7/31/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Beat Street Roxy Battle

Shall We Dance

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Beat Street (1984) is a  film featuring New York City hip hop culture of the early 1980s; breakdancing, DJing, and graffiti were front and center. Set in the South Bronx, the film follows the lives of a pair of brothers and their friends, all of whom are devoted to various elements of early hip hop culture.  Many of the internal dance sequences were filmed at the Roxy, a popular nightclub/disco located in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Continue reading

2/28/15 O&A Its Saturday Anything Goes: Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic at the Brooklyn Museum

By Walter Rutledge
It is Saturday

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Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn,is an overview of the artist’s prolific fourteen-year career featuring sixty paintings and sculptures. The works represent Wiley’s signature portraits of everyday men and women of color set in the style of the Old Masters. Wiley has replaced the European aristocrats depicted in those paintings with contemporary black subjects, drawing attention to the absence of African-Americans from historical and cultural narratives. Continue reading