Coming up next on Art rocks, a Baton Rouge sculptor uses her work to preserve history and mythology.

The imagery that appealed to me in the literature that I taught is now calling out to me as I try to create some original works in clay.

A major sports arena builds a public artwork collection.

You have these amazing blank walls.

How do you bring them to life?

Will you bring in the photography, the artwork, the graphics?

And then it starts this layering effect and the building gets its own vibe.

And an interactive ride driven by art.

If someone can leave and have a smile on their face and say, wow, that I liked that two minutes and 57 seconds, you know, then I think we did our job.

That's all.

Next, on our rocks.

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

Hello.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Chelsea Norris with Ann Connelly.

Fine art filling in for James Fox Smith.

We begin with a professor who taught rhetoric, writing and culture on the collegiate level for 50 years.

The stories Lillie Bradwell Bowles studied and taught informs much of her work in clay.

Lilly shares her story with us.

I taught a lot of literature and a lot of rhetorical work where the power of persuasion going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

And I've always been interested in mythology as well.

So naturally works like the Iliad appealed to me.

And I taught the Iliad many times, and I taught Plato's dialogs.

I guess that's the connection.

The imagery that appealed to me in the literature that I taught is now calling out to me as I try to create some original works in clay.

In Plato's dialog, the Phaedrus, which I taught for many years.

Because of what he says about rhetoric and persuasion, he tells a story.

It's embedded in the dialog in which he says that Toth, the Egyptian, the ibis head of God with the big beak, invents hieroglyphs and astronomy and mathematics and all kinds of things.

But he's also the scribe to the gods.

He writes everything down.

So if you look at some of the tombs in Egypt, he's everywhere because he's writing the story of the deceased and his journey across toward everlasting life.

Tov meets the king of Egypt and says, have I got something good for you?

You need this.

It will make you powerful beyond all power.

It's the power of writing.

The King of Egypt says, no, thank you.

It will be the death of memory.

And so, in my academic work, I use that story many times to talk about Google being the death of memory, writing things down, storing them, and not carrying them around in the oral culture could very well be the death of memory for a lot of things.

That story out of Plato was very meaningful to me.

So I went and looked at images of turtles and, of course he's in a mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

So you have all these Mardi Gras beads with a big ibis headed thing.

I found him, and I found him inscribing hieroglyphs in the Egyptian Book of Dead and many other things.

One of the first big flat slab projects with bar relief that I ever did is of toes writing hieroglyphs.

And I put secret messages in it and all kinds of fun things.

And I said to myself, in my feminist mode, I bet there was a woman.

I bet there was a woman goddess.

She was hard to find, but I found her in her name.

Say, Sean.

And then I thought, let's do it.

So I went and found one of her inscribing hieroglyphs.

I did that one.

And then I thought, okay, let's make it like the feminist, reclamation stories where the woman gets no credit, but she actually did the work.

So I have sufficient writing hieroglyphs.

And over next to her is toast, and he is looking over her shoulder, copying her, plagiarizing her.

So that was a great story for my students, who, had to worry about plagiarism all the time.

But it also was very meaningful to me because I think if you look at art history or any other history, up until at least the Renaissance, there's very little acknowledgment of the contributions of women.

In the 80s, I discovered that my education had betrayed me.

I had read only white southern authors in my southern literature study.

It dawned on me and I said, whoa, I have to fix this.

So I started reading basically only African-American authors and predominantly African-American women.

And so it was there that I discovered a lot of African folktales and legends that have informed some of my goddesses, including my okra goddesses.

The Ghanian goddesses came after a visit to the Whitney plantation.

I went down there with my brother.

We were looking at the other side of southern history that we had not known as white people, and the Whitney Museum is just a wonderful source of that kind of thing.

And the guide told us a story about the Ghanian women who would weave open seeds and and seeds into their hair so that when they were captured and they knew they might be captured because they were slave traders all over the area.

So they put these seeds in their hair so that when they got to wherever they were going to be taken, they could plant something that their children could eat.

And that just stopped me in my tracks when I heard that story.

Because okra is my favorite vegetable.

I've known it all my life.

to know that that it had that kind of history just stopped me cold.

I came back and I'd seen some Ghanian statues that they were selling in the gift shop.

I, I just sat and thought about that for a long time and created those Ghanian okra goddesses.

I call them goddess to gumbo, because combo's is the Ghanian word for okra.

How did I start throwing pots and playing in clay?

I call it therapy for the academic life.

When I came to Louisiana, I was at LSU and I was involved in administration and trying to build programs and so on.

Back when LSU was actually growing and building things and, it was stressful because people like things the way they'd always been and trying to to get people to do some new things.

But at the end of the day, I needed some kind of relief.

And art has always been my escape valve.

And so I discovered this group of potters in Baton Rouge, and you could rent a little space and use all of their equipment and many of them are trained at LSU and the wonderful ceramics program there.

So I knew about them.

so I went in and just turned myself over to them and said, I want to, I want to play with Clay.

This piece was inspired by a new component that I saw in New Orleans at the Newcomb Gallery.

It's called Grand Isle, and, it's probably about this tall and very much shaped like an urn.

And the story that the new designer wrote about it was that it represented the tide pool on Grand Isle.

So I went down to Grand Isle, looked around, didn't see any tile but tide pools that I could get inspired by.

So I went back to the new campus and study the design of it, which is really quite complex.

There are four points at the top of the pot, and then the the tide, swirls down from each of the four points.

It was quite a complex design.

It looks simple on the pot, but it isn't.

I love the fauna and flora of Louisiana, and it reminds me of my home in Florida.

So I've always worked with things like that.

So dragonflies and these lovely little animals.

I saw a pond at the LSU Museum of Art, a new component that had its blue, blue and white, and it had four animals around.

And I said, okay, I'm going to go home and put animals all over things because I remember them from my childhood.

They were everywhere, and they're all over my garden.

I like to throw, but I get bored easily, throwing round things over and over and over again.

I have to do more with the art.

You can decorate round things beautifully.

I started making my own clay, round things to design and then flat slabs that I could work on at my bench and get more detail into.

And it's also a better ergonomics because it doesn't require hunching over around pot all the time.

Or I could make flat stretch decorate it with motifs that I had made in my own stamps, and then form them around a rolling pin to make a round cup.

So a lot of the cups that you see behind me are slab built.

They're not thrown.

I can throw a round cup if I want to, but I love taking that slab, putting it on my workbench and adding my motifs to it.

I probably have 100 stamps back there on my workbench, and each one of those stamps is some image that I have found somewhere that I love.

And I use it over and over on certain pieces.

This is a shell, and the way I make them is that I just make a slab I cut out in the shape of the the thing, and then I carve it so that anywhere I've carved here that will be raised on my slab when I stamp it.

This is another style shell has little, bumps at the top when you press it, but I also take imagery from Ghanian folktales.

For example, this is the Sankofa bird, and in the Sankofa story, the tale is that it is not taboo to look back, to save that which is in danger of being lost.

so in the stamp, you have the bird, and it's looking back over its shoulder to retrieve an egg that was in danger.

I made this thistle for some Caledonian society, actually, for a silent auction.

I've repeated this thistle on cups and various plants that that they enjoy for the orchid pots.

through a round pot.

Very simple, low fire, red clay.

And when it's leather hard, which any potter understands.

Hard enough to, manipulate, but not so hard that you can't cut it.

I cut holes in the orchid pot, and sometimes you use a cookie cutter.

So if I want little hearts, I can have little hearts in it or whatever inspires me.

I don't really want to market my parts.

I like it when there's a reason why someone wants something in clay.

And I can do that.

When people commissioned something from me, they often have something very symbolic and important to them, that they want me to try to capture.

With a variety of artwork to explore in our region, here are some of our picks for notable exhibits happening at galleries and museums here in Louisiana.

For more about these and many more events in the arts, visit lpb.org/art Rocks Ball.

There you'll find links to every episode of this program.

To see or share any segment again, visit LPB.

Morgan Art rocks.

The Milwaukee Fizer Forum Arena is known as the home of the bucks.

What may come as a surprise to some sports enthusiast is that the arena has a special collection of artwork that celebrates the community and the state through a variety of media.

Here's the story.

Art is important expressions of people, and we have this huge house in the middle of Milwaukee that really is accessible.

And to be able to really kind of navigate a curator art collection is pretty special.

Monkey books represents an unbelievable state, an unbelievable city where a culture that really is objectively trying to with an NBA championship and really affect change in our community.

Fiserv forum is literally the home, so it is the physical footprint where we live.

Milwaukee Bucks art collection was conceived when I got a call from Peter Fagan, and Peter wanted to bring the walls to life, and how we could include the community and really celebrate the team and the entertainment and all the various events that are celebrated within the building.

Our owners thought from the very beginning, it's kind of an honor to have an NBA team in the city.

The team is so open to seamlessly be a part of the community, and art is no better way to integrate on a community basis.

So we love the fact that our artwork really resembles the entire state of Wisconsin.

What we want to do here is really make it cozy.

Make it home.

We did not want photographs as every framed picture.

We wanted really unique, really cool, eclectic things that made people want to wander around and explore and really kind of come back to.

You have these amazing blank walls.

How do you bring them to life?

Will you bring in the photography, the artwork, the graphics, and then it starts this layering effect and the building gets its own vibe.

And how could we celebrate Milwaukee?

Every piece is installed in a position with thought.

We don't just put things up to fill the walls.

Why is it there?

What story or retelling?

How does it work with the piece next to it?

How much is regional?

How much is team centric?

How much is current because you know you're in the building to celebrate the team, but you have your fans of yesteryear who want to celebrate the history of the team.

So I really think that you can play on all that storytelling, and then you find your local artists that are passionate about the area, the community, the region, the team, and they bring their personality into the artwork.

It's a win win for everybody.

One of the things was to really bring it to the public area.

It was very important to have artwork on the exterior of the building.

We have a long, great gospel piece on Juno.

We have another in the beer garden across the street.

That's super fun.

And then you come in and on the main concourse there's a sculpture by an ex baseball player, and in his spare time, he would sculpt and he sculpted a buck out of basketball leather.

I think that's one of the most unique, incredible pieces we've ever seen.

And then on the upper concourse, a lot of the time, the upper concourse doesn't get locked with the public art.

So we have an original mosaic.

We have a photo installation from high school kids throughout the community and then throughout the suite level and clubs.

It's really where your your storytelling is as well, because you can walk those corridors safely and really be brought into the art.

You've got the involvement of of of kids from, you know, several counties around the state.

I mean, we've got one piece that's just incredible.

It's actually, you know, dozens of kids have rolled Spalding basketballs over.

It is the background of the piece.

Some of the ways that we immortalized kind of everything from our score books to our legendary players.

So I love everything.

I'm so proud of how I feel.

It's Milwaukee, it has that passion.

It has that color, and it has that personality of your community.

And that's what the artist brought to the table.

It's really satisfying to really watch people stop and kind of give it that museum glare and get really excited with.

People are curious and really want to dig in to the artist or the piece itself.

It's a cool, exploratory exercise.

This gem of a building in the middle of the Midwest in Milwaukee, you have this contemporary feel, state of the art, and then you have these amazing wall graphics, these amazing artworks in here that really are the icing on the cake.

It just is a celebration of Milwaukee.

If you're ever in Denver, Colorado, you may want to spend some time at Elliott Gardens.

It's Ride Kaleidoscope is an immersive multimedia installation that takes passengers on an exciting adventure created by the collaboration of these innovative artists.

Take a look.

Huge roller coaster.

Cotton candy.

Carnival games.

That's what you usually think of when you think about amusement parks.

But Elitch Gardens is taking things a little bit further.

All the way into the multiverse.

So the idea behind the ride is that it was created by Q Dot, which is the quantum Department of Transportation, and they're basically a entire subway network meant for traveling in the multiverse.

We're talking about Alex's newest attraction, kaleidoscope, created by New Mexico based art collective Meow Wolf.

We make massive, permanent, narrative based, interactive art installations.

Their first permanent installation is in Santa Fe, and now they're bringing a brand new immersive experience to Denver.

So Q Dot will play a big role in the upcoming Denver exhibition as part of the narrative.

The ride itself is a simulation of something that Q Dot found during experimentation, and they have created a simulator of how a universe is born and grows and dies and repeats that cyclically.

If that doesn't make any sense to you, stay tuned.

Kaleidoscope is sort of a prequel to the massive four story exhibition opening in 2020.

Denver just had the most traction.

People were most excited about us coming here.

We love this city and they're already on great terms with their soon to be next door neighbors.

It's one we have.

We're really excited about this partnership with me out there on fire right now.

This is going to be the second permanent installation of Meow Wolf.

So we're stoked that it's going to be at Elitch Gardens.

Okay.

We're here in front of kaleidoscope.

Let's get in line and see what it's all about.

Kaleidoscope is what's called a dark gray.

More of an experience than a roller coaster.

Roller coasters move fast.

The thrill is really quick, and on a dark ride, you have more time to experience and really take in the art and really enjoy it.

It's a different dark night than I've ever been on.

This is so cool.

It's a fantastic feeling.

We've been thinking about doing a dark ride forever.

You know, and the fact that we're here right now and we can hop on the car and run it, and there are like 50 animated sequences, and they work and they're triggered on time.

Is a really, like, feeling very accomplished.

It took about eight months to complete with dozens of artists and technicians on the team.

We have our design team who looks at the architecture and helps us make the plans.

We have tag team.

We have, you know, our art team is making all the sculptures.

So it was really like a very like multi-disciplinary sort of.

We all take a look at the ride and think about it and then sort of see what can we do given the constraints.

Because we're repurposing something that's existing, like we can't build new walls, we can't really change too much, but what can we change?

What can we repurpose?

The ride replaces Ghost Blasters, where riders would shoot ghosts with plastic guns, an element that Meow Wolf was apprehensive about including.

Well, we wanted to reimagine the idea of a gun to be not an instrument of destruction, but an instrument of creation.

So we renamed it as the Llama Tron.

And the idea is that you will point it at the landscape, and it makes things grow and activate and move and come to life with light and sound.

And so you're actually, as the writer, playing an active role in helping the landscape evolve.

Yeah.

With the conglomeration, you know, you get a chance to bring things to life and really just experience it to this really unique voyage.

You know, not everyone is going to get the narrative of the ride.

But if if someone can leave and have a smile on their face and say, wow, that I liked that two minutes and 57 seconds, you know, then I think we did our job.

I hope that people see kaleidoscope and they get all the more excited for the work.

Denver to open, because this is really just a taste.

And there's more to come.

And until then, you can find kaleidoscope right here at Elitch Gardens.

Thank you and enjoy the ride.

Staying in Denver, there's a group of artists there who call themselves The Big Picture Denver.

The streets are their canvas.

Using the technique of wheat pasting.

They live in the city with powerful photographs.

Take a look.

To me, there's an important story here that is stepping outside of the white box Gallery Museum, and it's bringing art into the public domain to where people who wouldn't necessarily go to who art openings here, they're just free to come across it and look at it.

And it's it's a whole different concept being out in an open space and architecturally, then being enclosed in the white institution, that has been a great joy.

This good action shot here repays flying by the master himself.

Up, up.

My name is Mark Cinque, the director of the Big Picture Denver.

We're here today at the Temple Artist Haven.

That has asked us to do this wall with our Big picture project.

I'm.

So you know where your weak piece goes.

The big Picture project is a international street art exchange of artists from over 50 cities around the world.

We bring in work from those cities, and we send our work to be.

We pasted in the streets of those cities.

Oh my goodness, these are great.

The more an image tells you a story or talks to you, I find the more interested in including it.

There's a lot of different families in street art and wall art and graffiti.

The wheat paste, street art.

It's a very separate family.

It's a very ephemeral.

It doesn't destroy anything.

You can take it off just with a pressure washer.

It's always change in.

Some of the beauty is when the older starts to crack and curl, and there's age and coloration in it.

I feel a big sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, when we see just a finished wall, or even just coming back to an old wall and touching it up, it's like, oh, this looks great.

That's what the whole wall art and street art phenomenon is.

You get such great satisfaction when you're in a deteriorating alley, and you spend a morning making it into a beautiful art gallery.

I like flying that Colorado flag high that we have an incredible creative community here.

My key word is community.

Community.

Community.

And that's what we're doing.

We're outreaching with the community.

It's like.

That's going to do it for this edition of Art rocks.

But remember, you can always watch episodes of the show at LPB.

Dot org slash art rocks.

Meanwhile, Country Roads magazine is a great place to find out about what's going on in the arts across the state.

Until next time, thanks for watching.

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