- [Announcer] Production of applause an Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust, and by Cuyahoga county residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

(jazz music) - [David] Hello, I'm David C. Barnett.

Welcome to Applause.

Jordan Wong's art bursts with ideas.

The work he creates is stuffed with words and pictures drawn from ancient Chinese mythology, advertising, video games, and everything in between.

His latest exploration of this universe of images is on display in his first solo show at the Akron art museum, it's called The 10,000 Things.

Here are seven things to take away.

(bell ring) (mystic music) - So the 10,000 things is a Dallas phrase that refers to you know, the universe, the world pretty much all that's in existence.

And it kind of relates also to the imagery of things that are flowing, ebbing and flowing and just always shifting.

I love the concept of energy.

I love the concept of, you know, visuals of movement which I think have strong connections to life, to narratives, to human beings and growing.

A lot of the choices that I make connect to that.

(bell ring) My grandfather, he would take like computer paper and like, you know, cut it up into like smaller squares and just have like a big stack of it in the kitchen for me to draw on, I could spend hours drawing, you know - [Interviewer] What were you drawing?

- Oh!

Cartoon characters, comic book characters, you know video game characters, things, you know things that I was watching on TV like Sonic the Hedgehog, Dragon Ball Z, all those things.

(bell ring) This is Sun Wukong.

And he is one of the main characters in Journey to the West which is a classic Chinese novel written long time ago.

And there's a lot of, you know, adaptations of this character.

And I grew up watching the Journey to the West TV show that was made back in the 80s.

So my grandmother would record this show and have it on VHS tapes for me to watch.

And the stories just fantastical and really appeals to your imagination.

(bell ring) Someone asked me recently, like, you know, what is the use of rings and halos?

And I think they're a great motif to kind of connect to this idea of the divine or other worldly, you know something that is beyond this physical realm, you know to have this, this like halo or ring kind of like float around around you like 24/7 it's just like this really cool imaginative, you know scene.

(bell ring) I like using clouds because I feel like they are great imagery that communicates wonder, imagination, whimsy, and you can use them in all sorts of different ways.

You know, whether they're like kind of really fluffy and playful.

And now that I'm thinking about Chinese and Asian artwork the clouds are really used, especially in images of heaven and then things that are divine, beyond the realm of what we know.

(bell ring) Yeah, hiding little versions of myself is kind of been like a new thing just because the works I've been doing recently are just so detailed and there's so much going on that it's like, oh yeah, why not get away with hiding of this like small version of myself.

And it's kind of become a way to quote unquote, sign my my works.

(bell ring) A lot of the work that I'm doing now.

And also in the past, the common thread is this idea of like perseverance, encouragement, growth.

Now I'm exploring like again in relation to like those Dallas ideas, the ebbs and flow of life being a little softer when things are tense and hard and yeah, just kind of finding a balance and maybe bliss in this crazy life that we live.

Which, you know, I think applies to not just the times that we live now, but in the past and times that we're going to live.

So it's weird how it's like all connected and just always in flux.

- [David] Jordan Wong's new solo exhibition.

The 10,000 things is currently on view outside the Akron art museum in the Bud and Susie Rogers Garden.

We can thank Bostonian's of the 1800's who had the presence of mind to collect the works of artist Claude Monet when he was a daring contemporary artist.

For a once in a generation show, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston put together 35 of Monet's works bought by those forward-thinking collectors for the exhibit Monet and Boston: Legacy Illuminated.

Take a look.

- [Narrator] There he is on film.

It's 1915 and Claude Monet is talking, smoking, and painting at home in France.

He's real and regular.

Monet as man, not monument.

But as he fades from view, the legend takes hold.

- There's something that can be so transportative about Monet's beautiful vision of nature and about Monet's willingness to see variety and splendor in the mundane.

- [Narrator] Katie Hanson is the curator of Monet and Boston: Lasting Impression, a hallmark event of the Museum of Fine Arts, 150th anniversary celebrations.

It puts all of the museums vast Monet holdings on view.

- Boston was a great champion for Monet during the artist's own lifetime.

He knew his works were here.

- [Narrator] The show moves chronologically with the first work coming from a teenaged Monet.

Who is Oscar Monet?

(laughs) - Oscar Monet is someone who was teased about his name during his military service.

And so he switched to his second name Claude but we do have one caricature that he drew as a teenager and it's signed O. Monet for Oscar because that is how he began his career both as Oscar and also as a caricaturists.

- [Narrator] The caricaturist would turn impressionist in short order after an artist in his hometown recognized Monet's early talents and pushed him outdoors to experiment.

- Try the landscape, try color, and the vibrant air and Monet was open to that kind of exploration.

- [Narrator] Monet explored his native Normandy, from villages to harbors.

- He touches the canvas with the brush and squiggles it in one gesture to confidently create the reflection of the mast of a ship on the rippling surface of the harbor water.

- Katie, I love this painting because you feel like you can feel that little bit of heat that might be coming through with the sun.

- I love about this particular painting that it's really about Monet and where he lives.

I mean, he's living in this house, he's renting this house with the green shutters.

And so, you know that he saw this kind of commuting happen daily, and that he saw art in it.

He saw beauty.

- [Narrator] As he did wherever he went, especially along the coast, where he filled his palette to meet the explosions of color in nature.

Eventually Monet settled in Giverny, where he could make hay or hay stacks of his lush environment and where he'd be the stalwart of impressionism.

- You more and more see artists creating their own sensibility, their own touch.

- [Narrator] All the while Boston collectors wrote him, visited him, and purchased works for which Monet signed his own receipts.

The painter John Singer Sargent was both an admirer and a conduit to Boston patrons.

- Sargent painted Monet painting.

One of the pictures that's in the MFA's collection the meadow at Giverny, and there's a letter in the exhibition that Sargent wrote to Monet.

And he saying it was, it was a pleasant afternoon despite the Bostonian error of the ladies who came.

- [Narrator] This dramatically lit gallery is lined with later in life works in which Monet vigorously tackled the same subjects or views with multiple impressions.

Cathedrals, coastlines, and yes, water lilies.

Katie Hanson has titled this space: Monet's magic.

- In 1911, the MFA hosted its first solo show for Monet here at this location.

And one of the critics writing for a Boston newspaper was completely awestruck and talked about the magic moment, being surrounded by all the colors in a rainbow of dreams.

- [Narrator] His process, wasn't always dreamlike.

Here on the French Riviera where Monet had vacationed with his friend Renoir, he met his match in the blazing light.

- One of the things that he says when he's on the Riviera is that he had to joust and fight with the sun.

- [Narrator] Monet relished challenges.

And for it, his paintings evolved.

Ultimately he would make a splash with his water lilies.

Depictions of the gardens on his own property.

Places he saw every day.

But to Monet never stayed the same - A critic for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Roger-Marx, in 1909 when those paintings were first shown, he says, "no more earth, no more sky, no limits now."

For Monet, there were no limits to the canvas.

He continued to be curious.

He continued to look at the world around him in new and invigorating ways.

- [David] Next time on Applause, get to know Amanda Wicker.

As both a designer and instructor, she fashioned a legacy in Cleveland in the 20th century.

And we check in with Cleveland musician, Christine Jackson who's been obsessed with the blues ever since she got into her dad's BB King album collection as a kid.

Also, we visit with modernist painter Raymond Johnson, and his focus on the human spirit.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, a group of artists moved from the streets of New York, where their canvases were subway cars and brick walls, to the confines of exclusive art galleries.

In a new exhibition, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, charts the course of artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the hip hop generation.

- [Narrator] Blazing off the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts, the massive paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He was a New York street artist of the 1970s and 80s who became a darling of the art world.

Three years ago, one of his paintings sold for more than $100 million at auction.

Legend, icon, maverick.

He bore all the crowns so frequently depicted in his work before his young untimely death.

- He often gets described as the kind of soul, black genius artistically of the time.

And what we're trying to show is that he absolutely was an incredibly genius artist.

When he was surrounded by his peers who were on a similar journey with him.

- [Narrator] This new exhibition at the MFA is the first to examine Basquiat and his fellow artists in the hip hop generation, who changed the chemistry and sound of New York.

(hip-hop music) Rammellzee, Fab Five Freddy, Basquiat.

They were among a crop of fresh faced art world outsiders from marginalized communities but they made New York theirs, says co-curator Liz Munsell.

- They came from many different boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and then they began to converge downtown.

They were getting a little bit older and they saw this incredible scene of 1980s creatives.

People like Madonna around and they became part of this club scene.

- [Narrator] But before that, they were labeled graffiti artists pursued by police for tagging buildings and a most prized canvas the New York City subway.

Painting subway cars guaranteed their work would be seen by thousands of people as trains raced throughout the city.

- There was a lot of chaos for the eye to see every day.

- [Narrator] Writer and musician Greg Tate is the show's co-curator.

He knew most of the artists featured here when they all began to mix with performers, filmmakers, and musicians in New York's downtown scene.

- This is a youth movement, and in America, youth is everything.

So whoever's leading that charge is going to win.

- [Narrator] What the outsiders called graffiti, the artists simply called writing.

A form Basquiat noted had dated to ancient times.

And what artist Lady Pink said was like calligraphy but it was all a language the artists shared.

- Abstracting it, coding it, crossing it out.

They really, in the vein of hip hop music, are incorporating really whatever they can get their hands on and very freely in an unfiltered way, getting all of that into their canvases.

- [Narrator] But these artists wanted off the streets and into the galleries.

They demanded they be heard and seen.

The art world took notice and in the US two of them, Keith Haring and Basquiat rocketed into the stratosphere.

- [Basquiat] I could see the handwriting on the wall.

It was mine.

I've made my mark in the world and it's made its mark on me.

- [Narrator] Basquiat's work was fueled by his interest in history, not to mention the years of museum visits he'd made with his mother while growing up.

He charted his thoughts in notebooks.

- I went to one party at his house once and you know walked past his, you know, bedroom on the way to the loo.

I saw there was like a video of Super Fly that was on.

And then, you know, and then all of these art books stacked up.

So when he wasn't painting, you know he was in there just, you know, studying the artists he liked.

- [Narrator] Basquiat's work is also often populated by random bits of anatomy.

When he was seven, he was hospitalized after a car accident and developed a fascination with the book, Grey's Anatomy.

But it's this crown that is most ubiquitous in his work.

- He said my work is about three things, royalty, heroism and the streets, right?

So he was also as someone who had gone to all the major galleries and museums and didn't see any black people represented there.

He's letting you know that you know, his royalty is a street royalty.

- [Narrator] That reign would extend into the art world where Basquiat achieved superstardom.

But in 1988, he died of a drug overdose.

He was only 27, but he'd managed to see his community of artists get their due.

And beyond that, says Liz Munsell, they began to influence the A-List artists they worked to be alongside.

- Frank Stella.

You can, you can see his referencing.

And he also notes that he was looking at graffiti and trying to find a different surface for his painting in his late 80s works.

- [Narrator] It was a hard-fought acceptance.

And for it, this singular group of artists hang together, still.

- [David] Artist and educator Robert Schefman uses illusion to render an image.

We travel to Michigan now to visit the artist in his studio and find out more about his series of paintings and drawings that delve into the world of secrets.

- The most important thing you can do is invest yourself in the work.

And be willing to take and use what is most appropriate in terms of the skill to get your idea across.

Since I was a kid, I always loved art, but I also liked medicine as well.

So actually, when I was in high school, I had an internship down at Receiving Hospital, doing autopsies.

That experience gave me a different perspective on the human body, about being us.

And eventually that found its way into my work.

What you see in terms of my paintings and my sculptures is not the way I was trained.

Back in the 70s, you were pretty much discouraged from doing anything that was illusionist, like I paint.

You were also discouraged from doing anything with the figure, but I finally went in that direction and it seemed like endless possibilities as opposed to dead end.

So I went there, I'm making an illusion.

It's just a magic trick.

I want to see where I can take and use illusion to make metaphor, to use symbol to relate to different issues.

The inspiration can come from any place.

You take an idea and you run with it and you develop it a thousand different ways and explore wherever it will take you.

If you have the guts to go to places that were quote forbidden fine.

It's not about starting in any specific way.

So sometimes I might see something that that sparks an idea and it goes in my sketchbook.

I might work that and develop an idea.

Then again, it might take five years before that idea which I see in that sketchbook over and over and over kind of coalesces with other things that I see.

And it's suddenly, wow, these things go together and they make a different thing than I wanted to say before.

But it's unique.

Ideally, what I like to do when working in series, is take an idea and I'm exploring different things that are relative to that.

And try and explore as many as I can and develop images from them.

So they're all going to be different.

The series that I'm working on now, which is the secrets.

So I solicited secrets across the internet and people sent me personal secrets.

Everyone's secret is not unique.

In fact, I had very few unique secrets.

By using that secret not as an illustration of what they sent but talking about more internal feelings developing an image based on that idea some of the secrets were more personal, less political some were more political, less personal.

Some of the secrets were legal issues.

(laughs) But it was enlightening.

The biggest secret that Americans keep right now seems to be suffering from depression and everything that goes with that.

And so because of that it became the largest painting that I was going to do in the series.

And I wanted to take on that being otherworldly and right in this world the same time, because that is what we do.

Depression is something you are right in this world, yet you can't take a point of view that keeps you in this world.

There's another painting in the show that is someone who was in love with their best friend and couldn't tell them, and it was about sexuality and about choice and about also the hiding and that internal struggle is what I tried to get on the canvas.

And then there was a lot of people who are hiding sexual orientation, drugs and addictions to either food or different drugs and alcohol.

There was lots of stuff for me to explore.

Some of the people actually wrote again to tell me how cathartic it was that they'd been holding this secret for 45 years and never told anyone.

And that the experience of putting it down and sending it out, released them in a way.

The carbon series started with a trip to the Middle East.

And I was most impressed by this intersection of politics and religion and the carbon.

The carbon was a part of all the decisions in religion, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, us as human beings.

We are carbon.

In the Middle East, so much of what was going on was not just about religion, but the religions controlling other carbon issues, resource carbon issues, political carbon issues.

And this intersection where all of this was coming together gave me a notion about this carbon series and then a series of paintings called politics and religion.

And the two are integrated.

So the carbon series was drawings and everything I did was made out of carbon, about carbon, and the paintings were more about the political and the religious aspects of this carbon system.

My process has always been starting from a blank sheet of paper.

When you start with a drawing that has no direction, everything is possible and I'll use the drawing.

And I will make hundreds of drawings until one strikes me as making that agenda hit as much as possible.

Being as direct to what I want to say.

And then when I start painting, it's still a moving target and things are going to change when when I start painting and either for visual reasons or for content reasons, this is illusion.

It's not real.

It's just pixels on a page.

And if you think about the pixelization of an image this is how painters have always worked only instead of digital pixels, it's a brush stroke.

So every brush stroke is a different color.

And how illusionist do you want this work to be is how often you change the pixels.

I'm changing the pixels as much as I can.

That experience that illusion is important to me.

It's not the focus, but it's how I want to get the idea across.

And so if I want to paint a hand or an arm it'll probably be 15 different colors and we'll start with those and then intermix and change those depending on how it goes.

My paintings are not about paint.

It was about what I wanted to say.

You take an idea and you make an image and I've been fortunate enough to have moved enough people that they will give me a platform.

Meaning shows.

Whether it's galleries or museums.

When you get the work out there, people come and see the work.

I'll get letters back saying, "Oh, this effected me."

"That effected me."

I think that that's the communication factor.

That's that image transferring information from one person to another.

You're trying to affect someone.

You could go in a closet and make all your work and burn the closet down.

You fulfilled only half of the issue of the arts.

The arts is communication, without the audience, you have not fulfilled all the mission.

- [David] That's it for today's show.

For more arts and culture programming, go to: arts.ideastream.org.

I'm David C. Barnett.

Thanks for watching and hope to see you again next week for another round of Applause.

(jazz music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause an Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy foundation, The Kulas foundation, The Stroud Family Trust, and by Cuyahoga county residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.