NYTimes Picks Today's Visionaries in the Arts

[lennygoran]

The first section pertains to opera but for anyone interested in other art forms I included them as well. Regards, Len


Creativity That Comes From the Heart and Lives in the Memory

From the Bayreuth Festival to Chicago and New York, looking for new ways to entertain.
By Ted Loos
May 24, 2018

Constant Motion and Experimentation

Yuval Sharon

Founder and artistic director of the experimental opera company The Industry in Los Angeles

Yuval Sharon has staged his avant-garde productions in moving vehicles (“Hopscotch”) and in train stations (“Invisible Cities”), so it can’t be a surprise that he is in constant motion himself.

Lately Mr. Sharon, 38, has been traveling back and forth to Germany for two reasons. First comes his production of Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival this summer, as the first American director at the storied event since it began in 1876. Then in September he will stage Olga Neuwirth’s “Lost Highway” at the Frankfurt Opera.

Mr. Sharon — who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 — was in New York for a few days in March, to conduct auditions for Meredith Monk’s “Atlas.” He will stage the opera in 2019 at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he is an artist in residence.

“It’s a lot to take on,” said Mr. Sharon, chuckling a bit at the daunting schedule over coffee at Lincoln Center. Mr. Sharon cited T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to explain how his stated penchant for “openness and experimentation and adventure” worked vis-à-vis opera’s vaunted history.

“Any progress in any genre has an eye toward that tradition that it came from, because nothing came from absolutely nowhere,” he said.

Still, Mr. Sharon said it was surprising when he got a call in 2016 from Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter and co-director of the Bayreuth Festival, about taking the helm at the famed event. “I said, ‘How do you know about me?’ ” (Word had come from the director of the Wiener Staatsoper.)

His version of “Lohengrin” will have costumes and set design by Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy, the married German artists. It reflects Mr. Sharon’s belief that all of the arts are moving toward a collaboration-centered approach.

“To do that in the home of this overwhelming monolithic genius, I think it’s very exciting,” he said, seemingly still surprised at his success.

He added, “Sometimes I’m still in a state of shock how quickly these ideas have managed to take root.”
Open to Chance and Discovery

Nick Mauss
Artist

Unclassifiable exhibitions are all the rage, and “multimedia artist” is the most frequently claimed self-descriptor in the art world. But even in that context, “Nick Mauss: Transmissions,” which was at the Whitney Museum of American Art until mid-May, is hard to silo.

The show served as a kaleidoscopic lens on the development of ballet in 20th-century New York alongside avant-garde visual arts, with a focus on the tight-knit circle of gay men who propelled it. Though his name was in the title, only one piece by Mr. Mauss’s own hand was on view: “Images in Mind” (2018), two panels of enamel paint on mirrored glass that met in a corner.

“It’s an artwork disguised as an exhibition,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s chief curator and deputy director and an organizer of “Transmissions.”

Instead, Mr. Mauss, 37, largely curated works by others — including photographs by George Platt Lynes and costume designs by the painter Pavel Tchelitchew — and arranged for a daily production by a rotating cast of 16 dancers, who performed in a roped-off area of the galleries.

Mr. Mauss grew up in Germany and attended Cooper Union in New York. He says he considers drawing his primary medium, though he often works in sculpture, too. The 303 Gallery in Chelsea has shown his works on paper, as well as glass and ceramic pieces.

“Nick’s not a linear thinker,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “It’s part of what makes him a good artist. His process is open to chance, discovery and surprising connections.”

Mr. Mauss, who is developing a site-specific installation on M.I.T.’s campus, said that his goal with “Transmissions” was to capture something fleeting. “Ballet really only exists in its moment of performance,” he said, “but it also exists in memory.”


Amanda Williams
Artist

Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Amanda Williams was perceiving boundaries from an early age.

“Even at 6 or 7 years old, we’d drive by a piece of major infrastructure, and there would be trash just on one side,” she said. “That planted the seed for me: What is urbanism?”

Now an artist, Ms. Williams, 43, recently had a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, featuring her photographs, installations and works on paper that look at the social impacts of the built environment.

But she studied architecture at Cornell and took a long detour through that profession first. Working on the West Coast, she had “unlimited budgets on dream projects,” she said.

She had studied painting, too, and was making art on the side — until she reached a convergence point of sorts.

“The work has evolved to a point where I am able to marry my architect self and artistic self,” said Ms. Williams, who is again based in her hometown. “It occupies an interesting space that is neither and both.”

For her best-known project, “Color(ed) Theory” (2015), Ms. Williams painted eight homes in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood that were slated for demolition. The colors she employed were custom-mixed to match those found on products that were prevalent in her childhood, like Crown Royal purple and Chicken Shack red.

“People have an immediate response to the colors, and it did a great job of drawing attention to why these houses were being demolished, and larger issues,” said Grace Deveney, an assistant curator at the MCA who organized “Chicago Works: Amanda Williams.”

Ms. Williams collaborated on a project that just had its debut at the United States Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, and next year will address the phenomenon of redlining — discriminatory lending practices — for an exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.

“Chicago is unfortunately the perfect place to look at these things,” she said, adding, “Color always has a double meaning.”
From Comedy to Suspense to Victorian Melodrama

Theresa Rebeck
Playwright, screenwriter, novelist

If you want to find Theresa Rebeck, she is in Brooklyn, writing. That explains her prodigious output: She has written or co-written more than 20 plays (“Omnium Gatherum,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; “Mauritius”; “The Understudy”), scripted cop shows on television, turned out a couple of novels and created the NBC show “Smash,” set in the world of Broadway.

This year alone, audiences can see a new play by Ms. Rebeck with a restaurant setting, “Seared,” at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts starting in July; in November comes “Downstairs,” a family drama at Primary Stages in New York, which was written for its stars, siblings Tyne Daly and Tim Daly.

Given the range of themes, milieus and forms of her plays, what ties it all together? “I’m curious about a lot of things,” Ms. Rebeck said. “I never received a definition from critics saying, ‘This is what she does,’ and that’s been an enormous gift.”

Ms. Rebeck can write comedy, and she is quick with a quip: “Look it up,” Ms. Rebeck said when asked her age, which appears to be around 60, adding that she was “éminence grise” status. She grew up in Ohio with a “Catholic Republican” background, she said. “You could say I’m an escapee.”

Ms. Rebeck received an M.F.A. in playwriting and a Ph.D. in Victorian melodrama from Brandeis University and has shown an ability to find relevance in the forms of the past. Recently she retooled William Congreve’s Restoration comedy “The Way of the World” at the Folger Theater in Washington.

“There’s something intriguingly old-fashioned about her — she knows about form and language,” said Ms. Daly, the Tony- and Emmy-winner who read all of Ms. Rebeck’s plays before embarking on “Downstairs.”

Ms. Daly added that psychology, not plot, drives Ms. Rebeck’s works. “She’s wonderful with suspense,” she said. “I find myself sitting in her plays and getting scared, and I don’t know why.”
Dynamism and Hope, Performance and Education

Najee Omar
Poet, performer, arts educator and activist

Scheduled to open in 2019, the much-anticipated multidisciplinary arts center known as The Shed will be housed in a 200,000-square-foot building devised by Diller Scofidio & Renfro and the Rockwell Group, in New York’s Hudson Yards. The fund-raising target is a cool $550 million.

To the list of well-known artists, architects and philanthropists involved with the project, add the not-so-famous name Najee Omar.

Mr. Omar, 27, founded the arts education nonprofit Spark House, which is advising the Shed on “DIS OBEY,” a series of pre-opening commissions centered on civil disobedience and social justice. Spark House does its work in schools as well as at nontraditional venues like juvenile detention centers.

Over coffee, Mr. Omar, whose website proclaims “Najee Omar is possessed,” said his goal was to “create something good for people who have hope about what’s happening in the world today.”

Tamara McCaw, the Shed’s chief community and civic program officer, discovered Mr. Omar when both were working at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and he performed one of his poems at a staff talent show.

“He got up onstage and killed it with his poetry and the dynamism of his performance,” Ms. McCaw said. “You knew he was a rising star.”

Mr. Omar, raised in Brooklyn and a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, is the author of poems including “Black Is” and “Ode to Litefeet,” the latter a paean to hip-hop inflected subway dancing.

Ms. McCaw brought him to the attention of the Shed’s artistic director and chief executive, Alex Poots, and they saw that Mr. Omar’s voice fit well into the “DIS OBEY” theme. “We need him,” Mr. Poots said, adding that it was his goal to have Mr. Omar perform his works someday at the Shed, too.

The note of defiance in the title “DIS OBEY” seemed to fit Mr. Omar’s outlook. “Progress, for me, would mean access to the arts for everyone,” he said, before adding, “Progress is a fight.”

How We Picked Our Visionaries

People love lists.

We want to check out the best places to travel, catch up with the best inventions of the last 100 years, be in the know about the best-dressed people, the best books, the best schools. And on and on.

Of course, there is a risk to listmaking. Maybe your choices won’t hold up over the years. Maybe the best book of decades ago seems not so great today.

With the listmaking fervor and its risks in mind, we searched for people who would fit our criteria for visionaries. They had to be people who are forward-looking, working on exciting projects, helping others or taking a new direction. We wanted diversity in gender, race and ethnic background.

We assigned writers who are knowledgeable about the subjects we deemed most important. And we limited the list to 30.

Narrowing down the numbers was a huge challenge. And that’s a good problem to have. It means there are a lot of people out there who are following their visions.

We hope this inspires you to follow yours.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/arts ... collection

[John F]

Never heard of any of these people, and from the descriptions in this article, I probably don't want to. At least the Times gives its own definition of what this is about: "people who would fit our criteria for visionaries. They had to be people who are forward-looking, working on exciting projects, helping others or taking a new direction. We wanted diversity in gender, race and ethnic background."

The problem is that this seeks to predict the future. Whether someone is truly a visionary, merely unconventional, or a looney can only be told by the outcome and influence of his/her work over a period of years. And predicting the future is a mug's game, whether it's for the short term (horse races, presidential elections) or more grandiose (the thousand-year Reich).

If Loos wants to draw attention to little-known or unknown artists whose work he favors, fine, this is essentially harmless and can be useful. But to call them visionaries is hype. If they were truly visionaries they wouldn't be unknown, they would be famous.