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The O.J. Simpson white Bronco is now a museum piece. In Tennessee.
PIGEON FORGE, TENN.- Tyler Starrett was on vacation with his family in Pigeon Forge, about 35 miles from Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, when they learned on Thursday that O.J. Simpson had died. So they changed plans. They had heard that one of the key artifacts of the Simpson case happened to be on display nearby at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum: the 1993 white Ford Bronco that Simpson fled from police in, just days after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and Ron Goldman. They could not resist. “If the Bronco is here in Pigeon Forge, why don’t we go see it?” Starrett, 23, said. Starrett is too young to have been among the 95 million television viewers who watched the low-speed chase unfold on June 17, 1994, when a swarm of police cars followed the white Bronco over 60 miles of Southern California freeways, with Simpson holding ... More

Yan Lei joins Pearl Lam
HONG KONG.- Pearl Lam announced their global representation of Yan Lei, a Chinese conceptual artist. Yan’s unique artistic vision and unconventional approach have garnered him international recognition within the Chinese contemporary art scene. Born in 1965 in Hebei, China, Yan Lei graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now known as the China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou in 1991. Through an array of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, he fearlessly explores and reveals various issues such as power dynamics, competition, and the interplay of values and prices within the art system. His works often incorporate multiple and contradictory values, showcasing his thought-provoking reflections on the challenges faced in contemporary art making. As a prominent figure in Chinese conceptual ... More

Frank Lloyd Wright's Southwestern Pennsylvania opens at the Nationaal Building Museum
WASHINGTON, DC.- Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania presents both realized and unrealized projects Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the region from the 1930s through the 1950s. The exhibition examines how his vision of the future might have impacted urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. Realistic animated films, created by Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators, provide, for the first time, a virtual exploration of five unrealized Wright projects for Southwestern Pennsylvania. These include a monumental reimagining of the Point (1947), a self-service garage for Kaufmann’s Department Store (1949), the Point View Residences designed for the Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Trust (1952), the Rhododendron Chapel (1952), and a gate lodge for the Fallingwater grounds (1941). Using three-dimensional rendering technology to choreograph ... More

Eleanor Coppola, who chronicled her family's filmmaking, dies at 87
NEW YORK, NY.- Eleanor Coppola, a documentary filmmaker and artist who called herself “an observer at heart,” a description borne out through works chronicling the cinematic triumphs and ordeals of her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and their daughter, Sofia Coppola, died Friday at her home in Rutherford, California. She was 87. Her family announced her death in a statement, which did not state a cause. Coppola’s career as a documentarian began when her husband asked her to record the production of “Apocalypse Now,” his 1979 exegesis of the Vietnam War that took so long to make that some began calling it “Apocalypse Never.” By then, he was Hollywood royalty on the strength of his first two “Godfather” movies. But with “Apocalypse Now,” he stumbled. He came close to going broke as the movie, its roots in Joseph Conrad’s ... More

Representing the U.S. and critiquing it in a psychedelic rainbow
HUDSON, NY.- People in Venice, Italy, might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On Thursay, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform. The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion on April 20. Titled “the ... More

Dance Theater of Harlem is in new (and capable) hands
NEW YORK, NY.- It was, as Robert Garland said from the stage, a momentous occasion for him. Greeting the crowd at his first New York City Center season as the artistic director of Dance Theater of Harlem, he spoke warmly of the company’s co-founder: “Arthur Mitchell was my mentor, my hero, and he’s watching down from upstairs saying, ‘Get it right, Robert.’” The line earned laughs, but had the ring of truth — Mitchell was an exacting director. And on Thursday, Garland showed that he was getting some things right: Dance Theater, now in its 55th season, has a vintage kind of glow. It isn’t like it was in the robust old days, but it is refreshed. The company, along with its dancers, seems to be more sure of itself: It’s growing into a sense of style. Honoring Mitchell was a reminder of why Dance Theater, born after the assassination of the Rev. Martin ... More

A 'Missionary for Opera' steps down in Chicago
CHICAGO, IL.- In 1975, Anthony Freud went to a performance that changed his life. Still in his teens, he waited in line for hours to see a concert version of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes” at the BBC Proms in London. For the Proms, seats are removed from the Royal Albert Hall to create a vast standing room, and Freud found himself pressed against the stage, just a few feet from tenor Jon Vickers, who sang a crushingly intense Grimes. “This is what I want to spend my life doing,” he realized, recalling the show with relish in a recent interview. “I want to be a missionary for opera.” Last Sunday, Freud, now 66, was once again as close as he could be to the opera stage. At a matinee of Verdi’s “Aida,” the final full performance of his 13-year tenure as the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Freud was front row, left aisle. He usually sat there — in the theater’s t ... More

Thursday ends a 13-year break from new music with a pointed song
NEW YORK, NY.- Thursday, the band once described as the “great screamo hope” for helping break the shouty punk subgenre into the mainstream with its 2001 album “Full Collapse,” returned with its first new song in 13 years Friday, “Application for Release From the Dream.” The title alone underscores just how drastically things have changed for Thursday and its peers over the past two decades: Emo has evolved from a niche concern to a form of classic rock, and the artists who put it on the map are now in their late 40s, navigating a very different kind of life. Geoff Rickly, the band’s gregarious, garrulous frontman, spent the past decade as a multitasker in the New York City borough of Brooklyn’s art scenes before documenting his path to sobriety with his 2023 literary debut, “Someone Who Isn’t Me.” In the past, the band’s songwriting process might ... More

No 'Hippie Ape': Bonobos are often aggressive, study finds
NEW YORK, NY.- In the early 1900s, primatologists noticed a group of apes in central Africa with a distinctly slender build; they called them “pygmy chimpanzees.” But as the years passed, it became clear that those animals, now known as bonobos, were profoundly different from chimpanzees. Chimpanzee societies are dominated by males that kill other males, raid the territory of neighboring troops and defend their own ground with border patrols. Male chimpanzees also attack females to coerce them into mating, and sometimes they even kill infants. Among bonobos, in contrast, females are dominant. Males do not go on patrols, form alliances or kill other bonobos. And bonobos usually resolve their disputes with sex — lots of it. Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos ... More

'Player Kings' review: Ian McKellen's juicy assignment as Falstaff
LONDON.- There are two shows for the price of one at “Player Kings,” in which director Robert Icke has combined both of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” history plays into a self-contained whole. The production offers a compressed version of the royal accession story that, in this version, runs nearly four hours. It is an opportunity to experience Ian McKellen’s unbridled love of performance. At 84, the production’s leading man possesses an energy and vigor that belie his years. “Player Kings” — which runs at the Noël Coward Theater through June 22, before touring England — is the latest in a wave of recent high-profile Shakespeare productions in London. Uniquely among the other great British theater actors of his generation, McKellen still returns year after year to the stage, recently tackling Lear for a second time and playing an ... More