Towering bronzes depicting emperors once graced an ancient shrine in a region of what is now Turkey that was once part of Rome’s extended empire. Installed between around A.D. 50 and 250 to venerate imperial power, the statues were later buried by earthquakes only to be discovered and quietly sold …
Before I met the artist Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum to talk about her new survey show, “All Day All Night,” her team sent me a copy of her two-page “access rider.” It contained a list of terms to avoid: Don’t pathologize her by referring to her as …
Hilton Als is best known as a writer. His essay collection “White Girls” was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his theater criticism at The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for more than …
After Alice Coltrane’s death in January 2007, the many who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for different reasons. They even called her by different names. To musicians …
Come to the Center for Brooklyn History’s grand Romanesque Revival building in Brooklyn Heights looking for staid portraits of 19th-century burghers, and you’ll find them. But on a recent evening, Mildred Jones, an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was pondering a less expected large-scale oil portrait — of herself. …
Sixteenth-century ornamental timepieces frame a crystal-studded metal bodysuit by Thierry Mugler. Gilded silver reliquaries with sculpted hands stand next to a pair of Hermès gloves. A ceramic hand warmer from Faenza, Italy, that looks like a book is twinned with a Chanel clutch that looks like a book. This is …
‘The Ultimate Improv Show’ Jan. 24-25 at the Bell House, 149 Seventh Street, Brooklyn; thebellhouseny.com. In the late 2000s, you could catch many of today’s top sitcom stars and character actors honing their skills at cheap (or free) improvisational shows in the basement of a Gristedes in Manhattan that the …
The children seem like typical kindergartners: Some beam at the camera; some glance coyly aside; others appear lost in reverie. One slim, dark-haired girl in a pale dress looks precociously serious. She is Anne Frank, and this classroom photograph, taken at a Montessori school in Amsterdam in 1935, appears twice …
In Salzburg, Austria last spring, I skipped around the fountain outside Mirabell Palace. Others did too. Some 60 years earlier, Maria and the von Trapp children danced around the palace’s Pegasus Fountain, singing “Do-Re-Mi,” one of most famous songs from “The Sound of Music.” The movie recounts the story of …
Sarah Silverman Jan. 17-18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Beacon Theater, 2124 Broadway, Manhattan; msg.com/beacon-theatre. Since the early 1990s, Sarah Silverman has fearlessly pushed boundaries, finding laughs no matter the subject. Her incisive wit and dead-on deadpan helped her break through with the concert film “Jesus Is Magic” in 2005, …
