(theme song) ♪♪ - [Walt] Coming up on Mississippi Roads, we explore more artist in Mississippi as we visit with Yolande van Heerden, Tony Davenport, explore the Double Decker Art Festival and talk with Shawn Star Wars.

All that coming up now on Mississippi Roads.

Hi, I'm Walt Grayson.

Welcome to Mississippi Roads.

This week, we discover more of Mississippi's artists.

We're at the Meridian Museum of Art, and the sculpture exhibit they have here right now has pieces featured from all over the United States, Canada and South Africa It's curated by Antoinette Badenhorst.

She is a native of South Africa who has made her home in Mississippi, and she's not the only South African artist to make Mississippi home.

In our first story, we visit textile artist Yolanda van Heerden.

♪♪ - This is South African and this is Cape Town.

And people would give their trucks a name and this truck's name is Uncle Brother, and this is the town that this truck drives to.

I'm from South Africa, originally, and my family weren't very wealthy, so I was always looking around to make stuff with whatever I could find, and I remember, this was about 13, a friend of mine down the road where I lived had horses, so I would go and find her old bridles that they would throw away and make sandals with these pieces of leather and then go to church in my weird sandals.

♪♪ I got into making jewelry with telephone wire.

Just anything I could find.

I would fiddle around and invent, always expressing myself through art.

♪♪ The way how I got here via Los Angeles... met Martha Foose, who is a cookbook writer and a chef.

I met her in Los Angeles decades ago and we became friends real quick.

And her mom bought me a ticket out to Mississippi.

And I came to Yazoo City and we came through Greenwood and went to Oxford.

And I fell in love with the place.

So that's where the seed was planted.

And I moved to Mississippi ten years ago.

I had a lot of friends here by then because I had visited Mississippi so many times.

And it was just perfect.

I started originally with license plates because your license plates in this country are so colorful and beautiful and just little mini works of art that you carry around on your cars.

Well, I thought they're beautiful.

Why don't you incorporate them into art?

And so I started there.

And then from there, I started to make clothes, and I bought this special sewing machine called a serger.

And then slowly, everything just started to slowly grow from there.

I started to play with a placemat format and I started to do it with all the colorful fabric that I have.

And I was here till late at night 2 a.m., and I decided to put them on Facebook and within 10 minutes they were sold.

So I thought, okay.

And I started to make these placemats and people have been buying them just to put them on their tables as daytime decoration.

I'm a preschool teacher by profession, and I thought, what about if I do sewing with kids?

Art Place is a nonprofit arts organization that services Leflore County, and we provide art to kids as young as three years old.

We do all the way to adults.

- The first thing I ever made when I came here was a bucket hat.

So when I sewed it together, I kept getting off the fabric.

So then what she did was she told me to get to practice on a straight line.

Then when I was ready, go back to do it and started going back around the brim.

- We don't have a place like that where these kids can go and hang out and be teenagers because teenagers, what they like to do is be with each other.

It's more about the social aspect for them than it is about learning this new skill.

The skill is great, and the moment they grasp it, and the moment they know how to do it, they're sitting and chatting like a bunch of ladies at a quilting bee.

♪♪ So this year we're doing a entrepreneurship semester where the kids can make things to sell, and we're going to have a big sale at the barbecue festival on Saturday, and I'm hoping people will come and buy their items.

- I think it's a marvelous job.

It's good to expose children to many, many things in life, especially those skills that will help them later in life.

If their clothing gets torn, they can mend it.

They don't have to throw it away right away.

Or they can find a beautiful fabric and decide to make their own clothing out of it.

I think it's very, very important.

- I really want to go to school to become a teacher and become a social studies teacher and art teacher.

I was inspired by Ms. Yolande.

- Every time you do a whole bunch of stuff, you learn something new.

And coming to Greenwood was just perfect for myself, where I could really explore my craft and like develop it.

And it's been quite a-- it's been an enjoyable journey.

- I think this building is fascinating.

The Meridian Museum of Art is housed in the original 1913 Andrew Carnegie Library that served Meridian up until 1967.

Now, the art museum, in addition to hosting exhibits, also has teaching programs in the summer and afterschool for the kids in the area.

And in our next story, we're going to meet an art teacher who uses music and movement to express life in Mississippi.

Here's Tony Davenport.

♪♪ - My name is Tony Davenport.

I'm a visual artist, born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

I work all around, pretty much hop around different places in Mississippi and Tennessee as a visual artist, art teacher.

♪♪ My artwork is more like figurative of movement.

I listen to a lot of music, so the marrying of music and movement is what you mostly see in some of my images and some of my artwork.

I studied the artwork of a favorite artist of mine, Ernie Barnes, and I looked at how he used figures, how he used movement, so different mannerisms of how stretching the limits of the human form.

So I wanted to express that in my work as well.

Well, it's mostly from memory.

I'm motivated by people, groups of people, crowds of people doing things.

And in addition to that, sounds.

Music and art goes hand in hand, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I can listen to a certain sound and put that sound into that image and make it do what I want it to do.

So it's more like a poetry in motion type of thing, but it's just on canvas.

♪♪ Mixed media, acrylics, oil, I use a little bit of some of everything.

Pastels, chalk, crayon, ink, you name it, because I'm always experimenting too, you know, nothing is exact with me.

I'm just experiment and see what happens.

♪♪ - Robert Johnson is known around the world as the King of the Delta Blues and the Father of modern Rock and Roll.

My family and I decided to have a mural put on the side of the Robert Johnson Blues Museum.

We were trying to do something different.

We could have put a mural of my granddad up there with his guitar, but we wanted to do something that's outside of the norm, but yet still represents Robert Johnson.

- Davenport: This particular scene was told from the account of Robert Johnson's son, Claude Johnson.

The story is that he only seen his father twice.

And one of those accounts, that's what I put on the side of the wall, - Johnson: His granddad who raised him, would not allow his dad in the house because his dad was, of course, Robert Johnson, a Bluesman.

And his granddad was a Southern Baptist preacher.

And, you know, the myth, of course, and the beliefs then were that the Blues was the Devil's music.

I wrote Tony and I wrote down the vision exactly as my dad explained it.

You know, he drew it up, a rough draft, and I said, this is it.

So the little guy that you see on there is my daddy looking out the window.

He sees his dad give his granddad money to give to him.

- Davenport: I've always wanted to work big and doing murals gives me the opportunity to expand out and to actually work larger than what I normally work-- versus working on a small canvas.

♪♪ Attic Gallery in Vicksburg, I've been showing there now for about 20 years.

Leslie Silver, she promotes a lot of my work.

Does a very good job at that.

- But when I see Tony's work, it, to me, the first word that comes to my mind is "energy."

He does music and you can feel the music and he continues to do those people over and over again, because it's like he's capturing them, and he wants you to hear what they have to say.

I've taken his art to other cities because I think people need to see his work and he is always ready to do anything to to learn about art and expose other people to art.

- I'm always a lifelong learner, especially with art.

There's nothing new under the sun, but there is always more that you can add to your repertoire and more that you can learn, and more that you can do.

Each day I try to learn something new about this art thing.

Whether I'm painting a portrait of someone or I'm coming up with something, a new concept, I'm still working towards something.

So I'm always working.

- Up next, we go to Oxford, which is a city that, among other things, is known for its support of the arts.

As a matter of fact, one of the biggest art events in the area is held at Oxford: The Double Decker Art Festival.

Why do they call it Double Decker?

Let's find out.

Double Decker is an idea of a young girl who thought that she could do about anything.

In 1994, I was named the director of the Oxford Tourism Council and the first thing I wanted to do was plan a festival, and we managed to pull it off.

In April of 1995, we had our very first Oxford Double Decker Arts Festival, and at that time, Mayor John Leslie had arranged to purchase a double decker bus from Oxford, England.

Oxford has always been an artist community.

I look back to the late eighties, early nineties, when Oxford started being recognized across the nation as a great small town and started making lists of best small towns in America and most beautiful campus and those kinds of things.

When we started to catch the attention of travel writers and our arts community is what brought us to the table our writers, our artists, our musicians, our chefs.

I think Oxford is a small town that has an amazing cultural diversity and we're really proud about that and excited celebrate it.

- The event is held on the historic downtown square in Oxford, Mississippi, and it is a two-day free arts and music festival.

Friday night we start music and then all day art vendors and food and music on Saturday.

- At the same time, it highlights what's happening every single day of the year.

It's kind of a culminating event celebrating an active arts community.

- I hear about people who travel all over the world and they say that they like Americans from the South because they still have the esthetic for beauty, and the sensability to enjoy all kinds of art.

I don't even know if Mississippi would have a shape without art, would it?

- People want to see artwork from their own state, because they're proud of it.

There's a painting everywhere I look, so I want to be here to capture so much of what Oxford has to offer.

- This is my favorite art festival that I do.

So I live in Seattle now and I'm originally from Oxford and it's just so great seeing everyone, the music.

They do such a great job of putting it together.

♪♪ - Looking at all the art, the different art, that's been, like, a cool thing so far.

Seeing all the people, it's, I don't know, it's like cool having any type of crowd experience because I haven't really had that.

- You know, COVID shut us down, but it also made us realize a lot of things that we value.

And I think it makes this festival even more exciting.

We've learned that we value live music, that we value being with our community, that we value large gatherings.

And so we're about to have the best one ever.

- We estimate about 65,000 to 75,000 people each year.

This year we think we might have one of our biggest years yet with it being the 25th annual festival.

- Double Decker has brought the crowd that we have never seen before.

It's been record-breaking numbers this week, so it's definitely been a ton of traffic coming through and we can barely keep up.

- I look forward to it every year.

It's something I put on my calendar.

I went to Oxford High School and Ole Miss.

So I look forward to seeing old friends, making new friends, and just the fellowship, visiting the vendors, the food, the music, everything.

It's just a great event.

Been coming to it for a long time.

- I go with my mom and my dad and my whole family.

We've always come down here.

So just looking around, finding some cool things from different places.

- It's an electric atmosphere and it's a beautiful day, so it couldn't be more perfect.

- When you see Double Decker kicking off, it's that early morning before the crowds get here that's kind of the calm before the storm.

It's like waking up for Christmas morning for me.

That's my favorite time at the festival.

- My favorite part of the festival is the end of the day.

I always tell people this, it's my favorite time at night to kind of go behind stage and look out from behind the stage and look at the crowd and see that all these people came.

And just to know that I had a little part of that, you know, planning the festival from start to finish, it's just fun to see.

♪♪ - My favorite part is that it takes place on the square where you really get to be in the center of the community and you can stroll and be immersed in all the arts.

Whether you see the music, you have dinner at one of the great restaurants or you go to the kids area and get to do some hands-on experience.

Plus the diversity of art that's represented.

I think that really makes it, for me, a special experience.

And it's not just one kind of art.

It's everything that's happening.

- This is a place that, when you walk around the square, people still greet you.

When you walk into a store, people are glad you're there and they tell you.

And it is a community that has had tough times and has rallied together over the past two years.

And we're stronger than ever.

So we hope you'll come visit.

- Our last stop this show is Laurel where we meet an unusual print artist: Sean Star Wars.

♪♪ - Hey, I'm Sean Star Wars.

I'm a printmaker and I make a lot of woodcuts.

There's a lot of different types of printmaking, but I pretty much only do relief printmaking, woodcut, and linocut.

And I have a lot of fun.

That's kind of my big thing is just having a good time while I'm working.

I make a drawing on the wood, usually with a Sharpie, and once I have a satisfying drawing, then I have a whole number of chisels and gouges and I cut away everything that's not going to print.

And so then you ink that black up and you print it.

And I do that multiple times to get a multicolor print.

So I'll have a separate block for each, you know in blue, yellow, red, and then the black over top of it.

To me, there's nothing like what you get with printed color.

When you have to crank a press at so many pounds of pressure, you know, PSI, you're cranking it through and you're forcing that paper into the wood and the ink is permanently on that paper and your yellow was smashed in to that blue and you get that magical green.

I love all of that energy.

I love all that stuff that happens when you're working with color.

♪♪ I started skateboarding back when I was like 14 or 15, you know, back in the early eighties, and a lot of skateboarders were artists.

One guy in particular was a guy named Chris Miller who actually did linocuts for his graphics.

And so a few years later, when I was in college and I happened to see a sign for printmaking classes and it said that you learn to make linocuts.

I was like, that's that thing that Chris Miller does.

And so really from the very first one, that first week of intro to printmaking back in 1990, I was like, this is it.

This is all I want to do the rest of my life.

This is so much fun.

♪♪ Long before I was making artwork, I loved Star Wars.

My cousin was a big collector and my brother was a big collector.

So the three of us are going all over the place.

We got to be really pretty quick when we're going from table to table, you're scanning, you don't see anything or you see something and you hope that there's more, and you ask the guy, do you have any Star Wars stuff?

Then he pulls out something from, I don't know, Buck Rogers.

And you're like I said, Star Wars.

Star Wars.

You're talking to Sean Star Wars.

When you have some Star Wars, give me a call.

So just being a fool, you know, and so it just kind of stuck.

And when I was in school, the first time I heard an adult actually say my name to another adult, you know, because, like, that's not my legal name.

But he said, "And this is one of our printmaking students, Sean Star Wars."

And he didn't bat an eye.

It's like, man, I so respect him because he didn't make me feel like I was as silly as I know that I am, you know?

And that was like kind of when I felt like I could keep it out there, like, in any environment.

♪♪ Satire, comedy, humor, whatever, that's a big part of it.

It always has been.

I want to make things that look like they already belong in my world.

- I think people recognize the unique nature of his work and the strong narrative elements of it.

He's a past Artist Fellowship recipient from the Arts Commission, so that's a very select group of people, very competitive grant award.

I think his renown outside of the state is really due to his being out there doing lots of artist residencies and workshops virtually all over the country, doing weeklong residencies or even longer things for universities, even some private companies as well.

- And so I always strongly encourage you to do as much of that as you can to really grow as an artist.

- I know he teaches workshops all across the country, and has gone out of the country also, and so students are, you know, I think if they can have an opportunity to interact and hear the story of somebody like Sean, I think it can be really beneficial to them and see what lies down the road for them, maybe.

- I got a message from Eton College, which I'm just pretty much ignorant, and I didn't know that Eton College is where the Royal Family sends their kids to school, right?

And Prince Harry just graduated from there a few years back.

And I'm supposed to go over there for this six-week residency.

♪♪ We're at the real Woodcut Funhouse here in Franklinton, Louisiana.

It's coming along.

It's almost done.

Got to finish these walls over here, then I can get the stuff hanging on the walls like I want it and get shelves and all that good stuff.

At some point, this will be a fully-functioning print shop.

I've got one bedroom dedicated for visitors, you know, so that kind of can be a residency workshop situation.

So I thought, well, this is a good place to work and play.

So that's what's going on.

I love being here in Mississippi.

I'm not from here.

I grew up in Virginia.

We've already mentioned that.

I love living here in Laurel.

I don't know that I could do what I'm doing too many other places in the country.

- Well, I think, you know, Sean's work is amazing, but just getting to meet Sean, if you have the opportunity to meet Sean, attend one of his workshops or residencies, he's just an endlessly inspiring person to be around.

He has such a passion for his work and such a passion for creating work.

It's just, it seems like he never gets tired.

- I make a lot of work.

I've always made a lot of work.

Even that first semester, I made, like, 50 different prints, which is a ton.

And my graduate committee, they were like, "Why do you make so much work?"

And I'm like, "Well, if I make a lot of pieces, then even though I'm gonna make a lot of bad ones, I'm probably going to play the odds and make a few good ones.

You know, it's like, "Well, why don't you just make less work and make them all good?"

It's like, "If I could do that, I'd be teaching you."

- Well, that's all the time we have for this week.

If you'd like information about anything you've seen, contact us at: or like our Mississippi Public Broadcasting Facebook page.

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TIll next time, I'm Walt Grayson.

I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads.

♪♪