Weekend Reading: December 20 Edition

Around Columbus

• A long, utterly pleasant conversation with Freda Abbott-Ayodele, a multitalented teaching artist in the Community Studio program the Wex operates for Columbus Recreation and Parks, was abridged on Columbus Underground.
• Here’s more on Chaos Contemporary Craft, the new gallery opening downtown in 2025.
• Painter David Denniston opened up about his relationship with Ricky “Ice Cream” Jackson, the subject of the fabulous series of paintings Denniston is showing at 934 Gallery.
• If you’re an Adult Swim fan, here’s more on the Columbus-centric Off the Air program curated by Sarah Schmidt that’s still available to stream through the Adult Swim app.
• Charles O. Anderson has stepped down as chair of Ohio State’s Department of Dance.
• The cover for Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year impressed an art director at The New York Times.
• Comic artist Jeff Smith earned some props in this YouTube video about the industry impact of Bone.
• The Dispatch checked in on Otherworld.
• Pickerington high school art teacher Matt Young won a national arts fellowship.
• Monday, you can scribble away some holiday season stress with an Adult Coloring Night at 934 Gallery.
• And next Saturday, Sgt. Peppercorn’s Marathon offers its annual run-through of the entire Beatles catalogue at The Athenaeum.

Around the Globe

• Brooklyn Rail dropped a feature on our Ming Smith exhibition.
• Our Performing Arts team has been on the ball in 2024, according to NPR. Recent Wex guest Cécile McLorin Salvant made its critics’ list of the year’s best songs, and other recent guests, Meshell Ndegeocello and Tyshawn Sorey, showed up on NPR’s list of 2024’s best albums. (2023 guest Yasmin Williams is in there, too.)
• And look, there’s Tyshawn Sorey again on The New York Times list of the year’s best jazz albums.
• Director Joshua Oppenheimer explained why he’s gone from making intense documentaries like The Act of Killing to working with Tilda Swinton on the postapocalyptic musical The End.
• Audiences will soon be able to see a long-unavailable Lily Tomlin performance film.
• Unorthodocs 2024 selections No Other Land and Union are the focus of this story about the aversion US film distributors currently have for documentaries about politically controversial topics.
• n+1 has an opinion on what Netflix hath wrought in the film industry.
• Noodle boys, it’s your time to shine.
• Pixar admitted to trimming a trans storyline out of its upcoming series Win or Lose.
• Apparently, MIT commissioned a land art work from Maya Lin for a busy part of its campus and didn’t make a point of mentioning it.
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
• Artnet posted its list of the exhibitions that shaped the zeitgeist in 2024.
• ARTnews compiled all of its year-end lists—and determined that 2024 was the year of fiber art.
• Science meets surrealism in the Liliane Liin retrospective on view in Vienna.
• French Painter Claire Tabouret has been chosen to create stained glass windows for the newly reopened Notre Dame Cathedral.
• In case you needed another reminder, here’s the latest research on the benefits of consuming arts and culture.
• The Rothko Chapel in Houston has reopened after closing due to hurricane damage.
• A new study explores how Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night reflects the classic mathematical patterns of turbulence.
• Artist Rachel Handlin has a new show in New York featuring portraits of subjects who, like her, have Down syndrome.
• The discovery of the diary of Jewish teenager Yitskhok Rudashevski reveals how the arts were a tool of resistance during the Holocaust.
• A project created in response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas leads this story about the effort to garner more formal recognition for the benefits of art therapy.
• Amidst the rise of generative AI, the UK government is considering granting artists the "Right to Personality” to protect from the mimicking of artistic styles by AI tools.
• Eungie Joo, head curator of contemporary art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was fired for alleged workplace misconduct,
• Nicholas Galanin, an Alaskan multidisciplinary artist of Tlingit-Unangax̂ descent, has won the 2024 Don Tyson Prize.
• After 37 years, New York City’s Jack Hanley Gallery is set to close.
• Naomi Beckwith is now the second American-born and first Black woman to curate the German Documenta 16.
• Amsterdam’s Drift Museum is working to create more energy than it expends.
• Last seen in 1990, Vincent Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet has finally been rediscovered.
• Unfortunately, right now, no one can tell you how to get to Sesame Street.
• Rococo is making a comeback.
• And Murray Hill, the actor who played Fred Rococo in HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, has a new show that’s looking for contestants.
• Are you a big reader? Your brain may be wired differently.
• And scientists are looking at what happens to the brain when we stop reading.
• The far right is using AI to generate music to spread extremist messages.
• Roberto Chavez, the Mexican American artist who influenced generations of Chicanx artists, died at 92,
• Zilia Sánchez, known for her paintings that often alluded to the female body, has passed at 98.
• Former New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce died at the age of 90.
• Conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady passed at 90.
• Spanish actor Marisa Paredes, a frequent collaborator of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, passed at the age of 78.
• Indian music legend Zakir Hussain passed at age 73.
• Guitarist and former Replacement Slim Dunlap also died at 73.