[Narrator] "Art Loft" is brought to you by [Narrator 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft", It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, mixed media.

Miami inspires a different take on street art.

[Kern] Graffiti is part of what influenced this whole process for me, like appreciation for the history of graffiti, appreciation for people who really know how to use paint spray paint, in a way that, I mean, you wouldn't believe, and I just didn't know about all this before.

None of it is, it just, Miami changed everything for me.

[Narrator] We catch up with three artists from the Fountain Head residency [Miles] For the audience, they're walking into a situation in which the performance has already started when they arrive and it's still going when they leave, they don't really have the option to see it as a linear piece, right?

Like it becomes somehow circular, cyclical.

I want time to move differently when somebody walks into one of my installations.

[Narrator] And the NSU Museum introduces us to the colorful world of Wallace Ting, all that and more in this episode of "Art Loft".

Miami is a haven for street art.

So much so it's home to the world's first Museum of Graffiti.

We head to the museum to meet Kern Myrtle, an anonymous street artist with a unique take on the medium.

[Kern] When you find, like you find something cool on the street or anywhere, you have this feeling, it's like, oh, what's this?

You know, this is, oh, I can take this?

This is for me?

That's something that you don't find very often in life.

I am Kern Myrtle, and I am an artist.

Well, I do a lot of weird things.

I use yarn as a form of street art, which is known around the world as yarn bombing, where you put your yarn in a public space for people to find or see.

The way I tend to do it is leaving little pieces for people to find.

And with the intention of spreading joy and having that joy of discovery.

There's a tag on it and it says, "Hello, this is for you.

Please take it with you.

Or please give it a home."

And it has my name and my social media on it.

And so if people find it and they wanna tell me they found it, that's great.

I moved to Miami a few years ago and I didn't really know people and it was a new place to me.

And I was very, I was trying to find my place here.

It just occurred to me that I needed to do something and that I can't, I mean, the only way I can explain this is I was sort of called to do it.

I felt compelled to do it.

I was like, I need to make something and give it out so that someone can find it and maybe their day's a little bit better.

And if their day is better, then maybe that spreads.

These little weird, they kind of look like jellyfish, these strange organic little objects.

And I had a few of 'em and that was what I just decided.

I was like, I feel I have to do this.

I put it out the first time in May 9th, 2019 is my street art birthday.

And the person who found it, it posted it on Instagram and I had like zero followers.

But I had started a little account, and it turns out he is a really important graffiti artist and general creative, amazing creative person.

And I was like, well, if he thought it was art, maybe it is.

And so I was like, well, that was fun.

I'm wanna do that again.

And I just started doing it.

I mean there, I've probably left, I think by the count it's around 300 or more pieces like that on the street to be found.

So that's just something I haven't, I haven't stopped.

I still do it.

It started with yarn and then over time I began to work, well I got to know other people who painted here in Wynwood, because Wynwood is really where this all starts for me.

It's a story about yarn, that one-to-one dialogue with one person finding it.

But then starting to meet people who taught me about spray paint and taught me about the world of graffiti and street art.

So in 2020, I did an installation all by myself called, "This is For You" with Giant letters that said, "this is for you".

And all the little things I like to give out.

I probably put out 50 of those throughout that week.

And I just did it.

I was like, I'm gonna stage my own art show on a fence.

You know, I'm not really waiting for somebody to tell me it's okay, or this is art or whatever.

And the reaction was great.

I mean, people were taking stuff and then watching it change through the week.

'cause I didn't know if anyone would even notice it.

And then over the week, almost all of it was gone.

And I just kept rearranging it and playing with it.

And so that was my first time doing that.

And then in '21 I started to meet some more yarn artists on Instagram, which is kind of where our community hangs out.

The yarn community that I'm a part of.

And I just sort of, kind of casually said, Hey, anybody wanna join me?

I'm gonna do something called, why not?

And you can send me anything you want based on the prompt why not?

And I'll put it up with my thing.

And I got a lot of responses.

And these are not people who I knew personally, or I've never met most of them in real life.

And they were so excited.

They were like, we're in Wynwood.

I'm like, yeah, you're in Wynwood.

You're at Art Week.

You're at Art Basel.

And that was really cool to see that.

And I did a small one last year in '22, but it was smaller 'cause I was doing two murals at the same time.

So I didn't have as much time to do that project.

But I did put out a few from people, some of the same people.

And we call ourselves the yarn weirdos, because we're not really following the yarn rules.

In 2023, we did, "Yes, yes, yes."

So I said, same thing, the prompt is so simple, it's just respond.

I'm gonna do something about yes or a yes no choice.

And I got all kinds of things.

I got more than 20 pieces from the UK, from Mexico, from all over the US, and some people again who I don't know, I've never met in real life.

And they just send me their stuff and we put it up and then watch people respond to it, take it, and then I rearrange things and we just keep it going as long as possible.

When I was putting this up the other day, a little girl, the original stuff I put up, a little girl walked by, and she goes, "What is this?"

And I go, it's some art made with yarn.

She was on her way to school.

She was like, she went, "Ah, I seen my grandma do that."

Okay, you hear that a lot.

Every time I do an installation like that, a bigger installation, I make a sign just like a gallery sign, that explains what this piece is, gives it a name, lists the artist, and, and shows a QR code to my Instagram where I'm always talking about all the other people who are involved.

Because I think it's important for people to understand that you don't have to be in a place with white walls or a place where a curator said it was okay to show your art.

I mean, I wanna show my art to everybody.

I want anyone who's walking down the street, no matter whether they care about art or think they're going to see art that day, I want them to have a chance to see it.

And if they respond to it, that's great.

And if it doesn't strike their fancy or they even notice it at all, that's also fine.

But I think every person should have a chance to see it and experience it and touch it.

I mean, you can touch it, you can take it down, you can just touch it, you can take a photo with it, you know, I wanna share it that way, completely open to all.

So knowing people who are expert muralists helped me take an abstract design that I was doing based on my yarn, on paper with watercolors, and then bring that onto a wall.

And I'm interested in that design and how this abstraction based on these yarn patterns is a whole nother thing.

You know, it's a whole nother place to go.

And it isn't, it isn't anything.

It is not trying to be something.

I'm not painting a flower or a house.

So it's living way out in abstraction, but it is grounded in this reality.

It's grounded in this reality.

Very much so.

And if you look at my wall, different walls I've done, you'll see this, you know, these elements, this kind of, the holes in the strands, it's part of it.

It's interesting.

And I like that it comes from a real physical item that I made.

So it isn't just like a random design or like a pretty piece of lace.

It's something that I made and now it's huge on a wall.

And I love it.

I want to do more.

I wanna do more of everything.

The joy of discovery is really where this is at for me.

And this extends to all everything I do.

When I do my name in yarn, it is, I am writing my name in yarn.

If you call it graffiti or not, you can whatever, but I'm putting my name there.

I'm not just putting flowers.

I'm not just wrapping a pole, like a lot of people do, which is fine if that's what they wanna do, but I wanna put my name out there.

And that's that part of graffiti, that's why we're here at the Museum of Graffiti, because graffiti is part of what influenced this whole process for me.

Like appreciation for the history of graffiti, appreciation for people who really know how to use paint, spray paint in a way that, I mean, you wouldn't believe.

And I just didn't know about all this before, none of this, Miami changed everything for me.

[Narrator] Sculptures by the artist and musician, Lonnie Holley were recently shown at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, as part of its show, "Material Witness, Folk and Self-Taught Artist at Work", curator Brooke Wyatt, shared with WNET Public Media, what makes the works so spectacular.

I'm Brooke Wyatt, and I'm the Loose Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum.

This is "Material Witness, Folk and Self-Taught Artists at Work".

Material Witness focuses on, of course, the materials and the substances like clay, wood, rock, stone, metal, that artists work with to make the objects that are in this museum's collection.

Lonnie Holley's working in Atlanta, currently, making large scale paintings and sculptures, and he is also a sound artist and musician.

In that work he's very collaborative, working with other artists.

For Material Witness, I wanted to highlight how Lonnie Holley collaborates with materials that he uses.

The sculpture on view here is called, "Cleaning Up After the Games", Holley has manipulated wire to create these silhouette forms that repeat throughout the piece, and put those together with a plethora of found objects.

Upon closed inspection, you can identify a metal dust pan, a plastic bottle, some plastic cutlery, all manner of fiber and fabric, just some pieces of artificial flowers or greenery worked together, to create this form and space.

Lonnie Holley has transformed, you know, what some people would consider trash into a work of art that has its own kind of life, and that invites viewers to interact with it in space.

It was exciting to show also a painting of Lonnie Holley's the dates from 1991.

It's not a painting where you see those silhouette forms that, that Holley refer returns to so much.

But you do see the way the artist has applied paint to this composite or plywood surface.

And I see it as very sculptural the way that he moves around the picture plain in terms of the composition and his use of color and form.

I wanted to think about a relationship between Lonnie Holley working in paint, Lonnie Holley working with sculpture and found objects, because crossing those different domains is so fundamental to his process.

[Narrator] Our partners at Fountain Head Arts, offer a unique residency program.

Each month, bringing three artists from around the globe to Miami for a month-long stay.

As part of the work life experience, Fountainhead has been documenting these visits on film.

Here we meet three multimedia artists at work.

[Tamara] In my work, I'm dealing a lot with storytelling.

A lot of my work deals with asking people to consider the body through these secondary or intermediate objects, simultaneous presence and absence of the body, and what stories are encoded on our physical selves.

A lot of the craft techniques that I use in my work are direct references to African traditional craftsmanship and to things that I grew up with in households.

There are a number of layers of languages that exist in my work, because I am really invested in these secret languages that are developed out of necessity or out of safety or out of preservation.

And my hope is to present something beautiful to the viewer that they can be compelled by.

Even if they don't speak those languages, even if they're not well versed or literate in that particular tongue, that they take something from it or feel a sense of intrigue.

But then there's another layer of reward if you do.

I have a printmaking background.

So from printmaking as a reductive form of mark making to tattooing as working with skin, leather tooling was a really natural extension of that.

It kind of marries those two ways of working and ways of drawing, but it's also ultimately drawing on skin in a different way.

[Miles] Performance was something I had access to.

Something that everybody has access to.

It was something that I could just start doing and get an immediate response from my own body, from the bodies of my audience.

Duration kind of came quite naturally to me, because my first love was always sculpture.

So I started making performances that felt like sculpture.

For the audience, they're walking into a situation in which the performance has already started when they arrive and it's still going when they leave.

They don't really have the option to see it as a linear piece, right?

Like it becomes somehow circular, cyclical.

I want time to move differently when somebody walks into one of my installations.

I started to experience a lot internally as I started to evolve into like formats, you know, going past like two hours now, five hours now, eight hours now, 12 hours or 24 hours.

You experience a lot as a performer.

And so it sort of began my fascination with ritual, with the ways in which people kind of channel the divine.

Creating something that feels infinite, that feels like it's always gonna be there, it's quite powerful.

[Christian] So my work has a lot to do with migration, adaptation, feeling like someone who's caught between two worlds or living between places.

I also think lot about hierarchies and the different ways that different cultures deal with how we look at reality and how that reality is constructed.

And I think painting's sort of a way to, it's a way to converse with the universe and with reality and with what's going on around me in a way that the paintings can actually teach the artists and teach the viewer and form sort of a conversation rather than being a didactic practice of making a statement.

It's really nice to be somewhere where there's more diverse set of people and cultures sort of interacting in one city and one space.

My work often deals with how globalized the world has become and how immediate our access is to different stories and histories and cultures.

And being in a place where that's around in a general environment is also really lovely.

And just the color and storytelling of that is very inspirational, while I'm making work.

[Narrator] As artist, Stephanie Cole puts it, she paints with stuff, glass, wood, fiber, her mixed media constructions explore the many aspects of her life.

WGBH Boston takes us to the Fuller Craft Museum to see her work.

[Narrator 3] When it comes to the artwork of Stephanie Cole here, you'll find her life in pieces.

I found that building things and making things was what was really I was meant to do.

[Narrator 3] Within these wooden frames are bits of everything the artist has been collecting for more than 70 years.

Shards and shells, windows and words.

Even Cole's DNA is embedded within these assemblages.

Yes.

Are you thinking of the Royal Relic Quarry Window?

Probably in other places too.

I think there's some of my hair in the getting there.

[Narrator 3] Temples to the artist's tenacity.

These sculptures now on view at the Fuller Craft Museum represent how Cole has looked at herself, her grief and the world.

From the pain of losing a beloved cat to the euphoria of turning 60.

The one thing that is more joy than anything else is my self-portrait.

Domestic Goddess, it was supposed to be, self-portrait at age 60, but there were so many things going on, it wasn't done until age 63, but it's called Domestic Goddess because I was really happy with everything that I had accomplished [Narrator 3] An artist for as long as she can recall.

And well-documented here.

When she was four, Cole first learned from her artist father, then at art school.

She later became an art teacher, raised a family, and with her husband restored an antique home where she's excavated many an artifact now found in her work.

And it's here where she's had the luxury of working in a field to the Brim Studio, only since she was in her sixties.

You just get deep into it and I've had to learn to be able to portion it out because I'm still, I'm a grandma, I'm a mom, I'm a wife.

There are still responsibilities.

That's my first priority.

But I'm able to do it in bits and pieces and I'll tell 'em I'm going out in the studio and they're pretty good about letting me be.

To hear about an artist that was only creating for herself to make sense of the world around her, to chart her own history, is really compelling to me.

[Narrator 3] Elements of the show bring us deep into Cole's life and emotions.

We find a radiant rendering of her husband Jim, or "My Golden Man" as she crowns him and a frank assessment of her own aging.

The work is so personal, Cole never intended to sell or even really share it until curators like Beth McLaughlin took notice.

[Beth] She has this very deep understanding of objects and this very intuitive connection to material culture.

And she has a respect for the histories of these objects and for the embedded stories that come with them, to her.

[Narrator 3] It was Cole's daughters who urged her to put the work out in the world.

Art is the family business, by the way.

♪ I don't wanna wait for our lives to be over ♪ Her daughter, Paula Cole, is the Grammy winning singer and a chief champion.

Seeing her work in a museum leaves Stephanie Cole, both delighted and slightly perplexed.

[Stephanie] How do you go from being private to a museum that takes chutzpah, doesn't it?

So it was my daughter's chutzpah, not mine.

[Interviewer] And how do you feel about them being out now?

I love it.

I love it.

And what I love especially is people's reaction to it.

That's what I love.

[Narrator 3] Both Cole and McLaughlin say women in particular are drawn to her work, finding pieces of themselves among hers.

[Beth] I see an artist who is juggling the demands of family.

She also has very overtly feminist work, such as Don't Make the Tiger, which is a gorgeous mosaic piece that was created after the 2016 election, that is speaking directly to the oppression of women and how we do need to rise up and to fight for equality.

[Stephanie] It's mostly women that talk to me about their feelings about it.

They've said things like, I feel brave now.

I think I'm going to do things that I have not allowed myself to do.

Or they identify with moments, moments of grief or joy or materials lying around.

'Cause a lot of people collect things [Narrator 3] Because we are the sum of our parts or pieces.

[Narrator] The NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, brings us into the world of Wallace Ting.

The Chinese American painter's, neon-soaked landscapes, live at the intersection of Chinese aesthetics and American pop art.

[Jesse] He really loved the female form.

I always grew up with these images and with cuttings of Playboys all over the walls of his studio that he was painting from.

It's really about beauty and about aesthetics.

Same way he's trying to paint a parrot.

It's the the same process, it's the same idea of beauty.

The flower, the parrot, the woman, they're all the same.

Being a Chinese American, he didn't maybe typify American artists.

He wasn't always pushed out perhaps with other waves of American art.

He really felt that he did not want to be political.

He did not want to be generalized into a category, of a type or he was always a kind of transcendent, almost mystical kind of person.

Thankfully, even though it's some years later, thanks to NSU and other institutions like it, the recognition is coming.

[Narrator] "Art Loft" is on Instagram @ArtLoftsfl.

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"Art Loft" is brought to you by, [Narrator 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West [Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.