Daily Archives: August 16, 2021

Ilona Royce Smithkin, who as an orange-haired nonagenarian with matching two-inch eyelashes caught fire in the world of fashion, starring in a documentary film and joining fashion campaigns for brands like Coach, while flinging embers into many other fields as a muse for photographers, filmmakers and entertainers a joyous persona that took a lifetime to build after a grim childhood died on Aug. 1 at her home in Provincetown, Mass. She was 101.

The death was confirmed by Melinda Levy, a longtime friend and a trustee of her estate.

Ms. Smithkins rise to fame began with a rumor.

In 2010, the photographer Ari Seth Cohen, who created Advanced Style a blog devoted to the style of women over 60 that later became a book series and a movie on the same topic heard from a friend about a magical woman with fiery red hair and the longest eyelashes anyone had ever seen. He staked out a store she was said to visit.

Not long after, he spotted a woman on the street in the West Village of Manhattan who was about 4 feet 9 inches tall and wore hand-painted sneakers, matching baby blue clothes and diamond-studded sunglasses, with eyelashes poking out. It was her.

Mr. Cohen asked to take Ms. Smithkins photograph. She exclaimed, Of course, and kicked a leg in the air.

I instantly fell in love, Mr. Cohen said in a phone interview.

He began visiting Ms. Smithkins fourth-floor West Village walk-up, a tiny studio so crammed with fabrics, handbags, paintings, magazines and hats that the door could not fully open. Ms. Smithkin served coffee or vodka the only two things I know how to make, she explained and described how she fabricated her own caftans and turned objects like letter organizers and typewriter springs into jewelry.

Without any intent to make a movie, Mr. Cohen and a friend, Lina Plioplyte, began filming their conversations with Ms. Smithkin. That became, in 2014, a documentary, Advanced Style, focused on some of the blogs principal recurring characters.

In the movie, Ms. Smithkin, a painter by profession, combined arresting personal disclosures with slapstick comedy. I came into my own about maybe 10, 12, 13 years ago, she said, although she was 94 when it was released. She joined a nonagenarian friend, whom she said suffered from memory loss, to sing as a duet You Make Me Feel So Young.

I dont think Advanced Style would have been a fraction of what it is without Ilona, Mr. Cohen said. She brought it a depth. She was the star.

Ms. Smithkin started modeling, appearing in campaigns for eyewear by Karen Walker and clothes by Mara Hoffman. She was labeled a 92-year-old style legend by The New York Posts Page Six, which described her dancing at the Jane Hotel in the West Village without noticing that her scarf had caught fire from a nearby candle. Another partygoer doused the flames with champagne.

To those boogieing at the Jane Hotel, Ms. Smithkin might have seemed a figure from vaudeville, her flamboyant get-up amusing enough for a turn in the spotlight. But she had a stable of mentees, consisting largely of artists, who knew better, said one of them, the actor Erik Liberman.

She noticed who was pulled in by the color and light, and who wanted to understand the source of the color and light, Mr. Liberman said. For those who sought deeper conversation, off came the hats, the fabulous scarves and eventually even the eyelashes.

Mr. Liberman often showed up at Ms. Smithkins studio at a moments notice to take naps between Broadway performances. When, as an aspiring actor in his late 20s, he began spending time with Ms. Smithkin, he brought along notebooks to record what she said. She instructed him to take his own creative powers seriously, rather than view acting as a form of subservience to someone elses vision.

That altered the entire course particularly of my young career, Mr. Liberman said.

Ms. Smithkin was born Ilona Rosenkranz on March 27, 1920. Her father, Mordko, was an engineer; her mother, Frida (Lubinski) Rosenkranz, was a homemaker.

That information comes from immigration documents. In April 1938, the family moved from Berlin, where Ilona had grown up, to New York. They listed their race as Hebrew.

As an adult, Ms. Smithkin avoided discussing her background, saying when prompted that she had few recollections. But in a 2004 documentary about her, Ilona, Upstairs, she attributed the way her head shook sometimes involuntarily to experiences she had as an 11-year-old when the Nazis began their rise to power.

Its not Alzheimers, its not Parkinsons, she said of her shaking. That is that terrible, repressed fear.

In the United States, her parents Anglicized their names to Max and Frieda, and the family surname became Royce.

According to Ilonas early-1940s petition for naturalization as a citizen, she was born in Berlin, but she later said that she had been born in Poland. She began making art when she was about 5, and she studied at the Reimann School of Art and Design in Berlin, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Art Students League in New York.

A year after immigrating, when she was 19, Ilona married Irving Smithkin, a linotype operator. He died fighting in World War II and was buried in Italy.

Ms. Smithkin painted and made a living as a milliner, a factory worker, a painter of glass lantern shades and a movie theater usher. She moved into her West Village studio in 1947.

In the 1960s and 70s, she began teaching art classes in Kentucky and South Carolina, traveling to small towns and using church basements and funeral parlors as classrooms. In 1975, she began holding painting classes on the South Carolina Educational Television Network.

When she was not on the road, Ms. Smithkin split her time between the West Village and Provincetown. She met and made portraits of writers like Tennessee Williams, Eugene ONeill and Ayn Rand.

In interviews, Ms. Smithkin referred to having a revelation and finally becoming her authentic self around the age of 80, roughly the same time she started performing songs by Marlene Dietrich and dith Piaf in Provincetown and at New York venues like Joes Pub. She would wear stilettos, stockings and a revealing dress, and until she had hip surgery in her mid-80s, she finished every show by doing a split.

By her own admission, she did not have much of a voice but neither, she said, did Dietrich.

Ms. Smithkin leaves no immediate survivors, but she did develop a ritual for marking someone as part of her inner circle.

You entered her studio and sat on a chair next to her bed. She studied your face. She selected a pencil. Then, for about 20 minutes, you held still while she drew a portrait of one of your eyes.

You talk; I want to hear about you, she would say while drawing, according to Insomniac City, a memoir by the photographer Bill Hayes in which he described sitting for an eye portrait. At this moment, you are the most important person in the world.

It was, Mr. Liberman said, a spiritual experience.

She grew preternaturally still, and her observance plumbed the depths of who you were, he added. She could evoke the entire cosmos of someones being through the microcosm of their eye.

Alain Delaqurire contributed research.

Read more:

Ilona Royce Smithkin, Improbable Muse in Fashion and Art, Dies at 101 - The New York Times

Amid the thunderous praise for Kate Clanchys 2019 book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, there were also growing concerns about racist, fatphobic, and ableist descriptions of her past students. The award-winning memoir documents Clanchys thirty years as a (white) educator, emphasizing the need to support multicultural classrooms.

On that premise alone, this book should have been more critically examined. It already has a faint whiff of white saviorism and imperial gaze, and that is before getting into the word choice that started the discourse on it.

As the book got into more hands, reviews on websites such as Twitter, Goodreads, The Storygraph, and more began to point out the problematic to outright offensive ways of talking about the students. Clanchy not only denied the quotes that came from her book but asked Twitter users to flag the Goodreads reviews as false.

Piecing together the story through screenshots of now-deleted tweets, she at first claimed that people were lying. When that became harder to do, she pivoted to the oh well, now that is just taken out of context and if you read the book, then you would understand. That caused the already terrible situation to escalate.

In a move that at this point should surprise no one, she activated her white women fragility trap card. This prompted high-profile authors like Philip Pullman and Amanda Craig to fly to her defense.

Like Central Park Karen, Mary Beard, and infinite white women before them, Clanchy weaponized her tears to shield herself against mounting criticism. In doing that, she put targets on the backs of high-profile authors of color like Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh, and Sunny Singh.

In Ruby Hamads book White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color, she writes,

White womens racial privilege is predicated on their acceptance of their role of virtue and goodness, which is, ultimately, powerlessness. It is in this powerlessnessor, I would argue, this appearance of powerlessness that governs the nature of White Womanhood.

When Clanchy realized that enough people werent agreeing with her, she expressed this powerlessness. Many of her defenders made the bad faith argument that they, too, were powerless if they couldnt talk about race as offensively as Clanchyagain, making it about themselves rather than the people who were the focus of the descriptions, as if describing Black people (in this case children) as chocolate were appropriate. Just when you think the describing brown skin as food discussion is done, this happens.

All of this while Clanchy wrote to position herself as the white savior figure and bringer of culture to those with African voice, slanted eyes, and Jewish noseall words she used in her book to describe children.

Not only did His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman run to her defense, but he also did so by defending racism with more racism. Pullman compared the criticism of Clanchy by these women to ISIS and the Talibans censorship.

While he did give an actual apology for defending Clanchy and Ayn Rand, he did not apologize for the racism and Islamophobic remarks he made. In the thread with the apology, he continues to extend racist conversations.

Since then, Clanchy offered a non-apology in which she centered herself and outright said, many of the responses to the extracts from my books, especially those taken out of context, have been difficult to hear.

Since posting the apology, Clanchy has indicated that shell be editing the text for future editions. The sensitivity readers (plural) that should be hired for this process better be well compensated for the trauma they will be taking on.

Last place in the apology tour goes to Amanda Craig. Instead of an apology or even a non-apology statement for defening Clanchys book, Craig decided that locking her Twitter account was the best course of action.

In speaking with The Guardian,Suleyman said she is thankful for Picadors (the publisher) response and asked why content of this nature even reached bookshelves, schools, and was celebrated by prestigious awards.

This should surprise no one, but between 1950-2018, 95% of books from major publishers (Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, etc.) were from white authors. The 2018 numbers rested, still, at 89%.

If publishing (from acquisitions to marketing) and those who fortify canons like academics and award judges had a more diverse staffing in every respect, rather than reactionary inclusion training, this would not happen as much. It wouldnt be perfect because we internalize these violent words as okay when it really is anything but.

(featured image: from Pixabay, and Twitter)

The Mary Sue may have advertising partnerships with some of the publishers and titles on this list.

Want more stories like this?Become a subscriber and support the site!

The Mary Sue has a strict comment policythat forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults towardanyone, hate speech, and trolling.

Have a tip we should know? [emailprotected]

Visit link:

Readers Rush to Defend Kate Clanchy's Racist Book at the Expense of People of Color - The Mary Sue