“We are at our most inventive when we are falling.” This lesson from Liz Lerman, a choreographer and one of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ senior fellows, has stuck with me over this past year. Artists and the cultural sector have fallen harder in the past year than we could have ever imagined. The…
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The new English translation of Rudolf Zwirner’s autobiography traces the seeds of today’s big money. In 1960, after only a year in business, Rudolf Zwirner’s fledgling gallery in Essen, Germany, was in serious debt. In a panic he turned to the dealer Hein Stünke, whose gallery in Cologne, Der Spiegel, had become a gathering place…
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As the US reverberates from devastating challenges brought on by the health pandemic and its aftermath, we urge lawmakers to seek ingenuity and energy from a source not often in the spotlight: arts researchers. In addition to being creative thinkers and makers, many artists, designers and architects are also researchers whose work reveals new insights…
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Two exhibitions at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce can now be experienced virtually. The museum is offering video tours of “Queens of the Heartland,” a look at 30 innovative Ohio Black women, and “The Art of Soul!,” the museum’s seventh annual art show. The exhibitions opened last fall but had to…
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Twenty years and an epoch ago, Michael Landy destroyed his worldly goods, all 7,227 of them, in the just-closed flagship branch of C&A on Oxford Street in London. It was a wildly theatrical event. The mise en scène involved a snaking conveyor belt bearing tubs full of carefully catalogued objects, with a team of blue-boilersuit-clad…
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We live in a golden age of cringe, an art form defined, at least in part, by its grotesquely earnest monuments to politicians. And while it can be funny to laugh at an oil painting of a muscle-bound President Trump or fantasies of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a superhero, the genre deserves to…
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Gentrification is changing the cultural landscape in Philadelphia. Many parts of the city are experiencing rapid development, and murals, which celebrate neighborhood history and community leaders, are being destroyed, covered up, and whitewashed prematurely. The artists and communities who created these public artworks are left without a choice in the matter. While it is true…
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Outspoken filmmaking duo Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero don’t believe Mexican storytellers have the luxury of creating apolitically. Not at a moment in history when thousands disappear or are murdered as a consequence of drug-related violence and the widespread state complicity that enables it. Neither of them set out to make movies with a social…
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Roy Healy’s first tattoo wasn’t the kind people usually regret, like a future ex’s name or a quotation in a language one can’t read. Still, he was nervous about it. He had asked the artist to ink a QR code on the inside of his wrist, directing to a website he owned, and he wasn’t…
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Crusader Staff Report Let the music play. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on Martin Luther King Day to open the new National Museum of African American Music in Nashville. A limited number of spectators were allowed inside for the event, though a Facebook live stream of the program drew more than 1,000 viewers at a given…
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