Artists, Architects & Photographers

Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a listen of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of 21st-century art as well as anyone interested in American and European culture....

Take a tour through the wilder side of art history and discover true tales of murder, forgery, trickery, and great art—featuring jaw-dropping profiles of Da Vinci, Dali, and more...

Tracey Emin is an internationally renowned artist. Here she discusses her life and achievements in a series of interviews from the BBC radio and TV archives....

Salvador Dalí was a master of the surreal. His paintings are known as “dream photographs”: snapshots of nightmarish scenes brought to life in stunning detail....

Antony Penrose's tribute to his mother, Lee Miller, brings to life a uniquely talented woman and the turbulent times in which she lived.

Unlike most artists, Van Gogh developed very slowly, beginning with work as an art dealer that exposed him to many great works. He undertook this work for several years, after which he spent time as a missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church....

One of the most influential, admired, and innovative women of our time: Diane von Furstenberg shares stories about becoming the woman she wanted to be....

A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge....

From Life tells the story of the greatest portrait photographer of the Victorian age, Julia Margaret Cameron. Born in Calcutta in 1815, she married and settled down to the life of a typical Victorian colonial matron....

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the Rhode Island School of Design....

Hailed by readers/listeners and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences.

The star presenter and judge of Channel 4's The Great Pottery Throw Down looks back on his life and career - and the passion for ceramics that started it all....

When Picasso became Picasso: the story of how an obscure young painter from Barcelona came to Paris and made himself into the most influential artist of the 20th century....

Murray's son Mason Ball shares all the hits and misses and long years of hard graft that went into what would become the wildly successful creative enterprise: Footrot Flats.

When Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of O’Keeffe was first published in 1989, it received rave reviews and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year....

A classic work for artists of all kinds, about reconciling the call of creative work with the demands of daily life and narrated by Anne Truitt herself....

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before....

All my life, I have been looking for a man who has discovered the universal law which lies back of the Sermon on the Mount, and who consciously uses that law with full awareness of its meaning and full obedience to its principles. Walter Russel Clark found this man....

In the Hide is Gordon's emotionally honest and raw account of a brutal childhood in Glasgow and Mull, and the escape and solace he found – and continues to find – in the natural world around him.

Few women artists feature prominently in the history of art, and even fewer who are mothers. What can we learn about ambition, limitation, and creativity from women who persist in doing both? The Mother Artist explores the fraught yet generative ties between caregiving and creative practice.

This is the previously untold backstory of Ong's Hat, the Infinite Game, and proto-ARG. It weaves together early rudimentary Artificial Intelligence (AI), encounters with disembodied intelligence, emergence, and the budding Internet culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art....

Françoise Gilot was in her early 20s when she met the 61-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do, upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes....

The world’s most renowned art forger reveals the secrets behind his decades of painting like the masters—exposing an art world that is far more corrupt than we ever knew while providing an art history lesson wrapped in sex, drugs, and Caravaggio....

You have a unique destiny, an unquenchable dream inside you that’s waiting for you to take action. Maybe you are an artist. But chances are you’ve been told that you’ll starve on the streets if you pursue your art. That’s what Elli Milan was told, too....

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers.

This is the previously untold backstory of Ong's Hat, the Infinite Game, and proto-ARG. It weaves together early rudimentary Artificial Intelligence (AI), encounters with disembodied intelligence, emergence, and the budding Internet culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elements of psychedelic culture, Avant Garde art, punk rock, industrial music, experimental theater, improv, method acting, hermetic magick, beat literature, Esalen, the works of Philip K. Dick, and more converge to create this modern tale of a spiritual quest.

Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of World War I, avant-garde artists and writers sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life. Following the evolution of these revolutionary groups, How to Be Avant-Garde charts its pioneers and radical ideas.

Three complaisant kids, two stormy parents, one anxious French poodle, too many U-haul trailers, and the potholed road of the early 1960s. Searching for Alpha Centauri is American Public Television artist Gary Spetz's boyhood memoir of living a nomadic life with an impetuous mother, a discontent casino-security-guard step-father, an anxious French poodle, and two complaisant siblings -- during the early 1960s. The artist/author paints his moving landscape with words. He adeptly colors these words with both humor and tenderness.

In the Hide is Gordon's emotionally honest and raw account of a brutal childhood in Glasgow and Mull, and the escape and solace he found – and continues to find – in the natural world around him. An intimate and inspiring account of resilience in the face of hardship, In the Hide marks the arrival of a bold new voice in nature writing.