Tag: artist

creativity

A Banner Year for Broadway

Christa Avampato
Photo from Playbill. It features Cynthia Erivo, the host of the Tony Awards this year.

It’s been a record year for Broadway theater. 4.85 million viewers watched the Tony Awards on CBS on Sunday, the largest broadcast audience since 2019 and a 38% increase over 2024. It set a new record for streaming with a 208% year-over-year increase. This is on the heels of Broadway’s highest grossing year ever – $2 billion in revenue from 14.7 million tickets sold.

Working in the performing arts in many different capacities for a good portion of my career, including Broadway theater, regional theater, touring, and now for Carnegie Hall, it’s inspiring and gratifying to see so many people choosing to spend their time and money to experience live performances. Most of my work is now in the digital media space, and I’m especially excited to see digital and live melding together as is the case for the current Broadway incarnations of Sunset Boulevard and The Picture of Dorian Grey

We often hear platitudes that theater is an escape from our everyday lives. We sit together in a dark theater with total strangers for 2+ hours as a way to get away from our worries and cares, to forget the outside world for a little while, to find some kind of reprieve.

I’ve always seen live performance as a way to come home to myself, to my deepest dreams, to the core of who I am. It helps me to reimagine what I might create, what I might aspire to do next. That’s why I keep going back. I think that may be why in these troubling, dangerous times so many people are gathering together in theaters – to affirm their belief that our best and brightest days are still ahead of us.

creativity

Roll out the red carpet: Carnegie Hall opens the 2023–2024 season

Christa Avampato
Riccardo Muti with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on opening night 10/4/23. Photo by Christa Avampato.

Last night I went to Carnegie Hall’s opening night gala with one of my best friends and my many talented colleagues. It was thrilling to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the expert baton of Riccardo Muti with the incomparable violin soloist Leonidas Kavakos, and to experience this gorgeous music with a packed house of nearly 3,000 people in this historic venue. The program included Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 and Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition orchestrated by Ravel. As an encore, Muti chose the brief and beautiful aria Amor ti vieta (Love forbids you) that appears in Intermezzo from Fedora by Giordano and Colautti.

Happy to be at Carnegie Hall’s opening night. Photos by Christa Avampato.

A performance at Carnegie Hall is a must-do for New Yorkers and visitors. This year’s season features Yo-Yo Ma and John Williams, Mitsuko Uchida, The Vienna Philharmonic, Jason Moran, The Hot Sardines with Alan Cumming, Lea Michele, Sutton Foster, Kelli O’Hara, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Norm Lewis, Bryan Terrel Clark and Valisia LaKae with The New York Pops, Meow Meow, Patti Lupone, Emanuel Ax, Yuja Wang, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Met Orchestra, Tania León, and many, many more.

At 132 years old, Carnegie Hall is a stunning space in midtown Manhattan and the heart of its mission is to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience. It’s a privilege to work with them and contribute to this organization’s legacy in my extraordinary city.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra warms up for opening night. Photo by Christa Avampato.

One of my main projects at Carnegie is the subscription streaming channel Carnegie Hall+. We curate concerts, music festivals, dance, opera, and music documentaries from around the globe and deliver them to music lovers in the U.S. and 20 other countries. We have a lot of exciting developments underway for the year ahead. If you’d like to learn more, I’m always happy to chat about it. You can also find more details here: https://www.carnegiehallplus.com/

Happy opening, Carnegie Hall. I look forward to making more music available to more people in more places this season. 

creativity

Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum

Christa Avampato
Sunlight on Brownstones by Edward Hopper

If you’re in New York this weekend, run don’t walk to the expansive and breath-taking art exhibit Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum. New York was Hopper’s muse, second only to his wife Josephine “Jo” Nivison Hopper who was also a talented and accomplished painter. (Some of her works are featured in the exhibit as well and they’re stunning.) We see Automat, which reminds me of my heady early adult days in New York when I was scraping by working in Broadway theaters, as well as Early Sunday Morning, Room in New York, Bridle Path, Two Comedians, Drug Store, Tables for Ladies, New York Interior, From Williamsburg Bridge, Approaching the City, Sunlight on Brownstones, New York Pavements, Boy and the Moon, and the exhibit goes on and on with one gorgeous work after the next. 

We also find his illustrations, which I never knew he did, and an extensive set of his theater stubs that he saved. He and Nivison Hopper were massive theater fans and often went there to sketch not the show, but the audience and staff. Hopper was obsessed with depicting the lives of everyday people in ordinary and intimate moments of their lives. This entire exhibit is a celebration of not just New York, but New Yorkers. We could be, and perhaps have been, many of the people in these works. They feel familiar to us because they are. In our city, we have all lived these moments in the course of our average days. 

What Hopper helps us realize is the extraordinary in our ordinary. In his work, we find the sliver of light through the window of our small apartment, the summer sunshine and shadows in Central Park, the very first moments of our mornings when we are still between sleeping and waking, the views from our trains and ferries as we rush to our next appointment, that burnt orange hat or sky blue dress that we love to wear, and that moment when we round the corner and spot our friends seated around the bar at our third home where everyone knows our name. 

The one sadness I felt is that his most famous work, Nighthawks, is not there. I asked a guard where that painting is, and was told, “It’s at The Art Institute of Chicago and they weren’t giving it up. But, the sketches of it are in the side room.” My dear friend, Vicki, who prompted me to catch this exhibit with her before it closes on March 5th, and I hustled over to that side room and it was filled with Hopper’s sketches of many of his best known works. We found them equally fascinating as the final pieces because they show his meticulous, studious process of perspective and the clarity of vision via the clean lines with which he’s synonymous.

To enhance the exhibit even further, don’t miss the views of New York from the Whitney roof. Though it was freezing, Vicki and I ventured out there to see the sculptures and the views of New York that still look so much like the views Hopper saw. “Christa, we live here,” Vicki said to me. “We get to live here.” My heart was filled with gratitude for this city, this time with my dear friend, and for Hopper and Nivison Hopper whose visionary works endure.

creativity

Why we create art—inspired by the words of Scottish actor, Robbie Coltrane

Christa Avampato
Photo by Allison Batley on Unsplash

“50 years on, my children’s children will sit down to watch these [Harry Potter] films. Sadly, I won’t be here. But Hagrid will.” -Robbie Coltrane, Scottish actor

This is the most true thing I’ve ever read about art and the motivation of artists. It’s our chance to be immortal, to get down stories and put them out into the world. They will be here long after we’re gone. Someone will see them or read them or hear them and a part of us will be there. Our energy, our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our disappointments, our joy.

It will mean something to someone across space and time who we never had the honor to meet on this plane. And maybe they will feel less alone.

They will find in our art someone like them, someone who validates everything they’re feeling, someone who makes them feel seen and heard, who helps them see that they matter. Art is the gift that never stops giving. It becomes our home, in the truest sense of the word, the place where we will always belong.

This week we lost Robbie Coltrane, the actor who immortalized Hagrid, a character who is dear to so many of us. His memory lives on in his work and his art.

creativity

In writing and life, have a sculptor’s mindset

Christa Avampato
Photo by Ilia Zolas on Unsplash

First drafts, of writing and any project in life, can be difficult. The proverbial blank page stares at us and we’re so concerned about getting things exactly as we want them to be in the end that we forget all creative acts are a process of becoming. Nothing springs to anyone fully-formed and perfectly-worded. 

I’m in the process of writing the first draft of my third novel. You’d think this would get easier with time. It hasn’t for me. I still approach each first draft, each first attempt of all of my creative projects, with trepidation and anxiety. What if this time I’m a total failure? What if what I’m trying to do doesn’t land and I can’t do anything to make it even decent, much less something I’m proud of? 

In moments like this that make it difficult for me to even begin, I remind myself that I’m a sculptor. This blank page, this new project idea, is a block of marble. And like the sculptor, I’m taking away tiny bits here and there. It will take many rounds of refining to bring the sculpture to life from this block. It will not happen overnight. It will not happen quickly. My only job is to begin, a tiny tap here, a tiny tap there. Over and over again with intention, curiosity, and openness. I don’t need to be brilliant. I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to show up. What I don’t get right in this round, I can attempt in the next. And on and on it goes. 

We consume and admire the work of others at its end stage. All we see and experience in the finished product, not the many long and arduous hours, wrong turns, edits, messiness, doubt, and about-face maneuvers it took to get to that ending when it’s ready for the public. So we compare our work-in-progress to work that has already progressed. 

The sculptor’s mindset is the one we need as we begin. Pick up the hammer and chisel and chip away at the smallest task of your grand dream. It’s how all great work starts, and how all great work makes its way, slowly and surely, into the world. 

creativity

Joy today: Helping musicians become citizen-artists

Christa Avampato

It delights me to no end when a consulting client receives my draft deliverable of a business plan for their new program and their response is “this is amazing!” In this case the client is Carnegie Hall, and I’m working on helping them build an online community filled with content and resources that helps musicians become citizen-artists. Talk about a dream mashup of everything I love: art, activism, business, technology, and making the world a better place through building community. Updates coming soon with ways for you to get involved and access the resources yourself!

creativity

A Year of Yes: NYC’s tattoo history

Christa Avampato

Paging tattoo artists, lovers of good ink, and history nerds in New York City: I’m looking for 4 people to help me unravel New York City’s long and complicated tattoo history on stage with a packed audience. Are you that someone? Do you know someone who fits the bill? Let me know.

creativity

A Year of Yes: Kareem Waris Olamilekan is an 11-year-old artist in Nigeria with immense talent

Christa Avampato

If you need some good news today, feast your eyes on this Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/waspa_art/

I think all of the social media and press circulating about Kareem Waris Olamilekan’s artwork is amazing. And I’d like to do more than just spread the word. How do we help support him as a working artist and help him continue his art education? I’m going to reach out to his school and teacher, and will share more information when I have it.

creativity

A Year of Yes: It’s never too late

Christa Avampato

I saw this list over the weekend:

  • At age 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.
  • At age 24, Stephen King was working as a Janitor and living in a trailer.
  • At age 28, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare.
  • At age 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.
  • At 40, Vera Wang designed her first dress after a career in which she failed to make the Olympic figure skating team and didn’t get the Editor-in Chief position at Vogue.
  • At 42, Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting.
  • At 52, Morgan Freeman landed his first MAJOR movie role.
  • At 62, Louise Hay launch her publishing company, Hay House.
  • At 101, the artist Carmen Herrera finally got the show the art world should have given her 40 or 50 years ago before: a solo exhibition at the Whitney in New York City, where she has been living and working since 1954.

Know this: it is never too late to do what you love. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to achieve all of our dreams at an increasingly younger age. We beat ourselves up because we aren’t a 30 Under 30 or a 40 Under 40. Here’s my advice: forget about your age. Stop tracking your life’s milestones against someone else’s. 

Life is about the long game; it’s about being a little bit better version of yourself today than you were yesterday. That’s the greatest win of all. Your life could change at any moment, at any age. Do something you’re proud of doing. Celebrate your wins, learn from your losses, and most importantly, keep going. You’re going to find your way. You’re going to find what you’re meant to do, who you’re meant to be with, and where you’re meant to be. I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you that if you keep looking and trying new things, you will find your best life.

creativity

In the pause: Painting and poetry

Christa Avampato

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

Inspired by a recent post on the Two Drops of Ink blog, this idea of the play between painting and poetry speaks loudly to me. I paint with paper through collage work. Whenever I’m stuck in my writing world, or just looking for a new medium to use a different part of my brain for a while, I turn to collage work. I’ve never been much of a visual artist, or at least I wasn’t until I started to do collage work. There is something so satisfying about cutting up tiny bits of paper and reconfiguring them as a way of painting a canvas. Art does have a story, and stories do have an art to them. I’m fortunate in my case that I love art as much as I love books, and I’m immensely happy that my book about Emerson Page honors this connection between all art mediums. Ultimately art in any form expresses what we feel and know in our hearts and souls. And by expressing and sharing those feelings, a part of us lives on far beyond our years.