Art History

From Buena Vista Social Club to Hollywood blockbusters, Havana's crumbling architecture has been romanticized in countless movies. But what about the people who must live in these buildings? A unique thought-provoking portrait of Havana's inhabited ruins and their curious blend of magic and decay.

Earlier this year, Gustav Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" was sold for $135 million, the largest amount ever paid for a painting. This wonderful new documentary invites viewers to explore Vienna at the turn-of-the-century and the rich artistic movement that engendered such a work.

An acclaimed documentary on American artist Leon Golub, whose politically charged work calls attention to human rights violations and the abuse of power around the world.

A documentary film about the life and career of noted photographer, Walter Rosenblum, covering his work with the Photo League, described by The New York Times as suffused with formal beauty and expressive power and tenderness.

This poignant and inspiring documentary tells the story of Coopa-Roca, a cooperative of seamstresses in a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro who, in an effort to provide an income for their families, design and manufacture women’s clothing and accessories.

Painter Arie Galles created a series of charcoal drawings based on surveillance photographs of German concentration camps called 'Fourteen Stations'.

This video follows the sculptures of the late Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), one of Europe’s most popular artists, as they are transported from his Swiss studio to their new home at the Museum of Basel.

This video chronicles, from inception to completion, the creation of a commissioned art work, showing how one community comes together to make a vision a reality.

This video explores art and creativity through the work of three painters who are blind. As each artist reveals her perceptions of color, light and landscape, uniquely moving stories emerge amid a background of richly colored paintings and striking work techniques.

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.