| Radically visual
Two years ago, Ricardo Viera embraced the idea of an exhibition of snapshots with the typical gusto of a Cuban Falstaff. The director/curator of Lehigh University's galleries and museum operation relished the notion of a show of everything from family pictures to experimental collages. He knew it would neon-light his belief that photography is a level field, that a photograph is a flat world.
Viera made just one major proposal to the exhibit's proponents, Donald Lokuta and Robert Yoskowitz, arts professors and owners of large collections of snapshots. Why not, he suggested, pair pictures by amateurs with pictures of similar subjects by renowned photographers represented in Lehigh's collection? Why not invite visitors to debate who takes, and what makes, a better photo?
Organized by Viera, Lokuta and Yoskowitz, ''Vernacular to the Masters'' is a visual, intellectual hornet's nest.
Laurie Metcalf
Right out of college, she and a group of Chicago friends started Steppenwolf Theatre, which grew into one of America's most distinguished companies. (Her 20-minute monologue in Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead is an off-Broadway legend.) Later, she picked up a little sitcom called Roseanne, which rewrote the rules of television comedy with its unblinking look at blue collar life. Now Metcalf is exercising her gift for being up to the minute on Broadway, co-starring in David Mamet's new comedy November. It's a Mamet play unlike any other, with the structure of a classic comedy in the Kaufman & Hart vein but filled with scabrous jokes on such hot-button topics as the torture of prisoners, campaign fundraising, the Middle East and gay marriage. Nathan Lane stars as a U.S. President willing to shake down the national turkey lobby to save his faltering re-election campaign, with Metcalf as his lesbian speechwriter, who's not above a little blackmail to get married on national television.
Robert Kulicke, 83; artist modernized frame design
Robert M. Kulicke, a painter, goldsmith, teacher, businessman, and designer who changed the look of postwar art by modernizing frame design, died on Friday in Valley Cottage, N.Y. He was 83 and had lived in Manhattan until about 18 months ago. The cause was pneumonia, said Roy Davis of Davis & Langdale Co., the gallery that represented Mr. Kulicke since 1974, when it was called Davis & Long. Garrulous, articulate, and confident, Mr. Kulicke was a man of many talents, interests, and passions. He painted and regularly exhibited small, delicate still-lifes of flowers, dollar bills or, often, a single pear. He helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation and to establish a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.
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