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    Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey Dancer of ‘Power and Radiance,’ Dies at 81

    Judith Jamison, a majestic dancer who became an international star as a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and who directed the troupe for more than two decades, building it into the most successful modern dance company in the country, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 81.Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by Christopher Zunner, a spokesman for the Ailey company, who said she died “after a brief illness.”Ms. Jamison performed Alvin Ailey’s “Cry” at New York City Center in 1975. “Cry,” an immediate hit, made her a star.Jack Vartoogian/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesAt 5-foot-10, Ms. Jamison was unusually tall for a woman in her profession. “But anyone who’s seen her onstage is convinced she’s six feet five,” the critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in The New York Times in 1976.“I was the antithesis of the small-boned, demure dancer with a classically feminine shape.” Ms. Jamison (pronounced JAM-ih-son) wrote in her 1993 autobiography, “Dancing Spirit.”It wasn’t just her size and shape that were distinctive, however. She was a performer of great intelligence, warmth and wit.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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    What Trenton Doyle Hancock Learned From Philip Guston

    The Jewish Museum pairs the Texas artist with a 20th-century master. Together they confront racism with horror — and humor.When Trenton Doyle Hancock discovered the artist Philip Guston, it was a revelation. Hancock had just transferred from junior college in his hometown, Paris, Texas, to nearby East Texas State University. He was taking a printmaking class and working with a haunting photograph he’d made of himself partially cloaked in a white sheet with a noose around his neck. The rope wound around his body, including his semi-bare right arm, which holds up a hammer. Titled “The Properties of the Hammer” (1993), it probed the dark contradictions of being a Black man in America.Hancock’s printmaking teacher, Thomas Seawell, asked if he knew about Philip Guston, the New York School artist. Guston had (very controversially) left behind Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s to make figurative, cartoonish paintings of objects like books and shoes, which hearkened back to the Holocaust, as well as hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Seawell saw a kinship between Guston’s work and Hancock’s, but Hancock had never heard of Guston. So Seawell lent him a book, and the student fell in love.“The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible,” Hancock, 50, recalled recently. “When you put a colorful toy in front of a child, they want to eat it. That’s how I felt about those paintings: I just wanted to eat them. I didn’t even know you could make work that looked like this. It was totally new to me.”In “The Studio” (1969), Philip Guston’s hooded protagonist is an artist painting his own effigy. The artist was exploring “what would it be like to be evil?” Trenton Doyle Hancock recalled: “The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible.” The Estate of Philip Guston; via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIf you’ve never had the urge to eat a painting, you’re not alone, but meeting Hancock or seeing his art helps make that impulse understandable. He is a voracious consumer of culture, and his work has an intense physicality — in the bodies that are forever bending, stretching and breaking in his images, and in the cutout and collaged surfaces of his paintings. Hancock’s world is a profusion of colors, of media, of characters in his ever-expanding multiverse.His studio in a Houston suburb bears this out. Rooms of the two-story house are devoted to various collections, including sketchbooks dating back to childhood, scraps and detritus (literally dirt swept off the floor of past studios), and plastic bottle caps sorted by color.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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    A Trump Rally Speaker Trashed Puerto Ricans. Harris Reached Out to Them.

    Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign moved quickly on Sunday to elevate and denounce racist and inflammatory remarks made by speakers at a rally for former President Donald J. Trump at Madison Square Garden in New York.Before Mr. Trump had even taken the stage, warm-up speakers had called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” referred to Ms. Harris as “the devil” and “the Antichrist,” and made racist or derogatory remarks about Latinos generally, African Americans, Palestinians and Jews.The remarks at the rally came as Ms. Harris wrapped up a day in Philadelphia, where she spent time courting Pennsylvania’s significant Puerto Rican population by visiting a local Puerto Rican restaurant. While there, she talked about a new plan she announced on Sunday to bring economic opportunities to Puerto Rico, discussed her visit there after Hurricane Maria, and said that even as a senator she had “felt a need and an obligation” to “make sure Puerto Rico’s needs were met.”“This is not a new area of focus for me,” she said. She received a warm reception from the crowd, with chants of “Sí, se puede.”Before the Trump rally on Sunday, Ms. Harris had already taken aim at her Republican rival in a video message to Puerto Rican voters. She noted that, as president, Mr. Trump had resisted sending aid to the island after back-to-back hurricanes, adding that he had offered nothing but “paper towels and insults.”“I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and a competent leader,” she said.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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    Harris Slams Trump in Interview With Charlamagne Tha God: 5 Takeaways

    Vice President Kamala Harris agreed on Tuesday with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God that former President Donald J. Trump was a fascist, going a step further than she had before in casting her Republican rival as a dangerous authoritarian leader.During a free-flowing interview that often spoke to the concerns of Black Americans, Ms. Harris was contrasting her vision for the nation with Mr. Trump’s when Charlamagne jumped in to say: “The other is about fascism. Why can’t we just say it?”“Yes, we can say that,” Ms. Harris replied.Her comments came days after it was revealed that Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, had called the former president “a fascist to the core,” according to a new book from the journalist Bob Woodward.Ms. Harris’s hourlong appearance on Tuesday in Detroit with Charlamagne — a co-host of the popular hip-hop morning radio show “The Breakfast Club,” which has many Black listeners — was part of a major push to counteract weakening support from Black voters. And during the conversation, she predicted that the election would come down to the wire.“This is a margin-of-error race,” she said. “I’m going to win, but it’s tight.”Here are five takeaways from the interview.Harris sharpened her attack on Trump as ‘weak’ yet dangerous.For much of her vice presidency, some of Ms. Harris’s aides have thought she is too cautious in her public remarks. But when it came to Mr. Trump on Tuesday, she did not hold back.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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    ¿Por qué a Trump le va tan bien con los votantes negros e hispanos?

    Cinco posibles explicaciones sobre el aumento de apoyo al expresidente, sobre todo entre los hombres jóvenes.Un acto de Trump en el Bronx en mayo mostró el apoyo de negros y latinos.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesEn 2016, Donald Trump se convirtió en el candidato republicano y finalmente ganó la presidencia tras llamar violadores a muchos inmigrantes mexicanos y afirmar falsamente que Barack Obama no había nacido en Estados Unidos.Ocho años después, las encuestas sugieren que bien podría volver a la Casa Blanca al obtener mejores resultados entre los votantes negros e hispanos combinados que cualquier candidato presidencial republicano desde la promulgación de la Ley de Derechos Civiles en 1964.¿Cómo es posible? Es una pregunta que me hacen a menudo, y las últimas encuestas del New York Times/Siena College entre votantes negros e hispanos de todo el país representan nuestro mejor esfuerzo por responderla.Al igual que nuestras otras encuestas de este ciclo, los sondeos revelan que a Trump le va inusualmente bien para un republicano entre los votantes negros e hispanos. En general, Kamala Harris va a la cabeza, 78 por ciento a 15 por ciento, entre los votantes negros, y va a la cabeza, 56-37, entre los votantes hispanos.Casi de cualquier manera que podamos medirlo, Trump está funcionando tan bien o mejor entre los votantes negros e hispanos que cualquier republicano en la memoria reciente. En 2020, el apoyo de las personas negras a Joe Biden era del 92 por ciento entre los votantes de los principales partidos; su apoyo hispano era del 63 por ciento, según cálculos del Times.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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    The Met’s Next Costume Fashion Blockbuster Take On the Politics of Race

    With support from LeBron James, ASAP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and more.The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is wading into the politics of race relations.On Wednesday, the museum announced that its spring 2025 blockbuster fashion show will be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” focusing on the history of the Black dandy and the way peacocking goes beyond aesthetics to empowerment. ASAP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will be co-chairs of the gala that opens the show; LeBron James will be the honorary chair.The Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear, the show is another step in the Costume Institute’s efforts to rectify its own historic failures in diversity and inclusion, said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge.“I wanted to stage a show on race that could use our collection to tell a story that had been absent from the conversation both within the museum and outside,” Mr. Bolton said. “This is a first of its kind.”LeBron James will be the honorary chair of the event. Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe goal, he said, is to demonstrate what happens to the concept of the “dandy,” as defined by Beau Brummell in Regency England, when it is racialized. When, for example, an enslaved person is treated as a luxury object to be dressed up and displayed — and how those clothes in turn were appropriated by the enslaved and used to subvert existing systems and create new identities. Additionally, it will illustrate how contemporary Black men’s wear designers use their work to connect to this tradition.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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    Studio Museum in Harlem to Open New Building in Fall 2025

    The 82,000-square-foot structure on 125th Street will open with a show featuring the artist Tom Lloyd.The Studio Museum in Harlem on Tuesday announced that it will open its new home on 125th Street in the fall of 2025. Its first show there will bring the museum full circle by focusing on the work of Tom Lloyd, the artist, educator and activist who was featured in the 1968 opening exhibition of the institution — which was then just a second-floor rented loft on upper Fifth Avenue.“This building represents the collective aspirations of all who have been involved in thinking about what it would mean to make a museum on 125th Street devoted to the work of Black artists,” said Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, in a recent walk through the new structure. “This space allows us to fully execute on all of the work that we have been known to do, but gives us so much more capacity and so much more possibility.”Featuring stacked volumes of differing sizes over five stories, the new building provides 82,000 square feet, increasing the exhibition space by more than 50 percent and the public areas by about 60 percent.The museum’s news release makes no mention of the building’s architect, David Adjaye, nor those currently credited for the design — Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. (The museum parted ways with Adjaye in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. Adjaye has denied the accusations.)Golden declined to discuss Adjaye, but said, “We are thrilled with and proud of this design and look forward to working in it.” A rendering of the lobby, facing north. The museum said it has raised more than $285 million of a $300 million capital campaign for future sustainability. via Adjaye AssociatesWe 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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    Trump vs. Harris Would Be Nothing Without Myths

    Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.Each candidate is trying to pitch the contest to voters as a heroic episode in the unfolding of American history and invites them to imagine themselves as players in the narrative.In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do.Among the big issues at stake in the 2024 election, for both the campaigns and the country, is no less than shaping what it means to be an American and who gets to have power.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