#and that night happened to be the opening of a local collage artists exhibition and her work was just breathtaking

[squishious]

ok i finished my psych notes so now i'm going to tell you all a story

[markwatkinsconsumerguide]

Consumer Guide / No.91 / Artist, blogger, collector and Charlie Gillett fan,  Michael Leigh with Mark Watkins.

MW : Your background...

ML : I was born in London just after The Second World War so part of the “baby boom” generation. My parents lived in Highbury at the time and soon moved to various places around Kent and Essex – staying with relatives – uncles and aunties etc. as accommodation was very hard to find at the time. 

Eventually, my working class parents got on a housing waiting list for the new town Basildon (about 30 miles outside London, in Essex) and a couple of years later around 1953 got a small, modern, terraced house with a bathroom and a garden – things we'd never had before. 

The town at the time was a mixture of old villages and housing estates and farmland so I had a pretty enjoyable childhood roaming over fields and exploring old derelict bungalows and farm houses etc. that were due for re-development.

I enjoyed junior school but wasn't even allowed to take my Eleven-plus so ended up in a terrible secondary school, which I hated. The only nice teacher was the art master who was very encouraging and those were the lessons I really looked forward to. I seemed to be pretty hopeless at everything else except maybe for technical drawing. 

So after gaining just one O level in Art I enrolled in the general course at the local art school which happened to be Southend-On-Sea, about 15 miles away in the Thames Estuary. This was a real eye opener for me – mixing with so many like-minded and interesting individuals who loved art as much as I did. Great teachers who were very encouraging and helpful. I loved it!  

Looking back through rose coloured glasses these seemed like the Halcyon Days of my youth.  

MW : Tell me about your interest in art and any key "light bulb" moments at Art School...

ML : Key light bulb moments?  Well, I suppose just being immersed in art all day long was  totally thrilling and I thought myself very lucky to spend four years just painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture etc. 

My parents were very supportive too most of the time, although I'm sure they thought “a proper job” would be more beneficial ! I had no grant at the time only my bus fares paid by the local council. I realised if I needed to progress to the next level of education – university – I had to acquire some more O levels. 

So I had to do some night classes to catch up. Eventually getting a Level 3 over three years which enabled me to do a foundation course and go on to study fine art in Manchester, where I got my degree and afterwards a postgraduate place at Chelsea School of Art in London.

MW : What type of art do you produce...

ML : I've enjoyed all kinds of medium in art over the years – painting with oils and watercolours and making the occasional print when the opportunity arose. It wasn't until 1980 that I discovered the International Mail Art Network via a lovely exhibition at the Greenwich Theatre Gallery in South London, and so the painting took a back seat for a while and I concentrated on collages, rubber stamping and photo copies etc. - things that could easily be stuffed into an envelope and sent to other artists around the globe. 

This is how I met Hazel, my wife, after sending weird artworks back and forth to each other until we finally met up and fell in love. We have been together for 35 years now and have a 26 year old son who has just graduated from the Royal College of Art. 

I should mention the exhibition of our joint archive of mail art that goes on show this September at Special Collections at Manchester Metropolitan University. It's on until April 3rd, 2020 so you have plenty of time to go and visit it. It will be one of the largest shows of postal art ever in the UK.

MW : Do you have a favourite artist? 

ML : One of my favourite artists is the collagist John Evans who sadly died a few years back – we had been correspondents for over 25 years and he used to send me a collage for my birthday, as well as many ink stained letters from New York, his home town. He is featured in this exhibition in Manchester and we have several of his collages dotted around our house.

MW : What do you enjoy collecting? 

ML : I enjoy collecting all manner of things from mail art, postcards, rubber stamps, ephemera, records, toys etc. - the list goes on and on. Hazel, my wife, and my son Archie are also avid collectors of stuff.

We frequent boot sales, charity shops and flea markets all the time and have quite filled this little house from top to bottom with all kinds of junk (err... I mean antiques and collectables!).

Every now and then we have a purge and get rid of loads of DVD's, books etc. and take them to the charity shop, where hopefully some other collector will find room for them.

MW : How did you get into recording Charlie Gillett's radio shows, building up an archive, exchanging correspondence and mixtapes?

ML : I first encountered the DJ Charlie Gillett when he did a wonderful show on BBC Radio London in the 70's called “Honky Tonk”. Every Sunday I used to race back from the flea market in East London, where I lived at the time, to record his shows on an ancient reel-to- reel tape recorder with the microphone wedged up against the old valve radio speaker. 

Later on, I upgraded to a cassette player which made things a lot easier. I was making mix tapes of my own from records I found at the market and various other places and so eventually I sent him one and our correspondence began. Charlie would send me the occasional record, or a letter  - even some photos of his travels. He then moved to Capital Radio and did a show with World Music as the main interest and I was collecting that sort of thing too. Eventually he asked me to go on his show to play some market finds which I did in 1989.

I rather lost touch when we moved from London and couldn't hear his radio shows (except for those on the World Service) anymore and was shocked and saddened by his untimely death. I have tried to keep his name and his shows alive by uploading them onto my music blog and later onto the dedicated page on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1694083207508317/

MW: Why is Charlie (Gillett) much missed? 

ML : Charlie is much missed mainly because he was quite unique in the radio world being a passionate enthusiast of all genres of music from Rock 'n' Roll to World Music and was extremely knowledgeable. Also, he always found guests that were equally knowledgeable and engaging. 

Nobody comes close to him on the airwaves today because deejays seem to have lost the art of communicating. It's all a bit corporate and flash these days with brash personalities taking over the airwaves with crass chat and awful banter - I can't stand it! Charlie was one of the last real deejays - a bygone era of radio that will sadly never return.  

MW : Do you listen to music on the radio?

ML : I rarely listen to music on the radio these days. I much prefer playing records or CD's. 

As a child of the 1950's, I was brought up on Rock 'n' Roll - so still love Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Everly Brothers, Little Richard etc. - not many British artists, except maybe for Lonnie Donegan and The Shadows.

Later on in the 1960's it was The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks etc. 

I still listen to all that stuff with a mixture of Punk and New Wave from the 1980's - and - more recently World Music - artists such as Fela Kuti, Salif Keita, M'Bilia Bel, Youssou N'Dour etc.

MW : Your ideal day? 

ML : Ideal days for me are usually going out to a boot sale or an antique emporium with my dear wife or else shopping around charity shops in Chester or Llandudno etc. 

We also like country walks and finding cafes to have tea and a slice of cake. Somewhere like Whitegate Way in Cheshire where you can do both – their recently refurbished station café (it used to be an old railway line), all run by volunteers and sells lovely food and drink etc.

MW: How do you like to spend Christmas?

ML : I try not to think about Christmas too much. I hate all that hype for the festive season starting in September! Crazy! 

We usually have a quiet time at home with the family – eating and drinking too much and watching lots of crap on the TV just like so many other people!!

http://flobberlob.blogspot.com/

http://laughingshed.blogspot.com/

© Mark Watkins / September 2019

[creativinn]

Cleveland Mounts Global Triennial But Local Artists Are Largely Overlooked

Clevelanders of all ages enjoying themselves at “Judy’s Hand Pavilion” (2018) by artist Tony Tasset for FRONT International. (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is described by founder Fred Bidwell as an all-out effort to put Cleveland on the radar as an international art destination, and described by The New York Times, in an article cited prominently on the festival website, as an endeavor that “offers artists the canvas of Cleveland”— and this it absolutely does. Scores of participating artists and nearly three-dozen across Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, have contributed to eleven “cultural exercises” and 20+ official installation sites, which include museum exhibitions, commissions, site-specific interventions, public programs, residencies, publications and research projects.

All this has been thoughtfully and thoroughly organized under the curatorial auspices of Artistic Director Michelle Grabner, at the behest of Executive Director and CEO Fred Bidwell who, along with his wife, Laura Beth Bidwell, is a crucial booster for the arts in Cleveland. (In addition to the couple’s personal collection of contemporary art, with an emphasis in photography, they founded the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Foundation which, in 2013, opened Transformer Station, a contemporary art exhibition space on Cleveland’s West Side.) Fred Bidwell makes no bones about FRONT’s objective to put Cleveland on the map as a travel destination for art lovers, and the various contributing bodies and individuals have spared no expense in the 3½ year journey toward making it a reality.

An art happening of this scope and magnitude cannot, of course, be summed up easily, but there are a number of outstanding moments. There are some gems to be appreciated in the context of regular art venues, such as Untitled (1999), a 12-panel, 8-color woodcut by Kerry James Marshall that wraps around three walls of a small gallery space within the Cleveland Museum of Art (as well as an adjacent gallery filled with sketches and other ephemera); “Brutalismo-Cleveland” (2018), a new commission by FRONT from Brazilian artist Marlon de Azambuja, which is perfectly suited to the glass-box gallery at CMA in which it is displayed; and the eerily post-apocalyptic vibe affected by Josh Kline at MoCA Cleveland, with his gallery full of fractured furniture and large children’s toys, sculpted in lighter-weight materials, but rendered to look like the cast-concrete, ashy remains of a conflict alluded to in the title, “Civil War” (2017). The Martine Syms installation at MoCA, with the artist’s signature blend of interdisciplinary information overload — via video surveillance, performance, video, wall text, and reconfigured mass media — was nearly impossible to receive in the context of a busy opening night event, but merits a visit to MoCA all on its own.

“Brutalismo-Cleveland” (2018), a new commission by Marlon de Azambuja, at Cleveland Museum of Art, installation view. Images on the wall by Luisa Lambri.

Detail of “Untitled” (1999) by Kerry James Marshall at Cleveland Museum of Art.

However, it is in the less conventional venue that FRONT’s offerings, and Grabner’s curatorial efforts, really shine. Philip Vanderhyden’s “Volatility Smile 3” (2018) is an iteration of his very contemporary, multi-screen digital collage work that in no way blends with its surroundings at the baroquely ornate Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Cleveland. And yet, the work inspired by Vanderhyden’s feelings of financial insecurity — “volatility smile” is a term for a common graph shape that describes a market dip formed by a group of options that share the same expiration date — strikes an incredibly tense conceptual and aesthetic balance in a space literally designed to inspire confidence in the capitalist system.

FRONT Executive Director and CEO Fred Bidwell takes in “Volatility Smile 3″ by Philip Vanderhyden at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Likewise, there is an incredible impact to the placement of “The American Library” (2018) — a sequel to Yinka Shonibare’s 2014 installation, “The British Library” — sited at the Cleveland Public Library main branch downtown. First, visitors encounter a double-sided wall of books wrapped in Dutch wax print fabrics; a double-take reveals that these are artworks, not library books. Then comes the slower-breaking revelation that all of the 6,000 names gold-embossed on the book spines — many recognizable as names of contemporary celebrities and some 15% of them specific to Cleveland — denote people who are either direct or generational immigrants to the United States. The vibrant fabrics, which create an exceptionally satisfying relationship with the library’s surreal WPA-era mural in the installation’s background, serve as visual metaphor, in that they are culturally identified with Western Africa, where they were sold, but are in truth a product of Holland made in Indonesia. Considering our country’s current crisis of nationalism, these questions about authentic origin feel especially timely, and relevant to Cleveland, which was once within the top five gateway cities for immigration, and boasting, in 1900, a 33% foreign-born population.

The American Library (2018) by Yinka Shonibare at the Cleveland Public Library, multiple views.

These ideas coalesced for me aboard the William G. Mather, a decommissioned steamship and outpost exhibit docked at the Great Lakes Science Center. Much of the regular cargo hold main display has been cleared to accommodate a rolling screening of the documentary film, Lottery of the Sea (2006), by Allan Sekula, a frankly ponderous, 179-minute odyssey that tackles some of Sekula’s perennial themes: labor, global capitalism, and the sea. Though sitting in a muggy cargo hold on a long, hot press day and attempting to train one’s attention on a meditative and slow-moving examination of the international maritime industry in no way compares to the labor of, say, working on an industrial fishing craft, there is some sense of long and sustained effort that forms a kind of sympathy between the abstract and far-away reality being presented to the viewer, and the immediate surroundings. Afforded an opportunity to speak with artistic director Michelle Grabner directly, I raised this notion of her obviously intentional intersection of external input and locality.

A view of Cleveland from the deck of the steamship William G. Mathers.

“When you think about Sekula, or Vanderhyden at the Federal Reserve, or you go to the library and see Yinka Shonibare, what we’re seeing are artists who are not afraid to take on huge, big themes, that always risk falling into a cliché,” Grabner told Hyperallergic. “The idea of ‘the sea’ is a huge subject, right? Vanderhyden takes on the anxiety around money — that’s a big thing. Yinka Shonibare with immigration — and there’s many more. … I think that works perfectly with the suggestion that there is a kind of intersection that happens, and that is, if you’re going to slice through Cleveland, do it with something that it’s hard not to have a relationship with. Something that’s hard to neglect. We understand we are sitting on water, we deal with money, we deal with immigration on a daily basis. So those two things together will hopefully be what gives this exhibition its impact. That reinforcement might feel flat-footed or obvious, but I think it elevates and reinforces the subjects in a profound way.”

FRONT’s success in this aim notwithstanding, there are a few notable blind spots to its efforts — most strikingly, an overall lack of acknowledgement and elevation of the immediate and regional art community. Using Cleveland as a staging ground for out-of-town artists rings alarmingly close to the kind of ‘blank canvas’ mentality that is all too familiar to long-suffering denizens of Rust Belt cities experiencing redevelopment efforts driven by wealthy benefactors concerned with generating outside interest rather than addressing longstanding, often racialized, systemic inequities.

Detail view of the Martine Syms installation at MoCA.

Certainly, not every sited festival needs to feature local artists, and FRONT is in its first iteration of a Herculean undertaking, but among all the many exercises and exhibitions, only a small handful seem to consider that the people of Cleveland, and artists of the Midwest, have their own set of concerns and a way of presenting them that offers crucial perspective, much-needed awareness, and an opportunity for acknowledgement and healing. No doubt every festival has its shared of green-eyed monsters, but it’s difficult to avoid a sense that those artists who feel marginalized or wallpapered over by FRONT have a point. More or less every regional artist was shoehorned into a group show at the Cleveland Institute of Art, which felt less polished and less considered than many of the other sites—not to mention a bit perilously crowded, with 21 artists in a single venue, culled from a 2017 Great Lakes studio tour undertaken by Grabner.

Though it might be framed as a generous act on the part of Grabner and FRONT to visit the studios of 55 regional artists, this nonetheless feels like an awfully small number in the context of all the artists working in the surrounding Midwest region, which includes Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, upstate New York, Illinois, and Toronto, Ontario. While it might rightly be argued that truly great artists can shine through, regardless of context or support, it is equally true that many of today’s industry darlings achieved their status largely through being backed by incredible wealth and investment. It feels as though, with the amount of resources obviously brought to bear in Cleveland on FRONT’s behalf, that a greater portion might have been diverted toward helping to polish some of the city and the region’s diamonds in the rough.

Michael Rakowitz talks to press in the collection space for safety orange objects at SPACES.

One of the only venues that made an exhaustive effort to acknowledge the people and the artists of Cleveland was, fittingly, the experimental and community-oriented SPACES, which houses the efforts of artist Michael Rakowitz. The Chicago-base Rakowitz has a longstanding practice that includes regular, direct engagement with people and places, which he expresses in multiple ways in his work for FRONT. Notably, Rakowitz turned over roughly half the gallery space to Cleveland-based artists, reserving only the back room for his own work, “A Color Removed” (2015–ongoing). Both galleries address the police shooting of 12-year-old Cleveland resident Tamir Rice on November 22, 2014. The incident, caught on security footage, rattled the entire country, but was felt especially keenly in Rice’s hometown. Rakowitz installed kiosks to collect any and all items in Cleveland that are “safety orange” — in reference to the so-called justification for the offending officers’ acquittal, which was that Rice was playing with a gun unidentifiable as a toy because the safety orange cap had been removed.

In his campaign to remove all items of this color from Cleveland writ large, and progressively amass and install them in the back room at SPACES, Rakowitz hopes to raise the question of who “deserves to be safe.”  The installation continues to attract attention to a personal loss and national issue that remains vitally relevant to the people of Cleveland — particularly in neighborhoods like Glenville, site of a five-day riot exactly 50 years ago this week, into which new development is insinuating itself, under the guise of FRONT and other art-driven concerns.

Detail view of “Civil War” by Josh Kline at MoCA.

Surely, no one festival can do everything, and FRONT has made a bold inaugural effort to establish itself as a contender among the many new art destinations springing up allover the Midwest. There is much to be gained from visiting FRONT, not least of which is an opportunity to explore Cleveland, a city rife with outstanding historical architecture, amazing heartland food culture, and absolutely warm-hearted citizenry. One sees nothing but opportunity to create enhanced resonance and connection, not only to the “canvas” of Cleveland, but also to the people and artists who constitute its weave.

The inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art continues through September 30 at venues across Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, Ohio.

Source

https://hyperallergic.com/452636/cleveland-mounts-global-triennial-but-local-artists-are-largely-overlooked/

[giancarlonicoli]

Peter Beard, Wildlife Photographer on the Wild Side, Dies at 82

Called “the last of the adventurers,” Mr. Beard photographed African fauna at great personal risk, and well into old age could party till dawn. He had been missing for 19 days.

By Margalit Fox

Published April 19, 2020 Updated April 20, 2020, 10:01 a.m. ET

Peter Beard, a New York photographer, artist and naturalist to whom the word “wild” was roundly applied, both for his death-defying photographs of African wildlife and for his own much-publicized days — decades, really — as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town, was found dead in the woods on Sunday, almost three weeks after he disappeared from his home in Montauk on the East End of Long Island. He was 82.

His family confirmed that a body found in Camp Hero State Park in Montauk was that of Mr. Beard.

Peter Beard’s Family Confirms His DeathApril 19, 2020

He had dementia and had experienced at least one stroke. He was last seen on March 31, and the authorities had conducted an extensive search for him.

“We are all heartbroken by the confirmation of our beloved Peter’s death,” the family said in a statement, adding, “He died where he lived: in nature.”

Mr. Beard’s best-known work was the book “The End of the Game,” first published in 1965. Comprising his text and photographs, it documented not only the vanishing romance of Africa — a place long prized by Western colonialists for its open savannas and abundant big game — but also the tragedy of the continent’s imperiled wildlife, in particular the elephant.

In later years, Mr. Beard became famous for embellishing his photographic prints with ink and blood — either human (his own) or animal (from a butcher) — yielding complex, cryptic, multilayered surfaces.

He was also known for the idiosyncratic, genre-bending diaries that he had kept since he was a boy — profuse assemblages of words, images and found objects like stones, feathers, train tickets and toenail clippings — and for the large, even more profuse collages to which the diaries later gave wing.

But as renowned as he was for his work (he received solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris and elsewhere), Mr. Beard remained at least as well known for his swashbuckling, highly public private life.

Even by the dashing standards of wildlife photography, his résumé was the stuff of high drama, full of daring, danger, romance and tall tales, many of them actually true. Had Mr. Beard not already existed, he might well have been the result of a collaborative brain wave by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Paul Bowles.

He was matinee-idol handsome and, as an heir to a fortune, wealthy long before his photographs began selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.

Besides documenting Africa’s vanishing fauna, he photographed some of the world’s most beautiful women in fashion shoots for Vogue, Elle and other magazines. He had well-documented romances with many of them, including Candice Bergen and Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“The last thing left in nature is the beauty of women, so I’m very happy photographing it,” Mr. Beard told the British newspaper The Observer in 1997.

He discovered one supermodel, Iman, and spun a fabulous legend about her origins. He was married for a time to another, Cheryl Tiegs.

A denizen of Studio 54 in its disco-era heyday, he numbered among his friends the likes of Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Salvador Dalí, Mrs. Onassis, Grace Jones, the Rolling Stones and Francis Bacon, who painted his portrait more than once.

In 1963 he appeared, nude, in Adolfas Mekas’s avant-garde film “Hallelujah the Hills!,” a critical and popular hit at the inaugural New York Film Festival. He later recalled that “Andy Warhol called it the first streak.”

He seemed to possess the indefatigability of a half-dozen men, and well into old age routinely reveled until dawn, his escapades becoming grist for gossip columnists worldwide.

“Peter Beard — gentleman, socialite, artist, photographer, Lothario, prophet, playboy and fan of recreational drugs — is the last of the adventurers,” The Observer said.

“James Dean grown up,” another British paper, The Evening Standard, called him.

“The hard-partying septuagenarian shutterbug,” The Daily News of New York wrote.

There was the time, for example, as Vanity Fair reported in 1996, that Mr. Beard, after roistering until 5 a.m. at a Nairobi nightclub, emerged the next afternoon from a tent on his ranch in the Kenyan countryside followed by the “four or five” young Ethiopian women he had brought home with him.

“We were very cozy,” he noted.

There was the time in 2013, The New York Post reported, citing court documents,  that Mr. Beard, then 75, returned home about 6 a.m. to the Midtown Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife, Nejma Beard, who was also his agent, after a night’s revels.

Ms. Beard did not take kindly to his return — not because of the hour, but because he happened to have two Russian prostitutes in tow. In response, she dialed 911, declared that her husband was attempting suicide and had him committed for a time to a local hospital.

“Beard doesn’t really make art to enhance life for the rest of us,” a critic for The Globe and Mail of Toronto wrote in 1998. “He has created his flamboyant life as a work of art.”

Yet for all its swashbuckling glitter, Mr. Beard’s curriculum vitae was shot through with darkness. His art, reviewers often remarked, seemed haunted by death and loss. So, at times, did his life. In the 1970s, a devastating fire obliterated his home, along with 20 years’ work. In the 1990s, he was attacked and nearly killed by one of the very animals he had long worked to save

A Black Sheep Son

By his own account the black sheep of an illustrious family, Peter Hill Beard was born in Manhattan on Jan. 22, 1938, to Anson McCook Beard and Roseanne (Hoar) Beard.

A great-grandfather, James J. Hill, known in the press as “the Empire Builder,” founded the Great Northern Railway — running from St. Paul to Seattle — in the mid-19th century. A stepgrandfather was the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard V.

Peter’s father was a partner at Delafield & Delafield, a Wall Street brokerage house; his mother, Mr. Beard said long afterward, “suffered from lack of education and the disease of conformity.”

After spending part of his childhood in Alabama, where his father was stationed with the Army Air Forces, Peter was reared on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Long Island. He began taking photographs as a child, with a Voigtländer bellows camera given to him by a grandmother. He also began keeping the eclectic diaries that would become a professional hallmark.

Yet his obvious artistic gifts, he later said, were lost on his parents.

“Nobody said, ‘Your pictures are good’ or ‘You have a good eye,’” Mr. Beard told the CBS News program “Public Eye” in 1998. What they said, he continued, was: “‘Good hobby. When are you going to do something worthwhile?’”

His future seemed foreordained. He was dispatched to the schools his father had attended, including the Buckley School in New York and Pomfret School in Connecticut.

In 1955, at 17, Peter made his first trip to Africa, in the company of Quentin Keynes, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. Despite being chased up a tree by an angry hippo he was trying to photograph, he was smitten. In Kenya, he was introduced to the last of a generation of big-game hunters and went shooting — in both senses — with them.

Entering Yale, he embarked on premedical studies but quickly changed course.

“It soon became painfully clear,” Mr. Beard later said, “that human beings were the disease.” He switched to art history, studying with the artist Josef Albers and the art historian Vincent Scully.

He returned to Kenya the summer after his junior year. Many of the photographs he took then would be reproduced in “The End of the Game.”

After graduating from Yale in 1961, he signed on, per his parents’ wishes, as a trainee with the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. But the gray-flanneled life was not for him, and he soon defected.

Traveling to Denmark, he met and photographed Karen Blixen, who, under the pen name Isak Dinesen had written the 1937 memoir “Out of Africa,” a book Mr. Beard cited as a deep influence. He later bought 45 acres in the countryside outside Nairobi, abutting the coffee farm on which Ms. Blixen had lived.

“The End of the Game,” originally published by Viking Press, made Mr. Beard’s reputation. While a few reviewers took him to task for his seemingly uncritical embrace of the romance of the great white hunter, most praised his dynamic photographs and arresting thesis: that the game preserves meant to safeguard elephants were unintentionally contributing to their destruction.

Reviewing the volume in The New York Times Book Review in 1965, J. Anthony Lukas wrote:

“The portraits of the animals themselves — alive, dying and dead — are superb. These are not ‘pretty’ Walt Disney shots of gazelles leaping through the meadows or parrots chattering in the jungle greenery. Beard’s pictures catch all the saw-toothed savagery of the animals who must show each day that they are fit to survive.”

Mr. Beard’s close studies of wildlife at Tsavo East National Park in Kenya had shown him that the elephant population there, having far outstripped the available food supply, was starving to death by the thousands. Deeming himself a “preservationist,” he argued for the controlled culling of elephant herds, a position that by the 1960s had made many conservationists cringe.

“Conservation,” Mr. Beard once said, “is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses.”

Mr. Beard brought his thesis home even more starkly in subsequent editions of “The End of the Game,” which contained his later aerial photographs of the ravaged Kenyan landscape. In those images, elephant skeletons litter the parched earth like gleaming ghosts.

Ever-Beckoning Kenya

Though Mr. Beard maintained homes in Manhattan and Montauk, he lived and worked in Kenya for long periods. In the mid-1970s, walking down a Nairobi street, he spotted Iman. He introduced her to Wilhelmina Models, the New York agency, and her career was born.

Presenting Iman to the American news media, Mr. Beard gleefully spun an imperial fantasy: that he had come upon her herding cattle in the African bush. In truth, as Iman soon pointed out with what can reasonably be interpreted as a mixture of amusement and irritation, she spoke five languages, had been a political science student at the University of Nairobi and was the daughter of a Somali diplomat.

Mr. Beard’s first marriage, to Minnie Cushing, the daughter of a distinguished Newport, R.I., family, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ms. Tiegs, to whom he was married in the 1980s. He married Nejma Khanum, the daughter of an Afghan diplomat, in 1986.

For Mr. Beard, the late 20th century was a notably dark time. In 1977, while he was in New York City, an oil furnace exploded at his Montauk home. The house was destroyed, along with paintings by Warhol, Bacon and Picasso and decades’ worth of Mr. Beard’s photographs and diaries.

In September 1996, while picnicking near the Kenya-Tanzania border, he was charged by an elephant, who came at him, he recalled, like “a freight train.”

The elephant ran a tusk through his leg, narrowly missing the femoral artery. Using its head as a battering ram, it crushed Mr. Beard, breaking ribs and fracturing his pelvis in at least a half-dozen places. By the time he arrived at the hospital in Nairobi, according to news reports, he had no pulse.

Doctors revived him, but damage to his optic nerve left him blind. He was told that he might never walk again. He eventually regained his sight, and the ability to walk. He underwent further surgery in New York and lived ever after with more than two-dozen pins in his pelvis.

Nejma Beard filed for divorce in the mid-90s, but the couple reconciled after the attack and remained married.

Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Zara; a granddaughter, and his brothers, Anson Jr. and Samuel.

Among his other books are “Eyelids of Morning” (with Alistair Graham), about crocodiles; “Peter Beard,” a vast compendium of his work; and “Zara’s Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa.”

As Mr. Beard aged, the opinions he voiced freely in interviews sounded increasingly out of step with 21st-century sensibilities. He seemed, to all appearances, to be marooned in the world of the dinner jacket and the great white hunter — a world he simultaneously abhorred and pined for — as the new century passed him by.

In an interview with New York magazine in 2003, for instance, he expressed surprise on being told that the fashion designer Tom Ford was gay.

“But he looks absolutely normal,” Mr. Beard protested, going on to say, “I’m not homophobic,” and to assert that Truman Capote “was one of my best friends.”

Speaking in the same interview about why he had decided to forsake Africa after four decades, Mr. Beard said, “Africans are the only racists I know,” adding, “and that’s because they’re primitive.”

In the end, which Peter Beard will be remembered — the artist or the hedonist — is an open question. Perhaps, as he was clearly aware, those two incarnations need not be mutually exclusive.

In “Zara’s Tales,” written for his daughter, he quotes a line from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” a late-18th-century work by William Blake, that seemed to have been a touchstone for both his life and his art: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

To those emblematic words, Mr. Beard appended a personal capstone. “If you crave something new, something original, particularly when they keep saying, ‘Less is more,’” he wrote, “remember that I say: Too much is really just fine.”

Stacey Stowe contributed reporting.

Margalit Fox is a former senior writer on the obituaries desk at The Times. She was previously an editor at the Book Review. She has written the send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney.

[sentrava]

What’s On in Stockholm: May 2019

The sun is staying out longer, and so are the people of Stockholm! Emerging from the winter hibernation is exciting, whether you are a morning person or a night owl. There are plenty of outdoor events in Stockholm throughout the month, including bird watching, a fun run, food festivals, and concerts.

Here’s what’s happening in Stockholm this May:

Wednesday 1st – Sunday 12th

Memo Color at Galleri Glas

Gunnel Sahlin’s glass exhibit opened in April, and ends early this month. You don’t want to miss the chance to see her exquisite work!

    Wednesday 1st May

International Worker’s Day

As with most of Europe, 1st May is a public holiday in Sweden. Enjoy a day off in solidarity with those who have fought for labor rights – and still do.

    Thursday 2nd – Saturday 4th May

Swedish House Mafia at Tele2 Arena

Back in 2012, this house music group went on a farewell tour, which only increased their fame. Now, years later, Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso, and Steve Angello have reunited Swedish House Mafia. They will have three performances in their hometown of Stockholm, with tickets starting at 450 SEK.

    Thursday 2nd May

Wiz Khalifa at Gröna Lund

The Gröna Lund summer concerts are starting off big with the Pittsburgh star rapper, Wiz Khalifa. If you are interested in attending more of the Gröna Lund concerts this summer, be sure to look into buying the Green Card for 290 SEK. Otherwise, the ticket price is the park entrance price: 120 SEK if you enter early, and 290 SEK if you enter during the evening.

    Friday 3rd – Sunday 5th May

Stockholm Writers Festival at Finlandshuset Konferens

If you’re a writer or in the publishing business, this is the place to be. Agents, editors, and English-language authors will all gather to network, to learn, and to be inspired. The main festival pass costs 2600 SEK, and there is the option to add on other classes as well.

    Friday 3rd May

Trädgården Premiär

With warm weather in Stockholm comes a new season at Trädgården! Trädgården is an outdoor live music venue, with food, and an opportunity to embrace the midnight sun all summer long.

    Saturday 4th May

Bug Run Picnic at Gärdet

This event is for all VW enthusiasts. All Volkswagen models, their drivers and passengers are welcome. Come rev your engines with your fellow bug-lovers.

    Vernisage for “Dialog II” at Konsthantverkarna

Ceramicist Alexandra Nilasdotter and silversmith studio Murky Jewelry are showing their beautiful, minimalist pieces together at Konsthantverkarna on Södermalmstorg. They’re just one of the pairings in “Dialog II,” a group show that highlights artists and designers two at a time. Other mediums include textile, metal, and glass. Enjoy the opening event from 11 am – 4 pm.

    Sunday 5th May

Beasts of the Southern Wild at Sthlm Under Stjärnorna

During the summer time, Sthlm Under Stjärnorna hosts weekly film evenings for free. This week features the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild, an extraordinary film following six-year old Hushpuppy as her father’s health declines and her bayou community is flooded by melting ice caps.

    Tuesday 7th May

Bird Watching at Nationalstadsparken

Start you morning spotting and observing birds, whether rare or familiar. Bring food, warm clothes, and binoculars. If you miss this Tuesday, don’t worry; you can enjoy the birds on the 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th of this month.

    Wednesday 8th May

SHY Martin at Obaren

SHY Martin is a notable songwriter, having written Mike Perry’s “The Ocean,” as well as other hits. In 2017, she began to focus on creating her own album. She released her debut EP “Overthinking” in December. Entrance to this concert is free.

    Saturday 11th – Sunday 12th May

Tabletop Game Expo

Want to switch up your game nights from Scrabble and Monopoly? At the Tabletop Game Expo, you’ll experience a tradeshow, a flea market, and other activities. You’ll have the opportunity to play games, hear about the latest and best games, and even sell your own games if you’d like. A 1-day ticket is 150 SEK, and 2-day tickets are 250 SEK.

    Saturday 11th May

Superior Challenge 19 at Cirkus Arena

Both local heroes and international stars will fight in this MMA event. The fightcard’s main event is Diego Nunes vs. Simon Sköld. Tickets start at 744 SEK.

    Sunday 12th May

Lukas Graham at Cirkus Arena

Lukas Graham, the popular pop-music band from Denmark, is on tour with their third album, “The Purple Album.” Their newest album contains the hit “Love Someone.” Tickets start at 460 SEK.

    Wednesday 15th – Thursday 16th May

Notting Hill at Bio & Bistro Capitol

Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant will grace the screen at Bio & Bistro Capitol as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the delightful romantic comedy Notting Hill (20 years! How old are we?!). The movie is in English and does not have subtitles. Tickets range from 160 to 210 SEK.

    Thursday 16th May

Art After Work at Mister French

Mister French has joined up with Campo Viejo, Absolut Art, and the artist duo Thomas OKOK Gunnarsson and Jacqueline. You’ll have the chance to enjoy a new selection of art from Absolut Art, and watch as Thomas OKOK Gunnarsson and Jacqueline simultaneously paint on the same canvas, creating a new painting right in front of your eyes.

    Saturday 18th May

Food Market at Täby Park

This event focuses on local, homemade, organic food, and a good time for all! There will be plenty to eat, lawns to hang out on, and fun activities for everyone.

    Tuesday 21st May

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch at ArkDes

In this documentary, directors Jennifer Baichwai and Nicholas de Pencier explore how humans have had an impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystems. An important and timely film. Entrance is free.

    Mumford & Sons at Ericsson Globe

This British band fuses bluegrass, folk, country, and rock for a sound that has captured the hearts of many since the band formed in 2007. Gang of Youths will support Mumford & Sons in this concert. Tickets start at 625 SEK.

    Friday 24th – Sunday 26th May

Stockholm Burger Fest at Smålandstorget

The burger festival is back for a fourth year! Stay tuned to the Facebook page for more information about the restaurants that will be participating this year.

    Friday 24th May

Gods of Rap at Skansen

Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, and De La Soul, three extremely influential American hip hop groups, will perform at Skansen with DJ Premier. This is HUGE, so get tickets while you can! Tickets are 795 SEK.

    Saturday 25th May

Namaste Stockholm at Kungsträdgården

Start your day doing yoga, then watch dance performances and enjoy food from different corners of India. If you are curious about planning a trip to India, you will have a chance to learn about travel and culture in intimate seminars. Entrance is free.

    Sunday 26th May

The Recycling Party at Hornstull

The Conscious Consumption Association has organized the 15th recycling party in Hornstull! Residents of the area are welcome to set up a table and sell clothes, pastries, and more at this event. Come sell, browse, and buy.

    Wednesday 29th – Thursday 30th May

Swan Lake at Cirkus Arena

Ballerina Irina Kolesnikova, accompanied by the St. Petersburg Ballet Theater, will perform the love story of Prince Siegfried and the Swan Princess Odette. Tickets start at 480 SEK.

    Friday 31st May

ASICS Stockholm High Five

Join for this fun 5K run in Östermalm! The course will be mostly asphalt roads, with some gravel sections. This is a great starting race for those looking to get into long distance running. The price varies depending on when you sign up.

    Ongoing in May

Absolut Art Collection at Spirit Museum

For the summer, Spirit Museum will showcase about 50 photographs by art and fashion photographers. Go get inspired by these painterly shots. Entrance to the museum is 130 SEK.

    Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss at Moderna Museet

This collection includes drawings, collages, models, and ceramic objects made by the Palmstierna-Weiss, who has been politically active in many liberation struggles around the world. The admission to this exhibit is free.

    Ghosts, Generals and Goddesses at Dansmuseet

The works in this exhibit are from Japan, China, and Tibet. The pieces bring to life mythology, stories of historical heroes, and martial arts. Regular admission is 120 SEK, and is 80 SEK for students and seniors.

    Sound Check at Scenkonst Museet

This interactive installation comes alive with sound by the visitors – a truly unique and sensory experience. Wednesdays are free admission; otherwise, admission is free for youth, 70 SEK for 21 – 25, and 140 SEK for those 26 and older.

    Shadow Play at Carl Eldhs Ateljémuseum

Beginning Thursday 16th May, the Carl Eldh studio is celebrating its 100th year with an exhibit from the impressive Swedish architect, Rahel Belatchew. She strives for sustainability and adding to the public sphere. This firm’s architecture is recognized worldwide. Admission to the museum is 100 SEK for adults, 80 SEK for students and senior citizens.

  If you’re a business or organisation that would like us to add your event to next month’s calendar, please contact us at hello [@] scandinaviastandard [dot] com. Thank you!

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  What’s On in Stockholm: May 2019 published first on https://medium.com/@OCEANDREAMCHARTERS

[caveartfair]

Art021 Wants to Mint a Million New Chinese Collectors

Installation view of Hauser & Wirth’s booth at Art021, 2018. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

The first edition of Shanghai’s Art021 in 2013 was scrappy—just 29 galleries filling up a space in the Rockbund Complex. But it proved its art market mettle quickly, and by 2016, fellow Shanghai art fair West Bund Art & Design moved from September to November so that both events could happen simultaneously. Art021 takes a different approach to the internationally-focused West Bund, having committed to reserving at least half of its booths each year for Chinese galleries. And it has become increasingly important to rising Chinese collectors who have started buying art as a lifestyle.

“When we started it, November was nothing—there wasn’t an art thing then,” said David Chau, who co-founded Art021 with PR maven Bao Yifeng and collector Kelly Ying. “People forget that we started before West Bund, and people forget that West Bund started in September and had to move to November. You know, there’s a reason for that.”

Both fairs have grown rapidly—a testament to the market power in mainland China—and attract international galleries aiming to sell to the growing number of collectors in Shanghai and others who travel here from across China. West Bund jumped from 39 to 87 galleries participating in its main section this year. The sixth edition of Art021, which opened to VIPs Thursday afternoon, hosts 103 galleries in three wings of the Shanghai Exhibition Center. But, while West Bund is part of a larger, government-funded initiative to turn a previously industrial stretch of the Huangpu Riverfront into a cultural epicenter, Chau said the privately owned Art021 has been able to become a power center on its own terms.

"FLOWER", 2018. Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh Gagosian

Memento Mori: Black, 2018. Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh Gagosian

“We’ve looked at how West Bund is becoming a Basel kind of fair, whereas if we were trying to follow them, or even beat them, we’d be dead by now,” Chau said. “The reason we’re able to succeed is we are just not really following the art world’s rules. We never set ourselves to be a Basel or a Frieze.”

The 34-year-old Chau, who as a 21-year-old investment banker set up a $32 million art investment fund, said instead of fitting the mold of what an art fair should be, he’s focused on courting the newly wealthy would-be collectors in a country where a new billionaire is minted every two days. It’s the major Chinese collectors who buy at Art Basel in Hong Kong and at evening sales held in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing, that are currently driving the country’s rise in art-world clout—and its ability to edge out the United Kingdom to be the world’s second-biggest art market, after the United States, according to Clare McAndrew’s The Art Market | 2018. While many of those collectors buy art at Art021 too, Chau said his focus is on finding newly wealthy, culture hungry Chinese who haven’t collected yet, and turning them on to buying.

“Out of 1.4 billion people I think this is a big enough market that our mission should be to cultivate a million people rather than just cultivating the art world,” Chau said. In other words, Chau wants to expand the size of the pie, not just take a slice from it.

This is what he pitches to potential exhibitors: there is money here and there are people who want to spend it on art. It’s his job to deliver them on the first week of November.

Untitled Anxious Audience, 2018. Rashid Johnson Hauser & Wirth

“It’s about selling, and getting people to come back,” Chau.

Judging by the scene at Thursday’s VIP preview, they’re clearly doing something right. The aisles thronged with fashionable young collectors who milled about in the two halls upstairs before spilling down into the cavernous, Soviet-style structure’s main foyer, where quite a spectrum of offerings was on display. On one end, Gagosian was presenting the wildly popular collaborations between the artist Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Virgil Abloh. Drake is a known collector of the bombastic work and fairgoers were audibly yelling at passersby to move so they could get pictures. At the other end of the hall, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac had mounted a solo booth of serene portraits by the nonagenarian New Yorker Alex Katz.

True to Chau’s word, there were plenty of deals taking place in the opening hours—contra the general wisdom that Chinese collectors tend to wait to transact until the final day. Hauser & Wirth sold Zhang Enli’s The Garden (2017) for $385,000 to a Chinese museum, Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Collage (2017) to a collection in Hong Kong, and Martin Creed’s Work No. 2316 COCONUTS (2015) for $210,000 to a collection in China. The gallery also staged a show of work by Matthew Day Jackson at Qiao Space, next to West Bund, and sold his Babel (2013) for $325,000 and Flowers in a Vase with Jewels, Coins, and Shells (Milan) (2018) for $150,000—both to Chinese collectors. At David Zwirner, Oscar Murillo’s bank of (2017-18) sold for $300,000; a small Carol Bove sculpture sold for $220,000; and an untitled 2011–12 encaustic by Francis Alÿs, who opened a show at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum on Thursday night, sold for $250,000.

Installation view of David Zwirner’s booth at Art021, 2018. Courtesy of David Zwirner.

At Pace, which was participating in Art021 for the first time (they’ve done West Bund since 2015), a suite of three David Hockney iPad paintings sold for $26,000 each, as well as several works by Chinese artists in their program like Qiu Xiaofei and Hong Hao.

“It’s our first year doing the fair alongside West Bund, and we brought more work by Chinese artists here because there’s a different sort of purpose here,” said Youngjoo Lee, the director of the mega-gallery’s outpost in Seoul. “At West Bund it’s more international, and here, it’s more local Shanghai clients.”

bank of, 2017-2018. Oscar Murillo David Zwirner

Untitled, 2011-2012. Francis Alÿs David Zwirner

Galleria Continua is attuned to the buying habits of the Chinese markets, having opened a gallery in Beijing in 2005 (they also have outposts in Havana, Cuba, San Gimignano, Italy, and Les Moulins, France). Federica Beltrame, a director at Galleria Continua’s space in the Chinese capital, said that they had a lot of requests from local clients for work by Antony Gormley—et voila, an Antony Gormley solo booth. Three works were on reserve a few hours into the fair, at €350,000 for large sculptures and €175,000 for small ones. Beltrame added that, while they’ve done fairs in Beijing to support the local gallery scene, she doesn’t see it them taking off in the way Art021 and West Bund have in Shanghai, turning the city into a real destination for Asian buyers every November.

“I feel that Shanghai has a special energy,” she said. “Beijing fairs are a million years behind. Here, everything is just vibrating.”

Centre of the Centre , 2017. Vittorio Brodmann Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Transfiguring (RGB), 2013. Mark Leckey Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Contributing to that energy this year is a new sector at Art021, Detour, where Cesar Garcia, who is the director of The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, hand-picked five galleries, in addition to his own, that each paid a discounted booth price. A slowing Chinese economy and volatile capital markets in the country have also, perhaps counterintuitively, buoyed the art trade, said Sophia Wang, assistant to the director at Beijing’s Pifo Gallery who came to the gallery this year from Christie’s.

“People here are seeing art more as an investment,” she said, adding that this tendency increases in periods of volatility such as the one caused by the current trade war between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Wang said that even with the Office of the United States Trade Representative having announced that Chinese-made art and antiquities would not be included on the list of goods included in the tariffs, the conflict still poses issues.

“It’s building a wall, a barrier,” Wang said of the back-and-forth taxation between the two countries. “It’s not just about the taxes, it affects so many things.”

Pifo focused on works by European and Asian artists at Art021. And on opening day, they sold an untitled Enrico Bach painting for CNY140,000 (roughly $20,000), and two works by the Chinese artist Ni Jun, one for CNY70,000 (roughly $10,000) and another for CNY80,000 (roughly $11,500).

LOVE (Red, Violet), 1966-1999. Robert Indiana Kasmin

Trade war or not, Art021 continues to serve as a prime opportunity for American galleries to test the market waters in mainland China without the significant investment and business challenges that hiring staff or opening a physical space here can generate. Gavin Brown’s Enterprise did the fair for the first time this year and sold work by Vittorio Brodmann and Mark Leckey. It was also Kasmin’s first time at Art021. The New York gallery sold Mark Ryden’s cheeky painting Salvator Mundi (2018), a play on the Leonardo da Vinci painting that sold for $450 million at Christie’s a year ago, but with a fluffy dog holding the gazing ball instead of Jesus Christ.

Kasmin had a bit of fun with the presentation, as two security guards stood by the painting protecting the canvas as if it were truly the Leonardo and not a cute puppy-fied homage. And while it didn’t command a price tag nearing half a billion, it did sell for a very respectable $350,000.

“We’re only three hours into the fair and the activity has been overwhelming,” said director Eric Gleason. As if on cue, a woman approached him, pointed and yelled “Sit down!”—she wanted to get an unobstructed picture of the six-foot-tall Robert Indiana “LOVE” sculpture that served as the booth’s centerpiece.

“We’re thrilled to be here,” Gleason said. His only regret about Art021: “I wished we had came earlier.”

from Artsy News

[tsgmobilebayalabama]

JULY Scouted Calendar

We are right in the middle of the exciting days of Summer and with July comes a calendar packed with goings-ons. So whether you’re looking to take advantage of Summer sales, enjoy a tequila cocktail tasting or take in some local music, we’ve got events around the Bay that will keep you entertained all month long.

SALES 

Something New   Closing Sale

 All Inventory 50% Off 

East Bay Clothiers   Summer Sale

30-40% off men’s and women’s spring and summer clothes. 

mb greene bags  Red White & Blue Sale - through July 15th 

25% off all red white & blue

Haley Dermatology  July Specials 

FREE SkinMedica chemical peel with purchase of 4 CoolSculpting cycles. 

Purchase 6 cycles and receive the peel and a travel bag with products 

Buy 2 Revision Treatment products receive a free Vitamin C Lotion

Living Well   Summer Sale 

Select merchandise 50% Off

Gigi & Jay’s  Summer Sale

Buy 1 get 1 free all swim & cover ups  

50% off flip flops & beach bags 

30% off select merchandise 

Sadie’s   Summer Sale

30-80% off select merchandise 

Buy 2 get 1 free on sale items

Hemline   4th of July Sale 

Buy 3 get the 4th free 

20% off red white and blue items

Chapel Farm Collection   Mid Summer Sale 

25% off select items in the store 

25% off online use code America 

EVENTS

Local Color Walking Tour 

July 1st | 3:30pm | Secret History Tours

Starting at 3:30pm, there will be a historic architecture tour, a cemetery tour, and a ghost tour all in one! This fun walking tour that gets you off the beaten path and into local culture. As an added bonus, guests can purchase and enjoy a local craft beer along the way! The tour starts at Serda's Brewery and includes the Church Street Graveyard, the Boyington Oak, Big Zion AME Church, the historic Crystal Ice Company, Washington Fire Hall 5, and Creole Fire Hall 1, where the Excelsior Band began. Don't miss this tour of the west end of downtown, and be sure to try one of our local restaurants while you're in the neighborhood. $15 adults, $10 ages 12 and under. Book your tour online at secrethistorytours.com.  Learn More

Three Centuries Walking Tour

June 1st 1:30pm | July 2nd 9:30pm | Secret History Tours

Three Centuries Walking tour starting at 1:30pm on July 1st and ending at 9:30pm on July 2nd. This tour uses historic photos and locations to tell the 315-year-old story of Mobile, Alabama. See what Native Americans really looked like 300 years ago, a map of downtown when Mobile was a French city, or a photo from Armistice Day 1918 taken at the spot where you are standing!  This tour follows the beautiful streets of Alabama's oldest city, and includes street views and explanations of Royal Street, Ft. Conde, Bienville Square, and much more. Our experienced guide will share the "Secret History" of our tattooed French founder, the distant location where our city was actually founded, and an historic fire hall hiding downtown in plain sight! $15 adults, $10 ages 12 and under.  Learn More

Mommy + Me Yoga Class

July 3rd | 11am | Soul Shine Yoga

This class will focus on providing physical, mental and emotional support for new mothers. They will focus on correcting imbalances created during pregnancy, and rebuilding strength in the body. Specific movements and songs will be integrated throughout class to entertain baby as well as support their physical and emotional development. This class is appropriate for mothers and their non-crawling babies. Learn More

City of Fairhope Fourth of July Concert & Fireworks

July 4th | 7pm | Henry George Park and the Fairhope Municipal Pier  

The Baldwin Pops Band Independence Day Concert will begin at 7pm in Henry George Park with special guests Alabama 151st Army Band playing alongside. A variety of patriotic music will be played before and during the fireworks display. The Fairhope fireworks display will begin at approximately 9pm. The north end of Fairhope Municipal Park will be open throughout the day and will remain open until no parking is available. The south end of the beach front park and Knoll Park will be available to spectators. Handicap parking will be available near the fountain but will be limited. Those who wish to park in the handicap area should plan to arrive early and stay until the fireworks are over. As a reminder, this is an alcohol free event and no personal fireworks are permitted.  Learn More

4th of July at Gulf Quest 

July 4th | 2pm-8pm | GulfQuest/National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico

Enjoy multiple activities outside on their Riverfront Promenade overlooking the Mobile River to keep the entire family entertained, including an inflatable Tropical Water Slide for children. Attendees will enjoy unlimited access to this massive water slide, so be sure to bring your towel and sunscreen. Other fun activities for the family to enjoy include corn hole and a sidewalk chalk competition. In addition to the outdoor festivities, GulfQuest National Maritime Museum exhibits will be open. Guests can enjoy 90 interactive exhibits, simulators, theaters and displays. Exhibit galleries are housed on a life-sized replica of a container ship and are located throughout eight decks in the 90,000 sq. ft. museum. Treasures, the museum's store, will be open and provides a wide variety of specialty items for any personal or gift-giving needs. Guests should come hungry. The Galley, GulfQuest's in-house restaurant, will offer hamburgers and hot dogs available for purchase. Outside on the Riverfront Promenade. Beer and wine will also be available for purchase.The City of Mobile will culminate the evening at 9pm with a spectacular fireworks display backed by the Mobile Pops overlooking the Mobile River. Learn More 

Fireworks on the Fantail

July 4th | 7:30pm-10:30pm | USS ALABAMA Battleship Memorial Park 

Come celebrate July 4th aboard the WWII battleship USS ALABAMA. This fundraiser offers you an after-hours tour, entertainment by the 1940s jazz band Swing, barbecue dinner, drinks, an ice cream buffet and a great view of Mobile's fireworks show. Children receive a complementary sailor hat and the book "Hooray for the Mighty A." Children's activities included. VIP parking. Learn More 

Gators After Dark 

July 5th | 9pm-10pm | WildNative Tours - Delta Safaris 

Are you afraid of the dark? Search the Delta at night for the ever present American Alligator. This is a highly popular late night Gator Spotting tour! Gator eyes reflect a distinct red color when you shine a light on them, and your likely to see A LOT of red on this adventure! Bring your own flashlight and help us find “Gators After Dark!”Commentary includes informative and fun facts on the American Alligator – enjoy this one hour fun family ride on our Coast Guard Inspected tour vessel Osprey – a perfect way to end a great family evening. Advanced Reservation Required! Every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday Learn More

First Friday Art Walk

July 6th | 6pm-9pm | Downtown Fairhope 

Visit our local merchants in Downtown Fairhope as they open late and highlight the art community. Art Walk happens every first Friday of each month. Learn More

Market in the Park

July 7th {every Saturday} | 7:30am-12pm | Cathedral Square

Featuring locally grown produce, homemade bread, jams, preserves, honey, crafts by local artisans, music, and more in downtown Mobile!

Stephen and Symore Live 

July 7th | 6:30pm-10:30pm | Felix’s Fish Camp 

Stephen Sylvester is a singer-songwriter from Fairhope, Alabama, with a powerful voice and a talent for writing songs that are both deeply moving and relevant. His trademark instrument is a green composite acoustic guitar, and he is known for having rock-solid rhythm and you've-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it stage presence. What do you get when you mix a little bit of heartache, a touch of Jameson and a healthy dose of soul? Symone French, born and raised in Mobile, Alabama. Symone's earliest memories are of her parent's eclectic tastes in music. Her father, a collector of vinyl records, encouraged her musical exploration early on by introducing her to acts such as Steely Dan, Hall & Oats and Bonnie Raitt. Her mother, a product of the 70s, helped develop French's love of soul by adding Teena Marie, Donna Summer and Prince to the mix. Those influences cultivated the sound that audiences across the Gulf Coast have come to identify with French's diverse stage show. 

The State of the South: Mobile 

July 7th | 6pm |  Mobile Museum of Art 

MMofA in partnership with Mobile United welcomes Alabama Shakespeare Festival for an exciting workshop focusing on how Southern storytelling is changing. This free, one-hour discussion is hosted in a safe, inclusive space. People from all walks of life and of all shapes, sizes, colors, and capabilities are welcome. While the conversation thrives on participation, all activities and discussions are optional. Wear comfortable attire and feel free to bring a notebook and/or non-alcoholic beverages. Arrive early (5:45pm) and enjoy a pre-talk reception. Wine will be available. Learn More

Kid’s Summer Art Camp

(Weekly) | 8:30am-3:30pm | Alabama Contemporary Art Center

Explore the world of contemporary art! Starting in June and extending through July, ACAC offers five-day long art camps that produce inspiration from works of our ‘Back to Havana’ exhibition and real-world issues to ignite creativity. Camps range from graffiti, stop-motion animation, and printmaking to collaboration, collage, fashion and plenty more to choose from. Camps are tailored toward ages 5-17 and offered in morning and afternoon sessions, taught by enthusiastic instructors. An experience that will bring out each camper’s authentic gift and artistry! Learn More

Jubilee Festival Artwork Unveiling 

July 12th | 5:30pm-7pm |  Le bouchon Wine and Tapas Bar

Don't miss the exciting artwork unveiling for the 30th Annual Jubilee Festival of Arts. The Eastern Shore Chamber of Commerce is excited to finally share the wonderful piece that will represent this year's festival. Prints will be available for purchase and the artist will be on hand to personalize your print. Learn More.

LODA Artwalk

July 13th | 6pm-9pm | Downtown Mobile

LoDa ArtWalk takes place every second Friday of the month from 6pm-9pm in the Lower Dauphin (LoDa) Arts District. On this evening local art galleries, institutions, studios and unique shops open their doors for the public to come inside to view beautiful artwork, sample delicious foods, and hear the music of Mobile. This free family-friendly event is a staple of Mobile’s arts and culture. Learn More

MOB Music Fest

July 13th-15th | Cathedral Square 

Mob music FestMOB Music Fest will feature 3 days of music from all genres, poetry, dancers, spoken word and more! This event is free to the public and VIP packages are available for purchase. Learn More

Murder Mystery Dinner

July 13th | 6pm | Ruth’s Chris 

Are you looking for something fun, different and exciting to do on an evening out? Ruth's Chris is hosting a Murder Mystery Dinner on July 13, cocktails at 6 and show at 7pm. It's only $75 per person including dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House. Call today for reservations and details 251.476.0516. Learn More

CAMP GIRL

July 18th | 9am-4pm | Art House

Camp Girl is a day of empowering fun for fifth through seventh grade girls looking to develop essential skills. Science experiments, crafting, team building exercises and other exciting activities will help the girls learn through involvement and creativity. Learn More 

Garden Trends 2018 Creating Outdoor Living Spaces

July 18th | 10:30am-11:30am | Bellingrath Gardens and Home  

Exterior Designer Catherine Arensberg of “simple.honest.design.” is passionate about designing luxurious spaces on real life budgets. She will show you how to create outdoor living spaces that are natural extensions of your home’s interior design and reflect how you and your family live. The event is part of the Wonderful Wednesdays series at Bellingrath in June and July.  Learn More 

Art Talk: The Legacy of William Blake

July 19th | 6pm | Mobile Museum of Art 

MMofA Director Deborah Velders will speak on the legacy and enduring inspiration of English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake. Blake believed his writings were a means to influence change in the social order and the minds of men. Blake lived and worked in London at a time of great social and political change, change that profoundly influenced his writing. Learn More

 Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo 

July 20th-22nd   |  Dauphin Island Marina 

The Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, a Project of the Mobile Jaycees, is the largest fishing tournament in the world. Founded in 1929, the fishing rodeo now attracts over 3,000 anglers and 75,000 spectators. It is located on Dauphin Island, Ala. (N30 15'31, 90" W88 06'47.78).The ADSFR is a 3-day Captain's Choice tournament and a Southern Kingfish Association (SKA) sanctioned event. The total awards package is valued up to one million dollars in cash and prizes and anchored by a boat, motor, and trailer packages. The 3-day event features 30 categories with prizes awarded for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in all categories. One Master Angler is also awarded along with cash prizes for King Mackerel, Speckled Trout and Big Game Jackpots. Learn More 

Journey to Mars Live

July 21st | 6pm | Bluegill 

It's no mystery that a good band can make your event! Journey 2 Mars is one of the most exciting bands to come out of the Gulf Coast area in a long time! The band is comprised of some of the best musicians around. Enjoy fresh seafood, great views and live music at the Bluegill Restaurant  

8th Annual Dauphin Street Vault

July 21st | 10am-10pm | Lower Dauphin Street 

Dauphin Street Vault promotes health and wellness through athletics and celebrates the awesomeness of pole vaulting and track and field by throwing an amazing block party in its honor. Whether you're an athlete or not, we hope to see you there! Pole vaulting competitors of all ages and skill levels, including Olympians, compete in this invitational that takes place right on Dauphin Street in downtown Mobile!  Presented by the Mobile Sports Authority. Learn More 

Free Summer Sun Yoga - Buti Edition 

July 21st | 10am | 265 Young St 

Join Soul Shine Yoga for a free Buti Yoga class with Amber. They are still doing renovations at their new space on Young Street, but if you'll ignore the mess they will treat you to a sneak peek of their new sister space! 265 Young Street is just off Morphy Avenue near the tennis courts. Bring your own mat. Sign Up

Intro to Tequila, Beverage Academy

July 20th | 5:30pm | Grand Hotel Marriott Resort Spa & Golf Club

A tequila tasting class, participants will sample different kinds of tequila and learn about Mexico's magic elixir. Learn More 

Germanic Influence, Culinary Academy

July 21st | 10am | Grand Hotel 

A culinary class featuring German cuisine. Participants will learn about there history of German food and the influence it has had across the globe. Learn More

Cheese 101 Educational Experience

July 24th | 6pm | The Cheese Cottage 

Join the experts at The Cheese Cottage for a Cheese 101 class.  This 2 hour event will be an educational experience where each participant will learn the history, uses, types and pairings for cheese. A sampling of each cheese type and a wine selected to specifically pair will be provided. Tickets must be purchased in advanced for $20/person. Limited seating. Based on demand, there may be another class provided on different dates. Learn More

Bay Bites Food Truck Festival

July 21st | 5pm-9pm | Cooper Riverside Park 

Hosted by Mobile Baykeeper's Young Advisory Council (YAC) Leadership Committee, Bay Bites is an annual food truck festival benefitting our work for clean water, clean air, and healthy communities. Enjoy delicious food from the area's best local food trucks, craft beer from SweetWater Brewing Company, live music by Roadside Glorious, lawn games, and a variety of kids entertainment options to come on the beautiful riverfront of downtown Mobile.  Learn More 

Jason Aldean 

July 26th | 7:30pm | The Wharf 

Jason Aldean live at the Wharf in Orange Beach Alabama. Learn More

Dave Matthews Band 

July 29th | 8pm | The Wharf

Dave Matthews live at the Wharf in Orange Beach Alabama. Learn More

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Making Art from a City’s Isolation

Detail of Ron Tran’s “Ashes Under the Hill/Let Our Hands Grow to Hold What We Love” (2017) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

WINNIPEG, Manitoba — On a Thursday night in August, a crowd of people inside an empty gallery in Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art peered through the windows at a red, eight-foot Om symbol that was being secured to a flatbed truck and readied to traverse the city. Titled “Nobody pray for me, the road to hell is paved with good intentions (Mapping Identity: The Challenges of Immigrant Culture),” by Winnipeg-based artist Divya Mehra, the Om sign is one of several sculptures and performances (all from 2017) located around Winnipeg for Plug In’s summer exhibition, Stages: Drawing the Curtain; it touches on many of the themes that run through the show: absurdity; confrontation; identity politics; and the denaturalization of public space.

Stages, a public art project featuring nine artists from Canada, Europe and Central America, is the concept of its curator Jenifer Papararo, who is also Executive Director of Plug In. Formerly a curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Papararo has spent the past three years at Plug In cultivating a rigorous exhibition program and bringing both the museum and the city out from under the shadow of Winnipeg’s most famous art-exports, filmmaker Guy Maddin and the ’90s art collective, the Royal Art Lodge. With Stages she re-imagines the city as “a performative site of fluctuating and active meaning” and “a character in each of the artworks.”

Once a leading railway hub for North American trade — called the “Chicago of the North” because of its parallel architecture and development at the turn of the 20th century — Winnipeg began an economic decline with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The economic downturn continued throughout the 20th century, with the advent of suburban indoor malls drawing business away from the downtown area. The combination of geographic isolation and economic decline resulted in a landscape of abandoned and renegade spaces, many of which host the works in Stages.

Detail of Toril Johannessen’s “The Invention and Conclusion of the Eye” (2017) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

One of them is the Hudson’s Bay Company building, a former luxury department store on Winnipeg’s downtown thoroughfare Portage Avenue, now partially vacant and serving as the site for two audio pieces, The Invention and Conclusion of the Eye by Norwegian artist Toril Johannessen and Potato Gardens Band by Vancouver-based Krista Belle Stewart.

Johannessen’s 40-minute audio drama (also broadcast on local radio each Sunday of the show’s duration) narrates the eye’s evolution in nature through an extended meditation by a software designer called Mx. The paradox of the piece — an audio recording about sight — draws attention to the act of perception and the immediate environment: scientific eye diagrams folded into origami fortune tellers are piled inconspicuously on a table; light changes from warm to cool almost imperceptibly throughout the play; daisies mentioned in passing are arranged in a vase; signs for prosthetic limbs hang nearby. Although minor bits of scenery were added or arranged by the artist, the vast space on the building’s fourth floor remained largely untouched, with Kafka-esque details such as a lone desk and chair in a back room emerging as the absurd in reality.

Krista Belle Stewart’s installation, Potato Gardens Band, which features a digitized wax-cylinder recording of music by her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko, recorded by anthropologist James Alexander Teit, might have been better served in a gallery or museum setting. A member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, Stewart investigates narrative and interpretation, particularly in relation to indigenous histories. Her installation of spotlights and smoke near a row of mirrored columns creates a sense of being transported in time, which suits the recording’s ghostly quality, but the dimly lit basement feels too haunted on its own. Although the manipulated visual effects, in combination with the gloom of the basement, detract from an otherwise entrancing recording, the subterranean space evokes the economic and social marginalization of — and the long history of brutality and violence against — the city’s large indigenous population.

Issues of identity, otherness and discrimination are equally complicated in Mehra’s “Nobody pray for me” and in works by Toronto-based artist Abbas Akhavan.

Mehra – the only Winnipeg native in Stages who lives in the city and a first-generation Indian Canadian — uses humor less to diffuse conflict than to ambush the viewer. In a 2013 Hyperallergic interview, she explains, “I’m hoping [viewers] see the work and think: ‘Hahaha that’s so funny!’ and then something like the thought ‘OMFG WHAT AM I LAUGHING AT’ happens.”

Divya Mehra, “Nobody pray for me, the road to hell is paved with good intentions (Mapping Identity: The Challenges of Immigrant Culture)” (2017) (photo by Divya Mehra)

With “Nobody pray for me,” the Om symbol (which accompanies objects of worship in Hinduism, but is not a primary object, like the Christian cross) morphs into a seductive glowing, cherry-red logo that evokes the symbol’s appropriation by an affluent (and largely white) wellness culture in North America and its deviation from  religious to  “lifestyle” associations; as it is driven around the city on the flatbed truck, it seems as if it’s on an endless search for a destination somewhere between nightclub and yoga studio. The route, which was the one that Mehra took as a child on her way to Catholic school, travels north to a largely South Asian community and south to her childhood home in a predominantly white suburb, mapping a topography of otherness — her own as an artist, woman, and person of color, and that of the city’s non-white population.

For Variations on a Monument, Abbas Akhavan organized a series of performances showcasing Winnipeg’s drag scene. Set on a fountain plinth at a public park overlooking the Assiniboine River, the performances merge queer and drag subcultures with an Iranian tradition of transforming fountains into makeshift stages. The intersection of “public” and “private” suggested by the relocation of club acts to an open park is echoed in the scheduling of the performances at sunset. The plinth, on which a monument originally stood, anoints the drag queen as a living monument to marginalization, the return of normative society’s repressed.

Abbas Akhavan, “Variations on a Monument” (2017) (photo by Suzie Smith)

With “Ashes Under the Hill/Let Our Hands Grow to Hold What We Love,” Vancouver-based artist Ron Tran addresses the return of a different kind of repression. Tran, whose practice addresses issues of consumerism and waste, installed collaged cutouts of Canadian products from the first half of the 20th century at The Forks, a riverside park.  The piece was inspired by Westview Park, a public space in Winnipeg’s suburbs converted from a landfill in 1960 and still unofficially called “Garbage Hill.” The artist chose The Forks, a bustling tourist destination, based on its high volume of consumption and waste. While the level of activity obstructed the cutouts at times, which emerge from manicured bushes, the area — lined with restaurants, shops, and a large marketplace — contributes to Tran’s commentary; it bespeaks the irony of “resolving” a landfill problem, as the case with “Garbage Hill,” with businesses that beget more waste.

Erica Eyres, “Head” (2017) (photo by Divya Mehra)

Erica Eyres, whose drawings, videos, and sculptures traffic in absurdity, hyperbolizes the strange and singular with “Head,” a giant, clown-like inflatable head affixed to the roof of a shuttered Mini Mart slated for demolition. An amateurish mural depicting bike riders and a woman in funereal dress adorns the side of the building. Eyres, a Winnipeg native based in Glasgow, Scotland, relates “Head” to the inflatable figures used to advertise store openings, but, she told me, her grinning, greenish-gray “decapitated head [instead] commemorates the closure of a business and the death of a building.” Too awkward to be frightening, the piece invokes an uncanny sense of unease, all the weirder in the way it invades the tranquility of a restaurant patio next door.

For his part, Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero produces a dizzying redefinition of space by painting the floor of a gray underground tunnel connecting municipal buildings in dazzling yellows, blues, and greens layered with abstract, organic shapes. Herrero’s “Landscape” at once enlivens the tunnel with colors characteristic of Central and South American art and architecture (underscoring, by extension, the differences between Central and South American culture and that of North America) and stimulates diverse reactions among visitors (a corridor in bright yellow,was one such trigger — it might invigorate some visitors, but it felt disorienting and claustrophobic to me).

Federico Herrero, “Landscape” (2017) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Among the works that I caught during my tour of Stages, Kara Hamilton’s “Curtain Wall” and Pablo Bronstein’s Peony Unfurling at Various Speeds in Shopping Mall engage the most directly with the notion of the stage.

“Curtain Wall” is a large rectangular “wall” carved from local Tyndall limestone, located in a park next to a walking trail alongside the Assiniboine River. Hamilton, in her artist’s statement for Stages, cites Jennifer Krasinski’s one-line play Curtain from Prop Tragedies (2010) as a partial inspiration for the piece: “When in doubt, she wrote, blame the window for the view.” The settling evokes an abandoned amphitheater; two large, close-set, eye-shaped holes or “windows” in the wall create a dynamic in which passers-by look both at and through the piece, while the wall simultaneously blocks a full view of the river and with its eyeholes, looks back at the viewer.

Kara Hamilton, “Curtain Wall” (2017) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

A kind of counterpart to The Invention and Conclusion of the Eye, Toril Johannessen’s audio drama of optics, the streamlined simplicity of the piece belies its complex dialogue with seeing, being seen, and what is unseen — Tyndall stone constitutes most of Winnipeg’s municipal buildings — and reifying the role of the wall as the very fabric of separation and, increasingly, discrimination.

Peony Unfurling at Various Speeds in Shopping Mall, a dance performance conceived by Pablo Bronstein and co-choreographed by the artist and dancer/choreographer Rosalie Wahlfrid, took place at the Fort Garry Place Mall. Constructed in the 1980s, at the height of postmodern pastiche architecture, it’s the kind of space that feels deserted even when it is occupied. The mixing and faking of architectural and decorative styles — chandeliers, trompe l’oeil marble columns, a gilded mezzanine, and faux Rococo and Baroque paintings — reflects the pastiche in Bronstein’s drawings and paintings of real and imagined architecture.

The performance, a synthesis of ballet and modern dance, featuring Wahlfrid and seven local dancers, might have been campy in the hands of another artist, but Bronstein and Wahlfrid’s sincerity was evident in the technique and grace of the work, complementing the idiosyncratic sincerity of the building’s design.

Pablo Bronstein (co-choreographed by Rosalie Wahlfrid), “Peony Unfurling at Various Speeds in Shopping Mall” (2017) (photo by Kristina Banera)

Papararo plans to revive Stages as a biennial event in Winnipeg. Future iterations, she stated, might adhere less to the “stage” premise and include two-dimensional works; however, the principle of moving artwork out of the museum and into the city, and encouraging both interactions and interventions, will remain central.

Some of the works achieve this kind of active engagement — connecting with or confronting the public — more successfully than others. What makes the whole of Stages gutsier, and more fulfilling, than most public art projects is the willingness of its creators to expose Winnipeg’s unconventional and, at times, undesirable aspects and to allow public art to act as a kind of magnifying glass, finding intrigue where we might otherwise see a curiosity or worse. Undoubtedly the city’s isolation plays a part — it’s hard to imagine such freedom in securing public sites from a city vying to revamp itself for tourists — and Winnipeg will soon go back indoors for winter. But it’s a fascinating notion and one that beckons fruitful exploration of this city in the future.

Stages: Drawing the Curtain continues at various locations around Winnipeg through September 4.

Travel to Winnipeg and hotel accommodations were provided by Travel Winnipeg in connection to the exhibition.

The post Making Art from a City’s Isolation appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[barredux]

Bar Redux Presents Dystopian Utopia: Art & Music of Aurelea River and Kevin Comarda   

MAY 18th, 8pm to 10pm Local Artists, Aurelea River & Kevin Comarda exhibit their collaboration, of music & art, with Dystopian Utopia at Bar Redux Opening Night, May 18th...The exhibit will close on June 14th Art: Aurelea River is a doll and fabric artist originally from California. She lives in the 7th Ward, where the wild chickens are gradually taking over. She creates cloth and sculpted dolls and modern-day shrines, influenced by folktales, creepy Victoriana and apocalyptic dread. "Dystopian fiction is often presented as gritty and 'real' because it's grim and stripped of whimsy, but that's no more real than a troubled world that still contains beauty and wonder. For this show, I wanted to reference a fantastical dystopia, where magic existed among the ruins. The figures I created can be seen as inhabitants of this place, or as objects of worship to the people who live there. They're humanoid, but not necessarily human; alluring but with a darkness at their core." Kevin Comarda is a New Orleans collage artist/musician determined to embrace his own color-blindness in order to forge something unique that will transcend genre. These layered representations of life, love, and death are hoping to invite you in long enough to feel the subtlety, intimacy and rhythm contained within each vibrant colorscape. “Like any creative facet I might dabble in, I like my expressions to yield a personal story with a little majesty and a lot of intimacy. It’s incredibly humbling to think someone might print, listen to, look at, read, consume, love, hate, or even learn from any of my human interpretations of the creative force. I don’t take it lightly.” Music: As a singer/songwriter, Aurelea River creates haunting, densely-chorded melodies on her hybrid electric violin-viola, Lola. Her touchstones are Appalachian folk, traditional murder ballads, and tales of monsters and ghosts. Like her visual art, her songs often center around a morally ambiguous, often supernatural female figure, who can be tender or vengeful. She uses a variety of distortion pedals and effects to warp the violin's sound, but always keeps a low, lush drone. Kevin Comarda is also a musician, playing guitar, moog synth, loops, dissonance. "Through pattern and sound manipulation, I am able to directly reflect some of the same overarching ideas found in the visual collages—creating a moody backdrop with room to layer in the details that tell the story. " Join us for this Art & Music Happening, with Dystopian Utopia: Art & Music of Aurelea River and Kevin Comarda, on May 18th.

[sentrava]

What’s On in Copenhagen: November 2018

There’s no getting around it now: Copenhagen is squarely in winter mode. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying the city! There’s plenty to do this month, including excellent exhibitions, pop-up events, restaurant openings, concerts, and so much more. Find something that’ll bring a little sunshine to your life on even the darkest of winter days.

Here are the best events happening in Copenhagen during November:

Friday 26th October – Sunday 4th November

MIX Copenhagen LGBT Film Festival

MIX Copenhagen returns this year to celebrate film that showcases the lives of those in the LGBTQI+ community. Their aim is to bend the gender binary. All events take place at Cinematket and Empire Bio.

    Thursday 1st November

Slow: A Night on Dreams at Glyptoteket

Join Glyptoteket museum as they embark on a night all about dreams, in honor of their current exhibition featuring French painter Odilon Redon, “Into the Dream.” There will be food, drinks, talks, and activities from 5 – 10 pm.

    Memento Mori by Boris Peianov at BauBau Shop

Artist and architect Boris Peianov will be exhibiting in one of Copenhagen’s coolest second hand shops, BauBau in Nørrebro, throughout November. Join for the opening evening of the exhibition, from 4 – 9 pm. Peianov works in collage to communicate a variety of emotions in each piece.

    The Eye Launch at FRAMA

The Eye, the new book by Kinfolk Editor-in-Chief Nathan Williams profiling the world’s top creative directors, is launching. Come by the FRAMA store from 5 – 7 to celebrate, have some drinks, and purchase a signed copy.

    Friday 2nd – Sunday 4th November

Cabonara Festival

After much teasing throughout the year, Cabonara Festival is finally upon us. Come to Torvehallerne over these three days, where there will be a Cabonara pavilion (yes, you read that right) outside the glass halls. You’ll be able to taste various cabonaras, take a cooking class, or just breathe in the carb-y atmosphere. Find more info here.

    Friday 2nd November

J-Dag is Here!

Hurray, it’s J-Dag! On the first Friday of November, Tuborg’s special Christmas brew is finally available. Tuborg delivers the crates to bars across the country while singing their traditional song and handing out free beers to those they meet along the way. The seasonal pilsner is only available for six weeks, so make sure you go get one while you can.

    Coffee Collective Roastery Tour and Tasting

The first Friday of every month, Coffee Collective hosts a tour and tasting (called a cupping) of their impressive roastery in Frederiksberg. Tickets are 150 DKK and include a bag of coffee beans to take home. No reservations needed, just show up and get ready for some delicious coffee.

    Restaurant NOI Opens

The beautiful Nobis Hotel in Copenhagen will be opening their much-anticipated NOI Restaurant. The menu includes influences from all over Europe, with a New Nordic core and beautiful Scandinavian interior. Get your own expertly mixed drink at The Marble Bar. Whether you’re staying at the hotel or not, put the restaurant and bar on your list of places to try in the city.

    Sunday 4th November

Vogue Session at Dansekapellet

Interesting in learning how to vogue from some of the best around? This class offers you the chance to learn, and it’s only 50 DKK! The class runs from 5 – 7 pm, and there’s a vogue session from 7 – 8 pm that-s free for all. Can’t make it this time around? This event is held every Sunday at the same time throughout the month.

    Courtney Barnett at Store Vega

If you’re not listening to Australian rocker Courtney Barnett, what are you even doing? Her hard hitting songs, paired with witty lyrics, are the perfect outlet for all that air guitar you’ve been longing to work on. She’s an excellent live performer, so get your tickets before they’re gone.

    Wednesday 7th – Thursday 8th November

Long Table Gatherings at FRAMA

Craving human connection, calming surroundings, and delicious food? Long Table Gatherings is for you! Enjoy a wonderful, seasonal dinner on either scheduled night, cooked by Danish chef Mikkel Karstad. The meal takes place at FRAMA store, so it’s guaranteed to be a night of joy and beauty. This will be hosted again on the 21st and 22nd of November. Tickets are 650 DKK.

    Thursday 8th – Sunday 11th November

Copenhagen Short Film Festival

See short films of all genres represented at this exciting festival. Films will be held at Cinemateket, Gloria Biograf and Husets Biograf, so check their program for details. For filmmakers and film-lovers, this is not-to-be-missed!

    Thursday 8th November

Gudrun & Gundrun x Holly Golightly Pop-Up Reception

Ultra-sustainable Faroese knitwear brand Gudrun & Gudrun are having a pop-up at one of Copenhagen’s coolest boutiques, Holly Golightly. Their the opening, they’ll have a talk by Global Fashion Agenda CEO Eva Kruse, as well as drinks and snacks. Entrance is free and it promises to be an enlightening evening! The pop-up runs through the end of the year.

    Sorte Firkant Music Festival

Enjoy this full day music festival of mostly local, alternative music at Sorte Firkant in Nørrebro. Acts include Snail Mail, Orcas, and The Entrepreneurs.

    Friday 9th November

Breaking Bread at Apollo Bar

Copenhagen-based Israeli food photographer and self-taught cook Lior Zilberstein is hosting a one night dinner event at Apollo Bar from 7:30 – 11 pm. Come taste the flavors of Tel Aviv with this multi-course food and drink menu. Tickets are 590 DKK and can be purchased here. It promises to be a very special night!

    Saturday 10th – Sunday 11th November

Finderskeepers Market x YUME

Finderskepers market is back, this time in collaboration with design workshop YUME. Head to Lokomotiværkstedt to find artisan products and handmade goods, from furniture to interior pieces to clothes. There’s something for everyone, and it’s wonderful to meet so many makers in one place. Entrance for one day is 50 DKK at the door (40 if you book in advance) or 70 DKK for both days (60 in advance).

    Saturday 10th November

Cheese Festival

Love cheese? So do we! Check out the Cheese Festival at Torvehallerne for all kinds of delicious cheese, from domestic to international, from mild to smelly as hell. Want to learn more? Read our article on the best Danish cheese.

    Meet Me in St. Louis at Cinemateket

Enjoy a few hours of pure escapism with the 1944 classic romantic musical comedy Meet Me in St. Louis. The film follows four sisters, including an absolutely delightful Judy Garland, just before the St. Louis World Fair of 1904.

    Sunday 11th November

Danish on a Sunday: Backstabbing for Beginners

Directed by Dane Per Fly, this film follows a young, idealistic UN official working with a seasoned diplomat, played by Ben Kingsley. When corruption is covered, this official is confronted with the consequences of his work.

    Serpentwithfeet at Lille Vega

Josiah Wise, known on stage as serpentwithfeet, is an American artist who combines soul, R & B, and gospel, all swirled together with an experimental edge. His music is exciting ang beautiful; he was a big hit this year at Haven Festival, and we can’t see what he brings to a more intimate stage.

    Tuesday 13th – Wednesday 14th November

Ferm LIVING Stock Sale

From 10 am – 8 pm on both days, at Nørrebrohallen, you’ll be able to buy stock and samples from Danish interior design company ferm LIVING for up to 70% off the retail price. T Their pieces are lovely and very high-quality, so if you’ve been needing plant holders, pillows, candle sticks, or just about any interior item, check out the sale! This is also a great place to pick up some holiday gifts.

    Friday 16th November

Tech & Tonic: You Got Five Senses

Ever feel like you spend your whole life in front of screens, disconnected from your body? Reconnect with your body through the face senses

    The Room at Husets Biograf

The cult classic film, known as thee “Citizen Kane of bad films,” will have two screenings on this date: at 7 and 9:30 pm. The shows sell out quickly, so book your tickets well in advance. If you haven’t seen this odd film yet, it’s truly an experience!

    Saturday 17th November

Christmas Market Opens at Tivoli

Twinkly lights, warm drinks, and lots of handmade goodies for sale. The Christmas Market at Tivoli is a lovely way to spend a few hours and get yourself hyped for the holiday season. It runs until 31st December, and is even open on Christmas Eve.

    Oh Land at Store Vega

Danish pop singer and songwriter Oh Land blends catchy tunes with clever lyrics and the results are a lot of fun, and often thought-provoking. She’s a local favorite, so these tickets will definitely go fast.

    Thursday 22nd November

Wine and Words at Design WERCK

Author Katja Berger will be presenting “Stories from the Dead,” and discussing young adults and horror literature. It promises to be a spooky night! There will be wine, of course. Entrance is 50 DKK.

    Friday 23rd – Sunday 25th November

Mad About Copenhagen Pop-up at Palermo Hollywood

Congrats to our pals Mad About Copenhagen on the launch of their book! For this weekend only, the Mad team will be selling their book, merchandise, and a few select foodie treats at the colorful universe of Palermo Hollywood in Nørrebro. Go say hi!

    Saturday 24th November

Rocky Horror Picture Show at Husets Biograf

When times are tough, we need The Rocky Horror Picture Show more than ever. This joyful, weird, sexy, kinky romp is just the ticket for a night of subversive escapism. The show will sell out, so book while you can.

    Sunday 25th November

Danish on a Sunday: The Way to Mandalay

This documentary follows the life of beloved Danish singer-songwriter John Mogensen. John was in the popular band Four Jacks, then went on to a successful solo career. He died suddenly in 1977. It will be presented in Danish with English subtitles.

    Tuesday 27th November

Humanist Career Day

Not sure how you’re going to use that humanities degree? Come to this career day where you’ll learn all about companies and brands that need people with your skills! There will be some presentations, as well as coffee and beer available.

    Wednesday 28th November

Deer Tick at Lille Vega

American alternative rockers Deer Tick come to Lille Vega. After a four year break, the band came back in 2017 and has gently refined their sound; this will be a special concert for fans and new listeners alike.

    Ongoing in November

    The Blues Woman Pop-Up

Chef Amanda Yee of The Blues Woman opens her pop-up brunch and dinner spot at Slagtehusgade 5C in Kødbyen. Enjoy two courses of American Southern food with items like Cornbread Hash for brunch and braised oxtail for dinner. There are vegetarian and vegan options available too. The pop-up is slated to run until the end of the year, so be sure to book your ticket while you can!

    Colour Form Texture at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

This outstanding exhibition explores the use of color as a primary focus in modern art. Artists include Yves Klein, Sigmar Polke and Marilyn Minter.

    Take My Breath Away – Danh Vo at Statens Museum for Kunst

Danish-raised, Vietnamese-born artist Danh Vo presents a selection of his works over the years and the resulting exhibition is absolutely electrifying. Vo explores themes of identity and cultural history. His works are thought-provoking and absorbing.

  Women of Surrealism at GL Strand

Did you know that there is a rich history of female surrealist artists in Denmark? Neither did we, but thankfully GL Strand is showcasing three of the most important among this cohort. See the works of Franciska Clausen, Rita Kernn-Larsen, and Elsa Thoresen side-by-side for the first time. These pieces are from the 1920s – 40s. The exhibit starts 15th September and runs until mid-January 2019.

  If you’re a business or organisation that would like us to add your event to next month’s calendar, please contact us at hello [@] scandinaviastandard [dot] com. Thank you!

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  What’s On in Copenhagen: November 2018 published first on https://medium.com/@OCEANDREAMCHARTERS