Arts & Culture

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel try to reassess the meaning of time.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel switch seats, but try to remain A-1.

Kino Classics has released two films from the golden age of German cinema – films from the Weimar Republic, a particularly rich period for the arts that lasted from the end of World War I until the rise of Hitler.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel say "home."

Fifty-year-old South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho has made award-winning, box office hits for close to two decades.  Yet he had not gleaned the attention of mainstream American audiences until the 2019 feature, Parasite, which he directed and co-wrote.  Parasite won four major Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  It has made approximately $270 million, as of mid-March, and it currently is being adapted as an HBO series.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel are together, but apart.

Drawing on forty years of published work, Jay Rogoff’s "Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems" marks a milestone in the career. The volume presents over one hundred poems from earlier collections alongside forty¬-seven poems previously unavailable in book form.

Throughout his body of work, Rogoff interweaves craft and feeling as he contemplates immigrant ancestors, foreign adventures, baseball, ballet, and the uncanny entwinings of art and life.

Jay Rogoff is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including "The Art of Gravity" and "Venera." His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous journals, and he serves as dance critic for the Hopkins Review.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel swap seats without coming within 6 feet of one another.

The Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York is associated with summer in our region, but over the last few years, SPAC has begun offering programming year-round through collaboration with other community venues and organizations.

But, these are tough times – especially for the arts. CEO of SPAC Elizabeth Sobel is here to discuss the huge threat to survival all artists and arts organizations are confronting right now – and also discuss some of the ways art brings us together in times of uncertainty – and how one engages with art in an era of pandemic.

Elizabeth Sobol is the President and CEO of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel host a socially distant quiz.

Netflix recently debuted a new limited series called Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.  Directed by Kasi Lemmons and DeMane Davis, and executive-produced by LeBron James, the four-part series is a tribute to the first female millionaire entrepreneur in the United States.  Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American woman born just two years after the end of slavery into a family of slaves-turned-sharecroppers.  She manufactured and sold hair restorers and beauty products made specifically for women of color.

When the names of the world’s greatest film directors are discussed, the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa often enters the conversation.  As a screenwriter, director, and producer, he worked in Japan from 1936 into the 1990s.  His most productive period was in the 1950s and early 1960s and the films of that time, including Rashomon which marked Japan’s entrance onto the international film scene, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and Yojimbo, are considered classics. 

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel do a show based on an event that has since been canceled, but they have fun anyway!

Wild Nights with Emily sounds like a film about a rebellious teen who spends her nights at raves and overnight orgies.  It is not.  Wild Nights with Emily, which was released on DVD and other home-viewing formats this month, is an unusual independent feature film about Emily Dickinson, whom we grew up knowing as a prim recluse, a spinster-poet who didn’t socialize or have a very real passionate love in her lifetime, a woman who wrote of death and immortality.  It certainly is true that she was a homebody. She hid many of her works even from her family, and only a small portion of her 1800 poems were published during her lifetime.

BTG PLAYS! 2019-2020 Touring Show is "Magic Tree House: Pirates Past Noon," based on the book "Magic Tree House: Pirates Past Noon" by Mary Pope Osborne. This musical features a book by Jenny Laird and Will Osborne, lyrics by Randy Courts and Will Osborne and music by Randy Courts, with direction by Travis Daly.

Magic Tree House: Pirates Past Noon is an adaptation of the fourth of Mary Pope Osborne's award-winning fantasy adventure books from the Magic Tree House book series, which has sold more than 100 million copies and is available in more than a hundred countries around the world.

BTG PLAYS! Touring Show is a part of Berkshire Theatre Group’s year-round education program, which reaches 13,000 school children annually. Beginning in October and running through the school year, this production is appropriate for elementary and middle school aged children and family audiences, and is designed to introduce students to the excitement of live theatre.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel swap seats for a show on -ologies.

If ever a show deserved to be termed a “tragic musical,” its “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grille.”  

It’s common to call a puzzling mystery a head scratcher.

“Switzerland” is a mystery, playing at Curtain Call Theatre in Latham through March 14.   The play centers about famed mystery writer Patricia Highsmith.    It’s a head scratcher in a way that is not entirely complimentary.

Ferrin Contemporary is presenting "Nature/Nurture," a group exhibition of twelve contemporary female artists invited to explore the influence of gender and its impact on their practice. The show was organized in honor of Women's History Month in conjunction with FOREFRONT2020, a symposium on women in the visual arts taking place on the MASS MoCA campus.

The exhibition explores these ideas that range from direct interpretations of the natural world to more abstract notions, such as the construction of gender and the endowed role of women within their personal and professional careers. Works in clay range in form from individual vessels to composed still lifes and figural and abstract sculpture.

Considering the impact that the #MeToo movement is having on all professions, artists were asked to pause and reflect on the role gender plays in their artistic practice and to consider the nurturing experiences that have shaped them. To tell us more, we welcome Senior Curator of Visual Arts at MASS MoCA Susan Cross, an artist featured in Ferrin Contemporary's "Nature/Nurture" group exhibition Anina Major, and director of Ferrin Contemporary and curator of Nature/Nurture Leslie Ferrin.

  Derek McLane is an award-winning production and set designer for stage and screen. He’s designed for The Academy Awards, NBC’s live musical productions, and nearly countless theatrical productions around the country - including on and Off-Broadway.

 

His work is currently represented on Broadway in the opulent Bohemian-Parisian spectacular of the set for “Moulin Rouge!” at the Hirschfeld Theatre and in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” at The American Airlines Theatre.

The new exhibition “Celebrating Suffrage” at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York marks the 100-year anniversary of Congress’s ratification of women’s suffrage, the right for American women to vote in all government elections.

Women found unique creative outlets before and after they were officially recognized as full citizens of the United States. This exhibition explores the role of art as a vehicle for women, as individuals or in groups, to reflect, reform, or challenge social beliefs and political practices of their era.

“Celebrating Suffrage” examines how women created their place within the larger art community, adding an important vision that has often been overlooked or undervalued. This anniversary presents the opportunity to celebrate the contributions to subject matter, materials, and means of expression that women have made to the visual arts in the United States.

Miranda Hofelt is Curator of 19th-Century American Art at MWPAI.

WAMC's Ian Pickus and resident quizzer Mike Nothnagel play defunct football league categories.