Asriel Marketing Pvt Ltd. is geared to power the highly anticipated “Culinary Art Food Expo 2023” as the events Diamond Sponsor. An annual event, the “Culinary Art Food Expo’ was inaugurated in 1988 with a mere 75 competitors. Today, the competition has grown tremendously over the years, with nearly 1000 participants competing for gold, silver, and bronze awards one platform. The Expo has resulted achieving excellence and has helped nurture the creative talents of Chefs in a team setting. This provides an opportunity for Chefs to showcase their skills, techniques, and knowledge amongst each other.

Shiran Peiris, the Chairman of Asriel Marketing Pvt Ltd, shared his thoughts on the event: “Being named as the Diamond Sponsor of such a prestigious event, is nothing short of an honour for us., especially in lieu of the fact that it gives young Chef’s to shine of a global level. We look forward to contributing to the culinary & hospitality industry even more in the future.

The Expo was held annually until 2019, after which the COVID-19 pandemic vastly impacted the competition. However, the organizers were able to overcome the challenges they faced & stage the event this year with the utmost support from the culinary industry. The demand for the competition was evident from the multitude of requests received from trade professionals who are eager to provide recognition and share their knowledge with fellow culinarians.

Adhering to the World Association of Chief’s Societies (WACS) competition guidelines, the “Culinary Art Food Expo” must focus on food and beverage personnel. The competition has served as a platform where the talent of young chefs who are selected for many international events, including the World Culinary Good Olympics in Germany, and the Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg.

As a “Total Business Solutions Provider in the Food Industry”, Asriel Marketing Pvt Ltd. is dedicated to promoting culinary excellence and supporting the culinary & hospitality industry. The company is proud to be associated with this prestigious event and looks forward to contributing to the future success and growth of the culinary & hospitality industry.

 Image Caption – Shiran Peiris, Chairman of Asriel Marketing Pvt Ltd, addressing the press conference

Colorful chalk drawings lined the employee’s entrance of St. Mary’s Hospital, thanking to health care providers for their work.

Several Capital City High School students and their teacher drew different hospital-related pictures and calligraphic thank you messages at the entrance on Monday morning, helping to start off this year’s Health Care Week.

Celebrated nationally, the weeklong event ends Saturday. The theme this year is “All you do shines through.”

“So many different professions within health care have their own week, so Health Care Week is really a time for us to just celebrate anyone and everyone who works in health care,” said Janet Wear-Enloe, director of business development and marketing at SSM Health, which oversees St. Mary’s Hospital.

Abriana Brindisi, one of the students chalking, drew pill jars, a little cross and emojis with masks on. She hoped her art would “bring (a) smile to people’s day,” she said.

Wear-Enloe said CCHS students had created chalk art for the hospital last year and “everybody was blown away” by the drawings, so the hospital invited them again this year the hospital week celebration.

“They came over and uplifted the spirit of our staff, letting them know they are appreciated,” she said.

Apart from chalk art, the hospital planned a host of events throughout the week. There is going to be trivia competition today, three virtual town halls with Laura Kaiser, president of SSM Health, today and Wednesday, an afternoon and evening barbecue Wednesday, lunchtime music performances and a celebration of Florence Nightingale’s birthday on Thursday and a movie night for employees and their families on Friday.

Different sessions of the same event are being held so that employees working different shifts can participate, Wear-Enloe said.

Throughout Monday, three chaplains would go around the hospital and pray over the hands of individual employees who would like to receive Blessing of Hands, chaplain Bobby Reed said, where the chaplains would pray for the recipients’ hands and blessings in their lives.

On Friday, the chaplains will go out to all the clinics under SSM Health in Mid-Missouri to offer the same blessing to workers at those locations, he added.

The theme, “All you do shines through,” is decided by a committee made up of people from all the ministries under SSM Health, Wear-Enloe said.

“We really like the idea of using a star, because we feel like so much of what people do is their own love shining through, their commitment to patients shining through,” she said.

While this theme is used for all health care facilities under SSM Health, each hospital has a committee to organize specific activities for the week. For St. Mary’s Hospital, staff members can take selfies at a booth with stars as its backdrop, while all materials related to the week bear the theme, she added.

Across town, Capital Region Medical Center is also celebrating this week as Hospital Week, which is the name used by the American Hospital Association. Under the theme of “We are health care,” CRMC is holding events such as a T-shirt sale, bingo games, an employee lunch on Wednesday and a social hour on Friday.

Proceeds from the T-shirt sale are going to CRMC’s foundation to support the hospital’s cardiac program, spokesperson Emily Mantle said.

    Juie Smith/News Tribune photo: As is part of Health Care Week tradition, Chaplain David Tolliver performed a blessing of the hands for Kathleen Ochs, left, and Keerstin Price, both of whom are registered nurses in the Progressive Care Unit at St. Mary’s Hospital.
  

    Julie Smith/News Tribune Remi Taniguchi refers to an illustration on her cell phone Monday that she is trying to replicate in chalk on the floor of the employee entrance at St. Mary’s Hospital. As part of Health Care Week activities, St. Mary’s invited art students from Capital City High School to make chalk drawings in the employee entrance. Taniguchi is an exchange student from Japan and thought the idea of drawing on the floor with chalk was a “really cool” idea.
  

    Julile Smith/News Tribune photo: Capital City High School senior Abriana Brindisi does a final inspection of her work Monday morning before returning to school. She and three other art class students spent over an hour sketching out and filling in images as  encouragement for St. Mary’s Hospital staff who enter through the employee entrance in the lower level.
  

    Juie Smith/News Tribune photo: As is part of Health Care Week tradition, Chaplain David Tolliver performed a blessing of the hands for Kathleen Ochs, left, and Keerstin Price, both of whom are registered nurses in the Progressive Care Unit at St. Mary’s Hospital in Jefferson City. Ochs previously worked at St. Mary’s and returned in November while Price started a month ago. This was the first blessing of hands for either of them.
  



In June 2020, a clip of the then-11-year-old Anthony Mmesoma Madu dancing in a rain-soaked courtyard made the internet rounds. The video shows the young student gracefully performing on wet concrete, presumably demonstrating what he’s learned from Leap of Dance Academy. Located in Ajangbadi, Ojo, a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, the ballet school garnered global attention after that viral moment, including from prestigious organizations like the American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet, celebrities like Viola Davis, and the broader public.

A new documentary titled “Then Comes The Body,” directed by Jacob Krupnick of Wild Combination, pulls back the curtains on the genesis of the academy and follows its students, sharing their stories as individual artists and what it means to be part of a community with grand ambitions.

Established in 2017, Leap of Dance is the creation of Daniel Ajala, who began running the school out of his home as a way to offer free instruction to those who might want to pursue ballet as a profession. “I wanted, more than anything, to give that opportunity to those younger than myself so they wouldn’t miss their chance like I did,” Ajala said in an interview, noting that, since ballet isn’t widely practiced in Nigeria, he learned from YouTube. “It was too bad that I was as old as I was when I realized I wanted to dance.”

Krupnick first found out about the school and Ajala when much of the world did: with that first video of Madu. “Dance and movement are central to a lot of my films, and I always have an eye out for stories and collaborators that make me curious,” Krupnick says. “I’m a White filmmaker, and a theme that I’ve explored in my work is how it feels for non-White people to enter spaces where they haven’t historically felt welcome.”

After getting in touch with Ajala and learning more about his story, Krupnick traveled to Ajangbadi, where he spent time with the students in their neighborhood and learned more about their practices and dreams. This became the origin of the short film, which was created in partnership with Lagos-based producer Damilola Aleje. Showing the dancers atop yellow vans, moving in the streets, and teaching each other, the documentary offers insight into the immense impact of a single school. Leap of Dance, as the trailer shares, has already helped secure scholarships and performance opportunities for many involved, including Precious Duru and Olamide Olawale who, along with Ajala, narrate the film.

Premiering this June at Tribeca Film Festival, “Then Comes The Body” is an encouraging look at the power of expression and community and asserts that, as Ajala says, “ballet is here to stay.” (via Kottke)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article ‘Then Comes The Body’ Follows the Nigerian Ballet Academy That Stepped into the Global Spotlight appeared first on Colossal.

It’s a Tuesday morning at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and Samuel Wildman is covering the wall of an art gallery with night-lights. At a glance, these objects could be mistaken for mass-produced lights from the local hardware store, the sort you might find installed in a child’s bedroom to ward off bedtime anxiety. 

But take a closer look, and you’ll notice that each light is covered in a porcelain flame that seems more ominous than comforting. The sense of unease deepens when you step back and notice the lights are arranged in a pattern that unmistakably resembles a map of California wildfires, the type of diagram that tends to circulate across the internet during each of the state’s ever-lengthening fire seasons.

Wildman is one of seven emerging artists who will graduate this spring from UC Berkeley’s nationally-distinguished Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program, which dates back to the founding of the school’s Department of Art Practice in the 1930s and has produced many graduates, including Jay DeFeo, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Shirin Neshat, Alicia McCarthy and Brontez Purnell, who became famous in the art world. 

Much has changed in the artistic and cultural life of the campus since the program began, most notably with the establishment of BAMPFA in 1970 as Berkeley’s premier visual arts center. Since then, BAMPFA —  initially known simply as the University Art Museum — has held an annual exhibition that celebrates that year’s graduating class of MFA students, providing what is for many of these young artists their first opportunity to showcase their work in a museum setting. This year’s exhibit opens on Wednesday, May 10. 

Samuel Wildman’s installation of porcelain-covered, flame-shaped lights is an expression of
“the affective experience of climate change,” he says. “I’m trying to figure out how to express the experience of sitting in an apartment with your 6-year-old, not being able to go outside, trying to explain why smoke is slowly moving in from under the door.” (BAMPFA photo by Daria Lugina)

Just as each generation’s artists tend to draw on the preoccupations of their era, the annual MFA exhibition often serves as an illuminating microcosm of that year’s most pressing intellectual and artistic concerns. Wildman’s interest in the topic of climate change echoes a broader trend shared by the members of his cohort, who are using their unique artistic practices to explore how we live in the 21st century. They are tackling weighty themes including identity, technology, trauma, historical memory and the relationship between humans and the natural world.

The form that these explorations take are as diverse and distinctive as this year’s seven graduating artists, varying widely across different artistic mediums and aesthetic approaches. For Fei Pan, that means harnessing digital and physical tools to create haunting images that begin as computer-generated illustrations of built and natural landscapes. These renderings form the basis of handmade paintings that capture the tension between the material and the immaterial, between natural and virtual reality. 

Pan’s interest in the built environment is shared by her fellow graduate Juniper Harrower, whose work is likewise preoccupied with the interactions between human and nature. For the MFA exhibition, she has created a painting of the concretized Los Angeles River, in which the bustling Southern California metropolis has been visually distorted to accommodate the river’s explosion of natural dynamism.

In this year’s MFA cohort, water likewise serves as a creative inspiration for two other artists for whom water is closely tied to questions of identity and cultural heritage. For Tiare Ribeaux, water is a central theme of her practice as a moving image artist of Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry. Her short film, Pō’ele Wai (As The Water Darkens), revolves around an Indigenous weaver who slowly realizes she is being poisoned by her drinking water after a recent fuel spill. 

The 53rd Annual Master of Fine Arts Exhibition opens May 10 at the Berkeley Art Museum and & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and runs through July 23. (Photo courtesy BAMPFA)

In a similar vein, Eniola Fakile includes references to water in the titles of all her works, which range from sculpture to photography to clothing design. The mutability of water, for Fakile, is a powerful metaphor for reclamation, regeneration and coping — themes that inform her experience of moving through the world as a Black artist.

Themes of identity also infuse the work of Gericault De La Rose, whose multi-tiered sculptures and performance-based works reflect on the multiple layers of being that she experiences as a queer, trans and Filipinx artist. 

Another artist working in a very different ancestral tradition, Irma Yuliana Barbosa has created a sculpture in the form of a religious grotto. Many of Barbosa’s materials are dyed scarlet by cochineal insects that live on desert cacti, a traditional pre-Colombian dyeing method in Latin America that was appropriated by colonizers for Christian holy garments.

“I’m framing (these works), in a way, as a religious pilgrimage, where there will be three sculptural pieces leading up to the main installation,” says Barbosa, who uses the pronoun “they.” “I call them ‘milagros.’ it’s a term that means a kind of a vow or promise for a miracle, or proof that the miracle has already happened.”

Juniper Harrower’s artwork is called “Resting and raging through histories of containment.” Materials she used include Los Angeles river water, watercolor paint, ink, graphite and California-sourced gold dust and scanning electrode imagery. (Image: Courtesy of Juniper Harrower)

Describing their practice as “intuition-based,” Barbosa says they are interested in themes of “reclamation and healing,” especially with regard to the colonial contact between European colonizers and indigenous Mexicans that has shaped their own family history. Like many of the artists in this cohort, Barbosa has shifted between multiple mediums over the course of their trajectory as an artist. They first applied to the MFA program with a portfolio that was heavily weighted toward photography and performance art, but now work primarily in mixed media and sculptural installation.

“I guess I would describe myself as an interdisciplinary artist,” says Barbosa, attributing their increasingly multimedia approach to the “really big leap in resources” afforded by Berkeley’s MFA program. “I work in all sorts of mediums,” adds Barbosa, “and the through line throughout my practice is that I like to focus on process.”

Like Barbosa, Wildman also cites the extensive resources of the MFA program as a liberating force in his art practice.

“It’s been delightful to know that this show is coming up, and to have supportive faculty come through and give really formative critical feedback,” he says. “That, coupled with access to the ceramics studio and the opportunity to work alongside the artist Ehren Tool, really opened up a new set of possibilities for me.”

Prior to enrolling in the MFA program, Wildman had worked extensively as a carpenter and handyman — a lived experience that led him to reflect on the role of the single-family home in the U.S. as an increasingly fraught space, with regard to environmentalism, consumerism and the changing climate of California. These themes emerge in another of Wildman’s works at BAMPFA: an unsettling, distended soap dish sculpture installed alongside that wall of night-lights. He says it was inspired by the subversive domesticity depicted in the iconic Belgian film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

This oil painting by Fei Pan, one of the seven MFA students graduating in May 2023, is called “Garden of Forking Paths: The New Landscape Project 01.” (Image: Courtesy of Fei Pan)

When the MFA exhibition opens at BAMPFA this week, it will mark the 53rd installment of this showcase for the Master of Fine Arts program —  an important half-century partnership between Berkeley’s Art Practice Department and the campus’s nationally renowned visual arts center, which continues to provide a vital springboard for each year’s graduates as they emerge into the professional art world. 

Each year’s exhibition comes together through close collaboration among the students, faculty and BAMPFA’s own professional staff, including a member of the museum’s curatorial team who oversees the exhibition planning process over a nearly yearlong period. This year’s installment was curated by BAMPFA’s curatorial associate Claire Frost, who has worked closely with each of the seven artists to help them bring their unique works to fruition in the museum space.

“I meet with the students one-on-one,” says Frost, “and they also have meetings with our prep crew, our registrar, marketing and communications, and other folks. Learn how not only put up a show in a highly professional, institutional setting, but how to publicize their work and give artist talks.”

Frost adds that it’s an honor for the museum “to support such brilliant artists emerging from UC Berkeley and to provide a platform to share their work with the broader community. Each year, it’s truly exciting to see what the cohort of students brings to this important exhibition; the works in this show share a focus on embodiment and ecologies that has generated a cohesive, ambitious and prescient survey that speaks to Cal’s experimental and progressive legacy.”

The 53rd Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition runs from May 10 to July 23, 2023. Visitors are invited to BAMPFA to attend a joint artists’ talk by the 2023 MFA graduates on Friday, May 12, at 5:30 p.m. For more information, visit bampfa.org.

Le Printemps is in the air—and headed for the auction block in June. 

The oil on canvas painting, the name of which translates to “spring,” was created by French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1858. It’s part of the Ann & Gordon Getty Collection being offered by Christie’s during a live auction in New York on June 14 and two online sales ending on June 15. The collection features “furniture and decorative arts honoring the rich eclecticism of the late 19th and 20th centuries,” according to the auction house. Proceeds from the sale will benefit arts and science organizations created by the Gettys. 

The auction will include pieces from the couple’s Berkeley, Calif., home. Dubbed the Temple of Wings, the Greco-Roman style house was built in 1924 for a local artist. The Gettys bought the property in 1994, subsequently filling it with art and furnishings from the turn of the 20th century.  

The interior of the Berkeley home “blended the earnest tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement, the magical productions of Tiffany Studios, and the aesthetic costume of Fortuny with Roman maidens of [artists Frederic] Leighton and [Lawrence] Alma-Tadema,” Jonathan Rendell, Christie’s deputy chairman of the Americas, said in a statement. “It was a magical place.”

Among the lots is Bouguereau’s Le Printemps, which is expected to fetch between US$250,000 and US$350,000 under the hammer. The piece features three “classicized figures participating in activities associated with springtime” and was commissioned for a 19th-century Parisian home, according to Christie’s. The painting helped establish the artist in France after he returned from Italy.

“Le Printemps was part of the decorative scheme of the Salon des Saisons of the Hôtel Pereire, the home of the Parisian banker, parliamentarian, and railroad industrialist Émile Pereire, who commissioned Bouguereau to decorate two rooms of his house in 1857. … The opulent home, located at 35-37 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, now houses the British Embassy in Paris,” according to marketing materials for the sale. 

Another highlight is A Coign of Vantage, a 1895 oil on panel painting by Alma-Tadema that’s priced at between US$2.5 million and US$3.5 million. Depicting three women on a marble bench at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, “A Coign of Vantage has come to be regarded as one of the artist’s quintessential masterpieces,” according to Christie’s. 

“In many ways it anchored the collection at Temple of Wings, echoing the architect’s conception of the house as a Roman villa maritima, overlooking Berkeley and the bay just as its antecedents had looked out over the Bay of Naples,” according to the auction house, which noted it was an early acquisition for the collection.

Other lots include a leaded glass and bronze Wisteria table lamp created circa 1903 by Tiffany Studios, set to fetch between US$400,000 and US$600,000, and a hand-knotted William Morris Hammersmith carpet from around 1890 that could achieve as much as US$100,000.

Ann Getty, who died in 2020 at the age of 79, was an interior designer and paleoanthropologist who worked on archeological digs in Turkey and Ethiopia. Her husband, Gordon Peter Getty, 89, is a composer and the fourth child of industrialist J. Paul Getty, whose celebrated collection of art and antiquities formed the basis of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Together, the couple supported numerous philanthropic causes throughout California and New York. 

The June event is the second installment of the Getty Collection, following an October sale, which garnered more than $150 million across 10 auctions, according to Christie’s. More than 1,500 fine and decorative art objects were sold, with the proceeds to benefit the couple’s charity, The Ann & Gordon Getty Foundation for the Arts.

Use social media to the fullest

Social media is a great way to grow your audience and keep them in the loop of anything going on in the business. Use social media to showcase your car wash, announcing offers, or even showcase before and after images of customers cars. With the proliferation of stories and TikTok/Instagram Reels, take advantage of those mediums as well to target a younger audience.

Take great images and video

A picture or video can say a thousand words. The way you show your carwash can affect the perception of your customers. As noted in the social media section, taking before and after content of cars can help customers see the quality of the wash, enticing them to come in. Showcasing state-of-the-art equipment or the carwash in action will also give confidence in your carwash.

Use clear and concise signage

Signage helps customers know what they’re getting into and the features the car wash will have. Most carwashes have a tiered washes, with more features for premium washes. Try to nudge customers to pick a more expensive option by letting them know that it is the better or best wash for their vehicle. With banners or flags, it can bring down a customer who wasn’t thinking of getting a car wash as a drive-in customer. It would also help find the entrance to the carwash. Branding can also bring an identity with signage, giving a brand touch to everything a customer sees.

Create a website

Creating a website can give potential and current customers information before going to your car wash. Letting customers read about your car wash and services provided would help them be better informed in their decision.  If there is a monthly membership for your car wash, let customers purchase or manage it online.

Advertise locally

Get the word out! Billboards are great, but in the age of digital media, more eyes will be focused on screens. Set up a budget for digital ads and target within your city or region. The more exposure, the more business you will receive.

While these tips won’t make you a marketing expert, it will certainly help you lead you and your business in the right direction. It will increase your exposure and customers which will increase revenue and even repeat customers.

“Evil is when we don’t want to be together… This is what we do: we banish it so that we can all be together, all equal,” says one of the subjects of Killian Lassablière’s short documentary “Kukeri,” a movingly atmospheric portrait of a centuries-old Bulgarian ritual. Part of The New Yorker Documentary series, the film highlights the cultural practice from the perspective of its participants, known as Kukers, who describe the roots of faith, community, and family that draw them together each spring to ward off evil spirits.

During the annual event, dancers don elaborate animal skin garments, intimidating masks, and huge bells around their waists to appear spectral and huge. For those who participate, it is a calling with mysterious, spiritual ties. “It was innate for me, and it kept growing over the years,” one narrator says. “No one can say why they dressed up as a Kuker for the first time. It has been passed down from generation to generation.” Lassablière focuses on the custom’s ancestral and future appeal, as children dance with their parents and look forward to being able to dance with the big bells.

See the entire film on The New Yorker’s YouTube channel, and find more work by Lassablière on his website. You might also enjoy photographer Charles Freger’s portraits of Kukers and practitioners of similar Eastern European traditions.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Killian Lassablière’s Short Film ‘Kukeri,’ a Centuries-Old Bulgarian Tradition Wards Off Evil Spirits appeared first on Colossal.

The event will take place on Friday, May 12 from 5 to 10 p.m. and its footprint will also extend along Orange Street from Court Street to Chapel Street, according to the press release.

“This addition to the Market not only allows for increased vendor space, but allows the inclusion of a dozen additional brick and mortar businesses for guests to eat at and shop with, including Strange Ways who will host a Flair Fair Pop-Up, curating artists who specialize in wearable art and home goods,” Francesca Vignola, director of marketing and events for the Town Green District, said in the press release.

Among the event highlights, attendees will be able to view an Open Late Exhibit by Mark Breslin at Artspace, receive on-site tattoos in Ptkin Plaza from Showoff Ink Artistry and purchase posters made by local artists. Businesses in the 9th Square neighborhood will also remain open and some will offer “Night Market” promos to customers in partnership with the event. 

The Night Market Stage will also host performances by The Kreative Spectrum, The Nu Haven Kapelye, O.K. Company, Model Decoy, Yale MVM and DJ Shaki. At the corner of Chapel and Orange streets, 360 State Apartments employees will preview of The Yard at 360 and explain their plans for the space. 

The event is free to enter and the rain date is set for May 13.