Every time I'm about to do a strip, it's because I can't avoid it, either because I need the money - in the old days - or now, because I just need to think something through, make it manifest. In this program, Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman - humble, humorous, and completely honest - talks about his life history and his creative process using New York City as a backdrop and family photos, clips from home movies, and panels from comic creations...

It seems appropriate for a portrait to be a fair representation of its subject. However, problems can arise when the sitter does not perceive himself or herself in the same way the painter does. In this program, Tai-Shan Schierenberg paints a portrait of a wealthy English gentleman in two 3-hour sittings, under the intimidating stare of portraits by Holbein, Reynolds, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. As an artist, Schierenberg is drawn to his subject's natural...

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...

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...

Anti-entropy as it applies to art - think of it as a sort of explosion in reverse - results, ultimately, in the annihilation of creativity because each step toward the completion of a project rules out more and more of the random possibilities of what that project otherwise might have been. "The infinite becomes finite," says Kentridge in this lecture, as he seeks an answer to the question "Can we avoid the end of all potentiality?" A partial performance...

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...

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...

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,...