All upcoming Daytime programs

Be careful when you step into your garden: It’s full of killers. You may be familiar with carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap, sundew, or pitcher plant, but a surprising number of plants could be classified as carnivorous—including your geraniums and potentillas. Steve Nicholls, a wildlife filmmaker, offers a wide look into these garden-world wonders.

Discover how visual art can inspire creative writing and how writing can offer a powerful way to experience art. Join Mary Hall Surface, the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s popular Writing Salon, for five online workshops that explore essential elements of writing and styles through close looking, word-sketching, and imaginative response to prompts. This writing session is inspired by the mixed media work, Winning, by 20th-century African American artist Emma Amos.

Our understanding of dinosaur behavior has long been hampered by the inevitable lack of evidence from animals that went extinct more than 65 million years ago. But with the discovery of new specimens and the development of cutting-edge techniques, paleontologists are making huge advances in reconstructing how dinosaurs acted. Paleontologist David Hone provides a look at the fundamentals of dinosaur biology and evolution and describes feeding, communication, and social behavior.

Food and drink appear in myriad contexts over four centuries of European painting. In the Renaissance, feasting transcended mere sustenance, serving as a significant form of communication and expression. Art historian Elaine Ruffolo delves into images of lavish banquets to explore their menus, ingredients, preparation, dining practices, and table settings, as well as the intricate depiction of food in the period’s art. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Bletchley Park was Britain’s nexus of top-secret work during World War II, where under the cloak of secrecy, agents worked furiously around the clock to decode Germany’s secret messages, notably those encrypted with the Enigma machine. Alan Turing, Joan Clarke, and Dilly Knox were among the recruits. Sir Dermot Turing, Turing's nephew and author of The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, shares the story of this unusual group of people whose mission was to save the world from destruction.

Artists use their palette as a vehicle for expressing their creative vision—and behind every great painting there’s a palette that tells its story. Art historian and author Alexandra Loske explores this symbiotic relationship, pairing the palettes of artists including Seurat, Rembrandt, and van Gogh with their masterpieces, revealing a fascinating aspect of the creator behind the canvas. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Frederic Church, America’s preeminent landscape artist of the 19th century, spent 40 years creating Olana in Hudson, New York, a 250-acre designed landscape in which his family residence and farm were sited and whose panoramic views of the Hudson River Valley and Catskills are integral elements. Carolyn Keogh, director of education and public programs at the Olana Partnership, leads a detailed exploration of the life, career, and inspirations that motivated Church to create this masterwork. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

We think we know the Vikings well. These pagan conquerors from Scandinavia are everywhere in our popular culture: movies, TV shows, video games, and even Super Bowl commercials. But which parts of the Vikings that we know and love (or love to hate) are real, and which are based in fantasy? Medievalist Paul B. Sturtevant unpacks the differences between the fantasies and the medieval realities of the Viking world, investigating where the myths come from and why they persist.

Unlike other great painters of 16th-century Venice such as Titian and Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto was born and bred in the lagoon city. A considerable number of his works remain there to this day in the churches, confraternity buildings, and palaces for which they were commissioned. Art historian Sophia D’Addio of Columbia University explores a selection of Tintoretto’s dramatic and expressive sacred works located in such beautiful settings as the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and San Giorgio Maggiore. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo used the most universal artistic language available—the human body in all its configurations. From the spark of life given to Adam and Eve to the Last Judgment, his frescoes blazed a path toward secularism despite the chapel’s religious themes. Art historian Liz Lev examines the evolution of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a work so astounding it changed the course of Western art. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)