Coming up next on Art Rocks, drawing on life experiences to create beautiful art.

I always knew what I wanted to paint would be nature.

With the best parts of landscape is showing incredible depth.

But to translate all that depth onto a two dimensional surface takes time.

It takes energy and take study.

A partnership in creative design and a national museum of African-American history that's all about to happen on art rocks.

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

Hello.

I'm James Fox Smith, Country Roads magazine.

Back with another dose of art rocks.

We begin right at the water's edge with New Orleans barely solitary.

The artist actually grew up in Gautier, Mississippi, where the twin Constance of Sea and Sky shaped his artistic sensibility.

Living in the South, where everything is horizontal, Salazar was fascinated by vertical things.

And he loves to paint the summer cumulonimbus clouds.

Besides the sky, he also loves to paint what lurks beneath the surface the crabs, the shrimp and the oysters.

He grew up catching as a child.

Still in landscape.

Those are my two favorite genres.

So I was born in California.

I grew up in Goshen, Mississippi, which is right on the Gulf Coast.

Little small town.

I was fortunate to grow up right on the water.

We had a little john boat and a little five horsepower motor, and I'd go out and we'd go crabbing, we'd go fishing, we'd go oystering.

That was kind of my summer camp was just spending all that time in nature.

And as I got older, it sort of being interested in art.

I always knew what I wanted to paint would be.

Nature were the best parts of landscape is showing incredible depth.

It doesn't come naturally.

You see it naturally.

You can understand it naturally when you're seeing in nature.

But to translate all that depth onto a two dimensional surface takes time.

It takes energy and takes study.

There's different types of respect.

There's little perspective, there's atmosphere perspective, there's color perspective, which is kind of more complicated.

These are different ways of showing depth on two dimensional surface.

I studied Oskars Ozols at the Duals Academy of Fine Arts, but also studying through observation and just in starting to see his writing understand.

It takes a lot of work to do it, but it's a lot of fun to know how I would consider myself to be kind of a of a classic realist.

It's representational painting, but it's not sort of realism.

I feel that there's expression in the bold strokes, and then at the end I come in a little bit tighter.

But there's still paint on the surface.

There's still that quality that you can see.

The problem with, with learning how to get to the craft of painting, is that you tend to want to be very representational once you learn it.

One of my favorite subjects is Clouds and one of my favorite foregrounds is the Mississippi River.

I love having large cumulus nimbus clouds.

The big ones that are coming that are the most dramatic.

They are the grandfathers of the clouds.

I love having the Mississippi River at the bottom.

I love the fact that we can have this incredibly large container ship that's only this big.

It's just in the cloud is gigantic.

Is this wonderful play on what we think as humans is is big.

Nature is five times larger.

And here in New Orleans, we are very familiar with nature.

And with every summer, we all get ready for the hurricane season.

And we were always reminded how precarious we are, this little tiny sliver of land surrounded by all this water.

In a way, I like to make landscapes to be a metaphor for this nature versus a little sliver of of land at the bottom.

Another one of my favorite still life subjects is the oyster.

This is your show.

It's a fantastic, simple little creation.

We all know the mother, pearl and all the colors of rain water contained in it.

It's subtle.

It's beautiful.

The shell for the creature itself is magnificent.

The grays inside the shell are surrounded by greens and purples and subtleties of color that are often paying them in series like that, with the shells and many wedges to the strong yellow light versus all the subtle colors in the oyster.

And it's definitely my favorite subject.

I go back to all the time.

The crab on a tomato.

It's a nice little piece.

What's interesting is that instead of having the crab just lying flat on the surface, but I notice that by lifting them up a little bit, a you're adding some more character to what?

You're adding a little bit more narrative to it because it looks like it's more alive.

I'm much more interested in this not as as a piece of food, but more as a living creature.

The blue crab is incredible to it.

It has worked so hard to to create all these beautiful colors, every single color the rainbow, the reds, the oranges, the blues and the pinks it is in my head.

We think of it as just kind of this creepy theme is crawling on the mud, but it's working really hard to become this incredibly beautiful thing.

A drop of water is, you know, we we perceive it to be a certain thing, but reality is just a value and an edge quality.

The crawfish on the garlic or crawfish riding or garlic, it almost looks like in a garlic itself, you can see at the end the highest value is almost pure white, just laid on in a very thick manner.

Well, the highlights along the back of the crawfish are again are laid on there in a heavy manner.

I also try to have line very variations.

I like to have the edges of things to not always be sharp.

I like the edges of things to be had.

Soft edges, the sharp edges.

And so I'm from the school of thought that says Drawing is everything.

I'm constantly drawing, constantly drawing, drawing from observation, drawing from your mind, always thinking about how value and design is worked into paintings.

I usually work all wet on wet a prima meaning that working very quickly, almost one sitting.

Sometimes I'll do all the painting in one sitting by putting down dinner layers at the beginning and then fatter layers on top of that and heavier layers on top that.

You're able to get a lot of depth within the painting, even in one sitting.

Sometimes a week later I realize, no, it needs a little something here and something there.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, keep your eyes peeled for a copy of Country Roads magazine.

And while we're at it, help me.

These Art Rocks website features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any episode again, just log on to LTV dot org.

Now please consider a pair of Milwaukee artists who have found creative ways to combine glass and steel to create extra floral sculpture.

Take a look at how they do it.

We believe the fragility of the glass and the ruggedness, the sturdiness of the stainless steel are a great combination.

My name is Jerry Hershman, and I am a glass blower.

My name is Michael Paul Theory.

I am a stainless steel metal sculpture.

Partners in Art is Jerry and me combining our talents, mine and stainless steel and Jerry and glass to create things of beauty.

And we are indeed partners in our art.

Michael and I, we're doing our own art simultaneously and doing the art shows together, side by side with booths.

One day we just kind of brainstormed what could we do differently?

So I just made a very simple stem, so to speak, on stainless steel, and I made a little hook on top of it.

We could attach a piece of Jerry's glass to it, and we looked at it and said, Let's put some leaves on there.

And once we came up with the concept of our flowers, it really flourished.

And to us really being partners in art, we saw something there that we've never seen before.

And Michael helps me with every piece of glass I make.

I help him with his stainless work.

And and we've just married the two arts together.

Michael and I decided on a color scheme so that we have some continuity with the sculpture, the bouquet.

If you will.

We decide how many pieces we're going to have.

For instance, they can be multicolor, but they all have something in common.

Whether they have white specks or yellow center or a red rim going around the outer part of the bowl.

And from there, Michael builds the sculptures.

I go to United Salvage, and it's like going into a candy store and I see all these wonderful things.

And I just love to pick and choose.

That's how I get the steel that I work with.

So then we'll pick the steel and we'll cut it and we will bend it, twist it, turn it, and do everything we can to it to get a shape that is pleasing.

And then we'll take the steel and will grind the surfaces of it, put in designs of have stamp designs.

We have we clean the edges of it, make it smooth so there's no rough edges after the grinding.

And then we put the pieces together into a completed plant for the flowers that Jerry made.

Michael purchased himself to create more creative pieces all the time.

The glassblowing process starts with a crucible of molten glass at 2150 degrees on a five foot blow rod.

Once you begin the process of glassblowing, you constantly have to turn the blow rod.

Then we add the color and we begin the blowing process for the flowers.

We always add a patty, which is a separate piece of glass that I let fall onto a marble ring table, cut it, and we place the actual long piece onto it so that that is going to now be the place where Michael's stainless hook will rest and it'll keep the flower up on the sculpture.

We will then open it wide, spin it out, let it hang down to give it kind of the the handkerchief effect they call it.

Once we're done with the blown piece, we put it in a kneeling oven.

You can then have it start ramping down.

And glass needs to cool about two degrees a minute and by the next day it's at room temperature.

You can bring it out.

Each piece shows various emotion, and I think that's that's a real plus.

We've created a variety of sizes, some individual flowers, some with with multiple flowers, with a variety of colors.

So there's something for everyone.

It's all a nonstop problem solving.

That's what that's what it was all about.

It's constant problem solving.

And eventually, with some collaboration, the thought I personally love people's reaction to it.

They'll look at it for its beauty, various combinations, and they'll they'll be afraid when when we saw them, that the piece can be functional, that we have something that really hasn't been introduced to this area before.

And I think that's the fun part of it.

Besides loving beyond ourselves, Michael and I get to see our time together, being creative.

Our creating is really our entertainment.

That's what we do.

We've done it for so many years.

We both have been doing this for about 25 years, and it's our way of life.

It's pushing yourself and pushing the limits.

And it's endless.

What you can do with glass.

Keep in mind open.

And don't let anybody tell you you can't do something.

Don't let them say you can't.

Or their conversation pieces that we have all over the country.

We definitely want people to enjoy our art.

We are leaving an emotional impression on people, and I think that's what it's all about.

It's a collaboration.

We do it together and that's what makes us, I believe, successful artists.

The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio, welcomes visitors from around the world, and it's the permanent home to one of the largest collections of Afro-American materials in the country.

Let's take a look inside.

The intent behind opening this museum was to truly celebrate African-American history and culture.

Our museum started with the concept, I think, in the mid 1970s.

This area here, Wilberforce, very long history, very historic.

Wilberforce University being the third HBC, as it were, ever again before 1865.

So this was founded in slavery.

So the history, the meaning behind that is really deep.

So we think it's fitting that the first National African-American Museum would be situated on one of the oldest HBCU campuses anywhere.

African-Americans from all over the country have had some sort of history here or some aspect of been in contact with something that happened here.

Wilberforce, C.J.

McMillan, US Senator John Glenn.

People like that got together, started to tour with the idea of building a museum, a national museum, which at that time hadn't existed in this country.

We've had lots of local, state, museum and museums in other parts of the country, but not a national museum dedicated to no general African-American history, no adult collection is one of the cornerstone collections, I think, in our institution.

And if you read anything about history, you know that as far back as during slavery, African-American children made their own dolls makeshift things just to play with.

And those were passed down in a lot of instances, generation to generation, and they began to collect bills.

And we've put together exhibitions that's traveled throughout the country on African-American dolls.

Exhibits are set up now for 4 to 5 years out.

So I think we as a team, we come up with a plan for what types of exhibit we'd like to have.

We have a changing exhibit gallery, and those exhibits are up for six months to a year, depending on the topic.

And then we have also our long term exhibit, and that's a five year minimum exhibit.

We really touch on the pulse of the community, and that's what we really strive to do.

So as an exhibit curator and designer, I find my role to be to to make sure that we're community catering to the various learning styles, to various audiences.

And so the fact that we have two different types of exhibit, the changing exhibit tends to be more, more about artists and what artists are doing today.

So we have two ways to tell that story to continue to tell various stories and the various important points that we're putting out there.

This is a blessing.

It's a blessing.

To be general community.

And it's a blessing for the African-American community and for blessing to those who are going to come after us.

You know, this museum allows us to leave an imprint on this society.

It allows us to leave a piece of ourselves here to let you know one that we were here.

You can come in here and look at what a kitchen looked like in 1950.

1960, it is just a place for family and fans.

I'm telling you, I would not.

Be here if it were not for you.

And so and.

It also encourages artists to step out, you know, and have faith and believe that.

You know, the founding director and some of the other subsequent directors we've had, they had the foresight to collect African-American art.

Our art collection, obviously, is not the biggest art collection that exists, but is Sage Jam packed full of such rare pieces?

Because we were collecting so early when others were just doing things locally, we were collecting nationally.

So when we look at our collection now, is so much interest in that good I would like our visitors to take away from a visit.

Here is just how genuine we are trying to be with telling stories about history.

Our mantra at this point is Own your history, live your legacy.

We're being genuine.

We're being true to history.

But we're also trying to get you to to be more proactive.

Take these lessons that generations past have learned and tried to pass down to us, take those lessons and apply it.

A little bit.

North of Ohio, we met Akeem Spellman in Detroit, Michigan.

He is a young star in the making.

Discover what inspired this young artist to create photography portfolios as a student at one of Detroit's premier art schools.

I don't necessarily capture moments.

I create them.

I'm from two different places in Jamaica.

I mean, I'm never one place.

I mean, they're over there.

Over there.

But for me, I'm exposed to a lot of different social backgrounds.

Our motto for Jamaica is Out of many one people into high school.

The same thing regardless of who you are.

We are like always together, the mix of cultures and the ability to go from one race the other and there's no conflict or whatever.

So yeah, that's how Jamaica really reflects in my heart, to be honest.

Coming in Detroit, I was traumatized as meaning that I didn't know what to do.

I was like, there was like so much stereotypes attached to high schools.

And I was like, get escape because, you know, you're Jamaican, you need to a country.

My mom took some time online and then she found Detroit School of Arts.

When I heard the school's name, I was like, That's a high school.

College.

Sure, that's real.

It's such a great place for him because he can express all of the ways that he is artistically gifted.

Throughout our school, he uses our dance pages.

Through his photography, he uses our art students to help him create his beautiful pieces of work of art.

And it's just everything.

He just encompasses everything for me.

Detroit School of Art has really done a lot to the opportunities that they've given.

Like every our competition is better.

First day I came here, I showed my teacher, my portfolio, and ironically, like, there is this like scholastics, art and writing competition.

And she took my portfolio.

It was like select ten images out of it.

So I think she might have just sent like four out of them and get the portfolio thing.

I got three gold keys, a silver key plus American Vision Award, which is like the best of show out of 6600 entries across Michigan.

But for I'm what Detroit School of Art has been is like it's a family.

And I really appreciate the atmosphere.

There's like no bullying.

I like saying there's like this whole unity in this entire school.

There hasn't been any negative comments towards things and yeah, everyone is just really supportive.

And I feel at home my Detroit School of Arts, really.

He has such vision for such a young man.

I mean, what I see in his artwork, I would expect to see in artwork of someone who has been in the business for years and years.

He has such a wisdom about his art work and just the vision like he has seen this world before.

He has lived the life to 100 and started over again because it just comes through whatever he does and puts on canvas or shows in photography or whatever form of artwork he's using.

I'm really intrigued as to where he gets his ideas to put things together, to stage people and objects and use certain colors or textures.

In his work.

I love to write.

When I write, I write to.

I invite readers to carry them through and to like utilize different words to let them feel what I'm feeling.

And my whole passion of writing poems and descriptive writing that really grabs a person.

It's the same thing I feel about my photography.

How does it make me feel?

How it would make an audience feel?

And the thing is, regarding poses, I do get inspiration.

I would say, like from magazines, any fashion, high end fashion or or some magazines because again, everything started with arms.

So I look at the magazines, I'm like, Wow, how powerful.

How can I pull that off at Lamps, fan out of the house and I see like all the different poses and I see like the neutral.

It just invites you.

And so the same concepts that they apply with their poses, I put my own element of like theater and the writing into it, so it pushes the audience even more pertaining to anything.

That's actually where everything comes alive because it's on the computer.

I get to apply my abilities in illustration, graphic design and painting and stuff into my editing process.

I literally take the time to really articulate the models and give them the different esthetics that I want them to convey in the finished piece.

Sometimes it's just, wow, just absolute, just the wow factors and then it's just taking you deeper into where in your mind is this piece taking you and just the other worlds.

He has pieces where there's a part of a body, but then there's something else there and it's just like, Wow, how does it all fit together?

And it just really speaks to your heart and your emotions as well as your mind.

The photo session that I'm going to be doing today is seeing the soul of the arts is going to be a very intricate composition, utilizing all the different majors in Detroit School of Arts, such as Media and television, dance, drama and visual arts, and put some twists into it because I'm really looking forward to it.

The students are really seeing themselves to be a part of his artwork.

I've seen students who would be afraid to say two words to me put on a course to put on makeup and allow themselves to be pose and photographs in a way that I never thought that particular student what I would be able to show that kind of expression.

So he really taps into that core in the students that some of them have when able to get out yet.

And I think that that's very, very exciting.

I have to ensure that everyone is okay regarding visual the visual aspect and I did ask one person to kind of help me out, but normally I really don't tell my models to worry about stuff too much like makeup or anything because I said I can do that.

I'm on Photoshop.

I guess the most I tell them is like, we're a little black lipstick because it kind of eliminates like the Photoshop process when I actually paint it on because I think that causes noise and stuff.

But for the most part, I been tell my models to really worry about the post-processing.

Right now for me, I just ensure that they're polls properly, they're having the correct facial expressions and I do everything on the computer.

I fully expect to hear in a few years that I came, will have a one man show in some really fancy museum in New York.

But whatever he does, I hope that he has fun and he never loses his passion for it because that's what comes out most in his work, his passion, his dedication for it.

And I don't want him to do it.

It's just a business.

I want him to keep the heart that he has and his art work and to always flip that show wherever he goes.

And that is that.

For this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, Art Lover, you can always watch the episodes of the show and help be dot org slash art rocks.

And if that's not enough for you.

Country Roads magazine is a great resource for enriching your cultural life with art cuisine, escapes and events all across the state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thank you for watching and.