Art

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Art Rosenbaum, Painter and Preserver of Folk Music, Dies at 83

      by

      As an artist and exponent of American traditional songs, he sought to blur the lines between outsider and insider art, and became a guiding force in the Athens, Ga., scene.ATLANTA — Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, Ga., his adopted hometown. He was 83.His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was complications of cancer.Art Rosenbaum’s passion for documenting a broad range of American musical traditions as they were passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms expanded upon the famous field recording work of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, another high-profile 20th-century champion of folk music. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Seeger had once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.”Mr. Rosenbaum called it “good advice, and the kick in the rear that got me going.”“Outside Carnesville,” oil on linen, 1983-84. Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, as he did here, with Mabel Cawthorn on the banjo.Art RosenbaumIn 2007, the Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Mr. Rosenbaum’s trove, “Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” which won a Grammy Award for best historical album.The pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “an indispensable counterpoint to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music,’” a reference to the 1952 song compilation that remains a canonical touchstone for folk musicians.Like Mr. Smith, the bohemian polymath who compiled the “Anthology,” Mr. Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where his energetic paintings, often depicting the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an influence that resonated far beyond the classroom.Michael Stipe, the visual artist and singer with the Athens rock band R.E.M., who was a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s in the early 1980s, said Mr. Rosenbaum’s goal “was to blur the lines between what is outsider and insider, and to bring together this untrained music and art with trained music and art, and acknowledge that each have immense power, and that they’re not that far apart.”A portrait of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. singer, a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s, as well as a subject of his paintings.Art Rosenbaum, Collection of the Peasant CorporationArthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on Dec. 6, 1938, in Ogdensburg, N.Y., in St. Lawrence County. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged her children’s artistic inclinations. His father, David Rosenbaum, was an Army pathologist who sometimes sang what his son described as “Northern street songs.” Arthur later recorded one of these songs, his father’s a cappella version of the ribald 18th-century Child ballad “Our Goodman,” and included it in the 2007 box set.The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, entranced by traditional music, absorbed the Harry Smith anthology and the contemporary folk stars of the day. In high school he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize money on a five-string banjo. He went on to become a pre-eminent expert on traditional banjo playing and tunings and to record several albums.In the mid-1950s Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, then the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, earning an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University. In the summers he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began making recordings of nearby field workers from Mexico and the American South.In 1958, Mr. Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded in Indianapolis a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, whom he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” Back in New York, as Mr. Rosenbaum was fond of recalling, a fellow roots music obsessive named Bob Dylan would pester him for any details he could muster about Mr. Blackwell’s life and playing style.“Shady Grove,” 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum sought out traditional Black and white musicians, revealing a shared cultural history.Art RosenbaumIt was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark, who became his wife and lifelong collaborator. She survives him.In addition to her and his son, Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by a sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, a writer; and a brother, Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist.After eight years of teaching studio art at the University of Iowa, Mr. Rosenbaum in 1976 took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. With Athens as a home base, he and Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum continued making field recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, and giving the musicians they met opportunities to play before new audiences.“As these traditional musicians were identified and then brought out,” said Judith McWillie, an emerita art professor at the university, “and as there were more festivals and opportunities for them to play, people began to envision an identity for Georgia that was somewhat different from the one that it had. This was the 1970s, and coming off some extremely difficult times in the South.”Folk music, she said, revealed a shared cultural history: “The musicians Art brought out were Black and white.”In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of stories and songs by Howard Finster, the self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “man of visions” whose work has become indelibly associated with 20th-century Georgia after its use on album covers by R.E.M. and the band Talking Heads.Untitled Diptych, 2014. Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings are allegorical works in which the old and the new cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space with modern-day hipsters.Art RosenbaumHe also recorded the McIntosh County Shouters, an African American group from coastal Georgia who performed the “ring shout,” which Mr. Rosenbaum described as “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion and expressive and formalized dancelike movements.” The ring shout, he asserted, was “the oldest African American performance tradition on the North American continent.”Brenton Jordan, a member of the group, said of the Rosenbaums, “It’s their legwork that actually kind of introduced the McIntosh County Shouters to the world.” He noted that the ring shout, once on the verge of extinction, has in recent years been performed by his group in Washington at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.The Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. With drawings of the performers by Mr. Rosenbaum and photos of them by Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum, it depicts a place and a culture that seems beguilingly out of phase with modern life.Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loose allegorical works in which the old and the new clash and cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space on the canvas with modern-day hipsters, skateboarders and documentarians (often Mr. Rosenbaum himself).As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. At times his work recalls the painting of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist. Some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s works are large murals on historical themes.Pete Seeger once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.” That advice set him on a decades-long project of seeking out unrecorded musicians.via Rosenbaum familyBeginning in the late 1970s, Athens saw an explosion of forward-thinking rock musicians, many of whom, like Mr. Stipe, had ties to the Georgia art school. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passions always ran to traditional music, but he remained an inspiration for contemporary musicians.Lance Ledbetter, the founder and co-director of the Dust-to-Digital label, recalled Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant, idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, speaking of Mr. Rosenbaum, quoting him as saying:“When you move to Athens, and you hear about this guy who plays banjo and knows all of these songs, you just follow him around like a puppy dog. And I’m not the only one who did that.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Mentors Named for Next Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

      by

      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

    • 175 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Issy Wood Met Power Players in Art and Music. She Went Her Own Way.

      by

      The painter and budding electronic-pop musician has a new show of figurative paintings in New York, and quietly released the LP “My Body Your Choice” last month.For the last three years, through art fairs, auctions, a global pandemic and an album release, the British painter and musician Issy Wood has been perfecting the craft of being pursued professionally.Singled out by collectors, curators and titans of culture from two disparate worlds as a next big thing, Wood, 29, took a strange ride on her own hype cycle, luxuriating momentarily in the fuss and then — for the most part — rejecting it, leaving some fancy bridges smoldering behind her.As an in-demand visual artist and a D.I.Y. singer uncomfortable with the very different demands of potential pop renown, Wood is now resurfacing with new boundaries after extended sagas — in business, creativity and friendship — with two would-be patrons: the mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, in art, and the music super-producer Mark Ronson, best known for his work with Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga.Instead of Gagosian, the blue-chip gallery empire that might have been Wood’s champion, her new show of unsettling figurative paintings, “Time Sensitive,” opened Friday at Michael Werner, the more traditional Upper East Side gallery. And rather than releasing her debut album with Ronson’s Zelig label, an imprint of Sony Music where she briefly had a record deal, the wobbly and acerbic “My Body Your Choice” was put out completely independently last month, following the dissolution of her contract.“If I wanted an older man to hold money over my head, I would’ve gotten back in touch with my dad,” Wood said dryly over seltzer and Capri cigarettes last week at the cavernous Soho apartment where the new gallery had put her up for the show.One part self-professed naïf and one part openly savvy maneuverer, she identified as both “tough” and “very sensitive,” displaying both modes as she recounted her recent ups and downs across industries.Of Gagosian, 77, Wood noted that “to a point, he would say, I love how spunky you are,” only for the switch to flip when she decided not to work with him. “Then there’s a line where it becomes, Why are you being so difficult?” (Through a representative, Gagosian declined to comment.)On “Parts,” an almost playful kiss-off from her new album, Wood touches on a similar dynamic with Ronson, though it applies to others, too: “You only want the part of me/that smiles and says, ‘Yeah, I agree,’” she sings, adding: “I’m more than just a fresh face/I’ve got problems that you can’t pronounce.”It is this rare combination of emotional vulnerability and strategic, biting intelligence that allows Wood to connect across multiple mediums, said Vanessa Carlos, a founder of the London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa, where Wood has shown work since art school.“Issy really, really resists being commodified and objectified,” Carlos said. “Sometimes she might be seduced by something shiny, but very quickly she can see through things. Her main compass has been integrity to herself and to her own work.”On “My Body Your Choice,” made entirely alone at her kitchen table, Wood said she blends “heartbreak songs about actual boyfriends, heartbreak songs about my dad no longer being in my life and heartbreak songs about working with a music label.”Like her figurative paintings, which have been described as “a dysmorphic take on objects we think we know the shape of,” her electronic pop sounds nearly familiar, but can crunch or undulate in unexpected ways.Wood’s “Sore awards 1.”Issy Wood, via Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Carlos/Ishikawa, LondonThe artist’s “Stock, live.”Issy Wood, via Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Carlos/Ishikawa, London“Embarrassingly, I’m making what I think is pop music, but people describe it as wonky,” Wood said. “But I was trying my best! Why is it wonky? That’s everything — it’s me trying to be normal and failing miserably.”Tying the two bodies of work together are the semipublic blogs that Wood has kept since she was 14. Evolving from the abstract Tumblr musings of a disaffected teenager to raw and searing diary entries in which she dissects her life and career, the writing has regularly been compiled and released in book form by Carlos/Ishikawa. (Sample quip: “Having an angry 76-year-old man tell you how you feel is the new ASMR.” Or, after a failed romance: “Men continue to be a waste of moisturiser.”)“It’s all one thing,” said the dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, an owner at Michael Werner Gallery, of Wood’s various projects, all of which touch on “power, sex, class, femininity, masculinity.” He added, “She has enough energy to make everything the primary parts of her work.”Born in Durham, N.C., to doctor parents and raised in South London, Wood spent most of her adolescence “in hospitals and psychiatric units for my eating disorder,” she said. “Art school was the only path available to me.”At the Royal Academy in 2016, Wood was plucked by Carlos, who was drawn as much to the artist’s Tumblr as to her paintings. But by Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018, Wood’s large scale oil renderings of car interiors, painted on velvet, had become sought after, ushering her into a class of young artists whose sales market and attention share would explode in tandem. This year, one of her paintings topped half a million dollars at auction, a windfall not for Wood or her galleries, but for those flipping the work on the secondary market.Wood has done her best to ignore the noise, but there has been plenty of it. Most days, after meditation and two morning smokes, she paints during regular office hours at her London studio, taking breaks to chat with Carlos at the gallery next door.“We’ll talk about the insanity around how desperate people seem to be for my work right now and some of the deranged and frankly abusive emails from collectors, from advisers who want their cut, from people who put my work in auction,” Wood said. “Rich people don’t like being told no — most of them are men and they especially don’t like being told no by women. It offends everything they’ve worked to attain.”Music, which was supposed to be a haven, happens at night. While Wood had messed around in a band as a teenager, she returned to songwriting in 2019 following a breakup. “Art had very much become my job,” she said. “Music became my hobby, and it was like a secret.” Then a friend offered at a party to send Ronson some of Wood’s early demos.“I knew him as the guy that put loads of horns on things,” Wood said.The producer soon visited her in London — “He said, this could really be big,” she recalled — and began loaning her equipment, which Wood took as a creative challenge. She didn’t know Ronson had a record label until he offered to sign her, and even then, failed to realize it meant a deal with Sony as a corporate partner, she said.“I thought it was going to be like joining a gallery: It’s just a handshake and then you’re on the thing,” Wood said. She retained a lawyer on his advice.Used to the 50-50 splits of the art world, Wood was aghast at the lopsided terms of a typical major-label recording contract. “I feel like I arrived to that record deal in the strongest way possible — a bit older, a bit wiser. I was 27 rather than the 17-year-old version of me, desperately mentally ill and confused in every way,” she said. “And I had a very lucrative career, which meant I didn’t need much from them.”Still, across the rocky release of two pandemic EPs with Zelig (which she took to calling Zony), Wood found the requirements of her new job to be both mentally taxing and borderline absurd. The label fretted about being sued over her videos and album artwork, she said, and set her up with a social media manager who tried to teach her about hashtags. (“I was born in 1993, I know exactly what a hashtag is.”)“Embarrassingly, I’m making what I think is pop music, but people describe it as wonky,” Wood said. Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesAlthough Ronson could be generous with his feedback on her music, she found him difficult to pin down when she had questions; because of Covid, she had never met anyone else involved in her music career, including the manager Ronson had helped her hire.Emotional and physical distance turned to hostility, and then the unceremonious end of the pairing. “He made sure that I always knew that he was doing me a favor,” Wood said. “That he’d won an Oscar for his songwriting and I very much hadn’t.” (Ronson, in a brief statement, said, “I have a different recollection of our professional history but I wish her the best and the continued use of my HBO Max login.”)The rupture with Gagosian after a prolonged cat-and-mouse game was of a “similar flavor,” she said. “After all I’ve done for you …” Wood parodied, beating her fist on the table.She recalled upsetting the dealer at their final business meeting when she questioned who would shepherd her career when he died. After Wood retreated to the bathroom to escape Gagosian’s frustrated disappointment, she said, he texted her that “the other galleries you are considering will go out of business long before my demise,” accidentally sending it three times, which cut the tension. Later, she wrote about the episode in detail.This week, at Michael Werner, things were more tranquil. As Wood and her new gallerist, VeneKlasen, attempted to arrange the paintings, Wood compared the sweetly awkward negotiation to having sex with someone for the first time: “What do you even like?”The art being considered included a textbook-size depiction of a birth control container and a zoomed crop from “Mad Men” the size of a small swimming pool. Wood’s main instinct was to subtract. But even as the party, the sales, the reviews and maybe even more music loomed, the focus, once again, was on the work. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A ‘Virtual Rapper’ Was Fired. Questions About Art and Tech Remain.

      by

      Young people are increasingly at ease consuming culture via digital avatars or made with artificial intelligence. Should the same moral guidelines and laws apply to those works?The story of FN Meka — a fictitious character billed as the first musical artist partly powered by artificial intelligence to be signed by a major record label — might seem like a bizarre one-off. In August, Capitol Records dropped FN Meka, whose look, outlaw persona and suggestive lyrics were inspired by real-life music stars like Travis Scott, 6ix9ine and Lil Pump, amid criticism that the project trafficked in stereotypes.But to seasoned observers of technology in pop music and the debate over cultural appropriation, the rise and fall of this so-called robot rapper, whose songs were actually written and voiced by humans, has raised important questions that are not going away anytime soon.Last month alone, an A.I. artwork won a prize in Colorado and a computer program improvised a classical music solo in real time in New York City. From DALL-E 2, the technology that creates visual art on command, to Hatsune Miku, a Japanese software that does something similar for music, the arts world may be on the precipice of a sea change in how its products are created.And young people feel increasingly at ease consuming culture via digital avatars like FN Meka. It has already been happening in hip-hop: A hologram of the rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, performed at a music festival in 2012; Travis Scott gave a concert through his avatar in the video game Fortnite in 2020; and Snoop Dogg and Eminem rapped as their digital selves and their Bored Ape avatars in a metaverse performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month.In this brave new world, do fake characters based on real people amount to unseemly borrowing, even theft, or just the kind of homage that has always defined pop music? Even when artificial intelligence does help write music, should the humans behind it be accountable for the machine-created lyrics? And as far as race is concerned, how do the rules of cultural appropriation work when the person doing the appropriating is not a human being with a unique cultural background but a fictitious identity backed by an anonymous, multiracial collective?“A lot of our moral intuitions and codes as humans may have evolved for a context where we have discrete human actors,” said Ziv Epstein, a Ph.D. student at the M.I.T. Media Lab who studies the intersection of humans and technology. “These emerging technologies require new legal frameworks and research to understand how we reason about them.”From left: The Tupac Shakur hologram, Travis Scott in Fortnite and Snoop Dogg at the Video Music Awards.From left: Christopher Polk/Getty Images; via YouTube; MTVFor FN Meka’s critics, the presence of more Black people or people of color in the rooms where the character was conceived, designed and promoted may have helped prevent the negative stereotypes that they say it furthered. Industry Blackout, a nonprofit advocacy group, said FN Meka “insulted” Black culture and leeched off the sounds, looks and life experiences of real Black artists. Capitol seemed to agree when it apologized for its “insensitivity” in a statement.To the critics, FN Meka’s (exaggerated) debt to A.I. and its exclusively digital existence had the effect of absolving the people who were really calling the shots. “There are humans behind technology,” said Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of WAYE, an organization that educates young people about technology. “When we disconnect the two, that’s where we could potentially risk harm for different marginalized groups.“What concerns me about the world of avatars,” she added, “is we have a situation where people can create and profit off the ethnic group an avatar represents without being a part of that ethnic group.”In pop music generally and especially in hip-hop, the culture most likely to be exploited is Black culture, said Imani Mosley, a professor of musicology at the University of Florida.“There’s so much overlap between digital culture and Gen Z culture and Black culture, to the point where a lot of people don’t necessarily recognize that a lot of things Gen Z says are pulled from African American vernacular,” she said. “To interact with that culture, to be a part of that discourse, is to use certain digital and cultural markers, and if you don’t have access to that discourse because you’re not Black, one way to do that is to hide one’s own ethnicity behind the curtain of the internet.”For some, though, vilifying FN Meka’s creators raised the specter of artistic censorship.James O. Young, a professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria who studies cultural appropriation in art, acknowledged there is a long tradition in music of placing a premium on the artist’s lived experience. Young quoted the famous line attributed to the jazz legend Charlie Parker: “If you didn’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”But recently the consensus has moved toward sanctioning only art that arises out of lived experience, to the detriment of both art and political solidarity, Young argued. He pointed to an episode five years ago in which a white artist was pilloried for painting the Black civil rights martyr Emmett Till’s corpse.“One of the claims is, ‘This is digital blackface,’” Young said of FN Meka. “Maybe it is.” But he advocated for balanced examination, rather than swift reaction. “You’ve got to be very careful: I don’t think you want to claim that all representations of Black people are somehow morally offensive.”The broader impoverishment highlighted by both sides of this debate is a lack of language and concepts for discussing art that is not, or not entirely, made by people.Epstein, of the M.I.T. Media Lab, cited the thinking of Aaron Hertzmann, a scientist at Adobe Research. In a paper called “Can Computers Make Art?,” Hertzmann argued that at the moment art can be made only by humans, who are the only ones capable of interacting socially with other humans. In this understanding, machine learning is a tool; the artist behind a drawing made by DALL-E or the similar program Midjourney is not the software, but the person who gave it instructions.However, Hertzmann allowed, “Someday, better A.I. could come to be viewed as true social agents.”Meanwhile, as culture is increasingly mediated through the digital realm, questions of how to account for all of the other people who directly or indirectly touched that art will multiply, undermining the conventional notion of the artist as expressing her indivisible perspective.Some art is now the result of “a complex and diffuse system of many human actors and computational processes interacting,” Epstein said. “If you generate a DALL-E 2 image, is that your artwork?” he added. “Can you be the social agent of that? Or are they scaffolded by other humans?”A final question is deceptively profound: Does it even matter who, or what, composes the song, paints the painting, writes the book? Metaverse avatars and A.I. programs are intrinsically derivative: They are all but guaranteed to be riffs on already existing artists and their works.Anthony Martini, a co-founder of Factory New, the virtual music company that created FN Meka, stands firmly on one side of that debate: “If you’re mad about the lyrical content because it supposedly was A.I.,” he said, “why not be mad about the lyrical content in general?” More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      The Many Lives of Martine Syms

      by

      LOS ANGELES — As self-portraits go, the video “DED” by Martine Syms is a bit masochistic. The artist’s digital avatar strolls across a flat, featureless limbo, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a chef’s knife. Crippling, fatal allergies. Diarrhea so explosive she rockets into the sky like a rag doll, then dies from the fall. Then, somehow, she gets up and keeps walking.Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently, at a booth at Little Dom’s, a red-sauce, dark wood Italian restaurant in this city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. “But let me be clear that I understand how people do not. They were like, ‘What the [expletive] is this? It’s really violent. I don’t like seeing you dying.’”But that’s the thing, she told me. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with.”Especially when race is involved. “I’m using a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” she acknowledged. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”Syms, 34, is the sort of “new media” artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular. An early video, “My Only Idol Is Reality,” from 2007, consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue on race between two contestants on “The Real World.” Syms studied cinema at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a book store called Golden Age and started an artist-book imprint called Dominica. She racked up tags: artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker; D.J., influencer, brand. Throughout her art, her moving images feature avatars of herself that she endows with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.“DED” (2021), a digital video on view in “Martine Syms: Grio College” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Syms endows avatars of herself, including Teeny, seen above, with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.Olympia Shannon/CCS BardIn the summer of 2017, Syms graduated with an M.F.A. from Bard College; that fall, she began a year as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. In the interim, she produced a solo show at MoMA — a purple-tinged installation including photographs, furniture and a feature-length video.This fall brings her a triad of institutional coups, and a movie in theaters. Each stars dramatized, extrapolated versions of Syms. A new, open-ended video play fed by machine-learning algorithms anchors “Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And a gonzo sitcom called “She Mad,” 2015-2021, in which Syms often stars, appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until February 2023. The most recent episode routes the artist’s real-life ups and downs through a cover of the “Life Story” TikToks posted by the rapper Lil Nas X.“DED” is the showpiece of “Grio College,” Syms’s retrospective at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, in upstate New York. Bard, the artist’s alma mater, also inspired her first foray into independent films: “The African Desperate,” which she directed and co-wrote with Rocket Caleshu, enters worldwide distribution with screenings in New York starting Sept. 16. (The artist Diamond Stingily, an old friend, plays the lead, a Black femme named Palace with a newly minted M.F.A.; Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York dealer, and A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, have small roles as Palace’s professors.)Installation view of “Martine Syms: She Mad Season One,” a wry take on contemporary life as a Black woman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Feb. 12, 2023.Nathan Keay/MCA ChicagoSyms’s many avatars are a record of survival in a cloying media atmosphere. They’re sometimes self-indulgent — necessarily so, in the manner of psychoanalysis or self-care. The notion of “Grio College,” a place that teaches the trick of honing personal experience into modern stories, developed through the artist’s experience on the M.F.A. track. Syms writes in the press notes to “The African Desperate” that the overlapping dystopias of an advanced art college in the bucolic Hudson Valley came laced with racism. One of the last sequences of the film layers found audio of a man telling off his bigoted co-workers with shots of postcard-perfect fields and shops in Troy, N.Y.“The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators; the places she lives become sets and settings.Sitting in the booth at Little Dom’s, on the edge of Hollywood, dayglo-orange braids fell across Syms’s lilac tank top and accented a tattoo on her shoulder: the word “EVIL.” (Seen from a certain angle, it almost reads “LIVE.”) Waitstaff in the hall zapped small flies with loud pops of an electric racquet.Syms grew up in Altadena, a quiet town abutting the mountains east of Los Angeles known as a retreat for roughneck millionaires and an enclave for the Black middle class. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and Syms would take the bus into Los Angeles to spend afternoons browsing Goodwill and Skylight Books or watching films at the vintage theaters. The kinetic harshness of the city comes through in her work. Her characters take the bus; they walk in Los Angeles.Diamond Stingily, in the role of Palace, stars in “The African Desperate,” which Syms co-wrote and directed, and which opens in theaters this fall.Dominica, Inc.But virtual registers are just as important for Syms and her versions. In some of her videos, characters’ texts pop up on the screen in bubbles; her 2018 piece “Mythiccbeing” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she mustered text messages, voice memos and notes from her phone, piecing together how ideas coalesced into art. Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.Syms traces “DED” to a dream she had in early 2020, while she was sick with Covid; it is stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of the 2021 show in which that work debuted, “Loot Sweets,” derives from another reverie. She pulls up her notes app: “post ap life in a weird mall. bard people and others. lauren and i are trying to escape. people are looting so we stop by pleats please on the way out. everything is gone. all the good stuff at least. lauren drops from the second floor into the ocean while i crawl down to meet her. she swims w me bc she’s stronger against the current. we finally get out and i’m immediately shot dead.”It’s heavy stuff, a nightmare fed by civil unrest incited by police killing unarmed Black Americans, against the background simmer of a global pandemic. Syms explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “Loot Sweets”: medieval lute music, Bobby McFerrin’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” reparations. While artists and activists have called for ending the exploitation of images of Black death, Syms turned to gallows humor.Syms with her electric guitar in her studio in Los Angeles.Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesBut Syms is mining the vein of absurdity, hidden in plain sight, running through freewheeling experiments in Black culture like Amiri Baraka’s poetry or Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013, she wrote “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” which deflates Afrofuturist esoterica and other escapism. Instead, she proposes: “The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”The curator Meg Onli, who included Syms in the 2019 exhibition “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, told me that the text underpinned the show’s take on “the confluence of temporalities, Blackness and the mundane.”“I love her ability to pivot from conversations around Black futurity that center on the fantastic and spectacular,” Onli added, “and remind us that our future may not look drastically different from our present.”Syms pointed out that Teeny, her avatar in “DED,” doesn’t really die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt reads TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying an often-awful world.Installation view of “Martine Syms: Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a script and performances constantly revised in real time.Joseph Hu/Philadelphia Museum of ArtAt the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the glowing green installation of “Neural Swamp” mounts two women’s faces on monitors, arranged around vinyl poufs. A third screen flashes with footage from rounds of vintage video game golf. The score and performances are constantly revised in real time: Digitized actors recite a script that Syms wrote but an algorithm updates constantly into an amalgamation of sitcom clichés and tongues.Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles the Chicago install, and both recall another Syms production: her design for a Prada-sponsored supper club in Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Her vision for what she called “Prada Mode,” branded “HelLA World,” included “every last detail, from the lecture series to the matchbooks,” Donahue said. Her name on the restaurant’s marquee, DMs from guests crawling around long screens in the dining room, closed-circuit videos of the crowd on monitors hung from the bare studs between the restaurant, the outside bar — “It was a Martine Syms waking dream scene.”Maybe it’s a metaphor, too: There are stanchions, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. Maybe it’s simply that, in a world prone to displays of despair, Syms’s fluorescent way of coping draws a crowd.I asked Syms why, given her dynamic range, she still works as a gallery artist. “I feel a great deal of freedom, you know?” Only in the art world, she said, are your most unqualified hunches met with such serious support. She told me about an event at the Zentrum Paul Klee residency in Bern, Switzerland, where, in lieu of showing slides of old work, she asked the organizers to serve a purple cocktail at the bar. Not only did they agree, a mixologist spent hours beforehand helping her perfect the drink’s taste and color.“If I told somebody I want to run Little Dom’s for a month as an art project,” said Syms, “I probably could.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      California Bill Could Restrict the Use of Rap Lyrics in Court

      by

      The bill, which applies more broadly to other forms of creative expression, has unanimously passed the Senate and Assembly and could become law by the end of September.A California bill that would restrict the use of rap lyrics and other creative works as evidence in criminal proceedings has unanimously passed both the State Senate and Assembly, and could soon be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.The bill, introduced in February by Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat who represents South Los Angeles, comes amid national attention on the practice following the indictment of the Atlanta rappers Young Thug and Gunna on gang-related charges. Prosecutors have drawn on the men’s lyrics in making their case.The California measure, however, would apply more broadly to any creative works, including other types of music, poetry, film, dance, performance art, visual art and novels.“What you write could ultimately be used against you, and that could inhibit creative expression,” Mr. Jones-Sawyer said Wednesday in an interview. He noted that the bill ultimately boiled down to a question of First Amendment rights.“This is America,” he said. “You should be able to have that creativity.”Mr. Newsom has until Sep. 30 to sign the bill into law. If he neither signs nor vetoes the bill by that date, the measure would automatically become law. The law would then go into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, Mr. Jones-Sawyer said.When asked whether Mr. Newsom planned to sign the bill, his office said that it could not comment on pending legislation. “As will all measures that reach the governor’s desk, it will be evaluated on its merits,” it said.Though the bill’s genesis is in preventing rap stars’ lyrics from being weaponized against them, the measure loosely defines “creative expression” to include “forms, sounds, words, movements, or symbols.”It would require a court to evaluate whether such works can be included as evidence by weighing their “probative value” in the case against the “substantial danger of undue prejudice” that might result from including them. The court should consider the possibility that such works could be treated as “evidence of the defendant’s propensity for violence or criminal disposition, as well as the possibility that the evidence will inject racial bias into the proceedings,” the bill says.“People were going to jail merely because of their appearance,” Mr. Jones-Sawyer said. “We weren’t trying to get people off the hook. We’re just making sure that biases, especially racial biases toward African Americans, weren’t used against them in a court of law.”The bill would require that decisions about the evidence be made pretrial, out of the presence of a jury. For decades, prosecutors have used rappers’ lyrics against them even as their music has become mainstream, with critics and fans arguing that the artists should be given the same freedom to explore violence in their work as were musicians like Johnny Cash (did he really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?) or authors like Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote “American Psycho.”In other cases, though lyrics were not used as evidence, they were discussed in front of the jury, which “poisoned the well” by allowing bias to enter the court, according to Mr. Jones-Sawyer’s office. It also noted that while country music has a subgenre known as the “murder ballad,” it is only the lyrics of rap artists that have been singled out.Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, who has extensively researched the use of rap lyrics in criminal proceedings, said that the way prosecutors have used defendant-authored lyrics in court was unique to rap.The practice, she said, essentially treated the lyrics as “nothing more than autobiographical accounts — denying rap the status of art.” The California bill is significant, Dr. Kubrin said, because it would require judges to consider whether the lyrics would inject racial bias into proceedings. “This is bigger than rap,” she said.Among the first notable times the tactic was used was against the rapper Snoop Dogg at his 1996 murder trial, when prosecutors cited lyrics from “Murder Was the Case.” The rapper, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, was acquitted.Snoop Dogg entering a Los Angeles court in 1996, where a prosecutor cited his lyrics during a murder trial. He was acquitted.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressMost recently, the charges against Young Thug and Gunna have called national attention to the tactic. Both men, who have said they are innocent, were identified as members of a criminal street gang, some of whom were charged with violent crimes including murder and attempted armed robbery.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, co-wrote the Grammy-winning “This is America” with Childish Gambino and is one of the most influential artists to emerge from Atlanta’s hip-hop scene.In November, two New York lawmakers introduced a similar bill that would prevent lyrics from being used as evidence in criminal cases unless there was a “factual nexus between the creative expression and the facts of the case.” It passed the Senate in May.In July, U.S. Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Jamaal Bowman of New York, both Democrats, introduced federal legislation, the Restoring Artistic Protection Act, which they said would protect artists from “the wrongful use of their lyrics against them.”The California bill is supported by several other music organizations and activist groups, including the Black Music Action Coalition California, the Public Defenders Association and Smart Justice California, which advocates criminal justice reform.In a statement of support from June, the Black Music Action Coalition, an advocacy organization that battles systemic racism in the music business, said that prosecutors almost exclusively weaponized rappers’ lyrics against men of color.“Creative expression should not be used as evidence of bad character,” the organization said, maintaining that the claim that themes expressed in art were an indication of the likelihood that a person was violent or dishonest was “simply false.”Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, which runs the Grammy Awards, said that the bill was intended to protect not only rappers, but also artists across all genres of music, and other forms of creativity.“It’s bigger than any one individual case,” Mr. Mason said. “In no way, at no time, do I feel that someone’s art should be used against them.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Frank Miller Sues Widow of Comics Magazine Editor for the Return of Artworks

      by

      Two of Miller’s original drawings that were used in 1980s issues of David Anthony Kraft’s magazine Comics Interview were gifts, Kraft’s wife says. Miller says they were not.The comic writer and artist Frank Miller is suing the widow and the estate of a comics magazine founder over two pieces of promotional art he created that she was trying to sell at auction. The art, which appeared on covers of David Anthony Kraft’s magazine Comics Interview in the 1980s, includes an early depiction of Batman and a female Robin — from the 1986 The Dark Knight Returns series — and is potentially a valuable collectible.The lawsuit seeks the return of the Batman piece, which was used on the cover of Comics Interview No. 31 in 1986, as well as art depicting the title character of Miller’s 1983 Ronin series. He had sent both to Kraft for his use in the publication; the Ronin artwork was used as the cover of Comics Interview No. 2 in 1983. Miller contended in the court papers that he and Kraft agreed they were on loan, citing “custom and usage in the trade at the time,” and that he made repeated requests for their return.But Kraft’s widow, Jennifer Bush-Kraft, disagreed with Miller’s assertions. “My husband kept all his correspondence,” she said in a phone interview. “When I say all of it, I don’t know if you can comprehend the level of meticulousness. He bound all of this correspondence by year, by name and in alphabetical order by company.”When the question was raised about demands before 2022 to return the artwork, she said, she searched her husband’s files and found no such requests.Silenn Thomas, the chief executive of Frank Miller Ink, said in an email that Miller would not comment on the ongoing legal matter. The lawsuit, which was first reported by Law360, was filed on Monday in the Gainesville division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.Bush-Kraft said she believed that Miller had gifted the art to Kraft. “If it was not given, David would have given it back,” she said. (Another promotional piece by Miller, for his Sin City comic, was used by Kraft in the 1990s, and was returned, he said in the lawsuit.)“He wouldn’t have ruined the relationship with someone he would potentially work with in the future,” she continued. “He certainly wouldn’t have ruined his relationship” with DC Comics, which published The Dark Knight Returns and Ronin. The art was created for promotional use, she said, and it was common practice for Kraft to keep those types of pieces.The dispute started in the spring, and in May, a lawyer for Miller sent a cease-and-desist letter after Miller learned of a potential sale of the works on Comic Connect, an online auction house devoted to comics and pop culture memorabilia, saying he had given them to Kraft as a loan and expected their return after a period of time.A lawyer representing Metropolis Collectibles, a sister company of Comic Connect, wrote in response that “the actual, relevant ‘custom in the trade at the time’ was that comic artists would give — not loan — artworks to Mr. Kraft and other comic publishers in the hopes that publishers such as Mr. Kraft would use the artwork in their publications and thereby provide publicity and exposure to the artist and their work.” The lawyer also wrote that because Miller was only just now demanding the artwork be returned, decades later, his request might be untimely because of the expiration of the statute of limitations and under other theories.But Miller, in the court filing, wrote that he and his publisher had sought the return of the works directly and indirectly since the 1980s, and that they believed the works were lost. Miller is seeking damages for the value of the works “in an amount, exceeding $75,000, to be determined at trial.”The sale of the artwork could be lucrative: In June, the cover of Issue No. 1 of The Dark Knight Returns was auctioned for $2.4 million. In 2011, a page from Issue No. 3 of the series that showed the older Batman and Carrie Kelley — then a new, female Robin — mid-leap over the Gotham City skyline, sold for $448,125.“I can’t afford to go to court and I can’t afford not to go to court,” Bush-Kraft said. “I’m just one person. I’m not Frank Miller. I don’t have a company.”Currently, neither Miller nor Bush-Kraft is in possession of the art; Bush-Kraft had given it to Comic Connect ahead of the auction, which had been planned for June. (Both works were pulled from the auction before it started.)“We will let the court decide who owns the pieces, and in the meantime we are retaining possession,” said Stephen Fishler, the chief executive of Comic Connect and Metropolis Collectibles. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      What to See, Eat and Do in San Francisco

      by

      The city’s neighborhoods, from the Mission to Russian Hill and the Outer Sunset, are vibrant with packed restaurants and bars, and many are home to new parks and the return of in-person events.Lately, it seems like the news headlines from San Francisco have been negative, from the city’s homelessness crisis and highly publicized recall elections to the area’s astronomical cost-of-living and worsening fire seasons.But San Francisco is still San Francisco. The fog still rolls in from the Pacific to blanket the city’s jumbled hills, the sunset still flames crimson behind the Golden Gate Bridge and the smell of salt and eucalyptus still hits the moment you step outside of San Francisco International Airport. Always a city for lovers of the outdoors, pandemic restrictions led to the near-universal embrace of an indoor-outdoor city life. And at its core, the city’s spirit, a heady brew of creativity, progressivism and experimentation, remains unbreakable.San Francisco’s pandemic recovery has been slower than other major metropolitan areas in the United States; according to data from the San Francisco Travel Association, forecasts for 2022 estimate 80 percent of 2019’s visitor volume. While the Downtown and Union Square neighborhoods remain quieter than prepandemic times, the city’s singular neighborhoods, from the Mission to Russian Hill and the Outer Sunset, are vibrant with packed restaurants and bars, and many boast of new parks and in-person events. San Francisco no longer imposes a mask mandate, but some businesses will require or request masks; masks are recommended but not required on MUNI and BART, the city’s public transportation systems. Many indoor events, including concerts and theater productions, require proof of vaccination to enter.San Francisco has become more walkable and bikeable with the Slow Streets program, which limits or prohibits car traffic on streets and includes the Great Highway alongside Ocean Beach.Jason Henry for The New York TimesNew parks and slow streetsSan Francisco’s wealth of green spaces has increased thanks to a trio of new parks, including the Presidio Tunnel Tops, 14 acres of new national park land hugging the city’s north coast that opened this month. Boasting panoramic views of the Bay, the park was designed by the same group behind New York’s High Line and is home to a changing roster of food trucks, art installations and performances. For more views, check out Francisco Park in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood, which opened in April on the site of San Francisco’s first reservoir. In the southeastern Mission Bay neighborhood, largely protected from the city’s frequent westerly winds, Crane Cove Park has become a warm, sunny destination for stand-up paddle-boarding, kayaking and lounging since it opened in 2020.Always a home for lovers of the outdoors, San Francisco during the pandemic saw a near-universal embrace of an indoor-outdoor city life. Francisco Park in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood opened in April.Jason Henry for The New York TimesIn addition to new parks, San Francisco has become more walkable and bikeable with the pandemic-driven development of the Slow Streets program, which limits or prohibits car traffic on streets throughout the city. Destination-worthy ones include the Great Highway, which runs alongside Ocean Beach on the city’s western shore (it’s currently closed to car traffic on weekends and often, on windy days) and JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, which could be made permanently car-free in November. The one-and-a-half-mile stretch of JFK takes you past destinations like the Conservatory of Flowers and the Rose Garden, plus the Skatin’ Place, where you’ll often find a rocking roller disco.A return to in-person music eventsGolden Gate Park is also playing host to a number of major in-person events this year, including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a free, three-day music festival being held Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. This year’s lineup will feature Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Buddy Miller, with more artists to be announced next week. The Outside Lands Music Festival is taking place Aug. 5 to 7 with artists including Green Day, Post Malone and Lil Uzi Vert (single-day tickets from $195; three-day passes from $409). Find even more music in the Sunset District at the Stern Grove Festival, now in its 85th year. The series of free weekly concerts, happening on Sundays through Aug. 14, has acts ranging from the San Francisco Symphony to Phil Lesh.The Portola Music Festival (single-day tickets from $200, two-day passes from $400), a new music festival is coming to San Francisco from the team behind Coachella, takes place on Sept. 24 to 25 at Pier 80, and will showcase electronic acts including Flume, James Blake, The Avalanches and M.I.A.Jonathan Carver Moore, director of donor relations, partnerships and programming, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, which will opens this fall.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA new destination for contemporary artWith its opening in October, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco aims to provide a fresh approach to the ways in which contemporary art should be showcased and shared. Tied to its core tenets of equity and accessibility, ICASF will have free admission and plans to showcase local artists and artists of color in an environment that is welcoming to all. Opening programming includes a solo exhibition from Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee painter and sculptor, a group exhibit curated by Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon, Oakland-based members of the collective See Black Womxn, and work from the local artists Liz Hernández and Ryan Whelan.Sharing plates at Shuggie’s, a pop-art explosion which features “trash pizza” made from repurposed food waste.Jason Henry for The New York TimesEat and drinkSan Francisco’s restaurants have struggled from pandemic restrictions, but also the high operational costs and high costs of living limiting the workforce. Many storefronts remain empty, and a number of legacy businesses closed, including Alioto’s, an Italian seafood restaurant that held court in Fisherman’s Wharf for 97 years, and the Cliff House, an iconic destination hugging the jagged shoreline over the Pacific (a new restaurant may open there by the end of the year).While undoubtedly challenging, the past two years have had a silver lining: Outdoor dining and drinking cropped up everywhere, from long-established restaurants like Nopa to brand-new spots like Casements, a modern Irish bar in the Mission that opened in January 2020. The bar had originally planned to be a cozy, indoor-only affair, but instead it now serves stellar cocktails (from $12) on one of the best patios in the city, complete with an outdoor semi-private space, live music, D.J.s and colorful murals of Irish rock musicians including Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.San Ho Won is a Korean barbecue spot with classic dishes and riffs on tradition.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhile marquee openings are still a major part of the city’s food fabric — recent ones include the opulent Palm Court Restaurant in the new RH Gallery and a new Ghirardelli Chocolate Experience store — some of the most exciting developments center on low-key projects from high-end chefs. In the Mission, Corey Lee of three Michelin-starred Benu opened San Ho Won, a Korean barbecue spot with classic dishes and riffs on tradition, like a blood-sausage pancake and kimchi pozole (starters from $16, barbecue from $26). Matthew Kirk, a sous chef from Lazy Bear, opened Automat, a day-and-night destination in the Western Addition for baked goods, breakfast sandwiches and burgers (sandwiches from $9 to $16).Natural wine is nothing new in San Francisco, but low-intervention bottles — small-batch, often funky wines made utilizing organic ingredients, native yeast and usually, little to no sulfites — are dominating new restaurants and bars. Shuggie’s, a pop-art explosion with a lively bottle list from the West Coast and beyond, features two-dollar wine shots and a “trash pizza” made from repurposed food waste (wines from $15 for a glass or $51 for a bottle; pizzas from $19). Palm City Wines opened in the Outer Sunset in spring of 2020 as a takeaway-only natural wine bottle shop and deli; now, it also serves small plates, wines by the glass, Northern California beers and forearm-sized hoagies (starters from $8, sandwiches from $19). Upping the ante is Bar Part Time in the Mission, a natural wine-fueled disco with a rotating roster of D.J.s and wine producers.1 Hotel opened in San Francisco in June on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building. The space features reclaimed wood and native greenery.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhere to stay1 Hotel opened in San Francisco in June on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building. The striking space features reclaimed wood and native greenery, recyclable key cards and hangers in the 186 guest rooms and 14 suites (from $500 per night), plus a rooftop spa, chef’s garden and beehives. Terrene, the hotel’s restaurant, features a farm-to-table inspired menu and a wide selection of mezcal and tequila.With 299 rooms and a rooftop lounge, LUMA is the first hotel development in the Mission Bay neighborhood. Jason Henry for The New York TimesLUMA, which also opened in June, is the first hotel development in the Mission Bay neighborhood. With 299 rooms (from $329 per night) and a rooftop lounge opening later this summer, the hotel is close to Oracle Park and the Chase Center. And on June 30, the longstanding Sir Francis Drake Hotel in Union Square reopened as Beacon Grand with 418 renovated guest rooms (from $249 per night), a lobby bar and in 2023, will reopen a redesign of the famed top-floor bar, the Starlite Room.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More