Culture Vultures

Ruth Orkin - Bike Trip USA - exhibition We love bikes. We love photography. Having taken our own bike trip across the USA at age 20 this exhibition and book are particularly poignant, but you don't have to have crossed the USA on a bike to enjoy this show of the photographer Ruth Orkin's stunning work. In 1939, at the age of 17, Ruth Orkin, who grew up in Hollywood, crossed the United States, alone, with her bike, her camera (she received her first one at age 10) and only $25 in her pocket. This “bike trip” across the United States took her from Los Angeles to New York, where she planned to visit the World’s Fair. Her journey and her audacity, exceptional for the time, aroused the curiosity of the local press, which devoted numerous reports to her travels. She actually traveled less by bicycle than with a bicycle, crossing long distances by car, train, and bus, then using her bicycle to explore big cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston and San Fr…

JR at the Opera again RETOUR À LA CAVERNE A work by the artist JR, evoking Plato's cave, a place of knowledge and transmission, graces the façade of the Opera Garnier, another place of knowledge and transmission. As part of the restoration of the Palais Garnier, the Opera national de Paris invited the artist JR to decorate the scaffolding covering the monument with two successive installations. (Lucky for us because we missed the first one!) This project is a continuation of the artist's work of enormous pieces that have taken over various iconic sites around the world such as the Louvre Museum, the Trocadero esplanade, the Farnese Palace in Rome, the banks of the Seine, the favelas of Rio and bunkers of the WWII Atlantic Wall, just to name a few, each time as an invitation for viewers to change their perspective. Like an opera libretto, the artist metamorphoses the façade in two acts, the first in September and the second in November. Act I, which…

It’s been seven years since the Paris New York Heritage Festival (PNYH) first burst onto the summer circuit, spanning three continents and seven cities before the Covid 19 pandemic stopped it in its tracks. Unbowed, PNYH has grown new shoots, re-emerging as a sustainable, family-friendly fixture in the French capital, with a reputation for showcasing a new generation of artists and under-represented talent. Located on banks of the River Seine, the PHNY takes place this year on the 16 & 17 of September at the Parc André-Citroën in the 15 arrondissement. th Under the banner ‘Aux Arts’, the festival is one of just 50 projects selected by the Olympic Committee and the City of Paris for the Cultural Olympiad, celebrating the wealth and variety of culture in France.  PNYH embodies these values through its exceptional musical and artistic program which transcends borders, reminding us that music is a universal language that unites people. Each artist on stage represents a con…

● Festival Sonic Bloom ● 8-14 juillet Play concerts... without destroying the planet! Tour by bike along the Canal de Bourgogne with Jojoni Everybody loves a summer festival and France offers thousands to choose from. Sonic Bloom is a different kind of festival. It's an experimental sound experience that travels by bike. The first edition of Sonic Bloom was held in June 2021 in the community gardens of Dijon. It was a sort of end of confinement party. This second edition in 2023 is designed in two stages: first as a festival on the seam between the city and the countryside. A first weekend in Dijon and in the natural spaces of the Dijon conurbation, dedicated to encounters between musical, craft, culinary and vegetable practices, and participatory projects; then a bike tour along the Burgundy Canal: 200 km in six stages during which each evening will focus on and with the inhabitants and associations which are the life of the villages and cities bordering the canal. Natu…

6 May 16:00 Art historian and biographer Julia Frey will be at Bill & Rosa's Book Room to discuss her book Venus betrayed : the private world of Edouard Vuillard, a thought-provoking biography of a secretive turn-of-the-century French artist. Many have researched Édouard Vuillard, a prolific painter, for his contributions to the avant-garde. But what sets Venus Betrayed  apart is its attention to the figure behind the paintings. Frey uses Vuillard’s body of work and unpublished journals to access the interior state of the artist. Frey subtly reveals this life through his relationships with contemporaries from Toulouse-Lautrec to Mallarmé; the ideas that obsessed him; his often-tortured artistic process. Frey has produced a deeply intimate picture of the artist in life and at work. The result is a refined perspective into both the artist’s masterpieces and unfinished projects, as well as a striking argument for the relationship between artistic atmosphere and production.…

The Musée national Picasso-Paris hosts the first exhibition in France to bring together a group of major works by Faith Ringgold. She is an emblematic figure of a committed and feminist American art, from the struggles for civil rights to those of Black Lives Matter, and the author of very famous works of children's literature. Her work links the rich heritage of the Harlem Renaissance to the current art of young black American artists. Through her rereadings of modern art history, she leads a true plastic and critical dialogue with the Parisian art scene of the early 20th century, notably with Picasso and his Demoiselles d'Avignon. Born in New York City in 1930, Faith Ringgold grew up in Harlem, the northern part of Manhattan that became the symbolic capital of the cultural awakening of black communities between the wars. She spent her childhood in a thriving community of creators, musicians, writers and thinkers. She continued to live and work there as an artist and pu…

“RECONCILIATION” Wrapped in the joyous colors of Martin Parr and imbued with Henri Cartier- Bresson’s timeless portraits of humanity, RECONCILIATION is a satisfying last-minute holiday gift to yourself, alone or accompanied... and it’s up through January 29. The exhibition opened in November, launching an additional exhibition space called “The Tube” created by renovating an 18th century cellar located beneath the existing Fondation HCB at 79 Rue des Archives, 75003 Paris, France. The style of the two photographers is as opposite as can be: in the words of Cartier-Bresson, they come from “two separate solar systems.” Parr’s saturated, often garishly-colored images of the northern English working and middle classes document that population “at work and at play” during three different time periods: the early 1960’s, the mid ‘80s, and after 2010. Through his lens we see the bumpy transformation of working-class England from a grim, Dickensian manufacture-based economy to an …