Weekend Reading: April 7 Edition

Around Ohio

• We’re excited to share that Heron 1954–2002, the 2022 short by Wex Film/Video Studio Editor Alexis McCrimmon, is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
• Big congratulations to Hidden Mother author and past Film/Video Studio residency artist Laura Larson for winning a 2023 Guggenheim fellowship. The list of recipients also includes Kapwani Kiwanga, who’s working with Wex Executive Director Gaëtane Verna on the Canadian Pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale.
• Tuesday, Two Dollar Radio HQ is hosting a book launch for Ohio Roller Derby players/memoirists Amy Spears and Samantha Tucker. Spears is also an Ohio State colleague who helped make Meditation Ocean 3D tactiles a reality.
• Thursday, Wex Learning & Public Practice Director Dionne Custer Edwards is heading to Contemporary Dayton for a conversation with Saeed Jones.
• Hanif Abdurraqib has been busy recording; he kicked off a new season of his Small Joys podcast with author Jasmine Warga.
• And Abdurraqib also dropped a new Object of Sound podcast with Angélica Negrón.
• Fans of local artist Paul Volker, you can now purchase images from his long-running Wild Beasts series in book form.
• Looking ahead to next weekend, Franklinton Friday will bring new shows including one with a focus on abstracts, curated by Michael Halliday for The Vanderelli Room.
• The Columbus International Film and Animation Festival takes place Saturday at the Lennox.
• Also next Saturday, Scott Woods will discuss “Columbus Poets: Then and Now” at the MLK Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library.
• And Saturday afternoon brings a workshop on entrepreneurship in the arts to Upper Arlington Public Library.

Around the globe

• Wednesday, you can tune into a virtual talk by Wex Executive Director Gaëtane Verna, predicated on her work as juror for the Erie Art Museum’s 100th Annual Spring Show.
• There’s a new book out about how the arts can positively affect the structure of the brain, an idea we’ve found evidence for through Art & Resilience programs like Vets at the Wex.
• This week in irony, the conservative mayor of Lima, Peru closed the museum known as the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion.
• NBC News found evidence that the Russians are looting Ukrainian art at a Nazis-in-WWII scale.
• In a new interview, collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund revealed that she sold a Roy Lichtenstein to support reproductive choice.
• Speaking of Lichtenstein, a new documentary covers the artist’s less-than stellar reputation in the comics community.
• The New York Times spoke to 10 artists including Rachel Harrison and Mickalene Thomas about Pablo Picasso to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.
• There’s a new season of Art in the Twenty-First Century; Tauba Auerbach and Miranda July are among the artist profiles that await.
• Artist Trenton Doyle Hancock is earning raves for installing a basketball court at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
• An interesting option for Tuesday: Zoom in for an introduction to Māori art.
• The story about Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of expensive travel gifts from Republican donor Harlan Crow revealed to the world a strange realist painting by Sharif Tarabay.
• A sculpture work by Natalie Lambert has become the focus of a new QAnon conspiracy theory.
• People have been having fun with Barbie memes in the leadup to the upcoming film about the iconic toy by Greta Gerwig.
• The film Showing Up, which we previewed last month, seems to indicate that filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has developed a stock company.
• Filmmaker Paul Schrader discussed his move to assisted living to support the care of his wife, actor Mary Beth Hurt, who has Alzheimer’s.
• Legendary musician Ryuichi Sakamoto succumbed to cancer at the age of 71.
• Sire Records cofounder Seymour Stein, who signed artists ranging from the Ramones to kd lang, died at the age of 80.
• Photographer and African Jazz Art Society and Studios cofounder Kwame Braithwaite died at the age of 85.