Awards, Decorations and Honors

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    Harvey Awards Inducts 5 Comic Creators to Hall of Fame

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    The inductees are being recognized for work on G.I. Joe, Mad magazine, manga and mutants. They will be honored at New York Comic Con.The annual Harvey Awards hall of fame ceremony is back next Friday at New York Comic Con, and is adding five members to its ranks.The inductees include Arthur Adams, an artist perhaps best known for his X-Men illustrations; the writer and artist Sergio Aragonés, who did extensive work for Mad magazine; and Larry Hama, who has written G.I. Joe stories since 1982. Akira Toriyama, the creator of the popular manga Dragon Ball, and John Buscema, a Marvel artist who drew Silver Surfer and helped establish a house style, are both being honored posthumously.Fans and fellow professionals initially looked down on the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic book series, Hama, 75, said in an interview, because the stories were based on a toyline. But G.I. Joe and a Transformers series, which Marvel began in 1984, changed that perception when both comics proved to be popular.In 2012, Hama received an Inkpot Award at Comic-Con International in San Diego, an award for individuals’ contributions to the world of pop culture and fandom. (He said none of his stories had ever been nominated for an award, but added, “I’ve been given awards for just staying alive long enough.”)One of his early standout G.I. Joe stories was Issue No. 21, “Silent Interlude,” written and drawn by Hama and inked by Steve Leialoha. The story was told without dialogue, which fit perfectly with Hama’s approach to writing: He saw each issue as a silent movie, he said.Another proud achievement: G.I. Joe was popular among young women. Hama said he would receive letters from some who said they had borrowed the comics from their brothers. They liked G.I. Joe, he said, because “the women in the team were active participants and did everything that the guys did and were treated equally.”The Harvey Awards began in 1988 and are named after Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who created and founded Mad magazine.In addition to the hall of fame honors, the awards recognize several categories of comics, like book of the year, best international book and best adaptation. The book awards nominees are determined via a survey of about 200 comic book creators, members of the press and publishing professionals who submit candidates for each of the categories. The selections are tallied and pulled into a ballot, which is then open to a vote by a larger group that includes librarians and comic book retailers. More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Name 2024 Disability Futures Fellows

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      The 20 recipients, including a Broadway composer, a Marvel video game voice actress and a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, are the initiative’s final cohort.The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations on Wednesday named the 2024 Disability Futures Fellows — the latest class of disabled writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative artists who will receive unrestricted $50,000 awards.This year’s recipients include Gaelynn Lea, a folk artist and disability rights activist; Natasha Ofili, an actress and writer who in 2020 became one of the first Black deaf actors to portray a video game character — Hailey Cooper — in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales; Warren Snipe, a.k.a. Wawa, a deaf rapper and actor who performed in sign language at the 2022 Super Bowl; and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work focuses on queer, transgender people of color.Lea said she almost missed an email telling her she got the award. “Because the email said, ‘We’re excited to offer you $50,000,’ it went to my spam,” Lea, 40, said in an interview. (She later received a follow-up email.)“It’s very validating that I’m doing this stuff I really care about, and now it’s being recognized,” added Lea, who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, and composed and performed original music for a Broadway production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Lea plans to use the award to fund the writing of a memoir to be published next year.The initiative, which is administered by United States Artists, named its inaugural class of fellows in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of disabled artists and elevating their voices. (About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The second class was announced in 2022, and this is the last cohort in the program. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement that the program reflected the foundation’s support of the “work, experiences and visions of disabled artists — both in their individual practices and in the collective power they wield in the arts at large.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2024 James Beard Award Winners

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      Restaurants and chefs from Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., and New Orleans took home top honors.The James Beard Foundation handed out its coveted culinary awards Monday evening in Chicago, showcasing an eclectic collection of winners from a range of restaurants in cities and towns across America.Michael Rafidi, of the Arab-influenced Albi in Washington, D.C., was named outstanding chef. He dedicated his award “to Palestine and to all the Palestinian people out there, whether it’s here or in Palestine or all over the world.”The 24-seat Thai tasting menu restaurant Langbaan in Portland, Ore., won the outstanding restaurant award. The team from Dakar NOLA in New Orleans, which offers a Senegalese tasting menu, received best new restaurant. The award for outstanding restaurateur went to Erika and Kelly Whitaker, who run a restaurant group in the Denver area. Chicago’s own Lula Cafe won for outstanding hospitality.In recent years, the awards, which were first given out in 1991, have evolved into a glamorous night of red carpet moments and food-focused partying funded largely by a roster of big-name sponsors.According to the Beard award organizers, the ceremony sold out for the first time in eight years with several nominees opting to bring their entire staffs to the event.The popularity of this year’s event suggests that the organization may have weathered conflicts both internal and external, which exploded in 2020 when the foundation canceled the awards at the last minute after critics said the slate of nominees was not diverse enough and contained chefs who had been accused of abuse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jill Biden Hosts Teachers at Awards Dinner, With a Bit of Pomp

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      The first lady commended the winner of the National Teacher of the Year award during an event evoking formal state dinners.The hallmarks of a state dinner were there: lavish floral displays festooning the White House, the first lady arriving in a floor-length sequined gown, and members of Congress and cabinet secretaries mingling with attendees. But the honored guest was not the president of France or the prime minister of Japan.It was Missy Testerman of Rogersville City School in rural Tennessee.Jill Biden, the first lady, kicked off a new format for delivering the National Teacher of the Year award on Thursday by hosting this year’s winner, Ms. Testerman, and dozens of other teachers from across the country at the White House with a ceremony emulating the pomp normally reserved for foreign dignitaries.Dr. Biden, who has kept her day job as an English professor while serving as first lady and has worked to support community colleges from the White House, spoke in support of teachers’ unions in her opening remarks and stressed the need of helping educators after the Covid-19 pandemic.“Tonight we celebrate you because teaching isn’t just a job, it’s a calling,” Dr. Biden said, adding, “To answer this call of service is in itself an act of hope.”Ms. Testerman, an English as a second language teacher who had worked as a first and second grade teacher for 30 years, also spoke, discussing the importance of her profession.“As an English as a second language teacher, my students are all either immigrants to our country, or first-generation Americans having been born to immigrant parents,” Ms. Testerman said. “Hearing the experiences of my students and their families reminds me daily what a privilege it is to be an American and what a privilege it is to attend a public school in this country.”The Council of Chief State School Officers, which oversees the award program, has honored finalists and a winner at the White House nearly every year since 1952, according to the council’s website. Dr. Biden has presided over the award ceremony every year of President Biden’s term. (Mr. Biden, who was returning from a trip to North Carolina, dropped in briefly, reflecting on his days teaching law classes and telling the teachers, “You are the kite strings that lift our national ambitions aloft.”)The evolution of the ceremony this year came complete with floral arrangements incorporating irises — the Tennessee state flower — and classroom-themed décor. The guests dined on a menu including lobster ravioli and honey-poached apple mousse, and were entertained by the U.S. Army Chorus with the Army and Air Force Strings.Miguel A. Cardona, the secretary of education, told attendees that the event was meant to bestow “our teachers with a level of national respect that is long overdue.”In all, 57 teachers, including past winners of the award, attended on Thursday, according to a guest list released by the White House. Apart from the honor, selected teachers are also invited into a yearlong professional development program.Before the event, the White House announced new measures aimed at encouraging higher pay for teachers and highlighted changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s effort to slash student debt, which allows public servants such as teachers to have their federal student loan debt forgiven after 10 years.Dr. Biden, a teacher for over 30 years and a member of the National Education Association, has often waded into education policy, particularly during the transition back to in-person learning as the Covid crisis waned. She also led a push to make community colleges tuition free, though legislation she helped draft did not survive in Congress.Mr. Biden renewed the call for free community college as a policy priority in his budget for next fiscal year, but the proposal has little chance of becoming law with Republicans in control of the House. More

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      PEN America Has Stood By Authors. They Should Stand By PEN.

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      All strong institutions stand to benefit from internal dissent and external pressures. But too often, recent efforts to reform institutions have meant reconstituting them in ways that distort or fundamentally undermine their core mission.Nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies, university departments and cultural institutions have ousted leaders and sent their staffs into turmoil in pursuit of progressive political goals. In the wake of the 2016 election and the 2020 murder of George Floyd and in a rush to apply sweeping “In this house we believe” standards unilaterally, organizations have risked overt politicization, mission drift, irrelevance and even dissolution. And now the war in Gaza is ripping its way across American universities.The latest target is PEN America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to free expression by journalists and authors. Last week, after an increasingly aggressive boycott campaign by some of its members, PEN canceled its annual World Voices Festival, which was conceived by Salman Rushdie and was to mark its 20th anniversary in May. This followed a refusal by several writers to have their work considered for PEN’s annual literary awards. The ceremony awarding those prizes was also canceled.An open letter sent to PEN America’s board and trustees and republished on Literary Hub, now the de facto clearinghouse for pro-Palestinian literary-world sentiment, accused the organization of “implicit support of the Israeli occupation” and of “aiding and abetting genocide.” It demanded the resignation of PEN’s longtime C.E.O., Suzanne Nossel, and current president, Jennifer Finney Boylan. According to its 21 signatories, mostly up-and-coming authors, “among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”In response and in keeping with its mission of independence and free expression, PEN America accepted the writers’ willingness to voice their conscience. It has also made clear that there is room for more than one point of view on what constitutes genocide and on the current conflict in Gaza.“As an organization open to all writers, we see no alternative but to remain home to this diversity of opinions and perspectives, even if, for some, that very openness becomes reason to exit,” PEN America stated in an open letter to its community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-Nominated Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 80

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      Her films centered on Latin American experiences and received wide acclaim.Lourdes Portillo, the Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues through spellbinding narratives, has died. She was 80.Ms. Portillo died Saturday at her home in San Francisco. Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given.One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary “The Devil Never Sleeps,” a murder-mystery in which Ms. Portillo investigates the strange death of her multimillionaire uncle, whose widow claimed he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation at the National Film Registry.“Using vintage snapshots, old home movies and interviews, the film builds a biographical portrait of Oscar Ruiz Almeida, a Mexican rancher who amassed a fortune exporting vegetables to the United States and went on to become a powerful politician and businessman,” Stephen Holden, a Times movie critic, wrote in a 1995 review of the film.The documentary had the tenor of a telenovela and presented open questions about Mr. Ruiz Almeida’s mysterious life and death and the people who could have had a motive for the murder.“The more Oscar is discussed, the more enigmatic he seems,” Mr. Holden wrote.Ms. Portillo crafted the film’s story line from the information her mother relayed over the phone while Ms. Portillo was living in New York, she said in a talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Archie Moore, Australian Artist, Wins Top Prize at Venice Biennale

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      Moore, an Indigenous Australian artist, won the Golden Lion for “kith and kin,” which draws on what he says is 65,000 years of family history.Archie Moore, an Indigenous Australian artist who has created an installation including a monumental family tree, won the top prize at the Venice Biennale on Saturday.Moore, 54, took the Golden Lion, the prize for the best national participation at the Biennale, the world’s oldest and most high-profile international art exhibition. He beat out artists representing 85 other countries to become the first Australian winner.For his installation, “kith and kin,” Moore has drawn a family tree in chalk on the walls and ceiling of the Australia Pavilion. The web of names encompasses 3,484 people and Moore says it stretches back 65,000 years, although he has smudged some details so that they are hard to read. In the center of the room is a huge table covered with stacks of government documents relating to the deaths of Indigenous Australians in police custody.Julia Bryan-Wilson, the chair of this year’s Biennale jury and a professor of contemporary art at Columbia University, said during the prize announcement that Moore’s installation was “a mournful archive” that “stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts.”Before Saturday’s ceremony, which was streamed online, Moore’s pavilion had already been a critical hit. Julia Halperin, writing in The New York Times, said that the installation was one no Biennale visitor should miss. Moore’s hand-drawn family tree was so dense at points it was impossible to make out the names. “The implication is clear: expand the aperture wide enough and we are all related,” Halperin said. “It’s a concept that could feel trite if it weren’t rendered with such poetry, rigor and specificity.”A detail of Moore’s family tree in the pavilion.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

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      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More

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      WWII Rosie the Riveters Are Honored in Washington

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      Rosie the Riveters, American women who filled a crucial labor shortage during World War II and reshaped the work force, were honored at the Capitol.Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Marian Sousa moved to California to care for the children of her sister Phyllis Gould, who had gone to work as a welder in a Bay Area shipyard.Just a year later, Ms. Sousa, at 17 years old, joined the wartime work force herself, drafting blueprints and revising outdated designs for troop transports. Wearing a hard hat and with a clipboard in hand, she would accompany maritime inspectors on board ships she’d helped design and examine the product of her labors.She and her sister were just two of the roughly 6 million women who went to work during World War II, memorialized by the now iconic recruitment poster depicting Rosie the Riveter, her hair tied back in a kerchief, rolling up the sleeve of her denim shirt and flexing a muscle beneath the slogan, “We can do it!”More than eight decades later, Ms. Sousa, now 98, gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday with around two dozen other so-called Rosies — many of them white-haired and most wearing the red with white polka dots made famous by the poster — to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of their efforts.Marian Sousa, wearing a red shirt with white polka dots in a nod to the classic recruitment poster depicting Rosie, at the ceremony on Wednesday.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“We never thought we’d be recognized,” Ms. Sousa said in an interview. “Just never thought — we were just doing the job for the country and earning money on the side.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More