In a December 2020 interview with The Washington Post, Alexis McGill Johnson, the newly installed president of Planned Parenthood, recalled speaking with a woman who told the story about her mother as a college student discovering that she was pregnant and how afraid she was to tell her parents. “Her brother was a flight attendant, … Read more
The ambitious undertaking in the traveling exhibition Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem to summarize the prodigious achievements of artists of African descent over the last century astounds in its impressive displays. There is the larger-than-life oil canvas portrait of Kevin the Kiteman, a 2016 work by Jordan Casteel, set against a … Read more
What appears to be a genuinely holistic appreciation of the potential of home in all of its meta dynamics will anchor the forthcoming premiere of Home Run by the internationally renowned Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. It is worth thinking about this hour-long concert as a documentary shorts program one might see at a film festival. Set … Read more
Consumerism always trumps political ideology. Making the argument against it appears to be more difficult than ever. In the digital version of the award-winning multimedia theatrical piece, Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, which was presented this year in Sundance’s New Frontier platform, the fascinating post-mortem begins with details of an actual … Read more
A documentary about a jazz pianist-film composer who talks with his 91-year-old grandfather about a lifetime journey that took him from the Jim Crow era days of Florida to Los Angeles as a successful business owner and another about a filmmaker recalling a 50-year-old incident when he was among the students who bullied another fifth-grade … Read more
No Sundance experience should ever go without visiting the festival’s New Frontier programming. One of the best options is Weirdo Night, a filmed version of a popular underground show that has attracted a solid following in Los Angeles. The 42-minute episode, which was filmed last summer and was discovered online by a Sundance programmer, is … Read more
When Passing was published in 1929, Nella Larsen’s literary career was on the cusp of greater visibility. She had dedicated the novel to Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, white patrons of Harlem Renaissance creators. They also had supported the work of Gertrude Stein and other gay writers of the time. Shortly after Passing was … Read more
Just a quick glimpse of Lowell High School in San Francisco, the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi, tells the viewer that what matters most are not the flashy amenities of other campuses but instead the experiences of what it means to be an academic powerhouse. At Lowell, a public school where a … Read more
In the U.S., the art of dance has been a revolutionary art form. Dance artists and choreographers have expanded the possibilities of movement languages and their own distinctive vocabularies to produce work that often speaks to the urgency of the contemporary dynamics socially, politically and culturally through magnificent storytelling without the necessity of text. It … Read more
In 1965, as the last sessions of Vatican II concluded in Rome, the number of Catholic nuns in the U.S. had reached its highest point of 180,000. Five years later, the numbers already had declined by nearly 10 percent and by late 2019, there were just 31,350. In 1970, when three-fourths of the Sisters of … Read more