Pioneering ballerina Misty Copeland is retiring from American Ballet Theatre
Misty Copeland is ready for her swan song.
The dancer, 42, has announced she will retire from the American Ballet Theatre after more than 20 years and deliver her final performance during the company's fall gala in October.
"I could never have imagined the life ballet would give me," Copeland said in a statement. "To dance on the world's greatest stages, with artists I admire so deeply, has been one of the greatest gifts of my life."
She continued: "My time with ABT has shaped me not just as a dancer, but as a person, and given me the platform to reach back and make space for others. This moment isn't a farewell, it's a celebration of everything we've built together, and a step toward all the work that's still ahead."
Copeland made history in 2015 as the first Black woman to become a principal dancer at the ABT.
Misty Copeland shares essential advice from Prince, favorite dish to cook, self-care tips
Speaking to The New York Times Magazine, she said she initially "wanted to fade away into the background," only to realize this was not "really possible," so she decided to announce her retirement officially.
"The legacy of what I've created, the way that I'm carrying so many stories of Black dancers who have come before me — I can't just disappear," she said. "There has to be an official closing to my time at American Ballet Theater, this company that has meant everything to me."
Copeland also told the Times she is "dealing with a lot" while preparing for her final performance.
How I became a ballerina: Misty Copeland
"I have a labral tear that happened during my training recently," she said. "Then I found out that I have all these old injuries that I never acknowledged and danced through. My doctor was like, 'I think you should stop dancing.' I'm like, 'I'm trying!' So it's very humbling, but it's also comforting."
The American Ballet Theatre's fall gala, scheduled for Oct. 22, is set to include a "curated selection of works from Copeland's celebrated repertoire," as well as video tributes and performances from her "collaborators and admirers," according to a June 9 announcement.
Susan Jaffe, the American Ballet Theatre's artistic director, said in a statement that Copeland's legacy "is profound — not only through the roles she's redefined but also through the lives she's inspired," adding that her "advocacy for inclusion, equity, and education ensures her impact will resonate far beyond this moment."
In a May interview with USA TODAY, Copeland reflected, "Throughout my career, so many incredible women, and specifically Black women, have really been like the backbone of my success. That, naturally and organically, taught me the importance of being a mentor."
Contributing: Clare Mulroy
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hypebeast
3 hours ago
- Hypebeast
BlackStar Film Festival Gives the Floor to Cinema for Liberation
Summary The BlackStar Film Festival returns to Philadelphia for its 14th edition. Kicking off on July 31 and running through August 3, the 2025 iteration promises over 90 films from 35 country, spotlighting the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists from around the world. 'In our fourteenth year we continue to view the festival as an urgent gathering for filmmakers and cinephiles of color,' said BlackStar founder Maori Karmael Holmes. 'The need in this moment is not only visionary cinema, but to be in space together around the work—to experience pleasure, rejuvenation and radical care in ways that push us towards action. The upcoming lineup spans wide thematic terrain, including films that center music as resistance, climate resilience and communal healing. Highlights for this year's edition includes the A24-backedBLKNWS: Terms & ConditionsAfro-futurist epic byKahlil Joseph, honoring Black history and the legacy of his late brother, artistNoah Davis. ActorLetitia Wrightmakes her directorial debut withHighway to the Moon, a tender coming-of-age tale of brotherhood fused with magical realist elements. Also on deck is the world premier ofTCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizingby Louis Massiah and Monica Henrique, and closing the program will be Jenn Nkiru'sThe Great North, an experimental documentary that captures the cultural mosaic that is Manchester, England. This year's selections 'embody BlackStar's vision of cinema as a tool for liberation,' festival director Nehad Khader described. 'Amidst troubling times,' she continues, 'these filmmakers remind us of what is possible.' The 14th edition of the BlackStar Film Festival will run from July 31 through August 3 at multiple venues across Philadelphia and will be viewable online. To purchase tickets or learn more about the full lineup, head to BlackStar'swebsite.
Boston Globe
4 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Raymond Saunders, painter who rejected racial pigeonholes, dies at 90
Mr. Saunders prided himself on his independence from movements. In 1967, he published a now-famous polemical pamphlet, 'Black Is a Color,' which rebutted an article by poet Ishmael Reed, a leader of the Black Arts Movement. Breaking with the collective spirit of the '60s, Mr. Saunders argued that Black artists should not feel obligated to share social goals, or to use their work to lobby for political change. He wanted to be seen as an American artist rather than be ghettoized as a Black one. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Can't we get clear of these degrading limitations,' he wrote, 'and recognize the wider reality of art where color is the means and not the end?' Advertisement Still, he was not averse to exploring questions of identity in his work. 'He wasn't throwing his fist in the air,' artist Dewey Crumpler, a friend of his in Oakland, observed. 'It was more subtle.' Mr. Saunders was known for elegant paintings that usually began with an all-black background and ended up as semiabstract compendiums of chalk-scrawled notations and paper scraps. They were often compared to the 'combine paintings' of Robert Rauschenberg, whose voluptuous accumulations of castoff objects exemplified the material plenitude of postwar America. Advertisement Yet Mr. Saunders had a restrained and almost spartan touch. When he glued a choice morsel of collage material — say, a torn-off scrap of Chinese calligraphy, or a panel from a Flash Gordon comic book — to a canvas, he left lots of empty space around it, isolating and framing his finds as if to call attention to their radiance. You could say he foregrounded the magic of art and left blackness in the background. His work was underrecognized for years, but it achieved a new visibility in 2022, when the Andrew Kreps Gallery gave him his first show in New York since 1998. At a time when the art world was determined to correct the racial slights and oversights of the past, Mr. Saunders was an obvious candidate for reappraisal. Last year, Kreps joined forces with the powerful David Zwirner Gallery to organize an expanded view of Mr. Saunders' work in New York. A well-received retrospective followed in short order at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, Mr. Saunders' hometown. Mr. Saunders did not attend the shows in New York or Pittsburgh, his friends said. 'His community was here, in the Bay Area,' said Julie Casemore, who represents his work at her Casemore Gallery in San Francisco. 'His home was here.' Mr. Saunders had settled in the Bay Area in 1968 and lived in the Rockridge section of Oakland, in a two-story house that also served as his studio. The interior was crammed with bric-a-brac and mounds of source material for his work, much of which he had gathered on sojourns in Europe and Asia. He did his painting in his yard, on a bright white wooden deck that was designed to receive direct sunlight for most of the day. He called it 'the arena.' A stylish dresser, he liked to exchange his paint-stained duds for the pleated garments of Japanese designer Issey Miyake when he went out at night. Advertisement Mr. Saunders lived within walking distance of the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), where he taught painting from 1987 until his retirement in 2013. He was known to invite an entire class to accompany him on his trips to galleries and restaurants, or to stop for lunch at his house. Kevin Demery, a former student of his who now teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute, recalled an afternoon when he and his classmates were seated in Mr. Saunders' dining room sharing 'a robust charcuterie board.' Midway through lunch, the students were alarmed to realize that their professor had disappeared. 'I walked into his living room and saw through the windows that he was painting on his deck,' Demery said in an interview. 'Once we became a vibrant community, he let us thrive without him.' An elusive figure who seldom gave interviews, Mr. Saunders declined to muse on the meaning of his paintings or to disclose details about his childhood, even among friends. He was so private that his friends say they aren't sure whether he was ever married or not. Raymond Jennings Saunders was born on Oct. 28, 1934, in Homestead, Pa., a borough of Allegheny County just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. He and his three sisters were raised by their mother, Emma Marie (Hewitt) Saunders, who struggled to support them on her income as a maid. The family eventually moved into public housing, in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. His nephew Frank said that Mr. Saunders never learned the identity of his father. Advertisement In addition to Frank Saunders, Raymond Saunders is survived by a number of other nephews and nieces and his younger sister, Rossetta Burden. Bucky, as Raymond was nicknamed as a boy, found an early supporter in Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, a white educator who taught art at Schenley High School in Pittsburgh and who also presided over a class for gifted art students every Saturday morning at the Carnegie Institute. Fitzpatrick offered essential encouragement to budding artists, including Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. In later life, asked to name the artists who had shaped his work, Mr. Saunders instead credited his schooling. 'I am from Pittsburgh,' he said, 'and they had an unusual and outstanding program for kids.' By the time he had graduated from Schenley, Mr. Saunders was decorated with awards. Moving to Philadelphia, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a scholarship from the National Scholastic Art Contest. In 1959, he returned to Pittsburgh and transferred his college credits to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon), where he received his bachelor's degree in fine arts the next year. After living in California for a year to earn a Master of Arts in fine arts at California State University, Hayward (now East Bay), Mr. Saunders moved to New York, the country's art capital. Most established galleries declined to exhibit work by Black artists in that era, but Mr. Saunders found an ally in Terry Dintenfass, a well-regarded gallerist on East 67th Street in Manhattan who represented Jacob Lawrence, an older and much-acclaimed painter of Black life and history. Dintenfass gave Mr. Saunders his debut show at the gallery, in 1964. Reviewing it in The New York Times, critic Brian O'Doherty described Mr. Saunders as 'essentially a conservative painter with a good eye.' Advertisement Mr. Saunders returned to California to join the faculty of Cal State in Hayward. He continued teaching, he said, less to earn a paycheck than to repay the educational advantages of his hardscrabble youth. A fervent traveler, he purchased a second home in Paris, a former fire station in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood on the Left Bank, where he hosted art classes in the summer. But his influence extended not only to his students. Among his admirers was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the precocious art star who emerged in the New York art boom of the early 1980s. Some of Basquiat's paintings, with their graffiti-style markings and floating masks inscribed against flat fields of blue, bore a curious similarity to Mr. Saunders' tastefully disjointed imagery. Basquiat made multiple attempts to contact Mr. Saunders, apparently without success, before his untimely death in 1988. 'Basquiat tried to reach Raymond Saunders when he came to San Francisco,' Ishmael Reed, with whom Mr. Saunders had sparred decades earlier, told The Amsterdam News of Harlem in 2022. Poet Bill Berkson, who taught at the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute, related that he once offered a scholarship to Basquiat but the artist demurred. 'I'll only come if you get Ray Saunders to teach there,' Berkson quoted him as saying. Mr. Saunders, with his usual aversion to discussing his work and its critical reception, had little to say about Basquiat's regard for his work. Advertisement Crumpler, his Oakland friend, once tried to draw him out on the subject. 'When I looked at Basquiat's work for the first time, I knew he was biting Ray,' Crumpler said in an interview. 'I told Ray, 'Basquiat is biting your work all day and night.' Ray just smiled.' This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
5 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Tom Lehrer, math whiz who found international fame as a musical satirist, dies at 97
And the Black folks hate the white folks, To hate all but the right folks Is an old established rule. Liberals uneasy at having to show so much tolerance during what he lampooned as 'National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week' didn't get a free pass, either. He told them to take heart, though: 'It's only for a week, so have no fear/Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Lehrer, a youthful math prodigy who rose to unlikely international acclaim in the 1950s and '60s with witty songs he began composing and performing as a Harvard student, was 97 when he died Saturday in his Cambridge home. Advertisement He was as sharp as ever intellectually this year, his friends said, adding that even in recent months, batting snippets of song lyrics back and forth was a staple of dinner conversations at Mr. Lehrer's home. 'His main quality as a friend was being loving and endlessly affectionate, though at the same time he was fanatically unsentimental,' said the writer and editor Advertisement As a clever lyricist, Mr. Lehrer had such an unerring ear that for years reporters and critics invoked his name when writing about musical satire. Particularly in the political realm, 'a Tom Lehrer song' was the yardstick against which success was measured. Social or political, no topic was off-limits as he gleefully satirized the Army (' In early 1953, while a graduate student at Harvard University, he recorded an album of what he called 'some allegedly humorous songs' he had written. The initial 400 copies of 'Songs by Tom Lehrer' were mostly intended for relatives and friends, but Mr. Lehrer 'underestimated the national incidence of delayed adolescence,' he joked a few years later, in the annual report of his Harvard class. Over the years, reissues of the album and a few others he released sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Mr. Lehrer took time away from graduate studies to tour nationally and internationally, until largely stepping back from performing in 1960. Occasional concerts followed — along with TV appearances, mostly in other countries. In a Harvard class report, Mr. Lehrer quipped that he landed 'only a few brief non-primetime appearances in the United States, where standards are presumably higher.' In 1965, he released ' Advertisement A few years later, he contributed educational songs to 'The Electric Company,' a children's TV show. In 1980, 'Tomfoolery' — a musical revue of his songs — opened in London and later was produced in the United States and other countries. A book, 'Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer,' was published in 1981. Earlier in his career, Mr. Lehrer taught math at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wellesley College. 'As unsentimental as he was, he loved the unaffected sincerity and enthusiasm of students,' Kummer said. 'As cynical as he appeared, he completely admired people who weren't cynical but were fresh and raring to show the world their ambition and talent.' For Mr. Lehrer, teaching filled a need that the applause of strangers sitting out beyond the stage lights never satisfied. 'There's bliss and there's delight,' he told The Boston Globe in 1983. 'I'm more interested in delight. Bliss is one state. Humor and mathematics are full of delight. That's where my interest is.' In his later career, Mr. Lehrer lived in Cambridge and spent the winter months teaching courses at the University of California Santa Cruz, in American musical comedy and the nature of mathematics. Income from his music allowed him to teach part time. 'Aside from writing an occasional song and traveling a bit,' he wrote in 1977, 'I spend most of the rest of the year puttering, interrupted now and then by frittering.' Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in New York City on April 9, 1928. Advertisement Studying piano as a child, he set aside classical pieces to focus on musical theater. 'I would do the absolute minimum amount of practicing I would need for my lesson, and then spend hours picking out popular songs,' he told the Globe in 1984. He was 15 upon arriving at Harvard as a freshman in 1943 as part of the class of '47. While writing amusing songs such as 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard,' which poked fun at his college, Mr. Lehrer finished a bachelor's degree in mathematics early, in 1946, and completed a master's the next year, at age 19. He then began years of mathematics doctoral studies at Harvard and wrote that he eventually left 'a thesis shy of a Ph.D.' Stints with the Atomic Energy Commission in New Mexico and at a Cambridge research firm were followed by two years in the Army, working in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1950s. By the late 1950s, his music was attracting considerable attention. With songs that parodied folk music (' But Mr. Lehrer had tired of touring by the early 1960s, despite the chance to travel to other continents. While 'the actual performing part wasn't unpleasant,' he said, being on the road had run its course. 'As I used to tell people, 'Once you've been to Detroit, there's no need to go to Cincinnati,' ' he told the Globe in 1984. Advertisement With longtime friends, Mr. Lehrer 'was incredibly delightful to be with, as anyone who loves his work will be unsurprised to hear,' Kummer said. Fans also wouldn't be shocked to know that 'he revered lyricists,' Kummer added. As a songwriter, Mr. Lehrer was particularly deft with openings, such in as ' First you get down on your knees Fiddle with your rosaries Bow your head with great respect And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect! Do whatever steps you want if You have cleared them with the pontiff Nearly five years ago, Mr. Lehrer wrote on his website that he had relinquished the rights to his songs, and that all his lyrics 'whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.' Such generosity struck many as in keeping with his character. He had always been self-deprecating about so much in his life, including the decades-long success he enjoyed for recording only a few dozen tunes. 'It's very flattering that people remember the songs and have kept them alive all these years,' he told the Globe in 1984, 'but it's a little unreal.' Bryan Marquard can be reached at
