Women and Girls

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      A Jazz Quintet Bubbling With Good Vibes? Meet the Women of Artemis.

      by

      The pianist Renee Rosnes formed the group in 2016, and it has evolved into a five-piece drawn from different nations and generations with a common goal.The multinational, intergenerational jazz quintet Artemis is, as they might say, bubbling. Last fall, it topped Downbeat magazine’s reader’s poll as jazz group of the year for the second time running. On Friday, the band released its third album, “Arboresque,” which captures both the hard-bop strut of the most beloved 1960s recordings by its storied label, Blue Note Records, as well as Artemis’s own fresh take on jazz tradition.“We’re not here to prove anything,” said the pianist Renee Rosnes, 62, the group’s musical director and, in her words, “organizational force.” “We’re just playing music together, in conversation, with reverence for each other.”At the suggestion of a French promoter, Rosnes formed Artemis in 2016 to perform concerts in Paris and Luxembourg for International Women’s Day. “I never had such a proclivity to put together a band of all female musicians before,” she said. “But here’s a lot of players that I love.”She assembled an all-star septet, featuring the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen — who named the group for the Greek goddess of the hunt and wilderness — the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, the bassist Linda May Han Oh, the clarinetist Anat Cohen, the saxophonist Melissa Aldana and the singer Cécile McLorin Salvant. “I love their playing, and who they are,” Rosnes said, “and I thought it could be fun.”“We’re not here to prove anything,” Rosnes said. “We’re just playing music together, in conversation, with reverence for each other.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesIt was fun, of course — and a commercial draw. A European tour in 2017 introduced the group’s permanent rhythm section (Allison Miller on drums and Noriko Ueda on bass), and Don Was, the president of Blue Note, signed Artemis on the spot after its set at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2018, a performance preserved on NPR’s “Jazz Night in America” program.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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      9 Songs That Define R&B’s New Era

      by

      In my article on the renaissance of women in R&B, I write about a new generation of artists who are reshaping the genre, with some returning to the music’s gospel-based roots and others annexing fresh sonic territory — hybridizing with the latest hip-hop, grafting in global sounds and claiming R&B’s rightful stake in pop music today. That tells only part of the story, though, as many R&B artists resist the industry’s categorizations: While accepting the award for best country album at this year’s Grammys, Beyoncé, a 16-time winner as a solo artist in R&B categories, voiced an opinion shared by many Black artists: “I think sometimes ‘genre’ is a code word to keep us in our place.”What unites today’s R&B with music of the past is its celebration of voice. Fans don’t talk only about who can sing but about who can sang — enlisting their physical gifts and knowledge of tradition in performances that reach past exhaustion. Below is a playlist of nine songs, all released since 2020, by women artists who are extending and redefining R&B’s rich tradition.1. Muni Long’s “Make Me Forget” (2024)“Sometimes people just need to leave stuff alone when it comes to classics,” Long told me in an interview, recalling her hesitancy when the producer Tricky Stewart presented her with the instrumental for “Make Me Forget,” a spare interpolation of D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” (2000). But writing her own song on top of one of the most seductive songs (and music videos) in R&B history presented a welcome challenge. The verses tease out the terms of a fledgling relationship, working with and against old-school gender roles (“Know when to walk away / When I’d rather that you stay / Gently put me in my place / Leave when I need some space”). In the chorus, Long pleads three straight times for her new love to make her forget — the pain of her past relationship? The man before him? — only for the final line to reveal that she’s asking for him to make her forget “anything before you that didn’t feel like this.”2. Summer Walker’s “Session 33” (2021)On 2018’s “Session 32,” Walker sings about the messy process of moving on from a failed relationship (“Threw away your love letters / I thought it’d make me feel better”). The recording has all the qualities of a home demo, down to the sequenced title and the absence of the mixing and mastering of the modern studio — a conscious choice to underscore the song’s raw emotions. “Session 33” is its natural extension, but with a difference. Still an acoustic affair, featuring Walker’s voice and guitar, the recording now offers some studio sweeteners that “Session 32” lacked: echoed vocal effects, harmonic overdubs and Walker’s cleanly miked voice. “Session 33” shares with its predecessor the sense that the artist is letting us in on her creative process — as well as on her romantic life. “Should I move on since no one’s here?” she asks herself. The song never answers.3. Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings” (2021)With her 2021 concept album, “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan gave voice to herself and many other women working against the sexist conceit, sometimes perpetuated in R&B, that women are conquests and men are conquerors. On songs like “Put It Down,” “Lost One” and, most powerfully, “Pick Up Your Feelings,” she renovates the tired theme of the no-good man by centering her own — and other women’s — empowerment. The whole album is an exercise in validating female sexual desire while also acknowledging women’s equal capacity to do dirt, all while condemning the societal double standard that lets men do the same without tarnishing their reputations. But Sullivan’s not writing an essay; she’s engaged in a vocal workout session. And her peers have taken notice: “I’ve literally watched Jazmine Sullivan videos hundreds of times, slowed them down to 0.25 speed and mapped out the note transitions on sheets of paper that end up looking like infinite stairs,” says the artist Jessie Reyez. “Hearing her sing is like watching someone make a joke out of gravity.”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 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Paint Me a Road Out of Here’: Faith Ringgold’s Gift to Prisoners

      by

      In this documentary, the artist depicts what a more just and beautiful world might look like.In 1971, the artist Faith Ringgold received a grant to make a painting for a public institution in New York City. She decided to ask the prisoners in the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island what they wanted to see in a painting. “I want to see a road leading out of here,” one incarcerated woman told her.Ringgold took that idea and ran with it. She didn’t paint a literal road. Instead, her canvas — entitled “For the Women’s House” and installed at the prison in January 1972 — is divided into eight sections. In each, women are depicted performing jobs traditionally held by men at the time: bus driver, construction worker, basketball player, president. The road is implied: Seeing women in positions and roles they don’t always occupy can open up the viewer’s world. She might be in a prison for now, but there’s a place for her worth aspiring to beyond these walls.This was Ringgold’s imagination at work, always depicting what a more just and beautiful world might look like, particularly for the people whom the powerful prefer to ignore. Ringgold and “For the Women’s House” both appear in the documentary “Paint Me a Road Out of Here” (in theaters), directed by Catherine Gund, and hearing and seeing her talk is reason enough to see the film. Ringgold died in 2024 at 93, and is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, a native New Yorker who was unflagging in her activism and commitments to dismantle racism wherever it surfaced. As a Black woman and an artist, she insisted on coupling political meaning with her work, which is suffused with curiosity and joy.“Paint Me a Road Out Of Here” is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life. One major subject in the film is the artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, an executive producer of the film whose prison reform work often draws on her own experiences while incarcerated. Shortly after her own arrest, for example, Baxter went into labor — 43 hours while shackled to a bed.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 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      How ‘Her Story,’ a Feminist Comedy, Came to Rule China’s Box Office

      by

      “Her Story” touches on sensitive topics in China, like censorship and gender inequality. But its humorous, nonconfrontational approach may have helped it pass censors.The movie calls out stigmas against female sexuality and stereotypes about single mothers. It name-drops feminist scholars, features a woman recalling domestic violence and laments Chinese censorship.This is not some indie film, streamed secretly by viewers circumventing China’s internet firewall. It is China’s biggest movie right now — and has even garnered praise from the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.The success of “Her Story,” a comedy that topped China’s box office for the last three weeks, is in some ways unexpected, at a time when the government has cracked down on feminist activism, encouraged women to embrace marriage and childbearing and severely limited independent speech. The film’s reception reflects the unpredictable nature of censorship in the country, as well as the growing appetite for female-centered stories. Discussion of women’s issues is generally allowed so long as it does not morph into calls for rights. “Her Story,” which some have called China’s answer to “Barbie,” cushions many of its social critiques with jokes.The director of “Her Story,” Shao Yihui, has emphasized at public appearances that she is not interested in provoking “gender antagonism,” an accusation that official media has sometimes lobbed against feminists.At a time of sluggish growth and anemic ticket sales, movie producers — and perhaps government regulators — have been eager to attract female audience members, an increasingly important consumer base. Other recent hit movies have also been directed by and starred women, including the year’s top box office performer, “YOLO.”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 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Why the Year’s Best Performances Are From Actresses Who Say Very Little

      by

      Films like “Conclave” and “Bird” provide a stark contrast to the recent succession of films about women finding their voices.IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Erotos” (1993).© Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii GalleryWe 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 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Two Boxing Rivals Are Ready for a Rematch. Hold the Trash Talk.

      by

      Fierce rivalries are a cornerstone of boxing. But Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, who will fight for a championship title on Netflix on Friday, are going about it differently.When Katie Taylor defeated Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden two years ago in what was billed as the biggest women’s boxing match in history, the calls for a rematch started before the sweat and blood even had a chance to dry.A new rivalry was born. Fans and pundits wanted more. But the trash talk that is synonymous with boxing was largely absent.That was April 2022. On Friday night, Taylor and Serrano are finally set for a rematch on an even bigger stage — Netflix — and under even bigger headline names: Mike Tyson and Jake Paul.And yet the trash talking has been scarce — at least as far as Taylor and Serrano are concerned.“It’s definitely business, I respect all of my opponents,” Serrano, 36, said in a recent interview. “I respect any woman that does this sport, that goes into the ring and gets punched in the face. The sport isn’t easy.”“We have mutual respect,” Taylor, 38, said, “because I know how much courage it takes to step into the ring.”Fierce rivalries are a cornerstone of boxing. Mutual hatred builds a story line around a match that is maintained and encouraged by promoters and the media.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

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Shenseea’s Dancehall Music Makes Women ‘Feel Free’

      by

      While touring the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica, on a Saturday in late September, Shenseea, the dancehall pop singer, paused at a glass case. Inside was the Grammy lifetime achievement award that Mr. Marley received posthumously in 2001.“Haffi get one,” she said in Jamaican Patois of her desire to win a Grammy of her own.Shenseea, 28, who was wearing a cropped turquoise halter top, a matching flowy skirt and Louis Vuitton slides, has already come closer than many. In 2022, she was up for album of the year for her work as a collaborator on Ye’s album “Donda.”The museum occupies Mr. Marley’s former home in the Jamaican capital, where Shenseea also has a residence. Though she was raised mostly in Kingston and grew up listening to Mr. Marley’s reggae music, she had never been to the museum before.“He made it so cool to be a rasta,” Shenseea said, referring to Mr. Marley’s association with the Jamaican spiritual movement Rastafarianism. She had left the museum and was sitting in the back seat of a white Mercedes-Benz, playing a string of breezy new songs she has yet to release. Mr. Marley, Shenseea continued, “showed the people that it’s OK to live your life the way you want to, even though it’s different.”The same could be said for Shenseea. Dancehall, a musical genre known for its suggestive lyrics and provocative visual style, was not a feature of her upbringing in a Christian household. “I wasn’t allowed to listen to dancehall music when I was young,” Shenseea said. “When I was in high school, that’s when I fell in love with it.”She is now among the brightest young stars of the genre, which blossomed in the 1970s in Kingston and is named for the dance halls that held parties in the city.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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Prickly Martha Stewart Makes for a Bracing Netflix Documentary

      by

      “Martha,” from R.J. Cutler, argues that she was ahead of her time. But though she sits for a lengthy interview, this isn’t hagiography.The re-evaluation of maligned celebrities — especially women who reached the height of fame in the 1990s — has become its own mini-genre of pop culture. Often the story tells a bigger tale: a culture bent on taking down successful women, or beautiful ones, or just ones who accidentally strayed into the spotlight.So I wasn’t surprised to see a documentary about Martha Stewart on Netflix’s docket. Titled “Martha” — from that one name, you know instantly who it’s about — and directed by R.J. Cutler, it makes a simple enough case: that Martha Stewart was in nearly every way ahead of her time. She was a stockbroker in the late 1960s, then started a catering company that became the impetus for her books about entertaining and homemaking. Eventually she became a media mogul, considered both the first self-made female billionaire and the original influencer. Then, the movie argues, she was also unfairly prosecuted as a result of her fame and the prosecutors’ need to make a name for themselves. But look, “Martha” says: her road back to influence in recent years on TV and on social media has been remarkable.All of this follows the traditional arc: success, fall from grace, eventual salvation. What I didn’t expect, though, was how Cutler would go about filling in the details. Stewart, who is 83, sat down for a lengthy interview — often an indicator of a pure public relations piece, only telling the story the subject wants told. Usually those are surface-level and hagiographical takes, just part of the overall brand-building package.That’s definitely present in “Martha,” which in its final section chronicles the past decade of Stewart’s life in very rosy terms, beginning with her participation in a 2015 Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber, which began both her “cool grandma” era and her unlikely friendship with Snoop Dogg.But for most of the film, there’s more fruitful tension than blind celebration. Stewart makes for a prickly interviewee, especially when she’s talking about something she’s not interested in discussing in depth — her first marriage, for instance, or the subject of feelings in relationships. She argues a bit with Cutler. He occasionally lets a statement hang in the air or keeps the camera running, giving us a glimpse of something that feels not totally intended on her part.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