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Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Joyce J. Scott, Dawn Moore to speak at University of Baltimore commencement
Baltimore native Joyce J. Scott, a MacArthur Fellow and a critically-acclaimed multimedia artist, and Maryland first lady Dawn Moore will deliver keynote addresses at the University of Baltimore's commencement ceremonies May 21 at The Lyric. Following her speech at the undergraduate ceremony, Scott will be presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Baltimore President and former mayor Kurt L. Schmoke. Scott's art has been exhibited in museums worldwide and included in major public collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Corning Museum of Glass, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Mint Museum of Art, among others. In 2024, Scott opened a 50-year traveling museum retrospective, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum. Moore has more than two decades of leadership in state government, nonprofit management, campaign strategy, fundraising and community engagement. She held government roles in the administrations of former Govs. Parris Glendening and Martin O'Malley, and former Maryland Lt. Govs. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Anthony Brown. In addition to speeches by Scott and Moore, the ceremonies will feature two student speakers who will deliver remarks as representatives of their respective classes. The University System of Maryland Board of Regents will be represented by Regent Yvette Lewis, who will offer greetings during both ceremonies. Have a news tip? Contact Todd Karpovich at tkarpovich@ or on X as @ToddKarpovich.
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Giants' brings the provocative, exciting collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats to the Mia
A pair of drum machines, turntables, Alicia Keys' Yamaha CP-70 piano stenciled with 'Love' and 'Freedom,' Swizz Beats' eight-channel mixer, and a trio of BMX bikes. These objects greet visitors before they step into the Minneapolis Institute of Art's latest exhibit, 'Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.' Put together by Kimberli Grant, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 'Giants' glimpses into the collection of the New York musicians. While the rest of the exhibit isn't as concerned with objects as the foyer, it sets a tone. It's a collection with an eye on both history and modernity. Those opening pieces, coupled with a soundtrack selected by Swizz Beats playing throughout the galleries, offer an inescapable sense that history is alive and taking place in plain sight. (The foyer also contains towering portraits of the collectors by Kehinde Wiley, an artist the Mia recently declined to exhibit due to allegations of sexual assault.) The nearly 100 pieces, many of which are appropriately giant, predominantly feature Black diasporic artists, including familiar names like Jean-Michel Basquiat and one-time St. Paul resident Gordon Parks, as well as a glittering soundsuit by Nick Cave, massive paintings of BMX bikers in Baltimore by Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald, a multi-media collage by Ebony G. Patterson, and photographs by Jamel Shabazz. The music, the pervasive reminders that this is a private collection, and the thoughtful themeing of rooms — 'Becoming Giants,' 'Giant Presence,' 'Giant Conversation,' and 'On the Shoulders of Giants' — provide encouragement to connect the frequently bright and large-scale pieces to one another and to broader histories beyond the museum's walls. Amid Titus Kaphar's powerful triptychs or the awe-inducing room of paintings on gender and colonialism by Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi, 'Giants' amplifies the political themes found in individual pieces. Together, they provoke discussion on how collecting can be an investigation into which voices are centered and heard. (It's something Kaphar's "A Puzzled Revolution," found in the exhibit's second room, probes itself.) The statements on race and other issues are timely, arriving in Minneapolis just before the five-year anniversary of the Minneapolis Police killing of George Floyd. The presentation of bold artists assembled this way feels prescient in a moment when diversity initiatives are being vilified and extinguished, attempted book bans continue, and the government threatens to withhold funding from arts organizations that center artists of color, women, or queer voices. Even the exhibition's sponsorship — in part, the Center for Racial and Health Equity at Blue Cross Blue Shield, hosted in the Target Special Exhibitions Gallery — seems to invite these conversations as headlines frequently highlight the inequities of the healthcare system and Target retreats from diversity initiatives. It's a stark juxtaposition with a piece like Hank Willis Thomas' "You Shouldn't Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas (LeWitt)," a quilt made from the cloth of decommissioned prison uniforms. 'Giants,' full of exciting individual pieces thoughtfully assembled, will reward repeat visits for all it has to say, spoken and unspoken.
Boston Globe
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Mort Künstler, renowned painter of epic historical scenes, dies at 97
As he branched out in the 1970s to create large canvases of epic scenes in American history, including more than 350 images of the Civil War, he consulted historians and experts and visited the locations of his scenes to ensure the accuracy of his work. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up His paintings sometimes challenged and corrected the factual details of well-known historical paintings, including one of the most famous: Emanuel Leutze's dramatic 1851 rendering of 'Washington Crossing the Delaware.' Advertisement In the Leutze painting, Washington, at daybreak, stands tall in a crowded rowboat beside an American flag, which hadn't yet been adopted in 1776, when the crossing took place. Mr. Künstler, by contrast, after months of research, painted Washington in the dead of night gripping the wheel of a cannon on a 60-foot-long flatboat ferry guided by cable and crowded with dozens of troops and horses. 'I'm not knocking the original,' he told The New York Times in 2011. 'It's got great impact, and Leutze did a heck of a job. I give Leutze higher marks for a good painting than for historical accuracy, but why can't you have both?' Mr. Künstler's paintings have joined the permanent collections of dozens of museums, and he had scores of solo shows in galleries and museums across the country, including a 2014-15 exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. He has been compared to Rockwell, whose work he cited as an influence, as well as Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer. 'He was one of the most highly regarded contemporary historical painters of our time,' said Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, chief curator of the Rockwell museum. 'There was a cinematic sense about his work. Mort was an exceptional draftsman with an eye for creating drama.' Advertisement Morton Künstler was born Aug. 28, 1927, at his home in Brooklyn to Jewish parents of Russian and Austrian descent, Thomas and Rebecca (Weitz) Künstler. As family lore has it, the name Künstler, which means 'artist' in German, was bestowed on Mr. Künstler's paternal great-grandfather, a sculptor, by Russian Czar Alexander III in the small German-speaking area of Poland where the great-grandfather lived. Mort was a prodigy with a pencil by age 3. He spent stretches of his childhood bedridden by illness, during which he drew everything around him, while his father, an amateur artist, kept him supplied with art materials. On Saturdays, Mort attended art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. As a child, his first paying gig of sorts came as a counterfeiter of (free but scarce) youth tickets for Brooklyn Dodgers games, Jane Künstler said. As a student at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, he studied under Leon Friend, an art teacher who helped start the careers of many students, including photographer Irving Penn and graphic artists Gene Federico and Alex Steinweiss. Mr. Künstler also excelled in sports. While studying art at Brooklyn College, he competed in basketball and diving and ran track. 'He really wanted to be an athlete but pursued art as a backup career choice, as an illustrator,' his daughter said. He transferred to the University of California Los Angeles on a basketball scholarship but returned to New York after a semester when his father suffered a heart attack. Mr. Künstler worked summers as a waiter and lifeguard at resorts in the Catskill and the Pocono mountain regions. At one point, he shared quarters with future Boston Celtics basketball star Bob Cousy. They played together in games against other Borscht Belt hotel teams to entertain guests, Jane Künstler said. Advertisement Mr. Künstler finished college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1950 and met a classmate, Deborah Goldberg, who would become his wife of 73 years. In addition to his daughter, Jane, and his wife, he leaves another daughter, Amy; a son, David; and three grandchildren. By the early 1950s, Mr. Künstler was hustling between publishing houses in New York City, snapping up work as an illustrator for pulp paperbacks and popular men's adventure magazines such as Stag and True Adventures. Those publishers demanded vibrant scenes of red-blooded heroes facing down disaster. Mr. Künstler's bold illustrations became emblematic of the hard-boiled pulp genre of the 1950s. 'His experience as an illustrator of men's adventure magazines helped him to refine his storytelling abilities,' said Haboush Plunkett, of the Rockwell museum. 'The more sensational an artwork was, the more readers were drawn to it.' It was a skill that had wide-ranging applications. In 1969, Mr. Künstler illustrated an abridged version of 'The Godfather,' the Mario Puzo novel that was the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film. In the 1970s, the artist created memorable posters for action movies, including 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,' and then parodied the genre with a goofball version of the 1975 film 'Jaws' for Mad Magazine. For many years Mr. Künstler worked in rented studios in Manhattan, including the Lincoln Arcade, a commercial building on the Upper West Side used over the decades by an eclectic mix of bohemian artists, including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Marcel Duchamp. Advertisement In 1978, Mr. Künstler moved his family to the village of Cove Neck on Long Island, in the town of Oyster Bay, and set up a third-floor studio overlooking the water. He used a special easel mounted on a large circular platform that rotated by motor under rooftop windows to maximize the natural light. By the end of the 1970s, he began concentrating on fine-art paintings of historical subjects, often military themes. He painted scenes of wars from the American Revolution through Vietnam. A commission by CBS to paint a scene for the 1982 miniseries 'The Blue and the Gray' piqued his interest in the Civil War. His detailed, panoramic rendering of the Battle of Gettysburg, 'High Water Mark,' was unveiled at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum on the 125th anniversary of the battle in 1988. 'He was to Civil War illustration what Shelby Foote was to Civil War prose: a hypnotic master storyteller with an eye for color and character, drama and detail,' said Harold Holzer, a Civil War expert and author. This article originally appeared in
