>> Coming up on NYC Arts.

A profile of Edward Bacsinszky.

>> If I look at the theme that annoys my work for 40 years, it starts with a love affair with photography and large-format cameras.

Coming out of that Edward Weston Ansell Adams tradition of that slow approach to subject matter and nature.

It is kind of banality and that moves you to a sense of contemplation, mystery, wonder.

All those kinds of things I saw the early modernists doing.

>> And a visit to the American folk Art Museum and is addition Terry witness.

Folk and self-taught artists at work.

Quit the first theme is from the earth.

Clay, stone and mineral pigments.

It was a chance to think about what makes up paint.

The second section is called matter at hand.

That is where I focus a lot on process.

It is about the history of photography.

And finally, in the spirit is focused on how artists work with materials and use them as conduits for communing with spiritual realms in a process that is often transformative.

>> Funding for NYC Arts is made possible by Charles and Valerie diner.

The Milton and Sally every arts foundation.

Elroy and Terry Krumholz foundation.

The Nancy side water foundation and Ellen and James as 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 13 and by Swan auction Galleries.

>> Swan auction Galleries.

We have been offering printed books and fine arts since 1941.

Looking to combine knowledge with excess ability.

Information at Swan Galleries.com.

>> Overlooking the nearby Greenwich Harbor, the Museum in Greenwich Connecticut is a world-class destination whose mission is to promote the understanding and appreciation of both art and science.

Last spring, the museum opened the newly renovated and expanded building and continues to present a change array of exhibitions and education programs.

Good evening and welcome to NYC Arts.

I am on location at the new -- The museum has an ongoing engagement with the local community as a vital resource for learning and entertainment for visitors in the area and beyond.

The centerpiece of the renovation is a three-story wing that provides a new entrance, lobby and expensive exhibition gallery.

The design and construction took it is bridged from the geology of the region.

At its center, the interior courtyard also brings the surrounding nature into the space.

The histories of the Bruce Museum and American Impressionism are woven closely together.

In 1912, members of the art colony formed the Greenwich Society of art and selected the Bruce Museum for its yearly exhibition.

After suspending his exhibitions during World War I, the group mounted his neck show in 1919.

Which included noted women artists such as Matilda Brown.

The museum purchased multiple works from the show which were among the first paintings to ever enter the Bruce's collection.

John entirely from the museum's collection, Connecticut Impressionism demonstrates the important role that Connecticut then played in the development of American Impressionism from late 19th century through the first two decades of the 20th century.

And October warning.

All form deep connections with them this paintings that would come to define Impressionism in the United States.

On our programs and I, a profile of Edward Bacsinszky, a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes.

From Kenya to China, India to the Gulf of Mexico, his works would 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.

He 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 cap -- the collections of more than 80 major museums around the world including the National Gallery of Canada, the Met and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

They can also be found in London and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

NYC Arts had the opportunity to speak with Bacsinszky at the Howard Greenberg gallery on East 57th St.

The exhibition was on Edward Princess Kate, African studies.

>> 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 large-format cameras.

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

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

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 is the oceans, the forests through agriculture and urban expansion and infrastructure, all these things are changing that natural world.

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

Request the work I show is not about the individual, it is about the collective impact we have on the planet.

Every time I take a picture, I am really thinking about it.

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

But then I started doing aerial work and I tried shooting with film but all the ways I tried to shoot with film were failing.

I was renting helicopters and planes and it wasn't fast enough and the cameras were awkward but then I tried a digital camera in 2006 and lo and behold it was like I can shoot hundreds of claims.

The quality was there.

I was trying to make images in a helicopter that looked like I had the camera on a tripod with a hood over my head and charitably -- carefully cut contemplatively came to that image.

It was kind of liberating.

It was like I am no longer tied to gravity and anywhere I can stick the tripod ought to ground.

All of the sudden my subject could be anywhere, any distance.

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

Now they are very different but at the same time, what was interesting about it was just photographed the Industrial Revolution and I was starting to see -- starting to hear that China was off shoring to African countries.

I started with a combination of the unspoiled beauty of Africa and the industrialization of Africa.

When I was in Ethiopia, I learned about this area that is referred to the -- referred to as the data kill basin.

We could never get any aircraft there and there was a military zone as well.

The only thing we can really do is bring a drone.

What is incredible is in this history never he, these workers who break chunks of salt off -- after a whole day's work, they would be taking all the salt harvested that day back to the town where it would be sold so it was getting and of their journey, waiting with a drone and knowing they are going to have to come through their and then everything just aligned and I lifted the drone and then shot.

When I did the sand dunes near the Cessa flight, it was a great area, wrong time of day.

I thought this would be looking great early in the morning.

Knowing the particular range of mountains and the particular feel of the landscape and the background of it was extraordinary.

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

There is this grid that it creates.

It was this very surreal landscape.

If it into my landscape and themes.

When I look at what the thing we as humans have done to change the planet more than anything else, it is agriculture.

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

Then it occurred to me that the other one that is even more of a life force is water.

No water equals no life.

It is as simple as that.

I was looking at water from all kinds of ways from how we use it in agriculture and the building of dams and the places where the Colorado River does not make it to the Delta anymore.

It used to be there, it used to be full of life.

Also, water is very sacred to many religions in the Hindu to.

There is this ritual of dipping yourself because they believe in reincarnation.

In a beer family members that may be stuck between a transition from being a human to the next wherever you are going in life.

This releases them.

It is a release from ancestors.

And millions would make this pilgrimage.

It is also interesting the kind of unusual events that occurred like in the spring where there is a lot of water coming down the Tibetan plateau.

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

But they do once you're in the spring is they just open up all the gates and all the water starts rushing down the river.

It starts to create a momentum that lifts all of 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 km long reservoir.

There is that photograph I took of a guy, the donkey.

That was his town.

It was like a wasteland and he was leaving to go to higher ground.

It was kind of interesting to travel through these towns people lived.

They are leaving these towns to go to these modern towers.

As I was doing that, I was also starting to see the industrial factories and what else was happening and that is when I started to expand what I was doing and looking at the shipbuilding in China and looking at that chicken factories in China, looking at where our coffee makers come from.

There was this endless compliant workforce that allowed China to become a manufacturer.

All of these things were just looking at that scale of work force and trying to find images that really tell that story.

One shoe factory had 250,000 workers and they all lived at the site.

There were 25,000 workers at a time and they would feed 25,000 workers on three floors in about 40 minutes.

It is kind of like the scale of what I was saying is we just have no idea.

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

I want to be revelatory, not accusatory.

I want to show that world that has to exist for us to have this urban existence.

That there is another world that we don't see.

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

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Next, a visit to the American folk Art Museum and material witness, folk and self-taught artist at work.

The exhibit features nearly 150 works drawn from the museum's extensive collection and explores how and why artists across four centuries gravitated toward certain media and methods .

It is the first in a series of exhibits at the museum that would feature works that promote an expensive history of American art.

Featured artists include Minnie Evans, Judith Scott and Lonnie Holly who all worked with a variety of materials including found and collected everyday objects, urban wear, sculpture, textiles and photography.

Material witnesses will be on view until October 29.

>> I am the assistant curator at the American folk Art Museum.

This is self-taught artist at work.

Material witness focuses on the materials and substances like clay, wood, rock, stone, metal that artists work with to make the objects that are in this Museum's collection.

I liked the idea of witness to materials because we have several works in this show and in our Museum's collection where the maker identity is unknown.

In the case of so-called memory wears for example that are featured in the show, we have a selection of ceramic jugs and vessels that the maker has encrusted with hundreds of found objects.

Everything from skeleton keys to buttons from political campaigns to small figurines, objects like these found on grave sites.

American graves in the southern U.S..

But we don't know the makers identity.

I think an object like these as witnessing that process of making and even holding the stories of their makers or the lives they may have been documenting.

I was really drawn to opportunities to show multiple works by the same artists across their careers.

Three carvings by the woodcarver Jesse Aaron.

Art making is a lot of work and many of the artists featured here worked other jobs full-time for most of their lives in many cases other than full-time art making.

Work is an interwoven part of the stories behind all these objects.

Material witness is organized into four thematic areas.

The first theme is from the earth.

The focus is clay, stone, mineral pigments who so it was an opportunity to focus on what makes up paint.

This was a really exciting opportunity to put to work from our collection into conversation.

One in 1815, and oil painting by NY Phillips where the pigments that the artist has used for the vibrant reds and greens are so outstanding and against the relatively muted background.

That works in conversation whose sources on pigments and mixed those together with syrups and binding agents that he also developed.

Using everything from clay that he was sourcing to berries, X agrees, coffee grinds and the process of experimentation over time.

The second section is called matter in hand.

That is where I focused a lot on the process.

We don't always think about self-taught artists as having studio practices.

Our school trained, professional artists say.

This created this elaborate -- labyrinth world in which -- it was funny to think about how working with everyday materials you might find around the house, ballpoint pens and different colors.

It created a fantastical composition.

A case study called alchemy and light and it is about the history of photography and specifically hand tinted photos.

>> Here, we can put into conversation through the 20 century and two to 25 mm photos.

All of which have been hand tinted.

The fourth section is called in the spirit.

In the spirit section is focused on how artists work with materials and see them and use them as conduits.

For communing with spiritual realms, otherworldly realms in a process that is also often transformative.

It may begin with found projects and scavenging from different materials to create a work of art in which each part is transformed into a greater whole.

I hope the visitors will walk away with a sense of the amount of work that goes into not just making given art object but evolving practice over time of working with materials.

>> Next week on NYC Arts, a visit to the American Museum of Natural History and its revitalized Northwest Coast Hall.

>> This is the largest surviving canoe of his size that we know of in the world.

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

In recent years, they renewed that reconciliation.

>> A trip to the American Museum of the dog on Clark Avenue.

One of the only museums dedicated solely to the depiction of dogs.

>> This was an art museum, possibly one of the greatest collections.

It comprises about 1700 objects.

I merely find art.

Paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters, a whole variety all dedicated to the dog.

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

>> The center of the quilt is emblazoned with a large L. Also included is a musical staff and note.

Included was her piano.

>> I hope you enjoyed our program tonight, thank you so much for joining us.

I am on location at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich.

Good night.

To enjoy more of your favorite segments on NYC Arts, visit our website at N.Y.C.

-- arts.org.

Good evening and welcome to NYC Arts.

>> Classical and modern jazz are certainly different.

I have so much more to learn before I can really articulate the differences.

>> When I listen to the lyrics on that, I suddenly felt that is what I wanted to do with my life.

I reside in very intimate and private moments.

My primary way of playing the piano was by improvising.

>> Your in some respect on sacred ground.

A woman came to see you perform and said how would you like to play Billie holiday?

>> One of the essential things that we learned was that he used hands to compose his work.

>> The cardboard guitar is very first of that moment of realization.

>> Funding for NYC Arts is made possible by Jody and John Arnhold, the Lewis County Turner fun for dance.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation, Alize Johnson and Jeffrey Brown.

Charles and Valerie diker.

The Milton and salary every arts foundation.

Elroy and Terry Krumholz foundation.

The natty side water foundation.

Ellen and James as markets as well.

This program is supported by public funds from the New York City Department of cultural affairs.

In partnership with the city Council.

Additional funding provided by members of their team and by Swan auction grab -- Swan auction Galleries.

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

Whether you are a lifelong collector or looking to sell.

Information S1 Galleries.com.

-- Swangalleries.com.