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      in Movies

      The Painter Titus Kaphar Wanted a Bigger Canvas, So He Made a Film

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      We often scrutinize an artist’s work, searching for autobiographical clues. But in Titus Kaphar’s recent paintings, and in his new film, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” such close reading is unnecessary. His life experience is laid bare, in all its poignant and — sometimes agonizing — pain.The paintings, now on view at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, Calif., through Nov. 2, figure prominently in the film, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and will have its theatrical release nationally on Oct. 18. The movie, Kaphar’s first feature, tells the story of a young painter reuniting with his estranged father — a recovering addict — even as he also deals with the final days of his ailing mother.This foray into Hollywood — Oprah Winfrey and Serena Williams were among those who attended the Sept. 12 Los Angeles premiere — only cements celebrity status for Kaphar, 48, who, in the last decade, has won a MacArthur “genius award,” helped found the New Haven art incubator and fellowship program NXTHVN, created Time magazine covers about Ferguson protesters and the killing of George Floyd and seen his work collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. His paintings of sorrowful mothers evoke classical pietas.Kaphar’s painting, “Analogous Colors,” 2020, on the cover of Time Magazine in June 2020. Kaphar cut a shape out of the canvas.Painting by Titus Kaphar for TIMEThe two-hour film — which Kaphar wrote and directed — gave him a way to experiment with another art form, one that can reach well beyond the number of people likely to see his paintings. It also represents a significant filmmaking step from Kaphar’s documentary shorts “Shut Up and Paint” (2022), which was shortlisted for an Oscar and addressed the art market’s stifling of social activism, and “The Jerome Project” (2016), which began to explore the artist’s relationship with his father.But perhaps most importantly, the movie is Kaphar’s message to his two teenage boys. “I was trying to figure out how to help my sons understand how different my life is from their lives and why I’m so protective of them — why I adore them the way that I do, why I insist that I give them a hug and a kiss in the morning,” said Kaphar, wearing a cap and sweatshirt in a recent interview at his New Haven studio. “I still put them into bed, kiss them on their foreheads.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      A New Venue Beckons Jazz Musicians and Beyond to Upstate New York

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      The Mill, an arts center with art galleries and a performance space in an old flour mill, opened over the weekend. Its owners hope it sparks a “ripple effect.”Fourteen years ago, Taylor Haskins, a veteran jazz trumpeter, and Catherine Ross Haskins, a visual artist, moved from Brooklyn to Westport, N.Y., a picture-book town on Lake Champlain, 275 miles north of Manhattan. It became “the place on Earth that we love,” Taylor said. “But sometimes it could use a little bit of an injection of the outside world.”So three years ago, they bought an abandoned, 11,000-square-foot flour mill on Main Street, gutted it and refashioned it as the Mill, a center for contemporary visual arts with a chapel-like performance space.The venue, which had its official opening on Saturday, is exhibiting and commissioning esteemed visual artists. And it is booking musicians — including the pianist Guillermo Klein, the slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s Sexmob and the violinist Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire — who don’t often drive up to the Adirondacks for a gig. (They’d typically perform at downtown Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard or Joe’s Pub.) The hope, Taylor said, is to create “a cultural oasis” that the community will embrace.The Haskinses, both 52, are financing the project with their own funds. During their years in New York City, they watched as empty industrial buildings were given new lives, too often as condos (they lived in one), but sometimes in creative ways. They thought they’d give it a try: “We could fail,” Catherine said. “But what are we even alive for if we don’t do something we believe in?”Visitors gather in one of the Mill’s five galleries.Sinjun Strom for The New York TimesPieces in Mayer’s Slumpies series installed in one of the Mill’s galleries.Sinjun Strom for The New York TimesSituated about 100 miles south of Montreal, the Mill isn’t yet on anyone’s performance circuit. At the same time, it is one node in a network of far-flung venues that operate largely under the media radar. “It reminds me of places I’ve encountered not in the U.S. — in Japan, in Poland, in France,” said the harpist Zeena Parkins, who performed at the opening on Saturday. “And it’s always the energy of one or two people that makes this incredible thing happen just because they love the music and they love the art, and they’ve developed a trust with their community.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Monet, Taylor Swift, ‘Moana’: What Got Readers Through Their Grief

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      After our series on how artists have been affected by loss, we asked readers what helped them when they experienced it. These are 15 of their answers.Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, we published The Grief Project, a series of interviews with artists who discussed the ways that loss affected their work and creativity. We also asked readers about the art and culture — whether it was a book, a movie, a song or anything else — that helped them remember or cope with losing a loved one. Hundreds responded. Here is what some of them said.Music‘As’ by Stevie WonderLike Stevie Wonder, Nancy Hanks wrote, her mother “was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with.”Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesI’m not sure if it’s the melody or lyrics, but this song deeply captures the deep feelings of love and profound grief that I feel for the loss of my mother. Throughout the song Stevie Wonder professes all the ways and lengths that the depth of his love reaches. He notes “did you know true love asks for nothing / her acceptance is the way we pay.” I often am reminded of this. The grief that I carry is a tax on the lifetime of unconditional love I’ve experienced from my mother. Like Stevie, she was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with. We couldn’t have the proper celebration we wanted for her because of Covid, but I imagine if we did, we would have played this song along with so many more of her favorites and danced all night. I can’t hear the song anymore without feeling a deep sense of longing for her. I’m so grateful for her life and legacy, and I miss her terribly. —Nancy Hanks, AtlantaFilm‘School of Rock’It was less than a week after we lost our 4-year-old daughter Laila to cancer, in 2004. A neighboring couple, who had been supportive throughout Laila’s illness, brought over a VHS tape of “School of Rock.” In those very early days of bereavement, as far as I knew, I would never laugh again. But we popped in the videocassette, and before long I found myself laughing out loud, along with the family and friends gathered with us. Although my sadness filled my entire soul, there was somehow still room for humor. The wondrous physics of hope, in a lesson delivered by Jack Black with his electric guitar. As a family, we rewatch “School of Rock” every now and then, and it never fails to uplift. To me, it will always be a symbol of resilience. —Mary Janevic, Ann Arbor, Mich.SportsThe New York RangersWatching the Rangers “offered tremendous comfort to my family,” wrote Pam Poling, whose sister was a fellow fan.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images/Getty ImagesOur sister died in December after an incredibly brief illness. She was our go-to person for all things hockey, especially our beloved Rangers. Watching them skate so beautifully this season offered tremendous comfort to my family. Whether they win or lose, we often text each other, “Joanie would have loved this.” It really helps. —Pam Poling, Fairfield, Conn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Everyone Who Made This Happen: Meet the Many People It Takes to Produce One Thing

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      The act of creation is rarely a solo affair. Here are five outsize teams behind projects ranging from a performance piece to a new pizza.Even works of art that we think of as coming from the minds of lone creative geniuses were group efforts: Michelangelo, for example, recruited some 11 painters to assist him with the Sistine Chapel. The contemporary land artist Michael Heizer, who makes sculptures out of dirt, rocks and negative space in the Nevada desert, and whom The Times once called “art’s last, lonely cowboy,” has relied on a crew of construction workers to help execute his vision. Still, it’s only in the past few decades that attitudes around labor and the power of collectivism have shifted, making artists not only quicker to collaborate but also to give credit where credit is due. Reflecting on “Womanhouse,” the multiroom feminist art installation that debuted in Los Angeles in 1972 and was created by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and over 20 California Institute of the Arts students and local artists, Schapiro told the writer Judith E. Stein, “Collaboration was taking place right then and there in my brain and liberating me from the idea of being solitary.”Then there are the creative disciplines or undertakings, such as theater or architecture, being in a band or running a restaurant, that tend to preclude solitude. No matter the field, though, certain projects require an outsize number of bodies. We picked five projects that illustrate just how many people it can take to create a single object or artistic work, going behind the scenes of a performance piece, a work of puppet-led theater, an intricate chair, a leather handbag and a high-concept slice of pizza. “When producers first say they want puppets,” says the British puppetry director and designer Toby Olié, “I ask, ‘How many people have you got?’”Collaboration can be hard work, with multiple opportunities for conflict. It’s also a luxury. When the Canadian artist Miles Greenberg was starting out, he says, “I was just showing up alone with a duffel bag to an underground art space or club and painting myself in the bathroom mirror, and that’s still who I am and what I do in my head.” At the same time, he’s grateful to feel understood by his artistic partners, and for the time to focus on making art that his other collaborators afford him. Then, too, there’s the practical if unstated fact that, as artists and creative types, these people are in the business of pursuing perfection. Often, combining forces is the only way to get them closer to it.How Many People Does It Take to Make …… a ‘Spirited Away’ Puppet?The puppetry designer and director Toby Olié (standing, center), photographed at the London Coliseum on June 20, 2024, with some of the cast and crew of “Spirited Away,” including (clockwise from left) Yoshiki Fujioka, Ryo Sawamura, Miffy and Hayato Takehiro, puppeteers who operate the dragon Haku; the associate director Makoto Nagai; Maoko Imai, the director John Caird’s co-adapter and wife; and Dan Cook and Georgia Dacey from the puppet stage management team.Will SandersFor the director John Caird’s stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved 2001 animated film, a design team created 65 puppeteered elements, including a nearly 20-foot-long dragon. Read more here.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More