Page 20 - Rtists News Today

Dance Theatre of Harlem, under new Artistic Director Robert Garland, is definitely looking toward the future. The question, though, is how does it remain connected to twentieth-century icons such as George Balanchine while moving forward?

It takes but an instant with Whitney’s work to appreciate the value of gesture and line. The quality of active, energized mark-making runs through the show like a current of electricity. It seems to be there from the start, and in a way it was, but it isn’t truly charged until the artist has an epiphany in the printmaking workshop of Robert Blackburn. When he lays ink down on mylar, it retains his touch.

Over the course of one weekend in June, the Brooklyn International Music Festival is just one of the many initiatives created by the husband-and-wife team of Geoff and Lynette Wiley, who founded Jalopy in 2006 as a home for traditional music. Their focus had been on American folk music, but they have found common ground with roots music from around the world.

The Guest Critic is charged with suggesting a topic or theme that can be explored and debated for this special section of the Rail. On the occasion of the re-staging of Jenny Holzer’s 1989, architecturally encompassing piece at the Guggenheim, I have chosen the theme of site-specific Art. To my mind, Holzer’s Guggenheim project is one of the great site-specific works of my generation. It is also part of a larger history that has grown in some very interesting ways.

When a whale dies out in the ocean, its body often sinks to the ocean floor where it becomes what’s known as “whale fall”—a sudden, concentrated, long-term food source for ocean scavengers. Elizabeth O’Connor’s debut novel begins with a whale beaching on an isolated island off the coast of Wales.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

Rather than capturing actual therapy sessions, these photos show their spaces, unoccupied, in between appointments. Thurber’s photos offer compelling proof that furniture, objects, artworks, and architectural details together create tremendously different spaces and experiences of therapy, positing that the arrangement of things shapes social and psychological dynamics, whether healing or disparaging.

Walking through Vom Abend, Joe Bradley’s new show at David Zwirner in Chelsea, gave me the sense I was traipsing through heady conversations and the pulsation of music, following wisps of smoke with my nose like a cartoon character.

Delporte looks at herself from the panoramic distance of time and perspective, to witness her life through the eyes of her new self and identity. It opens with a desire to “overwrite” the man-made images of lesbians; the rest of the book shows her reckoning with the misogynistic culture that shaped her and her embodied experience.