“I think creativity by its nature is activism,” says composer-pianist Max Richter. “It’s about meaning, it’s about experiment, it’s about the unknown, it’s about discovery.” - The Guardian
"When Janet Sobel created one of the most recognizable artistic styles, drip painting, on scraps of paper, boxes and the backs of envelopes, she was 45 years old, had never taken a single art class and didn’t even have her own supplies." - The New York Times
Rhoads studied painting, but his fame came from his audiokinetic sculptures, "which ranged from tabletop size to more than 40 feet high, resembled a combination of planetariums, construction girders, carnival rides and pinball machines." - Washington Post
"It is widely assumed that Boulanger consciously renounced composition after her sister died in order to champion Lili's music and focus on teaching. But the biographical reality is more complicated." - The New York Times
Mr. Popeil’s mastery of television marketing, dating to the 1950s but spanning several decades, made him nearly as recognizable onscreen as the TV and movie stars of his era. - The New York Times
The compound at Austin Friars, known to readers of Hilary Mantel's trilogy, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. But a historian has used what's survived of Cromwell's own archives, along with later drawings and surveys, to work out a clearer idea of what it looked like. - CNN
His 42nd Street Ballroom, which has mesmerized passersby for decades at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, is but one of the 300 "audio-kinetic ball machines" that he created for museums, children's hospitals, transportation hubs, and the like. - The New York Times
"You only have to look a bit closer at Damon's career, at the notion of Matt Damon, Movie Star we have in our heads, to see that nice might be an ingenious sleight-of-hand, an illusion of sorts. Because that darkness is there." - The New York Times Magazine
"Such was the ire that the magazine transition published a Testimony Against Gertrude Stein. Matisse raged at his wife being described as having a mouth like a horse while Braque railed against her insistence on Cubism being a wholly Spanish affair." (Worse, she called Hemingway "yellow.") - BBC
Fernando Pessoa published not only under his own name, but under three different personas as well. These weren't pseudonyms (he called them "heteronyms"): the four had completely different biographies, personalities and opinions and regularly argued with each other in print. - Literary Hub
Mason, "a former rabbi from a long line of rabbis, ... made comic capital as a Jew feeling his way — sometimes nervously, sometimes pugnaciously — through a perplexing gentile world." - The New York Times
She was the first Black woman to star in a Ringling Bros circus, and "photographs from the time show Ms. Brown triumphantly astride her headstanding elephant, arms raised high, her elaborate headdress perfectly in place." - The New York Times
Schwarz was expelled from Egypt in 1949, arrived penniless in Italy, and went on to found a prominent gallery devoted to Dadaist and Surrealist art in Milan and become probably the world’s greatest self-made collector and donor of work from those artistic movements." - The New York Times
“What really stuck out to us was … Ronee’s real commitment to inclusivity, her real commitment to BIPOC artists and elevating those voices. But also there is a deep commitment to the world — climate justice — in her practices.” - WBUR
He and a friend started Universal Press Syndicate in 1970; Garry Trudeau was their first cartoonist. Among the many other cartoons and columnists he signed were Calvin and Hobbes, Cathy, William F. Buckley Jr. and Roger Ebert. - The Washington Post on MSN
