(exciting music) - [Jade] Richard Garrison charts aspects of daily life in his colorful work.

Corey Aldrich explores our creative economy, and catch a performance from Ryan Leddick.

It's all ahead on this episode of AHA!

A House for Arts.

(exciting music) - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, The Alexander & Marjorie Hover Foundation and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our community is crucial to our continued success.

That is why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(exciting music) - Hi, I'm Jade Warrick, and this is AHA!

A House for Arts, a place for all things creative.

Here's Matt with today's field segment.

- I'm in a parking lot in Slingerlands, New York, contemplating the art of Richard Garrison.

Why am in a parking lot?

It's part of the process.

Let's go.

(cart rumbling) - Most of my work is mapping related, and usually it's about the domestic environment.

A lot of it is based upon observation and looking at the palates of these things and distilling that information, and hopefully transforming and seeing these subjects in a different light.

I think I've always been interested in art, I think even way back in kindergarten.

I think it's always been something I've been really interested in and enjoyed doing.

I think in terms of how my perspective of what I've seen or what art is and how I think about art has drastically changed since then.

I've always been interested in landscape.

Initially, that's what I started doing, was the landscape paintings.

It wasn't until about 2000, I was coming off the Northway going on to Central Avenue, and Target was being built.

The old Northway Mall was being knocked down, and the parking lot was completed.

The red lampposts, the Target red lampposts were there, but there was no building yet, and in seeing that, it was like striking, 'cause you're coming off the ramp, you're kind of elevated and you can kind of see it differently.

I thought to myself oh, this is landscape for me.

This is the landscape that I'm living in.

There was something that happened back in, I think it was July 4th, 1998.

I was in a Kmart.

On one of the end cap walls were these color chips, and they weren't like just all reds or all yellows or all greens.

There was like a mixture of colors.

It looked like conceptual art when I saw it.

I started thinking about how can I use color chips as a way with my work?

And so back to Target, I started thinking about the parking lots and how there are places that you don't really pay attention to.

You park your car, they're kind of like these in between spots.

I went to 16 parking lots in the Capital District with my watercolor sets and just opened up the van door.

I matched the mulch, the painted parking lines, the asphalt, the lamppost.

From that, many projects have extended where I've gone and measured parking lots like with the GPS.

I've gone into stores and measured aisle widths.

It's always having this kind of rule or system to follow.

That's what I found to be really extremely engaging about that, was that the process would create the work itself, and I just really, after a while I got sold with that.

I really thought that was the greatest thing, and I still do.

Circulars were something I started working with probably about 14 years ago.

Before I was going out to the landscape, making paintings in parking lots and things like that.

I just thought how these flyers are like an extension of that landscape, and now they're coming into my home.

And so I started working the same way, like distilling colors from them, and I'd look at different pages.

I had this really rudimentary system of small, medium, large dots where I'd match the colors based on the size of the item on the paper.

A friend of mine, Bill Bergman, he saw this and he said to me you can do better than that.

He created a program on Excel.

So whenever I measured anything, it was more precise and it would convert the measurements into degrees and make it into a circle.

And so they ended up being this kind of hybrid of landscape and still lives, in a way.

It starts saying something, starts speaking about what's going on, what are we buying, what's being sold to us, how is it being sold, which I find really fascinating.

How about grocery shopping?

How can I make art while I'm grocery shopping?

I thought of this really simple system, really machine in a way, where it was just a wooden disk that had a Sharpie marker would go in the middle.

And then as I would go grocery shopping, the marker would move according to my movements of the cart.

It was a great way to kind of get work done when I really couldn't be in the studio.

There's always gonna be things that you like and you don't like and that you're interested in, you're passionate in, that really speak to you, but I think it's really important to just give everything a chance, like to question everything.

Why would someone do this?

That's what I love about looking at artwork and artists in general.

What are they saying?

I think when you're presented with more questions than answers, I think that's when it gets really interesting.

- Corey Aldrich is on a mission to spread the word about our area's creative power.

He's the Executive Director of ACE, the Upstate Alliance for the Creative Economy.

So what exactly is a creative economy, and what can we do to support it?

I spoke with Corey to find out.

Hi, Corey.

Welcome to AHA today.

- Well, thank you very much.

I am thrilled to be here experiencing your new gig with you.

- And I'm thrilled to be able to talk to you today.

So as Director of the Upstate Alliance for the Creative Economy, I wanted to get a little bit of history.

What is ACE?

- ACE is really an organization that's representing the interests and creating awareness of what we term the creative economy in the Capital Region, which is an eight county area.

It really came together as a convening of luminaries in the creative industries that were trying to figure out a way to pursue a new funding opportunity that Governor Andrew Cuomo had put together called the URI, the Upstate Revitalization Initiative.

There was a chance to be able to capture some of those funds to reinvest in our community in the arts and cultural sector.

These folks got together on a regular basis to meet about that, and eventually decided that a formalization of this group to kind of pursue this mission would be advantageous to our region and the organizations involved.

- Love to see the support, don't you, especially from our officials.

- Yeah, totally.

I mean, it's really important.

I think a lot of times creative individuals are siloed in that they're individual or freelancers, and they don't have the same voice that folks in different industries have, and yet our industry as a whole is a powerful segment in the economy.

In fact, pre-pandemic, it was coming in at almost as large as the construction industry for raw dollars that it was generating.

- That's beautiful.

So how would you define the creative economy?

For artists or folks who don't know what a creative economy is, how would you define that?

- Basically there was like five areas that we've identified that we felt were representative of the creative economy in the Capital Region, was media, design, preservation, visual arts, architectural heritage, and eventually we added artisanal food and beverage.

- There we go.

- I know, right?

So within that spans a number of different types of jobs and different employment functions.

It could be a game programmer, it could be an architect.

It could be an artisan chef working at a farm to table program at a small restaurant in Catskill.

But ideally the power of this particular market segment is that we are the place makers in our region.

So when you go to Catskill and you go to that really cool and hip coffee shop called HiLo that Liam and Laura started, that's part of what makes Catskill a great place to live, and the same thing's happening in Troy.

The same thing is happening across our region right now.

In large part, we feel that we have a disproportionate effect.

Maybe I'm a little haughty to say that, but I believe it, on creating a real value proposition for living in upstate New York, and so we just want folks to understand what we're doing and why it's so valuable to us.

- Seriously, and I will say just from my own experience as a muralist and artist myself, it helps bring people in.

When people see that your city is thriving artistically, they're attracted to that.

Is that something that you see often?

- Yeah, it's always been something that's a differentiator.

Why are certain areas of our region just on fire right now?

I was talking to Assemblyman John McDonald recently and he's like, Troy is a story.

Why is Troy a story?

Because there's these amazing mural programs going up, i.e.

Uniting Line, thank you for that.

But also there's the Arts Center of the Capital Region is putting together a very robust public arts program, and we're seeing that happening and rippling across the region.

I was recently up in Glens Falls and they just started a mural program up there, but it's more than just that.

It's the historical foundation.

It's the cultural museum, it's the Hyde Collection.

It's all these things that really give people a great opportunity to raise their family here and have a good quality of life.

- So in your opinion, what can we do locally to shift and build our creative economy here in the Albany, Troy and Schenectady area?

- I've been working to reenvision what ACE looks like in a post-pandemic world, and it occurred to me that ACE really stands for amplifying, educating and collaborating, and then the exclamation point that we've added is amplifying all those things.

So really if we're doing our job and we're fitting things into those categories, we're helping people to understand how to be sustainable as creatives in our region, and we're also broadcasting out a message that helps folks to understand that if you're in the creative industries, upstate New York is an excellent option for you to move your business or to be here, because honestly, you have some of the best of both worlds where you have this region, when you look at it as a cluster, is the equivalent of a large city.

When you put together Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga, all these areas, and yet we still have that beautiful wilderness.

We still have a lot of artisanal and niche creative industries here that could rival any other region in the country, I would argue.

- It's beautiful, and I agree.

I love all those cities, and they're filled with creatives.

Folks would be surprised with how the Troy, Schenectady, Saratoga areas are just filled with artists, just filled with amazing, talented, beautiful creative people, which when I moved to New York, I was surprised.

I was like oh my God, look at this, right next door.

I'm next to someone who is just doing amazing, beautiful things that you would see in the MOMA.

- Yeah, and it's even more than individual artists.

When we think creative economy, it's very easy to think oh, the musician, the painter, but it's our cultural institutions.

It's our performance arenas.

It's all those things that make a place whole, and when you look at the talent that's involved in those industries and in the institutional level, our educational institutions that are focused in some of these areas, we are an economic powerhouse.

The question is how do we continue to maintain people in our region by continuing to amplify and create those attraction points so that they'll want to stay here and look at this place as a destination to live and to move their business.

- Exactly.

Want people to stay in Albany and the upstate area too, not move down to the city all the time.

It's beautiful and amazing here and you can grow here.

I am a perfect example, I feel like.

- Yeah, and the city is really great.

I love going down there, but there's some things about upstate that you just can't really get down there, the experience that you can get up here.

I think that's why you saw a mass exodus of creative individuals moving up into the capital region.

I was shocked.

There was a period where I had to shift from my live event work before I became a director of ACE, and in my own consulting business was unable to do normal things, so I was working, helping some folks with some real estate stuff, and I couldn't believe how many creative people were moving up here because they just felt like they needed that extra space to be able to continue to have the head space to pursue their craft.

- Yes, not even physical space.

It's also that mental and emotional space that the upstate gives a creative that I think is really hard to find in larger cities such as New York.

- Yeah, totally.

I think we're all starting to understand the importance of that particular aspect of our lives.

You're seeing people voting with their feet in many ways, leaving in certain career paths and moving into the creative fields or moving physical locations to be in a place that's more conducive to their mental health.

- Agreed.

So I have another question for you.

What do you see other organizations doing that you think maybe that's not the best way to tackle growing the local creative economy?

What are some things that you see organizations do wrong, and what are some things that we could do right?

- Well you know, I would have had a much better or direct answer for that pre-COVID.

The 'rona has changed a lot.

I think no matter how excellent an organization was before, everyone has had to learn how to pivot in this new world where someone gets sick in your organization, you close down 20 jobs for two weeks and try and figure out how to make up the difference.

Some organizations that have a lot of public-facing activities in this sector have had a significantly difficult time reacting to those things.

I think the positive aspect of creative individuals in this economy is that we're used to improvising.

We're used to things coming at us having limited resources, and so that places us very well to address these issues and maybe become front runners in the solutions that we have.

I think being collaborative.

I was just having a conversation with a philanthropist in the region, Chet Opalka, and him and I were having this conversation about how do we continue to sustain funding sources for these organizations?

It's really about, we have to find new ways to integrate with maybe non-industry organizations and companies to figure out new and unique ways to be able to sustain one another.

- Now, when you say non-industry, what does that mean?

- That could mean for-profit businesses that aren't necessarily arts-related but maybe have some synergy that could be applied to those.

The example I like to use is when Albany Symphony is playing in Albany and Dominic has his restaurant there, DP, he's gonna have a full house every single time.

There are deeper levels of integration that could potentially happen.

In Glens Falls recently, I was talking to Chris over at the park theater, and he was talking about how he's been developing connections with a local restaurant where they're actually having an exchange in cash flow that's a little different than I would normally expect.

We're just gonna send these people over here.

What it did is, when one was needing extra assistance the other would step in to help.

I also saw this happen recently in Washington County where Salem Artworks has been actively working with a local business to put programming in there, provide paid internship opportunities.

These are all things that are benefiting the for-profit and the not-for-profit, but at the same time, creating deeper and more meaningful ways of collaborative sustaining, and I think that this is really critical for us at this time that is so uncertain in our economy.

- Very true, and I've noticed a common theme, collaboration.

- [Corey] It's a huge one.

- That's very important for artists in the industry to grow.

- Yeah, and I think some would say everything under the sun has already been done, and yet it's a new way of looking at things through creative expression that we can plum those depths to find new opportunity.

- Well thank you, Corey.

I appreciate you stopping by today.

It was nice speaking to you.

- I really enjoyed it Jade, and I look forward to collaborating with you in the near future.

- Thank you.

Please welcome Ryan Leddick.

- This song is called Brown Eyes.

It's about my partner that I've been with for almost four years.

It's about our first date.

♪ Like this glass of wine ♪ ♪ I prefer to take my time ♪ ♪ And savor, savor it all ♪ ♪ Savor it all with these candlelights ♪ ♪ And these brown eyes ♪ ♪ How they hold my gaze ♪ ♪ And my amazement ♪ ♪ My amazement ♪ ♪ I been around the world once or twice ♪ ♪ Read the book front to back ♪ ♪ But all that I seem to find ♪ ♪ Is in this candlelight ♪ ♪ And these brown eyes ♪ ♪ How they hold my gaze ♪ ♪ And my amazement ♪ ♪ My amazement ♪ ♪ Take one bottle down and pass it, pass it around ♪ ♪ Nothing looks like these candlelights ♪ ♪ And these brown eyes ♪ ♪ How they hold my gaze ♪ ♪ And my amazement ♪ ♪ Down, down, down ♪ ♪ Down, down, down ♪ - This next one is called State of Mind.

I wrote this one in Vermont, and I guess I'll just leave it there.

It's about state of mind.

♪ Underneath it all ♪ ♪ Lies this waterfall ♪ ♪ There will raise ♪ ♪ No one can cave ♪ ♪ 'Cause this is my state of mind ♪ ♪ With its voice new and refined ♪ ♪ 'Cause this is my state of mind ♪ ♪ State of mind ♪ ♪ Now underneath the moon ♪ ♪ Here I am snuggling up with June ♪ ♪ Now lay me down to sleep ♪ ♪ My head and my heartbeat ♪ ♪ 'Cause this is my state of mind ♪ ♪ With its voice new and refined ♪ ♪ 'Cause this is my ♪ ♪ This is my ♪ ♪ This is my ♪ ♪ This is my state of mind ♪ ♪ With its voice pure and refined ♪ ♪ 'Cause this is my state of mind ♪ - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit WMHT.ORG/AHA, and be sure to connect with WMHT on social.

I'm Jade Warrick, and thank you for watching.

(exciting music) - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chad and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.