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      The O.J. Simpson White Bronco Is Now a Museum Piece. In Tennessee.

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      The vehicle that Simpson fled in as 95 million Americans watched on television is on display at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.Tyler Starrett was on vacation with his family in Pigeon Forge, about 35 miles from Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, when they learned on Thursday that O.J. Simpson had died.So they changed plans. They had heard that one of the key artifacts of the Simpson case happened to be on display nearby at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum: the 1993 white Ford Bronco that Simpson fled from the police in, just days after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and Ronald L. Goldman. They could not resist.“If the Bronco is here in Pigeon Forge, why don’t we go see it?” Starrett, 23, said.Starrett is too young to have been among the 95 million television viewers who watched the low-speed chase unfold on June 17, 1994, when a swarm of police cars followed the white Bronco over some 60 miles of Southern California freeways, with Simpson holding a gun to his head in the back seat. But he was among those who visited the museum to see the vehicle in person on Thursday, as a three-minute clip of the police chase played on loop in the background.Pigeon Forge, best known for Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park, is at first glance not an obvious home for such a relic. But in recent years, this town has increasingly become a place for attractions and museums dedicated to the offbeat and believe-it-or-not interests of an American tourist — including the Alcatraz East Crime Museum, which is housed in a prisonlike building designed to be a cross between the Tennessee State Prison just outside Nashville and the original Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay.Inside the museum, the white Bronco is one of several notorious vehicles.It sits alongside the 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that was owned by the serial killer Ted Bundy, the 1933 Essex-Terraplane used by the bank robber John Dillinger and the so-called death car from the 1967 movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” riddled with bullet holes. (A Pigeon Forge snow globe featuring the museum, the Bronco and the Beetle can be purchased for $10.99 in the gift shop.)“There are events in history that will always stick in people’s minds, and I think the O.J. chase is one of those for a large number of people,” said Ally Pennington, the artifacts and projects manager for the museum.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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      Academy Museum to Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History After All

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      The museum was criticized earlier for failing to acknowledge the contributions of the Jewish pioneers who helped establish the American film studio system.Having initially drawn criticism for failing to acknowledge the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating Hollywood and the film industry, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday announced the details of a new permanent exhibition that will spotlight their contributions.The show, called “Hollywoodland,” is scheduled to open May 19, the museum said in its news release, and will spotlight “the impact of the predominately Jewish filmmakers whose establishment of the American film studio system transformed Los Angeles into a global epicenter of cinema.”When the museum opened in 2021, it made a point of highlighting the contributions of women, artists of color and people from other backgrounds, but there was barely a mention of the Jewish immigrants who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system — titans like Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Goldwyn and Mayer.The omission, coming at a time of growing concerns about antisemitism, drew complaints from Jewish leaders and concern from the museum’s supporters, many of whom saw it as example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history. Striving to assimilate, Hollywood’s founders feared being identified as Jews.The museum’s permanent exhibition about Jewish contributions is called “Hollywoodland.” via Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesVarious publications called out the affront, like The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”The museum said then that it had always intended to open a temporary exhibit devoted to the subject, but in response to the backlash it decided to make a permanent gallery, and it consulted rabbis and Jewish scholars on what should be included.“We learned,” Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who was then the museum’s director, said in an interview. “We took a lot of the information from the conversations that we’ve had and grew from that.“The show will be organized in three distinct parts: “Studio Origins,” which explores the founding of Hollywood’s original eight major film studios and their studio heads; “Los Angeles: From Film Frontier to Industry Town, 1902-1929,” which traces how the city evolved alongside the movie industry; and “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” a short-form documentary — narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, the TCM host and author — that looks at the Jewish immigrants and first-generation Jewish Americans who built the Hollywood studio system.The exhibition was organized by Dara Jaffe, an associate curator, with help from Gary Dauphin, a former associate curator of digital presentations, and Josue L. Lopez, a research assistant. Neal Gabler, the author and film critic who wrote “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” served as an adviser.“They were the ones who established this system,” Jaffe said of the pioneering Jewish filmmakers. “They were drawn to this industry because they were restricted from so many others.” More

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      Downtown Los Angeles Places Another Big Bet on the Arts

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      The pandemic was tough on city centers and cultural institutions. What does that mean for Los Angeles, whose downtown depends on the arts?For decades the effort to revitalize downtown Los Angeles has been tied to arts projects, from the construction of the midcentury modern Music Center in 1964 to the addition of Frank Gehry’s soaring stainless steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003.But the pandemic was tough on downtowns and cultural institutions around the country, and Los Angeles has been no exception.Its downtown office vacancy rates climbed above 25 percent. Storefronts are empty. Homelessness and crime remain concerns. Many arts organizations have yet to recover their prepandemic audiences. And there have been vivid displays of the area’s thwarted ambitions: Graffiti artists covered three abandoned skyscrapers just before the Grammy Awards were held across the street at the Crypto.com Arena, and some lights on the acclaimed new Sixth Street Viaduct were doused after thieves stole the copper wire.So it was a major vote of confidence in the area’s continuing promise when the Broad, the popular contemporary art museum that opened across the street from Disney Hall in 2015, announced last month that it was about to begin a $100 million expansion.A rendering of the expansion announced by the Broad, a contemporary art museum, in March, which it said would cost $100 million.Diller Scofidio + Renfro, via The BroadAnd it was very much a continuation of the vision of its founder, Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist who played a key role in the effort to create a center of gravity in a famously spread-out city by transforming Grand Avenue into a cultural hub. Broad, who died in 2021, helped to establish the Museum of Contemporary Art and get Disney Hall built before opening the Broad to house his own art collection.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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      Review: Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys Show ‘Giants’ in Brooklyn

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      Right in the middle of the exhibition “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” which opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long 2008 painting “Femme Piquée par un Serpent.” Showing a Black man in snappy but casual dress reclined in a distinctively twisted position, with a background of Wiley’s signature flowers, it borrows both title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger. What you think of it really depends on what you’re asking for.If you view the painting as a Venti-size iteration of Wiley’s ongoing project, his decades-long attack on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and art history, it’s one-note but hard to argue with. Brightly colored and thoughtfully composed, it’s visually appealing, and even today, when it’s no longer so uncommon to see Black figures on museum walls, catching sight of one this big still elicits a thrill.On the other hand, considered strictly as a painting, “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” (“Woman Bitten by a Serpent”) doesn’t offer that much. There are no details that you’d miss in a jpeg reproduction, no visible evidence of human hands at play, no sensual pleasure to be found in the surface, nothing surprising, mysterious or engrossing. It’s simply the adept illustration of an idea.Of course, you could also ask for both — for a clear conceptual work about painting (and the historical exclusion of Black subjects and artists) that is also a good painting. If you do, you’re likely to respond to “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” with ambivalence and frustration.Swizz Beatz, in turquoise at left, and Alicia Keys, at right, greet guests at the opening of “Giants,” in front of Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long “Femme Piquée par un Serpent,” from 2008.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesI was thinking about this — about artistic endeavors that succeed and fail at the same time — as I walked through “Giants,” the latest celebrity tie-in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (“Spike Lee: Creative Sources” closes on Sunday; a show of photographs by Paul McCartney opens in May.) “Giants” draws on the extensive art collection of the married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing together 98 works — many oversized and of recent vintage — by 37 artists. Most of them are American, but they also come from several countries in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, and they range in generation from Ernie Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood, born in 1996.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 Theater

      How a Culture Editor Covers the Kids’ Entertainment Beat

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      Laurel Graeber, who has covered kids’ entertainment at The Times for nearly three decades, shared her favorite stories and interviews from the beat.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Laurel Graeber grew up loving the theater and museums. But she never thought she would write about them for The New York Times — or that she would do so for nearly three decades.“I was an editor, but I always wanted to write,” said Ms. Graeber, who helped lead the Culture desk’s copy department for more than 10 years before she retired from full-time work in 2017. “And when the freelance assignment of writing our weekend kids’ entertainment column became open, I said yes.”She has written regularly about culture for young people for nearly three decades, spotlighting the best activities that parents or caregivers can do with children each weekend in New York City. She also writes features on new television shows, movies, museum exhibitions and podcasts for kids.“What I find most enjoyable is stuff for adults that’s also good for kids, but not necessarily geared toward them,” Ms. Graeber said in a recent interview.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?  More