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Now that Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, teachers fear it will muzzle speech and further stigmatize LGBTQ youth.

The town of Orick sits just steps away from Redwood National Park. It has prime real estate for recreation and tourism, so why are its motels and restaurants shuttered and its residents impoverished?

Photographer Carell Augustus spoke with NPR about his new book, Black Hollywood: Reimagining Iconic Movie Moments, a project more than a decade in the making.

The Comic-Con-affiliated event is free and open to the public, running concurrently at the downtown library, dedicated to the ways comics intersect with literacy and learning — including how to defend against book bans.

With a revival of her Pulitzer-winning play Topdog/Underdog on Broadway, and her new show about COVID off-Broadway, the acclaimed playwright is still learning new things about herself.

Ana de Alvear (born 1962), is an artist and filmmaker from Madrid, Spain who has exhibited throughout Asia, Europe, and South America. This is her first solo exhibition in the United States. Despite seemingly traditional subject matter, the title of this exhibition invites the public to question the veracity of what they see and hear, a contemporary concern in an age of frequent misinformation. As one looks closely at her work, it becomes evident that there are layers of meanings and deceptions. What originally appear as photographs or even paintings are all achieved, in astonishing hyper-realistic detail, with the humble medium of colored pencil. This repartee with the history of art is not new; René Magritte spoke of “the treachery of images” and artists have been using trompe l ’oeil (fooling the eye) techniques in painting for years to dialogue with the reality of the image, a conversation made more acute with the advent of photography and extended further into the digital age. Yet with de Alvear’s drawings, there is no digital or mechanical process involved. Beyond this, de Alvear uses stuffed animals, knockoff porcelain, and plastic flowers and insects as her subjects to probe ironically the values of contemporary society. The compositions are inspired by European still-life paintings dating back to the seventeenth century, wherein artists painted such highly prized items as tulips, crystal, and imported porcelain, alongside insects and symbols of decay as memento mori (reminders of death). Initially appearing humorous and playful, the inclusion of toys in de Alvear’s works nevertheless also embodies darker meanings of lost childhood and trauma, while the ubiquitous presence of plastic, only visible upon close scrutiny, alludes to the current crisis of the environment and impending animal extinctions, such as the artificial bee attempting to pollinate plastic flowers. Humans’ position in the universe is laid before us as we are made more aware of our physicality and scale in the presence of two dramatic galaxy murals, each comprising fifty elaborately executed drawings. Related Programs and Events: Friday, June 18, 2021 Art Alive Members' PreviewSaturday, June 19, 2021 Art Alive Members' PreviewFriday, August 6, 2021 SDMA+ Naruwan Taiko: In the Forced VortexFriday, September 17, 2021 SDMA+ Disco Riot: Everything You See Could Be a Lie

Life for a Latinx immigrant family in the New South can be challenging and sometimes terrifying, but thankfully, there are still fiestas. "¡Fiesta Quinceañera!' weaves the lives of three Latina girls and an LGBTQ activist as they celebrate their quinceañera, a complex and colorful rite of passage.

We explore the art of having civil conversations with those you passionately disagree with.

NPR's pop critic and correspondent shares her favorite albums of this year.

Over 13 days beginning on Oct. 16, 1962, the U.S. and Soviet Union were at the brink of a nuclear conflict. But since the Cold War ended, some historical assumptions about the crisis have changed.