Music & Fine Art

I Want to Break Free (From Your Lies)

From Freddie Mercury to 'M*A*S*H', to Irving Berlin and my own grandfather - a partial, fragmented, and often contradictory history of America's…

Mar 30 •

To Be or Not to Be: 'Ophelia' and (More) Tension of Becoming

A brief examination of John Evert Millais’s iconic 'Hamlet'-inspired painting

Mar 4 •

How John Denver Helped Me Find My Way Back Home

Music can connect us to each other, through grief and sometimes even across time and space

Feb 24 •

Sam Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' and the Audacity of Hope

Sixty years after the iconic song's release, its message couldn't feel more naive...or more necessary

Feb 3 •

We're All Made of Horrible, Beautiful Scars

Australian rocker Nick Cave, Native American activist/poet John Trudell, and a 14th-century Japanese shogun have thoughts about how to put ourselves…

Jan 20 •

What David Bowie Read (Or: 100 Ways to Make Yourself More Creative)

And if not more creative, at least a hell of a lot more interesting...

Jan 8 •

Be Like Bowie…or Die Trying

The rock star’s amorphous identity reveals a creative disdain for complacency, providing a rare rule all artists — from musicians, to authors, to…

Dec 19, 2023 •

One Surreal Christmas Day: When Bing Crosby Met David Bowie

How an unlikely cultural mash-up produced a holiday classic (and provided an iconic crooner his swan song)

Dec 14, 2023 •

A Rare Phenomenon: When Recording the Artistic Process Becomes Art Itself

What about when one artist attempts to capture another artist’s process as a historical document and, in doing so, creates a distinctly new piece of…

Nov 2, 2023 •

How to Escape the Funhouse Mirror of Culture Through Our Art

Artist Amy Sherald and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss how she uses her portraits to explore her own multifaceted American identity (a search for self that's…

Sep 21, 2023 •

Music, Arrested Development, and the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

How writer-director James Gunn uses music to explore childhood trauma and the perils of fetishizing nostalgia in his Marvel trilogy

Aug 12, 2023 •

When Norman Rockwell Got Woke: The Story Behind 'The Problem We All Live With'

In the 1960s, America's most famous artist defiantly transformed himself from an inadvertent white supremacist into a radical civil rights activist

Jul 13, 2023 •

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