Judith Stein’s 20-year labor of love, the book “Eye of the Sixties,” came out this summer and it’s great. The biography follows the life of enigmatic gallerist, Richard Bellamy, from his rise from college dropout/lost boy/self-taught poet and art lover in the 1950s to the global tastemaker he had become in the 1960s and 70s to his death in 1998 at age 70.
Read MoreAs someone who knows and has seen these artists develop their practice, I find many artistic commonalities and formal intersections in the show. In the pairings on view in the multi-room space at Vox, the strongest is undoubtedly the collaboration between Alber and Caponera. PLAYDATE #3 is the work of five months of teamwork, planning, and camaraderie.
Read MoreHoning in on the small body of work left to us by Hieronymus Bosch (some 25 paintings in museums across the world), the film opens with a series of luscious details of paint. Although cracking with age, the surface of the paintings still bears witness to the agile brush and even more agile mind of the artist. Lovingly detailed brushwork brings an almost jewel-like precision to the perverse devils and monsters that populate Bosch’s paintings, their forms dissolving into abstractions of color, line, and shape through the magnifying lens of the camera. The film is a paean to close looking, the sort of slow and deep observation that so few people seem to engage in–after all, recent studies have suggested that the average museum visitor spends about 15–30 seconds looking at a work of art.
Read MoreJulie Dash’s The Great Migration observes the closing of one chapter of history for many African Americans–life in the unforgiving South–and the beginning of another–an arduous journey North towards an uncertain future. The opening scene of the film, a beach at first light shot in soft muted color, is a fitting metaphor for this transition. A solitary suitcase sits on the sand, a totem for countless histories both individual and communal. At this point of departure where land ends and sea begins, the memories of these emigrants bridge all physical borders, and as the sole remaining traveler, the suitcase is our window into a narrative whose roots run deep and whose branches continue to grow.
Read MoreWhen experiencing this incarnation of “Firebird,” I couldn’t help but be immersed in all that’s going on in the storytelling. At times for a split second, I stopped noticing that the reliably superb Philadelphia Orchestra (led by conductor-in-residence Cristian Macelaru) was playing right behind the elaborate action. The orchestra was the glue that held all of the pieces together, especially in moments when the choreography and multimedia aspects didn’t always paint the clearest picture for the audience to follow along. All of the competing art forms forced me to choose which aspect of the piece to focus on and then after a while, switch over to the next aspect that caught the eye or ear.
Read MoreThe integration of the visual and the visceral was particularly successful in “Bonzi,” whose titular character (dancer Edgar Anido) is a traveling salesman who leads a humdrum life trying to sell people things they neither want nor need. At the start of the performance, the bowler-hatted Bonzi knocks on a plain white door and sets in motion a series of surreal vignettes involving multiple doors, bowler hats, apples, and eggs–all motifs familiar from the paintings of Magritte. Dancers hiding behind movable doors on casters swirled around the stage, dazzling poor Bonzi as well as the audience. With constant costume changes and the clever use of props, the dancers playfully shift personas from alluring coquettes with quixotic tree-like headgear circling around Bonzi, to a self-contained corps of dancers that largely ignores him. By the end of the performance, Bonzi seems to enter the dancers’ madcap surreal world, leaving behind his heavy black briefcase with unrestrained glee.
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