Hot-button issues may have dominated the headlines out of Austin, but the Texas Legislature this past spring made a quiet move that some of us will appreciate: It expanded the Texas State Artists Award program, which includes the poet laureate and such, to include a slot for a classical musician.
Mere days before acclaimed environmental journalist Jeff Goodell picks up the phone to talk about the Blanton Museum of Art’s If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change, a special exhibition running Sept. 9, 2023—Feb. 11, 2024, the skies along the East Coast actually do turn orange.
“What does it mean to make an image of a woman now?” Lauren Moya Ford asked during our recent studio visit. For her, the question is not sensational or rhetorical; instead, it’s personal.
There is actually no way to know how many artists support themselves solely through their artwork, but most people agree that it’s a fairly low percentage.
In 1995, South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda wrote a book called Ways of Dying that features a character named Toloki, a professional mourner at township funerals in post-Apartheid South Africa.
When I caught up with artist, professor, and 2022 Tito’s Art Prize winner Tammie Rubin, she was deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about to begin her second session at the Penland Artist Residency.
PART TWO: Think about classical ballet’s signature repertoire—The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, Cinderella. Each of these canonic story ballets is drawn from a European folk tale or story, and set to music by a European composer. Is it time to ask, “what other stories can ballets tell?”
Now as spring blooms, we find Austin’s Fusebox, the state’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival, carrying the trend into 2023 with five days (April 12-16) filled with its usual innovative and experimental work, but also a particularly playful and fun lineup.