[narrator 1] Art Loft is brought to you by.

[narrator 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[narrator 1] The MiamiDade County Tourist Development Council, The MiamiDade County Department Of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council.

The MiamiDade County mayor and the Board of County Commissioners, and the Friends Of South Florida PBS.

[kyla] Art Loft, it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, "10 Years of Art Loft".

We celebrate a decade of the arts in South Florida.

[donald] I'm really proud to be able to pass this legacy on.

[kyla] With a look at some of our favorite Emmywinning segments.

[nannete] It's joy, it's the sense of wonderment that only a great work of art can give you.

[kyla] As we kick off our look through the years, let's go back to the beginning, with this guy, Neil Hecker.

[neil] It was couple of streams simultaneously.

We were looking for funding to do a full arts channel.

At the same time there was a PBS initiative to create an arts half hour for stations to use.

So we didn't get the funding for the full 24/7 channel, but we were able to get funding from the Knight Foundation for the half hour program, and that was the seed for Art Loft.

[kyla] Neil had a vision for a quick response team for the arts, a great producer, and a couple of shooter editors cranking out art stories from the Keys to Jupiter every week.

That formula laid the groundwork for a decade of Emmywinning arts coverage.

Along the way, we've met some legends of contemporary art.

This is not a retrospective, but yet we are starting with one of your earliest works from 1958.

Well, it's a kind of tradition for exhibitions for older artists to begin with their student work.

Okay.

[frank] So I didn't wanna break the tradition.

[bonnie] And this but, that's quite a student work.

This is something you did Princeton University.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

This is unsized cotton duck which you could buy fairly cheaply in rolls, and then so you were able to roll out a big piece and then work on it and paint on it.

It's a landscape or basically a seascape in a way, or the beach.

If it isn't the beach, I don't know what it is.

So you've always worked in series.

Is there a reason why you prefer working in series?

[frank] No, but I mean once you start, I mean, I don't think of it exactly as a series.

There's a fair amount of difference between the paintings that are in the series.

[bonnie] Mmh!

[frank] So the ideas evolve.

[kyla] In 2019, we worked with the ICA Miami, to capture lightning in a bottle with artist, Judy Chicago.

I'm really excited to share a "Purple Poem for Miami" with you.

We've been working on it for a year.

We're giving Miami we hope a gift that you will enjoy.

So please, please enjoy "A Purple Poem for Miami."

Thank you.

Before this is over, let me tell you that one of my goals with these pieces was to soften and feminize the environment, and show the world what it would look like if we were all kinder and more generous with each other.

[kyla] We've also met the next generation of artists, challenging perceptions and inviting viewers to see the world through their eyes.

[natasha] I pushed the envelope by asking What now, what next?

And what if?

Expanding and accelerating, I am Imagination.

It's not unnatural for an artist to burst out into abstract painting because what you're doing is you're losing an image, and it becomes all about shapes and colors.

And for me I see it as a very high form of expression and extremely challenging, because you're losing the trees and the ocean, and trying to emote and communicate through brush stroke, color, paint, energy.

In my heart and in my soul I'm a storyteller.

And whatever medium you'd land on as an artist, it's storytelling.

[jen] That whole experience and even still because it's still like available to watch, has been amazing.

It was like one big warm hug.

[kyla] The key to this decade of coverage, our dedicated producers and videographers, and our amazing local content partners.

Teams like Lisa Leoni, Jonathan David Kane, and Renee Miralis, who worked with the Perez Art Museum Miami on this Emmywinning story, "Remembering Surrounded Islands."

[joseph] Christo will come up with an idea and then he will do what someone would think in architecture would be a rendering.

But in this case, this is the art.

The money that he would pay for the project, the entire installation and all the people associated with it, would come from the artwork.

And that caused people to not exactly understand what this was about.

The opposition was not knowing what it was, not understanding it.

And there was no way to describe it.

He's going to take fabric that floats and put it, why?

Why would he do?

Can't we use that money someplace else?

Was a recurring theme.

No one would believe that the artist funded the project himself.

[kyla] Producer, Serena Jimenez, and videographer, Jogen Dividal, both racked up Emmys while working on "Art Loft."

Each producing or shooting over 100 "Art Loft" segments including this 2015 Emmywinning look at glass sculptor, Dale Chihuly's installation at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

[nannete] We are here at Fairchild Tropical Botanic garden considered to be one of the greatest tropical gardens in the world, and it sits right here in MiamiDade county, so it's this great gem of a botanical rich heritage.

And what we trying do is really create a hub for cultural science education and conservation right here within this wonderful magical garden, so that everybody can understand how important it is to conserve tropical plants especially within an urban environment, as well as create cultural richness that allow people to connect with art and nature, and music and nature, and everything related to the gardens as a muse.

Fairchild started as our program in 2005, and our very first art exhibit was the Dale Chihuly.

And it seemed very appropriate to celebrate our 10th anniversary by bringing Dale Chihuly back to Fairchild, and what makes his medium, which has glass, so wonderful within a garden setting is that it's very malleable, it's very soft.

Glass is not soft, but the forms themselves can be very soft.

And so you get these great, bold designs, and then you also get these very organic and sinewy pieces that just feel like they're oftentimes considered plants.

You don't necessarily know if you're looking at a plant or if you're looking at glass.

You're required to take a more careful look.

And that's really great for both an art person and as well as a plant person, because you're forced to look at things that perhaps you would have walked by, and allows us to perhaps highlight certain things on a more subjective level.

So right behind me is a Polyvitro Chandelier, one of Dale's not glass sculptures.

And Polyvitro is really just Italian for polyurethane glass.

As you can see this piece is quite large, it's probably 25 feet large, and something that big would be exorbitantly heavy in glass.

So he created Polyvitro as a way to be able to do these great grand scale sculptures, but still have them be practical.

What you have over to my right when you pan over, you're gonna see the beautiful Sol de Citron, which is a piece that was made specifically for Fairchild.

And what it does, is that it really is very sensitive to this beautiful ruelle, and ruelle is a French word for alley essentially.

And the garden designers wanted the sense of mystery.

So you're walking on this dark ruelle, dappled light, and then you open up to this great big key hole, and that key hole is bright and lit and sun stricken.

So you get the sense of expansiveness.

You're gonna get pieces that sit within the arid garden that are very tough, very rigid, very staunch.

And they're designed to look very much like an arid garden, very much in keeping with zeroscaping.

And then you get into the rainforest, which is significantly more romantic and central, and you get pieces that move.

And pieces that are much more discreet and less aggressive and less angry, for lack of a better word.

[kyla] "Art Loft" producer, Kyla Ryan and videographer Nicole Malenga brought us this Emmy winning look at Dance Theater of Harlem's Miami visit.

My name is Donald Williams.

I'm a former principal dancer with Dance Theater of Harlem.

As part of its 50th anniversary has brought back Geoffrey Holder's doogla, which is one of the signature pieces of Dance Theater of Harlem from way back.

It was originally choreographed in 1974.

As a signature piece, but then in the nineties he did a revamp and he used me as the central character, the principal dancer to update it and make it more relevant to the future, and now it's a timeless piece.

You see what I'm saying?

Like that much, that much stuff.

Yeah.

So that's where you can go.

In this particular dance, a lot of the movements are very simple.

They'll just be arms, heads, and then the most important part of this would be the eyes when you turn your head to the front.

And the expression that you give, what you're saying with your face as you make the movement, what you could bring to the steps.

You bring your own flavor, your own extra feeling to it, what you're saying in your eyes and your face and in your body as well.

That's something that you can't really pass on through a video, you have to pass that on from person to person.

And so now I'm really proud to be able to pass this legacy on.

Because the company is smaller now, we have to have supplements, and we use local dancers from the different places that we go to perform this particular ballet.

Here we're gonna be using Peter London Ballet Company.

What I came here to do first is to begin to teach them before the company comes so that they know the work, and then the company comes and then we put it together and the magic happens.

I really appreciate the hard work that they've done.

I spent a long career at Dance Theater of Harlem, I was a principal dancer there for 27 years.

What Dance Theater of Harlem was about, was trying to give opportunities to dancers of color to perform in classical ballet.

That was the original thing, because there was a thought that dancers of color couldn't do classical ballet.

Before we were trying to prove that dancers of color could do classical ballet.

Now that we know that that's a fact and we can do it, now we're trying to do everything.

We wanna make sure that we continue to do what Dance Theater of Harlem was always known for, which is being able to do all styles and do them all well, and also provide opportunities for dancers of color to do classical ballet, to do contemporary.

It's all about access, opportunity, and excellence.

Just our presence makes it possible for students who are coming up to see, I can become a ballet dancer if I want to.

If they see people who are actually achieving it, then they can be it.

[kyla] Filmmakers Mike Launi and Vanessa Perez profiled local band, Sun Ghosts, in this Emmywinning segment filled with sunsoaked heat.

One, two, three, four Hey baby, I know it sounds crazy But we should get naked And all our troubles are through Oh lover, I want no other I wish we discover All the things we can doo [nik] I met Armenio Crocodile Deathspin Rivero.

He was in my music business two class, and we always talked about starting a side project band together because we were both in our own bands at the time.

[jared] My sister invited me to this like really cool barbecue that I knew a lot of people from other bands were going.

And I was like super stoked, I'm like, "Yeah, I might get to meet all these bands."

And I was like, "Yeah, I wanna go."

And Nick was one of those guys.

He was friends with these people like in a bunch of other bands, and he was in this one band that wasn't working out.

And he had this thing going with Crocodile and he really wanted to do something.

And I had just been to Detroit like the day before, I just saw the Chili Peppers and he had a Chili Peppers tattoo on his wrist.

So I was like, "Dude, I just saw them."

And he's like, "Oh man where?"

It just kind of like sparked a conversation and then it got really rowdy, and he had threw me in the pool, and I was like, "Oh my God!

I gotta be in this guy's band."

So I called up Armenio and he was actually our first drummer, but he was always talking about his best friend Louie and saying how incredible of a drummer he was.

They'd been playing in bands together since they were in like third grade.

Louie actually ended up quitting his job as like a top 40 blue martini drummer, because he saw us twice and really saw a lot of potential and knew that this was the band that he wanted to be in.

That little six month period of us figuring everything out was cool.

'Cause it was like not too many cooks in the kitchen, we could just kind of figure out what sound we want to have a general idea, then we got with Louie, it was like okay, like boom, like this guy's rhythms.

Like everything that he's applying to it, now we got a sound, we can roll with it.

The genre usually, my quick answer when I tell somebody.

Like, "Yoh man, what does it sound like?"

"Well, you know the Ramon's went to the beach more."

And he's like that you know?

The finest, surf rock, sock hop, punk rock your ears can taste.

Like we have a song that's just like a poppy, surfy, fun song, then we have "Viping Villains", it's like a dark harmonic minor song.

We have "Dose" that's a straight up punk song.

We got "Met Me at the Rainbow Bridge", it's just like a ballad, a psychedelic.

Like it just takes you on a trip.

So it's hard to pinpoint it but I feel like we have our own sound.

Like if you hear one of our songs you'll know it's us.

For the sake of just giving it some sort of a label, It's rock and roll with guys that grew up in a place that is not meant for rocknroll.

Now we're coasting Out along the waves And we're ghosting There's nothing more to say [kyla] We wrap up our walk down memory lane with local arts guru and filmmaker, Dennis Shul, and our content partners at Light Arts.

[dennis] I've had the good fortune of being involved in Art Loft in so many ways.

But particularly as a filmmaker.

I've made a number of segments for Art Loft about our community's artists.

And it's always a privilege to be able to have your work seen in such a wide distribution of audience.

Art Loft gives filmmakers a chance to be seen and to have their careers grow.

We appreciate that.

[kyla] Here's the Oohlight team's Emmywinning profile, of visual artist, Jen Clay, "The Texture of Anxiety."

[jen] When I was a child I had a lot of sleep paralysis.

I would be awake and I would see things, and then I also like had hallucinations till I was about like nine.

I make video, I make installation, I make performance, and for those pieces, I make like textiles that maybe are worn or performed like puppets.

I make like Claymation, I make stop motion animation, I film the costume pieces, and I collage those videos, and then maybe I project that and then I might interact with it again in a performance.

My work is like colorful and playful and I use texture so that people will at least know how it feels or wanna touch it, and that's really just bait.

I just want people to get in close.

With these pieces themselves like, that's not really the work.

It's more like they're props for an installation or a performance or a video, it's just a scenario for the viewer to interact with.

At the core of my work there is anxiety and depression, but really I'm thinking of like loneliness and isolation and vulnerability, and trying not to invade anyone else, but maybe I want to make them feel a little strange.

I think that people who also are depressed or have issues with panic, they'll see my work and feel like they have a home that they'll feel seen, but also the people that don't experience those things that they can understand the feeling of just like a little bit of chaos.

I think that, that is like where I do my best work.

I make a lot of wearables.

They're meant to not be a person, to not be symbols, to not be categorized, you're just encountering really uncertainties.

Hi, excuse me.

Yes, you.

Do you mind if we ask you some questions?

I enjoy having these costumes, these ambiguous creatures talk to you directly and they don't explain anything.

They don't explain why they are there, or what they are exactly.

He said we had to be quiet.

A lot of times my wearables are wanting to become friends with you.

And they're desperately wanting to become friends with you as an audience member.

Yeah so, sometimes we practice just so we can be perfect for you.

We wanna be perfect just like you.

They might be like really generic, like let's be friends.

And that could come from like a Mr. Rodgers, or that would be different if it was like an alien or the devil.

My work aesthetically isn't serious, but I'm dead serious, like about the meaning.

So that's something I constantly struggle with.

I'm also maybe not the most serious person either, or like I laugh a lot, but I think that the humor helps us as a human race to deal with those harder topics.

You need to show us on your insides?

Okay.

I think ambiguity is really interesting.

It's a cognitive dissonance where you can't really situate the feeling or the idea, or maybe the relationship.

That's my favorite place to be, that's where I want to live, and that's where I want all my work to live.

So I want it to be like inviting, but a little repulsive.

I wanna make large work so you feel small.

I wish that I could make things that were both terrible and terrific, and that's really like my aim, and I think that's something that I will always be trying to get at.

[kyla] We hope you've enjoyed our look back at "Art Loft" through the years, and we hope you'll tag us on Instagram with your favorite South Florida art memories from the past decade.

You'll find us @artloftsfl.

[narrator 1] "Art Loft" is brought to you by.

[narrator 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[narrator 1] The Miami Dade County Tourist Development Council, the MiamiDade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the MiamiDade County mayor and the Board of County Commissioners, and the Friends of South Florida PBS.