Listen up kids. One of the raddest and baddest female performance artists ever is playing Miami tonight (Friday). Before #metoo, before mansplaining was called out, before performance was “time-based art,” Karen Finley was shocking our cultural system. Calling out the patriarchy? Finley took her challenge to the Supreme Court. Finley was one of the most…
Tag: Featured
She’s in Control: Antonia Wright at Spinello Projects for Art Week
Control. Antonia Wright’s fast, brutal blast of a performance piece at Spinello Projects for Miami Art Week, took on multiple interpretations with that title. It’s a kind of miracle of meaning, a whole potentially tedious aesthetic and political essay in two syllables. The preparation took longer than the piece. On the Saturday I attended, the…
It’s Our Party – Celebrating Miami and the Knight Arts Challenge
Let’s call it an all-Miami house party. For locals, the celebration of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge winners that kicks off Miami Art Week is their best party. It’s the time when the city’s own artistic community gets to feel like the center of the glittering art/celebrity/marketing marathon that…
An Our Town for our town.
The moment during Saturday night’s opening of Miami New Drama’s rendition of Our Town, the quintessentially American Thornton Wilder play, that felt most familiar was the one you might have expected to be the most “foreign.” Mrs. Gibbs (the charismatic and marvelously vital Chantal Jean-Pierre) and Mrs. Webb (the formidable Carlotta Sosa), stood side by…
Despacito Broke New Ground for Latin Pop – and for its Female Songwriter
Despacito has been steamrolling records – most streamed song of all time, most played song on Youtube, most weeks topping Billboard’s Hot 100 (in the version featuring Justin Beiber with original singers Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee), most popular song in Spanish. On a more subjective metric, it may be the most pegajoso earworm ever…
The French singer Edith Piaf owes much of her iconic status to having endured and triumphed despite her brutal upbringing – abandoned by her mother, raised in a brothel – and terrible losses throughout her short life. She transmuted her pain and strength into her music, creating a cathartic passage through heartache and beyond. The…
Invented Icons – Irene Williams, the Queen of Lincoln Road
(Eric Smith next to the Annie Leibovitz photo of his adored Irene Williams, the “Queen of Lincoln Road,” at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. Photo by Jordan Levin.) Irene Williams, the fierce, elderly fashion iconoclast being celebrated in the show Irene Williams: Queen of Lincoln Road at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU this summer, was…
Bread, Roses, and a Declaration of Joy
[Photo – Jennifer Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra of Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami] This is a cultural blog, but celebrating culture often feels difficult these days. Politics is so enraging and frightening. The abuse, lies, stupidity and nastiness of President Trump; the meanness of politicians who seem determined to decimate support for the environment, health,…
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