(bright music) - The American dream has many different interpretations.

However, at its core the philosophy that every American through hard work determination and initiative, should have the opportunity for a better and richer life.

On this episode of The Arts Page, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Music Director Ken-David Masur shares his journey growing up abroad, and his family's move to the United States to pursue their American dream.

You'll also get a tour of two unique museums.

Take a tour of the Noguchi Museum, featuring stunning art of sculpture and light.

And visit a museum dedicated to fine art, focused on our four-legged friends, the American Kennel Club's Museum of the Dog.

The Arts Page starts right now.

(upbeat music) And welcome to The Arts Page.

I'm your host, Sandy Maxx.

Here at Milwaukee PBS we have been sharing the thoughts and definitions of the American dream, from the perspective of people here in our community.

In each of our local shows, 10thirtysix, Adelante, and Black Nouveau, you've seen people living their dream, working for their dream, and striving to improve the dreams of others.

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Music Director Ken-David Masur is living his American dream as conductor of one of the finest orchestras in the country Masu and the MSO, now in its second season, at the Bradley Symphony Center on Wisconsin Avenue, strive to bring extraordinary music performances that enrich our community.

The maestro was gracious enough to invite our colleagues from 10thirtysix into his home to talk about his American dream.

- American dream was something that was so distant but always colored with a certain sweetness.

(bright piano music) I'm Ken-David Masur, music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

I grew up in the town of Leipzig in Germany in the state of Saxony.

It was the second largest city after East Berlin in East Germany.

I was born in 1977, twelve years before the reunification.

My mother is a Japanese musician, singer.

She met my father, who is a conductor, and who at the time was music director, or the Kapellmeister as we call it, of the Gewandhaus, one of the really great traditional orchestras in Germany.

And they met in Rio de Janeiro.

For the most part, I really felt that I was this German kid, and then occasionally, of course, people would point out that perhaps I didn't look as German as they did, being half Japanese and was sometimes called things, but I grew up otherwise just like a German boy who loved everything that all of my friends loved.

I was my mother's only child, and so I was constantly trying to find friends, knocking on on people's stores, even though I didn't know who had lived there, I just thought maybe there's somebody there to play with.

And it was a time when you could do that.

The American dream seemed something that everything, regardless what it is, must be much better, life is better, music is better, food is better, colors are brighter.

I think that what we know from what came from America in terms of also jazz, and things that I think my father would sometimes say, you know, here's a recording, or an LP of, you know, things like Duke Ellington.

(playful music) I came to the United States.

We came to New York when I was 13 years old, and I entered school there in New York, the German School of New York.

And it was difficult for me because I remember that when my father got the appointment to be music director of the New York Philharmonic it was not an easy decision.

But when the decision was made, of course he and my mother wanted to introduce me in a way that would ease me perhaps into this city, and into the life that was so different from what I had known.

And so as a young teenage boy, they brought me to New York City to live for a couple of weeks across from Lincoln Center in one of those hotels.

And I remember because of jet lag, getting out of bed in the middle of the night, and it was on Broadway and of course the street was so busy and noisy.

And the next day I said, I'm not coming here.

I think my mother led this after my reaction to not stay in the city, but to move just 30 minutes north of the city where you have more quiet, there's more peace, more nature.

That helped me ease into understanding that American life is more than just the hustle and bustle of New York City.

- [Interviewer] Do you have dual citizenship?

- No, but I'd like to.

I'm a German citizen with a green card, and because I'm now the only non-American citizen in my family, I've made plans to become a US citizen.

(symphonic music) For me, the American dream was always something that was, I think an idea a dream and rooted in an imagination, in sort also a little bit of fantasy of what are your, perhaps your own hopes, even in music just feeling free to try anything without being judged, and during our daily lives, we are concerned with things, we are worried about things, but when we are all in the concert hall together, at least for those two hours we know that we will have peace.

And I'm realizing that this is the same for the country, really, that is the home of the American dream, that with the more freedom you are given the more responsibility and the more challenges also you have with it.

And this is why it's become clear to me that actually our idea to keep up this imagination of what the American dream is about bringing the people together on a personal level, in your neighborhood, in the communities that immediately that we are connected with, family, and especially after all the recent events that we had to face, not taking things for granted, especially the things that are closest to you.

I think I've questioned the American dream about, is it really true that we can use the privilege that we've been given about freedom of speech, and freedom of thought, and of creativity in the right way without hurting one another?

And I think seeing that it's sometimes gone to a much more uncivilized form, I think that every time that happens and that we witness that, and that I see that, the American dream idea gets shattered and gets damaged in a sense.

And that's when I feel it's much more important to understand that we on the inside, I think with a hope of coming together, a level of joy, positivity, and with this feeling that we are all actually blessed to be given this life, and blessed to be given family and loved ones, and experience that and be able to share that with others that we are responsible for that.

(dramatic orchestra music) - [Interviewer] So part of the American dream is, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, what makes you happy?

- I think simple things, having the liberty to create, to do programming that brings voice to people who didn't have a voice perhaps, or not enough of a voice, to find out about the huge range of people and of cultures, to be able to do that through art and through music, and much of that has really started here in the United States.

I am living the American dream.

I'm living a dream, I feel that I'm gifted with extraordinary performances, rehearsals, moments of music in the home, with extraordinary musicians, especially here with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in an extraordinary new concert hall, exploring some of the great music that has been written, and that has not yet been written.

And that I can be part of being in the process of being created.

And that is absolutely a dream come true, and I'm very grateful that I can do it here in Milwaukee.

- [Interviewer] Tell us a little bit about your love for basketball and- - Yeah.

- [Interviewer] Let's talk with basketball first of all.

- I have to give a shout out, I think to, my father had a driver at the New York Philharmonic and our driver, Matt Parker, his name is, he was always excited about American sports, something my father and my mother knew very little of.

And I remember that when we first moved into our new home in New York, that he gave me a baseball mat and a glove, and he taught me, told me, you know, you have to rub this oil and you know, how to maintain, and I didn't even know anything about the game but just all I remember is his passion for American sports.

And then the next week he would bring me this beautiful leather basketball.

And we had this old, it seemed it, dilapidated basket, I didn't really want to look at it because it it looked so old, but you know, your quintessential American basketball hoop.

And he brought this new basketball and he taught me how to properly stand and, you know hold the ball, and, you know, throw a free throw.

And I will never forget that, and I realized that just a few weeks ago I started doing that with my son, who was 12 years old , around the same age that I was at the time.

And when we looked for a home here in Milwaukee, I actually told our realtor whenever we drove up to a home that didn't have a basketball hoop, that I said I think we should pass this house, I think we should move on to the next one.

Wow, yes!

This it.

- You heard Ken-David Masur's American dream, you can also hear his wife's, pianist Melinda Lee Masur shares her dream with us too and you can see that story on our website, milwaukeepbs.org/americandreams.

You've heard the song lyric about New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

It is a city that many people go to in pursuit of their American dream and we visit two unique New York museums right now.

First, we visit the Noguchi Museum in Queens.

Isamu Noguchi was the son of parents from two different cultures, and although his mother wanted him to be a doctor, he became one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.

In 1985, he founded a museum dedicated to his work, the Noguchi Museum features the artist innovative large sculptures, drawings, and models, and honors his extraordinary legacy.

Step inside the museum now and learn why there are no labels on any of the artworks.

(calm music) - Noguchi was born in 1904.

He was born in Los Angeles, California.

His mother was an Irish woman from New York, she's born in Brooklyn.

His father was a traveling poet from Japan.

Noguchi wasn't even named, until he was almost three years old, his mother just called him boy or Yo.

His identity was complicated, from the very first moment of his birth, he was biracial, chose to be multicultural his whole life, but at a time when it was much harder.

Enrolled at Columbia in pre-med, his mother felt that he was destined for bigger things than being a doctor, and by that she meant being an artist.

He was a spectacular academic sculpture at 1920, and then very quickly realized that he was becoming the poster boy of a passe art form.

(bright music) He really wanted to change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic good.

He wanted to make it an active part of our everyday lives, that's why he never stopped making furniture, his Akari lamp series, he made playgrounds, he made playground equipment, he made sets for theater and dance, he had long collaborations with people like Martha Graham.

The museum was founded in 1985, but Noguchi had been here for almost 10 years.

He bought a derelict factory building which is the red brick building behind me, and started using it for storage and staging.

Sculpture is all about physical inconvenience.

Everything is big and heavy, and take some space, and requires equipment to deal with., so sculptors always need more room.

(calm music) He decided that in order to encapsulate his perspective or his point of view, his way of thinking of things, that the best thing to do was to build an institution.

And so he began to turn his private garden and space into a display space.

When the museum opened it was seasonal, or Noguchi would be here himself, you could ring the bell and he'd come down and walk you through.

One of the things that you'll notice when you come to our museum, probably right away, is that we don't have wall labels.

We do that, not because Noguchi hated wall labels, when the museum first opened there were labels identifying all the sculptures, somewhere near them in a kind of traditional museum fashion.

Gradually he just removed them, and it's because he wanted your experience of the work to be primary.

The fastest way to kill an artwork is to pretend that you've solved it.

The museum is really about a direct and intimate relationship with these objects and these things, and more important the larger sense of an environment that they create.

They really produce an atmosphere, and we're standing in this garden, which isn't even two-thirds of an acre, it's teeny tiny, it's a postage stamp.

He called the museum an oasis on the edge of a black hole.

The black hole is New York City and the urban maelstrom, and as small as it is, you come here and you just soak it in, and you soak it in through osmosis.

It's like visiting a forest, not like going to the museum.

Maybe Noguchi's most successful sculpture overall are his Akari lanterns.

He called them lanterns rather than lamps, because he said he wanted them to be as movable as butterflies.

The traditional paper lanterns in Gifu City specifically are made with a particular kind of continuous bamboo ribbing and washy paper, that's made with the interior bark of a mulberry tree, and it produces a laid paper that's just more durable, more flexible, and more resilient than classic laid cotton paper.

(calm music) "Break through Capestrano" was made out of Japanese basalt.

A basalt column is a single crystal of basalt, and Noguchi worked with harder and harder stones because he wanted the material to resist him.

What he really liked was stones that had already been marked by some process that he would then incorporate into the work.

You can see the lines of drill holes, those drill holes were made manually with hand drills, and then they'll push two bamboo wedges into the hole and fill the hole with water.

The bamboo wedges expand enough to crack the stone.

Noguchi loved that, and he loved the product of this breaking process.

So he would take these stones columns and set them up right, slice the bottom off so that it would stand up, and then make his few adjustments to turn them into sculpture in air quotes.

The well that's right behind me, this wonderful variation on a tsukubai, that is a circulating fountain, the water just cascades out over the stone.

That's another one of those basalt columns, just lopped off with a coring drill, making a hole in it.

Some of these sculptures are eroding, but the trees are growing, their relationship to each other is changing constantly over time.

He planted all of the trees, so the magnificent katsura tree that provides the canopy that dominates the garden, it really was a sprig.

It was a quarter in sapling, and now you see what that's become.

And that's why the heart and soul of the Noguchi Museum is this garden.

(calm music) - You can learn even more about the life and art of Isamu Noguchi at the website noguchi.org.

Another unique museum in New York is in Manhattan and it is dedicated to our furry four-legged friends.

The American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog, features nearly 2000 pieces of canine related artwork.

Founded in 1982, the museum highlights the meaningful role dogs play in society, and the strong bond they share with us.

(calm music) - The one thing you have to realize when you come here is the fact that it's an art museum, first and foremost, this is a collection, possibly one of the greatest collections of dog art in the world.

It comprises about 1700 objects, primarily fine art artwork and their paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, a whole variety of things, all dedicated to the dog.

Well, we've had several of exhibitions, we have a robust schedule.

Some that come to mind are the women and dogs in the arts.

We found that in going through the collection of how many women were involved and really good dog artists , and we want to show that off.

We've had Hollywood dogs.

We have a number of posters.

We have presidential dogs, and we do that every four years.

Talk about the different pets and dogs that different presidents owned.

Recently, we've hosted the exhibition of "Dogs of War and Peace," where we have a lot of images of dogs that how they helped on the battlefield, and off the battlefield as well, as therapy dogs and helping people come back.

Particularly poignant was the "Wounded Warrior Dogs" by James Mellick, who an Ohio artist who crafted these allegories of dogs, and reflecting the injuries and the suffering that not only the handlers but also the dogs incurred.

(calm music) One of the great joys of bringing this museum to New York, was the the reception we've had for the library.

The library is always packed, we have an activity center.

We bought 4,000 volumes of the AKC Library.

We not only have a great collection, but we also have state-of-the-art digitally interactive displays.

You can train a virtual dog, I think I just heard her, Molly.

We took a 10 year old lab out in Los Angeles put it in a motion capture suit, and then filmed her there.

So all the motions and reactions are in real time, the way the dog would've done it.

Probably the most popular is the find your match, not the dog you should have, but the dog you look like.

It takes you photograph and through AI decides what dog you look like.

We have a meet the breeds table where you can learn about all 200 breeds in the AKC.

The oldest work here is a 30 million year old fossil Hesperocyon, which is was an early dog.

Most of our paintings start around 1670s, and then go on to today.

And show a variety of different activities that dogs engage in.

(calm classic music) Queen Victoria was probably really the most important person in the 19th century and elevating the status of the dog, rather than just being a working dog in the field, to be a dog in the home.

It became very popular to have dogs as pets.

I think the crowd favorite here is "Silent Sorrow," a very sad painting, it's shows Caesar, Edward the VII's dog after the king had passed away.

Edward VII inherited his mother's the Queen Victoria's love of dogs.

Edward VII stipulated that Caesar was in his funeral procession, ahead of nine heads of state, who's at court to him.

Is painted by Maud Earl and it shows his dog Caesar leaning his head on his master's armchair, as the armchair solely fades into the background in obscurity.

Another work we have here, which is probably one of the greatest American dog paintings, is "Sensation and Bang Bang."

It's painted by John Martin Tracy.

It's a magnificent painting out in the woods.

This is by far his best work, the light filtering through the trees, the atmosphere that he brings to it, it's just a stunning work.

There were two pointers that were imported by the Westminster Kennel Club back in the 19th century.

One of them, Sensation is the dog that eventually became the logo for the Westminster Kennel Club which you see at their show all the time.

Another popular piece is not a painting but it's actually "Queen."

"Queen" is a carousel dog, by the Looff Factory, probably around 1890s, that shows a mastiff.

It hit me after you're looking at a lot of dog paintings throughout my life, I'm starting to look at dogs differently.

And I would see things that I didn't see in the dog that the painter was telling me, that really all sudden, it was like a moment where I said, this is really the goal of art.

Whether it be a dog painting, or conceptual work, or an abstract work, is to make you see the world differently through the artist's eyes, and that's what you learn about dogs.

You say, I never really noticed that, that's an interesting thing.

(calm music) - What's your favorite breed of dog?

You can browse hundreds of artworks in their permanent collection and get more information about this unique museum at their official website, museumofthedog.org.

Thank you for watching The Arts Page, I'm Sandy Maxx.

Please join us the first Thursday of every month for a half hour full of art, on The Arts Page.

(playful music)