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Tony Sirico, who played a gangster in 'The Sopranos,' dies at 79
NEW YORK, NY.- Tony Sirico, the actor who played eccentric gangster Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos, died Friday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 79. His death was confirmed by Bob McGowan, his manager. No cause was given. Paulie Walnuts which was Paul Gualtieris nickname because he once hijacked a truck full of nuts (he was expecting television sets) was one of mob boss Tony Sopranos most loyal, oversensitive and reckless men. Paulie was the kind of guy who would participate in an intervention for a drug addict, and when it was his turn to speak, punch the guy in the face. He loved his mother (although he found out she was really his aunt), and she loved him because he wrote the checks to keep her in an expensive nursing home. Paulie wore tracksuits, slept with hookers, was phobic about germs, hated cats and watched ... More

Ceramics Now exhibition opens at Greenwich House Pottery
NEW YORK, NY.- Jane Hartsook Gallery is presenting work by our 2021 fellows and artists in residence: Kelly Chang, Rachel Farmer, Meiasha Gray, and Heidi Lau. Our Residency and Fellowship program fosters artistic growth by providing makers with a creative community, time, space and materials to explore and generate new bodies of work in ceramics in vibrant New York City. Kelly Chang is a New York City-based art director, animator, and designer, who is developing his art practice in clay. Using his background in computer graphics and 3D modeling and animation, Chang employs 3D printing and scanning, photography, and computer simulation to create his slipcast ceramic sculptures. During his residency, Chang continued to develop a project that considers the replica and its value, or lack thereof. In this series, he reimagines the trash, plastic, ... More

Latvian National Museum of Art opens an exhibition of works by Jānis Aivars Karlovs
RIGA.- From 9 July to 4 September 2022, the Cupola Hall of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1) hosts a solo show by Jānis Aivars Karlovs Disobedience. Jānis Aivars Karlovs can be seen as the most convincing artist of the older generation, ambitious in his creative manifestations, a follower of his own path, whose oeuvre reflects the most significant overall processes in the development of sculpture. Jānis Karlovs has chosen granite, marble and tuff as his main working materials. The stages of artists active self-reflection are connected with spatial three-dimensional objects, which rhythms and textures never lose the romantic note of inspiration. Through research and experimentation Jānis Karlovs has arrived at a fairly minimalist solution for his expression in art. The exhibition Disobedience presents the authors ... More

At the opera, humans bear witness to atrocity, or ignore it
AIX-EN-PROVENCE.- The bodies kept coming up. First one. Then another. Then a dozen. Then a hundred. After an hour of Resurrection, the opening night production at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 160 decomposing corpses lay in neat, sickening rows on a stage covered in dark earth. The exhumation of a shallow mass grave is a grimly familiar sight: Sudan, Srebrenica, Veracruz, Rwanda, so many others. In March, Bucha, Ukraine, added to that litany a scene so eerily reminiscent of the one being staged here that the festival sent out an email assuring audiences that the director, Romeo Castellucci, had conceived the production a year before the war broke out. Three years ago at the Aix Festival, Castellucci presented Requiem, a staging of Mozarts final work. In a series of enigmatic episodes, he set to the mournful, churning music an evocation ... More

James Welling's eleventh solo exhibition with Regen Projects opens in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects is presenting Iconographia, James Wellings eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery. For Iconographia Wellings camera becomes a time machine, reanimating images of Greek and Roman busts. The exhibition debuts these Personae, as well as a selection of images from his Cento series. Welling has used the camera as a vehicle to time travel in previous bodies of work such as Diary/Landscape, Seascape, Wyeth, Buildings by H. H. Richardson, Glass House, and Maison de Verre, but rarely with the emotional intensity of this latest exhibition. The exhibitions title, Iconographia, refers to a seventeenth century portfolio of intaglio portraits made by Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck. In the artists own words: While making Cento, my ongoing series of photographs of sculptures and artifacts from the ancient ... More

Mire Lee depicts the state of a human being gradually departing this life in Kunstmuseum Den Haag's Project Gallery
THE HAGUE.- As a person falls asleep, or is dying, artist Mire Lee sees a sculpture emerge. People are like meat in that state. I find that endearing, potentially sad, but also intriguing because only the physical presence remains. Her installations are never silent or immobile. Mire Lee, who lives and works in Seoul and Amsterdam, uses sound and motion to suggest living material. In Kunstmuseum Den Haags Project Gallery she depicts the state of a human being gradually departing this life. Yet the movement never stops. In As We Lay Dying Lee evokes a state that apparently persists for all eternity. Lee explores in her sculptures and installations how she can use her material to depict states articulating what it is to ... More

Kenward Elmslie, poet and librettist, dies at 93
NEW YORK, NY.- Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died June 29 at his home in the West Village of Manhattan. He was 93. Poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years. Elmslie, a grandson of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Elmslie is said to have helped Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited. After Latouches death ... More

'He presented another path': Actors and directors on Peter Brook
NEW YORK, NY.- Actor Kathryn Hunter heard the news of director Peter Brooks death, last weekend at 97, in a telephone call from his longtime collaborator Marie-HÃ©lÃ¨ne Estienne. Then Hunter, an Olivier Award winner who played the witches in Joel Coens film The Tragedy of Macbeth, set off across London for Shakespeares Globe. Im playing Lear, which was, of course, Peters great, great play, she said the other day, describing herself as overwhelmed at his loss after many years of working with him, including in New York. As I was cycling in, I felt and almost saw a huge great light, and I felt it was Peters spirit. That sort of mystical event seems apt for Brook, who over his long, globe-trotting career attained a kind of guru status not least through his nine-hour landmark production âThe Mahabharata,â a 1985 adaptation of the Sanskrit epic, ... More

At Ballet Theatre, visions of the natural world and 'Swan' debuts
NEW YORK, NY.- American Ballet Theatres Swan Lake, which wrapped up its performances at the Metropolitan Opera House on Wednesday, can feel choppy, as if its swans were pushing through water that becomes rougher with each passing year. This production, from 2000, was staged by Kevin McKenzie, who will soon retire as Ballet Theatres artistic director. Is it time for his Swan Lake to leave the company, too? Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence, has a jewel of a Swan Lake in his back pocket, already made. In McKenzies staging, dramatic and playful moments have worn thin, notably the brash seduction scene between von Rothbart, the evil sorcerer, and the princesses in Act 3. What was mildly entertaining in 2000 is embarrassing in 2022. This season, one Rothbart making his debut, Gabe Stone Shayer, swung his cape like a hungry ... More

Maia Ruth Lee's first solo exhibition at François Ghebaly opens in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES, CA.- FranÃ§ois Ghebaly presents Migrant Reader by Maia Ruth Lee, the artists first solo exhibition at the gallery. Maia Ruth Lees multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture. Busan-born, Kathmandu-raised, and now Colorado-based, her work often addresses the complexities of self and cultural preservation in times of dissonance and globalization. Serving as atlases, maps, indexes and readers, each work helps navigate a viewer into further understanding her recurring subject, the migrant. For this exhibition, Lee considers rope-wrapped baggage often seen accompanying migrant workers and diasporic peoples from regions such as East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Having relocated several times in her own life, Lee reflects on the movement of ones body between borders, the distinctive ... More

PDNB Gallery presents works on paper by Don Schol and paintings by Pam Burnley-Schol
DALLAS, TX.- In 2009, PDNB Gallery featured the very powerful suite of woodcut prints from Don Schols suite, Vietnam Remembrances. In 2014, Don Schol (b. 1941, Iowa) had another solo show at PDNB of his linoleum cuts, Arrangements. Although Schol is well-known for his sculpture, especially his honest but humorous self-portraits, his printmaking and drawing have been a focus in his late career. Schols series of drawings, Jazz Mini, were created in his moms last years, between 2015-2017. During his visits with his mom, she would watch tv and he would draw while listening to jazz music with earbuds. These detailed drawings are small, 3.5 inch square compositions with intricate geometric forms dancing around, fitting together almost like gears in a machine. The energy created finds no end in sight except the end of the paper. His woodcut ... More