Coming to you on Art Rocks, a Louisiana sculpture garden ranked among the best and most unusual in the world.

An artist who found her way back to her passion after decades of separation and the Sandman dollar tradition of the Tibetan monks.

These stories.

Up next on Art Rocks Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana.

Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello, and thank you for joining us for Art Rocks with me.

James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Today, we begin down the bayou in the community of Chauvin in coastal Terrebonne Parish.

That's where you'll find a sculpture garden created single handedly by Kenny Hill.

Hill was a bricklayer by profession, but his real passion was building sculptures that illustrated the stories of scripture.

When Hill fell on hard times, he was forced to abandon his garden.

But fortunately, others traveling through the area recognized the genius of his work, and they are finding ways to ensure that it be preserved.

Here's Charles Jones to pick up the story Chauvin, Louisiana.

This small fishing community just south of Houma on Highway 56, comes alive every spring for the blessing of the fleet.

When the shrimp boats float down Bayou Particu to celebrate the upcoming shrimping season.

However, there's one particular point of interest that each of these boats pass by a brick lighthouse covered with unique folk art.

Standing at 45 feet tall.

This is the most recognizable piece at the Chauvin Sculpture Garden.

Me and Dennis, of course, we were going down to luncheon because we were getting ready to to teach a course, the photography course.

And on the way down, you could see this place and I had stopped and looked at it before.

So I said, Dennis, I want to show you this place.

I went down to see it, met Kenny Hill, talked to him for about an hour.

About his work, and found out that Mr. Hill was being evicted from the property for past due bills, not maintaining the property.

And luckily, I got to talk to him about his creation that he had made over a 12 year period and the sculpture garden that he had built himself by himself.

Kenny Hill, the genius behind the garden, started to construct these sculptures in the very early nineties and was very mysterious about it during the building process.

Mr. Julius, who was a shrimper who lived next door, would greet you and tell you, It's okay, you can go and look around.

Kenny did not want to.

He did not want to speak to the public about it.

He wanted the artwork to speak for itself.

We could see Kenny had a little trailer that he lived in, and you could see him looking out of the window, watching folks as they looked around the garden after being evicted in the winter of 1999 for various reasons.

Kenny Hill disappeared, leaving the garden's future in jeopardy.

And Dennis was very interested.

So what's going to happen to all of those sculptures?

He's no longer renting the land.

They could just fall into disrepair.

This would be a real tragedy.

So he approached the Collier Foundation of Wisconsin, and they often gift folk art sites to communities and then ended up working out.

So I'm from Wisconsin, I had worked at Koehler as a high school graduate, the college student in their factory.

And so when we talk about who sort of looks after the garden, there's really two groups.

There's Nicole State University and officially at Nicole's State University, there's the art department, and there's the Center for Bayou Studies.

Both of those groups help to sponsor activity here.

But then there's the advisory group, and that's called the Friends of the Show Band.

Sculpture Garden.

The Friends of the Garden have also written grants that provides funds for a docent program.

Its docents like these such as Billy Babin, who walk folks through the garden during their visit.

When we met Billy, she demonstrated just how powerful and innovative this garden and its creator is.

Kenny left this when he left the garden.

They were just like this.

We did not finish them because this gives us an example of how the other ones are made with this rebar and chicken wire.

Oh.

Oh, we have more angels.

I'm sensing a lot of heavy religious symbolism.

Yes, he was you know, he was raised in a religious household.

I think that he was raised in the Pentecostal faith.

And you see a lot of biblical imagery here, yet it's almost different.

A lot of it's different than what you usually would see in your Bible.

It wasn't long before I was making my own inferences about the themes of the garden.

They're going through some kind of struggle of some sort, and then they go underneath this archway and it's you know, now they're, you know, kind of I say normal people, but being guarded by the angels.

Okay.

So kind of going through that fits in with the theme of redemption, right?

Although many people try to decipher what Kenny was trying to say, the truth is that it's up to the viewer because Kenny certainly never said it.

Maybe one man's journey and everyone plugging into the concept of life is a journey.

It has both a universal and a biographical, autobiographical significance, autobiographical for Kenneth Hill and then a universal significance for everybody else.

Kenny did say a few things.

He's on record for saying he made this garden for the community, so I think he wanted to share it.

He also said that it was about things that he learned in his life.

He said it was about living in one of the most amazing things about the garden.

Kenny Hill refused to make a profit, and I said, Have you ever sold a piece to make money because he needed money?

He said, If I sell a piece of artwork, I lose my ability to create words and pictures.

Don't do it.

Justice.

Everyone agrees that one needs to visit the garden to take it all in.

I think the visit to the garden, the actual visit to the garden is an experience And you can read about it, you can photograph it.

But, you know, one picture, no one text is going to capture everything today.

The Kenny Hill Sculpture Garden is ranked as one of the top 12 such art sites.

In the U.S..

It's another Louisiana treasure that we can all be proud of.

Our lives are greatly enriched by considering the creative endeavors of others.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits taking place at museums and galleries in our part of the world.

For more about these and loads more events in the creative space, visit LTV Dorgan Art.

From there you'll find links to each episode of the program.

So to see or share any segment again, visit L.P.. Morgan runs when art gets into your blood, it apparently stays there.

If a vet walk a Dalton story is anything to go by.

From a very young age, Dalton pursued art.

But then life happened.

She embarked upon a long and productive career in the ministry.

But now, if it has come full circle, back to where she began and she says that this was the plan all along.

If it walk, a Dalton story comes to us from Dayton, Ohio.

In retiring, I always said, I want to go back to being an artist.

I started with acrylics and I like doing acrylics and I start doing collages.

I have a piece that I'm working on right now I can't decide whether I'm going to do it in acrylics or if I'm going to do a collage, but that's where I am right now.

I am a vet, Walker Dalton.

I'm a Dayton Ian, and I'm also an artist.

I have always been an artist even when I was a little town, I was an artist.

My parents didn't know that, not until I was six years old and I had to have a visiting nurse.

Her name was Mary Lou.

She was the first African-American visiting nurse here in Dayton, Ohio, and she told my mother and father that I think this child has some art skills.

And so ever since then, Mother then made sure I had paper pencils, crayons.

I started out being a art teacher.

I turned out to be a graphic designer.

When my youngest daughter was born as a preemie.

She weighed £2, 12 ounces.

That meant that when she came home at £5, somebody had to be there to take care of her.

And I could not go back teaching.

So I started designing cards for friends.

There weren't any black greeting cards that we could go into stores and buy.

So I started designing cars, and that just took her.

Absolutely took off We started with Christmas cards, and then we got into the loan cards, the funny cards we use, like slogans from Flip Wilson, things that were sort of out there in the sixties and the early seventies.

Then we started designing black greeting cards for Gibson trading cards.

We used all the people that we knew took pictures of our family or friends Those went over very well.

Then pretty soon a recession came along and some of our distributors with regular and we had to go bankrupt.

So that end of the card business.

We also did work for Procter and Gamble things like salesmen and tear picked shelf sites.

In 76, my husband, I got a divorce.

I moved to Lancaster, Ohio, and I was able to work for Ancor, hawking incorporation and designing glassware for them.

One Christmas, Christmas 1979, the director came in and says, Okay, who in this artwork must not do anything for Christmas?

And I raised my hand.

I said, What is it you want me to do?

And they said, Well, Star Wars want you basically to, to do a line or glassware for them.

And so can you go home and make up some type of a sketches for at least four glasses And so they gave me photographs of what they want on these particular glasses.

They also had me sign a paper saying that I would not nut not tell about Yoda at that particular time that was coming out for The Empire Strikes Back.

And so I went home, and that's what I did.

And I just loved making those glasses.

That was really a fun job.

In the meantime, I had been going back and forth from Cincinnati to Lancaster, Ohio, because my church was in Cincinnati.

The pastor there had been talking to me.

How about going into the ministry that and I thought he was absolutely crazy because I had never seen a willing pastor in my entire life.

And I said, well, if I'm going into the ministry, I'm not becoming a minister.

I'm going to combine my own experience with a theological education.

That was my whole reason for going into to do seminary.

My first church was in Louisville, Shawnee Presbyterian Church.

They called me to be pastor.

It was a great experience being a pastor.

I enjoyed working with the people.

I enjoyed seeing people grow I enjoyed working with the children.

They became my family, and hopefully I became one of theirs as well.

I'm very excited about exhibiting at Grace Methodist Church here in Dayton.

Yes.

Yeah.

These pieces are all pieces I have worked on since retirement.

What's next for me?

I'm not quite sure.

I'm just living in the moment right now.

Someone said, Oh, you're just like Grandma Moses.

Well, I know that I'm close to her age.

I'm 75 and she basically started at 76 and she, oh, she painted it up until she died.

101 So I would think ahead too far.

I still want to deal with where I am right now.

It's just absolutely great.

To think about my next project and I don't want to add to her ahead of that.

Doesn't matter where you go in the world.

Human beings have always expressed themselves through dance.

They're certainly dancing in Columbus, Ohio, at the hip hop based dance studio of James Alexander.

Their students learn to master moves from breakdancing to popping and locking.

Take a look.

These moves might take you back or you might learn a few new steps to music is not meant to be heard.

It is meant to be felt right.

So let's go ahead and get warmed up.

So I didn't know I was going to be a dancer growing up.

I wanted to be a elementary school teacher.

And this ended up being what I'm doing.

So it's like killing two birds with one stone.

Ego sides it sounds like my name is James Alexander.

I'm the owner of Flavor and Flow Studio.

So here a flavored flow.

My main focus is to introduce the dance and pass it down correctly in the culture of hip hop.

There's a lot of stigma, negative stigma around hip hop culture in the dance due to the media.

And that that's not really what hip hop culture is about or even the dance in hip hop culture, we have three main dances to the culture.

There is break in, which is the original style of hip hop culture.

Then there are there was Poppin, which is the West Coast, came from Fresno, California, and Northern California.

And then we have Locking, which came from Los Angeles, California.

I already hear it breaking and popping.

Five, six, seven, eight, to start doing a little turn poppin is more known to a lot of people because of the media I've called it popping and locking pop in Lock, which is actually two different dances with Poppin in the seventies.

It was just a muscle isolation it was just a quick hit of the muscle.

Now a lot of people look at it as the robot, the waves, the muscle, isolations, different things like that.

I've been dancing for about this.

It would be my seventh year dancing I came to Columbus in June.

I found this place in August, and it's been wonderful.

It's my face probably in my favorite dance to be there, to learn in practice from the crowd here.

It's kind of more it's more relaxed.

It's more about the art than anything else.

That's how I found out.

Unique here.

It's like visual poetry.

I mean, as someone comes on, you hear the beat, you got your by source bouncer and you're like, I just like, get to it.

This is exciting.

Right?

With B-Boy B-girl originally that meant Bronx Boy.

Bronx Girl because that's where it originated from.

And then it moved out of the Bronx and they started calling it break in or break boy.

Break Girl.

And the term originally means to break out and dance.

When the media picked it up in 1982, they started calling it breakdancing because we dance to the break of the music.

Coincidentally, that's what we do dance to So breaking the original style of hip hop started in the late sixties in the Bronx when it started as only dancing on your feet when California started picking it up, they really started putting in the power moves.

And now it's, you know, it's almost a muscle that you mix all these together There are four parts, main parts to the dance.

There's top rock, which is like dancing on your feet.

That's your introduction.

And then when you get down to the ground, you got your footwork, which stands on our hands and feet.

Tap, go back to squat.

Five, six, seven, eight, and go freezes for to stop and motion and power moves, which are the power moves are what breaking is known for the windmills the head spins stuff on your hands.

And I think this is where a lot of the misconceptions of breaking came from is that it's freestyle, which it is what I think a lot of people think freestyle is doing whatever you want, however you want and what actually with braking and pop and all this stuff freestyle is freestyle with the moves given My name is Lucy and my big girl name is Misfit and I've been dancing for two years.

I think that I love about it is that I get to make new friends and Jamie, which is our instructor, he he doesn't just teach dancing.

He too.

He teaches like behavior and stuff, which I really like.

Another thing that I really like about like going to these classes and stuff is that it's not all choreographed where you can he teaches you these moves and then you can mix them up and make them into something else.

Flavored flow is all about having flavor in your flow, and in flow is just about how you're you put your dance together and what you choose to.

So what you learn in these moves is how you flow with it, you know?

So just like I try not to teach choreography, I don't want you to learn my dance.

I want you learning the dance, and then I want you to flow and put your flavor style into however you want to.

Nice guys spin and please teaching the young ones.

I want to also instill a lot of the values and virtues such as courage, self-esteem, Well, I've always loved music and dancing, but I'm I got ADHD, so I'm always active and I always have energy.

So this kind of gets my energy out sometimes and the next day.

So I'm now crazy and grumpy from what you know, if you give them character, personality and hard work, they're going to fulfill their dream and work hard at it.

I see you guys are all growing and I love and I'm super proud of each and every one of you guys.

This is the best way I can give back.

You know, if I can change someone's life, I've done my job.

I feel we're wrapping things up today with a cultural lesson that combines both artistic and spiritual disciplines.

For one week each year in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Tibetan monks ceremoniously construct a sand mandala or spiritual structure in city hall.

Then they embark upon a sacred journey of dismantling the geometric construct.

Let's follow in their footsteps for just a moment.

Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.

Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, With ceremony and reverence, the Tibetan monks of the draping Low-slung Monastery prepare the sand that will become an intricately crafted mandala of ancient spiritual symbols and geometric patterns.

Created over three days.

The mandalas design promotes peace and healing for more just as important as its creation.

The ritual of destroying the sand mandala is a reminder of the impermanence of life and the blessings to those that have experienced its beauty.

And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, you can always see or share episodes of the show at ELP 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 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.