Weekend Reading: June 23 Edition

Around Columbus

• We’re elated to announce that the Greater Columbus Arts Council significantly increased its operating support for the Wex in this year’s grant cycle. And we’re excited to be in the company of great organizations like CAPA, COSI, and the King Arts Complex.
• Saturday, For the Love of Dance presents the program Culture. Color. Love. at the Battelle Grand Ballroom. Here’s a rundown from company founder Paris Miles.
• This weekend is your last chance to catch New Herring’s production of The Vagina Monologues.
• Ohio LGBTQ+ organizations and drag queens like Lima’s Redd Velvet are fighting back against right wing extremist attacks.
• Local activist and organizer Morgan Harper is going after Ticketmaster.
• Artist and Cinetracts ’20 contributor Cameron Granger will be back in town next Friday for his Before I Let Go Summer Tour, part of a series of free screenings with Q&As across the Midwest and East Coast. The Columbus leg will feature films from Dejiah Archie-Davis and Wex Film/Video Studio Editor Alexis McCrimmon. It’s all happening at Maroon Arts Group Box Park.
• Also Friday, screenwriter and OSU alum Jason Cho will lead a writing workshop at Staged 270.
• Next Saturday, artist Henry Hess has an opening of his Wizard of Oz-themed show at Witchlab.
• And Saturday is Gallery Hop, with new shows including a solo showcase for Lynda McClanahan at Sean Christopher Gallery.

Around the Globe

• It hasn’t been a great month for the performance world. First, the Public Theater announced that the the Under the Radar Fest, a showcase for experimental theater, is done. Then BAM announced plans for a smaller Next Wave Festival beginning this fall.
• Kronos Quartet talked up its “50 for the Future” program that commissions new works by contemporary composers.
• Boris Charmatz, the current director of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, discussed plans to create a center in the late choreographer’s name aimed at creating a stronger connection to its home city and its people.
• The New Republic did a poll to determine the most significant political films of all time, and in a companion piece, critic and past Wex guest J. Hoberman considered what makes a film political.
• Monday brings the Impact Virtual Short Film Festival, a program of shorts exploring the mental health impacts of climate change and burnout.
• After a remarkable flameout, MoviePass is back, and its founder explained why things are different this time.
• Following layoffs of more than two-thirds of the staff at Turner Classic Movies, Warner Bros. Discovery Entertainment CEO David Zaslav got an emergency call from Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg telling him he better not mess with the treasured cable channel. (Editor’s note: Plus one on that.)
• Fun fact: the Library of Congress is accepting recommendations through August 15 for the next crop of titles to be added to the National Film Registry.
• The Museum of the American Revolution is in hot water for hosting a private event for Moms for Liberty, the group that’s listed as “anti-government extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and that made headlines this week for including an Adolf Hitler quote in one chapter’s newsletter.
• The New York Times ran a fascinating series in which 17 columnists picked one piece of pop culture that captures the spirit of America, and responses ranged from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”.
• The Venice Biennale announced its title/theme for 2024: “Foreigners Everywhere.”
• The monument scene in America is about to get more diverse, thanks to an influx of funds from the Mellon Foundation.
• Meg Onli became the new curator-at-large at The Whitney. She’s already co-curator of the Whitney Biennial.
• The world-renowned Mütter Museum is reviewing its practice of showing human remains, to the distress of disability advocates.
• This week in painful irony, the Taliban is now hoping to draw tourists to see the remains of Buddha statues it blew up.
• The Guardian caught up with bustling British conceptual artist Ryan Gander.
• The shrinking arts coverage trend has hit Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC.
• Wired lambasted Midjourney Magazine, the first publication dedicated to AI-generated images.
• Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, the authors of And Tango Makes Three—a fact-based book about two male penguins adopting a chick—joined a group of Florida students in suing the state for First Amendment violations. (The Wex presented Penguins, a family play by Cahoots NI on the same topic, in 2020.)
• In happier news from the world of letters, Bookforum is back.
• Best known for iconic work on Spider-Man, comics legend John Romita Sr. died last week at the age of 93.
• And Jessie Maple, believed to be the first Black woman to produce, write, and direct an independent feature, died at the age of 86.