Jul 27 2025
Born on July 27, 1936, in Baltimore, Maryland, Roland L. Freeman spent more than half a century creating an extraordinary photographic record of Black American life. His camera traveled from Baltimore streets and Washington neighborhoods to Mississippi farms, quilting circles, church gatherings, festivals, Civil Rights demonstrations, horse-drawn produce wagons, blues performances, and communities whose traditions …
Jul 21 2025
Born on July 21, 1932, in Helsinki, Finland, Eero Aarnio became one of the designers who gave the Space Age its furniture. His Ball Chair looks like a private capsule waiting to be launched from a futuristic living room. The transparent Bubble Chair hangs from the ceiling like an enormous soap bubble. The Pastil can …
Jul 16 2025
Before Bob Marley became an international symbol of Jamaican music, Desmond Dekker was already helping audiences around the world discover the irresistible rhythms coming out of Kingston. With his distinctive high tenor, memorable melodies, sharp stage presence, and songs that drew on the language and everyday experiences of Jamaican life, Dekker became one of the …
Jul 14 2025
Woody Guthrie carried an America of dusty highways, freight trains, migrant camps, union halls, radio stations, city streets, and ordinary working people into his songs. With little more than a guitar, harmonica, plainspoken voice, and seemingly endless supply of words, he helped shape the image of the American folk singer as a wandering storyteller who …
Jul 11 2025
Born on July 11, 1940, Toby Bluth built an unusually varied creative career that crossed animation, illustration, watercolor painting, theater, children’s books, production design, and Disney fine art. Although his older brother Don Bluth became more widely known as the director behind films such as The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail, Toby developed …
Jul 09 2025
Born on July 9, 1929, in Mannford, Oklahoma, Lee Hazlewood spent much of his career somewhere between country music, pop, rock and roll, orchestral experimentation, and a wonderfully peculiar territory that was entirely his own. He wrote enormous hits for other singers, helped create the echo-heavy guitar sound that made Duane Eddy famous, transformed Nancy …
Jun 25 2025
Born on June 25, 1900, in New York City, Joseph Eichler became one of the most influential homebuilders of mid-century America without ever training as an architect. Instead, he was a developer with an unusually strong belief that ordinary families should be able to live in genuinely modern, architect-designed houses. At a time when much …
Apr 30 2025
Few films treat memory quite like Enchanted Desna. Directed by Yuliya Solntseva and released in 1964, the film moves through childhood recollection, rural Ukrainian life, war, imagination, and the natural world without trying to separate them neatly. Past and present overlap. Memories become dreams, landscapes seem almost mythological, and ordinary experiences take on the scale …
Apr 29 2025
A flower appears on an empty road. A woman climbs a staircase and enters a quiet house. A key changes into a knife. A mysterious hooded figure walks away with a mirror where its face should be. The same moments begin happening again, only slightly differently each time. In just fourteen minutes, Meshes of the …
Apr 17 2025
Chavela Vargas did not need a mariachi orchestra to make a ranchera sound enormous. Often accompanied by little more than guitars, she could slow a familiar song until every word seemed to carry the weight of a lifetime. Her voice was rough, intimate, wounded, defiant, and unmistakably her own. Songs about abandonment, desire, loneliness, drinking, …
