Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about an art exhibition to benefit Ukraine that has a lot of celebrity backing. We’ll also find out where the Concorde, the once-glamorous supersonic jet, has been for the last six months while having a little work done.
The actor and producer Joseph Feury has had a second career, as a painter who signs his canvases Joseph Fioretti, his birth name. Several months ago, when he began thinking about a show of his works, his wife said, “Why don’t you do it for Ukraine, and donate the proceeds?”
His wife is Lee Grant, who starred in movies like “Detective Story” and “In the Heat of the Night” and in the television serial “Peyton Place.” For her, Ukraine had a personal connection: Her mother had fled the strategic port city of Odesa at age 12, during a brutal Russian pogrom that took hundreds of Jewish lives.
Grant said that had stirred a passion to support President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine against Russia.
Odesa became a flashpoint in the current conflict last week when Russia launched a missile strike while Zelensky and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece were there, visiting the sites of earlier Russian strikes and paying tribute to victims.
Fioretti took Grant’s advice about his art show, and tonight “Fioretti — Family, Friends & Flowers” will open at the Ukrainian Institute of America, at 2 East 79th Street. Listed as co-hosts on the invitation are people who appeared in Feury’s films and other projects, including Joy Behar, Judy Collins, Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, Verino Pettinaro, Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas, Brenda Vaccaro and Peter Yarrow.
Sean Penn — who was also listed as a co-host and who, with Aaron Kaufman, directed the documentary “Superpower” about the war — introduced Fioretti to Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, who is expected to attend a reception tonight.
Fioretti said he hoped to refocus attention on the continuing conflict. “The Israeli crisis with Hamas has taken the eyes off Ukraine,” he said. “Maybe we can bring some of the eyes back.” He said he had raised $40,000 from friends to mount the show, along with $100,000 that would go to the Ukrainian Institute for humanitarian work, especially in trauma centers.
“I only do work that my eye catches and moves me, whether it be a portrait, whether it be a house or something,” he said. “It has to grab me, and I know this immediately, that it’s something I want to spend that much time exploring and doing.” He turned the dining room in his and Grant’s apartment into a studio, with brown paper on the floor, for when he is working in pastels. For projects with oil paint, he works in a studio downtown.
“Tying it all in to Ukraine was very easy,” he said. “I’m married to an ex-blacklisted actress with deep political views, and over the 60 years we’ve been together, I’ve picked up those views. When Putin invaded Ukraine, I knew there was something terribly wrong morally and that it was internationally dangerous.”
One of the canvases he painted for the show is a portrait of Zelensky, with the bright yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Eight others are images of sunflowers, a symbol of Ukrainian solidarity — at the State of the Union address in 2022, Jill Biden, the first lady, wore a Sally LaPointe dress with a sunflower embroidered on the wrist. Sunflowers were also a centerpiece of the Ukrainian economy: Before the war paralyzed harvests, Ukraine was the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil.
“All flowers are easy for me,” Fioretti said, standing next to a canvas of sunflowers on a Klimt-like background of gold leaf and silver leaf.
The bright yellows of the sunflowers belie a fact about Feury: He is colorblind, something he said he did not know until he had an eye test for the Army in 1959. “The biggest obstacle is I can’t tell the difference between dark blue and dark gray,” he said. “I just live with it. I’m always walking in to where Lee is and saying, ‘What color is this?’”
Weather
Enjoy a mostly sunny day with temperatures in the high 60s. At night, prepare for a chance of showers and temperatures dropping to around 50.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 24 (Purim).
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For the Concorde, a barge ride back to the flight deck
The Concorde, retired by British Airways more than 20 years ago, spent the last six months at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was getting freshened up with a new coat of paint that is supposed to look the same as the one that was stripped off.
This morning it will glide back to the aircraft carrier-turned-museum at Pier 86 after spending last night a shipyard in Jersey City.
Floating along on a barge is the only way it can get to the Intrepid. Its engines were removed before it went to the museum, so it cannot fly, and even if still had the huge turbojets, Manhattan has no runways it could land on.
Driving in from Brooklyn would also present a problem. It is too wide for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge.
The result? A ballet of barges. The Concorde will ride on one, with another essentially riding shotgun. “You don’t want a wing to hang over the edge of the barge and be out there 15 or 20 feet” — just far enough that it could hit something on the way in, Woods said. The empty barge next to the one carrying the Concorde will provide a margin of safety.
The Concorde will be lifted into place on the Intrepid’s flight deck by a 300-foot crane. Before that, a barge with a shorter crane will be maneuvered out of the way. That barge has been working on the rebuilding of the pier, which was mostly completed while the Concorde was away and involved replacing 180-foot-long piles in the water.
Woods wanted them in place before the Concorde came home. “I didn’t want to be lifting those over the Concorde,” he said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Full hands
Dear Diary:
I was on the F train going uptown when a young man carrying a large pizza and a small dog got on at 34th Street and sat down next to me.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Where are you getting off?”
Roosevelt Island, I said.
“Do you mind holding my pizza until then?” he asked.
I must have looked at him funny.
“I have a new girlfriend,” he said, “and I wanted to impress her, so my dog and I took the train up to New Haven this morning so I could buy her a genuine Frank Pepe pizza.”
“I’ve been carrying it for hours,” he continued, “and my dog needs my attention.”
He handed me the pizza and put the dog on his lap.
“What’s on it?” I asked.
“Sausage and mushroom,” he said. “Her favorite.”
“Mine too,” I said.
— Elisabeth Rosenberg
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
