This lecture opens with an excerpt from William Kentridge's animated film Shadow Procession, which "immediately calls to mind various historical displacements, exiles, and genocides, even as it avoids pinning the work to any specific time or place," says Harvard Magazine. From that point on, Kentridge's first of six "drawing lessons" travels from Plato's allegory of the cave, to illusion in art, to philosophical tyranny to make the point that knowledge...

Color adds beauty to our lives and helps us express our deepest feelings, but what exactly is it? This video lays out the scientific principles at the heart of that question, examining the relationship between light and color, the physical and chemical properties that create it, and the ways in which humans and animals perceive it. Viewers are shown how light can be broken down into component colors-or, more accurately, wavelengths-and are given simple...

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...

The fourth season, a groundbreaking, comprehensive visual exploration of the history, vitality, and cultural significance of America's craft movement. Threads explores the needle arts, including storytelling through quilts and textiles that speak to the creativity of the human spirit. Through the stories of four special artists, we will experience the drama and revelations art can bring to our lives.

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...

Albert Paley is world-renowned for his metal work in jewelry and large-scale sculpture. This program provides a comprehensive overview of his life and work, including his studies at Temple University's Tyler School of Art, his early work in jewelry design, and more contemporary works such as the Renwick Gates and his decorative architectural sculpture for Bausch & Lomb. Commentary from Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art,...

This program explains how artists' colors are made and applied by charting the development of various families of pigments-and by demonstrating that the compounding of colors is always a mixture of tradition and technology, experience and innovation. Pigments prepared from natural sources and derived from industrial processes are closely studied, noting failures as well as successes. Decorative applications of color to cloth-making, glass staining,...

The centuries-long era of painting on wooden panels culminated in magnificent works such as Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece and van der Weyden's Beaune Altarpiece. But then canvas finally came into its own: light in weight, low in cost, easy to prepare, and an ideal replacement for frescoes where climatic conditions did not easily permit mural painting, over time it became the artist's medium of choice. This program traces the evolution of painting...

The first to portray the Native American as "real, not red," Fritz Scholder has been a major influence on an entire generation of Native American artists. This program films Scholder, an artist of Luiseno descent, as he takes his painting Television Indian and his lithograph Film Indian from conception to completion. His unsentimental vision and his technique-a blend of abstract expressionism, West Coast pop, and Bay Area colorism-have enabled Scholder...

The abstract geometric paintings of Helen Hardin beautifully illustrate the artist's struggle to depict aspects of her native heritage yet depart from the Santa Fe/Dorothy Dunn model of her predecessors-including her mother, the acclaimed Pablita Velarde. This program takes a close look at the work of a gifted Santa Clara painter and printmaker who acted almost as if she knew that her time to make a mark in the art world would be short. Her multi-layered...