On the 1st of June 1942, the Spanish Flamenco composer and guitarist Paco Peña was born in Córdoba, Spain. Regarded as one of the world’s foremost traditional Flamenco players, Peña began his professional career very early in life. He learnt playing the guitar at the age of six, and by twelve he made his first professional appearances. […]
Category Archives: Politics
May
09
Political Criticism in Harold Gray’s ‘Little Orphan Annie’
posted by ArtLark
On the 9th of May 1968, American cartoonist Harold Gray died in La Jolla, California. His death marked the end of a very prolific career, but the fame of his newspaper comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, outlived him for a very long time. The story of an innocent vagabond girl wandering through a world of […]
April
20
Easter, 1916 by W. B. Yeats
posted by ArtLark
Easter Quote Week Easter, 1916 is a poem by W. B. Yeats charting the poet’s torn emotions regarding the events of the Easter Rising staged in Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, 24th of April 1916. The uprising was a failure, and most of the Irish republican leaders involved were executed for treason. The […]
April
02
Shakespeare in Politics: Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet
posted by ArtLark
On the 2nd of April 1956, German-Russian born director Peter Ustinov’s screenplay Romanoff and Juliet premiered as a theatrical performance in Manchester, England. A Broadway production followed and a Hollywood film adaptation, all starring and directed by Ustinov himself. An impressive cultural figurehead worldwide, Ustinov holds multiple awards for this work, such as the Tony, […]
April
01
Mechanisms of Totalitarianism in Kundera’s “The Joke”
posted by ArtLark
On the 1st of April 1929, the Czech Republic’s most recognized living writer, and author of the highly acclaimed novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera was born in Brno, then Czechoslovakia. His books were banned in his country by the Communist authorities until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The author himself, once a […]
March
30
Fortunato Depero’s Futurist Toy
posted by ArtLark
On the 30th of March 1892, Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero was born in Fondo, Trentino. In his youth, he was apprentice to a marble worker, which may explain his future interest in shape, form and design. On a 1913 trip to Florence, he discovered a copy of Giovanni Papini’s periodical Lacerba, which prophesized the […]
March
15
Immigration and Racial Prejudice: The Chinese Exclusion Act
posted by ArtLark
On the 15th of March 1879, Thomas Nast’s cartoon, A Matter of Taste, was published. In the cartoon, criticising the support of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Senator James G. Blaine, an active backer of the Act, is shown dining in ‘Kearney’s Senatorial Restaurant’ – a reference to Denis Kearney, the leader of a violent anti-Chinese […]
March
05
Durant Sihlali: Art and Apartheid
posted by ArtLark
On the 5th of March 1935, the South African artist Durant Sihlali was born in Germiston, South Africa. He was “one of the few living South African artists whose career coincided with the entrenchment of formal apartheid (c. 1948), the formation of the “white” Republic of South Africa in 1962, the long years of apartheid repression […]
March
02
Dr. Seuss: Politics in Children’s Literature
posted by ArtLark
On the 2nd of March 1904, the famous writer and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel, known as ‘Dr. Seuss’, was born in Footloose, Springfield, MA, USA. An Oxford University graduate, Geisel published 46 children’s books, characterized by imaginative characters and the use of anapestic meter – a breezy melodic rhythm for comic verse. His most celebrated books […]
December
02
Dickens’ Love and Hate for America
posted by ArtLark
On the 2nd of December 1867, Charles Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States at the Tremont Temple, Boston where he read A Christmas Carol (1843) to an American audience for the first time. This was his second and final trip to the New World – three years later, after a long […]
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