Coming in a moment on Art Rocks, the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge driving artistic endeavor throughout the capital region from an inspiring new headquarters and a special platform that expressly caters to artists of color.

These stories coming 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.

And thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine with the Long awaited opening of the Carrie Saraj Community Art Center, creatives in Baton Rouge and around the capital region.

Got 12,000 square feet of inspiring new headquarters to represent them.

Many have worked tirelessly to support the good works of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge and the organizations that it supports but the facility which doubles as the Arts Council's headquarters and an exciting event and exhibition space is named for long time supporter Carrie Saraj.

Come with us to find out how the Carrie Saraj Community Art Center delivers for the Baton Rouge community The old fire station had its charm.

It was a place that a lot of memories were made, but what's so fascinating about this new space is that we're able to go from 4000 square feet to over 12,000 square feet and diversify our offering in our old space, we had just one big room.

Now we have a dance studio space a black box an artist's studio.

We can really offer so much more to our community.

Black boxes are named that way because if you paint a room completely black then you can manipulate the colors in theatrical lighting and you can create all of these different scenarios, whether you're creating a dance performance or theatrical performance.

We have a strong floor that's also portable, but it allows for dancers to come in and be able to work on a floor that is safe for them.

That's why you see also mirrors in our black box, because we can convert it to a dance studio space.

We also have a film screen so people can screen films, and it's really great to be able to completely make that space dark, except for what you're seeing on the screen.

We love that.

So many different entities, from opera to the symphony.

The Symphony has a candlelight concert series in there where they have a string quartet and the only light in the room or over a thousand candles.

What we want about this space?

Not only to retain the talent we already have here in Baton Rouge, but also to make Baton Rouge and the Capital Region an appealing place for artists to come in a vibrant space where they can build work and where they can build community.

And so this vagabond dance troupe being formed.

We're originally in New Mexico, and they've relocated to Baton Rouge, which we love, because that means we're drawing people from the outside into the state of Louisiana.

And they had a really interesting model.

They like to be out in the community and do this site specific work, and they like to spread quality dance.

It's really hard as dancers to find a space that's affordable, that works in the timeframe that we need it the mirrors, the bars, the South there's so much that goes into it.

Having this space here was a no brainer in some ways.

We were like, We have to come here because this is half the battle This is really giving us an opportunity to reach the broader Baton Rouge community, and that's super important to us where we are as artists.

But it's also deeply aligned with the mission of the company.

Our mission is really to redefine what the relationship of dance is, and that's really bringing dance to everybody, making it a value that anyone can access, whether you're coming from impoverished areas or if you're coming from affluence.

See, the connection point is the human body and the connection point is our affinity with ourselves and our affinity to other people.

So I've always kind of been partly in the arts and partly in nonprofit work.

And so the connection point for something into town was how do we take what we want and what we envision can happen with dance and can happen with the art form and where do we bring that?

What community is open to that?

And really, Rene represented this person who was coming out of the community to say, we want this value for Baton Rouge.

And we also have a grant from the Pennington Foundation to do Dance for all.

And that program is also going to be fostered through this building.

But Dance for All is providing dance opportunities to people who may typically not see themselves as being able to participate, whether they're visually impaired, whether they're hearing impaired, whether they have maybe a muscular dystrophy or some other impairment.

That seems like typically you would not be able to dance.

And there's a really wonderful person in this community.

Shannon Ft. Is her name, and she has a program and a curriculum that we're going to have her facilitate so that more dance schools and more dance companies can adopt about the curriculum.

A real game changer and a real mandate for us when we renovated this space was the sound and visual recording studio We have such a great culture in our region of Singer-songwriters and these Singer-songwriters, we're then having to go to Atlanta or go to Memphis or go to these other recording studios where they can actually produce work and then have it streamed or dropped in that way.

That was commercially viable.

So we said, Why don't we have an accessible space like that right here so that people don't have to leave and we can retain our talent here.

Our show gallery is this beautiful exhibit space that's got both very, very high ceilings.

There's a section of it where you could have a multidimensional sculptural work and then a gallery work in the same way that you might see looking at two dimensional visual art.

And so we love that space.

We rotate about every month or two months.

We wanted to keep the integrity of the space the same as much as possible, but we just added some natural light.

The point of the triangle was extended by glass, and that's to allow so much more natural light for artists and for viewers.

And then also we added a rooftop terrace.

We love that Baton Rouge is discovering rooftops and the way to look at our city from that vantage point.

And so we just built that facility as well onto the building.

We wanted to have a space where people could be messy, have their stuff out and leave it and be inspired, and then also be in close proximity to other artists.

So they may have a conversation about challenges in working on a particular piece or whatever may be the case.

And we wanted the artist to create the spaces for themselves.

Sometimes we'll have artists, they want to have some privacy and they want to build walls around what they do.

Some really like the interaction, and they're very open in large scale pieces.

You want to be able to keep it up.

You don't have to pick it up and put it away.

We wanted to have that opportunity as well.

We had been working in a smaller space at my home and not being able to really step back and breathe.

I felt my work was being very I'm fine.

So having the room to step out and go a little bit larger would really help me advance my my art style.

Before it was just mainly online marketing, trying to find people going from people.

But now that I'm here in this space, there's always someone stopping in and I love talking to people.

Every artist just wants to be able to show their work, express their work.

I just want people to feel what I'm feeling and build a community around that.

There's a music studio right next door to me.

So there was a guy here a few months ago that was creating an album, and I was just going there and just listen.

You know, when I hear music, I start to see colors.

So I'll take that sometimes with me and bring it in here the way that we work.

Being a resident in the space is that we have a price per square foot.

So if you want to map out, I need this much square footage, then we work that rental agreement up for you and we usually like to do three months minimum.

But if you want to do community work, then we did cut that hourly rate from your rent or your lease so that it's affordable.

The art world is a very volatile.

You can be at the top one day and the next you could be, you know, towards the bottom.

You just have to keep creating.

That's the key.

But for me personally, it is definitely affordable.

One of the things that came up was that the Baton Rouge Symphony did not have a home for its offices.

It had been in various places in the city, and they needed rehearsals space.

They already had a performance space.

And we were one block away from the River Center Theater where they perform.

And so it seemed like such a natural fit.

And so we talked to the symphony and we came up with a plan and said they are long term tenants in this building.

We not only are close to the concert hall that has been our home for decades, but also to be part of the energy that's part of downtown, as well as just part of this living art space that we get to call our office space in our home.

It provides also an extra venue for us with the black box theater that's here and just is a great inspirational space for creativity and for our musicians.

Prior to being here, our music library was actually in a temperature controlled facility that was not connected to where our office space were.

So to have our music library actually in our office space where we have access to that music and are able to do all of the library work that we need to do, getting the music out to the musicians and whatnot is makes our workflow so much better and is a huge asset to us just to have access to our music on a consistent basis.

We thought it was really important to name this building for someone who had contributed not only to the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, but had been a force for good in the arts and in culture to build it in our community for many years, that it would be a celebration of that person's legacy.

In doing the research, it definitely became very clear that Carrie Siraj was in fact that person.

He has contributed to the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum here, LSU Museum of Art, regionally, beyond Baton Rouge, to celebrate local artists, but also to bring in artists to this community.

And he's done it humbly and he's done it quietly.

But we've had so many people in the community contribute to this building and to its repurposing.

And then we decided we wanted to have a very unique display of who those people were.

Some of these contributors contributed a minimal amount up to great amounts, and we thought that was important, too.

And so we talked to McLean Walsh, we know as Mikey Walsh, who's a professor at LSU and a wonderful ceramicist, she came up with this very beautiful display and has the names of all of our donors and supporters on that wall.

We love that they're part of the community in the artwork as well.

We wanted to honor the original peoples of this land in that installation.

And so Mikey took Clay from the Mississippi River bed and created some of the figures.

You see little faces and figures on that work and that is to honor the Mississippians who were here around the time of poverty point when we expose ourselves to the artistic perspectives of others.

We get to see the world through a different set of eyes.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits and events in the arts coming soon to museums and galleries in your part of the world and for more about these and loads more events in the creative space Visit LBB dot org slash art rocks.

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

So to see or share any segment again.

Visit LBB dot org slash patrols some artists take their inspiration from their surroundings.

Others find that their creative force comes from within but regardless of where the ideas come from, Lakeland, Florida painter Potter and art facilitator Rachelle Esten is passionate about helping others express themselves through art.

Here's Rachelle to describe some of the methods and mediums that she explores I am Rachelle Easton and I am an artist, a potter and Inspirer and a teacher.

Actually, I am a facilitator of ceramic classes at Florida Southern College.

I am an invited artist to Disney and I do pottery, stoneware, pottery that's fabulously functional.

And I create books, plants, stained journals, that I create through a boiling method of taking plant elements and designing papers and boiling.

And I have this great, great designs that come from nature So pottery is my first love in art, and I do fabulously functional stoneware.

Pottery is what I how I call it, because I want I love the form of pottery.

I love sculpting.

I love everything about it.

Glazing and but but I want it to be functional.

I have four kids I have a lively household, and I don't want pieces just sitting around doing nothing.

So pretty much everything that I create, there's a function to it.

Pottery inspires my plant staining and plant staining inspires my pottery.

I do a lot of pieces in pottery now that are inspired by the natural plant elements.

That I'm using in my plant staining.

And I, I now can't function with just one.

I have to do both to keep me.

Well, first of all, the short attention span.

So doing both pottery and plant staining helps me with that part, but also just the relationship between the two of them.

I mean, they're all very earthy the plants are sustainable.

Actually, I have different resources.

One of my favorite places to get them also is I get them from Epcot, so I have forged a relationship with the living, with the land attraction that grows all these plants in these wonderful greenhouses.

They're growing plants from all over the world.

I get to basically dumpster dove in their compost pile and use their plants.

It's very magical.

Okay, so I don't make the paper.

The paper is a whole different ballgame.

I have somebody that specially makes the paper for me.

That's a whole career kind of on its own.

I take fresh plant elements, design pages, and then I basically sandwich them together and I boil them and they are boiling for about a good four to 5 hours.

They're in the water.

And then after that they sit for a while.

I peel back the plant elements and I get these fabulous designs and you've got these beautiful pages, which I have to say a lot of people don't want to write on because they're so gorgeous but exciting for people I think to have a foundation that they can write on if they choose to.

I tell everybody that this is a journey, this is an adventure.

There's no right or wrong in art there's no perfection in art.

So you create because of the way it makes you feel, not because of the end product.

And when you get to that end product, you are going to be so connect with it because your hands, your creativity, your imagination did it.

Nobody else in the world would have created that piece just to you.

That's an amazing thing.

The blockbuster musical Hamilton generated unprecedented interest in the life and the legacy of America's founding father, Alexander Hamilton, now, one museum in Houston is aiming to cater to that interest, with an exhibition focused on the great statesman's life.

It's full of remarkable historical objects and pictures, too.

So let's take a look We are in a bio band, which was the home of Houston philanthropist Mrs. Omaha.

She was building the house in the late 1920s she'd begun collecting early American furniture and continue to build and grow that collection through the time that she decided to make it a gift to the Museum of Fine Arts.

Houston, the world of Alexander Hamilton.

We had some really interesting things.

We have objects that were specifically related to himself and his world, things that might have been in the possession, say, of the Schuyler family.

We have prints and images of people represented in the show, like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Henry Laurens and many others.

We have, for example, a service of Chinese export porcelain that was owned by Thomas William, the man who was the first president of the Bank of the United States.

So it's not out of the question that Alexander Hamilton dined from that China.

And then there's a chair that we believe was owned by Philip Schuyler and was part of a larger set of furniture that he's known to have owned.

This is what's called a roundabout chair.

It's the kind of chair that would have been placed probably in front of a desk or such as that.

And it is made in such a way that it enforces a peculiarly masculine posture on the sitter, you might say.

So it's definitely a man's chair.

It's a beautiful object.

It has wonderful expressions of symmetry that few other forms of American furniture of that time period have.

It's got a wonderful provenance or ownership history and all those things together, I think, make it an exceptional object.

The members of the cast were quite taken with it to doing the show, and even in just creating the character and trying to get inside of his head, you know, there's imagery that I try to make up in my own mind, like okay, what is it like to be in Philip Schuyler's mansion and what is it like to be standing on the battlefield?

So getting to actually be in there and see, you know, the objects and the pictures and all of that help to strengthen that imagery, you know, and it's pretty cool.

The world of Alexander Hamilton came to be, I think, largely through the efforts of folks in our education division and, you know, who were early fans of the show and saw this opportunity and started to think about the story that in turn, Owl's Book and the story that's in the play and to think about the objects that we have the touch on it.

And so the way that they crafted those things and placed them together and were able to knit together a sequence of objects that relates to the sequence of the story, I think is is a really remarkable thing that they've been able to achieve and we're pleased that these objects can serve that purpose.

For fine artists.

It can often be a big challenge to hit upon the right methods and mechanisms to market their work effectively.

In Tampa, Florida, one businesswoman has set out to bridge that gap, creating a service designed to help connect African-American artists with the right audiences.

Let's watch You know, it's just a really is a whole like it's a whole vibe.

It's a whole mood.

Like it's the mood and get it exciting culturally and even bring you All right.

So I am Camille Adrian.

I am the founder and CEO of a company called Smudge Life, which is the parent company to indie noir market, indie noir, noir, meaning black and indie being independent artists.

That's how the name got there.

The idea for the market started in January of 2019, and we had it up and running by March It's My Life is a company that is directly related toward spiritual education, about energy work So a lot of people don't understand the connection between like energy healing and what the market like was supposed to do.

But for me, when we talk about culturally the African-American community a lot of our healing comes from being able to collaborate and support each other.

That's like the first and foundational.

So the market was geared towards healing the community in the space of being able to support and, you know, really just let ourselves be unapologetically black and have a safe space to just be ourselves and not be stressed out and, you know, keep the money in the communities.

But the market itself is a safe place for everyone.

It's where you can come and support black owned businesses that might not have necessarily been able to get into some of your Seminole Heights markets or some of the larger markets.

Just maybe they weren't ready.

They didn't have the proper marketing, whatever.

They weren't fitting the demographic or the look.

And so I was like, well, let's just give you your own look.

You're going to fit here just fine.

As a small business, you think, Oh, man, this market is so popular, let me go apply.

And a lot of times they want prior market experience.

And of course, that's kind of hard to get prior market experience, if that's on every single application.

So any new our market is literally the perfect spot.

We like being your first experience as a vendor because we do make you feel like family.

And sometimes what we've heard is that a lot of the markets, you know, you feel kind of like, oh, I'm just at my booth.

We don't do that.

We want you to feel like it's family.

We got your back.

We're going to help you.

We're going to support you and help you get into some of these bigger markets to give you that experience.

When you walk in, you're going to walk into like 30 plus black owned vendors you're going to walk into artist.

We have like performances.

It's not just the shopping experience.

It is literally your coming on your Saturday afternoon and you want to have fun.

You come to any new.

So this is my first time coming, but I'm familiar with kind of what's happening in the area.

Same to Tampa.

It's just kind of like the movement of black business or entrepreneurship, I think so that's why I was excited to come to begin with.

And I feel like that expectation has been met.

It's it's different, obviously, because we do things differently Some of the biggest challenges has been just getting the word out there that there is a market specifically for African-American vendors.

Also letting the community know that even though it's specifically for African-American vendors, everyone's welcome.

We love the multiculturalism of the market.

I love seeing people have that experience.

So just letting everyone know that it is inclusive, it's not an exclusive event.

Please come support like you're going to feel comfortable.

You're going to have a good time.

It might be unapologetically black, but that's a great experience to be around.

I found out about the market in the weekend section of the Tampa Bay Times on Thursday, and we have a granddaughter who is 24 years old.

She's biracial, she lives in Chicago, but we know she would love to be here today.

We've gone to many of these together, so I thought I would come and see what it's all about, look for some gifts for her.

And that's that's how we got here today.

I think it's excellent for the Tampa Bay community both to just bring all the people together and learn about the different cultures and and see the many gifts that everybody has.

I mean, there are gifts to make these things and and sell them.

That's great.

We want to support their market I am the owner and creative director for the Shay Collection.

And with the Shay, I say the word it actually comes from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

It means may it be sold.

So I think that within the NUA, it's an opportunity for people of color to share with one another what we do, but also to be open to others that are not men and women of color, to embrace what we do as well, to see it, to honor it.

The Tampa Bay market scene, I mean, it's you know, it's fun but, you know, every market I go to, it's generally the same feeling.

You know, I'm like, okay, I go, I found a new person I might get something from, but you don't really go home feeling fulfilled.

At Indy New.

You go home, feel in some kind of way I believe that art is our way of keeping our history and telling our story so it doesn't get messed up along the lines.

And so I encourage a lot more black artists because we lose them.

It's not, you know, something that we're advocated to do.

You know, we have to be professionals and we have to make money and all these other things.

And I'm like, Art, it's important and it's being taken out of schools and all sorts of things.

So if I can do anything to cultivate and keep art in our community and that's what I'm going to do and that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But you can always find, watch and share episodes of the show at LPI B dot org slash rocks.

And if you're left wanting more country, Rhodes Magazine makes a great resource for discovering more inspiring stories in the arts, in the events and destinations 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