SUBTLE SUBVERSION Writer and producer Ilene Chaiken 79 GD has long seen her TV work as an opportunity for stealth activism — a way to champion marginalized communities. The creator of the Showtime series The L Word (2004 – 09) and now executive producer of Empire, she continues to stand out in an industry dominated by men, in part due to who she is and how that informs her work. As a 59-year-old white woman who grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Chaiken isn’t the most likely showrunner behind one of the most popular shows on broadcast TV today — about tensions in an African-American family that has made it big in the hip-hop music industry. But being female and gay are “things that I think make me good at my job,”
In its first three seasons, Empire has really taken off on Fox in large part due to Chaiken’s role as executive producer and showrunner.
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she told a writer for The Advocate last fall, adding that she approaches Empire “with a sense of inclusiveness, with a view to listening and nurturing and to welcoming input” from her colleagues. For her, producing The L Word — which presented “my story, my voice, my culture”— was very different from working on Empire, where she relies heavily on other writers to get the authenticity of voice right. Chaiken is also quick to acknowledge the impact on both her personal and professional life of the coarse rhetoric during the 2016 US presidential campaign. We’re living in “this extraordinary political moment with these two countervailing trends of political culture,” she noted several months ago. “There’s this great leap forward and this hideous and appalling kind of slide backwards. There’s a real tension in our culture right now that’s still being reflected in the entertainment industry.” That said, TV execs recognize that “passion is what makes shows work,” Chaiken says. And the industry may finally be ready to consider shows that aren’t necessarily about being gay or trans but that feature LGBTQ lead characters living their lives — content that has traditionally been seen as a business risk. “These aren’t risks,” Chaiken points out. “These are opportunities…. When television is great,” she adds, “it’s because it connects us to an experience that we might not otherwise have, and ideally a cultural experience that lets us see people that we haven’t had the opportunity to be close to — to see them intimately.”
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Deborah Baronas 79 TX
Fish Girl, a new graphic novel by triple Caldecott Medalwinning author/illustrator David Wiesner IL (Philadelphia), will be released on March 7. David Wiesner & the Art of Wordless Storytelling will be on view from January 29 through May 14 at the Santa Barbara [CA] Museum of Art and in June will move on to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA. David’s app Spot won several international and US accolades in 2016, including a Lion in the new media category at the Cinekid festival in Copenhagen, a Pepites Prize in France and a Bologna Bagazzi Digital Award in Italy. In addition, his delightful picture book Mr. Wuffles! (Herr Schnuffels! in German) won the top picture book award in Germany in 2015.
Swimmers is among the work Deborah exhibited in Grace & Gravity, a solo show at ArtProv in Providence that ran from mid August through late September. She lives in Barrington, RI.
1979 For 10 days in July artist Kathy Hodge PT lived and worked at Denali National Park in Alaska as a 2016 National Park Service (NPS) Artist in Residence.
Bryan Wiggins 81 IL Autumn Imago, a novel about family struggles and reconciliation, was one of three books chosen to launch Harper Legend, an imprint of HarperCollins, last fall. Based in Cape Elizabeth, ME, Bryan makes annual backcountry pilgrimages to explore the rugged mountain and lake landscape that serves as the setting for his second novel.
During her third residency in Alaska and 11th overall with NPS, she sketched, painted, wrote and collected impressions of the state’s interior wilderness, work she plans to develop further in her Riverside, RI studio and exhibit in 2017. Kathy also presented a public program at Denali headquarters and donated a painting to the park’s permanent collection. Hiding Places in a Dream, a solo show of work by Alex O’Neal IL (Cooperstown, NY), continues through February 11 at Linda Warren Projects in Chicago.
1980 Architect Peter Twombly BArch of Estes/Twombly in