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      in Music

      Kim Hill Is Building Her Seat at the Table

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      After walking away from the Black Eyed Peas, the artist and designer has been making work on her own terms.Before the Black Eyed Peas were a stadium act fronted by Will.i.am and Fergie, they were a trio of quirky Los Angeles-based rappers who often collaborated with Black female singers. Macy Gray, best known for her 1999 hit “I Try,” sang on their first two albums, released in 1998 and 2000. But their closest female collaborator in those days was Kim Hill.Hill, now 54, never formally joined the group (she got her own solo deal with the band’s label, Interscope Records), but she toured with them for five years and contributed vocal hooks to tracks like “The Way U Make Me Feel” (which she co-wrote) and “What It Is,” both released in 1998. The video for the latter shows her mugging for the camera alongside Will, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and, while her sultry vocals temper their young-man energy, she’s too goofy and fully clothed (in a fuzzy tangerine bucket hat, jeans and a trench coat) to present as what she calls a “come hither” chanteuse.That kind of typecasting never appealed to Hill. Growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y. — where she sang gospel at church but also performed with the city’s predominantly white children’s choir — she learned to use her wit to put people at ease and honed her sense of when it was time to make an exit. “I never feel like I have to be stuck somewhere that doesn’t feel good energetically or spiritually,” she says. “When it’s time to dip, it’s time to dip.”After majoring in dance at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. Label representatives looking for the new Mariah or Whitney were befuddled by this Black girl performing folksy songs with R&B vocals over hip-hop beats. But she connected with the Peas’ misfit energy when she met them at an artist showcase in 1995. She remembers thinking, “These are my people.”For the next five years, Hill traveled the world with the group, but eventually, she believes, her bandmates seemed to resent the attention she was getting from fans and the press. At the label, she perceived an ambient though unspoken discontent about her refusal to sexualize her image. In 2000, she says, she got word that the band was getting a raise from which she’d been excluded and felt sure it was time to part ways. When the Peas’ third album, “Elephunk” (2003), introduced Fergie — who proved central to their crossover success — Hill watched the group’s ascent with the pain of one left behind, as well as some big-sisterly pride.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

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      in Music

      At the Serpentine, Holly Herndon Taught A.I. to Sing

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      Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are presenting their first large-scale solo museum show. It sounds gorgeous, even if its visual elements are lacking.Although it’s easy to feel alienated by the opaque processes behind artificial intelligence and fearful that the technology isn’t regulated, the artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst want you to know that A.I. can be beautiful.Their exhibition “The Call,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London through Feb. 2, is the first large-scale solo museum show for the artist duo, who have long been at the forefront of A.I.’s creative possibilities.Herndon — who was born in Tennessee, grew up singing in church choirs and later received a Ph.D. in music composition from Stanford — has made cutting-edge, A.I.-inflected pop music for over a decade. With Dryhurst, a British artist who is also her husband, she has branched out to make tools that help creatives monitor the use of their data online, and recently, into the visual arts.The couple’s work “xhairymutantx,” commissioned for this year’s Whitney Biennial, uses A.I. text prompts to produce an infinite series of Herndon portraits that highlight the playful nature of digital identities.The Serpentine show combines musical and visual elements. With the varied a cappella choral traditions of Britain in mind, Herndon and Dryhurst worked with diverse choirs across the country, from classical to contemporary groups of assorted sizes, to produce training data for an A.I. model. In a wall text, the artists explain that “The Call” consists of more than just the A.I.’s output. They also consider the collection of the data and the training of the machine as works of art.“We’re offering a beautiful way to make A.I.,” the artists’ statement adds. Their utopian take is that A.I. is collectively made: It learns from whatever it is exposed to and can therefore be shaped for good.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

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      Park Avenue Armory Will Host Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’ and Jamie xx

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      The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new work from the Golden Lion winner Anne Imhof.The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2025 season on Monday, which includes the North American tour debut for the musician and producer Jamie xx’s new album “In Waves” and the largest ever North American installation of the artist Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” a grove of almost 100 trees that will arrive at the Armory for visitors to attach wishes to.“This season, some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories, contemporary society and visions of the future,” Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said in a news release.The season opens on Jan. 9 with “In Waves.” The show is a return for Jamie xx, one-third of the British electro-pop band the xx, after that group took over the Armory for 25 performances in 2014. “In Waves,” Jamie xx’s first solo album in nine years, was released this September, and will feature in the four-night residency along with some of his early solo music and songs from “In Colour” (2015).A “Wish Tree” installation in Germany. The ongoing work by Yoko Ono invites people to tie personal wishes to trees; 92 of them will be installed at the Armory.Klaus Ohlenschlaeger/Alamy“Wish Tree,” Ono’s ongoing participatory work where visitors are invited to tie personal wishes to a tree, will have 92 trees in honor of Ono’s 92nd birthday on Feb. 18. It will start on Feb. 14 and run for four days. A two-day symposium with panels and performances will celebrate Ono’s work during the installation.The Armory’s season will also include the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new durational performance piece from the cross-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof, who won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the 2017 Venice Biennale for her installation “Faust.” The performance, which opens on March 3 and is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, will take over the Wade Thompson Drill Hall with performers, sound and scenery to explore the balance between apathy, activism and resistance.In addition to those productions, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The North American premiere of “Constellation,” an exhibition of more than 450 prints of the photographer Diane Arbus’s work, some of which are still unpublished.“The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a musical theater adaptation from the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman of a cult favorite gay liberation fantasy novel, self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell.The North American premiere of “Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow,” a hybrid work from the choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell that uses the form of a dancing runway show on a catwalk to juxtapose everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical references, pop culture and political rhetoric. More

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      in Movies

      Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol’s Cinematic Collaborator, Dies at 86

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      In films like “Trash” and “Women in Revolt,” he brought movement, character and something resembling a story line to the Warhol film aesthetic.Paul Morrissey, whose loose cinéma-vérité films made with Andy Warhol in the late 1960s and early ’70s captured New York’s demimonde of drug addicts, drag queens and hipsters and turned an unlikely stable of amateur actors into underground stars, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86.The death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said Michael Chaiken, his archivist.In films like “Flesh,” “Trash,” “Heat” and “Women in Revolt,” all made on budgets of less than $10,000, Mr. Morrissey brought movement, character and something resembling a story line to the Warhol film aesthetic, which had consisted of pointing a camera at an actor or a building and letting it run for several hours. (Warhol’s “Empire” was a continuous shot of the Empire State Building that lasted eight hours and five minutes.)Relying on a shifting collective of amateur actors, like Joe Dallesandro and Viva; transgender performers, like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling; and marginal downtown characters, Mr. Morrissey concocted a distinctive blend of squalor and melodramatic farce that captivated many critics and even, in some instances, translated into box-office success.The scripts, such as they were, were almost entirely ad-libbed. The stars simply portrayed themselves. And the plots defied synopsis.Mr. Morrissey, front, with, from top, Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn and Jane Forth, in a publicity photo for Mr. Morrissey’s 1970 film “Trash.”Henri Dauman/Jour De Fete Films“Trash,” Mr. Morrissey’s biggest critical and commercial success, followed the trials and tribulations of Mr. Dallesandro playing a heroin-addicted gigolo earnestly, if groggily, trying to support his wife, played by Ms. Woodlawn. “Women in Revolt” took the theme of women’s liberation and grafted it onto a sendup of Hollywood women’s pictures of the 1930s, with Ms. Curtis, Ms. Woodlawn and Ms. Darling striking poses and reflecting on their status in a sexist society.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

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      Philip Glass Quartet to Be Performed at AIDS Memorial as Tribute to Brian Buczak

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      Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, written after the death of the artist Brian Buczak, will be performed at the New York City AIDS Memorial.The night Brian Buczak died, fireworks lit up the sky.It was July 4, 1987, and his bed at New York University’s hospital on the East River overlooked the holiday celebrations. Buczak’s partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, a prolific painter of clouds, was struck by the beauty of what he saw outside the window: bursts of color, brightening a dark expanse.Buczak was just 32, but he had already made more than 400 paintings, founded a small printing press for artists and settled down with Hendricks, the love of his life, with whom he had restored a Federal-style house on Greenwich Street. But all that was cut off when Buczak, like many thousands of New Yorkers before and since, died of complications from AIDS.As Hendricks grieved, he turned to a friend, the composer Philip Glass, to write a tribute to Buczak. The result was Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, nicknamed Buczak, which he has described as “a musical impression.” It premiered on the second anniversary of Buczak’s death at the Hauser Gallery; now it is returning with a free performance by the Mivos Quartet on Sunday at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village.This weekend’s concert is the latest event in a resurgence of Buczak’s story and work. Last winter, there was a solo exhibition of his art, “Man Looks at the World,” at the Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects galleries, his first since 1989, the year Glass’s quartet premiered. Hendricks, who died in 2018, has a show opening on Friday at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.“It’s such a relief,” Bracken Hendricks, Hendricks’s son and something like a stepson to Buczak, said of the fresh attention on Buczak. “It feels really earned by Brian’s just really deep and thoughtful work. His creative output was well conceived and conceptualized, and beautifully realized, but it was also forged by the grief of knowing he was dying.”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

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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