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Lindsay Lohan Gets Special Visit From Oprah And Lupita Nyong'o At Her London Play

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It's one thing for a fellow celebrity or friend to show up to support your new play. It's an entirely different, amazing thing when that person happens to be Oprah Winfrey.

Lindsay Lohan got a special visit from Oprah, who helped the actress open up on OWN's docu-series "Lindsay" earlier this year. Both Lohan and Oprah posted a photo together on their Instagram accounts over the weekend. Lohan also tweeted a photo, calling Oprah her "fairy godmother" and thanking Luptia Nyong'o (not pictured), who also showed up to support her play.

Načítání

The definition of a blessing. Thank you @oprah and @Lupita_Nyongo for seeing the show tonight. Love you xx

Zobrazit na Instagramu



The actress made her stage debut in the West End production of David Mamet's Hollywood satire, "Speed-the-Plow" last month. Reviews of Lohan's performance have been favorable, with The Guardian calling her "rather good" performance as the temp secretary "possibly the best thing about [the] show." If you've got the support of Oprah and the Oscar-winning Nyong'o, and are getting good reviews, then you're doing pretty well in our opinion.

H/T E! News


'Puddle, Pothole, Portal' Brings Animation's Absurdity To The Art World

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You know that moment where Wile E. Coyote, in pursuit of Road Runner, runs right off a cliff and, for just a second before he falls, hovers there, levitating in thin air, warping the laws of time and space for the purpose of a slapstick cosmic joke?

If you grew up mesmerized by the strange and skewed animated visions that dwelled on your television screen, you know there are few spaces as serious about play as the cartoon universe. In this quasi-two-dimensional plane, children's entertainment happily contorts into complex exploration through an endless stream of double entendres and hidden meanings. In this lawless flatland, binaries do not hold, as hybrid creatures somewhere between human and animal romp without consequence in an absurdly fantastical virtual reality.

A new exhibition at New York's SculptureCenter, titled "Puddle, pothole, portal," examines the ways we make sense of space, and constantly unscramble our understandings of it with the arrival of the latest technologies. Curated by SculptureCenter's Ruba Katrib and artist Camille Henrot, the exhibition compares our bumbling attempts to comprehend an ever-changing world to those of a child, hungry with wonder.

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Jamian Juliano-Villani, Messy View, 2013. Acrylic on canvas. 48 x 50 inches (121.9 x 127 cm). Collection of Liz Goldman. Photo: Retrospective Gallery.


"The inspiration was this idea of dealing with new relationships between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in relation to new technologies," Katrib explained to The Huffington Post Arts. "Through that we came up with three points we wanted to address: Saul Steinberg, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and early 20th century cartoons -- different but connected instances in which multiple actors, avatars, space, and anachronistic objects would come together in one plane and interact."

The show features an international, multigenerational cast of artists, approximately half of whom have created new works for the show. Like their cartoon counterparts, the artworks feature unorthodox interactions between 2D and 3D, as well as a fair share of absurdity, hybridity and randomness. In her acrylic on canvas "Messy View," Jamian Juliano-Villani delivers a neon-tinged artist studio as bumbling and chaotic as war and sex combined -- both of which manage to make an appearance. Camille Blatrix's "The girl from the mailbox," created specifically for the exhibition, is a singing mailbox that waits for an important letter to arrive, and needs a key to be opened.

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Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1971 Pencil and colored pencil on paper, 13 ¼ x 22 ¾ in. Framed History Published: The New Yorker, February 24, 1973, in Steinberg’s portfolio “The City” Exhibited: “Steinberg at The New Yorker,” The Pace Gallery, New York, February 11-March 5, 2005 (no catalogue)


And then there's Steinberg's work, which comprises a hefty portion of the show's inspiration. "Saul Steinberg is interesting because he deals with this idea of animating space," Katrib explained. "A lot of his work touches on notions of animation even though there aren't really any cartoons. Steinberg was working as an illustrator but also an artist in his own right. So he's really working between these different boundaries, between high and low and art, navigating that in a very interesting way. And he is bringing together all these disparate characters and architectural references into the plane of the drawing. He makes sculptures that look like drawings and he makes drawings that create virtual realities. He is someone who thinks through the mission of drawing in 2D space as something that could create a virtual reality before the concept of virtual reality as we know it now."

Do you remember the feeling of total confusion and captivation that emerged from watching your first few episodes of "Looney Tunes"? This exhibition, we predict, will reawaken that childlike feeling -- the slightest possibility that maybe if you stepped off a cliff you too would dangle there for just a second before spiraling down. "Puddle, pothole, portal" runs until January 5, 2015 at SculptureCenter. Get a preview below.

This Amazing Contemporary Photography Project Is Devoted Entirely To Cats

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When Jon Feinstein, co-founder of Humble Arts Foundation, sat down to name his cat-themed photography show, a few titles sprung to mind. "I Got 99 Cat Photos and a Bitch Ain’t One"? "These Cat Photos Will Blow Your Mind and You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next…”? “Henri Kittier Bresson, and the Canon of the Photo Meows”?

Sadly, he went with a milder, less punny title -- "New Cats in Art Photography" -- but thankfully, the carefully curated selection of cat photos didn't suffer. With over 100 images, imagined by some of our favorite contemporary photographers, the digital exhibition is an homage to the internet age's obsession with all things feline. No pretension. Just cats.

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Jamie Campbell, "Saddest Kitten," 2012


Given the art world's penchant for sticking its nose up at low brow trends beloved by internet plebeians everywhere, Feinstein's project is pretty spectacular. "New Cats" shows off the work of artists like Jill Greenberg, Amy Stein and Madoka Hasegawa, and by giving the fur balls center frame for just a moment, Feinstein hopes to redirect admirers to the photographers' non-cat specific portraits. We admire the philosophy: you come for the scintillating cat photos, stay for the genuinely intriguing aesthetics.

"Why do we love cats? Why are they one of the most viral entities known to post Generation X’ers and Millennials? Why are feline musings simultaneously click-bait dreams and equally one of the largest causes of social media animosity and 'de-friending?'" the exhibition description muses. "This exhibition won’t answer any of those questions. Nor will it project any theories on the impact of cats in our rapidly shifting contemporary photographic landscape, but it will give you a glimpse into how cats make their way into the work some of today’s most challenging (and diverse) photographers."

Behold, a bunch of f*cking delightful cat photos. All the artists' names are linked, so you can head to their websites to see, you know, the non-cat stuff too.

The Glamorous History Of Pin-Up Like You've Never Seen It Before

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In "The Art of Pin-up," Dian Hanson describes a pin-up simply as a "provocative but never explicit image of an attractive woman created specifically for public display in a male environment."

But this imaginary female isn't just attractive. "Her sexiness is natural and uncontrived, and her exposure is always accidental: A fishhook catches her bikini top, an outboard motor shreds her skirt, a spunky puppy trips her up or the ever-present playful breeze lifts her hem, revealing stocking tops and garter straps, but never the whole enchilada."

Since they skyrocketed to popularity in the World War II era, pin-up images have occupied a variety of roles -- military inspiration, commercial photography, kitsch nostalgia and cult aesthetic. But the images of buxom hips and red lips rarely fall into the category of fine art. Which is rather unfortunate.

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By Enoch Bolles


Taschen's newest work of bound eye candy, titled "The Art of Pin-up," explores the work of ten major pin-up artists, delving into the histories that inspired their salacious artwork. The erotic compendium features images created from 1920 to 1970, largely sourced from original publications -- a rarity for pin-up literature. "I bought every pin-up book there was," Hanson explained to The Huffington Post, "and there have been many books done on pin-ups and all of them done from poor original sources, from calendars, magazine centerfolds and bad scans."

"Then there came a man named Charles Martignette; he had over 4,000 pieces. So much of the material of this kind had been destroyed by publishers and calendar makers because they owned it outright. Because of the frivolous nature of this material, that it was something meant to entertain men, they didn't see it as having any value. Even when the originals were large oil paintings they didn't see them as having any intrinsic value."

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By Gil Elvgren (c) Brown & Bigelow


The idealized images, sexual without being graphic, are a delicious throwback to simpler times, when a naked woman wasn't just a click away. The arguably feminist images also scream of women's liberation at its earliest stages. And while ogling attractive females isn't really anything new, examining the brushstrokes that made them is surprisingly recent.

"This one man was able to gather up most everything and package it away and put it in storage units down in Florida where no one could see it. When he died in 2008, this collection was dispersed and suddenly all this pin-up art came on the market and could be photographed, could be seen, could be spread around. It was a tragic thing for him -- he died young -- but it was a wonderful thing for pin-up art and all its appreciators and collectors. This book really documents that dispersion -- of being able to see the original materials for the first time and make a book that treated it like fine art."

Get a glimpse of the glam world of pin-ups below and head to Taschen's website to learn more.

Playful Photos Capture What It Actually Looks Like To Be A Nun Today

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When we imagine the life of a nun, we imagine scenes of reverent prayer, humble wisdom and constant piety. We don't really conjure images of, say, trying to mow the lawn when a dog obnoxiously gets in the way and messes with your groove.

But, then again, someone's got to mow the lawn.

dog

Today we're smiling over photographs of modern day nuns doing their not quite so sacred duties, thanks to Scotland-based photographer Craig Buchan. The series, titled "Commitment," features the sisters of the Poor Clare Monastery living lives of total devotion to the Bible, free of worldly possessions or desires. However, despite how different their lives may be from the average contemporary city-dweller, there are still moments of shared experience in the banal chores of everyday life.

"I had a chance meeting with sister Dominique and the idea, to start this project, grew from there," Buchan explained in a statement. "I've always been drawn to individuals who seem to break the mold or challenge our preconceived notions of identity, the sisters of Humbie very much do so. I was welcomed into their private world and photographing in this environment for me was inspiring, to have the chance to capture the little moments that reveal themselves."

Buchan's images capture the sweet juxtaposition of divine calling and banal duty, revealing that the space between people living very different lives is often not as vast as it seems. Whether taking a drive or vacuuming a rug, the sisters of Humbie capture the contemporary reality of a lifestyle that's often assumed to be from another time. "I hope to give an insight of what life is like as a nun in this day and age and to show a lighter side too," Buchan continued. Mission accomplished.

How To 'Gird Up Your Loins' In The Most Biblical Sense: An Artist's Interpretation

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"Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me."

The above passage from Job 38:3 is just one of several references in the Bible to "girding up one's loins" -- a directive that may have made sense to an ancient audience but which eludes us today.

The simple reason for misunderstanding is fashion. Men and women in the Biblical era typically wore tunics, which would have understandably gotten in the way whenever a man needed to run, fight or perform hard labor -- as men are wont to do, of course.

Men got around this issue by fastening a girdle to their waist and tucking the loose ends of the tunic into it, thus "girding up their loins." Artist Ted Slampyak created a step-by-step guide for The Art of Manliness that explains how to accomplish this Biblically-manly act.

Try Slampyak's guide out and let us know how it goes!

gird your loins

h/t The Art of Manliness

'Who We Become' Documentary Examines The Transgender Journey Beyond The Transition Process

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A new documentary aims to examine the challenges many transgender people face aside from the transitioning process after coming to terms with their identity.

Produced in partnership with the Bronx Documentary Center, "Who we become" focuses on Jace, a transgender man who flees his native Texas for New York where he begins the gender confirmation process. Meanwhile, Kim and Cris run a Bronx-based clinic that deals with transgender care, and try tirelessly to create a makeshift family of transgender people who have been disowned by their family members and friends.

Jan Hendrik Hinzel, a New York-based journalist who is co-producing the film with Time magazine's Adam Perez, told HuffPost Gay Voices that "Who we become" is a unique take on transgender issues in that it does not emphasize the gender confirmation process.

"Without the help from a community, transitioning can be an isolating experience," Hinzel said. "We wanted to show that community for many trans people means family, and family is essential to survival. We hope to illustrate through our characters that sometimes even to live truthfully to yourself is an act of courage."

Hinzel and Perez are hoping to raise money raise money for editing and post-production expenses via Indiegogo. Check out the campaign here.



Alison Bechdel Explains The Effect Art Spiegelman's Had On Graphic Novels

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Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Fun Home" earned praise from critics for the way it conveyed the moving narrative of growing up with a closeted father, as well as the author's own coming out process, in a format usually reserved for topical material. In a HuffPost Live interview on Friday, the cartoonist and "Bechdel test" founder credited fellow graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, who penned the Holocaust-centric "Maus," as having paved the way for her to take on more serious subject matters.

"Comics were once sort of [for] superhero action stories," she recalled. "That was pretty much all they did, and [then] people started pushing the boundaries. Underground cartoonists in the '70s started writing about more adult topics and themes."

She specifically credited "the more artistic cartoonists of the '80s" as well as Spigelman as having "completed changed the medium" of graphic novels.

"Spigelman's 'Maus' changed comics forever," she said. "Comics now can be about anything -- any topics that's as serious as you can come up with."

See the rest of Alison Bechdel's conversation with HuffPost Live here.


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'Lowrider Piñata' Encompasses The Beauty And Violence Of Latino Culture In One 19-Foot Beast

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This story is one in a series of four profiles on unknown American artists, selected for an exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (click here to explore the full series). Crystal Bridges president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood split a map of the U.S. into four regions before setting off on a journey to find the best artists currently working in America. Each artist profiled here hails from one of the following regions:

Northeast | South | Midwest | West


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Justin Favela, 28




A piñata is a singular party prop, made to be beaten into shreds. Its complex character — both celebratory and suggestive of violence — is what drew Justin Favela to push the bounds of the form, to figure out what happens to a viewer when you festoon unlikely plaster shapes (say, a life-size lowrider car) with ribbons.

Favela, a Las Vegas-based artist, is one of the subjects we picked from State of the Art, an unprecedented exhibit featuring contemporary art from across the country. For nearly a year, two staffers of the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas — president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood — traveled thousands of miles in search of great American artists based outside of New York City’s art-world epicenter. It was a curatorial adventure unlike any that’s come before, and Favela was one of 102 people to make the final cut. His “Lowrider piñata” is currently on display.

Last week, Favela ducked into a storage closet in Caesars Palace — where he works as an administrator at an art gallery — just long enough to share his recipe for making a giant piñata.



"Lowrider Piñata," 2014. Paper, cardboard, and glue. Photo by Steve Marcus





Setting up a studio visit with a renowned museum can’t be an everyday experience. How did you feel when Crystal Bridges first contacted you?

At first I was a little confused because I had just been in a group show in Fayetteville [Arkansas], right next door to Bentonville, so I thought for some reason they were friends of my friends. When Chad showed up to my studio, it took me a minute to figure out what was happening. I was kind of shocked and surprised as to how big a deal it was after they left and I looked up Crystal Bridges online. I knew that it was a museum in Arkansas with a crazy-looking building, but then I learned more.

Not knowing what’s going on must be kind of a blessing, though, because you’re not stressed.

It was a fun studio visit. I just kind of showed them my work. At the time I had just made a giant, 6-foot-long turkey for a lighting studio in town. I had that and all these piñatas hanging around. The car was there, but it was in pieces. It was flat because I had showed it earlier — I think the year before. It was just so big that I had to take it apart and save the parts.

How did it feel to know that broken-up piece made it in?

I was overjoyed, of course. I almost threw up. It was amazing. I just couldn’t believe it. I knew that they visited other people in Vegas, and thousands across the country. When I found out I’m the only person from the whole state that made it into the show, it was just overwhelming. It was very real.

When did you start making piñatas?

When I was in college. I’ve had a history with piñata-tying since I was a kid. I never really liked it, just because I was a calm kid, and piñata time is very celebratory but also very violent. Just the idea that we’re going to put a blindfold on you and you’re going to hit this thing and you’re going to perform for us. Can we just get the candy? What’s going on here?

One of the first piñatas I did was kind of morbid. I made a life-size donkey out of fabric and wire, kind of like papier-mâché. I hung it from the ceiling, and it looked like this droopy dead donkey. I kept thinking about the piñata as a way to represent my background. It’s a fun medium, and it’s about violence. When I initially thought about the car, my friends and I were just brainstorming what symbols would represent Chicano or Latino culture. Eventually, we thought of a lowrider car.

“When I found out I’m the only person from the whole state that made it into the show, it was just overwhelming. I almost threw up.”



How do you make a piñata that’s car-sized?

I’m really bad at numbers and measuring, so I took a photo of the car and projected it onto a wall. It’s the size of what a car is supposed to be. With the projection, I get the right measurements. For those tracings, I cut the cardboard out and start making the shell out of whatever I have — cardboard, Styrofoam and then papier-mâché to make a real piñata shell. [The lowrider] is 19 and a half feet [long].

What is about the piñata that keeps you hooked?

Most of the things I do are covering something up with something else, but covering it up and either decorating it or just making it brighter and more visible. So taking a donkey and covering it in paper, or taking a car and making it fluffy. It’s like covering up the truth, but at the same time, it’s highlighting that it’s not a real thing.

A lot of my work is very accessible. It’s very easy to understand. Everybody knows what a piñata is. So people already understand what it’s for, and just taking that, and kind of messing with it, is kind of exciting. I like to make people laugh, so when something as celebratory and fun as a piñata is made into something that makes you think of something differently, I think that’s what I like about it.

Has the exhibit changed anything for you?

This has given me the confidence to say, “Yes, I’m an artist.” Yes, I want to be an artist, and I want to do whatever it takes to be an artist.



Many Humans Involved: 'Tales Of The Grim Sleeper' Offers Complex Look At Serial Murders

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There's only one way to look at "Tale of the Grim Sleeper," and that's grimly. The new documentary, which is screening as part of this year's New York Film Festival, tells the harrowing story of a section of South Central Los Angeles haunted by the disappearance of dozens of black women (many of them drug-addled prostitutes) since 1985. Lonnie Franklin Jr., labeled the "Grim Sleeper" because he appeared to take a 14-year hiatus before killing again, was convicted of 10 murders corresponding to those crimes, and most of the residents interviewed in Nick Broomfield's documentary believe he's responsible for the others.

When Broomfield ("Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer," "Biggie & Tupac") arrived in Los Angeles to investigate the crimes, he had little other than news reports with which to launch his film. That is, until he met Pam Brooks, a well-known resident of the neighborhood and self-described former "crack whore." Four years sober when the documentary was filmed, Brooks winningly guides the production from person to person and intersection to intersection as Broomfield and his son, Barney, who serves as director of photography on the project, meet scores of Franklin's associates, including several women familiar with his violent advances.

"Tales of a Grim Sleeper" is fascinating on a filmmaking level because we watch the documentary process unfold in an organic manner. Brooks hops in the Broomfields' car and recruits acquaintances on the street for interviews by hollering out of the window to ask what they know about Franklin and his whereabouts.

Moreover, the movie paints a dire portrait of institutional racism. Quickly after the killings began, some of the community formed the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, because "had the third victim been a UCLA student with blond hair and blue eyes," the Los Angeles Police Department may have tended to the case properly, one member argues. Instead, the police told the coalition they were waiting for a gun to pass through their offices that happened to match the bullets found in the victims. They also withheld a sketch, a 911 call and other information about the serial killer for 22 years, until a Los Angeles Weekly article from 2008 exposed the limited attention given to the situation. Instead, the documentary alleges, the LAPD used as a crutch the NHI pretense, or "no human involved," which law enforcement uses to describe murders involving sex workers and drug addicts.

What's most resilient about Broomfield's work here is that the movie seems to take on new life as it unfolds. It's clear the director didn't know what, if anything, he'd glean upon first planting himself in South Central. At the start, residents hurl racial slurs and urge him to leave. But he persists, and what unfolds over 105 minutes is an increasingly troubling look at vicious murders and the complicated backstory that informs how they're treated. There's no fancy camerawork and the editing has a stripped-down feel that may be mistaken for cheapness, but it's apt for a guerrilla-style documentary that grows increasingly grizzly.

Franklin has been behind bars since 2010 and has yet to have a trial. But this section of South Central has been imprisoned since at least 1985, and if the LAPD's purported negligence is to be believed, so has the grander state of racism in America.

"Tales of the Grim Sleeper" screens at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 6 and 7. It will air on HBO in 2015.

Sasha Grey Might Be The Most Sexually Liberated Woman In Hollywood, But She's Not A Feminist

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The nude photo leaks are a strange thing for Sasha Grey, who is currently promoting a new film, "Open Windows," about criminal voyeurism. She has become a role model for sex positivity, especially as her visibility has increased since leaving the adult film industry. As Grey figures out what it means to call Hollywood home, the 26-year-old has found herself acting out a far darker version of the twisted celebrity culture she stumbled upon outside of pornography.

sasha grey

"Open Windows" was filmed in November of 2010, so this is all, as Grey put it, "bad timing and a terrible time for women on the Internet."

Grey plays Jill Goddard in the film, a starlet terrorized with spying and torture seemingly with the end goal of getting her naked in front of a web cam. Much of the fear is propelled by a disembodied voice rather than anonymous 4Chan and Reddit users, though the whole thing feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of the leaks which began to unfold at the end of August.

"In terms of my own privacy ... I never want the world to see me as vulnerable as one can be."

In real life, Grey is an interesting counterexample for the leaks, specifically the ongoing insistence of some that certain stars (read: Kim Kardashian) are more "deserving" of this crime than others. Enter Grey -- who has had people tweet at her with tongue-in-cheek inquiries as to whether her own photos will be shared in a upcoming round of hacks. You might think her past work in adult films would inoculate Grey to the invasiveness of "The Fappening." The reality is that every woman involved in this scandal is a victim, even if their body is already visible in some corner of the Internet.

"Obviously, I have no problem doing nude scenes. But in terms of my own privacy, no matter what, I never want the world to see me as vulnerable as one can be," Grey told HuffPost Entertainment.

"First and foremost, the serious answer to all of this is that no one deserves to have their privacy invaded," Grey continued. "The idealist in me wants to say this is why we should be more open sexually, because they we wouldn’t have so many hang ups and we wouldn’t be so afraid of these things happening, because we wouldn’t care."

Grey faces quite a bit of stress managing the distribution of her own non-private images. There are plenty of times when photos turn up without her permission. Remember when she thought she was in the "True Detective" credits, and it turned out it wasn't her? She still thinks it is.

"I’m not gonna lie," she said. "I still do think that was an amalgam of me. I mean even my mom called me like, 'What the hell is this?' You know, there’s Photoshop magic, and I can take the Prince route and get pissed off every time my photo is used or manipulated or made to look like me or I can just let it roll off. That was an instance where it was really strange, but what am I going to do? Sue the creators of 'True Detective' and HBO?"

sasha grey

There is only so much Grey or anyone can do to control the use of their likeness. She has plenty more to worry about, like the mounting artifice of celebrity culture, which is far more complex than anything she had to deal with in the adult industry. After all Grey has seen, one of her reactions to the nude photo hacks was to wonder how many people were involved in it themselves.

"You know, there are so many planned things where people leak stuff and act like it’s an accident," she said. "But they were really behind it and they hired a publicist."

"You know, there are so many planned things where people leak stuff and act like it’s an accident, but they were really behind it and they hired a publicist."

She's dealt with that kind of thing quite a bit, most egregiously fielding requests for staged dates. "Publicists of people contact me through my publicist or my manager and say, 'Yeah, would Sasha be interested in going to dinner with so and so, and being photographed? Then, who knows, maybe they’ll end up getting along!'"

It's strange to hear the lore of Hollywood acknowledged so explicitly, but Grey is past the pageantry. "It sort of feeds the culture of people who like that kind of news and that kind of gossip," she said. "They like to believe in these perfect relationships. You know, you’re in Hollywood, you’re walking around, you’re going to nice dinners. It's all sort of part of the game."

Another thing Grey finds frustrating about the Hollywood "game" is the paradoxical way we treat women's sexuality, the contradiction of restricting and indulging in it at the same time. She refuses to perpetuate that double standard, and the choices she's made reflect that. For example, she has a nude scene in "Open Windows," but she was only willing to do it because it made sense to the story.

"I’m definitely less inhibited, but there are a lot of scenes I say no to, because they only depend on my sexuality, and I’ve already pretty much done what I’ve wanted to do," she said. "So, there’s really no reason for me to take on these roles where it’s only dependent on my sexuality and there’s no character. I would rather not act again."

sasha grey

Not that Grey is trying to erase her past as a porn star. She couldn't if she tried, and Grey is far too smart and aware of the permanence of the Internet to even bother. As for the female celebrities who are maybe less enlightened than Grey, her only advice would be to use their platform to make a change.

Sighing over the gender differences in celebrity culture, she suggested that current victims reach out and "make the situation clear in order to educate future generations."

"It’s sort of hard for me to define myself as a feminist, but I definitely do believe in women being strong and self-empowered."

There's a lot to be done on the path toward liberation and away from the kind of misogyny that allows these leaks to happen in the fist place. Grey's thinking is certainly part of that progress. Yet, she wouldn't call herself a feminist.

"I’ve always sort of struggled with that idea because the word feminist has become such an overused, watered-down term," she said. "Some people think of feminism and they think of women who are so far left, they don’t wear bras and the only way they can get attention for women’s rights is being naked. Then there are women who are so far right they’re the exact opposite, and believe in very conservative, tight morals and ideals."

While that might have been a good time to spit out the Beyonce-approved definition, on some level, Grey already lives up to the point Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is trying to make. "It’s sort of hard for me to define myself as a feminist," she continued, "but I definitely do believe in women being strong and self-empowered."

"Open Windows" is available on VOD now and in theaters on Nov. 7.

The ‘Mom Booth' Turns Real-Life Mothers Into Performance Art

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This story is one in a series of four profiles on unknown American artists, selected for an exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (click here to explore the full series). Crystal Bridges president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood split a map of the U.S. into four regions before setting off on a journey to find the best artists currently working in America. Each artist profiled here hails from one of the following regions:

South | West | Northeast | Midwest


***




Andy DuCett, 35




Growing up, Andy DuCett liked to rearrange his furniture so much, his parents placed a limit on how many times he could do it in a week. His obsession with disorientation lives on today in installations that use familiar objects, like chairs, in unusual ways.

DuCett, a Minnesota-based artist, is one of the subjects we picked from State of the Art, an unprecedented exhibit featuring contemporary art from across the country. For nearly a year, two staffers of the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas — president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood — traveled thousands of miles in search of great American artists based outside of New York City’s art-world epicenter. It was a curatorial adventure unlike any that’s come before, and DuCett was one of 102 people to make the final cut.

Below, DuCett examines the roots of his Crystal Bridges contribution, the “Mom Booth” — a deceptively simple piece of performance art that turns the typical museum information booth on its head. Staffed by museum volunteers who are also mothers, the booth is a detergent-scented twilight zone where a presiding mom might ask visitors to help fold her fresh laundry (which she’s brought in), or cluck at a fallen Lego piece (which she covertly dropped). The idea is to invite contemplation of a truly Midwestern sentiment: Mothers guide us all.


DuCett with the moms of "Mom Booth," 2013/2014, interactive installation. Photo by Marc Henning.





When did you start to understand the scope of State of the Art?

The initial email was very mysterious. It was, ‘Hey, we’re these two guys and we would love to come visit your studio.’ It was like, ‘Wait a minute, is this one of those art scams?’

Finding out who they were slowly is a great metaphor for the museum. It’s the best-kept secret. From the initial conversation to learning about the museum, every step of the way got more exciting.

How was the visit itself?

Chad and Don worked off each other really well. If [the visit] was a Venn diagram, they overlapped really nicely. I can’t remember how long it lasted. You could tell me it lasted two hours, and I’d believe you. You could tell me 10 minutes, and I’d believe you. There was definitely something exciting about it. It wasn’t a local institution, wasn’t somebody that you knew. There was this mysterious set of circumstances that led people from a different state, from a museum you hadn’t heard of, that when you did your research you were impressed by, to show up at your door.


DuCett's volunteer moms discuss their experiences in the Mom Booth.





What’s the elevator pitch for your work?

If I look back at my practice, it’s evolved a lot. [Early] assemblages grew out of my training in painting. They were arranged in a very specific way. Capital-A Art. You don’t touch it, you just look from a distance and ponder it.

[I used] everyday objects, cultural ephemera, very quotidian stuff — chairs and end tables and lamps, video game consoles, just things that harken back to the stuff of life. People wanted to [interact with] them. They were activated in life, whereas sculpture is more inert. So in 2012, I got an opportunity where I had a solo exhibition at a place called the Soap Factory [titled “Why We Do This”]. Twelve thousand square feet of raw space, beautiful beams, just gorgeous. It was a little unnerving! Rather than just show the end table or the lamp mixed in with a bunch of things, I wanted to show them in context so someone could be immersed in that space.

Why use everyday materials?

People have a lot of ideas about what contemporary art means. I’m not trying to democratize the whole thing, but at the same time, I want someone to get interested in it enough to peel back the layers, to have this fun or poignant or thoughtful or meaningful experience, go back home and unpack it, digest it as they lie in bed, and then want to come back to that in the same way they would do with a non-artistic experience.

For instance, my favorite day at the grocery store is free samples day. The king of free samples day is the pizza oven. That smell just hits you when you walk in. I was walking through a grocery store, got a slice from a local pizza institution, walked away, and just turned around and said, “I have a strange request.” Six months later, they donated 50 or 60 pizzas to my show at the Soap Factory, and the owner and his girlfriend were there handing out a slice, so it added a smell component and a textural nuance. You understand what this means in the grocery store context, but what does it mean in this context?

“I did mom training when I was down in Arkansas. They had earnest questions. I really appreciated it, but I told them... I can’t tell you how to be a mom.”



What inspired the Mom Booth?

One of the through lines in my work is the idea of collage. My parents put an embargo as a kid on how many times I could rearrange my bedroom. They were scared I’d wear out the carpet. I was dragging furniture around two, three times a week. I would relish those first couple of disorienting moments when you wake up and you’d be in a different place, and then you’d say, wait that’s my dresser, these are my things.

With the Mom Booth, I still feel like it’s a form of collage, a slippage between colloquial and high art. [It] was an actual commission from the curator of contemporary art at the Minnesota Institute of Art. The museum was putting on their first contemporary art show. It was called “More Real Art In The Age of Truthiness,” a play on Stephen Colbert’s concept. A lot of the work in the show was asking you to make distinctions between fact and fiction. This was for an established audience going to this museum for years and years. So, decades of people getting used to what they expected in a museum — of where the art lives and where the art doesn’t. I had shown a range of projects to Don and Chad, and the one they really liked was the Mom Booth, [placed] right next to the information booth, where you go to ask questions like, ‘Hey, where’s the restroom?’ In the museum, where are spaces that museumgoers wouldn’t expect to encounter art?

Are you worried about your work being ephemeral?

It would be ignoring somewhat what I’m trying to do if I don’t let it go away in some sense. If you think about a Sol Lewitt drawing, it’s instructions of how to create this piece long after he’s gone. There could be something worked out in helping to generate new work and how to expand something like the Mom Booth.

What sort of direction did you give the volunteers at the Mom Booth? Is the idea just, ‘Be mom-ish’?

I did mom training when I was down in Arkansas. They had earnest questions. I really appreciated it, but I told them [...] ‘I can’t tell you how to be a mom.’ It was more like set design, where I provided a place for them to perform. I heard that one of them brought in her clean laundry that needed to be folded. And visitors would be walking around, and she’d be like, ‘I’m really busy. Could you help me?’ Or one would throw Legos on the ground, and when someone would walk by, she’d wag her fingers and say, ‘Why did you drop those?’ Some would sit and knit, just stare ahead, smile over their glasses. Maybe that look was more than saying things.



This Sculptor Is Using Trash To Inspire One Of Pittsburgh's Toughest Neighborhoods To Make Art

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This story is one in a series of four profiles on unknown American artists, selected for an exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (click here to explore the full series). Crystal Bridges president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood split a map of the U.S. into four regions before setting off on a journey to find the best artists currently working in America. Each artist profiled here hails from one of the following regions:

South | West | Midwest | Northeast


***




Vanessa L. German, 38




In an abandoned house in Pittsburgh, kids gather after school to turn the day's frustrations and joys into artwork. They call the space the Art House, and they owe its existence to a woman named Vanessa L. German.

An artist, German is one of the subjects we picked from State of the Art, an unprecedented exhibit featuring contemporary art from across the country. For nearly a year, two staffers of the Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas — president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood — traveled thousands of miles in search of great American artists based outside of New York City’s art-world epicenter. It was a curatorial adventure unlike any that’s come before, and German was one of 102 people to make the final cut.

Working out of her house in Pittsburgh, German crafts beguiling sculptures she’s dubbed “power dolls,” from items otherwise doomed for a trash heap: collections of spoons, for instance, or the old, glittery high heels of a drag queen. She also acts as a sort of den mother for the neighborhood kids, whose constant visits to her porch to watch her work led her to establish an after-school studio down the street. As with the three other artists in our series, she’s new to the national stage. Below, we chat about her enduring faith in the unexplainable.



"White Naptha Soap or, Contemporary Lessons in Shapeshifting," 2013; mixed media assemblage.
Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York





How did you get into art-making?

Me and my family...we were just always making things. My mom was a fiber artist, she did costumes. She was the kind of person who could take materials and turn them into something together that you could never believe. I just thought, that’s the way you live. We didn’t have a whole lot of money, and there were five kids in the family. If we wanted something — new toys, new books...what my mom would tell us is, “You’re going to have to make that yourself.” What I found when I was young is it felt really good to make things.

And now you make dolls for the children in your neighborhood.

As a kid we didn’t have a lot of dolls to play with. Dolls were expensive, and so they were always literally special things. The figures [I make] are not all just [for] children. Some of them are about protecting the spirit of imagination. I just have a sense of magic, and I always have.

But I will make figures for anything. I have friends … I call them ghost mothers, because they’re women who you think are childless, but really their kids have been murdered. They don’t talk about them. I’ve made some power figures for them, really ensconced and weighted with a slew of blue things. I make those figures for the grief to be lifted off their hearts, so they are not paralyzed by their grief, but able to honor their experience.

Where do you find materials?

I live in the 'hood. People do renovations and literally dump everything in the alleyway, so I can find great materials off the street. People are always dropping things off at my front porch. Somebody’s grandma died and she collected those travel spoons, and they gave me her collection. Somebody else, his partner was a drag queen and she left all her drag shoes. Huge, beautiful, glittery, stacked drag queen shoes.



Details of some of the materials German works with in her sculptures. Courtesy of Vanessa German.




How did the kids in the neighborhood become a part of your art practice?

I work in a small basement in my house. The basement ceiling is what they call a Pittsburgh basement … too low for some of those sculptures. I have to pull them out to my front porch [to work]. I live at an intersection where there are buses and people would stop and say, “What are you doing? Is it art? Will people pay you for that?” Kids would say the same thing, but they would want to help me. “Miss Vanessa, can we help you?” I’d say, “No, I’m working right now. Your mom works at a hotel; this is my work.” I’d say, “You can watch, but you have to stand at the fence.”

They would do the thing kids do where they would swing on the fence. They’d do that and jump over and they’d say, “Oops, Miss Vanessa, I landed in your front yard.” They thought they were so cute and funny, and inch themselves until they were closer and closer, and then say, “Can I touch this flower, Miss Vanessa? Oh Miss Vanessa, you dropped a shell.”

I tried letting one of the kids help on my sculpture, but I realized I have a sense of touch that allows me to work with a facility that they don’t have. My girlfriend at the time was a scene designer. She’d given me this old scene design paint. So I picked up a bunch of slate from a house that got demolished down the street and let them paint. Eventually they felt really comfortable and they’d come home from school and change into play clothes, come to my house, and invite their friends walking down the street.

It was fascinating to me to see you didn’t have to teach them. Just like anybody, they had things inside of them.

German on discovering materials that resonate with her.





What’s happening with the kids now?

People got evicted across the street, so I called public housing and asked if we could use that property. Eventually, they said yes. We’re calling it the art house. There’s a kitchen, a bathroom, a place where they can wash their hands.

They know where everything is and know what they’ve been working on, and we work together. I make sure the house has snacks in it. A lot of kids come home and there’s nobody. They need a safe place. It’s not just that people get murdered at night. It’s that kids see an accumulation of things happen. There’s a lot of fighting, people yelling and cursing. It builds up this history of ugliness and meanness inside of them. My goal [with the Art House] is to be consistent, and open the door when I say I’m opening the door.

It was something I’d never heard of before, Crystal Bridges. I honestly thought it sounded like the name of a country music singer.”



What was it like to see your work at Crystal Bridges?

Everybody says the same thing, but it’s kind of a wonder to drive in and park the car. Walking to this concrete colonnade, all of a sudden, a museum springs out beneath you. You take an elevator four levels down into a ground. It’s built into a hollow over a stream.

It was something I’d never heard of before, Crystal Bridges. I honestly thought it sounded like the name of a country music singer. Of course, I Google it. Even in the research that I did do, they hadn’t talked about what they were doing, just how beautiful the museum was and how there were people who really didn’t appreciate [Alice Walton] buying some great American art and leaving it in Arkansas where not a lot of people from New York would get to it.

The visit from Don and Chad must have been mysterious, if you had no concept of their museum.

I had been in environments before where I was around artists who were really nervous about something called a studio visit, but I didn’t understand what they were nervous about. I didn’t go to art school. I had no frame of reference.

I talked to them about all the parts of the process, about how I pick objects that look like artifacts, like precious objects from 100 years ago. I think because I work in a basement and I go down to work, I have this idea that it’s like my secret world. There’s something about having someone there, something really affirming about it to me. You can imagine, getting visited and then getting an email that says, “We’d like you to be in this exhibition,” with a link to a New York Times article.



Japanese-Born Artist Brings Fantasies To Life In Enormous, Paper-Cut Masterpieces

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This story is one in a series of four profiles on unknown American artists, selected for an exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (click here to explore the full series). Crystal Bridges president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood split a map of the U.S. into four regions before setting off on a journey to find the best artists currently working in America. Each artist profiled here hails from one of the following regions:

Northeast | West | Midwest | South


***




Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun, 37




When she was a girl in Japan, Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun fell in love with the paper-cut illustrations in the children’s books of the time. But it wasn’t until she moved halfway across the world, to Jacksonville Beach, Florida, that she tried her hand at the intricate art form herself.

Moneyhun, a self-taught paper artist, is one of the subjects we picked from State of the Art, an unprecedented exhibit featuring contemporary art from across the country. For nearly a year, two staffers of the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas — president Don Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood — traveled thousands of miles in search of great American artists based outside of New York City’s art-world epicenter. It was a curatorial adventure unlike any that’s come before, and Moneyhun was one of 102 people to make the final cut.

Her enormous works do not sacrifice detail for size. She cuts the mythical-looking creatures and oversized faces with an X-Acto knife, in her living room. Seen in person, the shadows are as mesmerizing as the pieces themselves, playing on the gallery wall like a scene from a Balinese puppet show. Below, Moneyhun tells us about the simple appeal of what she does.



"UKIYO Floating World," paper. Courtesy of the artist.





What is your artistic background?

I’ve been drawing since I was a child, and I’ve done a little bit of tattooing. About four years ago, I had a lot of free time. My husband’s mom had a stroke. My husband was working, and I had to stay home to care of her. It was hard. So I thought, I have to do something for myself, something fun.

I had always thought I wanted to try paper cutting because I grew up reading children’s books with paper-cut illustrations. It’s not an uncommon medium. So one day I just tried cutting out paper.

What were your materials?

Regular paper. At first it was a hobby, and I just used whatever was lying around the house. I had an X-Acto knife already, so I used that and I’m still using it today. My supplies haven’t really changed. But as time passed, my figures became more intricate. At the very beginning, it was simple, only outlines. Now, it’s a lot of line patterns. My figurative images are all of my daughter. She’s 10 now, but I use images of her when she was a baby.



"Visionesses I," 2013, paper. Courtesy of the artist.




What drives you?

Of course, it’s fun. I really can’t stop doing it, as I’m always getting more and more ideas. I start with a subject, and then I have some kind of message for each subject, each series.

How did Crystal Bridges come to know of you?

The curator of my local museum, MOCA Jacksonville, put my name on their list of artists. He had been familiar with my work ever since I had a group show in Jacksonville, and he kind of supported my art. He give me advice, and told me he couldn’t really take my art to the museum yet because I was a new artist. But he said to keep showing my work.

And now you’ve made it to a museum.

To tell you the truth, the day Don and Chad came to see my work, I wasn’t sure what they were doing there, who they were and what Crystal Bridges Museum was. Because it’s in Arkansas, I just hadn’t done much research at that time. But when they came, I could tell they were serious art people. I just did my best explain my work to them. I didn’t really think about it until a few months after their visit. It was kind of a long few months to me, and I thought, OK, I’m not in this exhibition.

Hiromi Moneyhun, Paper Cut Artist from Wishbone Media LLC on Vimeo.

Moneyhun discusses her intricate papercuts.





When did you start to understand the scope of Crystal Bridges?

After their visit, I kept researching and getting more information from articles. I found a New York Times article. So I started to understand little by little that, wow, this a big deal. Showing at a museum is an artist’s dream, and Crystal Bridges is really a beautiful museum.

Has anything changed for you in how you think about yourself as an artist, having seen your work in a museum?

I feel other people take me seriously for my art, so that’s changing, but as for myself, I feel no change. I just want to keep on making progress.



Bloomberg Politics Is Doing Error Pages So, So Right


This Beauty Vlogger Is Hard Of Hearing, And She's Stepping Up Her Game On YouTube

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Rikki Poynter may have begun her YouTube career as a beauty vlogger, but her work on camera has recently broadened to include an issue that's close to her heart.

In honor of September's Deaf Awareness Week, the makeup enthusiast from North Carolina recently uploaded a 20-minute-long video addressing some frequently asked questions about the deaf and hard of hearing community. It's the first video Poynter has made in which she talks about being hard of hearing herself.





In the video, she delves into a range of challenges facing the deaf community. Some of those challenges are specific to YouTube; others, like harassment and employment discrimination, are very much not.

For example, Poynter says she's been applying to jobs for four years and has only gotten a single interview. Her experience, she suggests, is representative of what many other deaf and hard of hearing job applicants may face in their lives.

So far, she says, she's been well-received.

"I’ve wanted to do a video like this for a while, but I [was] too scared of how it would be received. I was afraid of so many audist comments so I figured I should just stick with makeup videos," Poynter told The Huffington Post via email. "Surprisingly and fortunately, all the feedback I’ve gotten is positive!"

Poynter's focus might be shifting, but don't expect her to abandon eyeliner and eyeshadow entirely.

"I love how makeup can look so cool, so pretty, and really change a person’s face. I love how creative you can get with it. Before I actually got into makeup, I thought it was just putting on some foundation and calling it a day, but there’s so much more," she told HuffPost.





If one of her goals is to raise awareness for what she calls a "hidden disability," her online presence, mixed with the vibrant colors showcased on her Instagram page, makes it pretty hard to look away.

You go, girl.

H/T Franchesca Ramsey

//huffington1239.rssing.com/chan-24466596/article3437-live.html

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Recall the famous New Yorker cover “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” by Saul Steinberg. All of America is shown from the vantage point of western Manhattan. In the distance lies the country’s West coast and not much else. New York City, naturally, is dead center.


This is the cartographic delusion that rules the art world. At this year’s Whitney Biennial — a powerful commercial launching pad for young artists, in much the same way “Saturday Night Live” is for comedians — more than 70 of the 100 or so chosen painters, sculptors, videographers and the like worked either in California or New York.



This “Steinbergian view of the country” is anathema to Don Bacigalupi, president of Crystal Bridges, the ambitious museum of American art in tiny Bentonville, Arkansas, founded in 2011 by Walmart heiress Alice Walton. Speaking from his vast, glass-walled place of employment, Bacigalupi discussed the museum’s new counterpoint to the Steinbergian worldview, an exhibit instantly coined “the anti-Whitney Biennial” by the press upon its opening last month. The elevator pitch for State of the Art: one hundred works, no big names and an insane road trip.



They didn’t know how to comport themselves. Many were shocked and curious as to why we’d traveled across the country.

In concert, the three elements make the exhibit nothing short of historic. For 10 months, Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood crisscrossed the country, dropping into the studios of 960 artists. The studio visit is a mythologized rite of passage — portrayed in movies as the moment an artist’s fortune changes — and most of Bacigalupi’s and Alligood’s hosts had never experienced one. “They didn’t know how to comport themselves,” Bacigalupi told The Huffington Post a few days after the opening of the exhibit. “Many were shocked and curious as to why we’d traveled across the country.”


With good reason. “This is not the way exhibitions of contemporary art are curated,” Alligood admitted, citing “a bit of fear” in the curatorial community and in museum leadership. The risks lie not only in the process (just try explaining a year of slow emails with “We’re not going to be in the office, because we’ll be in Idaho or Omaha,” as Alligood put it), but in shirking the typical approach to museum fundraising, where a star artist or piece is used to entice sponsors. Instead, Alligood said, “I had to say ‘Trust us.’”





Crystal Bridges, designed by the renowned architect Moshe Safdie, differs fundamentally from other museums of its size in that it is privately owned. Funded by Walton, it operates in service of her stated goal to transform a region. And indeed, Bentonville — a city nestled in the Ozarks, an area known primarily for its natural beauty — has changed around the museum. Where once the big attraction was the Walmart Museum, featuring a five-and-dime styled after Sam Walton’s original store, the downtown now brims with pint-size galleries, posh restaurants and an outpost of the boutique art-themed hotel chain 21c. A representative for the city’s chamber of commerce said that hotel and restaurant tax collection has increased by more than 12 percent each year since Crystal Bridges opened its doors.


The tourists aren’t your average art fiends. More than 1 million people have visited Crystal Bridges so far, and according to museum records, a good number of them have been real first-timers — meaning they've never stepped into a museum before in their lives. This statistic informed Bacigalupi’s vision for State of the Art, which he sees as a chance to do justice to contemporary art, a field he believes is unfairly maligned. “If we think about the stereotypes that attend it,” he said, “that it’s difficult to understand, that it’s something a child could do, that it may not have anything to say to us as a society — we wanted to counter all of those notions.”


He also expanded an idea he’d floated to Alice Walton while interviewing for his current post. At the time, Bacigalupi was director of the Toledo Museum in Ohio, the epicenter of “a very lively and very deeply rooted art scene,” he said. “I thought with this new museum, there might be an opportunity to focus the lens around practice happening in all parts of the country.”




The curators discuss how the artists interpret their cultural heritage in their work.



Walton is seen as something of a hawk in the art world — keen-eyed and dangerous, with a tendency to buy from insolvent institutions with beloved collections. She’s a natural disruptor, according to Alligood. Where some founders might have bristled at a long road trip toward a dream, Walton welcomed the plan. Omnipotence helps. “At other institutions, you have to convince a lot more people to make the gears turn,” Alligood noted.


From the start, the exhibit demanded a new process. Bacigalupi and Alligood canvassed hundreds of art professionals embedded in local scenes for names. From a total of 10,000 promising artists they chiseled a short list of 1,000. These they partitioned into four regions: Northeast, Northwest, South and West. Every week for nearly a year, the two men flew to a hub in one of these regions, rented a car and got going. Often, they visited a dozen or more studios in a day, capturing video and audio footage of the artist at each stop. They drove into dodgy city neighborhoods and one-road towns where the GPS didn’t work. No two studio spaces were alike, from front porches to basements to an overgrown bay in an abandoned Coca-Cola factory. The oldest artist they visited was in her eighties, the youngest a 10-year-old boy whose mother was on the list. (When he heard who was coming, he left his work out where the men couldn’t miss it, before leaving for school.) Another artist died a few weeks after the visit.





After each stop, the men composed a code they could later use to remember the work they saw, a process Bacigalupi likens in the exhibit catalogue to writing a haiku. The phrases, each three words long, describe the essentials of an artist’s work. (The catalogue lists some tantalizing ones — for example, “psychotropic video travelogues.”) The duo also scored the artists, Olympics-style, on a 10-point scale measuring qualities chosen with the audience in mind: virtuosity, engagement and appeal.


Bacigalupi considers this travelogue as vital as the exhibit, calling it “a database for the future about research at this moment in American practice.”


HuffPost’s look into State of the Art interweaves some of this data with our own profiles of four artists, none of whose work had been shown outside their geographical region before Crystal Bridges swooped in. Justin Favela, a Las Vegas artist, mines his Chicano heritage, as well as the high-low culture of Sin City, to produce outsized piñatas that wouldn’t look out of place in a photo shoot by David LaChapelle. In Florida, Hiromi Moneyhun uses only an X-Acto knife and memories of the paper-cut illustrations she loved as a girl in Japan to turn out large, mind-bendingly intricate structures. Twin Cities artist Andy DuCett turns the old trope of “Minnesota nice” into performance art, with a cast of actual moms. And Vanessa L. German makes "power figures" from trash for the children in the depressed Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where she lives.


The concerns of these artists are at once regional and global. Together, they form what Bacigalupi calls “a truer image of the country.” Even Saul Steinberg might agree: It’s a fine view.


To explore all of the 102 works in State of the Art, visit the exhibit website or download the museum’s dedicated app, available for Apple or Android devices.





Copeland's 'Disjointed' Is The Perfect Song For The Changing Of Seasons

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After Copeland's reunion announcement, we finally have the first song from "Ixora," the band's fifth LP, and "Disjointed" proves the band hasn't lost any of their magic over the last six years.

A gorgeous piano-led track, Aaron Marsh's falsetto has never sounded better, hovering carefully overtop meticulously built layers of guitar, strings, bass and drums, each sneaking into the song without you realizing it. However, what really seals the deal is a fun little bit of production at the end of the song -- let's hope the rest of the record has more of that.

Copeland has also put out teasers for two other new songs: "Erase" and "I Can Make You Feel Young Again." "Ixora" will be available for purchase on Nov. 24th via Tooth & Nail Records.

Listen to the amazing "Disjointed" below:

'We Have Allowed Community Colleges To Become Separate And Unequal' (VIDEO)

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Vladimir de Jesus is an art major at LaGuardia Community College in New York City. After six years in school, he still doesn't yet have an associate's degree.

In a new mini-documentary, the New York Times profiles de Jesus, 23, who the newspaper writes has amassed "fewer than half of the credits he needed to progress to a four-year college" in more than half a decade.

Of course, trouble with getting community college students to graduate isn't necessarily new.

The College Board reported in 2011 that "only 21 percent of those registered as degree-seeking completed associate degrees or certificates within 150 percent of the normal time." The American Enterprise Institute noted in a 2012 report that at community colleges only 1 in 4 students graduate, compared to 3 in 5 at four-year schools.

Complete College America has said one reason students spend so long in community college is due to students spending too much time accumulating credits they didn't need to get their degree. But community college students are also more likely to come from low-income backgrounds and be less academically prepared.

"We have homeless students, we have students who come hungry," Dr. Gail O. Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College, told the Times.

The reality is America isn't doing much to help community colleges serve students any better. According to a report released in 2012 by the U.S. Treasury Department, funding per student at community colleges has essentially remained flat for the past decade. The U.S. is spending a third of what it typically spends helping students go to wealthy schools like Brown University of the University of Michigan, Mellow explains.

"We have allowed community colleges to become separate and unequal," Mellow says.

Marian Seldes Dead At 86, Was Acting Coach And Tony Award-Winning Star Of 'A Delicate Balance'

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NEW YORK (AP) — Actress Marian Seldes, the Tony Award-winning star of "A Delicate Balance" who was a teacher of Kevin Kline and Robin Williams, a muse to playwright Edward Albee and a Guinness Book of World Records holder for most consecutive performances, died Monday at age 86.

She died peacefully at her home after an extended illness, her brother Timothy Seldes said. "It is with deep sadness that I share the news that my dear sister Marian Seldes has died," he said in a statement. "She was an extraordinary woman whose great love of the theater, teaching and acting was surpassed only by her deep love for her family."

Marian Seldes made her Broadway debut in 1947 in a production of "Medea," starring the versatile actress Judith Anderson, and later appeared in hits such as "Equus" and "Deathtrap." Her most recent Broadway outing was in Terrence McNally's "Deuce" in 2007, starring opposite Angela Lansbury.

Seldes was nominated for a Tony five times, for her performances in "A Delicate Balance," ''Father's Day," ''Deathtrap," ''Ring Round the Moon" and "Dinner at Eight." She won in 1967 for "A Delicate Balance" and won her second Tony in 2010 for lifetime achievement.

Her collaboration with Albee included "Three Tall Women," which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for drama, "The Play About the Baby," ''Tiny Alice" and "Father's Day."

"I think I'm as ambitious as any actress can be, but I don't ask," she told The Washington Times in 1995. "I have a theory that it's better for me if I wait and either the director or playwright chooses. The best opportunities in my career have come that way, and all my opportunities with Edward Albee have come that way."

But she moved easily from role to role, from Chekhov's "Ivanov" to Peter Shaffer's "Equus," from Ira Levin's "Deathtrap" to Tony Kushner's "A Bright Room Called Day" and Tina Howe's "Painting Churches." Her off-Broadway credits also include "The Ginger Man" and "Painting Churches."

Seldes' reliability and professionalism sealed her place in the Guinness World Records for a time after playing every performance during the run of "Deathtrap" from 1978 to 1982 — a total of 1,809 performances. Her record as most durable actress has since been broken by Catherine Russell, who logged over 11,000 performances in the off-Broadway production of "Perfect Crime."

Seldes, the daughter of author and journalist Gilbert Seldes, was twice married, to novelist and playwright Julian Claman, a union that ended in divorce in 1961, and then to playwright Garson Kanin, who died in 1999.

From 1969 to 1992 she served on the faculty of the Juilliard School, teaching the craft of acting to such pupils as Kline, Williams, Patti LuPone, Laura Linney, Mandy Patinkin and Christopher Reeve.

Seldes also acted in film, in "Mona Lisa Smile," ''Home Alone 3" and "Celebrity." On television she appeared in "Nurse Jackie" and played Candice Bergen's aunt in "Murphy Brown" and Mr. Big's mother in "Sex and the City." She also wrote two books: a memoir, "The Bright Lights: A Theater Life," and a novel, "Time Together."

Seldes, a slim and elegant woman who often wore her hair pulled back, studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse and made her professional debut at age 17 in Robinson Jeffers' "Medea," with Anderson.

Her other Broadway credits include "Crime and Punishment," ''The Chalk Garden," ''The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore," Oliver Hailey's "Father's Day," for which she won a Drama Desk Award, Arnold Wesker's "The Merchant" and Kanin's "A Gift of Time."

In 1995, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, marking 50 years in the profession, but she missed the ceremony because — typically — she was on tour with "Three Tall Women" in Los Angeles.
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