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Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Guadalupe Rosales crafts an analog Wayback Machine for a vibrant show at Palm Springs Art Museum
As an artist, Guadalupe Rosales is having fun, and she wants her audience to have fun too — and to think about what fun is and means. At least that sentiment, oriented toward pleasure and freedom, is what's telegraphed in the center of the Los Angeles-based artist's engaging and very timely solo exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum, where a checkerboard dance floor fills the central space. A makeshift DJ booth, assembled from a couple of upended shopping carts and some speakers, is at one edge of the checkerboard in the dimly lighted room, underscoring the general do-it-yourself ethos of Rosales' aesthetic. Motorized blue spotlights skitter across the floor and climb walls to the ceiling, where they rush past a pair of mirrored disco fixtures. These are not conventional 'Saturday Night Fever' spherical mirror balls but small rotating step-pyramids, doubled-up, flat sides pressed together one atop the other and then suspended, like mirror reflections of themselves. Teotihuacán meets Café Tacvba, a playful merger of ancient Mesoamerican civilization and a 1990s rock en español band in suitably fractured light. The '90s is the decade when Rosales, 45, entered her teenage years growing up on Los Angeles' Eastside. Like Teotihuacán and Café Tacvba, her exhibition looks into formative images and experiences from the past, glimpsed through a Chicana lens. (Women are prominent in the imagery.) She's gathered up ephemera — magazines, snapshots, lowrider bicycle parts, bandannas, street signs, keychains, newspapers, fuzzy dice to hang from a car's rearview mirror, feathers, fake flowers and more — and she's put them to one of two primary uses: Some form component parts of assemblage sculptures, while others are displayed in cases, like rare anthropological artifacts, or else tacked onto poster boards, like treasures from a teenager's bedroom. A side wall near the dance floor is papered with big blow-ups of joyful photographs showing jam-packed dancing at Arena, the massive, 22,000-square-foot former nightclub in Hollywood's old Union Ice building on Santa Monica Boulevard. Arena, like the adjacent club called Circus, was established by a couple of gay and Latino entrepreneurs as open-to-everyone party spaces — a radical departure during an era when discos were defined more by the vulgar discrimination of velvet ropes and vain bouncers policing entry. For people like me, who remember those clubs' heyday, even a memory of the name 'Union Ice' once prominently painted on the building's street wall flips into bitter irony, now that 'union' in daily American life has been purposefully shredded and 'ice' has become a thuggish term representing politicized, Gestapo-like cruelty. At an art museum, a dance club's once forward-leaning experience of scrappy social optimism — life and liberty fueling the pursuit of happiness — is enshrined as a necessary and valiant cultural value, which lends richness to Rosales' otherwise simple materials. The exhibition has four loosely thematic sections. In addition to the dance room, there's an introductory entryway, a gloomy nighttime space and a car culture gallery. The entry frames motifs that will ricochet through the exhibition, which is titled 'Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo' (My memory in your reflection). Tzahualli is a Nahuatl word for spiderweb, a common metaphor for fragility, interconnectedness, beauty and, not least, potential entrapment. Rosales juxtaposes a wall of psychedelic party posters, glowing beneath blacklight, with a roadside shrine of flowers and votive candles remembering loss. They are laid at the base of a black wrought iron gate, which doubles as a portal between public and private realms and the inescapable suggestion of prison bars. Bandannas tied and knotted around the gate put a familiar symbol of individual liberation and civil rights resistance at the heart of the work. Behind it, a wide rectangular hole cut into a hot-pink wall offers a telling peek into the inner dance room. An eccentric fainting couch, the horizontal hole is lavishly embellished with plush pink tufted upholstery, like the tuck-and-roll interior of a sexy 1964 Chevy Impala, the ultimate 'Lowrider' in the movie of the same name. That upgraded car, jacked with hydraulics, could also dance, which may explain the little mirrored disco ball dangling within the narrow void of Rosales' sculpture. In a rear gallery, dark nighttime photographs are hung on walls painted black to denote the wee hours. They show fragmentary urban scenes — a few palm trees illuminated by the glow of an unseen automobile's headlights, the artist's bland backyard, some mute shops — but the images aren't compelling. A wall text speaks of the melancholy of returning home after a night of fun, but visually the mood is not there. Surely, they have personal meaning for Rosales' late-night excursions as an exploring kid, but for a viewer the shadowy imagery is merely obscure. More disarming is the car culture room, where high art and lowrider productively collide. A couple of big, brightly colored photographs of painted car hoods merge automotive details of swooping and jagged shapes with the look of abstract hard-edge canvases, a painting term coined by California art critic Jules Langsner in 1959 — the dawn of a distinctly L.A. aesthetic. Nearby, an eye-grabbing projection of 'found video' snatched from the internet documents a gasp-inducing, acrobatic quebradita dance contest held in a neighborhood parking lot. (It seems to be a church event.) The amateur video, like the recreational athletic dancing shown, celebrates a kind of homemade street art. The clip is DIY culture at its most satisfyingly vivid. By now, the spiderweb invoked as the show's title is pretty much in focus, with very different pieces in very different rooms nonetheless intertwined with one another. The exhibition's strongest individual objects are three mesmerizing 'infinity portals,' two on the wall and one on the floor. Rosales edged double-sided mirror glass with strips of shifting LEDs, which create a reflected illusion of depth cascading into visual eternity. One is framed in aluminum engraved with chain links and the words 'Lost Angeles' written in an elaborate font that zips between establishment Olde English 'Canterbury' style and illicit urban graffiti. Look closely, and 'Smile now, cry later' is etched into the clear glass below a suspended bandanna, a gently admonishing song lyric by Sunny and the Sunliners, the 1960s Chicano R&B group. The other two portals ruminate on the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the wake of the horrendous Rodney King police brutality verdicts, as well as furious demands for gay rights and survival help as the AIDS epidemic rampaged. One surprising element of the show is several engrossing display cases with zines and memorabilia of daily life during those fraught days. An archive of throwaways gets new life when presented as a natural history composed of cultural artifacts. Absorbing works built from archives are becoming increasingly prominent in the art world. The motif is built on such diverse precedents as Fred Wilson's sharply researched interventions into the establishment framework of museum storerooms and Elliott Hundley's dizzying collages of material pinned with long needles to panels, which position life's scraps somewhere between exotic butterflies captured for close study and therapeutic visual acupuncture. (An excellent Hundley solo survey is currently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.) With this exhibition, Rosales is poised to join their ranks. Archival interests among artists may be residue of our tumultuously evolving digital age. As they say, nothing digital is ever permanently deleted, leaving everything open to revival and reassessment. That, too, dates to the 1990s, when personal computers became common household items, putting an infinity portal into almost every home. Think of 'Tzahualli' as a worldwide spiderweb. The show was organized by PSAM chief curator and interim director Christine Vendredi, her first exhibition since joining the museum staff last year. Disappointingly, there is no catalog, but fragments of the art's fun-drenched analog Wayback Machine are destined to live on in digital ether.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Pentagon Will Celebrate Pride Month by Renaming Ship Honoring Gay Rights Icon
President Donald Trump's assault on the LGBTQ+ community will continue through Pride month. According to a Tuesday report from the U.S. Navy is preparing to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a Navy support ship christened in honor of the assassinated gay rights icon. The report was confirmed by CBS News and ABC News. The order reportedly came directly from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Other vessels named after prominent civil rights and labor leaders are on a list for recommended renaming. According to a list obtained by CBS News, these include the USNS Thurgood Marshall, named after the first Black Supreme Court justice; the USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, named after the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court; the USNS Harriet Tubman, named after the famed abolitionist and former slave; the USNS Dolores Huerta, named after the Chicana labor activist; the USNS Lucy Stone, named after the suffragist and abolitionist; the USNS Cesar Chavez, named after the labor activist who worked alongside Huerta; and the USNS Medgar Evers, named after the civil rights leader and anti-segregationist who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963. It's no coincidence that such prominent historic leaders in minority movements are being targeted by an administration that is hell-bent on erasing the history of American equality movements from the public consciousness. The Defense Department source who spoke with said the decision to rename the ship during Pride month was an intentional choice. In January, Hegseth issued a directive titled, 'Identity Months Dead at DoD,' in which he declared that members of the department were barred from using Pentagon resources to promote or celebrate 'cultural awareness months,' including 'National African American/Black History Month, Women's History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month.' According to a memo obtained by CBS News, the decision to rename the ship was part of an effort to reestablish 'the warrior culture' within the military — a particular fixation of Hegseth. But the names on the list are, in many ways, the embodiment of American 'warrior culture.' Tubman braved the risk of capture and death to liberate dozens of slaves from the South, and Huerta and Chavez defied federal law to lead one of the most consequential labor strikes in American history. Evers led protests against segregation in the most racist corners of Mississippi. Milk was not only one of the most prominent figures in the gay rights movement in the '70s and '80s, he was also a Korean War veteran. Milk was ousted from the Navy in 1955 after being accused of engaging in then-banned homosexual activities. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 — the first gay man elected to the position — after years working as an activist and leader of the Castro neighborhood's growing gay and lesbian community. As city supervisor, Milk worked closely with former Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then also a city supervisor. Milk was assassinated along with former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978 by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White. In 2019, when the Navy announced it would be naming a vessel after Milk, it seemed like a step towards restitution by the organization that had forced out Milk on the mere suspicion that he was gay, and had done the same to an estimated thousands of other service members under 'don't ask, don't tell.' 'When Harvey Milk served in the military, he couldn't tell anyone who he truly was,' California state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote in 2016. 'Now our country is telling the men and women who serve, and the entire world, that we honor and support people for who they are. Harvey Milk's strength continues to reverberate throughout our city, our country, and the world.' Now, only a few years later, Republicans are using their revulsion of DEI as a cover to reinstitute discriminatory policies, and erase the work of countless Americans who have battled — and as in the case of Milk and others, lost their lives — in the ongoing work to build a better America for all. Under Trump, the military has banned the enlistment of transgender individuals, and the Pentagon recently caught flack for erasing scores of photos and web pages honoring women and minorities in the military — including in one instance flagging photos of the 'Enola Gay' airplane which dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, for deletion. Now, civil rights heroes will have their names scrubbed from Navy vessels, lest any seaman learn too much about the men and women who fought for the rights they may now enjoy. More from Rolling Stone 'Transphobia Is Not Victimless': Online Queer Communities Remember Charlotte Fosgate Transgender Troops Deserve the Right to Serve 'SNL' Cold Open: 'AA Team' Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth Have One Big, Boozy Reunion Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
My Boss Said 3 Words To Me On My First Day Of Work That Made Me Question My Entire Life
The first day of my exciting new life as a working journalist started with a question. 'What are you?' the editor asked me. He said I didn't look like 'a minority,' and wasn't that the reason I was given such a good opportunity? What was I? I was a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hire long before the term existed. And I was Yvonne Condes (Cón-des) de la Torre, who grew up Yvonne Condes (Con-diss), a second-generation Latina GenXer taught by my hardworking parents to assimilate so I could have an easier life than they did. I may have looked white, and spoke only passable Spanish, but inside, I was a proud Chicana. 'I'm Mexican,' I said. However, that three-word question got me thinking about where I'd come from, how I'd gotten to this place in my life, and how different my journey had been. Months earlier, a professor had taken me aside just before my interview with a newspaper editor hiring for a highly competitive 'minority' internship. 'You want to get this,' he said of the year-long, paid program. 'If you have something in you, show it now.' Deep down, I wasn't confident I did have something. My traditional Mexican American parents didn't talk to me or my sister about getting good grades or going to college, even though it was expected of our brothers. After high school, I waited tables while going to community college and then transferred to my hometown university. This process took years longer than it did for my childhood friends, who went straight to four-year colleges and had careers by the time I graduated. Who was I to aim so high? It turns out I did have something. I got the internship, and it propelled me into a life I didn't know was possible. As the Trump administration wipes out DEI from the federal government and pressures corporate America to do the same, I wonder what would have happened to me without having had that opportunity. The program was a dream come true. Interns spent four months at three different newspapers in a national chain and were provided with a furnished apartment in each city and a stipend to live on. One of my stops was at a small paper in the Midwest. I covered everything from school board meetings to carjackings to a young mother fighting to keep her husband in the country after an immigration sweep at his job. I worked hard, delivering an enthusiastic 'Yes!' for every assignment I was given, including the time I swallowed my fear of flying to ride in a prop plane to cover the county air show. Sadly, my occasional acts of bravery didn't morph into confidence. I went to work each morning worried my editors had figured out that I wasn't supposed to be there. Unfortunately, my imposter syndrome reached beyond my position in the newsroom. I could feel the class differences all around me. I had made friends with the paper's adorable graphic artist and her college friends. We'd spend weekends going to parties or bars where I would often end up arguing with a stranger about politics or why they should never use racial or ethnic epithets. I don't think I knew what a 'stealth Latina' was at the time, but that's how it felt — I was undercover, and constantly heard what white people really talked about when they thought they were among one of their own. When I offered to drive on these nights, my new friends politely declined. I drove a faded red Nissan Sentra with 100,000 miles on the odometer that my dad found at a police auction right before my internship. The backs of the front seats had been sliced open, and the trunk liner ripped out to look for drugs. It was a stark contrast to the shiny new Chevy Malibus two of my friends drove. After I completed the internship, the Midwestern newspaper offered me a full-time job with benefits. It did not include housing like my internship had, so I found an unfurnished one-bedroom apartment near work. Kind editors and friends dug through their garages and basements to gift me furniture, and I put a bed on my credit card. While I was overwhelmed by the generosity, it wasn't long after I moved into the apartment that I realized I was in over my head. At night, alone in my apartment, I would stare at the stack of bills I had no way of paying. I had applied for my first credit card at a college fair back when it didn't matter if you had a job, assets or a co-signer to gain access to thousands of dollars in credit. It's just for emergencies, I told myself. My credit card emergencies began with a semester of school (before I learned about low-interest student loans) and ended with day-to-day items I couldn't afford once my student loan payments began. I needed help — free help — so I made an appointment with a credit counselor provided by the county. The counselor was just a year or so older than me, and she shook her head as she looked through my paperwork. 'Can you live with your parents?' she asked. I wondered if she also drove a Chevy Malibu. Moving home wasn't an option. I also shut down her next suggestion to ask my parents for money. They didn't have any extra to give. An editor friend I told about my money troubles said she had an idea: A nice man we both knew was rich and could loan me money. I didn't feel good about it, but I was out of options. My soon-to-be benefactor and I met for lunch at an outdoor café to discuss a consolidation loan I would pay back in monthly installments. The terms were more than generous: The interest was low, and I didn't have to do anything creepy to secure the loan. Soon after I began my journey to good financial health, I started dating a journalist who had gone to a prestigious university followed by graduate school. He was financially solvent and a beautiful writer. I tried not to think about how we came from different parts of the cultural and economic universe until one day I spotted a check from his parents tossed on a table in his apartment. It was for a few hundred dollars, but to me, it might as well have been a million. Is he rich? I asked myself. Does he know I'm poor? I wish I could say that I started an adult conversation about generational wealth and what it meant not to have it. About how I felt like I would never catch up financially or in social strata. But I didn't have the words or maturity to explain that or how I was tired of being broke, stressed out and alone. Instead, I started an argument with him. Soon after, I got a job in Northern California, where my sister lived. Years before, she, too, had put herself through college and then law school in California. When I relocated, she was able to do for me what no one had done for her when she survived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches during law school. I lived with her rent-free for a year, chipping away at my debt and saving money for my own apartment. My boyfriend and I broke up. Even if I hadn't moved away, the chip on my shoulder was just too heavy. A few years later, I met a wonderful man. He was a responsible homeowner who had never experienced the overwhelming panic of not knowing how he would make rent or if there was enough room on his credit card to pay for a root canal. We were already engaged when my employer offered buyouts at the beginning of the great newspaper decline that continues today. I didn't think about what it meant to leave a good job in journalism because I couldn't see beyond my bills and how nice it would be to walk down the aisle as an equal and not a financial burden. So I took the buyout and used it to pay off the remainder of what I owed my benefactor in Illinois. At 31 years old, I could finally breathe. Since then, I've continued writing, raised two kids, started a couple of businesses, sold one, and never once took for granted what that DEI internship helped me to become. I'm sharing my story because losing DEI initiatives in this country will be devastating, and we're already seeing the effects. Universities are slashing programs that help Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ students get into and thrive in college. By destabilizing the Education Department, the Trump administration is throwing student loan and financial aid programs into chaos. Without student loans, I never would have made it through school. My situation wasn't easy, but I also know it could have been exponentially more difficult if I had experienced racial profiling and discrimination. The lid of my Nissan's trunk was held down with a bungee cord and would bob up and down when I drove. But as a 'Whitina,' the police never pulled me over like one Latino student I wrote about in college who was stopped constantly because he was brown and drove a fully operational low-rider. I can only begin to imagine the terror of being thrown into a detention facility and disappeared. Diversity programs aren't giveaways. They level the playing field so workplaces, schools and government better reflect America. For example, Latinos are nearly 20% of the U.S. population, yet only 8% are journalists. Of the hundreds of people laid off from print and digital newsrooms in 2024, a disproportionate number were people of color. DEI gave me an opportunity, but I earned my job and changed my circumstances, thereby changing the trajectory of my life and my children's lives as well. I have two sons in college who I've taught to believe in themselves, and to love and appreciate their Latinidad. I also confessed to them what I learned the hard way about financial health. My family is a melting pot like much of this country, and I believe that diversity, equity and inclusion is what makes America great — not throwing obstacles in the way of young people trying to get a good education and a decent job. Yvonne Condes is a freelance writer and contributing editor to Picturing Mexican America, a project that works to uncover the whitewashed history of Mexican Los Angeles. You can find her on Instagram @yvonneinla. Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we're looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@ I Just Got Into Harvard. My MAGA Grandparents' 6-Word Reaction To My Acceptance Devastated Me. I Just Lost My Job Because I'm An American I Spent Over $6,000 At Target Last Year. Here's Why I'm Giving Up My Favorite Place To Shop.
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Real Women Have Curves' Is Now a Broadway Show. Here Are 5 Things to Know.
Joy Huerta wasn't so sure about musical theater. When the director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo approached Huerta in 2019 about adapting Josefina López's play 'Real Women Have Curves' into a musical, she had her doubts. Huerta, best known as half of the brother-and-sister pop duo Jesse & Joy, was unfamiliar with the 1990 play, and she had never seen the popular 2002 film adaptation starring America Ferrera. But then she began reading the script. And it was then, she said, that she understood why the story could be so compelling set to song. 'I remember being so excited about it, because I was like, 'Anyone can relate to this,'' said Huerta, 38, who composed the music and wrote the lyrics with Benjamin Velez, 37, for the show, which is now a Broadway musical scheduled to open on Sunday. Set in 1987 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, 'Real Women Have Curves' explores immigrant experiences through the story of a group of Latina women working at a garment factory. The focus is on an 18-year-old who is torn between staying home to help her undocumented family members and relocating to New York to attend Columbia University on a scholarship. The production had an earlier run in 2023 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Shortly after performances began on Broadway this month, Huerta, Velez and Lisa Loomer, who wrote the book with Nell Benjamin, discussed their inspirations and approach to adapting the story for the stage. In a separate conversation, Tatianna Córdoba, 25, who stars as the musical's young heroine, Ana García, spoke about making her Broadway debut in a role she identifies with so closely. Here are five things to know about the production. It all started with a diary. More than a decade before 'Real Women Have Curves' made waves in 2002 as a film, it began life as the diary entries of López, an undocumented Chicana teenager who recorded her experiences working in a sewing factory in Los Angeles's Boyle Heights neighborhood. When she was just 18, she expanded on those entries and turned them into a play. 'Real Women Have Curves' had an initial production in San Francisco in 1990, and has been staged many times since. López (and George LaVoo) wrote the screenplay for the movie, which starred a young America Ferrera in her feature film debut. Loomer, who also lived near Boyle Heights in the 1980s, pulled from the original works and added some new characters. 'The movie is quite different from the play, and the musical is quite different from both of them,' she said. 'But they have the same DNA.' The show celebrates body positivity. Since body positivity is a relatively new concept, Loomer had to find a way to write about the story's celebrated appreciation of full-figured bodies for a contemporary audience. One of the musical's characters, Ana's blunt, family-first mother, Carmen, is constantly criticizing her daughter for her weight in the film. 'In terms of Carmen, I felt she would be better understood if we left it in 1987,' Loomer said. For the musical, she softened the edges of the character, who is played by Justina Machado on Broadway. (Lupe Ontiveros played her in the film.) In short: Less fat-shaming, more back story to help the audience understand the generational and cultural roots of Carmen's harsh approach. (Though some jabs remain, such as telling Ana she could stand to skip a meal.) 'You want to hate her for what she just said, but at the same time, she's not saying it in a way that she's meaning to put Ana down,' Huerta said. 'She's thinking as she speaks, because that's where she comes from.' Spanish is sprinkled throughout. It was a delicate balancing act, Loomer said: They wanted audience members who do not speak Spanish to be able to follow the story, but they also wanted to add as much authenticity as possible. 'They wouldn't speak in English to each other at home, and certainly not in the factory,' she said. 'So you have to give the feel of Spanish — the rhythms — and yet the Anglo audience has to understand it.' Sixteen of the show's 19 cast members are of Latino or Hispanic descent. Most are making their Broadway debuts. 'I just love to see how, when that curtain comes up every night, we see people that we feel like, 'Oh my God. That could be me onstage.' And ultimately, that could be my aunt, or my cousin, or my tía,' Huerta said of the cast. During the show's Cambridge run, they tested how much Spanish to include in the songs. 'We never wanted the amount of Spanish to take people out of the story,' Velez said. 'So it's been a kind of a dance as we figure out the right balance.' Illegal immigration is a theme. The musical is set in the summer of 1987, when a Reagan-era amnesty program was in place for longtime undocumented immigrants. (The playwright became a legal citizen through this program.) In a change from the film and the play, Ana is the only U.S. citizen among her family and co-workers. The other employees at the factory are undocumented as are her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), who owns the factory, and their mother, Carmen, who also works there. 'I made this change because it increases her family's need for Ana to stay,' Loomer said. 'It also increases the responsibility and guilt Ana feels when she wants to leave and pursue her own dreams.' Loomer also expanded the cast of undocumented characters, adding Guatemalan and Salvadoran women, including the sweet and vulnerable 17-year-old Indigenous Guatemalan refugee Itzel (Aline Mayagoitia), who sings about rising above life's challenges in the song 'If I Were a Bird.' 'The beauty sometimes about doing a play that's set in the past, it shows you what hasn't changed,' said Loomer, who has spent a majority of her four-decade career writing plays that deal with the experiences of Latinas and immigrant characters. 'At times, it allows you to see the present even more painfully.' The show is personal for the lead actress. When Tatianna Córdoba, who is making her Broadway debut as Ana, read the script for the musical, the family dynamics resonated with her. 'A lot of the mother-daughter exchanges that Justina and I have in the show remind me of my abuelita so much,' said Córdoba, who grew up in Los Angeles and whose parents are of Costa Rican and Filipino descent. 'There's that motherly judgment, but also love.' The discussions around body image also felt true to life, said Córdoba, who studied ballet when she was younger before feeling pressure to quit. 'I realized very quickly, when puberty hit, that my body was changing in ways that a lot of my ballet friends' bodies were not,' she said. One thing she wishes she'd had as a teenager: Her character's self-assurance. 'Ana is who I wish was at 18,' she said. 'She just has this belief in herself, this confidence in her body that I really wish I had at that age. She's far more concerned about everything else going on with her — her brain, her hopes and her desires.' She loves being part of a scene in Act II when the fuller-figured women in the boiling-hot factory strip down to their undergarments, reveling in their bodies. It's been receiving mid-show standing ovations. 'There's something infectious about just watching other people be joyful, about watching people being brave,' she said. 'I think that's what makes people stand up and clap — they feel really empowered, and they feel loved in that moment.'
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
This New Mexico City Is on the Rise, Thanks to Great Restaurants and New Boutique Hotels Like This One
Arrive Albuquerque, from trendy hotel brand Palisociety, is now open and located in the heart of the New Mexican capital. The 137-room hotel has chic design inspired by the high desert—expect earthy tones, wood accents, and fun pendant lights. There's also an on-site restaurant, Dwtnr Cocktail Bar & Lounge, specializing in craft cocktails and light bites. Palisociety, known for its chic, effortlessly cool boutique hotels, just opened its latest outpost, this time in the Land of Enchantment. Arrive Albuquerque is now one more reason to book a trip to New Mexico's capital. Arrive is located in downtown Albuquerque across from Robinson Park on Central Avenue, what was once old Route 66. There are 137 guest rooms spread across six stories, a seasonally open pool (plus a swim club), and an on-site restaurant, Dwtnr Cocktail Bar & Lounge. The building that now houses Arrive was constructed in 1965 and was originally named the Downtowner and, later, Hotel Blue. The Hotel Blue property joined Palisociety's portfolio in 2021 when the brand acquired Arrive Hotel & Restaurants. Palisociety then spent roughly a year thoroughly—and thoughtfully—renovating the property, transforming it into a modern hotel and injecting a little joie de vivre back into downtown Albuquerque. 'The city is ripe for a creative boom,' said Avi Broh, Palisociety CEO and founder, in an interview with Travel + Leisure. 'We've met so many interesting place-makers, artists, entrepreneurs, and creatives since we've been working on the hotel, and we are excited to be at the forefront of the downtown core's next chapter.' On the exterior of the building, you can see an expansive mural created by local Diné and Chicana artist Nani Chacon. The mural is reminiscent of the original artwork that once graced the front of the building and prominently features a candy-red lowrider among blooming nopal cactuses. Within the hotel, guests will find warm, minimalist interiors and a soft pastel color palette inspired by the hues and tones of New Mexico's high desert and the organic design movement of the 1970s. It's the first property under the Arrive umbrella with design completely overseen by Brosh and the in-house team. You'll spot things like pendant lights, wood accents, plush lounge seating, and tilework in earthy ochre, white, and brick red across the common areas. 'We paid homage to the city and its southwestern locale, but in a way that feels authentic, creative, irreverent, and unexpected,' Brosh told T+L. 'I think it blends classic New Mexico-inspired influences with the youthful aesthetic that the Arrive brand delivers seamlessly.' There are four different room types at Arrive Albuquerque: King, Double, Suite, or Accessible. Regardless of what accommodation they pick, guests will be able to enjoy rooms decked out in the property's signature eccentric aesthetic, Victrola Bluetooth speakers, a curated minibar, soft robes, and Grown Alchemist bath products. A reservation here will also get you access to the 24/7 fitness center and the Zia sun-shaped pool. Albuquerque is certainly having a culinary moment, with a few ABQ chefs making the James Beard semifinalist list this year, including Kattia Rojas of Buen Provecho and Sean Sinclair of Hotel Chaco's Level 5. However, you don't have to take a single step out of the hotel to find phenomenal food. Simply head to Dwntr Cocktail Lounge & Bar, specializing in American and Asian American comfort food. Some highlights on the menu include coconut shrimp toast with tom yum seasoning, green chile smashburgers, and char siu ribs. Don't skip on the fun cocktail menu with inventive drinks like the Rhinestone Cowboy (a mixture of yuzu liqueur, sparkling sake, and Champagne) or the Eastbound & Down, a refreshing little number made of gin and grapefruit juice. Nightly rates at Arrive Albuquerque start from $185. Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
