♪ Philippe: Coming up on "NYC-ARTS."

A visit to the American Museum of Natural History and its revitalized Northwest Coast Hall.

Peter: The great canoe is the largest surviving canoe of its size that we know of in the world.

It shows the coming together of those peoples who were in the distant past did not have a friendly relationship with each other.

In recent years, they've renewed that reconciliation.

Philippe: A look at the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism," now on view at the Metropolitan Museum.

Through over 160 works, including paintings, sculptures, film, and photography, the exhibit gives us a powerful glimpse into the Black experience in the early 20th century.

And a profile of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes.

Edward: If I look at the theme that underlies my work for 40 years, it really starts with a kind of a love affair with photography and the large format cameras coming out of that Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Elliot Porter kind of tradition of that slow approach to subject matter and nature.

How do you take a photograph in nature and somehow transcend its kind of banality and that moves you to a sense of contemplation, mystery wonder, all those kinds of things that I saw the kind of early modernists doing.

>> Funding for "NYC-ARTS" is made possible by.

Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation.

Jody and John Arnhold.

The Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for Dance.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.

Charles and Valerie Diker.

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation.

The Nancy Widewater Foundation.

And Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council.

Additional funding provided by members of thirteen and by Swann Auction Galleries.

Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at options, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.

♪ Philippe: Good evening and welcome to "NYC-ARTS."

I'm Philippe de Montebello.

On our program tonight, a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to explore the recently revitalized Northwest Coast Hall.

Located in the Museum's oldest gallery, it shows the creativity and history of the vibrant cultures of the Pacific Northwest.

Organized as a series of alcoves focused artifacts of 10 Native Nations, the gallery presents more than 1,000 restored cultural treasures enlivened by new interpretation.

It features works such as 67 monumental carvings, the iconic 63-foot dugout canoe, and more.

The hall was developed with the help of co-curator, Haa'yupps, and with consulting curators from nine Indigenous communities.

Curator Peter Whiteley is our guide.

♪ Peter: My name is Peter Whiteley.

I'm the curator of North American Ethnology here at the American Museum of Natural History.

The Northwest Coast Hall goes back to the late 1870's, when the first pieces started to come in.

At that time, there was a tremendous upheaval as a result of colonial processes.

Many Native people, came down under various smallpox epidemics, and the population was drastically reduced.

It was a very oppressive time for native peoples.

So the Canadian government passed the, the Potlatch ban in 1884, which prevented people from practicing a great deal of their traditional ceremonial life.

One of the fundamental challenges of renovating the hall was of course, the fact that the collection is an historical collection.

The major part of the collection was completed by the early 20th century.

We've had First Nations people, Native people come through for many years and they say, well you, have some wonderful , material, but it makes us look as if our culture has been gone from 150 years.

And its not.

We are still here.

That emphasis was certainly front and center, for our co-curator and for our nine consulting curators who definitely wanted to communicate the idea that these were living cultures.

And that while these were historical pieces, they informed a tradition that is still very much practiced in, in the present.

One of the things that we definitely wanted to bring out was this fabulous transformation mask, which is the celebration of a particular story of Siwidi, who's a Kwakwakaw'akw culture hero.

He's displeased his father and he's grabbed by this giant octopus who takes him down to the, to the bottom of the undersea world.

Siwidi spends four years there being given powers, and then eventually he comes back to shore guided by killer whales and partly transforming into a killer whale himself.

So that transformational process is represented in a variety of masks, so out as a sculpin, as the face of this, this large sea creature.

And then when it gets to a certain phase where as it's being danced, the sculpin's jaws open like that, revealing a sea raven inside, and then it dances as a sea raven for a certain period of time.

And then finally, the sea raven's mask also opens, revealing Siwidi.

That kind of emphasis on transformation and the interrelationships with the supernatural and natural worlds is a key principle of a lot of ceremonialism all up and down the Northwest coast.

♪ The great canoe is, is the largest surviving canoe of its size that we know of anyway, in, in the world.

It is 63 feet long and it's made out of a single, very large cedar tree.

And it's hand adzed shows influences from both HaAltzaqv and Haida on there.

The painting on the prow and the stern is definitely Haida.

The carvings there are, there are thwarts or benches on the top, which are in a distinctive HaAltzaqv design.

It shows the coming together of those peoples who in, you know, the distant past were, did not have a friendly relationship with each other.

In recent years, they've renewed that reconciliation.

We are delighted to have the Moon and Mountain Goat Chest as a focal element in the Haida alcove that comes from the village of Skedans.

This box is a chief's box, and it corresponds with the Chief Skedans.

The box represents some of the crests of Chief Skedans, so it has a moon face, a mountain goat, a grizzly bear.

The most interesting element is the mountain goat because there are no mountain goats on Haida.

And if you see the face, the background is a Chilkat pattern and design very similar to what you see in Chilkat blankets.

The tradition of Chilkat weaving comes from the Tsimshian and the Gitxsan on the mainland.

And so this represents the gift of certain privileges from a Tsimshian chief to Chief Skedans, which is represented in the Chilkat design.

So mountain goat wool, which is the major component of Chilkat blankets that was then traded to the Haida from the Tsimshian.

These are peoples who speak several different languages, which are not related to each other.

There are a lot of differences, but that process of exchange that's represented by the Moon and Mountain Goat Chest encapsulates the Hall and Northwest Coast culture as a whole.

♪ Philippe: Now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism."

In the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of a movement of art, literature and philosophy that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

This was the first international movement of modern art led by African-Americans, and its impact reached far beyond New York City.

The exhibit explores how Black artists portrayed everyday life in the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African-Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.

Through over 160 works, including paintings, sculptures, film, and photography, the exhibit gives us a powerful glimpse into the Black experience in the early 20th century.

Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring.

Although these artists shared the desire to portray all aspects of modern Black life and culture, they developed widely varied representational styles.

highlights include the work of studio and portrait photographer James Van Der Zee, who captured vibrant scenes of life in Harlem.

For this photograph, "Tea Time at Madam C. J. Walker's Beauty Salon," Van Der Zee posed a group of socially prominent Black women taking tea in the reception area of Madam Walker's townhouse on West 136th Street.

Walker was a hair-care entrepreneur, credited as America's female self-made first millionaire.

Painter Laura Wheeler Waring created portraits of Black women across the social spectrum.

In "Girl in Pink Dress" from 1927, her young subject is shown as an icon of the Jazz Age, complete with a sleek bob and an elegant flapper dress.

Waring was also a skillful graphic artist who illustrated several early covers of the NAACP's Crisis magazine.

William H. Johnson's "Woman in Blue" from 1943 exemplifies his signature portrait style, in which a figure is placed within a tightly cropped picture plane defined by flat expanses of bold, thickly applied color.

The painting recently received careful conservation to stabilize its unusual medium of oil paint on burlap.

The exhibition broadens our understanding of this artistic and cultural movement and establishes the critical role that the Harlem Renaissance played in modern art and modern life.

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism" is through July 28.

♪ Next on our program, a profile of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes.

From Kenya to China, from India to the Gulf of Mexico, his works reveal the increasing threat to nature and human existence.

These images represent over 40 years of dedication to bearing witness to the impact of humans on the planet.

Burtynsky skillfully integrates critical reporting with visual aesthetics, achieving a balance of content and form.

At times the aerial images he records transform into painterly abstraction.

His photographs are included in the collections of more than 80 major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, MoMA, the Met, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

They can also be found in the collections of the Tate Modern in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"NYC-ARTS" had the opportunity to speak with Burtynsky at the Howard Greenberg Gallery on East 57th Street.

The exhibition on view was "Edward Burtynsky: African Studies."

Edward: If I look at the theme that underlies my work for 40 years, it really starts with a kind of a love affair with photography and the large format camera.

Coming out of that Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Elliot Porter kind of tradition of that slow approach to subject matter and nature.

How do you take a photograph in nature and somehow transcend its kind of banality and that moves you to a sense of contemplation, mystery wonder, all those kinds of things that I saw the early modernists doing.

And in a way a lot of my work is about this lament for the loss of the natural world.

That there is this concern for biodiversity, whether it's the oceans of the forests through agriculture, through urban expansion, through infrastructure all these things , are changing that natural world.

I'm kind of championing nature and saying we must be careful with it because ultimately if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.

The work I show is not about the individual, it's about the collective impact that we're having on the planet.

♪ Every time I take a picture, I'm really thinking about it.

I'm really waiting for everything to be perfect, the light, the composition, make sure the focus was perfect, make sure the exposure was exact because you can't go back and remake it.

And then I started doing aerial work and I tried shooting with film and all the ways in which I tried to shoot with film were failing and I was renting helicopters and planes and it wasn't fast enough and the cameras were awkward.

So then I tried a digital camera in 2006 and lo and behold it was like, wow, I can shoot hundreds of frames before I have to change the chip.

The quality was there and I was trying to make images in a helicopter or in a fixed-wing airplane that looked like I had the camera on a tripod with the hood over my head and carefully contemplative, you know, coming to that image.

So that was kind of liberating.

It was kind of like all of a sudden I, I'm no longer tied to gravity and anywhere I can stick a tripod onto level ground, all of a sudden my subject could be anywhere at any height, at any distance.

♪ When I started thinking about Africa, I was just completing a project on China.

Now they're very different, but at the same time what was interesting about it was I had just photographed the industrial revolution and I'm starting to hear that China's now offshoring to African countries.

And so I started doing a combination of the kind of unspoiled beauty of Africa and the industrialization of Africa.

When I was in Ethiopia I learned about this area it, it's referred to the Danika Basin and it is interesting because we couldn't really get any aircraft there and it was a military zone , as well.

So the only thing that we really could do is to bring a drone.

It's regularly over 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

But what's incredible is in this extraordinary heat, these workers, they would break chunks of salt off and put them on the camels and after a whole day's work, the camels would be taking all of the salt harvested that day back to the town where they would be sold.

And so it was getting ahead of their journey, waiting with a drone and knowing they are going to have to come through there.

And then when everything just aligned, I lifted the drone and then shot.

When I did the sand dunes near Sossusvlei, it was late afternoon and I was looking at it and I'm thinking, this is a great area, wrong time of day.

I said, this will look great first thing in the morning when the sun comes up.

And knowing that particular range of mountains and that particular feel of the landscape and the way the background of it was extraordinary.

One of my very, very first shoots in Africa was the massive area where they grow tea.

And there was something really visual and textural about them too in the grid that it creates was this very surreal landscape.

And it fit into my aesthetic and my themes because when I look at what is the thing that we as humans have done to change the planet more than anything else, it is agriculture.

And you can still see the jungle where it was now all flipped into these geometric tea plantations.

And then it occurred to me that the other one that's even more of a life force is water.

Because no water equals no life.

It is as simple as that.

I was looking at water from all kinds of ways, from, you know, how we use it in agriculture and how we redirect it and the building of dams and uh, places where the Colorado River doesn't make it to the Delta anymore.

This is the absence of water that used to be there.

It used to be full of life.

Also, you know, water is a very sacred element to many religions in the Hindu religion, the Kumala Festival is this ritual of going and then dipping yourself because they believe in reincarnation that any of your ancestors or any of your family members who may be stuck between a transition from being a human to the next, wherever you're going in life, this releases them.

It's a release for their ancestors.

And millions would make this pilgrimage.

But I was also interested in the kind of unusual events that occur like in the spring when there's a lot of water coming down to the Tibetan plateau.

One of the biggest things that destroys the efficiency of a dam is the silting.

What they do once a year in the spring, they just open up all the gates and all the water starts rushing down the river.

And what happens is that it starts to create a momentum that lifts all the silt up and pushes it down the river.

As I was going there and as I was learning more, I was seeing the cities that were being destroyed and looking at how people were being displaced by the 600-kilometer-long reservoir that would be the consequence of this dam.

And so there's a photograph I took of a guy with a donkey and that was his town and he was just leaving town with his donkey because it's like a wasteland and he's leading to go to higher ground and then this is all going to go underwater.

So, it was kind of interesting to travel through these towns where people have lived for, you know, millennia and they're leaving these towns to go to these modern towers, you know, up on the hill.

♪ As I was doing that, I was also starting to see the industrial factories and what else was happening.

And that's when I started to expand what I was doing and looking at the ship building in China and looking at the chicken factories in China and looking at where our coffee makers come from.

So there was this kind of endless compliant workforce that allowed China to become the manufacturer for the world.

And so all these things were just looking at that scale of workforce and trying to find images that really tell that story.

You know, like one of the shoe factories that I went to had 250,000 workers and they all lived at the site and for dinners they would pulse out from the factories, you know, 25,000 workers at a time and they would feed 25,000 workers on three floors in about 40 minutes.

It's kind of like the scale of what I was seeing is just like, we have no idea.

None of these projects are comprehensive, but they're more like visual meditations and the things that I could kind of uncover that were interesting both visually and the story that they tell.

I want to be revelatory, nonaccusatory when I show that world that has to exist for us to have this urban existence, that there is another world that we don't see.

And I wanted to be the medium to connect us to that world.

Philippe: Next week on "NYC-ARTS ."

A trip to the Met and the exhibition "New York Art Worlds, 1870-1890," a period that saw the development of a modern and cosmetology and -- cosmopolitan art world.

Sylvia: This is an exhibition that opened last December in our gallery.

We were thinking about what was happening at the moment in 1870, who were the leading artists, who was defining taste at that time, the changes that occurred too in the transformation of the art world, you know, with all the new wealth after the Civil War.

The development really of an infrastructure for an art world proper.

I would say art worlds, there wasn't just one community.

There were many different communities that came together in the city in those years, in the 1870s and 1880's.

Philippe: Then a visit to the Jewish Museum and the exhibition "RBG Collars: The Photographs of Elinor Carucci" which celebrates Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the country's highest jurists.

Elinor: She started wearing the collars as a way to distinguish herself from the black-gowned and male more boring appearance and to feminize herself.

And then she started getting gifts, the collars that were commissioned and they became another symbol for her.

Without words, she was a woman of words, but this was visual messages, something that I really relate to as a visual artist.

Philippe: And a look at the exhibition "Pacita Abad," now on view at MoMA PS 1 in Queens.

Abad made the plight of political refugees central to her practice.

The exhibition features over 50 works, most of which have never been on public view.

They include vibrant paintings, works on paper and the painted and stitched canvases she began making in the 1980's.

♪ I hope you have enjoyed our program tonight.

I am Philippe de Montebello.

Thanks for watching and see you next time.

♪ >> Funding for "NYC-ARTS" is made possible by.

Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation.

Jody and John Arnhold.

The Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for Dance.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.

Charles and Valerie Diker.

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation.

The Nancy Sidewater Foundation.

And Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council.

Additional funding provided by members of thirteen and by Swann Auction Galleries.

>> Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at options, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.