Erica Galvin

If you’re planning a trip to the Netherlands, do try to fit in Nijmegen, the country’s oldest city. Having originally cohered as a Roman military camp back in the first century B.C., it became at the end of the first century A.D. the first city in the modern-day Netherlands to receive the official designation of municipium, which made Roman citizens of all its residents. Not that Nijmegen stands today as an open-air museum of Roman times. You’re less likely to glimpse traces of its city wall or amphitheater than to come across such thoroughly modern developments as the “dynamic living and working area” of Winkelsteeg, currently under construction — and even now turning up Roman artifacts of its own. ARTnews‘ Francesca Aton reports the discovery, by archaeologists working on the Winkelsteeg excavation, of “a blue glass bowl estimated to be around 2,000 years old.” Strikingly colored by metal oxide, its craftsmanship looks impressive and its condition astonishing: “with no v...

Dance videos are having a moment, fueled in large part  by TikTok. Professionals and amateurs alike use the platform to showcase their work, and while the vast majority of performers seem to be in or barely out of their teens, a few dancing grandmas have  become viral stars . ( One such notable brushes off  the attention, saying she’s just “an elderly lady making a fool of herself.”) You’ll find a handful of dancers happy to make similar sport of themselves among the 52 celebrated, mostly middle-aged and older choreographers performing in And So Say All of Us,  Mitchell Rose ‘s chain letter style dance film, above. Witness: John Heginbotham ‘s spritely bowling alley turn, complete with refreshment stand nachos (4:10)… Doug Varone ‘s determination to cram a bit of breakfast in before wafting out of a diner booth (5:15)… And the responses  David Dorfman , who both opens and closes the film, elicits aboard the 2 train and waiting on the platform a...

The influential exhibition, which opens in April, will lean toward the conceptual, with particular attention to Native artists and the U.S.-Mexico border. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3nZYNui via IFTTT

The archive documents the lives and suffering of the Kusserow family, who were among many from the religious group to be persecuted by the Nazis because of their faith. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3H1wymJ via IFTTT

More than two decades ago, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross published a piece on Bob Dylan in what many would then have considered his “late” period. “In the verbal jungle of rock criticism, Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms,” Ross writes. “His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or mystification.” Despite having long possessed exalted cultural status, and been subject to the attendant intensity of scrutiny and exegesis that comes along with it, “Dylan himself declines the highbrow treatment — though you get the sense that he wouldn’t mind picking up a Nobel Prize.” As it happened, he picked one up seventeen years later , in a clear institutional affirmation of his work’s being, indeed, literature. But what (as many have asked about the work itself) does that mean? In the video essay at the top of the post , Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter , examines Dylan’s literary powers through the microcosm of one song.  “All Along the Watchtowe...

“At roof-top level, Rome may seem a city of spires and steeples and towers that reach up towards eternal truths,” said Anthony Burgess of the great city in which he lived in the mid-70s. “But this city is not built in the sky. It is built on dirt, earth, dung, copulation, death, humanity.” For all the city’s ancient grandeur, the real Rome is to be found in its brothels, bathhouses, and catacombs, a sentiment widely shared by writers in Rome since Lucilius , often credited as Rome’s first satirist, a genre invented to bring the lofty down to earth. “The Romans … proudly declared that satire was ‘totally ours,'” writes Robert Cowan , senior lecturer in classics at the University of Sydney . “Instead of heroes, noble deeds, and city-foundations recounted in elevated language,” ancient Romans constructed their literature from “a hodgepodge of scumbags, orgies, and the breakdown of urban society, spat out in words as filthy as the vices they describe.” Little wonder, perhaps, that ...

771 million people – one in ten – do not have access to clean water close to home. Since 1981, international charity WaterAid has been working to change this. Their latest appeal is titled Thirst for Knowledge – aiming to bring clean water and decent toilets to tens of thousands of girls in Nepal and around the world. The goal: to “help ensure they have an equal chance to learn in dignity and safety.” As part of the initiative, WaterAid is collaborating with award-winning photographer and activist Poulomi Basu (b. 1983) on an evocative new series. Sisters of the Moon is inspired by women and girls the artist has met over the past 10 years, as well as her own experiences of being raised in Kolkata. Through powerful symbolism, the images explore gender-related violence, menstrual taboos and climate change. These are issues which face women across the globe. As such, Basu has chosen to create a fictional dystopian world, using Iceland’s striking natural landscape as a backdrop. The ar...