What's happening this week on Art rocks, an artist enchanted by his Louisiana surroundings as only a non-native can see them.

Half of it is my story.

The other half is the story that they bring to it.

And I think that connection is really what I'm seeking.

Plus, the Louisiana State exhibit Museum in Shreveport visualizes our Native American history.

That's all.

Next on Art rocks.

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Hello, Art lover, and welcome to Art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

We begin today in the rolling hills of north Louisiana.

Ruston, to be precise.

There you will find Nick Bustamante teaching art classes by day at Louisiana Tech and by night creating masterpieces about his adopted home that have stories to tell.

His paintings are in high demand with collectors all over the United States.

Nick tells us how he creates them.

The collectors that I get most excited about dive into it.

The story is part of the work and they really want to connect to it.

Half of it is my story.

The other half is the story that they bring to it.

And I think that connection is really what I'm seeking.

And I always start with a series of sketches, and I'll do color studies.

I always allow room for the work to grow though, through the process.

So a lot of times I'll have an idea or a set of symbols that I want to work with, but the story really develops and unfolds while I'm painting it.

So it's somewhat of a meditative process.

Things shift and change.

I'm okay with that.

If I do a sketch, I know that's exactly what it's going to look like.

Then I don't know if I even want to make it, because there's not that discovery.

And that's part of the process for me.

I use the patterns they refer to an internal or a psychological space.

I'm really interested in the way that we experience things they relate to, to memory.

I really want the viewer to think about these in a more of an abstract or surreal dreamlike, way.

So that way they can bring their experiences to the pieces as well.

There's a lot of precision.

My paintings are very labor intensive, and that's just part of the process that I really enjoy.

There's also a lot of layering through glazing and building up the surface.

So that all goes back to experience and memory.

So the paintings themselves embody that.

The depth of field.

It really is created through those multiple layers and slowly building up the painting.

These are oil paintings.

So it's a it's a pretty slow process.

The layering creates the darkness or the contrast, but also a lot of the color that you're seeing in the painting is actually optically mixed, meaning that I start with a really bright under painting, sometimes bright lime green or fluorescent orange.

And then I slowly build up those colors.

So color actually in the painting may appear to be a muddy green or a brown or a gray, but on closer inspection, it's really a bunch of subtle layers on top of this really bright layer that's making it appear to have that.

That's how I'm getting the luminosity in the work, because those slow building of layers and letting the light pass through those multiple layers coming back to the eye, that allows for that richness with the medium burns that are starting to appear in my work.

And this is fairly recent, the last three years, and they are placeholders for people.

So they're they act as characters and the reason I'm interested in crows, they have a lot of similarities with with us.

So they meet for life.

They have families they also attracted to to shiny things, which sometimes we as humans are attracted to shiny things.

And maybe it can be misleading.

So the pieces is talking about that and really reevaluating the family structure.

Finding home is really about me putting roots in Louisiana.

Chandeliers are hanging from the sky, which looks like a bayou scene.

I put the chandelier in the sky as a way to show that elegance in the South.

And then also this idea that this place, coming here, growing up in California and not being a Louisiana native, there's an incredible sense of mystery to me about this place.

I a little bit romanticized the location in the in Los Angeles.

You know, you have an acre of woods.

It'd be a park, right?

The painting itself has my house in it.

The most important part of the piece is the light on in the house.

Because I wanted it to be about idea of home.

And so for me, it's more than a house.

It's after a long day of work coming home and the lights on.

And you know that somebody that you love is waiting for you.

That is home.

It's at night and there's chairs that are set up with fireflies.

The first time I saw a firefly or real firefly was when I moved to Louisiana.

I always thought they were just something that exists in cartoons.

I didn't realize they actually were, as vibrant as they are.

I also have a painting where an island is featured, and it's all about this idea of home is what you create, right?

So there are sheet forts that are being created on this island.

That's secluded.

There is a paper telephone that thrown into the water.

That is my way of talking about trying to communicate with the past, which I think that's a very human thing, is trying to connect to the past.

And now having a son of my own and something that I'm really like, I'm reliving my childhood through his eyes.

In the painting.

Greenhouse of the landscape is the Mojave Desert, and it's an old Air Force base that was abandoned.

But also the shapes of those hangars resembled greenhouses to me.

Or I thought about greenhouses.

And within the piece I started to thinking about if they were greenhouses, what they would function as, they no longer function.

So this is again, me kind of making up the story of, of the space.

So it's more of my interpretation of the space than what the actual space functioned as in the sky.

I've done a floral pattern that for me would reference what these structures could have been used for.

It was carved into with cold wax, so there's actually a physicality to the piece.

There is a lifeboat that is in the middle of this, the Mojave Desert.

There are life preservers that are being thrown and cast out to the greenhouse structures.

So it's this idea of trying to recover or save, something that is, is beyond, you know, so it's like holding on to desperately holding on to the past and trying to reconnect.

I have a range of sizes, that I work with everyone from ten by ten inches to six by six feet in paintings.

And then I've also worked on murals as large as 200ft long by 17ft tall.

I really let the narrative drive what scale the work is going to be.

Sometimes it makes more sense for the work to be smaller and intimate.

Other times it needs to be, more grand and really immersive.

It's not so much about being unique in a in a bubble.

Like, I don't think we live in a bubble, but it's like, how do you put your voice into these things that have influenced who you are and what and more importantly, what do you want to say with, what do you you know, how are you adding to the conversation that has already begun?

To.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, pick up a copy of Country Roads magazine.

Another resource, the Art rocks website features every episode of the program, so just log on to PBS.org and follow the prompts.

Folks in Florida are also pretty good at keeping things interesting.

Among them is this troupe of Filipino Americans in Tampa Bay who stage dancers of the Philippines.

They say it is a chance to connect with their heritage through music and dancing.

Take a look at this rehearsal.

Philippine Dances is considered by the international audience as the most entertaining Asian dancers because it's so full of variety.

From Islam to tribal dances to Spanish flamenco and to the bamboo dance.

With all those combined occupiers, we call in the Philippine.

We got all the different variety of dances.

There's almost too much I've learned from not only being in the dance troupe and talking to some of the older members who've also lived in the Philippines, but also the dances.

And.

I am not into history or culture, but I am now deep into the culture and tradition of the Philippines.

I got involved in the dance company because I really wanted to learn more about the Filipino culture.

They get to find out who their parents are, their roots, and when they go to their friends, they have an identity.

When I'm performing the dances, it makes me feel for myself because I know that not a lot of my friends are really involved in their culture and their background.

So being in this company really helps me explore that.

And most of them are born here in the US, and it's such a great pleasure to be approached and say, I'd like to know about our Filipino dancers, because in college I don't know my identity.

When I formed the Philippine Performing Arts Dance Company, there were already a group of people here who were dancing.

And what we did is we announced to everyone that we were auditioning.

So that created a lot of interest because they said, oh, we have somebody teaching for free.

A professional, a former Philippine folkloric dancer and others for 300 to 1.

More.

I'm the oldest now.

Yeah.

The oldest.

So I was surprised he would still cast me.

Usually he would get the young ones, you know, and just let the old ones, help in the fall in the costumes or props.

And now he would cast me in the dancers.

I would say, thank you, Joey, but then you tell me now if I don't belong anymore, you know, the age is showing already.

Keep me out of it.

Look how the founder joys mentor.

I consider him like family because of how long I've known him.

We for?

Sure not.

Joey has been quite an inspiration.

It's.

It's great getting to know him and knowing that he puts so much work and effort into having us be successful.

You can't thank for.

You can do any part in any dance and he just knows them.

He can do my dance.

He can do, the female part better than pretty much all the girls in the group.

But he can really not only teaches us the moves, the dance, the history of dance, but also how we're supposed to feel during the dance.

So we're.

I think we're very lucky to have him as our teacher.

What's that?

April.

All the way.

I think I've learned from him to always do everything full out.

Because you can only do it once.

And if you practice it wrong, that's how you're going to perform it.

The self-confidence between the girls and the guy when they go back to their classmates.

Totally different.

The parents notice it too.

Helped, kind of make myself more well-rounded and being a Filipino.

And, of course, the most important thing that I always tell them is to be responsible in the in what you're doing and enjoy what you're having right now, because out there, there's so many Filipino Americans or teenagers who are not in your position having this luxury of being a member of the dance company.

So I say, when you look back 30 and 40 years from now, you have children and you will think, what have you learned when you were with the dance company?

Self-confidence.

Responsibility.

Respect.

I mean, what more can I oh.

With each click of her camera.

Photographer Connie Frisby hood captures stunning images across the world.

Based in Albany, New York, this photojournalist hit upon her method of storytelling during a trip to the Middle East.

When I first went to Afghanistan in 2003 and I got back, I realized I had very few photographs of the women because to me, I was not seeing.

I didn't see a face.

I just saw this blob, this ghost, this, you know.

So the second time I went, I wanted to be much more conscious of photographing the women as they saw themselves, which is dressed in the burqa.

I don't try and hide that.

I'm a photographer.

Because I just think that's not fair to the people that you're trying to take pictures of.

But I also don't want to do the, the post crummy smile, that kind of thing.

I want to capture people as they're doing something.

These women were feeding the pigeons, and it just seemed like a contrast to me of these women covered.

And the pigeons are so free.

So it was just a contrast.

I'm looking at the light.

I'm looking at the people.

What is it that strikes me as interesting?

But I also try to say, what's the everyday thing as well?

Because I don't want to just photograph the odd things.

I want to photograph the everyday things.

Street market.

This is in Herat.

Often women feel like they need to have a male family member walking with them.

So this could be a son that's traveling with these two women.

This is my green eyed girl, and she's in a internally displaced camp.

This is a family that probably came back to Kabul.

They might have wanted to go to their own land, but they don't own land in the same way that we own land with a deed.

And so anybody else could be on their land, and then they're stuck with no place to go.

I think that, you know, if somebody were to take my cameras away from me, I don't think that would stop me from traveling and learning and gaining that part of it.

I think what I would miss would be the opportunity to share it with others.

I'm not a writer, like some people could describe it in words and and that is not that's just not my way.

So the camera is my extension of being able to share that.

You can read things in the newspaper, you can read books, you can read, you know, listen to people talk about it.

And it's just it's not the same as really walking the streets and really meeting the people.

After Hurricane Katrina, I went down with our church and worked in Mississippi, in New Orleans.

It just hit me in the gut when I saw the ninth Ward, that this was like a war torn area.

It was just like Afghanistan.

So then I started to put photos together.

You know, each one has its own sort of sister image.

You know, this part of this metal, whatever it is here, where the destroyed houses behind.

And this kid's toy just out on the street, you know, typical thing that you saw in Afghanistan were the pockmarked walls of all of the gunshots, you know, whatever caused those pockmarks.

And then here you have the dried mud and probably whatever animal that is that remained.

These were three of the people that were down when we were in New Orleans doing work.

And this was our and our fun afterwards.

And New Orleans is masquerade, the whole idea.

And it just seemed to fit to me with the whole idea of the women in the burqas, and that we play around with masks in a, in a different way.

But it just people to people is what it's about to me is seeing these the relationship, the contrast, the similarities.

And the.

In the end, we're just all people.

We're all the same.

Back to the Bayou State.

Now for our Louisiana Treasures segment.

The Louisiana State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport offers all sorts of fascinating dioramas that depict life in these lands across the centuries.

So we asked curator Nita Kull to introduce some of the museum's most fascinating exhibits, some of which are not actually dioramas at all.

At the State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport, we have a wonderful collection of Louisiana's anthropology and archeological artifacts and history.

And this goes back to the very beginning.

When the museum opened in 1939, we were very fortunate to have, a trustee named Doctor Clarence Webb, who was part of the forefront of the beginning of archeology in the state of Louisiana.

So prior to 1935, there was no archeology program other than national international scholars coming in.

So Doctor Webb was part of being able to establish a program, scientific study.

So we are very fortunate that we have the artifacts from his collection that concentrate on numerous tribes within the state of Louisiana, one of which is the Caddo Nation.

And Doctor Webb started in the 1930s doing surface collections in the state of Louisiana.

And he ended his career in the 1980s with the discovery of a Caddo dugout that was made out of one piece of cypress.

So the highlight of the collection in the Shreveport Exhibit Museum is a 30ft, eight inch dugout made out of one cypress tree.

It's called a dugout because of the construction technique.

They would down a tree and then killed the inside of the tree by setting fires along one side of it.

And as the fires smoldered, they would take stone tools and literally dig it out.

And that was how the construction was accomplished.

The dugouts were used to transport not just people, but goods because they had an extensive trade network.

And so it was very important to the economy of the Caddo Nation.

It was located 20 miles north of Shreveport in Red River, buried in a riverbank that was approximately 30ft tall.

And so it had to be literally excavated or dug out.

The dugout had to be dug out of the riverbank.

And at the time of its discovery in 1983, it was the biggest, longest Native American vessel yet discovered.

Since that time, others have been located, one of which, last summer showed up on a sandbar approximately in the same location as this one, and it's 34ft long.

However, it is not as old as the one here.

The dugout within this museum carbon dates to 1035 A.D..

The new one that was discovered is 1370 A.D., so this one's a little bit older, but interestingly enough, exactly the same technique of being a dugout where they would smolder the tree and then dig it out with stone tools.

Our dugout is a cypress tree, so it would have been one of the old cypresses.

We also have a slice of a cypress tree in another part of the museum that's approximately the same age.

I think it's 980 tree rings on it.

So there were virgin cypresses here in north west Louisiana.

Most people think of the Mississippi River as being where the cypress trees grow, but they're here along the river basins, along Red River adjacent to the gallery.

The Caddo Nation is a gallery of Poverty Point, and it is anchored by a diorama that was constructed on the direction of Doctor Clarence Webb.

He and the archeologist Doctor James Ford, who was the first archeologist in Louisiana in 1935, worked for 20 to 30 years to excavate and research and produce the first official site report on Poverty Point in 1958.

The diorama is based on their research and it shows activities within the site, which dates to 1550 B.C.

so it's a 3500 year old culture and at the time of its existence, would probably have been considered one of the largest cities in America.

It was trade based.

They negotiated with peoples living in what is now Georgia, Alabama, the southeast, up and down the Mississippi River basin, and their specialty was making jewelry.

They imported rock because it was difficult to obtain rock in the state of Louisiana because of all the the rivers and the mud.

So they imported rock, and they made spear points and, other stone tools.

Another of the wonderful things to see at the state Exhibit Museum is a collection we call Autographing History.

And it's 54 original autographs from America's Founding Fathers, starting with George Washington.

We have a full page letter that is signed by George Washington and going all the way through Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant.

So we have them listed kind of groups where you can go through and kind of pick out your favorites.

We have a John Hancock, which is, wonderfully clear, autographed.

We also have, a Benjamin Franklin.

And along with that, we have grouped a very nice Louisiana exhibit on the Battle of New Orleans.

So we've got Andrew Jackson, and we've got a claiborne's autograph.

Who was the first governor, territorial governor, and then the first elected governor in the state of Louisiana.

So there are several cases with artifacts in it.

And then there's also a mural painting that depicts the battle that is part of that exhibit.

We have probably 60,000 over 60,000 visitors per year.

That includes, student groups as well as numerous out of state visitors.

And that is that for this edition of Art rocks.

But don't despair.

You can always find episodes of the show at LTV Dot old slash, rocks.

And if you want more, Country Roads Magazine is the ideal companion for making the most of Louisiana's vibrant arts and culture close to home and all around the state.

So until next week, I'm James Fox Smith, and thank you for watching.