Coming your way on art rocks, documenting Louisiana life.

Frame by photographic frame.

I spent about four and a half years photographing the Creole trail, riding clubs, the black in clubs out of mostly southern Louisiana.

I wanted to use that time in order to feel that I really had captured as much of the spirit of the rides as possible.

An innovative ballet company marks an important milestone and creating art with an airbrush.

All that up next on art rock.

Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana, public broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for being part of art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads Magazine.

We all know it.

Louisiana is home to many distinctive cultural traditions.

one of those belongs to the Black Trail Riding Club's horse riding clubs with roots that pre-date the cowboy culture of southwestern Louisiana.

The activity can be traced as far back as the 18th century.

Today, trail rides still take place, providing generations of people with an opportunity to gather, to ride and to celebrate a history that feels as old as the Cajun Prairie itself.

Photographer Jeremiah Aris has documented South Louisiana's trail rides in a book, and his photographs are exhibited in museums far and wide.

Take a look!

I spent about four and a half years photographing the trail trail riding club of the black hole across most of southern Louisiana.

I wanted to use that time in order to feel that I really had captured as much of the spirit of the rides as possible.

The project really started very much by chance that I was out on a weekend ride my motorcycle and I found a group of folks coming down the road horseback, and I had never seen anything quite like it before.

And I just waited for people to pass and I took a few photographs of people riding by and people wave and people were having a good time and someone at the end of the trail rides sort of wave and invited me on to join them for the rest of the afternoon.

So I did.

You have deejays playing zydeco music.

You have live bands playing zydeco music that my dad got me to, which you've written quite.

As good as you feel, you didn't smile for the cameras that night, so maybe there.

Lay it all out, right?

So in order to get all of this world, I wanted to just keep photographing and keep working, trying to get the very best images I could.

But it was really easy to continue because it's just so much fun.

The people that participate in the rides at healthy families, it tends to be friends.

Often when it's families, it's intergenerational.

So it's not uncommon to see three generations of people riding together, and that became immediately a real focus for me.

I wanted to focus on the family aspects, the sense of the cultural traditions being passed down from one generation to the next.

The number of people that participate in the rides varies from week to week, and the smaller end of some of the rides I've been on is maybe 50 people, approximately on the high.

It's hundreds.

A short ride with maybe last a couple of hours.

Not sure how many miles were passed in that.

How long the ride go on for four or five hours and stretch through the afternoon, maybe even into the evening.

And so each ride really varied.

The trail rides often occur.

Outside of public view, they're not the same kind of parade traditions that you might see for Mardi Gras or something where people are riding through town or people are coming out to the street corners.

It's something that's really happening for the riders themselves, and it's usually happening on a rural two-lane road somewhere.

Often a dirt road where there's not an audience.

And so one of the reasons I felt the photographs were so important is that they provided a kind of visual documentation for something that few people would maybe have the opportunity to encounter.

I did ride year round.

I was riding my motorcycle the first most of the time when I'm photographing, but I'm often riding on the back of a pickup truck and riding the trailer.

I'm just getting out on the road, really trying to be a part of the action as much as possible without being on a horse.

I started looking to try to find the history of these clubs trying to figure out like what their cultural tradition stemmed from.

How long does this go back to?

And as I was doing research over several years, I just found so little information.

Once I realized that there was not much out there in the way of published material, either writing or imagery.

I knew that a book would be the best outcome for the work, and so that began to take shape, probably after a year or so of working on the project.

The book, for me, is an ideal form for photography because it puts everything together, makes it available to people through time.

And amid delayed 18 hundred in our country, people drive large herds of cattle from Texas up through the middle of the United States through the Great Plains to get on the railroads to ship their cattle back to the East Coast.

This happened for 1520 years.

What most people don't realize is the estimates are about a quarter of folks out there were people of color, a lot of them coming from the south.

When I started to understand a little bit more about the history, I recognize that this equestrian tradition out of Louisiana predated those cattle drives.

It came from an earlier time, really clear back to the late 17 hundred.

And so this black equestrian traditions were there and active before this idea of the cowboy that we typically think of to this day.

I think of a cowboy generally as somebody who's physically working with cattle, moving cattle, driving cattle in the mid to late.

1800s in our country, even the number of riding clubs that there are is some indication about the number of people that are participating in these cultural traditions.

And so as I was working on the project over four and a half years, I was writing down the names of all the parenting problems that I was riding with and the people that I would see at the trail rides and looking at the schedule when I went to go publish the book because I had about 120 names and I wanted to put those riding club names in the book itself because they read like poetry to me.

I loved the trail running club names because they are reference often to kind of Western iconography on this cowboy idea, but also very much rooted here in the local place, often referencing their town names, et cetera.

This is a photograph of a gentleman named Homer in the center, and he's really the kind of commands the attention of the viewer there.

And one of the reasons I like that photograph is that it places the audience in much the same position that I was in when I first encountered the trailer.

We're out on a little two-lane road.

They're really commanding both lanes of that road.

It's got details in the photograph, which show when the photograph was made, and so you can look at the technology, you can see the cell phones people are using.

But most of all, Homer's got a pair of white Apple earbuds coming from his ears, and those were so ubiquitous at the time the photograph was made and becomes a bit of a time stamp.

But then also, he's just got so much power and grace in that image.

It's a standout for me.

There's also a number of photographs of fathers helping young children, and that to me really get to have kind of the heart about what this work is about.

For me, a sense of kinship, that sense of tradition and that sense of passing something down from one generation to the next.

And there's a lot of tenderness in those photographs, and I really love this as well.

I decided to work in black and white because I thought it was most advantageous.

There was so much information in the frames.

They're just so dense with detail, and color just becomes another layer of information.

And I find that it became a little hard to digest.

And if I could make it black and white, you could consume the images very easily.

There was a kind of poetry I felt in the black and white that maybe some of the colors we see in our everyday world might have taken me out of that world just a little bit.

I first started exhibiting the photographs in 2016 in Nashville, Tennessee.

A smaller grouping of images went to Atlanta to Chicago.

I started going to universities, went to Columbia State University in Georgia, went to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the K State Art Museum.

And so it had really traveled quite a bit.

And then as I was bringing that work home to Louisiana in 2020, I was able to make a larger exhibition with more photographs from the book, and I exhibited it at Katy at a center for the Arts in Lafayette and the beginning of 2020.

And then it went to Shreveport and 2021.

And that was just a really thrilling experience to be able to show the work really in the communities in which it was made so that the people that are in the photographs have a chance to to really see themselves represented and honored in these spaces.

That meant a lot to me.

I am extremely grateful for what the folks in Shreveport did and addition to exhibiting the photographs, they really made an effort to connect with these trail riding communities to bring them in and make them a part of the exhibition.

They had a companion show, Saddles Spurs, in which it gave the trail riders an opportunity to show their photographs.

It gave them an opportunity to show items from their material culture, so they had riding shirts, they had club shirts and they had, you know, saddles and boots and different ephemera from their world.

And so it meant that they had this direct voice in their representation.

But it also meant that then those trail riders became the primary audiences for the work, and that was evident in all of the programing that I got to attend there in Shreveport.

And then that really came to life when they did a trail ride and they organized a trail ride to go through the downtown streets of Shreveport to go around the gallery and then a block party the following.

So they had 75 riding clubs.

They had 150 riders coming through the streets of Shreveport, and they had to cap it somewhere.

They could have had a lot more than that, but that's about as many as they can handle for the afternoon.

And then we had a big block party afterwards, so there was a man playing zydeco in the street.

People were having a good time, people dance and people are strolling through the gallery.

So it gave people a chance to really make this visceral connection between the subjects and the photographs and the world in which is represented and the direct sort of trail riding culture itself.

So that was terrific.

The local impact was amazing, getting to put these people on a pedestal and the community really see what they do and how they care for the horses and that this is a community thing.

It was amazing.

Our lives can be tremendously enriched by enjoying the creative energies of others So here are some of our picks for interesting exhibits and events taking place at museums and galleries in our part of the world.

And.

For more about these and loads more events in the creative space, visit LTV dot org slash art.

There you'll find links to each episode of the program, so to see or share any segment again, visit El-P or Slash.

In the American Ballet World, Dance Theater of Harlem has been a driving force for 50 years in celebration of that milestone.

The company is presenting performances that acknowledge their past while also celebrating the ways the company is evolving into the present and also the future.

My name is Donald Williams.

I'm a former principal dancer with Dance Theater of Harlem, as part of its 50th anniversary, has brought back Jeffrey Holder's Degla, which is one of the signature pieces of dance theater of Harlem from way back.

It was originally choreographed in 1974.

As a signature piece within in the nineties, he did a revamp, and he used me as the central character, the principal dancer, to update it and make it more relevant for the future.

And now it's it's a timeless piece.

That much and much stuff.

Yeah, so that's where you can go in this particular dance.

A lot of the movements are very simple.

They'll just be arms heads and the the most important part of this would be the eyes when you turn your head to the front.

And the expression that you give what you're saying with your face as you make the movement and what you could bring to the steps you bring in your own flavor, your own extra feeling to it, what you're saying in your eyes and your face and in your body as well.

That's something that you can't really pass on through a video.

You have to pass that on, you know, from person to person.

And so now I'm really proud to be able to pass this legacy on.

Because the company is smaller now, we have to have a supplement and we use local dancers from the different places that we go to perform this particular ballet.

Here we're going to be using Peter London Ballet Company.

What I came here to do first is to begin to teach them before the company comes so that they know the work.

And then the company comes.

And then we put it together in the magic happens.

I really appreciate the hard work that they've done.

I spent a long career, I didn't see the problem, I was a principal dancer there for 27 years with dance theater.

The problem was a man was trying to give opportunities to dancers of color to perform in classical ballet.

That was the original thing because there was the thought that dancers of color couldn't do classical ballet.

Before we were trying to prove that dancers of color could do classical ballet now that we know that that's a fact and we can do it now we're trying to do everything, we want to make sur that we continue to do what dance theater problem was always known for, which is being able to do all styles and do them all well and also provide opportunities for dancers of color to do classical ballet, to do contemporary.

It's all about access, opportunity and excellence.

Just our presence makes it possible for students who are coming up to see I can become a ballet dancer if I want to.

If they see people who are actually achieving it, then they can beat.

Sometimes we stumble across a story that reveals how the arts are helping people to explore or cope with some really serious challenges.

This story is one of them.

It's a look at the way that music therapy is being used to help people cope with addiction and other mental health issues.

So watch and listen.

eight to ten years ago, the mix of alcoholism versus some form of drug addiction was almost half and half.

The alcoholism factor has dwindled to almost 5%, and nearly everyone else is involved in heroin.

There seems to be a highway that runs through Cincinnati and Dayton, where a lot of this stuff shows up, and it's very cheap and easy to get it.

Hold of the movement from recreational drug use to addiction seems to be more people coming off of opiates for some kind of pain management that has led to their addiction .

Music therapy provides in, in that context, a different way of approaching individuals awareness of of their issues and of their current coping skills, and how they might change, how they might use creative arts or more creative outlets as a means of getting in touch with themselves, their emotions so that they can move forward.

Music therapy training includes a lot of training in psychology as well as how music affects human beings or how music helps human beings get in touch with their emotional lives.

Sometimes I sit in the music therapy sessions and participate in them, and I get to listen to the dialog that's going on, and what is said really does translate into their individual counseling.

Sometimes it translates into group in terms of themes that we cover when they first get there, they're kind of in survival mode.

But the idea of being held by a community is communicated very effectively, and they feel that music therapy provides an avenue for them to use their creativity and use their inner resources towards emotional expression and learning how they handle them.

Which part of addiction is hiding or burying emotions that are difficult or challenging?

And music therapy?

We think of four primary methods.

So one is to use song material and to sing.

Another way is to use improvization.

We also use composition and so in groups, we might compose songs together, or we might take a song that everyone knows and tear it apart and recompose the lyrics to tha so that it says what they want it to say.

I was actively addicted from the age of 14 to about 39.

I'm probably in the first generation of people to not have like a generic alcoholism was poly substance, mostly opiates and alcohol.

People are more adept at processing their feelings than milieus in the past have been.

And I attribute that to the music therapy because it gives them another channel to work with their feelings.

They work better together because for that hour, what they're doing is they're kind of linking up and they're becoming a community at a different level.

And so once that part is over, it resonates out through the rest of the week and their daily life together.

We are so readily exposed to song material everywhere we go.

As Americans, we are bombarded with music depending on where they use.

There's typically some kind of music happening that can very easily be triggering for craving feelings.

So as we listen, then we talk about the energies that that song brings.

It's not just about the lyrics, it's about the energy of the music that supports the lyrics that might be triggering or that they might find really soothing.

So we talk about those process, how to focus on engaging with music that's healthier for me than the music that triggers my craving feelings.

Any time you're involved in in a creative process or with a creative medium, you're getting in touch with the esthetic.

And I think all human beings need that when I am into an addictive process.

My focus is so on self and getting my fix, getting that addiction need filled.

I lose track of everything around me and those around me, and those relationships are all have a static properties.

My relationship to the world and my relationship to you, to my family, to lose touch with the esthetic, to to the beautiful aspects of life is serious stuff.

So to reclaim that through a creative medium like music or art therapy really, I think, enhances any kind of treatment process.

Whether he is depicting pop culture icons, lush landscapes or ethereal angels, the weapon of choice for artist John Schmitz is the airbrush since he was 14 years old.

Schmitz has been transfixed by the unique effects that he can get with an airbrush to capture color, movement and emotion.

Plenty of others have taken notice, too, so let's take a look.

The artistic mediums I work in are acrylic paints with airbrush, and I sharpen my paintings with a paint brush.

The way the airbrush works is it's powered by a compressor and you put your paint into the device to airbrush, and it's powered by air through the hose and it's all coming off the tip of a needle, so the paint is atomized or pushed through the needle onto the canvas.

It's a very nice medium, and the advantage to using an airbrush over a traditional brush would be that you get seamless blends so you can get blends, nice gradients in skin tones, sky's clouds, you get that soft nature.

Look, that's in nature.

As you get older, you start to lose your vision and everything gets a little soft and fuzzy.

That's nature's Photoshop little airbrush look, too.

I would say my artwork is definitely Americana because it's pop culture.

It's now and then it's people, you know, or people you've seen or maybe even places, you know.

The types of clients I've had have been Elvis Presley enterprises.

I've did 36 Kenny Rogers murals that were in all of his restaurants.

I've done a lot of movie theaters and a lot of amusement parks, a lot of really big, large scale mural work, mainly with the airbrush.

That's another reason why I use it, too, is because it covers a lot more ground than you could with the paintbrush, depending on the size of job you working on.

In today's world, not many people airbrush as much as they used to, especially in illustration and advertising and art, because the computer is more efficient.

So airbrush seems like it's a little old hat now.

Not as many people do it, but the car industry still does a lot of it.

I mean, here in Reno, we have the hot August night.

You see beautiful hard work done a lot of it with an airbrush on cars.

So that's an industry that hasn't let go of it.

Some people look at me and they say, you still doing that?

You know, it's like, why are you still doing that?

So I just I'm, you know, I have a paint stained life and that's part of it.

When I do a painting I've gotten to in recent years where I don't finish the painting always, I like to leave my hand in it so you can tell it was made with the hand because I used to show my work to people and they say, You're a good photographer.

And I said, these aren't photographs, they're paintings.

You look closer and then you can see.

So my favorite thing to do is to mix it up where you can tell somebody drew it, you can tell somebody painted.

It's not photo realistic.

You let the paint do work for you.

It's like you let things happen.

You're not.

You don't have a plan.

You don't have a plan.

You start to push paint around.

It starts to look right, you know, and leave alone.

Because I learned something very early in life.

It takes two people to do a great painting, and that's one person to do it and the other to tell them when to stop.

Because you can romance the stone forever, you got to know when to quit.

And that'll do it for this edition of Art Rocks.

But as I think, you know, you can always see search and share episodes of the show at LPV dot org slash rocks.

And if you want to know more about the culture that surrounds you, Country Roads magazine makes a great resource for finding out what's going on in the arts and culture all across the state.

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

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