The Bronx Museum (BxMA) of the Arts threw a party in the Soho apartment of Trustee R. Douglass Rice and his wife, Cynthia Elliott, to welcome the their new executive director Holly Block. BxMA Chairman of the Board Bob Perez introduced Holly to the group, which included trustees Michèle Gerber Klein, Allen Duan, Ruth Corn Roth and Lisa Tweedy as well as artists Yoko Inou, Paul Henry Ramirez, Spencer Tunick, Eduardo Sarabia, Fred Wilson, Sonoko Sugiyama, and Anton Perich, and well known dealers, curators and collectors: I-20 Gallery’s Alice and Paul Judelson, Marlborough Gallery Director Janis Cecil with her husband Charles Cecil, Leon Koenig Gallery’s Kai Heinze, Christie’s Andrew Massad, Metro Picture’s Allie Card, Havenarts Gallery’s Barry  Kostrinsky, Noguchi Garden Museum Director Jenny Dixon, Art Dealers Association of America’s Linda Blumberg, The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Laura Hoptman and Charlie Scheips, whose book Andy Warhol: The Day the Factory Died comes out this fall.

Holly Block’s appointment marks her return to the museum, where she served as curator from 1985 to 1988, before gaining an international reputation as a director, curator and arts administrator. She served as Executive Director of Art in General, nonprofit arts organization. She also wrote Art Cuba: The New Generation, a comprehensive survey on contemporary art from Cuba.

The Rices are possessors of a beautiful apartment filled with great art, especially the paintings by the host RD Rice, himself, and a wonderful life-size portrait of Cynthia Elliott’s grandmother Audrey Osborne Elliott wearing a stunning real-gold mesh gown with ermine trim that had been painted around 1915 by Abram Poole. Most of the conversation that evening was about the museum’s newly installed Brazilian show which serves as the premier exhibition in the museum’s brand new building by the architectural firm, Arquitectonica, which nearly doubles its space on the Grand Concourse.

New York City Opera joined forces with De Beers and ELLE Magazine to celebrate the launch of Maestro, the new City Opera Young Patron program, and unveil De Beers’ new collection The Secrets of the Rose at an exclusive cocktail event at the De Beers’ Fifth Avenue store on Wednesday, September 27th.

Co-hosted by Alyce Alston, CEO of De Beers LV USA; Jack Kliger, CEO and president of Hachette Filipacchi Media; and Jane M. Gullong, executive director of New York City Opera, the event showcased arias from City Opera’s upcoming production The Elixir of Love performed by two of City Opera’s most talented young singers, Georgia Jarman and Leonardo Capalbo. De Beers is serving as the Production Sponsor of City Opera’s new production of The Elixir of Love, while ELLE is the Media Sponsor.

About The Elixir of Love:

The Elixir of Love, by Gaetano Donizetti tells the story of Nemorino who has helplessly fallen for Adina, the town’s most eligible bachelorette. However the feeling isn’t mutual. Hoping to win Adina’s heart, Nemorino buys a love potion from fast-talking salesman Dulcamara. But can the power of love be bottled? A triumph since its premier in 1832, The Elixir of Love is now reimagined by legendary opera and theater director Jonathan Miller. Donizetti’s rustic Italian setting is transformed into one of pure Americana; a 1950s diner straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. This charming new production is sure to leave audiences punch-drunk in love with this most intoxicating of operas.

The Elixir of Love can be viewed in 12 performances this fall at New York City Opera and is sung in Italian with English Supertitles. For more information about this production or other City Opera productions, visit www.nycopera.com.

New Yorkers in the know can’t resist a movie show, especially when it comes with a gilded free ticket and is followed by a dinner among friends and those separated by one degree at a hot New York restaurant. Could you resist? Probably not. This is the social norm these days in this most sophisticated mecca of commerce and boldfaced pursuits. Example: big, boldfaced glittery crowd turned out en masse for the Cinema Society’s screening of “All the King’s Men” last week.

The film is based on the great American political novel by Robert Penn Warren about the “Kingfish,” as they called Louisiana Governor in the 1920s, Huey Long, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. This is the second film version of the film, the first starring Broderick Crawford and released in 1949. It won three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress — Mercedes McCambridge). The new version which was the Cinema Society’s screening, was written and directed by Steven Zaillian and stars the great Sean Penn along with Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, and Mark Ruffalo. There was a lot of speculation at this screening about Penn’s possible Oscar for the performance.

The screening and dinner which followed at Riverhouse (New York’s first “green living” residence, designed by David Rockwell) was hosted by Cinema Society founder Andrew Saffir and drew a handsome list of New York and Hollywood glitterati: Tim Robbins, Bruce Willis, Edie Falco, Marcia Gay Harden, Connie Nielsen, Diane Kruger, Law & Order’sChristopher Meloni, Dean Winters (Oz and Rescue Me), Inside the Actors Studio’s James Lipton, Damon Dash, and Rachel Roy, CNN’s Lou Dobbs (who raved on the air about the film), Bebe Neuwirth, Marty Richards, Cindy Adams, Gail Sheehy, Ed Rollins, Vogue’s Sally Singer, Kelly Bensimon, Marina Rust, Leonard Stern, Jerry Della Femina and Judy Licht, Robert Zimmerman, Rufus Albemarle, Beth Ostrosky, Richard and Sessa Johnson, Elizabeth Lindemann, Todd Meister, Debbie Bancroft, Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, Hunt Slonem, Jeffrey Slonim, Coco Kopelman, Jill Kargman, Jamee and Peter Gregory, Cynthia Rowley, Irina Pantaeva, Jonathan and Somers Farkas, Patty Raynes, Leslie Stevens, James Laforce, George Rush and Joanna Molloy, Andrew and Nancy Jarecki, Lloyd Grove, Bettina Zilkha, Daniel Benedict, Olivia Chantecaille, Allison Aston, Blair Husain, Nina Clemente, Caroline Hirsch and Andrew Fox, Ted Roosevelt, and Christopher Daly.

Guests dined on a Louisiana-inspired menu of cajun-spiced tuna, Gulf Coast shrimp, & chocolate beignets along with Moet & Chandon and Belvedere Vodka, all in their glory under the glorious New York nightsky and skyline and off in the misty distance, Lady Liberty lighting up the night of the starry starry evening.

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