Hasta La Gadget!

Many of the nation’s leading environmental groups remain overwhelmingly white and male, according to a new report released on Thursday.

Advocacy group Green 2.0 compiled the study, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” after analyzing employment data from the 40 biggest U.S. environmental groups as of April, including heavy-hitters the World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy.

Most groups provided at least partial employment data, with notable holdouts including The Pew Charitable Trusts and Oceana.

The researchers found 73 percent of full-time employees at environmental groups are white and an equal proportion are men. That number rose for senior staff, with 86 percent of employees in those positions identifying as white and 76 percent male. The lack of diversity comes as the percentage of people of color with at least a bachelor’s degree has steadily increased and the nation’s demographics are poised to change within the coming decades.

“Finding qualified leaders of color to fill these positions should not be difficult,” wrote study author Maya Beasley, a professor at the University of Connecticut, in the report. “Although otherwise progressive, the environmental advocacy sector is predominantly led by white men.”

The results reflect an ongoing, but well-documented issue concerning diversity within the green movement. Communities of color are often among the hardest hit by climate change and disproportionately on the frontlines in local environmental fights. But in large part, standard-bearing events like Earth Day are mostly a thing for white people.

A 2016 study found people of color are less polarized about the issue of climate change than white people, but they’re also less likely to call themselves environmentalists. In an interview with HuffPost last year, the study’s authors alluded that such beliefs can likely be linked to the lack of diversity within environmental groups, where racial minorities often see “an image of whiteness.”

As Beasley notes, racial demographics in the U.S. are rapidly shifting, and the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that by 2044, more than half of Americans will belong to a minority group. The future, she writes, will see environmental groups “in a race to adapt … or become obsolete.”

“For nonprofits, this equates to a fundamental shift in the donor base, constituents and policymakers on which they rely,” the report reads. “Successful organizations will need to adapt their workforces to accommodate these changing dynamics.”

The report cited a slew of steps environmental groups can take to rectify the racial disparity, including the hiring of diversity managers, creating plans to attract more diverse applicants and to require accountability within leadership to focus on diversity-related issues.

Beasley found just 40 percent of environmental groups currently have diversity plans in place, despite 70 percent of groups saying they believed more diverse demographics could help their missions.

“While it is encouraging that key stakeholders see at least some benefits of diversity, it is essential that they recognize diversity is not only the right thing to do, but a business necessity,” the paper said.

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For a generation of ballerinas, Wendy Whelan was a walking goddess. The former New York City Ballet principal dancer joined the company at 17, and was quickly singled out for promotion and praise. She served as a muse for multiple then-up-and-coming choreographers and would go on to have more new ballets made for her than any other dancer in the company’s history. She became the defining American ballerina of her generation.

All the while, she says in a new documentary, she was asking herself, “What the fuck is it going to be like when I can’t do this any more?”

In 2013, she found out.

At the time, Whelan was 46 years old, which is all but ancient by ballerina standards. Ballet is so punishing on the body, and the standard demanded by top companies so high, that most women peak by their 30th birthdays and retire not long after. When Misty Copeland was promoted to the top rank of American Ballet Theater in 2015, it was a bittersweet moment: she’d been promoted at last, but at the age of 32, she probably didn’t have many dancing years left in her. Whelan, whose professional ballet career lasted three decades, was truly an anomaly, a ballet institution who outlasted some of her younger colleagues by years.

By 46, she noticed that she was being cast in fewer ballets, including, to her chagrin, the iconic Nutcracker, in which she’d been dancing the role of the Sugarplum Fairy for years. Her boss, Ballet Master Peter Martins, hinted that it might be time for her to move on. And then, her hip started hurting.

The documentary “Wendy Whelan: Restless Creature” finds Whelan preparing for surgery to repair a labral tear, which has made even walking across the stage an agony. She travels to Vail, Colorado, and puts herself in the hands of one of the world’s best hip surgeons, whose walls are covered in the jerseys of the pro athletes he’s treated. This is the man people see when they need to get back in the game, she explains. She needs to do just that, she says, especially since “I don’t have a ton of time left at my game.”

”Restless Creature” shows us Whelan’s recovery from the surgery (after first showing us the surgery itself, in rather gruesome detail), and her return to New York to contemplate what comes after ballet. She gets off crutches, returns to the ballet studio and begins to branch out into contemporary dance, hoping that it will be less brutal on her body. But it soon becomes clear that her body can’t take a return to ballet in addition to her ambitious plan to create a contemporary dance program and tour it all over the country. She has to focus on ballet for what little time she has left before retirement becomes inevitable.

Throughout the film, Whelan consults her former colleagues, all of whom have already retired. She asks them: How did you do this? How did you walk away from the only job you’ve ever had, the thing you’ve been working toward almost since you could walk? Who are you when you’re a ballerina who can’t do ballet any more?

Career paths out of ballet are notoriously narrow. Dancers usually skip college, and even the end of high school, to devote themselves to dancing in their late teens and early 20s, which means that when they retire from dancing, they’re out in the job market without an entry-level degree. Some dancers go on to teach or coach, and some to choreograph, though the latter path is often even less stable, predictable or lucrative than being a dancer. Some go into ballet-adjacent work, like dance photography. Some will be picked to run companies; Pacific Northwest Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Washington Ballet and Pennsylvania Ballet are all run by alumni of the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater. But there are only so many ballet companies to run, and turnover at the top can be infrequent.

Besides, as Whelan explains in the film, she hadn’t made a plan for her post-ballet life; while some of her colleagues were setting themselves up for the next step, she was busy just … dancing.

At its core, “Restless Creature” is a film about grief. We watch as Whelan comes to the realization that her career is ending; that she’ll soon lose the structure of morning class and rehearsal and performance that have defined her days for decades; that she’ll leave behind a large piece of herself, and her identity, when she leaves the Lincoln Center stage for the last time. She moves through the stages of grieving, showing the camera very little anger, and the film ends with her farewell performance in October 2014, which featured yet more new works made just for her.

Now, she’s “really close to the end” of that grieving process, she told HuffPost in a phone interview. She didn’t go to the ballet for a while after she retired, but, she says, now she can go “and not feel pangs in the same way. I’m really happy about that. I can watch works that were made for me and feel a separation, and I’m really glad about that.”

She’s still performing. Her collaboration with the cadre of contemporary choreographers she assembled at the end of her time at City Ballet has toured around the country, and she opened the Joyce Theater’s spring season this year. She’s started coaching other dancers, and recently set a piece by Alexei Ratmansky with Pacific Northwest Ballet — meaning, she learned every step and movement of the ballet and then taught them all to the dancers at that company.

In her new life as a contemporary dancer, she says, her body and her mind have begun working differently. “I’ve let my body soften,” she says. “I’ve let it relax. There’s a lot of anxiety in the ballet world and nervousness,” but in contemporary dance, she feels more grounded. “There’s this calmness that I didn’t have in ballet because I was always up so high on my toes. For me there’s a parallel between how I was dancing and how I was feeling.” After decades of sewing ribbons onto pointe shoes every night, she now rehearses in socks, or bare feet, or canvas ballet flats.

Her new role allows her far more artistic control than she had as a ballerina. She chooses who choreographs on her, she designs programs, she wields far more power than she could as a dancer — something most ballerinas never get to experience before or after they retire. It took some getting used to. “I was so comfortable with my ballet power, my dancer power, that to have a voice, the comfort with having a voice, is slower to come to me,” she says. “I’ve always had a point of view, but to be in the front of the room, I didn’t move into a front of the room position until I retired, and that was really slow. “ While contemporary dance sees more women at the front of the room — running rehearsals instead of dancing in them — than classical ballet does, there’s still an enormous gender imbalance. Most dance companies are run by men, and most choreographers (even those with whom Whelan now collaborates) are men.

Above all, Whelan doesn’t plan to stop dancing, even if she’s not dancing ballet anymore. After she retired, she had a full hip replacement, which she says left her totally pain-free. She says that good genes and “great energy” in her family gave her a body that took easily to dance and was able to keep dancing long after most people have to stop, “a lucky body, not a great body.”

Still, she’s no longer on the regimented rehearsal schedule of a principal ballerina, and when asked what she most misses and least misses, she answers both questions the same way: “I really miss dancing all day long,” she says. “But something I really love is not dancing all day long. I love that I can’t rely on dancing all day long to stay creative.” After the heartbreak of leaving her old self behind, she’s found that she didn’t need it as much as she thought, or feared.

As for the beautiful and cruel ballet slippers that she put on her feet every day for almost 40 years, the bodily extensions that are synonymous with the ballerina, does she miss those? “Sometimes I miss being en pointe, but not a whole lot,” she says. “Every once and a while I would love to float for a minute on a shoe. But for the most part, I did it long enough that it’s OK.”

”Wendy Whelan: Restless Creature” opens June 9th and will be in limited release.

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In mythology, the trickster is an archetypal character that takes many shapes ― animal, human and divine ― distinguished by intellect, cunning, a penchant for mischief, and an aversion to rules, lines and norms of all kinds. In African folklore, the trickster takes shape through Anansi the spider; in America, Brer Rabbit; in France, Reynard the Fox. In pop culture, you’ll recognize trickster tendencies in characters like Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat and Bart Simpson.

In each case, the character uses questionably moral tactics and a generous helping of wit to subvert the natural order of things, tip-toeing over boundaries and shaking up power dynamics to turn the world topsy-turvy. They are clowns, jokers and provocateurs, able to outsmart traditional hero archetypes through their ability to camouflage, think on their toes and step outside traditional moral frameworks. 

Outside the realm of myth, in contemporary life, artists often embody the trickster ethos, pushing buttons and testing limits in a world that, quite often, doesn’t quite know what to make of them. This was, at least, painter Kehinde Wiley’s understanding when he embarked upon his most recent painting series “Trickster.”

“Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we as artists deal with,” Wiley said in an interview with HuffPost. “The trickster position can serve quite well especially in times like this.”

The series consists of 11 paintings, all depicting prominent black contemporary artists who, according to Wiley, embody this trickster mode of being. There’s Mickalene Thomas, known for her bedazzled portraits of glamorous black women, as the Coyote, portrayed with feathers in her hair and a hand on her heart. And Nick Cave, whose boisterous “sound suit” sculptures are ecstatic cyclones of matter and sound, assumes the role of famous portrait subject Nadezhda Polovtseva, wearing a beanie and high-top sneakers while beckoning to the viewer with an umbrella. 

Wiley described his subjects as his heroes and peers. “These are people I surround myself with in New York,” he said. “Who come to my studio, who share my ideas. The people I looked up to as a student, as a budding artist many years ago.” He savors that intersectionality, using his brush to peer into art’s past, present and future. 

Since 2001, Brooklyn-based Wiley has painted grandiose, large-scale portraits of black subjects, injecting them into the largely pasty halls of Western portraiture. Riffing off traditional Renaissance imagery canonizing kings, nobles and saints, Wiley gives his contemporary subjects a hybrid sense of regal aplomb and swagger, a nod to the performative gestures that communicate youth, blackness and contemporary, image-saturated life.

Wiley’s painted figures are most often swallowed up by his sumptuous textile backdrops that creep meanderingly into the foreground. The serpentine vines and decorative flourishes usher Wiley’s typical human subjects ― whom he plucks from sidewalks and shopping malls ― out of their previous existences into the realm of paint, timeless and eternal. Over the past 15 years, Wiley’s artistic style has become immediately recognizable, if not iconic. And yet the artist believes his much of his practice remains, to a degree, misinterpreted.

“So much of my work has not been fully investigated,” he said. “Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it’s an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There’s a dissonance between inside and outside.”

Wiley perceives his current series, too, as an exercise in careful looking. “It’s about analyzing my position as an artist within a broader community,” he said. “About an artist’s relationship to history and time. It’s a portrait of a group of people coming to terms with what it means to be an artist in the 21st century dealing with blackness, with individuality.”

Those familiar with Wiley’s work might do a double take upon seeing this new work, which does away with lavish, cloth-like backdrops in favor of phantasmagorical scenarios. “This show is about me being uncomfortable as an artist,” he said. “When I’m at my best, I’m trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best, when I push myself into a place where I don’t have all the answers. Where I really rely on instinct.”

While Wiley’s earlier works have drawn comparisons to Barkley L. Hendricks, Jeff Koons and David Salle, this current series calls upon the spirit of Francisco de Goya, specifically, his “Black Paintings,” made toward the end of the artist’s life, between 1819 and 1823. The most famed work in the series, “Saturn Devouring His Son,” depicts Saturn as a crazed old man ― bearded, nude, eyes like black beads ― biting into his child’s body like a cut of meat. 

“I’m interested in blackness as a space of the irrational,” Wiley said. “I love the idea of starting with darkness but ending up with a show that is decidedly about light. There is a very self-conscious concentration on the presence and absence of light ― tying into these notions of good and evil, known and unknown. There is a delicate balance that comes out of such a simple set of metaphors.”

The trickster, like Goya, alternates methodically between these notions of light and darkness. Yet the practice extends beyond the metaphorical and into all too real life when black artists navigate the hegemonic and largely white institutions of the art world. “The trickster is an expert at code switching, at passing and posing,” Wiley said.

“In African-American folklore, the trickster stands in direct relation to secrecy,” he continued. “How do you keep your home and humanity safe from the dominant culture? How do you talk about things and keep them away from the master? These were things talked about in slavery that morphed into the blues, then jazz, then hip-hop. It informs the way young people fashion their identities.”

Just as a young man hanging out at the mall performs black masculinity through his look, walk and speech, artists like Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu and Yinka Shonibare are cast in the role of “black contemporary artist” ― a role they pilot with dexterity and finesse. “It’s about being able to play inside of it and outside of the race narrative at once,” Wiley said. “It’s difficult to get right.”

Wiley’s paintings are visual folktales littered with clues ― a rifle, a leather-bound book, a slew of dead foxes ― that, like Goya’s 19th-century canvases, reject certain understanding. Instead, they place viewers in an indeterminate space of in-between: between past and present, dark and light, classical and contemporary, reality and myth. 

“I am painting with this romantic idea that portraiture tells some kind of essential truth about the subject,” Wiley said, “but also with this modern suspicion of any representation to tell the truth about an individual. It’s about being in love with a tradition that is inclusive of so many possibilities, but still contains so much absence.”

Indeed, portraiture has historically served aristocrats and elites, leading critics like Vinson Cunningham to question whether such a medium can ever transcend its chronicled prejudice. “How can Renaissance-descended portraiture, developed in order to magnify dynastic princes and the keepers of great fortunes, adequately convey twenty-first-century realities or work as an agent of political liberation?” he wrote earlier this year. 

Yet what Cunningham views as painting’s weakness, Wiley sees as its strength. “Any writer or artist or thinker must have a set of limitations from which to push off from,” he said. “By virtue of its familiarity it can offer surprise.” And it does. With each subsequent series and show, Wiley stretches the understanding of what shape a portrait can take, who the art establishment serves, what the next generation of great American artists has in store. 

“When I have exhibitions, the people who don’t belong to the typical museum demographic show up,” Wiley said. “People view themselves within the rubric of possibility.” The artist himself had a similar experience back in the day, upon seeing Kerry James Marshall’s portraits flourishing, black American life at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The works left him “thunderstruck.”

Today, Wiley refers to Marshall as “a hero who has, in an improbable way, become a friend.” His smiling face appears three times over Wiley’s “Portrait of Kerry James Marshall, La Lectura.” Seated amidst a dim, rocky cave, Marshall assumes the roles of both student and teacher, directing the viewer’s attention to a large book in his lap, whose insides remain indecipherable. His grin is illuminated with wisdom, kindness and a glint of mischief, leaving the viewer to question what comes next. 

Kehinde Wiley’s “Trickster” runs until June 17 at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. 

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The ladies of Twitter never fail to brighten our days with their brilliant ― but succinct ― wisdom. Each week, HuffPost Women rounds up hilarious 140-character musings. For this week’s great tweets from women, scroll through the list below. Then visit our Funniest Tweets From Women page for our past collections.

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When one of the biggest laughs in your movie revolves around the supposed hilarity of Zac Efron fondling a dead man’s scrotum, it’s probably a good move to check your outrage over its critical reception.

If you’ve somehow been able to remain ignorant to its relentless marketing campaign (seriously, how?), “Baywatch” hits theaters Friday and critics are already savaging the movie with a 19 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Some have compared watching the reboot to sitting in a wet bathing suit for a prolonged period, while others have conceded it’s stupidly entertaining at best.

The movie’s star, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, however, is on a one man social media mission to convince the world that “Baywatch” isn’t as bad as everyone’s saying it is. Cue the actor launching into an almost Trumpian tweetstorm on Thursday about how out of touch the media is with what the the public wants. 

He kicked it off by reminding us all of the “extremely high scores” from fans. 

Then he posted a story about the critics score on Rotten Tomatoes rising from its 13 percent to a slightly less embarrassing 18 percent. 

“Yay positive upticks,” he tweeted. “Fans LOVE the movie. Critics HATE it. What a glaring disconnect. People just want to laugh & have fun.”

Next he spent time praising some fans and critics who actually liked the movie with some choice retweets and knocks at those who laughed in the theater, but trash the film publicly. 

And to finish off, Johnson took one more jab at the “Baywatch” naysayers, reminding everyone once again of just how differently the fans and the media feel about the movie. 

“Oh boy, critics had their venom & knives ready,” he wrote. “Fans LOVE the movie. Huge positive scores. Big disconnect w/ critics & people.”

Considering the way things are headed, “Baywatch” will likely get a sequel and Johnson will make the White House home within the decade, so maybe we should submit and take a bite of what The Rock is cooking.

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