Real Journalism. Written by Real People.
By Casey Mahoney For those familiar with the exquisite essays of Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future will be comforting terrain. Hustvedt’s latest circles her more pressing themes of female erasure, the fallibility of memory, and the bizarre fact that imagination always plays a role in our sense of the “present.” The situations in this novel are also familiar, namely, artists behaving oddly, cruelly, or bravely. While readers of Hustvedt’s […]
How does one make art from catastrophe? Look to Eleanor Kipping for her answer. Strange Fruit, a hybridized art performance and installation piece, is a sculptural, theatrical, and poetic representation of Black oppression throughout American history. Hundreds of black plastic afro picks dusted with gold leaf are suspended from the ceiling by transparent fishing line. They hang at various, scattered heights, […]
As the band’s bio explains: “Old-time is the music of square dances and school houses, church picnics and farm potlucks. It is the music heard on front porches while your hands are busy threshing beans or shelling corn. It is the music of the country, before country music was commercial… We are passionate about playing an Ozark music repertoire not just because it’s a local tradition that deserves to be carried on, but also because it’s a vibrant part of an ever-growing community in the Ozarks. Our rich tradition of music goes far beyond the “hillbilly” stereotypes and cultural tourism that often mask our region.”
It was a night of firsts at the Brooklyn Historical Society. On March 5, nearly 200 city residents gathered in the Great Hall to celebrate the launch of “When Brooklyn was Queer,” a new book by historian and curator Hugh Ryan that traces the untold history of the borough’s LGBTQ+ community – from the publication of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of […]
Through April 28, Theatre for a New Audience presents a clear and forceful production of Shakespeare’s 1599 tragedy, “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.” Director Shana Cooper’s take is a great lucid rendering that accentuates the plays core themes and conflicts, even as the production careens into one too many air-knife-fights that turn the tragedy into a Mortal Combat training site. […]
Photographer Denys Trofimchuk, originally from Rivne, Ukraine, moved to New York seven years ago. Though he’s been doing photography full-time since 2015, he first picked up a camera when he lived in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, years ago and learned the craft through trial-and-error during the cold winter months. Now he shoots a lot of film and portraits, including some fashion […]
“Marjana and The Forty Thieves” is a modern retelling from the minds of the Target Margin Theater Company of The One Thousand and One Nights, directed by David Herskovits. Broken into three distinct acts, each with a unique style of storytelling, the play enthusiastically immerses the viewer in a tactile world of storytale. The collaborative, unbridled energy and years of […]
It’s hard to know where to start with the artist Morgan O’Hara. Since the late 70s, she’s drawn over 4,000 pieces from everyday life — dinner with some lively Italians, a Noam Chomsky lecture, a Taiwanese Lion Dance performance — works she calls “Live Transmission.” On first approach, you’ll see a condense fog of scribbles or a soft web of […]
Feb 17 was a chilly Sunday night in Red Hook but there was a hot party at the Peninsula Art Space at 352 Van Brunt: the opening of a show called Viel Feind, Viel Ehr. Passing through the folks who had spilled out on the sidewalk to smoke and chat, I found my way into the gallery where Red Hook’s […]
March 1 Pioneer Works welcomes the Danish artist Joep Van Lieshoutfor for a three-decade survey of his work with “Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth.” The artist may be best known for his mobile homes that question domestic life (that or large scale cartoonish replicas of human genitalia). Atelier is an intentional misnomer, echoing his attention […]
Inspired by Black History Month, Calvary Baptist Church staged a work of community theater, Brother to Brother, which sought to honor both African-American luminaries of the past and ordinary Brooklynites of the present. The performance took place on Sunday, February 24, at 773 Hicks Street, with a cast of 25 locals. Drama Ministry Director Betty Moorning, a deaconess at the […]
On the last Sunday of each month, at 6 p.m., a potluck for “creatives” – officially the DIN DIN Curated Community Potluck – takes place at 41 Seabring Street. The venue, DE-CONSTRUKT, is a self-described “design studio, photography darkroom, event studio, and project space,” founded by the artist Laura Arena, who has lived in Red Hook for more than a […]
Vice Adam Mckay’s latest film “Vice” begins with a dramatically posed question from an unspecified narrator: how is a man like Dick Cheney (played by Christian Bale)- a man who as the vice-president expanded executive power and drastically increased America’s foreign influence almost invisibly-made? For all its initial emphasis on Cheney’s subtlety and self-erasure from politics, the film mirrors none […]