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      Steve Keene Made 300,000 Paintings in a Home Full of Easels

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      The artist’s studio and living space, created with his wife, Starling Keene, an architect, houses a one-man assembly line of affordable art — enough to fill a new book.When the artist Steve Keene and his wife, Starling Keene, an architect, spent $140,000 on a dilapidated former auto body shop to live in, in Brooklyn in 1996, it was understood that he would use most of it for his studio space. His brightly painted works are typically not large, but they are numerous: Over the last 30 years, he says, he’s created more than 300,000.Sold them, too — most for $10 or less apiece. His images, with visible brushstrokes on plywood panels that he cuts himself, are done in rapid-fire multiples: lo-fi renderings of album covers, presidents, streetscapes and pastorals inspired by discount art books from the Strand, sometimes with a lyric or funny non sequitur on top — “just to kind of slow you down, to look at it,” he said. He spends upward of eight hours a day painting, up to 120 canvases at a time, 52 weeks a year. (He doesn’t like to take vacations.) When the Keenes moved into the building, in Greenpoint, they built a nest for themselves in the back, a lofted area with a dorm-room fridge. The rest was easels.Now, at 65, Steve Keene may still be New York’s most prolific painter, and certainly the one most beloved in ’90s indie-rock circles. A college radio D.J. in his native Virginia, he got his start showcasing his paintings in scuzzy bars during his favorite bands’ sets, and did album art and commissions for groups like Pavement, Silver Jews and the Apples in Stereo. He earned an M.F.A. in printmaking at Yale, perfected his sense of primary color as a commercial silk screener in New York — a job he hated, he said, “though half of what I do is kind of based on that” — and eventually attracted collectors like the restaurateur David Chang, who hung a 12-foot Keene at Momofuku in Toronto. His prodigious output and enduring D.I.Y. ethos is cataloged, for the first time, in “The Steve Keene Art Book,” out this month.Keene’s paintings are rapid-fire multiples, executed with visible brushstrokes on plywood. Most are sold for $10 or less apiece.Lila Barth for The New York Times“This is a 30-year affordable art experiment that he’s been undertaking,” said Daniel Efram, who produced the new “Steve Keene Art Book.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn essays and commentary by Shepard Fairey, the downtown gallerist Leo Fitzpatrick, the artist Ryan McGinness and the musician Chan Marshall (Cat Power), it makes the case for Keene as a cultural signifier, a subversive success — an artist who, though he has shown in galleries, art fairs and museums, still sells (and packages, and ships, via UPS) his work entirely himself, prizing accessibility above all.“To me, one of the things that has cemented his importance is, here’s an artist who has a full understanding of the traditional art world, but chooses a pathway that is about directly making art and sustenance in a very modest way,” said Daniel Efram, a photographer and the Apples in Stereo’s manager, who produced the book. “This is a 30-year affordable art experiment that he’s been undertaking. It’s dramatic, it’s joyful and it’s created a community of fans that are very loyal.”Thanks to a recent influx of attention, Keene’s website, where he sells bundles of paintings for $70, has been overwhelmed with orders. Efram, who has known him since the ’90s, crowdsourced the book, borrowing hundreds of pieces from around the U.S. to photograph. “People see his work and they smile,” he said. “I think because it’s vibrant — and because it’s a really good deal.”Fairey, the street art star, said he owned more than half a dozen Keenes, and called him an inspiration. “He’s mixing gestural or impressionistic mark-making with pop and underground imagery in an assembly line that yields repetition with variation,” Fairey wrote in an email. “He’s like a folk hero Warhol.”Lo-fi renderings of album covers are a frequent Keene subject.Lila Barth for The New York TimesWhat has enabled Keene’s grand-scale, low-priced career — besides the foresight to acquire a 90-foot-long home studio early on — is Starling Keene, 63, the director of architecture for the city’s Department of Design and Construction, an agency responsible for helping to actually build New York. It’s more logistics than glamour: Her favorite project lately is a giant fuel yard and administrative depot for the Department of Transportation.In previous roles, she has also created a mansion in the hills for a Hollywood heavyweight and helped erect Little Island, the Hudson River park, as a partner in Standard Architects. (The British firm Heatherwick “designed it,” she said, “but we had to make it work.”)When I visited the Keene household, I asked about her own architectural style. After mulling it over for a while, she called it “industrial hermit crab.”“Because I do love an existing space, and then reacting to it, more than almost anything else,” she explained. “The willingness to constantly change — I do love that, too.”The Keenes’ thrifty fluidity is on ample display in their home. As the couple raised two daughters, now college age, Steve’s studio had to shrink, and they encircled it with a backyard-style chain-link fence that he affectionately calls “the cage.” It was inspired by the 2001 Frank Gehry exhibition at the Guggenheim — in Gehry’s early projects, the architect used the outdoor material “as color on a facade, because it changes the light,” Steve said.Also, Starling added, “We did need a way to separate the toddlers” from the paint-splattered studio.Keene with his wife, Starling, the director of architecture for the city’s Department of Design and Construction. “She’s a better artist than me, a better painter and a better everything else,” Steve said.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn the last dozen years, guided by Starling’s design and engineering know-how — “My claim to fame is, I taught Steve trigonometry in one day,” she said — Steve has also built just about every stitch of their furniture, most of it white and curlicued. Made entirely of interlocking wood pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, it doubles as stairs, storage and artistic display, not to mention hiding spot (or launchpad) for their four cats and two dogs.“Star’s always trusted me visually,” Steve said, looking at his wife. “She’s always trusted me when I wanted to do things — like, I remember calling you up and I said, ‘Is it OK? I took out the bathroom ceiling.’”In January, they will celebrate their 40th anniversary.Steve’s exhibitions often involve him doing live painting, and the couple’s latest thrill is in crafting custom-made displays for each setting, from just a rough sketch — they are so conversant in each other’s drawing style that, Steve said, “people don’t like to play Pictionary with us.”“I couldn’t do this without her,” he added, of his work. “I’m very artsy and she’s super logical. I mean, she’s a better artist than me, a better painter and a better everything else.” (Starling has lately been engrossed in fiber arts, making an abstract weaving inspired by the Citi tower in Queens, in the fog.) “When I run into any kind of problem, she solves it.”The Keenes’ D.I.Y. couch: floor pillows covered in a blanket on a platform of wooden canvases.Lila Barth for The New York TimesGuided by Starling’s engineering know-how, Steve has built nearly every piece of their furniture.Lila Barth for The New York TimesAn aluminum foil chandelier Steve created years ago for a daughter’s fourth birthday party still hangs in the space.Lila Barth for The New York TimesTheir artistic inclination to repurpose materials collides, frequently, with domesticity: an aluminum foil chandelier that Steve made for a daughter’s fourth birthday party is still up; plastic grocery baskets serve as drawers in their closet — an ingeniously constructed space, like an inverted boat, with a scalloped trellis that also supports their loft bed. “It’s like being inside a little cloud,” Starling said.The couch — constructed from floor pillows she stitched, and covered in a serape-style blanket — rests on a platform made of hundreds of large wooden canvases. They’re a new, engraved style that Steve developed in the last decade and has hardly exhibited yet.“He rarely likes to do things that other people ask him,” Efram said. “He has to feel it, and I really respect that.” The Keenes seemed surprised to find that, at a recent exhibition that Efram curated in Brooklyn, he was able to sell some larger Keene pieces for substantially more than normal — they were $150.Over the years, Starling said, they have wondered whether they could make more money from Steve’s paintings. But he likes to price them low so they’re “irresistible,” she said. And besides, the art world hustle has never interested him.“He doesn’t want to even think about, like, is somebody going to think one is good and one is bad,” she said, “which is why he makes so many.”He allowed Efram to produce the book on the condition that he didn’t have to get heavily involved. “I still haven’t really sat down and looked at it, page by page,” Steve said. “It’s just overwhelming. It’s wild that it’s a static thing, it doesn’t change.”As much as his work is about an iterative process, it’s also revitalizing to him with every brush stroke, he said. “I think the reason why I have so much energy to do this, it’s because every week it’s new — stuff goes to UPS, I don’t see it, so I need more work.”“Everybody has these rituals,” he added. “Making art for me became that system of losing yourself, or finding infinity. Or something.”“Or something!” Starling repeated, and they laughed together. More

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      After Decades, the Philharmonic’s Hall Sounds and Feels More Intimate

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      Raise your hand if you ever thought you would go see the New York Philharmonic, America’s most venerable orchestra, by entering off Lincoln Center’s plaza through a wide-open garage door. No one?But yes: The main entrance of David Geffen Hall — the Philharmonic’s home, newly, completely and happily renovated after a wait of decades — is now a big glass wall that can swoop up in good weather. And the past week has been bright and mild in New York. So as audiences drifted in for some of the first concerts in the revamped hall, the lobby inside and the plaza outside merged, without any barrier.It’s a new degree of informality, matched once you get into the transformed auditorium. The vast, drab shoe box that the city knew as Avery Fisher Hall after 1973 — a few years before a major remodeling attempted to fix the acoustics that had been criticized since the building first opened as Philharmonic Hall, in 1962 — has been gutted.Five hundred seats have been eliminated, along with the proscenium. The stage has been pulled 25 feet forward, and seating has been stretched around it. The once-dingy interior is now acres of honey-colored wood, the seats upholstered in a floating-flower-petal motif. A theater in which it once felt like miles from the back row to the timpanis now verges on intimacy.There is intimacy in how it sounds, too. Any judgment on a hall’s acoustics is highly provisional after just a few visits. For the rest of October’s opening events — and the rest of this season — I will be listening to the Philharmonic play in the new Geffen, and hearing how the experience changes as I sit all over. The orchestra will be changing, too, adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.But a mighty improvement is already obvious. The acoustical problems of the hall post-1976 have perhaps been overstated. Especially as it aged, it sounded so bad at least in part because it looked and felt so bad.Now the sound, like the whole experience of being there, is far more immediate and warm. We hear with our eyes as well as our ears, and simply seeing your fellow audience members sitting above and around the stage makes Geffen sound more human.On Wednesday, the Philharmonic’s first subscription program in the space, the third movement of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” demonstrated that magical orchestral alchemy in a superb hall: the way dozens of musicians playing softly can feel huge. A low growl in the basses was palpable, not just audible. At quiet dynamics throughout the evening — like the brooding opening of the catacombs section of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and the ambiguous haze of Tania León’s “Stride” — the sound was glistening and lucid.Van Zweden and the orchestra on Wednesday; the sound was glistening and lucid in quiet passages.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIf, at its loudest and densest, the Philharmonic seemed strident and blurrily blaring rather than richly massed and blended, with the brasses and percussion overwhelming the woodwinds and strings, that may be less an inherent quality of the room than a remnant of the orchestra’s notoriously blunt and punchy style.That style — which has not always been discouraged by Jaap van Zweden, on the podium as music director for another two seasons — evolved partly because of the shortcomings of the old hall, the need to force the sound to reach its distant upper reaches. But what felt necessary merely to be heard in that former space could profitably be eased in this new one. The Philharmonic no longer has to blast to a faraway audience, but can play more like it is sharing the music with a bunch of friends gathered around the campfire.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.It’s been a long journey to that campfire. Most observers swiftly recognized that the 1976 renovation, which built a new theater in the shell of the 1962 building, had not solved the hall’s acoustical issues, and had introduced new aesthetic ones. But the will was not present — and relations between the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, its landlord, were too dysfunctional — to do much about it.Around the turn of the 21st century, a plan emerged to demolish the building entirely and start over, but the Philharmonic was so spooked by the scheme’s probable cost and duration that it tried to pick up and move to Carnegie Hall, its home before Lincoln Center was built. That escape failed miserably, leaving Avery Fisher Hall as the center’s problem child, ignored in a sweeping, six-year campuswide refurbishment that finished in 2012.In 2015, David Geffen restarted the hall project with a $100 million gift — minus the $15 million required to buy off Avery Fisher’s heirs, who were surprised to learn that Fisher’s name wouldn’t be permanently attached to the building. But the design that was developed in the wake of Geffen’s donation once again spiraled out of control in ambition and price tag.It wasn’t until two pragmatic chief executives, Deborah Borda at the New York Philharmonic and Henry Timms at Lincoln Center, arrived a few years ago that a workable project — which would, as in 1976, fill the existing shell with new contents — was finally agreed on. And when the pandemic shut down performances, construction was fast-tracked so that the opening has come two years earlier than planned, without exceeding the $500 million budget.The only part of the 1960s auditorium that remains is the zigzag ceiling, and it’s been painted black and hidden behind a billowing silvery sheath. In one crucial way, though, this is a restoration: At 2,200 seats (versus 2,700 starting in 1962), the hall finally has the capacity for which its acoustics were originally designed.Over the next weeks and months, the orchestra will be adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIn pulling the stage forward and surrounding it with seating, the new theater, designed by Gary McCluskie of Diamond Schmitt Architects, with Paul Scarbrough in charge of the acoustics, borrows the approach that was workshopped with a temporary structure for over a decade at Lincoln Center’s summertime Mostly Mozart festival. That setup was in turn influenced by the “vineyard” seating of the Philharmonie in Berlin and its most famous American descendant, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.If it lacks Disney’s flair, the Geffen auditorium, clean and straightforward, is more successful than the hall’s public spaces, which have been redesigned by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their main achievements are in decluttering. The box office has been moved to a corner, allowing the lobby to extend far deeper off the plaza, reducing crowding in a space now more appealing to linger in. Having lost its weird mudroom of an archival display, the grand promenade one floor up is much more expansive, too. The corner of 65th Street and Broadway has become a small performance space visible from the street.But the eclectic decorations — the vaguely tree-shaped lighting fixtures on the first tier balcony, for example, and the scattering of curvy couches in the lobby — have the brightly clashing patterns and generic whimsy of a Marriott, a college student center or the new Delta Sky Club at LaGuardia. The champagne-colored curtains surrounding the grand promenade, stitched with bits of light-catching gold, have the mass-market feel of those spaces, too — bathed in the permanent deep blue light of a catering hall cocktail hour.A week in, the sprawling spans of frosted glass around the promenade are already smudged, which is a little icky and a little charming: The new Geffen Hall already has a comfortable, lived-in feel. That seems to be the point. After all, Marriotts, student centers and airport lounges are designed to be antitheses of the intimidation often associated with classical music. But in eschewing intimidation, did the space have to reject glamour, too?Some of the ways the new hall intends to embrace a broader audience already feel persuasive. A concert hall’s quality in unamplified music is no indication it will work when amplified, too. (Carnegie Hall is a classic example.) But when its retractable fabric dampening panels are opened and line the walls, the new Geffen is as good with amplification as without.“San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” Etienne Charles’s multimedia excavation of the history of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center, which officially opened the hall on Saturday, begins with a small jazz ensemble playing alone for half an hour. The amplified sound was direct but resonant; even Charles’s slightest finger taps on a drum registered, just enough.And on Tuesday, the mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile convened a handful of guests for the first in his series of events this season modeled on bluegrass jam sessions. Merrill Garbus, the singer of the band Tune-Yards, came onstage in bright green socks, so Thile took his shoes off, too. The sound was crisp yet tender, the moody lighting classily done.It was astonishing and delightful to realize that Geffen Hall had become a place where artists could pad around the stage in their socks, or groove as quietly as they would in a tiny jazz club. On Tuesday there wasn’t that vaguely embarrassing feeling of an orchestra hall slumming it with pop. Geffen felt — and sounded — natural.Near the end of the show, Thile looked out into the darkness and smiled broadly. “Let’s do this lots more times,” he said. More

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      Timeline: The Long, Long Journey to a New David Geffen Hall

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      After decades of failed attempts, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are hoping that the new $550 million renovation has finally fixed the hall.The efforts to fix the New York Philharmonic’s troubled Lincoln Center home date back almost to the night it opened in 1962, when the auditorium, originally called Philharmonic Hall, was found acoustically wanting.In 1976 a gut renovation transformed the space, which had been renamed Avery Fisher Hall in honor of a large gift from the audio equipment pioneer Avery Fisher, and tried to fix its acoustics. But problems persisted. More tweaks were made in the 1990s. The Philharmonic tried to leave for good in 2003 to return to its old home, Carnegie Hall. Plans for new designs by Norman Foster and Thomas Heatherwick came and went.Now the hall, renamed David Geffen Hall after a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen, is reopening in early October after a $550 million overhaul that everyone hopes will finally get it right. Here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Sept. 23, 1962A Glamorous Opening, Troubling SignsLeonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at the opening of the hall in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesPhilharmonic Hall, which was designed by Max Abramovitz and was the first part of Lincoln Center to be completed, opens with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at a white-tie gala attended by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and other luminaries. But in his review the next day the critic Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Times notes a “decided lack of bass” in the orchestra section that worsens in the loges and at the back of the hall, where he likens it to “a high-fidelity outfit with the bass control out of the circuit.”Sept. 25, 1962“We’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.”Philharmonic Hall on opening night.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe hall’s acoustician, Leo Beranek, tells The Times that he is “not entirely satisfied” with the sound but believes that adjustments will improve it. “In other words,” the article quotes him as saying, “we’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.” A series of remodeling efforts begins, but by 1974 visiting ensembles, including the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, decide to return to Carnegie Hall.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.1975Gutting the Hall and Starting Againvia New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesLincoln Center announces plans to gut the hall, now called Avery Fisher Hall, and to completely rebuild it under the supervision of the acoustician Cyril M. Harris and the architect Philip Johnson. “There was no point any longer taking halfway measures in relation to the hall,” Fisher says. “A fresh start was needed.”1976Avery Fisher Hall Reopens, to HopeThe philanthropist Avery Fisher, center, was in the audience when the newly renovated Avery Fisher Hall opened in 1976.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesAvery Fisher Hall reopens, and the early reviews are good. This time Schonberg writes in The Times that in “any part of the dynamic range, too, from the wispiest pianissimo to the most stupendous forte, Fisher Hall came through with extraordinary clarity.” But for all his early enthusiasm, he notes that the bass sound, while improved, “tends to be a little weak.”1992The Musicians Still Cannot Hear Each OtherSound reflectors were added around the stage to help the players hear each other.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesMusicians still complain that they cannot hear one another on the stage, so sound reflectors — some called “bongos” for their curved appearance — are placed on the walls and ceiling. Allan Kozinn writes in The Times that “Avery Fisher Hall’s acoustics have troubled musicians and listeners ever since it opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall. And although the 1976 renovation was considered an improvement, critics continued to complain of an overly bright brass sound and a weak bass.”2003The Philharmonic Tries to Leave Lincoln CenterThe Philharmonic stuns Lincoln Center by announcing that it plans to leave Avery Fisher to return to Carnegie Hall. The announcement throws the center’s on-again, off-again redevelopment plans into chaos (three finalists had been selected to compete to redesign Fisher: Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo and the team of Richard Meier and Arata Isozaki). But the plan, which also called for the Philharmonic and Carnegie to merge, proves unworkable and is soon abandoned.2005Norman Foster Tapped, But Nothing Comes of ItThe Philharmonic board selects the architect Norman Foster to redesign the hall, but plans stall.March 4, 2015David Geffen Gives $100 MillionDavid Geffen, center, with Katherine G. Farley, chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and Jed Bernstein, who was then its president.Richard Perry/The New York TimesDavid Geffen donates $100 million to renovate the hall, which is then named for him, after the Fisher family agrees give up the naming rights in exchange for several inducements, including $15 million.Dec. 9, 2015Heatherwick Studio Briefly on Design TeamThe London firm Heatherwick Studio, led by Thomas Heatherwick, and Diamond Schmitt Architects of Toronto are chosen to redesign the interior of David Geffen Hall. They join the acoustic design firm Akustiks and the theater design firm Fisher Dachs.2017Back to the Drawing BoardLincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic scrap the current plans and go back to the drawing board, saying that the proposals were growing too complicated and too costly, and would force the orchestra out of the hall for three seasons.2019A Plan, and a Design Team, at LastAn artist’s rendering of the plans for the new hall. New York PhilharmonicA new $550 million plan is unveiled to make the hall more intimate, cutting more than 500 seats, reducing capacity to 2,200 from 2,738. It also calls for adding seats behind the stage, fixing the acoustics, rethinking the public spaces and, yes, adding more restrooms. Heatherwick Studios is off the design team, which now consists of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (lobbies and other public spaces); Diamond Schmitt Architects (the auditorium); Akustiks (acoustics); and Fisher Dachs Associates (theater design). The hall is scheduled to open in March 2024.2021The Pandemic Shutdown Speeds ConstructionThe concert hall being rebuilt in 2021.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe pandemic, which has shut down live performance, allows the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center to accelerate the construction schedule, and to push the reopening to this fall. That keeps the orchestra’s nomadic period to just one season, which saw it play at Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater with forays to Carnegie Hall.2022David Geffen Hall Set to ReopenThe new hall, so many years in the making and remaking, will come to life this month. There will be two concerts Oct. 8 featuring the world premiere of new piece that Lincoln Center commissioned for the occasion: Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” about the vibrant neighborhood that was razed to make way for Lincoln Center. It will be performed by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Jaap van Zweden. Tickets will be available on a choose-what-you-pay basis. More

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      Mentors Named for Next Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

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      El Anatsui, Bernardine Evaristo and Dianne Reeves are among those pairing up for the program.The Ghanaian-born visual artist El Anatsui, the British writer Bernardine Evaristo, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the French architect Anne Lacaton and the American jazz singer Dianne Reeves are the new mentors in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a program started by Rolex in 2002 to foster new generations of outstanding talent.The names of the new mentors and their protégés, who will collaborate for two years, were announced Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Arts Initiative is celebrating the culmination of its current program cycle. This cycle included Lin-Manuel Miranda, the first mentor in a recently added open category to incorporate multidisciplinary artists.The protégés are the architect Arine Aprahamian, the writer Ayesha Harruna Attah, the visual artist Bronwyn Katz, the filmmaker Rafael Manuel and the singer and composer Song Yi Jeon. The protégés each receive a stipend of about $41,000 in addition to funds for travel and expenses.The new group of mentors and protégés hail “from nine different countries in Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East,” Rebecca Irvin, the head of philanthropy at Rolex, said in an email. “And their artistic work reflects many of the most pressing issues of our day, including sustainability, diversity and social change.”Evaristo, who wrote in a statement that she had her eye on the program “ever since Toni Morrison was a mentor 20 years ago,” said that the “very close and personal attention” that the protégé receives is very different than attending workshops or writing courses. “It might also involve career guidance and personal development, as well as opening up conversations around creativity and society, and looking to other art forms for inspiration,” she said.Twenty years after it began, the Arts Initiative, which calls on influential advisers to select the mentors and protégés, now has a boldface list of alumni, including David Adjaye, Alfonso Cuarón, Brian Eno, Lara Foot, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Hlobo, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Anish Kapoor, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Crystal Pite and Tracy K. Smith. More

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      In the Australian Outback, the Cobar Sound Chapel Quenches the Soul

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      Beneath the skies of a remote mining town, a composer and an architect created a musical chamber for marveling at the universe.Life in Cobar was a delicate thing until the arrival of the Silver Tank. In the vast, red-dirt hinterland of Australia, over 400 miles northwest of the shores of Sydney, rainwater is scarce. ​​For thousands of years, the nomadic Aboriginal Ngiyampaa people excelled at the art of survival by creating natural rock reservoirs. But after European settlers discovered copper and gold in the area in the 1870s, enough water was needed to sustain a booming mining town. Reservoirs were dug. Water was trained in from afar. Then, in 1901, a 33-foot-high steel water tank painted silver, hence its nickname, was erected about a mile outside of town. While the threat of drought remained (and remains to this day), it turned dusty Cobar, a freckle at the edge of the Outback, into something of a desert oasis.The entrance to the sound chapel, which features a bench from which visitors can listen to Lentz’s “String Quartet(s)” (2000-21), a 24-hour-long composition inspired by the Outback’s dramatic skies.Josh RobenstoneNowadays, Cobar pipes in its water from the Burrendong Dam, about 233 miles east, and the tank, whose silver finish long ago succumbed to rust and graffiti, is empty of water. It has, however, been filled with something new — music. On April 2, after two decades of work, it will be officially reborn as the Cobar Sound Chapel, an audacious sound-art collaboration between Georges Lentz, one of Australia’s leading contemporary composers, and Glenn Murcutt, an Australian Pritzker Prize-winning architect. For his reimagining of the roofless tank, Murcutt installed an approximately 16-foot cube within its cylindrical space, in which Lentz’s “String Quartet(s)” (2000-21), a 24-hour-long classical-meets-electronica work, will play on loop via a quadraphonic sound system. Inside the chamber is a concrete bench that seats up to four, from which one can look out through the ceiling’s gold-rimmed oculus. Morning, noon and night, then, the otherworldly sonic stream will reverberate throughout the concrete booth and spill out into the sky that inspired it. The artists’ hope is that their work will prompt visitors to meditate on our place in the universe. “There is a mysterious element to our existence that we ignore at our own peril,” says Lentz, 56. “By turning to something higher than ourselves, we realize we are just this tiny thing in this vast scheme.”Murcutt set a concrete cube within the tank. Inside it is a concrete bench from which one can look up at the sky through the gold-rimmed oculus.Josh RobenstoneLentz’s “String Quartet(s),” on which he collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet, will play on loop via a quadraphonic sound system.Josh RobenstoneLentz has been consumed by questions of cosmology and spirituality ever since he was a child. Born in Echternach, a small town in Luxembourg that formed around a seventh-century abbey, he grew up attending classical music festivals and stargazing with his dad. Later, he studied music in Hanover, Germany. While riding the train to university in the fall of 1988, he happened upon a story in the German science magazine Geo about the creation of the universe. It threw the tininess of humanity into sharp relief for him, and he fell into a depression that left him sleepless for weeks. “It felt like an abyss you look into and go, ‘Wah!’” he says.A view from just outside the concrete chamber, which was built inside of a roofless (and now empty) water tank.Josh RobenstoneEver since, Lentz has devoted his entire body of work to exploring the questions of the cosmos, transforming his initial fear into a quest for contemplation, one that only intensified following his 1990 move to Australia and exposure to the Outback’s ocean of sky. Both a continuation and culmination of his work, “String Quartet(s)” began as an attempt to translate that sky into a score. To do so, he collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet that’s based in Sydney. They used a range of techniques; to mirror a starry night, for example, the musicians invoked the pointillism of the contemporary Aboriginal painter Kathleen Petyarre, plucking their bows at the top of their instruments to create contained bits of sound. “If you repeat that,” says Oliver Miller, the Noise’s cellist and a technical and creative adviser to the chapel, “it converges into a galactic formation where you get a cluster of the Milky Way.”Two concrete slabs mark the entrance to the sound chapel, though, thanks to its oculus, music can also be heard from outside the space.Josh RobenstoneThey ended up with about six hours’ worth of music, which, through digital editing, Lentz expanded into a 24-hour, techno-infused soundscape of terror, wonder and reverence. Taking inspiration from Gerhard Richter, he layered recorded sounds as if they were in a palimpsest. In one track I sampled, a curtain of piercing strings gave the impression of a dust storm haunting the horizon. In another, I fell into a reverie as the strings receded into shiny, ethereal dots, ringing as if in an empty basement. I listened from atop a hill in Connecticut, but to hear the music inside the chapel would be an experience of an entirely different magnitude.The interior walls of the concrete chamber were cast in corrugated iron formwork and act as sound diffusers. The men chose to keep the graffiti that had accumulated on the disused tank over the years.Josh RobenstoneAround 2000, Lentz began dreaming of a music box amid a copper landscape, a place where his music could live alongside its muse. But it wasn’t until he played a concert in Cobar in 2008 that he considered the town as a potential site. He pitched the idea to the Cobar Shire Council, which later proposed the hilltop bearing the tank, suggesting it be demolished to make room. “Absolutely not!” Lentz said. Soon after, he called Murcutt, 85, who is celebrated for hand-drawn, landscape-specific designs inspired by Australian vernacular architecture, such as farmhouses and shearing sheds. “You’d have to be mad to be doing something like this,” Murcutt remembers thinking. “But it’s also extraordinary.”The morning sun creates a sliver of light on the interior of the entrance to the Cobar Sound Chapel, which will open in April.Josh RobenstoneMurcutt has always been drawn to the desert, whose sparseness resonates with the Aboriginal mantra — touch the earth lightly — by which he tries to abide. In keeping with that idea, he set out to design, largely thanks to governmental funding, a simple, solar-powered chapel that would unify sound, site and atmosphere. Two large slabs of concrete mark the entrance outside. Inside, the cubic space (which is slightly slanted to optimize acoustics) is stark, just like the desert itself. In the four corners of the ceiling, sunlight streams through windows of Russian blue glass painted by the local Aboriginal artist Sharron Ohlsen, who also employs pointillism in her work. And, over the course of each day, an ellipse of light traverses the floor and concrete walls, which were cast in corrugated iron formwork and act as sound diffusers. Music booms from a speaker in each wall, enveloping listeners, Miller says, as if they were “moving within a cosmic nebula or swimming within a school of deep-sea jellyfish.”And so, over a century after arriving in town, the Silver Tank — which promises to put Cobar on the cultural map, especially as the chapel will play host to an annual string quartet festival sponsored by Manuka Resources, a local mine — once again provides something essential. For anyone who spends time inside, it offers a sanctuary for contemplating existential questions that, particularly in the age of the pandemic, haunt us so acutely. And while the piece may not provide answers, it is also a comforting reminder that, even in a vast, seemingly empty expanse, there can still be music. More

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      From a Burger King to a Concert Hall, With Help From Frank Gehry

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s ambitious new home for its youth orchestra is the latest sign of the changing fortunes of Inglewood.INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Noemi Guzman, a 17-year-old high school senior, usually has to find a corner someplace to practice violin — the instrument she calls “quite literally, the love of my life.” But the other Saturday morning, Guzman joined a string ensemble practicing on a stage here that is nearly as grand and acoustically tuned as the place she dreams of performing one day: Walt Disney Concert Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.“This is beautiful,” Guzman said during a break from a practice session at the Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center, her voice muffled by a mask. “To have a space you can call your own. It is our space. It is created for us.”Inglewood, a working-class city three miles from Los Angeles Airport that was once plagued by crime and poverty, is in the midst of a high-profile, largely sports-driven economic transformation: The 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, which opened here last year, now the home of the Rams and the Chargers, will be the site of the Super Bowl in February and will be used in the 2028 Summer Olympics. Construction is underway on an 18,000-seat arena for the Los Angeles Clippers, the basketball team.But the transformation of Inglewood, historically one of this region’s largest Black communities, is also showcased by the 25,000-square foot building where Guzman was practicing the other morning. The building, which opened in October, is the first permanent home for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, and is the product of a collaboration involving two of the most prominent cultural figures in Los Angeles: Gustavo Dudamel, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which oversees YOLA, and Frank Gehry, the architect who designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.Mario Raven, right, led students in a singing and music reading class: “Here we go — one, two, three!”Rozette Rago for The New York Times“This was an old bank,” said Dudamel, who has long been friends with Gehry, a classical music lover who can often be spotted in the seats of the hall he designed. “Then it was a Burger King — yes, a Burger King! Frank saw the potential. What we have there is a stage of the same dimensions as Disney Hall.”The $23.5 million project is a high-water mark for YOLA, the youth music education program that was founded here 15 years ago under Dudamel and that he calls the signature achievement of his tenure. It serves 1,500 students, from ages 5 to 18, who come to study, practice and perform music on instruments provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was patterned after El Sistema, the youth music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel studied violin as a boy.And it is one of the most vivid examples of efforts by major arts organizations across the country to bring youth education programs out into communities, rather than concentrating them in city centers or urban arts districts. “You can’t just do it downtown,” said Karen Mack, the executive director of LA Commons, a community arts organization. “If you really want it to have the impact that’s possible with that program you have to bring it out to the community. It has to be accessible.”Gehry called that idea the “whole game.”“It becomes not the community having to go to Disney Hall,” he said, “but the Disney Hall coming to the community.”For Inglewood, the new YOLA Center is a notable addition to what has been a transformative wave of stadium and arena construction, which has spurred a wave of commercial and housing development (and with that, concerns about the gentrification that often follows this kind of development). Until 2016, Inglewood was known mainly as the home of the Forum, the 45-year-old arena where the Lakers and Kings once played before moving to what was known as the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, and Hollywood Park Racetrack, which closed to make way for SoFi stadium.Some instruments cannot be played through masks; those lessons are often held outdoors these days.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“We’ve never been known for cultural enrichment,” said James T. Butts Jr., the mayor of Inglewood. “That is why this is so important to us. What’s happening now is a rounding out of society and culture: we will no longer be known for just sports and entertainment.”Even before Beckmen Center opened, YOLA could be a heady experience for a school-age student contemplating a career in music. Guzman, who joined the youth orchestra seven years ago, has played bow to bow with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the baton of Dudamel. YOLA musicians have joined the Philharmonic at Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and on tours to places including Tokyo, Seoul and Mexico City.Christine Kiva, 15, who started playing cello when she was 7, is now studying with cellists from the Philharmonic. “It’s helped me develop my sound as a cellist, and work on a repertoire for cello,” she said.Inglewood is the fifth economically stressed neighborhood where the youth organization has set up an outpost. But in the first four locations, it shares space with other organizations, forced to fit in without a full-fledged performing space or practice rooms. “We were making the project work in spaces that weren’t specifically designed for music,” said Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Now, the words “Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center,” named after the philanthropists and vineyard owners who made the largest donation to the project, stretch out across the front of the renovated building overlooking South La Brea Avenue and the old downtown. Dudamel has an office there. Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic regularly show up to observe practice and work with students.This building has plenty of rooms for students to practice. There are 272 seats on benches in the main hall, which can be retracted into a wall, allowing the room to be divided in half so two orchestras can practice at once. The acoustics were designed by Nagata Acoustics, which also designed the acoustics at Disney Hall.YOLA, the youth music education program founded 15 years ago, now serves 1,500 students from ages 5 to 18.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThe building had been owned by Inglewood, which sold it to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “When we first walked into it, it still had the greasy smell of a Burger King,” said Elsje Kibler-Vermaas, the vice president for learning for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gehry, who had worked with Dudamel on projects before — including designs for the opera “Don Giovanni” in 2012­ — agreed to take a look at the building, a former bank that opened in 1965.He said that when they brought him there, he was struck by the low ceilings from its days as a bank.“I said, ‘is it possible to make an intervention?’” recalled Gehry who, even at 92, is involved in a series of design projects across Los Angeles.By cutting a hole in its ceiling and putting in a skylight, and cutting a hole in the floor to make the hall deeper, he was able to create a performance space with a 45-foot-high ceiling, close to what Disney Hall has. “The kids will have a real experience of playing in that kind of hall,” he said.That turned out to be a $2 million conversation; the total price, including buying the building and renovating it, jumped from $21 million to $23.5 million to cover the additional cost of raising the roof, installing a skylight and lowering the floor.The building was bustling the other day. Students had come for afternoon music instruction from elementary schools, most in Inglewood, and after snacks — bananas, apples, granola bars — they raced to their lessons in reading music, percussion and how to follow a conductor.“Pay attention!” said Mario Raven, leading his students in a singing and music reading class. “Here we go — one, two, three!”The brass players were outdoors because of Covid-19 concerns (it’s hard to play a French horn while wearing a mask). As planes flew overhead, they performed High Hopes by Panic! at the Disco, suggesting that a youth orchestra need not live by Brahms and Beethoven alone.Students typically sit through 12 to 18 hours a week of instruction for 44 weeks a year. About a quarter of them end up majoring in music. Smith said that was reflected in the broader aspirations for the program. “Our goal wasn’t we were going to train the greatest musicians in the world,” he said. “Our goal was we were going to provide music education to develop students’ self-esteem through music.”Dudamel said his experience as a boy in Venezuela had been formative in bringing the program to Los Angeles. “I grew up in an orchestra where they called us, in the press, the ‘orchestra without a ceiling,’” he said in a Zoom interview from France, where he is now also the music director of the Paris Opera. “Because we didn’t have a place where to rehearse. We have materialized a dream where young people have the best things they can have. A good hall. Great teachers.”“Look, this is not a regular music school,” he added. “We don’t pretend be a conservatory. Maybe they will not be musicians in the future. But our goal is that they have music as part of their life, because it brings beauty, it brings discipline through art.” More

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      Joaquina Kalukango and Amanda Williams on Creative Freedom

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      The “Slave Play” actress and the Chicago-based artist discuss generational gaps, success and the art that brought them each acclaim.What does it mean for an artist to be free? And what does that freedom look like for a contemporary Black artist? Amanda Williams has recently been asking herself these very questions. A Chicago-based visual artist who trained as an architect, Williams, 47, is known for her pieces exploring the nuances of color, both racial and aesthetic. Her breakout work was “Color(ed) Theory,” a 2014-16 series in which she painted eight condemned houses on Chicago’s South Side in vivid, culturally coded shades, such as “Ultrasheen,” a dark turquoise that matches the hue of a Black hair-care product, and “Crown Royal Bag,” a purplish pigment that mirrors the packaging of a popular whisky.In a 2018 TED Talk, Williams discussed how we perceive color — specifically, how our perceptions are determined by context. One example, she said, was redlining — federal housing maps from the 1930s marked neighborhoods inhabited by Black Chicagoans as red, contributing to policies that prevented many residents from securing loans — which weaponized color and resulted in underinvestment. When the actress Joaquina Kalukango, 32, heard the speech, she was awe-struck. Kalukango is no stranger to powerful works of art: Last year, she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play for her work in Jeremy O. Harris’s searing, passionately debated drama “Slave Play,” which is set on a plantation and follows a trio of modern-day interracial couples whose relationships are stymied by conflicting views on race.One rainy morning in October, Kalukango met Williams at the latter’s studio in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Kalukango was days away from starting a Chicago run of “Paradise Square,” a musical about the 1863 Manhattan draft riots, in which Irish immigrants turned on the Black neighbors with whom they’d previously peacefully coexisted. (It’s headed to Broadway early next year.) Meanwhile, Williams is expanding on “What Black Is This, You Say?,” an ongoing, multiplatform series of abstract paintings inspired by cultural touchstones and observations related to the Black experience that she showed at Art Basel in Miami Beach this month.Amid laughter, Williams and Kalukango talked generational differences, the desire to be “regular” and the blurry line between artistic genius and madness.AMANDA WILLIAMS: Twenty twenty was a mess. I was contemplating Kool-Aid [the subject of one of her latest paintings] and laughing about it, and then the whole world was like, “How are you feeling about being Black, segregation and systemic racism?” People were like, “I want to help, right this minute.” I thought, “I don’t know how I feel right now. I was actually doing something else, and now I’m going to cry.” It’s a little easier now. We’re farther away from it. How did that feel for you?JOAQUINA KALUKANGO: It’s interesting, because “Slave Play” opened [on Broadway in October 2019] before the country had its racial awakening. There was a lot of aggression toward our production. There was a lot of pushback, specifically within the Black community. [Some who had seen the play, and many others who hadn’t, found it offensive in its use of antebellum role play and inappropriately sexually graphic; one online petition calling for the show’s shutdown referred to it as “anti-Black sentiment disguised as art.”] But after audiences saw the show, there was so much conversation. On the streets, people would come up to me and talk about it. That was affirming. It was also exhausting. The greatest thing that helped me was when we had a “Black Out” night — the audience was all Black. I heard the show in a different way: It was funny. There was this release of Black people finally being able to feel like this show was for them, as opposed to sitting next to someone and wondering, “Why are you laughing at this?” How can we get Black people to feel free regardless of who’s sitting next to them? How can we fully enjoy ourselves in situations and experience art without feeling like other people are watching us? It’s always a struggle.Kalukango in “Slave Play” at the Golden Theater in New York City, in September 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA.W.: I’ve thought a lot about the freedom question. Take Kanye West. He’s obviously experiencing some mental health issues. But also, he has a level of mastery and talent that borders on complete freedom. He says inappropriate things, and maybe he doesn’t even understand what freedom is. But if you’ve ascended beyond practically any other brown human you’ve ever met, and you can buy Wyoming, isn’t that free? [West has purchased two huge ranches there.] He just does what he wants. [For the listening party for “Donda,” his recent album named after his mother, who died in 2007,] Kanye was like, “I’m going to recreate my mom’s house in [the Chicago Bears stadium] Soldier Field.” Everybody was confused. But I thought, “This could be a mental moment, but it’s also pure creativity.” Every artist who you might say is the most free, in terms of pushing their craft to the edge, is always called crazy.J.K.: Did anyone tell you, early in your career, that you had to work within certain boundaries? Did you feel pressure to be a certain type of artist?A.W.: I trained as an architect [at Cornell University]. My parents were in a panic that I might be an artist. They were like, “Artists who make money are called architects.” In a sense, that was a boundary. Then, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area right at the height of the dot-com boom. The economy was great. Projects were bountiful; jobs were plentiful. I was able to live out this architectural career that I thought would take 30 years in five or six. Then I had a boss who said, “If you could be doing anything in the world right now, what would it be?” She thought I was going to say, “Taking over your company.” And I said, “Painting.” She encouraged me to try it. And the Bay Area lent itself to that. Everybody had an idea. Google was born when I lived in the Bay. That kind of environment helped me take the leap.If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t. I’d be like, “What if it doesn’t work? How am I going to eat?” But back then, I was just like, “Oh, I’ll eat some avocados, it’s California.” There’s no moment I remember when somebody said I couldn’t do it. Well, I’m sure there was, but I blocked it out. My friend and I were just talking about how our generation tended to dismiss racist comments or sexual advances. We just kept moving. Your generation does not tolerate nonsense. Is that how it feels?J.K.: Definitely. The new show I’m in, “Paradise Square,” is a musical that has been in development for a long time. There was always a struggle to figure out whose lens the story should be told through. Now, it finally centers around this free Black woman in New York who owned a bar in 1863 [Nelly Freeman, the role Kalukango is playing]. We have an E.D.I. [equity, diversity and inclusion] person who talks about terminology. One day in rehearsal, an assistant said, “Joaquina, we’re not going to say the L-word in this sentence.” I was like, “ ‘Let’? ‘Listen’? ”A.W.: Which “L”?J.K.: It was “lynch.” I said, “What? We’re just not going to say this?” But the idea was, we don’t have to say that word until it’s absolutely necessary. I thought, “Well, this is a whole new way of being, even for me. That word doesn’t bother my spirit, but it’s bothering other people’s spirits.” It’s a different world from when I was growing up in Atlanta.Loren ToneyA.W.: How does that impact your craft? Does it trip you up to have to be mindful of words in a way that maybe you hadn’t been before?J.K.: We’re all more careful. Everyone’s fragile. We’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and so many issues have come up for so many people. We’re all giving each other a lot of care and grace in this new era that we’re trying to build, this new era of theater we’re trying to make. But it’s a bit of a struggle, I’ll be honest. When you do work that’s specifically about a very troublesome time — and if you look at the Jan. 6 riot [at the U.S. Capitol], it’s similar to the draft riots — you can’t sugarcoat it. You can’t run away from it. It’s always a balance of, how do you tell a story without traumatizing our community?T: When did you first encounter each other’s work?J.K.: I first saw Amanda’s work in her TED Talk.A.W.: Oh my God. I had wondered, how did you find out about me? How do you know who I am?J.K.: I had such a visceral reaction to “Color(ed) Theory.” All of it was so much a part of my life, my childhood. Plus, I just love colors. How did you get that concept? What inspired you?A.W.: I grew up on Chicago’s South Side and crossed town every day to go to school. Chicago segregation, coupled with the city’s grid, is perfect for systemic oppression because it sets boundaries, and then we mentally reinforce them. I was hyperaware of color all the time, as in race, thinking, “That’s a Mexican neighborhood.” “Chinese people are there.” “White folks do this.” Things like that. And I’ve loved [chromatic] color since birth. Then I learned about color in an academic setting.One summer, while [I was] teaching color theory, a friend joked, “They pay you money to teach people what? Red and blue is green?” I said, “No, color theory is a whole science.” She said, “You know colored theory.” We laughed and I left it alone. A week or two later, I thought, “I do know colored theory.” I spent another few years making sense of it. It seemed so juicy. I started to think, “What things make you think of the color first?” There’s a story I told in the TED Talk: I met a gentleman who grew up near the “Crown Royal Bag” house. He thought the purple house meant Prince was coming. Even after I told him about my art, he said, “You wait and see. Prince might show up and perform right here.” Suddenly, he had hope for that vacant lot, in a way that maybe he didn’t before. To me, that was success.J.K.: It was brilliant.A.W.: At first, I wasn’t as familiar with your work, but when I started to look into it, I was like, “How could I have missed all of this? These are the exact same things I’m thinking and talking about.” I’m excited about how we translate these thoughts across mediums — theater, performance, music, architecture, sculpture, writing.Williams’s “Color(ed) Theory: Pink Oil Moisturizer” (2014-16).Amanda WilliamsWilliams’s “Color(ed) Theory: Crown Royal Bag” (2014-16).Amanda WilliamsT: You both have long been working artists, but your breakout pieces — “Slave Play” and “Color(ed) Theory” — made you famous. Has that affected your work? Do you feel an added responsibility now?J.K.: An actor starts off auditioning for nearly everything. We’re told “no” 99 out of 100 times. Initially, the roles I took were just what ended up coming to me. But I also believe that what’s for you is for you. When you’re on a path that you’re aligned with, more things start coming your way. Now I am adamant that Black women see many facets of ourselves, that we are depicted with a wide gamut of emotions: the unflattering and unraveling parts but also joyful and loving, peaceful and gentle. I want it all for us, at every possible moment. I’m trying to ensure I show Black women as full human beings — not stereotypes, not archetypes. We’re not strong all the time. Yes, our ancestors had to survive, but there was always joy in the midst of all that pain.A.W.: You also have to give yourself permission to be an artist. That’s hard because there is a burden. You know how few people have the same opportunities, so you always want to make sure you’ve done justice. At the same time, you have to take the pressure off. Our society thinks about the home run, the slam dunk — the idea that each thing you do must be better than the last. But if you look at any creative being’s full oeuvre, there are ups and downs. Artists have to continue to understand themselves and improve their craft for themselves. It makes me think of this great artist Raymond Saunders, who lives in the Bay Area. He taught an advanced painting class, and I was teaching at the same school, so he invited me to his class. I went — and the students were eating handmade pastries from this beautiful boutique in Berkeley or something. I’m like, “What is this?” And they’re like, “He told us he can’t teach us how to paint, he can teach us how to live.” It was mind-blowing. Maybe we don’t have to nail it every single week of every year. Maybe we just nail it every five years. Maybe we can sleep one of those years.J.K.: I always think, “Do we ever have the space to be mediocre and figure things out?” I don’t want to be Black girl magic every day. Sometimes I want to be regular. Just regular Black. [All laugh]A.W.: Regular Black. I’m going to make a painting based on that.T: How do you two define success right now?A.W.: Just being the best me. I don’t worry so much if my work is well received or if it garners accolades. That sounds so cheesy. My husband jokes, “Well, that’s nice to say after you’ve gotten the accolades.” [All laugh]J.K.: I love originating and creating new roles. For me, success is knowing that there are girls coming up who can use work I’ve done as audition pieces for colleges. In “Slave Play,” my character, Kaneisha, has a 10- or 15-minute monologue. She takes up space for almost the entire last act. I’d never seen anything like it onstage before. For a long time, it was hard to find material or scene work that included multiple Black characters. It was hard finding those plays [when I studied at the Juilliard School]. It’s all about the next generation for me. If at any point I can make someone feel more free, more confident in their abilities, that’s the win.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      in Movies

      The American Academy of Arts and Letters Unveils Expanded Roster

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe American Academy of Arts and Letters Unveils Expanded RosterFor the first time in more than a century, the society is adding new spots for members, with a diverse group of cultural figures.From left, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joy Harjo, Wynton Marsalis and Betye Saar, who are among the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Credit…John Lamparski/Associated PressMarch 5, 2021, 5:19 p.m. ETThe American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society of leading architects, artists, composers and writers, announced 33 new members on Friday as part of an effort to expand and diversify.Among them are the painter Mark Bradford, the poet Joy Harjo, the artist Betye Saar and the composer Wynton Marsalis and the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.Founded in 1898, the institution had capped membership at 250 since 1908; members are elected for life and pay no dues. In addition to adding 33 members, the academy announced it is going to grow to 300 by 2025. Its move to diversify comes as the arts reckon with issues of race, inclusion and social justice.“The board of directors is committed to creating a more inclusive membership that truly represents America and believes that expanding the Academy’s membership will allow the Academy to more readily achieve that goal,” the organization said in a statement.Early on after its establishment, the organization — which now administers more than 70 awards and prizes, totaling more than $1 million — was mainly made up of white men, like Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent and Mark Twain. Previously, new members could only be elected after the death of existing members.“That the doors of the institution have opened to a more representative membership is symbolic of a cultural shift that is long overdue,” Harjo said in an email to The New York Times.“Every culture has contributed to the restoration, remaking and revisioning of this country,” she added. “Together we are a rich, dynamic story field of every shade, tone and rhythm.”The academy is ushering in its most diverse group as institutions across the nation have reckoned with racial justice, equity and inclusion in the last year. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a $5.3 million program to distribute curated collections of books to prisons across the country last June and later pledged $250 million to help reimagine the country’s monuments and memorials to include the histories of people who have been marginalized. In January, the Library of Congress also announced a Mellon-funded initiative to expand its collection and encourage diverse outreach for future librarians and archivists.Employees at other arts organizations are also airing their issues with the gatekeepers of high arts: a coalition from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and other New York-based cultural institutions issued an open letter on social media regarding the “unfair treatment of Black/Brown people” last year, demanding “the immediate removal of ineffective, biased Administrative and Curatorial leadership,” among other requests.The academy only includes American architects, artists, writers and composers. Among the new additions, who are not in these categories, are honorary members, like Mikhail Baryshnikov, Spike Lee, Unsuk Chin and Balkrishna Doshi.All of the new members will be inducted on May 19 via a virtual award ceremony.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More