Author: Fred Lapides

Michelangelo Lovelace’s Drawings of Nursing Homes at Fort Gansevoort

May 25, 2020
Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has devastated nursing homes across the United States, the gallery Fort Gansevoort is staging an online exhibition focused on the residents of such communities. As part of Fort Gansevoort’s web series “Seeing Through You,” the presentation, titled “Nightshift” and organized in collaboration with artist John Ahearn, will feature 22 drawings created by Michelangelo Lovelace during his 30 years working as a nurse’s aide in nursing homes throughout Cleveland, Ohio. Continue reading “Michelangelo Lovelace’s Drawings of Nursing Homes at Fort Gansevoort”

The Haunting of Drums and Shadows Sam Worley

| Sam Worley

Savannah is haunted. That’s the first thing tourists learn about this city at the northern end of Georgia’s hundred-mile coast—a notion solidified in the popular imagination by the success of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, both the 1994 book by John Berendt and the subsequent film directed by Clint Eastwood. Midnight revolves around a nouveau riche antiques dealer named Jim Williams. Berendt, formerly the editor of New York magazine, happened to be in Savannah in the early 1980s when Williams killed a roughneck rent boy; he chronicled the event’s reverberations through Savannah society, which he depicts as eccentric and decadent. “The whole of Savannah is an oasis,” an informant tells him. “We are isolated. Gloriously isolated!”

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Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19

– Los Angeles Review of BooksBy Ryan Boyd
–FOR A WHILE it has been difficult to be optimistic about American higher education, beyond the fortunes of a shrinking circle of “elite” schools. Just ask historian and professor Kevin Gannon, who introduces Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by claiming (and I mean this is literally the first sentence) that “it has never been more difficult to teach in higher education than in our current moment.” And, thanks to “strangulation” by neoliberal austerity budgets, things are wretched for students, too: “It has also never been more difficult to learn in higher education than in our current moment.” Nonetheless the former group is still expected to be intellectually “transformative”; the latter, transformed by and grateful for their collegiate experience. In a tottering empire’s declining institutions, where corporate ideology and standardized tests and student loans and vast battalions of adjuncts dominate reality, it’s hard to teach and learn. Continue reading “Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19”