Earlier we posted an audio podcast of the talk between Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska and WNYC’s Leonard Lopate at the Y in March. Get more insight from the evening with the video above which includes Hagel’s views on political pundits and their “patriotic” charges. He has a word or two for Rush Limbaugh and crowd.

Related Talks: Steve Coll in Conversation with Leonard Lopate: The Bin Ladens (May 15), Scott McClellan with Dan Rather: Inside the Bush White House (Jun 4), Bill Moyers in Conversation with Phil Donahue: On Democracy (Jun 10), Drew Westen, PhD, on the Political Brain (Jun 12) and Barbara Walters in Conversation with Frank Rich (Jun 17)

“By combining ideas of contemporary painting, sculpture and crafts into multimedia forms my vision becomes realized. It is informed by my love of the land, a sense of nostalgia for home and ideas of culture. Themes of joy, sentimentality, celebration, loss, humor, environmental beauty and destruction imbue my work with content.”
—Eddie Dominguez

Stephen Fleming, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program Director, wrote of Eddie Dominguez in 2002:

In the mid-Eighties Eddie Dominguez began examining the way household objects function in our culture. Not with “punny” ironies (which would have been so easy considering the ceramic work of that period), but with an open reverence for the ceremonial and symbolic potential for the most humble places, events and things in our lives. He has, over the years, “re-contextualized” just about every room in the house. And, in his own way, de-constructed: tacky tourist trinkets, minimalism, the vessel, the landscape, dinnerware, race, craft, main-street and the family home.

Eddie’s work has eluded the twin pitfalls of becoming overly formalistic or wallowing in ethnicity. The youngest of eight kids, Eddie grew up in Tucumcari, New Mexico between the cheap motels of old route 66 and the train tracks. But Eddie’s story is more than a cliché of a small-town-boy-makes-good. At it’s heart lay an infectious optimism and joy that baffles both the jaded post-modernist and confounds the categorizers. And while there is an uplifting quality to Eddie’s work, there is also an edge...an edge between art and craft, between cute and beautiful, between Anglo and Hispanic, between chic and kitsch and between the mundane and the visionary.

His pieces pictured above, Adam and Eve and Night Garden go for $12,000 each but for a much lower price you can attend his lecture and slide show at the Y on May 20 in conjunction with his Mosaics workshop.

[Ceramics at the Y]