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New Orleans Museum of Art presents 'Picture Man: Portraits by Polo Silk'
NEW ORLEANS, MO.- The New Orleans Museum of Art presents Picture Man: Portraits by Polo Silk, on view July 16, 2022January 8, 2023. For more than three decades, Selwhyn Sthaddeus Polo Silk Terrell (American, born 1964) has been photographing New Orleans, creating a unique body of work that blends elements of portraiture, fashion, performance, and street photography. Picture Man explores how Polo Silk blends all of those elements and illustrates his contributions in the history of American photography. The exhibition features more than 35 images by Silk spanning 20 years from 19872007, with an emphasis on the 1990s. Through his years of documenting seminal moments in New Orleans, Polo Silks name and photos have become synonymous with New Orleans culture, said Susan Taylor, ... More

Rediscovering Australia's Generation of Defiant Female Directors
NEW YORK, NY.- In the opening moments of Gillian Armstrongs debut feature, My Brilliant Career (1979), a freckled, tawny-haired young woman stands in the doorway of her house in the Australian outback and declares: Dear countrymen, a few lines to let you know that this story is going to be all about me. The woman is Sybylla, played by a fiery, young Judy Davis, and she dreams of a long, fruitful career as a writer love, marriage, motherhood and all of societys other expectations be damned. Sybyllas words might as well have been the rallying cry for a whole generation of Australias female filmmakers, who had waited for years to tell their own stories. Their defiant and eclectic body of work is the subject of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema, a fascinating series that opened last week at the Museum of the Moving ... More

Heritage Auctions sells Muhammad Ali's WBC Championship belt for $6.18 million
DALLAS, TX.- A heavyweight bout lasted well into Sunday morning. And when the final bell rang at Heritage Auctions, Indianapolis Colts owner and philanthropist Jim Irsay walked away with the championship belt specifically, Muhammad Ali's World Boxing Council (WBC) heavyweight championship belt earned in his victory over George Foreman in 1974's legendary Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. The WBC belt realized $6,180,000, the highest price for a sports collectible sold at Heritage Auctions. It was offered alongside other historic Ali items in Heritage's July 21-23 Summer Sports Catalog Auction. "After several hours of watching two bidders go back and forth over this belt, this proved to be a battle worthy of the Rumble itself," says Chris Ivy, Heritage's Director of Sports Auctions. "We're just thrilled this extraordinary ... More

Sarah Faux joins Hales
NEW YORK, NY.- Hales announced representation of Brooklynbased painter Sarah Faux in collaboration with M+B and Capsule Shanghai. The gallerys first solo exhibition with Faux will open at Hales New York in Spring 2023. Sarah Faux (b. 1986 Boston, MA, USA) received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2015. She gained a joint BA and BFA from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. Faux lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Faux is a painter whose somatic work lies at the threshold of figuration and abstraction. Her paintings embrace unabashed sensuality, autonomy and pleasure. Faux's fluid compositions teeter on the edge of reality, revealing how much of our emotional and sensory lives take place beneath the surface. Initially, her works often appear abstract. Overlapping ... More

Sacred Site at Olana by artist Diana Wege highlights intersection of art and environmental history
HUDSON, NY.- Artist and environmentalist Diana Wege studied one of Frederic Churchs masterpieces for a decade. Her impulse was to focus on Churchs traditional representation of Niagara Falls as a way to raise contemporary awareness of the climatic and environmental challenges we face today. The result is Sacred Site, an installation of twelve hand-painted full-scale replicas of Churchs largest painting, Niagara, from the American Side. Placed in the North Meadow at Olana State Historic Site, this installation is accessible and free for all visitors to Olanas designed historic landscape. Of the twelve canvases she painted, Wege altered four of them to emphasize abstract qualities of Churchs imagery. A closer look at all the reproductions shows changes which reflect humanitys destructive impact on our planet. Through ... More

Going where the wind blows in Italy's Salento
NEW YORK, NY.- Go to one of the inland cities today, advises the burly fruit seller as he hands me a barattiere, a mixture of melon and cucumber thats indigenous to Puglia, the region that forms the stiletto heel of Italys boot. The sand will be blowing today on both the coasts, and you wont be able to see the lovely colors of the sea. The wind and the sea are constant topics of conversation in Puglia. Whether its the scirocco, the hot current coming from the Sahara, or the tramontana, the cold draft from the Alps (not to mention the ponente or the levante), the way the wind blows determines which beach to go to and how to plan the day. Bartenders, street vendors and shop owners are quick to opine about which is in force and how to best navigate its currents. Tonight in Lecce, the tramontana takes center stage and the effect is like a fan ... More

Paul Sorvino: A voluble man who excelled as a brick of a mobster
NEW YORK, NY.- When Paul Sorvino was offered the role of Paulie Cicero, the Queens-based mob underboss in Martin Scorseses Goodfellas (1990), he very much did not want to accept it. In the first place, he was a proud Italian American. A connoisseur of Italian culture, particularly food and music, he was not inclined to play a Mafioso. In addition, Sorvino, who died Monday at 83, was a voluble guy, and he liked playing voluble guys. Paulie was largely a brick. Much is made in the early scenes of the movie about how most of the criminals directives were executed with a mere nod. He accepted the role anyway and went into rehearsals. A few days before shooting began, he called his agent and asked if he could bail. At a 2015 panel at the Tribeca Film Festival commemorating the 25th anniversary of Goodfellas, ... More

1825 coin worth $4 million+ to be auctioned
COSTA MESA, CA .- Stacks Bowers Galleries will present the finest of three known Proof 1825/4/1 Capped Head Left half eagles in their Summer 2022 Global Showcase Auction, offered as part of the Mocatta Collection of U.S. Gold Rarities. Graded Proof-67 Cameo by PCGS and awarded a CAC sticker for superior quality, it boasts a magnificent provenance stretching back to before 1864 and has been held privately off the market since the early 1970s. It is first traced to the collection of George F. Seavey formed before 1864, which was purchased en bloc by Lorin G. Parmelee in 1873. It appeared in lot 957 of the June 1890 sale of the Parmelee Collection where it sold for $40, or just eight times the face value. Over the next hundred years, this coin passed through a litany of legendary cabinets including those of Waldo Newcomer, ... More

Black portraits get new names, and a new show
LONDON.- In the early 20th century, Glyn Philpot was one of Britains most respected portrait painters. The artist was known for depicting high-society sitters in a style mimicking the old masters, so his works sat comfortably on the walls of his clients country homes alongside generations of their family members. All the papers are raving about P. now. Have you seen? Philpots friend Gladys Miles wrote to art historian Randall Davies in 1910. Everyone is rushing to be painted like sheep. By the 1930s, though, not only had Philpots painting style become more modernist, incorporating abstracted backgrounds and a lighter color palette, he was also painting sensitive portraits of Black people, some of which, unusually for the time, were shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Philpots most frequent Black subject ... More

Aldrin's space memorabilia sells for more than $8 million
NEW YORK, NY.- A white, Teflon-coated jacket worn by astronaut Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969 sold for $2.7 million at a Sothebys auction Tuesday, fetching the highest price among dozens of pieces of rare memorabilia tracing his career in space exploration. Aldrin, now 92, has a storied career as an astronaut, joining NASA in 1963 after flying for the Air Force. Within three years, he had executed the worlds first successful spacewalk in the Gemini 12 mission. Then, on July 20, 1969, millions of people watched on television as he became the second man to walk on the moon, about 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong, who declared it one giant leap for mankind. The custom-fitted jacket Aldrin wore on that mission sold after fierce bidding lasting nine minutes, with the auctioneer calling it the most valuable ... More

A new commission by Devin Kenny launches on the Whitney Museum's Artport
NEW YORK, NY.- Today, the Whitney Museum of American Art launched Ongoing, Individual Adaptability or How to Quiet Quit, a new project by artist Devin Kenny on whitney.org. Commissioned for artport, the Museums portal dedicated to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art, this two-part work explores artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of art institutions, creativity, collaboration, and labor. To create the work, a compilation of images and videos, Kenny used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a form of machine learning in which algorithms trained on specific data sets continuously generate new images with the same characteristics as the originals. Kennys data set to train the AI for this work comprises thousands of installation images documenting exhibitions at the Whitney Museum. Devin ... More