“When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.” On April 7, 1955, Robert Frost delivered a poetry reading at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Born in the Bronx on Labor Day in 1914 to recent Italian immigrants, the self-taught American painter Ralph Fasanella is known today for his bustling tableaux of working-class city life.
“The only pleasure you can get from creating something is the pleasure you have in doing it, not the final product even,” the photographer Berenice Abbott once said of her work.
The artist and musician Richard Lippold is perhaps best known in New York City for his spectacular Orpheus and Apollo (1962), a five-ton chandelier made of shimmering metal ribbons that once hung in the lobby of the New York Philharmonic.
Superstition and fear ran rampant in 17th-century New England, causing many people to conjure up visions of spectres—which they believed could only be exorcised with certain rites.
When this film was made a century ago, Cairo was much smaller, and to Western visitors the way of life along the Nile River appeared to resemble that of Pharaonic Egypt.
In this short feature, produced to accompany a 1993 LACMA exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s series on Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, hear from the artist and those who knew him well.
This atmospheric short film presents the many wonders of France’s Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais, from its intricate stained glass to its soaring, vaulted interior.
Shot on location in Mexico and Honduras, this film tells the sweeping story of the civilizations that flourished in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for centuries before European colonization.
In this dazzling short animation by the Brothers Quay, learn about the illusionistic technique known as anamorphosis, in which a hidden image only becomes visible when viewed from a different angle or in a curved mirror.
In this thought-provoking film, musicians such as Ellie Mannette and Pete Seeger talk shop and explain what they love about the steel drum, from its origins in Trinidad and Tobago to its status as one of the world’s most popular musical instruments.
This short film presents rare footage of 12th-century Romanesque apse at its original site in the Castilian countryside, where dismantling the structure required meticulously numbering and crating each of its nearly 3,300 stone pieces.
Shot on location in Istanbul, Edirne, and the Turkish countryside, and narrated by Ian McKellan, this documentary explores Süleyman (or Süleiman) the Magnificent, the longest-reigning emperor of the Ottoman empire.
The American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam is known today for his depictions of New England landscapes and portraits of life in turn-of-the-century New York.
Perhaps the most famous wrought-iron monument is the Eiffel Tower in Paris. But you can also find wrought iron all around you on the streets of New York City, decorating balconies, staircases, windows, and doorways.
Near the end of his life, Vincent van Gogh moved from Paris to the city of Arles in southeastern France, where he experienced the most productive period of his artistic career.
The American sculptor George Grey Barnard—known as the “modern Michelangelo” for his ambitious, often larger-than-life marble sculptures—perfects several projects in this charming vignette, including two massive busts of Abraham Lincoln.
A gem of analog animation, George Griffin’s Head offers a delightfully snarky and clever self-portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man, undone by his own cartoon surrogate.
This outrageous and slyly self-aware documentary revisits The Costume Institute’s 1982 exhibition La Belle Époque, from the decadence in fin-de-siècle Paris through the global pandemonium of World War I.
This captivating documentary about the rituals, myths, and traditions of Indonesia incorporates Old Javanese poetry, sculpture, and music alongside performances by traditional artists and healers.
This lyrical portrait of the Cathedral of Chartres was produced for the 1970 exhibition The Year 1200, a centerpiece of The Met’s centennial celebration.
This short documentary follows the custom installation of Isamu Noguchi’s beloved sculpture Water Stone and offers a special opportunity to witness a living artist interact with staff as their work is prepared for display.
Produced for the 1974 exhibition Masterpieces of Tapestry, this short form recounts the tale depicted in “The Unicorn Tapestries” and explains the symbolic meaning of these mythic creatures, including their purifying and restorative powers.