View a gallery of vintage photos of Martha Graham's performances

A visual biography of Martha Graham

This history of the modern dancer's life uses archival photos and videos to illustrate how Graham's childhood, especially her upbringing by a psychiatrist and her early dance performance, set the stage for her career.

Martha Graham's revolutionary approach to choreography

The dancer and choreographer created a uniquely American form of ballet that brought together stories from the country's history, abstract expressionism, modern psychological ideas, and collaborations with other major artists.

How Martha Graham challenged ballet's rigidity

Ballet prized lightness, but Graham's choreography emphasized weight. This essay explores how her work broke from European influences to embrace American idioms, much as her American contemporaries in jazz and literature did.

Watch Martha Graham perform 'Heretic'

The 1929 piece features Graham in white, expressively dancing on her own, flanked by 12 dancers in black who follow a more rigid choreography. Some critics have argued the piece was an allegory for Graham's rebellion against ballet's strict traditions.

Listen to the last-known interview with Martha Graham

Reporter Michael Small interviewed the influential choreographer and dancer in 1989 for People magazine, two years before she died, and features the 95-year-old looking back on her life and career. If you want to skip ahead to the raw audio, jump to 26:40.

How the Martha Graham Company experiments with technology

The dance company was the first major group to livestream rehearsals and has collaborated with Google on a version of Graham's "Lamentation" that superimposes past performances on the present-day dancer.

Exploring Martha Graham's 'love of the body'

The innovative choreographer encouraged her dancers to tune into their bodies' natural movements. According to Dr. Kimerer L. LaMothe, author of "What the Body Knows," that kind of mindfulness made them better able to communicate a piece's symbolic meaning.

Watch Martha Graham perform 'Lamentation,' an influential piece on grief

Graham choreographed and performed the piece about grief, which premiered in 1930. The dance is performed while seated, with Graham's character attempting to free herself from an all-encompassing purple jersey.

Martha Graham on preparation and discipline

This clip from the 1957 documentary "A Dancer's World" features the dancer explaining why she's committed all of her energy to her art. "Spontaneity … is something arrived at over years and years of training," she says, "it is not a mere chance."

A step-by-step guide to the Martha Graham Technique

This BBC explainer walks you through Martha Graham's famous approach to dance, offering you six moves you can work into your exercise regiment—or Graham-inspired routine.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Why the US State Department sponsored Martha Graham Dance Company tours

The Graham company toured the globe several times on cultural exchange campaigns throughout the 1950s. Some believe that the Graham Company, in particular, was chosen because it was the first integrated dance company in the US, thereby countering international perceptions of American segregation and racism.

Unpacking 'Night Journey,' Martha Graham's take on a Greek myth

The dance piece was inspired by the story of Oedipus, as well as by more contemporary psychoanalytic theories from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. This JSTOR article explores how Graham's show merged those texts with her singular approach to movement to explore gender and identity.

Watch Helen Keller visit Martha Graham's studio

The two women were friends, and Keller eventually visited Graham's studio while her company was rehearsing. In this footage of that encounter, Graham shows Keller the shape of her choreography.

Watch a performance of the influential ballet 'Appalachian Spring'

This performance of the American ballet—choreographed by Martha Graham, with music composed by Aaron Copland—about a small community in 19th-century Pennsylvania, aired in 1959 on Pittsburgh's WQED.

How Martha Graham's 'Rite of Spring' imposed order on chaos

Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is famously chaotic, making it an odd choice for Graham's highly precise style. Her 1984 choreography for it, however, redefined how people saw the ballet's score. Graham's version is still performed today; below is an excerpt from a 2018 performance by the Paris Opera.

Martha Graham refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics

Graham turned down an invitation to perform at that year's Summer Games in Berlin, citing the Nazi regime's persecution of artists and implying that Jewish members of her company would not be welcome. "Chronicle," a work about the rise of fascism, debuted in New York the following December.

Marina Abramović helped popularize performance art

Working across continents for over five decades has made Abramović one of the most recognizable and prolific performance artists in history. Her shocking oeuvre has involved self-harm, public nudity, exotic animals, and fire.

Fifty backstage photos of musicians in the 1970s

Elton John, James Brown, Cher, Diana Ross, and many others all have famous photos seen multiple times on album covers, iconic images from events, and more. Rare is the unseen backstage photo of the greats, lounging or rocking out or, like Bo Diddley, frying up some chicken pre-show at the Garden. Peruse this incredible collection of candid shots of 1970s stars waiting in the wings to come on stage.

Explore a collection of media depicting major milestones from the life of Grace Hopper

The gallery features Hopper's meeting with President Ronald Reagan, her attendance at the groundbreaking of the Grace Murray Hopper Service Center—a Naval data processing facility—and her Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony.

Check out pictures from the Bauhaus' elaborate costume parties

Bauhaus is known for its innovation, but, at the end of the day, it was still an art school. That means parties were regular occurrences and often featured elaborate costumes—Gropius once dressed as the renowned architect Le Corbusier, while Kandinsky was known for pretending to be an antenna.

Pictures of paintings: a virtual art museum

If you can't get to the art museum, maybe try bringing the art museum to you. This independent project presents photographs of select classic, public-domain paintings in an interactive format so you can get the full museum effect from home. Note:...

View photos of classic New York graffiti

Henry Chalfant was one of the foremost documentarians of early graffiti and hip-hop culture, photographing some of the era's most iconic pieces and playing a part in the genre-defining "Style Wars" film. This interview with him is accompanied by some of his photos from an exhibit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, showcasing the art form as it came into its own.

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Richard Hamilton's iconic pop art collage inspired the set of 'Barbie' (2023)

Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa House in Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" was inspired by Hamilton's jumbled vision of a home in "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" Set designers cited the work as inspiring the mishmash of Americana imagery in the man cave.

Explore Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of New York

While the artist is most commonly associated with painting natural landscapes, specifically in the American Southwest, O’Keeffe also captured the industrial world while living in New York City. Her time in New York played a crucial role in establishing her reputation in the art world.

See what women's tennis looked like through history

Women playing tennis today wear athletic clothing tailored to the demands of the sport. But when tennis started in the late 1800s, women were expected to play wearing long, Victorian dresses. Using historic photos, this Bustle article explores how tennis was brought to the US, what it looked like at the 1900 Olympics, and how the sport has grown since its inception.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Dorothy's famous entrance into Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz' relied on analog tricks, including a body double and sepia-toned paint, as much as it did on technology

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

See photos of Meteora, a mountainous site in central Greece, home to 14th-century monasteries perched atop soaring outcroppings.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

After her fellow cult members tried to kill her with an LSD-infused hamburger, one member of the Manson Family, the murderous cult led by Charles Manson, decided to testify against the group's leader.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.