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Solway Gallery announces the passing of Jay Bolotin
CINCINNATI, OH.- Solway Gallery announced the passing of Jay Bolotin; father, artist, composer, songwriter, filmmaker, and life-long friend to so many. Despite navigating a long illness, Jay worked passionately up until his death on May 14, 2024. Jay was seventy-five years old. Jay is survived by his son Ezra Bolotin, and Ezra's fiancée, Ally Orosco of Seattle, his daughter Simone Bolotin and son-in-law Colin Malone along with grandchildren, Harrison Malone (age 9) and Georgiana Malone (age 6), of New York, and sister Susan Bolotin of Lexington KY. A memorial for Jay will be announced in the near future on social media. Jay Bolotin, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was born 1949 in Fayette County, Kentucky. He was a prolific artist who worked across an expansive range of mediums — making drawings, prints, sculptures, designing sets, composing ... More

SFMOMA announces new details regarding major commission by Kara Walker
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art today announced additional details for its forthcoming installation by artist Kara Walker in the museum’s admission-free, street-level Roberts Family Gallery. The complete title for the presentation is Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker. It will open to the public on July 1, 2024, and remain on view through May 2026. The presentation marks the first time that SFMOMA has commissioned an artist to create a site-specific installation for the Roberts Family Gallery, following other major exhibitions in the space including Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity, JR’s digital mural ... More

'Megalopolis' premieres at Cannes: First reaction
CANNES.- Late in “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s plaintively hopeful movie about — well, everything under the sun — a character speaks to the power of love. It’s a wistful moment in a fascinating film aswirl with wild visions, lofty ideals, cinematic allusions, literary references, historical footnotes and self-reflexive asides, all of which Coppola has funneled into a fairly straightforward story about a man with a plan. It is a great big plan from a great big man in a great big movie, one whose sincerity is finally as moving as its unbounded artistic ambition. “Megalopolis,” which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is Coppola’s first movie since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen, small-scale horror fantasy. “Megalopolis” is far larger in every respect, though at this point it’s an open question whether it will reach ... More

'Nobody Cares' about Laura Benanti, but they let her entertain them
NEW YORK, NY.- Laura Benanti’s show “Nobody Cares,” at the Minetta Lane Theater, is being recorded and will soon be available from the comfort of your home. Future audiences are likely to enjoy Benanti’s autobiographical romp through her family life, her romantic and professional travails, her insecurities (see the title) and her often overwhelming need to please. They will appreciate the handful of original songs, which she wrote with music director Todd Almond — Benanti is a fabulous singer, with a Tony Award on her mantel for her sultry turn as Louise in “Gypsy.” But because the show will be on Audible, those audiences will be made up of listeners, and they will miss out on the physical comedy of a woman who can communicate more with one raised eyebrow than most actors can with a lengthy monologue. Benanti dramatically throws herself on the floor ... More

National Gallery of Art acquires two Netherlandish decorative objects from the 17th century
WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art has recently acquired two exquisite Netherlandish decorative art objects: a silver standing dish from 1618 and a large serpent-stem glass goblet from the late 17th century. Intricate works of rare materials such as these were highly sought after in Europe by wealthy individuals for their Kunstkammern, or “rooms of wonders.” The rise in popularity of these encyclopedic collections of distinctive objects, which might have included art, insect specimens, seashells, and fossils, among other things, coincided with the rise of global trade and the spread of European colonialism. The silver dish and the glass goblet, together with a 17th-century nautilus cup that was acquired in 2023, are being displayed in gallery 50 on the Main Floor of the West Building. The Dutch artist Willem Claesz Heda depicted this same ... More

The (very brief) return of Gastr del Sol
NEW YORK, NY.- In late January 2016, Akinobu Oda — a Japanese restaurateur and concert promoter — taped a red-and-black handbill demanding “Don’t disturb!!!” to the window of his vegan dive in Tokyo. The reason? The American art-rock band Gastr del Sol was dining inside. It had been 18 years since the duo split. During the late 1990s, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke enjoyed an intense and prolific partnership, working together in multiple groups and running the audacious label Dexter’s Cigar. But they hadn’t seen each other since 2002, communicating only through sporadic emails. In Tokyo, they were finally face to face. “Our breakup was hard, because what had started as a very easy collaboration wasn’t easy anymore,” Grubbs, 56, said during a recent video interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he was surrounded on one side by rows of records ... More

Sandy Koufax's rookie-season Brooklyn Dodgers jersey realizes record-setting $1.8 million at Heritage Auctions
DALLAS, TX.- A century-old jersey worn by Walter Johnson, the Washington Senators pitcher who was among the first five inducted into baseball’s hall of fame, has one more story to tell: It sold at Heritage Auctions over the weekend for more than $2 million, a new record for the man Babe Ruth called “the best of them all.” Johnson’s button-down wool pinstripe with a small “W” stitched into each sleeve was among numerous game-worn, game-used items that made history during Heritage’s May 16-18 Spring Sports Catalog Auction, which realized $21,393,221. The right-handed hurler was joined by a veritable Murderer’s Row of fellow Hall of Famers, among them fellow pitcher Sandy Koufax, whose photo-matched rookie-season Brooklyn ... More

Uncut sheet of 'Pokémon' and 'Magic: The Gathering' cards brings record $375,000
DALLAS, TX.- A Magic: The Gathering/Pokémon Test Print Uncut Sheet with Notes (Wizards of the Coast) that was part of the sales pitch to extend the Pokémon game’s reach from Japan into the Western world sold for $375,000 to lead Heritage’s May 17-18 Trading Card Games Signature® Auction to $1,747,323. The final price, reached after 34 bids poured in, established a new world record for the most ever paid for an uncut sheet of cards from any trading card game. The auction’s top lot is hugely significant in trading card games history because it not only helped the growth of the Pokémon game, but also features cards from the two most popular trading card games in the world: Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering. Uncut sheets from either game are coveted by collectors, but to have both games on the same sheet is incredibly ... More

Review: The tragic story of 'An American Soldier' comes home
NEW YORK, NY.- Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts from fellow soldiers. “An American Soldier,” the opera based on his story, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. But when the work had its run in Missouri, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Chen’s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. Last week, they succeeded, as “An American Soldier” was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center — just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed Private Danny Chen Way in 2014. In Chay Yew’s clearheaded production, ... More

After a wrenching bestseller, an author takes up her dream project
NEW YORK, NY.- Chanel Miller has wanted to be a children’s book author and illustrator since the second grade, when she started writing stories that her teacher, Mrs. Thomas, would laminate. But her first published book, despite being a bestseller and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, was not at all what she’d wished for. It was a memoir about surviving sexual assault and its aftermath called “Know My Name.” Brock Turner, who had been a Stanford University swimmer, was found guilty of sexually assaulting Miller while she was unconscious after a party on campus in 2015. His sentence, six months in jail, was widely criticized as lenient, and a letter she read to the court at the sentencing hearing was published online and read in Congress. Now, after years trying to raise awareness about sexual assault and trauma, Miller ... More