I met Alice Tan Ridley back in 2007 singing her heart out in the subways of NYC and set up this MySpace page for her back then. I bought one of her homemade CDs and have listened to it for years... also posted some samples on this site. I told her I was going to put her on the Internet so others would be able to hear her sing.
I'm so glad she is at long last being recognized for her great talent! Her daughter, Academy Award-nominee Gabourey Sidibe of 'Precious,' will soon be cheering her mom on. As previously reported, Alice Tan Ridley, auditioned for the new season of 'America's Got Talent' this past March.
Read more: Alice Tan Ridley: Moving to Next Round on 'America's Got Talent'
Always fascinated by Ambroise Vollard, one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century, I was amazed to read this article today about all these paintings that were found in 1979, but neglected for decades!
"A long-lost trove of Impressionist and Modern art not seen since World War II will be offered at auction in London and Paris, Sotheby's said Friday. The 140 works - including paintings, prints and drawings - belonged to Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who played an important role promoting artists including Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse. The collection was found in 1979 in a Paris bank vault. It had been neglected for decades because Erich Slomovic, an acquaintance of Vollard who deposited the art in the bank in 1939, was killed by the Nazis in 1942.
The key work is a 1905 painting by French artist Andre Derain valued at up to (EURO)15 million ($18 million). Derain co-founded the short-lived Fauve art movement with Matisse in the early 20th century." [more...]
A cache of 75 long-lost silent films uncovered in the New Zealand Film Archive vault, including the only known copy of a drama by legendary director John Ford, is being sent back to the United States to be restored.
Among the movies found in storage are a copy of Ford's "Upstream," the earliest surviving movie by comic actor and director Mabel Normand and a period drama starring 1920s screen icon Clara Bow. Only 15 percent of the silent films made by Ford, who won four Oscars, have survived.
New Zealand Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Christopher Finlayson said the find is important as there are no prints of the films remaining in the U.S.
"These important films will be preserved and made available to both U.S. and New Zealand audiences to enjoy," he told The New Zealand Herald newspaper Tuesday. [more...]
I remember when I first arrived in New York in the early '90s... one of the first things I wanted to do was to see a silent film in an actual New York City movie theatre. I managed to find an extant Garbo screening, which was fascinating... and, I believe, in Long Island City at the Museum of the Moving Image, saw one of the famous silent film organists playing live to a silent picture. I was so thrilled. But not as thrilled as when I attended Lillian Gish's 100th birthday celebration at MoMA. She had recently died at 99!
Now, Rosa Rio, among the very last to have played the silent-picture houses, "accompanying the likes of Chaplin, Keaton and Pickford on the Mighty Wurlitzer amid velvet draperies, gilded rococo walls and vaulted ceilings awash in stars," has passed on to the Great Silent Beyond! She was 107!! Read more here...
I thoroughly enjoyed the National Gallery of Art (in Washington, D.C.) yesterday and especially the Chester Dale Collection. What magnificence! We watched a short film while we were there which described how Mr. Dale obtained the paintings with his wife, Maud - growing their collection throughout the mid-20th century. Some of the best paintings by the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, his friend, George Bellows... modern painters, Matisse, paintings from Picasso's blue and classical periods and so much more. Go HERE for more on the exhibit.
Dale was an astute businessman who made his fortune on Wall Street in the bond market. He thrived on forging deals and translated much of this energy and talent into his art collecting. He served on the board of the National Gallery of Art from 1943 and as president from 1955 until his death in 1962. Portraits of Dale by Salvador Dalí and Diego Rivera are included in the show, along with portraits of Dale's wife Maud (who greatly influenced his interest in art) painted by George Bellows and Fernand Léger.
I've always loved the vaudeville era and as a youth was fascinated with the Ziegfeld follies. One of my favourite movies is The Great Ziegeld (1936), which won the best picture that year. So, to hear that the last Ziegfeld girl has passed on to the Great Beyond is sad.
The last Ziegfeld Follies Girl has died. Doris Eaton Travis, one of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls, who wore elaborate costumes for the series of lavish Broadway theatrical productions in the early 1900s, died Tuesday at age 106, public relations firm Boneau/Bryan-Brown said. It didn't say where or how she died.
Travis, who was from West Bloomfield, Mich., also was a supporter of the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising organization and appeared often in its Easter Bonnet Competition.
She continued to work long after her Follies days ended, with annual appearances on Broadway, a small role in a Jim Carrey movie and a memoir, "The Days We Danced: The Story of My Theatrical Family From Florenz Ziegfeld to Arthur Murray and Beyond. [more...]
Sandy Frazier is a mixed-media Expressionist whose art encapsulates qualities of mysticism and allegory. Working with color in the manner of the Fauves and of Gauguin, and with mixed-media and collage in the manner of Picasso, she envisions from a subliminal source emblematic representations of her own life and the world in which she lives.
With joyous color and striking form, Sandy Frazier's artworks create a dynamic vision of a world both everyday and transcendent. Working with acrylic and mixed media, Frazier’s bold Expressionist style is unique, an alluring combination of intense hues, layered patterns, subtle textures and strong lines. Her handling of color is superb, taking unusual shades and placing them next to each other in a taut harmony that seems almost to vibrate with energy from the painting’s surface. The strong stylized lines that define her subjects are influenced by Picasso, but Frazier makes them her own, giving them fluidity. The result is a stunning combination of technical skill and artistic interpretation. [more...]
Coney Island's new Luna Park, modeled after original, will debut 19 thrilling rides on May 29th. It's now a drab construction site dotted with piles of dirt - but by Memorial Day weekend, a gleaming new amusement park will rise in Coney Island where Astroland once stood. It's been modeled after the original Luna Park, the legendary lunar-themed Coney Island mecca that opened in 1903 and closed because of fire in 1944. Valerio Ferrari, president of Central Amusement International and Zamperla USA, the companies responsible for building the new Luna Park said he's never heard of an amusement park being built from scratch so quickly, but he's confident it will be ready in time for the May 29 opening. But should it be rebuilt? [more...]
Years ago I saw a documentary on Coney Island which begins by showing the haunted roller coaster as it appeared back in 1995 when my mother and I visited there - amidst a blanket of fog, scrawled with graffiti. It represented, metaphorically, the shadow of evil, and the social decay that Coney Island came to represent. The five mile stretch on the coast of Brooklyn, just nine miles from Manhattan, was the home to three great parks (Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland) which were built in the late 1800's and early 1900's... all of which were destroyed by fire (although Steeplechase was rebuilt soon after)... thus, the name, "The City of Fire." The great, but crooked, builder, McKane, had ruled the island in the late 1800's; but he was not a good man and landed in Sing Sing for election fraud, misuse of public funds and other charges.
Ministers and reverends spoke of the violence, lewd sex, gambling and prostitution that went on there, "victims they make drunken and rob." There were actually three chief men who created the parks and all of them were shady characters who competitively argued amongst each other, always trying to outdo one another. One of them died and another ended up bankrupt. They never really reveal the details of what went on there; but even in 1995, there was an unmistakable dark presence in the remains where the sordid, shoddy amusement shacks still ran full blast, where the hiss and boom of the breakers and crumbling paste board dominated the scene. The Wonder Wheel still stood in Astroland. Historians, nonetheless, say we should always consider Coney Island to be "forever an opportunity, a frontier..." not a place to rebuild what once was. [more...]
Inspired by my mother, a teacher of meditation, I painted this the other day. Actually, I was working on it for about a month... it started out to be chaos out of my abstract mind... and then suddenly one night, the vision of a girl in a meditative pose possessed me and voila! There she is! I love texture in paintings and so this one really expresses a mood in the way I wanted others to tap in to my art.
Inspired by 'The Passion of the Christ,' I have created a series of paintings, like the film, that reaches out across the ages, throughout all time, past race, creed, color, religion... deep into the hearts of what we all actually are: just simple human beings.
"...I wish to paint the artist's struggle against nature, the creative effort in the work of art, effort of blood and tears to give one's flesh, to create life: always wrestling with the truth and always beaten, the battle with the angel. ... tormented by his inability to give birth to his own genius..."
See the series here. Happy Easter!
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