(bright music) - This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Announcer] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by Charles Rosenblum, Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, the State of Florida and Division of Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

- [Gabe] In this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus," fashion for all.

- That's usually the first impression someone gets is often your outfit.

And so I always think it's so important that you're able to be fully you, even if something has happened.

- [Gabe] Examining history through art.

- [Titus] When people say that I'm erasing history, they're pointing to the fact that they don't recognize that I'm actually uncovering what was already there.

- [Gabe] An origami holiday tree.

- The success is the popularity of the tree and people saying "Ooh, ah."

Just the little kids pointing, "Wow, wow!"

It's just great.

- [Gabe] And art that blows.

- Our idea was to create a kind of journey, should we say, through the site with surprises around every corner.

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

(bright music) Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is "WEDU Arts Plus."

Lady Natasha Fines was working in the fashion industry when a personal experience revealed a gap in the market.

After pitching her ideas and getting turned down each time, she decided to do it herself.

Now she's designing clothing specially made for people with disabilities, combining function with high fashion.

(ethereal music) (accessories clanking) - I had been wanting to have a brand in general my whole life.

I've always loved fashion.

But I wanted to make sure it was sending a message.

Like it's like we're doing this for a purpose.

But I didn't know what it was.

So, many years go by.

And then being that I was already working as a buyer in the fashion industry, kind of the stars aligned in a way where that light bulb moment of this is an opportunity of that brand I've always wanted to do, but this is the message we can really make happen with this brand, which was making sure everyone is showcased in the fashion industry, even if you have an illness or disability.

- When she started showing me some of her designs and I'm like, "Oh my God.

I never thought of that."

But the reaction that I had I'm sure is everybody else's because no one thinks about a disability unless you have it.

(bright music) - I was very close with my aunt.

She ended up passing this February, and she is the aunt who actually inspired the brand.

She was immediately diagnosed with stage four cancer six years ago.

And so immediately you see that there is a change of emotion, of course.

There's a change of how you do things and what you can do and what you can wear.

And I noticed that when she was going to her chemo treatments that the fun bubbly outfits that she would wear, she loved pink, it immediately was like neutrals and then very boring type of outfits in order to be comfortable at the hospital because there was nothing available for her.

There's nothing available in the market that's fashion forward but also functionable for someone that has an illness.

Someone like her shouldn't have to sacrifice who she is and what she loves because of something that has happened to her.

And the brand is also reflecting who she was, kindhearted, courageous, brave, but also you can still show off your fun, spunky fashion personality as well.

- She's definitely the artist.

We're both very passionate.

We're Latinas.

That is in us.

But that she had a clear vision and, for me, it was I needed to help her with my experience in the corporate world.

I knew that she was into something and I had to support her.

And I could not be any more proud.

(soft music) - I would actually put together PowerPoints and presentations for my bosses and my teams that I worked for in the industry, and I showed them they're such a big opportunity here for beautiful women to be showcased and also represented and have a category of clothes that we don't really see right now.

And unfortunately, they just said, "This is not our customer."

And long story short, I could not just sit there and not do something about this.

So I ended up quitting my job in the fashion industry.

I moved back home and I was getting a lot of nos.

And finally I ran into one manufacturer and she believed in the vision and the brand.

And that's how we got our first collection done, which was in finally January of 2023, I received our first samples.

Adaptive clothing is when you have your basic pieces that everyone else wears.

The only difference is there's a little extra love that's put into the pieces and they have accessible features and anybody can wear it.

It's universally designed to wear.

Even I have trouble.

I don't have a physical disability, but putting on my pants sometimes I'm jumping up and down, and there's no need for that.

It's fashion forward with functionality and accessible features on the pieces, that it's easier for someone to put it on if they need a little extra help.

- They don't look at us, people with disabilities or wheelchair users, they look at able bodies, you know.

So easy to just stand up and put pants on.

Not for me.

It takes me five minutes to put pants on.

I have to put the legs in, and then I have to lean back and lean to the side, and it's a whole ordeal.

So these zippers and the magnets that just open up so I can just put it on and zip it on, I mean, it makes life so much easier.

When it's easier for me to put something on, it makes me feel good about myself.

Granted these clothes are amazing anyway.

They look amazing.

But if it takes me 10 minutes to put something on, I'm not gonna feel as good about wearing it as I am because I'm outta breath now.

I just did a workout to put these clothes on.

I already go through struggles on a daily day being in my chair.

So if it's just something simple as zipping something up versus trying to like do the worm crawl to put them on, it's amazing.

- Because of some of my conditions that I have, I utilize a portacath, which is a central line, so it's a needle in my chest.

First, I do like to say that I'm currently like in her jacket and I love her jacket because even if I have it zipped here, if I need to do medication, which I'll have to do after we finish our interview, I don't have to necessarily expose my whole chest to the world.

I can just pull this part down, pull my port out, I mean, pull my line out, do my medication and put it back.

So when I did actually see her brand and I saw that, I was like immediately I was like "I need to buy this."

(bright music) - I get to bring in that fun dopamine-boosting type of colors and excitement to the clothes.

You're expressing who you are and how you want the world to kind of see you.

That's usually the first impression someone gets is often your outfit.

And so I always think it's so important that you're able to be fully you even if something has happened.

- [Emeline] I absolutely love to see her thrive.

When she finish it off, it is like it's art.

- I hope that our models are able to be role models to girls that are looking up to them.

Like we just did in New York Fashion Week and there was little girls in the audience.

So I just, I genuinely hope that with our brand we're opening doors, that there's more designers like myself.

Bigger brands will see that this is important and this is needed.

- I'm a person with disabilities, but I'm also really big into disability representation, disability advocacy.

So not only does Natasha have Lady Fines Adaptive, she does have Rebels With a Cause where she's also doing advocacy.

So really not only am I able to model for this brand, but I'm also able to make a voice and be a sound and really just be myself.

(upbeat music) - To shop her designs, visit ladyfines.com.

Artist, Titus Kaphar, examines history and representation in his paintings and installations, revealing history's impact on the contemporary world.

Meet the artist at the American Revolution Museum in Yorktown, Virginia, to see one of his works.

(bell rings) - When I say shifting the gaze, I am imploring the viewer to set what feels natural aside for a moment and try a different route through the work.

And when you do that through a painting, even a familiar painting, you might find something you never expected to find.

Composition.

There are techniques and strategies for guiding the gaze through a particular composition.

I've spent a lot of time studying them.

Artists spend a lot of time studying them.

They work.

I am shifting it from the strategy of the original artist's pathway through the work and trying to find some other way to see, not giving in to what will feel most natural.

What I've been doing is actually trying to separate those black characters from the other characters in the paintings who were oppressing them, to give the viewer the opportunity to contemplate these characters on their own terms, on their own merit, without the pressures of this oppression that exists within the compositional structure of the painting itself.

I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this.

There is a reason he is the highest in the composition here.

(paintbrush scraping) There is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here.

(paintbrush scraping) He's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in his paintings.

Painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important, it's coded.

But sometimes because of the compositional structure, because of compositional hierarchy, it's hard to see other things.

(paintbrush scraping) There's more written about dogs in art history than there are about this other character here, about his dreams, about his hopes, about what he wanted outta life.

I don't want you to think that this is about eradication.

It's not.

The oil that you saw me just put inside of this paint is linseed oil.

It becomes transparent over time.

So eventually what's gonna happen is these faces will emerge a little bit.

What I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to show you is how to shift your gaze.

When people say that I'm erasing history, they're pointing to the fact that they don't recognize that I'm actually uncovering what was already there.

I'm attempting to make you look at a different part of the painting.

Not erasing history.

That takes a kind of structural institutional power that I actually don't have.

We can look at institutional structural power and we can look and see the ways in which history has been erased.

It hasn't been erased by some random black dude in Connecticut making paintings and putting white paint on it.

That ain't how it works.

(tense music) I didn't grow up going to museums.

My mother worked really, really hard.

My mother had me when she was very young.

She was 15 years old.

She worked three jobs usually just to make sure we were taken care of.

I found art very late in my life.

I was 27 by the time I realized that this is really what I want to do.

So I take my kids to the museum every time I have a chance, whether they like it or not.

We were in New York City and we were going to the Natural History Museum in New York.

And as we were walking up the stairs, we came upon the Teddy Roosevelt sculpture that's out front of the Natural History Museum.

And Teddy Roosevelt is sitting on the horse looking really strong, boldly holding that horse with one arm.

And on one side of him is an African American man, and on the left side of him is a Native American man.

And as we were walking up those stairs, my oldest son, Sabian, he said, "Dad, how come he gets to ride and they have to walk?"

And it was one of those moments where you as a parent realize this is gonna take way longer than we really have, but you can't pass up those kinds of teachable moments.

And so we sat on the stairs for a little bit and we talked about it.

And in my house, history is a really important thing.

It's alive.

And we try to help our kids understand that understanding the past is about understanding the present.

(energetic music) That painting, "Behind the Myth of Benevolence," is about the dichotomy of this country itself, of our country itself.

You have the individual who probably wrote more eloquently about liberty than anyone to ever walk, Thomas Jefferson, right?

And you have that same individual who values liberty more than life itself withholding liberty from hundreds of people who make his very life possible.

The character in the painting, the woman in that painting is at once Sally May Hemings, in quotations, and at once a stand-in for all of the other black women who are on that plantation.

There are over 300 other enslaved people on that plantation.

At least 50% of them are women.

And so it's easy for us to focus on that one part of the story and forget that there were other women who were abused in so many different ways.

In that painting, it's a literal pulling back the curtain to, again, shift our gaze.

We can't just simply demonize our founding fathers, but it's also important not to deify them.

Let's just find the truth in the middle.

The "Forgotten Soldier."

I've been working with this concept for a little while now.

It came as a sort of fascination of the process of making sculpture.

In this particular work, I decided that I wanted the mold to be the finished work.

That is, I wanted you to be able to look, in this case, at George Washington, one of our founding fathers, in his absence, his complete, his perfect absence.

But in his perfect absence is, as I said, the pure potential for all of the good things, but the reality of the bad things as well.

In front of that is this figure, the soldier, on one knee prepared for battle in profile.

The black figure in the front is about those forgotten soldiers, the ones that were there, that participated, that, for some reason, history forgot.

(gun bangs) Let's be honest, it's not for some reason.

It doesn't work with the narrative that slavery makes sense, slavery is good for the nation, Black people like to be enslaved.

So we write out those kinds of histories.

We just ignore them because it challenge other aspects of what we believed.

My intention is that we see both of these characters at the same time.

That there is a visual dialogue between the character who sits in front, this black soldier, and George Washington.

We have this tendency to kind of write our history thinking about those people sitting on that horse.

But there is a lot of other characters, those soldiers on the ground that actually give their lives for the battle.

In this particular exhibition we're talking about the Black soldiers who were by and large forgotten to history, erased from history.

In putting them together, I'm trying to say let's not prioritize either part of the conversation over the other.

Let's have both of the conversations at once.

(bright music) - To learn more about the artist, go to kapharstudio.com.

During the holiday season, an origami holiday tree is displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Inspired by the museum's exhibits, volunteers from OrigamiUSA fold paper into a variety of inventive designs to decorate the tree.

(festive music) - Our origami holiday tree, it started with Alice Gray, who was an entomologist here, and she was always into arts and crafts, - And we used to use her office to have meetings and fold and play and listen to her rather large hissing cockroaches.

And Alice used to make a little tree.

- She decorated a three-foot tree with origami insects, and told somebody about how it would be so great if the museum had a holiday tree with origami on it.

- [Ros] And they gave her this humongous tree to decorate.

And we all did.

(festive music continues) This is an amazing marriage of science and art.

- This is the 45th tree for the museum, and it's been a wonderful tradition that we honor and cherish.

We have a whole collection that we've developed.

- And they range from super complex all the way down to super simple.

You could do every scale on an alligator if you want to.

And we have a lot of repeat models that we rearrange in different ways because we bank them.

It's not practical to do over a thousand models every year.

And we always make it look like a different tree.

- We'll also bring in new models because of each new theme may require special models.

One of the stronger themes that we have is based on the Dinosaurs Among Us special exhibition, which means that these are dinosaurs that later developed into birds, and we're showing the relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

- And we research different flora, fauna, and try to reproduce it in origami.

That's why I have a lot of cute hatchlings and egg nests and other silly things, and they're really very nice and fun to fold.

- Unlike Christmas ornaments or holiday ornaments, we get much more play and interesting ways of positioning the models when we have floral wire glued to them from two or three different points.

They can be standing.

We can twist them in different directions and angle them.

Kind of looks like they're interacting with one another.

(gentle music) They all hang out together and have a good time.

- Five.

- Four, three, two, one.

- Zero.

(audience cheers) (bright music) - The success is the popularity of the tree.

And people say, "Ooh, ah."

Just the little kids pointing, "Wow, wow."

That's just great.

And it's a labor of love.

I enjoy it.

It's magic.

(bright music continues) (bright music) - For more information, go to amnh.org.

A Light on Mars is a nocturnal exhibition that celebrates the firefly.

Walking along the outdoor sculpture path, visitors are able to see site-specific artwork that illuminates the night sky.

- [Jared] This fall, as the days grow shorter and night becomes heavier, a Gloucester estate is lighting the way.

- I just love being here at this moment when it is all about to change.

- [Jared] Belinda Rathbon is guest curator of this nocturnal exhibition featuring 16 members of the Boston Sculptors Gallery, crafting work that floats, flickers and tantalizes.

- Our idea was to create a kind of journey, shall we say, through the site with surprises around every corner.

- Rathbon is also the author of a new first-ever biography on kinetic sculptor, George Rickey, and says, "These artists have risen to similar challenges."

- He was very challenged about working with outdoor installations, which is what he's best known for.

And these sculptors here today are also making work that is alive in the landscape as light turns to dark.

- [Jared] The exhibition populates the onetime estate of Paul Manship, perhaps best known for his 1934 sculpture of Prometheus in New York City's Rockefeller Center.

Today, his home studio and grounds comprise the Manship Artist's residency, a place for artists to gather, find inspiration, and break out of their routines.

Rebecca Reynolds is the executive director.

- People who come here, they refer to it as a magical place.

And to me, that's just what we'd love to hear, because to me that suggests, you know, other worldly or transformation, taking you out of your every day.

(insects chirping) - [Jared] The sculptures here are inspired by Manship's unyielding fondness for fireflies, so profound that he named his home Starfield for the twinkling, mesmerizing insects that dance around the property still.

- Paul Manship didn't mow his meadow until the end of July because he knew if he did it any sooner, he wouldn't give the fireflies a chance to go through their lifecycle.

- [Jared] Now that lifecycle has evolved both in actual literal fireflies and in their essence.

Here, light captivates because it places the Big Dipper beneath the sky, as in Jessica Strauss's "Drinking Gourd."

Christopher Abrams piece, "Developing Weather," assumes the form of a portable storm.

While Marilu Swett's sculpture, "Glow," floats.

Now I know this is meant to be seen in the dark, which we will see in about an hour.

But what are we seeing here?

- You're seeing a collection of multiple figures that connect with the ocean.

They're in the spiral formation because that's one of the flight patterns for fireflies, you know.

- [Jared] This has been a show years in the making, giving artists time to craft work, both site-specific and leveraging light at its best.

- People started working and doing their research on light, how to incorporate light into their work.

Really only a few of our members had worked with light in their pieces before, so it took some digging.

- [Jared] But this had already been an area of exploration for Swett whose work glows with phosphorescent pigment.

- I've come to be interested in, through the research of deep sea creatures, being more and more interested in bioluminescence, and finding that it's not just in the ocean.

It's many, many...

Even fireflies, of course, and other insects, but mammals as well fluoresce.

- [Jared] Other artists have taken their cues from the property, from sun dappled leaves, a lamp that brightens the homes staircase, and glass fishing floats tucked into a living room basket.

- Many of these artists have studios and they're working every day in their studios.

But it's different if you can get out of your every day and go into a place where there are no expectations.

- [Jared] Not to mention where you can see the light.

(bright music) - For more, visit manshipartists.org.

And that wraps it up for this episode of "WEDU Arts Plus."

To View More, visit wedu.org/artsplus, or follow us on social.

I'm Gabe Ortiz.

Thanks for watching.

(energetic music) - [Announcer] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by Charles Rosenblum, Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, the State of Florida and Division of Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

(bright music)