Articles: 2016
South Beach on the Cusp
[Editor’s Note: David Dunlap (b.1952) has been with the New York Times since 1975, and his current beat is writing and photographing architecture. I first met David because he was in the midst of an ambitious project—to photograph every single dwelling in Provincetown, Massachusetts (the artist colony at the very tip of Cape Cod), and write about the most interesting people who had ever lived in each house (see www.buildingprovincetown.com). David used some of my portraits of Provincetown artists and writers (i.e. Pulitzer Prize...
read moreTimeless Mosaics
[Editor’s Note: The 2016 exhibitions of a Roman mosaic floor from Lod, Israel and documentation of Hans Hoffman’s rare exploration of mosaic wall murals at the FIU Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami have caused us to consider examples of the role of mosaics over the past two millennia. So we asked art historian M. Stephanie Chancy to comment on the “Lod Mosaics,” NYU Professor of Modern Art Kenneth Silver to comment on Hans Hoffman’s mosaic murals, and the daughter of artist Pedro Pablo Silva to comment on the mosaic...
read moreThe Writer’s Room
It should come as no surprise that hotels have long been incubators of poetry and the arts. For 700 years, readers have been feasting on Chaucer’s tales of pilgrims sauntering to Canterbury from the Tabard Inn in Southwark. More recently, booklovers have been charmed by the exploits of Eloise at the Plaza and of Hemingway in the Ritz. Who doesn’t get giddy thinking about the Round Table of New York wits at the Algonquin or the bohemians at the Chelsea? And then there’s Eugene O’Neill’s famous last words from his death bed in a Sheraton...
read moreBuoyant City
Everyone has a plan to save Miami, ranging from Dutch water experts to Danish architects, Harvard grad students, Swiss urbanists, New York engineers, not to mention all the hydrologists and climatologists from around the world who’ve been weighing in on the subject of sea-level resiliency and climate change. Meanwhile, Miami continues to build higher and higher towers in flood-prone areas as if waiting for something, some deus ex machina, to come to the rescue and make it all right. Florida is the flattest, lowest state in the...
read moreThe Dynamic Jerry Robinson
My father, Sherrill David Robinson, known as Jerry Robinson, was born in Trenton, N.J. on New Year’s Day in 1922 and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 2011. In between, he did a lot of historic things. BATMAN Jerry was a 17-year-old journalism student at Columbia University in 1939 when he was discovered by Batman co-creator Bob Kane, who hired him to work on that fledgling comic as an inker and letterer. Kane, with writer Bill Finger, had just created the character Batman for National Comics, the future DC Comics. Within a year,...
read moreRising Waters
THE ADMIRAL by JAMES R. GILBERT was published in 2014. The novel portrays what Earth may be like at the end of the 21st century, when climate change and rising sea levels have dramatically altered Earth’s surface. This excerpt from The Admiral contains an edited narrative of how the Earth changed during the 21st century, as experienced by one extremely wealthy visionary who saw the coming collapse of human civilization and created Akkadia, a floating, remote and reclusive mid-Atlantic community of aging yachts to safeguard his family and preserve much of mankind’s accumulated art and knowledge.
read moreA New Spin Every Year
Editor’s Note: In 2006, noted art critic Elisa Turner wrote a profile of Debra and Dennis Scholl for ARTNews magazine, focusing on the Scholl’s unusual practice of allowing a different curator every year to arrange and hang artwork from the Scholl’s collection. The curated exhibition is on the display in the Scholl’s home for one full year, and then the process is repeated. With permission of Elisa Turner and ARTNews magazine, ArtSpeak is pleased to present Turner’s article. You can also view our Inspico video discussion with Dennis...
read morePillars of the New World Symphony:
Ana and Neisen Kasdin
Undoubtedly one of this country’s most outstanding and remarkable musical assets is the New World Symphony (“NWS”) which Michael Tilson Thomas (“MTT”) has created to bring gifted players for three year residencies to prepare them to be orchestral players. Formed in the late 1980s, the NWS will hold its GALA: 1000 on Saturday, March 12th at the New World Center to honor the thousand “fellows” who have matriculated through the New World Symphony. For the Gala, the Symphony will be conducted by...
read moreCherry Pickman
On Cognitive Dissonance You go to the art show, which is in memoriam of the dead artists the one whose death was accidental, the other one not so much. It isn’t enough to know that someone died, we need to know how in order to distance ourselves from any mortal likelihood. Can the sculpture act as political barometer? Even the poem has borders. The long walks you expose your skin to hoping to perfume yourself with place are taking you nowhere, are greening your sensibilities, which should not be confused...
read moreRicardo Pau-Llosa
Odds Double its species norm, or thrice, a great egret combs my slow garden, neck and head the very fraud of reed in the willow wind, picking off the dozed lizard and the rock-still toad. The size of a woman, or of the shadow common specimen cast on freeway slopes or the medians of turgid avenues. It reigns, the golden beaked and eye, ignoring the longanimous postman and me quiet in my dead car holding the wheel two-handed as if desire might steer the beast of awe to make a home on my lawn and ground the miracle....
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