Latest news with #Hyperallergic
NDTV
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- NDTV
19th Century Condom, With Erotic Image, On Display At Dutch Museum
New Delhi: It is neither a painting nor a sculpture. It's a 19th-century condom, made from a sheep's appendix and printed with an erotic image of a nun and three aroused clergymen, now on public display for the first time in Amsterdam. Measuring under eight inches, the condom is in "mint condition". UV testing revealed it hasn't been used, says Joyce Zelen, curator of prints at the museum in the Netherlands. Believed to have been a luxury souvenir from an 1830 brothel, "It makes it more of an object to laugh about with your friends than an actual object to use," Ms Zelen told CNN. The scene etched onto the condom is explicit and deeply ironic. A nun, legs open, is flanked by three clergymen lifting their robes, exposing their erections. The phrase 'Voila mon choix' (This is my choice) is scrawled underneath. "It shows a sort of parody on religious celibacy, but the composition is also clearly a joke on the Judgment of Paris [the Prince of Troy], where he chooses the most beautiful of the three Greek goddesses before him," Ms Zelen told Hyperallergic. "For me, that underlines the potential clientele for such a luxury condom with a print. They were probably a wealthy and well-read person." Ms Zelen explained that the design was printed using a copper plate on the flattened intestine of a sheep or goat. While this particular example wasn't intended for use, condoms from the era were typically made with similar materials and offered minimal protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections like syphilis, a major health concern at the time. The rare object was acquired by the museum for 1000 Netherlands Euros (around Rs 98,000) at a Haarlem auction six months ago. The price wasn't the awkward part. "We came to the point where we had to decide: 'Which of us is going to call our boss to ask if we can buy a condom?' And yeah, that was me," Ms Zelen said. The condom is now part of the museum's new exhibit titled 'Safe Sex?', which explores 19th-century prostitution, desire, and disease. And this artefact sits at the centre of it. The condom will remain on display in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum's Print Room until the end of November.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New York museum to acquire 6,500 photographs capturing key moments of modernity
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to acquire a unique trove of 6,500 photographs, including images of iconic moments from modern Africa, China, and Japan. The collection is a gift from former Goldman Sachs general partner and art collector Artur Walther. In 1994, he began amassing modernist German photographs, later expanding to Africa and Asia, with many images capturing key moments of social and economic upheaval during that period, Hyperallergic wrote. Other items in the collection are examples of 'vernacular photography,' capturing medical, commercial, and private family life: 'Many are just random, but others are sociologically relevant as they say something about individualities and the way people investigate or represent themselves,' Walther said.
Los Angeles Times
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Elisa Wouk Almino named editor in chief of Image magazine
The following announcement is sent on behalf of Executive Editor Terry Tang: I'm delighted to announce that Elisa Wouk Almino has been named editor in chief of Image magazine. Wouk Almino joined the L.A. Times in 2022 as Image's deputy editor. Her creativity and editorial ambition are exceptional. Under her leadership in 2024, the magazine has thrived by offering readers a glorious and authentic view of the makers of L.A. style, fashion and art. She has recruited top talent for the magazine's pages and published thought-provoking, unexpected stories on art and fashion, from deeply felt essays on surfing and personal style to visual stories, such as one that re-created old K-town beauty pageants. Wouk Almino has also written memorable essays of her own, including profiles on L.A. luminaries such as Catherine Opie, Sérgio Mendes and Ed Ruscha. And she has led new projects such as Image's activation at Art Basel Miami in 2022 and the Image party at Soho Warehouse, which drew over 600 people last year. Prior to joining Image, Wouk Almino was a senior editor at Hyperallergic, where she launched and ran the art magazine's L.A. bureau. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2018, she lived in New York for 10 years, where she worked at and wrote for various publications including Words Without Borders, n+1, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Rizzoli, Guernica and the Nation. At one point, she gave gallery tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and taught art criticism and literary translation at UCLA Extension and Catapult. She started in her new role Monday.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Art Museum of the Americas cancels Black & LGBTQ+ exhibitions after Trump's DEI crackdown
The Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., has canceled two major exhibitions showcasing Black and LGBTQ+ artists, citing executive orders from President Donald Trump targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The Washington Post reports that the decision comes amid a broader push to defund DEI programs across federally supported institutions. Keep up with the latest in + news and politics. One canceled exhibition, 'Before the Americas,' was set to open on March 21 and feature 40 works by Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American artists. The show, curated by Washington-based artist Cheryl D. Edwards, highlighted migration, colonialism, and the African diaspora's cultural impact, the Post reports. Among the artists featured were Wifredo Lam, Elizabeth Catlett, and Amy Sherald, the portraitist of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Edwards told Hyperallergic that this would have been the first time the museum displayed such a significant number of African American artists. Related: Kennedy Center cancels Gay Men's Chorus of D.C. WorldPride show about acceptance, group confirms Edwards, commissioned to curate the show in 2021, told Hyperallergic that museum leadership informed her that the Trump administration had labeled the exhibition as a 'DEI program and event' and withdrawn funding that the Biden administration had earmarked. ''I have been instructed to call you and tell you that the museum [show] is terminated,'' Edwards says Adriana Ospina, the museum's director, told her, according to the Post. 'Nobody uses that word in art — terminated.' Internal emails reviewed by Hyperallergic confirm that the U.S. government had been the show's primary financial sponsor before pulling its support. When Edwards offered to secure private funding, AMA refused. A second canceled exhibition, 'Nature's Wild With Andil Gosine,' focused on queer theory and colonial law in the Caribbean. The Canadian visionary's show featured multiple LGBTQ+ artists, including a centerpiece video installation by the late Lorraine O'Grady. Gosine told The Washington Post that he was informed of the decision on February 5 without further explanation. These cancellations follow similar cutbacks across federally funded institutions. After Trump installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center and installed gay loyalist Richard Grenell, his special envoy, as the institution's executive director, the center canceled a concert in celebration of WorldPride featuring the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Edelweiss Pirates, Zazous, and Swing Kids: How Youth Subcultures Resisted the Nazis During World War II
Universal'In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.' –Bertolt Brecht When people imagine life under an authoritarian government, they probably don't picture expressions of joyful nonconformity. The government itself would certainly prefer they do not — fascism, in particular, typically disdains individualism. In his essay 'The Doctrine of Fascism,' Benito Mussolini wrote that the ideology 'stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State.' This was especially true when it came to young people living under the Nazi regime. The Hitler Youth had existed since 1926, before the Nazis came to power, but in 1939 membership for children ages 10 to 18 was made mandatory by law. While the organization was first and foremost intended to indoctrinate the nation's young people into the Nazis' fascist, antisemitic ideology, it also furthered the image of a totally unified society. But there was a major fly in the ointment of this plan: Multiple youth subcultures weren't willing to go along with that project and had their own ideas about self-expression. Some of the most distinctive of those movements emerged not from Germany but France, under the German occupation and collaborationist Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. The so-called Zazous proliferated on Paris's iconic Champs-Élysées, where they smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and partied to swing jazz. Male Zazous wore oversize jackets and long hair that they slicked back, while the girls wore broad-shouldered jackets, bright red lipstick, and curls or braids they let hang down. The style was partly in imitation of the wide, high-waisted 'zoot suit' popular in the US among figures like the flamboyant bandleader Cab Calloway, whose song 'Zaz Zuh Zaz' is believed to have inspired the group's name. That style, however, was also a deliberate, practical middle-finger to the Nazis and the collaborationist regime. To contribute to the war effort, citizens of occupied France were expected to conserve cloth and cut their hair to be made into slippers. Thus, to be a Zazou wasn't just to defy the state's idea of who a good French young person should be, it was to actively deprive the state of raw materials. The Zazous 'opposed the regime by ignoring it, which was a political act whether they knew it or not,' the American musician and jazz critic Mike Zwerin wrote in his book Swing Under the Nazis. 'Wearing long jackets with wide collars and plenty of pleats is a political provocation during a highly publicized campaign for sartorial austerity.' After the Nazi occupation mandated that all Jewish people in occupied France wear the yellow Star of David, a number of sympathetic gentiles donned their own stars with alternate messages, such as 'Goy,' 'Buddhist,' and naturally, 'Zazou.' Isabella Segalovich, who writes and produces videos on history for Hyperallergic, tells Teen Vogue, 'One of the things that totalitarianism does, and fascism does, is the totalitarian leaders want everyday people to feel alone and helpless, and putting something on your body to show you are not happy with the state of things is something everybody else can see. And even if they're not in that place to do that, they can feel more strength so they can keep going on.' Segalovich compares the Zazous' wearing badges to non-Palestinians who have taken up the traditional keffiyeh cloth in solidarity during the war in Gaza. Across the Rhine River, a similar subculture had developed in Germany: the Swingjugend, or Swing Kids. Like the Zazous, they loved swing jazz and had distinctive style, derived from American and British fashions. This included checked sport coats, homburg hats, and shoulder-length hair for the boys, and 'overflowing' hair with lacquered nails and penciled eyebrows for the girls. While the Nazis aggressively discouraged deviation from the norm — and from German culture in general — jazz was particularly infuriating to them. The genre's association with Black and Jewish composers led the regime to refer to jazz as 'degenerate art,' embodied in an infamous illustration that depicted a racist caricature of a Black musician with a Star of David on his lapel. Even more dangerous, from the Nazi perspective, the Swing Kids deliberately mocked the Hitler Youth, the national emblem of proper German boyhood. The lyrics to one popular Swing Kid song taunted their 'crew cuts and big ears,' and the Kids jokingly greeted each other with 'Swing Heil.' The conservative press saw the cosmopolitanism and swagger of these movements as a threat, with French media accusing the Zazous of acting like American teenagers. 'We are having great difficulty in eliminating the venom of Americanism,' the Vichy newspaper La Gerbe wrote in 1942. 'It has entered our customs, impregnated our civilisation.' In other words, a regime organized on the basis of strict hierarchies — itself the puppet of a regime organized on racial supremacy — couldn't thrive if its youth wanted to be more like the kids in a multiracial democracy, even one with its own problems. A third subculture was less urbane and fashion-forward than the Zazous or the Swing Kids and had more in common with hippies or crust punks. The Edelweiss Pirates, named after a flower many members wore as a badge, were an even more pointed rebuke of the Hitler Youth. In addition to the group's opposing ideology, it also countered the structure of the Hitler Youth by being a loosely organized group of largely working-class kids who wore colorful, outdoorsy clothing and engaged in activities like camping and hiking, which were outside the Hitler Youth's strict regimentation. Significantly, the Pirates comprised girls and boys, while the Nazis consigned girls to the Hitler Youth's female auxiliary, the League of German Girls, to remind them of their duty to the state and the family unit. These groups may have started out being opposed to the Nazis largely for aesthetic reasons, but as time went on, some of them transitioned to more active opposition to the Nazi state. Some members of the Edelweiss Pirates engaged in resistance tactics like aiding fugitive Jewish people and deserters from the German army. The fist of the state frequently came down on these subversive cultural movements. The Zazous became the subject of a moral panic in the Vichy-controlled press, which led to frequent beatings on the street and a campaign by the French fascist youth group Jeunesse Populaire Française to forcibly cut the hair of Zazou members. The Swing Kids were repressed even more brutally, with many of their members sent to youth detention camps or, in the case of legal adults and/or Jews, concentration camps. The Nazis hanged 13 young adults without trial in Cologne in 1944, among them Edelweiss Pirates, in a place that is marked by a commemorative mural today. One of the Pirates killed, Barthel Schink, was recognized by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. He was hanged weeks before his 17th birthday. In a time when concerns are now running high about authoritarianism in much of the western world, these groups offer a historical lesson that joy is an act of resistance, however small, because it deprives authoritarians of the unified consensus they covet. 'We don't see any literal effects of art most of the time and in that exact moment," Segalovich tells Teen Vogue. "But often these things are unseen. I have no doubt that it makes a very large difference in how we can sort of hold on to our humanity and our community during these times.' Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want to read more Teen Vogue history coverage? 6 of the Most Famous Cults in U.S. History This Deadly Georgia Lake Holds Secrets About U.S. History Helen Keller's Legacy Has Been Sanitized Why We're Still So Obsessed With the Salem Witch Trials
