Sarah Lilley

Richard Serra began working with steel as a teenager, on a summer job in a steel mill. Next week in New York, the Museum of Modern Art will unveil a giant retrospective of his career ...

There are plenty of places you’d expect to find a brass band: on a football field, in a parade, backing Prince at the Superbowl. But on a subway platform? Sarah Lilley listened in on a band of brothers from Chicago who stop commuters in their tracks.

Last spring some billboards appeared along a highway near Syracuse, New York, just over an hour's drive from the Ft. Drum Army Base. On each billboard was an enormous close-up of a young man's head on a plain dark surface. Suzanne Opton took the pictures. Produced by ...

Perfumers generally design complicated scents to stimulate a fantasy or a mood, not to match any one particular thing. Christopher Brosius is a perfumer with a different approach: he bottles the smell of celery, a gin and tonic, thunderstorms, even snow. Sarah Lilley went ...

In an era when many artists have embraced abstract conceptual work, Shahzia Sikander, who was born in Pakistan, embraces good old-fashioned painting. Her main point of inspiration is classical miniature painting – all the rage in the courts of Central Asia some seven hundred years ago. Sikander’s ...

As part of Studio 360's series on science and creativity, Sarah Lilley talks with scientists who admire the impressionist painter Claude Monet not just for his color choices, but for his ability to trick the human eye and brain.

How do you convey the millions of years over which a species evolves in the span of a museum tour? Sarah Lilley looks at an exhibit on Charles Darwin that lets the science speak for itself.

Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall believes there are more dimensions to space - possibly 13 more -- than the three we experience. She's faced the challenge of describing a world that no one can see. Produced by Sarah Lilley.

Japan has embraced cuteness with a vengeance, from the ubiquitous Hello Kitty to the successful artist-designer Takashi Murakami, the Andy Warhol of Japan. Sarah Lilley tries to figure out why an ancient culture like Japan's would strive to be super adorable.

The works of the late graphic artist M.C. Escher have been admired for decades by students and scholars alike. But Escher claimed to have failed his own high school exams. He considered becoming an architect before traveling to Spain, where he hit upon a better way to express himself. Produced ...

Frieda Hughes

The casting of Oz — a cute, well-rounded lead surrounded by three amusingly deficient pals — became a reliable shape for a TV sitcom. Sarah Lilley appreciates the draw of the foursome.

Ed Ruscha is one of the great Pop artists, but he's not a household name. That's probably because his projects look completely unlike one another — from black and white photographs of the Sunset Strip to luscious drawings of words that he did in the 1960s. Words such as "Squirt" ...

Teenagers and young adults in this country are embracing Japanese art and pop culture like never before. An exhibition at the Japan Society in New York has filled the museum with colorful toys, strange dolls and paintings of schoolgirls. It's all very cute, but it doesn't take long to sense ...

Over the past couple of months, critics have been breathlessly extolling the Tim Hawkinson retrospective at the Whitney Museum here in New York. Hawkinson's work can grab you in unexpected ways — like his tiny, perfect bird skeleton that on closer examination is constructed from the artist's own ...

We know the name of the man on stage, but we don't know much else about him — he constantly revises his opinions and his portrayal of himself. In the acclaimed new play Thom Pain (based on nothing), playwright Will Eno explores some of the darker and ...

The German poet Goethe was 23 years old when he wrote his first novel, which he composed almost entirely of letters. The Sorrows of Young Werther spoke to readers, especially young men, in a way no book had ever done before, inspiring a crazed following and a ...

Playwright Sarah Ruhl always wondered how Eurydice experienced her death, what she really thought of her lover Orpheus and who she met in the underworld. Audiences in San Francisco discovered surprising answers to Ruhl’s questions when her play, Eurydice, premiered in 2003. Ruhl told Sarah Lilley how she imagined the ...

The life of the average artist is not known for a sense of security. Most will gain little money, status, or recognition. They may dream of these things, but what many artists should be yearning for more than anything is … health insurance. Sarah Lilley explains why.

This weekend, the residents of Manhattan will wake up to find their beloved Central Park taken over by orange fabric. The project, known as "The Gates," has been 26 years in the making from the artists known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This married team wraps big things in ...