Smithsonian Associates Online Programs

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 20th-century Hungarian-American artist Lily Furedi’s Subway.

Enhance your knowledge and understanding of color theory in watercolor. Learn practical skills such as identifying and mixing colors correctly to create your own cohesive palette.

Gain confidence in your ability to paint important natural elements in watercolor. Demonstrations and exercises introduce techniques for creating flowing landscapes.

Dip your toe into the world of weaving and create a miniature woven tapestry on a small frame loom after you learn techniques to manipulate the yarn to make stripes and shapes and mix colors.

Explore the meeting of traditional and nontraditional mosaic materials while learning design and composition theories. Working with a theme of the face, combine mosaic and assemblage.

Beginning students explore watercolor techniques and learn new approaches to painting through demonstration, discussion, and experimentation.

Designed for beginners who want to learn how to use their digital or mirrorless camera as a creative tool, this class gives students the opportunity to learn about technical aspects of photography so they can concentrate on composing beautiful images.

Everything in nature is regulated, from the numbers of vital molecules in our bloodstream to the number of lions on an African savanna. Biologist and author Sean B. Carroll discusses the impact of the work of the pioneering scientists whose investigations uncovered the rules and logic of the human body—known as the Serengeti Rules—and the interconnectedness of the regulation of all of life's elements on the planet.

On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and faced attacks by state troopers. The confrontation shocked the nation, yet the previous year an even more brutal incident dubbed Bloody Tuesday took place in Tuscaloosa. Historian John M. Giggie examines one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement: a pivotal moment in a Southern city unwilling to shed its history of racial control and Klan brutality until forced by armed Black self-defense groups, a bus boycott, and the federal government.

For many years, dinosaurs were considered ponderous, overgrown monsters doomed from the start. However, a fundamental change in thinking occurred in the late 1960s when two Yale University paleontologists noted that many aspects of their anatomy and biology were much like those of warm-blooded creatures. Paleontologist Hans Sues of the National Museum of Natural History discusses the main researchers involved, the arguments behind the new thinking, and the impact on paleobiology.