The crossword tournament Boswords is returning for another event on Sunday, July 24. It takes place at The Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Mass. They’re holding it both in person and as a virtual event and registration is now open. I may not be able to attend this year, but I’ve attended it in the past and have taken part in several of their virtual tournaments and themeless leagues and they always do a good job.
Art
Analysis | Solution to Evan Birnholz's July 3 crossword, “State of the Art” – The Washington Post
We’ve got a big puzzle on our hands this weekend (23×23 squares, 182 answers) and it has a meta. The instructions say we’re looking for a Grammy Award-winning song. The first thing to do is to look at the longest entries since those are likely theme answers:
- 23A: [Some luau tops] is ALOHA SHIRTS.
- 25A: [The Ganges flows into it] is BAY OF BENGAL.
- 40A: [Insects also known as Florida woods cockroaches] is PALMETTO BUGS.
- 45A: [Diamond shapers, for instance] is GEM CUTTERS.
- 67A: [Extortion scheme involving humans, not weasel family animals as the name suggests] is BADGER GAME.
- 72A: [Policemen in shorts] is KEYSTONE KOPS.
- 83A: [Opening book of Tamora Pierce’s “Protector of the Small” series] is “FIRST TEST.”
- 99A: [Top 10 title for Peter Frampton and Styx] is “SHOW ME THE WAY.” They’re different songs with different lyrics, but here is Peter Frampton’s song, and here it is for Styx.
- 102A: [What Meriwether Lewis called a “barking squirrel”] is PRAIRIE DOG.
- 127A: [Rodents’ river structures] is BEAVER DAMS.
- 131A: [Fruity diner dessert] is PEACH COBBLER.
- 148A: [Subject of the beauty blog Afrobella] is NATURAL HAIR.
- 152A: [Baking apparatus that resembles an insect nest] is BEEHIVE OVEN.
There’s also a meta-related hint at 162A: [Like the third letters of three-letter answers (many of which you’ll need to solve the meta)] which is LAST (appropriately the last Across entry in the grid). So, we’ll need to find some relevant three-letter answers, but let’s focus on the longer answers first.
Those 13 thematic answers above have something in common, though it may not be apparent at first glance. The title gives a key hint: they’re related to states. The theme answers begin with keywords from U.S. state nicknames. It may take some Googling to confirm them if you don’t know them by heart (I certainly don’t), but here they are:
- ALOHA SHIRTS → Aloha State → Hawaii
- BAY OF BENGAL → Bay State → Massachusetts
- PALMETTO BUGS → Palmetto State → South Carolina
- GEM CUTTERS → Gem State → Idaho
- BADGER GAME → Badger State → Wisconsin
- KEYSTONE KOPS → Keystone State → Pennsylvania
- FIRST TEST → First State → Delaware
- SHOW ME THE WAY → Show-Me State → Missouri
- PRAIRIE DOG → Prairie State → Illinois
- BEAVER DAMS → Beaver State → Oregon
- PEACH COBBLER → Peach State → Georgia
- NATURAL HAIR → Natural State → Arkansas
- BEEHIVE OVEN → Beehive State → Utah
Here is where the second step comes in. Whenever you’re led to U.S. states in a metapuzzle, one of the first things to list out is their two-letter postal abbreviations. You’ll find all of them in the grid at various three-letter answers, where the first two letters are the abbreviation and the third is an extra meta letter:
- Hawaii → HI → HIT at 151D: [Thwack]
- Massachusetts → MA → MAH at 4D: [___-jongg]
- South Carolina → SC → SCI at 47D: [Ecol., e.g.]
- Idaho → ID → IDS at 104D: [DOB bearers, often]
- Wisconsin → WI → WII at 100D: [“Metroid Prime 3: Corruption” system]
- Pennsylvania → PA → PAS at 124A: [Faux ___ (slip-up)]
- Delaware → DE → DEA at 106A: [Org. in the film “Traffic”]
- Missouri → MOM → MOM at 27A: [Blythe, to Gwyneth]
- Illinois → IL → ILE at 120A: [Land in l’Adriatique, e.g.]
- Oregon → OR → ORR at 119D: [Bassist Benjamin]
- Georgia → GA → GAI at 58A: [Moo goo ___ pan]
- Arkansas → AR → ARC at 41D: [Hammer throw path]
- Utah → UT → UTA at 17D: [Acting teacher Hagen]
Take those 13 extra letters in thematic order, and you spell out the 2018 Childish Gambino Grammy-Award winning song “THIS IS AMERICA.” If you’ve never heard of it, you can watch the music video here.
This meta idea was a holdover from my files from last year. I remember toying with the phrase “country music” and wanted to hint at “This Is America” for the 4th of July in 2021 using different song titles that hit the Billboard charts, but instead I shelved that for a Declaration of Independence-themed puzzle and used the music meta mechanism for the puzzle “Places, Please” the next month. For today’s puzzle, I originally wanted to use the 13 original U.S. states and their nicknames since that would match the number of letters in THIS IS AMERICA. The problem was that Virginia’s nickname (The Old Dominion) messed it up. There are only a handful of phrases that begin with OLD DOMINION (like OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY and its athletic teams, the OLD DOMINION MONARCHS), and those were way too long for as much theme material as I needed. In any case, there was no need to stick only to states admitted to the Union in the late 18th century.
I hope you enjoy the rest of your 4th of July weekend. What did you think?
Art
Art and Ephemera Once Owned by Pioneering Artist Mary Beth Edelson Discarded on the Street in SoHo – artnet News
This afternoon in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, people walking along Mercer Street were surprised to find a trove of materials that once belonged to the late feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, all free for the taking.
Outside of Edelson’s old studio at 110 Mercer Street, drawings, prints, and cut-out figures were sitting in cardboard boxes alongside posters from her exhibitions, monographs, and other ephemera. One box included cards that the artist’s children had given her for birthdays and mother’s days. Passersby competed with trash collectors who were loading the items into bags and throwing them into a U-Haul.
“It’s her last show,” joked her son, Nick Edelson, who had arranged for the junk guys to come and pick up what was on the street. He has been living in her former studio since the artist died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Naturally, neighbors speculated that he was clearing out his mother’s belongings in order to sell her old loft. “As you can see, we’re just clearing the basement” is all he would say.
Some in the crowd criticized the disposal of the material. Alessandra Pohlmann, an artist who works next door at the Judd Foundation, pulled out a drawing from the scraps that she plans to frame. “It’s deeply disrespectful,” she said. “This should not be happening.” A colleague from the foundation who was rifling through a nearby pile said, “We have to save them. If I had more space, I’d take more.”
Edelson’s estate, which is controlled by her son and represented by New York’s David Lewis Gallery, holds a significant portion of her artwork. “I’m shocked and surprised by the sudden discovery,” Lewis said over the phone. “The gallery has, of course, taken great care to preserve and champion Mary Beth’s legacy for nearly a decade now. We immediately sent a team up there to try to locate the work, but it was gone.”
Sources close to the family said that other artwork remains in storage. Museums such as the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney currently hold her work in their private collections. New York University’s Fales Library has her papers.
Edelson rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the early voices in the feminist art movement. She is most known for her collaged works, which reimagine famed tableaux to narrate women’s history. For instance, her piece Some Living American Women Artists (1972) appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) to include the faces of Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Alice Neel, and others as the apostles; Georgia O’Keeffe’s face covers that of Jesus.
In all, it took about 45 minutes for the pioneering artist’s material to be removed by the trash collectors and those lucky enough to hear about what was happening.
Dealer Jordan Barse, who runs Theta Gallery, biked by and took a poster from Edelson’s 1977 show at A.I.R. gallery, “Memorials to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era.” Artist Keely Angel picked up handwritten notes, and said, “They smell like mouse poop. I’m glad someone got these before they did,” gesturing to the men pushing papers into trash bags.
A neighbor told one person who picked up some cut-out pieces, “Those could be worth a fortune. Don’t put it on eBay! Look into her work, and you’ll be into it.”
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Art
Biggest Indigenous art collection – CTV News Barrie
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Biggest Indigenous art collection CTV News Barrie
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Art
Why Are Art Resale Prices Plummeting? – artnet News
Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column.
In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones.
Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole lot more.
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