In a minute on, rocks.

We're looking to swamps and roadside ditches to find the raw material for drawings, paintings and sculpture.

I go into the environment where I grew up, and I draw from life.

I spend time observing.

I personally found that I was really drawn to floral forms, the dark side of fashion, and the pianist drawing inspiration from a whole ensemble of musicians.

That's all about to happen on Art rocks.

Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello, I'm James Fox Smith of Country Roads magazine, and thank you for joining us for Art rocks.

Mia Caplan's inspiration comes courtesy of the wildlands of southeastern Louisiana, specifically the woods and the waterways of Saint Tammany Big branch Marsh.

Using a process that she describes as foraging for images, Kaplan filters the flora that she discovers through a process of abstraction, creating two and three dimensional images that vibrate with the energy of life.

Take a look.

I go into the environment where I grew up and I draw from life.

I spend time observing.

I personally found that I was really drawn to floral forms environmental relationships between trees, lights, canopies, positive negative space.

I break my time down seasonally, so it's very much like a plant.

I spend a large amount of time outside just gathering drawings documenting things.

There are so many weeds here, like dandelions for instance.

They grow all over the place here.

Dandelions have wonderful medicinal qualities.

Same with like the primroses.

Like you can make a tea in order to induce labor.

Hibiscus is used for different things.

I'm fascinated by how nature is so important to the balance.

We learn so much about life by studying nature.

Depending on whether the intended output is paintings or sculpture.

I go between the two mediums, and I find that the order of them tends to be drawing paintings, sculpture, drawing, paintings, sculpture.

When I first started working in paper, I defaulted to the form of paper folding that I know most, which is origami my brother used to do or got me all the time.

So some of my early works are, or call me based forms of chameleons cranes.

But I found that when I was sharing them a lot of people, all they can see is origami.

They're not seeing what I was trying to express, which was this idea of transformation.

I'm really interested in life cycles and transformation, which nature's the perfect place to study.

I started opening up to the idea of working in different materials.

Aluminum is very lightweight.

It's not the easiest thing to fold and form.

Certainly not as easy as paper, but I don't care.

I do it anyway, like I just muscle it out.

Sometimes I have to like I fold it and then I'll like stand on top of a pile of it and I just make sure that it happens.

The way that I compose these pieces is, I start as a painter.

I'll start with, very simple, clear sheets of aluminum primed, all stapled on the wall.

And then I will paint all of the sheets of aluminum at once, which is why they look like they're part of the same family at different times of year.

It's because they're created in a body of work all at once.

After the aluminum has dried, then I just get my scissors out and I just start cutting forms and reconstructing them, which is where it's like in your mind, you're starting over whenever you see, a piece of aluminum that's ready to be folded, you have to be open to the idea of it becoming whatever it wants to become.

Because when you start folding it, the material speaks back to you.

I don't want to go this way.

Or maybe, like, I should go here.

And so when I'm folding these, I put them to the side.

I fold another one, I put it to the side, and then I start finding ones that just seem to go together, pieces that seem to relate to one another in an interesting way.

And so I'll start pairing them back together, reconstructing.

When I was asked to create a steel sculpture for the Poitras Corridor Sculpture exhibition in New Orleans, my friend at the time and said, you know, do you think you can work in large scale sculpture?

And I said, yeah, when I went to go look at the materials, steel kind of reminded me of sheets of paper, which is completely my comfort zone.

So I translated my work from one medium into another because of the sensory qualities of the materials.

So steel became paper.

So my work, even if it's in steel, it has this lightness to it.

There are three works that are paintings presented as tapestries, and they feature trees.

The trees at that point, for me, became almost like stand ins for people in the theater.

They came at a time where I was having a hard time getting along with someone really close to me, and we went out into the swamp and I just saw these trees leaning on one another for support.

On the left side of the photo, you'll see these two cypress trees leaning on one another, and there's a setting sun behind them, and they're there.

They're supporting one another.

There's humanity in there.

People tend to gravitate towards the use of color in my work, and I think it's because we love color and we associate that with color.

So my colors tend to be very joyful and uplifting.

The background of these paintings, like, for instance, you can see this and like the little bean shapes and things that, you know, they have their forms.

There's a framework in this painting which is drawn from, one of my illustrations of spider Ward, which grows here.

Wild.

It's a it's a native plant.

When I'm speaking to people about my work, a lot of people will say, you know, I don't understand abstraction.

And that to me, it made me really sad because there is a logic to it drawing from something which was identifiable allowed me to create conditions that could be understood, and I think it makes it more digestible.

It's like going into the cellular structure of like what makes something magical and and special.

And in this particular case, there's all this energy and movement and density and like you can see like hints of other flowers peeking through and and that's it.

That's just that's what the painting is.

My favorite collectors are the ones that really, they feel that joy.

They feel that uplift.

I do have some work in the Mary Bird Perkins, Our Lady of the Lake Cancer Center and part of their Healing Arts program, and Linda Lee, the administrator of the hospital, came up to me and she said, so many people are coming up to the receptionist and saying, I'm seeing all sorts of stuff in that.

I'm seeing Wild Turkey and clouds and, birds and mountains.

And she held me and she said, do you realize that just for like a couple minutes, these people who in many cases are fighting for their lives are just imagining what something could be like, the power in being that type of distraction.

It added a whole new layer of gratitude to my work and why I love doing this type of work to be able to create something that naturally comes for me, but it also has the quality of being able to happily distract someone.

It's a gift.

I got a great gift to be able to do it.

No plans for something culturally creative to do this weekend?

No problem here in brief around tips for some of the events, festivals, exhibits and performances coming soon to places near you.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, keep your eyes peeled for a copy of Country Roads Magazine.

And while we're at it, PBS rocks website features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any episode again, just log on to lpb.org.

Conflicting themes of vanity and darkness both play a role in the stunning fashion pieces currently on display at the Bass Museum in Miami, Florida.

Here's Harold Koda, American fashion scholar and former curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To break down what we're looking at here.

The Harold Koda, curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And I'm a consultant curator here at the museum.

The museum is hosting an exhibition called Vanitas fashion and Art, which is one of the first, I believe, exhibitions here that focuses on actual apparel of vanitas.

The title of the exhibition is, really derived from a 17th century Dutch still lives, the vanitas body totem omnia.

Vanitas was, an exhortation in the Bible about, the ephemerality of life and worldly pursuit.

So it's vanity, vanity.

All is vanity, physical beauty at its peak, but poised on the point of its slipping into raw.

One of the first things that, the public will see is an iris van.

Her pin, dress that it alludes to.

Vanitas themes without actually being above vanitas.

The designer sky dives, and she says when she's in freefall, she says, you feel such a sense of liberation and freedom that she wanted somehow to encapsulate that in a garment.

And so what she's done is perhaps counterintuitive.

She's created a skeleton to put over the body as a way to suggest the liberation of the spirit.

It's about freedom.

This is a spectacular, Sara Burton dress.

You see a mannequin that is floating above the ground wearing one of her butterfly dresses.

And it's as if a swarm of butterflies has created an armor over this woman.

So there you see, the butterfly, which is, seen as something that is, you know, fragile, beautiful, but quick to die.

Incorporate it in a way that doesn't focus on those darker themes, yet holds them and is presented in a way that is estheticism.

You know, what I love about, Miami and Miami Beach is that it's this intersections of so many cultures, but, it's especially the Latino culture that infuses this whole environment.

And I think that a vanitas exhibition as a spring show, you know, spring rejuvenation, happiness, it's not really logical for most places, but within Spanish culture, there's this thing where you can decorate death.

And so it seems like, to have a spring show of vanitas is not an appropriate in a culture which isn't afraid of addressing death as an issue of mortality as an issue, that it's something that has to do with, resurrection, rejuvenation as much as it has to do with loss.

And vanitas is not a logical subject for fashion.

Fashion is about optimism.

Looking to the future, capturing desire and seduction.

Luxury.

You can look at the fine art pieces and say, you know, even these themes can percolate into, the field.

That's seen as superficial as fashion that even these richer, narratives can also bide in something, like a spring dress.

It's all the way to the West Coast now, where San Francisco, California born pianist Laura Downes is revealing how working with guest artists has given her a richer and more nuanced connection to the music of America.

One of my earliest memories is sitting at the piano, and I must have been 2 or 3, one of the toddler classes.

And I remember sitting at the keyboard with the teacher, and there was a little boy who was crawling around on the floor underneath the piano, making trouble.

And I was just thinking, why is he not paying attention to this?

This is the greatest thing.

And, you know, I, I fell in love with with that instrument.

I'm a musician, and that means so many things.

Maybe now more than ever.

But I think I've put together this life in this career that are made up of a million moving parts.

And I like it that way.

You're lucky if you find a way to something that's interesting and fascinating and uniquely yours.

I have my musical heroes and very high on that list is Leonard Bernstein, for obvious reasons.

You know, the music that's just so magical.

And the the changes that he made to American music, the things he tried that no one had tried before, the chances that he took, but also very much because of who he was, what he stood for, what he believed in and what he tried to accomplish through music, the kind of communication and education and the bigger changes that he that he fought for, the social and social change and social justice.

Really, I think looking at American democracy as something that could be accomplished through music and the arts.

It's his centennial year, and I wanted to do something in tribute.

So I'm in the final stages of putting together this album called For Lenny.

So most of this record has been recorded in New York.

The rest of it is waiting to come together quickly because I've got some guest artists on the project.

Just like.

Oh.

We were thinking of did.

Okay.

Well, how many months ago was that?

Three months ago.

Something like that.

Yeah.

I was invited to go to the San Francisco Symphony to hear you and that show.

It was.

It was the repertoire and even your remarks.

I was like, how does this woman think about everything that I think about?

You know, because I'd never find it.

This list started at the top because, just to get in the same spot, I think.

So I just popped the question.

Yeah, really quick for this and then sent me the, you know, the song.

And I was like, he would love it because today the nice thing is that I was coming to this with, not, not the usual understanding of Bernstein's, you know, non West Side Story, World of Burnside.

I just, I love all these pieces of the repertoire that nobody knows.

I love that this centennial is bringing them back.

Yeah, it's a great project which is old, the people so pretty.

For me, American music is possibly the only place where you can look back the road of history.

You can see where things came together.

You can see the good that came out of those meetings.

But you can also you really can trace all of the failures and triumphs and pain and, you know, gain and all of that.

And within this universal language, I think American music is it's a unique set of circumstances that went into creating American culture.

What happens is that you end up with this place where all of these people are coming from, all these different places, and then the culture that was created was able to be disseminated all around the world, and everybody saw something in it because it was a creation of many cultures.

So I think that's one of the reasons why it is so and like enduring the fascination with American culture, like, and the music that comes out of it.

Yeah.

Traveling around this country with American music, sharing American music in American communities, I've I've learned so much.

I've understood so much about just how deep that goes, just how much change can happen in a room or, you know, in a town, in a heart through this, this open door that music gives the the night after the election in the fall, I was playing in Louisville, Kentucky, and there were some responses in the room that night that were just extraordinary.

There was a young man sitting in the front row with his family, and I played in the course of the program.

I had played a piece by an immigrant composer.

And, you know, I was talking about how American music is so much made up of all the places that we come from, all the things we bring with us.

And I played that, that piece in it at the end of the concert, he spoke up and he said, my family and I are undocumented.

And hearing that music made us feel that we belong here.

A little bit closer to home.

Remember what it felt like to be a young art student?

Me neither.

That's why arts educators in Denver, Colorado, are using a new approach to try and understand.

Here's a look at why arts professionals are striving to walk a mile in their pupils shoes.

Art can provide amazing access points for students into content that you might not expect them to embrace.

And when you give children more tools to learn and express, the memory retention increases their joy and learning increases their attendance rates increase by bringing in connections, risk taking, imagination, sensory experiences, perceptive and active engagement.

These are themes that all teachers can utilize to create, what I'd call enhance classroom activities.

This is a professional development institute for K through 12 teachers from all different schools, all different programs, and they come here to learn about how to integrate creativity and the arts into their everyday lessons in an ever changing external exchange of information.

Just sharing some of my process, sharing some of the knowledge that that I've learned, and providing it in a way that gives it authentic, artistic experience to participants, but also some ideas for working art into the curriculum.

Boom and Messina.

Who are these guys?

The science let you know about the outer world arts, let you learn about our inner world.

Here we're taking basically random supplies and making them into shapes of animals.

Different animals have different forms that they take in their recognizable right.

This doesn't look exactly like a giraffe, but you can tell from looking at it that that it's like a giraffe, right?

So when I think of that in terms of science, I say like, what makes a giraffe looks like it looks like a giraffe.

And what about a giraffe would say, like health, it's, fitness or survivability?

For something like biology or something like that.

It's all based on folk art.

That's from San Martin, Oaxaca.

But those are carved animals.

You don't necessarily want elementary school or school carving things, so try to come up with a different way of sort of replicating, understanding another culture.

So we're using recycled materials with papier maché.

It has been a while for some of these educators since they have been students, particularly students in areas that they don't feel comfortable in where there's a lot of risk by creating a very safe environment, by creating an environment where risk taking is encouraged and we're all taking risks together, people tend to open up.

I believe that we are all artists.

You ask any child, if they are an artist, they will say yes and they can create art for you on the spot.

Somehow we lose that as we grow older and older.

Which is unfortunate because if you want to change something in society, if you want to change something in your life, you have to believe that you have the ability to construct an alternate reality.

I have two suitcases today.

What the students are working on are small group efforts to create very short, original theater pieces, starting with nothing.

This meeting has been called about you.

This meeting has been called about you.

We really encourage our participants and our artists and ourselves as staff people to think about how they can integrate dance with math or dance with physics.

So we get to play today, we're going to play with the tech stuff.

But I'm going to give you kind of an overview of it and understanding of how you can use it in your classroom.

What we look for are artists that are really adept at working with a wide variety of student populations, those that are very skilled in developing curriculum, but also really awesome artists in their own right, so that we can help bring the art form to life in more classrooms and inspire more teachers to teach content.

Through that art form, you can actually create really cool 3D models of the body.

Using this camera in conjunction with another camera.

We're trying to give people the experience of what it's like to be the student in the classroom so they can understand what's risky for a student to do, and to afford the opportunity to be an artist as well.

I was really successful at the end of this last year, doing a poetry slam and using think 360, and it really inspired my students and also really inspired me and reminded me of the importance of creative teaching and allowing students to be successful through the arts.

You don't want me.

Art can transform a life.

I.

Art can save a life.

Art can make somebody understand the world in a different way.

That is, you know, it can be a magical experience, art to make life worth living.

It's not the only thing that makes life worth living, but it enhances the lives we live.

And that is that for this edition of Art rocks.

But remember, Art lover, you can always watch episodes of the show at lpb.org/uh, rocks.

And if that's not enough for you.

Country Roads Magazine is a great resource for enriching your cultural life with art, cuisine, escapes, and events all across the state.

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