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

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

[narrator] 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 supporting Black ballets next generation and an immigrant artist reflects on the masks we wear.

[narrator] Coral Gables played host to a groundbreaking gathering last summer with the Memoirs of Black and Ballet Symposium bringing together professional dancers, teachers, and young dancers for a once in a lifetime experience.

As a Black ballet dancer, you're oftentimes either in the training pipeline, the only one or one of a few and then oftentimes in historically white ballet companies, you are the only one or one of the few.

For me, when I envisioned it the first time, I knew exactly what I wanted and I curate 360.

I curate the experience, not just the events, the feeling, the energy, the vibration.

I was blessed enough to to perform at Dance Theatre of Harlem and I was surrounded by blackness in ballet, so I understood that feeling and so I'm almost trying to recreate a microcosm of that experience, both for the students and for the dancers that had professional careers and have never been in a room full of Black ballet dancers.

I, as a dance journalist, write about some of the things that I see and diversity or the lack of diversity was one of them.

And so, you know, if you can't be a part of the solution, you're a part of the problem.

So that's how MoBBallet Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet came about.

And hold squeeze, squeeze, rotate- We have to support young Black dancers who are, again, one of the few, give them the understanding of how to navigate that space.

We're drafting a new blueprint for ballet and beyond because it really can be anything.

And so what happens if you begin to really value the full person and not just the art coming out of the body.

Seeing the scholars, the educators, the dancers, the choreographers, all moving with this collective drive and passion.

There's nothing that is like this symposium where it's a place of learning and educating and uplifting, but more than that, it continues through the mentoring that Theresa has curated.

The dancers then have these mentors that follow them through their training.

They can connect back with life questions or skills.

We are a co-host along with Sanctuary of the Arts.

So we have donated our space and our time and our energy and our love of what MoBBallet and Theresa Ruth Howard is doing.

We are just thrilled and honored to be a part of this momentous week.

The way we think of ballet, that's just one sliver.

The symposium gives them a look at the history so who came before and then that instills confidence.

That confidence then translates into then them performing and repeating and practicing their steps in a different way.

It's definitely important for our Black ballet students and teachers to be knowledgeable about their own history because that gives them a sense of pride.

And when you are standing in the room by yourself, you know that you're actually not by yourself and that nobody has to invite you into this art form, that the art form was yours all along.

And a one and a two, go to the toe and plie, out, plie, and in and in .

Maestra.

Culturally, we show up as ourselves, as our authentic selves culturally.

Oftentimes you don't have that in mixed company especially in the ballet space and that kind of natural, organic way of engaging with one another happens and it happens inside the studio, it happens outside the studio.

It becomes a real village.

I haven't always been in companies that have had as many dancers of color along with me.

Just being here knowing that, you know, it's not a competition with one another.

It's we're really just a community and a family.

They get to take the richness of their experience here and it follows them.

And so I think they feel in a good way a sense of armor, a sense of support, a sense of confidence because they know there's this long lineage behind them and that also they have a mentor at their fingertips that they connect with right away and so many different friends that they've made.

There's a psychological strength, a mental strength, a malleability though not just like strong and brittle but strong and flexible that one has to have in order to pursue this art form.

Things aren't so easily planned out.

That's not how it works for artists.

They have so much to share with us and they're eager to share.

We're eager to learn.

It's a great feeling being a mentor.

It's very fulfilling.

It makes me feel really good because I'm able to share the things that my mentors shared with me to the next generation and a generation after that.

I'd say they're living legends.

They sort of paved a way for this generation of dancers of Black dancers to come up and now that they've paved a way, they're able to do that for us, share that information with us so that we don't have as hard of a time trying to pave our own way and find our own path and journey as well.

The symposium is a space that centers Blackness, but welcomes everyone.

We want to have Black students, Black mentors in a space together so that there's a comfortability that your Blackness becomes a non-factor and your artistry like whatever else is there that has been suppressed because you're constantly holding up the mask or making sure that you are, you know, being respectable.

That can go away and you can just be.

It allows people to feel confident in themselves as artists and dancers separate from the color of their skin.

So they are an artist and they are a dancer, and they then value, they see their worth, they see their value and then they can advocate for themselves and they know that they have a foundation that will support them in that.

Ballet is not easy for anyone, but what the symposium really reinforces is that you're not alone.

It's been really just incredible looking around and seeing all these black and brown faces.

There was no way I was gonna come into this and, you know, not be changed.

I was never gonna be the same person after this experience.

So just knowing that is really just heartwarming to me.

[narrator] We're excited to share another Emmy-winning film from our longtime arts partner, Oolite Arts.

"The Perpetual Loop," winner of a 2022 Suncoast Emmy Award is a short film documenting visual artist Edison Penafiel's artistic practice focused on the immigrant experience.

I think my best self will be brought .

I believe that all artwork is an autobiographical or a self-portrait.

It has to come from the inside.

My name is Edison Penafiel.

I am originally from Ecuador.

I moved here in 2002 and overstay my visa.

I'm here now.

I'm a U.S. citizen.

My idea was to focus on the general idea of migration rather than specific situations of migration throughout the world.

So MARE MAGNVM consists of 14 different votes with 81 characters wearing a paper mache mask through this animation of a seascape.

Boats navigate forever on a perpetual loop.

It's a representation of the Mediterranean Sea.

MARE MAGNVM is the old name that the Romans gave to the Mediterranean.

There's a lot of play of words within this name.

There's the idea of the Great Sea but also an etymology of nightmare.

Like Mare becomes nightmare, but Mare also becomes mother.

So it's a play of concept between the great mother, the Great Sea, and the great nightmare in these situations that are presenting.

The work has many layers and that's important to me because of all the symbolisms it can bring and not only the layers like the technical layers that happen in the production of the work which are like more than 60 different layers to create this 12 channel installation.

The layers of the mask, right, the meaning, the concept behind it, the idea of covering one's face, the idea of migration, the idea of adaptation.

Personally, I think I have a lot of masks in different situations with friends, with family, with institutions right now.

I have chosen black and white because of the idea of of timelessness.

So I work a lot with the idea of history and the repetition of history.

The piece being aromatic, it removes that idea of time.

So it just become like a general idea of that event.

So I didn't want to go political at all and the work ended up being political.

So I guess it was my own experience of migrating and being undocumented for a period of time that created work about labor and about criticizing the powers, political, economical, or religious.

But little by little it has been washing out that anger.

I work a lot with the subconscious, the music, the lullaby as a way of other representation of that safe place where your mother tucked you in bed and sang you a lullaby.

So that is them trying to reach that safeness, right?

And I think this situation of combining these three elements of Mare, which is the nightmare, the mother and the sea and the mother being that origin and trying to hold on to that idea of like the motherland maybe, not only like the human mother, but the land as well.

My relationship with my mother is pretty good.

She's elder already, so it's becoming because she still live in Ecuador, but she is kind of a split because we are here and her relatives also her brothers and sisters.

So I see that a struggle for her because she doesn't know where to be.

I believe that there is this passing of information through different generations and in the process of finding oneself through my artwork, but also through the stories of my relatives that I never met and seeing myself, then like figuring out why I do these things.

I see that passing of information becomes the loop right where we are doing the same thing over and over again until we decide not to do it anymore .

This time for me is just being conscious of how this system works, but not only in the social realm but also within generations and that information that is passed on to the next one and the next one continues growing and adapting.

It's not the end.

[narrator] When you enter 2D Cafe in St. Petersburg, it's as if you've stepped into a black and white comic book.

Painted and designed by a local artist, the immersive space allows you to become part of the artwork.

What we expect people to feel when they come in here is that wow effect.

Our slogan is be the art because we want our customers to become the focal point of our art on the wall.

So when you take a picture, it is you inside this comic book that we created.

The first 2D Cafe originated in Tokyo, Japan and it blew our minds.

We started thinking that how cool would it be to bring that amazing concept and experience to us here locally.

Chad Mize is a very well-known artist here in the community in St. Petersburg, Florida and we wanted to commission someone that was gonna make it very unique in his own art and also make it very St Pete and he did an amazing job with that.

I've been a self-employed artist for 20 years now.

Recently, probably in the last eight years I've been doing mural work.

So I do large scale murals for corporate and interior clients and so that has really opened up a world for me where it's more about people's general seeing my art.

You know, they don't have to go into a gallery to see my art.

They can be in a restaurant or walking down the street and seeing a mural on the side of the street, which is really powerful.

So for so long in my career I toyed with other styles of work and kind of put this in a little bit of a backseat like the the free flow doodle style and probably in the last five years I've realized that it was my strength.

It was something that was natural to me and I feel like when I put that out there, that's when my career really elevated because I was doing what was most natural to me and like, you could kind of see that, you know, you can see like that's what he should be doing.

When we started collaborating together with Chad, we wanted give him free range and for him to go with his own unique amazing style that he has.

However, we wanted our cafe to be a European bistro, therefore, we wanted to incorporate European elements in the design.

When you add these personal touches to it, you can do little Easter eggs and hide things and I did add my dog Cookie in here, she's in the piece.

Then also the owners, the Marias, gave me a couple things to add that are personal to their life and that was kind of cool too.

My wife is from Greece.

Her name is Maria.

So we're both Marias.

I love humor as well, so there's a lot of humor and like tongue in cheek in a lot of my work.

[maria] It's playful where you can almost get the sense of you don't know what's real or not.

To date this has been the largest interior piece that I've worked on.

[maria] We had to come up with ideas to really bring the effect to life.

So we actually created these columns and arches in the keystones that make to the effect even more complete.

It totally transformed the space adding those arches and then, you know, because it's so tall, you wouldn't typically have like a clock go all the way to the ceiling based on the size of these ceilings.

So we kind of did the patterns and stuff to fill in the top portions which kind of gave that another element of the type of work that I do, which is pattern based work.

When we developed our menu, we wanted to incorporate both of my wife and I's culture in it.

So we have a few dishes that represent her culture and I was born in Uruguay in South America.

So we have in our menu, for example, six different kinds of empanadas, which is something that I bring from my culture and our 2D mocha is very popular.

It's actually white and dark chocolate with a coffee.

So it goes with the theme.

It's very welcome and cozy inside the 2D Cafe.

You just walk in and you're kind of, you just see all the sights at once, and you kind of wanna explore and see all the bits of inspiration of where this cafe might be.

You know, we're inundated with color so much so to come into a space and it be very stark and black and white, but also very busy, you know, there's a lot to look at in here, and I would hope that someone that came in here would leave with an inspiration of their own.

Working with Chad Mize, it was great.

It was a breeze.

He did an incredible job of making 2D Cafe so unique, so St. Pete and so ours at the same time.

It's just really cool to like, leave your mark and help a business with its artistic vision and it's been awesome for me to be part of that.

[narrator] Hailing from Brazil, Argentina, and Haiti, Fountainhead Arts introduces us to three artists each influenced by their unique cultural histories with this look at how those experiences show up in their work.

[artist] As a Haitian American, I have attempted to develop a diasporic language that uses different cultural markers within a contemporary language, a contemporary experience.

The whole idea of a diasporic experience it is a construction, and that Haiti, the Caribbean, that is reflected is very much of a myth in itself and a construction in itself.

Even the act of collaging, which you find in many of the paintings is a way of layering those different experiences.

And in many ways my different bodies of work have been less concerned with sticking to a specific medium and more about how those bodies of work come into conversation with each other.

I think that it's really in the space in between that the narrative really resides.

[narrator] Art Loft is on Instagram @artloftsfl.

Tag us in your art adventures.

Find full episode segments and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube At South Florida PBS.

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

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