Summary: This program examines the pottery of Grace Medicine Flower and her brother Joseph Lone Wolf, members of the renowned Tafoya family of Santa Clara Pueblo. They revived and expanded the traditional forms and techniques of their pre-Columbian ancestors, the Mimbres, to create exquisite works featuring abstract designs and emphasizing sgraffito and polychrome techniques. Together with their father,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Charles Loloma was one of the first Native American jewelers to use gold instead of silver and diamonds and other precious gems in addition to turquoise, coral, and shell. His innovative designs, so sculptural in quality, were internationally acclaimed. And his clients included celebrities, monarchs, and presidents. This program examines the work of Charles Loloma-and how the visionary behind...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: The first to portray the Native American as "real, not red," Fritz Scholder has been a major influence on an entire generation of Native American artists. This program films Scholder, an artist of Luiseno descent, as he takes his painting Television Indian and his lithograph Film Indian from conception to completion. His unsentimental vision and his technique-a blend of abstract expressionism,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Sculptor Allan Houser won international recognition for his depiction of the stoic, powerful figures of his Chiricahua Apache and Navajo families in wood, stone, and metal. This program follows Houser-also acclaimed for his murals and paintings-from quarry to studio, where he sculpts a face in marble, and to the Shidoni Foundry, where he casts a bronze head. The art of Houser, whose father was...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: I have the strength to walk my own path, no matter how hard, in my search for reality, and not cling to the splendid wagon of desperate illusions. A writer of novels, short stories, folktales, plays, and essays, Zora Neale Hurston combined a hunger for research and a desire to penetrate the deepest of popular beliefs with a truly exquisite narrative talent. This illuminating biography of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Unconventional and "paradoxical" are two of the more common words people use to describe R. C. Gorman, an award-winning Navajo painter and printmaker who treats Native American subjects ranging from geometrics to nudes with a distinctly Mexican artistic sensibility. This program films the man The New York Times dubbed "The Picasso of American Indian Art" as he works, capturing his fascination...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: The abstract geometric paintings of Helen Hardin beautifully illustrate the artist's struggle to depict aspects of her native heritage yet depart from the Santa Fe/Dorothy Dunn model of her predecessors-including her mother, the acclaimed Pablita Velarde. This program takes a close look at the work of a gifted Santa Clara painter and printmaker who acted almost as if she knew that her time to...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Following acclaimed poet and memoirist Maya Angelou on a visit to her childhood surroundings in Stamps, Arkansas, this Bill Moyers interview remains a classic of broadcast journalism and a valuable teaching tool for African-American studies. "I was terribly hurt in this town," Angelou tells Moyers, "and vastly loved." She recalls her rapturous discovery of Shakespeare (while savoring a favorite...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Flannery O'Connor is often likened to Faulkner for her portrayal of the character and lifestyle of the South, Kafka for her fascination with the bizarre, and Beckett for her dark humor-comparisons that underscore the fact that her voice has a unique place in the canon of American literature. This program provides a biographical sketch of O'Connor that illuminates her efforts to come to terms...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This moving dramatization of Tillie Olsen's frequently anthologized "I Stand Here Ironing" is an unvarnished exploration of an impoverished single mother's ambivalence toward her worth as a parent and her 19-year-old daughter's future. Rich in subtext, the highly metaphorical story-penned in a stark and dramatic fashion devoid of cliche and sentimentality-raises important questions about...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: What were Alice Walker's motivations in writing "Everyday Use"? In this program, the author discusses her short story with her official biographer, Evelyn C. White. Over the course of the interview, Walker talks about the autobiographical aspects of the story, the significance of quilting to African-American women, the perception of class differences, and the important life lessons she wished...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Being black, being a woman, and being a writer is just the most wonderful challenge. It's like having three eyes, three hearts, rather than one, says the author of The Color Purple in this profile, as she relives her journey from an impoverished childhood in rural Georgia to the peace and creativity of her present life in northern California. Alice Walker describes how the Civil Rights movement...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Facing the reality of what happened in Southeast Asia-and bringing others together to reconcile with it-has become the life work of novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, who teaches Buddhism and creative writing to Vietnam veterans. "In the workshops, [they] break out of the solipsism, the narcissism, the isolation," says Professor Kingston, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: For 15 years, National Humanities Medalist Maxine Hong Kingston has been working with veterans-soldiers from World War II, from Vietnam, and now, from Iraq-to convert the ghosts of war into the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that Kingston believes will help them survive. In this program, Bill Moyers speaks with Kingston about her book Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, an anthology called...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: When Maxine Hong Kingston was growing up in California, she listened to her parents' stories and memories of their native China. In her highly acclaimed memoirs, The Woman Warrior and China Men, she linked those tales of tradition to the story of her own American experience, blending childhood memory, meditation, and magic. They are the most widely taught books by a living American author on...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: A leading voice among American writers, Alice Walker has published books of influential poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. In this program, Ms. Walker talks with Bill Moyers about a range of subjects, including The Color Purple, whose themes are as relevant today as they were when she wrote the book in 1982; the way in which her life experiences and ancestry are reflected in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: The late Susan Sontag was not a photographer, yet her famous book On Photography is required reading in almost every serious photography course in the world. Her novels and nonfiction books such as Illness as a Metaphor have been translated into a score of languages. And she also wrote and directed films and plays. In this program, the renowned writer and human rights activist talks with Bill...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005