Latest news with #Tennessee-born
The South African
26-04-2025
- The South African
Kidnapped pastor Josh Sullivan returns to US after ordeal
Josh Sullivan, the US pastor who was kidnapped and rescued in a dramatic showdown, has returned to America. Earlier this week, the Tennessee-born preacher broke his silence about the traumatic ordeal, which he labelled the 'worst experience' of his life. In 2018, Sullivan and his family relocated to South Africa, where they established a church in the Eastern Cape. In a Facebook post, Josh Sullivan posted an update about himself, now in the US. The 45-year-old tagged his location, back in his home in Tennessee. Earlier this week, the US pastor broke his silence about his kidnapping experience, which occurred mid-sermon earlier this week. After five days of being held ransom, Josh was rescued by police, who shot dead three suspects. He shared: 'I want to begin by thanking God for delivering me from what was undoubtedly the worst experience of my life. I also want to thank him for delivering me from my sin 28 years ago when I accepted Jesus Christ. Because of my personal relationship with Jesus, He gave me the peace I needed to get through'. Josh Sullivan thanked the public for their prayers, which he believes resulted in the 'miracle' of his rescue. He also thanked the South African police, the FBI, and other law enforcement authorities for their rescue mission. He added, 'As we begin the difficult process of healing and moving forward, we kindly ask for Meanwhile, the US Embassy has thanked authorities for rescuing Josh Sullivan, five days after his kidnapping. It shared in a press statement: 'We commend the swift, coordinated SAPS response, led by the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks), in collaboration with the Serious Organised Crime Investigation team, Anti-Gang Unit, Crime Intelligence, Tactical Response Team, and other partners. We are grateful for their cooperation with the U.S. Mission. It added that the mission was 'committed to continued collaboration with South African counterparts to promote the safety and security of U.S. citizens'. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 . Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp , Facebook , X, and Bluesky for the latest news.
New York Times
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Marcia Marcus, Painter Rediscovered in Her Last Decade, Dies at 97
Marcia Marcus, a figurative and conceptual artist with a steely will and a bold contemporary style who found fame in the 1960s and then was largely overlooked until she was nearly 90, though she kept working, confidently, decade after decade, died on March 27 in Manhattan. She was 97. Her death, in a nursing facility, was announced by her daughters, Kate Prendergast and Jane Barrell Yadav. Ms. Marcus was everywhere that mattered to a young, determined and very talented artist in the late 1950s and '60s. In Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod each summer, painting out of a shack in the dunes. At the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, holding her own. (Willem de Kooning was a paramour.) She showed at the 10th Street galleries in the East Village, the scrappy spaces run by artists who were ignored by the uptown establishment, and at the short-lived Delancey Street Museum, run by her friends the Tennessee-born Red Grooms and Bob Thompson, the Black figurative painter who died young, both of whom she conscripted to dance and play the bongos at a Happening she staged there. (She read a poem.) The Whitney Museum included her in its roundup 'Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six.' And again, two years later, as part of its 'Forty Artists Under Forty' exhibition. The art critic Brian O'Doherty, reviewing her solo show at an uptown gallery in 1961 for The New York Times, compared Ms. Marcus to Milton Avery, Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. She was a virtuosic figurative painter — one reviewer described her painting technique as 'thinned out shallower than a razor' — with a flat, almost deadpan style resembling that of her contemporary Alex Katz, a comparison that annoyed her. She made portraits of her circle: Lucas Samaras, Mr. Grooms and Mr. Thompson. She painted Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Jill Johnston, the lesbian feminist author and dance critic at The Village Voice. She painted strangers, too — anyone whose presence she found compelling. But her favorite subject was herself. She painted herself over and over again, in a variety of costumes and settings, her gaze stern and challenging. She was a helmeted Athena, arms akimbo, wearing a frothy pink chiffon dress from the 1930s; she painted herself as Medusa, and as a reclining nude. In pearls and a red sheath, she placed herself in front of Masada, the Israeli fortress where, legend has it, Jewish soldiers died by suicide rather than surrender to Roman forces. Not that she would have joined them, had she been there, she told Amei Wallach, the film director and critic, who reviewed a show of Ms. Marcus's in Newsday in 1979: 'I'd be damned if I would take someone's orders to kill myself.' 'Marcia the difficult,' Mr. Samara called her teasingly in a letter in 1965. Ms. Marcus was difficult. Or tough, as the painter Mimi Gross said recently: 'And that's an understatement.' She had to be. Like her older peers, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh, Ms. Marcus was doubly hobbled, as a woman and as a figurative painter working in a very male milieu, through periods of art history — Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism — when her sort of work was mostly out of fashion. Seen today, it is eye-poppingly modern. Just look at the work of Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama's portrait. 'Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh and Marcia Marcus are all very different,' said Saara Pritchard, the curator who put together a show of the three artists at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in Manhattan that opens April 10. 'Neel is interested in the formal aspects of painting, in character studies; Sleigh is very political, 'How do we subvert the male gaze, etc.' Marcus is more conceptual. But they were all working at the same time, and they were free to do what they wanted because no one was paying attention.' Next week's exhibit is the latest showcase for Ms. Marcus, who re-emerged as an unknown yet oddly familiar star in 2017. That year, at 'Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965,' a show at New York University's Grey Art Gallery about upstart artist co-ops in the East Village and on the Lower East Side — Ms. Marcus's scene — many viewers were apparently stopped in their tracks by one of her self-portraits. In the large-scale painting, she stands poker-faced, clad only in tights, heels and a bolero jacket. Who was this startlingly modern painter that seemingly no one had ever heard of, or had long forgotten? Holland Cotter, in his New York Times review, called the painting 'a way-ahead-of-its-time self-portrait' and Ms. Marcus 'now obscure.' Melissa Rachleff, the curator who organized 'Inventing Downtown,' was not familiar with Ms. Marcus before she began putting the show together. But when she saw that Ms. Marcus had been part of Mr. Grooms's gallery, Ms. Rachleff sought her out. 'She was wholly unsentimental, an artist through and through,' said Ms. Rachleff, who met Ms. Marcus in her TriBeCa apartment in 2013 and was struck by her work's boldness and innovation, and by her sassy stoicism. 'She had lived with financial uncertainty and with the uncertainty of never being successful. She was absolutely uncompromising about it, even through the years of barely selling anything. If she didn't take herself seriously, no one else would.' Marcia Helene Feitelson was born on Jan. 11, 1928, in Manhattan, the eldest of two daughters of Frieda (Gelband) Feitelson, who worked as an accountant, and Irving Feitelson, a window dresser for department stores. Marcia grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan and wanted to be fashion designer. But her mother was adamant that she attend college instead of studying at a trade school, and perhaps become a teacher. She was only 15 when she entered New York University's College of Arts and Science, where she earned a bachelor's degree in art, graduating in 1947. That same year, she married Harry Gutman, who worked for her father, mostly as a way to leave home. A year later, the marriage was over, and Marcia was determined to change her surname. She had been named for her maternal grandfather, so she chose his first name. 'If I called myself Marcia Marcus,' she said in an oral history interview conducted in 1975 for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, 'then I was like myself both ways, in a way, and I had no connections with anything, but it also had some kind of significance.' She had been drawing all through college, and now began to take classes at the Cooper Union and, later, at the Arts Students League. Ms. Marcus met her second husband, Terence Barrell, at a party in Provincetown. They married in 1959, and he moved into her New York loft, in Alphabet City. Mr. Barrell was supportive of his wife to an extent that was unusual at the time. He worked as a cook and a teacher, but mostly cared for their two daughters, especially in 1962, when Ms. Marcus won a Fulbright grant to study in France, and the family moved to Paris. For a few years after they divorced in 1972, he continued to build the stretchers for her canvases. Despite commissions for her portraiture, money was always tight. Ms. Marcus worked as a visiting professor at a series of colleges, including Vassar — piecemeal employment that left her more time to paint, although it meant she was financially insecure. In the 1990s, with great reluctance, she took a job as a substitute teacher in New York City's public school system. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her sister, Barbara Rose, and four grandchildren. Ms. Marcus's work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian. Ten months after the Grey Art Gallery show opened in 2017, the Eric Firestone Gallery in NoHo put on a solo show of her work. (Mr. Firestone also thought her self-portrait at the Grey was a standout.) After that, Ms. Marcus appeared in a few more exhibitions before the pandemic dawned, including one at the Borough of Manhattan Community College that paired her with Ms. Gross, the painter. The critic John Yau, in his review of the show for Hyperallergic, noted that both women used painting as 'a vehicle of the imagination.' 'It is a stance that runs counter to other, better-known figurative artists, such as Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, and Fairfield Porter,' he wrote. 'I would argue that what Marcus and Gross attained is equal to their male counterparts, and in that regard is an integral part of art history.'
Los Angeles Times
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Too liberal for the South, too redneck for L.A.: Why Trae Crowder's comedy makes him a man without a country
Don't judge a comedian by his accent, especially if it's Trae Crowder. Though the Tennessee-born comedian describes his voice as having more Southern twang than 'a racist banjo,' it takes him less than two minutes onstage to show why he's known as 'the Liberal Redneck.' Whether it's punch lines skewering white supremacists or viral video rants about the Trump era filmed from the front seat of his sun-damaged Jeep, Crowder's brand of comedy is a mind-melting combination that never minces words about where he stands on major topics related to America from his unique perspective. His latest special, 'Trash Daddy' — released Friday on YouTube via comedy platform 800 Pound Gorilla — swerves among jokes about politics, family and living life as a hick from the sticks while trying to raise California-bred children. Recently Crowder spoke with The Times about his Southern background, including his upbringing in a liberal family in a conservative area and his current life as a fish out of water living in Los Angeles. What has it been like for you as a touring comic since the presidential election, doing your political material for crowds that might sympathize with a lot of your liberal positions on politics? People are definitely bummed out and feeling weird. The response has been pretty positive after the shows and whatnot, because I do talk about [politics] a little bit, but then I also talk about a whole bunch of other things that have nothing to do with that and it's like a welcome distraction for people, so they get a little bit of what they expect but then also a little bit of a diversion at the same time. But when I'm actually talking to people offstage, the morale generally is not super high right now. How do you feel about the power of comedy when it comes to processing fear or disappointment? I've never really believed that comedy changes too many people's minds or anything like that. But I do think it can still serve an important purpose. When it comes to things that are hard for some people to think about or talk about, comedy just kind of takes some of the edge off of it. So I do think that can help and be important. Also, people find it relatable. But I don't think there's too many comedy conversions happening. You think people more or less have their opinions set one way or the other when watching a comedian and it just depends on how they view it? I definitely have talked to people before that have told me I changed the way they looked at a particular subject, or something like that. But generally speaking, I don't really think it works that way. I do think that for young people when they're growing up, depending on what they're watching and listening to, it can go a long way toward shaping what they think as they get older. But for full-blown adults, I don't think too many of them are gonna hear a stand-up bit and then be like, 'You know what, I'm doing a complete 180 on that.' My first interaction with your comedy was through your 'Liberal Redneck' videos on YouTube, with you sitting in your Jeep ranting about current events and frustrations with Trump and the state of the country. Are those videos still mostly the entry point most people have into your comedy? Yeah, 100%, that's the main thing. Before the election, if it had gone the other way, which I'm not saying I expected it to — I very much didn't know what was going to happen in the election — but if it had gone the other way, I was planning on trying to pivot not completely away from politics, to doing just general comedy stuff online that wasn't political. I do some cooking videos and stuff like that, here and there. But then with the election going what it did, it just feels like, what else am I going to talk about? But those videos are definitely the main things that people know me for. I started comedy in 2010 living in Knoxville and was doing stand-up in the South. I thought it was going pretty well for my circumstances. But then in 2016 I went viral with one of those videos specifically, and that's what garnered me the following I have today. Some people also think they're going to go to my show and I'm just going to be on the stage ranting in that style for an hour — which would be very hard, and also exhausting. So it's not the only thing I do. But without a doubt it's the thing that most people know me from still, and it's been that way since the beginning of my full-time professional comedy career. What was your motivation going into the new special 'Trash Daddy' and what were some topics you knew you wanted to touch on? I try to strike a balance between doing at least some of a version of what people know me for and also talking about other things. All my favorite comics talked about real stuff — social or cultural issues or whatever. So I always want to do some of that without being too overtly going completely after just one side, or one political party. I have a chunk in there about making fun of the idea of white supremacy. I'm talking about a very serious subject, but in my opinion, that shouldn't offend anyone but a white supremacist. If you're a conservative, but you're not a white supremacist, it shouldn't bother you to hear me make fun of white supremacy, and so that's kind of how I try to think about a lot of it. Growing up, was your family more liberal than most families in rural parts of the South? Yes, and that is unusual. My wife and a lot of my friends are liberal people from small Southern towns. Pretty much every single one of them is what I call the 'blue sheep' — they're from a typical Southern, conservative family, and they're the wacky liberal at the table. That seems to be a much more common experience, but that's not my circumstance. I was raised mostly by my dad. My dad only has one sibling, my uncle Tim, who is openly gay, and him and my dad were very close. On top of that, my family, even my grandparents, were Southern Democrats. My grandpa was what you think when you hear Southern Democrats. He was born in 1935 — he was a little racist or whatever, but he was a Democrat because Democrats used to run the South until that whole switchover after the Civil Rights Act. He just remained a Democrat. And my dad and uncle Tim were Democrats too, not like that kind, just like regular. Also, I didn't go to church. My dad didn't send us to church because they're very homophobic. My dad ran the video store in my tiny little town, and he was into like, you know, David Bowie and David Lynch and foreign movies and stuff like that. So I pretty much just am the way that I was raised to be. It's just that that happened in a very odd place for that to happen. I feel bad sometimes because a lot of people, fans and stuff, will ask me for advice on how to deal with their crazy, insane MAGA relatives. And, like I said, I almost feel kind of guilty about it, because I'm like, I don't have any of those. After moving to L.A. did you feel more at home, or are there some aspects of living here that caught you by surprise? I always kind of felt like a man without a country because of everything we just talked about. But I never felt like I really fit in in my hometown, even though I had great friends there, some of which are still my friends to this day. It wasn't horrific, but I very much wanted to get out. I knew I was leaving as soon as I could because I didn't feel like I fit in there. And now in L.A., I definitely don't fit in on the West Coast either. I mean, just the way that I sound, but also we live in the Valley and we mow our own yard and do our own landscaping and stuff like that. It's weird to people that we mow our own yard, living around there. We drive a Jeep that's got sun damage on it, it's kind of beat up and rusty and everything. I don't even know how to compost or what composting is. My wife showed me a post on Facebook the other day from somebody in that area who was looking for a vegan wedding photographer. All that type of stuff is just pretty alien to me. And another thing that happens, I take a lot of Ubers and stuff out there, because we just have that one Jeep, and people hear my accent, and ask where I'm from. And if I say I'm from Tennessee, and nine times out of 10, if they then go, 'Oh, Tennessee. I love Tennessee!' especially if they say, 'I've been thinking about moving to Tennessee,' I know that they're about to go into some conservative right-wing thing. If they're big fan of Tennessee or whatever, then that means they're going to start talking about all the problems with California and all the crime and the immigrants and yada, yada. So how do you handle that in the moment without turning everything into a big argument? I usually just downplay it and change the subject. If I get in an Uber that has that little box you can check where it says, like, 'Quiet, please,' I check it. I don't think I'm a rude person. I'm just not good at small talk with strangers. So I'd literally prefer to not talk about anything. But when this happens, I usually switch to talking about the weather, sports, or something like that, or try to change the subject, basically, because I'm not trying to have a full-blown argument with my Uber driver in L.A. traffic.
