Beyond the Velvet Ropes: Inside Lincoln Center’s Next Act

The Theatre Times: For Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, home to the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet, redefining the modern stage is a delicate dance: honoring rich heritage while expanding how storytelling lives both under the spotlight and beyond the proscenium.

Awards Season and the Management of Cultural Power

hyperallergic.com: Award season now arrives less as a sequence of events than as a continuous atmosphere. Announcements blur into ceremonies, ceremonies into press cycles, press cycles into speculation about the next stage. The art world has begun to mirror this rhythm, producing its own awards, its own stages, its own moments of recognition that appear to consolidate value and, more importantly, authority in real time.

The Guardian view on the class crisis in the arts: the UK’s culture must not become the preserve of the elite

Editorial | The Guardian: In his McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2024, the playwright James Graham called class “everyone’s least favourite diversity and representation category”. A socioeconomic duty on public bodies was included in 2010’s Equality Act, but has never been enacted.

Five Fronts in Trump’s Culture War

The New York Times: In his first term, President Trump took issue with some actors, arts funding and the media. In his second, he has hit the accelerator. Changing what Americans see and hear at their national museums, their performance spaces and on television is now at the core of his agenda. Mr. Trump views it as an effort to return to a lost vision of national greatness, one that seeks to “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.” Critics regard it as a nostalgic, reductive whitewashing. Here are five areas where the Trump administration has tried to reshape American culture.

Liverpool's unsung COVID heroes: how the city's arts scene became a life support network

theconversation.com: You are never far away from culture in Liverpool. The forthcoming host of the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest on Ukraine’s behalf has long pioneered the idea of “arts as life support” – via initiatives such as The Life Rooms, which uses a library and theatre (among other sites) to engage people in cultural activities as part of its social health model.

New York Launches Biggest Guaranteed Income Fund for Artists in the US

www.businessinsider.com: Big Apple artists will be getting big checks in just a few months, providing relief to thousands who have been struggling during the pandemic.

Embracing Arlington Arts reports 2021 successes

DC Metro Theater Arts: The nonprofit arts-advocacy organization Embracing Arlington Arts (EAA) is widely known in the theater community for its weekly “Embracing Arlington Arts Talks” podcasts featuring artists, actors, theater leaders, arts dignitaries, gallery directors, dancers, musicians, and more. Now the organization has released its 2021 Annual Report of Successes.

Lincoln Center to offer free programming in NYC and online

DC Metro Theater Arts: To make the arts more accessible to everyone, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has announced an exciting spring season of free and choose-what-you-pay programming, beginning on Sunday, February 27, and running through Wednesday, June 15. The extensive roster will feature both in-person and virtual performances, discussions, and civic activations, bringing together dozens of arts organizations and artists from across NYC and beyond to explore the intersection of culture, civic engagement, and community-building through vibrant and varied weekly programming.

What will theater look like in a post-COVID world? Old Globe launches initiative to answer that question

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Six months after San Diego’s oldest and largest theater closed its doors due to the pandemic, the Old Globe today announced an initiative to reimagine the future of theater performances in a post-COVID world.

The Globe has recruited six theater artists from around the country to grapple with the question: “What is theater now?”

What Does a Social Justice Curator Do? The Bronx Museum's Jasmine Wahi on Why Every Museum Should Have One

news.artnet.com: I discovered the work of curator Jasmine Wahi on Instagram, where she posts powerful meditations on politics, art, and the intersections between the two as @browngirlcurator. Since February, Wahi has served as the social justice curator at the Bronx Museum, which I found particularly intriguing at a time when questions about the role of social justice in museums have been amplified in the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Pearls with pajamas: Arts companies re-envision galas in the coronavirus era

Datebook: Before Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s annual Ovation gala officially began on Saturday, April 18, swanky jazz by Marcus Shelby played as a slideshow cycled through images of donors. Guests chatted about their drinks: “Piña colada over here!”

Belarus Free Theatre: Britain is in danger of authoritarianism

Stage | The Guardian: The coronavirus outbreak has forced theatre-makers to change the ways in which they collaborate, with many starting to make work remotely. But Belarus Free Theatre’s founders, Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin, have had to work this way for years. Exiled from their home country for a decade, and living in London, their circumstances have obliged them to find creative new ways of continuing to make work.

Institutions Do Not Define Our Artistic Practice

rescripted.org: Institutions do not define our art.

Like many of us, I am an artist who has defined my artistic career by the institutions that granted me entry. This quarantine is causing them to suffer, which is causing my colleagues and mentors and teachers to suffer. In this moment of tremendous uncertainty, where the future of these institutions is unstable, it feels like our future is too.

Philadelphia DA explores new role for arts in the criminal justice system

PBS NewsHour: Mixing art with criminal justice has become increasingly common in the U.S. The work often tackles complex subjects of redemption and reform. Jeffrey Brown recently traveled to Philadelphia for a look at a new program bringing art to an unexpected part of the justice system: the office of the city’s top prosecutor.

Tim Burton Launches 'Lost Vegas' Art Exhibit in the Desert City

Hollywood Reporter: Tim Burton spent a lot of time in Las Vegas as a kid. Growing up in Burbank, California, he frequently visited the desert paradise with his parents, and it would later be heavily referenced in his work. "Every element of grand Las Vegas is part of his memory: the Dunes, the Landmark of course, the Aladdin, the Sands," says Jenny He, Burton's curator, who for 10 years has spearheaded his museum exhibitions, which have toured the world and drawn millions of people hungry for a glimpse into the frightmaster auteur's creative process.

Why go to the theater? It’s inconvenient. It can be uncomfortable. And here’s why I love it.

The Seattle Times: Theater is inconvenient (you must move your buns); it’s uncomfortable (at least airplanes have flight attendants you can flag down for pretzels); it’s puny for cultural capital (not the street cred of graffiti, nor the sophistication of symphonies); it’s economically silly (there are better ways to make money); it can be intensely claustrophobic and boring (can’t get up, can’t change the channel); and so on.

Artist Completes Public Work Celebrating Hill District Residents

90.5 WESA: Njaimeh Njie spent three years on her public artwork “Homecoming: Hill District, USA.” This month, she completed the project’s final piece, a photo mural on the front steps of the Hill House Association’s landmark Kaufmann Center. But if a visit just hours after the installation is any indication, the work is already meeting its goal of connecting community members across time and space.

Skyrocketing Seattle prices and lack of space for artists led to the start of this arts festival

The Seattle Times: It all started with a backyard party.

And now, festival:festival — a multi-arts event taking place Aug. 2-3 on Capitol Hill and in the Central District — is in its third year, energizing and supporting the local arts scene, while focusing on underrepresented and underpaid cultural workers.

‘Setting the Stage’ tells the story of Chicago theater in 56 objects

Performing Arts Feature | Chicago Reader: A new exhibit at the Design Museum of Chicago pushes visitors through the theater's proverbial fourth wall and onto the scaffolded backstages of some of the cities most storied theaters.

Telling A Thai Tale: A Dance Dramaturg’s Take

The Theatre Times: When I was initially brought as a dramaturg into the Mahajanaka Dance Drama project, directed by composer Sebastian Reynolds and choreographer Adrienne Hart (Neon Dance), in collaboration with Klunchun and Thai musicians Pradit Saengkrai and Great Lekakul, we began by asking “how can we tell a story from the Buddhist mythology using traditional Thai and contemporary Western art forms?”