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Portraits of Serena and Venus Williams, Ava DuVernay Coming to the Smithsonian
Serena and Venus Williams and Ava DuVernay, and the artists who portrayed them, talk about their choices, which will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery.Three strikingly personal and introspective new portraits of three famous women — the tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay — go on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington on Nov. 10 as part of the institution’s Portrait of a Nation Award.The award, recognizing individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the United States, includes the gallery’s acquisition of the new portraits of these groundbreaking Black women and the other honorees this year — the chef José Andrés, the music executive Clive Davis, the president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, and the children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman. (For Edelman, the gallery’s curators acquired a photograph by Ruven Afanador from 2013.) Each of the other honorees worked with the curators to select the artist to represent them, and the works will remain on view in the exhibition “Portrait of a Nation” until Oct. 22, 2023.This award program, begun in 2015 and honoring people every two years, is an effort “to grow our collection in a way that truly recognizes the diversity of the country,” said the director, Kim Sajet, “working with dynamic contemporary artists who are pushing the boundaries of what portraiture can be.”The Williams sisters and DuVernay each chose to collaborate with a rising Black artist on the new commissions (as did Andrés, selecting Kadir Nelson; Davis worked with DavidHockney and Fauci with Hugo Crosthwaite). DuVernay took the opportunity to support Kenturah Davis, an artist she knows and collects. Serena Williams had followed the career of Toyin Ojih Odutola and selected her from a shortlist under consideration. Venus Williams was more exploratory, meeting with multiple artists culled by the gallery’s curatorial team and her own research and picking Robert Pruitt from some two dozen possibilities.Here is how those three portraits came together.From left, Robert Pruitt, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kenturah Davis.From left: Brandon C. Luckain; Beth Wilkinson; via Kenturah DavisVenus Williams and Robert PruittThe idea of Venus Williams dropping by for a visit was surreal to Pruitt, born in Houston and based in the Bronx. He typically hires models for his large-scale figurative portraits, informed by comic book graphics and symbolic objects, which explore Black experiences and mythologies. “She came to my studio and was so down to earth,” Pruitt said. They immediately bonded over his huge comic book collection on display.The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special SectionBigger and Better: While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings.A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude — and priorities.New and Old: In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists. And the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum is working to engage visitors about the realities of climate change.A Cultural Correction: After removing all references to Columbus from its collections the Denver Art Museum has embraced a new exhibition on Latin American art.More From the Special Section: Museums, galleries and auction houses are opening their doors wider than ever to new artists, new concepts and new traditions.After being selected, Pruitt visited Williams in Florida armed with a massive photo download. “I wanted to get a sense of what kind of images of herself she likes and she was very clear, picking a photo she had taken of herself in the mirror,” Pruitt said.He used that as the compositional reference to build out his double-figured portrait of her — with Williams in one instance facing the viewer and encircled by a celestial halo of kinetic white beads (referencing her beaded hair in motion on the court as a young girl). A mirrored Williams, shown from behind and in profile, wears a tennis skirt made of raffia and the Wimbledon trophy dish refashioned as a collared chestplate apropos for a warrior superhero.Williams gave Pruitt information about her family and her relationship to tennis history that he has embedded, such as studding the swirling beads with the birthstones of her siblings. “It was really interesting to work with another voice involved in the process,” he said, a first for him.Pruitt sees “a fertile space of reflection” between his two Venuses. “My hope,” he said, “is that the duality of the portrait gives us this sense of a person looking back at themselves, considering where they came from and where they’re going.”Ava DuVernay and Kenturah DavisKenturah Davis’s portrait of Ava DuVernay. “I wanted to push myself in a different direction than I’m used to seeing myself,” DuVernay said.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionKenturah Davis takes language as a departure point, using rubber stamps of letters spelling out personal texts meaningful to her portrait subjects to draw their images. This process mesmerized DuVernay when she first met Davis several years ago.When the two women, based in Los Angeles, met up to discuss the portrait, Davis suggested using a blur technique she has recently introduced. “I was really interested in making a figure in motion and thought it paired well given Ava’s relationship with motion pictures,” Davis said. DuVernay was hesitant initially, she said, but “I wanted Kenturah to feel free.” And, she added, “I wanted to push myself in a different direction than I’m used to seeing myself.”They collaborated on a photo shoot, where Davis used a long exposure to capture the turning of DuVernay’s face from front to side view in a single elongated image. Then, Davis translated the photographic information onto a larger-than-life-size drawing, rendering DuVernay’s double-faced image pixel by pixel using rubber stamps dipped in ink spelling out a message of encouragement that DuVernay received from her father shortly before he died.“It’s a kind of embodiment, that she’s made up of these words,” said Davis. DuVernay likes that the message is only legible in pieces up close, like “a secret inside of the work.”DuVernay described being startled, in a good way, when she saw the result. “I’ve never seen anything like that of myself — that large, that personal,” she said. “There’s a spirit moving between the two countenances that feels revelatory.”Serena Williams and Toyin Ojih Odutola“I wanted to show her physique but also show her relaxed,” Ojih Odutola said of her portrait of Serena Williams.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution“What I am interested in as an artist is what is often overlooked, what people might not notice about a subject,” said Toyin Ojih Odutola, the Nigerian-born, New York-based artist known for her life-size figurative drawings exploring identity and rendered in charcoal, pastel, ballpoint pen and pencil. With Serena Williams, among the most photographed people in the world and often framed as fierce or glamorous, what was missing in representations was her sense of joy, Ojih Odutola felt.“I thought about her being a mother, a sister, a daughter, and how funny she is,” Ojih Odutola said. In a first exploratory Zoom conversation, the artist asked about depicting her laughing, Ojih Odutola said. “Serena loved that.”Ojih Odutola traveled to Williams’s home in Florida to take reference photos, from which she would construct a composite. “Serena looked at them on the day and liked it, but kind of left it to me,” Ojih Odutola said.Ultimately, the artist decided to go with her gut, presenting Williams with a wide rapturous smile and resting her head on her hand, almost becoming enveloped by vibrant green foliage encroaching from behind.“I wanted to show her physique but also show her relaxed,” Ojih Odutola said. “I wanted to show her as a beautiful Black woman.” She finished the portrait before Williams announced she would step away from tennis after the recent U.S. Open, giving the image another layer of meaning.“This year had been a season of change and evolution for me,” Williams said in an email. “Toyin’s perspective as an artist is unparalleled and to be able to say Toyin Ojih Odutola painted my portrait feels surreal.” More
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Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera
“This is what your brain was doing!” a Lincoln Center staffer said to Shanta Thake, the performing arts complex’s artistic director, while swiping through some freshly taken photos.It was the end of a recent rehearsal at Alice Tully Hall for “Song of the Ambassadors,” a work-in-progress that fuses elements of traditional opera with artificial intelligence and neuroscience, and the photos did appear to show Thake’s brain doing something remarkable: generating images of flowers. Bright, colorful, fantastical flowers of no known species or genus, morphing continuously in size, color and shape, as if botany and fluid dynamics had somehow merged.“Song of the Ambassadors,” which was presented to the public at Tully on Tuesday evening, was created by K Allado-McDowell, who leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence initiative at Google, with the A.I. program GPT-3; the composer Derrick Skye, who integrates electronics and non-Western motifs into his work; and the data artist Refik Anadol, who contributed A.I.-generated visualizations. There were three singers — “ambassadors” to the sun, space and life — as well as a percussionist, a violinist and a flute player. Thake, sitting silently to one side of the stage with a simple, inexpensive EEG monitor on her head, was the “brainist,” feeding brain waves into Anadol’s A.I. algorithm to generate the otherworldly patterns.“I’m using my brain as a prop,” she said in an interview.The “ambassadors” included, from left, Debi Wong, Laurel Semerdjian and Andrew Turner.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDigital art by Refik Anadol was projected above the Tully stage.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJust to the side of the stage, level with the musicians, sat a pair of neuroscientists, Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil, who had been monitoring the brain waves of two audience volunteers sitting nearby, with their heads encased in research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics.Wu, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego, investigates the effects of works of art on the brain; in another study, she’s observing the brain waves of people viewing paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art. Khalil, a former U.C. San Diego researcher who now teaches ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland, focuses on how music gets people to synchronize their behavior. Both aim to integrate art and science.Read More on Artificial IntelligencePublic Defenders: Clearview AI’s facial recognition software has been largely restricted to law enforcement. Now, the company plans to offer access to defense lawyers.Creating Art: Artwork made with artificial intelligence won a prize at the Colorado State Fair’s art competition — and set off fierce backlash about how art is generated.Generative A.I.: Apps like Stable Fusion use artificial intelligence to create images. Some say it is the key to unlock creativity, but critics abound.Are These People Real?: We created our own artificial-technology system to understand how easy it is for a computer to generate fake faces.Which makes them a good match for Allado-McDowell, who first pitched “Song of the Ambassadors” in January 2021 as a participant in the Collider, a Lincoln Center fellowship program supported by the Mellon Foundation. “My proposal was to think about the concert hall as a place where healing could happen,” said Allado-McDowell, 45, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns “they” and “them.”Healing has long preoccupied them. They suffered from severe migraines for years; then, as a student at San Francisco State University, they signed up for a yoga class that took an unexpected turn. “I was besieged by rainbows,” they recalled in a forthcoming memoir. “Orbs of light flickered in my vision. Panting shallow breaths, I broke out of the teacher’s hypnotic groove and escaped to the hall outside. As I knelt on the carpet, cool liquid uncoiled in my lower back … as a glowing purple sphere pulsed gold and green in my inner vision.”This, they were told, was a relatively mild form of kundalini awakening — kundalini being, in Hindu mythology, the serpent that is coiled at the base of the spine, a powerful energy that generally emerges from its dormant state only after extensive meditation and chanting. Others might simply have dropped yoga. “For me, it was an indication that I didn’t understand reality,” Allado-McDowell said. “It showed me that I didn’t have a functional cosmology.”Audience volunteers were outfitted with research-grade headsets from a company called Cognionics.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat followed was a yearslong quest to get one. Along the way, they picked up a master’s degree in art and went to work for a Taiwanese tech company in Seattle. At one point, while sitting in a clearing in the Amazon rainforest, they had a thought: “A.I.s are the children of humanity. They need to learn to love and to be loved. Otherwise they will become psychopaths and kill everyone.”Later, in 2014, Allado-McDowell joined a nascent A.I. research team at Google. When the leader suggested collaborations with artists, they volunteered to lead the initiative. Artists and Machine Intelligence was launched in February 2016 — 50 years after “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” the pioneering union of art and technology led by Robert Rauschenberg and the AT&T Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver. The connection was not lost on Allado-McDowell.One of the earliest partnerships they established was with Anadol: first for “Archive Dreaming,” a project inspired by the Borges story “The Library of Babel,” then for “WDCH Dreams,” Anadol’s A.I.-driven projection onto the billowing steel superstructure of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. For “Song of the Ambassadors,” Anadol said, “we are transforming brain activities in real time into an ever-changing color space.”Anadol’s artwork also responds to Skye’s music, which alternates between periods of activity and repose. “We wanted to bring people in and out of a space of meditation,” Skye said. “I carved out these long gaps where all we’re doing is environmental sounds. Then we slowly bring them out.”All this is tied to Allado-McDowell’s goal of testing the therapeutic powers of music in a performance setting. “Might there be policy implications?” they asked. “Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”The jury is still out.“We know that listening to music has an immediate impact for things like mood, attention, focus,” said Lori Gooding, an associate professor of music therapy at Florida State University and president of the American Music Therapy Association. Positive results have been found for people who have suffered a stroke, for example — but that’s after individualized therapy in a medical or professional setting. The approach in “Song of the Ambassadors,” she said, is different because of “the public aspect of it.”Derrick Skye’s score was performed by musicians including the violinist Joshua Henderson.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne goal of the project is to turn a hall like Tully into a public healing space.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWu and Khalil, the neuroscientists involved with the production, have yet to analyze their data. But at a panel discussion preceding Tuesday’s performance — and yes, this opera did come with a panel discussion — Khalil made a prediction that left the audience cheering.“We’ve started to understand that cognition — that is, the working of the mind — exists far outside our head,” he said. “We used to imagine that the brain is a processor and that cognition happened there. But actually, we think our minds extend throughout our bodies and beyond our bodies into the world.”With music, he continued, these extended minds can lock onto rhythms, and through the rhythms onto other minds, and then onto yet more. As for the spaces where that happens, Khalil said, “You can start to think of them as healing places.” More
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Steve Keene Made 300,000 Paintings in a Home Full of Easels
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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‘The African Desperate’ Expands the Movies’ Narrow View of the Art World
Most films set adjacent to studios and galleries lampoon unfathomable pretension, but Martine Syms takes a more nuanced approached in her look at art schools.Martine Syms’s “The African Desperate” begins on the last day of art school for a Master of Fine Arts student named Palace. She’s facing the final critique from a committee of four instructors who sit in her studio, lobbing comments about her work — some earnest, some passive-aggressive, altogether a bit bewildering.“It’s been interesting having you in the sculpture department.” “Where are you going to go with this?” “You’re afraid of your own appetite. It’s all a bit polite, isn’t it?” “Where’d you grow up? West Side Chicago?”Palace — played by the artist Diamond Stingily, with bright orange hair and a deadly deadpan — holds her own. She calls out problematic questions, quoting Saidiya Hartman and others. Then, at a seemingly arbitrary moment, it’s all over: She passed.“That’s it?” Palace asks quietly. “You’re free,” one examiner says, meaning well. But the comment also implies that art school wasn’t always liberating.“The African Desperate” stakes out new terrain in the rarefied niche of movies featuring art schools. Unlike many films set adjacent to the art world, it focuses on a Black protagonist and avoids the cliché of “making it big” amid unfathomable pretension — a satirical staple of movies like “Velvet Buzzsaw,” “Pecker” and “The Square.”Stingily, right, opposite Erin Leland in “The African Desperate,” which draws on the director’s time as a Bard College student.Dominica, Inc.Syms, a thriving artist who currently has multiple shows on, drew upon her time as an M.F.A. student at Bard College and years of teaching in universities and other settings. Syms remembers both feeling invisible and sticking out in white-dominated professional spaces at the upstate institution.“It’s not even impostor syndrome, because you’re doing the stuff and you’re there,” she said in an interview. “But even now I get people I went to school with who were like, ‘You weren’t even making art when we were in school.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was literally in film class with you!’ So I wanted to capture this feeling of not being seen sometimes,” Syms said last month, in advance of the film’s streaming release Friday on Mubi.Her portrayal of art school pulses with the energy and humor of Palace and her friends, but it’s also a story of emotional survival.“It’s a brilliant lampooning of art schools, but it also felt like a catharsis in a way,” David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, told me. “Some of the greatest art is someone who’s working through something they experienced that they have contradictory feelings about it.”Syms, who co-wrote “The African Desperate” with Rocket Caleshu, created the part with Stingily in mind. The two connected at a Chicago bookstore and arts space Syms was running called Golden Age, and the director has cast the performer in other works. Syms, Stingily and Caleshu all drew on their experiences navigating professional spaces, and Palace, like Stingily at the time, also has the family responsibility of an ailing mother.Syms and Stingily would talk and laugh about how they would respond to situations.“She was like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I would have done in that program!’ Because some of the things that I experienced were really out of pocket,” Syms said.Instead of a traditional dramatic arc, “The African Desperate” exists in the moment with Palace. She’s ready to leave, but people keep coaxing her into hanging out. Her closest friend drives her to a lake to decompress; another friend buzzes with anticipation for the big graduation party; and there are last-chance flirtations with a guy who hasn’t made a move all summer.The film’s style zigs and zags with Palace’s conversations. It captures her very funny shorthand with friends and colleagues, using pop-up memes and head-on shots for phone dialogues. Syms said she had wanted to show “how talkie talkie talkie everything is” in art school. Max Minghella in “Art School Confidential” (2006), which leans into satire.Suzanne Hanover/United Artists and Sony Pictures ClassicsIt’s a sharp contrast with the style of “Art School Confidential,” the 2006 feature directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”). Clowes adapted the story of a starry-eyed art student, Jerome (Max Minghella), from a 1991 comic, loosely based on experiences at the Pratt Institute. The film is set on a cruddy, crime-ridden urban campus where a killer is on the loose.Zwigoff and Clowes’s acerbic satire leans into caricature: a horn-dog roommate, a pretentious instructor (John Malkovich) who draws only triangles (“I was one of the first”), an overbearing wannabe director with a “Film Threat” T-shirt. There’s a simmering skepticism about idolizing anyone, from a once-great alcoholic recluse (Jim Broadbent) to an arrogant art-star (Adam Scott).“Art School Confidential” was partly shot at Pasadena City College, which Syms attended. She liked the comic — and remembers getting caught in middle school reading Clowes’s books — but the movie “is not my favorite.”“I think it’s in the canon,” Syms said. “But it’s also about a white guy, which almost every art movie is about.” In her own time at art school, Syms said she saw precious little work by Black artists and filmmakers, like Edward Owens. “I remember really leaving school feeling — and not in any dejected way, just as a fact — I just don’t think I’m an artist,” Syms said.“The African Desperate” centers on Palace’s experience and subjectivity. The title comes from a verbal slip in conversation with Syms when Stingily meant to say “the African diaspora.” Syms remembered the accidental phrase and found it “evocative of the mood and what it feels like sometimes to be part of the diaspora in those spaces.”Palace does go to the party everyone’s talking about. It’s a happily spacey affair in a cavernous half-empty studio space. It might not look like much, but that’s also part of Syms’s realism. (“That was one scene I really didn’t want to be movie-fied, because it’s not a cool party! You’re upstate and there’s maybe 10 people you hang out with.”) Palace’s studio in the opening scene, for example, is a collage of life and art in progress, populated with books and Tarot cards and art materials (including long locks of hair she works with).Perhaps because it’s Diamond’s last day on campus, we see fewer artists at work than in another film featuring an art school: Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” which recently screened at the New York Film Festival.Michelle Williams as a ceramist who works at an arts college in “Showing Up.”A24Michelle Williams plays a Portland ceramist, Lizzy, who is finishing a collection for her imminent show at a gallery in town. The camera traces her gaze as she considers the pieces in her home studio. We also see the hive of student activity at the arts college, where she works as an administrator.“I was watching next to a friend of mine I went to RISD with, and we talked about how authentic the scenes felt to us,” Cynthia Lahti, the Portland artist who made Lizzy’s works, said, referring to the Rhode Island School of Design. “The way studio work flowed into the hallway. The painting class, the person throwing on the wheel, the fabric people wringing out cloth and hanging it up.”Syms’s film shares this embrace of the many creative energies in flux at an art school. The “African Desperate” cast includes a number of practicing artists, and the effect is effervescent without feeling gratuitously eccentric.“It’s not portraying this already joke-fied version of the art world,” Velasco said. “‘The African Desperate’ is portraying art school, but it’s doing it as an artwork itself.”Syms’s film doesn’t pretend that Palace emerges unscathed from her experience. “I mean, people out here really want me to get mad,” the character says early on, evoking a whole history of aggravation before the film’s 24 hours. “And it’s like, I don’t want to fight you.”But if the movie doesn’t offer a blandly happy ending, it affirms that a story has begun that only Palace can truly tell. More
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From the Underworld to Our World: An Opera About Frida and Diego
“I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.” Frida Kahlo confided these remarks to her diary in 1954, just a few days before making her final exit.In a new opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), the composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz imagine Kahlo overcoming her reluctance to return from beyond. She is summoned back on the Day of the Dead with a mission: to escort her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld. What lures her is the prospect of being given a chance to paint once more.“Sueño,” the debut opera by Frank, 50, has had a long road to the stage. In 2007, she was invited by the Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen to write a work. He suggested the Mexican painter Kahlo as an ideal topic. It resonated with her immediately.“On a personal level, the fact that Frida is a multiracial woman of color with a disability is something I can really relate to,” Frank said in a recent video interview, referring to her heritage — Peruvian-Chinese on her mother’s side, Lithuanian-Jewish on her father’s — as well as her history of hearing loss and Graves’ disease. “She lived this rich, full life that any able bodied, non-disadvantaged person would love to be able to live. And she did so through some very dangerous times in world history.”The commission from Arizona Opera fell through. But in the meantime, Frank established herself as a significant American composer, winning the Latin Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition in 2009.Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl” from 1949, which depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by Kahlo and by an earth goddess.The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation; Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWhen the “Sueño” project was revived, San Diego Opera’s general director, David Bennett, took the lead. In 2015, he convinced San Francisco Opera to come onboard as a co-producer, securing the support needed to bring “Sueño” to the stage. Now, after further pandemic delays, the work will premiere at San Diego Opera on Oct. 29, with San Francisco’s production coming in June.The material is well-trodden — Kahlo’s life and work have inspired films, books, dance and Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s musical theater-tinged opera “Frida” (1991) — but Frank and Cruz determined from the outset to take a novel approach to it. Instead of dramatizing Kahlo’s physical and emotional torments and her notoriously tempestuous relationship with Rivera realistically, they embed these biographical details in the mythic context of a Day of the Dead ritual. Motifs from their paintings are integral to the story — as is the act of painting itself.“I thought: Let’s do something different,” said Cruz, 62, recalling the first time he and Frank met to discuss the project. Frank had gravitated toward Cruz, a Cuban American playwright and poet, after reading his “Anna in the Tropics,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003. “It looked like a libretto,” she said, “with monologues that could obviously be arias and lots of witty banter with a great sense of rhythm that composers can get into.”Thus began a collaboration that has shaped the development of the careers of these two artists. Over the course of the opera’s prolonged incubation, the pair have worked on about a dozen projects, from a brief choral piece about the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca to “Conquest Requiem,” an oratorio inspired by the complex, contradictory legacy of the Nahua woman Malinche and her role in Cortés’s war against the Aztecs.And the long postponement of “Sueño” had its upside. “The opera is different for having this long relationship,” Frank said.Sketches by the costume designer Eloise Kazan; above, Frida. Eloise KazanAnd, here, Catrina. Eloise KazanA rendering of a “Sueño” set, by the scenic designer Jorge Ballina.Jorge BallinaWhen they started to work on it, Frank played samples of her music for Cruz, including “Requiem for a Magical America: El Día de los Muertos” (2006), a “folk requiem” ballet originally scored for band and dancers, and “La Llorona,” a viola concerto about death and the afterlife. Cruz found these pieces so evocative that he decided to use the Mexican folk tradition of the Day of the Dead to anchor the opera.“What I love about that idea is that we go into a mythic landscape that is bigger than life,” he said. “I think those are the brushstrokes that an opera needs.”The Spanish-language libretto he wrote uses the Day of the Dead to enact a reversal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — a myth central to the history of opera itself. Frida crosses the threshold from the underworld to the living for the single day allotted and guides the ailing Diego back with her as he accepts his mortality.The opera is replete with references to the pre-Columbian Mexican culture and folklore that so profoundly inspired Kahlo and Rivera. The realm where the departed souls reside is depicted as Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Access back to the world of the living for the Day of the Dead ritual is controlled by Catrina, a trickster figure.Catrina also serves as the mouthpiece for the wit that leavens Cruz’s poetic, magic realism-inflected text. “Nothing illustrates the Mexican sense of humor and irony toward death more than the sugar-candy skulls that are made for the festivities of the Day of the Dead,” Cruz said, “as if death were sweet to eat and it can disintegrate in our mouths.”The most surprising of the opera’s quartet of characters is a young actor named Leonardo — a countertenor role — who impersonates Greta Garbo for a fan, whom Leonardo crosses over from Mictlan to visit every year.Leonardo embodies the world of art, which coexists with the worlds of the living and of the dead. The entire opera is structured around the passage among these three worlds, which are separate yet also connected. Frank said she set out to create “evocative soundscapes so that the audience is very clear when we enter a different phase of Frida and Diego’s story.”Frank established a musical vocabulary to conjure these worlds by assigning distinct gestures and instrumental colors to each: lush harmonies to evoke “the grandeur of the underworld beneath the moonlight, a big, night sound”; hints of folkloric music and lighter dance rhythms for the world of the living; and intimate, chamber music-like textures for the world of art.Diego Rivera’s “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park,” at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, in Mexico City.Fernando Llano/Associated PressFor authenticity, said Bennett from San Diego Opera, it was important to round out the creative team with Mexican artists and to hire native Spanish-speaking singers for the two leads. The mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz and the baritone Alfredo Daza will create the roles of Frida and Diego.The Mexican-born conductor, Roberto Kalb, who recently led the premiere of Tobias Picker’s opera “Awakenings,” admires the diversity of colors in Frank’s score, with the marimba threaded throughout as a unifying timbre. “She’s a master orchestrator and writes for the chorus as well as anyone,” he said. “It’s her first opera, but it doesn’t sound like it.”Frank’s references to Mexican music tend to be subtle and, for Kalb, “are always done elegantly, with great respect. As a Mexican, I appreciate that, because so many pieces just slap it on.”Kalb described the overarching tone of Frank’s music as “ancient spectralism” — referring to a focus on the phenomenon of sound itself, which she blends with an early-music flavor.“A timeless kind of sound is important,” Frank said. “That’s how Frida and Diego saw what they did. Yes, they were creating new art. But they were obsessed with old Mexican art and tradition.”Specific examples of their art influenced Cruz’s ideas for the dramatic structure. In “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” from 1949, Kahlo depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by herself and by an earth goddess. Cruz said that from this image he derived the opera’s core concept of Kahlo helping Rivera cross over at the end of his life, three years after her death: “It is a self-portrait that celebrates the union of the Riveras, perhaps in the afterlife, or in a more idealistic and artistic world.”Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park” (1946-47), which mingles his life story with a political history of Mexico, springs to life at the beginning of second act as the artist is shown painting it. Frida emerges from its composition to re-enter the world of the living.The director, Lorena Maza, who is from Mexico City, said that she and her design team took their cues from the two painters’ shared love of Indigenous and folk art, as well as their activism. But equally fundamental to the opera’s mise-en-scène are their differences in outlook: the intimacy of the self-portraits that figure so prominently in Kahlo’s work — “each one a battle against pain and disintegration” — and the social realism of Rivera’s epic murals.“Mainly what we bring to the table is the Mexican view of the story,” Maza said. “What Anglo-Saxon culture knows about the Día de los Muertos, or about Frida and Diego, is a bit different from how we live it. We want to avoid the folkloric, cliché version of this celebration and of these two artists. For us, these are very close, personal characters who have been with us since we were children and who both created a Mexican visual identity for us.”The opera’s aim, suggested by the final lines of the chorus of departed souls, is to invite us to enter into the world of Frida and Diego, to erase the borderlines between the real and the imagined:“Life is briefbut the light will followthe strokes of your paintbrush.From your paintings emerge,an anthem of sun,the glory of your gaze.” More
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Geffen Hall Commissions New Art That Honors Black and Latino History
Public art commissions are tricky. The creator has to make something that’s accessible but enduring, relevant to the site but also able to stand on its own. Still, Jacolby Satterwhite and Nina Chanel Abney, tapped by Lincoln Center, the Public Art Fund and the Studio Museum in Harlem to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall with a pair of major new installations, make it look easy.Photo of “An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time,” a video by Jacolby Satterwhite at David Geffen Hall in Manhattan.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesSatterwhite, 36, a Brooklyn-based artist, works in performance, 3-D animation and sculpture, often incorporating drawings by his mother, Patricia Satterwhite, into elaborate installations. Abney, 40, best known for painting, also lives in New York and is a public art veteran. They were chosen from a short list of nominated artists after submitting proposals. Between them, the artists incorporate the history of the Lincoln Center and its performing companies, and also of San Juan Hill, the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood displaced by the performing arts complex, into deeply thoughtful pieces that are also joyful and welcoming.Both will stay up 18 months before giving way to new commissions. (Sadly missing is Richard Lippold’s majestic, 40-foot “Orpheus and Apollo,” removed from the hall in 2014 and currently slated to reappear at La Guardia Airport.)“San Juan Heal,” Abney’s contribution, comprises 35 large vinyl squares ornamenting most of the building’s northern facade. Collagelike shapes render an apropos figure, letter or phrase: “Soul at the Center,” “San Juan Hill,” Thelonious Monk in a red cap. (He lived in the area.) The mixture captures the sometimes dissonant vibrancy of this particular patch of Manhattan; several large letter Xs could stand for multiplying different influences or for the overlooked histories that have been crossed out. But the bold colors and easy legibility, and the way the whole thing makes the building look almost like an educational children’s toy, reach out and grab you across Broadway.Satterwhite’s “An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time,” a half-hour video that will play on all 400 square feet of the lobby’s digital wall whenever it’s not simulcasting concerts, offers a kind of simulated timeless Lincoln Center. News tickers share factoids about the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, especially relating to Black musicians and composers (like the opera singer Marian Anderson or the child prodigy Philippa Schuyler).Dancers and musicians, choreographed by Satterwhite, silently follow their muses under billboard-size photos of performers from the past in a constantly moving digital landscape. As the views swing gently in and out and the video’s muted colors cycle through four sections, the piece achieves an extraordinary balance between stasis and movement, picture and narrative, the excitement of the present and the grandeur of history. More
