♪ Announcer: Coming up on NYC-Arts a visit to the Parrish Art Museum on the East End of Long Island for a look at the work of American Impressionist painter, William Merritt Chase.

Alicia Longwell: William Merrit marriage Chase had a long and rich relationship to the East End of Long Island.

You might even say that he staked his claim to this landscape early on earlier and that he saw more possibilities in it than the untutored eye.

>> A trip to the Brooklyn Museum and its Arts of China Galleries which represents 5,000 years of artistic accomplishment.

Joan Cummins: The Arts of China Gallery is set up roughly chronologically with the earliest material at one end and the later material at the other end.

But there is in fact a sprinkling of contemporary art throughout the galleries.

>> And a close look at the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the American Wing of the Met.

>> I am here today to talk about Augustus Saint-Gaudens who is arguably the greatest American sculptor of the late 19th century.

The Metropolitan has 50 works by Saint-Gaudens and we are very fortunate to be able to present his work in such a comprehensive way.

From early cameo portraits to low relieved portraits of his friends and fellow artists to models for and reductions after his great Civil War monuments.

Announcer: 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 The Nancy Sidewater Foundation Elroy and Terry Krumholz 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.

♪ ♪ Paula Zahn: Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I'm Paula Zahn on location at El Museo del Barrio --right at the top of Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 104th Street.

El Museo was founded in 1969 by artist and educator Rafael Ortiz.

He was joined by a coalition of Puerto Rican parents, educators, artists, and activists who noted that mainstream museums largely ignored Latino artists.

Since its beginning, El Museo has been committed to celebrating and promoting Latino culture and has become a valuable resource for New York City.

El Museo's permanent collection of more than 8,500 objects, spans more than 800 years of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art.

Included are modern and contemporary drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as textiles, prints, photography, video and film.

Currently On View is "something beautiful: Reframing the collection," one of the museums most ambitious presentations in more than two decades.

It features over 500 artworks, including new acquisitions and artist commissions, with the displays rotating over the course of a year.

Themes and motifs reappear across sections to create a larger conversation throughout the exhibition.

Ocama Aracoel -- which translates to a call to the ancestors -- pays tribute to the Taino, the indigenous people of the Caribbean and Florida.

In the late 15th century they were the principal inhabitants of most of Cuba, Jamaica, and what is now the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Puerto Rico.

The Taino had an elaborate system of religious beliefs and rituals that involved the worship of carved figures.

The objects in El Museo's permanent collection also shaped the practice of Nuyorican artists.

Cosmic Visions shows the work of Indigenous and non-indigenous artists evoking Native American languages, landscapes and other cultural references.

The works here represent the possibility of a less Eurocentric art world.

Together they reflect contemporary issues related to the destruction of natural resources and the ongoing lack of attention paid to native peoples throughout the Americas.

First Impressions focuses on Puerto Rican printmaking.

Drawing on the ready ability to reproduce and circulate, printmaking made ideas about politics and social change available to a wide public.

El Barrio features 100 years of images reflecting the museumâ™s immediate community.

Overlapping with successive waves of Puerto Rican migration, these works capture the life and changing fashions of the neighborhood as conducted on its stoops and streets.

This gallery also features the vendors, religions, and popular entertainments of El Barrio.

Also included are materials that address charged issues of housing, cultural exploitation and political activism.

On tonight's program we will visit the Parrish Art Museum on the East End of Long Island for a look at the work of American Impressionist painter, William Merritt Chase.

Beginning in the early 1890s, the painter and his family spent their summers in a large house in the Shinnecock Hills of Southampton.

The lyrical summer scenes Chase painted there as established the artists reputation as an exceptional landscape painter.

>> I am Alicia Longwell.

I am the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator of Art and Education here at the Parrish Art Museum.

Our new Herzog and de Meuron designed building is located in Water Mill, New York, a hamlet just to the east of Southampton Village on Long Island seized end.

This is the first time that we have had dedicated space to show our permanent collection and to have a dedicated gallery for the work of William Merritt Chase.

The Parrish Collection is really notable for its range of work from all periods, especially from the Shinnecock paintings when he was here.

And is the largest collection in a public institution in America.

William Merrit Chase had a long and rich relationship to the East End of Long Island.

You might even say that he staked his claim to this landscape early on and that he saw more possibilities in it than the untutored eye.

He once said that he could find pictorial gold in the dross of the Shinnecock Hills.

It was in many ways a scrubby landscape; one that had been greatly over looked by many other artists.

He first came out to eastern Long Island in 1881 to sketch en plein air.

Chase adopted not so much what you might call the techniques of the French impressionists but certainly their ideas of coming out and painting modern life.

In 1891, two civic-minded women in the Southampton area decided they would like to start a plein-air school of art.

Chase was a very well-known teacher there, at the Art Students League.

He was a renowned portrait painter and he readily accepted their invitation to come out and in 1891 be the founding director of the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art.

By the next summer, a house had been built for him.

This beautiful Dutch colonial revival shingle style that has become very famous and ubiquitous here on the East End.

And his whole family came out.

He taught here until 1902 and then the family continued to use the house in Shinnecock really up to his death in 1916.

The William Merritt Chase Archives at the Parrish Art Museum is a repository of documents, letters, and most especially 600 photographs that really document the life of the artist.

Many of the photographs were, we know, taken by Mrs. Chase, she was an amateur photographer.

They give an extraordinary glimpse into what you might call a Gilded Age summer, but really more importantly into the life and work of Chase.

These photographs particularly are extremely important because many of the same scenes that Chase depicted are visible in the photographs.

Chase is indelibly associated with the paintings that he did here in the Shinnecock Hills.

Our own painting, 1895, The Bayberry Bush is really emblematic of these and he really did find pictorial gold in this scrubby landscape.

I think one of the most interesting things about that painting is of course the presence of the house that they lived in, the three daughters.

It is a complete look at the artist and his life I think, having the domestic realm, the landscape realm.

There is perhaps no better entry into the creative life of William Merritt Chase than this painting we see here, Alice in the Shinnecock Studio, from around 1900.

Alice Chase his oldest daughter, , was often depicted by Chase in his paintings.

Alice is really a surrogate for the viewer, inviting us into this rarefied atmosphere of the artist's studio.

While the nominal subject of the painting is the studio, the true theme is painting itself.

Here we see so many objects that become a self-portrait for the artist; the Shinnecock painting on the easel, the luminous glow of the bric-a-brac that he collected, his upended paint brushes, the sketch of Velasquez in the upper left, and the light coming through the studio window.

It is a complex fusion of art with family, landscape, and the material world.

I think Chase was very much a student you might say of the light here on the East End.

He was extraordinarily aware of the light at all times and his painting is infused with that perception.

We would welcome your visit when you are out on the East End of Long Island to come to the museum in Water Mill New York just to the east of Southampton Village.

♪ ♪ >> Next we travel to the Brooklyn Museum to visit the Arts of China gallery.

It represents 5,000 years of Chinese artistic accomplishments.

They include bronzes, ceramics, paintings, and selections from the museum's collection of cloisonné enamels.

The installation currently features more than 130 works.

Contemporary art is also an important part of this display.

Since 2014, the Brooklyn Museum has acquired more than fifty contemporary paintings and sculptures by artists of Chinese descent.

The experimental ink paintings on view challenge and transform China's traditional artistic practices.

They respond to present-day societal concerns such as the rapid pace of urbanization and threats to the environment.

Joan Cummins: The Brooklyn Museum is excited to welcome visitors to our newly re-installed Arts of China Gallery.

The Arts of China Gallery is set up roughly chronologically with the earliest material at one end and the later material at the other end.

But there is in fact a sprinkling of contemporary art throughout the galleries.

♪ This magnificent jar, with a decoration of fish on it is one of the great masterpieces of the Brooklyn Museum.

It dates to -- it is from a period of when they had really mastered the art of decorating in cobalt blue, but they had not yet found a source of cobalt in China, so that had to be imported from the Middle East.

The fish are in fact so well painted that we can recognize the four species that are represented.

And if one says their names in Chinese, in the order in which they appear on the jar, it actually sounds like you're saying out loud, the words honest and incorruptible.

So we believe that this jar was actually made for a Chinese consumer, somebody who would have gotten the pun, which is unusual because most blue and white ceramics in this period were made for export either to the Middle East or to Southeast Asia.

The Brooklyn Museum has an unusually large collection of Chinese cloisonné objects.

The piece that we're looking at now is called a champion vase.

It's a shape that was often used as a sort of trophy cup or a reward that was given to heroes in battle to celebrate their contributions to the military.

And this double vase shape is something that was used in antiquity to hold arrows.

Ours is far more decorative than the kinds of things that would've been used to hold arrows.

And it has a wonderful falcon, which is of course a very bold, strong bird on the front, standing on one foot.

And then the whole body of the vase is covered in a decorative pattern of this cloisonné in beautiful blue and violet and pink and white.

This is one of the oldest objects in the Arts of China Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum, and it's one of the great masterpieces of the collection.

It is a wine pouring vessel that would have been used primarily in ritual situations.

It dates to about 1100 B.C.

So it's quite old and it's beautifully, beautifully made.

It is just covered with patterning and with animals that are morphing into each other and the whole thing is shaped kind of like a dragon with this sort of snaggletooth grin.

And when you poured it, the wine would come out from between the teeth of the mythical animal.

This shape would have been made in China for only a very brief time -- it is quite an unusual shape.

And among objects of this shape, this is considered a really fabulous example because the quality of the finish is so beautiful.

Installed near our wonderful wine vessel is this wonderful piece by the New York based artist, Zhang Hongtu.

It is, as you can see, a bronze version of a McDonald's burger box, fry container and fork.

It's very much the artist's take on American culture.

The ritual bronzes on which its decoration is based, were used in worshiping the ancestors.

They were of great importance and seriousness.

And here he recreates something that's absolutely a throwaway object used for food that you eat on the run, that has no real ritual significance whatsoever to remind us of how sort of shallow the experience of eating fast food can be by comparison with these much more ritualized meals that took place in ancient China.

In and around the Arts of China Gallery are a quite a number of contemporary works that refer to the ancient Chinese practice of ink painting.

The piece that we're looking at now is actually a very overt reference to a Chinese landscape hand scroll.

This is a painting that people would look at by unrolling gradually and it would allow you to travel through a landscape visually.

And this is a a time-honored format for Chinese painting, but here it's done not in paint but in photo montage.

You can see that the mountains and trees are actually composed of skyscrapers and electrical towers and that some of the rocks are derelict Ferris wheels.

The whole piece is very much the young artist's, Yang Yongliang's, take on the Chinese treatment of the landscape today.

There are so many pieces in the Arts of China Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum that we have not shown here today, and I invite visitors to come and discover them for themselves.

♪ ♪ >> and now on another curators choice.

>> I am curator in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of art and we are standing in the new American wing galleries.

Twenty-six new spaces devoted to art from the 18th century through the early 19th century.

I am here today to talk about Augustus Saint-Gaudens who is arguably the greatest American sculptor of the late 19th century.

The Metropolitan has 50 works by Saint-Gaudens and we are very fortunate to be able to present his work in such a comprehensive way from early cameo portraits to low relief portraits of his friends and fellow artists to models for and reductions after his great Civil War monuments.

Saint-Gaudens was born in Ireland but came here to New York as an infant and was raised on the Lower East Side.

He began at age 13 working as an apprentice for a cameo-cutter and that really fueled his interest in becoming a sculptor.

In 1867 he went abroad to Paris to study and trained at the Ec ole des Beaux-Arts which was really the foremost training ground for students across the world at that time.

Saint-Gaudens also studied in Rome, he came back to New York and established a career as a sculptor of great Civil War monuments.

Some of the best known works in New York are the "Farragut monument" in Madison Square Park and the great gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman at 59th Street and 5th Avenue in a space called Grand Army Plaza.

In 1892, after Sherman died, Saint-Gaudens received a commission for a monument to honor his contributions to the Union cause.

Saint-Gaudens incorporated an allegorical figure into a realistic portrait of the person who was being commemorated.

So while General Sherman is marching along on horseback, the winged figure of victory, is leading him on.

She is moving forward with these wind-blown draperies, she holds a palm frond in her hand, which is a symbol of victory, and she is really quite American in a sense.

Saint-Gaudens worked with several different models to create this sculpture.

Generally this was a process that was kind of an amalgamation of poses.

Most interesting is the fact that one of the models was a woman named Hettie Anderson who was an African American woman from South Carolina, and Saint-Gaudens worked with her frequently and said she had a figure like a goddess.

Saint-Gaudens was a real perfectionist.

In the case of the "victory" he arranged draperies on 4 different models and it took him something like two weeks to get the look he was after, and when he finished the figure he wrote -- hyrray, it is the greatest victory anyone ever made.

Here I am in front of one of our most recent sculpture acquisitions, Saint Gaudens standing Lincoln.

This is a really exciting piece for our collection because despite the comprehensiveness of the collection, we had no sculptures representing this great commission that he did for the city of Chicago.

Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to complete a full-length portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1883 and it was unveiled in Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1887.

For Saint-Gaudens' portrait of Lincoln he relied on a number of different sources, but very interestingly he had first-hand experience with Lincoln because he grew up in New York City and saw Lincoln when he came to New York in 1861 on his way to Washington to assume the presidency.

Later, Saint-Gaudens was one of thousands of people who went through a line at City Hall to see the slain president lying in state in April of 1865.

So he said that these two times that he saw Lincoln really formed his impression of "the great man" as he called him.

Saint-Gaudens also read his speeches and writings and referenced photographs that were taken of Lincoln during the Civil War, but a very interesting opportunity arose for him in 1885 when an artist friend of his showed Saint-Gaudens plaster models of Lincoln's face and hands.

And these were models that his father, the sculptor Leonard Volk, had taken from life when Lincoln was running for president in the spring of 1860.

So, Saint-Gaudens was able to use the life mask as well as the models of the hands to incorporate into his sculpture.

Here is Lincoln in a transitional moment.

We can presume he has just stood up from this oversized chair of state with an eagle emblazoned on its crest rail and he is in this moment of contemplation where we presume he is about to lift his head to address the audience in front of him and say something meaningful and serious and profound.

And Saint-Gaudens captures the pensiveness and the solemnity of the moment and the burden that Lincoln felt during this great war.

Saint-Gaudens was known for his attention to naturalistic detail, not only to getting an accurate portrait, facial representation, but always thinking of little ways to enliven the compositions, to make them more interesting, whether it is attention to textural detail or just little narrative details that really bring the pieces alive.

I am Thayer Tolles, curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum and I hope you will come and visit our galleries and pay special attention to the installation of our sculpture collection.

>> next week on NYC-Arts -- a profile of artist Jeffrey Gibson whose beadwork, ceramics, sculptures and paintings are influenced by Cherokee and Choctaw tradition.

Jeffrey Gibson: You know, when you are a foreigner, you don't entirely understand what you are looking at or what you are hearing all the time.

So you have this kind of subjective comprehension of the world around you that is an estimated guess.

>> a look at a highlight in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum.

Stacy C. Hollander: Jean Marcel St. Jacques gathered the debtor test of his home after Hurricane Katrina and started fashioning what he called wooden quilts, paying homage to his great-grandfather, who was a Hoodoo man and a junk collector, and his great-grandmother, who was a quilt maker.

>> and a trip to the Met and the major exhibition, "van Goghs cypresses" a subject which captivated the artist during the two years he spent in the South of France.

The exhibit marks the 170th anniversary of van Goghs birth and features over 40 works, many of which have rarely-- if ever been on view.

♪ ♪ I hope you enjoyed our program tonight.

I am Paula Zahn on location at El Museo del Barrio.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Good night.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Announcer: 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 The Nancy Sidewater Foundation Elroy and Terry Krumholz 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.