The 2021 Yale Drama Series Prize, one of the theater world’s most prestigious awards for playwrights, has been awarded to Rachel Lynett for her play Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You Too August Wilson). Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel selected the recipient.
The play explores racism in the U.S. after a fictional second Civil War. Lynett, who identifies as queer and Afro-Latinx, writes dark comedies about complex, complicated women of color.
Front-Page Femmes:
The New York Times profiles choreographer Mayfield Brooks and their new work Whale Fall, filmed in the Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center and viewable online through Saturday 4/17.
Hyperallergic reviews Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life at MoMA PS1, noting the show frees the artist from “the lens that reduces her to a feminist painter and sculptor.”
NPR looks at the life and career of Laurie Anderson, who channels her emotional past into transformative, multidisciplinary art.
Artnet interviews writer Roxane Gay, a new art collector, who has acquired works by Julie Mehretu, Bisa Butler, Barbara Kruger, Mickalene Thomas, Jenny Holzer, Lorraine O’Grady, and more.
The New York Times profiles Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the famous painter’s sister-in-law, who is finally being recognized as the force who opened the world’s eyes to his genius.
Hyperallergic reviews Lucía Vidales’s exhibition Sudor Frío at New York City’s PROXYCO.
T, the New York Times style magazine, features interviews with Nan Goldin and Thora Siemsen and Julie Mehretu and Jessica Rankin for the issue’s “On Friendship” theme.
On April 22, the Academy Museum will premiere Breaking the Oscars® Ceiling, a free, virtual conversation with actors Whoopi Goldberg, Sophia Loren, and Marlee Matlin, and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.
The Guardian profiles the exhibition Women Take the Floor at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art.
Artnet reports on the arrest of Russian feminist artist Yulia Tsvetkova for “disseminating pornography” based on her artwork featuring the naked female body.
Variety profiles Women in Animation, a group working to help young women artists find a place in the business.
Shows We Want to See:
At the Mississippi Museum of Art, Piercing the Inner Wall: The Art of Dusti Bongé is the first retrospective of the actress, debutante, and Mississippi’s first Modern artist. The exhibition includes 65 paintings, 29 works on paper, and three sculptures, offering an in-depth look at her experimental career. Artnet recently profiled the artist. On view through May 23.
On view at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, Amy Sherald: The Great American Fact presents five new works produced in 2020 that extend the artist’s technical innovations, distinctive visual language, and consider the way Black American identity is shaped in the public realm. On view through June 6.
At the New York Botanical Garden, Kusama: Cosmic Nature is on view through October 31. The expansive exhibition features the artist’s monumental sculptures scattered throughout the 250-acre landscape, with some smaller works—including drawings, collages, and paintings—on view indoors. It is the first comprehensive exploration of the artist’s lifelong fascination with the natural world.