There is an immersive exhibition devoted to the prolific and unclassifiable painter, Marc Chagall (1887–1985) at the Hall des Lumières, 49 Chambers Street. This unique digital exhibition presents his entire oeuvre, revealing a work rooted in its times, at the crossroads of the artistic and cultural novelties of his century and in constant renewal.

Paris and New York, are the emblematic capitals of modern art and represents two crucial stages in the artist’s long career. Paris was his chosen city, and thanks to the avant-garde movements of the 1910s, it provided the young Russian painter with a pool of experimental work, which he enriched with his own cultural references. New York was primarily a place of exile during the 1940s, and yet it gave the artist’s creativity fresh impetus. After the war, several exhibitions and major commissions reinforced the links between Paris and New York and brought Chagall back to the United States, up until the 1970s.

During this immersive exhibition, all the themes and images present in the artist’s repertoire are projected onto the walls of the Hall des Lumières, like intertwined cut-out images. They are complemented by short extracts of classical music, klezmer, and jazz, which were also part of Chagall’s cultural universe. His fantastic bestiary, his marvellous characters from circuses, fables, and the opera, as well as biblical episodes and references to Russian culture, poetically evoke the artist’s rich life experiences, which naturally resonates with the collective experiences of his people and generation.

Hall des Lumières, mission is to inspire visitors to enjoy art beyond the frame with their exhibitions and unique programming. With the help of advanced visual mapping technology and audio equipment, Hall des Lumières continues to provide dynamic art experiences with a mission to make art and culture more accessible to all.

Field of Light at Freedom Plaza officially opens December 15.  Encompassing more than six-acres on Manhattan’s East Side from 38th to 41st Street on First Avenue, Field of Light at Freedom Plaza will feature 17,750 lowlight, fiber-optic stemmed spheres, which will illuminate with a slow and subtle change of hue. The installation melds art, technology, and nature to create an ethereal muted landscape in the open waterfront area set against the backdrop of Manhattan. Made possible by The Soloviev Foundation, Field of Light at Freedom Plaza welcomes guests free of charge and presents meaningful opportunities for community engagement and educational programming. Visit fieldoflightnyc.comand follow @fieldoflightnyc on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for information and updates.

London-born Bruce Munro is globally recognized for large-scale light-based artworks inspired by his lifelong study of natural light and curiosity about shared human experiences.  His work has been commissioned by and displayed in gallery exhibitions, parks, cathedrals, botanical gardens, and museums across the globe, including New York’s Guggenheim Museum; the Sharjah Museum of Art in the UAE; Sotheby’s Beyond Limits at Chatworth, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Uluru, Northern Territory Australia—the inspiration for the Field of Light; Texas Arboretum at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center; and most recently Kings Canyon, Northern Territory, Australia, among others. Bruce’s work is also held in the permanent collections of museums and public art collections worldwide. For more information, visit brucemunro.co.uk.

Photos by Maria Baranova

HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) is pleased to announce that applications for the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) are currently open. This multi-year, $125,000 residency is HERE’s signature development and producing program since 1999 and one of the nation’s top commissioning programs. HARP provides each hybrid artist with a commission, development support, career planning, and an opportunity for a full production, all within a collaborative environment of peers working across disparate art forms – including theatre, dance, music, puppetry, visual art, and new media. Each HARP artist receives significant long-term support of $125,000, which includes $50,000 in cash and more than $75,000 in equipment, space, and services over two to three years. Each residency is tailored to the needs of the artist.

Through HARP, HERE has developed such highly acclaimed works as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle’s All Wear Bowlers, James Scruggs’ Disposable Men, and most recently, Normandy Sherwood’s Psychic Self Defense (pictured above), to name a few. Since HARP’s founding, HERE has supported the work and career development of 165 lead artists and hundreds of their collaborators.

Each season, HERE premieres two to three of these Resident Artist productions as mainstage works. These innovative projects are grown in a diverse artistic community where artists receive career development resources and hands-on training. Through significant investment of time and resources, dynamic work within a strong community is created. 

HARP has been widely recognized as a unique model for artistic development for the field to emulate. In honoring HERE with the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, the OBIE Committee noted, “It’s become increasingly hard for artists to find a place to take risks, a safe haven where they can develop daring new work. One theater has regularly bucked the trend, making its mission to ensure that artists have a home for their research and development, and that theatregoers can sample the exciting results.” 

The 2024 HARP application is due February 1, 2024, and can be found at here.org.

Through HARP, HERE commissions and develops new hybrid works over multiple years. Throughout the year, resident artists show works-in-progress, develop workshop productions, and mount full–scale premieres. Projects currently continuing development in HARP include: 

Based on the research of the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects from Janani Balasubramanian is an operatic, immersive experience for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a lesser-known class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir. A translation across boundaries of language, gender, discipline, and generation. An artist’s son studies his physicist mother. She studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science—the story—of how things flow.

Choreographer Ximena Garnica and Video Artist Shige Moriya’s A Meal, a choreographic ritual of preparing, serving and eating together experienced as part performance, part installation, part concert, and part dinner.

With theaters reopened, Joshua William Gelb’s Theater in Quarantine is in a period of reinvention, exploring new, dynamic ways of using technology to reach hybrid audiences and this new project, [Untitled Miniature], will be the company’s most palpable expression of intimacy yet. 

Dream Feed is an electro-acoustic song cycle that drops family singing group The HawtPlates and the audience into a dream sequence – in the humor, terror, beauty, and allure of the active mind within a slumbering body. The HawtPlates utilize a vocabulary of gestures, lyrics, vocables, and exchanges to bring some of our most common shared dreams into collective view while playfully engaging the concept album as an interdisciplinary performance form.

Interdisciplinary performance Upstairs, In Our Bedroom places performance collective Same As Sister’s experiences as female identical twins of color next to the real-life story of outsider authors June & Jennifer Gibbons (a.k.a. The Silent Twins). Utilizing dance, text, mobile VR technology, and puppetry they will reveal the dual struggles to be recognized as individuals within a pairing and within a racist and patriarchal society.

Nia Witherspoon’s new work, Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School – inspired equally by the “bad bitches” of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples – presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.

 The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines—theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.

HERE’s standout productions include Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs’ Disposable Men, Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique and, this season Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram and Zoey Martinson’s The Black History Museum According to the United States of America.

Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk Nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony Nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.

The Turtles had the most cans

One of my favorite fall New York events is CANstruction down at Brookfield Place, 230 Vesey Street, near the World Trade Center. It is a free sculptural event running from November 2 -13 that does good work for New Yorkers. I had no idea this began in 1992 as I only came upon the event about five years ago. Canstruction® New York has donated over 2 million pounds of food to local food banks since 1993, and over 1.2 million pounds to City Harvest since 2006.

Stuffed or canned Winnie the Pooh is the cutest

This year 28 companies created wonderfully inventive sculptures made almost entirely from cans of food. Themes run the gamut of ideas and canned foods range from tuna to beans. Looking at the sculptures you wonder what came first the idea of the sculpture or the colors of the cans because the colors of the labels blend perfectly with the theme of the design.

50 years of Hip Hop

Winnie the Pooh, Mario, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle all come to life via corn, beans, peas and carrots. New Yorkers are represented as they stand waiting for the subway and the subway is an homage to the end of the Metrocard as OMNY takes control of our transport system. Sloths hanging from trees, polar bears on icebergs and giraffes with extended necks join our local pigeons to help feed the needy. Fifty years of Hip Hop is celebrated as well as new ideas in environmental technology.

Can it be true. No more Metrocards

Each work of art has a sign explaining the sculpture’s theme, the company that designed it, number of cans used and how many people will be fed by those cans. I walked around the two levels of displays viewing all 28 and noted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s KowaHUNGA had the most cans coming in at 5,852 which will feed 3,508 New Yorkers. I estimated that the average number of cans per sculpture this year is 3,100 cans totaling 86,800. That uncanny!!!!

Please step behind the yellow line while train approache

The displays are amazing and you need to look at them at all different angles because they will surprise you. A number of them I looked at and just saw a bunch of cans but when I took a picture and then looked at the snap, Mario, the subway rider and the MTA came to light on my camera.

It wouldnt be 2023 without a tribute to Barbi

This is a free event but donations of food are very welcome so when you go bring some green in the form of peas or beans.

I had no idea the cow was being beamed up until I looked at the picture