Friday, April 29, 2011

"The Following Post Is A Renaissance Research Exclusive"































Baritone Thomas Hampson and Members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Give Washington Premiere of Selections from George Crumb's new Six-Hour American Songbook

By Pan Cogito

Last night, five superb members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center were joined at the Library of Congress by the internationally-renowned American baritone Thomas Hampson for an exquisite and powerful performance of seven of the 49 new twenty-first century American art songs that Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize winning American composer George Crumb has composed over the past decade based upon Appalachian folk songs, African-American spirituals, cowboy songs, and other indigenous American folk material. The composer was joined in the audience by the U.S. Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington, by several members of Congress, and by several board members of the Washington National Opera of the Kennedy Center. In the seminar with artists that preceeded the concert, and in the presence of Dr. Billington, Dr. Susan Vita, the Chief of the Library’s Music Division, announced that Dr. Crumb has recently agreed to donate his lifetime music sketches and working papers to the Library of Congress. Thomas Hampson was joined in the recently recorded songs by four percussionists led by Jeffrey Milarsky, and by the superb contemporary pianism of American and contemporary music champion Gilbert Kalish, the pianist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 2006. Mr. Kalish also played the shofar in one of the African-American spiritual settings concerning the fall of the biblical walls of Jericho.

The second half of the program found four percussion members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln joined by cellist Andrés Díaz in a well executed performance of Tan Dun’s "Elegy: Snow in June", written in commemoration of the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China. After the exceptionally subtle, almost hour-long performance of the Crumb songs, this very often very loud memorial work was somewhat of an anti-climax to the evening.

Tan Dun has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for his [sic] opera “The First Emperor,” while Professor Dr. George Crumb is awaiting an as-yet-to be announced joint commission by the Metropolitan Opera and the Washington National Opera of the Kennedy Center. George Crumb and American classical song and opera champion, Thomas Hampson, is reported to be advising during the tense negotiations to secure the opera commission for Dr. Crumb. The undisclosed concept for the new American opera is rumored to concern love and warfare in 19th, 20th, or 21st century America; and an international and American cast is rumored to involve Mr. Hampson and several other well-known international and American singer-actors. It is uncertain at this time whether Dr. James Billington would or would not be involved in the libretto (the story book) to the rumored new American opera; and whether the MET or the WNO of the Kennedy Center would have first performance rights to the work.

Pan Cogito is a Washington-based freelance music writer.

Bridge Records, Complete George Crumb Edition, in 15 Volumes

Header credit: Dr. George Crumb and Dr. James Billington. Score by George Crumb similar to the one that accompanied Paul Hume's August 15, 1973 Washington Post review of a new work by Dr. Crumb premiered at the Library of Congress. All images (c) Copyright controlled. All rights reserved.

Stunning New 3-D Operas Receive American Premieres Today

















89 minutes



















Images: (c) Copyright controlled and (c) Associated Press and Gero Breloer 2011. Copyright controlled. All rights reserved.

This Weekend "Great Performances at the Metropolitan Opera" Comes To Public Television in the Nation's Capital -- Hear & Fully Understand The Opera













Why? ... Because a great democratic nation deserves great art.


Airs on
WETA HD
Sat., April 30, 2011
6:00 am (150 minutes)
The Damnation of Faust (Libretto by Almire Gandonnière and Hector Berlioz)

A production of Hector Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust," in which the infamous Faust (Marcello Giordani) strikes a deal with the devil in order to save his beloved (Susan Graham).

Rating: TV-PG

Airs on
WETA HD
Sat., April 30, 2011
11:06 am (147 minutes)
The Damnation of Faust

A production of Hector Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust," in which the infamous Faust (Marcello Giordani) strikes a deal with the devil in order to save his beloved (Susan Graham).

Rating: TV-PG

Airs on
WETA HD
Sat., April 30, 2011
2:30 pm (150 minutes)
The Damnation of Faust

A production of Hector Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust," in which the infamous Faust (Marcello Giordani) strikes a deal with the devil in order to save his beloved (Susan Graham).

Rating: TV-PG

Image credit: (c) The Metropolitan Opera. Copyright controlled.

Thursday, April 28, 2011







Answer: From Alexander Graham Bell's notebooks (51,500 images) on-line at the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress.

All Rise!! ... Let's Get Over Those Early Millennium Blues And Get Those Hopeful Red Balls Up Higher In The Air!!















[Click on graph for enlargement.]

Credit: Mark Doms, U.S. Department of Commerce (Formerly, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.)

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Spring-time "Conservatory Project" Post: Dr. Karl Paulnack's 2004 Welcome Address To Parents Of Conservatory Students In Boston














"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, "you're wasting your SAT scores!" On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January
1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music?
There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. [...]

... People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. [...]

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

*

Excerpts from a welcome address given to parents of incoming students at The Boston Conservatory of Music, Dance, and Theater on September 1, 2004, by Dr. Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division.

(c) Dr. Karl Paulnack 2004. Copyright controlled. All rights reserved.

Mayday!! Musicians To Perform Lindberg And Xenakis At John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts














[Click on image for enlargement.]

5/1/11: Oberlin Conservatory of Music 6 PM FREE
Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.

Students play works by Rameau, Rachmaninoff, Moszkowski, Lindberg, and Xenakis. Part of the Conservatory Project.

Image credit: (c) iannis-xenakis.org 2011. Copyright controlled. All rights reserved.

Post-Chornobyl: And Now For A Bit Of Good News After Twenty Five Years














[Click on image for enlargement.]

"From June 1, 2011, Latvijas Dzelzcels in cooperation with Belarus Rail, will begin a passenger rail line between Riga and the Belarus capital Minsk, writes The Baltic Course with reference to Nozare.lv.

The Riga-Minsk line will stop in Latvia in Krustpils, Daugavpils and Indra, as well as in Belarus in Bigosova, Verhnedvinsk, Polotsk, Krulevscizn and Molodechno. From Minsk, passenger will be able to travel further to Ukraine, as well as to European destination such as Prague, Berlin and Warsaw." ...

Source: www.balticbusinessnews.com

Photo credit: English: Regional Drama Theater. Homel [Gomel], Belarus.
Беларуская: Абласны драматычны тэатар. Гомель, Беларусь.
(c) Alex Zelenko 2005. Copyright controlled. With thanks.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

When Eurovision Is Not Enough



Credit: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Aide Memoire



CENTER FOR WORLD MUSIC / SECOND BERKELEY WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL
Saturday, August 16, 1975
MUSIC FOR AN AMERICAN GAMELAN
Solo and Slow Jhala ..............................Lou Harrison
"Nuptiae," a film by James Broughton, with music by Lou Harrison
Convergences................................Barbara Benary
Gamelan II..... ....... ..... .............Philip Corner
"The Passing of All Shining Things" ....................... Jeff Abe/ll
text by e. e. cummings
Dolphin Eucalyptus .... ..... ....... ....... Peter Plonsky
Braid Piece ......................... .................. Barbara Benary
"The Dreamer that Remains," a film produced by Betty Freeman, with
music by Harry Partch
Changing Part ..................................Daniel Schmidt
Instruments of the Gamelan were designed and constructed by William Colvig; played by
Jeff Abell, Barbara Benary, William Colvig, Suzanne Chutroo, David Doty, Eulah Getty,
Lou Harrison, Bob Labaree, Peter Plonsky, Daniel Schmidt, lacqueline Summerfield

Figure 5. Program for the concert "Music for An American Gamelan"
(Old Granddad), Center for World Music, August 16, 1975.

Photo credit: (c) Ethel Aardvark 2011. Copyright controlled.

Михайлівська церква в м. Житомир



Photo credit: (c) Texnik 2011. Copyright controlled.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Distinguished Washington Arts Institutions Begin To Experience A Taste Of The Austerity That Washington Artists Experienced A Generation Ago



[Click on image for enlargement.]

The U.S. Congress has cut the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program, administered by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, by $7 million -- from $9.5 million last fiscal year.

Amost two million of the $9.5 million went to the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Washington National Opera. ( Last year, the Washington Ballet was disqualified from receiving funding under the program.)

Last year, Arena Stage received $430,000 and the Phillips Collection received about $424,000.

Washington Post

Image credit: (c) Copyright controlled. National Gallery of Art, East Wing, Washington D.C., 1971. Alan Freeman. Office of Dan Kiley.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

National Gallery of Art -$8 million
National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs -$7 million

Monday, April 11, 2011

No Longer Silent Spring?



TOKYO, April 12 (Reuters) - Japan is considering raising the severity level of its nuclear crisis to put it on a par with the Chernobyl accident 25 years ago, the worst atomic power disaster in history, Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday.

The report came as the government expanded an evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant because of the high levels of accumulated radiation since a 15-metre tsunami ripped through the complex a month ago, causing massive damage to its reactors which engineers are still struggling to control.

The Kyodo report said that the high levels of radiation that have been released by the Fukushima Daiichi plant meant it could raise the severity level from 5 to the highest 7, the same as the 1986 Chernobyl accident. ...

Photo credit: (c) Toru Hanai/Reuters 2011. Copyright controlled. All rights reserved.

Stop The Terrorism: Time Now For Real Democracy In Belarus





"Sitting us up straight at the end and reminding us of Soviet life's depressive effects was Alfred Schnittke's Violin Concerto No. 3. Tortured, trilling solos, handsomely played here by Augustin Hadelich, are accompanied by a small woodwind-driven orchestra. There are moments of Schnittke's found-object style in the slight distortions of old-fashioned chord progressions."

Source

Alexander Lukashenko has run Belarus, a former Soviet republic, with an iron fist since 1994.

Political tensions have been rising in Belarus since December, when a massive demonstration against yet another disputed presidential election sparked a harsh crackdown by police in which more than 700 people were arrested, including seven presidential candidates.

Photo credits: (c) James Hill/New York Times 2005; (c) Anton Motolko/Reuters 2011; and Sergei Grits/AP 2011. All rights reserved.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Post-Classical Ensemble Examines How Stravinsky Used Multi-Ethnic Music Of Far Northwest Ukraine To Revolutionize 20th C. Western Music And Theater





Stravinsky Museum in Ustilug, Ukraine, Former Russian Empire.
Former summer home of the Stravinsky family.

Post-Classical Ensemble Stravinsky Project, this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, at Georgetown University (MacNeir Hall), the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Strathmore Hall, North Bethesda.

Georgetown University's multimedia Friday Music Series launches the festival with two innovative adaptations of Stravinsky's music for ballet -- new woodwind quintet arrangement of Stravinsky’s groundbreaking The Rite of Springand the lyrical Suite Italienne performed by members of the Kennedy Center Opera House orchestra and Ralitza Patcheva, piano and Vasily Popov, cello.

The National Gallery of Art hosts two film biographies — Tony Palmer's Stravinsky: Once at a Border and Richard Leacock's A Stravinsky Portrait (D.C. premiere) — with commentary and a live piano performance by Alexander Toradze.

On Sunday starting at noon (the only ticketed events), The Stravinsky Project features five Russian pianists, three music historians, films, photographs, and an American premiere of Les Noces featuring a waist-length bearded pianola player from London.

Three Russian pianists — Alexander Toradze, George Vatchnadze, and Genadi Zagor — reveal the soul of Stravinsky’s music in this chronological survey of the composer’s works for piano, including his two-piano arrangement of The Rite of Spring, the Washington-area premiere of Scherzo from the Sonata in F Sharp Minor, Tango, Piano Sonata, Concerto for Two Solo Pianos and an improvisation that references each of the works.

Earlier afternoon celebratory events:

1. The Stravinsky Odyssey: films and photographs by Katya Chilingiri. One-day only exhibition of photographs documenting Stravinsky’s odyssey from Russia to Switzerland to France to California, along with Chilingiri’s filmed interviews with his descendants. Chilingiri will offer a guided tour, followed by discussion.

2. Rex Lawson performs Stravinsky's final pianola version of Les Noces (American premiere) in a rarely heard version for solo pianola (mechanical piano) created by the composer.

3. Using archival recordings, film, and music in live performance, pianists Alexander Toradze, George Vatchnadze, and Genadi Zagor take issue with Stravinsky.

Sunday concert at Strathmore

Program
Stravinsky: Concerto for Piano and Winds
Stravinsky: Symphonies for Wind Instruments
Stravinsky: Danse Sacrale from The Rite of Spring, arranged for four pianos and percussion (D.C. premiere)
Stravinsky: Les Noces

Artists
Alexander Toradze, piano
George Vatchnadze, piano
Genadi Zagor, piano
Vakhtang Kodanashvili, piano
Edisher Savitski, piano
The Washington Bach Consort (J. Reilly Lewis, Founder & Music Director)
Angel Gil-Ordóñez, conductor

Classical WETA-FM interview Angel Gil-Ordóñez and Joseph Horowitz about the Stravinsky Project, recorded on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 as part of the Classical Conversations series.

Photo credits: (c) Katya Chilingiri 2011 and
Baker Artist Awards Copyright © 2011.

Interior photo of Stravinsky Museum, Ustilug, Ukraine (c) danilovd 2011. Copyright controlled. All rights reserved.

Shadow Lands South Of Krakow, Przemyśl, and Lviv: The Carpatho-Rusyn Society’s Oral History Research Project





[Click on map for enlargement.]

The Carpatho-Rusyn Society’s Oral History Research Committee seeks to preserve the oral histories and artifacts of the Lemko people, and to explore the post-World War II expulsion campaigns that resulted in the destruction of their settlements in Southeast Poland.

In order to obtain and preserve firsthand perspectives of the events, C-RS is conducting extensive fieldwork, including recorded interviews with eyewitnesses in North America, Ukraine and Poland. The research team is seeking individuals to participate in the study who meet one or more of the following criteria:

1.Lemkos who recall life in their villages before or during World War II;
2.Lemkos who experienced the post-World War II expulsions from their homeland, and who were resettled in either Soviet Ukraine from 1945-1946, or in Western Poland (former German territories) in 1947 (Operation Vistula/Akcja Wisla.);
3.Lemkos who were displaced in Allied-occupied Germany during the time of the expulsions in the Lemko region, and who became separated from their relatives as a result;
4.Former members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who witnessed or had knowledge of the expulsion operations of Lemkos;
5.Polish civilians who lived in the Lemko region at the time of the expulsions and bore witness to these events; and
6.Others with relevant, first-hand information about the events.

Source

Additional information

According to Ukrainian estimates, during the Second World War about 3,000,000 Ukrainians were sent to Germany and Austria to work in factories and as forced labor.

Image credit: Lemko style church in the Museum of National Folk Architecture, Lviv, Ukraine. (c) Copyright controlled. Map is copyright controlled as stated on image. (c) Copyright controlled.

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Possible Culture In The Nation's Capital -- Olli Kortekangas in conversation with Norman Scribner


Olli Kortekangas in conversation with Norman Scribner

Monday, May 16, 2011 at Noon (Free, no tickets required)
Whittall Pavilion, adjacent to the Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress

Meet the Composer
Attend a musical conversation with leading Finnish composer Olli Kortekangas and Choral Arts Society of Washington Artistic Director Norman Scribner. They will be discussing Mr. Kortekangas’ new composition, Seven Songs for Planet Earth, which will premiere Sunday, May 22 at the Kennedy Center.

This event may take place.

Monday, April 04, 2011

Support Japan, Give with the Phillips




Gather at the Phillips Collection this Thursday evening to support disaster relief efforts in Japan. The Phillips Collection will donate 50% of membership and cash bar proceeds, as well as designated visitor donations, to the American Red Cross.

At 7:30 pm there will also be a ‘give-by-text’ rally to benefit the American Red Cross.

A special installation of Kenzo Okada’s poetic Footsteps (1954) and Isamu Noguchi's Mother and Child (1930) will provide a space for personal remembrance and reflection.

Image credits: Kenzo Okada. Footsteps (c) The Phillips Collection 2011.
Isamu Noguchi's stage set for Martha Graham’s Night Play, 1947
© Isamu Noguchi Foundation, New York via the The Design Museum.

Art, Government, Arts Policy, Human Rights



"Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous modern artist, was detained at Beijing airport on Sunday and his house was cordoned off by police as the Communist party continued its crackdown on advocates of free speech and political reform....

The Chinese government has detained scores of lawyers, human rights activists, writers and internet bloggers in the past two months in what human rights groups say is the most severe campaign of repression in China in more than a decade."

Financial Times

Credit: (c) Agence France Press 2011.

Friday, April 01, 2011





Photo credits: (c) Art Frisch 2011. (c) Tyler Hicks 2011. Copyright © 1996-2011, Karl L. Swartz. All rights reserved.