Art History

From December 1999 through October 2000, the entire community at the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, Massachusetts worked together to create a work of public art.

This video tells the story of a controversial mural painted on a Los Angeles building in 1932 by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

In this video, artist and art educator Betty LaDuke presents the lives and work of three American women artists of diverse heritages—Lois Mailou Jones, Mine Okubo, and Pablita Velarde.

Surveys the contemporary Chicano art movement by tracing its development during the height of Chicano political activism in the late Sixties and Seventies, blending archival footage with interviews with the artists and samples of their work, including photographs, murals, graphics, films, paintings, and ephemeral art.

Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), a Russian painter best known for his founding in 1913 of the Suprematism movement, is one of the founding fathers of the avant-garde. This video portrays the vision of this innovative artist whose aesthetic ideas revolutionized customary perceptions of the fine arts.

This video profiles Frederick Brown, one of America’s most prolific expressionist painters, whose Soho loft studio in New York served as a gathering place for artists, musicians, writers, dancers and other creative personalities during the Sixties and Seventies.

This documentary takes a look at another side of the art world, its brilliance sometimes hiding behind ragged edges and everyday innocence.

This documentary surveys the revolutionary new developments in American puppet theater, profiling many of puppetry’s most imaginative contemporary artists.

This documentary examines the tradition of both the Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Loyalist communities in Northern Ireland of painting huge murals on building walls, both as a way to celebrate cultural heroes or commemorate significant historical events as well as to demarcate their respective neighborhoods.

Featuring rare archival footage and interviews with sculptors, art historians, gallery and museum directors, this video examines how monuments connect us with the past, how they are destroyed and new ones raised at times of social cataclysm, and how every turning point in society has begun history anew in a struggle with old monuments.

For nearly thirty years, in the longest ongoing war in Africa, the Eritrean people waged a bitter struggle against the occupying forces of the Ethiopian government, which were armed by the Soviet Union and Israel.

This video examines the work of Native American artists in the Pacific Northwest and how their wood carvings of totem poles, ceremonial masks and sculptures is part of a broader cultural renaissance.

Filmed over a two-year period, this video traces the creation of sculptor John Behan's "Famine Ship," a large bronze sculpture commissioned by the Irish Government in 1997 to commemorate the famine of 1845-47.

Chronicles the history of Chicano Park, famous for its giant murals painted on freeway pillars, which became the focus for the revitalization of San Diego's Chicano community in the 1970s and '80s.

The Bread and Puppet Theater has become famous in America over the last thirty years for its street theater and political satire utilizing giant papier-mâche puppets, masks and twelve foot high stilt walkers.

Portrays the life of America's pioneer social photographer, Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who recorded the waves of immigration around the turn of the century and the development of industrial America during the first four decades of the 20th century, from the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side to the mines, mills and factories across the nation. The video blends Hine's photos with historical footage and interviews.

More than 100 years ago, in his journalism and his influential book, How the Other Half Lives, photojournalist Jacob Riis dramatically portrayed issues of homelessness, poverty, crime, public health, and race relations in America.

Examining issues surrounding the mass production or `democratization' of art, this documentary shows the making of a lithograph and reveals three cardinal rules for identifying an original print.

Featuring professional art instructor Carolyn Berry, this series is designed for students, hobbyists, amateur painters, and professionals eager for tips on new techniques.

Profiles San Francisco painter and muralist Scott Williams who uses stencils and Krylon to appropriate images from movies, TV, magazines, advertising, and other pop culture sources.