♪ >> Coming up on "NYC Arts," a profile of one of the most renowned American muralist of the 20th century.

>> She pioneered a modern approach to murals and blended influences such as early Byzantine mosaic, Egyptian wall painting, classical Greek vase painting and Native American beadwork.

She really incorporated violent color, scale and ornamental style, which were all elements that became synonymous with Art Deco designs.

>> And a trip to the Met for a look at the exhibition Art of Native America.

>> Native American art is foundational to our cultural heritage.

Exhibitions like this are meant to move people outside of that idea, that all native peoples are the same, homogeneous.

They were not at any time, and they are certainly not today.

>> Funding for "NYC Arts" is made possible by The Petschek foundation, the Lewis Turner fund for dance, Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, Charles and Valerie Diker, the Milton and Sally Avery arts foundation, the Nancy Sidewater foundation and Ellen and James 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 Mmebers of Thirteen and Swann auction Galleries.

>> We have a different way of looking at auctions.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility.

Whether you are a lifelong collector, first time or looking to sell, information at swanngalleries.com.

♪ >> Good evening and welcome to "NYC Arts."

I'm Paula Zahn on location at one of the treasures of New York, the New York historical Society in Central Park West.

Here, visitors can experience 400 years of history through groundbreaking exhibitions, all of which tell the stories of New York as well as the American experience.

The exhibition On View in this gallery is called The Collecti on: New collaborations.

It presents long-standing favorites from the museum's permanent collection alongside recent acquisitions and its aim is to raise questions, create unexpected connections, and reconsider established mediums.

The result is more inclusive rethinking of both American art and how museums present our cultural history.

In Betty SARS, extreme times call for extreme heroines, a woman is to fight sexism in the present day.

Here she wields an assault weapon while carrying on her a pron the image of enslaved people packed into the cargo hold of a shift.

More than 240 years after the Revolutionary war, her work still fights for freedom.

Her work is placed near a painting from 1852, pulling down the statue of King George the third.

The painting calls out the selective nature of the United States founding ideals.

The work portrays a dramatic event from the American Revolution.

After listening to a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Continental soldiers joined with patriotic New Yorkers in Bowling Green to tear down an equestrian statue of King George the third and the tear any it represented -- tyranny it represented.

Only a few fragments of the statue, such as the horse's tail, survive today.

Martin Wong's Canal Street from 1992 pairs nearly identical scenes of New York City's Chinatown.

Each shows the red pagoda style building at the corner of Canal and center streets as well as a pagoda style payphone, subway entrance and traffic lights.

This strangely empty cityscape dramatizes what is currently characterized as Chineseness.

It belongs to a larger series of works exploring Chinatown.

At the banner at the top, the artist appears to wear a Stetson hat and purple cowboy shirt.

Like many of the surrounding portraits, this work, Far Eastsiders, from 2021, centers on marginalized communities.

The sitters lock together like the bricks behind them, stare defiantly out of the picture plane.

They claim space for queer relationships within their community, and for the Chinese in U.S. history.

The Asian cowgirl re-inserts herself into the story in the American West, from which her community has historically been excluded.

The placement of Thomas Cole's five painting series from the 1830's "the course of Empire" alongside contact 2021 by a contemporary artist explores the politics of race and gender in the Hudson River school landscape tradition.

In this work from 2021, approximately 3500 porcelain pieces bearing the artist's thumbprint form a map of the region.

They evoke the purple and white clamshells long fashioned by coastal native communities.

The shells would turn into beads that could be used to trade in treaties when colonists arrived on their shores.

"The Course of Nature" is adjacent to Leonard's work.

The artist shows the forces of nature in these five paintings and Empire working in concert.

Civilization emerges in a forested landscape, cuts clearings through the foliage, erupts into chaos, and collapses into ruin as nature is renewed.

An early environmentalist, the artist vividly shows the tremendous power of nature.

On our program tonight, a profile of one of the most renowned American muralist of the 20 century.

During her forty-year career from the 1920's until her death in 1961, she pioneered a modern approach to murals that broke away from American academic tradition.

She blended influences such as early Byzantine mosaic, Egyptian wall painting, Greek vase painting and Native American beadwork into a style that came to be known as Art Deco.

Working with leading architects of her day, she received 100 commissions.

Her best known works in New York City include radio city music Hall, the red room, Temple Emanuel, and many more.

She decorated buildings across the country from New Jersey to Nebraska.

Known for her willingness to explore new materials, she designed for a variety of mediums raising -- ranging from mixed metal to glass mosaic.

The Hildreth Meiere foundation was founded by her daughter.

We spoke with the great granddaughter of the artist at Temple Emanuel.

♪ >> I am the president of the international Hildreth Meière Association, also known as IHMA, as well as the great granddaughter of Hildreth Meière .

Today, we are here at Temple Emanuel in New York City in the landmark district in Manhattan.

Temple Emanuel is the largest synagogue in the world and can host 2500 people.

Hildreth Meière was one of the most renowned American muralists of the 20th century.

Her career lasted for over 40 years, starting in the 1920's until 1961 when she passed away.

She pioneered a modern approach to murals.

Hildreth broke away from academic tradition and blended early Byzantine mosaic, Egyptian wall painting, classical Greek vase painting, and Native American beadwork.

She really incorporated vibrant color, scale, and ornamental style, which were all elements that became synonymous with Art Deco designs.

Hildreth and the architects she worked with would have largely defined their stylistic approach as modernistic.

The term Art Deco was not really expressed until the mid-1960's.

She designed approximately 100 commissions, both secular and liturgical.

Generally, Hildreth's design process would start small, in sketch form, then she would auto utilize smaller studies -- also utilized smaller studies.

Hildreth provided the design but however did not install the work herself.

Fabricators and installation firms would be hired.

In the case of Saint Bartholomew's and temple Emanuel, a Berlin factory was used to fabricate.

Hildreth got to visit the factory to learn everything she could about the mosaic making process and its execution.

Hildreth was selected to provide the Byzantine style glass mosaic decoration for the eight story high arch of the main sanction area and the arc housing the Torahs on the eastern wall behind it.

Temple Emanuel and work at Saint Bartholomew's were completed in close succession.

♪ Over 20 years after the dedication of St. Bart's, Hildreth was asked to design six figurative stained glass Windows.

♪ Unfortunately Hildreth was only able to complete four out of the six proposed windows.

I feel she could be very proud of her first stained glass work, and how all three of her commissions are in harmony.

John D. Rockefeller Junior proceeded with building radio city music Hall and the older Rockefeller Center complex despite the stock market crash.

Hildreth was asked to design three Roundels for the façade above the radio city Marquis.

The three roundels were chosen to represent the forms of theater, song, drama and dance.

The completed work also represents Hildreth's first time and first time in general that metal and enamel decoration were used on such a large architectural scale in the U.S. Hildreth was quite an enthusiastic fan of theater and ballet.

While she was attending performances, she would very intensely observe all the action on stage.

Among her subjects was the learn Jerry access Margaret Anglin, known for her role in Greek tragedies and Shakespearean dramas.

Anglin was so impressed by Hildreth's ability to capture the spirit of the performances that she asked Hildreth to attend her rehearsals.

Not only did Anglin purchase all of Hildreth's sketches, she encouraged Hildreth to relocate to New York City to design customs for a series of plays Anglin was appearing in.

Within a week Hildreth met with Anglin's costume and set designer in New York.

She designed customs for the Canterbury pilgrims, an opera that debuted at the melatonin -- at the Metropolitan Opera in 1917.

One Wall Street was completed in 1931.

The primary goal of the commission was to create a really warm inviting reception room for the Irving trust company.

The challenge was that the room was irregular and faceted with walls that echoed the curved limestone panels of the building's exterior.

The irregular shape makes it difficult to see a repeat in the abstract design, but the patterns are repeated on opposite walls.

And if you are ever in the red room, you should look for the stamps that indicate how they laid out those panels.

This commission allowed Hildreth to demonstrate talent for creating drama solely through the use of color.

The color gradation moves from the floor in an ox blood red to brilliant orange and into a gold glow.

Hildreth Meiere's final New York area commission were the three large panels to decorate the walls above the elevator banks at the Prudential Plaza in New York, New Jersey.

Hildreth selected the pillars of Hercules as her theme, in recognition of the Prudential insurance company's logo, the rock of Gibraltar.

Once again, she created a narrative Art Deco design influenced by ancient Greek vase painting and mythology.

♪ When the lobby for the Prudential Plaza was renovated in the late 90's, Hildreth's three panels were removed and placed in storage.

Fortunately, they faced extensive damage.

In 2013, Tony, who had been the head mosaicist came out of retirement to work with a master mosaicist on the restoration.

Once the restoration was complete, Prudential donated the center panel to the New York Museum of Art, where it can be seen today.

The international Hildreth Meiere Association, IHNA, was founded in 2004 by my grandmother, who was Hildreth's only child.

IHMA is uniquely positioned to educate the public since we have a firsthand account of her life, including letters, diaries and pictures.

The house I grew up in Sanford, and Connecticut housed a lot of Hildreth's sketches and studies and was her summer home.

Her spirit and art was everywhere in the background of my childhood.

I am thankful to have a consistent connection to Hildreth my whole life.

♪ Most people think they need to go to Europe to see beautiful architecture and decorative art, but Hildreth brought it here to 17 states across the country.

She created something for everyone.

Hildreth created a huge body of work in a relatively short time.

She contributed to architectural structures and decorative art that are relevant today.

She created work that is not only representative of that Art Deco time period, but has stood the test of time and is now being appreciated by future generations.

♪ Paula: Museums have long benefited from the foresight of intrepid collectors.

Charles and Valerie Diker continue this tradition in 2016 when they promised their collection of historical Native American artwork to the Netra polity Museum of Art.

-- the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Art of native America contains more than 100 objects and represents more than 50 North American cultures.

Presented in the Met's American wing, the installation reveals the complexity of the country's past and an expansion of who was included in its narrative.

The exhibition was curated by someone of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, in collaboration with Native American scholars and cultural leaders.

>> The most important thing I think about this exhibition, other than the celebration of native American art and the artists that created these works, is the fact that these works are being shown in the American wing, which is the first time in the history of this museum since the wing opened in 1924.

So it is a momentous movement and terms of recognizing Native American art as foundational to our cultural heritage.

Exhibitions like this are meant to move people outside of that idea that all native peoples are the same homogeneous.

They were not at any time and are certainly not today.

It is not chronological.

We did decide to lay it out by geographic regions.

The problem with that is these culture areas did not have firm boundaries.

We endeavored in the gallery design to keep things open and permeable and visible so that almost any where you stand within these galleries you are perhaps in a culturally related area but are looking into other areas as well, suggesting a greater universality.

Most of these objects were created within the backdrop of colonization, which makes the achievement even greater.

I find the pine war club to be one of the most astonishing objects inte collection -- in the collection.

As sculpture work, it is sublime in terms of its proportion, the elegance and the shape.

It is a functional weapon.

It was carried to war, but it was also an important piece of artistic expression.

For the owner, this club was invested with a great deal of spiritual power.

The designs on one side consist of some zigzag lines at the top, then a circle with a single sharp zigzag line in the dating the full length -- line e manating the full length of the club.

It is possible the circle and line may represent thunder and one strike of lightning.

On the other side is I think the most amazing design I have ever seen on a Native American war club.

It is covered with stars like the night sky, a painting of the constellation Pleiades.

The objects are some of the most amazing images one can imagine.

This particular mask represents the prey animals that the people depended upon for their survival.

These masks were worn in ceremonies.

In the dances, they were intended to thank the animals that had given themselves in the previous year and ensure that there would be a continuous flow of new life.

It's often said that these masks represent something that is easiest translated as "the ongoing soul."

When you see an image of a fish or seal or bird, it does not represent specific creatures, it represents all of that genus that lived or will live in the future, so the mask is timeless in that respect.

It places the people in a timeless relation with all of the animals within nature of the world.

Standing Bear participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876.

In the 1880's, Standing Bear went to Europe with Buffalo Bill's show.

He met an Austrian woman, married her, brought her back to Pine Ridge Reservation.

And to develop his art, he basically tried to bring together in this painting six different episodes that he remembered.

They did not all happen at the same time, but within the tradition of warrior art, Standing Bear represented them all as if they were occurring at the same time.

There are horses being run off, separated, leaving the soldiers on foot.

There is a depiction of a group of shoulders -- group of soldiers killed in a ravine.

Another group killed on horseback riding to the south.

Then there is the final battle on the hill, including a depiction of Custer himself.

They all are great battle narratives like one would expect to see in the great battle paintings and tapestries in Europe, which he undoubtedly saw.

Carrie Bethel was a master basket maker.

She was prominent in the 1920's and 1930's in California.

This particular piece was her first attempt to create a basket of that scale.

It took her three years.

Maybe the best way to think about the achievement in that basket is to think about it first in relation to the materials, which required an en ormous body of knowledge in terms of which plants to prepare.

A basket of that kind is created using a coil technique which begins in the center of the bottom, then started upward and outward to form the sides of the object, and then at a certain point began to curve inward to reach its final form.

She simply wove it from the bot tom up.

When you see the respect and in that form, in the relationship of that two dimensional design to the volumetric shape of the object, and ultimately the kind of tension that form holds, the achievement is visible and amazing.

The objective in presenting these objects in the way that we've done is to respect them as works of art, as sophisticated and beautiful creations.

♪ Paula: Next week on "NYC Arts," a trip to the museum in Queens.

>> He wanted to change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic good.

He wanted to make it an active part of our everyday lives.

♪ Paula: Then, a look at the exhibition Indian Skies, the Howard Hodgkin collection.

Hodgkin, an acclaimed British painter and printmaker, built a collection of 122 Indian court paintings.

Hodgkin's collection includes portraits, Royal hunts, illustrations of religious epics, devotional subjects, and nature studies.

And a profile of a modern-day violin maker who has spent his career creating violins for some of the world's most talented musicians.

>> Every violin I make, I have exhausted records on every aspect.

When one comes back and I like it, I want to make another.

Paula: I hope you enjoyed our program tonight.

I'm Paula Zahn at location -- on location at the New York historical Society.

Please join us next time.

♪ >> Funding for "NYC Arts" is made possible by -- 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 13 and Swann auction Galleries.

>> We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine arts since 1941, working to combine knowledge with accessibility.

Information at swanngaller ies.com.

♪