Weekend reading: June 18 edition

Around Columbus

• To start things off, our sincerest thanks go out to the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the City of Columbus, and Franklin County for their general operating support for the Wex.
• Juneteenth is now officially a federal holiday. You can read up on it here and celebrate at Saturday events at locations including the King Arts Complex, Maroon Arts' BoxPark, Ohio History Center, Goodale Park, Weinland Park’s Berry Patch, and Crafted Culture Brewing.
• Saturday brings a virtual Pride March from Stonewall Columbus.
• The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum reopens this weekend with The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons and the return of an exhibition dedicated to the political satire in Walt Kelly’s Pogo.
• Tuesday, Transit Arts is having an open mic at Franklin Park Conservatory
• Claudia Owusu headlines an outdoor writers event Wednesday on the Thurber House lawn.
• The Columbus Museum of Art dropped some big news this week related to board member and Orange Barrel Media head Pete Scantland (who's also on the Wex's board).
• Local and national crafters and artisans will gather Saturday and Sunday on the Near East Side for the NOBO Arts Summer Marketplace.
• Filmmaker and Ohio State Professor Roger Beebe is in a new virtual program of experimental shorts from Rhizome DC that also features work by Nancy Kangas and Josh Kun. It streams through August 1.
• Keep next Friday night clear for the latest online program of experimental animation from Malt Adult.
• Next weekend also brings the second virtual edition of Comfest.
• And there's the blowout Franklinton Pride celebration, which starts Saturday, June 26 at 11 AM.

Around the globe

• The New York Times Style Magazine’s 2021 Art Issue is out and it includes a celebration of the work of Climate Changing artist Baseera Khan by Amy Sillman, as well as a profile of Lynn Hershman Leeson. We’ll host a virtual discussion with Leeson July 22 as part of an upcoming three-film retrospective of her work.
• There’s also a piece on the art inspired by Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man in the decades since its 1952 release.
• Here’s a story on Opal Lee, the woman who fought for decades to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
• Via the nonprofit A Closer Look, Esquire has unearthed a timely 1979 interview with James Baldwin that ABC decided to kill instead of airing. (The interview’s producer says he was told, “Who wants to listen to a Black gay has-been?”)
• On Monday, Canada celebrates National Indigenous People’s Day and the Banff Centre is hosting a full day of free activities online.
• In other news from our neighbors up north, the country recently hosted a visit from Columbus-bred filmmaker Jennifer Reeder; here’s why.
• Reeder also participated in a panel with fellow filmmakers Karyn Kusama and Prano Bailey-Bond about how women factor into the future of the horror genre.
• MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos, announced that she’s given $2.7 billion of her fortune away to organizations that include the Studio Museum of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art.
• Physicists at England’s University of Leeds are looking for help expressing concepts of quantum mechanics through dance.
• National Queer Theater announced that Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko and Ayla Xuan Chi Sullivan are the inaugural recipients of its New Vision Fellowship.
• The Black Theater Coalition is now accepting applications for the BTC Fellowship Program.
• Dr. Dre is collaborating with Jimmy Iovine on opening a music-focused high school in South Los Angeles.
• New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro speaks for performing arts organizations around the country with his chronicle in comic form of his wife’s efforts to keep Portland Center Stage open.
• The Pulitzer Prize Board nominated cartoonists this year, but didn’t give an award.
• Here’s a guide to who did win a Pulitzer, and the finalists.
• Transgender writer Alex Marzano-Lesnevich wrote about the power of queer coming of age stories.
• Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International will proceed in person starting September 24.
• Raphaela Platow has been named the next director of Louisville’s Speed Art Museum.
• CNN has announced it’s getting into the NFT business.
• Janet Malcolm, writer and longtime essayist for The New Yorker, passed away at the age of 86.
• And cult filmmaker Milton Moses Ginsberg died at the age of 85.