We here, the gang at A Gathering of the Tribes, are saddened to share the news that our friend, collaborator, and patron Jack Tilton is no longer with us.

It is a curious show. Curious even for me who was born & grew up in Japan & knows its culture. VERY curious for a non-Japanese who knows little about it.

The Congolese musicians arrived.  They went immediately into their complex bongo, conga, and chakra rhythms, making their opening sequence a tribute to their African deities.  This was accompanied by a lively dance, performed by lithe, agile male and female dancers, each of whom had obviously been honing their craft since childhood. 

In the space of a month in 2014, at separate art exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai that included my work, my name was blotted out — in one case by government officials and by exhibitors themselves in the other case.

“Showing young artists isn’t a way to make a lot of money but I do it because I love art and it’s fun to help young artists,”

Great theater requires high stakes conflict. In Oslo, J.T. Rodger’s tour-de-force, cross-cultural opus now playing at Lincoln Center Theater, there is no shortage of conflict. In a play largely made up of talks between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, this is to be expected.

There’s a cafe called Dante’s on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village that I used to go to with my father when I was teenager.

Gaitskill’s writing is surprisingly tender but always on point and never misses a beat.

Word: An anthology by a Gathering of the Tribes is brand new; it’s a gorgeous, slim and glossy volume of photographs, art works such as paintings, photographs, collage and even a comic strip, as well as many poems.

What a difference a month can make. When the first reviews of the 2017 edition of the Whitney Biennial came out before the exhibition was open to the public, there was a curious univocity or single voice at play among most of the critics who initially reviewed the show.

Luciann Berrios' debut collection bursts out from "under the shadow of a memory," offering not simply poems but chronicles of movement, forward and backward in time.

By the time Jon Batiste arrived at Spotify’s studios near Union Square on a recent evening, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis had commandeered his seat at the piano.

“It’s not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” says artist Hannah Black.

What does a revolution look like in 2017? In our cable news-facilitated present moment in which the unified voting patterns of white Americans are portrayed as a silent revolution of sorts, it’s almost hard to imagine a time when groups like The Black Panthers were even able to be revolutionary in their willingness to exercise their second amendment right to bear arms. 

Present meets the past in Max Vernon’s time-traveling new musical The View Upstairs, which opened last month at the Lynn Redgrave theater. The musical is set in the eponymous UpStairs Lounge, a seventies gay bar and safe haven for the LGBT community located in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

In the age of heated racial discussions and political fighting, Hidden Figures, the untold story of three black women at NASA is both timely and interesting.

There’s lots of action along with music in The Present (including The Clash before each act and the odd Europop sensation, Haddaway), drinking, dancing, and Blanchett, in one scene, pulling off her black bra before firing a shotgun into the air (multiple times).

If you looked down from the sky or had an aerial view of the Memorial ACTe (Caribbean Centre for the Expressions and Memory of African Slave Trade & Slavery), the new memorial museum that opened in Guadeloupe in 2015

April Fools Day// 7-9 //Howl! Happening

Sarah Van Gelder reminds me of myself when she starts her book, The Revolution Where You Live: Stories From A 12,000 Mile Journey Through A New America.