In their works, artists create fertile grounds in which human freedom can thrive, rooted always in the individual rather than in institutions, churches, or national states. While each artist may undertake their journey differently in relation to their awareness of Plato’s chariot allegory and Nietzsche’s metamorphoses of the spirit—they, as their own masters, are driven to make their work from inner necessity, a condition that embraces both feeling and thought, held together by the embracing unity of freedom.
Richard Armstrong joined Guggenheim President Emeritus Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro to discuss the parallels of politics, religion, and art; the joys and challenges of spearheading one of New York’s most storied cultural institutions; and the importance of keeping the art—and the artists—close.
I remember being in full rapture before many of her paintings, due, at least in part, to the maximal stimulant of urban energies made up of numerous tightly edged regions of bright colors evoking a post-Surrealist geography of imagination.
Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler are returning to New York. Partners in life and cinema for nearly sixty years, this month, MoMA and Anthology Film Archives will present a panoply of screenings of their experimental, personal, and mostly silent films—spanning from their earliest endeavors of the 1960s when they were immersed in New York’s cross cultural artistic bloom, to more recent poetic transmissions from their perch in San Francisco.
Being a massive opera star is only a narrow slice of Costanzo’s purview: not only is he a tireless campaigner on behalf of the art form itself, enchanting school children in the Bronx and helping to coordinate Orfeo-spinoff mini-operas in a school in Brooklyn, he has joyously commandeered the project of becoming the historian of his singing genre.