All upcoming 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 two works by 20th-century French artist Henri Matisse, including Open Window, Collioure.

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.

In the 1840s, Italian composers Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini commanded full attention on the opera stages of Europe. The young Giuseppe Verdi inherited their traditions—and then began to transform them. In a 5-session series, classical music and opera expert Saul Lilienstein uses audio and video recordings to illustrate how the myriad musical and theatrical elements of Italian opera evolved under Verdi’s restless imagination.

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

The six wives of Henry VIII are collectively famous (and infamous) in song and story. But who were they as individuals? And how did they make their ways into the sextet? Tudor scholar Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger examines each queen to unpack the legends and rumors that have clouded our understanding of them and provides new perspectives on what they contributed to court life and to history.

Discover the versatility and fluidity of painting in watercolor, an exciting and unpredictable medium. Learn techniques such as graded washes, wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, dry brush, splattering, lifting, and glazing.

If you’ve always wanted to learn the language and elements of musical notation and composition this 8-session interactive online course led by music educator and conductor Ernest Johnson offers the perfect opportunity. He guides exercises and assignments geared to developing the foundation every musician needs: the aural and visual understanding of pitch, rhythm, harmony, and form.

Over the past half century, dwarves, hobbits, magic, dragons, runes, and other staples of fantastic realms have become entrenched in popular culture, from The Lord of the Rings to the Harry Potter series. There are substantive historical inspirations behind these phenomena. Historian Justin M. Jacobs discusses the evolving conceptions of fantastic elements in Eurasian history and lays bare the truth behind what he sees as four distorted myths of fantasy in our culture in this fall series. This session focuses on elves, dwarves, and hobbits.

At the start of World War II, the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to today’s CIA, turned to academia to fill its ranks with experts. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work. Historian Elyse Graham profiles the unlikely spies who helped lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transformed American higher education when they returned after the war.

Learn how to paint expressive portraits as you improve your observational skills, ability to see angles and shapes, and understanding of color and value. The class emphasizes how to define a subject’s unique features by determining shapes of light and shadow.