Of all the tasks to undertake in the current arts climate, leading a brand-new multimillion-dollar performing-arts center through its opening and first season must be one of the most daunting. Yet, Bill Rauch, the inaugural artistic director of the Perelman Arts Center (usually referred to as PAC NYC) in Lower Manhattan managed to launch with a bang through an astonishing array of music, dance, theater and opera performances. He also capped the first season with a personal triumph, co-directing with Zhailon Levingston an inventive reimagining of the musical “Cats” set in New York’s drag ballroom scene. The production, titled “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” garnered enthusiastic reviews and was immediately extended.

Although Bill has decades of experience as an artistic director and producer, his previous posts were markedly different from the current. Right out of college, he founded Cornerstone Theater Company, a firmly community-centered company that was initially nomadic, creating theater with and for small and often rural towns before it put down roots in Los Angeles in 1992. Cornerstone continued to make homegrown community-partnered theater in Los Angeles as well as in satellite projects around the country.

Then in 2007 Bill became the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is a bit of a unicorn in the American theater ecosystem as one of the very few theaters in the U.S. with a full-time acting company. It is also one of a handful of destination theaters in North America, with patrons traveling from all over the country to rural Southern Oregon to enjoy a theatrical vacation. At OSF, while still centering Shakespeare’s works, Bill diversified the theater’s offerings and bolstered its new-play development program.

“Art Restart” was eager to speak with Bill to learn how he has adapted his heavily community-centered vision to the demands of leading New York’s newest cultural landmark, which opened during a particularly perilous time for so many of the city’s performing-arts institutions. Here he describes why and how PAC can thrive in today’s New York as a singularly welcoming hub for the countless communities throughout New York City and its environs.

https://pacnyc.org/

https://pacnyc.org/bio/bill-rauch/

Tariq Tarey is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Columbus, OH. Over the years, he has captured thousands of portraits of refugees from around the world whom the U.S. government resettled in Central Ohio.

Tariq himself arrived in the States in the mid ’90s as a refugee from his native Somalia. He therefore has a particular empathy for his subjects, many of whom like him hail from Somalia but also from a myriad global locations, from Nepal and Iraq to the Democratic Republic of Congo and more recently Ukraine.

His passion is not only for his work’s artistic expression, though, but also for its documentary value. Tariq wants to ensure that the refugees’ faces and the histories they contain are photographed and then archived with the same care shown to their antecedents who in centuries past arrived largely from Europe through Ellis Island.

Tariq has also conducted photographic projects in refugee camps around the world and has directed documentary films, including "Women, War and Resettlement: Nasro’s Journey" and "Silsilad," which have been featured on PBS, and most recently "The Darien Gap," which was showcased at the 2nd United States Conference on African Immigrant and Refugee Health. His photos have been exhibited in several institutions, including the Ross Museum and Wright State University, and several are now part of the permanent collections at the Columbus Museum of Art and the Ross Museum.

His deep knowledge of the refugee experience stems not only from his own personal excellence. For years now he has worked as the Director of Refugee Social Services at Jewish Family Services in Columbus, Ohio. He also serves on Ohio’s New African Immigrants Commission and the Franklin County Board of Commissioners' New American Advisory Council.

In this interview, Tariq describes how he launched his photographic career soon after arriving in Ohio and explains why his work remains crucial as history keeps repeating itself.

https://tariqtarey.com/

Antonia Wright is an award-winning Cuban American multimedia artist based in Miami, FL whose work has been exhibited all over the world, from the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Pérez Art Museum in her hometown to the Havana Biennial and the Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires. The focus of her work tends to be the human body and how it responds to extremes of emotion, control and violence promulgated by systems of power, and in the past, she has often used her own body — often in startling and violent ways — to illustrate her themes.

Her tools are varied, including video, photography, light and sculpture, and are constantly evolving. In 2021 she transformed a cement mixer into a giant musical instrument for her project “Not Yet Paved,” and recently she has been creating site-specific installations with the kinds of barricades that have long been used as methods of crowd control at protests the world over.

Her interest in examining the autonomy – and lack thereof – of the human body, particularly the female body, extends to her personal life. She has long been an advocate and activist for reproductive rights and serves on the board of Planned Parenthood of South, East and North Florida.

Art Restart was eager to speak with Antonia soon after Florida banned abortion after six weeks of gestation. We wanted to hear how a changemaking artist continued or recommitted to her work when the sociopolitical winds around her shifted dramatically. In this interview she explains how she’s long channeled her anger into her practice and describes how she remains committed to the curiosity and fearlessness that initially launched her from poetry into performance and installation art.

https://antoniawright.com/