Weekend guide: Black History Month art and eats and an Anti-Valentines Day party
The big picture: The annual show at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry celebrates well-known and emerging Black artists, creatives and innovators.
Flashback: Chicago Defender staffers started the program in 1970 as a tribute to Black culture and heritage, and extended it beyond art with live music, dance and theater.
The vibe: This year's exhibit includes 150 artworks from nearly 100 different artists, including work by teens and mediums ranging from acrylics, oils, collage, dry painting, clay, plaster, and more.
💭 Moyo's thought bubble: These displays of Black art are truly remarkable. The attention to detail, rich colors, and diverse styles are something I wish we could experience more often in public viewings.
If you go:"Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition" is open now through April 27 at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.
🎟️ Cost: Tickets start at $25.95
Illinois residents can take advantage of free admission on select days this month: Feb. 9-13, 18-20, and 24-27.
🤳🏾 Behind the scenes: Check out some of my favorite artworks.
More things to do this weekend in Chicago:
🧘♀️ Family Day | Comfy Cozy
Snuggle up with the family for tea making and other interactive art workshops, music and movement.
Saturday 11am-3pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Streeterville.
Plus, there will be a sound bath meditative experience to calm your mind, body and spirit.
Cost: Free
Afrofuturism: The Freedom Metropolis:
Dance to the sounds of Africana music spanning jazz, soul, hip-hop, African-American spiritual and Afrobeat as part of Uniting Voices' Black Futures concert series.
Friday at 11am at the Chicago Symphony Center in the Loop.
Free, but must RSVP
🤑 Bingo Logo
Grab your friends and cards for a night of Bingo (yes, it's cool!), dance-offs, lip-sync battles and more.
Friday at 8pm at the Morgan MFG in the West Loop.
Cost: Tickets start at $35
Travis
Dust off your old CDs ahead of the band's Chicago stop on their "Raze the Bar" tour.
Saturday at 7:30pm at the Vic Theater in Lakeview.
Cost: Tickets start at $72
🐍 Lunar New Year Celebrations
Celebrate the Year of the Snake with bright colors of floats, the sounds of marching bands and the sights of traditional dragon and lion dancing.
Saturday 10am-4pm at Argyle and Sheridan in Uptown and Sunday 1pm at 24th Street and Wentworth Avenue in Chinatown.
Cost: Free
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Boston Globe
4 hours ago
- Boston Globe
He made Green-Wood Cemetery a destination for the living
Around the office were a half-dozen Smeck signature guitars that Moylan had collected for the cemetery, along with books, CDs and artwork associated with other people interred there. Advertisement 'We have Leonard Bernstein,' he said. Also F.A.O. Schwarz (toys), Eberhard Faber (pencils) and Samuel Morse (code). But of filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who was cremated at the cemetery in 2019, Moylan lamented, 'I don't think we have him.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up (It is a sore spot with Moylan that so many families choose to scatter their loved ones' remains rather than entomb at least some of them at Green-Wood, where future generations might gather to visit them.) Green-Wood, which sits on 478 rolling, tree-filled acres in a semi-industrial neighborhood that real estate agents call Greenwood Heights, occupies a distinctive place in New York City and in the development of American cemeteries. First opened in 1838, it was in the 19th century the second-most-popular attraction in the state, after Niagara Falls, and inspired the competition to design Central Park and Prospect Park. Advertisement Moylan, who started working at the cemetery during law school and never left, has the rare distinction of taking over an established institution and utterly transforming it, turning it into a National Historic Landmark with 450,000 annual visitors. On a garishly perfect June afternoon, the cemetery's towering neo-Gothic arch entryway, home to a group of noisy monk parakeets, welcomed a few dozen visitors to the grounds. (All proceeded on foot; the cemetery does not allow bicycles, scooters or roller skates.) A couple of trolleys, used for weekend guided tours, sat idle on one of the extensive, labyrinthine paths. Smoke from an earlier ceremony wafted from a large dish by a koi pond in an area known as the Tranquility Garden. The garden and smoke reflect the changing neighborhood around Green-Wood, which has become heavily Asian American. When Moylan took over Green-Wood in 1986, the cemetery was closed to tourists or people drawn to the open space. Visitors had to tell guards at the gate which grave they intended to visit. 'That was when people were breaking in and stealing stained-glass windows and stealing bronze bars and doors off mausoleums,' Moylan said. Even so, he allowed, the tight security was choking off the life of the institution. 'I mean, Ken Jackson from Columbia, he was turned away,' Moylan said, referring to the Bancroft Prize-winning historian and author of 'Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery.' If people tried to take photos within the cemetery, guards would rip the film out of their cameras. Then, around 1999, Moylan was attending a cremation convention in Baltimore (as one does) and decided to visit a nearby cemetery where John Wilkes Booth is buried, among other historical figures. 'And on this Saturday afternoon, there was no one in the place -- no one,' Moylan said. 'And I thought: This can't happen in Brooklyn. We can't have 478 acres of land, and we're basically not allowing people to enjoy it.' Advertisement Moylan started to court visitors, in part for financial reasons -- as more people choose cremation over more remunerative burials, cemeteries have fallen on hard times. Opening the gates gives people more opportunities to consider spending eternity there. Current plot prices start around $22,000. Over the years, Moylan added green burials and was persuaded to allow the grass to grow wild in one area to attract pollinators, a practice that has upset some families whose relatives are buried there. The cemetery created an artist-in-residence program and commissioned new sculptures, including an obelisk by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, with a slot into which visitors are invited to slip notes describing their secrets. Work is now finishing on a $34 million welcome center and gallery in a restored 1895 greenhouse across the street. Money came from the city and state, recognizing Green-Wood as a cultural institution, not just a place where people are buried. Moylan had hoped the welcome center would open before his retirement, but he has left it to his successor, Meera Joshi, a former deputy mayor who resigned earlier this year when the Trump administration moved to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams, in apparent exchange for his help with the president's deportation agenda. It makes sense for someone who has spent his life in a cemetery to develop a particular relationship with death. Moylan, who is divorced and has no children, does not have a will -- despite a quadruple-bypass operation in 2020 -- and does not much care whether he will be buried or cremated. 'I'm not a big believer in an afterlife, so I don't think it'll really matter very much,' he said. Advertisement He said he likes to visit the graves of his parents and writer Pete Hamill, who bought a plot near that of Boss Tweed, a 19th century Tammany Hall power broker and scofflaw. 'If you're going to spend an eternity,' Hamill once said, 'better with a rogue than with a saint who would drive you into slumber.' As for Moylan's next chapter, he hopes to travel to some of the world's great cemeteries that he has not visited, and to brush up on his guitar skills, which he had once hoped would lead him to Roy Smeckian glory. He kept one of the Smeck guitars, a Gibson he had bought himself; the remainder, along with all the art, is now Joshi's domain. Beyond that, there is a planned move to Staten Island, followed, eventually, by a return to Green-Wood, with or without the possibility of an afterlife. 'Ultimately,' he said, 'I will be with Mom and Dad.' This article originally appeared in
Buzz Feed
5 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
Superman Is Super Woke According To MAGA Supporters
It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's grown adults upset over a classic superhero in tights, and what he stands for. Superman hit theaters on July 11. It was written and directed by James Gunn and stars David Corenswet, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Brosnahan, Edi Gathegi, Nathan Fillion, and more. At this point, everyone knows that Superman is an alien from another planet who humans raised to eventually become the superpowered hero in the red and blue tights. But when James recently referred to Superman as an "immigrant," all hell broke loose. In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, James said, "Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me, it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost." James's comments sparked immediate backlash from the far-right MAGA crowd. Even though the original comic was created in 1938 by the sons of actual immigrants, and Superman was sent to Earth to make a better life for himself after his planet was destroyed, they accused the film of being "too woke." Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway said, "We don't go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us." Fox News host Jesse Watters said in the same segment, "You know what it says on his cape? MS-13," referring to the Salvadoran gang that's designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Ben Shapiro may have agreed that Superman is technically an immigrant but argued that he's a man "who assimilates to American values and then brings those classic American values to the big city." Actor Dean Cain, who played Superman in the 1990s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, agreed with Jesse Watters, saying to TMZ, "How woke is Hollywood going to make this character? How much is Disney going to change their Snow White? Why are they going to change these characters to exist for the times?" Dean continued, "For Superman, it was 'truth, justice in the American way.' Well, they dropped that … I don't think is a great idea. I think if you want to create a new character, go ahead and do that. But for me, Superman has always stood for 'truth, justice, and the American way' — and the American way is tremendously immigrant friendly. But there are rules. You can't come in saying, 'I want to get rid of all the rules in America because I wanted to be more like Somalia.' Well, that doesn't work, because you had to leave Somalia to come here — so it doesn't make any sense. If people are coming for economic opportunity, let's take a look at your government and why you don't have that economic opportunity … And there have to be limits, because we can't have everybody here in the United States … our society will will fail." Ironically, the internet quickly resurfaced a clip from Season 4, episode 14 of Dean's series where Superman is stopped by an "immigration and naturalization" officer asking for his green card. Even the 2001 TV series Smallville had an entire storyline where Tom Welling's Clark Kent referred to himself as "an illegal immigrant" when justifying to his mom why he wanted to help a friend from being deported. So, I had the pleasure of seeing the Gunn's Superman reboot. While things that certain groups consider "too progressive" don't cause me a meltdown, I find it disturbing that people are accusing superheroes of being "too woke." For decades, comic book superheroes have been characters who come from different planets, sometimes with abilities that set them apart from average society, and heck, some of them even find themselves at odds with world governments and authority because they challenge the status quo. It has ALWAYS been the superhero agenda since its iteration. The only difference is that there was a time when American values aspired to fight for the same causes as Captain America, Superman, and Batman, and not the bad guys. Today, it feels like it might be harder to swallow that Lex Luthor, a genius tech billionaire who colludes with political figures for his agenda could be the villain in the story. Thanos, Magneto, Doctor Doom, and these larger-than-life supervillains who use their power, wealth, influence, and exact vengeful and hypocritical tyranny on people who don't align with them are hitting too close to home nowadays. If our world leaders' talking points start sounding more and more like something a Bond villain would say, it's not the fictional superhero that got "too woke," or changed for the worse — it's our society. And heck, don't just take my word for it. Although MAGA enthusiasts might decry the idea of Superman being an immigrant fighting for truth, justice, and the progressive American way, there are a lot of folks pointing out that the backlash is wrong. Aside from the celebrities involved in the film, the rest of the internet is having a field day shutting down the backlash against Superman being "took woke." Here's what some folks are saying: And finally, this X user held nothing back, saying, "You're uncomfortable by the acts of kindness cause you're fucking evil. The movie isn't woke. You're just fucking evil." She called out people who claim Superman is "superwoke" for trying to push a political message when the message is just "be kind to other regardless of who they are." What are your thoughts?
Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
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At the Huntington, the New Hollywood String Quartet recalls legendary studio musicians
When four top film studio musicians formed the Hollywood String Quartet in the late 1930s, its name was presumed an oxymoron. Exalted string quartet devotees belittled film soundtracks, while studio heads had a reputation for shunning classical music longhairs. The musicians spent two intense years in rehearsal before disbanding when war broke out, and the quartet was brought back together in 1947 by two of its founders, Felix Slatkin (concertmaster of 20th Century Fox Studio Orchestra) and his wife, Eleanor Aller (principal cellist of the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra). Oxymoron or not, Hollywood produced the first notable American string quartet. Throughout the 1950s, the ensemble made a series of revelatory LPs for Capitol Records performing the late Beethoven string quartets and much else, while also joining Frank Sinatra in his torchy classic, 'Close to You.' Everything that the Hollywood String Quartet touched was distinctive; every recording remains a classic. The legacy of the Hollywood String Quartet is a celebration of Hollywood genre-busting and also of string quartet making. Today, the outstanding Lyris Quartet is one of many outstanding string quartets who can be heard in the latest blockbusters. Another is the New Hollywood String Quartet, which is devoting its annual four-day summer festival to honoring its inspiration as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. The quartet's festival began Thursday night and runs through Sunday in San Marino at the Huntington's Rothenberg Hall. The repertory is taken from the earlier group's old recordings. And the concerts are introduced by Slatkin and Aller's oldest son, who as a young boy fell asleep to his parents and their colleagues rehearsing in his living room after dinner. The celebrated conductor Leonard Slatkin credits his vociferous musical appetite to his parents, who, he said Thursday, enjoyed the great scores written in this golden age of movie music and also championed new classical music as well as the masterpieces of the past. L.A. had no opera company in those days, and Slatkin said his parents likened film scores to modern opera scores. Just about everyone has heard his parents in one film or another. Take 'Jaws,' which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. That's Aller's cello evoking John Williams' shark-scary earworm. You've no doubt heard New Hollywood violinists Tereza Stanislav and Rafael Rishik, violist Robert Brophy and cellist Andrew Shulman on some movie. IMDb counts Brophy alone as participating on 522 soundtracks. You might also have heard one or more of the musicians in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Opera Orchestra or Los Angeles Philharmonic. The New Hollywood's programming may not encompass the original quartet's range, but it is nonetheless a mixed selection of pieces that have somewhat fallen by the wayside, such as Borodin's Second String Quartet. The original quartet's performances and swashbuckling recording of the Borodin surely caught the attention of L.A. director Edwin Lester. In 1953 Lester created and premiered the musical 'Kismet,' which adapts parts of the Borodin quartet, for Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, before it went on to be a hit on Broadway. Times have changed and the New Hollywood brings a more robust tone and more overt interaction to its effusive interpretation compared with the silken and playful Slatkin and crew, who were all Russian-trained players. Hugo Wolf's short 'Italian Serenade,' which opened the program, was here lush and Italianate, while on an early 1950s disc it dances more lightly. The big work was César Franck's Piano Quintet. Slatkin noted that the recording, released in 1955, didn't sell well, probably thanks to the album cover's saturnine painting of a composer that few would recognize. Slatkin also noted that his parents weren't enamored of their performance, but then again, he explained that they were temperamentally ever ready to find fault. That recording, which features his uncle, Victor Aller, a graceful pianist, is slow and commanding. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was the right guest in every way for the big-boned performance at the Huntington. He is a French pianist with a flair for German music, well suited for the Belgian French composer's Wagner-inspired score. Thibaudet is also a longtime L.A. resident and an especially versatile performer who happens to be featured on the new soundtrack recording of Dario Marianelli's 'Pride & Prejudice,' which tops Billboard's classical and classical crossover charts. He and Slatkin also go back decades, having performed together and become such good friends that the conductor turned pages for him in the Franck. Seeing the 80-year-old Slatkin onstage evoked a remarkable sense of history, reminiscent of the roots to L.A.'s musical openness that his parents represented. On my drive home Thursday, I couldn't resist following the route Albert Einstein would have taken after practicing his violin when he lived a 12-minute bike ride away during his Caltech years — the time Slatkin's parents were making music history at the studios. Like them, Einstein played with the L.A. Philharmonic (although invited once not because he was a good violinist but because he was Einstein). The New Hollywood and Thibaudet made no effort to relive the past in Franck's quintet. Instead, in their opulence and expressive explosiveness, they showed Hollywood how to produce a remake that's magnificent. In the meantime, Leonard Slatkin, who is a former music director of the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl, returns later this month to the venue where his parents met in 1935 at a Hollywood Bowl Symphony competition. He will conduct a July 24 program that includes a recent work by the next generation of Slatkins. His son, Daniel, is a film and television composer.
