California

In the spring of 1942, Chiura Obata, an art professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and his family were among the thousands of Japanese Americans relocated to internment camps. Obata’s granddaughter, Kimi Kodani Hill, and Timothy Burgard, a curator at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, tell the story of Obata’s efforts to […]

Collectors can radically affect an artist’s career by the choices they make. California artist Eugenia Butler talks about her experience being collected … and then un-collected. Produced by Michele Siegel.

Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico are two desert towns, yards away from each other along the US-Mexico border. When the US Government erected a 14-foot-high, 2 mile-long steel fence along their border, some local residents tried to bring the two towns back together. Produced by Polly Sveda.

Ruben Ortiz Torres is a Mexican artist living in California. For a performance piece, he took lawn equipment, and customized it. He created a metal-flake magenta lawnmower that danced to music. Sara Harris talked to Ortiz Torres about his piece “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Earlier this year a movie was released on DVD telling the story of a forgotten American war — the civil war between the people of northern and Southern California. The movie imitates a Ken Burns documentary, but it’s obviously fictional. The premise and the visuals are based on the work of an artist named Sandow […]