C10
R
K Eids sTHE SCORE by Fred Bowen
See stars of today — and tomorrow F
igure skating fans are in for a treat this Sunday. Three-time U.S. champion Michael Weiss is hosting his sixth an-
nual “Ice Champions — Live” at the Kettler Capitals Iceplex in Arlington County. Weiss has assembled an eye-pop- ping list of skating stars for the show. Brian Boitano, Ilia Kulik, Kim- mie Meissner and Todd Eldredge are all World or Olympic champions who will perform Sunday. Other stars, including 16-year-old Christi- na Goa, Silvia Fontana and Ryan Bradley, will strut their stuff on the ice, too. The show will also spotlight sever- al younger local skaters including Mary-Kate Mulera, a 9-year-old third-grader from Our Lady of Mer- cy School in Potomac. Mary-Kate trains five days a week, two hours a day and “really wants to” skate in the Olympic Games someday. Weiss, who trains at the same rink
as Mary-Kate, says she is a “good young talent.” He hopes the chance to skate with Olympic champions will “inspire her.” Although she has been competing for more than three years and is a regional champion, Mary-Kate admits she is “kind of nervous” to skate with Weiss. Helping young skaters is one of
Weiss’s passions and the reason for “Ice Champions — Live.” The pro stars perform for no pay, and all the money from ticket sales and the si- lent auction before the show goes to the Michael Weiss Foundation. The foundation gives scholarships to
If you go
What: Ice Champions — Live When: Sunday at 5 p.m. Where: Kettler Capitals Iceplex, 627 N. Glebe Rd., Arlington County How much: $30-$50 For more information:
www.michaelweiss.org
JEREMIAH TAMAGNA-DARR Michael Weiss is a two-time Olympian.
skaters 18 or younger who might have a chance to go to the Olympics and other high-level competitions. The foundation has awarded more than $300,000 in scholarships to promising young skaters. Weiss knows how difficult and ex- pensive becoming a world-class skater can be. He grew up in the Washington area and started skat- ing when he was 9. He admits that in the beginning, “I was not good at all.”
Weiss stuck with it, practicing at
the Fairfax Ice Arena while going to W.T. Woodson High School. He be- came a two-time Olympian and the first skater to land the super-hard
Michael Weiss, left, will be performing with Mary-Kate Mulera, a third-grader from Our Lady of Mercy School in Potomac.
quadruple toe loop jump in compe- tition. “I fell for years before I could do that jump,” Weiss says now. Weiss learned perseverance and discipline from skating. He hopes he can pass on those life lessons through his foundation and encour- age the next generation of skaters. So if you are one of those kids who
can’t wait for the Olympics because you love figure skating, go to the Kettler Capitals Iceplex on Sunday. The “Ice Champions — Live” show is a chance to see skating stars up close — 400 seats will be right on the ice — and maybe some future Olympic stars, too.
Fred Bowen writes the KidsPost sports opinion column and is the author of 15 books for kids.
MARK FINKENSTAEDT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Aria Curameng was the overall winner in last year’s wrapping paper contest. Want to enter?
KLMNO FRAZZ
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2010 JEF MALLETT
TODAY: Breezy and partly cloudy
HIGH LOW 67 43
ILLUSTRATION BY MARCEL VIRACHITTEVIN, AGE 10, WASHINGTON
The youngest Olympic gold medalist in figure skating was American Tara Lipinski, who was 15 when she won in 1998.
TODAY’S NEWS
It’s beginning to look a lot like . . .
Halloween: Are you ready for the night of costumes, chaos and candy? Well, the first part, of course, is the costume. And we’d like to know what our readers are going to be for Halloween. So ask your parents to take a picture of you in your costume — whether it’s handmade or store-bought — and then have them upload it to
wapo.st/kidscostume. We might publish some of our favorites. Winter holidays: Once Hal- loween is over, Hanukkah, Christ- mas and Kwanzaa can’t be far be- hind. Which means that it’s time for Weekend’s wrapping paper contest, for kids age 12 and younger. The winning artist will be featured on the cover of Week- end. Find the details in Friday’s Weekend section.
Facing stark reality in the newspaper biz art reviewfrom C1
finding the daily press as com- pelling as they did more than a century ago, when painting pic- tures of newspaper readers, or using the dailies as art supplies, was a sure sign of your avant- garde cred. In 2007, artist Aleksandra Mir
got a team of assistants to draw almost 200 scruffy, felt-pen en- largements of the front pages of New York tabloids. “Mail Bomb Alert,” reads one of the two imag- es in this show, in a hand-drawn font that must be 1,000 points high.
Adam McEwen comments on our celebrity culture by printing fake New York Times obituaries for varied figures — before they’re even dead. (He was once a newspaper obituary writer.) The sculptor Robert Gober
fills one corner of a gallery with what seem to be bundles of yel- lowing newspapers, but are in fact deluxe facsimiles hand- crafted from the finest archival art supplies. The veteran issue- artist Hans Haacke sets up a computer printer in the middle of a gallery, and lets it spew out reams of copy that pour in from 30 RSS feeds. (Haacke’s installa- tion evokes the out-of-control as- sembly line in “Modern Times,” with information as the com- modity now being churned out.) So does all this artistic atten- tion give hope to us ink-stained wretches and hacks? In one sense it does: It seems that news- papers have yet to lose their po- tency as fetishes. The “morning
MARY BOONE GALLERY OF NEW YORK VIA NEW MUSEUM
BIG TYPE: Aleksandra Mir enlarges New York Post front pages — to ironic, stark effect — with “Mail Bomb Alert ‘12 December 1994,’ ” left, and “Let’s Go Get ’Em! ‘19 October 1996.’ ”
miracle” — a novel’s worth of text, arriving daily on stoops across the nation — still carries magic for today’s artists, the way the foreign art of Africa had power for Picasso. Newspapers seem to represent one side of a binary that has art as its other half; it feels as though art can as- sert its own identity just by set- ting itself up as the opposite of news. That binary seems to be in
play in works by a bad-boy artist named Dash Snow (recently de- ceased, age 27) in which he used semen to glue glitter onto tab- loid front pages featuring Sad- dam Hussein. It’s Dash the Fab- ulous up against the dreary world — with the newspaper standing in for the latter. Other artists are more directly
Playing Now Through Sunday!
For full show schedule and to buy tickets, go to
www.disneyonice.com
engaged with the specific con- tents of the sources they are quoting. The photographer Wolfgang Tilmans, who had a fascinating solo at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2007, once again pre- sents tables covered in bits and pieces of printed news that he feels we need to digest more completely. He could almost be a street photographer, pointing his lens at unsavory corners of our culture — except that it’s eas- ier to compile clippings than to hang out in dark alleys. The impressionists declared themselves modern artists by painting pictures of modern life. Tilmans with his clippings, or Mir with her enlarged tabloids,
are doing much the same thing, but they let a newspaper digest that life before they even start depicting it. Several artists in the exhibition use newspapers as a kind of shorthand or placehold- er for all the reality that lurks be- yond their studio walls. And newspapers are the medium of choice because they distill the world into a tidy, physical pack- age that artists can have their way with. Working with news- papers, you end up with a nice, juicy object rather than disem- bodied ideas or electronic bits and bytes. A newspaper gives an ink-on-paper portrait of the world that isn’t infinitely far from the pictures artists have al- ways drawn of it.
Which brings us to why this show should perhaps scare any- one in love with newspapers: Even when they seem to be deal- ing with the day to day, artists have a tendency toward retro- spection and nostalgia. Art his- torian Joshua Shannon, at the University of Maryland, recently showed that the cast flashlights of Jasper Johns, usually read as coming straight out of his daily life, were in fact based on models from his childhood. In the 1930s, when Max Ernst and others made their great collages, they were most often using printed matter from decades earlier. Even Rembrandt often dressed his sitters in archaic clothes. That could be what we’re seeing in the New Museum show: Not
an engagement with the live but a fascination with the almost- gone. The exhibition includes docu-
mentation of a project called “Old News,” in which eight art- ists or collectives have cannibal- ized old newspapers to turn out their own peculiar, mostly non- sensical riffs on what a news- paper might be. There’s also the “Last Post,” a tabloid that dou- bles as the exhibition catalogue, published weekly over the course of the exhibition — from a mini-newsroom in the middle of one of its floors. And there’s a nearby table manned by the staff at StoryCorps, who collect and archive snippets of oral history from across the nation: They give the public usually talked about in papers the chance to speak for itself. Imitation may be sincerest
flattery, but not in every case. The flocking together of all these alternatives to newspapers may not signal the continued power and relevance of the real thing. They may be watching at its deathbed. After all, you some- times learn more from an au- topsy than from a living body.
gopnikb@washpost.com
The Last Newspaper runs through Jan. 9 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Call 212-219-1222 or visit
www.newmuseum.org.
First lady presents awards for youth arts programs
by Robin Givhan
The annual Coming Up Taller Awards, which since 1998 have celebrated grass-roots organiza- tions engaged in youth arts educa- tion, have been given a new name and higher profile at the White House. On Wednesday, first lady Mi- chelle Obama presented 15 com- munity groups with the newly named National Arts and Human- ities Youth Program Award for their work in helping young peo- ple tap into their creativity through music, writing and the visual arts. In an East Room cer- emony, in front of an audience of students, arts supporters and edu- cators — as well as members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities — Oba- ma congratulated the groups for their arts advocacy but also for the impact they’ve had in improv- ing students’ reading skills, col- lege matriculation rates and self- confidence. “You’re doing more than teach- ing them to be better artists,” said Obama, who was wearing a rasp- berry-colored jersey dress. “You’re helping them become better peo- ple.”
She added that this White
House would do everything it could to sustain the kinds of pro- grams like the ones being hon- ored and to encourage young peo- ple to explore the arts and human- ities. The students themselves of- fered proof of the impact the or- ganizations have had in their lives. Mariana Pavon Sanchez, 19, read an excerpt from her play, “Mariana’s Wish,” which she wrote through the District’s Youth Playwrights’ Theater. The play was based on Sanchez’s longing to see her mother, who lives in Nica- ragua. The story had a happy end- ing; Sanchez saw her mother in December 2009. “I was a very shy student, afraid to speak out,” the petite 11th- grader in a sparkly black dress said as she introduced herself to the audience. “Now here I am ad- dressing the first lady of the Unit- ed States.” The exclamation point on a morning dedicated to youthful
MANDEL NGAN/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES
ARTSY:Michelle Obama thanked 15 community groups.
self-expression came in a per- formance by members of the Art- ists Collective Youth Jazz Ensem- ble. With students jamming on pi- ano, drums, bass and saxophone, two hoofers pounded away on the East Room’s makeshift stage. They were rewarded with cheers and a standing ovation led by Obama. This year’s winners of the Na- tional Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards will each receive $10,000. The recipients include: After-School Playwriting Pro-
gram, Youth Playwrights’ Theater Inc., Washington; Brooklyn Cul- tural Adventures Program, Brook- lyn, N.Y.; Center for Community Arts Partnerships, Chicago; Com- munity MusicWorks, Providence, R.I.; FACT After-School Programs, Santa Fe, N.M.; Girlstories Thea- tre Project and Workshops, Tam- pa; New Directions YouthArts, Las Vegas; Project ALERTA, Bos- ton; RiverzEdge Arts Project, Woonsocket, R.I.; San Francisco WritersCorps, San Francisco; Scripps College Academy, Clare- mont, Calif.; Mentors of Minor- ities in Education Inc., Washing- ton; Artists Collective’s Trans- forming the Lives of High Risk Youth: Training in the Arts & Cul- ture of the African Diaspora, Hartford, Conn.; Urban Voices, New York; and YouthCAN, Seattle. The Jean Baptiste Dessaix Mu- sic School in Jacmel, Haiti, re- ceived the International Spotlight Award.
givhanr@washpost.com
© Disney/Pixar.
MELANIE MOBLEY
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78