Create spectacular color combinations in your quilts as you build your color theory vocabulary and learn how to beautifully incorporate many types of printed fabric through exercises presented in this class for quilters ready to level up.
Why and how does a living language like English change? The answer, in a word, is fascinating. Linguist and English-language historian Anne Curzan offers a lively tour that spans the language’s many influences and shifting landscape, from Beowulf to blogging, texting, and tweeting.
The country houses of England are among the country’s greatest treasures. In a day-long program, art historian Bonita Billman surveys a selection of these grand estates, known for their architectural magnificence, spectacular decorative art and art collections, and glorious gardens. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)
During World War II, physicist Luis W. Alvarez achieved major breakthroughs in radar and played a key role in the Manhattan Project. At the end of his life, he collaborated with his son on a project to demonstrate that an asteroid impact was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Alvarez was also a combative, ambitious figure who testified as a government witness at the security hearing that destroyed the public career of his friend and colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer. Author Alec Nevala-Lee shares ideas, lessons, and anecdotes from Alvarez’s life.
Discover how visual art can inspire creative writing and how writing can offer a powerful way to experience art. Mary Hall Surface, the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s Writing Salon, leads three online workshops that explore essential elements of writing and styles through close looking, word-sketching, and imaginative response to prompts. The sessions spotlight a wide range of visual art chosen to inspire writers of all experience levels to deepen their process and practice. This writing session focuses on the same London subject by French artists, Claude Monet and André Derain.
Enter a world colored by mythology, history, romance, and spiritual exploration with Japanese traditional theater, a living art form that stretches back centuries. Its many varieties range from masked Noh dance-dramas during medieval times to the Tokugawa/Edo period’s boisterous Kabuki plays and Bunraku puppet theater to the Shingeki (literally “new drama”) forms inspired by Western stage plays and the Butoh dance-theater. Linda Ehrlich, who has taught Asian studies and traditional theater for several universities, delves into these traditions.
When it comes to finding a partner, cephalopods pull out all the stops. Pygmy squid squirt inky backdrops to highlight their dazzling courtship displays. Cuttlefish multitask, decorating one half of their bodies to seduce a mate while the other half flashes a warning to rivals. After fertilization, the situation gets even more incredible. Market squid carpet the seafloor with ghostly egg fingers that repel predators even as the parents are devoured. Deep-sea octopuses set a world record: The mothers guard their eggs for over four years. Biologist Danna Staaf leads a journey through the bizarre beauty of cephalopod life cycles.
The year 1000 sparked a remarkable revival of artistic expression, particularly in 11th- and 12th-century France. From that renewal emerged the Romanesque style, which reshaped the spiritual and cultural landscape of medieval Europe. Art historian Janetta Rebold Benton explores this vibrant period through its cathedrals, churches, cloisters, and monasteries—beautiful spaces created to instruct and inspire. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)
