The collection comprises artworks by seminal figures such as Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro, Jean Tinguely, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Le Corbusier, Sol LeWitt, Edgar Degas, Nicolas de Stael, Barbara Hepworth and Picasso.

The 35,600-square-foot Bechtler museum building was designed by the Swiss architect  Mario Botta.

An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo presents 72 extraordinary works of the 16th through 18th centuries, from one of the preeminent collections of Italian Old Master drawings in private hands. It features masterpieces by gifted and historically important draftsmen—principally Italian masters but also artists whose careers brought them south of the Alps—among them Correggio, Parmigianino, Bernini, Poussin, Guercino, Canaletto, and Tiepolo. The drawings represent the principal centers of Italian art: Florence, Rome, Naples, Bologna, Parma, Venice, Genoa, and Milan. Their strikingly broad range of subject matter includes figure studies, historical and mythological narratives, landscapes, vedute, botanical drawings, motifs copied from or inspired by classical antiquity, and designs for painted compositions.

The 16th-century Italian painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari has been credited with formulating the concept of Renaissance art in his celebrated Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). He also invented the practice of systematically collecting Italian drawings in compiling his Libro dei disegni, a volume comprising examples by many of the artists whose biographies he authored.

Among the many treasures of the collection on view are a recently discovered, magnificent red chalk drawing of the head of Julius Caesar by Andrea del Sarto, the leading Florentine painter of the first decades of the 16th century; a luminous study by Correggio for the figure of Eve in his great masterpiece, the painted dome of the cathedral of Parma; a sprightly pen drawing by his younger contemporary Parmigianino—hailed in his day as the spirit of the divine Raphael reborn—for one of his most important painted portraits; brilliantly rendered colored studies by the Florentine artist Jacopo Ligozzi, one depicting, with poetry and scientific precision, a plant, and another an exotic Oriental theme; a powerful study of a recumbent nude man by the towering genius of Baroque Rome, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and of a fanciful ship by his contemporary, the sculptor Alessandro Algardi, made for the pope; a rich concentration of drawings by some of the leading Bolognese painters of the 17th century, notably Guercino (who is represented by three masterful studies), Guido Reni, and Domenichino; and fine examples by the great Venetian draftsmen of the 18th century, among them Canaletto, Guardi, Piranesi, and the greatest artistic luminary of the age, Giambattista Tiepolo.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), preeminent master of the German Renaissance, transformed drawing in northern Europe. The exhibition includes eight extraordinary drawings by Dürer that demonstrate the variety and dynamism of his draftsmanship. Also included are prints and treatises by the artist.

Among the many highlights of the exhibition that illustrate Dürer's preoccupation with beauty are his seminal engraving of 1504, Adam and Eve, along with its most important extant related preparatory drawing.

Demonstrating the persistence of Dürer's fascination with perfect proportions is another work from about a decade later, Constructed Head of a Man in Profile. By overlaying a grid on a man's head delineated in pen and brown and red ink, Dürer used geometry to construct a profile with mathematical precision. Also on view is a 1532–34 edition of his landmark treatise, Four Books on Human Proportion, a book in which he articulated his artistic philosophy and the centrality of proportion in his depictions of the human body.

The Ramayana is a Sanskrit epic consisting of 24,000 verses in seven books. Its original version is attributed to the poet-sage Valmiki (ca. 400 B.C.). The epic is an endearing classic tale of love, romance, human frailty, and righteousness; it recounts the adventures of Rama, his wife Sita, his brother Lakshmana, and his staunch ally and devotee Hanuman, who are pitted against the forces of Ravana, the evil king of the island Lanka. This narrative, which has a happy ending, provides a philosophical platform for examining the nature of morality, kingship, and divinity in Indian society that endures to this day.

Thirty-six masterworks from the National Museum of Cambodia's unparalleled collection of some 7,000 bronzes make up the exhibition. The bronze sculptures and ritual objects created within a Khmer cultural context that spanned some 1,600 years, from late prehistory through the Angkor period (9th–15th centuries).

A 160-page illustrated exhibition catalogue, edited by Freer and Sackler colleagues Louise Allison Cort  and Paul Jett, includes essays by four senior scholars illuminating the significance and development of bronze sculpture and ritual objects in the Khmer world.

“Why is something art, and why is something else not art?“ This is how John Baldessari (born in 1931), one of the most important contemporary American artists, has described his concept. His oeuvre, which combines photography with painting and art-historical reference with everyday life, is a study of the impossibility of grasping total truth or obtaining complete knowledge.

The John Baldessari retrospective features more than 150 works spanning the artist's career from 1962 to the present day, and include works on canvas, photography, videos and artist's books.

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street,
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497

The exhibition Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine highlights the artist’s experimentation with diverse media, showcasing sculptures, paintings, installations, works-on-paper, glass works and modified found objects. Comprising more than 25 works, Memory as Medicine includes new art created for the exhibition as well as works never before seen on public display. The exhibition also juxtaposes Bailey’s work with a display of classic African sculptures from the High’s permanent collection and selected loans of African art to show the influence of African aesthetic practices on the artist’s work.


Radcliffe Bailey, Windward Coast (detail), 2009. Piano keys, plaster bust, glitter. Collection of the artist.

The exhibition presents Bailey’s work divided into three main themes: “Water,” “Blues” and “Blood.” Works included in the “Water” group feature the artist’s references to the Black Atlantic as a site of historical trauma as well as an artistic and spiritual journey. “Blues” highlights works that illustrate the importance of music as a transcendent artform, including Bailey’s 1999 painting “Transbluesency,” which references a book of poems by Amiri Baraka and echoes the “Blues” theme. The third theme, “Blood,”  features works focusing on the ideas of ancestry, race, memory, struggle and sacrifice. This section  further explores the artist’s engagement with African sculptures in tandem with his investigation of his own family’s DNA.

In 2006 Bailey learned his family’s ancestral links to the Mende people of Sierra Leone. This inspired the smallest, most intimate work he ever created―a miniature drawing done in ink and coffee on a piece of sheet music that features a Mende mask framed within a tiny red-velvet lined, 19th-century tintype case, as though a family portrait. This work will be on view in the exhibition alongside more recent works, including a new sculpture that has the smooth, curvilinear forms of Mende masks. It is made of wood and was repeatedly rubbed with finishing wax in a daily studio ritual. Minus the functional purpose of Mende masks, this work becomes a Brancusi-esque objet d’art, an inscrutable prop for a Neo-Dada-style, contemporary art world performance. Another 2010 work, “Clean-up,” is a painted wooden sculpture in the form of a 10-foot-high baseball bat. Bailey comments, “The reason why I made the bat so big was to beat down all the things that I confront. Baseball being one of my first passions, before art, the bat was like my paintbrush. In baseball, the fourth batter that comes up is the clean-up hitter.”

Radcliffe Bailey was born in 1968, in Bridgeton, New Jersey. He grew up in Atlanta, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991. From 2001 to 2006 Bailey taught at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2004) and was a visiting faculty member at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2006). In 2008, he created large-scale glass works as a participant in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project (GAPP). His work is represented in leading museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 1994 Bailey’s work was included in “The Hale Woodruff Memorial Exhibition” at The Studio Museum of Harlem. In 1996 Bailey gained acclaim for his large-scale mural “Saints,” a commission for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. “Saints” remains on view, welcoming travelers entering the airport at International Terminal E.

A noted American art historian, Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969), was a pioneer in the study of Persian art, heritage, and culture, as well as an energetic collector, curator, and art dealer. The exhibition features a variety of media, including ceramics, tilework, textiles, paintings, glasswork, and lacquerware from the Art Institute’s permanent collection.

Pope also organized large-scale exhibitions and congresses of Persian art in London, St. Petersburg, Philadelphia, and New York. His multi-volume A Survey of Persian Art (1938–39), complied and edited together with his wife and colleague, Phyllis Ackerman, was highly influential in the way the Western world came to perceive and appreciate Persian art. The aesthetic criteria that he, his wife, and his contemporary colleagues established for assessing the importance of cultural remains from modern Iran, west Afghanistan, and west central Asia influenced the way many people around the world came to understand the art, architecture, and material culture of Persia. Those criteria continue to shape our thinking today.

Organized by curator Ilene Susan Fort, the exhibition celebrates the museum’s acquisition of Thomas Eakins' (1844-1916) last great sporting painting, Wrestlers (1899). The show features around 60 oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, photographs, and sculpture by the American artist.

Eakins’ last sporting images feature boxers and wrestlers and showcase the new indoor spectator sports that attracted the attention of middle and working-class enthusiasts. These paintings, some of which rank among the artist’s largest canvases, are ironically among his least known endeavors in the sporting genre. Boxing and wrestling imagery was typically modest in scale and relegated to journalistic reports and advertising.

The three canvas versions of the Wrestlers paintings (two of which now belong to LACMA) have not been seen together since they left the artist’s studio over a century ago. The wrestling paintings are shown along with a group of related wrestling photographs that were recently discovered and have never before been exhibited.

Manly Pursuits is supplemented by Tad Beck: Palimpsest, a small display of photographs by Los Angeles-based artist Tad Beck. A photographer, video artist, and teacher, Beck presents the nude male figure in relationship to his environment and the artist. Selections from Beck’s Palimpsest series, which are reconsiderations of photographs from Eakins’ Grafly Album (on view in Manly Pursuits) underscore the continuing relevance of Eakins’s late nineteenth-century exploration of the male body.

This exhibition is the first in-depth presentation of the photographs of Peter Sekaer (American, born Denmark, 1901–1950), a Danish-born artist who made a photographic record of Depression-era America. While Sekaer's well-respected photographs were occasionally exhibited during his lifetime, he slipped into obscurity after he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1950 at age forty-nine. His life's work has been preserved by his wife, Elisabeth Sekaer Rothschild, and their younger daughter, Christina Sekaer.

The High Museum recently acquired a trove of more than seventy rare vintage prints by Sekaer, the largest holding of its kind in any American art museum. Many of these works have never been on public view.

In this show, LA-based photographer Catherine Opie's primary focus is high-school football, a subject that allowed Opie to explore issues of masculinity, community, and national identity in the United States.

Over the last three years, Opie photographed football games and players in seven states across America: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, and Texas. Atmospheric cues locate each regional site, while gestures and gazes reveal the adolescent players’ disparate psychologies.

Looking past the clichés associated with football, Opie perceives diversity in the individuals and communities that celebrate the game.

The exhibition traces the evolution of Hopper’s artistic output and features more than 200 works spanning his prolific 60-year career in a range of media, including an early painting from 1955; photographs, sculpture, and assemblages from the 1960s; paintings from the 1980s and ’90s; graffiti-inspired wall
constructions and large-scale billboard paintings from the 2000s; his most recent sculptures; and film installations.


Dennis Hopper: Double Standard, 1961
gelatin silver print
© Dennis Hopper, image courtesy of the artist and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

The title of the exhibition is taken from Hopper’s iconic 1961 photograph of the two Standard Oil signs seen through an automobile windshield at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and North Doheny Drive on historic Route 66 in Los Angeles. The image was reproduced on the invitation for Ed Ruscha’s second solo exhibition at Ferus Gallery in 1964. Dennis Hopper Double Standard is curated by Julian Schnabel.

Dennis Hopper (17 May 1936, Dodge City, Kansas – 29 May 2010, Los Angeles) was a Hollywood legend, actor, director, and artist. He directed numerous films including Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971), and Colors (1988), and acted in many more including Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Giant (1956), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Apocalypse Now (1979), Blue Velvet (1986), Hoosiers (1987), Speed (1994), and Basquiat (1996).

Images of love, attraction, alienation, death, and other universal human experiences in the work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) are on view in an exhibition of nearly 60 of his most important prints. Entititled Edvard Munch: Master Prints, the show examines the artist’s stylistic approach to each of these themes, a process that involved transforming ideas into an evocative motif and exploring that image through numerous variations over a lifetime. Munch produced more than 700 woodcuts, lithographs, and intaglio prints, constituting one of the major accomplishments in the graphic arts of the past century.

Personal events such as the deaths of his mother and sister, which occurred when he was a child, his own close brush with death at age 13, and his intense love affairs had a profound effect on his work.

Greater New York is the third iteration of the quinquennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art, showcasing some 68 artists and collectives living and working in the metropolitan New York area. New large-scale installations and artist commissions were produced for the exhibition. Monumental pieces like Hank Willis Thomas’ Unbranded series appear, which is showcased for the first time in its complete version in New York City, along with Sharon Hayes’ Revolutionary Love: I Am Your Worst Fear, I Am Your Best Fantasy, being shown in its first full-length exhibition iteration.

Spanning a broad variety of artistic processes and practices today, the works in Greater New York range from explorations in color and form, to examinations of ecological, geopolitical, and sociological interests, to meditations on race, gender, and generational identifications, to discussions of recent trauma and the building boom in New York.

The Greater New York 2010 curators selected artists through studio visits, review of recommendations, mailed submissions, and through Studio Visit, a new initiative on www.MoMAPS1.org that invites artists to present their artwork and studios online. Over 750 Studio Visit submissions were reviewed by the curatorial team.

List of Artists

Michele Abeles, David Adamo, Ei Arakawa, An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Tauba Auerbach, Darren Bader, Kerstin Brätsch, David Brooks, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Leidy Churchman, Deville Cohen, Brody Condon, Caleb Considine, William Cordova, Delusional Downtown Divas (Joana Avillez, Lena Dunham, Isabel Halley), DETEXT, Debo Eilers, Franklin Evans, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zipora Fried, Daniel Gordon, Tamar Halpern, K8 Hardy, Tommy Hartung, Sharon Hayes, Vlatka Horvat, Matt Hoyt, Alex Hubbard, Alisha Kerlin, Liz Magic Laser, Deana Lawson, Leigh Ledare, Dani Leventhal, Kalup Linzy, Tala Madani, Nick Mauss, Ryan McNamara, Dave Miko, Amir Mogharabi, Sam Moyer, Nico Muhly, Rashaad Newsome, Dominic Nurre, Brian O’Connell, Alice O’Malley, Virginia Overton, Adam Pendleton, Maria Petschnig, Zak Prekop, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Gilad Ratman, Lucy Raven, robbinschilds, Mariah Robertson, Adele Röder, Emily Roysdon, Aki Sasamoto, David Benjamin Sherry, Erin Shirreff, Xaviera Simmons, A.L. Steiner, Elisabeth Subrin, Hank Willis Thomas, Naama Tsabar, Guido van der Werve, Conrad Ventur, Amy Yao, Pinar Yolacan

Japanese images of heaven and hell range from depictions of serene paradises to grotesque realms of punishment. Heaven, situated in a land of bliss where devotees are reborn to reside with Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light, is typically represented by luxurious palaces, jeweled trees, and tranquil ponds. Hell, with scenes of fire, torture, and suffering, is the destination awaiting those who fail to follow the sacred precepts of Buddhism. The concepts of the afterlife are derived from ancient Buddhist scriptures, and they have impacted morality, spirituality, and behavior up until the present day.

Heaven and Hell in Japanese Art features several Edo-period (1615–1868) Buddhist paintings that have rarely been exhibited. It also highlights a recent loan of a monumental 18th-century sculpture of Amida and his atttendants descending on swirling clouds to the faithful.

Huichol Art and Culture: Balancing the World focuses on the Huichol, a Native American people of western Mexico who for many centuries have retained their unique culture and prehispanic religious beliefs. Their remote location in the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental mountains primarily in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit has allowed for greater resistance than any other indigenous group to the forces of Christianization and acculturation. The Huichol people today continue to create traditional art and practice ancient rituals that predate the time of Spanish contact.

From 1934-1935, Dr. Robert Mowry Zingg (1900-1957) was the first American anthropologist to conduct extended ethnographic fieldwork among the Huichol in the community of Tuxpan de Bolaños. Zingg lived with Huichol families and participated in everyday life, while studying their mythology and ceremonialism. Huichol Art and Culture: Balancing the World presents the collection of Huichol artifacts which Zingg collected on behalf of the Laboratory of Anthropology during the earliest years of its history as an institution.

In the past and today, Huichol art is made to communicate with a pantheon of ancestors and gods. When Zingg arrived in Tuxpan, he found that most Huichol adults were occupied with making art. As he observed, the Huichol constantly create offerings which serve as visual prayers to the gods. As part of the ceremonial cycle, the Huichol make pilgrimages to leave offerings at sacred sites.

At left: This votive gourd bowl is an early example of the technique used in Huichol yarn painting. The interior is decorated with wool yarn pressed into beeswax. Gourd bowls are prayers for health, success, or bountiful crops. The 1803 silver coin in the center of this bowl is a request for prosperity. Tuxpan de Bolaños, ca. 1934. 20.0 x 7.0 cm. Robert M. Zingg collection, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/ Laboratory of Anthropology

Shot in three Tokyo parks during the early seventies, The Park is a series of black and white photographs capturing couples meeting up for clandestine trysts and, more provocatively, the voyeurs who came out to watch them. First exhibited in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo, the uproar surrounding his methods caused these photographs to be hidden from the public for the next 28 years.

Mr. Yoshiyuki first stumbled upon this hidden world while photographing skyscrapers in front of Chuo Park in Shinjuku at night when he witnessed a couple having sex and quickly discovered an entire scene of young lovers—and their peepers. He soon returned with an inconspicuous 35mm camera, a filtered flash and infrared film, and began shooting these hetero- and homosexual couplings, along with their spectators lurking in the bushes.

What is particularly striking about this series of photographs is not the graphic nature of the sexual acts portrayed, which are usually obscured by other figures or occur out of frame, but the densely packed tableaux of voyeurs who crowd in on the couples and sometimes attempt to join in.

The exhibition also includes photographs from Yoshiyuki’s 1978 companion project, Love Hotel, a group of video stills pulled from unerased videotapes made by clients of one of Japan’s infamous rooms-by-the-hour hotels. The resulting pictures are grainy abstractions of faceless, nameless people caught, mid-act, in lovemaking.

Kohei Yoshiyuki was born in 1946 in Japan, where he currently lives and works. Photographs from The Park series have been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Museum of Modern Art (New York), North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In Achim Hochdörfer's article in the February 2009 Artforum entitled A Hidden Reserve: painting from 1958 to 1965, the author names a number of painters included in this exhibition, "Whose practices are rich with implication." Le Tableau, continuing the conversation begun by Hochdörfer, attempts to expand his time frame historically, with a particular focus on the contribution of French abstraction from the post-war era through the present.

There has been a longstanding rejection of French painting due to American triumphalism and a misplaced sense of competition by artists and critics of all stripes. French painting now seems timely in that the identifiably American notion of the "flatbed picture plane"appears banalized, having exhausted most options left for abstraction. Here, the emphasis is on the particular contributions made by painters identified with France and their exploration of the paintings' physical facticity, of surface as a "thickness," and/or other complexities of painted two-dimensionality. "Le Tableau" is a term commonly used by French painters and theorists involved in an interrogation of what constitutes the condition of the painting and/or of the pictorial.

In the interest of a broad selection of French painting since WWII and contemporary works from Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere that is perceived as having parallel concerns, works have been included that some might consider more peinture than tableau. Much of the work selected places emphasis on the material means and/or structure of painting as a form or figure. Writing on post-war French painting, Clement Greenberg criticized "their surfaces with buttery paint and films of oil and varnish."i His observation was indicative of French paintings' continuance of tradition, but also of a desire to think and work with the givens of the conventional painting's complexity. This contrasts with Greenberg's dictum involving flatness, "purity" and a priori American reading of the painting as a tabula rasa or virginal plane. Artists associated with the Ecole de Paris in the period Greenberg was writing (1953) such as Fautrier, Hartung, and Riopelle used the aforementioned picture-making substances to negate the traditionally resolved painting. These French contemporaries of the Abstract-Expressionists were involved in a dismantling of the picture-object that at moments resembled an evisceration of the very body of the painting. This differs from the American project that tended to reduce painting to a single trope. (Still: the palette-knifed passage, Pollock: skeins of spatter, Rothko: sfumato, etc.).

In a paper delivered at the Courtauld Institute on French artisticii practice  the painter Mick Finch translated a fragment of a Hubert Damisch textiii  on how Dubuffet "liked working in the thickness of the ground—I mean the tableau—to reveal what is beneath: scratching the paper, incising and beating up the substance, skinning it and whipping it up to reveal layers below." Finch cites this description as a working of the surface as a "material entity in itself." This negation of the authority of the painting can be seen to reaffirm the haptic connection with the viewer. Jean Fautrier wrote, "in front of a painting that we like completely, there is a physical need as well as its fulfillment."

Joe Fyfe, curator

Noted French artist Pierre Huyghe uses diverse media—including large-scale installation, public events, and video—to delve into the uncertainties of representation and investigate how narrative models affect our sense of reality.

Shown in the Stone Film and New Media Gallery, Les Grands Ensembles, presents a fixed view of two residential towers in a bleak urban landscape, swathed in fog at night. Lacking any signs of human activity, the buildings appear to take on lives of their own as the video’s buzzing electronic soundtrack, composed by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot, builds in intensity. Windows in the two façades begin to light up rhythmically and with increasing frequency, as if communicating in some sort of code. The towers, which are actually models the artist created in a film studio, do not represent specific structures but echo the architecture of French government housing projects common in the 1970s. Set in the starkly desolate landscape, the buildings recall the failures of Modernist architecture’s utopian social goals.

Les Grands Ensembles also introduces the artist’s engagement with forms of spectacle and the cultural conditions that emerge from it. The flashing lights that play across the façades of these buildings, repeated in an endless video loop, seem to ask whether this is a stream of coded information waiting to be translated or a deluge of vacant representation, a spectacle pointing to nothing but itself.

Laurence Hobgood Jazz Trio and Kurt Elling

Tall, dark, and handsome, perfectly groomed and impeccably dressed, the clean-cut Italian with the rich baritone voice is an enigma.

Inspired by the singers of yesteryear, Patrizio Buanne harks back to a time when a man would not dream of singing onstage in anything less than a suit, shoes polished, clean-shaven, hair neatly brushed, with a dab of cologne behind the ears.

Nothing strange about that, you might say. Except that Buanne is only 26 years old—and hopelessly devoted to his art: romantic crooning. Dean Martin, Paul Anka, Tom Jones, along with the traditional Italian singers—these are the men he idolizes.

The Black Butterflies

Featuring

Mercedes Figueras, saxes
Tony Larokko sax, percussion
Levi Barcourt, keyboards
Fred Berryhill, percussion
Bopa "King" Carre, percussion
NIck Gianni, upright bass
Kenny Wollesen, drums

NUBLU
62 Av C
New York, NY 10009

Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold
Librettist: Richard Wagner
Sung in German with Met titles in English, German and Spanish

Bryn Terfel, singing his first, much-anticipated Met Wotan, leads the cast in Das Rheingold, the Ring’s first installment.

James Levine, conductor

Cast

Freia: Wendy Bryn Harmer
Fricka: Stephanie Blythe
Erda: Patricia Bardon
Loge: Richard Croft
Mime: Gerhard Siegel
Wotan: Bryn Terfel
Alberich: Eric Owens

Production: Robert Lepage
Set Designer: Carl Fillion
Costume Designer: François St-Aubin
Lighting Designer: Etienne Boucher
Interactive Projection Artist: Holger Foerterer
Video Image Artist: Boris Firquet
Fasolt: Franz-Josef Selig
Fafner: Hans-Peter König

Jacques Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Librettist: Jules Barbier
Sung in French with Met titles in English, German and Spanish

Patrick Fournillier, conductor

Cast
 
Olympia: Anna Christy
Antonia/Stella: Hibla Gerzmava
Giulietta: Enkelejda Shkosa
Nicklausse: Kate Lindsey
Hoffmann: Giuseppe Filianoti
Four Villains: Ildar Abdrazakov

Production: Bartlett Sher
Set Designer: Michael Yeargan
Costume Designer: Catherine Zuber
Lighting Designer: James F. Ingalls
Choreographer: Dou Dou Huang

This new musical, based on the life of groundbreaking African composer, performer and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, is directed and choreographed by Tony Award-winner Bill T. Jones, with a book by Jim Lewis and Jones. Sahr Ngaujah returns in the title role for which he received universal acclaim, while the world renowned Antibalas and other members of the NYC Afrobeat community, under the direction of Aaron Johnson, will again perform Kuti's rousing music live onstage.

Winner of this year's Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical, Fela! was conceived by Bill T. Jones, Jim Lewis and Steve Hendel.

Using his pioneering music (a blend of jazz, funk and African rhythm and harmonies), Fela! explores Kuti's controversial life as artist, political activist and revolutionary musician.

Eugene O'Neill Theatre
230 West 49th Street
New York, NY 10036

The Georgia Aquarium opened in downtown Atlanta, Georgia on 23 November 2005, as the world’s largest aquarium. With more than 8 million gallons of marine and fresh water, and more than 100,000 animals of 500 different species, the Georgia Aquarium is a gift to the people of Georgia from Bernie Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, and his wife Billi, through the Marcus Foundation. The $200 million building, designed to look like a ship breaking through a wave. The facility hosts five viewing galleries along with a 4-D movie theater.

Wolfgang Puck Catering operates exclusive special event catering services at the Aquarium.  Chef Puck and his staff serve seafood at the Aquarium and participate in the Seafood Watch Program, pioneered by the Monterey Bay Aquarium to raise consumer awareness about the importance of buying seafood from sustainable sources.

With more than 60 live lizards and snakes from five continents, Lizards & Snakes: Alive! introduces visitors to a diversity of legged and legless lizards, including snakes, that make up a group known as squamates. Grounded in the evolutionary history of the group, Lizards & Snakes showcases live animals and some of their remarkable adaptations including projectile tongues, deadly venom, amazing camouflage, and surprising modes of locomotion.  Representing more than 20 species from countries such as Australia, Cuba, Egypt, Guatemala, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Sudan, and the United States, the animals—which include the veiled chameleon and the Madagascan giant day gecko — are displayed in re-created habitats complete with ponds, tree limbs, rock ledges, and live plants.

In addition to a four-inch tropical girdled lizard to a fifteen-foot Burmese python, visitors encounter interactive stations which invites them to explore the inner working of a rattlesnake on the hunt and view videos of lizards and snakes.

This new center documents Muhammad Ali's odyssey from then-segregated Louisville, Kentucky and his youth as Cassius Clay, to a Gold Medal at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome to his conversion from Christianity to Islam and to the pinnacle of the boxing world.

Through five floors and 93,000 square feet, the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville (which opened in November  2005) is no typical sports museum; it is equal parts elegance (the prominent atrium display of his Presidential Medal of Freedom) and kitsch (the equally prominent display of the bejeweled robe,a gift from Elvis Presley before a fight in Las Vegas.) It is pluck - his youthful boasting of how pretty he was - and pathos- his Parkinsons' wracked body painstakingly lighting the torchat the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. It is crass commercialization - his 1977 Rolls Royce Corniche - and the best of the human spirit- a collage by children from 141 countries in which they express their hopes and dreams.

The National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., opened to the public on 2 December 2006 as the first American, and only national, museum dedicated to preserving the artifacts, history, and experiences of what was deemed “the war to end all wars.” Designed by Ralph Appelbaum, the National WWI Museum houses a collection of more than 49,000 artifacts.

The 30,000-square-foot core exhibit is built directly beneath the existing Liberty Memorial. Beginning with a surreal walk across a glass-floored bridge, beneath which lie 9,000 poppies, each representing 1,000 fallen military fatalities, visitors pass into an vast interactive museum that seeks to tell the story of the war through the experiences of those who lived it.

Shakira, one of the most successful global artists in recent history, with more than 214 global award nominations and more than 50 million albums sold worldwide, returns to North America with her 2010 global tour. 

Shakira's most recent album She Wolf was released last November. The Spanish version of her latest single, "Gypsy," is No. 1 on Billboard's Latin pop airplay charts and her first single off of the new album, also titled "She Wolf," went to No. 11 on the Hot 100.

Shakira, one of the most successful global artists in recent history, with more than 214 global award nominations and more than 50 million albums sold worldwide, returns to North America with her 2010 global tour. 

The Grammy Award-winning Colombian pop star's most recent album She Wolf was released last November. The Spanish version of her latest single, "Gypsy," is No. 1 on Billboard's Latin pop airplay charts and her first single off of the new album, also titled "She Wolf," went to No. 11 on the Hot 100.

Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Center operates the world's largest collection of waterfowl, including many rare and endangered species. The 8 acre avian breeding preserve in Scotland Neck, North Carolina is now home to over 170 species of birds-- more than half of the world’s known species of ducks, geese and swans--along with cranes, pheasants, parrots and many other birds.

Sylvan Heights has now embarked on a new and exciting mission--providing conservation-oriented programs and avian exhibits to the public. Building on an adjacent 18-acre property owned by the North Carolina Zoological Society, the new Waterfowl Park & Eco-Center has been open to the public since October 7, 2006.

Scotland Neck is only a few miles from the Roanoke River, an environmentally protected waterway that attracts many thousands of migrating ducks, geese and swans to the North Carolina coastal plain.  The cypress-tupelo swamp forests and wetlands surrounding Scotland Neck are a wintering home for many bird species, and provide opportunities for waterfowl, raptor and songbird observation. In fact, this area was named one of the top 500 most important bird areas by the American Bird Conservancy Guide.

For the 28th Annual "Battle of the Badges" at The Theater at Madison Square Garden, the NYPD look to even the score with FDNY. In last year's Battle of the Badges, the FDNY completed an improbable comeback with a victory in the evening's final bout.

The event features twelve bouts with fighters ranging from welterweight (145 lbs) to super heavyweight (230 lbs).

The Battle of the Badges benefits the Police Athletic League's (PAL) community programs and the Wounded Warriors Project. The PAL provides New York City 's youth with an alternative to crime, gangs and drugs. Today, the PAL services over 70,000 boys and girls in 19 full-time centers and 53 part-time centers throughout New York City. 

Get up close and personal with raptors this summer at Carolina Raptor Center. New exhibits include the Eurasian Eagle Owls, Corvids and new educational kiosks. The Eurasian Eagle Owls, one male and one female, came to Carolina Raptor Center from St. Louis as a gift from the National Aviary. The Corvid Exhibit, which is currently under construction and coming this summer, explores human superstition associated with Jays, Magpies, Ravens, Crows and other Corvids and animal intelligence. The new child-focused kiosks explain the physics and history of flight.

Each weekday at 1 pm, Carolina Raptor Center offers a different interactive raptor experience. A behind-the-scenes tour is offered on Mondays, demonstrations of birds in flight are offered on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and live bird demonstrations are offered each Thursday and Friday.

Weekends offer even more opportunities. Each Saturday and Sunday, demonstrations of birds in flight and live bird presentations are held every half-hour starting at 11:00am Saturdays and 12:30pm Sundays. The vultures are fed at 12:30pm each Saturday and Sunday.

Incorporated in December 1981 and based in Huntersville since November 1984, Carolina Raptor Center has been dedicated to the care and successful release of injured and orphaned birds of prey, including hawks, owls, harriers, eagles, falcons and vultures. The center houses more than 20 species of raptors, most too injured to return to the wild, plus cares for approximately 700 injured or orphaned raptors annually at its Jim Arthur Raptor Rehabilitation Center where the birds receive treatment, recovery and eventually, release.

Michael Longoria 
Christian Hoff - Tony Award Winner
Sebastian Arcelus
J Robert Spencer

Book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice
Music and Lyrics by Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe
Directed by Des McAnuff
Choreography by Sergio Trujillo

La Cages aux Folles 

Nominated for 11 Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical!

Direct from London's West End!

Can a camp man (and his lover) pretend not to be gay just to meet his son's prospective parents-in-law? This delightful tale of an unusual night club and the extraordinary characters whose lives and relationships revolve around it, La Cage Aux Folles is a sumptuous blend of glamour, comedy and passion. Kelsey Grammer stars as Georges. Terry Johnson directs.

Terry Johnson, director 
Jerry Herman, music and lyrics 
Matthew Wright, costume design 
Tim Shortall, set design

Cast:

Douglas Hodge: Albin 
Kelsey Grammer: Georges 
Sean Patrick Doyle: Chantal of Avignon 
A.J. Shively: Jean-Michel 
Veanne Cox: Mme. Dindon/Mme. Renaud 
Robin de Jesús: Jacob 
Christine Andreas: Jacqueline 
Elena Shaddow: Anne 
Chris Hoch: Francis 
Heather Lindell: Colette 
Bill Nolte: Tabarro 
David Nathan Perlow: Etienne 
Fred Applegate: Dindon/M. Renaud 

Memphis: A New Musical

Set in the turbulent south (Memphis, Tennessee) in the 1950s, it is the story of Huey Calhoun, a white radio DJ whose love of good music transcends race lines and airwaves.

Christopher Ashley, director 
David Bryan, music and lyrics 
Joe DiPietro, book and lyrics 

Cast

Chad Kimball: Huey Calhoon 
Montego Glover: Felicia Farrell 
Derrick Baskin: Gator 
J. Bernard Calloway: Delray Jones 
James Monroe Iglehart: Bobby 
Michael McGrath : Mr. Simmons 
Cass Morgan: Gladys Calhoun 


Paul Tazewell, costume design 
David Gallo, set design 
Howell Binkley, lighting design 
Sergio Trujillo, choreographer 
Ken Travis, sound design 

POV (Point of View), the award-winning PBS documentary series presents POV Adoption Stories, three films about international and domestic adoption, airing on PBS from Tuesday, 31 August – Tuesday, 14 September at 10 p.m. (check local listings). In addition to premiering these documentaries on television, PBS will be streaming them online in their entirety beyond the broadcast to commemorate National Adoption Month in November.

The films explore the challenges of adoptees forging new identities while holding on to their national and racial identities, and of parents helping their adopted children make sense of their new lives.

Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy by Stephanie Wang-Breal

Tuesday, 31 August at 10 p.m. on PBS; Streaming online from 1 September – 30 November 2010 at www.pbs.org/pov/video  

What is it like to be torn from your Chinese foster family, put on a plane with strangers and wake up in a new country, family and culture? Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy is the story of Fang Sui Yong, an 8-year-old orphan, and the Sadowskys, the Long Island Jewish family that travels to China to adopt her. Sui Yong (now Faith) is one of 70,000 Chinese children now being raised in the United States . Through her eyes, we witness her struggle with a new identity as she transforms from a timid child into someone that no one — neither her new family nor she — could have imagined.  

Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy is an intimate account of a global phenomenon — transnational and transracial adoption. Little Sui Yong’s adoption takes place against a background of more and more Americans adopting overseas, especially in China . Since the Chinese opened their doors to foreign adoptions in 1992, some 70,000 Chinese children have been brought to the United States , making China the top choice for international adoptions by Americans. To further explore the issues in the film, POV will host a live chat with filmmaker Stephanie Wang-Breal and Donna (mother) and Faith Sadowsky on Wednesday, 1 September 2010 at 2 p.m. ET on www.pbs.org/pov. .

Off and Running by Nicole Opper

Airing Tuesday, Sept. 7 at 10 p.m. on PBS; Streaming online from 8 September – 7 December 2010 at www.pbs.org/pov/video  

Off and Running is the story of Brooklyn teenager Avery, a track star with a bright future. She is the adopted African-American child of white, Jewish lesbians. Her two brothers are black and Puerto Rican and Korean-American. Though it may not look typical, Avery’s household is like most American homes — until Avery writes to her birth mother and the response throws her into crisis. She struggles over her “true” identity and estrangement from black culture. Just when it seems her life will unravel, Avery begins to make sense of her identity, with inspiring results.

In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee by Deann Borshay Liem
Airing Tuesday, Sept. 14 on PBS; Streaming online at www.pbs.org/pov/video 15 September – 15 October 2010 

Her passport said she was Cha Jung Hee. She knew she was not. So began a 40-year deception for a Korean adoptee who came to the U.S. in 1966. Told to keep her true identity secret from her new American family, the 8-year-old girl quickly forgot she had ever been anyone else. But why had her identity been switched? And who was the real Cha Jung Hee? In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is the search to find the answers, as acclaimed filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem (First Person Plural, POV 2000; encore POV 10 August 2010) returns to her native Korea to find her “double,” the mysterious girl whose place she took in America.

Artist lineup for the Los Angeles concert is Kangta, BoA, U Know, Max, Super Junior, Girls' Generation, Shinee, f(x), Zhang Li Yin, Trax and other SM artists.

This concert is a part of SM Entertainment's world tour project which begins in Seoul, then continues to LA, Tokyo, Shanghai, and other major Asian cities.

Three rare marathon screenings of the documentary by Patricio Guzmán, The Battle of Chile, will take place for September 11, the anniversary of the Chilean military coup. The film brings viewers into the Chilean political conflict and includes one of cinema's most famous shots: a cameraman who captures his own murder on film. Often discussed but little-seen, The Battle of Chile  has been newly restored and released on DVD by Icarus Films.

Friday 10 September at 7:30 pm
Saturday 11 September at 3:00 pm
Sunday 12 September at 3:00 pm

The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (Part 1) 1975, 96 min.
Patricio Guzman, director

The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie examines the escalation of rightist opposition following the left's unexpected victory in Congressional elections held in March, 1973. Finding that democracy would not stop Allende's socialist policies, the right-wing shifted its tactics from the polls to the streets. The film follows months of activity as a variety of increasingly violent tactics are used by the right to weaken the government and provoke a crisis.

Friday 10 September at 9:15 pm
Saturday 11 September at 4:45 pm
Sunday 12 September at 4:45 pm

The Coup d'Etat (Part 2), 1976, 88 min
Patricio Guzman, director

The Coup d'Etat opens with the attempted military coup of June, 1973 which is put down by troops loyal to the government. It serves as a useful dry run, however, for the final showdown, that everyone now realizes is coming. The film shows a left divided over strategy, while the right methodically lays the groundwork for the military seizure of power. The film's dramatic concluding sequence documents the coup d'etat, including Allende's last radio messages to the people of Chile, footage of the military assault on the presidential palace, and that evening's televised presentation of the new military junta.

Saturday 11 September at 7:10 pm
Sunday 12 September at 7:10 pm

The Power of the People (Part 3), 1978, 78 min.
Patricio Guzman, director

The Power of the People deals with the creation by ordinary workers and peasants of thousands of local groups of "popular power" to distribute food, occupy, guard and run factories and farms, oppose black market profiteering, and link together neighborhood social service organizations. First these local groups of "popular power" acted as a defense against strikes and lock-outs by factory owners, tradesmen and professional bodies opposed to the Allende government, then increasingly as Soviet-type bodies demanding more resolute action by the government against the right.

9:00 pm and 11:59 pm

Drawing its inspiration from the internationally acclaimed BBC documentary series Walking With Dinosaurs - seen by a world-wide audience of over 700 million - the live arena production credits TV series’ creator/ producer Tim Haynes.

Fifteen life-like and life-size dinosaurs have been brought to life by a team of specialist engineers employing technologies and techniques from film, animatronics, conventional puppetry and physical theater.

Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs.

The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the awesome Cretaceous. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 36 feet tall, and 56 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 – including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts – a year to build the original production. The show depicts the dinosaurs’ evolution, complete with the climatic and tectonic changes that took place, which led to the demise of many species. Walking with Dinosaurs has scenes of the interactions between dinosaurs, and the audience sees how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs, and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators.

The history of the world is played out with the splitting of the earth’s continents, and the transition from the arid desert of the Triassic period is given over to the lush green prairies and forces of the later Jurassic. Oceans form, volcanoes erupt, a forest catches fire -- all leading to the impact of the massive comet, which struck the earth, and forced the extinction of the dinosaurs.

World Wrestling Entertainment returns to Madison Square Garden with the "Smackdown World Tour."

The Undertaker vs. Kane - World Heavyweight Championship Match

Bret "The Hitman" Hart and The Hart Dynasty (w/ Natalya) vs. The Nexus - Six Man Tag Team Match

Christian vs. Dolph Ziggler vs. Matt Hardy - Triple Threat Match for the Intercontinental Championship

The Big Show vs. Jack Swagger

Kofi Kingston vs CM Punk (w/ The Straight Edge Society)

MVP vs. Cody Rhodes

Kelly Kelly/Rosa Mendes vs. Layla/Michelle McCool - Smackdown Diva Tag Team Match

Also scheduled to appear: Drew McIntyre, Chris Masters, Alberto Del Rio, Chavo Guerrero, Teddy Long among other Smackdown Superstars live.