Coming up on State of the Arts, paintings inspired by the Arab world, O'odham pottery and basket weaving, and a special illustrated book.

These stories and more, on State of the Arts.

[ Music ] Hello, I'm Mary Paul.

Thank you for joining us this week.

David Najib Kasir has cultivated and evolved his work over the years to create a look and feel that is one of a kind.

Kasir blends bold colors with Arab mosaic patterns, thought-provoking imagery, emotionally stirring figures, and heavy subject matter that draws your attention, keeps your attention, and gets you to connect with his work.

It feels like such a box to be in, you know, to say that I make uh, uh, work, about Arab culture and life and war.

♪ PIANO You know, generally my work is about myself in certain aspects.

When the Syrian Civil War started, I started doing work about that subject matter because that's where my family is from and that's a country I consider to be my other home.

Now, my work revolves around children a lot because I am a father and I understand the idea of how much care it takes to raising a kid and how much love is given.

♪ PIANO When I see these images, I see them as a father and I'm hoping my viewers see them as parents themselves.

♪ PIANO These designs are known as Moroccan designs, but, um, they actually date to, you know, all those designs actually date to the Babylon era.

And I cut the designs.

On top of that, I paint a building that is war torn, somebody's home, you know, a family's home.

But the thing is, is that even though you see it in the front right now, once I remove all this tape, that design will show through and so that building will be hidden more.

And so you almost have to go through these layers to see what's behind and that's the loss of land and the loss of homes.

I was there in Syria in 1999 was the last time I was a student at the time.

So I was looking at buildings, I was looking at furniture and structures and I really started to notice the art and the design, the Zelij design in particular that I would see on instruments and jewelry boxes and buildings and furniture and everything.

I was sort of like, you know, wowed by it.

♪ ELECTRONIC KEYBOARD Before the Civil War started, my mom was there.

And, you know, we're Christian Arabs.

So my mom brought this framed picture of white Jesus, which is I find funny.

So when she brought that to me, she wanted that to be in my daughter's room.

Some years after I was putting my daughters to bed and, you know, I was turning off the light and that frame in the room caught my eye and I closed the door and I thought about it and then I went back in the room, took it off the wall and started to draw on top of it of what we were seeing or what I was seeing happening in Syria.

And it was sort of like a moment that just clicked.

I think as I was using these framed designs, I was trying to frame everything that was happening, or how I was seeing it happen.

♪ Somber Music I really take pride in everything I do in here.

My work has definitely evolved.

It's an evolution.

I'm constantly making sure that the work looks different from prior years and sometimes it could be just slight differences or sometimes it'll be drastic.

At first, I left the figure's face blank for the reason I really wanted people to see themselves in those figures, you know, looking at how that mother cared for their child.

That desperation to do whatever they can for their child.

If you go to the Baird Center, there you'll see a large painting of mine.

If you look at that piece, you could see that where it depicts the same family in both paintings, there are certain things missing of each family member from one painting to the other.

And there was this one figure in one of the paintings, a mother holding her baby.

And that baby, I just could not figure out what design I wanted to use on that child.

Nothing was coming.

I wasn't satisfied with anything I was seeing, that I felt fit.

I realize now that I was telling myself subconsciously nothing fits.

You have to paint that child.

So when you see that painting now, you look at that one child who is painted realistically and you look at the family he's surrounded by, I think you can ask the question, you know, "Who made it?"

It forces the viewer to, you know, ask, "What happened to that child?"

or, "What happened to that family?"

You know, I don't really consider myself a muralist.

You know, I consider myself more as a studio artist.

But I like to dabble, and the first one I did was in Black Cat Alley.

It was dedicated to my mom.

And then last year, I got these messages that people were asking me, you know, why they weren't able to see it or if it was moved, which doesn't make sense.

I can't move a mural.

But I got enough of these messages to go and check out what was going on myself.

And then I was very disappointed to see that it was fenced off.

And all the garbage canisters were put in the area where my mural was.

I got upset.

It looked bad.

It looked bad for Milwaukee.

And it looked bad for the East Side.

And so I approached the East Side bid about removing the fencing and removing the dumpsters.

And he tried to.

But the businesses were not willing to do it, to work with him.

And so he kind of came back to me and said, you know, we're just going to have to get you to paint another one.

And, you know, I was happy to paint another one.

But, you know, it was also kind of disappointed because that one had such a connection with the community.

So I told him that because I know what I can do as a muralist now, I told him that I'm going to make something even bolder of a statement with everything going on.

We're nearly two years into everything that's happening in Gaza.

I've seen way too many dead children.

Read about too many families being separated.

There's just no way I could be quiet.

Harrison Preston, a Wok O'odham artist, Is a traditional basket weaver and potter whose work bridges the past and the present.

He creates both traditional and contemporary pieces, always with a deep respect for the cultural practices that shape his art.

Raised and still living on the San Xavier Indian Reservation, a district of the Tohono O'odham Nation, just south of Tucson, Harrison is dedicated to preserving his heritage through every weave and curve of clay.

♪ String Music Pottery is just experimenting.

Sometimes the clay just doesn't want to do what you want.

Maybe a big pot might turn into several small pots, you know.

I am a multimedia artist.

I refer to myself as a Wok O'odham artist.

That's part of the larger Tohono O'odham Nation.

For the Tohono O'odham community, there's about 33,000 members to our tribe, but there's probably less than 20 full-time potters.

And that's working today.

This is my full-time job.

I also advocate and demonstrate at different places.

I always like doing things with my hands.

Growing up, it was just me and my mom for a long time, in Tucson.

She was always working to try to provide for us.

There wasn't a lot of kids around.

She would buy me craft stuff.

So that's kind of where I got my practice down.

For about 28 years now, I was a basket weaver.

I learned it during high school and I always just jumped right in.

And so that's what I got well known for.

Roughly about eight years now, I've actually been doing traditional Tohono O'odham pottery, which is Padawan Anvil style.

This is a red clay that comes from the main reservation in an area called Topawa, just west of the Baboquivari Mountains.

This is a little added step where I'm just trying to marry these coils.

But because I'm not sure about this clay just yet, I just want to make sure that they're really stuck together well.

So really, I'm just looking and trying to get a uniform thickness.

Traditionally, Tohono O'odom pottery were well known for having like an evaporative effect to it.

So you can see this pot here, the water has actually started to slowly come out to the surface and it will keep it cool during the summer.

Especially in the desert, you know, it gets so hot, it would help keep that water cool.

It also gives it a better taste and more of an earthy kind of taste to it.

Right here, all I'm doing is again thinning out that, that wall, but also trying to slowly start shaping it.

Especially water pots, you have to kind of treat the inside a little bit different so that way you're trying to close up the pores and make sure that there's no big holes.

I like to shape as I go, and so I usually then start working on the outside.

Traditionally, Tohono O'odom pottery was all plainware because it was meant for cooking and water storage.

There was only a few instances where you had painted pottery that was usually for ceremonial use.

So the paint that I use is hematite paint.

So this is hematite that comes from an area southeast of Patagonia, so down more towards the border.

And so you can see here, this one just really breaks down easy.

Sometimes it's a little softer, sometimes it's a little harder, and this is maybe about, maybe about a good hour, hour and a half of grinding it on a stone, yeah?

So this is hematite mixed with a little bit of clay to kind of help it stick to the pot, and then a little bit of mesquite sap, the clear sap as a binder.

And so this is what they call dip and drag.

You're just dipping in your paint and then drag it along the surface.

This clay here, it's a pink color.

It actually comes from Magdalena in Mexico.

This is another one of those clays where for about two, three years, I just could not get it to work.

It seems like it's going to work now, hopefully.

I kind of have to figure it out as I go along, you know?

So that's a quick design, you know.

This is agate.

Kind of come in and start to burnish it down.

And I'm just letting the stone do the work, I'm not even applying any pressure.

A basic design, you know.

[LAUGHS] Pottery, you know, it's going to be very humbling.

Early years, you're going to lose probably about, I'd say maybe 50% of your pots to cracking, to, you know, sometimes you can put them in the fire and they explode from the heat.

I always say, you know, it has to be fun.

If it's not fun, I don't want to do it.

It safeguards me from, like, the stresses in the world and things that are going on, that are going to worry me.

You know?

I always tell the, like, little kids, you know, you get to play with mud.

If you do it safely, you get to play with fire.

Rebecca Wilder is a painter, designer, and a book artist.

She is fascinated by the light, large horizons, skies and the magic of the natural world.

While driving home late one night, she met a stranger rolling a flat tire by the side of the road.

This story is not only Rebecca's journey to become an artist, but also about her journey of taking a leap of faith.

♪ GUITAR My journey to being an artist really started with my mother.

She was a painter.

It was a big lesson for me because she had this little closet.

She could fit an easel in there.

There was an incandescent light bulb.

She would go in there and close the door.

There would be no windows, no light, just the light bulb.

And she would say, "Don't bother me unless one of you is bleeding."

As I grew older and I thought, "Well, I really can't paint because I don't have a studio."

Or, "I can't paint because I don't have a teacher."

And then I would think of my mom and I thought, "If she could paint in a closet, I can paint anywhere."

I studied journalism and literature, and so I and so I always thought that I would be going into journalism.

Graphic design, I did that for 23 years- 24 years, until I gave my notice to my husband, who didn't accept it right away.

It took him two years to accept my notice.

I started painting.

I am a bookmaker, so I started making books.

Now, I feel like all these different parts of myself, the bookmaking, the journalism, the writing, and the painting, have come together.

People feel that adults outgrow illustrated books, but illustrations are another way in.

And even though the words are lyrical, the illustrations, I feel, really take it to another level.

My book, The Other Side, El Alto Arrallado, is a true story.

It's about an event that happened to me.

I'm driving, about midnight.

It's in the high desert of Arizona.

I'm heading back home to Nogales after having dinner with friends.

I pass somebody rolling a tire in the middle of nowhere, and it's very cold, and they're only wearing a t-shirt.

My initial thought is, "That could be me."

Because I really thought it was a woman.

I turned around to get a better look, and then I saw that, indeed, it wasn't a woman.

It was a man.

Still me, but different gender.

And I didn't know what I was going to do.

So to give myself time to think, I went and looked for the car, found the car.

I had to go back many miles.

So I realized this person had been walking for a really long time.

I decided, as I drove by him for the third time, that I was going to stop.

And I rolled my window down just a few inches and asked him in Spanish, "What's the problem?"

I just wanted to give him a chance to talk to me.

I told him I was afraid he was going to hurt me.

He assured me he wasn't, and so I picked him up.

He said, "I'll hold the tire in my lap," and I said, "Well, you know, let's put it in the back."

This story is about our journey.

It turns out he was equally as afraid of me, as I was afraid of him, because I had passed him three times, and he didn't know who it was, and he thought somebody was going to hurt him.

The journey is really about moving beyond fear, fear of the other, opening up trust.

I wanted to tell the story, Spanish, from his perspective and English from my perspective.

Primarily, I hope when somebody picks up this book, to maybe see the world a little differently, or if it is how they see the world, to be inspired when they're in the same situation.

Take a leap of faith, moving beyond the fear of the other.

Luis Alberto Urea says, "There is no them.

There is only us."

I just really felt like I needed to tell this story and put it out there, that this is about us.

Very wide and complicated us, but about us.

As a visual artist and former professor and Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University, E.K.

Newsom has spent his adult life highlighting class struggle and racial injustice, both academically and artistically.

Growing up in the U.S.

South in the 1950s and 60s, in a family of artists, and the son of civil rights activists, it seems this was a role he was born to play.

My full name is Ikechukwu Okafor-Newsum.

I was born Horace Newsom.

That was my name my parents gave me at birth.

But the name has changed, due to my writing and my art.

I'm from a family of artists.

My brother Floyd Newsom just passed in August of this year.

Then my sister Vicki is a jazz musician.

I like my art.

If noone else likes it, I like it.

But it's also a commitment.

It's something I'm committed to.

It has to do with my philosophy in terms of identity, social justice.

Madonna and the police.

I'm talking about police violence, and suggesting that these unarmed people that are killed by the police have mothers, who miss them once they're gone.

I also believe that I need, I have to acknowledge and respect the ancestral arts.

That is, African art for me is the ancestral art that I feel like I'm connected to.

I believe that everything, almost everything I do, kind of speaks to that appreciation, and respect for ancestors.

One of my installations that people really remember is a lynching scene.

I carved a boy, about almost five foot tall boy, thinking of Emmett Till.

Carved about a maple, yellow maple, and a stain in Jacobean stain, which is very dark.

But it made the figure look like it had been cremated.

But it's a pretty hard one to look at.

I really do this because I'm trying to change minds.

I want people to see my work and think about what they're seeing, and think about what actions can they take, in response to what they're seeing.

Right now, as we speak, a lot of the things that Right now, as we speak, a lot of the things that I fought for are being dismantled.

It's hard to watch that.

I'm really sensitive to those kind of things because I was raised that way.

You can't read anything about Martin King's assassination without coming across my dad's name, Floyd Lucer.

My mother was the campaign manager for the first black man to run for mayor in the city of Memphis, in 1968.

So, they were very much involved in the local civil rights movement in Memphis.

A lot of my heroes, in terms of the arts, come from that period.

I recently did a painting that honors our ancestors in interesting ways.

One way is, I use fabric.

I do a piece-based one, a textile design, that's popular in East Africa.

Then, in another place, I use Nsibidi, which is a form of writings, ideograms, which tie to Nigeria and Cameroon, to secret societies in those countries.

The piece is called After the Fire, Shuka, Aaron Douglas, and Futurism.

This is the late 60s, 70s.

Becoming a young adult during that period helped me form the person I am now.

I always tell people I'm a product of the Black Arts Movement, a product of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Arts Movement.

Those things gave me a reason for making art.

Wasn't just making art to be making art.

♪ POSITIVE MUSIC Thanks so much for joining us this week for these stories of identity and art.

I'm your host, Mary Paul.

We'll return next week with more from the Arts World.