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Alexandra Peers
10/29/2009 03:45 PM
The first annual Tribeca Film Festival begins today in Doha, Qatar, the tiny, oil-rich Arabian monarchy on the Persian Gulf. A swank of celebrities—Robert de Niro, Ben Kingsley, Jeff Koons, Patricia Clarkson and directors Martin Scorsese, Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and R.J. Cutler (The September Issue) are attending the festivities, which will be headquartered at I.M. Pei's new Museum of Islamic Art. The event was cooked up by the Emir's daughter, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, 27, after she worked as an intern for the Tribeca festival in the summer of 2006. (Her first job was picking up breakfast pastries.) It's the first time the Tribeca group has expanded its franchise globally, and the woman helming the four-day event is festival executive director Amanda Palmer, a veteran of CNN and Al Jazeera. We asked her what it's going to be like:
ALEXANDRA L. PEERS: Why a Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar? Is that still Tribeca?
AMANDA PALMER: You have a very young population. 67% of the people here are under age 30. They're multilingual and well-educated. Incredibly, cinema is the number one entertainment here. [People go to the movies] once if not two times a week
PEERS: What kind of movies do the locals like?
PALMER: The Hangover was huge here—and midnight films are popular. But not the best of Hollywood films [are exported]. There's a lot of Egyptian films.
PEERS: You are originally from Australia. What surprised you about Qatar?
PALMER: People would be very surprised by Doha. For one thing, they really know how to have a nightlife because it's the coolest part of the day. It's a community that is financially not hugely challenged–the predominate population is ex-pats.
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09/16/2009 12:50 PM
Image courtesy of Sofia Maldonado
Pink, fleshy girls spray-painted on the side of Q subway car. Big, naked bodies scrawled on skateboard ramps. A high heeled goddess in day-glo pink drawn on a brick wall.
Two striking things about graffiti art by women: It's rare, and it's loud–big, bright and, most of the time, naked.
How come? "I think it's because it's empowering," explains curator and graffiti historian Karla Murray, whose buzzy graffiti exhibition opened on the rooftop of Gawker Media's Nolita offices last month. (Pieces from the show are now on view at the city's Clic Gallery through Sept. 27.) She added: "They are strong and sexy and can stand out among all the boys."
Right now, Murray and her co-curator husband James are putting together "Graffiti Gone Global", a sweeping international survey of contemporary graffiti. Premiering during Art Basel Miami Beach in December, it's an unusual graffiti show in that approximately one third of the artists are women. In the mix are Ecuadorian-born Lady Pink, perhaps the most famous female graffiti artist (her work in is the Elizabeth Sackler collection of feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Aiko (part of the Faile collective), and Sofia Maldonado, one of the few U.S.-based artists invited to the Cuban Biennial.
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07/10/2009 03:14 PM
Sportwear for Sportmen, 1965
If every era gets the swimsuit it deserves, what do string bikinis say about us? Today, Miami design museum The Wolfsonian opens two shows on ‘contemporary bathing culture'—basically, how the swimsuit reflected the social and political experiences of its time.
Fashion design has always shaped current ideas of what was healthy, desirable, glamorous, even hygienic, says Wolfsonian curator Marianne Lamonaca. It's no coincidence, she notes, that bathing-suit design changed most radically twice in the century: once when women got the vote-and again during the sexual revolution.
The exhibitions, "Beauty on the Beach" and "Sun Stroke Stimulus," look at just the last 100 years (the latter is contemporary photographs by Miles Ladin), during which time the curators locate four major influences on swimsuit design: the Olympics, new fabrics, Hollywood and public opinion on what was decent. (Coco Chanel and Christian Dior had a voice, too.)
"There's always been controversy over the revelation of the body in public," Lamonaca says, explaining thatmodesty ruled swimsuits until almost the 1920s; the bathing costume for women was a dress that included not only stockings, but shoes. Then, everything changed.
In 1919, World War I and its deprivations ended, women got the vote the following year, and Americans crushed competitors in water sports at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. Men's swimsuit design took a leap forward when U.S. Olympics champions Johnny Weismuller and Duke Kahanamoku endorsed fashionable new lines right after the games. Almost overnight, as their dress hemlines shrunk, women switched to sleeveless tank swimsuits made of wool jersey. (Chanel was showing sleeveless dresses.) Bathing caps topped off the look, covering up the bob haircuts that were all the rage at the time. (LEFT: POSTCARD, 1910)
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