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      7 Days in the Cultural Life of an Artistic Director

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      Violaine Huisman, who leads programming for the Crossing the Line festival, takes in dance on Little Island, a world premiere at Asia Society and “invigorating” translation projects.Bastille Day felt a little bit different this year than others, said Violaine Huisman, the artistic director of New York’s annual Crossing the Line festival. L’Alliance, the French cultural center in Midtown, throws a party every July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. This year, the celebration took place just one week after a surprising snap election left President Emmanuel Macron — and France — in a state of flux.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” recalled Huisman, who had just been in the country to witness the upset in the streets. (Many participants in this year’s festival opted to carry blank placards in homage to a demonstration created by the choreographer Anna Halprin during the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s.)During these times of uncertainty, many look to art for clarity and guidance. Huisman, 45, is certainly one of those people, as she has been hard at work curating programming for the next Crossing the Line, which kicks off several weeks of art, dance and theater on Sept. 5.Ahead of the festival, Huisman tracked a few days of her cultural life, noting some of the performances, books and music, mostly from her native France, that inspired her. Here are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” Huisman said.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSunday: Placards for PeaceWe celebrated Bastille Day at L’Alliance with a street fair and an amazing piece of performance art, in which two dozen volunteers carrying blank placards engaged in a procession through Midtown, trailed by a marching band. It was a re-enactment by Anne Collod of Anna Halprin’s “Blank Placard Dance.” Volunteers asked audience members what they would march for. “Peace” was the overwhelming response.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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      I ❤️ a Hate-Watch. Don’t You?

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      When it premiered in 2017, I quite liked “The Bold Type,” a television series about three 20-something women working at a fictional magazine called Scarlet. Although the show could tend toward after-school special, with the characters learning important lessons about speaking your truth, facing your sexuality or getting regular gynecological examinations, its heartwarming conventions — young women living their editorial dreams in the big city — worked their magic on me.My love began to curdle during the third season. That’s when a new guy is brought into the office to spearhead Scarlet’s weirdly late foray into online publishing (it was set roughly in 2019). For reasons I couldn’t fathom, he referred to the magazine’s website as “The Dot Com.” Over and over and over again.To someone who’s spent her career in digital media, this was a bridge too far. It suggested that the show’s writers hadn’t ever worked in this world, hadn’t talked to anyone who did, maybe had never read a magazine. My annoyance grew in the fourth season, as the star columnist (a fount of bad ideas) got “her own vertical,” by which the show meant “a blog.” What was going on?I found myself declaiming to friends and colleagues about how deranged this turn of events was. I kept watching, but only to get annoyed at the things that I used to excuse as creative license: plot holes, improbable couplings, messed-up New York City geography. What I’d once enjoyed, I now hate-watched.Hate-watching is a weird thing. There is so much to see, do, hear, read: Why spend precious time, in an age of nearly infinite media, plopped in front of a bad show to pick it apart? It’s like gorging yourself on a disgusting meal not because you’re hungry, but because you want to gripe about it later. Or taking a vacation with someone you find excruciating, not because you don’t have any actual friends, but because you want to bellyache afterward about all the stupid things they said and did.Yet hate-watching is now part of the cultural conversation and arguably contemporary life. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity: We start watching a show because it looks appealing, but we keep watching because we want to complain about it at happy hour. It’s fun to be the person who describes a particularly terrible story arc or performance to our friends’ disbelief. Besides, it’s better than whatever is on the news.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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      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

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      in Music

      Lincoln Center Taps Education Leader as Next President

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      Mariko Silver, a former president of Bennington College, will take the reins of the organization as it seeks to expand its audience and increase fund-raising.Mariko Silver, a prominent leader in education, government and the nonprofit sphere, will serve as the next president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, the organization announced on Wednesday.Silver, who previously led Bennington College in Vermont and the Henry Luce Foundation in New York, will succeed Henry Timms, who left last month after five years in the job.She will take the reins of Lincoln Center as it works to broaden its audience, navigate an uncertain economy and push through an ambitious plan to tear down the barriers between the center and the surrounding neighborhood. She will also help shape its programming; the center has recently shifted away from classical music in favor of genres like pop, hip-hop, social dance and comedy.“Lincoln Center is the beating heart of New York City,” Silver said in an interview. “I’m incredibly excited to get going and do the work of bringing more beauty, more joy, more art and more human feeling into the world.”The appointment is a milestone for Lincoln Center: Silver, 46, whose father is Jewish and mother is Japanese American, will be the first woman of color to serve as president and chief executive. It is also a homecoming of sorts: Silver grew up a few blocks from the center and studied dance and theater as a child.Steven R. Swartz, the president and chief executive of Hearst, who serves as chair of Lincoln Center’s board, said the organization was impressed by Silver’s record as a nonprofit executive. At Bennington, where she was president from 2013 to 2019, she oversaw the largest capital campaign in the school’s history, raising more than $90 million. She also serves as chair of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s board and was an official at the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration.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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      Taylor Swift Gets the Museum Treatment

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      Costumes and memorabilia from the pop star’s personal archive are now on display at the V&A museum in London.“Disappointed Love,” painted in 1821 by the Irish artist Francis Danby, is a scene of eternal teenage wistfulness, its visual codes as readable now as they were back then. A young girl sits by a river, tearful and heartbroken, her head in her hands, her white dress pooling around her legs. In the water, pages of a torn letter float among the waterlilies. By her side are props of femininity: a straw bonnet, a bright red shawl and a miniature portrait of the man who wronged her.The work hangs in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in a red-walled gallery tightly packed with Georgian and Victorian paintings. As of recently, Danby’s weeping beauty has a new neighbor: a ruffled cream Zimmerman dress worn by Taylor Swift in the music video for “Willow,” from her 2020 album “Evermore.”The gown is one of more than a dozen items from Ms. Swift’s personal archive featured in installations across the V&A galleries. Danby’s painting is “so her vibe,” the curator Kate Bailey said of Ms. Swift, gesturing to the lovesick girl and her assortment of trinkets — “the dress, the scarf.”It was not yet noon on a muggy July day in London, and yet Ms. Bailey, a senior curator in the V&A theater and performance department, had already clocked more than 8,000 steps on her iPhone pedometer as she rushed about the museum overseeing the Taylor Swift installation. The V&A galleries, spread across multiple floors, stretch seven miles. (The exhibition, “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” will be open to the public through Sept. 8.)“Whose idea was it to put a trail around the whole museum?” Ms. Bailey asked as she arrived, cheerful and panting, in the gilded Norfolk House Music Room. The V&A acquired the room in 1938, when Norfolk House was demolished, and reassembled it in its entirety, panel by panel, in 2000.Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” blasted from speakers, and her iridescent tulle ball gown, worn on the back cover of the album, was encased on a mannequin in a vitrine in the center of the room, like a ballerina in a giant music box.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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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Name 2024 Disability Futures Fellows

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      The 20 recipients, including a Broadway composer, a Marvel video game voice actress and a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, are the initiative’s final cohort.The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations on Wednesday named the 2024 Disability Futures Fellows — the latest class of disabled writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative artists who will receive unrestricted $50,000 awards.This year’s recipients include Gaelynn Lea, a folk artist and disability rights activist; Natasha Ofili, an actress and writer who in 2020 became one of the first Black deaf actors to portray a video game character — Hailey Cooper — in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales; Warren Snipe, a.k.a. Wawa, a deaf rapper and actor who performed in sign language at the 2022 Super Bowl; and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work focuses on queer, transgender people of color.Lea said she almost missed an email telling her she got the award. “Because the email said, ‘We’re excited to offer you $50,000,’ it went to my spam,” Lea, 40, said in an interview. (She later received a follow-up email.)“It’s very validating that I’m doing this stuff I really care about, and now it’s being recognized,” added Lea, who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, and composed and performed original music for a Broadway production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Lea plans to use the award to fund the writing of a memoir to be published next year.The initiative, which is administered by United States Artists, named its inaugural class of fellows in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of disabled artists and elevating their voices. (About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The second class was announced in 2022, and this is the last cohort in the program. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement that the program reflected the foundation’s support of the “work, experiences and visions of disabled artists — both in their individual practices and in the collective power they wield in the arts at large.”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