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Equity Actors Would Very Much Like To Go Back To Work

And they're not shy about asking the union to move up the timeline - please. "We feel unheard, we feel left out, and we feel way farther behind than any other industry when it comes to putting in place practical protocols that would get us back to work." - The New York Times

England’s Man On A Mission To Bring Museums Into The 21st Century

Gus Casely-Hayford has a vision for the new V&A East. "The space itself will be accessible in every possible way. We’ll build around it digital technologies, so you can both engage with the collection while you’re there and leave something of yourself behind, like comments. So it becomes not just a repository of objects, but of people’s thoughts and...

Henry Darrow, Who Fought For Roles For Latinos And Was The First Latino Zorro On TV, 87

Darrow was "best known as Manolito Montoya in the hit Western The High Chaparral," but he was also "an activist who worked to expand the roles offered to Latinos on screen. In 1972, Darrow, Ricardo Montalban, Carmen Zapata and Edith Diaz founded the Screen Actors Guild Ethnic Minority Committee. Darrow was also a vice president of Nostros, the organization...

Making The Argument For 1925 As A Literary Watershed

Don't just salivate over Ulysses, The Wasteland, and the soon-to-come centennial of 1922. Where would modernist English literature be without Great Gatsby? Mrs. Dalloway? John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer? Or Hemingway's In Our Time? - The New York Times

Trying To Scout Locations During A Pandemic

It's not easy for film and TV production location scouts at the moment. There's a lot of digital photography, and a lot of after-the-big-Zoom-meetings adaptation. One location manager "wonders if she’ll soon be using her new iPhone 12, which has Lidar light detection and ranging capability, to scout locations." - Variety

Children’s Book Illustration Is Art, And James Ransome Also Wants More

James Ransome just won the Gold Award. He's "well-known and loved for his illustrations, especially for his many children's books. But at age 60 he recently earned an MFA, and is developing a parallel career as a painter. His Gold Award was for Who should own Black Art -- a painting and book jacket — and his acceptance speech acknowledged some...

Looking Back At The Oscars Of Two Decades Ago

The final pre-9/11 Oscars (can that be real?), the Oscars where Gladiator beat Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and where Marcia Gay Harden won (deservedly! but perhaps cursedly?) for Pollock ... what else should, or could, have happened? - Los Angeles Times

Making Change Sometimes Means Becoming A Member Of The Establishment

Julie Mehretu, who has a solo show opening at the Whitney: "There is a deep consideration of who you show and who comes to the museum and how do you shift that. There is a lot that has to be challenged." - The New York Times

What It’s Like Filming ‘The World’s Greatest Love Scene’ When You And Romeo Can’t Touch

Jessie Buckley is playing Juliet, and Josh O'Connor is playing Romeo, but there's no audience - and there's a huge audience. "When news first broke that Buckley and O’Connor would appear together in a contemporary version of Romeo & Juliet, there was huge excitement among theatregoers. The idea was for a short autumn run at the Lyttleton theatre, in...

The Agony Of Waiting For Relief To Come

Arts venues are dying while waiting for their entertainment venue relief. Not great: "A far longer than expected build-out of the application process by the Small Business Administration — which only had its new head, Isabel Guzman, confirmed by the Senate last week — has meant serious delays in the disbursement of funds. And a buildup of anxiety, debt...

Behind The Scenes, Artists Confronted MoMA Leadership About Board Chair’s Iraq War Ties

And the confrontations - and revelations about who on MoMA's board and who on MoMA PS1's board are implicated in "security firms" in Iraq, not to mention ties to Jeffrey Epstein - are ongoing. Iraqi American art scholar Rijin Sahakian: "The denial of the artists’ right to peacefully protest through their work — on an active war actively accumulating...

Selling Books With Some Tears On TikTok

TikTok might not be the place we think of immediately for book reviews - but a lot of bookbuyers - that is, young women - do. "Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released The Song of Achilles , said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually...

The Gender-Based Lawsuit Against Disney Expands To Include Pay Secrecy

California labor law doesn't allow for pay secrecy. Disney denies the claims by the plaintiffs that "Disney prohibits employees from disclosing their own wages, discussing the pay of others or inquiring about another employee’s compensation. ... Some of the plaintiffs also claim to have been instructed multiple times not to talk about their compensation, with one alleging that another...

Indoor Dance In New York Goes On Delay Once Again

The plan: Audacious, but careful. The space: The Park Avenue Armory, with an extremely limited audience. The issue: "The eagerly anticipated performances, which were set to begin on Wednesday for a sold-out seven-day run, had to be postponed after several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company tested positive for the virus." - The New York Times

Reading Books By Black Authors Isn’t Some Kind Of Magical Medicine White People Can Take

And many Black authors resent the implication. Yaa Gyasi on her time touring the United States after her book Homegoing came out: "I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that...

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