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...

Renowned for her extraordinary pottery and highly respected as a teacher, Toshiko Takaezu is one of the most significant ceramic artists of the 20th century-and the 21st. This program, filmed both in New Jersey and the artist's native Hawaii, presents the life story of the internationally acclaimed potter. Film clips of Ms. Takaezu at work-shaping clay in her studio, demonstrating pottery techniques at Princeton University, and overseeing raku-firing-provide...

Produced in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's exhibition of the same name, this lively program explores the evolution of late-20th-century ceramics. Using interviews and myriad examples of their works, leading figures in the field, including Ruth Duckworth, Wayne Higby, John Mason, Ron Nagle, Otto Natzler, Richard Shaw, and Peter Voulkos, discuss such major themes as Abstract Expressionism, Funk, vessels, form and function, and...

Gary Hill's transformative films, performances, and video installations offer resonant philosophic and poetic insights as he explores the tensions that reverberate among electronic media, language, the senses, and the self. In this program, Hill uses a number of his pieces to investigate otherness and ambiguity, dislocation of the senses, the boundary between words and comprehension, the physicality of text, and figurative interactivity. Featured...

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...

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,...

Beneath its apparent thematic simplicity, Edouard Vuillard's The Public Gardens raises numerous historic and technical questions that this program seeks to resolve. Entries from Vuillard's journal unify the narrative as it travels from his art education, to his painting technique, to the effects of symbolist theater on his work, to his practice of photography-all of which shed light on or are illumined by his nine-panel masterpiece.

This program examines the pottery of Grace Medicine Flower and her brother Joseph Lone Wolf, members of the renowned Tafoya family of Santa Clara Pueblo. They revived and expanded the traditional forms and techniques of their pre-Columbian ancestors, the Mimbres, to create exquisite works featuring abstract designs and emphasizing sgraffito and polychrome techniques. Together with their father, Camilio Sunflower Tafoya, Medicine Flower and Lone Wolf...

Should brushstrokes be allowed to show-or even be shown off, like a signature-or should they be carefully effaced whenever possible, leaving the surface of a painting smooth? This program looks at both the mechanical side of the question-the influence of pigments and brush types on the traces of a brush's passage-as well as the long-running doctrinal tension between exponents of visible and hidden brushstrokes.

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...