This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, the glory of guitars.

So this looks at how guitars came to be in the United States of America, how they really evolved, changed, and then in the 20th century, how guitars became a symbol of American social movement.

Art colonies inspired by New England.

Here in Cape Ann, where it's a very welcoming place for artists.

And everywhere you look you can find something that attracts you no matter what medium you work in.

Designing a pair of shoes.

It was just crazy to see my design on a sneaker and not just any sneaker.

My favorite sneaker of all time, the Nike SB dunk.

And building a career in music.

What a lot of people would say is I had a lot of raw talent that was very not refined, and so I had a whole lot of amazing people around me who taught me how to kind of harness it.

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

[light music] Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

If you could tell America's story using just one object, what would you choose?

Consider the guitar.

A touring exhibition from the National Guitar Museum in New York City celebrates the evolution and cultural impact of the instrument.

It was recently on display at the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Bradenton.

It's titled, "America at the Crossroads, The Guitar and a Changing Nation."

Exhibition is called, "America at the Crossroads," and it's about guitars.

[guitar playing] This is one of the coolest exhibitions I've seen in the 42 years I've been coming here as a musician to see all these different guitars and all these state of the art guitars, all these historic guitars, really one of the coolest things I've seen here.

So I've been playing guitar almost 40 years, and that's one of the reasons I really wanted to bring this exhibit here, because I wanted to be able to share with people my passion for guitars.

This is from the National Guitar Museum in New York City, and they travel guitar exhibits around the world.

And this is one of three they have currently traveling around.

But this one we thought the people at Bradenton would really enjoy.

So this looks at how guitars came to be in the United States of America, how they really evolved, changed, and then in the 20th century, how guitars became a symbol of American social movement.

Well, the origins of the guitar really came from the Middle East.

And maybe 2000 years ago.

They have ouds and and they had lutes.

Lots of early stringed instruments where basically they realize that plucking a string under tension over some object would make a musical sound.

By the time we get to the 1500s, you start to see what look like guitars today.

Just a lot smaller and a slightly different shape, but they're very, very similar.

And that's when the settlers came over, brought them over from Europe, and that's when we start to see them arrive in the Americas.

[guitar playing] So it starts with the first guitars that came to America that actually were first found in St. Augustine, with the Spanish settlers who came over there.

It then looked at over the next couple of hundred years, how acoustic guitars and Spanish classical guitars evolved, became something a little bit louder, got picked up.

But then it gets really exciting when we get into the Jazz Age, into the country bluegrass age, and then when electric guitars start happening.

A very American story and how electric guitars really took over and became something that American social history evolved around the same time as.

[guitar playing] Well, you get the Martin Company up in Pennsylvania.

They develop a way to make guitars stronger, which makes them bigger and makes them louder, but still have a great tone.

But it's really in the 20th century.

Everything really changes when they start to learn how to electrify guitars, put electric pickups on them, plug them into what were converted radiograms, and now the guitars finally get loud enough to compete with a jazz band or a big band, and all of a sudden the guitar isn't a rhythm instrument anymore.

It becomes a lead instrument and you start to get people like Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian start playing lead jazz guitar.

That changes everything.

So what happened after World War II is American society really started to evolve, and people had a lot more leisure time.

People started to have money again, and Americans wanted to go out and dance and hear live music.

So the auditoriums the bands would be playing got larger.

That meant the guitars had to get louder.

I definitely think it's an absolute collaboration because it's the needs of the guitar players versus what the manufacturers are putting together.

So the Telecaster and the Stratocaster made by Fender is a perfect example.

There are only a few years apart in their production, but Fender took the advice from the musicians and put all that advice and work into the Fender Stratocaster.

And now that's the most popular electric guitar to this day.

Every type of movement needs a new guitar, and that's one of the things we look at here in the exhibit is you have the guitars that made rock and roll, you have the guitars that made jazz, you have the guitars that made country, western and bluegrass.

But then later on in the exhibit, you get into things like Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstrat guitar that became a symbol of heavy metal.

Particularly.

One of the most interesting objects we have is a guitar designed by Annie Clark of St. Vincent, and that was by the Ernie Ball Music Man Company, the first time a female artist actually designed a guitar from the ground up.

Before then, women had played the same guitars as men, but quite often had problems with the scale lengths being big, the bodies being big, and this was the first time a female artist actually designed a guitar to be based around a woman's body.

So as guitars got louder and you could start focusing on the lead guitarist, they started presenting a story to America.

So through the civil rights movement, through women's rights movements, through just whatever's going on, we tell other people our story and try to fix and solve problems and make change by just playing that song.

How emotional do you get when you hear that favorite song of yours, and it makes you want to act on something?

I think guitars are always going to be there, and I think there's something about getting up on stage, playing through an amplifier, playing through a big open G chord and feeling that air moving behind you and the sense of the vibration through your body.

The first time any young player does that and makes a chord that sounds good, there's just no feeling like it.

I love electronic music too, but when you actually get a guitar strapped on when you play it, there's just something visceral about it and physical about it that you can't replicate.

And there'll always be a place for people playing those big, loud chords through big amplifiers and getting that feeling and what that invokes in an audience.

It's the loudest, all the other instruments, they can only go so far, but with amplification, the electric guitar can outplay anything.

And that's why it takes the spotlight when you go into concerts.

It's bold, but it's very expressive.

You can be quiet with it.

You can be soft with it.

You can be dramatic with it.

You can be mad with it.

You can be angry.

You can be happy, you can be cheerful, but you're going to be loud or soft.

[guitar playing] I think there's lots to take away from this exhibit.

I think if you like music, you get a chance to see the guitars up close that your favorite musicians have played.

If you play guitar, you get to see some guitars here that maybe you've never seen before, which is my experience with this exhibit.

But what I would love people to take away is understand what a really amazing American story the electric guitar was particularly, and I would love it if people went away and thought, you know what?

I'm going to give that a go.

I think there's something special here.

There's a lot of variety, and I would love people to actually go buy their first starter guitar.

It's never been a better time because starter guitars now are better quality than they've ever been.

I would love some people in 3 or 4 years time to come back to the museum and say, I came to your exhibit.

I started playing guitar and I'm still playing today.

For more, visit bishopscience.org.

Up next, travel to the Cape Ann Museum in Massachusetts to see an exhibit focused on two of New England's oldest summer art colonies.

An assortment of artworks inspired by the region's landscapes are on display.

As much as artists have always been drawn to, say, the sea.

They've also felt the gravitational pull of each other throughout art history.

It's been the crux of many an art colony.

In the case of Cape Ann, it is a place where teachers and art teachers, and students, and professional painters, amateur painters all seem to gather and find inspiration amongst themselves.

Cape Ann has been a draw for its harbors in Gloucester and Rockport, places which have long found a balance between bustling and the rustic grit that defines ages of seafaring.

Martha Ochs is curator of the Cape Ann Museum.

Here in Cape Ann, where it's a very welcoming place for artists.

And everywhere you look you can find something that attracts you no matter what medium you work in.

But many of the same artists who have made Cape Ann their artistic oasis have also found their muse on Monhegan Island, 100 miles up the coast from Cape Ann.

It's a picture of stony isolation.

We find the beautiful rocky coastline, the ocean, crashing waves and unspoiled land.

When I was there this summer, I stepped off the boat and literally the first thing I saw was an artist at an easel.

Oliver Barker is the director of the Cape Ann Museum, which, along with the Monhegan Museum of Art and history, is presenting an exhibition documenting the growth of the two enduring art colonies.

It's looking at that period of the late 19th century into the early 20th century, when artists were searching for their own unique American voice.

And I think perhaps why they were drawn to these two rugged landscapes to try and encapsulate that, that new sense of American identity.

Artists began creating art colonies in both locales in the years after the Civil War, when transportation improvements made access to Cape Ann and Monhegan easier.

Both places, Barker says, illustrated the differing dimensions of an America on the mend.

In recalling that these works were made at a time when Gloucester was in its heyday, it was America's largest seaport.

And I think that you see the working industry of the fishing industries here going to Monhegan for the first time this summer and sitting on that boat and going out from Port Clyde for 12 miles out into the middle of the ocean.

And what impressed me about that experience is that there were people that lived there year round, and it obviously was a way of life.

It still is.

And there's a to me, it shows a pioneering spirit.

It was also a spirit of welcoming.

Oakes points out, as we tour the show, especially for women like artist Theresa Bernstein, whose work we find here, she was a pioneer in her own right as one of the early 20th century's leading artists.

This shows a group of women artists in the Folly Cove neighborhood, and we see some of the local people, the women who ran the boarding house where artists stayed.

The man who supplied her with the lobsters that she cooked to feed the artists.

Well, we just long for days like this here in the fall, right?

I know.

Eric Hudson, whose painting is shown here, he's one of the few artists who actually resided in both places.

The story is he would frequently get in a dory or a small boat and actually take his canvases out with him.

So not as much in this one, but some of the paintings, you look like you're actually in the trough of a wave with the artist looking up at these big fishing vessels.

What carries through these works is an aura of place, something that comes from years, if not decades, of familiarity and careful observation as we see in a lifetime of work.

By Stow Wengenroth.

I love works like this where you can smell the wood almost.

You can smell the evergreens.

What we have here is an early lithograph they did in the 1930s of a Cape Ann scene.

And then on the bottom, a drawing done on Monhegan.

And he was really a master at black and white.

It's just remarkable when you look at them, you really think you're right there.

And as both Oliver Barker and the artists still working in both places today remind us, we still can be.

These landscapes are all still here around us.

So we very much hope that people, when they come to see the show, will also then step outside and explore this wonderful place.

For more information, go to capeannmuseum.org.

Take a trip to Virginia to meet Kenney Jones for a contest.

He designed a Virginia Beach themed Nike sneaker.

His design won and the custom shoes went into production and sold out in minutes.

[music] My dad was in the Navy, so we moved all over the country and finally settled here in Virginia Beach.

I really fell in love with the ocean and the waves and the boardwalk and the beach.

The vibrancy and the people and all the colors.

The florals, the timberlands, the cliffs.

All the people who made it from here.

I mean, how could you not be inspired by this place?

[music] I've always been amazed by skateboarding.

It's a beautiful thing.

When I was getting into the skate scene, Nike SB dunks were coming into popularity.

I fell in love with trying to figure out what these designs are based off, because it wasn't just some random colorway they thought was cool.

It was stories for every single shoe.

I love Pharrell, so then I found out he had a skate team, and then he had his own shoes.

And then I found out about BBC and ice cream.

All the stuff that I liked kind of came together.

I had a clothing brand right out of high school called X society.

It was me trying to get my creativity out there a little bit.

I joined the Coast Guard, and at that point I wasn't really putting designs out on paper, but I was always designing stuff in my head.

Everything changed when I got the opportunity to design my first sneaker.

[light music] I'm scrolling through Instagram and I see Nike SB or nothing post something about a contest.

It's about your city and you can win your own shoe.

I was like, dang, this is like made for me because any shoe design I ever thought of was always based off of where I'm from.

[music] I wanted to do the waves because that's like the first thing I think of is the Virginia Beach oceanfront and the King Neptune statue as well, which is such an iconic thing at the beach.

I knew I'd want to give ode to the military because I'm in the military, and also my dad was in the military.

And then the swoosh.

Not only was it a nod to Nike Diamonds, who designed my favorite SB dunk of all time, it was also the big Navy ships that are steel.

I wanted to obviously give know to the music, because that's one of the things that kept me excited about living here.

I put it out there just like any other post.

You're hoping a whole bunch of people see it.

After that first day, I had like a thousand likes and I was like, dang, way more people were sharing it than I ever thought.

Virginia Beach and all Virginia backed me so hard with the whole contest was almost surreal.

I never really thought I was going to win.

I just wanted to put something out because I haven't put something out and this is my dream.

Once I actually won the reverse lane, people hit me up like, all right, we're gonna get started as soon as we can.

It was the longest couple of months of my life.

It was just like a waiting game.

I knew they were coming at some point.

I just didn't really know when.

[music] Happy birthday to you.

When the shoes finally came, it was actually on my birthday, so that was even cooler.

Happy birthday, dear dad.

Happy birthday to you.

Woo!

[applause] Thank you.

Do you like the cake?

Yeah.

Where'd you get it?

This is cool.

I like the cake too.

You do?

My friend Samantha made it.

To have the box in hand.

Was an unbelievable feeling.

[light music] Look, Danny surprises here.

Look, I think I know what it is.

Come sit over here.

You ready to see it?

What are.

What are those?

You should look cool.

Dad.

It was just crazy to see my design on a sneaker.

And not just any sneaker.

My favorite sneaker of all time, the Nike SB dunk.

They look.

They look like the picture.

Mhm.

They're like waves on it.

Like the waves on it.

Reverse landed such a great job of putting the shoes together.

The manufacturing the colors pop.

The attention to detail.

It was amazing to see how it all came together.

[music] Even the sneaker box was dope.

Can you find daddy's?

That's daddy.

Yeah.

It was.

I signed off on the design that went into manufacturing.

And since they're custom, there wasn't a whole lot of pairs that were going to be made.

And the process takes a little bit longer.

But once the day came to put them on sale, I got notification.

They sold out in 15 minutes, and I was like, dang.

[music] To sell out and to sell out in less than 30 minutes is a dream come true.

[music] [applause] I'm a religious person, so I feel like God didn't give me this opportunity just for me to go back to posting pictures of my family and the shoes that I'm wearing that day.

As soon as I won the contest, it really rejuvenated me to be able to let that creativity out.

And now that I have like a platform to do it, it's almost like I don't want to buy clothes from anybody else.

I'll just make my own shirt.

So if I can actually live out my dream of becoming a designer or working in the industry in any way, I need to jump on it and do as much as I can as quick as I can.

This opportunity is not going to always be there if I just rest on my laurels.

You got to strike while the iron is hot, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

I have a lot of eyes on me, and the attention of a lot of people that have always wanted to work with and looked up to.

There's a lot of pressure on myself, but I also feel like I'm on top of the world.

[music] Adam Patek is a singer songwriter from Ohio who is pursuing a career in the music industry with his alternative chamber pop records.

He wants to be positive and uplift his listeners.

I started in music initially in fifth grade, I think when I started playing trumpet.

I was just one of those band kids here and there.

Essentially, my senior year of high school got suckered into it because of peer pressure, because of friends saying, you got to do show choir, you got to do it.

I didn't think that it was going to be my thing, but it ended up really altering the course of my life.

And so I auditioned for show choir at my high school.

Loveland High School and I essentially started my singing journey then.

Baby, when you see what a lot of people would say is, I had a lot of raw talent that was very not refined.

And so I had a whole lot of amazing people around me who taught me how to kind of harness it.

[guitar playing] I would say soft pop is probably the best way to put it.

It's pop music with a lot of singer songwriter influence.

Um, I sing a lot.

I sing a lot about things that are just real.

I don't I don't want to overcomplicate things, and I want to generally be positive and take an uplifting outlook with my music.

[guitar playing] I think what sets me apart to a degree is the amount of connection that I have with the people around me.

A lot of people do it kind of as a hobby, and they treat it like, like kind of something more for fun.

This is what I want to do for my career.

I think about it morning to night, and I'm writing, either writing or producing or sending emails to get connections, to do interviews, to be on playlists or whatever it could be.

I think what sets me apart is my perseverance I want.

I think I want this more than anybody.

Yo looks so good tonight.

[applause] I had my first debut headlining show at A&R Music Bar, so it was kind of a dream because we were initially going to be at the basement, but we got to upgrade to A&R Music Bar because tickets just flew, and so we got upgraded up there about a month out from the show, and everybody came out for the show and played a good hour of music.

It was the coolest, coolest day of my life.

From morning to night, I was interacting with people that I hadn't seen in months or even years.

Like my mom's college roommates daughter came because she heard about it.

Like like the connections went that far.

We had people fly in from Missouri, from Florida for the show, so it was really encouraging.

Like from morning to night, everywhere I would turn, it would be another circle, another like crazy connection from class or from elementary school.

It was awesome.

A lot of college musicians aren't necessarily doing that formal aspect that comes with the production and the mixing and the mastering and all of that.

You hear right next to me.

And so the production aspect is something that can be so overbearing and so frustrating and like, you can just dig, dig, dig yourself a hole for sure.

But I think when you find that right feeling, when the song has the colors that you have in your head when they're executed, I think that's that's like when a production manifests to, like, what it's supposed to be, you know.

Stay close to me.

The only place where.

Production is definitely one of my favorite parts of making music, because it gives you so much creative control over the idea and making it into something that is more palatable for everyone else.

I want to hear from you.

I would say the difficulties that I ran into while starting up this music journey was, I mean, the entire thing is trial and error.

Like, you do so many things, right?

But then you also do so many things wrong.

And I think that I'm in a good place in my life, and especially just with the communities, communities that I have, that when I made those mistakes, I have people to lift me up and to say, hey, this is what you can do next time to make it better.

So there's like the business aspect of music and like how that works.

And I've really taken a lot of influence from some of my older friends who've been doing this longer.

It's their career.

It's what they do.

And so they they pay it forward because people helped them initially.

And now they're helping me out.

When I wake up, I have to do it.

It's not a like to do list or anything.

It's kind of what drives me.

So I mean, my biggest inspirations for sure are getting to play it, play the music that I make with the people that I make it with.

So like some people live to play for thousands and thousands of people, I feel like I'm lucky that I'm getting to that.

But some of the most fun I've ever had in music is just being in the studio with friends, making the songs.

I think that anybody who listens to my music, I really hope that they leave just kind of feeling good.

It's feel good music.

It's not supposed to weigh you down, it's supposed to, if anything, lighten your burden, you know?

So my goal is for it to be so uplifting and positive that when you go through a playlist of just Adam Paddock's music, you're going to leave feeling better than when you started listening.

♪ So hard ♪ Hear more at adampaddock.com.

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

To view more, visit wedu.org/artsplus Or follow us on social.

Until next time, I'm Gabe Ortiz.

Thanks for watching.