ArtBeat

Cover of "Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up" catalog
Cover of "Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up" catalog
Gannit Ankori, professor of fine arts and head of the Division of Creative Arts, served as special adviser to the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, collaborating on the 2018 exhibition and catalog “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up.” The exhibition focused on how Kahlo created her personal identity, presenting a collection, never before shown outside Mexico, of the artist’s clothes, jewelry, cosmetics and other personal effects — even items as intimate as her painted plaster corsets and prosthetic leg.

In May, the Fort Worth Opera’s Frontiers showcase presented  a selection from “Companionship,” an opera by composer librettist Rachel Peters ’99. Based on a short story by Arthur Phillips, “Companionship” tells the story of a baker engaged in an obsessive quest to bake the perfect baguette when, suddenly, the 207,345th one comes to life. Some Frontiers showcase entries go on to be developed as full-length works for the opera company.

Actress Annette Miller ’58, MFA’76, won the Berkshire Theatre Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for her perfomance in “Mothers and Sons” at Shakespeare & Company. Miller, a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, and her husband, Michael, are Fellows at Brandeis and fund the Annette Liberman Miller Theater Scholarship.

Alicia (Suskin) Ostriker ’59 has been named to a two-year post as the 11th New York State Poet, joining an impressive line of bards — including Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Audre Lorde and Stanley Kunitz — to be so honored. Colson Whitehead was named the New York State Author.

The June release “Leave No Trace,” directed and co-written by Debra Granik ’85, became the second-most reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes to hold an approval rating of 100 percent. The movie features Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie as an Iraq War veteran and his teenage daughter, forced to readjust to the “real” world after living off the grid in the Oregon woods. Granik is currently working on a documentary about life after incarceration as well as a fictional adaptation of the 2001 book “Nickel and Dimed,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s undercover look at low-wage jobs and the working poor.

Former Rose Art Museum director Joseph D. Ketner II died on Sept. 14 at his home in Natick, Massachusetts, at age 62. The cause was cancer. Ketner had been Emerson College’s Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice, and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence since 2008. He directed the Rose from 1998-2005. He once described first seeing the Rose’s Andy Warhol silkscreen “Saturday Disaster” as “a revelatory experience similar to that of the biblical Paul struck by a bolt of enlightenment from the heavens and knocked off his horse.”

The Brandeis University Press book “Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back,” by Noam Zadoff, has been awarded the 2018 Concordia University Azrieli Institute Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies. The book is part of the Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry. This AzrieliInstitute award has gone to a Brandeis University Press book four times running.

Jennifer Ritvo Hughes, MA’11, has been named executive director of Boston Baroque, a pre-eminent period-instrument orchestra established in 1973 as the first permanent Baroque orchestra in North America. Previously, she spent six years as executive director of Boston’s Cantata Singers.