Weekend reading: April 17 edition

Around Columbus

• This weekend, She Burns Bright - From a Distance offers livestreams of local musicians including Sue Harshe to benefit Ace of Cups.
• The Columbus International Film + Animation Fest is also going virtual this weekend, with programs including the popular animation show for kids (pictured at top of page, Om Nom Nom by am am gokkun team)
• Ohio Prison Arts Conference collaborator Aimee Wisman, seen recently on this blog, has made a curator tour available.
• Homage has released a sweet new fundraiser tee, this one for the Greater Columbus Arts Council's emergency relief grant fund.
• Service!, the new relief effort launched by local restaurant owners to feed hospitality workers, has started delivering meals.
• Freedom a la Cart has come up with a clever way to proceed with its annual fundraiser event.
• This week in support local journalism: the shot by Columbus Dispatch photographer Joshua Bickel of this week's State House protest that went viral. Here are a couple of zombie movie veterans on the comparisons it inspired to their work.
• Columbus Alive has the first in a series about local artists and livestreaming.
• The Columbus Museum of Art announced that Memphis artist Johnathan Payne will be the first Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Residency artist.
• The Columbus Foundation has given its 2020 Spirit of Columbus award to Dr. Amy Acton.
• Last but not least, some very exciting Wex staff news: on Friday, Lighting Supervisor Sonia Baidya and Assistant Exhibition Designer James Mericle welcomed their first child, a boy, to the world. All are healthy and well and colleagues are sending their love from a safe distance. ♥️

Around the globe

• Art World Conference has a free share of a workshop from earlier this week on financial strategies for artists and freelancers.
• Creative Capital has a new grant program for arts writers affected by COVID-19. 
• Ohio University has started the first MA program for Community Dance, described as "any form of dance that engages professionals and non-professionals working together."
• The TCM Classic Film Fest is online all weekend with a "special home edition" highlighting past presentations, airing films like Safety Last and Casablanca for subscribers with supplemental interviews and other materials available for all via its YouTube page and social feeds.
• The Guardian has a list of the best very long films for filling multiple hours. (One of them, Béla Tarr's Satantango, is coming to our virtual theater next Friday.)
• Brooklyn performance space JACK has joined the retrofitting-for-COVID-19 response by transforming its space into a food distribution hub for families in need.
• apexart announced the four winners of its international open call for art proposals and they're all fascinating.
• There's a new Instagram-hosted show of images by artists including past Wex Artist Residency Award recipient Shirin Neshat, created in response to the theme of isolation.
• While you're looking, refresh your IG follows with this list of five artists to watch on the platform.
• And on Twitter, give a follow to Art Activism Barbie.
• Previously unpublished poems by Black Mountain College sculptor John Chamberlain are seeing the light of day.
• The Met has opened its moving image archives for its 150th anniversary, making works available for free for a limited time. Here's a 1977 short of artist Louise Nevelson at work.
• And here's the complete 2011 doc Gerhard Richter: Painting.
• Artforum has another great throwback in this piece the mag commissioned from Kara Walker in 1996, with essay by Thelma Golden.
• Crystal Bridges Museum has a deep video dive into Kerry James Marshall's Our Town.
• As we all continue our adjustment to Zoom, French academic and filmmaker Chloé Galibert-Laîné discusses making a video essay about Penny Lane's short The Pain of Others for Toronto's now-online-only Images Festival.
• Choreographer Mark Morris is getting comfortable using Zoom for rehearsals.
• Banksy has joined the ranks of people working from home.
• If you can't tour a museum right now, let a robot on wheels do it for you.
• Being fans of both online dance classes and pets crashing video meetings, we had to share a story with both.
• Not to be outdone by gerbil owners, someone has made a mini museum for their pet lizard.
• Also new in critter-related art news this week: a squirrel park installation.
• Get some scissors and join the Carnegie Museum in making paper art like Henri Matisse when he was homebound.
• And make time for Yayoi Kusama's hopeful message to the whole word to banish coronavirus.