- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Dalia] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.

In this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus," The Art of Gardening.

- I love to create things.

I love creating new landscapes from from nothing and watching it grow.

I really get enjoyment seeing people come in and actually enjoy the work that my staff and I do.

- [Dalia] A rock and roll group with a distinct sound.

- An independent band is truly independent.

It's built by the people who made it.

- [Dalia] A historic Gilded Age mansion.

- [Pamela] When you're walking through the house you experience some unique things from our history that set a path for where we are today.

- [Dalia] And the grand reopening of a contemporary art museum.

- It allows us to be nimble, allows us to not be beholden to a collection, that we have to show something every so often, you know, because it's in storage somewhere.

- It's all coming up next on "WEDU Arts Plus."

(upbeat jazz music) Hello, I'm Dalia Colon and this is "WEDU Arts Plus."

Spending time in a garden is like stepping into a beautiful work of art.

Let's head to Lakeland to visit the urban oasis that is Hollis Garden.

(fountain gurgling) (birds chirping) (light classical music) (light classical music continues) - Hollis Garden is located in downtown Lakeland off Lake Mirror and Hollis Garden was a donation from Mark and Lynn Hollis.

Mark Hollis was President of Public Supermarket from 1984 to 1996, and him and his wife Lynn both donated $1 million to build and construct the garden.

(light classical music) My name's Kevin Polk and I oversee Hollis Garden and I've been here for over 20 years.

(light classical music) Hollis Garden is a 1.2 acre garden.

It's a neo-classical garden with neo-classical architecture.

And it's also a sculpture garden.

(light classical music) Hollis Garden opened up on December 8th of 2000.

So an architect by the name of Jay Hood designed the garden and he designed it in a creative way.

The garden tells a story about Florida's history and it starts up in our primitive Florida area, which is our native section, where we have native plants of Central, Northern and South Florida.

As it flows from primitive Florida it gets to our agrarian age, our agriculture era which consists of our vegetable room, our two herb rooms, our fruit and spice room, and our fruit orchard.

But whenever you leave primitive Florida you'll go into our historical tree section which is our Trees of Americana section.

And in that section we have FDR's Dogwood it came from his home.

We have Edgar Allen Poe's Sugarberry tree which came from his estate.

We have Helen Keller's Water Oak, which came from her home.

And we also have a Martin Luther King's Sycamore tree which came from his church.

We have Patrick Henry's, Osage Orange, which came from a Lewis and Clark's expedition over 200 years ago.

We also have a butterfly section, succulent section, and my favorite, is we have probably one of the best cycad collections around.

A cycad is a plant that's pre-historic.

It dates all the way back to the dinosaurs and they're very, very rare.

(light classical music) I love to create things.

I love creating new landscapes from nothing and watching it grow.

I really get enjoyment seeing people come in and actually enjoy the work that my staff and I do.

People coming, taking their photos with our photo op areas that we've created.

- What brings us here today is to take my pictures from my Quinceanera.

I came from Wimauma, so it's I think an hour drive.

It's a really pretty place.

If you wanna take pictures I suggest you come here with their pretty scenery.

- Gardening to me is kind of like a visual art.

You got to think about the colors, the texture of the leaves when putting stuff together.

How it's gonna grow and what it's gonna look like in it's matured state, because it changes all the time.

It changes with the seasons.

It can change throughout the day the way a certain plant looks, because of the lighting, the sun hitting it and everybody's gonna get something different out of it when they see it.

(light classical music) - Today my friend and I came over to take some graduation pictures for my mom and dad, so they can send them out to our family.

Actually my college did like a little film project over here and I found out from my friends and I saw it actually in their little video and I was like that is the most gorgeous place ever.

So I thought about it and this is why I wanted to take some pictures for my graduation.

(light classical music) (light classical music continues) - Well, hurricane Ian really, it destroyed probably 60% of all of our large trees.

It took us about three to four days just to clean it up and we're still cleaning it up today.

When I came in the morning after the hurricane I saw all the destruction and my heart just sunk right into my stomach 'cause I planted these trees when they were babies and watched them grow and mature and when you see 'em falling over, it just changes the whole look of the garden.

All your hard work goes into something and it's just devastating to see.

(rich classical music) I've always had a green thumb growing up.

I used to garden with my great grandma in her front yard.

I used to go out in front of her trailer and we used to plant caladium bulbs and she'd plant amaryllis and flowers and stuff.

So I kind of always enjoyed it.

Hollis Garden, it's a public garden, it's a free garden so it doesn't cost anything for people to visit and see.

It's a blessing for us to have something like this in Lakeland.

It's a very special place.

(light music) - To learn more visit lakelandgov.net and enter the search term Hollis Garden.

With bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drums and keyboard.

The five piece rock and roll band Silver creates catchy tunes that attract listeners across the country.

Head to Reno, Nevada to meet this talented group of musicians.

(rock music) ♪ Well it's all over now my Johnny ♪ ♪ Seems that we've lost the touch here ♪ - One of the things that I really love about Silver is that we don't try to be anything.

I think Greg kind of goes and does his thing and does a lot of the songwriting and he'll bring a song to the band and we kinda just play what we would play on it as individuals, not necessarily trying to make it sound like this or that or the other thing.

We kind of add our own taste or flair to it each time.

Every time we bring a song to the band, everybody just kind of plays what they're gonna play.

We don't actually try to go after, "Oh, this is supposed to sound like a country song.

"This is supposed to sound like it's "from the early seventies," or something like that.

I think that's just something that is channeled through our own individual experiences and it kinda comes in to be this whatever you want to call it, five-headed beast that is Silver.

(rock music) ♪ Oh, oh, oh my love ♪ - But while certain songs maybe resemble other styles or sounds.

It's super important that I think each one of us has a different distinct personality so that every time we do work on a song there's five very distinct styles and personalities coloring that particular tune.

So it's never gonna sound too much like anything else, other than us making whatever it is that we're making.

(rock music) ♪ Create a sound in a dream ♪ - Rehearsals usually consist of going one of two directions.

They're either running through and getting ready for a specific show or it's getting together and doing a writing session.

- Greg will start either playing something he kinda came up with and then someone else will start playing something and it's just one of those situations where Jeff's like, well I was listening to you for what to do and I'm like, well I was listening to you for what to do.

So like all of a sudden both of us just like kinda went past each other and we're all just kind of creating the cycle together.

And even with songs that Greg has spent some time at home crafting and writing, he'll bring it in and all of a sudden playing it with us will change the song a little bit.

So it's all this constant, this constant evolution of the song as we play it together.

- And that's what it takes to really get it dissected and figure out what makes it Silver.

(rock music) - I think it's kind of neat the the amount of power that you have in a band now to be your own entity.

I mean an independent band, is truly independent.

It's built by the people who who made it, but it's a lot of work.

(rock music) - The video thing this year has been a big learning curve.

The first one we did included some friends and it had some reach and I think the takeaway was put your friends in your video.

(all laughing) Have them tag the video, more people see the video.

Yeah, profit.

So we did the Chase video and got more friends and more members of the community and a cooler location and filmed it in more iconic spots in Reno.

And the feedback has been good on that video.

I think we've achieved over 30,000 views on that.

I think that it's opened a few doors that have otherwise been closed for us in the community.

(rock music) ♪ It's the chase that brings you back to the start ♪ ♪ It's the chase ♪ - Most of the time when I'm writing a song the goal is to make somebody feel better about some kind of situation that they're in or something that they're feeling.

That's what I've always wanted to do.

- To me, music has always been something where lyrics combined with melody, create something that means something to your own personal experience and to me, a lot of the songs, a lot of the lyrics that Greg writes, it hits me and it creates some sort of meaning and I'm able to use that in my life to put myself in a better place from feeling down or heck in the other way.

I wanna feel down, I want to feel like I don't know if I'll ever be good enough.

And like I hear that and I'm able to relate to it.

- I think that the ability to relate to the content is useful for a lot of people and for me personally.

Whether that escape is like just tuning out.

And for me, when I listen to music, a lot of it is rhythm oriented listening, but sometimes you want to close listen and you want to hear the words and you wanna be pulled out of your life and into something else and see it from a different perspective.

And I think that's super important.

(rock music) (light music) - To hear more visit Silverisaband.bandcamp.com.

In this segment, travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to take a look inside the Pabst Mansion.

Completed in 1892, this architectural marvel serves as a time capsule of The Gilded Age.

(light classical music) - The Pabst Mansion is a historical home located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that represents a lot of the different pieces of history that speak to the City of Milwaukee.

It is the story of German immigrants, who started an entrepreneurial beer business and how that contributed to the landscape of Milwaukee during its formative years.

- Captain Pabst emigrates from Germany when he was 12 years old, 1848.

Eventually he became a Great Lakes steamship cabin boy and then rose to the rank of Captain by the age of 21.

So that's why we have the name Captain Pabst.

When he was plying the waters of Lake Michigan that apparently he met his future father-in-law.

Phillip Best who owned a small brewery in Milwaukee and Phillip Best was traveling with his young daughter, Maria Best, they met and had a two year courtship and they were married in 1862.

He invested half of his fortune into his father-in-law's brewing company and purchased a half interest in the Phillip Best Brewing Company for $21,000 which doesn't seem like a lot of money today, but in those days that was a significant sum.

That really, firmly made Milwaukee his home base and he committed himself to the life of a brewer.

By the 1880s, they pretty much had national distribution and so in 1889 they changed the name from Best to Pabst.

The year that the name is changed from Best Brewing Company to Pabst Brewing Company you start seeing Captain Pabst doing a number of different things and one of those important things that he did was to engage an architect to build a large mansion on Milwaukee's Grand Avenue.

Which is today, West Wisconsin Avenue.

Between 1890 and 1892, the house was built.

They moved in in July of 1892.

The cost of the house was $254,000 and just over 20,000 square feet.

So it is known as the second largest home to have been built in Milwaukee.

The largest was Mrs. Pabst's sister's house which was twice the size of this home, which is remarkable.

- There are actually five levels to the Pabst mansion.

The first, second and third floor are what the family would've utilized for entertaining and their living spaces.

The rear side or the north side of the Pabst Mansion was the living and working spaces for the staff here.

Those are the levels the guests today will see.

They'll be able to see the main areas that Pabsts would've entertained in, their bedrooms, their private offices and studies here at the house.

And then also where the servants would've eaten and helped prepare the food for the family.

So these three principal rooms here on the first floor, really where guests would've spent a lot of time with Frederick and Maria Pabst here at the house.

Mrs. Pabst parlor or the ladies parlor, a more general term for it, probably the most formal room in the house, the least utilized, actually.

It would've been just for the ladies.

Mrs. Pabst and her daughters did not have formal jobs but they did have a lot of entertainment to do here in the house.

We're currently sitting in the music room.

A lot of people think this could have doubled as a gentleman's parlor, but the family utilized this mostly as what we would call a living room today.

The family celebrated Christmas in this room, they had a daughter that was married here in 1897, in the music room and then both Frederick and Maria's Pabst's funerals were also held here in this space.

Just to the north of the music room here.

This is the one spot in the home, the dining room is, where the family would've entertained.

Everything as far as entertaining at the home was gonna be food centric for the Pabst family.

Second floor, probably the section of the home the family spent most of their time in when they didn't have guests here.

You're gonna find the four principal family members who lived here, what we consider year round or full-time, had their bedrooms on the second floor.

So a central hallway called the foyer and then the bedrooms radiate off of this.

- Guests that come to visit the mansion, they're here for maybe 10, 15 minutes and they really, I think, are struck by the intimacy of the house and that this really is kind of a family home rather than a vast mansion.

Captain Pabst passes away on New Year's Day 1904.

His wife remains here until her death in 1906 and it's eventually purchased by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

And so for almost seven decades, almost through the entirety of the 20th century this was the home of five different archbishops.

Actually one of the things that saved the Pabst Mansion is that a continued to be used as a private residence.

And so in 1978, our organization with the help of 23 savings and loans, I always think that's kind of one of the best parts of the story, is that raising the money was really difficult, but 23 savings and loans each wrote a $10,000 mortgage to finance the purchase of the house.

And so we were able to do that and opened formally for tours in May of 1978.

When guests come to visit the Pabst Mansion today they're seeing a very accurate view of what the house was all about in the 1890s.

We're very fortunate that the Pabst family commissioned Milwaukee Society photographer Simon Stein to come into the house in 1897 and photograph two to three views of all the principle rooms in the house.

The Pabst family has been extraordinarily generous in loaning and donating original objects back to the house.

And so the mansion is actually repopulated with entire rooms of original furniture and then objects and artwork.

- When you're walking through the house you experience some unique things from our history that set a path for where we are today.

- [John] It's a house built by Milwaukee architects for Milwaukee clients by Milwaukee craftsmen and I think showcases Milwaukee at its very best.

(light music) - Discover more at pabstmansion.com.

Up next, get an inside look at the reopening of Mass Art Art Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

As a non-collecting museum, the space is ever changing.

A wide range of contemporary works are always on display.

- Here we are your brand new museum.

- Yay.

- Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- What's the one bit of advice you wanted to give people who haven't been here yet?

- I want people to feel like this is their space that we are welcoming place to come and hang out in our Arne Glimcher Plaza and to come visit and to visit often, because we are a temporary exhibition space that will change up our shows year round.

You wanna come in?

- You wanna go in?

- Yes.

- I do.

I'm so excited about this.

- Jared, welcome to MAAM.

- Thank you.

Lisa Tung is the museum's Executive Director and happy to be rid of the old Mass Art Galleries, a warren of winding ways that despite the art on view felt very much like the former gymnasium, it once was - We were really just spaces.

There was a space to show a show, a space to show another show, but there was no lobby like we're standing in right now and there was no front door.

- [Jared] But after a 20 month, 12.5 million dollar renovation, Mass Art has reopened as a full fledged museum with free admission.

Tung calls it a Kunsthalle, the German word for a non-collecting museum - Allows us to be nimble, allows us to not be beholden to a collection that we have to show something every so often, because it's in storage somewhere.

It allows us to respond to today's topics and dialogue and ideas of artists.

- [Jared] In the lobby, you'll find an installation by Brooklyn-based artist duo, Ghost of a Dream.

- We gave Ghost 30 years worth of exhibition ephemera, catalogs, posters, newspaper clippings, postcards and they have created a kaleidoscopic patterning of madness.

- [Jared] It's now game time for the new museum and one of its first exhibitions.

"Game Changers" is a show of video games at play with much to say.

Tracy Fullerton's Walden invites a slowing down with demerits for a competitive pace.

Momo Pixel's "Hair Nah" is born out of people's predilections for touching a black woman's hair, unsolicited, And artist and MassArt Professor Juan Obando hacked the popular "Pro Evolution" soccer game to create "Pro Revolution Soccer."

(game announcer speaking a foreign language) His game inserts members of Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation or EZLN, a civil resistance group, onto the soccer field.

It's based on a proposed match that never materialized.

EZLN he says are not unlike computer and game hackers.

- I thought that the metaphor was very, very clear.

People are intervening.

The system is no different from the way that EZLN has intervened in the Mexican system.

- [Jared] Upstairs in the museum's main gallery a jaw dropping installation by Lisbon-based artist, Joana Vasconcelos.

- Any museum can put sculpture on the floor.

But I wanted the first show to show something that we'd never done before which is completely suspend something up in the sky.

And I was a little selfish.

I wanted to bring an artist who had never shown in Boston before.

- How do you want people to feel when they are underneath?

Or do you want people to feel when they're underneath?

- Well, the idea is that this piece has a kind of a movement.

She's flying in that direction.

And of course she has a center.

And this center is like any chapel, any cathedral.

- [Jared] She would be the latest in the artist's Valkyries series in which she's created pieces around the world, including in Paris, London, and Bilbao.

- The Valkyries are goddesses, flying goddesses, warriors.

And they will fly over the battlefield and they will bring alive the brave warriors.

- [Jared] Here, the museum is the battlefield, a place Vasconcelos says, where the spirit of art and dreams are revived.

The pieces named for and inspired by Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman an enslaved Massachusetts woman who was the first to sue for her freedom.

- And I was like, okay, this was an incredible woman without knowledge, without being able to read or to write she fought for her rights and for her freedom.

That's the spirit of the Valkyries.

- [Jared] Vasconcelos' Valkyries are made in her Lisbon studio, a space for magic as she describes it.

Teams of assistants craft the works out of deliberately chosen fabrics.

In this case, they come from Mozambique.

A nod to Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman's history.

And they are beings she says.

- You can look into this as an animal or you can look into this as a plant or as a monster from the sea world.

You can look into this from a lot of angles.

It's not upon me to decide which one - [Jared] Why not?

You made it.

- Yeah, I know, but I like to make open things.

So you can analyze and choose whatever connects with you.

That's the idea.

- [Jared] One writ large, very large.

(upbeat music) - For more information, visit massart.edu And that wraps it up for this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus."

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Dalia Colon.

Thanks for watching.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) - [Dalia] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.

(dramatic music)