Passage: Arthur Mitchell and Robert Venturi

It happened this past week … the loss of two very different artistic giants.

Arthur Mitchell was a trailblazing dancer.

Born the son of a building superintendent, he rose to become a star performer with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine.

To watch Allegra Kent and Arthur Mitchell in a rehearsal for Balanchine’s “Agon,” click on the video player below:

He then went on to co-found the Dance Theater of Harlem, the country’s first major African-American dance company.

“I actually bucked society,” he told the New York Times earlier this year. “[Took] an art form that was three, four hundred years old … and brought black people into it.”

Arthur Mitchell was 84.

See Arthur Mitchell speak at a New York Public Library exhibition in 2009:

See also:

Harlem ballet group perseveres (“60 Minutes,” 10/25/99)
dancetheatreofharlem.org


Robert Venturi was an architect of remarkable talent and vision.

In the 1960s, he broke with the Modernist school principle that “less is more” … insisting, to the contrary, that (as he put it) “less is a bore!” 

Venturi designed buildings bursting with ornamentation and flourishes.

He’s widely regarded, along with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, as one of the founders of Post-Modernism.

In 1991 Venturi was awarded architecture’s prestigious Pritzker Prize.

Robert Venturi was 93.

       
For more info:

VSB: Venturi Scott Brown

      
Story produced by Justin Hayter and Charis Satchell.

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