having a good time.”



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    Art Review: Three Critics on the Whitney Biennial 2024

      March 14, 2024
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    The Whitney Biennial, New York’s most prominent showcase of new American (or American-ish) art, thrives on argument: in print, in comment threads, in barrooms and sometimes in the galleries themselves. Its 81st edition opens Thursday to museum members and to the public on March 20, and it introduces a “dissonant chorus” — in the phrase of Ligia Lewis, a participating artist and choreographer — of young talents and veteran practitioners. We sent a dissonant chorus of our own to the Whitney Museum of American Art: three critics, each writing separately, on the highs and lows of the exhibition everyone will have an opinion about.

    Jason Farago

    What can the Whitney Biennial be, now, so late after the end of modernism? Is it a grand intellectual battle, or just an insiders’ chinwag? A polemic, or a party? A get-’em-while-they’re-young (or while-they’re-old-but-underpriced) market showcase, the cultural equivalent of the N.B.A. draft? An atavistic society ritual, a debutante’s ball for the M.F.A. debtset?

    Choose your own metaphor, but one thing it cannot be is a summation of where art stands in the United States in 2024. When the larger culture is rudderless, and an avant-garde will not come again, the best you can offer — or so this year’s curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, seem to say — is a cross-section with a point of view. Their biennial is small, with just 44 artists and collectives across four floors of the museum and its outdoor spaces; another two dozen will screen films in the Whitney’s theater and, for the first time, on its website. Indeed, the show is small in other ways: resolutely low-risk, visually polite, and never letting the wrong image get in the way of the right position.

    If nothing else, the show does pinpoint some fashions. Autobiography and self-disclosure are out (and stay out!). The celebratory portraiture that has gummed up our galleries over the last five years is out, too. In place of the portrait, the hottest trend is landscape, though usually as harbinger of ecological collapse (in Dionne Lee’s silent black-and-white video “Challenger Deep,” the artist’s hands hold dowsing rods in search of water) or living record of colonial ravages (in Ligia Lewis’s short film “A Plot, a Scandal,” she and Corey Scott-Gilbert wear 17th-century wigs and dance among Italian cypresses).

    Love the earth, says the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and decorate accordingly. When Iles, a veteran Whitney curator, co-organized the 2006 edition of this show, every other room had shimmering surfaces of silver and gray. Two decades on, the millennial glisten has given way to organic austerity; the dominant tones are now ocher and umber, turmeric and coffee. Dala Nasser drapes two-by-fours with bedsheets “dyed with iron-rich clay from the banks of the Abraham River” to create a makeshift temple. (The classical tradition remade from dregs and debris is a decades-old biennial staple.) Clarissa Tossin, in an overlong film shot partly in Guatemala, presents to us hand-spun brown and beige cotton whose natural dyes reflect, so its Maya weaver informs us, “the energies of the land.”

    Hard not to make the obvious diagnosis: Artists emerging today are intelligent but terrified. Exhausted by culture’s surrender to the market, badly outmatched by Silicon Valley’s image regimes, they conclude that small-scale (and museum-compliant) acts of demonstration and recalcitrance are the safest bet. This is a strategy of “cynical reason” that the art historian Hal Foster identified almost 30 years ago — a tactical ambiguity to “retain the social status of art and entertain the moral purity of critique.” We have all the answers already: Cannupa Hanska Luger abstracts a tipi from recycled fabrics and hangs it upside down, a distress signal from the world colonialism made (and you, if you find it obvious, are a bullheaded settler). Carmen Winant pastes to the wall snapshots of physicians and volunteers at abortion providers and women’s health clinics (and you, if you find the accumulation as formless as a social feed, are guilty of minimizing threats to women’s health).

    Just compare these to the art of — oh, how about Josh Kline, Ruth Asawa, Henry Taylor and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who all exhibited in the Whitney’s galleries in the last 12 months? Each made works of great beauty, great surprise, great political and social consequence, as well as a share of failures and nonstarters. But each of them got there because they risked something, forgoing the comfort of cynical reason for the danger of making something new.

    In that vein, the most compelling works in this year’s show come from two women, both in their 30s, who do not purport to have all the answers: who face the challenge of form head-on, and who embrace the freedom of art as the true act of rebellion. One is the Canadian-born New Yorker Lotus L. Kang, an artist of rare precision, whose installation “In Cascades” comprises long, broad sheets of exposed film untreated by fixing chemicals. Subtly strewed aluminum casts of leaves, roots and even anchovies lie on the floor, or else on tatami mats sheathed in sheets of pale silicone. The draped, bruised film, still light-sensitive, will streak and fog over the show’s run from the glare and humidity of the museum, while magnets and further small casts of glass tie everything together into a richly sedimented, beautifully vulnerable installation in a perpetual state of becoming.

    The other is Diane Severin Nguyen, an incisive young photographer and video artist, whose 67-minute film “In Her Time (Iris’s Version)” proposes a vibrant case study of digital-political bafflement and the hazards of projecting the present onto the past. Shot on a gigantic Chinese backlot usually used for nationalist epics, this profound, sometimes darkly comic work centers on a young actress struggling with her role in a (fictional) movie about the Nanjing Massacre, one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century; Nguyen also intercuts behind-the-scenes phone footage of the actress-playing-the-actress, until history, cinema, propaganda and selfie opportunities are just a hall of mirrors. She understands that to work through past crimes and present inequities takes much more than sloganeering, and that our speculative visions of resistance and renewal might serve the dominant order quite fine.

    Travis Diehl

    Does art show you what you want to see, or frame what you don’t? Is it a mirror or a window? Three flickering neon signs on metal stands in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial, poised at the west end of the museum’s fifth floor, crystallize this question.

    The title of the 2024 piece, by Demian DinéYazhi’ — a Navajo artist, poet and activist — summarizes their imperative text: “we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation.” The sentences face the Hudson piers through the building’s tall windows; you see the letters mirrored in the glass, you can walk around the signs and read them, but it seems like the work’s intended audience is waiting at a stoplight on 11th Avenue or jogging along the waterfront: the world out there.

    From the ground, though, looking up, the work is a glowing, cherry smudge — the idea of a sign, but illegible. And what could be the most incendiary political declaration in this biennial — pertinent to what the artist, on the wall text, calls “Indigenous resistance movements” as well as human crises around the globe — feels buffered and small. A huge statement in tiny letters. It’s emblematic of a show that can’t seem to decide who or where its audience is, who needs to hear its message, or whether it should have a message at all.

    [Update: an official at the Whitney initially said in response to questions about the artist’s intent that the work had been conceived in 2023, before the current conflict in Gaza, and was a reflection on “Indigenous resistance movements” cited in the wall text. Since then, it emerged that a handful of the flickering letters across all three signs can be discerned to spell out “Free Palestine.” The Whitney said Wednesday evening that officials had not known about the hidden message when the work was installed.]

    The Whitney Biennial once showcased the current state of art. Now, the internet does that. But as recent biennials’ knack for controversy proves, the show still registers the cultural and civil mood of its self-selecting audience. This year, with political strife crackling in the air (but was there ever a peacetime biennial?), the art feels mostly riskless. It’s careful. It’s quiet, often delicate. The artists and collectives have lots of space, and many have their own rooms. The world outside is combative and chaotic — if art is your refuge, this biennial is for you.

    It will also appeal to those who want to hear from marginalized voices, an area where museums are making up for lost time. (Even including the film program, there will be far more white men reviewing this biennial than are in it.)

    And, if you like, it will affirm your beliefs about the evils of racism and colonialism. This speaks to our antagonistic culture of book bans, anti-queer legislation and fearmongering politicians — no wonder folks withdraw into insular conversations with like minds. Past biennials used art like a window. This show tends to be a mirror.

    Should art comfort? A tense installation by the Los Angeles artist P. Staff, directly off the sixth-floor elevators, ensnares visitors beneath toxic yellow light, an orange net and a sizzling electrified strip (a safe distance above their heads). Nearby, a sculpture by the MacArthur fellow Carolyn Lazard, of Philadelphia, in their second biennial appearance, consists of actual mirrors: a small maze of chrome medicine cabinets standing on the floor. The piece addresses you, the viewer, as someone with a body — probably one too tall to see your face in it. These works ask, “Are you comfortable?” and don’t expect you to say yes.

    Should art entertain? Nikita Gale, of Los Angeles, contributes a modified baby grand player piano, centered in a carpeted gallery, whose hammers don’t strike the strings. The keys, stripped of ivory, jerk up and down with rhythmic thumps and taps, plonking out the jaunty rhythms of (I think) Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Spotlights in the room dim and brighten out of sync with the song. It’s a somber instrument — coy and elegiac, an eerie portrait of the musician or artist, conspicuous because of their absence.

    Should art confront? It can be powerful for a work to imply the presence of you, the viewer, abstractly — through common experiences like physical space, rather than relatable imagery. Charisse Pearlina Weston of New York offers a sculpture consisting of six thick sheets of smoked glass suspended from the rafters with steel cable, an austere plane angling over visitors’ heads. The sculpture suggests transparency and solidity, filtering both sight and movement — the material, corporate and slick, is a boundary you’re not meant to cross.

    You will have a much different, even politically charged, experience of these works if you study the wall labels. You’ll learn that Gale’s piano piece means to question the limits of intellectual property, and that Lazard makes work about illness and accessibility. According to the Whitney’s text, Weston’s gray panes were inspired by a planned protest by C.O.R.E. to block access to the New York World’s Fair in 1964 — an abstraction of Black refusal. I like the piece because it feels like it could squish me, the way the world could — because it’s both human-made and unrelatable. The museum’s attempts to help viewers orient themselves according to the works’ intentions, or social causes, feel belittling.

    Other moments in the show find more aesthetic ways of framing the world outside: Lotus L. Kang’s installation of slowly fogging sheets of light-sensitive film drape from the ceiling, reacting to the ambient light, space and time of the exhibition. Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s crumbling wall of tree resin mixed with plant and animal debris absorbs gravity and sun, and is already sagging; Holly Herndon and her partner Mat Dryhurst’s A.I. project generates figures with versions of Herndon’s signature orange braids and bangs, a pleasantly weird experiment in narcissism.

    For a moment of reflection, though — in the meditative sense — I recommend the east end of the fifth floor. There, a mesmerizing video projection by Dionne Lee, of Columbus, Ohio, in which two hands pilot dowsing rods through tall grass, has a luxurious amount of floor space (and two sofas) to itself. The city stirs outside the high windows, the rich piano and deep vocals from a nearby installation bleed through the wall, and the pointers in the video twist and roll like antennae. Here, at least, artists are tired of making declarations. They’re searching, yearning for a new language.

    Martha Schwendener

    When the artists and collectives selected for the Whitney Biennial were announced in January, next to most of the artists’ names, in parentheses, were gender pronouns. I started reading the list — and immediately got distracted. (Remember when it was the medium that was paraded: “sculptor,” “painter,” “performance artist”?) This, of course, is among the most fraught topics of the moment. In a stroke of perfect cosmic fate, Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” which details authoritarian responses to current gender debates around the globe, even drops the day before the biennial opens to the public.

    I was prepared, then, for a biennial in which identity was showcased, and the curators have indeed set out to celebrate the work of Black, L.G.B.T.Q., Indigenous, disabled, marginalized and overlooked artists. The results are mixed. But first, the art.

    The best works here, for me, are film and video, followed by sculpture and trailed significantly by painting. Some of the standouts in the video category are Tourmaline’s six-minute elegiac and playful meditation memorializing the transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson. You step off the fifth-floor elevator and the first thing you see is an arch leading to Tourmaline’s video.

    Nearby is the Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin’s wonderful video installation with people playing 3-D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments and the terracotta-colored instruments themselves displayed on the wall to this space. The juxtaposition of instruments with life and music in them, compared to those in nearby cases, treated as static objects and artifacts, is a great illustration for how colonized bodies and cultures themselves are treated.

    The Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo has made a watery, poetic exploration of Indigenous cosmologies, while Dominican-born Ligia Lewis’s video, shot in Rimini, Italy, is more hard-hitting. The camera gazes up at the cypress trees in that town, but the video considers how place and philosophical humanism are connected — particularly, in her words in the wall text, “Eurocentric ideas of (white) Man’s dominion over the land.”

    Isaac Julien’s masterful video and sculpture installation is a highlight of the show. It remakes the dialogue between the Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke and the collector-philanthropist Albert C. Barnes, and there is an absorbing discussion of how Europeans and Americans viewed African sculpture — and the responses of Black versus white artists and collectors to such objects.

    Sculpture here tends toward monumentality and is often relegated to the outskirts of the exhibition. Some of the best works include Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s block of shifting, pre-fossilized amber, embedded with plants and even typewritten documents, suggesting both natural and cultural elements in an unstable state. Torkwase Dyson has taken over an outside terrace on the fifth floor with two arching black behemoths you can climb and sit on. Dyson has been working in a late-minimalist vein for a couple of decades, and her ideas of Blackness and abstraction in physical spaces, including the vast city stretching out before you on the terrace, resonate through this work.

    On a smaller scale, Jes Fan’s upright sculpture remakes Isamu Noguchi’s modern biomorphism — using fiberglass and CT scans of his own body. Holes are also burrowed for viewers to peek into the gallery wall, suggesting art as a living organism and providing a weird element in an exhibition that is largely lacking in weirdness. Meanwhile, Rose B. Simpson’s totemic figures made with ceramics and even animal hides hark back to Pueblo pottery and matrilineal Indigenous culture.

    Where the show falls short, in my estimation, is painting — ironically one of the most robust areas of contemporary art. Nonetheless, some standouts are here, including Takako Yamaguchi’s curious and colorful graphic abstractions, as well as Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s large canvases, which mix the Black figure and animals with drippy gestural abstraction, and Suzanne Jackson’s painterly skins, made with gel medium, suspended from the ceiling.

    After the rise of installation art in the ’80s and ’90s, large-scale installations have become a mainstay. The best one here, for me, is Pippa Garner’s layout of photographs, photocopies and other ephemera tacked onto wood paneling, which stretches along most of the third floor. Here, she tracks, with sly humor and intelligence, her gender transition in the midst of post-World War II consumerist culture and the idea that the body is “just another product.”

    So how does the identity focus play out? The catalog names a lot of exemplary thinkers around this nexus — including Saidiya Hartman, whose idea of Black enslaved bodies as “abstract” chattel obviously ripples back toward art and its obsessions — and the curators say they are aiming toward “destabilized identities.”

    That’s not always what’s happening in the galleries, though. There is a bit too much predictability — the A.I. transfer prints of work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst pale in comparison to the wild inventions you see any day on social media — and I would like to see identity scrambled a lot more. For instance, what if the curators had invited an Indigenous person making A.I. works instead of the stereotypical references to tribal arts? What if a feminist’s vaginal allusions were ditched for neon signage?

    The message conveyed is that you have to conform to distinct identity stereotypes rather than subvert them to succeed in the art world, which artists have railed against for decades.

    Don’t get me wrong: This is a well-researched, well-intentioned, beautifully installed, if sedate, edition of the biennial. We all need a rest in this moment of upheaval and change, when being a person can feel as complex as creating an artwork. But as the trans activist and legal adviser Stephen Whittle has pointed out, we’re moving “into a new world in which any identity can be imagined, performed, and named.” The next step, of course, is a world in which no demarcating “identities” are needed at all.

    Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing
    Member previews, March 14-18. Open to the public, March 20-Aug. 11. Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600; whitney.org.

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    The Architect of Our Neoliberal Hell

      March 13, 2024
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    Years later, it still seems unbelievable. A designer is tapped to build a grand public structure, with a budget of $75 million, as the centerpiece of a Manhattan real estate project. As he works, the cost rises above $150 million—more than the annual expenses of the Whitney Museum, more than the price of an F-35 fighter jet, more than any artist before could ever possibly hope to have at their command. Eventually, it is said to climb further, to $200 million, with some landscaping added.

    The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some 150 feet) into the sky. In 2018 the designer offers a wan explanation: “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bullshit, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg,” he tells the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.

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    Then, early 2019, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel opens to the public in Hudson Yards, the crowning jewel of a complex of towering corporate offices, luxury apartments, luxury stores, and a luxury hotel developed by a luxury gym chain. Its pristine copper-colored cladding gleams in the sun. It looks alien and a little menacing, like a digital creation clicked and dragged from a computer screen into real life. It is vacuous in its celebration of vertigo-inducing capital and private ambition, and even though it closes to visitors not long thereafter, in May 2021, it has to rank as one of the defining architectural projects—one of the defining artworks—of the era.

    Miraculously, this managed not to derail the 53-year-old Englishman’s career. Gargantuan, eye-catching Heatherwick schemes continue to crop up around the world. Boris Johnson has compared him to Michelangelo. Diane von Furstenberg has termed him a “genius.” For engineer Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod,” he is “a creative genius.” Billionaire Stephen Ross, the man behind Hudson Yards, is said to view him as “the ultimate genius.”

    It is no crime for artists and designers to be adored by the wealthy and powerful, of course. It’s essential. (Michelangelo certainly knew this.) But Heatherwick has become the go-to artist of the ultra-rich. Why?

    Rolling Bridge, 2002, in London.

    Photo Steve Speller/Courtesy Thomas Heatherwick Studio, London

    ONE ANSWER IS THAT Heatherwick really can make punchy spectacles—edifices that become landmarks that patrons tout with easy pride. An early success was the Rolling Bridge, conceived for a London office and retail development where it was installed in 2004. More a kinetic sculpture than a bridge, it unfolds grandly from an octagon into a now-nonfunctional 36-foot-long footbridge over a canal in Paddington Basin. (Comprising thousands of complex moving parts that stopped working in 2021, it may never be repaired.) A few years later, his UK Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, covered with 60,000 thin acrylic rods, was a shimmering Op art tour de force. And his similar starburst of a sculpture for Manchester, England, the nearly 200-foot-tall B of the Bang (2005), emanated the thrill of a vision brought improbably to life. Sadly, it was removed because parts of its 180 spikes kept falling off. Even the lobbying of Antony Gormley, another lover of bombast, could not save it.

    But these are essentially razzle-dazzle, one-note pleasures, perfect examples of Ed Ruscha’s old line about the reaction that bad art elicits: “Wow! Huh?” Whereas good art draws those same words in reverse. Heatherwick’s 2007 Spun Chair, rendered in polished copper and stainless steel, could be a mascot for his methods: a sleek chair (picture a thread spool pinched at the center) that sitters can tilt at an angle and spin in a complete circle. It’s fun for a few spins.

    Heatherwick’s competitor (and collaborator on a 2022 Google building in California), Bjarke Ingels, nailed it when he told the New Yorker: “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work. An element of steampunk, almost.” He comes bearing showy designs that aim to be icons for a development, a neighborhood, a city. A prime example is his 2017 plot with Mayor Johnson to build a $260 million Garden Bridge—a tree-filled pedestrian walkway—across the River Thames in London, scrapped after having sucked up $48 million in public funds.

    Digital rendering of Garden Bridge, 2013, in London.

    Courtesy Arup, New York

    The Heatherwick phenomenon is not a tale of gentrification. That work has usually been done by the time he gets the call. Long ago, white-cube galleries in West Chelsea and the rent-spiking High Line paved the way for Hudson Yards, which was helped along by almost $6 billion in tax breaks enacted by dubious rezoning that made Harlem, Central Park, and Hudson Yards all one low-employment district (never mind that only one of these had people living in it: the latter is a former train yard). He is, instead, an exemplary architect for a time when cities have become unbearably expensive and the wealthiest do not believe they should have to pay taxes.

    HEATHERWICK, HOWEVER, positions himself as a man of the people. In his new manifesto of a book, running nearly 500 pages, he goes on the attack against the past century of design. “Some architects see themselves as artists,” he writes in Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. “The problem is, the rest of us are forced to live with this ‘art.’” He inveighs against buildings that are “boring”—too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, serious. Some 50 pages are devoted to a diatribe against Le Corbusier, “the god of boring,” whose theories “gave permission for repetitive order to utterly overpower complexity,” which Heatherwick prizes.

    “Modernist architects think boring buildings are beautiful,” Heatherwick grouses. Their minimal, theoretically loaded work has lent cover for the cheap, knockoff stuff that sits alongside it. Against these elites and their “emotional austerity,” their buildings that “make us stressed, sick, lonely, and scared,” he adopts the language of the populist politician. “I am going to make a promise to you,” he writes in a lightly condescending letter to the “passerby” that closes Humanize. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to this war. But I need you … to join us. Our aim is modest: we just want buildings that are not boring!” And if boringness sounds difficult to measure, do not worry: Heatherwick Studio has made a “Boringometer” to determine how interesting a structure’s shapes and textures are, on a scale of 1 to 10.

    The obvious irony is that many Heatherwick structures read like desperate, failing attempts not to be boring, via some whiz-bang trick. They illustrate Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick—a device induced by late capitalism that falls flat for appearing to work both too little and too hard. Bulbous, grenade-shaped windows monotonously line his 2021 Lantern House apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while his newly opened 1,000 Trees mall in Shanghai features, yes, 1,000 trees, each sitting on its own mushroomlike column high in the air around the stepped building. It suggests a videogame environment, as do renderings for his overwrought multifarious proposal for an island in Seoul’s Han River.

    Shanghai Expo 2010 Uk PavilionShanghaiChina, Architect: Thomas Heatherwick Studio, 2010, 'Seed Cathedral', Uk Pavilion, Thomas Heatherwick Studio, Shanghai Expo 2010, China, Panoramic Exterior Day Time View Of The Structure On Site At The Shanghai Expo With A View Out Over The City Skyline (Photo by View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

    View of Seed Cathedral, the UK pavillion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

    Photo View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty

    While purporting to speak on behalf of everyday people, Heatherwick is careful to do nothing that could actually offend the ultra-rich. In a revealing passage in Humanize, he praises Antoni Gaudí’s curvaceous Casa Milà in Barcelona for “wanting to fill us up with awe and break us out in smiles.” Says Heatherwick: “Even though this building was made to provide high-end apartments for wealthy people, I believe it is a gift.” We should be grateful.

    Heatherwick’s pitch sounds precisely attuned to the ears of politicians who are disinclined to pursue projects that might actually benefit the public at a time of government austerity (forget about the emotional strain). Self-styled technocrat Michael Bloomberg blurbed Humanize, praising it as “a powerful prescription for buildings that put the public first.”

    “Our most vulnerable people live in the most boring buildings,” Heatherwick writes on a page that is illustrated, bizarrely, by the burned-out Grenfell Tower, where 74 people died in 2017. “Why should absence of boredom be a luxury good?” Heatherwick, it should be noted, has not pursued any large-scale, or affordable, housing projects that I am aware of.

    Making buildings and cities that are more hospitable, livable, and generous is a noble pursuit, but the designer of a cold and imposing nine-figure stairway to nowhere does not feel like the right man for the job—not least because he and his developer-patron declined to install safety features after a series of suicides there. (Following the fourth, they finally closed it; nets are reportedly being tested.) Standing below it, I do not feel that I am receiving a gift.

    Spun Seats, 2007, at the London Design Festival at Southbank Centre, 2010.

    Photo Susan Smart/Courtesy Thomas Heatherwick Studio, London

    STILL, IT IS EASY to share a common enemy with Heatherwick: boring buildings that exhibit little regard for those who use them. We all spend time in places made with little imagination and even less care. We deserve more. As he writes, “we’re richer than we’ve ever been at any point in history.” Heatherwick, making that pitch to deep-pocketed developers, has not often been able to deliver satisfying structures, but his brio should inspire everyone, whether commissioned architects or apartment renters or voters, to ask for more.

    In any case, some ideas that Heatherwick floats in his tome for creating better buildings are sensible mainstream ones that practitioners and activists do advocate, like reducing regulations and simplifying planning processes. (Such moves could also assist wealthy developers, to be sure.) But my favorite Heatherwick prescription is an eccentric one, and absolutely peak Heatherwick: “Sign buildings.” Instead of “staying in the shadows,” he says, a building’s creators should “be proudly named at eye level on the outsides of their projects.”

    “Why would anyone involved in the process of building buildings be against this?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t you be proud? Why wouldn’t you want to sign your canvas?”  

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    ÆTHER/MASS Taps 3 Collaborators for 4 New Collectibles

      March 12, 2024
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    Davy Grosemans’ ÆTHER/MASS design studio exists to create unique, experimental collaborations between designers and makers who use materials and production techniques with innovation. Akin to their other pieces, these four new objects being released today at the Collectible fair in Brussels buck trends and logic in favor of interesting works with exceptional attention to detail and finishing. By restricting each collaborative project to an edition of 12, Grosemans is afforded the focus to create experimental, one-of-a-kind, expressive works.

    “Working with skilled craftsmen is the guiding principle in my work. Despite the popularity of crafts and the involvement of many young ‘makers’ working with their hands, authentic craftsmen are scarce,” Grosemans shares. “I’m talking about individuals who have an in-depth knowledge of their materials and can deliver exceptionally high quality. Personally, I aim to think broadly, sample various aspects, and experiment across different disciplines initially. Subsequently, I can delve deeper into the matter.”

    Exposure, Aperture, Forge, and Beam each hold deeper meaning, more than can be seen in their minimalistic designs. Alongside a wooden cabinet, the new collection features first time collaborations between ÆTHER/MASS and three workshops who specialize in metal: aluminum, wrought iron, and mirror-polished stainless steel. You’ll find that each craftsman uses the metals’ properties to their favor in various ways that put its intrinsic beauty front and center.

    Exposure

    CasimirAteliers has previously worked with ÆTHER/MASS, with the Exposure cabinet the fruit of their continued collaborative efforts. Master woodworkers who specialize in solid wood furniture, CasimirAteliers’ cabinet is as complex in design as it is simple in aesthetic. The doors, well, aren’t doors at all. Rather, they’re seamlessly integrated into the cabinet’s structure, staying open and losing their expected function of closing to conceal. Are they lending an ear or are thy threatening to tell your secrets? You decide.

    tall wood cabinet

    Exposure

    tall wood cabinet

    Exposure

    detail of tall wood cabinet

    Exposure

    detail of tall wood cabinet

    Exposure

    square metal coffee table with tabletop perforations

    Aperture

    The Aperture table, created in collaboration with the artisans of Alton, subtracts material to generate detail in its solid 30mm-thick aluminum slab rather than adding more. It remains fully functional, with the table’s captivating surface punctuated with a pattern of 32 circular perforations removed using water jets. The aluminum byproduct doesn’t go to waste – it’s stacked to become Aperture’s table legs.

    square metal coffee table with tabletop perforations

    Aperture

    square metal coffee table with tabletop perforations

    Aperture

    detail of square metal coffee table with tabletop perforations

    Aperture

    detail of square metal coffee table with tabletop perforations

    Aperture

    metal candelabra

    Forge

    Dujardyn’s master blacksmiths meld the physical strength of steel with the power of fire to bring Forge to life. The refined candelabra with a tactile surface reveals its own process of creation with clear signs of human touch. The four candles in a broad placement – literally and figuratively – symbolize the fire from which the artifact itself is forged.

    metal candelabra

    Forge

    illuminated metal candelabra

    Forge

    metal candelabra

    Forge

    detail of metal candelabra

    Forge

    slim metal floor lamp

    Beam

    Another collaboration with Alton, the Beam Lamp slices through space with its mirror-polished stainless steel blade and arching glow in its wake. The lamp’s base, which is reminiscent of a serif, gives Beam a sculptural form that’s as valuable as its utility. This unconventionality is what makes Beam Lamp stand out from most others, an unexpected but welcome visual aesthetic.

    slim metal floor lamp

    Beam

    detail of slim metal floor lamp

    Beam

    detail of slim metal floor lamp

    Beam

    illuminated slim metal floor lamp

    Beam

    To learn more about the four latest collaborative pieces from ÆTHER/MASS, visit aethermass.com.

    Photography by Jean Van Cleemput.

    Kelly Beall is Director of Branded Content at Design Milk. The Pittsburgh-based writer and designer has had a deep love of art and design for as long as she can remember, from Fashion Plates to MoMA and far beyond. When not searching out the visual arts, she's likely sharing her favorite finds with others. Kelly can also be found tracking down new music, teaching herself to play the ukulele, or on the couch with her three pets – Bebe, Rainey, and Remy. Find her @designcrush on social.



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    4 Pioneering Women Artists Everyone Should Know 

      March 11, 2024
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    ✓Showcase your talent and win big in Artists Network prestigious art competitions! Discover competitions in a variety of media and enter for your chance to win cash prizes, publication in leading art magazines, global exposure, and rewards for your hard work. Plus, gain valuable feedback from renowned jurors. Let your passion shine through – enter an art competition today!

    In observation of Women’s History Month — as we celebrate the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society — we want to call out five historical women artists who may not have as much name recognition as, say, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, or Frida Kahlo, but who also offer abundant inspiration as artists and creative pioneers. 

    Emily Carr (Canadian, 1871–1945) 

    Canada informed Emily Carr’s work, but France influenced her style. For although her commitment to the native people and forests of British Colombia never wavered, her approach to the subject matter changed dramatically after she spent time abroad. Dissatisfied with the conventional painting approaches she found at home, she studied for a brief period at the San Francisco School of Art and then in England. But it was a sojourn in France, where she was introduced to the work of the Fauves, that most influenced her work. 

    Although you can see the influences of Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and abstraction on her work, it was the Fauves who had the most dramatic impact on Emily Carr’s painting, as seen in House Posts, Tsatsinuchomi B.C. (1912; watercolor over graphite on wove paper, 22×30), a work in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.  

    Inspired by the French artists’ intensely vivid color, Carr exchanged her watercolors for a time for oils and worked directly from life, without sketching, simplifying forms to represent the French landscape. Although she ultimately returned to watercolor, her work had taken a bold, new turn that shocked and alienated former patrons and students when she returned home to Victoria, British Columbia. Frustrated by the response, Carr gave up on her painting career for more than a decade. She opened a rooming house, which she named “House of All Sorts,” bred sheepdogs, and made crude pottery to make ends meet. 

    Strong-willed and independent, Carr challenged the conventional mores of late-Victorian society. She took extended trips — often alone — into the forest, painting and communing with nature and visiting the First Nations peoples who lived there. Dating back to 1898, these visits inspired her well-known collection of totem pole paintings.  

    In 1927, Carr’s stalled career was revived when the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, included her work in the exhibition “Canadian West Coast Art — Native and Modern,” where she met the Group of Seven. Impressed by her work, the Seven invited Carr to exhibit in their next show and thus began her valuable association with the group, who later dubbed her “The Mother of Modern Arts.” 

    A few years before her death, in 1945, Carr was asked what the most outstanding events of her life had been. She responded, “Work and more work … loving everything terrifically.” 

    — Written by Kelly Kane 

    Gwen John (Welsh, 1876–1939) 

    Gwen John gave up much of what was expected of an early twentieth-century woman to become an artist. She left her homeland, isolated herself from friends, and never married or had children. Although she regularly exhibited her work in Paris and London, she became progressively more reclusive, painting her subjects — solitary women, empty rooms, and her cats — with single-minded focus. Writing of herself, John once said, “I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world — and yet I know it will. … I think I will count because I am patient.” 

    Born in Wales, John trained at London’s Slade School of Art before heading off to study painting with James Abbott McNeill Whistler, in Paris. From Whistler she learned to use a limited color palette and to concentrate on subtle tonal variations — techniques that infused her work with a melancholic, meditative mood. In 1903, she left England again, embarking on a walking tour to Rome with a friend. They only got as far as Toulouse, France. John soon settled in Paris, never again to return to England.  

    Gwen John’s portrait Chloe Boughton Leigh (ca 1907; oil on canvas, 23×15), part of the collection of Tate Britain, was likely painted in the artist’s attic room and studio at 85 rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris, where she was living in 1907.

    Though it didn’t occur in her lifetime, John’s hopes for her work ultimately came true. The artist’s work appears in some of the world’s top public collections, including Tate Britain, in London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Her brother, Augustus — once the more famous painter of the two — predicted just such a reversal of fate, remarking, “in 50 years’ time, I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.” 

    In Paris, John’s life was not easy: She faced near-constant illness and financial peril, but she made acquaintances of the leading artists of the time, including Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Pablo Picasso. At the beginning of her artistic career, she earned a meager income as an artist’s model — an occupation that led her to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, with whom she quickly fell in love. Their passionate affair was short-lived, but John flooded Rodin with letters until his death more than a decade later. 

    John left Paris in 1911 for the quiet suburb of Meudon, where she found solace in the Roman Catholic Church and painted portraits of nuns in the town’s humble convent. In later years, she traveled to the northern French countryside in search of rural models. For her last trip to the rugged Brittany coast, John packed her will and burial instructions. She died there as she’d lived, independent and alone, leaving behind the legacy of an artist who’d sacrificed much for her life’s work — work that is recognized today for its singular artistic vision. 

    — Written by Tamera Lenz Muente 

    Rosalba Carriera (Venetian; 1675–1757) 

    Rosalba Carriera assumed an essential role in the history of pastel painting. In the early 18th century, she transformed pastel from a sketching tool to a medium of significance, just in time to help initiate the French rococo style. Her portraits, genial in spirit, deft of touch, and executed with a feel for luxuriant textures, made her famous throughout Europe. Scores of poems were dedicated to her; one sonnet concludes, “your colors have given Light to the world.” 

    A Young Lady With a Parrot (1725–35; pastel on blue laid paper mounted on laminated paper board, 23.75×19.7), by Rosalba Carriera, doesn’t fit the conventional portrait mode. The subject is a bit risqué, the bird likely a symbol of lust. Although the model’s identity is unknown to us, the portrait may represent a real person, depicted with imaginative flourish and showing Carriera’s mastery of her medium.

    Carriera was born in Venice and started her career painting miniature portraits on ivory. She became a protégé of Venetian artist Antonio Maria Zanetti; her pastel portrait of him went the eighteenth-century equivalent of viral, initiating her international reputation. In 1705, Carrier was elected to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. The academy’s rationale stated, in part, “(such an action) runs counter to our statutes that have been disobeyed in order to (accommodate) this foreign spinster, who is applauded everywhere and is truly a virtuosa by fame and ability.” 

    Carriera was the first female foreign painter inducted into the French Academie. She was, in effect, too good for the male-dominated art industry to ignore. The artist’s Venetian studio was a destination for visiting European aristocracy who desired to have their portraits painted. Augustus II of Poland amassed a major collection of her pastels, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI became an important patron. She visited France, where she painted every member of the royal court and befriended artist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), who sat for her as well. During her stay in Paris, Carriera had a formative effect on French rococo painting. She influenced other pastel masters, including Maurice-Quentin Delatour (1704–88) and Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–89). 

    — Written by Jerry N. Weiss  

    Elizabeth Nourse (American, 1859–1938) 

    During her career in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elizabeth Nourse was considered by many critics to be the equal, if not the superior, of her contemporary, Mary Cassatt. Like Cassatt, Nourse liked to paint mothers and children. In addition, she painted still lifes, portraits, and scenes of European peasant life influenced by her long residence in France and her exposure to the Barbizon school of art. She especially enjoyed painting festivals, religious processions and peasants engaged in everyday activities. 

    Born in Cincinnati, Nourse began her training in 1874 at the McMicken School of Design (now the Art Academy of Cincinnati), where she was recognized as one of the school’s most promising talents. Even as a student, she found work as an illustrator for magazines and brochures, giving her the opportunity to offer financial support to her parents and nine siblings. At age 21, Nourse participated in a student exhibition where one critic noted, “Unless all signs fail, or she marries and buries herself in oblivion, the world will hear more of this girl.” 

    In 1888, Elizabeth Nourse submitted La Mere / The Mother (oil on canvas, 45.5×32) to the jury of the Salon, the prestigious annual exhibition of contemporary art in Paris. The work, her first submission to the Salon, was not only accepted but was hung “on the line,” the location reserved for the most highly esteemed pictures. The piece is currently part of the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.

    Although she lived and worked successfully in Cincinnati for several years, Nourse — like many American artists of her generation — determined that her art education wouldn’t be complete until she’d studied with the great masters in Paris. So, in 1887, she and her sister, Louise, moved to Paris, where they rented a studio near the Luxembourg Gardens, and Nourse enrolled in the Academie Julian. The two sisters would travel to Ukraine, Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland, and England, where Nourse gathered new subject matter. It was during this busy period that her paintings were included in exhibitions at London’s Royal Academy, the Kunstausstellung in Munich, the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the Art Club in Philadelphia.  

    Nourse was an admirer of the work of Jean Francois Millet, one of the leaders of the Barbizon school, and associated his paintings of French peasants with the hardworking farmers of her homeland, which lent authenticity to her efforts. When critics wrote of her work, they often noted Nourse’s appreciation and respect for the character of her subjects. She didn’t resort to artificial or insincere mannerisms — as did other turn-of-the-century painters — to make them more sympathetic or appealing.  

    Throughout her career, Nourse was the recipient of numerous high honors, but perhaps the most important was the purchase, in 1910, of her interior work, Les Volets Clos (The Closed Shutters), by the French Ministry of Fine Arts for the contemporary art collection in the Musee du Luxembourg. She joined other notable American artists represented in the collection, including Homer, Sargent, and Whistler.  

    — Written by Walter Garver, 2004 

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    Two climate activists charged for pouring red powder on National Archives display of the US Constitution

      March 10, 2024
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    Two members of the environmental activist group Declare Emergency have been charged with felony destruction of government property over a 14 February action in which they poured red powder on the display case at the US National Archives in Washington, DC, that contains the US Constitution. The Archives’ rotunda was closed for several days after the action for cleaning, which cost upwards of $50,000, according to the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.

    Both suspects in the action—Donald Zepeda of Maryland and Utah resident Jackson Green—were arrested after the incident. Zepeda was released on bond. Green, meanwhile, has been ordered held in jail in DC because, in carrying out the National Archives protest, he violated the terms of a previous release.

    Earlier this year, Green was charged with damaging property of the National Gallery of Art for a November 2023 protest, during which he used red paint to write the words “Honor Them” on the wall next to Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial (1900), a monument to Black soldiers who fought in the US Civil War. After that incident, a judge had ordered Green to stay away from Washington, DC, and all public monuments and museums.

    Green and Zepeda’s cases are ongoing, and are being investigated by several agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Art Crime Team.

    According to a statement by the National Archives, the US Constitution—the 1787 document establishing the laws of the new country—was not damaged in the attack. Analysis revealed the powder that coated the case and activists to be a mix of pigment and cornstarch. Dozens of conservators were involved in the process of cleaning the sophisticated display case that houses the four-page document.

    Conservation staff members clean the case holding the US Constitution in the rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, DC, on 14 February National Archives photo by Ellis Brachman

    “The cleaning of the Rotunda and preparation to reopen it was a large, collaborative effort involving [conservators], facilities personnel and building services contractors,” Stephanie Hornbeck, a National Preservation Program Officer, said in a statement. “Approximately 30 people were directly involved, contributing an estimated total of 335 person-hours.”

    Referring to the pages of the Constitution, Hornbeck added: “They are well protected by the enclosure in separate anoxic encasements located inside of the well-sealed, robust exhibit cases.”

    A previous action by Declare Emergency targeted Edgar Degas’s 1880 sculpture La petite danseuse de quatorze ans at the National Gallery of Art. The group’s actions in Washington, DC, are the most high-profile US examples to date of “eco-vandalism”, or climate activism targeting works of art. In the past two years, high-profile actions by climate advocacy groups like Just Stop Oil have focused on famous works at some of Europe's most popular museums, including the soup-splattering of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa at the Louvre. These actions have attracted enormous media attention and prompted larger questions about the efficacy of these strategies in conveying the urgency of the current environmental moment.

    An adjacent display case at the National Archives that holds the US Declaration of Independence was a major plot point in the Nicolas Cage blockbuster film National Treasure (2004), though presumably the systems that his character, named Benjamin Franklin Gates, was ultimately able to circumvent are not based on the National Archives’ actual security apparatus.

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    Spark Art Fair Vienna Gears Up for 2024 Edition in the ‘World’s Most Livable City’

      March 9, 2024
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    This month, Spark Art Fair Vienna will return to Austria’s capital with the theme “The City in Dialogue.” The forthcoming edition will take place March 14–17, 2024, and see more than 80 galleries from roughly 20 countries representing four continents, contributing to the young fair’s stature as the leading international fair in the country. Maintaining its unique approach to exhibiting, participating galleries will present only solo shows, allowing for a more comprehensive look into each artist’s unique work and practice.

    Speaking of the new iteration of the fair, Curatorial and Advisory Board Chairs Walter Seidl and Jan Gustav Fiedler said via press release, “With the participation of a large number of renowned galleries from so many countries, we are more than living up to our motto of ‘The City in Dialogue.’ We are putting Vienna in the spotlight of contemporary art and transforming it into an international platform for dialogue. Once again, we will have both carefully selected established artists and also young, up-and-coming artists at the Marx Halle. We are particularly pleased with the high female representation, which is around 70 percent.”

    Spark Art Fair Vienna (2021). Photo: Anna Rauchenberger. Courtesy of Spark Art Fair.

    The Curatorial and Advisory Board, which also includes curators Marina Fokidis and Christoph Doswald, recently announced that Seidl and Fiedler are over the artistic direction of the 2024 edition of Spark Art Fair. Developing the motto, the team looked to the city’s ranking as the most livable city in the world according to the Global Livability Ranking—and a recognized center for national and international artists and art enthusiasts alike.

    A special highlight of Spark 2024 is the staging of a special, curated film program on the Globe theater stage within the Marx Halle. Works have been selected by gallery artists like Charim Gallery’s Scott Clifford Evans from Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński from Wonnerth Dejaco. The theater stage will also be host to a series of talks—focusing on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and diversity—offering a thought-provoking and wholistic element for visitors of the fair.

    In conjunction with the diverse and intriguing exhibitor presentations, the 2024 edition of Spark Art Fair promises to strengthen not only the fair’s standing within the regional art sphere, but the international art world as well.

    Spark Art Fair Vienna will be held March 15–17, 2024.

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    ‘Boarders’ Could Be Tubi’s First Original Hit Series

      March 8, 2024
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    In an unforgiving TV landscape where promising new scripted series are being canceled left and right, it can sometimes feel hopeless to invest time in a show that could be ― and is often very quickly ― on the chopping block, especially when it’s a streaming platform original.

    Hulu’s “This Fool,” Netflix’s “The Brothers Sun,” and Max’s “The Flight Attendant” and “Rap Sh!t” are just a few of the many streaming titles that were axed this year alone (and we’re only at the top of March). And they’re all from the major platforms.

    So it’s intriguing and maybe a little “risky” (which is industry-speak that has little to do with artistry and everything to do with Hollywood’s innovation-averse climate) for a somewhat outlier platform to dip into original programming.

    But apparently the newly rebranded Tubi, an impressively vast free platform that draws considerably less fanfare than its aforementioned counterparts, is risk-tolerant. Since 2021, it has invested in a substantial number of original titles. Most have been movies, like last year’s “Cinnamon,” starring Pam Grier; many center Black talent; and practically all fly under the radar.

    Some of that is due to a lack of quality. “Cinnamon,” for instance, is among myriad C-level and D-level original titles on the platform. But like we’ve seen before, it sometimes takes years for a platform to find its footing with original programming. Tubi’s newest series, “Boarders,” though, has all the makings to become the platform’s first original hit this year.

    Tubi, recently freshened up with a new logo, bets on itself with the promising original series "Boarders," an entertaining and thoughtful high school dramedy that fills the void left by Netflix's "Sex Education" last year.

    BBC/Studio Lambert Media Ltd.

    It is produced by Studio Lambert, a British television company, in association with All3Media International for the BBC. It premiered in the U.K. last month. Tubi has branded it as the streamer’s original series, which will premiere Friday on the platform for U.S. audiences.

    “Boarders,” written and created by Daniel Lawrence Taylor, a BAFTA nominee for 2017’s “Timewasters,” fills the void left by Netflix’s “Sex Education” in that they both center on horny high school students in the U.K. who grapple with life, love and friendships. But it’s the complexities of friendship and success that help make “Boarders” such an intriguing watch.

    That and the fact that it centers on Black students, particularly in a country that’s always had, at the very least, an awkward relationship with race. “Boarders” brings that often passive-aggressive tension right to the fore from the first episode.

    The series begins as a forked narrative, introducing the protagonists — Leah (Jodie Campbell), Jaheim (Josh Tedeku), Omar (Myles Kamwendo), Toby (Sekou Diaby) and Femi (Aruna Jalloh) — and, briefly, their home lives. They have very little in common except that they are all gifted students who have been overlooked and/or cast aside because they’re Black.

    That sets up comedic exchanges early on in the series when the quintet soon unite on the way to St. Gilberts, one of the most prestigious (and almost exclusively white) boarding schools in Britain to which they’ve landed scholarships.

    Among the many themes of "Boarders" is the commodification of Black excellence.
    Among the many themes of "Boarders" is the commodification of Black excellence.

    BBC/Studio Lambert Media Ltd.

    Despite their brilliance, there is a hitch to this new scholarship: The school administrators are scrambling to fix their image following a controversial leaked video featuring one of their students. They think Leah, Jaheim, Omar, Toby and Femi could also help them look better.

    The friends connect over the fact that they’re all struggling to navigate their parents’ and guardians’ high expectations and decide to stick together. They also recognize that they’re in a position to control the school’s fate while contending with being branded as the “charity cases.” So they cause a stir as soon as they enter the school gates.

    With a premise like that, you might think you can guess what happens in the series. Something to the effect of the protagonists experiencing one racist encounter after the next, calling out their classmates on their ignorance until something dramatic or revolutionarily occurs to conveniently upend then neatly conclude the whole story.

    And to be fair, there are a few moments that fit into some of those assumptions. Yes, the white kids are terrible and privileged. One even has the caucacity to say “I’ve never seen a Black penis before” when she meets Jaheim.

    Yes, Leah quickly makes it her mission to have a racist artwork removed from the school walls. And, yes, by the end of the season, some tensions are more or less resolved. None of that is where the show actually thrives.

    "Boarders" introduces audiences to a brassy, horny and interestingly imperfect group of Black protagonists — and makes a good case for why it deserves another season.
    "Boarders" introduces audiences to a brassy, horny and interestingly imperfect group of Black protagonists — and makes a good case for why it deserves another season.

    BBC/Studio Lambert Media Ltd.

    Rather, it’s the characters and performances — including Taylor’s role as the protagonists’ counselor — that prevent “Boarders” from being rudimentary or one-dimensional.

    Together with co-writers Ryan Calais Cameron, Emma Dennis-Edwards and Yemi Oyefuwa, Taylor weaves a taut, six-episode season with loosely defined yet recognizable young characters that are continually shaped by new life experiences.

    They’re not all the way virtuous, as we’ve seen too often with Black characters. And they’re not flattened stereotypes, either. At times, they might even be frustrating for some audiences to watch.

    The characters are nuanced and often undercut their efforts to be the proverbial change they want to see in the world as they, for instance, oblige the objectifying white girl. Or befriend the biracial Black girl (Assa Kanoute) who initially wants nothing to do with you because you’re Black and dark-skinned. Or ditch your brown crush for your outright racist white roommate.

    Or, in the case of Taylor’s Gus, continue to guide young charges into a system of behavior that teeters on respectability politics that calls for swallowing microaggressions and, sometimes, their own pride in the process. Because not everything is that black and white.

    With little promotion, "Boarders" could potentially fly under the radar, like many other Tubi original titles. It's actually good. But will it find an audience?
    With little promotion, "Boarders" could potentially fly under the radar, like many other Tubi original titles. It's actually good. But will it find an audience?

    Simon Ridgway/BBC/Studio Lambert Media Ltd

    Much of what happens in “Boarders” highlights the natural contradictions many young Black people possess as they maneuver the lines of who they want to be, who they’re expected to be and who they actually are.

    On top of all that is ties to community — one being what they established back at home among their own, another that they created among the other Black students at St. Gilbert’s and the most complicated one with their counterparts at school.

    Made light on its feet at times with a fun and rhythmic score and grounded by the keen direction of Ethosheia Hylton and Sarmad Masud, “Boarders” is funny, human and accessible. And, most important, it’s binge-worthy, which could work in Tubi’s favor.

    Particularly considering there’s been little promotion for the series, it will be interesting to see whether American audiences will watch it, much less fall for it. Potential definitely won’t be to blame.

    “Boarders” is available to stream on Tubi on Friday.

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    ‘Past Lives’ Resonates For Immigrants Like Me

      March 7, 2024
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    Among those watching the Oscars on Sunday, there will be immigrants like me who’ll be rooting for “Past Lives,” a quiet film that shows how we mourn the ghost lives that could have been had we stayed in our homeland.

    “Past Lives,” nominated for Best Picture and Original Screenplay, resonates deeply with those of us who have left our homelands behind. The film is about Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), two deeply connected childhood friends in South Korea who are separated when one moves away. Two decades later, they’re reunited in New York and have to confront their destiny and the choices they’ve made.

    Like Nora, the Korean American main character, I also had a childhood love in my native homeland Iran before leaving and eventually finding my home in America. He was the son of one of my mother’s closest friends ― a gentle boy with a broad smile and sea-blue eyes ― and my only friend growing up. After a quick hello to his parents, we would run up to his room; it was a magical place filled with shelves of colorful Lego creations, model planes, ships and cars. We talked about the world, about our families, about big ideas of freedom and independence.

    I was as brash and opinionated as I wanted to be, not afraid of being labeled as too loud, too forward, too unladylike — something I’d been chastised for many times by my relatives. We ran around his expansive garden weaving between the cyprus trees, making each other laugh so hard we would buckle over with tears streaming down our faces. A few years later, my family moved away. I saw him a couple of times after that, but as our parents’ friendship faded, so did our visits.

    My relationship with that young boy is inextricably tied to my memories of Iran. He was the only person that made me feel alive at that tender age.

    I left Tehran with my family during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and, similar to Nora, went on to marry a white American man, and worked toward my picket-fence dreams. But, I’ve always wondered what my ghost life would have looked like had I stayed in Iran. I suspect many immigrants think about their could-have-been lives, even if they left under difficult circumstances.

    In the film, years after Nora leaves Korea, Hae Sung finds her through social media and they explore the feelings they had for each other. Through this exploration, Nora struggles with how this connection raises questions about her cultural history and identity. In contrast to Nora, I didn’t have the opportunity to investigate those questions with my childhood friend. Tragically, he died by suicide as an adult. Along with him, I lost an untouched part of me and my past.

    When questioned by her American husband about her love for him and his enough-ness in her life, Nora says, “This is where I ended up.” Even though her husband learns Korean, he understands he will never be able to fully connect with that part of her.

    John Magaro and Greta Lee in "Past Lives."

    I’ve thought about that line often since seeing the movie. Like Nora, I had lofty dreams and thought of America as my salvation of sorts. The place where I could achieve things I’d never have an opportunity to experience in Iran. As I watched the movie nestled next to my Midwestern husband, I wondered about my “other” life. What did I sacrifice to “end up” here?

    I remember being 8 years old and dragging my Mickey Mouse bag down the stairs of our home in Tehran. At the bottom, bulging suitcases lined up like toy soldiers. After leaving my bag, I stepped outside into the garden. It smelled of the sweet blooming apple trees.

    On our car ride to the airport down Pahlavi Street, the main road stretching through downtown Tehran, the snow-topped Alborz Mountains in the distance, I remember catching a whiff from the vendors selling freshly roasted chestnuts and charcoal cooked corn on the cob.

    Watching the city fly by, I was oblivious to the magnitude of the car ride or the crucial decision my parents had made to keep us safe. I didn’t know I was leaving behind an identity, a culture and a home I’d never experience in the same way again. Or that the pictures of my childhood, my family’s belongings and keepsakes my grandmother had given my mom would be destroyed when the government took our house.

    We spent the next two years moving from country to country, trying to find a new home. I went to numerous schools, many times not speaking the language, or fitting in, continuously feeling isolated and disoriented.

    As a “third culture kid” — a term coined by U.S. sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s for children who spend their formative years in places that are not their parents’ homeland — I became accustomed to being different.

    I came to America at 14. It was where I could have the freedoms I had yearned for. I embraced my new country and left behind everything Iranian. Later in life, I started to question who I wanted to be, as Nora did in the film. I realized to feel whole, I needed to come to terms with the coexistence of my American and Iranian identities.

    Even though I’ve learned to better understand these two disparate parts of myself, I’ve often wondered what I’ve left behind to “end up” here, as Nora said, in this country that has given me a life beyond anything I thought was possible.

    After three decades as a U.S. citizen, I still think about what it would be like to know that the land you walk on is your land, and no one can question where you’re from or what you’re doing here. Where you’re never made to feel like you’re an intruder in someone else’s home.

    The beauty of “Past Lives” lies in its ability to capture the universal essence of the immigrant experience. No matter how many years pass or how comfortably we integrate into our new homes, the film underscored that we’re forever burdened by the repercussions of leaving fragments of our identity behind when we immigrate.

    Just as Nora wept in her American husband’s arms when her childhood friend left for Korea, I wept too for the loss of my friend, and the ghost life that exists only in my imagination.

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    Media Layoffs Are Bad For Election 2024

      March 6, 2024
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    To say journalism has had a tough year would be an understatement.

    It seems as if every other week, the industry has been plagued by shutdowns, layoffs and massive cuts. Los Angeles Times laid off 20% of its newsroom in January, including many young journalists of color. After filing for bankruptcy last year, Vice laid off its more than 900 remaining employees and- ceased publishing to its website in February. The Messenger had it’s grand closing just a year after its launch. After shutting down BuzzFeed News last April, BuzzFeed (HuffPost’s parent company) recently sold Complex and laid off 16% of its employees. The DCist closed its doors. Sports Illustrated eliminated nearly all of its positions. And Google and Facebook are experimenting with removing the news tab from their platforms.

    That only scratches the surface of what’s been going on. And it not only impacts journalism, but the livelihood of journalists as well. That’s especially so for marginalized journalists who already over-index as freelancers.

    On the most recent episode of “I Know That’s Right,” HuffPost deputy front page editor and social media’s favorite news curator Phil Lewis noted that a big concern is audiences getting credible news about communities that typically go under-covered.

    “When you have all of these issues combining in an election year, all these things are happening and it’s this confluence of different factors and stresses on the field that are really making it difficult for journalists to cover the stories we find important,” he said.

    What makes matters worse is the rise in misinformation, via robocalls, AI and social media that erroneously parade as the truth. Lewis advises folks to tap into their local outlets and read more than one story on a single topic.

    As far as the future of newsrooms is concerned, Lewis believes we’ll begin to see more worker-owned publications like Defector, Hell Gate and 404 Media. He said it’s still early, but these newsrooms are creating a path forward that more should consider.

    “These are newsrooms filled with journalists who have decided enough is enough, I’m tired of the venture capital growth imperatives,” he said.

    He also predicted that “the future as it stands right now, there’s gonna be The New York Times and CNN.”

    “There’s gonna be some other smaller outlets and there’s gonna be worker-owned outlets and there’s gonna be a bunch of hyper-hyper-partisan, wildly right-wing websites that are just kind of floating around,” he continued.

    Journalism is still very much necessary. The way newsrooms function now, however, is clearly unsustainable and bad for not only the industry, but for everyone.

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    New Keith Haring Biography Provocatively Asks If He Was a Sellout

      March 5, 2024
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    Conjure an object in your head, and there’s a good chance you can purchase a version of it that is emblazoned with Keith Haring’s motifs.

    You can buy a Uniqlo baseball hat with his “radiant baby” image ($29.90), a chess set from the MoMA Design Store whose pieces are all barking dogs and breakdancing figures ($55), high-top sneakers from Zara covered in Haring’s thick black lines ($25.99; on sale at the time of writing), and lounge pants from Urban Outfitters adorned with people with flowering heads ($45).

    You can buy skateboards, stickers, and pins, all dotted with the same images that appear in Haring’s paintings. And from the design store at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, you can even buy a Haring candle in a container with zigzagging stick figures all over it ($88). Per its description, when burned, the candle smells like lily of the valley, with notes of jasmine, peony, and musk.

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    There are few artists whose signature style has been so widely, unashamedly capitalized by big brands (with the help of estates and foundations). But in some ways, the condition is hardly new—Haring himself sold magnets, buttons, garments, coloring books, and skateboards at his very own Pop Shop, which launched in New York; for a time, he also ran a Tokyo outpost. The Japanese store became a problem when copycats began peddling shirts like his; it closed when the knockoffs became too tough to control, rendering Haring’s business obsolete. Money matters, after all.

    The Pop Shop’s facade was spray-painted with the word CAPITALIST when it opened in New York in 1986—not that that necessarily kept members of the art world from flocking to it. Some observers were even more abrasive than the Pop Shop’s vandal. Writing in Spy magazine, journalist Tad Friend claimed that Haring’s art had reached a dead end with the Pop Shop, writing, “what precipitated Haring’s eclipse was not so much the suspicion that he had prostituted his art, but that he had nothing to prostitute.”

    But was Haring really a sellout? This is the question that the writer Brad Gooch bandies about in his new Haring biography, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper), which makes the case that Haring’s art was conceptualism masquerading as capitalism.

    The Haring we know is a graffiti artist-turned-art world superstar. Having made his name scrawling cryptic creatures on the walls of the New York subway system (and occasionally drawing legal penalties for doing so), he would within a decade end up exhibiting these inventions in paintings that sold for vast sums in blue-chip European galleries. It was a tough balancing act for Haring, who once retorted, “I don’t know what they intended me to do: Just stay in the subway the rest of my life? Somehow that would have made me pure?”

    A museum gallery with a large circular painting for a figure eating people that crawl out of its mouth. Opposite that work is a wall lined with black-silhouetted figures and T-shirts.

    Keith Haring’s recent exhibition at the Broad in Los Angeles featured items from the Pop Shop.

    Photo Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    Well, would it have? Gooch invests himself in rebutting the notion that Haring was impure simply because he profited from his art. He quotes KAWS, an artist known for selling his own array of collectibles: “It almost seems like a natural thing these days to be an artist and make products.” The implication is that Haring simply opened the door for others to follow. And in the book’s final chapter, Gooch approvingly quotes American actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper’s eulogy for Haring, given at his funeral in 1990, the year Haring died of AIDS-related causes at the tender age of 31. Hopper credited Haring with “bringing back the ideals of conceptual art” by spinning the stuff of the everyday into works galleries could show and sell.

    And sell, they did. Haring came of artistic maturity in the ’80s New York scene, a milieu that was suddenly flush with money as the art market rapidly expanded. (He got his start in the more hardscrabble and less monied East Village, and then graduated beyond it.) Haring, as Gooch reports, had at the start of the decade vowed never to sell a painting for more than $10,000. By the end of his life, one of his paintings sold at an AIDS charity auction for seven times that figure.

    In Radiant, the painter George Condo, who befriended Haring, recalls that, at one point in his career, Haring consciously decided to “change his ways from being relatively humble to exploiting the potential of what you can do when you make a few bucks as an artist.” Gooch seems to ask if you can blame him.

    The desire to make money always lay dormant within Haring. Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring was raised in the unassuming suburb of Kutztown; his family’s home exuded a “middle-class respectability,” according to one local publication. Haring had the ambition to exceed that town. “When I grow up,” a fourth-grade Haring wrote, “I would like to be an artist in France. The reason is because I like to draw. I would get my money from the pictures I would sell. I hope I will be one.”

    His early reference to financial fortune seems telling: not every aspiring artist dreams of a creative lifestyle and a healthy cash flow. But during the 1970s, when he attended a Pennsylvania art school with a focus on work made to suit commercial purposes, he came to the realization that he “wasn’t going to be a commercial artist.” He just didn’t have the chops for it, he thought. Little did he know.

    By the time he came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts in 1978, he was working in what Gooch describes as an “Alechinsky-meets-Dubuffet manner,” a reference to Pierre Alechinsky and Jean Dubuffet, two European avant-gardists. These painters worked in a faux naive style that deliberately appeared sloppy and loose, like a child’s approach to a grade-school art assignment. Gooch digs into the influence Haring drew from both, in particular Dubuffet for his “sympathy for the influences of Eastern art, especially calligraphy, in which drawing is a kind of writing and writing a kind of drawing.” If you follow Gooch’s logic, no sellout would fall so hard for art that so vastly differed from what Westerners want. Perhaps for that reason, Haring’s stardom did not arrive overnight.

    Gooch’s descriptions of Haring’s poverty during this era are evocative. He writes of one of Haring’s early living spaces, an East Village residence that was actually part of a “lady’s apartment subdivided into small, unattractive rooms she leased mostly to much older men, one of whom died while Haring was living there, with everyone sharing a kitchen and bathroom.” It was certainly nothing like his final apartment, “a duplex penthouse in a six-story condominium building with ten raw loft spaces.” Haring paid $600,000 for that residence.

    Yet while he initially hustled to make ends meet, he also found he didn’t have to suffer forever. During the early ’80s, Haring helped organize art exhibitions for the Mudd Club, a chic boîte in the East Village, but as he grew increasingly skeptical of management there, he parted ways and started selling his drawings himself. “I realized I could probably start living from my work,” Haring said. “I also realized I didn’t ever have to do menial work again. And so, I quit.” Later, he would work with dealer Tony Shafrazi, who priced his paintings at $30,000 a pop.

    A white man in a fright wig standing beside a white man in a tank top who smiles.

    Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, 1984.

    Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

    In the ensuing several hundred pages, Gooch charts Haring’s social rise, pointing out the time that he consulted Andy Warhol for business advice and the times he hung out with Madonna. Gooch adopts a defensive posture regarding Haring’s fame, writing that he was “unaware that he was as famous as some of the celebrities he was eager to catch a glimpse of or speak with.” This seems sort of hard to believe, given that Haring put so much work into cultivating a friendship with Warhol and even leaned heavily on the Pop artist’s own social network for clout. (Warhol, for his part, was impressed by some but not all of Haring’s art. Of the Pop Shop, Warhol disparagingly wrote in his diary, “So I guess he is a little like Peter Max.”)

    For Haring, fame was twinned with fortune, and the confluence of the two blinded him to the realities of those he kept close. Radiant does not elide descriptions of behavior by Haring that now seem queasy at best and racist at worse.

    His Pop Shop was staffed mainly by “cute, young Latin boys,” as one of Haring’s colleagues recalls—ostensibly as a means of differentiating its workforce from the ones seen at department stores of the era, but really to add intrigue for white visitors. Haring’s lovers also tended to be Latino; one ex, Juan Rivera, claims that Haring had a “rivalry” with Madonna that was based around “street-looking Latino boys.”

    One walks away with the sense that Haring exoticized these Latino men because it added value to his life and art. But this is not something Gooch presses too hard, since his point, mainly, is to show that Haring’s gleeful commercialism was intentional. It’s places like these where the book fails to rebut the notion that Haring’s concessions to the whims of capitalism served a larger purpose.

    As described in Radiant, the differences between Haring and his Black and Latino colleagues are stark. Rivera narrates a party held at the Whitney Museum where the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat drew away from the festivities while Haring reveled in them. “Jean-Michel would lock himself in the bathroom,” Rivera says, “and Keith would have to go spook him out, and he’d be like, ‘this party, man, and these people—they are just not my style.’”

    Rivera leaves it unclear which party he’s describing. Gooch believes it was one held in 1986 to celebrate a collaboration between Haring and Absolut vodka—yet another example of how he had monetized his art, allegedly in the name of avant-garde radicalism. The party may not have been Basquiat’s style, but as Gooch makes clear, it certainly was Haring’s. It was loud, brash, and exciting. And it was sponsored by a big-name brand too.

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    The enduring story for Underground Railroad Quilts : NPR

      March 4, 2024
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    Melanie Dantzler, president of the African American Quilt Circle of Durham, N.C. and past vice president Teena Crawshaw, stand in front of the quilt "Recalling Slavery Days" at QuiltCon 2024.

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    Melanie Dantzler, president of the African American Quilt Circle of Durham, N.C. and past vice president Teena Crawshaw, stand in front of the quilt "Recalling Slavery Days" at QuiltCon 2024.

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    As a hobby, quilting is often about remembering loved ones. Today almost a million Americans make some kind of quilt, including replica Revolutionary War quilts, and, increasingly Underground Railroad Quilts. One of those was on display at QuiltCon in Raleigh, N.C. The annual conference is held by the Modern Quilt Guild and this year drew 12,000 visitors.

    Quilter Cyntia Kelly's "Recalling Slavery Days" was on display at the booth run by the African American Quilt Circle of Durham. "A lot of these blocks were from the Underground Railroad quilt, and she just put her own colors and her own spin on the blocks," explained Quilt Circle President Melanie Dantzler.

    Some blocks have been in use for centuries. Dantzler pointed out a couple of traditional blocks incorporated into this quilt, including Jacob's Ladder and Flying Geese.

    The Underground Railroad quilt is a story about a set of quilt blocks that could have helped enslaved people escape during slavery. The idea took off 25 years ago with the book, "Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad," by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, a journalist and art historian duo.

    Sandra Daniel stands before an Underground Railroad Quilt Code quilt hanging in her store, Country Barn Quilt Co.

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    Sandra Daniel stands before an Underground Railroad Quilt Code quilt hanging in her store, Country Barn Quilt Co.

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    Sandra Daniel, an African American quilter and the owner of Country Barn Quilt Company in Augusta, Ga., is a huge fan. "I think it's a great read. I kinda read it in one night," she said.

    For the book Tobin interviewed Ozella Williams, a South Carolina quilter who descended from enslaved people. Williams recalled an oral history shared by her grandmother that explained enslaved people made quilt blocks with coded meanings to help guide escapees to freedom.

    "And those blocks actually gave slaves directions on how and when to leave and which route to take. It started out with the monkey wrench block," Daniel explained.

    The monkey wrench quilt block is said to be the first block to appear, indicating enslaved people should get ready to escape.

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    The monkey wrench quilt block is said to be the first block to appear, indicating enslaved people should get ready to escape.

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    The monkey wrench is a symbol for a freed African American blacksmith who could travel between plantations, according to the book. When he gave word that the time was right for people to attempt escape, a quilt with the monkey wrench block would be hung outside. It communicated that would-be escapees should gather supplies and get ready. When the next block, a wagon wheel, appeared, enslaved people would know that safe transportation was on its way. The book explains as many as 12 quilts were made for the route.

    The wagon wheel quilt block indicated that a safe wagon or cart was on its way.

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    The wagon wheel quilt block indicated that a safe wagon or cart was on its way.

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    Published in 1999, the book became popular and controversial early on. Tobin and Dobard's book told the story of one woman's unrecorded narrative and added other information about quilts of that era and the lives of the enslaved. Museums in Missouri, Florida, and Michigan have held shows featuring "authentic" quilt code quilts. Libraries in California, Louisiana and Georgia have held lectures and displays about the quilt's use. There are even math and history lesson plans using the quilt codes. But there's a tear in the narrative.

    "There is no evidence of it at all," according to Tracy Vaughn-Manley, a Black Studies Professor at Northwestern University. She studies Black quilting. She said there's evidence that enslaved people made utilitarian quilts from old clothing and scraps of fabric given to them by their enslavers. "Based on my research, and the research of highly regarded slave historians, There has been no evidence: No letters, no notes, nothing that would signify that quilts were used as codes."

    In fact, the history of quilts and slavery conditions contradict this code story. That's according to quilt historian Laurel Horton. But she's also a folklorist. As a narrative, she recognizes the cultural significance of the codes. "It's appealing to Black people because it gives them the idea of agency, that your ancestors had some way of dealing with their situation," she said. It's the story of the underdog, the hero's narrative. She said it's appealing to white people, too. "Because if Black people could find ways to escape right out under the noses of their enslavers then [slavery] couldn't have been all that bad."

    Horton says folk narratives like this are tools for meaning, and the quilt code does just that for quilters like quilt store owner Sandra Daniel. "We all have something we try to hold onto. A lot of the history of African Americans has been erased. What else can you tell me? You can't tell me my history because it was taken from me," she said.

    Daniel and other quilters know the story may not entirely match reality. But some of the code blocks did appear in quilts made in the 1850s, before slavery's end. They believe that the quilt block narrative demonstrates the creativity and fortitude of their ancestors.

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    The ‘Dune’ Popcorn Bucket and the Golden Age of Movie Merch

      March 3, 2024
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    When I first encountered an image of the popcorn bucket that AMC Theaters is selling to promote Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” I stared at it for a beat trying to process what I was looking at. The item is supposed to represent a giant sandworm, the beasts that slither under the desert planet Arrakis. On top of the normal container sits a lid that depicts the cylindrical body of the creature emerging from the ground. The opening where you are ostensibly supposed to reach in to snatch some kernels is fashioned like the worm’s maw with its many tendril-like teeth, here rendered in plastic. The bucket is intricately designed, but appears, well, especially anatomical — to put it politely — and somewhat difficult to use to actually get treats into your mouth.

    The “Dune” popcorn bucket has become a genuine mini phenomenon. The film’s cast and crew have been asked to comment on it, and Villeneuve even told The Times, charmingly, “When I saw it, I went, ‘Hoooooly smokes.’” There was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that rhymed “bucket” with a phrase that is unprintable here. Yet, the more I followed talk of the bucket, the more I wanted to possess it. (And no, not for the reasons you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter, please.) As a fan of movies and their ephemera, I began to feel as though I needed to have this piece of hilariously suggestive memorabilia in my home.

    The bucket, both in its sheer strangeness and in the way it has become a cultural moment, reminded me of an earlier era of collectibles — of tie-ins like those McDonald’s “Batman Forever” mugs with badly drawn versions of Jim Carrey’s Riddler that seemed to be a mainstay in 1990s cupboards. But it also is reminiscent of the too-weird-to-be-true marketing misadventures of yore, things that are so unintentionally off-putting that they are also sort of amazing. See the Jar Jar Binks lollipop in which the Gungan alien’s mouth opens to reveal a candy tongue that you are supposed to suck. Ew, to say the least.

    There’s even a history of this with “Dune” itself. When David Lynch’s 1984 version of the Frank Herbert epic was released, you could buy a sandworm action figure that, once again, looked unnervingly phallic. (There’s one on eBay if you’re willing to shell out.)

    Not all of my nostalgia is for the unsavory. The recent frenzy reminded me of the things I used to covet when I was a wee fan starting to fixate on film. My main obsession was Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, so when Burger King released a line of light-up goblets with the visages of characters like Aragorn and Arwen etched on their sides, I knew I needed them. (I had other “LOTR”-themed glassware as well, including mugs that revealed the inscription on the Ring of Power when you filled them with hot liquid. Pretty sure those are still in my parents’ house.)

    Thinking about the potential legacy of the “Dune” popcorn bucket, I called my friend Griffin Newman, an actor and merchandise obsessive. On his movie podcast “Blank Check With Griffin & David,” he regularly goes on tangents about miscellanea like the Austin Powers Collectible Card Game (featuring cards like Mini Me in Quasi Futuristic Clothes.) He described the “Dune” bucket as “ingenious” because it incentivizes people to go to theaters. “There is the sort of magic alchemy of when you have something where everyone’s perversely fascinated by it,” he added.

    The “Dune” bucket follows a series of containers that AMC has released for other blockbusters, among them ones in the shape of the masked heads of Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and burn books for the new “Mean Girls.” In December I picked up one pegged to “Top Gun: Maverick,” made to look like the outside of a flight craft, that my local multiplex was giving away for free. It was a little less elaborate, but I liked the movie and thought, Why not? Perhaps the most desirable one was the “Barbie” Corvette. It doesn’t do a great job of holding popcorn, which spills out the sides, but it does uncannily resemble a sleek Barbie car.

    The buckets aren’t the only merch circulating these days. There’s an elite side to this, too, thanks to the likes of the distributor A24, which sells $36 hot dog finger gloves in homage to the best picture winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and a $400 designer necklace tied to Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” But A24 also at least has an appreciation for the chintzy: Its publishing arm has put out the book “For Promotional Use Only,” a catalog of swag and merch from 1975 to 2005 that features wonderful treasures like a flashlight from Roland Emmerich’s “Godzilla” (1998) with the illumination coming from Godzilla’s mouth. (It also apparently roared.)

    It’s easy to be cynical about all of this. After all, the “Dune” popcorn buckets are just a way to upsell you on already expensive snacks, and it’s likely that most of the bulky vessels will eventually end up in landfills when buyers decide they don’t really need a Shai-Hulud depiction that raises eyebrows. But some fans will invariably hold onto these wonderfully bizarre totems of their affection for a genuinely unique cinematic experience. Even Villeneuve acknowledged that the bucket “brought a lot of laughter and joy.” Twenty years from now, when someone says, “Remember those awkward ‘Dune’ popcorn buckets?” we movie freaks will reply, “Yes, we sure do!”

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