In 1913, Agnes Ernst Meyer, the wife of financier Eugene Meyer, Jr., and pregnant with her second child, was out of sorts and unable to make her rounds to the art galleries, where, as a former New York Post reporter on the art beat, she had been dubbed “the Sun Girl” by photographer-gallerists Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Writing to Stieglitz, a brooding Meyer quipped, “I am now your Eclipsed Sun-girl.”
The Ivy Leaguer tore up his career plan. For his first two years at Princeton University, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen had majored in public policy, figuring he’d go to law school and work in public affairs. Then a summer project stirred his love for singing, which went all the way back to his childhood.
If good playwrights tend to have discerning ears for the language and voices around them, then perhaps those wanting to produce a new kind of theater festival need to become the most sensitive of auditory aficionado as well. Kenn McLaughlin, artistic director of Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, seems to subscribe to this theory because when the company began organizing their new play-reading event that would become Sin Muros: A Latina/o Theatre Festival, he knew the first act of creation was to be quiet and listen.
Extraordinary examples of handmade stone tools, some of the first aesthetically-conceived objects known to humankind, will be included in the exhibition First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone which opens Jan. 27 at the Nasher Sculpture Center.