special culture
At St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Devastating Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors Urges Close Attention

But will Americans want to see this? When New York theater people talk about Grenfell: In the words of survivors, a documentary play (originally staged at London’s National Theatre) chronicling the disastrous fire in a 24-story low-income apartment building in West London that killed 72 people and left countless others homeless in 2017, that is the question. Yes, it’s an enormously crowded season, both on and off Broadway, and one can’t see everything. My thought? Make Grenfell a priority. Playing until May 12 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, it is a fulfilling theatrical experience, an education in humanity transcending mere entertainment. Tickets are priced reasonably enough, and I don’t think there is a bad seat in the house.

Why will Americans care? Because we should. Never disputed is the brilliance of this heartbreaking, mind-boggling, angering dramatic work. It’s brilliantly staged and directed by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike and magnificently written by Gillian Slovo, who has aggregated, verbatim, the court testimonies and interviews of the surviving residents as well as local authorities, firefighters, and business owners. When it was staged in London, a therapist was on the premises in case any audience member was triggered. In Brooklyn, one is invited to leave the theater, regroup, and return if one can handle the intensity of emotions.

The company of Grenfell: In the words of survivors

Photo: Teddy Wolff

Relationships Take Center Stage in the Museum of Arts and Design’s New Craft Show

The first time the artist Eve Biddle exhibited her work alongside her mother’s, she was a bit nervous. It was 2018, 20 years after she lost her mom, Mary Ann Unger, to breast cancer. Unger used materials like bronze, marble, and steel to make her mammoth sculptures. “Mom’s work has a loud voice,” says Biddle, whose own work crosses disciplines and is often smaller in scale. But Alexandra Schwartz, the curator of that 2018 show, knew it would be a powerful pairing despite the artists’ different styles. “She told me, ‘You can see two voices,’” Biddle recalls. One didn’t drown the other out—they harmonized.

Since then, sculptural works from Biddle and Unger have continued to appear together in exhibitions, most recently in “Craft Front & Center: Conversation Pieces,” which opened in early June at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. Also curated by Schwartz, this third iteration of “Craft Front & Center,” on view through next April, places more than 60 works from MAD’s extensive collection in dialogue with contemporary artists. The works span more than 80 years, and most are composed of the core craft materials of fiber, ceramic, and glass.

Installation view of “Craft Front & Center: Conversation Pieces.” In the foreground: Kay Sekimachi’s Kunoyuki, c. 1968 (center) and Trude Guermonprez’s Banner, 1962 (far right).

Photo: Jenna Bascom; courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design.

Ahead of Illinoise’s Transfer to Broadway—What You Might Be Missing From the Sufjan Stevens Musical

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.

The original company of Illinoise

Photo: Liz Lauren, 2024

From Ariana Grande’s Fairytale Fantasy to Madonna Taking Us There: The 8 Best Met Gala Performances to Date

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.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo
Photo: Getty Images

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?

Lizzo
Lizzo performs on a table during the 2023 Met Gala Celebrating “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line Of Beauty.” Photo: Kevin Mazur/MG23/Getty Images
In a New Production of Gypsy, Audra McDonald Takes On a Towering Role
The Elephants Are Coming! A Striking Traveling Exhibition Troops Through Manhattan’s Meatpacking District

“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.)

In Santa Fe, Artist Teresita Fernández Confronts the Legacy of Land Artist Robert Smithson

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.

With Someone Spectacular, Playwright Doménica Feraud Lends Clarity to the Fug of Grief

In Someone Spectacular, a new play by Domenica Feraud, something unnerving happens when six people convene for their weekly grief-counseling session: Beth, their therapist, just doesn’t show up. As 10 idle, nervy minutes turn into 20 and 30, the group—made up of Nelle (Alison Cimmet), who’s lost a sister; Jude (Delia Cunningham), who’s lost a baby; Thom (Damian Young), who’s lost his wife; Julian (Shakur Tolliver), who’s lost his aunt; Lily (Ana Cruz Kayne), who’s lost a mother she loved; and Evelyn, (Gamze Ceylan) who’s lost a mother she hated—begins to come undone. They panic, draw lines, judge each other, judge themselves. But as more time goes on, a change takes place. They start to open up and protect each other, to split off and rearrange themselves into a shape that feels more stable, almost safe. What every person is figuring out, sotto voce or at full volume, is how they are meant to carry on without their person.

Feraud has often wrought rewarding and incisive work from intimate experiences—her essays “The 26=Year-Old Virgin” (2020), “The Movie Star and Me” (2022), and her 2019 play Rinse, Repeat being, until now, the best examples. Yet while Rinse, Repeat centered a subject, disordered eating, with personal relevance to Feraud, it was ultimately an invention. Someone Spectacular, on the other hand, sits much closer to autobiography, emerging from the blinding shock of her own mother’s death in 2022.

With four weeks left in the show’s off-Broadway run, at The Pershing Square Signature Center on 42nd Street, Feraud talks to Vogue about her profoundly joyful opening night, being one of the understudies (She’s on this weekend!), and how mainlining The Real Housewives helped shape the work. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length.

Vogue: I’d love to hear about your opening night. Someone Spectacular is a very personal show, it’s an emotional show, though it’s also very funny. How did you celebrate it?

Doménica Feraud

Photo: Getty Images

Doménica Feraud: It was a bit overwhelming, in the best way. My brother came in from Austin to be there, and it was his first time seeing the play, so that was really special. A lot of my family and my mom’s closest people were there, and then I had friends who were able to be there. And then, also, just to celebrate with the cast and my director, Tatiana Pandiani, and to meet her partner and her friends…and to have Paige [Evans], who’s my co-producer on this, and also my dramaturg, who’s been a mentor to me for a very long time and now is a peer—even though we’ve been so close for seven years, we got to take a picture for the first time. Also, each of these characters is inspired by real people, to some degree; they’re sort of the Inside Out emotion versions of people that I know. So we got a really cool moment of getting a picture of each actor with their inspiration.

Faye Wei Wei’s Paintings Are Portals to Another World

“It’s almost like you could dive into them,” the artist Faye Wei Wei says of her paintings over the phone from London. “I like to swim a lot in the lido and I often think about how, when you’re swimming, the pool is like this mirrored surface. As your fingertips are reaching for another stroke, you see a reflection of yourself and there’s this doubling. It’s almost like there’s another world that you could exist in and you could just go into it.”

This romantic way of looking at such a simple action, is a throughline within her work. Once she even painted two intertwining flowers on a literal portal—a lover’s door—to protect him and remind him of their love. “It’s a bit silly, but there’s a record of the traces, all the marks and the feeling that you fit into the painting,” Wei Wei says of the outpouring of self. “You can feel my presence there. I see canvas and the surface of a painting as infinite.”

Life class early work, 2010© 2024 Faye Wei Wei, courtesy of Cob Gallery.

Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than within her debut monograph Portals, out now from Éditions Lutanie, which encompasses nearly 14 years of the British artist’s work. The book opens with a simple dedication to Wei Wei’s mother, Autumn Cloud, in Chinese, and a figure drawing titled, I Tangled Your Legs in Mine. We Were a Knot in the Grain of the World. “The first piece is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, but it’s just me and my ex-girlfriend intertwined,” she explains. “It’s a really tender drawing and I made it by rubbing it out with a pencil eraser. It created this kind of dreamlike quality, but also a cocooning of the two lovers.”

Born in South London, Wei Wei spent the majority of her childhood either seated at the table drawing while her siblings played video games or picking flowers—“lots of good weeds,” she says—at the park down the street. She remembers collecting fallen leaves with her art class when she was about six and developing an early interest in still lifes. “I was so fascinated by the crevices in leaves,” she says. “It just felt really natural. I don’t know why it just feels so good—like all the blood is rushing into my right hand—but I’m really moved by it.”

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