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How Hurray for the Riff Raff learned the power of the present
NEW YORK, NY.- Almost a year after the sudden death of Alynda Segarra’s father, the sight of a Bronx-bound subway entrance made the musician cry. “I walked by the 1 train yesterday, and the color of the red and the ‘1’ and the ‘Van Cortlandt Park’ and the ‘Uptown’ — I just burst into tears,” Segarra, who uses they/them pronouns, said. “I was just like, this is so crazy that I don’t really have a reason to go up there.” Segarra, who is 36 and makes folk music with a punky defiance as Hurray for the Riff Raff, wore a distressed white tee under a fitted leather vest, and silver jewelry that matched their painted nails. Sipping a coffee on a zebra-print couch in a quiet nook of Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea, Segarra compared the storied hotel’s décor to the sets of the Yorgos Lanthimos movie “Poor Things.” Staying at the Chelsea was an uncharacteristic ... More

At the Oscar lunch, he was fetching
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.- At the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, there is always a top dog that even a ballroom full of A-listers will clamor to meet. Last year, that honor went to the “Top Gun: Maverick” producer Tom Cruise, a star so huge that the other nominees began to orbit him, biding time until they could dart in to kiss the ring. The luncheon held Monday afternoon at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, initially seemed to lack that supernova presence, even though there were plenty of famous names including Robert Downey Jr., Emma Stone and Martin Scorsese. Still, they’ve all grown too used to each other to engage in much genuflection: When you treat an awards campaign like a full-time job, the other contenders might as well be your co-workers. Was there anyone who could jump-start this starry but sleepy scene? I ... More

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, the diva of 'Diva,' dies at 75
NEW YORK, NY.- Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, a South Philadelphia-bred soprano who sang in the opera houses of Europe and gained even more fame for playing the title role in the style-soaked 1981 French thriller “Diva,” died Feb. 2 at her home in Lexington, Kentucky. She was 75. Her daughter and only immediate survivor, Sheena M. Fernandez, said the cause was cancer. Trained at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later at the Juilliard School in New York City, Wilhelmenia Fernandez made her mark in the 1970s as Bess in the Houston Grand Opera’s international traveling production of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, where she caught the eye of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario known for reviving the Paris Opera. He offered her a two-year contract. It was in a 1980 performance ... More

Is she joking with these clothes?
NEW YORK, NY.- Not everything sold by Fashion Brand Company is weird or playful or erotic. Occasionally the inventory is mellowed out by the addition of plain trousers or a ribbed tank top. But it is the more imaginative pieces that have seduced the brand’s customers: minidresses with 10 cartoonish arms sticking out from both sides; sunglasses with a realistic set of teeth embedded into each arm; gowns with necklines that make the wearer look as if she is being eaten by a fish or choked by an alien. Even a plain summer frock may have a freaky name, such as the “breeze on my genitals dress.” The clothes are jokes. The woman telling them is Penelope Gazin, a 34-year-old artist who lives in Altadena, California. Yet the brand, founded in 2018 in her old apartment, where she boxed and shipped orders herself, should not be mistaken for either ... More

Lucy Sante is the same writer she has always been
NEW YORK, NY.- It took a lifetime. After carrying a secret “the size of a house” for decades, Lucy Sante, a writer and the author of, among others, “Low Life,” a cult book about the grittier side of New York City, began transitioning in 2021, at the age of 66. All the subterfuges she had built to conceal her identity finally crumbled, thanks to a small experiment during the pandemic. She downloaded FaceApp, which allows users to see how they would look if they swapped genders. She uploaded one photo and then another until an alternative timeline of her life as a woman emerged. She was irreversibly gripped by what she saw: the person that she had most avoided and yearned for all her life. This epiphany starts Sante’s new book, “I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition,” in which she jumps between past and present, narrating her transition process while revisiting her life from a new vantage point. ... More

Driehaus Museum's contemporary exhibition series continues with 'Twin Flame, Double Ruin'
CHICAGO, IL.- Starting today, the Driehaus Museum presents the fourth iteration of its contemporary art series A Tale of Today with the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of Copenhagen-based artist Sif Itona Westerberg. Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin will be on view at the Driehaus Museum, 40 E. Erie St., Chicago, from February 16 to April 14, 2024. Curated by Stephanie Cristello, Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin takes inspiration from the Ancient Greek myth of soulmates—a single body that was divided into two parts, fated to forever yearn and search for its reflection. The exhibition title borrows terminology from concepts of interpersonal connection, a ‘twin flame’ often described in modern psychology as akin to soulmates. Westerberg contrasts ideals of creation and metamorphoses with the idea of ‘ruin,’ a double ... More

Review: In 'The Apiary,' the bees have a troubling tale to tell
NEW YORK, NY.- Here’s a pitch you haven’t heard before. It’s 2046. Bees in the wild have succumbed to a planet-wide die-off, taking almonds, avocados and honey down with them. But in a subterranean lab, three women doing “palliative care” with four remaining broods make a hopeful if gruesome discovery. Also, it’s a comedy. Call it “Little Hive of Horrors.” That’s the setup, if nowhere near the payoff, of “The Apiary,” a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut with this off-off-Broadway production. Unlike most such debuts, though, “The Apiary,” which opened Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving a nearly perfect, first-class staging under the almost too good direction of Kate Whoriskey. I say “almost too good” because a staging so sensitive ... More

Mohamed Bourouissa works to create collective stories that draw on the roots of bitterness
PARIS.- The imprisonment of bodies and the restriction of thought, the representation of identities, the determination and the control of language, forms of care based on plants, music, and color, informal economies, alienation and resistance: these are some of the intimate experiences from which Mohamed Bourouissa works in order to create collective stories that draw on the roots of bitterness (seum in Arabic). This first retrospective in a national institution will offer an opportunity to discover the work of this artist from his very beginnings to his most recent production, alongside creations by artists to whom he is close, and across jumps in time that eschew the norms of chronological order and exhaustivity. Since our world is, for Bourouissa, a small one, the exhibition brings together several different geographies: his home town of Blida, Algeria, where ... More

Two-artist exhibition by Merikokeb Berhanu and Abbas Akhavan now open at Bortolami
NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami has launched a two-artist exhibition by Merikokeb Berhanu and Abbas Akhavan, opening today at 55 Walker. The exhibition presents new artwork by both artists, alongside a selection of sculptures and paintings produced over the past decade. Merikokeb Berhanu’s abstract paintings are matrices of embryos, microchips, and cells—biospheres containing worlds nested within worlds. In rich cobalt blues and burnt siennas, her forms fall, drip, and pulse within a shared bed, the viewer’s vantage resting impossibly at the cross-section of this environment’s crust. The paintings on view hail from two periods in the artist’s production: from the time in which she was still living in Ethiopia, and after her move to the United States in Maryland. Hieroglyphic impressions appear in the latter work, like embedded computer processors ... More

Exceptional exhibition by Léon Spilliaert at Galerie Patrick Derom in Brussels
BRUSSELS.- Galerie Patrick Derom in Brussels is presenting an exceptional exhibition by Léon Spilliaert (Ostend 1881-Brussels 1946). The exhibition brings together twenty-one works on paper, some of which have never before been shown to the public. The exhibition covers Spilliaert's entire career, with early works such as the sombre Landscape with Sign (1904), mature works such as the luminous Blue and Yellow Seascape (c. 1934), and late works such as the enigmatic The Open Door, Waiting (c. 1945). The exhibition is divided into five sections, each focusing on a different aspect of Spilliaert's work, allowing visitors to familiarise themselves with lesser-known elements of his art. The accompanying catalogue, published by Snoeck, offers a unique testimony by the grandson and describes in short chapters the artistic contribution ... More

Special exhibition tour 'Age of Armor' is now showing at the San Antonio Museum of Art
SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Starting today visitors will have the opportunity to see marvels of late medieval and Renaissance craftsmanship from one of the largest collections of arms and armor in the United States when The Age of Armor: Treasures from the Higgins Armory Collection at the Worcester Art Museum opens at the San Antonio Museum of Art. With more than eighty works, including several full suits of armor, the exhibition brings together an impressive array of armor and weapons from late medieval and early modern Europe and traces the evolution of armor in the 1300s and 1400s in tandem with developments in metalworking technology and advances in weaponry. The Age of Armor will be on view in the Cowden Gallery at SAMA through May 12, 2024. The Higgins Armory Collection at the Worcester Art Museum comprises ... More

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