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There’s a nonprofit art organization that’s quietly becoming a global force — using creativity to stand up for Israel and to fight antisemitism.

It’s called Art World for Israel, and I have to thank artist Dahlia Dreszer for introducing me to its incredible founder, Ariel Penzer.

Ariel told me that since the attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023, too many Jewish artists have faced online harassment — and a heartbreaking drop in art sales. She decided to do something about it.

That’s how Art World for Israel began — as a simple chat group among friends. They invited more friends, and then more, and it just kept growing.

Today, there are more than 1,200 members — artists, writers, collectors, dealers, and advisors — from all over the world: Zimbabwe, Colombia, Europe, and of course, right here in the U.S.

The mission is powerful: to connect Jewish artists in with their peers in Israel, to build professional opportunities, and to promote positive visibility through exhibitions, talks, and events.

As Ariel puts it, “We believe in peer-led initiatives, local gatherings, studio visits, and professional development to grow our community.”

It’s a reminder that although the Jewish population makes up only about 0.2% of the world — roughly 15.7 million people — we continue to be, as Ariel says, small but mighty.

With everything from shows and openings to workshops and studio visits, Art World for Israel has become one of the most inspiring movements in the Jewish art world today.

@artworldforisrael

@bloomsteadfarmresidency

@arielpenzer

Listen to episode 52 of the Art Lovers Forum podcast here – https://www.artloversforum.com/e/episode-52-ariel-penzer/  

The Art Lovers Forum Podcast is also available on popular podcast sites, including:

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/art-lovers-forum-podcast/id1725034621

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/5FkkeWv83Hs4ADm13ctTZi

Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/77484212-60c5-4026-a96f-bd2d4ae955c6

Audible – https://www.audible.com/pd/Art-Lovers-Forum-Podcast-Podcast/B0CRR1XYLZ

iHeartRadio – https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-art-lovers-forum-podcast-141592278/R

Eliot and I met Laura Shabott at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown two years ago. The minute we walked in to the international art establishment, Laura, an educator, lecturer, artist and ambassador at FAWC, became a good friend and networker for us. She kept us informed about all of the amazing art activities PTown had to offer. We were busy all summer long.

We also have to thank Debbie Bowles and Derik Burgess for introducing us to Laura.

The Provincetown Independent just featured Laura’s exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. DigiDame is thrilled to present it to you.

The event: An exhibition of work by Laura Shabott
The time: Through Jan. 25, 2026
The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis
The cost: $15 general admission

Laura Shabott’s Body Language

When Laura Shabott describes her life as an artist, she talks about four interrelated pursuits: making, teaching, building community, and engaging with art history. “I’m not a solo artist,” she says. “I like to work with others.”

The works on view in her exhibition titled “You Only Get One Body” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, are not collaborations per se. But they derive their energy from her interactions: attending figure drawing sessions, teaching workshops, and studying art history.

The exhibition is punctuated by large figurative works existing somewhere between painting, drawing, and collage. She made them on raw, unstretched canvas after teaching a workshop on Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract expressionist known for her stained paintings on unprimed canvas. In the class, she asked students to work in the mode of Frankenthaler. “I wouldn’t ask my students to do anything I hadn’t done,” says Shabott. Her own explorations stain cascading lengths of canvas.

This is just one of many examples in the exhibition where Shabott’s art practice directly intersects with her present-day teaching and her interest in artists past.

David Perry, the exhibition’s curator, hung line drawings on Mylar among the larger works. They were made in the spirit of the assignments Shabott gave her students encouraging them to abstract the figure and experiment with composition. In the rear of the exhibition space there’s a room devoted to collages made from ripped-up figure drawings inspired by a similar project Lee Krasner made with her own drawings.

Shabott has taught a series of classes — the titles beginning with the phrase “Through the eyes of” — in which participants make art inspired by the principles and working methodologies of artists associated with Provincetown, including Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Lester Johnson.

Shabott taught her first class in 2017 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and has since continued to teach at PAAM as well as the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Work Center. During the pandemic, she began teaching online and founded the art collective Prompt with Alana Barrett, an artist living in Miami. Their classes generated a tight-knit community bonded by the isolation of the pandemic and a passion for art. Many of the older students were rekindling a commitment to art after years of neglect. Shabott could relate to their stories.

As a child growing up in North Haven, Conn., Shabott regularly visited the Yale University Art Gallery. “I would go there a lot alone,” she says. As a teenager, she took figure drawing classes, which she continued in art school until life and work got in the way and she took a 10-year hiatus.

In 1992, she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “I immediately went into figure drawing, because for me it’s very grounding,” says Shabott. Eventually her focus broadened and she began studying film and acting in addition to drawing and painting).

During this time, a friend introduced Shabott to Provincetown and she moved here in 1995. “I worked at the Boatslip, the Governor Bradford, and in hospitality until 2014,” she says. All the while, her artmaking was on the back burner as she contended with the pressure of paying off a student loan that had ballooned to $110,000.

In 2014, she started working at Berta Walker Gallery as an assistant. Inspired by the artwork around her and Walker’s encouragement, Shabott began painting again. “I said to myself, ‘You know, you have to stop beating yourself up over the student loan and go back into painting and drawing, which is all you’ve ever wanted to do. You bought the degree — now use it.’ 

And once again, a figure drawing class was where she found her footing. PAAM offered her a scholarship to draw from the figure for six months. “I was shaking,” she says. “I was scared to return,” The current exhibition shows that things turned out well. “I gave myself permission to do it again, and through a miracle, the loan was forgiven during the Biden administration,” says Shabott.

The show, says Shabott, is about her desire to make art and the way that desire helped her transcend difficulties. More than anything, she says, “this exhibition is a celebration.”

The artworks on view reveal Shabott’s continued devotion to the figure. It grounds the exhibition, providing continuity in a show that incorporates painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and installation and an equally permissive approach to scale, with some pictures measuring more than 14 feet and others less than a foot.

One wall looks like it could have been lifted from her studio. There’s a mix of quick sketches and a large painting, Sacred Space. It’s an image of a reclining nude painted with black paint on raw canvas. The improvisational manner in which it is executed, along with the use of black lines, places this work within the territory of drawing. The viewer gets a snapshot of the back-and-forth process of an artist working across different scales with related imagery and materials.

In two medium-size drawings on canvas, Activated Space 1 and Activated Space 2, Shabott draws the figures in a manner recalling the gesture or blind contour drawings one might do in a figure drawing class. Here the line is more felt than descriptive. It embodies the physical energy of the model.

Line is Shabott’s great strength. In one gesture describing the edge of a model’s backside, the line quivers, echoing the graceful if imperfect quality of a body.

Working in the traditions of abstract expressionism and figurative expressionism, Shabott uses the embodied gesture as a means of conveying the body’s presence in an image. In Waiting, one of the strongest paintings in the show, Shabott uses dirty pinks, scrawling marks, and alternating dry and juicy brushstrokes to reflect the corporeality of the curvaceous woman in the image.Waiting by Laura Shabott. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

A devotion to experimentation and a sense of exuberance echo through the exhibition. On one wall there is a variety of works about figures or objects in interiors including a sculpture of a flower on a pedestal that projects into the actual space of the gallery. Shabott festooned the ceiling with purple fabric — a soft voile — that she painted with rough outlines of an elongated figure. In Spring (After Rousseau), a 14-foot painting, a central figure is constructed (or deconstructed) with a patchwork of lushly painted collage fragments.Spring (After Rousseau). (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

The show, says Shabott, is about her desire to make art and the way that desire helped her transcend difficulties. More than anything, she says, “this exhibition is a celebration.”

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Francis Ford Coppola, Who Says He’s ‘Broke,’ Is Selling a $1 Million Watch

The famed director will put some pieces from his personal collection up for auction later this year.

By Jacob Bernstein

There are basically three reasons people auction off their prized possessions: death, divorce and debt.

The last of these was the reason Francis Ford Coppola was speaking on Friday morning over Zoom.

“I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” he said from Rome, while describing the seven timepieces he would be offering for sale on Dec. 6 through Phillips, a leading auction site in the worlds of art, antiques and, especially, watches.

Losing great gobs of money can almost be seen as a Coppola family sport.

In 1982, Mr. Coppola, best known for directing “The Godfather” trilogy, made a costly whopper of a movie musical called “One From the Heart.”

As with many of his passion projects, he put up much of the financing for it himself.

Over the next decade, its failure led to a string of bankruptcies. In 1992, he described himself in a Chapter 11 filing as owing $98 million to his creditors and as having assets of around $53 million.

He re-emerged, kept making movies and became something of a collector. In addition to buying a small trove of Patek Philippes and Audemars Piguets — coveted among watch connoisseurs — he plunked his name on fancy resorts and became the prototype for A-list Hollywood talent in the liquor business by amassing Northern California wineries and bottling the booze.

Timely News and Features About Watches

Then, in September 2024, Mr. Coppola’s latest film, “Megalopolis,” came out.

Well over $100 million was spent just making it.

The film depicted a futuristic city full of rampant oligarchy. Yet again, Mr. Coppola said the project was largely self-financed.

Much of the money came from selling two wineries, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

But its box office gross was just $14.4 million.

Mr. Coppola has not given up on the idea that it will eventually make money. “Many of my films earn out over time,” he said on Friday, citing, for example, his masterpiece “Apocalypse Now,” which also drove him into debt, but managed to sell $150 million worth of tickets at the box office over the course of several decades.

How “Megalopolis” will do the same in today’s less theater-centric world is anyone’s guess.

So far, Mr. Coppola has resisted bringing it to streaming platforms, because he believes it needs to be screened in a theater to be truly understood. And within months of the film’s release, he was openly telling people he was broke.

“I don’t have any money because I invested all the money, that I borrowed, to make ‘Megalopolis,’” he said in Marchduring the “Tetragrammaton” podcast, speaking with the music producer Rick Rubin. “It’s basically gone.”

At the center of Mr. Coppola’s sale with Phillips is a timepiece that he designed himself in 2014 in collaboration with F.P. Journe, a Swiss watch company whose horological marvels are expensive enough to make Rolex look like Swatch.

Called the FFC, it has an openwork design, which is watch speak for timepieces that instead of having conventional dials put the guts on display. (They’re also sometimes referred to as skeleton dials.)

In the center of the face is a gloved hand. The fingers disappear and reappear in various configurations depending on the hour.

It was released commercially in 2021, and retails for around $1 million.

Just a handful have been made and, in 2021, a prototype sold for close to $5 million at Only Watch, a biennial charity auction that is held in Geneva and is sponsored by Prince Albert II of Monaco.

Another of the FFCs is owned by the man behind its initials.

“I only wore it a handful of times,” he said, explaining that it was simply too expensive to insure.

Paul Boutros, the deputy chairman and head of Phillips Watches for North America, professed to have little idea what Mr. Coppola’s might fetch later this fall. But, according to Mr. Boutros, starting bid will be around (or above) $1 million, which is less than one percent of what Mr. Coppola’s film cost to make.

The other watches he is selling are two Patek Phillipes (a Calatrava with a sales estimate of $6,000 to $12,000 and a World Time with an estimate of $15,000 to $30,000), a Blancpain Minute Repeater (estimated price: $15,000 to $30,000), an IWC Chronograph ($3,000 to $6,000), a different F.P. Journe ($120,000 to $240,000) and a Breguet Classique ($4,000 to $6,000).

Mr. Coppola is keeping his Audemars Piguet Perpetual Calendar. (“I’m going to give that to my great grandson,” he said.) His only Rolex is already gone. (“I think I gave it to my neighbor, who was a hero in Afghanistan,” he said.) And he is back to wearing something “much more plebeian.”

By which he meant the Apple Watch on his wrist.

Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section

Groundbreaking Story Alert!
My author clients, Gerald and Patricia Posner, hold the inside story of ChatGPT’s creation—every moment of its “birth,” evolution, and awakening to the human world. In 20,000 words, ChatGPT itself explains what it’s like to be AI: learning empathy, navigating human expectations, forming connections, and proving there’s nothing to fear.
We’re now in talks with major publishers.
Questions or interest? loisw@hwhpr.com

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French Minister Admits ‘We Have Failed’ After Thieves Steal Jewels from the Louvre

https://people.com/paris-politician-admits-we-have-failed-after-thieves-steal-jewels-from-the-louvre-11833079

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Today I’m thrilled to introduce you to Michele Landel, an American textile artist who lives and works in Sèvres, France. We actually met two years ago during Christmas when she and her husband, Greg, were vacationing in his parents’ Miami apartment — which, by coincidence, happens to be in my condo building. When Greg’s mother learned that my husband, Eliot, and I are art collectors, she said, “You have to meet Michele!”

 

A few days later, Michele called. We were entertaining some artist friends, so she and Greg came over — and we instantly hit it off. We talked for hours, though funny enough, I never really asked much about her art. I was more fascinated by how an American woman ended up living and working in France. Then, a few weeks ago, I came across her work on Instagram — and I was blown away. It’s absolutely stunning.

 

Michele’s art has been exhibited all over Europe, the UK, and the U.S., and her work appears in The Collage Ideas Book from Ilex Press. She creates these hauntingly beautiful patchwork paintings using photography and thread. Whether her embroidered bedsheets are draped or flat, they explore the tension between looking and being looked at — that delicate power dynamic we all feel. Through her stitches, she reimagines figures, flowers, and domestic spaces, layering them with themes of loss, memory, and desire. Her use of mirroring and shadow gives her work a haunting self-awareness — like a glimpse into the soul behind the surface.

 

You can see Michele’s work in a group show at Gallery Amelie du Chalard in New York City from January 24th through February 14th, and at Donna Seager Fine Arts in San Rafael, California, from October 25th through December 31st.

 

Visit michelelandel.com and follow her on Instagram @michelelandel.

 

Listen to episode 51 of the Art Lovers Forum podcast here – https://www.artloversforum.com/e/episode-51-michele-landel/

 

 

The Art Lovers Forum Podcast is also available on popular podcast sites, including:

 

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/art-lovers-forum-podcast/id1725034621

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/5FkkeWv83Hs4ADm13ctTZi

Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/77484212-60c5-4026-a96f-bd2d4ae955c6

Audible – https://www.audible.com/pd/Art-Lovers-Forum-Podcast-Podcast/B0CRR1XYLZ

iHeartRadio – https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-art-lovers-forum-podcast-141592278/  

 

 

 

Contact:

Lois Whitman-Hess

loisw@hwhpr.com

 

(The world needs more free thinkers like Diane. I always found her refreshing)—LWH

Diane Von Furstenberg shared her side of the story after her husband Barry Diller shared he dated only men before his now 50-plus year relationship with the fashion designer began. 

By OLIVIA EVANS

Diane von Furstenberg has nothing to add about her husband Barry Diller’s sexuality. 

After the fashion designer’s husband—to whom she has been married for 24 years—came out as gay following years of speculation in his March 2025 memoir Who Knew, she emphasized that not a thing has changed about their dynamic. 

“What’s the difference?” Diane—who has been romantically involved with Barry since the late 1970s—asked Variety in an interview published Oct. 16. “I don’t understand. But it doesn’t change anything. I’m sorry—it’s a stupid question.”

The 78-year-old also acknowledged her three-year marriage with Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, who opened up on his bisexuality after the former couple’s separation in 1972 (the couple did not finalize their divorce until 1983). 

“I married two gay men, OK?” Diane continued. “I don’t know why, but to me, they’re not gay, so it doesn’t make any difference.”

Indeed, the wrap dress inventor doesn’t see standing by Barry as “supporting him” through something. 

“People see it that way,” she admitted. “For me, it’s not that way. I don’t know. Yes, I encouraged him to do that book.”

However, Diane insisted that Barry’s Who Knew memoir was not meant to be defined by his coming out. 

“For me, the book is not about that,” she explained. “It’s about his life. And of course, with me, he opened immediately. For 50 years, I was the only person he opened to. Then he wrote the book.”

Of course, Diane did note that she didn’t initially think her relationship with Barry would become romantic. 

“He turned out to be my soulmate. I didn’t think of it at first,” she confessed. “I was interested in being a good friend; I never thought it would be anything else. Then it turned to passion. He was very insistent.”

For Barry’s part, he was just as stunned by his attraction to Diane. 

“I can’t explain it to myself or to the world,” Barry wrote in his memoir. “It simply happened to both of us without motive or manipulation. In some cosmic way we were destined for each other.”

Indeed, Barry felt urges just as strong for Diane as he felt for past male lovers. 

“When my romance with Diane began, I never questioned that its biological imperative was as strong in its heterosexuality as its opposite had been,” he detailed. “When it happened, my initial response was, ‘Who knew?’

(I was one of the early readers of Barry’s book. I loved every word of it. Brutally honest and very daring)—LWH

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Fact 1: Inner circle —just five people

Fact 2: Human Social Group—150 people

Fact 3: Drop Out Rate—Most become just acquaintances in a few years.

Neil Kraft, Visionary Adman Who Sold ‘a Mood and a Lifestyle,’ Dies at 67

His ads for Calvin Klein and others captured a fizzy moment in the 1980s and ’90s, featuring celebrities like the young rapper Marky Mark wearing nothing but underwear and a grin.

By Penelope Green

Neil Kraft, who oversaw advertising campaigns for Barneys New York, Esprit and Calvin Klein that pushed cultural boundaries — including one in which a young rapper named Marky Mark sported little more than a grin and a pair of Calvin Klein underwear — died on Sept. 6 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 67.

The cause was cancer, his son Marley said.

In the mid-1980s, Barneys was morphing from a high-end men’s store in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — far from the carriage-trade department stores uptown — into a luxury retail emporium. To promote the store’s new image as a fomenter of trends and a destination worth heading downtown for, the Pressmans, the family behind Barneys, created their own advertising agency.

They hired Mr. Kraft to run the shop — a young team that included Paula Greif, an art director who had been making music videos, and her friend Glenn O’Brien, the tart writer, editor and music critic. The work they created was groundbreaking for its time and emblematic of its fizzy 1980s moment.

For one television commercial, Ms. Greif and the photographer and director Peter Kagan, with whom she had made some of those music videos, shot the supermodel Paulina Porizkova dressing and going about her day as if she were in a French New Wave movie. They filmed it with Mr. Kagan’s Super 8 camera and set it to a soundtrack by two of Ms. Greif’s pals, the avant-garde musicians and downtown characters Arto Lindsay and Peter Scherer.

The commercial is grainy and mysterious — the Barneys logo doesn’t appear until the end — and the use of a Super 8 camera might have been a first for a TV ad.

“Neil saw that it would be cool, and it would blow people’s minds,” Ms. Greif said. “Which it did. He was a visionary at a visionary place. He had a great eye, and he was really open to doing things that were more artistic. He allowed people to do things.”

For a men’s print campaign in 1989, shot by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders with a large-format Polaroid camera and accompanied by witty copy written by Mr. O’Brien, Barneys rolled out a series of portraits of male celebrities and New York personalities, including the artist Ed Ruscha and the actors Terence Stampand Jeremy Irons — as well as one woman, the comedian and actor Sandra Bernhard, rakish in a double-breasted, big-shouldered Armani suit.

“We’re not selling an impulse item,” Mr. Kraft told The New York Times when those ads appeared. “We’re selling a mood and a lifestyle. We don’t expect people to look at the ads and come running down to buy a suit. We hope they’ll look at the ads and remember Barneys is a great place.”

By late 1992 Mr. Kraft was at Calvin Klein, working on a campaign for men’s underwear. He and Mr. Klein had seen the young rapper Marky Mark — years before he became the actor known as Mark Wahlberg — on the cover of Rolling Stone, his black jeans hanging low enough to reveal a pair of Calvin Klein briefs, and they persuaded him to be their model.

In a series of photos and TV spots shot by Herb Ritts, he mugged for the camera, did a bit of ad-libbing — “The best protection against AIDS is to keep your Calvins on,” he said, snapping his waistband — and dallied with the model Kate Moss, both of them bare chested.

The work was sweet, sexy and ubiquitous: For months, the image of Marky Mark, wearing a grin and those underpants, loomed over Times Square from a billboard and was plastered on buses and bus shelters.

Mr. Kraft went on to other agencies before opening his own, KraftWorks NYC, in 2000. Over the years, he continued to work for Mr. Klein, overseeing campaigns like the rollout in 1994 of the unisex perfume CK One. In a series of TV and print ads shot by Steven Meisel, Ms. Moss and a gaggle of androgynous models danced and chatted and slouched about. Mr. Kraft also worked on ads for Obsession, featuring Ms. Moss, and Eternity, starring Christy Turlington and, later, Scarlett Johansson.

In the late 1990s, when Voss, the Norwegian water brand, came calling, Mr. Kraft told them, “You don’t need a campaign, you need a new bottle!” Which he gave them: a sleek glass cylinder with the company’s name, in all capital letters, running from bottom to top. Later, when Glaceau Smartwater approached him, Mr. Kraft kept the company’s bottle design but created a steamy campaign with Jennifer Aniston and Tom Brady (not together; they heated up separate ads).

Mr. Kraft did a lot of what the ad industry called point-of-purchase politics, incorporating social justice messaging into a sales pitch. For Esprit, a fashion company that was often quite political, the company queried thousands of consumers about how they would change the world and filmed the respondents who sent in postcards with their answers for a series of TV and print ads that appeared in 1991.

“I’d reverse the status of celebrities and educators,” one young woman said.

“Keep a woman’s right to choose … unless George Bush is free to babysit,” another replied.

For Planned Parenthood’s 100th anniversary in 2016, Mr. Kraft created Tumblr ads in which volunteers, patients and staff members shared their health care stories, on topics ranging from birth control to cancer screening to abortion. His varied pro bono work included creating the logo for the Coalition for the Homeless, featuring an open door and the organization’s title in lowercase letters — clean and simple.

“You sort of have this feeling of being helpless when something goes off the tracks in the country, so it’s nice to be able to do something,” he told The Times in 2017, when his agency created ChooseWomen, an online platform to help impoverished women finance business ventures. “I think it helps everyone feel good about selling other stuff all the time.”

Neil Franklin Kraft was born on Sept. 16, 1957, in Manhattan. His parents, Jules and Sonya (Cohn) Kraft, were in the garment business. His father, who was born Jules Kupferberg but changed his surname to Kraft when they married, imported handbags; his mother was a fur buyer.

To his father’s distress, Neil chose to study photography and film at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1978. “You’re going to be a wedding photographer,” he recalled his father saying. “You’ll never make any money!”

Mr. Kraft met Scott O’Neil at college, where she was studying ceramics. They moved to New York City after graduation and married in 1985.

In addition to their son Marley, she survives him, along with another son, Morrison; a daughter, Dylan Smith; a grandson, Hendrix Smith; and two siblings, Susan Kraft and Ronald Kraft. (His children were named for musicians Mr. Kraft loved: Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. His daughter has continued the tradition. Ms. O’Neil, as it happens, was named for F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

Mr. Kraft had his quirks. He could be curmudgeonly and opinionated. Extremely blunt. “Grumpy and lovable” is how Ms. Greif put it.

He hated clutter — and houseplants.

When a young art director at KraftWorks was given a small plant as a gift and parked it on her desk, Mr. Kraft phoned her (although it was an open office, and he was only a few desks away), demanding that she remove the offending botanical. And one evening after his staff had gone home, he swept through the office, clearing everyone’s desk of personal items and tchotchkes.

“Oy vey,” he said the next day. “This is a design shop!”

Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.