John Virtue is painting an impressionist landscape on an enormous canvas laid out in a field. While he paints, he discusses how he expresses himself artistically through creative brushstrokes rather than through realistic imagery. Through Virtue we learn how the elevated social status of artists in general, and physical changes in the composition of paints, have allowed for more artistic experimentation with a wider variety of mediums and techniques....

In this charming sequence of 1972 film excerpts, a passionately creative octogenarian named Anna Shafer imparts the narrative meanings behind her intriguing drawings and describes how she goes about producing them. The visual focus is on the artwork while the audio track consists of Schafer's unabashed commentary, guided by direct yet unobtrusive questions from an interviewer. Demonstrating the many ways in which art-making can enrich and give meaning...

An excerpt from William Kentridge's animated film rendition of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute sets the stage for this lecture in which he builds upon observations elucidated in Drawing Lesson One to argue that colonialism - with all its inherent brutality - is the logical culmination of 18th-century Enlightenment thought. "Every act of enlightenment - " says Kentridge, "all ambitions to save souls, all the basic impulses - is so dogged by the weight...

In this lecture, William Kentridge explores the concepts of self and other, transformation and deformation, and translation and mistranslation by yoking together the African funerary sculpture called an asen, a film loop of a panther pacing in its cage, Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Der Panther," Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros created from bits of second-hand description, and Pablo Picasso's bronze sculpture of a she-goat cast from an assemblage...

The idea that uncertainty and improvisation in art can help in negotiating the dangerous passage between passive acceptance and authoritarian subjugation is a theme that William Kentridge continues to expound upon in Drawing Lesson Four. He uses his short film Journey to the Moon - a tribute, in part, to George Méliès' 1902 cinematic classic La Voyage dans la Lune - as a part of a discussion praising cinema as an art form that exemplifies, as stated...

This World War II-era newsreel includes the following segments: 1. Molotov boards a plane in Washington, D.C. 2. Secretary Hull and Ambassador Litvinov sign a lend-lease agreement. 3. Grand Coulee dam is opened. 4. President greets King George II of Greece at the White House. 5. Women war workers leave their children in nursery schools. 6. U.S. bombers ferried to Canada. 7. Scrap metal drives. 8. Allied troops parade in New York City.

In only 15 years' time, we will be watching television in a radical, three-dimensional form. This 2009 Falling Walls lecture video features Thomas Wiegand, professor at the Technische Universität Berlin and head of the Image Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institut, whose work is transforming television and our viewing habits. Having studied electrical engineering at the Universities of Hamburg...

In decades past, Native-American artists who wanted to sell to mainstream collectors had little choice but to create predictable, Hollywood-style western scenes. Then came a generation of painters and sculptors led by Allan Houser (or Hazous), a Chiricahua Apache artist with no interest in stereotyped imagery and a belief that his own rich heritage was compatible with Modernist ideas and techniques. Narrated by actor Val Kilmer and originally commissioned...

Sculptor Allan Houser won international recognition for his depiction of the stoic, powerful figures of his Chiricahua Apache and Navajo families in wood, stone, and metal. This program follows Houser-also acclaimed for his murals and paintings-from quarry to studio, where he sculpts a face in marble, and to the Shidoni Foundry, where he casts a bronze head. The art of Houser, whose father was with Geronimo in 1886, blends his people's heritage with...

Praised by the New York Times at the time of her death as one of the world's foremost sculptors, Barbara Hepworth left a legacy of creations that continues to inspire new generations of artists. This program reveals the beauty and the power of her sculptures through footage of her naturalistic carvings of the 1920s, her increasingly abstract sculptures of the '30s, her ambitious postwar works, her monumental public commissions, and the striking creations...