Coming this time on art rocks.

A New Orleans fire breather manipulates glass as if it were Play-Doh.

Broken Glass is one of the oldest art forms in the world.

And the coolest thing about it for me is if you took a 16th century Italian master and brought him into my studio today, he would recognize every single tool and every single piece of equipment.

And that's how little it's changed throughout the years.

The portrait painter and the former first lady, Michelle Obama.

I don't place my figures within a context because I want the viewer to have a singular experience with the person that's in the portrait.

And stretching the possibilities of balloons.

These stories are next on are relics.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

And by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for coming to Art Rocks with me.

James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

The volcanic ability of blown glass to transition between liquid and solid states has been fascinating sculptors for millennia.

One of them is New Orleans artist James Villa, whose stunningly realistic glass, trout and delicate orchids demonstrate the striking versatility of blown glass.

As a medium, the manager of Yale's Glassblowing program talked about what keeps him facing the fire.

Blowing glass is one of the oldest art forms in the world.

And the coolest thing about it for me is that if you took 16th century Italian master and brought him into my studio today, he would recognize every single tool and every single piece of equipment.

And that's how little it's changed throughout the years, with the exception of technology and with the exception of better combust ability from higher heats, an easier way to heat things up.

The art form hasn't changed in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

And to me, that's one of the most embracing aspects of it.

It's like you're carrying on.

A handmade tradition, though, is rare, has been around forever.

I started out as a wildlife painter and I went to college 100% as a football player, and throughout my life I had a strong appreciation for art.

But I also found a love for painting and drawing.

And when I was in college playing football, for lack of a better word, I was forced to find ways to get good grades because I couldn't study as much.

I had a lot of responsibilities towards football that took me away from academia.

So I took advantage of the fact that I was a good painter and draw, and I enrolled in painting classes.

So my undergraduate work at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, was in wildlife painting.

I became obsessed with photorealism painting.

Below my painting studio was the high glass studio.

I'm like, Wow, man, They're listening to music.

They're working as a team.

It's hot as heck down there.

They're sweating.

They're using every muscle in their body muscles they never thought they would ever have to use in their lives.

And when they're done with the piece, man, we got high fives, we got hugged.

Hey, we can do better next time.

And I was like, dear God.

That's football in art.

And I was like, I've hit the jackpot here.

So I started running glass.

And the thing about glass is, it's so difficult to do and it's so difficult to learn and it takes so much practice and dedication and like reading a book, I've been practicing that.

Those kinds of disciplines my whole life in sports.

And I was like, Wow, this is an emergence of two things that I love more than anything, and I'm going to embrace this and make it my life.

I was very fortunate to have a lot of mentors who really pounded that down my throat.

Use your skills to make art.

Don't use your skills to show everyone what your skills are.

And I really take that to heart.

Full circle to the beginning of the story.

As I started sculpting more and more.

I had the same passions for representing nature in my class, and that started with fish and birds.

And Louisiana seafood was just like perfect for me.

And then that evolved into my love for gardening.

And I was like, Well, I can represent that in glass as well.

And I would have to say that I'm probably most known for my rather large oversize flowers, mostly orchids.

And I've kind of just stayed in that realm of nature and beauty for the sake of beauty and nature, for the sake of nature.

The technical aspects of the birds, it's pretty straightforward.

We blow a little bubble, which would be the body of the bird.

We sit down the color in a rather painterly fashion, and then the wings and the beaks and the eyes.

Those are all added separately.

I like to put the hot bit of glass on and then I'll sculpt that bit into what I want and lay it down.

You can do that with various coloring and various texture to give it the look of being more like a bird wing.

And the same with the beak.

You add the beak onto the face and then you sculpt the beak into what it should be.

Two things that are really important to me is mouth and eyes.

On almost any living thing that I would ever sculpt.

I personally believe that the mouth and the eyes are the two most important characteristics that you have to portray.

You know, color and shape are obviously important, but mouth and eyes mouth shows you how this fish eats.

The mouth shows you that that's the type of fish that it is.

But I show you that it's a predator.

So when you make them in a movement that represents them hunting or looking for prey or food, it makes them look more realistic.

We're doing it all hot, so hot sticks to hot glass perfectly.

And so once you get the body figured out, you put the wings on, you add the wings, hardens, pinch them out, you pull them, you sculpt them into a good wing, and you lay them down on the side.

Do the other wing.

Same with the big same with that.

We use a lot of tools that give us the best control of the glass we can get without burning ourselves.

And for majority of glass blowers, if not all, these two fingers are the closest that we come to the glass on a daily basis.

Almost everything that we would ever make use of these two fingers.

I've been doing this for so many years and I've lost a lot of the sensitivity in these two fingers.

They tell us over really nice and you end up with what we call glass blowing and we have a furnace that holds about £500 of molten glass and that stays at about 2160 degrees, pretty much always runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We shut it down probably once a year for about a month to do maintenance.

The thing about it is that it's so hot when you get something that hot, it could take 7 to 8 days for it to ever to cool off enough that you could actually work on it.

And then it's going to take another additional 5 to 6 days to bring it back up to temperature, because in the meantime, everything is subject to thermal shock.

For that reason, we keep it on.

We used to buy the raw materials to make glass and then melt them ourselves.

So we would turn what looked like maybe rock salt crystals.

Of all the chemicals that went into making good glass, we put it in our furnace.

We heated up to 2400 degrees, cook it overnight and the next morning, while we had more than glass.

Nowadays, most people buy glass.

It has already been melted and it comes in little medallion form, we call it.

That's what we load our furnace with.

It takes far less energy to melt, but we have solid rods where we can just scoop the glass out of this furnace about the consistency of honey, and we can scoop it onto a solid rod and we can sculpt that glass just as a sculptural material solid.

Or we can gather it up on what's called a blow pipe.

And the blow pipers hollow and that allows us to put a bubble in and create a hollow form.

Balls, plates, bases, and then also allows you to sculpt a bubble.

So you can have solid sculpting or you can have blown sculpting where you blow a hollow bubble inside of the molten glass, and then you can sculpt that glass into whatever shapes you need it to be.

We work the glass so hot that the majority of the colors that we use are going to read right off the bat as red or an orange.

And that's because they're so hot.

And as they cool off closer and closer to that 1000 to 1200 degree mark is when you're going to really start seeing their true colors.

And then when it comes out in the morning from the enabler, you'll see the actual color will be a lot of people are like, how long did it take you to make that crap?

And when my answer is half an hour, they're like, Wow, it shouldn't be worth that much money.

So I correct that by saying that the amount of time it takes to make that is half an hour and 30 years or 30 years and a half an hour.

If they happen to be good, the first try.

I benefit from that.

But it may have taken me four tries to make a beautiful sculpture and whether the attempt that you make to sculpt something fails at the very beginning or at the very last step, putting it away, you still have to start over.

And once the glass has been contaminated with color, it's not even reusable in the furnace.

We use only clear glass from the furnace so that we can add our color as we sculpt.

I have my own glass studio here in New Orleans.

We started in 1996, 97.

The exhaustion of having your own small business and trying to keep yourself afloat as an artist, It was a lot of pressure and an opportunity came out to be our Glass studio manager, and I jumped on to things that I've always loved in life or glass and teaching.

So when I had a chance to do that in my own hometown, I jumped at what is is a nonprofit afterschool art program for kids throughout the city.

And they come here after school.

They're part of community.

We teach them entrepreneurial skills through art.

We teach them business skills through art.

And we also put a very strong emphasis on art through art.

They're given many opportunities here.

There's a ceramics program, there's a mixed media program, there's computer graphics, textiles, you name it.

If we can expose our audience to any material, any new learning experience, we are all on board all time, and I find it every single bit as rewarding and enjoyable as the best of my previous career.

But fine art delivers beauty and inspiration for creator and viewer alike.

So get out and see some here are some of our picks for notable exhibits coming up soon at museums and galleries in our part of the world.

For more about these and many more events in the arts, visit LP dot org slash art rocks.

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

So to see or to share any segment again, visit lpx dot org slash art rocks.

Now meet an artist who became a household name to millions after her astonishing powers were recognized by an American pioneer.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama commissioned Baltimore painter Amy Sherald to paint the portrait that now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

Sherald, who considers her work American realism, depicted Obama in a way that somehow transcends race, reaching deeper to reveal a different source of power the quieter hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans everywhere.

I pay in portraits because growing up it was what I considered art.

I mean, it was what I saw in encyclopedias of what represented art and so becoming an artist meant being able to render the figure.

I knew that I wanted to be an artist around the time that I was in the second grade.

I'm not sure I knew what that meant, but I knew that drawing was something that I like to do, and I knew that I would rather do that than be around people.

It found me.

Yeah.

I did not find that style.

That style found me.

I don't really have a descriptor for my style.

I loosely attach myself to the genre of American realism.

Being that I consider myself mostly self-taught, it's just how I paint.

It's how I see it.

How I paint.

My subjects are people of color because I choose to paint and put out in the world idealized versions of myself.

Also realizing that if you look at the art historical canon, there's a lack of representation of people that look like me.

And that was enough reasons for me not to want to paint anybody else but myself.

I don't place my figures within a context because I want the viewer to have a singular experience with the person that's in the portrait, the person that's in the portrait.

They're aware of the viewer and they're aware that they're in this painting, if you will.

So since my work is a meditation on photography, a lot of the images that were taken of African Americans at one point in time were anthropological.

So it's it's also a critique on that frontal position.

It's a soft confrontation and I also hang my paintings a little bit lower than they would normally be hung because I want them and the viewer to actually have a real interaction for me.

Michelle Obama's portrait beyond the professional and historical aspects of it.

I think it changed who I was as a woman.

I think it gave me permission to ask for more of myself and ask more of others.

Success has not changed me.

It has given me more agency to do things that I want to do in the community.

It's given me social leverage.

I don't consider myself an activist, but I consider myself a humanist and somebody who is aware of what I have and people don't have and to share what I have gained with other people.

I see myself evolving as a painter at this point, mostly because I have a bigger budget, and so it's going to be easier for me to make some of these larger paintings that I've been wanting to make for years but just didn't have the money to to make them.

And I'm not putting any pressure on myself to become a different person.

I just am pursuing my practice in the same way that I would, but with the ability to fund some of the bigger ideas that I have.

The Native American culture is renowned for its intricate beadwork.

And in her work, artist Sheila Lujan embraces her family's history and her people's heritage, creating patterns that inform as well as adorn.

So let's head to La Junta, Colorado, to see how Lujan breathes history and heritage into her beautiful, jeweled beadwork southern Colorado and northern New Mexico.

It all has the same air of just that high desert high plains, which I think my beadwork really draws from that energy.

We grew up on the Jenny Nation, the Navajo reservation and Ganado, Arizona.

All of those traditions and cultural backgrounds really had an effect on me.

Ceremony and traditions and the culture of indigenous people.

Those things are just really, really near and dear to my heart.

They really kind of shaped who I was growing up in that way.

My mother, Charlotte, her grandmother was Hickory Apache.

Her name was Della Vina Chapman.

I don't know much about that lineage, unfortunately.

I really wish I did.

But back in those times, she didn't tell anybody that she was Apache, so there wasn't a lot of those traditions that she might have had in her life.

Passed on to my family.

My mother, Charlotte, was actually the one who taught me beadwork, and she was taught by a famous Tony, our Navajo artist.

I remember her teaching me the limb, the beaded lamb, which when I was about six years old, I was just a baby.

And I remember taking it to it really easily.

But I didn't pick it up again until I was 23.

I remember seeing happened that somebody was wearing and I knew that that's what I wanted to do, and I knew that I had to teach myself how to do it.

And so I did.

The name of my business is Roadside Remedies.

You know, you go to these places and there's always vendors on the side of the road who are selling jewelry, etc.. On Etsy, we found the name and I started getting the supplies.

And my supplies at that time were cheap for lack of a better word, you know, because I didn't know the difference between the speed or the speed and and quality versus quantity, that sort of thing.

I finally opened up my own online store, which looks a lot better, thank God for Instagram and things like that.

And then I have gotten on board with really talented women, other women makers, people like Kate Hofstadt, who is making her own hats.

Susie Caccia, who her husband was before this happened.

I saw that I wanted to do and she was really supportive of my work.

This is a party prank call happen, so you string up the porcupine calls first and those are all hand-dyed.

This is underneath Tree of Life, the Navajo Tree of Life.

It's a corn stock and birdies in the basket and feathers.

And it's all about sacred symbols.

This is the Cheyenne Stitch.

This one in particular was inspired by ceremony by for the four rounds of a ceremony.

So this is what I call midnight water in the blue line.

And blue represents the water.

And the shape, of course, is the teepee in the womb.

The the ribs, the mother and the gray, the smoke coming out of the fireplace.

I use a lot of hearts and a lot of triangles that I think represent fire and make this teepee shape to represent the world and Mother Earth, essentially.

And the colors just like a painter, would pick out his palette or her palette.

And I do the same thing with my kids to develop their relationship with threads and beads and patterns and colors, and they talk to me.

That's kind of how I feel.

There's times when I think that I don't want to teach somebody, but I know that people have helped me so much learn that and it isn't mine.

It's not mine to it.

It's not mine to own till it has to be passed on or it'll be lost.

My own lineage, my being a woman of color and trying to find out my roots and what those are, I think really is what inspired me to continue the beadwork as my mother started it and passed it on to me.

And hopefully my daughter will will do it too.

I'm all for it.

I can only imagine wanting to sit next to her and teach her how to do this and pass it down like my mother passed it down to me.

But definitely I'm a little slower now.

I Butterflies, Dinosaurs.

Flowers made a couple of friends from Reno, Nevada, who fell head over heels for the squeaky delights of balloon animal art and learn how they honed the skills to charm young and young at heart alike.

I go by Sam Guy, the balloon guy.

And I'm Daniel.

The balloon attic.

A balloon artist is someone who is skilled in the balloon craft.

It's someone that can morph all these balloons together and really make anything a kid wants.

It's just a way of creating art and like, a really unique 3-D sort of web.

It's a way that's a lot of fun for everyone involved.

Sometimes explosive, but definitely has a lot of potential for all sorts of things.

It all started when Sam told me to come get a job up at Mount Rose.

Washing dishes.

Mirrors is a ski resort near Reno, and there's a fun job about what you're doing.

That over winter break and you're washing dishes every day, all day.

It's not exactly the most fun time.

Maintaining work on Pretty restless of our job.

And Sam at one point brought up that he used to make balloon animals a few years ago like doodle.

Why are we still doing this?

If we can go make balloon animals.

And that very night we went back to his place and the balloon lessons began.

Let's talk about a butterfly hat.

We're going to start with the base of that.

It's got three sections that are equal length and it kind of looks like a banana in a way.

And so once that's built, they're going to blow up two balloons and you going to leave maybe like a four inch section on the end where it's not blowing up from there.

You're going to take those two bullies and twist it into the end of this little banana hat that you have and bring these, you know, really big butterfly wings over and you leave like a little knob on the end to, like, make these little antennas from there, kind of creasing it into a heart in a way to make that butterfly shape.

And after that, you're just squeezing the little along the edges, creating this little eyeball on the end, and it's a little butterfly hat.

Favorite one to make.

I would have to say, is the monkey hanging on a tree?

It's a kind of a long process or a lot of it doesn't really look like a monkey hanging on a tree.

But once you put that monkey on there and you tool that little tail, everyone's eyes just light up and they realize, well, that really does look like a monkey on a tree.

You put it on their head and everyone just loves it.

Then I would estimate that we have around 50 different designs, and there's definitely countless ways to improvise based on whatever they want, actually, to varying degrees of success.

And a lot of the reaction comes when you're making the balloon because at a certain point it stops being a bunch of like straight pieces of latex and it starts being like the creature that they're looking for because while you're twisting it, it might not be exactly clear what it's turning into, but you can always see that instant when it clicks like, that's a butterfly.

And that's just a really cool moment because you're creating this piece of art, that creative process, and sort of just improvising and refining these designs on the fly while you're working is something that was really challenging at first, but definitely has proven to be a lot of fun with creating all these different types of animals or objects.

It's really a form of art because you get to choose all these different colors.

You get to choose how you go about it and just how creative you can get with it.

I've learned a lot from being a balloon artist.

I've learned that, you know, keeping your cool in stressful situations is one of the best ways to get through it and are trying something over and over till you get it right.

Is the best way to.

And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But don't let that stop you.

You can find, watch and share episodes of the show at OPB dot org slash art rocks.

And if you're wondering what else you might be missing.

Country Roads magazine makes a great resource for finding out what's going on in the arts and culture out and about in the Bayou State.

So until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks for watching.

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