The groundbreaking virtuoso organist and 2015 Harman-Eisner Artist in Residence will speak with entertainment-industry leader Michael Eisner about his meteoric career rise and vision for the future of his instrument. Accompanied by live performance.

The televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley in the summer of 1968 are the subject of the new PBS documentary. They skyrocketed ABC from dead last in the ratings and birthed a new era in public discourse. Today the heavily scripted exchanges of Sunday-morning television and 24-hour news are a far cry from the explosive but informed vitriol that surrounded the arguments between two of our country’s towering intellectuals. A discussion on the current health — or infirmity —...

In collaboration with the New Orleans Police Department, the City of New Orleans, New Orleans City Council, and the Youth Empowerment Project, gallery owner Jonathan Ferrara and artist Brian Borello started decommissioning guns and handing them to a variety of diverse artists to interpret. Taken off the streets of New Orleans via a gun buyback program, the guns have been distributed to over 30 internationally known artists to use as the raw materials in making works of art dealing with the...

Harman-Eisner Artist in Residence Goldie Hawn joins Michael Eisner for a discussion about her career and the work she continues to support through the Hawn Foundation, which takes up as its mission the needs of children. Learn how the Foundation uses mindfulness to help young people develop social and emotional intelligence, and, in turn, reduce the distress and distraction within their educations that leads to increased rates of dropout.

Two of America’s most powerful poetic voices join with the Aspen Student Poets to explore how their art can tackle some of the most difficult social-justice questions we face today. Walt Whitman wrote in 1855, “Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most need poets.” In the past year we have witnessed images of our country at war with itself; how can poetry dispel alienation and give rise to a new level of citizenship in America?

When poverty, blight, and neglect devastate cities, it is often artists who step in to revitalize them, restoring opportunity and hope. The art of creative placemaking is a powerful force for recasting the futures of our most troubled urban centers. Learn how from two of the masters, Houston’s 2014 MacArthur Fellow Rick Lowe and Detroit’s Powerhouse co-founder Gina Reichert.

Memoir can be a powerful tool for grappling with the most challenging moments of our lives. Elizabeth Alexander’s new book, The Light of the World, allowed the acclaimed writer to grapple with the tragic, sudden death of her husband. She shares how the work opened pathways to healing and how one woman’s grief can provide a universal framework for finding our place in the world.

Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, educator and a leading advocate of American culture. He is the world’s first jazz artist to perform and compose across the full jazz spectrum from its New Orleans roots to bebop to modern jazz. Jon Batiste is a New Orleans-bred, New York-based musician, educator, and humanitarian, and the new band leader of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” The two will discuss the genius of jazz with Walter Isaacson.

International artists are using their creative voices to restore nuance in a country that is often most defined by its stark religious, ethnic, and economic divides. Discover how music and photography are vehicles to inspire in Israel an enlargement of its community and a diminution of its boundaries.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts. Its chairman Jane Chu speaks with incoming Brooklyn Museum president Anne Pasternak about fulfilling the NEA’s mission of providing Americans the “opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities.”