Author Archives: Christina

COMMUNITY BLOOD DRIVE

West Village Community Blood Drive
Westbeth Gallery
57 Bethune Street
NY NY

Tuesday June 22, 2021
1PM – 7PM

Our Region’s blood supply has never been lower. COVID-19 has devastated our City’s blood supply over the past thirteen months, as many companies and non-profits have been unable to hold the large blood drives our blood centers often rely upon. When we put out a call for donations New Yorkers typically respond in remarkable ways. With thousands of New Yorkers getting vaccinated each day, everyone is hopeful the New York Metropolitan area is on the way to recovery from this catastrophic year. As New York bounces back in strides this Spring, we need everyone to make an appointment and donate blood to save lives. That’s why The Westbeth Artist Council is hosting another of their Community Blood Drives in support of New York Blood Center. We are encouraging all New Yorkers who are able to please donate blood. June 22nd is Primary Election Day. If you’re coming to Westbeth to vote, please come to the blood drive and donate lifesaving blood. This is an excellent opportunity to exemplify both civic duty and community good deed.

To schedule an appointment:

Click on link below:

https://donate.nybc.org/donor/schedules/drive_schedule/293577

or

Use your camera to hover on the QR Code and enter Sponsor number 71021

Please Bring:
Don’t forget to bring photo ID or NYBC donor card.
Face covering is required before entering the blood drive.
Eat well and drink plenty of fluids before donating.

Do not donate if you have:

a fever or other symptoms of COVID-19 (cough, shortness of breath,
or difficulty breathing)

had close contact with someone diagnosed with or suspected of
having COVID-19 in the last 14 days

been diagnosed with or suspected of having COVID-19 until 14 days
after your illness has resolved

NOTE: close contact is defined by CDC as being within 6 feet of an
infected individual for a prolonged period of time

Westbeth Movie Night
Artists and Models

Thursday June 10, 2021 at 7PM

FREE

Artists and Models is a 1955 American musical comedy film in VistaVision and marked Dean Martin’s and Jerry Lewis’s fourteenth feature together as a team. The film co-stars Shirley MacLaine and Dorothy Malone, also featuring Eva Gabor and Anita Ekberg in brief roles.

Rick Todd (Dean Martin) is a struggling painter and smooth-talking ladies’ man. His goofy young roommate Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis) is an aspiring children’s author who has a passion for comic books, especially those of the mysterious and sexy “Bat Lady.”

Covid Protocols

Limited capacity
Masks required for unvaccinated.
Masks recommended for vaccinated.

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Marya Zimmet
On the Road to Love

“I’m over-the-moon to report that my first CD, “On The Road To Love,” was released on June 10th

It is now available on most streaming and downloading platforms. Fresh, jazzy arrangements of folk/rock classics, jazz standards and lesser-know gems, with Tedd Firth on piano, Phil Palombi on bass, Mark McClean on drums, Nathan Childers on horns, and Pete Smith on guitar. Go to maryazimmet.hearnow.com for links to where you can hear it.”

Latest Review

Alix Cohen
June 21, 2021
CABARET SCENES.ORG

“Marya Zimmet studied music, took a three-decade detour for a doctorate and a “civilian” career, and rejoins the community with this outstanding CD. The song selection is varied and clearly personal. Zimmet expresses emotion with subtle inflection, key changes, and pauses, penetrating without volume or stress. Her beguiling voice often evokes a muted glow.

Arrangements by Tedd Firth, John DiMartino, Don Rebic, and Frank Ponzio—in combinations—reframe august material and creates freshness. Everything sounds contemporary in the best sense of the word. The musicianship is a treat.”

Read the entire review HERE

Special for Westbeth residents.

Please contact me through my website (maryazimmet.com/contact) to learn about special pricing and white glove service (hand delivery!).

To preview a song and preorder, go to maryazimmet.com/audio.


I decided to make a CD (my first) at the beginning of 2020. The timing of this project turned out to be – in a way – fortuitous. I started developing the repertoire in January, and by March, the Covid-19 pandemic had shut everything down. That spring, I wandered the empty streets of Lower Manhattan, the air unusually fresh and clean, practicing my tunes.

Find out more about Marya Zimmet HERE

Veronica Ryan
ALONG A SPECTRUM

Image: Veronica Ryan, Along a Spectrum (2021) Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Commissioned by Spike Island, Bristol and supported by Freelands Foundation. Photograph by Max McClure. Copyright Veronica Ryan. Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Spike Island

May 19 – September 5, 2021
Bristol, UK

Spike Island presents a major exhibition of new works by British artist Veronica Ryan (b. 1956, Montserrat). Supported by Freelands Foundation through the Freelands Award, this is Ryan’s largest and most ambitious exhibition in the UK to date.

Ryan is best known for her sculpture that is evocative of shapes, forms and objects from the natural world. Over the years, she has experimented with scale, material and technique while remaining focused on the interplay between conflicting opposites: revelation and concealment, container and contained, absence and presence. Her work sits at the intersection between materiality and idea, and enquires into the processes by which objects carry and construct meaning.

Made during an extended residency at Spike Island in Bristol, the works in Along a Spectrum examine environmental and socio-political concerns, personal narratives, history and displacement, as well as the wider psychological implications of the current pandemic. New works include cast forms in clay and bronze; sewn and tea-stained fabrics; and bright neon crocheted fishing line pouches filled with a variety of seeds, fruit stones and skins.

Fruits, seeds, plants and vegetables are recurring motifs in Ryan’s sculpture – they function metaphorically for the artist’s own sense of dislocation and, more widely, they allude to a history of trading across the globe. In Ryan’s work, personal experience is often conditioned by a sense of location. An important focus of her research is on the history of Montserrat and trying to identify its early culture prior to the arrival of the Europeans. As such, Along a Spectrum presents large groups of soursop skins and cocoa pods cast in clay and glazed with volcanic ash from Alliouagana, the name by which the native Caribs called the island of Montserrat.

– from Spike Island
Veronica Ryan at Spike Island

“I don’t know anyone who makes art for art’s sake.”

Read Veronica Ryan’s interview in The Art Newspaper

Kate Walter
Interview with SAGE Advocacy and Services for LGBTQ elders

Photo: Kamila Harris

SENIOR PLANET
June 3, 2021

Kate Walter
interview with Aaron Tax, Director of Advocacy SAGE, and Christina DaCosta, Senior Director of Communications.

SAGE  Advocacy Services for LGBT Elders was founded in 1978 and has grown over the decades since. It is now the world’s largest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBT+ older people.

LGBT older people are twice as likely to be single and four times less likely to have kids than their straight and cisgender counterparts.  This presents challenges for socializing, managing finances, going to the doctors, even changing a light bulb. These are all the things other older people rely upon their families for. LGBT older people generally don’t have that support network in place.

One of the stereotypes about the LGBT elder community is that they are better off financially but that’s not true. On the whole, LGBT seniors are worse off financially.  The stereotype creates challenges when we are advocating public policies that will help LGBT older people.

We are finding that while there are many folks who come out later in life due to greater societal acceptance of LGBT+ people, the opposite is also true – some LGBT+ elders actually go back into the closet. This can happen when trying to access eldercare, housing, and other services geared toward older people where staff and policies are not LGBT-friendly or culturally competent. SAGE’s National Resource Center on LGBT Aging is a great place for people to get resources and information.

Read the entire interview on Senior Planet

Beth Soll: Two Red Solos
and a review by Deborah Jowitt

Two Red Solos: A Formal Response (2021) 8 minutes

Beth Soll Choreographer
Ethan Mass Videographer and editor

Dancers
Beth Soll
Abby Dias

The formal nature of Two Red Solos grew out of special circumstances that were both limiting and stimulating. Because of Covid, we worked on uneven ground in a beautiful, green public park next to the Hudson River. We were regaled with the music of the nearby highway and the sounds of insects, birds, and people. The 50+ year age difference between dancer Abby Dias and me also influenced my choreographic decisions. The quarantine rules required us to stay far apart, so I choreographed two separate solos: one for each of us. Our cameraman and editor, Ethan Mass made it possible to create a filmed version of the two solos. In the film, we dance these individual solos at the same time, but often in two different frames. In the post-Covid era, we hope to join our solos in a duet.

Beth Soll bethsollandcompany.org

Deborah Jowitt Review

Artsjournal.com
May 27, 2021

Excerpt
Sometimes they’re together in the verdant space and the camera’s eye; at other times, each occupies half of a split screen. Co-director Mass doesn’t keep his camera still either.

Maybe one woman seems to hasten into a close-up. Maybe one screen blacks out for a second. The dancers rush away and become tiny, or hurry toward us, becoming larger. Briefly the editors layer one moving image on top of another. Cuts occur. One half of the screen may briefly go dark.

I love watching Soll and Dias slip into unison and then slide out of it. They also move in canons with each other and, once, build a fugue. The image the two create is—almost—that of a friendship: they like being creative individually but enjoy coming together to confirm their amity. The differences between them are as interesting as the similarities

Two red solos. The performers’ responses to the title may be formal, and the two of them never touch. but their simultaneous solos seethe with the implications of togetherness and isolation that at present shape our daily lives.

Read the entire review
https://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2021/05/red-on-green/

David Greenspan
Radio Play: The Memory Motel

Tickets: FREE

BOOK NOW

Written by David Greenspan
Directed by Morgan Green

Michael S. Michaels returns to a beach resort in order to piece together and better understand the fragments of his past. While he’s there, he encounters a series of eccentric characters with whom he discusses art, philosophy, and the peculiarities of memory. Obie-award-winning playwright and actor David Greenspan (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) returns to Two River with this brand-new radio play crafted with his unique blend of fancy, theatricality, and wit.

Cast

Joshua Avery Begelman
David Greenspan
Paul John
Keilly McQuail
Steven Ratazzi
Mary Schultz
Pete Simpson
Paco Tolson
Kevin Veloz

Reserve your free ticket and you will automatically be emailed the password to access the radio play in your confirmation email. In addition, the hour following your reservation you will receive an email with the login link, password and additional resources to enhance your experience.

BOOK NOW

You will be able to access the stream as often as you’d like through June 6/2021. Closed Captioning on an audio spectrum visualizer is available. Total listening time: 50 minutes.