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Charlottesville, a city that once aspired to be a center of learning and culture, now bears the shame of this desecration.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was moved by Lankes’s vision and by his friendship with Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson. With J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia, I aimed to explore how his art and his dialogue with Frost, Anderson and others framed an American understanding of work, place, and purpose.

Across painting, music, and the decorative arts, the exotic functioned as a field of projection—a way for Western culture to measure itself against the imagined other. Lévy’s brush, Tiffany’s glass, Bridgetower’s bow: each transformed foreignness into beauty, light, and sound that spoke as much about the Western imagination as about the East it sought to evoke.

Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.

Fourteen years ago, I made Rita Dove: An American Poet, a biographical film that captured something essential about one of America's most important voices. You can watch the documentary below. Now, as Rita and I prepare to embark on a new cinematic journey exploring her epic poem Sonata Mulattica, I find myself revisiting that first collaboration—not out of nostalgia, but to understand who we were then, what we captured, and how far we've traveled since.

Between 1898 and 1933—spanning thirty-five years until Tiffany's death—Arlington Street Church commissioned what would become the largest collection of single-themed Tiffany windows in the world. Sixteen magnificent panels, conceived and executed as a unified narrative, demonstrate what becomes possible when patronage extends beyond individual commissions to embrace a complete artistic vision.

In the 1880s, Louis Comfort Tiffany lokking at this 700-year-old tradition would asked: “What if we could bring this magic into people’s daily lives, and into their homes?” The question lead Tiffany to reimagined the medieval trinity for a new world.

Perhaps, we have to stop swimming and let the current take us to safe harbor, or to a sandy beach somewhere. Come to think of it, it was in fact Aronovich who explained to me once how Weinschenk himself used to talk of shades of gray in film as beaches. And here I go again! drifting in free association when I should be getting ready to pick my daughter from school and talk about what we're going to do once we move to Madrid.

The next chapter in our nearly forty-year journey is being written now. If we are to continue thriving in this mission to ensure that art, culture, and social consciousness find their place in our rapidly evolving media landscape, we need a broader audience, international partnerships, and you.

This is my tribute to Humberto Calzada: Cuban, American, painter, friend, brother in all the ways that matter. A man who understood that sometimes the only way to go home is to create it, brush stroke by brush stroke, until the canvas holds everything you remember about love.

In our digital age, when so much experience is mediated and virtual, these surviving in-context Tiffany works represent something increasingly rare: authentic encounters with artistic vision as it was originally intended. They exist in the wild not as abandoned artifacts but as continuing participants in American cultural life.

The lives of these four artists span different generations and movements, yet three share roots in Spain's Mediterranean arc—Valencia and Catalonia—while Vicente hails from Castile's high plains. Despite their distinct origins, these regions have long been Spain's most outward-looking, connected by trade, art, and a comfort with cultural exchange. Each man carried that sensibility to New York: an appreciation for light and color, a balance between classical training and natur

Throughout the film, Montes-Bradley weaves personal archival materials, interviews, and on-location filming with understated sensitivity. We see Lankes’s legacy not only through his prints but also through the memories of scholars, collectors, and descendants who help reconstruct the arc of his life—from Buffalo to Europe, from Vermont to Virginia.

here are moments during filming that never make it to the screen—far more of them than one might imagine. I’m not referring to bloopers, those lighthearted clips some reserve for the credits when all is said and done. I mean the other kind—the ones that stay with you, etched in memory.

In 2009, I created a film about Cuban-American painter Humberto Calzada. What emerged was more than a biographical portrait—it became a meditation on exile, memory, and the quiet power of art to reclaim what was lost.

A Buffalo Sunday newspaper article from the late 19th century offers a vivid account of the premiere of Niagara…

I want to take a moment to shine a spotlight on the incredible work of my talented friend, Eduardo Galliani, particularly his contributions to the world of Book Arts and Publishing through Antares Portfolio.

Documentaries can serve as cinematic expressions that explore social practices, traditions, and the shared experiences of specific groups.

El Eternauta signals something new for Argentine cinema. For the first time, we are seeing a production that stands on its own without imitating the tropes of international (especially American) storytelling. It’s not about achieving universality through abstraction—it’s about being unapologetically Argentine, and in doing so, achieving something truly universal.

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was not just a gifted composer and pianist; she was a force of nature in a world unprepared for women with serious musical ambitions. Born in the quiet town of Henniker, New Hampshire, Beach entered the world with an uncanny musical sensibility. Stories from her earliest years border on myth: by the age of one, she could reportedly sing over 40 songs; by four, she was composing her own music.