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      The Works of Christo and Jean-Claude Are Experiencing a Revival

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      Known for their outsized and revolutionary art projects, the couple’s work is seen again in Florida, New York and Germany.It was 42 years ago. Miami awoke to a strange, crooked line of hot pink images floating in the waters of panoramic Biscayne Bay.Eleven small islands had been wrapped in wide, rippling swaths of pink plastic. They were almost glowing as the morning sun swept over the beaches and skyscrapers of the city. Crowds came out in helicopters and speedboats and the family car. Some people perched on condo balconies.It was the work of Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, the European artists who had wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and run a billowing, tall white nylon fence 24.5 miles over the cattle ranges just north of San Francisco and into the Pacific Ocean.People flew in from Europe and around the world to see the show, and collectors and museum directors and many others say it lifted the curtain on Miami as a city of natural beauty that would eventually become a dazzling global art center.“It was a world happening,” said Norman Braman, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, a collector and a Miami car dealer with about a dozen brands, from Hyundai to Rolls-Royce.But it was a tough time for Miami. Cocaine seemed to be everywhere. Gunmen were in the streets. Time magazine had put the city on its cover as “Paradise Lost.” In 1984 — a year after the extravaganza on the bay — the “Miami Vice” TV show took the city’s crime and fashion into American living rooms.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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      Trump’s Wishes Aside, Censoring Racial History May Prove Difficult

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      Late last month, when two federal grants to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana were rescinded, the Trump administration seemed to be following through on its promise to root out what President Trump called “improper ideology” in cultural institutions focused on Black history.After all, the plantation’s mission was to show visitors what life was truly like for the enslaved, contrary to the watered-down Black history that the president seemed to back.Then just as quickly, the grants were restored a few weeks later, the Whitney Plantation’s executive director said in an interview.Because the money had already been approved, “maybe it was an exposure for lawsuits,” the executive director, Ashley Rogers, said, “but who knows?”Ever since Mr. Trump issued an executive order in March decrying cultural institutions that were trying to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” sites like the Whitney Plantation have lived with such uncertainty. An order specifically targeting the Smithsonian Institution tasked Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials with “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”But reversals like the one in Louisiana and actions by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seem to indicate some misgivings about the president’s order. They also show that putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes.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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      This Year’s Met Gala Raises the Most Money in Its History

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      The Met’s annual fashion party has become a fund-raising juggernaut, but the lavish event comes with a price tag of its own. How much bang does it get for its buck?The Met Gala has outdone itself, even before it’s begun.The annual gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the flashy fashion extravaganza that highlights the city’s social scene every May — raised a record $31 million this year, museum officials announced on Monday, the biggest gross in the event’s 77-year history.The money haul — and the avid interest the gala inspires — further cements its place as the pre-eminent benefit among the city’s cultural institutions, and one the world’s most sought-after tickets. The Met’s take dwarfs events like a September gala for the New York Philharmonic (which brought in nearly $4 million) and the 2024 event for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which raised some $5.2 million.The $31 million figure does not reflect the seven-figure cost of staging the gala, which will kick off on Monday evening with the procession of pop stars, fashion icons and sporting-world superstars striding the red carpet, enduring countless flashbulbs, and surrounded by a swarm of publicity and eager onlookers.The gala will act, as always, as the opening of a Costume Institute exhibition: This year’s is entitled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” examining 300 years of Black fashion and the vibrant history of Black dandyism.That emphasis is a significant departure from the department’s largely monochromatic past: This is the Met’s first fashion exhibition devoted entirely to designers of color, and is being seen as part of a larger effort to diversify the collection. It is also a rarity for its focus on men’s wear.As such, it drew an array of Black celebrities to help host the event — including Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, ASAP Rocky and Pharrell Williams. LeBron James, whose Los Angeles Lakers were bounced from the N.B.A. playoffs last week, is the honorary chair.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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      These activists are ‘flooding the zone with Black history’ to protest against Trump’s attacks on DEI

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      A coalition of civil rights groups have launched a weeklong initiative to condemn Donald Trump’s attacks on Black history, including recent executive orders targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC.The national Freedom to Learn campaign is being led by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a social justice thinktank co-founded by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw is a leading expert on critical race theory (CRT), a framework used to analyze racism’s structural impact. She has fought against book bans, restraints on racial history teaching and other anti-DEI efforts since the beginning of the Republican-led campaign against CRT in 2020.“Our goal this week has been to flood the zone, as we call it, with Black history,” Crenshaw said about the campaign. “We have long understood that the attacks on ideas germinating from racial justice were not about the specific targets of each attack … [but are] an effort to impose a specific narrative about the United States of America, one that marginalizes, and even erases, its more difficult chapters,” she added.The weeklong campaign will conclude with a demonstration and prayer vigil in front of NMAAHC on 3 May.Leading up to the protest, AAPF, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and six other advocacy groups signed onto a statement criticizing Trump’s “attempted mass erasure of Black history and culture”, according to a press release published 28 April. In March, Trump ordered an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network, in order to demolish what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”. He singled out NAAMHC, a museum that has been lauded since its opening in 2016.The coalition’s affirmation read, in part: “We affirm that Black history is American history, without which we cannot understand our country’s fight for freedom or secure a more democratic future. We must protect our history not just in books, schools, libraries, and universities, but also in museums, memorials, and remembrances that are sites of our national memory.”“I wasn’t shocked by it,” said Crenshaw of Trump’s executive order against NAAMHC. “I never did think that these attacks on civil rights, on racial equality, would find a natural limit because there is no limit.”Within this week’s movement, AAPF has led sessions to educate people on Trump’s dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, an element of the broader campaign. About 1,500 people attended a virtual event titled Under the Black Light: Beyond the First 100 Days: Centering Racial Justice and Black History in Our Fight for Democracy. There, panelists, including civil rights leaders and academics, discussed how attendees could organize against Trump’s mounting censorship of history. Coffee meetups and a sign-making session were organized as additional parts of the campaign, providing further conversations between participants and academics about how Trump’s initial executive orders connect to a larger thread of eroding racial justice.The group has also launched a “Black history challenge” where participants are encouraged to find a historical site or artifact and “put it into memory”, or recognize it, “as part of Black history’s role in American history”. As a part of the challenge, Crenshaw posted a video on social media of Bruce’s Beach, in Manhattan Beach, California. There, in 1912, a Black couple purchased oceanfront property and built a resort for Black people. The property was later seized by the city under the auspices of eminent domain. “It’s important to tell these stories so people understand that it’s not a natural reality that many Black folks don’t have beachfront property or that we don’t have transnational hotel chains owned by Black people,” said Crenshaw. “These things are actually created by the weaponization of law to impose white, exclusive rights and privileges.”The weeklong campaign comes as the Trump administration has attempted to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at all levels of local and federal government since the start of his second term. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from any public schools that do not end their DEI programming. He later signed executive orders to crack down on diversity efforts at colleges and universities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCrenshaw added: “If you want to sustain this idea of making America great again, then you’ve got to erase the ways that it wasn’t great all along. We’ve always understood that what the end game was, was the elimination of any recognition that our country has had and still has challenges with respect to racial and other forms of justice.”In response, advocacy groups have come together to channel their outrage into the collective action of the campaign and protest. “We want to be sure that we can preserve, beyond artifacts, the true experiences of those that have [undergone] the oppressive past of African Americans, and how that experience of resilience is important today,” said Reverend Shavon Arline-Bradley, president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).A partnership, especially given the importance of the NMAAHC, felt like the most significant way forward, said Arline-Bradley. “This really is a collective, multiracial, multicultural, multi experience, coalition that is saying no. When you take away our history, when you take away African American history, then you really are trying to take away culture.” More

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      Art to See on Day Trips From New York City This Spring

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      Exhibitions and discoveries await in New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and the Catskills, and on the East End of Long Island.The busy calendar of fairs and auctions in May makes New York City an attractive hub of activity for the art crowd. But if a breather is needed or desired, a day trip may be in order. Here are a few art destinations worth considering.The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 Indigenous artists.McKay Imaging PhotographyZimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J.Located at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, the Zimmerli — with a substantial collection strong in American, European and Soviet nonconformist art — has long been overshadowed by New York City institutions. But the museum has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 well-established and emerging Indigenous artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Terran Last Gun, Wendy Red Star and Marie Watt. It was curated by the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who was honored with a Whitney Museum retrospective in 2023 and died at 85, a week before the Zimmerli show opened.On view through Dec. 21, it is the largest of more than 30 exhibitions that Smith organized throughout her career in the United States. “Jaune helped define Native art history based on the artists she gave a platform to over the years,” said the Zimmerli director, Maura Reilly. Rather than apply an authoritative curatorial style, Smith asked each artist “how they wanted to be represented,” Reilly said, “very different from how I’ve worked typically.” Smith called the show “a celebration of life,” Reilly recalled: “She said it was about ‘kinship, community, survivance, solidarity and resilience.’”A piece from “Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora & Contemporary Responses,” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.Thomas Cole National Historic Site Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, N.Y.Two centuries ago, the artist Thomas Cole took a momentous boat ride up the Hudson River to Catskill, where the scenery inspired him to found the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He also fell in love with Maria Bartow and moved in 1836 to her family home in Catskill, painting the view from their porch of the Catskill Mountains more than any other.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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      In Philadelphia, Art Shows by Women Teem With Eros and Audacity

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      Devotees of the human figure, Cecily Brown and Christina Ramberg turn the Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a showplace for the female gaze.Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn’t fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound.By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg’s imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown’s world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited.Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze.Christina Ramberg, “Untitled,” 1970-1971. Felt-tip pens, with graphite and colored pencil on ivory wove graph paper.via Philadelphia Museum of ArtRamberg, who died in 1995 and remains underknown, was officially a Chicago Imagist, one of a dozen or so figurative artists who defined their work in opposition to New York, the country’s No. 1 painting town. Spurning abstraction, the Chicago Imagists worked on the margins of cartooning and surrealism. They pursued the rough, often raunchy edges of American culture with a zealousness that made the art of both coasts seem relatively polite.Ramberg’s work is easy to recognize, even from the next room. She painted cropped, centered, fastidiously crafted images that isolated a female hand or a vintage hairdo against a blank ground, as if turning them into heraldic emblems. And she can fairly be called a connoisseur of undergarments. With nearly devotional detail, she captured the texture of different fabrics, contrasting the smooth, blue-black sheen of satin bands with the intricate patterns embedded in lace. Her colors, compared to the screaming hues of other Imagists, tend to be soft and muted, with an emphasis on peachy beiges and grayed lavenders reminiscent of women’s slips.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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      Sculpture Museum in Dallas Names a New Director

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      Carlos Basualdo, a veteran curator who has spent most of his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will take over the Nasher Sculpture Center next month.Carlos Basualdo visited Dallas for the first time in October with interest in seeing the Nasher Sculpture Center, a prized small museum. It mingles 20th-century European sculpture by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti with contemporary works by American artists like Arlene Shechet and Carol Bove.“I fell in love with the building and the garden,” said Basualdo, a veteran curator who has spent most of his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.He will be returning to the Nasher on May 12 with the title of director, his first time overseeing an institution.The Nasher is relatively intimate, with a collection of about 500 works and an annual operating budget of about $13 million, but it has long commanded an outsize reputation for its holdings. It is housed in a jewel of a building: a light-flooded, travertine-and-glass structure by Renzo Piano. From the museum’s entrance you can see, in a nearly seamless glance, through the interior and across the length of the sculpture garden out back.A sculpture by Otobong Nkanga at the Nasher, which has a collection of about 500 works.Nitashia Johnson for The New York Times“When I walked into the place, coming out of the street, it was super-powerful,” Basualdo said. “It’s open, it’s very present, it’s not ostentatious, it’s generous, it’s full of light.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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      Trump will not stop until every American relic reflects his imaginary world view | Kellie Carter Jackson

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      Last week, Donald Trump issued another executive order, this one aimed directly at the Smithsonian Institution, and called for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. He contended that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and that it advocates “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. Specifically, the order targeted American history and art that focused on stories of race and racism.Being responsible for the distillation of the nation’s narrative is no small thing. The Smithsonian oversees 21 museums, libraries, research centers and the National zoo. Every year millions of people visit various sites that are free to the public. The collection of museums represents the pinnacle of public history and the story America tells the world about itself.But Trump’s executive order is not about restoring the truth. Quite the opposite. It creates false narratives and myths that promote the supremacy of whiteness. This executive order has the potential for harm because erasure is violence; it robs the public of the truth. Because there is no way to explain slavery and segregation as not “inherently harmful and oppressive”, Trump would rather not explain it at all.One of the most popular Smithsonian sites is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), affectionately known by Black people as the “Blacksonian”. The museum was conceived of as early as 1915 by Black veterans who fought during the civil war and wanted recognition for their service and valor. These soldiers were not only left out of national memorials and ceremonies, but also faced tremendous discrimination often culminating in deadly violence when they returned home. They wanted a space and memorial that would honor their achievements and pivotal contributions.It was impossible to separate the story of Black military service and valor from racial discrimination and violence. Similarly, one cannot separate out the “good” from the “bad” in creating an honest narrative about the United States. Accordingly, the NMAAHC holds a special place in America, one where the complexity of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are recognized as founding fathers and slaveholders. There is no abolitionist movement without slavery. There is no suffrage movement without women’s denial. There is no civil rights movement without racism and oppression. These are the facts. Museums exist to collect, preserve and exhibit the past as it happened. Archivists and curators care deeply about their mission to be accurate and authentic.An America that will re-erect statues and rename military bases after Confederate generals, while simultaneously stripping the evidence of race and racism from the Smithsonian history museums isn’t correcting the historical record. That nation is whitewashing the political record to legitimize the actions of those in power. Slavery is a fact. Jim Crow is a fact. Racist and exclusionary immigration laws are a fact. Japanese internment is a fact. Native American removal and extermination is a fact. Mexican and Mexican American expulsion is a fact. Removing them from the sight of the public doesn’t change the facts, it only changes one’s perspective on and relation to them politically.Museums offer cautionary tales, hard lessons about where the country has been and where we hope to never be again. They hold a great deal of public trust, perhaps more than schools, media, newspapers or even films. Patrons get to experience first hand documents, letters, original photographs and artefacts. Museums are public time capsules of where we have been. I will never forget seeing Emmett Till’s casket, Harriet Tubman’s shawl, Nat Turner’s Bible or an early flag of the First Republic of Haiti. These artefacts do more than defy the odds by still existing; they tell a powerful story about who people were during the times that they lived. Museums should not be party to culture wars. Our history is a collective memory whether Trump likes it or not.A nation that cannot reckon with its past, triumph and tragedy, is ultimately a weaker one; puffed up with its own delusions of grandeur. There is more power in the truth than there is in a lie. The efforts in the last 50 years to give the powerless a place politically, academically and legally is not from a revisionist view of American history, but rather a move to make all of America the democratic nation it claims to be.Moreover, key features of the NMAAHC reflect optimism, spirituality and joy because anti-Blackness is not the totality of the Black experience. The museum showcases Black food pathways, artistry, music, sports, film, ingenuity and technological advancements. It is a celebration of achievement despite the barriers and challenges racism presents. But even if museums solely focused on slavery, they still deserve a right to exist. America has been a land with enslaved people longer than it has been a county without slavery.Are museums contested spaces? Absolutely. No one space can include everything and offer an exhaustive history of a country, person or movement. But what is included or not included is painstakingly considered. Museums are bipartisan sites where everyone can grapple with the good, bad and the ugliness of nation making. But Trump will not stop until every American relic reflects his imaginary world view, a place where few can see their lived experiences on full display. More