Arts

AYCAF Theater summer camp performance
Arts, Theater

Asase Yaa School of the Arts Prepares for Largest Kid’s Summer Camp to Date

Brooklyn-based Asase Yaa Cultural Arts Foundation (AYCAF) and their School of the Arts program are getting ready for what’s expected to be their largest children’s summer art camp. The multidisciplinary theater camp, which is geared toward ages four to 13, has attracted over a thousand participants since 2006, averaging 70 kids per summer. This summer AYCAF is adding 30 additional […]

Arts, Sunset Park, Theater

TARGET MARGIN THEATER’S ‘MARJANA AND THE FORTY THIEVES’ IS CHARMING AT ITS BEST, BUT DISJOINTED.

“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 […]

At rehearsal for The Troubador
Arts

May Arts Calendar Picks

May 1 In Carroll Gardens, Cathouse Proper celebrates its fifth anniversary with “FUNeral in Cathouse Proper: Life to Art to Life” running through June 2. The name is appropriate as the gallery originated in 2013 in an East Williamsburg funeral parlor. Founding director David Dixon moved the gallery to its current locale in 2016.  The exhibition includes two massive plaster […]

Alexander McKimm styling
Arts, Education, Red Hook Labs

Snatch a Master Workshop Spot with Stylist Alastair McKimm

There’s one day left to submit an application to be one of 10 participants in Red Hook Lab’s Master Workshop with Alastair McKimm.   Selected participants will have their work evaluated by the renowned stylist whose vision has collaborated with brands like Calvin Klein, Alexander Wang, Jill Sander and Saint Laurent, and teamed with photographers including Mario Sorrenti, Collier Schorr, Inez and Vinoodh, Dan Jackson and Davis Sims. McKimm will […]

Arts

Vera Iliatova’s Women in Movement

Vera Iliatova sometimes accidentally leaves her studio in the same outfits as the women she’s painting. That’s because the draped, familiar trenches and sensible skirts that outfit the women in her work are painted from the mirrored reflection of her own body. Her work reverberates with the warmth of the same lifeforce. It animates her lush dreamscapes to feel eerily familiar and […]

Arts, Books

Siri Hutsvedt’s Memories of the Future 

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 […]

Arts

Eleanor Kipping’s “Strange Fruit” at FiveMyles

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, […]

Ozark Highballers playing outside
Arts, Music

Album Review: Ozark Highballers – “Going Down to ‘Leven Point” – Jalopy Records

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.”

Arts

On the (Queer) Waterfront

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 […]

Arts, Theater

TFANA’s lucid take on The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

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. […]