- Hi, I'm Satori Shakoor and here's what's coming up on One Detroit Arts and Culture.

An artist talks about his latest exhibition.

A weekly festival in Southwest Detroit, and checking out Belle Isle's newest renovation.

It's all this week on One Detroit Arts and Culture - Support for this program provided in part by the Kresge Foundation, the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

From Delta faucets to Behr Paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit dtefoundation.com to learn more.

- Gregory Haynes and Richard Sonenklar.

Nissan Foundation.

And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(smooth jazz music) - Hi, and welcome to One Detroit Arts and Culture.

I'm your host, Satori Shakoor.

Thanks for joining me at the David Klein Gallery on Washington Boulevard in Detroit.

Coming up on the show, the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation hosts a very special event every Friday, and the Belle Isle Nature Center renovates its space.

But first, I am so excited to be joined by artist Scott Hocking whose exhibition opens here at the Gallery on November 19th.

Scott, thank you for being here on One Detroit Arts and Culture.

- It's my pleasure.

Nice to meet you.

- And what is your upcoming exhibition about?

- Well, my exhibition here at David Klein that opens this November is kind of in tandem with a retrospective exhibition of my work over the last 25 years that opens at Cranbrook Art Museum a couple of of weeks earlier on November 4th.

So here at the Gallery we're going to focus on some work that's not in the museum show but also connects to that, that history and timeline of my work over the years.

Some smaller cast bronze sculptures are based on a piece that was just installed in front of Huntington Place back in August, where it's a an 11-foot bronze sphere that was installed.

- Wow, okay.

And how does Detroit come into play in all of your works?

- Well, I'm 47 years old and I've been here my whole life.

It really started early for me because I, I grew up near the railroad tracks and I would go to the railroad tracks and walk and explore and those early experiences with finding things, finding industrial detritus, industrial castoffs and found objects and junk at junkyards.

It ended up becoming really inspirational to me.

And really at that time, in the mid-90s in Detroit, there was an abundance of wasted material.

There was a lot of spaces where people just left everything behind.

Whole factories shut down, shuttered.

Like people stopped going to work one day and abandoned it.

So for me that was a huge inspiration, but also irritation.

I would be kind of inspired by the buildings, but irritated that somebody had enough money to have a building like that and then let it go to waste.

Those kinds of things fueled my work early on and they still do now.

- What do you want people to know when they're looking at the exhibition?

- I like that people bring their own ideas and their own baggage to exhibitions.

I don't necessarily care if they get what I'm saying, but in general, I, I like making work that I might have 10 different reasons behind it, but it's still up for interpretation.

It's abstract enough.

Maybe it connects with people in ways.

I love it when people view my artwork and somehow they have the same thought I do or there's a connection we make like, oh, I get it that way.

But I also love it when they have no connection and they have no idea what I was thinking and they have their own idea about it, good or bad.

So for me that's always been one of the most amazing kind of exciting things about artwork is if it gets a reaction, if it, if it makes people stop for a moment and look, it may be a break from like the mundane reality.

They're walking down the street and they look through the window and they see something and it makes them for a moment just stop.

That's enough for me.

And if they want to, they can go deeper.

They can come in the Gallery, they can look, they can read, they can ask questions.

To me, that's kind of the beauty of art.

- Is there anything else you wanna share with our audience?

- I would say come to my exhibitions.

(laughs) I'm really excited about the Cranbrook exhibition opening and I'm really thrilled that I'll have work here.

I mean, I'm kind of amazed that I'm gonna have two openings, two weeks apart.

I'll be exhausted, but I'll be here.

Might be cold, put on a hat and come through the exhibitions.

- Well thank you so much.

- Nice to meet you.

Thank you very much.

- Nice to meet you too.

Now we're going to Southwest Detroit where every Friday the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation hosts a popup event called Fantazma Market where local artists and vendors sell their work.

Guest chefs serve up delicious eats and performers take the stage.

One Detroit's Chris Jordan was at a recent Fantazma Market to raise funds for Puerto Rican hurricane disaster relief.

Take a look.

(Latin rhythm singing) - Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation.

This is our 25th year.

We've service southwest Detroit and some surrounding downriver communities, primarily focusing on the Latino community, but everybody in our neighborhood.

Fantazma Market and Cafe and our social entrepreneurship program is a project that we started last year kind of coming out of COVID.

A lot of Detroiters started a side hustle during COVID as a way to make money because everybody kinda, we were out of work.

So we're trying to turn side hustles into real thriving businesses.

Majority of our vendors are female, so women owned businesses and people of color owned businesses is really our focus.

Every week now we have about 20 vendors.

A different pop-up kitchen, and then we have different music performers, different themes.

So it can be a comedy show, it can be a, next week is a drag show.

We had a fashion show showing all Detroit fashion designers.

So it's just, it varies every week to try to keep the community interested and engaged.

We had on schedule already for tonight salsa pachanga night to have salsa dancing and that.

But when the hurricane hit a couple weeks ago I woke up that morning.

We needed to do something.

Puerto Rico was hit hard a couple years ago and it was not rebuilt.

And there are a lot of families struggling.

A lot of our community members' families who live there, whose houses don't have roofs, who are still having tarps, whose infrastructure was trashed during Maria.

And then they got hit again.

So I woke up that next day after hearing it on the news and I'm like, we need to turn this into a fundraiser.

- And so immediately we sort of began to identify the different groups on the ground that were doing good work, that were doing direct work with people affected and thinking about what their needs are, right?

What are the people's needs and what are the organization needs?

We began to list those things and name those groups.

Casa Pueblo and Adjuntas, Puerto Rico and (indistinct) Salud are the two main organizations.

And then we know community organizers and activists who are doing wellness checks and door knocking and they have their hands on the pulse of what the people need.

And the idea is to skip all the middle, middle men, middle women and just get the aid directly to them.

- Puerto Rico.

(indistinct) - All these community organizers coming together for one cause you know, it's, it's, it's this events kind of speaking with music and then speaking also with different fundraisers and different companies that come together and see what we could do, you know, to, to help.

- This is a Detroit thing, this is a Detroit thing.

(man raps) - We have a bunch of different Puerto Rican artists who are from the neighborhood who are coming to represent for Puerto Rico and perform to raise money for the fundraiser.

A lot of them are in the hip-hop world and a little bit in the Latin scene.

- Singers, rappers, reggaeton artists that wanted to just contribute their time and lend their voice to the cause because it's their family who's hurting.

I mean, Puerto Rico seems far but when you're Puerto Rican, you always have family there.

You always have a tie to the island.

So even though it's a a long distance away, it's also here.

So everybody here hurts.

- I have family back there and it's just devastating to know that they don't have the resources they need and they don't have electricity and working water and it's honestly not right.

- My family's 100% Puerto Rican and my grandmother's actually from Yabucoa, Puerto Rico.

That's just in our blood and that's definitely my blood and I definitely feel deep connection and that's kind of like why me personally is why I decided to perform not only to kind of help relief and how to bring awareness or whatever, but kind of like it was my way of standing up for Puerto Rico.

- Music communicates with everybody and bringing people together, all the different people here enjoying the music, you know, here for a cause.

- Art and culture transcends grace and ethnicity in a very powerful way.

And I think that there's also a common thread behind a lot of popular music in general, but Latino Hispanic music.

So the bachata, merengue, the salsa, there's some differences but then there's this undergirding similarity which is the African sound, the African rhythm.

And because of that, I think it also transcends cultures, right?

So hip hop, reggaeton, even Motown music.

And so because of that, I think that art and culture has a way of of building bridges in a very unique and powerful way.

And I think that's what you see in southwest Detroit.

(woman sings) - It really, it is the culture.

It's home.

Like I hope that it gives everybody a sense of the love and joy you feel in your heart when you think about the island.

I love that (indistinct), they really focus on bringing the cultural aspect back.

And you just always feel that love when you're in the building.

You feel like you belong and you're accepted (woman sings in Spanish) - What does Puerto Rico mean to you?

- My intro to my performance is actually a piece that I actually recorded from my grandmother and my mother.

And it's pretty much answering the question of what Puerto Rico means to them.

- This idea of mutual aid and this idea of like solidarity is very organic to Detroit and is very present in the islands.

And so that connection was bound to be made and, and bound to be effective.

We will continue to raise funds until we get word right, from our comrades on the islands that that things are, are better and things are good.

We'll continue to raise funds probably through the new year if, if the energy is there.

- I think any way or any opportunity where people come together and and show support, solidarity, but also enjoy themselves in one another's presence, in, in a positive sort of element, right?

In a positive environment.

I mean I, I go home with my heart full - Turn to the left, basic.

- There's always something new every Friday.

So if you check us out on Facebook or Instagram at Fantazma Market and Cafe you'll be able to see what we have coming up and then you can sign up to vend or be an entertainer or be a popup kitchen.

- And the atmosphere is different every time you come here.

But the one thing that stays constant is that we have a family of vendors and people who work here and it really starts to feel like a community.

Everybody here knows each other, loves each other, helps each other out.

I think it's really beautiful that the community, community can come together and do something like this because it's giving us a reason to all come together and just celebrate our culture and spend time with each other.

But we're also raising money for a great cause for the people back at home in the island.

- The Belle Isle Nature Center has opened its doors again following a $2.5 million renovation.

The updated facility aims to show how nature is closer than you think, even in an urban setting like our city.

One Detroit's Deija Moss headed over to the center to see the new exhibits.

- When COVID 19 hit, many places had to shut down, Belle Isle's Nature Center being one of them.

But the shutdown wasn't all bad.

The timing allowed for the over 40 year old nature center to receive a makeover.

I spoke with the nature center's director, Amy Greene and education specialist Sierra McWilliams to get some insight on the renovation that highlights urban wildlife.

- So we have worked for, for longer than the pandemic about plans and our vision for what this place really could be in this city.

I do like to say we're the Detroit prior of the Detroit Zoological Society.

We've been here for a long time and it means a lot to a lot of people.

People loved it before we renovated.

So it's really been a dream to be able to kind of breathe into life what this place could really mean.

There are a lot of really really great nature centers out there.

And you, when you walk in you can see that this is different.

It's strikingly different if you ask me.

And that's on purpose because Detroit is different, right?

And we're here in the heart of the city.

we're on Belle Isle, there's nature all around us.

- I think that's important for Belle Isle in Detroit as a whole to have a nature center because if you were to like Google nature centers in this area right now, there's not many, there's not many that come up.

I think when I was younger, the first nature center I went to was like an hour away from here.

So I think it's really nice to have something that's in the city that's right here that's easily accessible for the community.

- Every single mural in the whole nature center is based on an actual location in the city where the animal was seen.

So reinforcing you'll see in some of the habitats or the the murals, sidewalks or streetlights or those things that are part of urban nature, Detroit nature and amplify in that, you know the intersection of the built and natural environment.

It's both.

It's very rarely only one or the other.

- And when you work at a zoo space, you're usually talking about animals from like the tropics and they're very different and they're far away.

Like you would not really be able to go see a Galapagos turtle somewhere here, but you can see a red-eared slider.

You can't see a painted turtle, and I think that having that connection to like your backyard nature is something that's really cool.

When I talk about people returning to the nature center I like to say we have a heartbeat again and a soul.

When you're in the offices, it's kind of a literal beat.

You can hear the children running through that space and it's just such a cool way to literally reinforce that programming that we do.

- My favorite programs are our public programs because you get all different kinds of people that come together and I really enjoy doing our nature hikes because we all work as like one group to kind of explore and you get to share knowledge and information.

Our hikes have different themes and they have different lengths.

So there's a few different trails around the nature center.

There's one like right out back, there's like the Wildwood Trail if you go further down then like the Lighthouse Trail.

So they range anywhere between like 20 minutes to up to an hour.

- The young learner space is I think one of the most powerful new pieces.

I think the other thing that I'm really excited about is the bee vision.

So it's this big perspective shift, like I don't know when the last time you looked up and saw the bottom of a dandelion or an aster and saw these flowers so big.

But also there's this bumblebee and you can move the bee left and right and up and down and see kind of the world, In a way you can see the way the the bee sees it through ultraviolet.

And so their sensory perception is a little different than ours.

And what does this mean and how do they see flowers?

- I think my favorite part of the nature center is kind of helping people discover the animals like in their habitats because we have very like naturalistic habitats.

So the animals don't like pop out at you.

You kind of gotta look for them.

So when people are at the the like habitats they have to get in close.

- Although many changes have been made to the newly renovated nature center, visitors will still be able to revisit some familiar sites.

- The salt from the Detroit salt mines, it took a lot of effort to help everyone understand like, this means so much this salt, right?

This means so much to the people who have been here before.

Those who are coming back, they look for it when they come here.

The photo opportunity frog, that's iconic if you've been here before.

So those things are, are the same - For Amy and Sierra, the nature center isn't just about viewing animal habitats and fun activities.

It goes much deeper than that.

It's a place for discovery and connection.

- You're not just here to to hang out, you're here to say like dig a little deeper maybe literally dig an orient tunnel and see what does that mean to be a little bit more connected to the island and who's been here before and who's coming later and how we're all part of this much, much bigger thing together, right?

It's not just the animals, it's the people we're sharing it with and the, the space that we're sharing it with.

- You have all different kinds of people that come into the nature center and they're all experiencing nature a little bit differently.

So, to really try to connect with them when they come in the nature center, you want to try and empathize with them, see where they're coming from and try and help them like really open up their eyes or like help them see something maybe they wouldn't normally see.

- We're here to give you a space to, to belong as part of this already and make it your own and experience it in your own way.

Like it's a stressful world out there.

Come here and let that go for a minute and share your time together and have some fun and learn something.

And you know, maybe, maybe the parents can impart some of their knowledge on their kids or maybe the kids can teach something to the parents.

It's kind of a privilege to be a space where those kinds of things can happen for people to make memories.

- For more information about all of our arts and culture stories go to oneDetroitpbs.org.

Thanks to the David Klein Gallery for having us here today and connecting us with Scott Hocking.

Remember, in addition to this space in Detroit, David Klein also has a Gallery in Birmingham.

I'm going to leave you with a performance from Detroit performs live from Marygrove.

Enjoy and I'll see you next week.

(mellow piano music) ♪ Let it in, yeah, ♪ ♪ Ee ee ah ee yeah ♪ ♪ Ee ee ah ee yeah ♪ ♪ Memories of the loved ones ♪ ♪ Who pass by me ♪ ♪ On the way to another lifetime ♪ ♪ I mustn't think that they left me lonely ♪ ♪ because they're in my mind, my soul, my style, my lives ♪ ♪ Shout out to the elders who told me the truth about you ♪ ♪ What I should do and I do ♪ ♪ All the dumb mistakes they wish they never made ♪ ♪ The obstacles they had to face, ♪ ♪ but it got better in time ♪ ♪ The light at the end of the tunnel was crystal clear ♪ ♪ Young ones don't wanna look ♪ ♪ because they feel the end is near ♪ ♪ but the end is the beginning when you're enlightened.

♪ ♪ so the oldies whisper ♪ ♪ open your eyes brighter ♪ ♪ on the other side ♪ ♪ memories of the loved ones ♪ ♪ who once passed by me on the way to another lifetime ♪ ♪ I mustn't think that they left me lonely ♪ ♪ because they're in my heart, my mind, ♪ ♪ my soul, my style, my rhyme ♪ ♪ I cannot pretend that life's a fairy tale ♪ ♪ like I did this by myself ♪ ♪ No, starting for life from within ♪ ♪I traveled on a past with them ♪ ♪ and this is how it went ♪ ♪ story shared with music ♪ ♪ The cold rhythm spoke to my soul on a spiritual mission ♪ ♪ They said listen now and leave tomorrow ♪ ♪ Once you've heard and learned to follow ♪ ♪ Finally that keeps you going ♪ ♪ Positivity the soul flowing ♪ ♪ and the memories will guide ♪ ♪ the memories will guide you ♪ ♪ Memories, memories of the love ♪ ♪ One to one pass by me on the way to another lifetime ♪ ♪ I wasn't think that they left me lonely ♪ ♪ because they're in my heart, my mind, my soul, ♪ ♪ my style, my rhymes ♪ ♪ Sweet memories, memories, memories, yeah, yay ♪ - Sweet memories.

Sweet memories of the people like my uncle who used to play the jazz keyboard.

And I used to listen when I was a kid.

And now I know that as I'm an adult I still live with those memories that guide me every day in my musical journey.

Sweet memories.

Don't forget those sweet memories and those ancestors that we say I share for because those are those sweet memories that you'll never forget that make you who you are.

They're in your soul, your styles, your rhymes.

They're who you are.

- Support for this program provided in part by the Kresge Foundation, the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

From Delta faucets to Behr Paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving.

We support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit DTEfoundation.com to learn more.

- Gregory Haynes and Richard Sonenklar Nissan Foundation and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music)