Weekend Reading: August 25 Edition

Around Ohio

• The local arts community lost a significant force this week when Darryl Mendelson, a cofounder with his brother Ro-Z Mendelson of the legendary comics store Monkey’s Retreat as well as Comfest, passed away at the age of 75. Here’s a recent interview with Mendelson, and a remembrance from Curator Caitlin McGurk at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
• Sunday afternoon, Idea Foundry hosts an open house to celebrate its 15th anniversary.
• And Sunday night, The Vanderelli Room hosts an unconventional production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
• Ohio State launched a new academic program on hip-hop studies.
• The state government’s budget includes a bump for the Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit. The Cleveland Film Society shared the news with its own Wes Anderson-inspired video.
• Art Possible Ohio has partnered with Accessible Expressions Ohio to present AEO’s exhibition in tandem with the start of this year’s ReelAbilities Film Fest. We’re excited to partner with APO on a visiting filmmaker screening of Alison O’Daniels’s The Tuba Thieves in October.
• APO also announced a call for entries for the 2024 statewide exhibition Accessible Expressions Ohio.
• The Dispatch featured an interview with local poet Ruth Awad.
• Monday, Columbus College of Art & Design hosts and event celebrating the cultural exchange between Columbus and Havana, Cuba.
• Columbus filmmaker Angelo Thomas’s Felicia DeRosa documentary, DeRosa: Life, Love & Art in Transition, just hit Amazon. DeRosa participated in the audio portion of our summer 2022 exhibition Carlos Motta:
• Next Friday, Global Gallery opens a show of work by Taibi Mastelse.

Around the Globe

• Arts Midwest put out a call for videographers to pitch their ideas for short documentaries on regional artists who are deeply embedded in their communities, with an emphasis on historically marginalized communities.
• Jennifer Reeder’s new film Perpetrator, which we showed last month with the Columbus native filmmaker in attendance, got a rave in The New York Times. If you missed our screening, the film drops on Shudder September 1.
• The Times’s culture reporter Alexis Soloski wondered what happened to movies that parents can watch with their younger kids.
• Talks continue between Hollywood studios and the striking Writers Guild of America.
• Before the DVD rental portion of Netflix goes away September 29, subscribers can not only borrow up to 10 discs at once, they can keep them.
• In related news, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody offered a reminder of the importance of physical media.
• And CDs are making a comeback.
• The New Yorker also published a new essay from Werner Herzog.
• The Joan Mitchell Foundation announced its 15 fellows for 2023, including Demond Melancon and Sable Smith.
• Artnet covered the cultural losses from the tragic Maui wildfires.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning a February show about the Harlem Renaissance.
• The government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni is injecting nationalism into the conversation around who can run the nation’s major art institutions.
• More AI-generated books are winding up on Amazon. Here’s one reason why that’s a bad idea, courtesy of Black Forager.
• They’ll be no copyright protection for AI-generated art, for now.
• Performing artists and arts leaders in Texas are struggling with an impending restriction against drag and the range of its effect, which may include a planned run in Dallas of The Rocky Horror Show, a live version of the nearly 50-year-old cult movie.
• Choreographer Sarah Michelson has brought Merce Cunningham’s work Beach Birds to an actual shoreline with help from past Wex guest and Cunningham company alum Rashaun Mitchell.