The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., has a new exhibit about the soaring tile vaults built by a famous father-son team. The Guastavinos came to this country from Spain in the late 1800s, and left their mark on some of America's most important public spaces.

In his memoir The Friedkin Connection, the legendary director of films like The Exorcist and The French Connection recounts his journey from a poor Chicago neighborhood to the apex of Hollywood success.

NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg has worked in all four of NPR's locations since it went on the air in 1971. As the company moves into its bigger space, Stamberg once again shepherds us to our new home.

The biopic Renoir plots the final years of the impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and creating the film's sumptuous imagery took a special eye for detail. NPR's Susan Stamberg explores the inspirations behind the film.

Artist John Baldessari is an iconic figure in some modern art circles. His conceptual pieces — black-and-white photographs covered with colorful dots, a blue sky painted on a museum floor — can provoke smiles. But serious ideas lie beneath the surface.

The subject of Johannes Vermeer's painting could be the Girl With a Pearl Earring's slightly older aunt. She's less innocent, more serious and currently on display at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, her first-ever appearance on the West Coast.

When he was just 10 years old, Shankar began performing in Europe and the US with his family's Indian dance troupe. But at age 18, Shankar gave up all the glitter to study with a guru who taught him the sitar. He became a master, and introduced the West to his country's music.

Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his dotted, angst-filled comics featuring beautiful ladies in distress. But a major retrospective at the National Gallery shows that the painter found inspiration beyond the comic-book world; he also paid his respects to the masters — Picasso, Monet and more.

Newsprint is both the medium and the message in the "Shock of the News" exhibit currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The show examines a century's worth of interaction between artists and the journals of their day.

The Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio has been home to Edward Hopper's Morning Sun painting for more than 50 years. But if you visit Columbus, there's no guarantee you'll be able to see it; the painting spends much of its time on loan to other museums.

A new exhibit in New York explores the life of Edouard Vuillard — a lesser-known, intellectual Parisian artist — and the Jewish tastemakers who supported him at the turn of the century.

No, Olivia Newton-John doesn't work out to her own anthem about exercise. That would be weird.