Peter Libbey

In Episode 2, two years into the investigation, half the country has heard of Baby Hope, but the detectives are still no closer to discovering her real name.

The mystery that unfolds over the succeeding episodes resembles the sort of true-crime narrative made popular by podcasts like “Serial” and “In the Dark.” But this time, the creators are not journalists or sound engineers, but members of the law enforcement agency that pursued the case for more than 20 years and (spoiler alert) finally charged a man with the crime.

After decades of seeing its work depicted by others in ventures like ABC’s drama series “NYPD Blue,” the New York Police Department has begun to mine its own material for a true-crime podcast, “Break in the Case,” which debuted last week.

It joins several other law enforcement agencies around the country that have decided that podcasts are an effective way to polish the image of the police, humanize them, explain the intricacies of their work and enlist the public’s help in gathering information.

“The way that we’ve traditionally disseminated information is standing on a soap box and yelling at people about what’s happening,” said Lt. Saul Jaeger of the Mountain View Police Department, outside San Francisco. “That’s not listening, and it doesn’t allow the community to be truly engaged.”

The Mountain View department developed its podcast, “The Silicon Valley Beat,” several years ago and said it had been happy with the results. Early next year it will release a parallel series about its investigation into the murder of a 21-year-old Ethiopian immigrant in 1985.

“One of the best tools that we can use to connect with people is stories,” Jaeger said. “At the end of the day, that’s what people remember.”

The New York project is directed by Jill Bauerle and Edward Conlon, a former detective who became a best-selling author (“Blue Blood” and “The Policewomen’s Bureau”).

Last year Conlon, who retired in 2011, returned to become director of executive communications for Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill. He began trying to inject more storytelling into the department’s communications strategy, writing and posting long narratives like “Old Hays and His Descendants: The Legacy of the Last High Constable of New York City” and “The War at Home: Remembering Foster and Laurie” on the police website. But he found the results disappointing.

“People weren’t going to the website for long-form nonfiction,” he said. “They were going for traffic closings and Civil Service test information.”

So Conlon and his departmental collaborators — Bauerle, the series’ executive producer, and Kenzie Delaine, a producer and writer — decided to create a podcast that would be very different from one that the department had produced several years ago, which focused on distributing practical information like event announcements and street closings.

“It’s such an intimate medium,” Bauerle said. “A lot of what police officers and detectives say is filtered through other sources,” she added. “To have them telling their own stories is very powerful.”

The first season of “Break in the Case” will cover three investigations. Five episodes written and narrated by Conlon will trace the “Baby Hope” case, which was revived by an anonymous tip in 2013.

A single episode, scheduled for release in December, will focus on the efforts by detectives to identify a woman whose remains washed up along the Brooklyn waterfront in 2015. It will be titled “Monique” for the tattoo found on the victim’s leg. Bauerle, who wrote the episode, said she hopes it will aid investigators in turning up new leads.

Larry Davis, who wounded six officers in a 1986 shootout with police, will be the subject of the season’s final episodes. New installments are to be published online weekly.

Jane Kirtley, an expert on the media, cautioned that nonfiction podcasts from sources other than news organizations or academic institutions were not necessarily impartial.

“It seems important to recognize this for what it is: a public relations exercise,” said Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “The stories that are being told are being told from the perspective of law enforcement. It’s not journalism.”

But the podcast’s creators said they were committed to reflecting with accuracy the details of the crimes they will discuss.

So, in the case of Baby Hope, the producers interviewed the various people involved in a complicated investigation that stretched over two decades.

Sean Kenny, a former police sergeant who was among the first on the scene when Baby Hope was found, recalled dealing with his supervisor at the time, a crusty lieutenant.

“He said: ‘Kenny, this is a big deal. Be careful and take your time. Do it right.’”

In 2013, Baby Hope was finally identified as Anjélica Castillo. Later that year, police charged Conrado Juárez, the brother of a woman who was caring for the child, with the killing.

Juárez confessed, but later said his admission had been coerced and pleaded not guilty. He spent five years in jail awaiting trial, a delay partly caused by a dispute over whether a New York Times reporter who had interviewed Juárez in jail could be forced to testify in the case. Juárez died of complications from cancer last year, still in custody and awaiting trial.

Joseph Reznick, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of internal affairs, who as a commander of detectives led the investigation for many years, recalls on the podcast why detectives pursued the case for so long. After all, the police precinct in that Upper Manhattan neighborhood recorded 121 other homicides that year.

“What made this one different,” he says on the podcast, “was the fact that it was a child.”

This article originally appeared in

For This Crime Show, the NYPD Holds the Camera

In Episode 1 of a new podcast, New York City police officers find the body of an unidentified 4-year-old girl in a cooler near the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan. Technically, she is “Homicide No. 79” of 1991, but the detectives, some of whom have children of their own, rename her: Baby Hope.

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance and power of this gift,” Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s director and chief curator, said. “The scale of it and the depth of it is mind-blowing.” The bequest, which includes the pieces by Tompkins and works by more than 400 artists from across the country, will account for about 15% of the art collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which is affiliated with the University of California.

Leon’s collection will help introduce the public to African American quilt makers other than the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose work was showcased in a celebrated exhibition that Rinder helped bring to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002. (In his review for The Times, Michael Kimmelman called the show’s 60 quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”) “Gee’s Bend, which a lot of people know about now, happily, that’s one small town in one state in the South,” Rinder said. “Eli’s collection is a broad overview of hundreds of other towns and the work that was made in them.”

Two exhibitions of quilts from the bequest have already been planned. The first, a retrospective of Tompkins’ work, will open Feb. 19, 2020. The second will follow in early 2022 and focus on the others artists represented in the collection, like Willia Ette Graham and Arbie Williams.

The breadth of Leon’s collection and its emphasis on Tompkins’ quilts are closely linked. It was a chance encounter with Tompkins at a flea market in the Oakland, California, area in 1985 that convinced Leon, a psychotherapist, to dedicate his life to collecting quilts by African American artists.

Tompkins, whose real name was Effie Mae Howard, didn’t make herself easy to find. She had begun quilting seriously in her 40s and when her work started to attract attention, she used a pseudonym, fought hard to maintain her privacy and rarely parted with her pieces. Leon was one of the few to whom she revealed her true identity and sold her work regularly. Tompkins died in 2006 at age 70.

Once he had persuaded her to share her work, Leon was immediately taken by Tompkins’ daring designs and use of unconventional materials like velvet and fake fur. His passion for her quilts led him to buy as many as he could and also inspired him to seek out work by other African American quilt makers in the Bay Area.

To trace the lineage of the practitioners whose art he had fallen for so deeply, Leon traveled to Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, where Tompkins and some of the other artists had roots, to conduct research on the tradition of African American quilt making and collect pieces. His home back in Oakland eventually became so crowded with quilts that he built a two-story addition to accommodate them. In 1987, he organized a first exhibition of quilts from his collection at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum.

Despite Leon’s recognition of the quilts as substantial pieces of art, it has taken some time for the collection he assembled to be seen that way by others. “I believe that sexism and racism, not to mention classism, have each played a role in shaping the history of art as we know it,” Rinder said when asked why this body of work hasn’t received more attention. The quilts in Leon’s collection, which were predominantly made by African American women, have been particularly affected by these prejudices, he said.

Jenny Hurth, the executor of Leon’s estate, said that he chose to leave his collection to the Berkeley museum because Rinder was among the first people in the art world to recognize the value of the quilts he had acquired. “He knew that if he left them in Larry’s hands, his idea that these were works of fine art would be carried forth in some way,” Hurth said. Rinder organized the first solo exhibition of Tompkins’ work at Berkeley in 1997 and included her work in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Leon’s original plan, Hurth said, was to place his collection in multiple museums, including Berkeley, but he died before plans for this dispersal could be made.

Rinder will resign from his position at the Berkeley museum in March, but Catherine Koshland, the president of the museum’s board and the University of California, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for undergraduate education, said that his departure would not affect the care of the bequest. “Eli Leon’s collection is a transformative gift,” she said by email. “And we’ve made a sustained commitment to sharing it with scholars and the public for many years to come.”

African American Art Quilts Find a Museum Home in California

Almost 3,000 quilts by African American artists — including more than 500 by Rosie Lee Tompkins, a quilt maker whose formally inventive work has helped elevate the standing of the discipline in the art world — are heading to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as a bequest by Eli Leon. Leon, who died last year, was a voracious collector and champion of African American quilting.

Dance Theater of Harlem was established in part to show that black dancers could excel at classical ballet. When the company was looking for a place to perform for a mixed audience, “the Guggenheim opened up its doors and presented this performance in 1971,” said Duke Dang, general manager of Works &amp; Process.

“We’re really proud to recognize how forward thinking both institutions were and to celebrate that,” he added.

The new season, announced on Monday, also includes a preview of Ballet West’s production of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer’s reconstruction of a rarely seen Balanchine ballet from 1925, “The Song of the Nightingale,” or “Le Chant du Rossignol.”

Visitors to the museum will be able to see excerpts from the piece performed on Sept. 29 in advance of its American premiere in Salt Lake City in October. The performance will be accompanied by a discussion among Hodson, Archer, Ballet West’s artistic director Adam Sklute and Victoria Simon from the Balanchine Trust.

Other dance offerings include discussions and performances by members of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Washington Ballet.

Audiences at the Guggenheim this fall will also have the opportunity to get a peek at theatrical productions before they go onstage in New York. On Sept. 9 cast members from “Seared,” a new play by Theresa Rebeck set to begin performances at MCC Theater in October, will perform highlights from the show; Rebeck and the production’s director Moritz von Stuelpnagel will also share their thoughts. Peter Dinklage, of “Game of Thrones” fame, will appear with director Erica Schmidt to give a taste of Schmidt’s musical adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac” on Sept. 28. The New Group’s world premiere production will have its debut in October.

More information on the fall Works &amp; Process season can be found at worksandprocess.org. Tickets go on sale July 29.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/at-guggenheim-works-process-looks-backward-and-forward.html" id="44f147fa-3fd7-39e4-a678-4a6d846c51ab">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Dance Theater of Harlem will return to the site of its official New York debut as a part of the fall Works &amp; Process season at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The company, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, will perform Arthur Mitchell’s “Tones II,” portions of George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments” and a piece by Robert Garland in the museum’s rotunda on Sept. 30.

At Guggenheim, Works & Process Looks Backward and Forward

Pamela Tatge, director of Jacob’s Pillow, described Lopez Ochoa, a Colombian-Belgian, as “a global citizen” and said “she creates rigorous works of great beauty and intensity in hybrid contemporary and classical ballet vocabularies that enable dancers to truly realize themselves.”

Lopez Ochoa, 45, is particularly appreciative of the recognition from Jacob’s Pillow because, she said, “they honor an artist for who they are, the uniqueness of their way of working, their way of thinking.”

But as Lopez Ochoa pointed out, what distinguishes her choreographic work can be difficult to pin down.

“I am chameleon,” she said. “When you see my Ballet Hispánico pieces or the ones at Dutch National Ballet, you cannot guess that it’s the same choreographer.”

She said that sometimes her flexibility has been “a sort of pain point” for her but that joining the list of previous winners, which includes Kyle Abraham and Michelle Dorrance, helps to reinforce her confidence in her approach.

“I make work for people,” she said.

Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerísimo” will be performed by Ballet Hispánico as a part of the company’s season at the Joyce Theater in New York beginning March 26. The piece is a René Magritte inspired, athletic exploration of the relationship between clothing and identity. Dance Theater of Harlem will debut an expanded version of Lopez Ochoa’s “Balamouk,” previously seen at City Center’s Fall for Dance in 2018, at Jacob’s Pillow in July.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/arts/dance/annabelle-lopez-ochoa-wins-jacob-pillow-dance-award.html" id="30f1c4bd-7826-3c0c-a3fa-b5a23064fd43">The New York Times</a>.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, a versatile choreographer whose work includes flamenco, hip-hop, classical ballet and contemporary dance pieces, is the recipient of the 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, the organization announced Wednesday. Lopez Ochoa will accept the award, which comes with a $25,000 cash prize, on June 15 at the Jacob’s Pillow season-opening gala in Beckett, Massachusetts.

Lopez Ochoa Wins Jacob's Pillow Dance Award

The theater’s 2019-20 season, announced Thursday, will include the world premiere of Jeffrey Hatcher and Andy Garcia’s adaptation of “Key Largo,” featuring Garcia in the starring role, and Tony Award winner Idina Menzel reprising her role in Joshua Harmon’s “Skintight,” from Sept. 3 through Oct. 6.

“Key Largo,” set to run from Feb. 4 through March 8, 2020, is based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and the 1948 noir film directed by John Huston, and written by Huston and Richard Brooks. “Skintight,” which had its premiere at Roundabout Theater Company last summer, starred Menzel as Jodi, a lawyer struggling with her relationship to her fashion-designer father.

Shakman, the Geffen Playhouse’s artistic director, said in a statement that the coming season “marks some notable firsts for the Geffen — our first Shakespeare production, two world premieres and a coproduction with the dazzlingly inventive Vampire Cowboys” company based in New York.

“Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation,” a play with music by Qui Nguyen, will be the season’s second world premiere and its final production. It will run from June 16 through July 19, 2020.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/theater/nikolaj-coster-waldau-macbeth-geffen-playhouse.html" id="ba6b96c8-4331-3f79-a476-153d77bf1e65">The New York Times</a>.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is no stranger to the bloody side of feudal politics. He’s been playing Jaime Lannister, a character known for his murder of a king, on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” for seven seasons. He’ll continue in this vein in November when he portrays another king killer, Macbeth, in a production of Shakespeare’s tragedy directed by “Game of Thrones” alumnus Matt Shakman at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, California, from Nov. 5 through Dec. 8.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to Play Macbeth Onstage at the Geffen Playhouse

The author of the “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” did more than write books. He invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages, religion and an era-spanning history. “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,” an exhibition of his artwork, letters, drafts and other material now on view at the Morgan Library &amp; Museum, reminds visitors that the stories Tolkien wrote, however impressive, represent only a fraction of his efforts.

“I don’t want to make him sound delusional, like he thought Middle-earth was a real place, but he did believe that Middle-earth, in and of itself, was a real place,” John T. McQuillen, the curator of the Morgan’s iteration of the exhibition, said. “Internal to the story, it was a true reality, so it had everything that this world does.”

Creating maps, languages, history and a detailed visualization of this world was Tolkien’s way of honoring that reality. “I think it was this sort of duty for him to be sure that he was being true to the vision and properly recording what was there,” McQuillen said.

Tolkien’s artwork ranges from a scene of a bucolic landscape in the English Midlands, “Alder by a stream,” to nearly psychedelic depictions of fantastical vistas like “The Shores of Faery.” Somewhere in between are the drawings and paintings he made for “The Hobbit,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Silmarillion.” These meld Tolkien’s romanticism and his desire for realism with some of his more wild artistic impulses.

The exhibition, through May 12, highlights Tolkien’s unparalleled ability to create an immersive experience using only words and pictures. After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in the reality of Midde-earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there.

Here are four facets of the show that exemplify the depth and breadth of Tolkien’s creation.

— Tolkien as Mapmaker

Cartography was at the heart of Tolkien’s most famous creation, “The Lord of the Rings,” a trilogy that chronicles the journey of Frodo, a hobbit, to destroy the ring he inherited from his uncle Bilbo. “For ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ Tolkien began with the map and made the story fit,” McQuillen said.

It is no wonder, then, that Tolkien sometimes simultaneously charted the story’s plot and sketched its geography, as he did in “Map of Rohan, Gondor and Mordor with plot notes for ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ Book V.” This helped him coordinate among characters in different settings, ensuring that no one was moving in a way that didn’t make sense for the topography they were passing over. For Tolkien, McQuillen said, “Pippin and Gandalf couldn’t ride to Minas Tirith in shorter time than someone else was traveling a similar distance in another part of the story.”

Tolkien’s maps, eight of which appear in the exhibition, are about more than verisimilitude. They are meant to remind the reader that the stories are visiting only a small part of the available terrain. There is more to Middle-earth, Tolkien implies, than any single tale could convey.

— Tolkien’s True Masterpiece

It is incredible to think that Tolkien considered neither “The Hobbit” nor “The Lord of the Rings” his masterpiece. That honor goes to “The Silmarillion,” a work he began around 1915, well before both of his better-known projects. “The best way to describe it is as almost biblical in scope,” McQuillen said. Richard Ovenden, head of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, where a previous version of “Maker of Middle-earth,” organized by Catherine McIlwaine, appeared last year, likened it to the underwater, invisible bulk of an iceberg.

“The Silmarillion,” an early cover page of which is on view at the Morgan, begins with a creation story for Middle-earth before diving into its religious cosmology. What follows is an account of the world’s first major conflict between good and evil, a history of the Elvish race, and an in-depth explanation of the events that led up to “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” among several other things.

This would be like J.K. Rowling following up her “Harry Potter” series with a book that covers the whole history of her world leading up to the adventures of Harry and his friends.

The unfinished work was published posthumously in 1977 under the direction of Tolkien’s son Christopher. As his imaginary world grew, the difficulty of ever capturing it in a full and final way also increased. Tolkien’s attention to detail here probably surpasses what he did in “The Lord of the Rings”: He went so far as to design heraldic devices for some of the characters featured in the book.

— Tolkien the Artist

While Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” films are the most famous visual representations of Middle-earth, Tolkien drew and painted many images of his world himself. He created two sets of illustrations for “The Hobbit,” one in black and white and the other in color. For “The Lord of the Rings,” his artwork was primarily for his own reference and, Ovenden said, for his own enjoyment.

“He’s doing the drawings and the maps and the spreadsheets and all of that detail — the language, the calligraphy — for himself,” he said, after pointing out that Tolkien didn’t write his books to earn a living or because he considered himself to be a professional creative writer.

The visuals, he emphasized, were a way of adding yet another layer of depth and richness to his work. “It helps him paint the picture of the world,” he said. “It helps him populate the world with a reality that would be weaker otherwise.”

Ovenden said he hoped the exhibition highlights Tolkien’s skills as an artist and shows visitors, especially those who have seen the films but not read the books, that there are several ways to imagine Middle-earth, and that going back to Tolkien’s original work is a great way to appreciate this.

— Tolkien, Lover of Languages

Tolkien was an inventor of languages before he was a writer. By 1915, he had begun to devise a “nonsense fairy language” that would eventually become the tongue of his elves. At the time of his death, in 1973, it had developed into a body of interrelated languages — Sindarin and Quenya being the most advanced — with a complex history. “The Tree of Tongues” sketches a version of this history.

McQuillen suggested that it was Tolkien’s love of his own languages that spurred him to begin writing fiction. “When he was in school and in his early undergraduate years he realized that without stories, without literature, a language will die,” he said. This view of the relationship between language and literature, informed by Tolkien’s professional life as a philologist and professor of English at Oxford, was the engine that drove him both as a scholar and as a writer.

Tolkien’s lifelong love of language extended into the aesthetic realm as well. “The Fire-writing” shows him experimenting with several different forms of Elvish script for the inscription on Sauron’s infamous “ring of power” from “The Lord of the Rings.” The language of the text is another of Tolkien’s inventions: the Black Speech of Mordor.

—Event Information:

“Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” runs through May 12 at the Morgan Library &amp; Museum, 225 Madison Ave., Manhattan; 212-685-0008, themorgan.org. The show will travel to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in late 2019.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/arts/design/tolkien-exhibition-morgan-library-and-museum.html" id="e320d6e7-df8c-3ee1-ad17-d3a3e7253985">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — If you have ever opened a fantasy novel and found a map, you most likely have J.R.R. Tolkien to thank. He probably deserves some credit, too, for inspiring future fantasy writers to create their own languages. And if you’ve ever completed a book and found that there’s an online encyclopedia dedicated to its world and mythology — that’s also thanks to Tolkien.

Tolkien's World: An Exhibition Transports Us to Middle-earth

The money will go to a retrospective exhibition of work by painter Oscar Howe, who was a member of the Yanktonai Dakota tribe. The show will be at the National Museum of the American Indian’s New York facility.

The ban was instituted in 2010 when the National Portrait Gallery removed David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly” from its exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” because of political pressure. The Warhol Foundation had supported the show and saw the removal of the artwork as an example of “blatant censorship.”

In addition to licensing Warhol’s work and supporting scholarly research, the Warhol Foundation also provides grants to arts organizations.

“We believe that the ban has had its intended effect of promoting freedom of artistic expression at the national level,” Joel Wachs, the foundation’s president, said in the statement announcing the repeal. “The Smithsonian has also demonstrated a strong track record of highlighting underrepresented artists over the past eight years, which aligns well with the Foundation’s core values.”

Wachs said that the Foundation has reviewed its decision every year, but until now hadn’t been comfortable reversing it. “We thought that a period of time has to go by before you know whether someone has really changed,” he said in an interview Friday. The Oscar Howe show, he added, came along and seemed like a perfect example of what the foundation wants to support.

Wojnarowicz’s video came under fire from the Catholic League and members of the House of Representatives for its perceived disrespect to Christianity. One image — of ants crawling on a crucifix — was singled out for criticism. At the time, Martin E. Sullivan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, said that the aim of the work was to articulate “the reality of the suffering of the AIDS epidemic in Latin American culture,” not to criticize or demean Christianity. Nevertheless, the piece was removed from the exhibition. (Wojnarowicz died at age 37 of AIDS-related complications in 1992.)

The Oscar Howe retrospective will include approximately 75 of his paintings, some of which have never been publicly exhibited. Howe, who died in 1983, was a pioneer of contemporary Native American art whose style combines abstraction with passionate, expressive dynamism. The remainder of the Warhol Foundation’s fall 2018 grants will be announced next week.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/arts/design/warhol-foundation-smithsonian-ban-lifted.html" id="011d9c4a-2755-3acf-a2bd-303528062c59">The New York Times</a>.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced that it will award $100,000 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian — ending an 8-year-old ban on providing money to the Smithsonian Institution.

Warhol Foundation Overturns 8-Year Smithsonian Funding Ban

A first version hung in the Ziegfeld Theater in New York and was later lost in a fire that destroyed the Mount Kisco home of the theater’s owner, Broadway impresario Billy Rose. Dalí made a second copy for Rose, who sold it.

One owner later, it ended up in the home of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin whose cocaine empire placed him among the world’s richest people and whose terror campaigns paralyzed his country.

Now a fuller view of what happened next to the painting, sometimes known as “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” is recounted in a new book published in Spanish by Escobar’s wife, Victoria Eugenia Henao. In the book, “Pablo Escobar: My Life and My Prison,” she recalls her feelings when she first spotted the work by Dalí.

“It was incredible,” she writes. “I was struck by the movement of a couple in an endless desert, sexual and dreamlike.”

More important, the painting became a talisman of sorts for Escobar family members, as they narrowly survived a bombing at their Medellín home, she reports, and later served as the sort of “gift” that she believes may have saved her life and the lives of her children.

Here’s an account of the painting’s travels as further illuminated in the book.

New York City, 1944

The first iteration of “The Dance” was known as “Art of Boogie-Woogie,” and it was part of a series commissioned by Rose to decorate the Ziegfeld during its inaugural production, a 1944 musical revue called “Seven Lively Arts.” Dalí created paintings that reflected his views of music, theater and other arts, in a small room at the theater, where they later hung in the lobby.

The original painting featured several twisted, emaciated figures locked in what appeared to be more struggle than celebration as they moved within a corridor or tunnel. A flaming tuba appears amid them, and mysterious figures loiter in the background.

Mount Kisco, New York, 1956

The original set of Dalí paintings was later moved to Rose’s mansion in Mount Kisco, a New York suburb. But the works were destroyed by a fire that swept through the home in 1956.

When Dalí found out the paintings had been lost, he offered to repaint them for the same price as the original commission as a sign of gratitude to Rose, his patron.

Port Lligat, Spain, 1957

Dalí painted the replacement series in Spain, where he lived in Port Lligat. He had become an internationally known painter by this time, famous for his unpredictability, his outrageousness and his surreal mixture of the brutal and the divine. The second version was slightly different. Only two figures are featured, and the tuba has disappeared. The setting, too, is altered. The two dancers appear against a typically Dalí-esque barren landscape. The replacement series was later installed in Rose’s Manhattan apartment.

New York City, 1985

The man who bought the Dalí from Rose sold it at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on May 14, 1985. Henao does not make clear in her book whether she was the purchaser who paid $209,000 (about $490,000, adjusted for inflation) or if she bought it subsequently. But by 1988, it was in Colombia, part of a collection she was creating.

In her 512-page book, Henao suggests that art became something of a refuge for her, a gentle pursuit in a life often enveloped by violence and fear. She says she was largely unaware of the extent of Escobar’s crimes. But she does not try to deny them, and in an interview last month on a Colombian radio station she apologized for the pain he had caused.

As for the art she collected, she writes that Escobar took little notice. He was interested only “in antiques and antique cars.”

Henao collected work by a range of artists, including painter Claudio Bravo, painter and sculptor Fernando Botero and sculptor Édgard Negret.

But acquiring the Dalí was particularly momentous, she writes, given his stature. “It seemed incredible to me,” she wrote, “that at my 22 years of age I could have such a work of art in my house.”

Medellín, Colombia, 1988

The Escobars’ apartment was in El Poblado, a neighborhood of Medellín. Henao said she hung the Dalí in what she describes as a privileged place, the library, where it could be seen from multiple vantage points.

It was hanging there in 1988 when a car bomb targeting Escobar and his family ripped through the building. Escobar wasn’t present, but family members were, and they fled.

Days after the attack, her sister returned to the building, found the painting unscathed and retrieved it, she said.

Henao moved “The Dance” to her sister’s home in another neighborhood in Medellín. But that house also came under attack, Henao writes, from the vigilante group Los Pepes, which hated her husband. The house was set on fire in 1993, and Henao said she initially assumed the painting had been destroyed.

But the arsonists had walked off with the Dalí painting, she writes, a fact she learned after the death of her husband in December of that year. Soon after, she said, she received a message from an intermediary for Carlos Castaño Gil, who led Los Pepes along with his brother Fidel.

They were willing to return the painting to Henao, now a widow, to aid her in paying off her husband’s enemies. But she declined, she said, because she remembered something her husband had told her to assuage any potentially dangerous situations. “The day I die,” she recalled Escobar telling her, “give them what you have left so they do not kill you and our children.”

This gesture, she said, was one of many she made to convince her husband’s former enemies that she posed no threat and to compensate them for the costs of having battled with Escobar. It was, it seems, successful. Henao and her family were able to leave Colombia safely, eventually settling in Argentina.

“The last thing I knew about ‘The Dance of Rock and Roll’ was that Carlos called several dealers in Bogotá and asked them for help in selling the work to an international collector,” she writes.

Fukushima, Japan, 2018

In 1994, “The Dance” went up for sale at Christie’s London. The provenance in the catalog named Billy Rose and another collector as prior owners, but it did not name the seller or Escobar. The auction house gave a high estimate for the value at $625,195. It ended up being bought, price unknown, by a Japanese businessman, Teizo Morohashi, founder of XEBIO Corp., a sporting goods retailer.

An art collector particularly fascinated by Dalí, Morohashi acquired some 330 paintings, sculptures, prints and other works by the artist. He then donated them, along with 70 works by other artists to create the Morohashi Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1999 on land he provided in an inland section of the Fukushima region that is about a two-hour drive from the Pacific coast. Today the museum welcomes about 50,000 visitors a year.

Dalí would probably be happy with another museum that honors his legacy. Given his particular fondness for the humor and beauty to be found in a world gone awry, he also would have likely enjoyed the strange journey that his painting “The Dance” took to get there.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/arts/design/pablo-escobar-salvador-dali.html" id="6af4bce5-cf07-307b-a823-6632c5292847">The New York Times</a>.

“The Dance” is perhaps not the best painting by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, but it’s probably the one with the most interesting history.

The Dalí and the Kingpin's Wife

Now a fuller vision of what happened next to the painting, sometimes known as “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” is recounted in a new book published in Spanish by Escobar’s wife, Victoria Eugenia Henao. In the book, “Pablo Escobar: My Life and My Prison,” she recalls her feelings when she first spotted the work by Dalí.

The first iteration of “Dance” was known as “Art of Boogie-Woogie,” and it was part of a series commissioned by Rose to decorate the Ziegfeld during its inaugural production, a 1944 musical revue called “Seven Lively Arts.” Dalí created paintings that reflected his views of music, theater and other arts, in a small room at the theater, where they later hung in the lobby.

<h1>NEW YORK — This year the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival will expand its mission of challenging artistic and geographical divisions by highlighting work that also troubles the boundaries between fact and fiction, self and other, past and present.</h1>

This updated focus comes from Courtney Geraghty, the festival’s new curator. “When I think about what lines need to be crossed in 2019, I don’t think they’re the same lines that needed to be crossed when the festival was founded 13 years ago,” she said in an interview. The battle to make artwork more interdisciplinary, she added as an example, “has more or less been won.”

For her inaugural season, Geraghty wanted to apply the festival’s transgressive ethos to new areas, including generational differences and some of the more basic concepts we use to order our world.

The director Cyril Teste’s “Opening Night,” which kicks off the season Sept. 12-14 at the French Institute Alliance Française’s Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan, is not merely another work that blends theater and film. His adaptation of John Cassavetes’ screenplay for his 1977 film of the same name subtly incorporates elements from the life and career of Isabelle Adjani, the show’s main performer. The infusion of the actress’ autobiographical material, along with Teste’s nightly changing of stage directions, helps to turn the piece into a reflection on how we can be transformed by the roles we play.

A new play by Peter Brook and his creative partner Marie-Hélène Estienne raises similar questions about the role of art. In “Why?” the 94-year-old director and his collaborator interrogate themselves, their audience and their actors by asking “Why theater? What’s it for? What’s it about?” The introspective piece, which promises to be informed by Brook’s nearly 80-year career in the theater, will run Sept. 21-Oct. 6 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn as a part of the 40th-anniversary season of Theater for a New Audience, which commissioned the play along with CICT/Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and several other arts organizations.

The Crossing the Line roster also includes several dance offerings. Among them is Jérôme Bel and Catherine Gallant’s dance portrait of Isadora Duncan, which will make its American debut on Sept. 25 at Florence Gould Hall. “SOMEWHERE AT THE BEGINNING,” a solo by Germaine Acogny and Mikaël Serre, performed by Acogny, that addresses her personal journey from Africa to Europe and back, through the lens of Greek tragedy, will follow at La MaMa Sept. 26 and 28.

A full schedule for the 2019 Crossing the Line Festival can be found at crossingthelinefestival.org. For more information on Theater for a New Audience’s coming season visit tfana.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/arts/crossing-the-line-festival-challenges-itself-to-evolve.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Crossing the Line festival challenges itself to evolve

For her inaugural season, Geraghty wanted to apply the festival’s transgressive ethos to new areas, including generational differences and some of the more basic concepts we use to order our world.

<h1>NEW YORK — No less a critic than Charles Dickens was appalled by the way New York in the 19th century housed its prisoners in the dank, overcrowded and smelly precincts of “the Tombs,” the city jail in lower Manhattan.</h1>

“Such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!” he wrote in 1842.

Yet every day into that dark world walked a woman who brought the inmates care, compassion and practical help. For these efforts, Rebecca Salome Foster, a volunteer who dedicated herself to humanitarian work after the death of her husband, came to be known as the “Tombs Angel.”

A sympathetic ear, a zeal to investigate their cases and a willingness to plead their cause with judges were among the blessings she brought to the prisoners, many of them poor, none of them yet convicted of the crimes with which they were charged.

When she died in 1902, a victim of the Park Avenue Hotel fire, an effort to honor her arose almost immediately, resulting in the installation of a 700-pound marble monument in the city’s old Criminal Courts building. But when the court was torn down in about 1940, the monument disappeared from public view for decades, hidden away in the bowels of various storage spaces.

Now the monument, rediscovered and refurbished, is being reinstalled in the lobby of the New York state Supreme Court this month, a tribute to Foster and also part of a wider effort to recognize the many women whose contributions to the city have never been properly honored.

“Timing is everything, and there’s all this interest now in the dearth of tributes to deserving women, and here we had one that dates back to 1904,” said John Werner, chief clerk and executive officer of the civil branch of the court.

Beyond this project, New York is working to address the fact that so few of its public monuments feature women by creating a series of new ones, including figures of Billie Holiday and trailblazing Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

Foster’s spirit of service was recognized in her own day by the City Club, which started the campaign to create a monument to her. Admirers noted how Foster, beginning in the 1880s, had not only helped the jailed, but also offered food, money, clothing and job-training advice to the poor of lower Manhattan.

Greg Young, one of the hosts of the New York City history podcast “The Bowery Boys,” said that by the time Foster began working there, The Tombs was “already a total hellhole.” Because it was built atop the poorly filled-in Collect Pond, he said, the jail had major structural problems that disrupted its sewage, drainage and water systems. It was also terribly overcrowded, with several prisoners usually filling cells designed for one.

That jail was shut down and replaced the year Foster died, with a new building that was itself shut down in 1941. Several iterations later, the city’s jail in that neighborhood is now officially known as the Manhattan Detention Complex. Informally, it’s still called the Tombs.

Soon after Foster’s death, important judges joined the campaign to honor her. So did President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave money to the project. The monument they helped to create consisted of a marble bas-relief and a medallion likeness of Foster by Austrian-American sculptor Karl Bitter, with a bronze frame by his American collaborator, Charles Rollinson Lamb.

At some time while in storage, the bronze frame and the medallion disappeared. The surviving element, the relief depicting an angel holding a vulnerable figure, is scheduled to be installed in the court building at 60 Centre St. on Tuesday and rededicated June 25.

“We sort of dropped the ball when we lost track of it and didn’t immediately restore it to public view when the old criminal court building was torn down,” Werner said. ”

Werner was critical to rescuing the monument from oblivion. The piece had turned up briefly, dirty and damaged, during a survey of city-owned art that registered its existence in 1983 and sent it out for some conservation work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But no plan for what to do with it came together, and it was ultimately put away again.

Almost two decades later, a relative of Foster, Jeremy Ann Brown, who served on a New York panel that reviewed judicial conduct, contacted Norman Goodman, longtime county clerk of Manhattan. She said she recalled that her great-aunt might have once been honored with a monument. Did he know where it was?

They found it in storage, but again a plan to place it in public view never materialized.

Werner, though, had sat in on a meeting where the monument’s future was discussed, and a few years ago took it upon himself to restart the process. His first stop — finding Jeremy Ann Brown — was not easy, because her last name was so common.

But an online search in 2014 turned up a possible email address for her, and they managed to reconnect.

“Twenty years ago, we would have been toast,” Werner said.

It wasn’t long before the Municipal Art Society, the New York Public Design Commission and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services came on board, too. The project drew funding from the Paul &amp; Klara Porzelt Foundation, which has previously supported projects of this sort.

The project’s $44,000 price tag included a complete restoration of the work by A. Ottavino Corp.

Brown, who lives on Cape Cod, is scheduled to attend the rededication this month and said she is happy that her perseverance won out. She said she had been fascinated as a child by a scrapbook about Foster that she found in the attic of her home in Rockland County, New York.

“Over the years, I would leaf though it with my mother,” she said, “and she would tell me stories about the Tombs Angel. I always knew she was very special.”

Werner’s persistence also paid dividends.

“Hope springs eternal,” Werner said, “and, somehow or other, as badly damaged and abused as this monument was, it survived. Surviving is the key.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/arts/design/new-york-monument-tombs-angel.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Yet every day into that dark world walked a woman who brought the inmates care, compassion and practical help.

An angel of New York, regaining her glow

His collaborative meditation on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise” will make its American debut from Sept. 20-22 as a part of the fall season of NYU’s Skirball Center.

While “White Noise” is being billed as an adaptation, Fish said, “It’s a show that is very freely inspired by the novel.

“It’s more a conversation with the novel than an adaptation,” he added.

This freedom with the source material, which tells the story of a death-obsessed professor contending with an environmental disaster, is evident in the show’s script, which Fish devised by homing in on one of Delillo’s stylistic quirks: His use of lists. “What I did was I took everything that I thought was a list in the novel, and I had a kind of rule for myself for what that was, and that’s the text,” he said.

He will use these selections from the novel, which will be performed in a one-man show by Bruce McKenzie, in dialogue with a film that Fish made with Jim Findlay and 19 teenagers from Freiburg, Germany, where the piece received its premiere at the Theater Freiburg.

The film, Fish said, is a series of scenes that respond to the novel but “in a kind of slightly ‘off’ way, not a very direct or literal way.”

The Skirball season begins Sept. 6 with “BAD NEWS! i was there ...” a site-specific work by JoAnne Akalaitis that examines the character of “the messenger” in the works of playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare. The season also includes the world premieres of two Skirball commissions: “Underneath the Skin,” John Kelly’s solo dance theater piece about the life of Samuel Steward, a gay writer, scholar and tattoo artist (Oct. 11-12); and “The House of Forbidden Flowers,” a collaboration between choreographer Richard Move and director Ong Keng Sen inspired by the plays of Jean Genet (Nov. 15-16).

A full schedule is at nyuskirball.org. Tickets go on sale June 5.

This article originally appeared in <a id="cc0fa829-dd13-3819-ae33-ff57cc5402be" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/theater/white-noise-daniel-fish-american-debut.html">The New York Times</a>.

Daniel Fish's 'White Noise' set for American debut

NEW YORK — New York fans of Daniel Fish’s Tony-nominated production of “Oklahoma!” will soon have the opportunity to experience another remix of an American classic by the director.

But Socrates also repels. We know of him only from the work of others, and even Plato, who seemed to have held him in high regard, paints him as a pugnacious and ironic figure — someone who insistently dispelled comforting notions and sought to overcome the tendency to mythologize.

This complicated man, and how he was received by later generations, is the subject of Tim Blake Nelson’s new play, “Socrates,” now in previews at the Public Theater as a part of the Onassis Festival in New York City. Running through April 28 at the Public Theater and La MaMa, the festival offers theater (including “Antigone” staged as a comedy), music (like a concert exploring the songs of refugees) and talks that focus on this year’s theme: democracy.

After attending an early performance of “Socrates,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor and the author of The New York Times Magazine’s column “The Ethicist,” spoke with me about the philosopher, the sometimes strained relationship between philosophers and society, and how to deal with critics of democracy.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

PETER LIBBEY:Were you surprised to learn that there is a new play about Socrates? Our society doesn’t tend to celebrate philosophers.

Almost 2,500 years after his death, Socrates continues to fascinate. The Greek thinker is seen, by some, as the father of philosophy, a martyr for the cause of freedom of speech and even as a kind of secular saint.

Peter Libbey

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