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spiritual reflections on art

KYOTOGRAPHIE KG+ Select: Masahiro Usami’s (宇佐美雅浩) Community Manda-las (April 17, 2024)Photo © by Masahiro Usami

KYOTOGRAPHIE KG+ Select: Masahiro Usami’s (宇佐美雅浩) Community Manda-las (April 17, 2024)

October 13, 2024 | , ,

Masahiro Usami creates art, photographic mandalas, by undertaking a journey, as much relational as through time and space, to understand and capture the essence of a community’s journey in collaboration with that community. In his words, “Each individual photograph [in his long-running mandala series] features a central figure, all of whom come from different regions and standpoints, and then distributed in their environs are the people and things that express the world of that particular figure, just like the form of a Buddhist mandala painting.” His latest depicts the confrontation between citizens and developers over a proposed radical redevelopment of a beloved and historic park in the heart of Tokyo.

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When the Sun ComesPhoto © by Alex Joseph

When the Sun Comes

March 6, 2024 |

Maya Keren's five-piece band Careful in the Sun is about to embark on its first mini tour, with support from CRS, and I reached out to Maya to learn more about their music and vision, which fuses elements of jazz and pop and draws inspiration from black queer...

Alix Bailey Reminds Us That Painting Is Light and So Are WePhoto © by Alix Bailey 2022, “Alex and Pink” 42” x 60”

Alix Bailey Reminds Us That Painting Is Light and So Are We

December 14, 2023 |

On November 25, 2023 I had the pleasure of attending the closing reception for "Alix Bailey: Recent Paintings" at The Painting Center in Chelsea. The show, her fourth at The Painting Center, consisted mostly of large paintings of one particular model whom Bailey...

M³ Festival Demonstrates the Power of InclusivityPhoto © by Christopher Pelham

M³ Festival Demonstrates the Power of Inclusivity

November 1, 2023 |

From Sept 21 – 23, Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³) held its 2nd annual M³ Festival at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY. The event brought together musicians from around the world from M³'s 3rd and 4th cohorts, many of them meeting and performing together in...

When My Exile Sees MePhoto © by Christopher Pelham

When My Exile Sees Me

August 30, 2023 |

Having presented violinist/composer Sita Chay as part of Shoko Nagai’s trio Tokala with percussionist Satoshi Takeishi in the White Room at CRS and having seen them perform several times at Barbès, I was very interested to see Chay’s program, featuring the same...