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/

Phil Chan is a choreographer, director and ballet scholar who seven years ago decided to turn a longstanding frustration into a wellspring of activism. Although American entertainment had made great progress in eliminating the use of blackface, demeaning and wildly inaccurate depictions of Asians and Asian-ness continued to appear on ballet stages.

He therefore teamed up with prima ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin to create Final Bow for Yellowface, an organization that started working with ballet companies in America and Europe to eliminate offensive depictions of Asians in their repertoires and help them find inventive and respectful ways to stage culturally problematic ballet classics.

Their work has paid off, notching up notable successes here and abroad and changing the culture in ballet companies to value and welcome a broad array of artists. Phil distilled his ethos and tactics in his book “Final Bow for Yellow Face: Dancing Between Intention and Impact.”

As a director and choreographer, Phil has put his own stamp on once-problematic Orientalist standards. Last year, he directed “Madama Butterfly” at Boston Lyric Opera in a production that The Boston Globe called “an invigorating and meaningful reclamation of Puccini’s beloved opera.” Earlier this year he co-choreographed with Doug Fullerton the ballet “La Bayadère” at Indiana University, maintaining Auguste Petipa’s choreography but moving the setting from a 19th century India sprung from a European imagination to the homegrown American exoticism of 1920s Hollywood.

In this interview, Phil describes how he developed the mission and methods of Final Bow for Yellowface and explains how reexamining the standard ballet repertoire through a multicultural contemporary lens honors and benefits the artform as a whole.

https://www.yellowface.org/

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s compositions are finding evermore ardent fans among the public and musical institutions alike. This interview took place just days after his return to his Oklahoma City home from an eventful week in New York. While there he heard the New York Philharmonic play the string-arrangement premiere of his piece “Pisachi.” He also not only experienced the Carnegie Hall premiere of his “Clans” performed by the American Composers Orchestra; he also performed in it, singing alongside his 10-year-old son, Heloha. Onstage as well were several fellow members of the Chickasaw Nation dressed in traditional regalia.

Jerod’s work has been performed all over the country, and the rest of this musical season will remain busy for him. Dover String Quartet is touring his new quartet, “Woodland Songs”; Oklahoma’s Canterbury Voices premieres his first opera, “Loksi’ Shaali’ (Shell Shaker);” and he will curate an all-American-Indian program in Washington D.C. for the PostClassical Ensemble.

In this interview, Jerod, who is a 2022 inductee into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame, describes how he developed his distinctive multi-traditional composition style as well as his hyper-local and collaborative ethos.

https://jerodtate.com/

A major theme that reappears in episode after episode of Art Restart is the fact that audiences/consumers, institutions/businesses and sometimes even artists themselves often fail to recognize that art is labor, not a pastime or an unconventional way to earn a living. A recent labor action by America’s premier ballet company served as a fresh reminder.

On February 6 of this year, by an overwhelming majority, the dancers and stage managers of American Ballet Theatre voted to authorize a strike. Among their demands were an increase in wages that had been frozen since the Great Recession of 2008 as well as an adjustment to their working hours.

Represented by their union, AGMA (American Guild of Musical Artists), after approximately three weeks of negotiations, the ABT company members and management were able to reach an agreement and avert a strike. The terms of the new agreement include cost-of-living increases of between 9 and 19% (varying by rank) across three years​, their workday being shifted a half-hour earlier and reduced by one half-hour on Saturdays and new parental-leave benefits and a commitment to keep pregnant dancers on contract until the time of the dancer’s choosing​.

In this interview, Art Restart speaks with Griff Braun, AGMA’s national organizing director, who was himself once an ABT company member. He speaks about the nuts and bolts of how and why dancers unionize and describes the challenges and opportunities of organizing as an artist in 2024 America.

https://www.musicalartists.org/griff-braun-national-organizing-director-professional-bio/

For painter Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, the land on which she lives and works is the raw material for her art, both metaphorically and literally.

In November 2016, ten days spent at Standing Rock, ND protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and meeting and working alongside fellow Native artists changed her life. Ka’ila, who is Klamath Modoc, learned about the Jordan Cove Energy Projects, a liquid natural gas LNG pipeline that was threatening her ancestral homeland in southern Oregon, and in 2018, she moved to Modoc Point, where she jump-started a new chapter in her activism and artistry journey, scoring a couple of big wins in the first year. She created her “Land Back” series of paintings, in which she started incorporating pigments and minerals from the land around her, and she was successful in blocking the Jordan Cove Energy Project.

Now, in 2024, represented by the Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, she’s had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, including at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. One of her pieces is also in the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection. On the activist front, she is suing the State of Oregon for illegal surveillance and is also combating lithium mining in Native regions of Southern Oregon and Nevada.

In this interview, Ka’ila explains why she left the artistic hub of Portland to live in rural southern Oregon and describes how her activism and artistry have evolved hand in hand.

https://www.kailafarrellsmith.com/

In February of 2024, after a year of touring the country, the musical group Rising Appalachia, an ensemble that marries American folk music with a wide array of world influences, made an announcement that might have been surprising only to those who don’t know them well. Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, who created Rising Appalachia over 15 years ago, had decided to take a sabbatical year, though they would honor the concerts already on the books in 2024.

Longtime Rising Appalachia fans have been supportive because they know this is a band that has never taken shortcuts in how they manage their artistry and their lives. Since early on in their careers, Leah and Chloe have been advocates for and practitioners of the slow music movement, an ethos of touring and music-making that places sustainability, local engagement and creative control at the heart of their business. The current sabbatical is the latest tool in their slow music toolbox.

Yet though last year’s tour was hugely successful and they’ve just released an album titled “Folk and Anchor,” Chloe and Leah’s decision was undeniably gutsy and far from conventional in the music industry. In this interview, the sisters, speaking from their homes in the North Carolina mountains, discuss why this was the right time for a yearlong break, how they prepared for it and the ways in which they and their bandmates keep the slow music ethos at the heart of their artistic practice.

https://www.risingappalachia.com/tour

https://www.risingappalachia.com/