Weekend reading: August 27 edition

Around Columbus

• The Columbus Black International Film Festival kicks off at the Wex Friday, but there’s more to see throughout the weekend at other partner venues.
• The music fest Wonderbus is back this weekend with proof of vaccination required for entry. Along with sets from the likes of Black Pumas, Kesha, and Wilco, there will be mental health resources provided by the Wexner Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health.
• Saturday and Sunday, 400 Square hosts Scrawl 15, the large-scale live art demo with artists such as Olivia Barney, Marcus William Billingsley, Henry Hess, Kate Menke, and the dynamic duo of Dan Gerdeman and Rob W. Jones participating.
• Sunday afternoon, another Loyal to the Soil Flea is happening at The Crest in Clintonville to benefit Children’s Hunger Alliance.
• Here’s a terrific review of the new Riffe Gallery show, Shift: Thinking Globally/Acting Locally, for your reading and viewing consideration.
• Need a change of scenery along with some culture? Here are three Ohio micro museums that are worth a road trip, including Hilliard’s Early Television Museum.
• The Ohio Society of Professional Journalists announced its 2021 awards this week, and among the recipients is a new member of team Wex: Development Writer Linda Lee Baird. Here’s her piece on the Facebook group Pizza Connoisseurs of Columbus for Edible Columbus. Congrats to Baird and all the other hard-working winners.
• Educators, the Ohio Arts Council has updated its roster of Ohio Teaching Artists who are vetted and ready to supplement your classwork. Participants include Wex collaborators like Nancy Kangas and Fariha Tayyab.
• Also in school-related creativity news, award-winning local art educator Jon Juravich wrote about how to introduce students to contemporary women artists in the classroom.

Around the globe

• Cauleen Smith shared a teaser for her latest work, which will premiere online via Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum early next month.
• The remains of the great Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Pantheon monument in Paris. Writer, curator, and new Wexner Center Film/Video Studio residency artist Ruun Nuur recently spoke to Terri Francis of the Black Film Center/Archive for us about Francis’s book on Baker.
• More than 350 artists including Susan Meiselas, Hank Willis Thomas, and Lynne Tillman signed a letter calling on the US to offer asylum to Afghan culture workers.
• Here’s an essay on the history of film in Afghanistan, with links and info to watch many of the films mentioned.
• Here’s a recap of this week’s CinemaCon and what it says about the state of the movie theater industry.
• Hong Kong has instituted a new film censorship law with heavy fines for “illegal” screenings.
• There was a nasty split between the board of Sheffield Doc/Fest and its entire programming team.
• Here’s a podcast interview with Joshua Rofé, the filmmaker behind the new Bob Ross Netflix documentary that has Bob Ross Inc. in an uproar.
• Actor Jonah Hill railed against the idea that great art comes from suffering.
• Spike Lee came under fire for including coverage of 9/11 conspiracy theories in his new doc for HBO.
• Nia DaCosta’s remake of Candyman is opening this weekend to strong reviews. Here’s some background on the visual artists whose work appears in the film.
• HBO late night host John Oliver has given five $10,000 grants to museums that have agreed to exhibit his show’s odd collection of art. 
• Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies received a $50 million gift for its 30th anniversary.
• The Art Institute of Chicago’s Sam Ramos wrote about using art as a tool to build empathic thinking in legal and medical professionals.
• Here’s an episode of Quick Study, a podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, on evidence of functional changes in the brains of students enrolled in a drawing class.
• Thursday, the Smithsonian launched “Our Shared Future: Reckoning with our Racial Past,” a new initiative to address the legacy of racism.
• Black Theatre United, an alliance of theater workers of color, has established a plan to make Broadway more diverse, equitable, and accessible.
• Painter Ellen Gallagher is among the Black artists who spoke about their decision to leave America.
• Artnet had the history behind the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that made its public debut in a controversial Tiffany campaign with Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
• Bernhard Garnicing of the collective memeclassworldwide is offering virtual classes on things you won’t learn in art school.
• Photographer and muse Tina Modotti is being recognized with a plaque outside her onetime home in San Francisco, thanks to the efforts of B. Ruby Rich and Lynn Hershman Leeson.
• The late-career compositions of John Cage are finding favor with a new generation of musicians.
• Kaycee Moore, star of Charles Burnett’s breakthrough film Killer of Sheep, passed away at the age of 77.
• And the beat stopped for supremely talented Rolling Stones drummer and style icon Charlie Watts. He was 80.