Real Journalism. Written by Real People.
Among the most powerful recent exhibitions I’ve visited in the city, Shahidul Alam: Truth to Power at the Rubin Museum on West 17th Street chronicles the four-decade career of the prolific Bangladeshi photographer, writer, and activist Shahidul Alam. The first major U.S. museum retrospective of his work, the exhibition features both film and digital photography, Alam’s writing, contact sheets, and […]
Horror Stories, the memoir by recording artist Liz Phair, is not a bad book, but it’s an odd one with which to have made her debut as a writer, and it’s certainly not the one fans of her music will wish she’d have written. Despite Phair’s assertion that it’s her “effort to slow everything down and take a look at […]
Wigs often become the scene-stealer when musicians, actors and actresses make a fashionable statement with colorful, avant-garde hairpieces. In no particular order, we’ve rounded up some of the best wigs worn by celebrities since the late 1960s. Diana Ross: This is Wig Bar founder Isaac Davidson’s favorite celebrity wig. Ross wore this while singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man […]
Robert Manning used to be a manufacturer in Sunset Park, and he’d like to be one again. As neighborhood groups fight to preserve and renew Brooklyn’s working waterfront amid a possible rezoning of Industry City, the New York City native hopes to make a case for his own longstanding proposal to create a textile manufacturing hub with the help of […]
Off the Hook, a Falconworks program at Red Hook’s PS 15, continues to create original youth theater for 11-to-14-year-olds. The latest performances took place in November. There were 15 participants and three different plays (acts). The playwrights, who also act, all live in Red Hook. The authors were Ilse Menke (The Tea), Leryri Crus-Ramirez (The News) and Abigail Romero-Montero (Intoxicated). […]
The following is an interview with artist Dustin Yellin, founder of Pioneer Works. RHSR: What’s the genesis of your work? Yellin: The works in this building are of the three hands: the Descriptive, the Prescriptive, and the Impossible. The Descriptive being how do you use different mediums to tell stories, narrative stories, and that’s what you see happening in the […]
Juan Carlos Pinto is our artist. Originally from Guatemala, Pinto has made Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, his home for the past ten years. Pinto and I met at Vox Pop in Ditmas Park. Now closed, Vox Pop was an artist cafe-bar. A place where people gathered to create. Unlike other gentrified parts of NYC, Vox Pop was a home to Brooklyn […]
Andro Wekua November 1 – December 21, 2019 515 West 24th Street, New York On the same block of Chelsea where I once spent a fantastic summer as an unpaid gallery intern is the W. 24th Street location of the infamous Gladstone Gallery. The gallery boasts a stunning roster of artists, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Amy Sillman. This month, I […]
Like most people, my introduction to Jamaican music started with Bob Marley, whose aptly titled hits collection Legend set my standard for all other reggae music. Soon after I discovered Peter Tosh, Toots and The Maytals, Black Uhuru, and more. A family trip to Jamaica in the spring of ‘87 exposed me to the dancehall styles of Admiral Bailey and […]
For an artist of such enormous popularity for such a long period of time, Prince was never one to fall in line with expectations. He played sexuality and spirituality side by side, willfully crossed perceived lines of race, gender and musical genre and insisted on musical autonomy where most artists in his league happily cash the corporate checks. So an […]
Having heard about a show featuring The Glow, a band whose current lineup featured musicians from other groups I admire; Teen Body, whom I had wanted to hear live; and Sean Henry, a band releasing a record on one of my favorite labels, I knew this was not one to miss. I was further intrigued that the show was hosted […]
Today, hearing Afrobeats punching through speakers in many NYC bars and clubs is the norm. The rise of Afrobeats in recent years tells an interesting story about music’s ever-evolving landscape. Afrobeats isn’t Dancehall or Reggaeton, yet these genres do have a shared ancestry, surprisingly or not. Much like hip hop, Afrobeats’ far-reaching roots have made the genre a poignant sound […]
Would jazz have anywhere the accumulated history if its development had not coincided with that of audio recording and reproduction technology? As an art form, it’s gloriously impure, not only stitched together at its base with musical ideas from multiple traditions but integrated into the rise of the record business from the very start – two important early jazz labels, […]