Why People By Art, Josephine Baker, Pinter plays, Mozart and Hard Nuts

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This year's African Diaspora International Film Festival (through Dec. 14) begins with Josephine Baker: Black Diva in a White Man's World, a remarkable documentary that proves the Festival's purpose. Director Annette von Wangenheim examines the career of the black singer-dancer from St. Louis who went to Paris in 1925 as part of Revue Negre au Music Hall and had a huge effect on Europe during the same period America circumscribed its black performers.

What a Nut!

It's difficult to conceive that The Hard Nut, Mark Morris' irreverent, inventive and deliciously entertaining version of The Nutcracker, is nearly 20 years old. Returning to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (where it had its U.S. premiere in 1992) for the first time in eight years, the production has now been around long enough to generate its own set of memories and reference points for its audiences and performers, just like traditional versions of the Tchaikovsky classic.

Reading Between the Pauses

Harold Pinter has been remarkably absent from the New York theater scene over the last few years. Every season seems to bring with it a Tennessee Williams or Noel Coward revival, but with the exception of The Homecoming, Pinter hasn't much been seen lately. Expect that to change with The Atlantic's double-header of Pinter's two one acts The Collection & A Kind of Alaska: Two Plays By Harold Pinter.

Museum Mess Cleaned At Last?

The Chelsea Art Museum will be looking for a new home since it will leave its current location by the end of 2011. A bankruptcy court paved the way for a $19.35 million sale of the museum's building at West 22nd Street site to the Albanese Development Corp. The sale would allow the museum to continue operating rent-free until the end of 2011.

Guts of a Coward

Nick Jones spent years developing, workshopping and fine-tuning Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, his wacky Off-Off Broadway puppet rock musical that had a strong run at Ars Nova. He follows it up with the kooky and confusing The Coward, an ironic period comedy set in 18th-century England. Produced by LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater's "edgy" offshoot, Jones is being prepared for big things.

Women on the Loose

The whip was cracking and the pace was crackling as William Christie conducted Mozart's overture to Cos� fan tutte last week at the Metropolitan Opera. Then in the opera's first scene - in which cynically wise older man Don Alfonso (William Shimell) dares young braves Ferrando (Pavol Breslik) and Guglielmo (Nathan Gunn) to test their beloveds' fidelity - went off like a pistol. The two impetuous young men almost ricocheted across the stage as they shot dialogue at their elder. Christie, making his Met debut, was determined to hook up the work to the anarchic exuberance manifested by the comedic spirit as it has dated back millennia.

Why do People Buy Art?

A good question to ask on the opening day of Art Basel on Miami Beach. Art critic, Julia Morton poses the question to dealers, collectors and art lovers as she covers the contemporary art fair. Watch Julia's video here.

Gallery Openings

Brooklyn

Charles Yuen: RHV Fine Art, 6 - 8 PM, 683 6th Ave, 718-473-0819
This exhibition will feature 15 paintings and drawings (all oil on canvas or paper) that explore the artist's incisive exploration of the tensions of contemporary existence. In Yuen's work space is abstracted, layered, ambiguous and often tenuous. Populated with whimsical often-distorted human figures and a litany of personal metaphors, like oil derricks, puffs of smoke or businessmen, he composes narratives where the rational and irrational coexist. His fictions are often a response to the news of the day and contain references to politics, the environment, technology, spirituality and materialism. The seriousness of Yuen's ideas are conveyed with a wistful, gentle humor...meditating monks hover over oil storage tanks or little girl legs stand alongside smokestacks puffing clouds of toxins or a man in a suit stands in a field of wavy stripes with his head contorted between his legs inspecting his posterior. Yuen's reflection of our complex and conflicted dystopian existence is not a pedantic critique. His gentle humor doesn't allow it. We are caused to probe the dualities of his metaphors and reflect on our own perception of the world around us.
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Bronx

Acting Out: Bronx River Art Center, 6 - 9 PM, 305 East 140th Street, #1A, 718-589-5819

Acting Out features Danielle Abrams,* Shana Moulton*, Jill Pangallo, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Karina Skvirsky, and Maya Suess. The exhibition focuses on these women artists, all based on the east coast, working in video and performance since the 1990s. Each of the artists embody characters in order to discuss personal or collective histories. This work finds its historical precedents in much of the performance and video art produced in the US during the 1970s, including consciousness raising techniques used by Judy Chicago at CalArts and Fresno State as well as the video and performance work of Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Martha Wilson and Jacki Apple, Linda Montano, and Adrian Piper. Utilizing techniques such as role-playing and dress-up, the artists in the exhibition construct personas and narrative, in some cases creating elaborate lives for their characters in order to comment on race, gender, identity, and representation.
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Chelsea

Hiroyuki Hamada: Coleman Burke Gallery, 6 - 8 PM, 636 West 28th Street, New York, NY, (917) 677-7825

The powerful elegant abstract forms of Hiroyuki Hamada's sculptures invite us into a world of symphonic imagery and allow the mind to examine each piece as artifact from a distant past and a future not yet conceived. The sculptures speak for themselves using lines, marks and basic shapes as language while suggesting a natural indigenous feel amalgamated with synthetic structures.
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DUMBO

Blessed Is The Infinite- new drawings by Pete Watts & Jason Bartell: Rabbitholestudio, 5 - 9 PM, 33 Washington Street, (between Water and Plymouth), 718-852-1500

RABBITHOLESTUDIO is pleased to present BLESSED IS THE INFINITE- a two-person exhibition of drawings and installations by Jason Bartell and Pete Watts. Rendered in meticulous detail, the works featured in the exhibition explore the dynamic between order and chaos- creating a space that reflects the entropic descent of organized systems, and the quiet emergence of order from the chaotic void. The imagery and techniques evoke the aesthetics of the sublime- the push and pull between attraction and repulsion. Scenes of destruction and entropy are rendered in exquisite detail, at once drawing in the viewer and confronting them with displays of overwhelming scale and power.
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Christy Powers: Other People's Lives: Giacobetti Paul Gallery, 6 - 9 PM, 111 Front Street, No. 220, 917-548-8107
Giacobetti Paul Gallery is pleased to present "Other People's Lives," a NYC gallery debut solo show of artist Christy Powers, in which she investigates how social networking and online sharing affects memories. Through distorting and reconfiguring online photographs, her paintings recreate her own undocumented life.
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East Village/Lower East Side

Red Balloon (I Wish I Was A): Rooster Gallery, 6 - 8 PM, 190 Orchard Street, between Houston and Stanton, 212-230-1370

The latest canvases of this NewYork-based painter are a mix of oil paint, cement, plaster and spackle on multiple layers that react, de facto, to each other. The reactions born from the use of these materials and Sommer's control of this process enable the works to
assume the effect of decayed urban structures. Sommer's works, therefore, reference the issue of physical abandonment as a metaphor for human loneliness.
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Midtown

Lili Maya and James Rouvelle: Traversal 53: chashama Donnell Library Window Space, 9 - 10 PM, 20 West 53rd St, New York, NY

Installed in the western half of the former Donnell Library and visible across the surfaces of the large windows fronting the space, traversal53 is a kinetic art installation composed of robotic instruments programmed to survey the space with custom optics.

As Seen in CityArts:

Blue Mountain Gallery

Capo Auction

Carol Crawford

CUNY, The Graduate Center

David Findlay Jr Fine Art

First Street Gallery

Gemini G.E.L.

Hutter Auction Galleries

Jazz at Lincoln Center

Joy in Singing

Julliard

June Kelly Gallery

Lesley Heller Workspace

Liberty Science Center

The Met

The Modern Show

Montclair Art Musuem

Museum of Art and Design

Museum of Jewish Heritage

New York City Center

New York Philharmonic

Sacred Music in a Sacred Space

Salute to Vienna

Stella Show Management

Storm King Art Center

Swann Auction Galleries

Symphony Space

Toast Art Walk

Two Trees NY

Woodstock School of Art

Yale School of Music

Check out:

CityArts

NYPress

Our Town

West Side Spirit
Art Market Monitor

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