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Tag: visual arts

  • Indigenous artists help skateboarding earn stamp of approval

    Indigenous artists help skateboarding earn stamp of approval

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    PHOENIX — Years ago, skateboarding was branded as a hobby for rebels or stoners in city streets, schoolyards and back alleys. Those days are long gone.

    Skateboarding, which has Native Hawaiian roots connected to surfing, no longer is on the fringes. It became an Olympic sport in 2020. There are numerous amateur and professional skateboarding competitions in the U.S. And on Friday, the U.S. Postal Service is issuing stamps that laud the sport — and what Indigenous groups have brought to the skating culture.

    Di’Orr Greenwood, 27, an artist born and raised on the Navajo Nation in Arizona whose work is featured on the new stamps, says it’s a long way from when she was a kid and people always kicked her out of certain spots just for skating.

    “Now it’s like being accepted on a global scale,” Greenwood said. “There’s so many skateboarders I know that are extremely proud of it.”

    The postal agency is debuting the “Art of the Skateboard” stamps at a Phoenix skate park. The stamps feature skateboard artists from around the country, including Greenwood and Crystal Worl, who is Tlingit Athabascan. William James Taylor Jr., an artist from Virginia, and Federico “MasPaz” Frum, a Colombian-born muralist in Washington, D.C., round out the quartet of featured artists.

    The stamps underscore the prevalence of skateboarding, especially in Indian Country where the demand for skate parks is growing.

    The artists see the stamp as a small canvas, a functional art piece that will be seen across the U.S. and beyond.

    “Maybe I’ll get a letter in the mail that someone sent me with my stamp on it,” said Worl, 35, who lives in Juneau, Alaska. “I think that’s when it will really hit home with the excitement of that.”

    Antonio Alcalá, USPS art director, led the search for artists to paint skate decks for the project. After settling on a final design, each artist received a skateboard from Alcalá to work on. He then photographed the maple skate decks and incorporated them into an illustration of a young person holding up a skateboard for display. The person is seen in muted colors to draw attention to the skate deck.

    Alcalá used social media to seek out artists who, besides being talented, were knowledgeable about skateboarding culture. Worl was already on his radar because her brother, Rico, designed the Raven Story stamp in 2021, which honored a central figure in Indigenous stories along the coast in the Pacific Northwest.

    The Worl siblings run an online shop called Trickster Company with fashions, home goods and other merchandise with Indigenous and modern twists. For her skate deck, Crystal Worl paid homage to her clan and her love of the water with a Sockeye salmon against a blue and indigo background.

    She was careful about choosing what to highlight.

    “There are certain designs, patterns and stories that belong to certain clans and you have to have permission even as an Indigenous person to share certain stories or designs,” Worl said.

    The only times Navajo culture has been featured in stamps is with rugs or necklaces. Greenwood, who tried out for the U.S. Women’s Olympic skateboarding team, knew immediately she wanted to incorporate her heritage in a modern way. Her nods to the Navajo culture include a turquoise inlay and a depiction of eagle feathers, which are used to give blessings.

    “I was born and raised with my great-grandmother, who looked at a stamp kind of like how a young kid would look at an iPhone 13,” Greenwood said. “She entrusted every important news and every important document and everything to a stamp to send it and trust that it got there.”

    Skateboarding has become a staple across Indian Country. A skate park opened in August on the Hopi reservation. Skateboarders on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in eastern Arizona recently got funding for one from pro skateboarder Tony Hawk’s nonprofit, The Skatepark Project. Youth-organized competitions take place on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

    Dustinn Craig, a White Mountain Apache filmmaker and “lifer” skateboarder in Arizona, has made documentaries and short films on the sport. The 47-year-old remembers how skateboarding was seen as dorky and anti-establishment when he was a kid hiding “a useless wooden toy” in his locker. At the same time, Craig credits skateboarding culture as “my arts and humanities education.”

    So he is wary of the mainstream’s embrace, as well as the sometimes clique-ish nature, of today’s skateboarding world.

    “For those of us who have been in it for a very long time, it’s kind of insulting because I think a lot of the popularity has been due to the proliferation of access to the visuals of the youth culture skateboarding through the internet and social media,” Craig said. “So, I feel like it really sort of trivializes and sort of robs Native youth of authenticity of the older skateboard culture that I was raised on.”

    He acknowledges that he may come off as the “grumpy old man” to younger Indigenous skateboarders who are open to collaborating with outsiders.

    The four skateboards designed by the artists will eventually be transferred to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, said Jonathan Castillo, USPS spokesperson.

    The stamps, which will have a printing of 18 million, will be available at post offices and on the USPS website beginning Friday. For the artists, being part of a project that feels low-tech in this age of social media is exciting.

    “It’s like the physical thing is special because you go out of your way to go to the post office, buy the stamps and write something,” Worl said.

    ___

    Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP

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  • Toni Morrison honored with new stamp, unveiled at Princeton

    Toni Morrison honored with new stamp, unveiled at Princeton

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    PRINCETON, N.J. — Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is now forever immortalized on a stamp honoring the prolific writer, editor, scholar and mentor that was unveiled Tuesday morning in a tribute at Princeton University, where she taught for almost two decades.

    Guest speakers, some who had close personal relationships with Morrison, included former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden.

    The monthslong series of events opened with a recording of Morrison’s voice playing in the auditorium, reciting a passage from her 1992 novel “Jazz” on Harlem: “Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody says it’s easy either. What it is is decisive, and if you pay attention to the street plans, all laid out, the City can’t hurt you.”

    Later, an all-Black acapella group sang the popular hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is known as the Black national anthem.

    The dedication paid tribute to Morrison, who died in 2019 at age 88, was hosted by Michael Cadden, a longtime Princeton lecturer who co-taught courses with Morrison, and formerly served as chair of the Lewis Center of the Arts.

    Cadden introduced Pritha Mehra, the chief information officer and executive vice president of the United States Postal Service, who said that the postal service is proud to commemorate Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

    “Our new stamp will be seen by millions, and forever remind us of the power of her words and the ideas she brought to the world,” Mehra said.

    Photographer Deborah Feingold, whose portrait of Morrison taken for Time magazine’s Jan. 19, 1998 cover appears on the stamp, also spoke at the event.

    Morrison’s son, Ford Harrison, and his family were also in attendance Tuesday.

    “Anyone who was lucky enough to meet (Morrrison), knows that she was just as captivating in person as she was on the page,” said Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American studies who read a letter written by the Obamas. “We hope that this postage stamp would make her smile, that she would love the idea of helping us connect through writing once again,” she said.

    “Toni may no longer be with us, but we know that her words will endure — challenging our conscience and calling us to greater empathy,” Benjamin said.

    Winfrey praised her late friend Morrison, who started her book club in 1996 with Morrison’s novel from the same year “Song of Solomon” in mind. “Over the years, I selected four of Toni Morrison’s books to read as a community more than any other author,” she said Tuesday in a pre-recorded video.

    Winfrey has recalled that when Morrison made her first appearance on “The Oprah Show,” she talked about raising her boys as a single mother and left many in the audience moved. “I shared with her that, ‘Ms. Morrison, sometimes your books are challenging and difficult for some people to read.’ And she said, ‘Well think about how difficult they are to write,’” Winfrey said.

    “But difficult or not, what she was able to do through her words (is) bring people from all over the country and the world together in an entirely new experience,” Winfrey continued.

    In addition to the events this month, an exhibition exploring Morrison’s creative process will be held at the university library through June 4. Drawn from her archives, the exhibit features more than 100 pieces, some of which have never been seen — including manuscripts, correspondence with other Black women, photographs and hand-drawn maps she created while working on her acclaimed 1987 novel “Beloved.” The exhibit also features some of the only existing drafts of “Song of Solomon,” as well as various unfinished projects.

    Later this month, there’ll be a three-day symposium with author Edwidge Danticat giving the keynote address; in April, Grammy-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform.

    Princeton’s President Christopher Eisgruber stressed that Morrison’s legacy will continue to be an inspiration for the university, its community and most importantly, Black artists and artist of color.

    “She was a writer of rare genius, brilliant originality and genuinely historic importance,” Eisgruber said.

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  • MacDowell artist retreat org taps Chiwoniso Kaitano to lead

    MacDowell artist retreat org taps Chiwoniso Kaitano to lead

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    NEW YORK — MacDowell, one of the oldest artist residency programs in the U.S., has tapped Chiwoniso Kaitano as its new executive director, the organization announced Friday.

    Kaitano joins MacDowell with a mandate to “intensify outreach to traditionally underrepresented artistic voices,” among other charges, a release said.

    “Our search was rigorous, all our finalists compelling. But Chi’s expertise, energetic and collaborative methods of engagement, and inspiring leadership qualities proved irresistible,” author Nell Painter, the chair of MacDowell’s board, said in the statement.

    Kaitano is the former executive director of Girl Be Heard, a nongovernmental organization that uses theater and the performing arts to advocate for social change. Originally from Zimbabwe, she also serves on the boards of several arts organizations.

    The prestigious MacDowell retreat is based in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where David Macy serves as resident director. Kaitano will work from the organization’s New York office when she joins in mid-March. She will take over from transitional leader Philip Himberg.

    In the wake of the 2020 protests spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, MacDowell shed “Colony” from its name in response to feedback from fellows and artistic communities.

    “In the language we speak today, colony is a word tied to occupation and oppression,” Painter told The Associated Press at the time. A statement from the organization said the name change was “in keeping with the organization’s longstanding commitment to eliminate financial, geographic, cultural and accessibility barriers to participation.”

    Friday’s statement referenced the shift in announcing Kaitano’s appointment.

    “This change in MacDowell’s leadership follows an intense period of inquiry and innovation throughout the pandemic and recent social justice movements,” said board president Andrew M. Senchak. “During which time, MacDowell dropped ‘Colony’ from its name and the staff and board worked with external consultants to examine our values and our governance, to strengthen and democratize our policies, procedures, and program.”

    The retreat was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and the musician and philanthropist Marian MacDowell and has played host to more than 8,800 fellows across seven disciplines: writing, architecture, composition, film, theater, visual art, and interdisciplinary art.

    “I look forward to working with the board and staff to sustain and grow funding and to build upon the extraordinary vision for artist support that Edward and Marian MacDowell articulated when they welcomed the first artists-in-residence,” Kaitano said in the statement. “Imagining and joyfully meeting the ever-evolving needs of contemporary artists is how MacDowell can and will continue to be a pioneering champion for the value of the arts in our society.”

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  • Photos this week: February 9-15, 2023 | CNN

    Photos this week: February 9-15, 2023 | CNN

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    Michigan State University students gather at The Rock, a popular campus landmark, as they pay their respects to the victims of the campus shooting that took place on Monday, February 13.

    Jake May/AP

    Published 7:10 PM EST, Thu February 16, 2023

    Three Michigan State University students were killed and five were critically injured after a shooting at two campus locations on Monday, February 13.

    The gunman, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae, fatally shot himself as police closed in on him. His motive remains a mystery, said authorities, who are still investigating.

    The MSU tragedy was the 67th mass shooting this year in the United States, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.

    Here are some of the stories that made headlines over the past week, as well as some photos that caught our eye.

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  • A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

    A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.

    Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”

    “The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?

    “That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.

    A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.

    Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

    In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.

    That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.

    Guy Oseary and Madonna at a 2016 Billboard Women In Music event. Oseary said both bought NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

    The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.

    When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”

    A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.

    The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”

    Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.

    Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.

    Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”

    The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.

    The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.

    CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.

    The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.

    One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.

    Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.

    Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”

    “The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”

    Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.

    Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”

    Mad Dog Jones' SHIFT// goes on view as part of 'Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale' at Sotheby's in June 2021. NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art.

    The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”

    But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.

    Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.

    In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)

    Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.

    Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

    To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”

    Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”

    This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.

    “I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.

    So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.

    “Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”

    Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.

    This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.

    Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”

    In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.

    The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”

    “It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.

    Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.

    In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”

    “I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”

    – CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.

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  • Tyre Nichols was a son and father who enjoyed skateboarding, photography and sunsets, his family says | CNN

    Tyre Nichols was a son and father who enjoyed skateboarding, photography and sunsets, his family says | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Tyre Nichols was a father, a man who loved his mama and a free-spirited soul who was looking for a new life in Memphis, Tennessee.

    That life was tragically cut short earlier this month after a violent arrest by five officers with the Memphis Police.

    Now, as attention turns to the five former officers being charged with second-degree murder in Nichols’ death, according to court documents, Nichols’ family wants the world to know the man Nichols was.

    The 29-year-old was the baby of his family, the youngest of four children. He was a “good boy” who spent his Sundays doing laundry and getting ready for the week, his mother, Ravaughn Wells, said.

    “Does that sound like somebody that the police said did all these bad things?” Wells said. “Nobody’s perfect OK, but he was damn near.”

    “I know everybody says that they had a good son, and everybody’s son is good, but my son, he actually was a good boy,” she said.

    Above all else, Nichols loved being a father and loved his son, his family said.

    “Everything he was trying to do was to better himself as a father for his 4-year-old son,” attorney Benjamin Crump said at the family’s news conference.

    Nichols was someone who brought everyone joy. “When he comes through the door, he wants to give you a hug,” Crump said, speaking on behalf of Nichols’ family.

    Nichols moved to Memphis right before the Covid-19 pandemic and got stuck there when things shut down, his mother said. “But he was OK with it because he loved his mother,” she added.

    His mom said he loved her “to death” – so much so that he inked it permanently.

    “He had my name tattooed on his arm, and that made me proud because most kids don’t put their mom’s name, but he did,” Wells said with a laugh.

    “My son was a beautiful soul and he touched everyone,” she said.

    Nichols became friends with an unlikely group of people because they kept showing up to the same Starbucks around the same time in the morning, his friend Nate Spates Jr. said.

    A couple times a week, these five or six friends would sit together, put their phones away so they could be present and enjoy each other’s company, said Spates, who met Nichols about a year ago at a Starbucks in Germantown, Tennessee.

    The group didn’t talk much about their personal lives, and they never touched politics. But sports, particularly football, and Nichols’ favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers, were regular topics.

    Nichols was a “free spirited person, a gentleman who marched to the beat of his own drum,” Spates told CNN. “He liked what he liked. If you liked what he liked – fine. If you didn’t – fine.”

    Spates said he saw himself in Nichols and recognized a young man who was trying to find his own way and learning to believe in himself.

    He saw Nichols grow and start to believe he could do whatever “he set out to do in this world,” Spates said.

    Spates’ favorite memory of Ty, as he called Nichols, was last year on Spates’ birthday, when Nichols met Spates’ wife and 3-year-old at their usual Starbucks. He watched Nichols play with his toddler and talk to his wife with kindness.

    “When we left, my wife said, ‘I just really like his soul. He’s got such a good spirit,’” Spates said.

    “To speak about someone’s soul is very deep,” he said. “I’ll never forget when she said that. I’ll always remember that about him.”

    Tyre Nichols loved his mother so much, he got a tattoo of her name.

    Spates joins the rest of Nichols’ family and wider Memphis community in being frustrated at the lack of information that has come out about the traffic stop that resulted in Nichols’ death. He said he’s had to do a lot of compartmentalizing to be able to even speak about his friend.

    “I just hope that this truly does open up honest dialogue, and not dialogue until the next one happens, but a dialogue for change,” he said.

    Nichols’ daily life was ordinary at times, as he worked and spent time with family, but he also made time for his passions, his mom, Wells, said.

    After his Starbucks sessions, he would come home and take a nap before heading to work, said Wells, with whom he was living. Nichols worked the second shift at FedEx, where he had been employed for about nine months, she said.

    He came home during his break to eat with his mom, who would have dinner cooked.

    Nichols loved his mom’s homemade chicken, made with sesame seeds, just the way he liked it, Wells said.

    When he wasn’t working, Nichols headed to Shelby Farms Park to skateboard, something he had been doing since he was 6 years old. He would wake up on Saturdays to go skate or sometimes, he’d go to the park to enjoy the sunset and snap photos of it, his mom said.

    “My son every night wanted to go and look at the sunset, that was his passion.”

    Photography was a form of self-expression that writing could never capture for Nichols, who wrote that it helped him look “at the world in a more creative way,” on his photography website.

    While he snapped everything from action shots of sports to bodies of water, landscape photography was his favorite, he wrote.

    “I hope to one day let people see what i see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work,” he wrote. He signed the post: “Your friend, – Tyre D. Nichols.”

    Tyre Nichols does tricks on his board in a YouTube video, which was shown at a news conference by his family's attorney Crump.

    Skating was another way Nichols showed the world his personality. A video montage of Nichols on YouTube shows his face up close with the sun shining behind him before he coasts up and down a ramp on his skateboard. He grinds the rail and does tricks on his board in the video, which was shown at a news conference by his family’s attorney Crump.

    Sunsets, skateboarding and his positive nature were all things that Nichols was known for, longtime friend Angelina Paxton told The Commercial Appeal, a local paper.

    Skating was a big part of his life in Sacramento, California, where he lived before he moved to Memphis, Paxton said.

    “He was his own person and didn’t care if he didn’t fit into what a traditional Black man was supposed to be in California. He had such a free spirit and skating gave him his wings,” Paxton said.

    Paxton and Nichols met when they were 11 years old and attending a youth group, she told the Appeal.

    “Tyre was someone who knew everyone, and everyone had a positive image of him because that’s who he was,” Paxton said. “Every church knew him; every youth group knew him.”

    When Paxton found out about Nichols’ death, she crumbled, she told CNN affiliate WMC.

    “My knees gave out,” she told WMC. “I just fell because I could not believe that someone with such light was taken out in such a dark way.”

    Paxton attended Nichols’ memorial service earlier this month in Memphis. She said she represented the people in California who knew him and wanted to support his family.

    “There would be a couple thousand people in this room,” Paxton told WMC, if the memorial had been in Sacramento. “He was such an innocent person. He was such a light. This could have been any of us.”

    For his family, seeing the turnout and feeling the outpouring of support meant a lot.

    Nichols’ stepfather Rodney Wells told WMC: “My son is a community person, so this (memorial) was good to see.”

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  • Android Jones, Iconic Visual Artist, Loses Decades Worth of Art In Devastating Studio Fire – EDM.com

    Android Jones, Iconic Visual Artist, Loses Decades Worth of Art In Devastating Studio Fire – EDM.com

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    Consider helping one of electronic music’s most iconic visual artists, Android Jones, whose decades of work went up in flames after a devastating fire.

    Jones recently shared the heartbreaking news that his art studio had burned down on January 18th. He says he lost roughly 20 years worth of work in the fire, which claimed all of his art books, sketches, hard drives, laptops and equipment. The bespoke creative studio was built by his late father, who passed away in 2013.

    The renowned Colorado artist has now launched a GoFundMe campaign to help rebuild the studio and acquire the tools he needs to continue his work.

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  • AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?

    AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Countless artists have taken inspiration from “The Starry Night” since Vincent Van Gogh painted the swirling scene in 1889.

    Now artificial intelligence systems are doing the same, training themselves on a vast collection of digitized artworks to produce new images you can conjure in seconds from a smartphone app.

    The images generated by tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be weird and otherworldly but also increasingly realistic and customizable — ask for a “peacock owl in the style of Van Gogh” and they can churn out something that might look similar to what you imagined.

    But while Van Gogh and other long-dead master painters aren’t complaining, some living artists and photographers are starting to fight back against the AI software companies creating images derived from their works.

    Two new lawsuits — one this week from the Seattle-based photography giant Getty Images — take aim at popular image-generating services for allegedly copying and processing millions of copyright-protected images without a license.

    Getty said it has begun legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London against Stability AI — the maker of Stable Diffusion — for infringing intellectual property rights to benefit the London-based startup’s commercial interests.

    Another lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco describes AI image-generators as “21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists.” The lawsuit, filed on Jan. 13 by three working artists on behalf of others like them, also names Stability AI as a defendant, along with San Francisco-based image-generator startup Midjourney, and the online gallery DeviantArt.

    The lawsuit alleges that AI-generated images “compete in the marketplace with the original images. Until now, when a purchaser seeks a new image ‘in the style’ of a given artist, they must pay to commission or license an original image from that artist.”

    Companies that provide image-generating services typically charge users a fee. After a free trial of Midjourney through the chatting app Discord, for instance, users must buy a subscription that starts at $10 per month or up to $600 a year for corporate memberships. The startup OpenAI also charges for use of its DALL-E image generator, and StabilityAI offers a paid service called DreamStudio.

    Stability AI said in a statement that “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.”

    In a December interview with The Associated Press, before the lawsuits were filed, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.

    “Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”

    The copyright disputes mark the beginning of a backlash against a new generation of impressive tools — some of them introduced just last year — that can generate new visual media, readable text and computer code on command.

    They also raise broader concerns about the propensity of AI tools to amplify misinformation or cause other harm. For AI image generators, that includes the creation of nonconsensual sexual imagery.

    Some systems produce photorealistic images that can be impossible to trace, making it difficult to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s AI. And while some have safeguards in place to block offensive or harmful content, experts fear it’s only a matter of time until people utilize these tools to spread disinformation and further erode public trust.

    “Once we lose this capability of telling what’s real and what’s fake, everything will suddenly become fake because you lose confidence of anything and everything,” said Wael Abd-Almageed, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California.

    As a test, the AP submitted a text prompt on Stable Diffusion featuring the keywords “Ukraine war” and “Getty Images.” The tool created photo-like images of soldiers in combat with warped faces and hands, pointing and carrying guns. Some of the images also featured the Getty watermark, but with garbled text.

    AI can also get things wrong, like feet and fingers or details on ears that can sometimes give away that they’re not real, but there’s no set pattern to look out for. Those visual clues can also be edited. On Midjourney, users often post on the Discord chat asking for advice on how to fix distorted faces and hands.

    With some generated images traveling on social networks and potentially going viral, they can be challenging to debunk since they can’t be traced back to a specific tool or data source, according to Chirag Shah, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, who uses these tools for research.

    “You could make some guesses if you have enough experience working with these tools,” Shah said. “But beyond that, there is no easy or scientific way to really do this.”

    For all the backlash, there are many people who embrace the new AI tools and the creativity they unleash. Some use them as a hobby to create intricate landscapes, portraits and art; others to brainstorm marketing materials, video game scenery or other ideas related to their professions.

    There’s plenty of room for fear, but “what can else can we do with them?” asked the artist Refik Anadol this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he displayed an exhibit of climate-themed work created by training AI models on a trove of publicly available images of coral.

    At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Anadol designed “Unsupervised,” which draws from artworks in the museum’s prestigious collection — including “The Starry Night” — and feeds them into a digital installation generating animations of mesmerizing colors and shapes in the museum lobby.

    The installation is “constantly changing, evolving and dreaming 138,000 old artworks at MoMA’s archive,” Anadol said. “From Van Gogh to Picasso to Kandinsky, incredible, inspiring artists who defined and pioneered different techniques exist in this artwork, in this AI dream world.”

    Anadol, who builds his own AI models, said in an interview that he prefers to look at the bright side of the technology. But he hopes future commercial applications can be fine-tuned so artists can more easily opt out.

    “I totally hear and agree that certain artists or creators are very uncomfortable about their work being used,” he said.

    For painter Erin Hanson, whose impressionist landscapes are so popular and easy to find online that she has seen their influence in AI-produced visuals, the concern is not about her own prolific output, which makes $3 million a year.

    She does, however, worry about the art community as a whole.

    “The original artist needs to be acknowledged in some way or compensated,” Hanson said. “That’s what copyright laws are all about. And if artists aren’t acknowledged, then it’s going to make it hard for artists to make a living in the future.”

    ——

    O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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  • Getty Images suing the makers of popular AI art tool for allegedly stealing photos | CNN Business

    Getty Images suing the makers of popular AI art tool for allegedly stealing photos | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Getty Images announced a lawsuit against Stability AI, the company behind popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, alleging the tech company committed copyright infringement.

    The stock image giant accused Stability AI of copying and processing millions of its images without obtaining the proper licensing, according to a press release issued Tuesday. London-based Stability AI announced it had raised $101 million in funding for open-source AI tech in October and released version 2.1 of its Stable Diffusion tool in December.

    “Getty Images believes artificial intelligence has the potential to stimulate creative endeavors. Accordingly, Getty Images provided licenses to leading technology innovators for purposes related to training artificial intelligence systems in a manner that respects personal and intellectual property rights,” Getty wrote in the statement. “Stability AI did not seek any such license from Getty Images and instead, we believe, chose to ignore viable licensing options and long standing legal protections in pursuit of their stand-alone commercial interests.”

    Getty declined to comment further on the suit to CNN, but said that it requested a response from the AI firm before taking action. Stability AI did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    AI art and traditional media suppliers have struggled to coexist in recent months as computer-generated images grow more available and advanced, using human-created images and art as data training.

    Once available only to a select group of tech insiders, text-to-image AI systems are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. These systems include Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, from OpenAI.

    Shutterstock, a Getty Images competitor and fellow stock image platform, announced plans in October to expand its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and viral AI chat bot ChatGPT, and enhance AI-generated content while launching a fund to compensate artists for their contributions.

    These tools, which typically offer some free credits before charging, can create all kinds of images with just a few words, including those that are clearly evocative of the works of many, many artists, if not seemingly created by them. Users can invoke those artists with words such as “in the style of” or “by” along with a specific name. Current uses for these tools can range from personal amusement and hobbies to more commercial cases.

    In just months, millions of people have flocked to text-to-image AI systems which are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers and images to illustrate news stories. An image generated with an AI system called Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, creating an uproar among artists, who are concerned that their art can be stolen by these systems without due credit.

    “I don’t want to participate at all in the machine that’s going to cheapen what I do,” Daniel Danger, an illustrator and print maker who learned a number of his works were used to train Stable Diffusion, told CNN in October.

    Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque told CNN Business in October via email that art is a tiny fraction of the LAION training data behind Stable Diffusion. “Art makes up much less than 0.1% of the dataset and is only created when deliberately called by the user,” he said.

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  • Italian film legend Gina Lollobrigida dies at age 95

    Italian film legend Gina Lollobrigida dies at age 95

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    ROME — Italian film legend Gina Lollobrigida, who achieved international stardom during the 1950s and was dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world” after the title of one of her movies, died in Rome on Monday, her agent said. She was 95.

    The agent, Paola Comin, didn’t provide details. Lollobrigida had surgery in September to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall. She returned home and said she had quickly resumed walking.

    A drawn portrait of the diva graced a 1954 cover of Time magazine, which likened her to a “goddess” in an article about Italian movie-making. More than a half-century later, Lollobrigida still turned heads with her brown, curly hair and statuesque figure, and preferred to be called an actress instead of the gender-neutral term actor.

    “Lollo,” as she was lovingly nicknamed by Italians, began making movies in Italy just after the end of World War II, as the country began to promote on the big screen a stereotypical concept of Mediterranean beauty as buxom and brunette.

    Besides “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman” in 1955, career highlights included Golden Globe-winner “Come September,” with Rock Hudson; “Trapeze;” “Beat the Devil,” a 1953 John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones; and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” which won Lollobrigida Italy’s top movie award, a David di Donatello, as best actress in 1969.

    In Italy, she worked with some of the country’s top directors following the war, including Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Pietro Germi and Vittorio De Sica.

    Two of her more popular films at home were Comencini’s “Pane Amore e Fantasia” (“Bread, Love and Dreams”) in 1953, and the sequel a year later, “Pane Amore e Gelosia” (“Bread, Love and Jealousy”). Her male foil was Vittorio Gassman, one of Italy’s leading men on the screen.

    Lollobrigida also was an accomplished sculptor, painter and photographer, and eventually essentially dropped film for the other arts. With her camera, she roamed the world from what was then the Soviet Union to Australia. In 1974, Fidel Castro hosted her as a guest in Cuba for 12 days as she worked on a photo reportage.

    Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927 in Subiaco, a picturesque hill town near Rome, where her father was a furniture maker. Lollobrigida began her career in beauty contests, posing for the covers of magazines and making brief appearances in minor films. Producer Mario Costa plucked her from the streets of Rome to appear on the big screen.

    Eccentric mogul Howard Hughes eventually brought Lollobrigida to the United States, where she performed with some of Hollywood’s leading men of the 1950s and 60s, including Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner.

    Over the years, her co-stars also included Europe’s most dashing male stars of the era, among them Louis Jourdan, Fernando Rey, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Alec Guinness.

    While Lollobrigida played some dramatic roles, her sex symbol image defined her career, and her most popular characters were in lighthearted comedies such as the “Bread, Love” trilogy.

    With lush eyelashes and thick, brown curls framing her face, Lollobrigida started a hairstyle rage in the 1950s known as the “poodle cut.” Gossip columnists commented on alleged rivalries between her and Sophia Loren, another Italian film star celebrated for her beauty,

    In middle age, Lollobrigida’s romance with a man 34 years her junior, Javier Rigau, from Barcelona, Spain, kept gossip pages buzzing for years.

    “I have always had a weakness for younger men because they are generous and have no complexes,” the actress told Spain’s “Hola” magazine. After more than 20 years of dating, in 2006, the then-79-year-old Lollobrigida announced that she would marry Rigau, but the wedding never happened.

    Her first marriage, to Milko Skofic, a Yugoslavia-born doctor, ended in divorce in 1971.

    In the last years of her life, Lollobrigida’s name more frequently appeared in articles by journalists covering Rome’s courts, not the glamour scene, as legal battles were waged over whether she had the mental competence to tend to her finances.

    On her website, Lollobrigida recalled how her family lost its house during the bombings of World War II and went to live in Rome. She studied sculpture and painting at a high school dedicated to the arts, while her two sisters worked as movie theater ushers to allow her to continue her studies.

    ___

    Maria Grazia Murru contributed reporting.

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  • First images of British banknotes featuring King Charles III unveiled | CNN Business

    First images of British banknotes featuring King Charles III unveiled | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN Business
     — 

    The first images of banknotes featuring Britain’s King Charles III were unveiled on Tuesday by the Bank of England.

    Charles’ portrait will appear on English notes of £5, £10, £20 and £50. Meanwhile, the rest of the design will remain the same as the current notes that feature the late Queen Elizabeth II on the front. The cameo in the transparent security window will also feature the current monarch, the United Kingdom’s central bank said in a press release.

    The new banknotes are expected to enter circulation by mid-2024 and will co-circulate with notes featuring the Queen’s portrait, which will remain legal tender in the UK, according to the bank.

    “This is a significant moment, as The King is only the second monarch to feature on our banknotes,” Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said ahead of the release.

    The reverse side of the notes will remain unchanged – the current designs feature portraits of Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing on the reverse of the £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes, respectively.

    “To minimize the environmental and financial impact of this change, new notes will only be printed to replace worn banknotes and to meet any overall increase in demand for banknotes,” the Bank of England added.

    Earlier this month, the first coins bearing the official effigy of King Charles III entered circulation. The 4.9 million 50 pence coins feature the King’s portrait, and on the reverse, a design symbolizing the “life and legacy” of the late Queen, according to the Royal Mint.

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  • Pelosi honored with official portrait and emotional tributes at unveiling ceremony | CNN Politics

    Pelosi honored with official portrait and emotional tributes at unveiling ceremony | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s official portrait was unveiled in a ceremony Wednesday at the US Capitol, with speeches from old allies and political sparring-mates who reminisced on her historic tenure.

    The painting, which depicts Pelosi standing before the speaker’s chair in the House chamber and holding a gavel, will hang in the Speaker’s Lobby just off the House floor.

    “This program was wonderful to me. It was like seeing the story of my political life revealed in front of me, not in terms of believing all the accolades, but in identifying with the persons who were presenting,” Pelosi said, thanking fellow California Democratic Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Lucille Roybal-Allard, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, and former Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

    Boehner, who handed off the gavel to Pelosi in 2007 when she became the first and only female speaker, praised her as “one tough cookie.”

    “You know the younger generation today has a saying, game recognizes game,” Boehner said. “And the fact of the matter is, no other speaker of the House in modern era – Republican or Democrat – has wielded the gavel with such authority or such consistent results.”

    “You’ve been a fierce warrior for your party, but when the stakes were highest, you were willing to put the interest of the nation first and take the heat for it. Now that’s leadership. Leaders lead, Madame Speaker, and you Madame Speaker, have led,” he said. “And I’m here to say thank you for that.”

    Pelosi and Boehner, who have long maintained a friendly rapport despite disagreeing on policy, embraced following his remarks.

    “I would have been a little disappointed if he hadn’t gotten emotional,” Pelosi said of Boehner, who served as both her predecessor and her successor, and who teared up at times during his remarks. “He gave me the gavel. I gave him the gavel. I was present at his unveiling and he’s here today.”

    Former President Barack Obama recorded a message thanking Pelosi and saying that “she will go down as one of the most accomplished legislators in the country.”

    “Just last week, she helped keep marriage equality, the law of the land and even after insurrectionists literally broke into her office. She never stopped defending democracy here at home and around the world,” he said in the tribute. “While you won’t be in leadership anymore, I’ll still feel better knowing that your portrait will be looking down from these walls, fighting everyone who sees it to keep up the fight.”

    Pelosi, who was designated “Speaker Emerita” in a unanimous vote by the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee last month, announced in mid-November that she would be stepping down as speaker after leading House Democrats for two decades.

    The announcement came just weeks after her husband, Paul, was violently attacked in the couple’s San Francisco home. He was present, wearing a fedora and a glove that he has donned since suffering injuries in the attack, along with the couple’s children at the unveiling.

    Pelosi has thrown her support behind a new group of Democratic leaders, headed up by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries from New York, who who will become the first Black person to lead either major party in either chamber of Congress when he assumes the role next year.

    Jeffries, 52, will represent a generational change from the current triumvirate of House Democratic leaders, who are three decades older than him.

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  • Broadway writer of ‘& Juliet’ builds show with huge pop hits

    Broadway writer of ‘& Juliet’ builds show with huge pop hits

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    NEW YORK — We first see Juliet in the Capulet tomb, devastated. She’s wakes up to see her Romeo dead. But before she plunges a dagger into her heart, she starts … singing. What comes out is, improbably, a Britney Spears hit.

    “Oh, baby, baby. How was I supposed to know? That something wasn’t right here? Oh, baby, baby. I shouldn’t have let you go,” she sings, the opening lines of “…Baby One More Time.”

    That such a pop song works perfectly in this august scene is a credit to playwright David West Read and the team behind the Broadway jukebox musical “& Juliet.”

    They’ve taken an original story using “Romeo and Juliet” as a launch pad and mixed in some of the biggest pop hits of the past few decades by Spears, Celine Dion, NSYNC, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, The Weeknd, Justin Timberlake, Pink and Backstreet Boys.

    “I really tried to let story and character drive it,” says Read, an Emmy-winning writer from “Schitt’s Creek.” “It’s a long process to make it seem effortless, but it’s a lot of effort.”

    The link between the songs is Swedish super-producer Max Martin, who has had a hand in writing such hits as “Since U Been Gone,” “Roar,” “Larger Than Life,” “That’s The Way It Is” and “Can’t Stop the Feeling,”

    The musical starts when William Shakespeare’s wife challenges him to rewrite “Romeo and Juliet” with a happier ending for Juliet, sparking a journey of self-discovery for the young woman and nearly everyone on stage. Inspired in part by “Mama Mia!” it has multiple couples of different generations.

    “I think the genius of David has just knocked all of us sideways,” says director Luke Sheppard. “I don’t think Max ever imagined that somebody would be able to find such a cohesive world for this.”

    Read had been handed a playlist of over 200 Martin songs in 2016 and whittled it down to about 30. He challenged himself to not change any of the lyrics, although he altered some pronouns. Some hits — like Perry’s “California Gurls” and Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” — were clearly never going to fit.

    “Instead of going for what are the most popular songs, I tried to prioritize what are songs that are going to tell this story in the best possible way,” says Read.

    Masterstrokes include turning Adam Lambert’s “Whataya Want From Me” into an duet between arguing lovers, giving Perry’s “Teenage Dream” to an older couple looking back on their young romance and handing Juliet “Oops!… I Did it Again” after she’s found herself in a second romantic conundrum.

    In one special move, Read gave Spear’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” to a new character, Juliet’s nonbinary friend, May, played by genderqueer Justin David Sullivan. It’s a landmark moment for Broadway, allowing a nonbinary main character to talk about being misgendered and what it’s like to date while trans.

    Read also turned Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” into a duet between May and a male love interest. “I wanted it to be a queer love song sung by two unexpected characters that feel more representative of our current world,” he says. (Some audience members have walked out after that. “Clearly we still have a ways to go,” says Read.)

    There are also nods to musical theater conventions: “Stronger” works as a callback of “… Baby One More Time” (“My loneliness is killing me” in the first song reappears in the second as “My loneliness ain’t killing me no more”). And musical theater rules mean you need to have a song where a lead character makes clear they want something; the creators of “& Juliet” had one in plain sight — Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.”

    Read even made a connection between Martin and The Bard himself: “Shakespeare was the pop writer of his time. We think of him as very highbrow now, but he was creating an entertainment for the masses. That kind of overlap between Max and Shakespeare seems like it could be a fun way to give a brand to someone who doesn’t have his own brand.”

    The team got an early indication that the concept would work at the first workshop in which an audience was invited. Backstage, they waited for the reaction to “…Baby One More Time.”

    “The audience didn’t laugh. And that was amazing. I was like, ‘OK, passed that test,’” says Sheppard. ”I felt the audience just lean in that moment and connect with that song and with that artist.”

    Critics have been kind to the finished show, with Variety saying “& Juliet” “is exactly the musical Broadway needs right now: fun, exuberant, supremely joyful, hilarious and excellently performed by a talented and diverse cast.” Entertainment Weekly said Read’s work is “cleverly, sometimes ingeniously calibrated to sync with the songs.”

    “The ones that really mean a lot to me are the critics who clearly come in with a hatred for jukebox musicals and reluctantly admit that there is a lot of craft in this one,” says Read.

    He credits Martin for being open to outside-the-box ideas and allowing the show’s collaborators the flexibility to make what’s not another run-of-the-mill jukebox musical.

    “Sometimes it feels like someone slapped their name on something, and they show up on opening night and people are maybe making the show for the wrong reasons,” says Read. “To have the artist working with us and collaborating with us, I think also separates this from other jukebox musicals where the artist is either dead or not involved.”

    Read has since moved on — he is the creator and showrunner of the upcoming Apple TV+ series “The Big Door Prize” — but his experience with “& Juliet” has been so positive that he and Sheppard are working on another jukebox musical, this time with the catalog of Roy Orbison.

    “We’re trying to tell a new story with his existing music and challenging ourselves to do something completely different from what we would did with ‘& Juliet,’” he says.

    ———

    Online: https://andjulietbroadway.com

    ———

    Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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  • Veronica Ryan wins Turner Prize for evocative sculptures

    Veronica Ryan wins Turner Prize for evocative sculptures

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    LONDON — Artist Veronica Ryan has won the prestigious Turner Prize for work that transforms materials including fruits, seeds and volcanic ash into elusive and evocative sculptures.

    The Montserrat-born British artist was awarded the 25,000-pound ($30,000) prize at a ceremony in Liverpool, England on Wednesday evening. She won for work including public sculptures in London’s Hackney area in the shape of tropical fruits – custard apple, breadfruit and soursop — that honor the contribution to Britain of post-World War II immigrants from the Caribbean.

    “Better late than never,” said Ryan, who at 66 is the oldest artist ever to win the prize.

    The Turner Prize judges praised the “personal and poetic way she extends the language of sculpture” through found and often forgotten objects and materials including fruits, plants, seeds and volcanic ash from the Caribbean island where she was born.

    Work by Ryan and three other finalists is on display at the Tate Liverpool museum in northwest England until March 19.

    Named for 19th-century landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, the award was founded in 1984 and helped make stars of potter Grayson Perry, sculptor Anish Kapoor, shark-pickling artist Damien Hirst and filmmaker Steve McQueen.

    But it has also been criticized for rewarding impenetrable conceptual work and often sparks debate about the value of modern art. In 2019, all four finalists were declared winners after they refused to compete against one another. Last year all five finalists were collectives rather than individual artists. The 2021 winner was the 11-member Array Collective from Northern Ireland.

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  • Alito’s mentions of Ashley Madison and children wearing KKK costumes cap an awkward Supreme Court day | CNN Politics

    Alito’s mentions of Ashley Madison and children wearing KKK costumes cap an awkward Supreme Court day | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    As the Supreme Court gathered for more than two hours on Monday to discuss whether a graphic designer can refuse to do business with same-sex couples, the justices somehow strayed into dueling hypotheticals concerning Black and White Santas and dating websites.

    Hypotheticals are nothing new at the high court as the justices probe how cases before the court could impact different challenges down the road. But Monday’s hypothetical was unusually awkward, with a reference to children wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit to visit Santa Claus.

    It all began when Justice Ketanji Jackson expressed some alarm about the extent of arguments put forward by the graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who wants to expand her business to celebrate marriages, but does not want to work with same-sex couples out of religious objections to same-sex marriage.

    “Can I ask you a hypothetical that just sort of helps me flesh” this out, Jackson asked a lawyer for the designer.

    Jackson wanted to know about a photography business in a hypothetical shopping mall during the holiday season that offers a product called “Scenes with Santa.” She said the photographer wants to express his own view of nostalgia about Christmases past by reproducing 1940s and 1950s Santa scenes in sepia tone.

    “Their policy is that only White children can be photographed with Santa,” Jackson said and noted that according to her hypothetical, the photographer is willing to refer families of color to the Santa at “the other end of the mall” who will take anybody, and they will photograph families of color.

    Jackson asked Kristen Waggoner, Smith’s lawyer, “why isn’t your argument that they should be able to do that?”

    Waggoner finally said that there are “difficult lines to draw” and said that the Santa hypothetical might be an “edge case.”

    That drew incredulity on the part of liberal Justice Elena Kagan.

    “It may be an ‘edge case’ meaning it could fall on either side, you’re not sure?” she asked.

    Jackson returned to her query later and expanded it. She said her hypothetical photographer is doing something akin to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” and wants it to be “authentic” so that only White children could be customers.

    Waggoner suggested that in the case at hand the “message wins,” but never really explained what she meant.

    Artist explains why she thinks she shouldn’t have to work with same-sex couples

    When a lawyer for Colorado stood up to defend the state’s anti-discrimination law, Justice Samuel Alito chimed in.

    He wanted to know if a Black Santa at the other end of the mall doesn’t want to have his picture taken with a child who’s dressed up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit whether the Black Santa has to do it?

    Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson replied that there is no law that protects a right to wear a KKK outfit.

    That spurred Kagan to jump in, noting that objection would be based on the outfit, not whether it was worn by a Black or a White child.

    Alito then uttered an extremely awkward aside that could have been an attempted joke gone astray. “You do see a lot of Black children in Ku Klux Klan outfits, right? All the time.”

    At another point in arguments Alito was posing a set of hypotheticals and again engaged Kagan – his seat mate – as he searched for how the case at hand could impact other cases.

    He was referring to a “friend-of-the-court” brief filed by lawyer Josh Blackman on behalf of the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty in support of Smith. The aim of the brief is to discuss problematic situations for Jewish artisans who object to speaking out about certain topics. A series of hypotheticals was included to show instances in which a Jewish artist would be compelled to betray his conscience.

    “An unmarried Jewish person asks a Jewish photographer to take a photograph for his JDate dating profile,” Alito began, referring to a hypothetical in the brief.

    He paused. “It’s a dating service, I gather, for Jewish people,” Alito said.

    Kagan, who is Jewish, chimed in to laughter, “It is.”

    Alito decided to plow awkwardly forward with another hypothetical from Blackman’s brief .

    “All right. Maybe Justice Kagan will also be familiar with the next website I’m going to mention,” he said. “A Jewish person asks a Jewish photographer to take a photograph for his Ashleymadison.com dating profile.”

    The audience laughed as Ashleymadison.com appears to refer to an online dating service and social networking services marketed to people who are married or already in relationships.

    It was another awkward moment with Alito adding: “I’m not suggesting that – she knows a lot of things. I’m not suggesting – okay … Does he have to do it?”

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  • Supreme Court taking up clash of religion and gay rights

    Supreme Court taking up clash of religion and gay rights

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    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is hearing the case Monday of a Christian graphic artist who objects to designing wedding websites for gay couples, a dispute that’s the latest clash of religion and gay rights to land at the highest court.

    The designer and her supporters say that ruling against her would force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their faith. Her opponents, meanwhile, say that if she wins, a range of businesses will be able to discriminate, refusing to serve Black customers, Jewish or Muslim people, interracial or interfaith couples or immigrants, among others.

    The case comes at a time when the court is dominated 6-3 by conservatives and following a series of cases in which the justices have sided with religious plaintiffs. It also comes as, across the street from the court, lawmakers in Congress are finalizing a landmark bill protecting same-sex marriage.

    The bill, which also protects interracial marriage, steadily gained momentum following the high court’s decision earlier this year to end constitutional protections for abortion. That decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade case prompted questions about whether the court — now that it is more conservative — might also overturn its 2015 decision declaring a nationwide right to same-sex marriage. Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly said that decision should also be reconsidered.

    The case being argued before the high court Monday involves Lorie Smith, a graphic artist and website designer in Colorado who wants to begin offering wedding websites. Smith says her Christian faith prevents her from creating websites celebrating same-sex marriages. But that could get her in trouble with state law. Colorado, like most other states, has what’s called a public accommodation law that says if Smith offers wedding websites to the public, she must provide them to all customers. Businesses that violate the law can be fined, among other things.

    Five years ago, the Supreme Court heard a different challenge involving Colorado’s law and a baker, Jack Phillips, who objected to designing a wedding cake for a gay couple. That case ended with a limited decision, however, and set up a return of the issue to the high court. Phillips’ lawyer, Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, is now representing Smith.

    Like Phillips, Smith says her objection is not to working with gay people. She says she’d work with a gay client who needed help with graphics for an animal rescue shelter, for example, or to promote an organization serving children with disabilities. But she objects to creating messages supporting same-sex marriage, she says, just as she won’t take jobs that would require her to create content promoting atheism or gambling or supporting abortion.

    Smith says Colorado’s law violates her free speech rights. Her opponents, including the Biden administration and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, disagree.

    Twenty mostly liberal states, including California and New York, are supporting Colorado while another 20 mostly Republican states, including Arizona, Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee, are supporting Smith.

    The case is 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 21-476.

    ———

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

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  • Review: A portrait of an artist in Venice-winning doc

    Review: A portrait of an artist in Venice-winning doc

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    Nan Goldin, the subject of Laura Poitras’ Venice Film Festival-winning documentary “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” is a name you probably either know well or not at all. In the art world, she is unequivocally famous. Her photographs depicting downtown life in the late 1970s and ’80s and the vibrant, glamorous bohemians she encountered on the scene, like John Waters It-Girl Cookie Mueller, have been displayed at the Whitney, the Tate and MoMA.

    To look at any of the photos in her most well-known work, the ever-evolving slideshow “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” you can see how influential she was on generations to come with her raw, public-private snapshots of parties that didn’t end until dawn, beautiful “queens” and even her face, one month after a “dope-sick” boyfriend beat her so badly she almost lost her eye. The New York Times review of a collection of those photographs at the time said that “The Ballad” was to the 1980s what Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was to the 1950s. And it would become a devastating document of many of the young lives lost in the AIDS epidemic.

    This is only part of Goldin’s story, as you’ll learn in “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which begins its theatrical run this week in New York before expanding to more markets in the coming weeks. Poitras, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind “ Citizenfour,” started filming Goldin to document her protest efforts against museums accepting money from the Sackler family. Their company, Purdue Pharma, developed and marketed the widely prescribed and widely abused painkiller OxyContin, the brand name for the opioid oxycodone. Opioids, which also include fentanyl, have been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. over the past two decades.

    Goldin several years ago found herself addicted to opioids which she was prescribed for a surgery and took according to instructions. But, she said, she became addicted overnight. When she got out of treatment, she started reading about Purdue and the Sacklers, a name she associated with museums and philanthropy. Sackler-run foundations have given many millions of dollars to some of the world’s most prestigious museums and universities, from the Guggenheim to Oxford. And her mission became clear: To use her status in the art world to get museums to stop accepting money from the Sacklers, take down their name from galleries and to change how we think about addiction and treatment. And partially as a result of her efforts, many museums from the Louvre to the Met, have distanced themselves from the Sacklers.

    Poitras smartly saw that there was a very clear through-line from what Goldin did in the ’80s, when she came out of rehab and saw all her friends dying of AIDS, and what she was doing now. The documentary weaves together these threads to make a holistic portrait of an artist’s battle cry.

    Though the Sackler protests are the hook, the film’s strongest portions are its historical ones. Poitras artfully overlays Goldin’s heartbreaking eloquence with her photographs and a camera shutter soundtrack. Goldin speaks about everything from her stifling childhood in suburbia to the ripple effect of her older sister Barbara’s teenage institutionalization to her death by suicide at age 18 that left Nan, then Nancy Goldin, bouncing between foster homes. It wasn’t until she found a camera that she found her voice and her true family (her friends).

    There are some particularly devastating family realizations that Poitras and Goldin save for last. It’s trite to call that an origin story, but with Goldin, everything stemmed from those confusing days. She’d been told early on never to let the neighbors know about their troubles. Brushing it under the rug, not talking about it and not dealing with it would destroy them, though.

    Goldin might not have known it when she started photographing her LGBTQ friends, but her work has always been about looking at the so-called fringe cultures in society, about showing the problems that the masses would rather just ignore and making them so urgent that you can’t look away anymore. It is an act of hope in the idea that things could be better because the alternative, the silence, is infinitely worse. Goldin would know.

    As Goldin says at the start, “It’s easy to make your life into a story. But it’s harder to sustain real memories.”

    “The real memories are what affect me now,” she continued. “Even if you don’t actually unleash the memories, the effect is there, it’s in your body.”

    “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a NEON release in limited release now, expanding on, has not been rated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 117 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

    ———

    In a story published Nov. 25, 2022, reviewing “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” The Associated Press erroneously reported that OxyContin had been responsible for more than 500,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. That death toll is attributed generally to opioids, which include oxycodone and fentanyl.

    ———

    Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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  • Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes | CNN Business

    Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular for generating images, a question has roiled the art world: Can AI create art?

    At bitforms gallery in San Francisco, the answer is yes. An exhibit called “Artificial Imagination” is on display through late December and features works that were created with or inspired by the generative AI system DALL-E as well as other types of AI. With DALL-E, and other similar systems such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, a user can type in words and get back an image.

    Steven Sacks, who founded the original bitforms gallery in New York in 2001 (the San Francisco location opened in 2020), has always focused on working with artists at the intersection of art and technology. But this may be the first art show to focus on DALL-E, which was created by OpenAI, and it is the first one Sacks has presented that concentrates so directly on work created with AI, he told CNN Business.

    Using technologies such as 3D printing and Photoshop is commonplace in art. But new text-to-image systems like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can pump out impressive-looking images at lightning speed, unlike anything the art world has seen before. In just months, millions of people have flocked to these AI systems and they are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers and images to illustrate news stories. Yet while these systems are gaining ground, they’re also courting controversy. For instance, when an image generated with Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, it caused an uproar among artists.

    For Sacks, generative AI systems like DALL-E are “just another tool”, he said, noting that throughout history artists have used past work to create new work in various ways.

    “It’s a brilliant partner creatively,” he said.

    “Artificial Imagination” spans several mediums and many different styles, and includes artists known for using technology in their work, such as Refik Anadol, and others who are newer to it. It ranges from Anadol’s 30-minute video loop of a computer’s take on an ever-changing nature scene to Marina Zurkow’s bright image collages, created with the help of DALL-E, which almost feel reminiscent of Soviet propaganda mixed with old-fashioned storybooks.

    Sacks said the exhibit, which is being presented by bitforms and venture-capital firm Day One Ventures, is in many ways an educational show about the state of DALL-E and how artists are using AI.

    Marina Zurkow used DALL-E to help create her 2022 piece

    Many pieces are more straightforward in their use of AI, and DALL-E in particular, such as August Kamp’s 2022 print, “new experimental version, state of the art”, which looks like a close-up of a retro-futuristic stereo on a spaceship. Kamp said she began creating it by typing what she calls a primer — a series of words like “grainy”, “detailed”, “cinematic”, “movie still” — intended to evoke the aesthetic she’d like, which in this case was meant to look as if she was watching a movie and had just paused it, she said. Then she added words in hopes of generating electronic synthesizers that “looked as weird as they sound,” she said.

    The final piece is a combination of 30 or so different generated images, which were outpainted section by section — a process that uses AI to expand the image by adding more elements to it. Kamp also used Photoshop to tweak the overall image.

    Kamp pointed out that the general idea of art galleries give the sense that good art is scarce, but she sees generative AI tools like DALL-E as a way to get people to consider that art can be plentiful (such as by making it so anyone can wake up from a vivid dream, type in a description of what they were imagining, and generate an image expressing their thoughts).

    “To me art is and should be very abundant because I see it as an expression of love and feelings, which I think are abundant things,” she said.

    Alexander Reben, Ceci N'est Pas Une Barriere, 2020.

    Some of the pieces on display use AI in a more indirect (and perhaps silly) fashion, such as a 2020 sculpture by Alexander Reben called “Cesi N’est Pas Une Barriere.” Reben used AI as a sort of art director: He used text generator GPT-3 and a custom set of algorithms to generate a description of a non-existent artwork that hangs on bitforms gallery’s wall. It includes the title, a fictional artist’s name — Norifen Storgenberg, who is listed as “Swedish, born 1973” — and text such as “It has a very domestic feel, and yet it is very oppressive” and “The use of police issue handcuffs is striking. In the context of society, they are used to restrain prisoners, and yet here, they are used to create a barrier between the viewer and the work.”

    Reben built his sculpture, which also hangs on the wall, around the description, with elements including green roof shingles, a porch light, metal grab bars, and handcuffs.

    “I wanted to just put it out there: Here are a range of artists, here are really different ways of presenting this kind of work, living with this kind of work, connecting with this kind of work,” Sacks said. “I wanted people to ask questions about it.”

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  • Guatemala expat community roiled by relic smuggling charges

    Guatemala expat community roiled by relic smuggling charges

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    ANTIGUA, Guatemala — Two Americans, one a photographer and the other a connoisseur of Mayan folk art, are facing charges of smuggling pre-Hispanic artifacts in Guatemala Tuesday in a case that has roiled the normally tranquil tourist-magnet town of Antigua.

    Antigua, just outside Guatemala City, is a place where visitors and expats live among centuries-old ruins of colonial buildings and soaring volcanic peaks, admiring the lively handicraft and art scene.

    American Stephanie Allison Jolluck was part of that community after moving from the Atlanta, Georgia, area. She wrote on her photography website, “I am a designer and social entrepreneur who has always been fascinated by Indigenous cultures. As a lover of ethnographic art, antiques, and handicrafts, I enjoy shopping markets around the world.”

    It was on one such shopping trip that she claims to have picked up two ceremonial basalt stone carvings, which she told a judge she thought were cheap souvenirs at a public market in Antigua, purportedly as a gift for her brother.

    Guatemala’s Culture Ministry said the two stone carvings were made between 600 and 900 A.D. Known as Mayan “axes,” because of their shape, the carved slabs may have been associated with the sacred ball game of the Mayas, rather than have any use as an axe.

    She was released on her own recognizance after her arrest at the airport because she was a long-term resident of Guatemala. But Jolluck and her American companion, Giorgio Salvador Rossilli, were detained again Sunday when they were found with 166 Mayan artifacts in their vehicle.

    Rossilli is listed as an author of a two-volume work on the “Masks of Guatemalan Traditional Dances” and was credited as one of the curators of Los Angeles art exhibitions of pre-Hispanic artifacts several years ago.

    Rossilli is also listed as a donor to the La Ruta Maya Foundation, which lists as its main work “the recovery of archaeological artifacts that have been illegally taken out of the country.”

    After police pulled them over, Rossilli apparently argued ignorance. Prosecutor Jorge Alberto de León said the couple told a judge they thought the artifacts were cheap reproductions.

    “They argued that, because they are foreigners, they cannot tell one piece from another,” de León said. “They told the judge that because they were pieces of stone they had seen sold at the markets, they never imagined that they were ancient archeological pieces.”

    Guatemala’s Culture Ministry says that 90% of the 166 artifacts — mostly stone carvings — found in the couple’s vehicle are authentic. People smuggling relics and archaeological artifacts face between 5 and 10 years in jail if convicted in Guatemala.

    De León said Rossilli also argued the pieces weren’t his, and that he had been given them by someone else to restore, and that he was returning them when he was detained. Why someone would want to restore fakes was unanswered.

    Court secretary Milton Benítez said a local architect, Franklin Contreras, has claimed the pieces belonged to him. Private citizens can hold such artifacts in Guatemala as long as they prove they weren’t looted from ruin sites and register them with the government.

    On Monday, Judge Sherly Figueroa released both Jolluck and Rossilli on bail of about $6,400 apiece and allowed them to keep their passports but prohibited them from leaving the country. They will be required to show up at prosecutors’ offices every two weeks as their case continues.

    Jolluck’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Velasquez, refused to discuss the case with journalists, saying ,“I don’t litigate in the media.”

    The expat community in Antigua and greater Guatemala seemed somewhat divided on the arrests.

    In an expat Facebook group, many warned against a rush to judgement, noting it would take an impartial investigation to determine whether the pieces were in fact genuine.

    Antigua resident Ivan Borja said. “From the people I’ve talked to in the expat community, the news was a shocker.”

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  • Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1616 nude to be digitally unveiled

    Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1616 nude to be digitally unveiled

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    FLORENCE, Italy — Art restorers in the Italian city of Florence have begun a six-month project to clean and virtually “unveil” a long-censored nude painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most prominent women in the history of Italian art.

    Swirling veils and drapery were added to the “Allegory of Inclination” some 70 years after Gentileschi painted the life-size female nude, believed to be a self-portrait, in 1616.

    The work to reveal the image as originally painted comes as Gentileschi’s contribution to Italian Baroque art is getting renewed attention in the #MeToo era, both for her artistic achievements but also for breaking into the male-dominated art world after being raped by one of her art teachers.

    Her work was featured in a 2020 exhibit at the National Gallery in London.

    “Through her, we can talk about how important it is to restore artwork, how important it is to restore the stories of women to the forefront,’’ said Linda Falcone, coordinator of the Artemisia Up Close project.

    “Allegory of Inclination” originally was commissioned for the family home of Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, the great-nephew of the famed artist. The building later became the Casa Buonarotti museum, and the painting was displayed until recently on the ceiling in a gilded frame. When lead conservator Elizabeth Wick removed the painting in late September, a shower of 400-year-old dust was released.

    Wick’s team of restorers is using ultraviolet light, diagnostic imaging and X-rays to differentiate Gentileschi’s brush strokes from those of the artist that covered the nudity. The public can watch the project underway at the museum through April 23.

    Restorers won’t be able remove the veils because the cover-up was done too soon after the original, raising the risk that Gentileschi’s painting would be damaged in the process.

    Instead, the restoration team plans to create a digital image of the original version that will be displayed in an exhibition on the project opening in September 2023.

    Gentileschi arrived in Florence shortly after the trial in Rome of her rapist, during which the then-17-year-old was forced to testify with ropes tied around her fingers that were progressively tightened in a test of her honesty.

    She also had to endure a physical examination in the courtroom behind a curtain to confirm that she was no longer a virgin. Eventually, her rapist was convicted and sentenced to eight months in prison.

    “Somebody else would have been crushed by this experience,’’ Wick said. “But Artemisia bounces back. She comes up to Florence. She gets this wonderful commission to paint a full-length nude figure for the ceiling of Casa Buonarroti. So, I think she’s showing people, ‘This is what I can do.’”

    While in Florence, Gentileschi also won commissions from the Medici family. Her distinctive, dramatic and energetic style emerged, taking inspiration from the most renowned Baroque painter of the time, Caravaggio. Many of her paintings featured female heroines, often in violent scenes and often nude.

    She was 22 when she painted “Allegory of Inclination,” which was commissioned by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. Another member of the family, Leonardo Buonarroti, decided to have it embellished to protect the sensibilities of his wife and children.

    “This is one of her first paintings. In the Florentine context, it was her debut painting, the same year she was then accepted into the Academy of Drawing, which was the first drawing academy in Europe at the time,” Falcone said.

    With the younger Michelangelo as her patron, Gentileschi gained entry to the cultural milieu of the time.

    “She was able to hobnob with Galileo and with other great thinkers. So this almost illiterate woman was suddenly at the university level, producing works of art that were then, you know, appreciated by the Grand Duke,” Falcone said. “And she became a courtly painter from then on.”

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