Who:Michael G. Garber,Miss Maybell,Charlie Judkins What: Book talk with music Where:Ceres Gallery, 547 West 27th St. between 10th & 11th Aves., #201 When: Thursday, September 11, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $15), 6:30 Why: “This book celebrates women who wrote popular songs in the early twentieth century. These female composers and lyricists deserved greater opportunities and fame and to be more highly valued. Generations later, the same could be said for many of their sisters in songwriting in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Hopefully, looking at the past will inspire change in the future. To do this, we must travel in our minds back to what was, in effect, a different world.”
So begins historian, professor, scholar, and artist Michael G. Garber’s Songs She Wrote: 40 Hits by Pioneering Women of Popular Music (Rowman & Littlefield, March 2025, $36), an illustrated journey into that different world, focusing on women’s contributions to popular music, including ragtime, jazz, Broadway, and Hollywood. Featuring a foreword by Janie Bradford and Dr. Tish Oney, the book explores such tunes as Lucy Fletcher’s “Sugar Blues,” Lovie Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “The Down Hearted Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” Dorothy Parker’s “Serenade from The Student Prince,” and Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.”
Charlie Judkins and Miss Maybell will perform as part of book event at Ceres Gallery
On September 11 at 6:30, in conjunction with the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project, Garber (My Melancholy Baby: The First Ballads of the Great American Songbook, 1902–1913) will be at the nonprofit feminist Ceres Gallery for a free book talk with live performances by Jazz Age artists Miss Maybell and Charlie Judkins, surrounded by Carlyle Upson’s nature-based “Submerged” watercolors and Marcy Bernstein’s “Evocative Abstractions” paintings, which Bernstein says “invite viewers to look inward. They’re filled with allusions to the raw energy of creation itself,” a fitting sentiment that applies to Garber’s book as well. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $15.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The twelfth annual STooPS Arts Crawl and Block Party takes place on July 26 on Decatur St. between Lewis and Stuyvesant Aves. in Brooklyn, with live music and dance, workshops, and visual art on the stoops and shared spaces of Bedford–Stuyvesant. This year’s theme is “Echoes of Greatness: Celebrating Bed-Stuy’s Hidden Gems,” honoring the lesser-known treasures in the neighborhood. The festivities begin at 1:00 with a block party lasting until 7:00, hosted by Koku with ToniBNYC, a Kiddie Korner by Bridges: A Pan-Afrikan Arts Movement, collaborative visual art by Ovila Lemon/Mut’Sun, and healing workshops by Akika Flower Essences & Apothecary and Essence of Ase. There will be art crawls at 1:30 and 4:00, led by Shanna Sabio of GrowHouse NYC, with Carmen Carriker, Courtney Cook, Ariana Carthan/Wukkout!, Brooklyn Ballet, Qu33n Louise, Nia Blue, and Púyaloahí. Kendra J. Ross Works and Soul Science Lab headline the show. This year’s awardees are Ovila Lemon, Richard Cummings, Valerie Ferguson, Monique Scott, Larry Weekes, and Damon Bolden.
“The summer festival is more than a celebration — it’s a bridge between Bed-Stuy’s past and its future,” STooPS founding director Kendra J. Ross said in a statement. “By bringing art to the stoops, we make space for neighbors to connect across generations and experiences. In a time of change, this is how we honor what’s been while shaping what’s next — together.”
All events are free but advance registration is recommended.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
“Diane Arbus: Constellation” continues at Park Avenue Armory through August 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
DIANE ARBUS: CONSTELLATION
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Daily through August 17, $25 www.armoryonpark.org
Don’t look too hard for a theme to “Constellation,” the exciting and dramatic Diane Arbus installation at Park Ave. Armory. “The connection is that there is no connection,” curator Matthieu Humery explained at a press preview.
The exhibition fills half of the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, with a mylar mirror in the middle that makes it look like the entire space is populated by the seemingly endless parade of diverse people the New York City–born Arbus photographed during the course of her career, cut short by her suicide in 1971 at the age of forty-eight. There are 454 photos in all, arranged on gridlike beams that form a kind of maze, where visitors can take multiple paths, like walking through the streets of the metropolis that was her canvas; the setup also evokes an alternate subway map. The black frames match the black beams, giving it an organic feel.
The photos are placed at different heights, identified by small blocks on the floor and in a long list inside the official pamphlet; there are no detailed labels, making each photo, like each person she photographed, equal, whether a stripper, a drag performer, a political supporter, kids playing, a circus strongman, twins and triplets, a well-known artist, a corpse, a dominatrix, or swimmers at the beach. The only specific organization is the section that includes her breakthrough limited edition “box of ten,” which contains iconic, familiar images. Other favorites are scattered about in a colossal, inviting jumble. The lighting creates fascinating shadow patterns that have a ghostly presence on the floor.
“They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain,” Arbus wrote in a 1971 letter to Davis Pratt of Harvard’s Fogg Museum. “And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.” To take that philosophy to another level, numerous photos at the armory are backed by mirrors so visitors can imagine themselves being caught by Arbus’s lens and becoming part of the unique and welcoming community she built more than fifty years ago. “I would like to photograph everybody,” she wrote in the margin of a letter to photographer, graphic designer, and teacher Marvin Israel, seen in #120 in the show. Famous faces range from Tiny Tim, Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Mailer, and Roy Lichtenstein to James Brown, Charles Atlas, Peter Ustinov, and Jayne Mansfield, but Arbus treated all of her subjects as celebrities.
However, whereas we’re all taught to avoid making eye contact on New York City buses, subways, and sidewalks, you should take your time as you wander through the aisles, making friends with these hundreds of strangers, among them a young couple eating hot dogs in a park, an elderly gentleman apparently with three legs, a woman on a couch holding a baby monkey like an infant, a Jewish giant towering over his parents in their Bronx home, four members of the radical feminist group the Red Stockings, a transvestite on her bed with her birthday cake, a girl in a devil mask with a naked doll, a wax museum ax murderer, a boy clutching a toy grenade, a silhouetted couple watching a newsreel of a cross burning, kids playing baseball, two women at the Automat, and Ronald C. Harrison, the Human Pincushion. Most shots are posed, with many of the subjects looking directly into the camera.
“Constellation” offers a multitude of paths to take (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
I highly recommend not reading the titles of the works, at least not during your first trip around, to get the full impact of Arbus’s egalitarian view of humanity; each one of us is unique, yet we are also alike, and we basically all want the same thing out of life: happiness. Arbus’s photos inherently make us happy.
The prints were made by Neil Selkirk, a photographer who studied with Arbus and is the only person authorized by her estate to produce prints from the original negatives, using what he calls an “abstruse technical process.” He has cited A family one evening in a nudist camp as one of the works that stands out for him, holding a special place; it’s a 1965 gelatin print of a husband, wife, and child hanging out naked in a grassy field, the corner of a car’s tailfin visible on one side, all three people peering at us as if they have something better to do.
The display, sponsored by the LUMA Foundation, is supplemented with a short video of close-up eyes from Arbus’s photos, projected onto a freestanding wall in the drill hall, as well as, in the Board of Officers Room, two documentaries, including the ninety-minute What Diane Arbus Wasn’t Doing, and How She Wasn’t Doing It, a filmed conversation between Selkirk and Darius Himes from Christie’s.
“I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another,” Arbus wrote in her 1966 application for her second Guggenheim fellowship (which she received), “a certain group of young nihilists, a variety of menages, a retirement town in the Southwest, a new kind of Messiah, a particular Utopian cult who plan to establish themselves on a nearby island, Beauties of different ethnic groups, certain criminal types, a minority elite.”
Just another day in New York City, this time courtesy of Diane Arbus and Park Ave. Armory.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Henry Hintermeister, Retreat to Victory, oil on canvas (gift of Charles Lauriston Livingston, Jr. / courtesy of Fraunces Tavern Museum)
Who: Scott Dwyer, Lisa Goulet, Peter Hein, Seth Kaller, Charles (Chuck) Schwam, Lloyd S. Kramer, Louise M. Joy, George Bruton Delaney, Moses L. Delaney, Richard Sylla, more What: Independence Day open house and “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty” symposium Where:Fraunces Tavern Museum, 54 Pearl St. When: Friday, July 4, $1 in person, free virtually, 1:00 – 5:30 Why: The Lower Manhattan Historical Association’s It Happened Here turns to the founding of America on July 4 with an Independence Day open house and afternoon symposium at Fraunces Tavern Museum, home to a banquet on June 18, 1776, honoring General George Washington’s military victories. “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty,” which can be attended in person or online, features members of the Sons of the Revolution, the American Friends of Lafayette, history professors, collections managers, military veterans, descendants of James Armistead Lafayette, and others. Visitors can explore such exhibitions as “Path to Liberty: The Emergence of a Nation,” “Fraunces Tavern: Over 300 Years of Building History,” and “Lafayette: A Hero’s Return” before attending the symposium prelude “Liss and the Culper Spy Ring in Historic Lower Manhattan” at 1:00, followed at 1:30 by the symposium itself.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Rachel Elizabeth Seed turns the camera on her mother and herself in A Photographic Memory (courtesy of Capariva Films and Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber)
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (Rachel Elizabeth Seed, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Friday, June 27, through Sunday, June 29 newplazacinema.org
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, June 30, 7:00 www.ifccenter.com
“I have no memories of my mother. And when I set out to find her a few years back, she was basically a stranger to me,” Rachel Elizabeth Seed explains in her award-winning debut documentary, A Photographic Memory. “My dad never talked much about her except to tell me that she was an accomplished writer and photographer way ahead of her time. But it wasn’t until I became a photographer myself that I started to become curious about the work she created and whether in the pages of her transcripts and contact sheets, her journals and her audio tapes, I might also find her.”
Rachel’s mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a pioneering photojournalist and filmmaker who died suddenly and unexpectedly in June 1979 at the age of forty-two, when Rachel was eighteen months old. While working on “The Motherless Project” (2004–11), in which she interviewed and photographed forty women who had grown up without a mother, Rachel found, in her father’s attic, a box of reels her mother had made, and decided to go on a journey to learn more about her by investigating her legacy while also dealing with her own sense of loss. “I thought that telling their stories would make me feel less alone. But what do you do when your greatest loss is something you can’t even remember?” she says.
A Photographic Memory is not about having total recall but is a moving and cathartic love letter constructed from family pictures and home movies, journals and letters, and personal remembrances centered around Sheila’s “Images of Man,” an audiovisual project for Scholastic in which she spoke with and photographed some of the most important and influential photographers in the world, compiling fifty hours of audio interviews with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, William Albert Allard, Brian Lanker, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, and Eliot Porter in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rachel also goes through Sheila’s phone book and calls up her old friends and contacts. “Your mother was a remarkable storyteller,” one instantly says.
Rachel visits with ICP founder Capa, Davidson, and Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, who remember Sheila well and talk about the interview sessions fondly. She meets with Scholastic president and CEO Dick Robinson, who was extremely close with Sheila; he happily recalls when Rachel worked there as an intern and how Sheila decided that she did not need a cameraman accompanying her on her Scholastic assignments. Among the others sharing memories are Sheila’s brother, Barry; Sheila’s ex-boyfriend Gabriel Edmont, who gets teary; her father, Joe Turner, a successful photographer himself; and Sheila’s old friend, author Lael Morgan, who refers to her and Sheila as “lifeaholics . . . Sheila had to see the world.”
Sheila’s relatives, including her father and grandfather, had experienced severe oppression in their native Russia and did not want to leave America once they arrived. “Many members of my family will not travel outside of US borders. It is only there that they feel safe. Maybe that’s one reason why I have an insatiable desire to travel everywhere and to see everything,” Rachel reads from her mother’s autobiography. Rachel also re-creates scenes from the interviews, bathed in mysterious black-and-white and filled with memorable quotes.
“I’m tired of being lonely,” Allard tells Sheila in Virginia in 1972. “Photography, it’s what I do, but it is not totally me.”
In his Paris living room in 1971, Cartier-Bresson offers, “Life is very fluid. Sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, ‘Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.’ There’s no repetition. Life is once forever.”
“You have a lot of your mother in you,” Davidson says in the same New York City apartment where he spoke with Sheila in 1971. He also advises, “I think probably one of the most dangerous things that one can do is to look at themselves.”
Rachel admits, “Revealing myself scares me. What am I hiding?” But she is soon turning the lens on herself, not only discussing her relationship with her boyfriend, Joseph Michael Lopez, and whether she wants to have children but also observing herself in the archival footage she finds. Watching home movies, she says as if addressing her mother, “I saw you moving for the first time, family footage of your childhood, and then of your wedding. And then, at the end, I saw the two of us together. I only remember not having a mother, but here is a little girl who has a mother. And in this perfect arc of time, we’re together.”
It’s an intimate moment that gets to the heart of the film, which Rachel directed, wrote, and produced; it was edited and cowritten by Christopher Stoudt, shot by Rachel, Lopez, and Drew Gardner, and scored with a tender gentleness by Mary Lattimore and Troy Herion. A Photographic Memory is a vivid and poignant celebration of craft, of family lost and found, of film and photography and mothers and daughters. It will have you searching through your own albums, slides, and reels, finding long-forgotten gems. It is sad that, with the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media, future generations will not have these opportunities to establish and reestablish personal connections with the past, as everyone is now a photographer and a filmmaker, posting away online, each picture fading away as soon as the next one is uploaded.
Rachel says, “The camera was always present,” which was a rare thing back then, when each click had to be made carefully, with limited availability on every roll. With A Photographic Memory, Rachel has given us a special treasure grounded in the art forms used by her mother, her father, and her with such joy.
A Photographic Memory is screening June 27–29 at New Plaza Cinema and June 30 at IFC Center; each show will be followed by a Q&A with Rachel Elizabeth Seed, along with Danielle Varga on June 27, Stoudt and Judith Helfand on June 28, Dami Akinnusi, Jill Campbell, and Liz Nord on June 29, and executive producer Kirsten Johnson on June 30 in a special encore from DOC NYC 2024.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible, oil on canvas, 1632–33 (National Gallery of Canada, purchased 1953)
Who: Rukhl Schaechter, Adina Cimet What: Yiddish tour of “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” Where:The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. When: Friday, June 20, $40.25, 11:30 am Why: The Jewish Museum exhibition “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” is a surprising look at the Dutch fascination with the story of Esther, King Ahasuerus, Queen Vashti, Mordecai, and Haman (boo!!). Artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Lievens, Aert de Gelder, and Jan Steen painted depictions of the biblical story that is related in the Megillah, which is read on the holiday of Purim; the show is supplemented with beautifully designed scrolls and contemporary works, including Fred Wilson’s 1992 Queen Esther/Harriet Tubman. Curators Abigail Rapoport and Michele Frederick make a strong case connecting the events surrounding Esther with Jewish immigration to the Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648); as Rapoport writes in the catalog, “The Dutch, who saw themselves as religiously and politically oppressed by the Spanish monarchy, found in the Book of Esther a viscerally apt analogy for their own liberation and associated their war of independence with the Jewish people’s struggle with, and ultimate triumph over, the ancient Persian Empire.”
The exhibit continues through August 10; on June 20 at 11:30 am, Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter will lead a one-hour tour of the show in Yiddish, along with sociologist Adina Cimet. Tickets are limited and include general admission to the museum, which is also hosting the terrific “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity” exhibition.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Playwright Sara Fellini stars as Caravaggio in spit&vigor’s Nec Spe (photo by Nick Thomas)
NEC SPE: THE FINAL CONFESSION OF BRUTE PAINTER CARAVAGGIO
The Players Theatre
115 MacDougal St.
Friday, June 20, and Saturday, June 21, $20-$55, 7:30 www.spitnvigor.com
In past productions, the New York City–based spit&vigor has staged works dealing with such real-life figures from centuries ago as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley (Mary’s Little Lamb), Irish madam Dorcas Kelly (The Wake of Dorcas Kelly), the Booth brothers (The Brutes), and Hungarian serial killer Elizabeth Báthory (Blood Countess).
The company is now reaching back to its 2019 show, Nec Spe (No Hope), which was initially presented with Nec Metu (No Fear); the former featured Adam Belvo as Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the latter Sara Fellini as his contemporary, Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Lomi Gentileschi. This time around, troupe cofounding artistic director Fellini, who wrote the plays, will take on the role of Caravaggio, and it will be staged at spit&vigor’s tiny baby blackbox space at the Players Theatre, where I saw the excellent Anonymous in February.
In a January 2022 twi-ny talk with Fellini, she noted, “I’ve always been into history. I have trouble relating to the modern world. . . . So, while a lot of the ideas and prejudices of the past are nonsense and based in ignorance and inexperience, I do think there’s a lot to be learned from people who spent all of their time noticing, negotiating, and navigating other human beings.”
Directed by Megan Medley, the play, which deals with art, gender, politics, and murder both in the past and how it relates to what is happening today, will have two more performances, June 20 and 21, and tickets are almost gone, so act fast to check out this unique exploration of an important and influential artist.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
