Melena Ryzik

It was near the end of shooting for “Hustlers,” a spiky-smart drama in which Lopez plays a single mother from the Bronx — “so that comes easy,” she said — and a stripper extraordinaire who masterminds a scheme to con her Wall Street clientele out of money by nearly any means necessary. A moment later, she and her co-star, Constance Wu, were filming a scene in which they cook up the MDMA-ketamine concoction they would use on their marks.

“How much?” Wu, playing a newbie named Destiny, asked. “Just a sprinkle,” Lopez, as the wily, cigarette-dangling Ramona, advised.

The writer-director, Lorene Scafaria, watched behind the camera, surrounded by sheets of aluminum foil flaked with prop drugs. It’s only the third feature she’s made, and the flashiest by far. “Hustlers” is based on a real-life tale, which appeared in New York magazine in 2015, about a crew of high-end strippers in New York who — after their customer base deflated thanks to the 2008 recession — found creative, and illegal, ways to keep business going. (They were eventually caught.)

Though the story dates back a decade, its themes — gender dynamics, economic inequality, sex, cash and female solidarity — resonate richly now. So much so that the movie is being rushed into theaters less than six months after filming ended. (It opens Friday.) “Why hold back?” said Jessica Elbaum, one of the producers who immediately optioned the original article, by Jessica Pressler.

“We’re white-knuckling because of the buzz — there’s such a spotlight on this,” added Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Lopez’s longtime producing partner, sitting by the monitors on set with other producers (most of them women).

The gleam comes in part because of Scafaria’s savvy casting: “Hustlers” is the big-screen debut of Cardi B, herself a former stripper from the Bronx, along with appearances by of-the-moment artists like singer Lizzo; actress and trans advocate Trace Lysette (“Transparent”); Lili Reinhart (“Riverdale”); and Keke Palmer (newly announced as a host of the third hour of “Good Morning America”).

Note the absence of a leading man: There really isn’t one.

For Scafaria, 41, that was the lure of the source material. “Because it was like every good story that you ever read — but with women in it, naturally,” she said. “It wasn’t something that had to be manufactured into an all-female anything.”

No shade to “Ocean’s 8,” but the “Hustlers” girl gang radiates a lot more campy fun, especially in the prelapsarian years before the recession. (Bandage dresses never evoked so much nostalgia.) “Doesn’t money make you horny?” is Lopez’s opening line.

Dressed in full bodycon to celebrate their first score in that midtown high-rise, the central foursome — Wu, Lopez, Palmer and Reinhart — whooped it up for the cameras, spraying Champagne and doing a choreographed routine to Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much.” (“Swing it, bust it, cradle it,” as Palmer described her swerving moves.)

“Louder!” Lopez called to the sound techs. “Don’t be cheap!”

“We’re a family now,” she crowed in character as Ramona. “A family with money!” The stars kept dancing after the scene stopped; Scafaria jumped in, too, holding her own with the hip swivel.

Here’s the sly superpower of “Hustlers”: It’s serving us a Hollywood stripper romp but pivoting to show that life from the women’s point of view. Witness JLo, with her bikini bod, wrapping an adoring Wu into her fur coat on the club rooftop — the very first scene that Scafaria wrote. It plays up Mama Bear relationships in a way that felt familiar to Lopez. (“They call me Ma a lot, the people that work with me,” she noted.) But it’s also transactional, an unabashed display of wealth-envy. It’s intimate but not sexualized — focused on Wu’s female gaze. “Hustlers” has a rare vantage point, as perhaps the only high-caliber feature about strippers made by a female filmmaker.

Rarer still, it doesn’t exoticize the profession. And when it comes to the crimes the women eventually commit, there’s no sugarcoating. The opening montage, which tracks Wu through the club, echoes the Copacabana scene in “Goodfellas.” That movie was a touchstone for Scafaria, as she was making her pitch. Because, she said, when it comes to depictions of men in an underworld behaving badly, “we can name 1,000 of those characters by their first and last names; we’ve enjoyed them.”

Real-life female baddies are still so uncommon on creen, though, that they almost seem heroic, not dangerous, by default. “There’s no doubt that people are going to think it’s a female empowerment movie,” Wu said, “because if you look at the highlight reel of the movie, it’s badassery.”

But she added: “We’re not trying to romanticize that life. Whereas in ‘Goodfellas,’ the first line is, ‘I always wanted to be a gangster.’ ”

The story is told through Wu’s character, who begins working at a club out of economic necessity, only to realize that stripping has its own financial hierarchy. Dancers are often at the bottom; club managers, security and DJs can all take a cut. The drug-and-fraud scheme that Lopez’s Ramona concocts — and the leg-up she offers as a friend — is a lifeline, especially in the wake of the recession, when the women tumbled down from the status they had precariously reached. The movie, said Wu, focuses on “the societal structures they have grown up in and the backgrounds that have given them very few choices of how to survive and flourish in this world.”

Authenticity mattered. Scafaria and her cast made many visits to strip clubs and had a stripper as an expert and comfort consultant on set. “She would say little things like, ‘The guys say “please” a lot more,’ ” Scafaria reported. They shot in an actual club, Show Palace in Long Island City, Queens, where, after an open call, they cast several real-life dancers and a manager.

Lopez and Wu committed themselves to the moves, installing stripper poles in their homes to train. Even for Lopez, a lifelong dancer, it was jolting. “I was incredibly nervous,” she said. “I had to be up there, and I had to kind of bare myself — my soul and my physical body — in a way that I hadn’t in any other movie.”

And she was surprised at the skill and stamina required. Filming her showstopping routine over several days at the club in May, she hurt her arm, “and it still hasn’t recovered,” she added.

For Cardi B, who appears in a few memorable club moments, the film hit home. In an Instagram live message she posted immediately after a screening, she was on the verge of crying as she recalled her dancing years. “Sometimes — a lot of times — I always remember when I first started, how hard it was,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. She got customers’ attention, eventually: “I was just that bitch, ooh baby,” she said, giving the camera a meaningful glance. “But it took time for me to get there, and it took training, and it took long hard nights of dealing with” less than savory people (to paraphrase). “Like, it took a lot of my self-esteem away, but then it also built some self-esteem, because I felt so powerful at times.”

Customers, she said, tried “to hustle me any type of way; they try to hustle me out of my body.”

But the friendships she made with other women at the club, and the lessons they taught, changed her life, she told her followers: “I be feeling like nobody can hustle me anymore.”

The movie brought all that back, “like, wow,” she said, adding: “I recommend every stripper to see it. Especially if you are a New York stripper — like, you definitely will relate.”

The group scenes with Cardi B, Lizzo and the rest of the diverse cast stand out — the performers were chosen in part to showcase that real strip clubs, unlike the typical Hollywood version, have bodies of all shapes and sizes.

Wu decided not to plump up her own bikini top: “I thought, wow, could be fun, to have a strip club movie with a lead actress who is like, completely flat-chested,” she said. And she shelved her vanity. “There was a hot minute where I was like, ‘Oh my God, I should work out every day,’ ” she said. “But this character, she probably didn’t have the time or money to hire a personal trainer. And I want to represent her the way that her life was.”

(Cardi B, to her own dismay, did not work the pole in the movie — she couldn’t, she explained in another interview, because she had just had liposuction and her breasts done — but she made the scripted lines her own.)

Those big group scenes were among the last to be shot, and for the filmmakers, most delivered on their vision — not least because the movie had fallen apart in development exactly a year before. A victim of upheaval at a previous production company, Annapurna, it was subsequently picked up by STXfilms.

Scafaria originally joined the production as a screenwriter; as her script was sent to the likes of Martin Scorsese, she started making her own case to direct, complete with a sizzle reel, heavy on images of powerful female foursomes, to explain her concepts. “I’m so glad Scorsese said no,” Elbaum, the producer, said.

To get the movie done in the 29 days allotted for filming, Scafaria and her cinematographer, Todd Banhazl, detailed every scene and music cue, with the first half heavy on montages — by design to convey the characters’ heady rise at the club. Scafaria felt a little bad, she admitted, “about all the fur coats and smoking in this movie.” But the pace, she added, “was always a freight train, even on paper.”

Her editor, Kayla Emter, cut as they shot; five days after they wrapped, Scafaria saw an assembled version of the movie. “I wept with relief, like genuine relief,” she said. In early July, having taken almost no days off for months, she and Emter were in a darkened editing suite in Burbank, California, figuring out where to put the hot-pink title credits.

The film still manages some twists: As the women’s criminal plot intensifies and then unravels, the storytelling becomes more layered (Julia Stiles plays a journalist who connects the dots).

“It gets ugly,” Lopez said of what the foursome pull off. Watching the first screening as a producer, she was suddenly put off by her own character (an amalgam, not a direct representation). “She is a beast,; she’s brutal,” Lopez said. “I don’t think she ever felt bad.”

That’s a reason the movie intrigued her: “Like, be careful, these things could be glamorous and sexy — but they could also be dangerous, and they can finish you,” she said.

For Scafaria, the culture of strip clubs offers a way to explore power on screen — the way the dancers onstage are trying to tip the balance, dollar by G-string dollar, in their favor. “I’m hoping that the conversation outside of the movie is about gender, and the economy — what it is that we provide, and what we get back,” she said. “It’s not quite the fair trade.”

But mostly, she added: “I just care if sex workers like it. I made the movie for sex workers. As long as they like the movie, great. If women like it, really great. And if men like it, that’s cool, too.”

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — Jennifer Lopez apologized for how she smelled. That light waft of cigarette smoke, she said, gesturing with a faux-tattooed arm. Maybe it was her, maybe it was embedded in the white couches and plush carpeting, here on the 29th floor of a midtown Manhattan high-rise. Either way, the mood was set.

The Sly Superpower of 'Hustlers'

In the rough sketch, a few lines nodded at the inception of Sleater-Kinney, the Pacific Northwest trio that reframed feminist punk for a generation. “Annie was like, ‘Oh, we should expand that so that it actually is the story of the band,’” Tucker recalled. “Like, ‘I think that’s cool, and I think the world would want to hear it.’”

Brownstein added, “She thought about the audience, she thought about the listener in a way that I think we don’t always.”

The result is “Love,” an affectionate catalog of the humilities of indie-rock life — those broke nights sleeping in the tour van — that crescendos into an unyielding bond. “We can be young/We can be old/As long as we have/Each other to hold,” Brownstein sings, as her bandmates provide a chorus with a bright throwback vibe. In Sleater-Kinney fashion, there’s also a turn toward anthemic fury: “Done with being told that this should be the end.”

That narrative might have a different coda now. Not long after the group announced the Aug. 16 record, “The Center Won’t Hold,” Weiss, who has been the propulsive spine of the band since 1996, revealed she was leaving, dissolving one of rock’s most enduring and respected acts.

Since its self-titled 1995 debut, Sleater-Kinney has been revered as one of indie rock's most musically fierce and lyrically sharp bands, cutting a path for passionate musicians who refuse to check their politics or their emotions at the club door. The band’s signature sound — Brownstein and Tucker’s guitars and vocals winding around each other in stinging counterpoint, anchored by Weiss’s deft, thundering drumming — always relied on its precise chemistry. On the eve of its ninth studio album, Sleater-Kinney is now skimmed down to its founding duo, Tucker, 46, and Brownstein, 44.

“The Center Won’t Hold” — a grimy-by-choice release made in response to personal and political turmoil — turned out to be, Brownstein later joked darkly, too prophetic a title: “We should’ve called the record, ‘Let’s Stay Together.’”

And they are: Sleater-Kinney, with a new, yet-to-be-named drummer, will go on tour as scheduled this fall. Some dates overlap with a freshly announced mini-tour by Quasi, Weiss’ other long-running band.

“It’s been a surprising and sad turn of events,” Tucker said, in an interview alongside Brownstein. They had touched down briefly at a hotel restaurant in West Hollywood, California, from Portland, Oregon, their longtime musical home, and were still bristling — tearful but determined — from Weiss’ departure weeks after it became public.

“I’m glad that there’s this record that has her immense drumming on it,” Brownstein said. “But now Corin and I have to kind of clean up the mess of someone leaving after we announced a tour.”

“We have a job to do,” she continued, “and we’re going to do it well, because I feel really lucky to get to do this — like, luckier than I’ve ever been.” Her eyes welled up. “I just realize that there’s nothing that feels like this band. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to do it.”

Weiss, 53, declined to comment for this article. In the statement announcing her choice, she said, “The band is heading in a new direction and it is time for me to move on. I will never forget the heights we reached or the magnificent times Corin, Carrie and I shared. We were a force of nature.”

Brownstein said that, in a band get-together after she’d made her decision, Weiss said she hoped they’d remain friends. “Of course,” Brownstein replied. “She’s like my family member.” (Weiss also worked as a location manager on “Portlandia,” Brownstein’s comedy series, for several seasons, including the final one in 2018.)

This unexpected pivot point for Sleater-Kinney arrives when the group has a bigger platform than ever before — because of Brownstein’s TV fame, and because of the reputation they built with some of the most critically acclaimed albums of the last 2 1/2 decades. “We do have more cultural power than we did 25 years ago,” Tucker said. They view it as a responsibility, and an opportunity.

Before the split, the big news about Sleater-Kinney’s next chapter wasn’t about who was missing, but who they’d gained. It’s the first time they’ve entrusted a fellow performer — another woman with a guitar-god reputation and an art-rock flair — with their studio time.

As a teenager, Clark discovered “All Hands on the Bad One,” Sleater-Kinney’s 2000 album, “and promptly went and mail-ordered every other Sleater-Kinney record at the time, had the posters on my wall,” she said in a separate interview.

Clark said it was originally Weiss’ idea for Clark to produce a few songs, and see how it went. In a first, the band’s two songwriters started work not together, but in different cities — Brownstein in LA, where she had been developing another TV show, and Tucker in Portland, where she lives with her husband, director Lance Bangs, and two children.

“They were the classic things that Sleater-Kinney has always done so well, which is great guitar parts and big firework, lightning-in-a-bottle kind of songs,” Clark said, “but then there was this other side that I also felt in the demos — kind of an extra vulnerability from both of them.”

It came through in their vocals and subject matter, which both writers called unusually personal, taking on depression, suicidal thoughts and #MeToo. “Broken,” the wrenching piano ballad that closes the album, invokes Christine Blasey Ford.

Clark, Brownstein said, directed them to “not circumvent the emotion, but actually really delve into it.”

Production-wise, “I remember I was using the word ‘corrosive’ a lot,” Clark said, when she joined the group interview. All three were arrayed in variations on black, white and a pop of red, in escalating levels of glam. “Nice suit,” Brownstein, low-key in a printed button-up, said admiringly of Clark’s slick, sexy-boss black-and-white pinstripe, set off by red heart-shaped sunglasses and a Gucci handbag.

They wanted the album to sound “really gross,” Tucker, in contrasting lacy white, said, as her collaborators mmm-hmmmed in affirmation. “Like, disgusting, dirty, gross, dusty.” She went to a Depeche Mode show and got absorbed by synths; Clark and Brownstein saw Nine Inch Nails, and heard industrial.

The three or so weeks they spent in the studio with Clark were, to hear Brownstein and Tucker tell it, transformative. Choruses and bridges were revised; major keys were introduced; Tucker, whose raging vocals have helped define the group’s sound, sometimes sings two octaves higher than normal.

“She pushed us further,” Tucker said, just as they were ready for someone to challenge their instincts. (The trio similarly left its comfort zone making its sprawling 2005 album “The Woods;” after its bruising tour, they went on hiatus for nearly a decade.)

This time, the band pushed back, too. On the poppy “Love,” Clark questioned a Brownstein lyric: “There’s nothing more frightening and nothin’ more obscene/than a well-worn body demanding to be seen.” It’s essentially the album’s defining statement. Clark and Brownstein exchanged a look when I mentioned the line.

Brownstein: “Annie didn’t want that.”

Clark: “I didn’t object to the sentiment, I think it’s right on. I thought that Carrie was being too self-effacing. I was like, well-worn body? What?”

Brownstein: “Yeah, check out this body! It’s crazy! I mean, my body is perfect, but for you other people out there, with worn bodies, this is for you.” She laughed — she was clearly joking, but also, that really is her bare butt on the cover for the single “Hurry on Home.”

Arguing that they had avoided showing their bodies through their 20s and 30s, and that it would be meaningful to do so north of their 40s, she had briefly tried to convince her bandmates to disrobe, too — “Corin was like, ‘that is a hard pass.’” Brownstein decided to go for it anyway, because the image, with her head on backward, was unsettling rather than sexy.

At the table, Clark was still trying to explain her objection to the lyric as the other women laughed. “I was picturing, like battle wounds, and botched —” she made some flailing hand gestures, which cracked everyone up further. “That’s the only reason I was checking in with you, to make sure that you knew that you were beautiful.”

As collaborators, Brownstein and Clark — who previously dated — are deeply intertwined, with other projects in the works, both said. “There’s no reference that either of us could throw out that the other person didn’t get,” Clark said. “It’s fully just dialed in, and we make each other laugh.”

The dynamic, when all three were together, was a rapid, sharp and frequently hilarious riff on subjects ranging from the media they’d absorbed (which, yes, sometimes felt like a “Portlandia” sketch) to politics (“President Marianne Williamson. I’m trying to get used to it now,” Brownstein kidded) to gender parity in the studio. “We had to have one man in there,” Tucker said of their recording engineer, Cian Riordan. “It’s required by California law.”

Clark also seemed careful not to overstep the bounds of Sleater-Kinney’s partnership. Early in our conversation, she realized that, as primarily a solo artist, she’d hardly fielded interview questions as one among collaborators. “Was that OK?” she mock-whispered, looking to Brownstein, after an answer. “That was great,” Brownstein assured, then couldn’t resist a rimshot: “No.”

A few weeks before Weiss’ departure made headlines — but after her bandmates knew her inclination — Brownstein was sitting, damp after a summer downpour, in a TriBeCa coffee shop, declaiming her pride in the longevity of Sleater-Kinney.

“There’s something about popular forms of music that feels like the only stories that have meaning come from youth,” she said. “But that’s not true. We need women — and all kinds of women — to tell us what it feels like to be on the other side of a year, or a decade, or a struggle. What about my story as a nearly 45-year-old, that’s in an all-female band? There are hardly any all-female bands that have even made it this long.”

It’s a sentiment that echoes more bleakly after Weiss’ exit. Britt Daniel, the Spoon frontman, has known Sleater-Kinney since he befriended Weiss after her first tour with the band in the late ’90s. “Even at that time, they felt legendary to me,” he said. “Like they were coming out of nowhere with this sound that was totally unique and really aggressive. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, I hadn’t heard anything like that before.” (Spoon’s song “Metal School,” he said, “was my interpretation of a Carrie riff.”)

Weiss, who helped sequence the last two Spoon albums — and who masterminded Sleater-Kinney’s set lists — is “good at having a concept of the overall big picture,” said Daniel, who has dealt with lineup changes in his own long-running band. “It just hurts, when it can’t stay together.”

Coming out of the DIY riot grrrl scene that birthed Bikini Kill and other defiantly feminist acts in the ’90s, Sleater-Kinney was primed to buck the system, and defy the misogyny of the music industry.

But the punk ethos also conflicted with their ambition, especially for Brownstein. “Carrie is ultra-ambitious, and I respect that,” Tucker said. During their hiatus, Tucker released two solo albums, and recently began another band, Filthy Friends, with Peter Buck of R.E.M. “I’m better in a collaborative situation,” she said. With Brownstein, after 25 years together, “we’re much more able to share the spotlight.”

Brownstein also found an outlet in creating and starring in “Portlandia” alongside Fred Armisen. It won a Peabody and four Emmys (for costuming and design), gave her a nascent career directing television (“Shrill;” “Search Party;” “Mrs. Fletcher,” a forthcoming Tom Perrotta adaptation for HBO) and almost certainly attracted a bigger audience to Sleater-Kinney. When the group returned with “No Cities to Love” — which The New York Times chief pop music critic Jon Pareles called “the first great album of 2015” — the band noted happily that the fans on that tour were not just nostalgists; they were new.

Now, Sleater-Kinney has rock stature. “We do have conversations about, what are our responsibilities? How do we do this to live up to our ideals?” Tucker said.

It’s something they discussed while conceiving “The Center Won’t Hold.” “This band is always a place for us to go when we feel vulnerable and fragile and angry,” Brownstein said. “It houses emotions that aren’t necessarily sanctioned in our day-to-day life, that people don’t make room for — because we can’t. You wouldn’t function if you allowed the ambient anxiety of the current era to permeate every cell.”

The lyric about the well-worn body was also asking, “How much can any of us withstand right now?” she added later. “All the characters, all the narrators — all of us in this album are seeking a means of resistance and withstanding pain. But I didn’t want to express that in a way that was like a screaming match. I wanted to give people something that buoyed them, that reached a chorus where they could sing together, and sing along with us.”

After “No Cities,” Brownstein made a pilot for Hulu based on her 2015 memoir, “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” reliving her origins as a ’90s-bred artist. It didn’t get picked up — and that was the impetus she needed to dive fully back into music again. “The way I want to interact with songwriting is in the present,” she said.

If anything, her vision for the band has grown: “The Center Won’t Hold” is the first Sleater-Kinney album to credit creative directors, including Brownstein’s friend Humberto Leon of the fashion line Opening Ceremony. She wanted to give the group a visual identity, to take ownership of their accomplishments, she said.

“I just want people to be able to carry this around with them, not just on their headphones, but to feel like, when you see Black Flag on something.” (Despite her best efforts, Sleater-Kinney has yet to pick a signature font.)

But the idea that they might be known for their willingness to adventure, experiment and persevere — “those kind of ambitions, I’m interested in,” Brownstein said.

Denying oneself change “isn’t a way to live, or to make things, ever,” she said. “I’d rather take risks. This is the mid-period of this band; it’s going to be expansive, and it’s not going to feel like it did before, because I’m not in the same place. No one in the band is. And there’s just a point where you have to say: Either come with us, or don’t.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/arts/music/sleater-kinney-st-vincent.html" id="022b755b-87c1-3c15-a972-84a3b02ffabf">The New York Times</a>.

Sleater-Kinney Asked St. Vincent for a Creative Spark. The Trio Blew Up.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — When Sleater-Kinney arrived in a Los Angeles studio last fall with the slim demo of a track for its upcoming album, the group’s new producer, Annie Clark (better known as St. Vincent) had an ear for how to amplify it. What if, she said to the group — singer-guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, and drummer Janet Weiss — you took Brownstein’s guitar riff and made it the lead? Oh, and also, changed the key. And the lyrics.

Nikki Columbus, who is also an art editor, filed the claim in July 2018 with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The settlement, made public by the law firm that represented Columbus, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff &amp; Abady, includes financial compensation for Columbus as well an agreement by the contemporary art museum in Queens to update its written policies designed to protect women, working parents and other caregivers who apply for jobs or work there.

“What happened to me was wrong and clearly against the law,” Columbus said in a statement Tuesday. “I decided to speak out in order to protect other women at MoMA PS1 and beyond.”

The financial terms were not disclosed, but Columbus said she made it a point that her agreement not bar her from discussing other details of the case.

“That was really central to me, that I could talk about the importance of the suit,” she said.

Columbus said she has not been able to find full-time work since the PS1 offer, to be the museum’s curator of performance, was withdrawn.

Elizabeth Saylor, one of Columbus’ lawyers, said in a statement, “We hope that more people will follow Ms. Columbus’ lead and take advantage of the robust protections that NYC law provides.” Saylor is also co-chairwoman of the board of A Better Balance, a nonprofit that focuses on improving work-life balance conditions, and was a co-sponsor of the claim.

Her claim named MoMA PS1 and its chief curator Peter Eleey, chief operating officer Jose A. Ortiz and director Klaus Biesenbach, who has since left the museum.

“MoMA PS1 at all times has been compliant with the law and remains committed to supporting women and caregivers,” a museum spokeswoman said Tuesday. “We are satisfied with the agreement and are happy to put this matter behind us.”

MoMA PS1 has not named a performance curator; its performance program is overseen by two assistant curators. Biesenbach is now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Columbus said friends had worried that her claim might lead to her being ostracized professionally. But, she said, “I received many private messages of support from people across the art world, friends, people I didn’t know, including people who work at MoMA, thanking me for coming forward.”

Still, not many people voiced their support publicly, she said. “I think that reflects MoMA’s power within the art world, and the fact that there have been so few stories like mine,” she said.

Pregnancy discrimination is common across many industries, and even Planned Parenthood has been criticized for how it treats its pregnant employees. “I decided that I needed to call it out, and I think people weren’t expecting that,” Columbus said, “and I think that women themselves don’t realize that they can do that.”

She added: “I hope that this shows that it’s possible to hold the art world to account.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/design/moma-ps1-settles-with-curator-who-said-giving-birth-cost-her-job-offer.html" id="aa29f222-61eb-3f18-a62e-673ff12854e1">The New York Times</a>.

MoMA PS1 Settles With Curator Who Said Giving Birth Cost Her Job Offer

NEW YORK — A curator who accused MoMA PS 1 of gender, pregnancy and caregiver discrimination has settled the claim she brought against the museum saying it had rescinded a job offer upon learning she had recently given birth.

It was the only case the couple worked together, and it encapsulated, Stiepleman thought, so much about the era and their marriage: the discrimination that women faced; the path his aunt blazed, as she won cases to counter that discrimination even before she became a Supreme Court justice; and the unusually equal partnership she had with Martin Ginsburg, in the courtroom and at home.

In 2011, Stiepleman, a fledgling screenwriter, called his aunt — who was not yet the pop culture phenom known as Notorious RBG — to pitch her on doing a movie about her life. “I said, I have this idea, I would love your permission and I would really love your help,” he recalled. “And there was this pause and she said, ‘Well, if that’s how you think you’d like to spend your time.'”

In the seven years between that call and the new film, “On the Basis of Sex,” the production became another point of connection for the extended Ginsburg clan. Even for a biopic, this one is unusually family-oriented: It traces Ginsburg’s extraordinary relationships as much as her unparalleled career.

She opened her files in the Library of Congress to her nephew, who found inspiration in the snarky comments she made in the margins of briefs. She reviewed several drafts of the script, as did her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, whose childhood and teenage years are depicted onscreen. Jane’s son, Paul Spera, an actor, has a small part. And Stiepleman, whose mother, Claire, and Martin Ginsburg were siblings, is also an executive producer, “which basically means I’m the Ruth-whisperer,” he said.

Their closeness, which blossomed during filmmaking, was imperative. “There wasn’t going to be a movie, at least not by him, if my mother wasn’t comfortable with it,” Jane Ginsburg said.

Having so many family members participate, and the approval of the justice herself — she even makes a cameo — gave the movie an air of indispensable authenticity, said Mimi Leder, the director. Ginsburg reviewed the script as if it were a contract. “Like any good lawyer, she doesn’t leave any detail untrammeled,” said Felicity Jones, who plays her.

The objections started with the very first line, which described young Ruth wearing heels to her orientation at Harvard Law School; she wore flats, she explained to her nephew, because she walked to campus. He persuaded her to let the fancier footwear stay — just about the only argument he won.

Beyond giving Jones’ casting her blessing, it was also “very important to her who played Marty,” Leder said.

He was tall, fair-haired in his youth with a chiseled jawline, a charismatic storyteller who never missed a punch line. Armie Hammer fit the bill. When the stars went to Ginsburg’s chambers to meet her, “she couldn’t take her eyes off Armie,” Jones said.

To get her portrayal right, Jones, the British actress and star of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” studied audiotapes from Ginsburg’s early lawsuits, divining that her Brooklyn accent became more pronounced as she grew more impassioned. They spent time together at the justice’s home, where, Jones said, “she very proudly showed me her incredibly tidy desk,” which is near her bed. (She still keeps a night owl’s working hours, with phone meetings about the script starting at 11 p.m., after she’d finished her typically long day at court.)

Being in her orbit emboldened Jones. “Every time I sort of feel overwhelmed by something, I constantly come back to her,” she said. “I think, how would she have dealt with this situation and navigated it? After playing Ruth, I realized how important it is to have a voice in the world and to express that. If she wasn’t scared to do it, I shouldn’t be.”

The film is an origin story, revealing how a young mother went from one of the few women in her class at Harvard to an architect of the laws that overturned gender discrimination (no more bias “on the basis of sex”). The 1970s case that the Ginsburgs fought together, Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue — which Martin brought to his wife, then a law professor — was the first time she delivered oral arguments in court. In a real-life twist that was, Stiepleman said, “a gift from the screenplay gods,” the opposing counsel was overseen by the couple’s former Harvard Law dean, who had been less than kind to his female students, asking them what qualified them to take the place of men.

Of course, the story was also Hollywoodized. That pivotal moment when Ruth freezes in court and cedes the floor to her husband? “There’s not a shred of truth to that,” her daughter said, a point the justice has also made. “I didn’t stumble,” she said in a recent Q&amp;A; after a screening in Manhattan, where the audience included Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton.

The mid-December event was held before Ginsburg had surgery to remove cancerous nodules from her lungs. But her health was still a fresh concern, since she broke three ribs last month. In a conversation with NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg, she assured the crowd she was feeling “better each week” and was back to her regular, strenuous workouts with her trainer. “Even planks,” she said.

If she didn’t seek out the biopic, she seemed to appreciate it. “The film is part fact, part imaginative,” she said that night. “But what’s wonderful about it is that the imaginative parts fit in with the story so well.” (In lieu of interviews, Ginsburg participated in several Q&amp;As.;)

Some of the legal groundwork may be familiar, thanks to the wildly popular documentary “RBG,” released in May. (Among her many firsts, Ginsburg is the only sitting Supreme Court justice to be the subject of two films in the same year.) But the revelation of the feature is in its focus on her home life: her terrible cooking, devoted mothering and spats with the teenage Jane, as well as the way in which Martin Ginsburg stepped up as parent and household co-leader.

Stiepleman viewed his uncle as an exemplary husband and father, a role model, and hoped to convey that onscreen. “Itwas that dynamic of two people my age, trying to figure out how to live at home what they’re also fighting for in court, which is true equality,” he said.

“This movie is as much about their love story as about how change happens,” Leder said.

For the Ginsburg family, seeing their life recreated onscreen, detailed down to the jewelry Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore when she argued before the Supreme Court, was surreal, “a step out of reality,” Jane Ginsburg said.

The movie presents the teenage Jane as brash and opinionated (a characterization also based in part on Jane’s daughter, Clara Spera, Stiepleman said). And though in real life, the young Jane was politically and socially engaged, with a consciousness-raising group and an internship at Ms. magazine, she does not believe she led her mother into a more forcefully feminist outlook, as the film suggests. “I think my mother had a much greater tolerance for poetic license than I did,” she said.

The future justice was a stickler when her daughter was growing up, though. A skilled editor, “she made me rewrite every English paper multiple times,” Jane Ginsburg recalled. “That kind of paid off the other way round, when she would give me the drafts of her briefs, and I got to read them and make editing suggestions.” A Harvard Law graduate, Jane Ginsburg is now a professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University. (Her brother, James, runs a classical music label in Chicago. Clara Spera, another Harvard Law alumna, is a federal law clerk in New York.)

To anyone who was around the Ginsburgs, their unusual parity was obvious. But to financiers and development executives, the character of Martin Ginsburg as a supportive husband was far-fetched. Backers offered to fund the film if he was rewritten as angrier, or less understanding; maybe he should threaten to divorce his wife, if she didn’t drop the case.

“It came up a lot,” Stiepleman said. “I remember at some point saying in a meeting, There’s a 5,000-year history of narrative, of men coming home from battle, and their wives patch them up and boost their egos and send them back out to fight again. You write one supportive husband, and everyone’s like, such a creature could never exist!”

For Hammer, the chance to play second fiddle was rare, and welcome. “I’m sure that women feel like they’ve been stuck in these supportive roles for a long time, but for me, to get to play something like this was amazing, because it’s fair,” he said. “And I think that there is a lot to be gained from seeing that a man can be an even better and stronger man, while still being an incredibly supportive husband and a buttress for his wife. It didn’t make him any less of a man. If anything, it made him more.”

Representing that dynamic may be one reason Ginsburg gave the film her greenlight. “My mother strongly believes there won’t be true equality until men take full participation in child care and other household tasks,” her daughter said. The justice’s chambers are decorated with photos of her son-in-law gazing at his infant son, and now her grandson gazing at her great-granddaughter.

She also wanted the practice of law to be depicted accurately. It was a reverence Stiepleman couldn’t miss: for Hanukkah, “every year from the ages of 5 to 12, she gave me a copy of the U.S. Constitution,” he said. (As a child he was mystified by the gift; as a teenager, inspired. Only as an adult did he realize the likely truth: “I was like, oh, of course, she has a discount at the Supreme Court gift shop. And she’s reeeally busy.”)

Her other big note, he said, was that she didn’t want moviegoers to think that she alone shattered legal barriers, “as if it had never occurred to anyone else that women should be considered equal.”

“She said, ‘I built my career on the shoulders of women who came before me, like Dorothy Kenyon, like Pauli Murray, and people should know that,'” Stiepleman added. He wrote Kenyon, the pioneering feminist social activist and lawyer, into the script.

The original story ended differently, but (spoiler alert) Leder wanted to close on an image of the real Ginsburg. Her cameo was set for the last day of filming; the justice picked her own costume, a sapphire-blue coat and dress, which she kept afterward. Starting on the steps of the Supreme Court, they did two takes, and then, Leder recalled, she asked the justice if she could do another. The reply, in a stern voice: “Just one more.”

The moment, as an 85-year-old woman ascends into her future, brings audiences to tears.

Ginsburg was not immune. At a friends-and-family showing, she and Claire Stiepleman, her sister-in-law, held hands from the moment their Marty appeared onscreen, her nephew said.

“I always thought she was just doing me a favor,” letting me tell her story, he added. “But then right after she saw the movie, she gave me a hug and she said, ‘Thank you.’ And it never occurred to me, until that moment, that it was something we had done for each other.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/movies/on-the-basis-of-sex-ruth-bader-ginsburg.html" id="a9654eea-9d20-3922-a89d-64d5bd8addaa">The New York Times</a>.

A Family Fosters an Idea's Passage to the Screen

Daniel Stiepleman was sitting at his Uncle Martin’s funeral in 2010, when he heard a eulogy that sparked a screenplay. The story had to do with a case that his uncle, a tax lawyer, tried with his wife, who happened to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Once a baby sitter herself, with a taste for 1950s B-horror flicks, Hill wrote and produced “Halloween” with director John Carpenter. Laurie endured as a symbol of female resolve, fending off her attacker and rebuilding her life.

“Here was a woman who didn’t run from danger, but stepped up to it,” Hill later told the author David Konow for his book “Reel Terror.”

Hill, those who knew her said, was equally audacious.

“Being a woman in show business is a scary situation,” said Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred as Laurie, and befriended Hill. “It’s a boys’ club, and she established herself, very early on, as a very thorough and capable producer.”

At the time, Hill was a rare female producer who grew to be a mentor for a pivotal generation of women in Hollywood — “part den mother, part cheerleader,” as Stacey Sher, her former employee and now a producer in her own right (“Erin Brockovich,” “Django Unchained”), put it.

Hill nurtured talent wherever she found it — filmmaker James Cameron was once her visual effects guy; a second assistant director, Jeffrey Chernov, became a producer of “Black Panther” — and had the confidence not to fear that others would leapfrog over her if she gave them a steppingstone.

She later grew frustrated, friends and colleagues said, that the system in which she excelled as a producer did not welcome more women as directors. But even that did not dim her passion for the industry, and she spent the last few years of her life working on a romantic thriller that would be her directorial debut.

She considered herself, above all, a storyteller, starting with “Halloween,” which she and Carpenter, her boyfriend at the time, wrote in three weeks. It catapulted them on to major careers.

Released in 1978, “Halloween” had a shoestring budget, about $320,000, and went on to earn $70 million globally (around $200 million in today’s dollars), a record for an independent movie. A slasher classic that revitalized the genre, it’s now in the National Film Registry. Hill also championed Curtis, then 19, for “Halloween,” her first feature, presenting a model of female camaraderie in a male-dominated field.

Hill worked or was credited on most of the “Halloween” sequels — last year’s blockbuster installment, also starring Curtis, and made long after Hill’s death, was the 11th in the franchise — and collaborated with Carpenter on other seminal horror and sci-fi thrillers, including “The Fog” and “Escape from New York,” after their romantic relationship ended.

She was an exacting producer. As she told the Los Angeles Times in 1982, “I discovered very early that there are two ways for a woman producer to go. You could be aggressive, or you can be very nice. So I arrive on the set, in my tight jeans, and people wonder. Then they see I’m nice. Then, finally, they see, I mean business.”

Curtis recalled that Hill scrutinized every receipt, keeping track of how many spools of thread and rolls of gaffer tape were used — and yet, said Curtis, Hill was “beloved” by her overwhelmingly male crews.

“She brought the proof that a woman can do anything in successful filmmaking that men do,” said Jeanine Basinger, a film historian. “They can make top box office blockbusters, they can make action films and genre films and horror films. She brought originality.”

In the ‘80s, Hill teamed up with Lynda Obst, a former studio executive, in one of the first female producing partnerships. Their movies included “The Fisher King,” “Clue,” based on the board game, which was Hill’s idea to develop for the screen, and “Adventures in Babysitting,” the directorial debut of Chris Columbus (“Home Alone,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”).

“Debra knew how to do every job on a set,” from positioning cameras to fine-tuning lighting, Obst said. She remembered Hill standing, “with her arms on her hips, like Peter Pan arriving in Neverland,” surveying every shot. “She just was able to solve a problem, imaginatively.”

On “The Fisher King,” (1991) when director Terry Gilliam suddenly decided, during a location scout, that he wanted to create an elaborate dance with 1,000 waltzing extras in Grand Central Terminal, Hill figured out how to pull it off. The sequence was among the most lauded in the film, which earned multiple Oscar nominations and won one.

Debra Gaye Hill was born on Nov. 10, 1950, in Philadelphia, to Frank and Jilda Hill. Her mother was a nurse and her father, who had been a Hollywood art director before her birth, eventually became a salesman, including on a car lot. The family, among them Hill’s younger brother, Franklin Robert Hill Jr., known as Bob, moved often.

Once, when house-hunting in Connecticut, their parents parked the children, then 10 and 11 or so, in a local movie theater. “I think Deb and I saw ‘Gone with the Wind’ four times a day,” said Bob Hill, a retired tugboat captain.

They later settled in Haddonfield, New Jersey, which Hill used as inspiration for the fictional Haddonfield, Illinois, setting of “Halloween.” Horror, she observed, always struck in small, under-policed towns and sleepy suburbs, where it seemed — tantalizingly — like nothing could go wrong.

“The idea of pulling off the veneer and seeing what lies beneath has always intrigued me,” she told Konow, the author of “Reel Terror” (2012).

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in sociology at Temple University, she became a flight attendant, then lingered in Jamaica, getting involved with a jazz musician.

That led to writing liner notes for albums, her brother said, which evolved into more writing gigs. She landed in California and, through her father’s connections, worked as a production assistant and a script supervisor, or “script girl,” as it was then called, on low-budget movies (including Carpenter’s first feature, “Assault on Precinct 13”), eventually moving her way up to producer.

Off the set, Hill liked to throw dinner parties, cooking for up to 20 people — she made a mean matzo ball soup, said her friend Diane Robin, an actress, and poached her salmon in the dishwasher. She gathered guests around her piano to sing and coaxed them to dance. Sometimes, she pulled out a baton and did a majorette routine she had learned as a teenager. Later, because of the cancer that would eventually take her life, her legs were amputated; undeterred, she threw a disco-themed birthday party, and danced along in her wheelchair.

Hill died on March 7, 2005, at 54. Her directorial debut never happened, but in a speech she gave in 2003 it was clear she knew her importance in the industry.

“I want every producer, studio executive and agent in this room to include me in their directors list,” she said while accepting an award from the organization Women in Film, “along with the women who have come before me, and the women directors who will come after me. If you need me, you’ll find me — I’ll be sitting by my pool, reading scripts and waiting for your numerous offers.”

In 2005 the Producers Guild, where she was a board member, named a fellowship in her honor, for women and men “whose work, interests, professionalism and passion mirror that of Debra Hill.” A dozen people have been recipients thus far, furthering her reach within the industry.

“There weren’t a lot of women to emulate or follow or learn from when I came to Hollywood in 1975,” Hill said in 2003. “Women struggled to have their voices heard, but I refused to struggle along with them. I realized that a woman can be successful in a man’s world.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="e5cda618-d871-37ac-a058-7b1223043ff1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/obituaries/debra-hill-overlooked.html">The New York Times</a>.

Overlooked No More: Debra Hill, producer who parlayed 'Halloween' into a cult classic

Perhaps the most famous baby sitter in all of moviedom, Laurie Strode, the teen heroine of “Halloween,” is stalked by a crazed predator, and survives — repeatedly. Laurie was resourceful and kind, “quiet but defiant,” said Debra Hill, who helped create the character.

There are seven flute players, all women, in Björk’s latest live extravaganza, “Cornucopia.” She mentioned the giraffes as a way to translate her sonic vision to her collaborators. “Like, they’re kind of furry and they’re kind of clean,” she said of the animals, “but they’re not as clean as you think, because they’re actually giraffes.”

“If that makes any sense,” she added.

As an iconoclastic artist — a punk-turned-pop-turned-experimental singer, multimedia visionary, misfit-fashion darling, and proto-futurist with a lasting fixation on the melding of nature and technology — Björk, 53, is used to explaining her leaps of imagination. Somehow, coming in her lilting voice, it works. The flute, for example, was her childhood instrument, but she rebelled against classical composers and learned contemporary, atonal work — the furrier-sounding stuff.

“Cornucopia,” a major commission from the Shed, the new arts venue at Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan, is characteristically ambitious — billed as Björk’s “most elaborate staged concert to date.” Opening Thursday, it includes a 50-member Icelandic young people’s choir, a custom-made reverb chamber, mesmerizing video projections, carefully positioned 360-degree sound and multiple bespoke instruments, some used for mere moments.

Björk calls it digital theater, or a sci-fi pop concert. But it is also a way to get into her head. Which, at the moment, is focused on a feminine, feminist, hopeful alternative future; the show is based around the music of her last album, “Utopia.”

“It’s like a fairy tale, I guess,” she said, “or like very purposely ecstatic, and kind of caustic.”

She was speaking over dinner last week during a break from rehearsals, dressed in a long pleated cloak in bifurcated marigold and purple florals, over a matching gloved jumpsuit; a glove dangled at her wrist while she ate. We sat in a space overlooking the theater and for no apparent reason — except, of course, that I was dining with Björk — the lights in the room grew progressively dimmer, until we were discussing hope and utopia and womanhood in pitch blackness. (It felt just right.)

Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, commissioned “Cornucopia,” and sat back while Björk developed it over the last few years. “She has a prodigal approach to creativity,” he said. “There’s this combination of real rigor and punk brought together, that creates this explosion of creativity, because it never becomes staid or safe. There’s always this yearning to reinvent.”

He had hoped that Björk would be one of the Shed’s first commissioned artists. “I would’ve been really upset if we hadn’t seemed relevant to her,” he said. He first presented her in 2011, when he lured her to the Manchester International Festival, where he was previously artistic director, with her conceptual-minded production for her album “Biophilia.” It spawned a long-running children’s educational project, and became a turning point in her career; she has hardly done a traditional tour since.

“Martha Rosler,” the feminist artist, “talks about the future flying in under the radar,” Poots said. “And certain artists like Björk are very tuned to keeping their eyes wide open all over. She’s someone who opens up questions rather than gives a lot of answers and instructions.”

“Utopia,” released in 2017, was Björk’s return to optimism, enthusiasm and romantic possibility — her “Tinder album,” as she has sometimes jokingly called it. Made in collaboration with Venezuelan DJ Arca, it was suffused with birdsong, loose melodies and the female flutists, all Icelandic musicians, who followed her to the Shed. The album was a response to “Vulnicura,” the bleak 2015 record she made after the end of her decade-long relationship with artist Matthew Barney, the father of her teenage daughter.

“‘Vulnicura’ for me was basically really, really sad,” she said. “Just, like, winter in Iceland, rocks on the ground, no plants — you know, the melody was literally lying on the floor. It didn’t ever make big leaps.”

Her visualization for “Utopia,” by contrast, was like a 3-D scan of fireworks, exploding over a (symbolic) lush island in the sky. Musically, she and Arca “talked a lot about it, and we wanted the synths to sound like flutes and the flutes to sound like birds and the birds to sound like synths,” Björk said. “Nothing holding it down.”

Lucrecia Martel, a celebrated Argentine filmmaker who is making her New York and theatrical debut directing “Cornucopia,” was tasked with staging Björk’s vision. Asked about the giraffe-flute metaphor, Martel laughed. “Many of her explanations are of that style,” she said, through a translator. “And sometimes it’s a little bit hard to understand what that actually means.”

Still, she followed Björk’s lead. Björk did the musical arrangements, and Martel added what she called materiality and physicality, by, say, projecting video (by Tobias Gremmler) onto curtains instead of screens, creating transparency and the ability for performers to modify the visuals by touch. Sometimes, Björk presented ideas, particularly about wardrobe or dramaturgy, that made her fear “this is a disaster,” Martel said. “And when I see everything together, it is incredible.”

Collaborators include Björk regulars like James Merry, her co-creative director, who made intricate golden masks by hand for Björk and other musicians. The costumes are mostly by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain. (The show, with performances through June 1, is sold out.)

Björk has been the boss almost since she began recording. She still has the same manager, Derek Birkett, she chose as a punk teenager in Iceland, and has only signed with major labels as distributors. “I never had anyone, not even Derek, nobody I have to play the album for and say, ‘Oh, I don’t like song three,’” she said.

She stepped off the standard, grueling pop tour cycle after “Biophilia,” she said, “because I just didn’t believe it anymore. Also, I had a family.” She adapted her career to suit her needs. “If I want to pretend I’m a matriarch I might as well, you know, walk the walk,” she said.

The lifestyle suited her, but it had a professional cost.“I’m lucky because I was from the generation that I could actually buy myself a house, because I sold CDs in the ’90s,” she said. “I got a couple of houses and a cabin in the mountains. I’m OK. But I probably haven’t made a penny in the last, I don’t know, 20 years. It just all goes back into my work — and I like it that way.”

That her last two albums have been far outside the pop-radio firmament does not seem to trouble her. Only once in her career, when she was living in London in the ’90s, has she felt, she said, like an A-list celebrity. “I was invited to all the hot parties,” she said, “and I just did it, had a laugh and thought it was amazing. And then I just woke up one morning and I was like, OK, I’m done — like, the music is terrible, conversations are awful. I’m done.”

She moved to Spain and wrote her album “Homogenic,” with the realization that she was not the kind of musician who could be in the spotlight and still be creative. “I have to go in the shadow, in the corner, and have no one watch me,” she said.

In “Cornucopia,” Björk’s introversion is represented by the reverb chamber, a booth on the side of the stage with minimal amplification that’s meant to recreate the effect of her singing alone on long, rural walks, as she did growing up. In a preview on Monday, she sometimes disappeared from view when she stepped inside. “I’m scared,” she said with an expletive, of showcasing her vocals in such a raw way.

But there’s a lot to distract: two eight-meter-long organ pipes that resemble canons are suspended in midair. They were specially made in Iceland and are used on only one song, “Body Memory.” Björk also sings from inside a Hula-Hoop-size circular flute, as four women play it.

“The whole show is a lot about females supporting each other,” she said. The flutists have been coming to her cabin in Iceland for years. “We would have flute Fridays and rehearse and brunch all day,” she said, describing her arrangements for them as “flute folk music for the future.”

The most direct appeal to the future comes from Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish climate activist, who delivers a video message toward the end of the show. Like Thunberg, Björk’s daughter has been participating in climate strikes on Fridays. Her generation, Björk wrote in an email, “is extremely aware of the power of activism and I’m very proud of them.” (Björk also has a 32-year-old son and became a grandmother earlier this year.) The lyrics on “Utopia,” she wrote, “are about proposing to come up with a more compassionate way to interact with nature. Hopefully to start from a female point of view will help.”

That is what Björk, who has been rooted in Iceland for the last year, has lately surrounded herself with. During our dark dinner, she said she was happy, and in love.

Romantic love? I asked in an email later. Or the spark that comes with creative connection from partners like Arca?

“Perhaps all of the above,” she wrote back. “‘Cornucopia’ is probably as expansive as I will get ...an effort to find an equilibrium between all areas. And a way for love to be present.”

Björk’s ‘Cornucopia’: Through June 1 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Sold out.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c22bdd71-9287-3acd-a7c1-d7043be2e433" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/arts/music/bjork-cornucopia.html">The New York Times</a>.

Melena Ryzik

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