Glitter & Doom

Celebrate Brooklyn is back, baby! After moving to an exclusively online format last year, Celebrate Brooklyn! is back and the Bandshell in Prospect Park with a full line up of artists ready to blow the roof off of the thing. One of these artists is KAMAUU. KAMAUU's music is packed with electrifying and rambunctious melodies, while at the same time filling his lyrics with versatility and substance. Find out why he and MacKenzie go to talking about Muhammad Ali and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. You can RSVP for KAMAUU's performance on July 31st, plus check out the rest of the Celebrate Brooklyn line up at: bricartsmedia.org See you there!

Meet Damon Davis, a post-disciplinary artist from St. Louis. A prolific creator, Davis has a solo show open at Detroit MOCA right now titled Filling in the Cracks. Textured and profound, Cracks is an exploration of grief where Davis has cast concrete busts of himself, broken them open and filled the vacant space with beauty. Mackenzie and Davis talk about grief, masculinity and the role we play in the structures that bind us. Also quartz watches. Check out his work here: heartacheandpaint.com

Hi there! Glitter & Doom is off this week, so while we fish MacKenzie out from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from Season 1. Movement based performance artist, mayfield brooks spoke to us on Jan. 2020 about their love of Marsha P Johnson, their 2020 project Viewing Hours, and "improvising while Black." Today in 2021, mayfield premiered a new piece commissioned by the Abrons Art Center called Whale Fall. As an extension of that piece, an immersive installation will be up from June 12 to June 19th here in Brooklyn at the Center for Performance Research in Williamsburg. You can find more details about how to see it at cprnyc.org

It’s not often you hear the expression, “quilting world flash bang” but that’s exactly how we would describe Michael C Thorpe. An outlier in the quilting world, Thorpe has made a splash in the medium by weaving in his identity as a black man, his dreams about his family and his own manner of painting with fabric and thread. He and MacKenzie talk about the Gees Bend quilters, and how quilting makes beauty out of discarded items. Stick around for an insight into the AIDS quilt with organizer, Ted Kerr. And finally, a very special guest.

Emily Spivack, producer of Worn Stories (a Netflix series based on her book of the same name) has spent years collecting the stories people attach to their clothes. Whether it's the onesie you came home in, to the crushed velvet Mary Janes you wore to your 8th grade graduation – the clothes you put on your back soak up something about you and the moment you wore them. Emily and MacKenzie dive into their favorite stories from the series, their own pre-teen fashion journeys and, somehow, we end up at a prison in Northern Ireland.

Welcome to Glitter & Doom, a show that believes that the hardest times yield the greatest art. Join your host, MacKenzie Fegan, every other Wednesday to explore a new featured artist.

Meet new media artist, Mina Cheon and her North Korean alter ego, Kim Il Soon. While Mina Cheon is busy being a professor at Baltimore's MICA, and laying out 100,000 Chocopies to promote a unified Korea, Kim Il Soon is teaching art history to North Koreans via smuggled USB sticks and SD cards. Wait, you don't know about Chocopie? Christina Chaey from Bon Appetite is also here to tell you all about them. 즐겨!

Torrey Peters is the author of Detransition, Baby, a whipsmart novel about three women – trans and cis – trying to have a baby. One of the first novels written by a transwoman published by a Big Five publisher, Detransition, Baby imparts a textured, multi-demensional, and at times incredibly funny exploration of gender, parenthood and sex. Torrey Peters has decided to answer the questions that are tied to the stigma of detransitioning, and she does with nuance, compassion, sensitivity and grace. But what does this all have to do with the cultural implications of owning a dishwasher?

A "talking circle" is, historically, a way for a community to come together to hash out difficult issues in a respectful fashion. But in Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby's Talking Circles – a work in progress at the New York Theatre Workshop – it also speaks to the spiral of history where 102 years after a global pandemic and protests over the murders of Black people, who are in the grip of a global pandemic and are protesting the murder of Black people. Have we learned anything? Or are we just talking in circles?"

Maria Chavez never wanted to be an artist, but her life led her to become an abstract turntablist who has reinvented the playback arts by mixing broken records with broken needles. Her art is almost like listening to real-time sculptures, where the vinyl’s grooves are the topography. But how did we end up talking about owls?

What is theatre? Is it a group of people watching actors on a stage? Is it a magical transportive experience that can only be experienced live? Does it need a crowd? Lines? Snarky will-call folks who can't spell your name? MacKenzie talks to Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, the duo that make up 600 Highwaymen – a theatre company "at the intersection of theater, dance, contemporary performance, and civic encounter" to try and answer some of these questions. Their newest piece A Phone Call (a guided phone call between you [yes you!] and a total stranger) is available for attendance at the Public Theatre as part of the Under The Radar Festival 2021.

It's season three of Glitter & Doom, and this time around, we're tackling the theme of reinvention. With the concert series Celebrate Brooklyn! moved online this year, the programmers at BRIC had a decision to make: what would they do with the concert venue? They tapped artists Oasa DuVerney and Mildred Beltré, together known as the Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine, to reinvent the Prospect Park bandshell as a public art space. Using neon ribbon, they created an installation featuring the woven words "come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed," from a poem by Lucille Clifton. MacKenzie talks to Oasa, Mildred, and Clifton scholar Rachel Harding about Black sisterhood, resilience, and community.

After the Red River War in 1874, drawing was one of the few sanctioned ways that the prisoners of Fort Marion were able to keep their cultural traditions alive. Back home on the Plains, they would have commemorated a successful battle by depicting it on a buffalo hide, but in Florida, where they had been shipped off and stripped of their communities, these men drew what they knew on what they had – and for some, it was lined ledger paper. Emil Her Many Horses (curator, Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian) speaks about the history, the practice and the people at Fort Marion.

In all of literature, Robinson Crusoe is certainly among the most isolated of characters. Dude was stranded on an island for 28 years. For most of that time he is entirely alone except for his pets and God, who is a notoriously bad conversationalist. But was Crusoe *lonely*? MacKenzie speaks to scholars about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and how his loneliness speaks loudly in times of pandemics and major social movements.

There's been a massive outpouring of support or Brooklyn's bail funds and, thankfully, pro bono representation is popping up everywhere. However, that doesn't mean other parts of the country don't need your support. Here are a few places where you can help: Black Lives Matter Birmingham Bail Support - https://cash.app/$STARROBB Freedom Fighter Bail Fund BLM Charleston Bail Fund Richmond Community Bail Fund Black Lives Matter West Virginia

Nelly Toll was eight or nine when she painted, “A Trip With Father: A Present for Good Behavior," in 1943. At the time she painted it, Nelly hadn’t been outside in probably a year. She was Jewish, and she and her mother were in hiding in Lwów, Poland. Today, Dr. Toll is self-isolating like the rest of us, and speaks to MacKenzie about her childhood in hiding and her watercolor box.

We’re back! Welcome to the second season of Glitter & Doom, where we’ll be exploring artists in isolation. If you’re on Twitter, you might remember a meme-storm in early March after Roseanne Cash tweeted: “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.” With the help of Andrew Dickson, author of The Globe Guide to Shakespeare, we try and figure out if Shakespeare actually *did* write King Lear while under quarantine, and which one of Lear’s daughters was the actual, literal worst.

Hey there! What's everyone been up to? Anything new? Glitter & Doom has been taking a short break but it's back for its second season and cooking up some new episodes for you to listen to while you switch from your night pajamas to your day pajamas.

What do Trump rallies, German interior décor and the Village People have to do with author, Dave Eggers? Does satire still have a role to play when reality reads like an Onion article? Dave Eggers says yes. His new book, The Captain and the Glory, follows the grim misadventures of a narcissistic, incompetent sea captain steering a cruise ship called The Glory. Before long, he and his supporters are throwing dark-skinned passengers overboard to chants of “Drown the brown!” The metaphor isn’t subtle, but then again, these aren’t subtle times.

What do microaggressions, sea captains and spam email have to do with artist, Liana Finck? As a shy person who struggled with social interactions, illustrator and cartoonist, Liana Finck made notes and drawings as a way to figure out how to fit in. “Passing for Human” is the title of one of her three books. But at a certain point, she started wondering, what if this isn’t just me? Liana would find herself in awkward situations because she was behaving in a way she wasn’t supposed to. But who decides how women are supposed to behave?