The Rubin Museum is now showing the first American retrospective of Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female photojournalist, in “Candid: The Lens and Life of Homai.” Vyarawalla started out as an outsider, taking furtive shots of Bombay street life. She ended her career photographing heads of state and dignitaries. Along the way, she may have 
Film Forum’s current retrospective series, “The French Old Wave” (through Sept. 13), continues with more classic films and film history that you need to catch up with in order to realize—in this awful era of comic- book frivolity—how great cinema can be. Though billed as a tribute to the “quality” films that Truffaut and Godard, 
By Elena Oumano Just before a recent performance of Dan Fishback’s musical The Material World (held-over, full house, many turned away), Dixon Place’s omnipotently attractive founder/creative director Ellie Covan took the stage to thank “those of you in the audience who are holding drinks” and then warmly encouraged everyone else to also visit the upstairs 
Manhattan’s own Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, produced by the City Parks Foundation, celebrates its 20th anniversary with free concerts in Marcus Garvey Park — on Friday, Aug. 24, “Bird with Strings,” revisiting saxophonist Parker’s project of 1949 and ’50, and Saturday, Aug. 25, four acts including Roy Haynes’ Fountain of Youth band and Rene Marie’s 
The late composer-arranger Gil Evans’ music finally, gloriously, reached the Newport Jazz Festival, 58 years after the fest began. Drummer Jack DeJohnette celebrated his 70th birthday onstage there, as vigorous and inquisitive as a 40-year-old. Guitarist Bill Frisell jammed with the Bad Plus, duoed with violinist Jenny Scheinman and led a lyrical quintet interpreting John 
By Mona Molarsky At a time when performance art, contraptions and conceptual art continue to dominate the contemporary museum scene, it’s a pleasure to find an artist who actually paints, draws and makes prints. Nicole Eisenman is not the only one, of course-—the vast majority of galleries still show works on paper and canvas. But 
Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper is exactly what we’ve come to expect from The Morgan Library: a precisely calibrated exhibition centered on a finite aesthetic compass, a specialist’s delight that nonetheless has tangible pleasures to offer the layman. It’s also a rare treat to witness Albers, that most pedantic of artists, let down his 
In a recent issue, I referred to the International Keyboard Institute & Festival as a “piano-palooza.” Every July, there are some 25 recitals presented at Mannes College, on West 85th Street. The festival is directed by a distinguished pianist and Mannes teacher, Jerome Rose, and his better half, Julie Kedersha. I have often quoted a 
Citizen Kane or Vertigo, which is more fun? Now that Sight & Sound’s decadal critics poll has given the #1 spot to Vertigo, toppling Citizen Kane (to #2), it confirms that film culture as we used to know it has toppled as well. Citizen Kane held sway as the “Greatest Film Of All Time” for so long that a lot of people 
By John Goodrich Kusama moves beyond pop What kind of pop artist “does battle at the border of life and death”? Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), who so described her art-making in 1961, suggests a Japanese Andy Warhol in terms of sheer energy, protean endeavors and fixation with publicity. But Warhol would never have professed such 
