Archives 2023

By now, there’s already been much buzz surrounding Illinoise, the stage musical/dance performance based on Sufjan Stevens’s hallowed album Illinois. Since its premiere at Bard College in New York last spring, reviews for the production have been unanimously rhapsodic. After Bard, Illinoise traveled to Chicago’s Shakespeare Theater, the Park Avenue Armory, and finally to Broadway, where it opens tonight at the St. James Theatre—just in time to be eligible for the 2024 Tony Awards.

Upon its 2005 release, Stevens’s 26-song concept album immediately imprinted on the generation who gobbled it up. An ode to the state of Illinois, Stevens weaves historical figures, tragedies, and hyper-regional IYKYKs into an album that swells with plush marching-band riffs and then quiets down to homespun banjo strums. But for all its locale narratives, the album had mass appeal. It gave listeners the sense of being lost and found again, and who can’t relate to that?

Justin Peck—who directed and choreographed the production and cowrote the book with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury—was about 17 when he first listened to the album, and there was no going back. (In the Illinoise pamphlet, you’ll find an essay from Jessica Dessner, an artist, writer, former dancer, and close associate of Stevens who recalls a Facebook message she received from Peck more than a decade ago expressing his desire to meet with Stevens.) Peck’s profound appreciation for Stevens has resulted in several direct collaborations at the New York City Ballet (where Peck is a resident choreographer), which began with a composition for the ballet Year of the Rabbit in 2012.

It can be easy to forget that the Met Gala is, first and foremost, a prodigious charity fundraiser. Like other events of its kind, it includes a cocktail hour followed by a seated dinner and then a performance. The Met being the Met, however, this capstone moment usually takes on epic proportions. Historically orchestrated in coordination with visionary maestro Baz Luhrmann, Met Gala performances have ranged from the cast of Billy Elliot swanning at the barre to Bruno Mars smashing it with pitch-perfect sincerity and Diana Ross serenading guests in a strapless feather contraption. On the Met stage, musical artists have collaborated, debuted new albums, and performed one-off songs never heard before or since. It’s a relief that, given where the show takes place, nobody has literally brought the house down. (Not yet, at least.) Here, some of the best Met performances to date.

In her truly stunning medley at the 2024 Met Gala, Ariana Grande managed to combine “Once Upon a Dream,” from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, with a string of her most infectious pop hits—both new (“Yes, And”) and long-established (“Seven Rings”). Bringing it all home? A tear-jerking rendition of “When You Believe” with her Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo. Oh, and did we mention the 30 dancers, 40-person choir, and two different Maison Margiela Artisanal looks?

“It was really just a vision that dropped in my head: Let’s make a herd of 100 elephants and migrate them across America,” says Ruth Ganesh, a UK-born animal rights activist, conservationist, and arts advocate. After moving to the United States, her new home had her musing about the Route 66 cross-country road trip. But she also had another idea: “Could these elephants be made out of something that was entirely good for the environment?”

It wasn’t until Ganesh connected with Tarsh Thekaekara—an animal researcher and conservationist based in India who had long studied elephant behaviors—that her phantasm morphed into a joyous, roving art installation, with New York as the next stop in its national tour. “The Great Elephant Migration” will be on view around the Meatpacking District through October 20.

The elephant sculptures are life-size, modeled after real-life cows (female elephants), bulls (male elephants), tuskers (male elephants with tusks), and lovable little calves, all made from dried lantana plants—an invasive species that crowds out native plant life, reduces biodiversity, and encroaches on wildlife habitats. (This was at Thekaekara’s suggestion: He has been working with indigenous populations in India to craft furniture out of the plant.)

For most of her life, Teresita Fernández had encountered in person as many artworks by Land Art trailblazer Robert Smithson as most people had—which is to say, zero.

“For most of us, the little we know of Robert Smithson is that bad picture in art-history books of Spiral Jetty, which is really little and in grainy black and white,” says the Brooklyn-based artist of Smithson’s seminal site-specific 1970 earthwork in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which came to epitomize Land Art. “We don’t know how the artwork was made. We don’t know what it looks like from any other angle. And that was my experience too. It wasn’t until I was much older that I saw a piece of his.”

That’s in part because Smithson’s most important works are site-specific earthworks, designed to be consumed by time and nature, in places far from art-world hubs, such as Kent, Ohio, and the northeastern Netherlands—and because his life was cut short at age 35 by a light-aircraft crash while inspecting a site for another piece in 1973.

Now, as co-curator of a groundbreaking exhibition that brings his historic work in dialogue with hers, Fernández has seen more of his work than ever before—and so too can visitors to “Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson,” on view at Site Santa Fe through October 28.

Conceived as an intergenerational conversation between two artists, the show considers themes of place, site, and agency. Along with co-curator Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation (dedicated to the legacies of Smithson and fellow Land Art artist Nancy Holt, his wife), Fernández not only surfaces formal, material, and conceptual resonances but also, at times, challenges Smithson’s work and complicates his legacy.