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The short film I am sharing here is nothing more than a quick study—a montage of luminosity and shadow, a meditation on Sorolla’s way of sculpting daylight, a hint of guitar strings reverberating behind images that refuse to sit still. It is a first step, a way of preparing the eye before standing in front of the original canvases.

Workflow is changing. Production models are changing. The way we capture, process, and share images is changing. And the audience — students, scholars, the public — is consuming information faster, with greater intensity, and through tools that barely existed a few years ago. In the middle of this shifting landscape, I asked ChatGPT an opinion...

The official story says his father migrated with him and his brother Frederick Jr., eventually landing as musicians in the House of Esterházy, some 30 miles from Vienna. But nothing is ever said about why they would leave what some imagine as a cozy, romantic enclave in the heart of Galicia in the first place. From Rita Dove’s Sonata.

This documentary includes extraordinary archival footage as well as original photographs taken by Che himself. So far, it is the only documentary that brings the ceremony of the return of Che’s remains to Santa Clara, the government ceremony, as well as the pouring of people who gave homage to this twentieth-century heroic figure. This documentary is a must-see for anyone interested in labor studies, history, and cultural studies of Latin America.

And then the Civil War barged in, rude as a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. You can’t tell Bristow’s story without it: 750,000 Americans dead in four years—how many of them might have someday sat in a concert hall to hear one of his symphonies, or become the next generation of musicians carrying his work forward? I hit pause on everything else and started patching together that chapter—still pinning photos to the wall like a detective.

“It is well known…”—the phrase lands with quiet confidence. The writer assumes the room shares the lore: Beethoven, before composing, always walked in the countryside or read a poem, usually Goethe’s. Historical accuracy? Partial at best. Cultural shorthand? Undeniable. This wasn’t a citation; it was an invitation to a shared imaginative space.

While errors may have been made in haste or misunderstanding, the path to integrity remains open. The Lewis and Clark Monument—Their First View of the Pacific by Charles Keck is not merely a statue but a significant work of American public art. The City now has an opportunity to correct its course honorably: by acknowledging the absence of due process, restoring the artwork to its lawful and rightful place, and recommitting to the preservation of our shared artistic and histo

Preston, professor emerita at the College of William & Mary, makes use of the Bristow Collection at the New York Public Library, including letters, photographs, and other documents acquired from the composer's descendants. These sources help to present Bristow as a working musician in 19th-century New York: a violinist in orchestras, a church organist and choir director, a private and public school teacher, and a composer across multiple genres.

Light & The City will be the first documentary to bring this story to the screen — a film about photography not as an artistic afterthought to European invention, but as a homegrown act of innovation rooted in New York’s workshops, rooftops, and factories.

This article is not an argument for restoring the former name or returning the monument. Reasonable people may still disagree about symbols in public space. But we should all agree that history must be based on what we can prove — not on what we “find fair to assume.”

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an extravagant Frenchman arrived in New York with a gold-tipped baton and a sense of theater that the concert stage had never seen. His name was Louis-Antoine Jullien, and long before Liberace—or anyone who understood that art and spectacle could share the same stage—there was Jullien.

The following unsigned article appeared in The Choir Leader in December 1898—the very month of George Frederick Bristow’s death. The author could not have known that the composer would pass away only weeks later, and thus the piece stands midway between tribute and obituary. Written in the past tense yet with the expectation of further work to come, it praises Bristow’s integrity, idealism, and devotion to American musical life while lamenting the nation’s failure to recogniz

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.

It feels profoundly meaningful to reunite with Rita after all these years — to extend the conversation that began in Rita Dove: An American Poet into a new creative horizon. Much has changed since we first filmed together, but the essence remains: a shared belief that art — whether written, sung, or filmed — has the power to make history visible and to make the invisible resonate.

In 2004 I had the privilege of producing a film on Jesús Ramón Vera, a celebrated poet, writer, and devoted comparsero from Salta, Argentina. Vera’s life and work offer a fascinating journey across the cultural frontier of Northwest Argentina, blending high literature with the deep, collective traditions of the Andean highlands.

This post draws on recent scholarly analysis of Haydn's employment contracts and Rita Dove's groundbreaking work in "Sonata Mulattica" to explore the intersection of servitude, genius, and race in classical music history.

The Jefferson Hotel opened in 1895, a creation of Lewis Ginter and the New York firm Carrère & Hastings. In 1901, a devastating fire consumed much of the building, and the iconic marble statue of Thomas Jefferson, sculpted by Edward Valentine, was heroically rescued—wrapped in mattresses and carried to safety by hotel staff.