Peter Libbey

In Episode 2, two years into the investigation, half the country has heard of Baby Hope, but the detectives are still no closer to discovering her real name.

The mystery that unfolds over the succeeding episodes resembles the sort of true-crime narrative made popular by podcasts like “Serial” and “In the Dark.” But this time, the creators are not journalists or sound engineers, but members of the law enforcement agency that pursued the case for more than 20 years and (spoiler alert) finally charged a man with the crime.

After decades of seeing its work depicted by others in ventures like ABC’s drama series “NYPD Blue,” the New York Police Department has begun to mine its own material for a true-crime podcast, “Break in the Case,” which debuted last week.

It joins several other law enforcement agencies around the country that have decided that podcasts are an effective way to polish the image of the police, humanize them, explain the intricacies of their work and enlist the public’s help in gathering information.

“The way that we’ve traditionally disseminated information is standing on a soap box and yelling at people about what’s happening,” said Lt. Saul Jaeger of the Mountain View Police Department, outside San Francisco. “That’s not listening, and it doesn’t allow the community to be truly engaged.”

The Mountain View department developed its podcast, “The Silicon Valley Beat,” several years ago and said it had been happy with the results. Early next year it will release a parallel series about its investigation into the murder of a 21-year-old Ethiopian immigrant in 1985.

“One of the best tools that we can use to connect with people is stories,” Jaeger said. “At the end of the day, that’s what people remember.”

The New York project is directed by Jill Bauerle and Edward Conlon, a former detective who became a best-selling author (“Blue Blood” and “The Policewomen’s Bureau”).

Last year Conlon, who retired in 2011, returned to become director of executive communications for Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill. He began trying to inject more storytelling into the department’s communications strategy, writing and posting long narratives like “Old Hays and His Descendants: The Legacy of the Last High Constable of New York City” and “The War at Home: Remembering Foster and Laurie” on the police website. But he found the results disappointing.

“People weren’t going to the website for long-form nonfiction,” he said. “They were going for traffic closings and Civil Service test information.”

So Conlon and his departmental collaborators — Bauerle, the series’ executive producer, and Kenzie Delaine, a producer and writer — decided to create a podcast that would be very different from one that the department had produced several years ago, which focused on distributing practical information like event announcements and street closings.

“It’s such an intimate medium,” Bauerle said. “A lot of what police officers and detectives say is filtered through other sources,” she added. “To have them telling their own stories is very powerful.”

The first season of “Break in the Case” will cover three investigations. Five episodes written and narrated by Conlon will trace the “Baby Hope” case, which was revived by an anonymous tip in 2013.

A single episode, scheduled for release in December, will focus on the efforts by detectives to identify a woman whose remains washed up along the Brooklyn waterfront in 2015. It will be titled “Monique” for the tattoo found on the victim’s leg. Bauerle, who wrote the episode, said she hopes it will aid investigators in turning up new leads.

Larry Davis, who wounded six officers in a 1986 shootout with police, will be the subject of the season’s final episodes. New installments are to be published online weekly.

Jane Kirtley, an expert on the media, cautioned that nonfiction podcasts from sources other than news organizations or academic institutions were not necessarily impartial.

“It seems important to recognize this for what it is: a public relations exercise,” said Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “The stories that are being told are being told from the perspective of law enforcement. It’s not journalism.”

But the podcast’s creators said they were committed to reflecting with accuracy the details of the crimes they will discuss.

So, in the case of Baby Hope, the producers interviewed the various people involved in a complicated investigation that stretched over two decades.

Sean Kenny, a former police sergeant who was among the first on the scene when Baby Hope was found, recalled dealing with his supervisor at the time, a crusty lieutenant.

“He said: ‘Kenny, this is a big deal. Be careful and take your time. Do it right.’”

In 2013, Baby Hope was finally identified as Anjélica Castillo. Later that year, police charged Conrado Juárez, the brother of a woman who was caring for the child, with the killing.

Juárez confessed, but later said his admission had been coerced and pleaded not guilty. He spent five years in jail awaiting trial, a delay partly caused by a dispute over whether a New York Times reporter who had interviewed Juárez in jail could be forced to testify in the case. Juárez died of complications from cancer last year, still in custody and awaiting trial.

Joseph Reznick, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of internal affairs, who as a commander of detectives led the investigation for many years, recalls on the podcast why detectives pursued the case for so long. After all, the police precinct in that Upper Manhattan neighborhood recorded 121 other homicides that year.

“What made this one different,” he says on the podcast, “was the fact that it was a child.”

This article originally appeared in

For This Crime Show, the NYPD Holds the Camera

In Episode 1 of a new podcast, New York City police officers find the body of an unidentified 4-year-old girl in a cooler near the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan. Technically, she is “Homicide No. 79” of 1991, but the detectives, some of whom have children of their own, rename her: Baby Hope.

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance and power of this gift,” Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s director and chief curator, said. “The scale of it and the depth of it is mind-blowing.” The bequest, which includes the pieces by Tompkins and works by more than 400 artists from across the country, will account for about 15% of the art collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is affiliated with the University of California.

Leon’s collection will help introduce the public to African American quilt makers other than the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose work was showcased in a celebrated exhibition that Rinder helped bring to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002. (In his review for The Times, Michael Kimmelman called the show’s 60 quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”) “Gee’s Bend, which a lot of people know about now, happily, that’s one small town in one state in the South,” Rinder said. “Eli’s collection is a broad overview of hundreds of other towns and the work that was made in them.”

Two exhibitions of quilts from the bequest have already been planned. The first, a retrospective of Tompkins’ work, will open Feb. 19, 2020. The second will follow in early 2022 and focus on the others artists represented in the collection, like Willia Ette Graham and Arbie Williams.

The breadth of Leon’s collection and its emphasis on Tompkins’ quilts are closely linked. It was a chance encounter with Tompkins at a flea market in the Oakland, California, area in 1985 that convinced Leon, a psychotherapist, to dedicate his life to collecting quilts by African American artists.

Tompkins, whose real name was Effie Mae Howard, didn’t make herself easy to find. She had begun quilting seriously in her 40s and when her work started to attract attention, she used a pseudonym, fought hard to maintain her privacy and rarely parted with her pieces. Leon was one of the few to whom she revealed her true identity and sold her work regularly. Tompkins died in 2006 at age 70.

Once he had persuaded her to share her work, Leon was immediately taken by Tompkins’ daring designs and use of unconventional materials like velvet and fake fur. His passion for her quilts led him to buy as many as he could and also inspired him to seek out work by other African American quilt makers in the Bay Area.

To trace the lineage of the practitioners whose art he had fallen for so deeply, Leon traveled to Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, where Tompkins and some of the other artists had roots, to conduct research on the tradition of African American quilt making and collect pieces. His home back in Oakland eventually became so crowded with quilts that he built a two-story addition to accommodate them. In 1987, he organized a first exhibition of quilts from his collection at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum.

Despite Leon’s recognition of the quilts as substantial pieces of art, it has taken some time for the collection he assembled to be seen that way by others. “I believe that sexism and racism, not to mention classism, have each played a role in shaping the history of art as we know it,” Rinder said when asked why this body of work hasn’t received more attention. The quilts in Leon’s collection, which were predominantly made by African American women, have been particularly affected by these prejudices, he said.

Jenny Hurth, the executor of Leon’s estate, said that he chose to leave his collection to the Berkeley museum because Rinder was among the first people in the art world to recognize the value of the quilts he had acquired. “He knew that if he left them in Larry’s hands, his idea that these were works of fine art would be carried forth in some way,” Hurth said. Rinder organized the first solo exhibition of Tompkins’ work at Berkeley in 1997 and included her work in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Leon’s original plan, Hurth said, was to place his collection in multiple museums, including Berkeley, but he died before plans for this dispersal could be made.

Rinder will resign from his position at the Berkeley museum in March, but Catherine Koshland, the president of the museum’s board and the University of California, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for undergraduate education, said that his departure would not affect the care of the bequest. “Eli Leon’s collection is a transformative gift,” she said by email. “And we’ve made a sustained commitment to sharing it with scholars and the public for many years to come.”

African American Art Quilts Find a Museum Home in California

Almost 3,000 quilts by African American artists — including more than 500 by Rosie Lee Tompkins, a quilt maker whose formally inventive work has helped elevate the standing of the discipline in the art world — are heading to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as a bequest by Eli Leon. Leon, who died last year, was a voracious collector and champion of African American quilting.

Dance Theater of Harlem was established in part to show that black dancers could excel at classical ballet. When the company was looking for a place to perform for a mixed audience, “the Guggenheim opened up its doors and presented this performance in 1971,” said Duke Dang, general manager of Works &amp; Process.

“We’re really proud to recognize how forward thinking both institutions were and to celebrate that,” he added.

The new season, announced on Monday, also includes a preview of Ballet West’s production of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer’s reconstruction of a rarely seen Balanchine ballet from 1925, “The Song of the Nightingale,” or “Le Chant du Rossignol.”

Visitors to the museum will be able to see excerpts from the piece performed on Sept. 29 in advance of its American premiere in Salt Lake City in October. The performance will be accompanied by a discussion among Hodson, Archer, Ballet West’s artistic director Adam Sklute and Victoria Simon from the Balanchine Trust.

Other dance offerings include discussions and performances by members of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Washington Ballet.

Audiences at the Guggenheim this fall will also have the opportunity to get a peek at theatrical productions before they go onstage in New York. On Sept. 9 cast members from “Seared,” a new play by Theresa Rebeck set to begin performances at MCC Theater in October, will perform highlights from the show; Rebeck and the production’s director Moritz von Stuelpnagel will also share their thoughts. Peter Dinklage, of “Game of Thrones” fame, will appear with director Erica Schmidt to give a taste of Schmidt’s musical adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac” on Sept. 28. The New Group’s world premiere production will have its debut in October.

More information on the fall Works &amp; Process season can be found at worksandprocess.org. Tickets go on sale July 29.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/at-guggenheim-works-process-looks-backward-and-forward.html" id="44f147fa-3fd7-39e4-a678-4a6d846c51ab">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Dance Theater of Harlem will return to the site of its official New York debut as a part of the fall Works &amp; Process season at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The company, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, will perform Arthur Mitchell’s “Tones II,” portions of George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments” and a piece by Robert Garland in the museum’s rotunda on Sept. 30.

At Guggenheim, Works & Process Looks Backward and Forward

<h1>NEW YORK — This year the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival will expand its mission of challenging artistic and geographical divisions by highlighting work that also troubles the boundaries between fact and fiction, self and other, past and present.</h1>

This updated focus comes from Courtney Geraghty, the festival’s new curator. “When I think about what lines need to be crossed in 2019, I don’t think they’re the same lines that needed to be crossed when the festival was founded 13 years ago,” she said in an interview. The battle to make artwork more interdisciplinary, she added as an example, “has more or less been won.”

For her inaugural season, Geraghty wanted to apply the festival’s transgressive ethos to new areas, including generational differences and some of the more basic concepts we use to order our world.

The director Cyril Teste’s “Opening Night,” which kicks off the season Sept. 12-14 at the French Institute Alliance Française’s Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan, is not merely another work that blends theater and film. His adaptation of John Cassavetes’ screenplay for his 1977 film of the same name subtly incorporates elements from the life and career of Isabelle Adjani, the show’s main performer. The infusion of the actress’ autobiographical material, along with Teste’s nightly changing of stage directions, helps to turn the piece into a reflection on how we can be transformed by the roles we play.

A new play by Peter Brook and his creative partner Marie-Hélène Estienne raises similar questions about the role of art. In “Why?” the 94-year-old director and his collaborator interrogate themselves, their audience and their actors by asking “Why theater? What’s it for? What’s it about?” The introspective piece, which promises to be informed by Brook’s nearly 80-year career in the theater, will run Sept. 21-Oct. 6 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn as a part of the 40th-anniversary season of Theater for a New Audience, which commissioned the play along with CICT/Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and several other arts organizations.

The Crossing the Line roster also includes several dance offerings. Among them is Jérôme Bel and Catherine Gallant’s dance portrait of Isadora Duncan, which will make its American debut on Sept. 25 at Florence Gould Hall. “SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING,” a solo by Germaine Acogny and Mikaël Serre, performed by Acogny, that addresses her personal journey from Africa to Europe and back, through the lens of Greek tragedy, will follow at La MaMa Sept. 26 and 28.

A full schedule for the 2019 Crossing the Line Festival can be found at crossingthelinefestival.org. For more information on Theater for a New Audience’s coming season visit tfana.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/arts/crossing-the-line-festival-challenges-itself-to-evolve.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Crossing the Line festival challenges itself to evolve

For her inaugural season, Geraghty wanted to apply the festival’s transgressive ethos to new areas, including generational differences and some of the more basic concepts we use to order our world.

<h1>NEW YORK — No less a critic than Charles Dickens was appalled by the way New York in the 19th century housed its prisoners in the dank, overcrowded and smelly precincts of “the Tombs,” the city jail in lower Manhattan.</h1>

“Such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!” he wrote in 1842.

Yet every day into that dark world walked a woman who brought the inmates care, compassion and practical help. For these efforts, Rebecca Salome Foster, a volunteer who dedicated herself to humanitarian work after the death of her husband, came to be known as the “Tombs Angel.”

A sympathetic ear, a zeal to investigate their cases and a willingness to plead their cause with judges were among the blessings she brought to the prisoners, many of them poor, none of them yet convicted of the crimes with which they were charged.

When she died in 1902, a victim of the Park Avenue Hotel fire, an effort to honor her arose almost immediately, resulting in the installation of a 700-pound marble monument in the city’s old Criminal Courts building. But when the court was torn down in about 1940, the monument disappeared from public view for decades, hidden away in the bowels of various storage spaces.

Now the monument, rediscovered and refurbished, is being reinstalled in the lobby of the New York state Supreme Court this month, a tribute to Foster and also part of a wider effort to recognize the many women whose contributions to the city have never been properly honored.

“Timing is everything, and there’s all this interest now in the dearth of tributes to deserving women, and here we had one that dates back to 1904,” said John Werner, chief clerk and executive officer of the civil branch of the court.

Beyond this project, New York is working to address the fact that so few of its public monuments feature women by creating a series of new ones, including figures of Billie Holiday and trailblazing Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

Foster’s spirit of service was recognized in her own day by the City Club, which started the campaign to create a monument to her. Admirers noted how Foster, beginning in the 1880s, had not only helped the jailed, but also offered food, money, clothing and job-training advice to the poor of lower Manhattan.

Greg Young, one of the hosts of the New York City history podcast “The Bowery Boys,” said that by the time Foster began working there, The Tombs was “already a total hellhole.” Because it was built atop the poorly filled-in Collect Pond, he said, the jail had major structural problems that disrupted its sewage, drainage and water systems. It was also terribly overcrowded, with several prisoners usually filling cells designed for one.

That jail was shut down and replaced the year Foster died, with a new building that was itself shut down in 1941. Several iterations later, the city’s jail in that neighborhood is now officially known as the Manhattan Detention Complex. Informally, it’s still called the Tombs.

Soon after Foster’s death, important judges joined the campaign to honor her. So did President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave money to the project. The monument they helped to create consisted of a marble bas-relief and a medallion likeness of Foster by Austrian-American sculptor Karl Bitter, with a bronze frame by his American collaborator, Charles Rollinson Lamb.

At some time while in storage, the bronze frame and the medallion disappeared. The surviving element, the relief depicting an angel holding a vulnerable figure, is scheduled to be installed in the court building at 60 Centre St. on Tuesday and rededicated June 25.

“We sort of dropped the ball when we lost track of it and didn’t immediately restore it to public view when the old criminal court building was torn down,” Werner said. ”

Werner was critical to rescuing the monument from oblivion. The piece had turned up briefly, dirty and damaged, during a survey of city-owned art that registered its existence in 1983 and sent it out for some conservation work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But no plan for what to do with it came together, and it was ultimately put away again.

Almost two decades later, a relative of Foster, Jeremy Ann Brown, who served on a New York panel that reviewed judicial conduct, contacted Norman Goodman, longtime county clerk of Manhattan. She said she recalled that her great-aunt might have once been honored with a monument. Did he know where it was?

They found it in storage, but again a plan to place it in public view never materialized.

Werner, though, had sat in on a meeting where the monument’s future was discussed, and a few years ago took it upon himself to restart the process. His first stop — finding Jeremy Ann Brown — was not easy, because her last name was so common.

But an online search in 2014 turned up a possible email address for her, and they managed to reconnect.

“Twenty years ago, we would have been toast,” Werner said.

It wasn’t long before the Municipal Art Society, the New York Public Design Commission and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services came on board, too. The project drew funding from the Paul &amp; Klara Porzelt Foundation, which has previously supported projects of this sort.

The project’s $44,000 price tag included a complete restoration of the work by A. Ottavino Corp.

Brown, who lives on Cape Cod, is scheduled to attend the rededication this month and said she is happy that her perseverance won out. She said she had been fascinated as a child by a scrapbook about Foster that she found in the attic of her home in Rockland County, New York.

“Over the years, I would leaf though it with my mother,” she said, “and she would tell me stories about the Tombs Angel. I always knew she was very special.”

Werner’s persistence also paid dividends.

“Hope springs eternal,” Werner said, “and, somehow or other, as badly damaged and abused as this monument was, it survived. Surviving is the key.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/arts/design/new-york-monument-tombs-angel.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Yet every day into that dark world walked a woman who brought the inmates care, compassion and practical help.

An angel of New York, regaining her glow

His collaborative meditation on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise” will make its American debut from Sept. 20-22 as a part of the fall season of NYU’s Skirball Center.

While “White Noise” is being billed as an adaptation, Fish said, “It’s a show that is very freely inspired by the novel.

“It’s more a conversation with the novel than an adaptation,” he added.

This freedom with the source material, which tells the story of a death-obsessed professor contending with an environmental disaster, is evident in the show’s script, which Fish devised by homing in on one of Delillo’s stylistic quirks: His use of lists. “What I did was I took everything that I thought was a list in the novel, and I had a kind of rule for myself for what that was, and that’s the text,” he said.

He will use these selections from the novel, which will be performed in a one-man show by Bruce McKenzie, in dialogue with a film that Fish made with Jim Findlay and 19 teenagers from Freiburg, Germany, where the piece received its premiere at the Theater Freiburg.

The film, Fish said, is a series of scenes that respond to the novel but “in a kind of slightly ‘off’ way, not a very direct or literal way.”

The Skirball season begins Sept. 6 with “BAD NEWS! i was there ...” a site-specific work by JoAnne Akalaitis that examines the character of “the messenger” in the works of playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare. The season also includes the world premieres of two Skirball commissions: “Underneath the Skin,” John Kelly’s solo dance theater piece about the life of Samuel Steward, a gay writer, scholar and tattoo artist (Oct. 11-12); and “The House of Forbidden Flowers,” a collaboration between choreographer Richard Move and director Ong Keng Sen inspired by the plays of Jean Genet (Nov. 15-16).

A full schedule is at nyuskirball.org. Tickets go on sale June 5.

This article originally appeared in <a id="cc0fa829-dd13-3819-ae33-ff57cc5402be" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/theater/white-noise-daniel-fish-american-debut.html">The New York Times</a>.

Daniel Fish's 'White Noise' set for American debut

NEW YORK — New York fans of Daniel Fish’s Tony-nominated production of “Oklahoma!” will soon have the opportunity to experience another remix of an American classic by the director.

But Socrates also repels. We know of him only from the work of others, and even Plato, who seemed to have held him in high regard, paints him as a pugnacious and ironic figure — someone who insistently dispelled comforting notions and sought to overcome the tendency to mythologize.

This complicated man, and how he was received by later generations, is the subject of Tim Blake Nelson’s new play, “Socrates,” now in previews at the Public Theater as a part of the Onassis Festival in New York City. Running through April 28 at the Public Theater and La MaMa, the festival offers theater (including “Antigone” staged as a comedy), music (like a concert exploring the songs of refugees) and talks that focus on this year’s theme: democracy.

After attending an early performance of “Socrates,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor and the author of The New York Times Magazine’s column “The Ethicist,” spoke with me about the philosopher, the sometimes strained relationship between philosophers and society, and how to deal with critics of democracy.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

PETER LIBBEY:Were you surprised to learn that there is a new play about Socrates? Our society doesn’t tend to celebrate philosophers.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I can’t say I was super surprised, because people write plays about all kinds of things. The challenge in writing a play about Socrates is that Plato already wrote more than a dozen episodes of Socrates talking to people. In a way, you’re in competition with Plato.

If somebody was going to write a play about a philosopher, Socrates would be an obvious one to pick, because he had this interesting life in which his philosophy and his philosophizing came into the public life of his society and led to his being condemned to death.

LIBBEY: But wasn’t Socrates an enemy of the arts? In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates banishes poets, including dramatists, from the perfectly just city. Do you think that philosophy and theater are in some kind of tension with each other?

APPIAH: I think they can be. It’s brought out in the dialogue with the poet in Nelson’s play. One way of thinking about this philosophical skepticism about the arts is as a conflict between logic and rhetoric. The skepticism about the arts is that they will lead us away from the truth. This is true, of course. Poetry isn’t just about saying what is so. It’s about saying it in a particular way.

I don’t share this Platonic skepticism about the arts, but you can see how you get there. One worry is just that Socrates is preoccupied with truth, and fiction doesn’t even aim at truth directly. The other worry is — and this is why Socrates, in this new play, argues with the Athenian politician — is a worry about fiction as being something that can be used to confuse us, to get us to go along with things or believe things that aren’t so. The problem isn’t that it’s not aimed at truth, it’s that it can be used to assist in the propagation of falsehoods.

LIBBEY: We tend to credit ancient Athens with the invention of democracy and also with the birth of philosophy. But are these two things even linked? After all, Socrates was condemned to death by democratic Athens.

APPIAH: I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to try to say when philosophy begins. But I think that this play brings out the fact that there can be a conflict between the philosopher and the polity. Socrates thinks that the search for truth is the search for how to live, because he thinks that if you know the truth, it will tell you how to live. For him, the search for truth is an ethical thing, it’s about guiding the conduct of your life. But, as you can see in the play, he’s interested in understanding for its own sake.

Now, if you’re trying to get on with things — and politics is a practical art — having someone stop you and say, “I know that works in practice but I want to understand the theory of it,” is not very helpful. So philosophers can be an irritant in any political system but especially in a democracy, because they’re likely to seem, as Socrates does, to be looking down on the ordinary citizen who doesn’t have what the philosopher considers a decent understanding.

LIBBEY: Socrates was viewed as dangerous because he questioned his city’s most fundamental norms and values. Can a democratic society accommodate those whose questioning goes so deep?

APPIAH: You have to have the confidence that democracy is sturdy enough that even the critics of democracy cannot undermine it simply by raising questions. If you don’t have it, then you’ll want to silence people who, by their questioning, seem to undermine democratic institutions. My own tendency is to think that our democracy is robust enough that we don’t have to worry about that, that we can allow people to make arguments against our fundamental assumptions and institutions and the institutions will survive.

Athens is just starting out on this. They’re emerging from a period of nondemocracy, and you can see why you might be worried that someone who questions democracy could end up undermining respect for the institutions. That might lead back to tyranny or oligarchy. They don’t have full confidence that the system can be given a rational defense. And I think its true that a lot of politics does depend a little bit on magic and mystery.

LIBBEY: It is easy to admire Socrates from afar. But is it fair for us to assume that we’re so different from and better than the Athenian citizens who put him to death?

APPIAH: Some very thoughtful and decent people loved him, so he must have had something endearing about him. Plato, while certainly disagreeing with him about certain matters, admired him enormously. But Socrates must have been intensely annoying, in ways Nelson’s play brings out.

Execution isn’t our response to people who try to unsettle our cherished beliefs, but we don’t have a huge amount of patience. If Athens had had our technology, I’m sure Socrates would have been widely blocked on social media.

LIBBEY: On April 15, you’ll be discussing the relationship between theater and democracy, with the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and the Public’s artistic director Oskar Eustis. What, for you, is the connection between the two?

APPIAH: For us at the Public — and I’m on the board of the Public, so I sort of have a strong sense of how we all think about this — one of the main things we’re doing is trying to be a theater for this democratic society.

The thought is that great drama, great art, helps in the discourse of a society to think about what we should be doing. The Socrates play does this, as do all of Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays. They help us reflect on what’s going on in our society, about the displacement of workers or the complexity of race relations and so on. Democracy is, among other things, about a kind of shared public deliberation.

LIBBEY: How do you think Socrates would conduct himself at a panel discussion in Manhattan in 2019?

APPIAH: You wouldn’t be able to get him to make an opening statement, because he would say, “I don’t know anything.” But as soon as anybody started saying anything, he’d be asking you to make your arguments clearer — he’d be challenging your assumptions. He’d want us see that the standard stories we tell ourselves aren’t good enough.

“Socrates” runs through May 19 at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. It is part of the Onassis Festival 2019, at the Public Theater and La MaMa, through April 28.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e5437f3c-f4c7-33af-a4de-7f1c7422c351" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/theater/socrates-democracy-public-theater.html">The New York Times</a>.

Socrates Questions, a Contemporary Philosopher Answers

Almost 2,500 years after his death, Socrates continues to fascinate. The Greek thinker is seen, by some, as the father of philosophy, a martyr for the cause of freedom of speech and even as a kind of secular saint.

Socrates questions, a contemporary philosopher answers

The gift will help create new studio space, which will be named for Jody Arnhold, who is also the founder of the Dance Education Laboratory there.

Arnhold said the donation was motivated by her affection and respect for the 92nd Street Y, especially with regard to its place in dance history. Modern dance in New York, she said, started at the 92nd Street Y. “In the ’30s there was no place else to see modern dance and a small cadre of people came to the Y to watch Martha Graham and those early dance pioneers who created the dance form,” she said.

Arnhold also cited education as a reason for her gift. “Probably 3,000 dance artists and educators have come to the Dance Education Laboratory and today there are close to 500 dance teachers in New York City Public Schools,” she said in an interview.

Laurence Belfer, chairman of the board at the 92nd Street Y, said, “To have Jody as a partner with us, to think through what the physical space should look like at the Y and who should populate it for the 21st century is a real gift, not just of money but also of talent and resources that we plan to put to good use.”

This spring the Harkness Dance Center is contributing to the celebration of Merce Cunningham’s centennial with performances and other events. Through Saturday, the center is hosting Ellen Cornfield, an alumna of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, whose company will perform two repertory works and “Portal,” a new piece.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2ca4ce1e-6f64-4d69-a715-e1e4aa8a39d3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/arts/dance/harkness-dance-center-92y-expansion.html">The New York Times</a>.

Harkness Dance Center Set to Expand Thanks to a $5 Million Gift

NEW YORK — The Harkness Dance Center at the 92nd Street Y is expanding thanks to a $5 million gift from Jody Gottfried Arnhold, a board member for the organization, and her husband, John.

Harkness Dance Center set to expand thanks to a $5 million gift

But on Thursday, the Hammer Museum at UCLA announced that more than 35 contemporary artists, including Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins, will donate pieces to raise money for the museum’s new Artist Fund. Their work will be auctioned off in New York at Sotheby’s in May.

Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer, said that support is a testament to the closeness between the museum and the artists it exhibits. “Many of the artists in the auction have had long and deep relationships with the Hammer,” she said by email. “In a lot of cases we offered them their first museum show in Los Angeles.” Philbin cited Mark Grotjahn, Kaari Upson, Jonas Wood and Kevin Beasley as examples.

She also mentioned Mark Bradford, “a close friend and partner for the museum over the last 20 years,” whose first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “Scorched Earth” was at the Hammer. Bradford’s contribution to the auction, a mixed-media painting titled “Scratch Pink” (2018), is estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million.

The auctions, set for May 16- 17 at Sotheby’s New York, will be preceded by public exhibitions of the work in Los Angeles at the UTA Artist Space, from April 17-20, and in New York at Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning May 3.

The drive to raise money for the Artist Fund, which will support the work and exhibition of emerging artists, is a part of the Hammer’s $180 million dollar capital campaign. Since February 2018, the museum has raised more than $140 million of its goal.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7f4c33ce-19f3-4363-9d05-e15bc8423552" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/arts/design/hammer-museum-auction-at-sothebys-will-benefit-young-artist-fund.html">The New York Times</a>.

Hammer Museum auction at Sotheby's will benefit artist fund

Artists can be reluctant to part with their work, especially if they’re not being paid.

On Thursday the museum announced two site-specific commissions from contemporary artists Wangechi Mutu and Kent Monkman. A third contemporary artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, will also debut a new seven-channel video installation at the Met this spring.

“If you take all of them together, it is clearly a statement that shows the Met, in it’s main building, engages with contemporary art and contemporary artists in a way that is bold but also playful,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director, in an interview. Playful, for Hollein, means “using the building itself and some of our more public spaces as areas of intervention, engagement and interaction with the audience.”

On May 30, the Robert Lehman Wing atrium will host the world premiere of Kjartansson’s “Death Is Elsewhere.” Hollein said the Icelandic artist’s installation will weave together “music, poetry, intimacy and landscape into a fully immersive environment.”

Mutu, a Kenyan-American artist known for her sculpture, film and performance work, will create a collection of sculptures for the niches in the museum’s facade. This will be the first time that art has been displayed on Richard Morris Hunt’s 1902 facade. The sculptures will be on view from Sept. 9 to Jan 12, 2020.

Hollein said the plan is for Mutu’s installation to be just the first iteration of an annual facade project by a notable contemporary artist.

The second commission, multiple large paintings by Kent Monkman made for the Met’s Great Hall, will be unveiled on Dec. 19. Sheena Wagstaff, chairman for modern and contemporary art at the Met, said that Monkman’s works will “deal with that sense of arrival that any visitor has when they step over the threshold and into the Great Hall.”

Hollein said the commissions and Kjartansson’s piece could be seen as a “counter argument” to the notion that the closing of the Met Breuer is a sign that the Met is decreasing its engagement with contemporary art. But he said that the exhibitions were part of the museum’s long-standing commitment to the field, not something created to address this perception.

Wagstaff echoed Hollein, saying: “This is just the beginning. There will be more to come, different types of responses and possibly different spaces too.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1db7c92d-48ad-4296-87f3-a02adee3bf5b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/arts/design/the-met-will-use-its-facade-and-great-hall-to-showcase-contemporary-art.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Met will use its facade and Great Hall to showcase contemporary art

NEW YORK — As the Metropolitan Museum of Art prepares to close the Met Breuer, where, among other things, it staged multiple exhibits of contemporary art, the museum is making a point of staging high-profile exhibits from contemporary artists in its flagship space on Fifth Avenue.

Lopez Ochoa will accept the award, which comes with a $25,000 cash prize, on June 15 at the Jacob’s Pillow season-opening gala in Beckett, Massachusetts.

Pamela Tatge, director of Jacob’s Pillow, described Lopez Ochoa, a Colombian-Belgian, as “a global citizen” and said “she creates rigorous works of great beauty and intensity in hybrid contemporary and classical ballet vocabularies that enable dancers to truly realize themselves.”

Lopez Ochoa, 45, is particularly appreciative of the recognition from Jacob’s Pillow because, she said, “they honor an artist for who they are, the uniqueness of their way of working, their way of thinking.”

But as Lopez Ochoa pointed out, what distinguishes her choreographic work can be difficult to pin down.

“I am chameleon,” she said. “When you see my Ballet Hispánico pieces or the ones at Dutch National Ballet, you cannot guess that it’s the same choreographer.”

She said that sometimes her flexibility has been “a sort of pain point” for her but that joining the list of previous winners, which includes Kyle Abraham and Michelle Dorrance, helps to reinforce her confidence in her approach.

“I make work for people,” she said.

Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerísimo” will be performed by Ballet Hispánico as a part of the company’s season at the Joyce Theater in New York beginning March 26. The piece is a René Magritte inspired, athletic exploration of the relationship between clothing and identity. Dance Theater of Harlem will debut an expanded version of Lopez Ochoa’s “Balamouk,” previously seen at City Center’s Fall for Dance in 2018, at Jacob’s Pillow in July.

This article originally appeared in <a id="afc4fd0f-2c4e-4dc4-9856-6034884c94f2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/arts/dance/annabelle-lopez-ochoa-wins-jacob-pillow-dance-award.html">The New York Times</a>.

Lopez Ochoa Wins Jacob's Pillow Dance Award

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, a versatile choreographer whose work includes flamenco, hip-hop, classical ballet and contemporary dance pieces, is the recipient of the 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, the organization announced Wednesday.

Lopez Ochoa wins Jacob's Pillow Dance Award

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/arts/dance/annabelle-lopez-ochoa-wins-jacob-pillow-dance-award.html" id="30f1c4bd-7826-3c0c-a3fa-b5a23064fd43">The New York Times</a>.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, a versatile choreographer whose work includes flamenco, hip-hop, classical ballet and contemporary dance pieces, is the recipient of the 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, the organization announced Wednesday. Lopez Ochoa will accept the award, which comes with a $25,000 cash prize, on June 15 at the Jacob’s Pillow season-opening gala in Beckett, Massachusetts.

But these panes, nine of them, most of which weigh between 750 and 1,000 pounds, have a special purpose: They’re here to create a more than 800-square-foot transparent cube in the middle of the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The cube is the centerpiece of Es Devlin’s set for “The Lehman Trilogy,” a play by Stefano Massini about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers, the financial firm whose inglorious demise sits at the symbolic center of the 2008 financial crisis.

New York Times critic Ben Brantley called Devlin’s creation “a time machine” in his review of the production (the English version is an adaptation by Ben Power) at the National Theater in London. This appeared to be true when, during the construction of the cube, a recording of the actors blared over the speakers in the hall. Some of the glaziers turned their heads to find its source. For a minute or so, the actors’ disembodied voices played across the half-finished set, and it felt like a séance was being conducted in the ruins of a hypermodern temple.

This effect will only be heightened when the creative team arrives — preview performances begin March 22 — but for a few hours Friday, an uncanny glass box was the star of the show.

It took roughly five hours for a team of eight glaziers and two men working a hydraulic manipulator equipped with gigantic suction cups to move the mammoth glass pieces into place. Amid the sound of carpentry, voices and the city, the team members could be heard quietly coordinating their movements in Russian. When asked if this job was more complex than others he had encountered, Yuriy Fursenko, one of glaziers, shrugged and said no, not after 20 years of working with glass. Gesturing to his surroundings, he added, “It is a new experience,” he added.

Jim Leaver, production manager of “The Lehman Trilogy,” explained that the panes had to be custom made in New York because their unusual size and shape made it impossible to ship them efficiently from London or purchase them here ready made.

The team moved the panes into place by first picking up one pane at a time off a stack against the wall with the hydraulic arm and pushing it to the lip of the stage. The glaziers then fit the pane into a wooden dolly, attached hand-held suction cups and guided the glass into position. From there, they put the glass on the floor and nudged it so that it lined up perfectly with the gap in the structure before lifting it together and fixing it to the frame with screws and panels. After eight painstaking and successful installations, the glaziers gathered to finish their task. But it was not to be. The final pane was cracked during unpacking. After an intense conversation, the team found a solution, confirming, once again, that oldest of theatrical clichés — “the show must go on.” The last piece was replaced and inserted Monday.

Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s founding president and executive producer, compared the glass cube to a building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the 20th-century modernist architect known for his austere steel and glass creations. But its function, she explained, extends beyond its form: “This beautiful glass cube is really an actor in the work. Its incredible transparency and glow focuses your attention in such a special way on this story.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="cd05a60b-305f-4c8a-b6f6-37a82378ca07" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/theater/lehman-trilogy-glass-box-park-avenue-armory.html">The New York Times</a>.

How Do You Build a Giant Glass Box? Very Carefully

NEW YORK — The panes of glass do not look out of place here on the Upper East Side. They could easily be going into an office building or luxury apartment in this neighborhood.

How do you build a giant glass box? Very carefully

<h1>After spending years behind the scenes as an artistic and executive director of various arts organizations, Kristy Edmunds will take center stage March 25 in Chicago to receive the inaugural Berresford Prize from United States Artists. The prize, which will be given annually to a cultural practitioner for their work on behalf of artists, comes with an unrestricted award of $25,000.</h1>

The new prize is named for Susan V. Berresford, a co-founder and current trustee of United States Artists, an organization that attempts to show the value of artists to American society.

Edmunds is the executive and artistic director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. Previously, she has served as the founding executive and artistic director of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and the inaugural consulting artistic director for the Park Avenue Armory in New York, among other positions.

“Art doesn’t just occur on its own — it’s made, shared, and recognized because spaces and conditions are created for it to happen,” Ann Hamilton, a United States Artists trustee, said in a statement. “Kristy is one of those condition makers whose visionary leadership and sensibility has helped so many artists make their work possible.

When asked about her approach to the projects she’s involved with, Edmunds emphasized that her focus is always on “listening to the integrity of the idea” an artist has. And then, she said, she tries to understand “how that idea is going to find form from where it’s starting.”

For an accomplished facilitator committed to receptive listening, stepping into the spotlight, even for a night, can be a slightly uncomfortable experience. Receiving this award, Edmunds said, is “profoundly humbling” but also “extremely strange and surprising.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="4d059162-9264-47fb-aa95-39b609b79b3f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/berresford-prize-kristy-edmunds.html">The New York Times</a>.

Inaugural Berresford Prize honors behind-the-scenes work in the arts

The new prize is named for Susan V. Berresford, a co-founder and current trustee of United States Artists, an organization that attempts to show the value of artists to American society.

<h1>NEW YORK — Life often isn’t easy for small performing arts venues in New York. Even beloved spaces can struggle with the city’s high rents and competition for fundraising dollars. But JACK, an interdisciplinary performance space in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood, is showing that it is possible to thrive.</h1>

On Tuesday, Alec Duffy, the co-director of JACK, announced that the organization has signed a 10-year lease to move into a larger home.

JACK is known for hosting experimental and politically inclined theater, dance and music performances, as well as community forums on issues that are relevant to its neighborhood. Its new venue will be at 18 Putnam Ave., just a short walk from its current site, and it will include a backstage area, a lobby, space for an administrative office and a slightly increased audience capacity. The aim is to open in midsummer. JACK’s current lease ends March 31.

Duffy said the move was made possible by conservative budgeting, unexpected grants and a little bit of real estate luck. “We had a very good year last year, so we’re coming out of 2018 with a significant surplus, which is going toward building the space out,” Duffy said. “And the rent is pretty much on par with what we’re paying now.” But he acknowledged that the decision also includes “a huge leap of faith that the JACK family of supporters and their network can help us make this dream possible.” A fundraising campaign will help raise money for the new space.

JACK will embark on this venture with a new co-director, Jordana De La Cruz, whose appointment was also announced Tuesday. De La Cruz, who was program manager at the Park Avenue Armory, will be the organization’s first full-time co-director. She succeeds DeeArah Wright, who is now the director of education at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and a JACK board member. De La Cruz is no stranger to JACK. She directed Cristina Pitter’s “Decolonizing My Vagina” at the venue in 2018.

While Duffy strongly emphasized that the desire to upgrade JACK’s space was motivated by a desire to better support the artists it hosts and helps to cultivate, he also mentioned that the current JACK office is in his living room. “It’s tricky,” he said. “The mixing of the personal and the work is pretty fluid right now, and as we’re welcoming new employees and artists it will be a real boon for us to have an actual office on site.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="af96901e-ae58-4b49-adaa-b94ee0e529ae" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/theater/jack-brooklyn.html">The New York Times</a>.

JACK arts venue finds a new home and some new leadership