Good afternoon and welcome back to another roundup of the day’s top goings-on; it’s news you can use for the weekend.
MANICA Architecture will design the new stadium for the Chicago Bears
Populous was named the designer of a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills last week, but the Bills aren’t the only NFL team looking to make a big move. On March 16, the Chicago Bears announced that they had hired the Kansas City, Missouri-based MANICA Architecture to design their new stadium at the former Arlington International Racecourse site. While no estimated opening date or budget have been made public yet, MANICA is no stranger to football stadium design, having worked on the Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium in Nevada.
H/t to Sports Mockery
THE POEM, an immersive sculptural tower, will open in Times Square on April 8
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, has unveiled its latest installation for the Manhattan crossroads, THE POEM. Created by Cuban artist Raúl Cordero, visitors will walk below a 20-foot-tall cascade of live plants to decipher the artist’s mysterious symbols and find a moment of peaceful contemplation from April 8 through May 4.
“It’s difficult to create meaningful art for people in an era when their attention is scattered across so many mediums and technologies simultaneously,” said Cordero in the project’s announcement. “THE POEM seeks to stop time, reminding us that humans also have the capacity to invest in one thing at a time — like listen to ‘the secret dialogue of trees’ (as put poetically by Reinaldo Arenas) and read a haiku, even when standing in the center of Times Square.”
Los Angeles’s Underground Museum shutters without warning
Los Angeles’s Underground Museum, founded in 2012 by the late painter Noah Davis and wife Karon Davis, has shuttered indefinitely only shortly after reopening for the first time since the pandemic began. The Underground Museum’s co-directors, Meg Onli and Cristina Pacheco, are leaving the institution, and the closure may stem from the recent exhibition of paintings by Noah Davis, as Karon Davis reportedly put out an Instagram statement on how difficult operating the space has been following Noah’s unexpected death in 2015.
H/t to The Art Newspaper
The last Confederate monument in Maryland is taken down
The Talbot Boys Statue in Easton, Maryland, was taken down on March 14, marking the last Confederate statue in the entire state to be removed. Erected in 1916 in front of the Talbot County courthouse, the 13-foot-tall statue was built in honor of a Confederate regiment from the county and inscribed with the names of 96 men from the county who fought against the Union during the Civil War. Although Maryland was part of the Union, individual counties within were decidedly not, and although Talbot County wasn’t a particular Confederate stronghold, a planned statue commemorating the Union soldiers who served from the county had never been realized.
H/t to Hyperallergic
Turkey completes the world’s longest suspension bridge
The 1915 Canakkale Bridge was inaugurated today, officially connecting Europe and Asia. The 6,637-foot-long suspension bridge is the longest of its type in the world and spans the Strait of Gallipoli, connecting the town of Lapseki in the Asian section of Turkey with the town of Gelibolu on the European side. The bridge was built by a group of Turkish and South Korean construction companies and is expected to strengthen ties between the two countries.
H/t to The Associated Press
