Connecting People with Art since 1985
News Inside The News takes a look at the first Obama Romney debate and answers the question; What could president Obama have done differently. Take a look and see if you agree. Mind you that this is no attempt to imitate Barack Obama. All my impressions sound just like me.
Michael Cottman
Senior Writer, Blackamericaweb.com
Six days before Election Day, with President Barack Obama returning to the campaign trail after taking a break to oversee relief efforts from Hurricane Sandy, two new polls show that African Americans, young adults, and first-time Latino voters will be critical to Obama’s re-election to the White House.
This week, in the final stretch of a deadlocked race, Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign’s national field director, said the campaign is turning its attention to the African American vote.
“The African American community is solidly and overwhelmingly behind President Obama, because they know he is fighting for all of us, not just some of us,” Bird told reporters this week.
“Our campaign has been committed to organizing in the African American community for years, with our Barbershop and Beauty Salon program, congregation captains, and HBCU summits (Historically Black Colleges and Universities),” he added.
Bird said that over the last four years, the Obama campaign has recruited and trained members of the community to own and run the campaign in their neighborhoods.
“Now that voting has begun, we’re seeing it at polling places across the country,” Bird said. “The pictures and the numbers tell the same story: African Americans are committed to doing everything they can to re-elect the president.”
Obama returns to the campaign trail on Thursday with stops in Wisconsin, Colorado and Las Vegas. And this weekend, Obama will crisscross the country asking for votes from coast to coast. On Saturday, Obama will deliver remarks at grassroots events in Mentor, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Dubuque, Iowa and Bristow, Virginia. On Sunday, the president will campaign in Concord, New Hampshire; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; Cincinnati, Ohio and Aurora, Colorado.
Meanwhile, Obama’s 52-point lead in the new Latino Decisions tracking poll, matches the president’s widest advantage of the year over Republican Mitt Romney:
The president has the support of 73% of all Latino registered voters, compared to 21% who favor Romney. The 52-point gap matches the largest gap among Latinos this year, also found in the Oct. 1 tracking poll.
“Those are remarkable numbers on the economy, given that Romney’s strategy to win back Latinos has been to campaign on jobs and hope that trumps immigration,” according the survey.
The poll says Latinos believe the economy is the most important issue in the presidential campaign that Romney and the Republican Party has been unable to convince Latino voters that the GOP can improve the economy and put people back to work.
In a separate survey conducted by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the poll concluded that if the election were held today, Obama would win the youth vote by 52% to 35%.
Support for Obama rose more than 7 points among likely voters: up from 44.4% in July while support for Romney is down slightly from 36.9% to 35.1% among likely, registered voters, according to the poll.
“The racial and ethnic group breakout shows that there is a rise in intent to vote among the three groups whom we polled in large numbers, with an impressive three quarters of Black youth intending to vote,” said CIRCLE Director Peter Levine.
The poll asked young people to pick their top issue. The percentage of youth who chose “Jobs and the Economy” rose and it remained the number-one issue, at 37.9%.
Here are some key findings:
● The proportion saying they are extremely likely to vote has risen 9.9 points, from 44.7% to 54.6%. Two-thirds (67.3%) of young adults are “very” or “extremely” likely to vote, up 7.1 percentage points since June/July.
● The proportion who are paying attention to the election has also risen, from 56.1% to 71%.
● If the election were held today, Obama would win the youth vote by 52% to 35% among those registered voters who are “extremely likely to vote.”
Alexandra Acker-Lyons, director of the Youth Engagement Fund, said young Americans are a critical voting bloc to both campaigns.
“Young voters have been targeted in the last few weeks,” Acker-Lyons said. “But with young voters comprising one quarter of the electorate, the campaigns — having spent one billion dollars each — and the media remain focused on seniors and other sectors of the electorate. Politicians underestimate the youth vote at their own peril. Young voters have the power to decide this election.”
In the wake of New York City’s most devastating natural disaster to date, many of the city’s landmark institutions are stepping up to provide relief for members of their communities. The art world is no different, as the Museum of Modern Art is demonstrating this weekend.
The major art house announced that they will hold a free public presentation on conserving damaged art and cultural materials this Sunday, featuring speakers from the American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team as well as MoMA itself. They will make their expertise available to the numerous galleries and artists who have had their livelihoods interrupted by the flooding of Hurricane Sandy, presenting information on the safe handling of paintings, drawings, books, sculptures and other archival works. MoMA has also issued “Immediate Response for Collections“, a set of step-by-step measures art owners can take to preserve their work, including a list of suppliers and emergency services that are on the ready.
A number of New York’s well-known art organizations have suffered greatly in the aftermath of the city’s unprecedented storm. Printed Matter, a non-profit art publishing group located in Chelsea, lost thousands of pieces in its inventory, as shown in the image above. “We lost a shocking amount of materials,” stated AA Bronson, artist and former director of Printed Matter, in an email to The Huffington Post. “And of course even the damp that will remain will continue to damage the books over the next months.” Watch the video posted here by Now This News for more information on the damage Hurricane Sandy wrought on New York’s art world.
It’s no secret that music has a unique way of unifying people across cultures, geographies and communities. It takes exceptional artists and performers to build those stories to which many can relate. Nick Africano, whose music blends folk, soul, storytelling and rock, does just that — his soulful storytelling performance style is built upon a philosophy of music as an ‘art of inclusion.’
During a conversation about his recently released album, The Butterfly Bull, Africano classified his sound as living “between the soulful, passionate, poetic space of rock and roll.”
A tireless performer, he shared his key defining moments as a musician, shaped by a commitment to incessant improvement.
Laura Cococcia: What motivated you to create a career as a musician?
Nick Africano: I grew up around art, and I grew up performing on the baseball field first. I’ve always loved performing. My mother was an artist, and my father, Nicolas Africano, is a painter and sculptor whose work is in many museums in NYC. They were my first heroes, and always encouraged me.
Later, my interest in poetry inspired my first songs in high school. What finally motivated me to commit to a career in music was my mother’s death when I was 22. Her loss moved me into action, into belief that anything was possible, and created the desire inside my heart to honor life by choosing every day to do what I love most. My mother’s friends also collected $500 for me as a gift to go make my first recording and presented that gift to me after her funeral.
LC: What makes you (or inspires you to) write?
NA: These days, stepping out into the world, walking in New York City, stepping further into myself. I write every morning now, and I get excited by the thought of losing myself momentarily in my work. I make small watercolors also that often inspire lyrics.
LC: What established artist made you want to perform (make music, write songs, etc.) and why?
NA: Reading Federico Garcia Lorca made me want to write poems. I feel connected to the intensity of his imagery and to his search for what is mysterious and contradictory. My father’s work gave me hope that it was possible to have a career. Hearing Bob Dylan in high school gave me courage to begin to sing what I was writing. And these days, watching old concerts of Bruce Springsteen give me courage to perform with more abandon.
LC: Do you have a personal example of how you’ve seen music impact communities in positive ways?
NA: I love performing alone and with a band, but in college I was lucky to have the experience of performing with an African music ensemble. We rarely performed anything solo. Eventually, we learned traditional funeral songs from Ghana, and performed these songs at one of our member’s funeral. I have never had as cathartic or unifying an experience. We were laughing with joy and sadness. Music brought us closer to each other’s grief and helped us feel not so alone. It lifted our hearts. Music is an art of inclusion. It is an exchange with an audience. It helps us relate and empathize. It helps teach us to give and to receive and to give back.
LC: What advice do you have for anyone looking to start in today’s music industry?
NA: Keep writing songs. Your work is your true home. Keep believing. Embrace your doubt and keep believing. Ask for help. Do what you can for yourself always, but ask for help. And then write more songs.
With a $100 million budget, “Cloud Atlas” was banking on box office success. If this weekend is any indication, it’s going to be a slow process making that $100 million back. The movie, which stars Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, made $9.4 million this weekend across 2,008 theaters, bringing it to the number three spot.
It was beat by “Argo,” which rose to number one for the first time since its release three weeks ago. The movie brought in $12.4 million for the weekend, for a total of $60.8 million since debut.
Adding insult to injury, the sci-fi adaptation was also beat by “Hotel Transylvania,” which made $9.5 million in its fifth week. The movie has now earned $130.4 million which is record-breaking for Sony for animation movies.
Distributed by Warner Bros., “Cloud Atlas” has received mixed reviews. Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tywker oversaw the film’s adaptation from David Michell’s best-selling book. Mitchell himself reportedly thought the book would be unfilmable because of its broad fantasy aspects.
THR is reporting that Warner Bros. president was quick to point out that “Cloud Atlas” did see success in that it had the highest per screen average of any top 10 movie, with $4,681.
It was a quiet box office weekend across the board as three other movies saw small opening weekends as well. Horror movie “Silent Hill Revelation 3D” had an $8 million weekend, Halloween flick “Fun Size” brought in $4.1 million, and Gerard Butler’s surfing drama “Chasing Mavericks” made a disappointing $2.2 million.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And the art market likes it that way, according to Federal Reserve Bank economist Benjamin Mandel.
Mandel recently spoke with German newspaper Die Ziet about the peculiar beast that is the art economy, existing almost fully removed from the reality most of us experience from day to day. While the ranks of America’s poor are stuck at record levels, the prices for famed works of art have skyrocketed, breaking records left and right. From Edvard Munch’s $120 million “Scream” to Mark Rothko’s $86 million “Orange, Red, Yellow,” the price limits of these physical objects has gone so high, tracking them has become a spectacle in itself. (Yes, we did live blog the scream auction.)
How is this possible?
While most economies fluctuate in proportion to the economy at large, the art economy fluctuates parallel to the pockets of the super rich — aka the 0.1%. According to Mandel, the art market thrives “not when only the poor are getting poorer, it must also be the richest get even richer.”
Since the majority of society’s wealth rests in the hands of the upper ranks, the same goes for art. Extremely expensive paintings are among the few seen as a safe investment, with little money pouring into art at middle or lower price points. It could be a matter of purchasing “perceived quality“, ensuring a good investment or simply being a showoff, but art consumption at this level has a lot to do with economic safety and little to do with that naive notion of loving art.
Of course there are forces fighting to keep art’s middle class from fading into oblivion. The Affordable Art Fair has spread to fifteen locations worldwide over the past 12 years. We asked Cristina Salmastrelli, the director of Affordable Art Fair New York City about the importance of a strong mid-price art presence. In an e-mail to The Huffington Post, Salmastrelli wrote:
The art world isn’t a playground just for the rich, it is a place for all to explore no matter what their price point is and we strongly support that. The middle market is where emerging talents are displayed, and where the value of art is developed by those who begin buying artists work early in their career. Without the middle market laying down the groundwork, the next generation of masters (and multi-million dollar pieces) would not be created.
If this stratification continues, we will likely see canvases continuing to break enormous records on the chopping block. At least we can live blog the next preposterous sale, can’t we?
On a recent afternoon at Julius Lowy Frame and Restoration Co., a three-by-four frame sat on a work table, shining with freshly-applied gold leaf. The craftsmen at Lowy, as it’s known, still apply gold leaf by hand, a painstaking process that starts with coating a wood frame with successive layers of gesso, yellow clay, red clay and water. A gilder will rub a gilding brush on his or her forehead to coat it with oil and make it slightly adhesive, and pick up a sheet of gold with the tip of the brush. The gold leaf is so thin it wags erratically in the air, like a catfish yanked out of a river by an expert noodler. The gilder gently lowers the gold onto the wet surface of the clay. The molecular attraction of the wet clay bonds gold to the frame instantly, so the tiniest stray gesture could ruin it.
“Two and a half hours,” the glider said, sighing, when asked how long it had taken her to finish the frame.
Lowy CEO Larry Shar, a sharply-dressed man with the bald head and Brooklyn accent of Lloyd Blankfein, wasn’t impressed. He can afford to be patient with his 4,500 antique frame inventory. They get older and more valuable by the day. But he has to make sure that with the workers he pays by the hour—to restore old frames, craft new designs and reproduce antiques—are doing their jobs efficiently.
“The only correct answer to that question,” he told Huffington, “is not fast enough.”
For the last 105 years, Lowy has been one of the premier framers in New York, if not the world. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires a new Velazquez, or the estate of Max Weber is putting on a big retrospective, or a Slovakian collector buys a $10 million Caillebotte, they go to the grand six-floor Lowy townhouse on East 80th Street to pick out a frame. They’ve most notably made the frames that showcase Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Cezanne’s “The Bather” at the Museum of Modern Art.
Most of Lowy’s frames were made in Europe, especially Spain, France and Italy, and sell for between $15,000-$50,000. One of the most valuable frames on hand right now, though, is American. Larry’s son Brad, who represents the third generation of Shars to work at Lowy, estimates it will sell for $150,000, probably to a “frame collector” who will display it as art object in itself—without a painting inside. Designed by 19th century architect Stanford White, the ornate, gilded number hangs hidden behind a thick grey velvet curtain in the Lowy’s showroom. Gold never tarnishes, and it remains a mark of prestige for many. (“Especially Russians,” Shar laughed.)
Lowy specializes in antique frames, which are found everywhere from antique stores in Europe to auction houses. Some date back as far as the 14th century. Shar particularly admires the Spanish and Italian frames from the 16th and 17th century in his collection, which are often painted black and red rather than gilded, and feature figurative rather than decorative accents. “They’re not so pompous, not so regal, so they appeal to a Brooklyn boy like me,” he explained.
When Larry first started working at Lowy, learning the ropes from his father Hilly, many of the company’s clients came from elite, old-money families like the Whitneys and the Rockefellers, whose collections dominate the walls of New York museums to this day. They were confident, idiosyncratic art collectors who chose frames from the gut, often with an eye to fitting in well with the rest of their decor.
But many of Lowy’s clients now think of paintings as investments more than beautiful objects. So they tend to choose frames that they think will make an artwork marketable. A frame’s historical accuracy is a selling point that translates easily from buyer to buyer, unlike its subjective aesthetic appeal.
“In today’s world, it’s more a thinking man’s game,” Shar said. “50 years ago, we’d put French frames on American 19th-century paintings. They were expensive paintings, so we’d put a fancy frame on it.”
But just because a frame fits a painting’s historical period doesn’t mean it’s the right one. For that reason, Shar sees historical accuracy as just one of many factors that should be considered when choosing a frame. The underlying principle, he says, is to strike a balance between “contrast and harmony.”
Shar notes that some bids for historical accuracy result in awful pairings. French impressionists, for example, would often fit gilded 18th century French frames from a century previous to their paintings—so it makes no sense to insist on a 19th century frame for a Monet today. Meanwhile, many mid-20th century American painters used low-quality frames for their artwork merely because they couldn’t afford better ones.
“If you want to put that kind of trash in your living room, around your multi-million-dollar painting, by all means, do it. But it seems like a pretty narrow-minded approach,” he said.
WASHINGTON — Once again, Florida and its problems at the polls are at the center of an election.
Early voting is supposed to make it easier for people to carry out their constitutional right. Tuesdays are notoriously inconvenient to take off work, so many states have given voters the option of turning out on weekends or other weekdays in the run-up to Election Day.
But in Florida this year, it has been a nightmare for voters, who have faced record wait times, long lines in the sun and a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who has refused to budge and extend early voting hours.
“People are getting out to vote. That’s what’s very good,” said Scott.
People are getting out to vote — but many of them are having to wait in line for three or four hours to do so. One contributor to DailyKos claimed it took 9 hours to vote. In Miami-Dade on Saturday, people who had gotten in line by 7:00 p.m. were allowed to vote; the last person wasn’t checked in until 1 a.m., meaning it took some individuals six hours to cast a ballot.
“We’re looking at an election meltdown that is eerily similar to 2000, minus the hanging chads,” said Dan Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
Miami-Dade attempted to deal with the problem on Sunday by allowing voters to cast absentee ballots in person between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. However, after just two hours, the Miami-Dade elections department shut down the location after too many people showed up. People outside the locked doors were reportedly screaming, “We want to vote!”
“They didn’t have the infrastructure,” filmmaker Lucas Leyva, who was among those turned away, told The Huffington Post’s Janie Campbell. “We read the press release and everything that went out this morning, promising we’d be able to get absentee ballots and vote. We got here and there was a line of hundreds of people all being told the same thing, that that wasn’t true anymore. You could drop off [a ballot], but they could not issue one.”
And if getting turned away from the polls weren’t enough of an indignity, some of those 180 people ended up getting their cars towed from the parking lot across the street, according to a Miami Herald reporter.
On Twitter, former Republican governor Charlie Crist — who is now an independent — responded to news of the office’s closing, writing on Twitter, “Let the people vote!”
“We had the best of intentions to provide this service today,” said department spokeswoman Christina White. “We just can’t accommodate it to the degree that we would like to.”
About 30 minutes later, a Miami Herald reporter tweeted that the Miami-Dade location was reopening its doors.
Palm Beach, Pinellas, Orange, Leon and Hillsborough Counties also opened up in-person absentee voting on Sunday.
President Barack Obama’s campaign and some of its supporters were attempting to keep people’s spirits up — and discourage them from abandoning the lines — by bringing in food, water and even local musicians and DJs as entertainment.
North Miami Mayor Andre Pierre brought 400 slices of pizza to voters in line at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night at the city’s public library, according to an Obama official.
While many Democrats viewed it as a victory when a few offices opened absentee balloting on Sunday, the process is not the same as early voting — and could result in more individuals not having their votes counted.
“Absentee ballots have a much higher rejection rate for minorities and young people, if you look at the Aug. 14 primary,” said Smith.
A major reason there are so many problems at the polls is that last year, Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature shortened the number of early voting days from 14 to eight, meaning all early voters are trying to cast their ballots in a shorter window. Previously, Floridians were allowed to vote on the Sunday before Election Day — a day that typically had high traffic.
But losing that final Sunday isn’t the only problem. Smith said that he and Dartmouth professor Michael Herron found that in 2008, voters 65 or older were much more likely to cast ballots in the first five days of early voting than members of other age groups, alleviating some of the pressure at the polls in the remaining days. Those extra days, however, are gone this year, leading to a compression that the system has been unable to handle.
Scott has refused to extend early voting hours, essentially arguing that there is no problem, despite calls from Democrats, independent groups and even a Republican elections supervisor. He is arguing that he can extend early voting hours only when there is a true emergency — like a natural disaster — that warrants it.
“I’m focused on making sure that we have fair, honest elections,” said Scott. “One thing to know, these early voting days and on Election Day, if you’re there by the time the polls close, you get to vote.”
Scott has some of the lowest approval ratings of any governor in the nation. In recent Quinnipiac poll, just 39 percent of Floridians said they approved of the job he is doing. Scott, unlike many other GOP governors, has not hit the campaign trail much on behalf of Mitt Romney.
As Florida Democrats have pointed out, the state’s previous two Republican governors — Jeb Bush and Crist — both extended the hours. A spokesman for Bush didn’t return a request for comment.
A judge extended the hours in Orange County after the state Democratic Party sued for more time. The location was closed for several hours on Saturday when everyone was evacuated due to a suspicious package.
Democrats are traditionally more likely to vote early, which is why many in the party have ascribed political motives to Scott’s restriction of the process. According to a report in the Miami Herald on Saturday, Democrats were leading Republicans “by about 187,000 early in-person ballots cast” as of that morning.
On Election Day, there will be fewer polling precincts this year than in 2008 — due to redistricting and budget constraints — meaning traffic on Tuesday could also be a problem.
Florida is expected to be tight in this election. According to HuffPost Pollster’s average of polls in the race, Romney is now leading Obama in the state by less than one percentage point.
This article was updated with comments from Dan Smith.
This is real funny, but true.
When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, he also won a long-running debate with his wife Michelle. Contrary to her fears, politics now seemed like a worthwhile, even noble pursuit. Together they planned a White House life that would be as normal and sane as possible.
[easyrotator]erc_82_1351948490[/easyrotator]
Nikki A. Greene
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies and Art
Art historian examining African American and African identities, the body, feminism, and music in twentieth-century and contemporary art.
I envision my role in the arts and academia as not only providing awareness of artists who have traditionally lacked exposure, but also as demonstrating their significance and value to the larger public. In the Philadelphia area, my interest in community-based research has included enhancing the chronological history of a settlement house-turned-community center and cataloging the African American art collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. During my two-year fellowship at Wellesley, I—and my students—will actively engage in the arts community of the greater Boston area.
Music has played a significant role in my research. While I used to sing in choirs and vocal groups, I’ve directed my passion for music into my scholarship. I have investigated the significance of jazz in the work of artists such as Aaron Douglas and Philadelphia-based artist, Moe Brooker. My dissertation, The Rhythm of Glue, Grease, and Grime: Indexicality in the Works of Romare Bearden, David Hammons, and Renée Stout , shows how all three artists use physical, sometimes metonymic, indexical references in order to lessen the negative impact of stereotypes of African Americans. By examining how discourses such as music, literature and visual culture operate in concert with the cultural associations of the materials used by artists, I identify these discourses as noteworthy conduits through which the artists’ metonymic bodily presences prevail.
Building upon these previous investigations into the aural possibilities of the visual, my current book project will treat the art of David Hammons and Renee Stout through the lens of FUNK, the music and its visual aesthetic. In particular, I am analyzing the sounds and style of funk rocker Betty Davis, former wife of Miles Davis. The jazz musician said of her in 1989, “If Betty were singing today she’d be something like Madonna; something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that…” As a result, students who find their way to my office at the Newhouse Center may just be greeted by the music of John Coltrane, Parliamentary Funkadelic, or Jill Scott at any given moment.
Blog: Nikki G Ph.D.
Margarita J. Aguilar, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio, New York
Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Beatrix Ruf, Director, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich
Moderator | András Szántó, Author and Consultant to arts and philanthropic organizations, New York
Starting with $600 and a dream, Edward Ford has made a lucrative career as a jeweler while smashing perceived limits on African American success.
Holst + Lee is a New York City based jewelry brand started by Southern designers Natalie Holst and Rochelle Lee. Each statement necklace and bracelet is made-to-order and features fabric, beads, crystal rhinestones and magnetic closures. The one-of-a-kind pieces have been featured in InStyle, Seventeen, Elle and New York Magazine just to name a few. While the brand counts celebrities like Solange—shot for InStyle February 2012 wearing Holst + Lee layering necklaces—as fans. The colorful, bold bracelets and necklaces might be a little hard to pair with everyday wear, but they’ll definitely boost even your most boring outfit. Do like Solo and wear them with mixed prints and colors or use them to spice up neutral tones and solids. The pieces are so fabulous that they could be worn either way and still look great.
Check out a few of our faves from their 2012 collection below.
