Category Arts

A few years ago, the French Moroccan artist Yto Barrada visited MoMA PS1, in Queens, following an invitation to create a site-specific work for the museum’s courtyard. As soon as she entered the space, she noticed its walls. Tall and made of concrete, they reminded her of the old city ramparts and Brutalist architecture in Tangier, where she grew up and still spends part of each year.

“When I’m thinking of walls, I’m also thinking of symbolic walls, power structures,” Barrada tells me over video chat from her Brooklyn studio. Creating an outdoor, large-scale sculpture was a first for Barrada, but responding to power structures has been at the core of her cross-disciplinary practice for more than two decades.

As she worked on her installation—an arrangement of massive, brightly colored concrete blocks called “Le Grand Soir”—Barrada pulled from other influences that often show up in her work: labor, play, cultural histories. Such themes also appear in a concurrent solo show of Barrada’s photo-based work at the International Center of Photography, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Though disparate in scale and material and coincidental in timing, as a pair, MoMA PS1’s “Le Grand Soir” and ICP’s “Part-Time Abstractionist” speak to the many ways Barrada explores the social forces that shape our world.

Now, I know what happens at the Tony Awards. I’ve watched them closely for years, sometimes with friends and themed snacks (I’m looking at you, 2022’s “A Strange Fruit Loop”), sometimes at a more formal viewing party. At regular intervals I’ll also revisit “Bigger,” Neil Patrick Harris’s joyous opening number at the 2013 ceremony, knowing I will feel the same swelling in my heart every time he arrives at the climax of his rap: “We were that kid.” (Is someone cutting onions in here?) Still, nothing could quite prepare me for being in the room where it happens (…sorry!) during the 77th Annual Tony Awards on Sunday night.

Below, I’ve rounded up four things you likely didn’t catch watching the Tonys from home. We’re live in five…four…three…can I get applause, please?

The pre-show (which is actually very charming)

Yes, you can watch the pre-show at home via Pluto TV, but most people only know to switch on the Tonys for the CBS broadcast at 8 p.m. Hosted by Julianne Hough and Utkarsh Ambudkar, however, “The Tony Awards: Act One” was a delight, representing a welcome transition from the frenzy of the red carpet to the live show—and giving well-deserved recognition to the creative and design teams behind each production. Directors George C. Wolfe and Jack O’Brien also received their Special Tony Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre during that time, giving two very endearing speeches. “Most of the people here tonight were discouraged by their parents, teachers, lovers, financial advisors,” O’Brien joked (but not really) of beginning a career in the theater. “But we couldn’t help it, could we?” The crowd loved this.

The weirdness of the commercial breaks

One recent sweltering summer afternoon, photographer Ethan James Green and I escaped the heat by visiting the Ukrainian Museum in New York to see “Peter Hujar: Rialto.” In the dog days of a New York City summer, when the temperature feels like it’s rising at the kind of frenzied pace you only wish your bank balance could match, the museum is quite the refuge from those steamy streets. (It still can be: “Peter Hujar: Rialto” runs until the beginning of September.)

Of course, the real reason to visit is to see Hujar’s incredible work. One could lavish all sorts of superlatives on the Ukrainian-American photographer, who passed away in 1987, and he would be worthy of all of them. Hujar, a titan of photographic practice, could be unvarnished and direct, but also possessed a very tender way of capturing whoever and whatever was in front of him—a singular marriage of tender intimacy and an unflinching look at humanity.

Hujar is best known for his work depicting LGBTQIA+ icons and iconography, from Candy Darling on Her Death Bed, 1973 to Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976. “I love his work, and think that when it comes to gay and queer photographers, he’s one of the best,” Green told me. “When he was coming up, so was Robert Mapplethorpe—and it was like Mapplethorpe was so much about being abstract with his subjects, whereas Hujar is about getting the person in a very raw way. I prefer that approach—especially in portraiture.”

Yet the brilliance of “Peter Hujar: Rialto” is that it reveals work of Hujar’s that is much less familiar. What’s on view here spans a period from 1955 to 1969—just over a decade of images, but one in which Hujar captured the world slowly starting to shift on its axis towards what seemed like a more progressive era. That’s true whether he was in rural America or in the spooky Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, with city kids on the streets, or meeting some of the future icons who would go on to ignite the 1970s—Iggy Pop, Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis, and Loulou de la Falaise, who worked with Yves Saint Laurent, et al.

“I’m seeing a lot of images I haven’t seen before,” Green said that afternoon. “You tend to forget that he’s a photographer who was shooting for a good amount of time, and there was just so much work. You realize when someone passes that certain images stay and others maybe slip away—and that has nothing to do with how good they are.”

Walter Hill’s 1979 film The Warriors, based on the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, presents a blood-stained map of a New York City ruled by highly territorial gangs.

Warriors, a new concept album based on the same story, begins with a dancehall-tinged intro by the Jamaican singer Shenseea, before Bronx-born rapper Chris Rivers hops on the track to rep and introduce his borough. This sets the stage for the next four voices: Nas (of Queens), Cam’ron (Manhattan), Ghostface Killah and RZA (Staten Island), and Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn).

Soon after comes a jolting reminder that this is, in fact, a musical theater piece by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as a handful of Broadway favorites (Phillipa Soo, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Aneesa Folds, Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Gizel Jiménez, and Julia Harriman) drop in, playing the gender-swapped titular gang.

But then, the ultimate blow to expectations: Lauryn Hill emerging as Cyrus, a soon-to-be-slain gang leader who proposes the clans drop their rivalries and take the city from the police, which they outnumber 3-1. While Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, released after the success of that 2015 musical, featured several hip-hop notables, never has his music sounded so, well, hard.

At a little after 5 p.m. last Thursday, a jury in New York found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Immediately, my phone was flooded with messages about the court’s ruling—from news apps, my family, friends, and coworkers. Some cheered. Others wondered if a guilty verdict really meant anything for someone like Trump. Others still expressed concern for the safety of the jurors.

I received these alerts en route to see the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of The Welkin by playwright Lucy Kirkwood. (This staging marks the work’s American debut after premiering at London’s National Theatre in 2020.) Inside the Linda Gross Theater, housed within a former church in Chelsea, the cast was warming up before their 7 p.m. curtain when the production manager rushed in to tell them the news.

“There are aware and concerned citizens in our cast,” says Sandra Oh, who appears in the play as Lizzy Luke, a defiant midwife. “There’s no way that we are not influenced by everything that is going on in the world.” And indeed as many theatergoers noted during intermission, The Welkin made for richly apt viewing while a real-world trial unfolded.

“It’s no exaggeration to say we are living in the spring of Joan Jonas,” said Randy Kennedy on Monday night at the National Arts Club. The veteran arts writer was joined onstage by Jonas, 87 years old and having a major moment, as she currently headlines not one but two shows in New York: at the Museum of Modern Art, where a riveting retrospective of her five-decade career opened in March, and at her enchanting show of works on paper at the Drawing Center in SoHo. Beyond our hallowed art institutions, her work also features on graphic tees, mirrored bags, and fringed dresses from Rachel Comey’s thrilling spring 2024 collection.

For the unfamiliar, Jonas is the visionary American artist who worked on the front lines of performance and video art starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ever inventive, she developed her own language through sound, movement, visual symbols, and a relentless exploration of ideas. She incorporated folklore, ecology, and a feminist point of view, swinging from large-scale performances in the empty lots of downtown Manhattan to tender drawings of beloved pets. She has influenced generations of young artists who, like her, seek to break with artistic norms and tread new ground.

“She works at this lovely intersection that really breeds cultural diplomacy,” said Phillip Edward Spradley, who chairs the National Arts Club’s art and technology committee and who planned Monday night’s talk between Jonas and Kennedy.

On an otherwise unremarkable day in the spring of 2017, Flora Yukhnovich, a 27-year-old master of fine art student with no distinct technique, no discernible profile, and no particular prospects, climbed the Wallace Collection’s grand marble staircase and came down again, an hour or so later, fixed on the aesthetic that would make her the pre-eminent British painter of her generation. There, in among the Gouthière clocks and Jean Ducrollay snuffboxes, she’d come face-to-face with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, the inescapable French fancy that distills the 18th-century rococo movement’s frivolity and flirtatiousness into a titillating trio of figures: a Marie Antoinette-esque coquette, suspended aloft in billowing blush-silk skirts; her bewigged, cuckolded husband, lurking in the shadows of an Arcadian forest; and her ancien régime paramour, reaching for her as she suggestively sends a ballet-pink slipper flying towards him in the velvet undergrowth.

“It felt like all these strands that I’d been looking at came together,” Yukhnovich tells me today of the 25-by-31-inch canvas, which has, in the centuries since a licentious French baron commissioned it, been reproduced everywhere from Disney’s Frozen to a fridge magnet on Etsy. She’s perching on a rickety folding stool in her southeast London studio, her head tilted in a way that brings out her own resemblance to one of Fragonard’s subjects: copper hair, heart-shaped face, ivory skin, Cupid’s-bow lips. Until that point, she says, she’d spent her MFA indulging her “light-hearted curiosity” about the froufrou via Spode’s Blue Italian porcelain and aughts Cath Kidston wallpapers, and feeling vaguely ashamed about it. (Tricky to imagine her teen idols, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, studying Sèvres’s elephant-head vases with any degree of seriousness.) But with The Swing in her mind’s eye, she suddenly “got the bit between my teeth”—and began to query how and why decorative had come to mean downmarket, the ladylike inherently lowbrow.

Four years later, Tu Vas me Faire Rougir (You’re Going to Make me Blush)—one of three Permanent Rose-daubed reinterpretations of Fragonard she painted for her graduate show—sold at Christie’s for £1,902,000, making her, in the space of a gavel stroke, a bonafide blue-chip artist. Gradually, she expanded her remit beyond Fragonard to encompass other rococo masterpieces—Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s celestial allegories, Nicolas Lancret’s rural idylls—exposing the ways in which they had shaped fashionable conceptions of the “coded feminine,” both then and now. See 2020’s Warm, Wet N’ Wild, which repositions Katy Perry’s maraschino-topped “California Gurls” video in the fruity, fecund context of Watteau’s fête galantes. It sold to a private collector, by way of Sotheby’s, for £2,697,000 in 2022.

If you happen to find yourself at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum this summer, don’t be surprised if you see flocks of Swifties, dressed in their Eras tour costumes and wearing stacks upon stacks of friendship bracelets, rushing through the cavernous halls of the South Kensington institution. The reason? “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” a new free exhibition which sees 16 of the 14-time Grammy-winning pop powerhouse’s most memorable looks—from across her music videos, tours, album covers, red-carpet appearances, and all 11 eras—go on display alongside instruments, awards, and storyboards from her personal archive, some of which have never been seen before.

Crucially, though, this isn’t one of the V&A’s standalone exhibitions, but one for which installations are dotted around the entire museum itself, with each showcase opening up a fascinating dialogue with the building’s architecture and permanent objects, and sending visitors on a thrilling treasure hunt as they wind past Renaissance sculptures, medieval tapestries, and 18th-century paintings in search of the next Swiftian curio. Each of the 13 stops—designed to be non-chronological, like the Eras tour before it—features fittingly theatrical displays crafted by Tom Piper, best known for his work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as for surrounding the Tower of London with poppies, while Kate Bailey, the museum’s senior curator for theater and performance, has overseen the whole project, seeding in Easter eggs and ensuring each chapter builds on our understanding of this often-mythical-seeming figure.

While Taylor herself wasn’t involved in selecting the items on show, Bailey says her archive was incredibly generous in giving her free reign, so much so that one of the main challenges was editing down her picks to just one or two garments per era. There was also the matter of timing—turning the exhibition around in only a few months, so that it could both incorporate The Tortured Poets Department era and coincide with the second leg of the Eras tour in London—and the need for collaboration. “This is something which has actually involved the whole museum,” she tells me. “I’ve been working with colleagues across different departments and engaging curators in different galleries to open up these historical spaces. And that was challenging because, in many cases, these were things we’d never done before.” Her goal, she says, was to create something that, “like Taylor’s shows, combines spectacle with that feeling of intimacy.”

The first stop on the tour is a case in point. Enter the museum through the grand archway on Cromwell Road, turn left, and make your way up two flights of stairs to the first era: Lover. Here, you’ll find the silk Versace shirt and loafers Taylor sported in her self-directed music video for “The Man” in 2020, alongside the wig and facial hair which transformed her into a millionaire playboy, her director’s chair from the set, the best-director VMA she scooped for her efforts, and a loop of the video itself.