Coming up now on Art rocks when making art turns out to be good medicine.

The magic of mixing media.

Crossing the line between painting and sculpture.

And a story spanned by an historic bridge.

These stories coming your way on art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB.

Offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and program that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

We'd like to introduce a young man who has had to work hard to live a productive, fulfilling life after suffering a traumatic brain injury in his teens.

In the years since his accident, though, BJ Smith of Lafayette has found physical and psychological healing in painting with acrylics.

Now he's working to show others how art helps him not just survive, but thrive.

To.

Offer them life.

When I was being a kid, I had a girlfriend.

I was playing football.

I was in school.

I.

One day my cousin said, Come to Houston.

Come play football over there, man.

The football team thought that I was in college football and I had me with started ninth grade year.

My uncle had a Yamaha major he had bought for us to ride down for, and I ran.

And then Dell came out.

I swear to Miss Love.

I had Ray, my sister in law, called me and she said, I'm over here at the hospital with B.J..

He's been in an accident.

I thought, well, maybe he just broke his arm or something like that.

I said, how bad is it?

And she said, he's in brain surgery right now, and they're giving him a 10% chance of survival.

I was unconscious, I was dead on arrival.

I spent six months in the hospital, and that adjustment started quite quickly in the hospital.

Coming out of a coma and not being able to talk and walk.

And he was like an infant.

He had to relearn everything.

Catastrophic brain injury is absolutely life changing in ways that you can't predict.

You don't know because it's a process and it's also life changing for the family.

B.J.

strength and his determination, his will, all those things that you need to play football and to be successful.

Those things remained with him, the physical things.

It was crazy.

I was like a lost goose.

I read a lot.

I was take medicine.

I didn't know what to do with myself and it was crazy.

But I tried, girl.

I tried to work.

It was fun.

I tried school.

Working out.

I worked so hard and made my body begin to break.

So he was just constantly trying to find something to make him happy.

All of his friends left him.

None of his friends remained with him.

Which I hear is a common thing that happens after catastrophic injury.

My mom brought me into or.

I think she found a new to that's hard to dive into.

And I found the swinging rod, which you can see the rotation of the earth, and it stopped us.

I realized that I could do something to me, and the colors of the colors speak to me.

They talked.

Anybody can do it.

It works with gravity.

It has a pad.

And if you were to put something dripping, a swinging, it would show you a beautiful pattern.

I know how to use artificial intelligence to collaborate with my artistic taste.

You can get on an app store, and by 50 if you want to.

When art came along, a new person emerged and there was real joy there.

Some of the things he lost after his brain injury was like an excitement about life.

It was gone.

There was no satisfaction in anything.

Very little fleeting pleasures, that kind of thing.

But nothing that really stuck.

So once he started to do art, it's just been eight years of just full throttle.

As much as we need love and affection.

We need art.

We need spirituality.

We just can't live without it.

BJ is not our family's first experience with brain injury.

My youngest brother was born in 1971 and he had a catastrophic brain injury because of traumatic birth.

He loved life and he loved people.

So much.

There was not a day in his life when he wasn't creating art.

When he got up and he made coffee, he was coloring very, very childlike.

He had great, great joy in doing art.

And time to time he and BJ would get together and do art, but they were like brothers.

They were absolute best friends.

They had brain injury in common and was a great support for each other.

And it was wonderful for me to see because B.J.

is an only child.

When I first started doing art, occasionally he would do some art walks and Opelousas and Sunset, and we met an art teacher from Alice's Catholic named Cindy Pete, and she fell in love with BJ, and then she took a job at this amazing place called Leading Homecare.

And they are a provider of services for people with disabilities.

They hire, train and put caregivers into the homes of people like B.J.

who need support every day.

She said, we have an awesome place here called Saint Pierre Center for the Arts, and she said, I'd really like for B.J.

to come and show our participants his art.

And he started going, so he's a guest teacher there at Saint Peter's, and the students are lovely.

You can see the happiness that they have when they're created.

He taught them how to do poor art like this.

And he's just incredible.

He is so open and so patient and so excited about what art has done for him.

And so it's contagious and my clients just adore doing it.

This process that BJ has taught us is immediate.

You get an immediate emotional satisfaction from it.

And then when you come back after it's dry, the art has changed, just like we have changed.

And BJ brings to us a different type of language and it's like awesome.

And they've all been taught, as we all were taught in school, to stay within the lines.

And if you go outside of the lines, it's a mistake.

It's not a mistake.

You live outside of the lines.

We got an invitation to go and speak at LSU Health Sciences in New Orleans to the School of Occupational Therapy.

And so we went and we brought a lot of BJ's art.

And I speak, and then he comes in and he speaks separately.

And we lecture from two completely different perspectives, me from mom and caregiver and observer.

And of course, PJ is just out there loud and joyful talking about art.

And it's wonderful to see the class interact with him and the wonderful response, really wonderful.

And to be able to give to the community.

This is what I tell whenever we lecture, we choose every day to live in the miracle, not the tragedy, because the alternative is just it's too costly to live in that eye.

When my eyes are scanning the classes and looking at the faculty with their eyes are opening and they're really taking notes and paying attention.

Art therapy has been around forever.

For as long as human beings were in caves making beautiful carvings and stuff.

It's about life.

It's about documenting life.

To watch or rewatch any episode of Art rocks again, just visit lpb.org/art rocks.

There you'll also find all of the Louisiana segments available on LPB YouTube channel.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads Magazine available in print, online, or by e-newsletter.

Many artists draw on differing states of mind to unlock creativity.

Andrea contrast is one.

She approaches her art making in ways that she describes as sometimes serious, sometimes silly, but always with enthusiasm.

Contrast works across a variety of mediums.

At the goodwill Art studio and Gallery in Columbus, Ohio.

My name is Andrea Contraste and I'm at goodwill Art studio and I do artwork.

It's mixed media.

I'm using painting on cross-stitch material, and I'm writing stitching lines and different shapes and.

I do interesting work.

I just do what comes from my brain onto the canvas.

Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's serious.

It just depends.

I would probably be at home crying or bored to death if I couldn't come here on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I'm out in the community on Mondays and Fridays with Alec, my daytime staff, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm with Nicholas and, Heather and Colleen and Ed here at the studio.

And I really enjoy it.

It makes me feel a sense of accomplishment and makes me feel like wanted.

I'm such a sales woman, I. I do a craft show in November, every November, and it's the only one I do.

You guys want to come out and see me at the Grove City High School?

How does it make you feel when one of your pieces sells?

I love it.

That's like sitting.

It makes me proud to have my artwork be sold, and it feels like a sense of accomplishment that that somebody actually bought and really enjoyed my painting.

Now we're headed down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to visit with Gavin Jordan.

Jordan creates striking, three dimensional sculptural paintings, works that require hundreds of industrial screws to assemble, and special gallery space to exhibit.

So here's how it all comes together.

It's funny because halfway through most of these paintings, I'm like, Gavin, what are you doing?

Why are you low?

Why don't you just paint normally right away?

Why are you going through this?

But you know, when the painting is complete and I step back and I'm like, wow, I did that.

You know, so it's a difficult technique to to to do what keeps me doing it and keeps me going is actually the reaction from from viewers.

Right.

Because, you know, there's 2D with 3D.

3D adds, a different dimension to the experience of seeing the piece.

My name is Gavin Jordan.

I am the gallery owner of 24 Murray Fine Art Gallery.

I'm also an artist and, you know, some of my work is is here at the gallery as well.

And, you know, Gavin is also an executive, right?

A business executive, a CPA.

So Gavin is many things.

So in 2016, I was doing an assignment in, in new Jersey, right.

For a Jamaican owned, business.

And I was the CFO for that business.

It was, a stressful experience.

And, I remember I was driving by Michael's art store, one Saturday afternoon, and, you know, I said to my wife, Tamika, you know what?

I want to stop at Michael's, and I need to get some pencils because I want to start sketching again when I think about it.

I can't really tell you why it happened the way it happened.

You know, I often tell people it's like, you know, when Spiderman does that bit by that, that radioactive bug and then, you know, suddenly he has superpowers kind of it like that, right?

I was sporting my sketches on Facebook and Instagram for a while, and the response was, you know, well, that was overwhelming in terms of the reactions, the pieces, that passion that was reignited in 2016, you know, caused me to go through a process of significant, exploration.

Right.

So I started with sketching with pencils and charcoal.

You know, painting with acrylics, inks, oil paints.

And I eventually started working with mixed media.

I was doing a lot of research.

This is my mechanical brain now.

As soon as I started painting, I wanted to have a style.

I was like, why?

You know, I need my style to.

I need something to show that this is me is very humbling, right?

It teaches you about patience, right?

You have to be, you know, vulnerable.

And then you have to figure out how you get your, authentic voice to come out in European things.

So it took me a while to figure that out.

So I started exploring with mixed media.

And after that process, I decided to merge that three dimensional element with traditional painting.

You know styles, right?

You know, some more impressionist, then you have the mixed media coming in.

So I decided to go the route of this cruise.

You know, so doing my exploration with nails, you know, after, you know, the disaster of hitting my fingers a few times, I said to myself, you know what is easier to use than than actual nails?

So this is the tool of the trade.

So so I have my drill.

So I paint with a drill at my feet.

And I also paint with brushes here, you know, with my my oil paints as well.

So given this particular piece that I'm working on.

So I will after going through the process of doing the sketch then and I've worked out how I want this piece to look.

Unscrew is then I will look at this sketch and with intuition determine the depth of each screw, the positioning of each front.

So I. I'm not connected to a painting emotionally.

It's hard for me to complete the painting.

Right?

So I can't just paint random objects without any sort of emotional value to it.

Right.

And what I've found, creating pieces that have that kind of emotion and of value mixed with the three dimension, you know, unlocks, a different experience for my for my viewers.

Right.

So I want, I want people to experience what I call the other side of the story and not focus on the single story.

When I came up with this idea for for opening a space, right.

One of the the issues I had in my creative journey was finding spaces that we're open to showing my work.

So when I open this space, I decided that, you know what I need to figure out, okay.

I also help those other artists to to get exposure.

So we decided to set up this space in the, you know, the Flagler Village.

You know, the there's a lot of history as it relates to African-Americans, ancestral.

I mean, it was one of the the largest settlement for African-Americans in Fort Lauderdale.

We decided that, you know what?

This upcoming area would be a great, area to to have a gallery that's dedicated to the African experience.

Right.

You know, because our culture is it's it's there's a thread that ties us all together with our experiences that are just so different.

So this guy is walking, having done his work.

I mean, does he feel fulfilled?

Has he lived live the life that he's comfortable with?

And, you know, I decided to name this 1 or 2 lives.

So it was it was kind of me asking myself that question as well, you know, have I done what I wanted to do?

So one of the responses to that question was actually for me to pursue my creative journey.

And finally, the story behind the Sedona Bridge, a historic pedestrian suspension bridge in Cleveland, Ohio.

The bridge was completed in 1930 to connect two neighborhoods, then closed following a period of racial unrest during the 1960s.

But since being placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022, efforts are underway to give this important physical and cultural landmark a second life.

Hidden in plain sight and rising above an overgrown valley is a connection to Cleveland's past.

A bridge that once connected two neighborhoods on the one side of the bridge, which is now branded as Slavic Village, was neighborhood known as Yats Cova, and that was the neighborhood that was centered around Saint Hyacinth Church.

It was largely Polish.

It was an industrial neighborhood.

Like most Cleveland neighborhoods.

These were walking neighborhoods.

People didn't have cars, and it sort of was a little community.

There.

Going across the ravine, which is Kingsbury Run.

You had the kinsman neighborhood, which at one point was Jewish and Hungarian and also ethnic.

And the thing that that held them together was, was this bridge.

The original wooden trestle bridge, opened in 1909, replaced 20 years later by a steel suspension bridge.

We noticed Sideway Bridge now is the only suspension bridge in Cleveland, and it's a bridge with a notorious past spanning Kingsbury Run, where victims of the Cleveland Torso murders were discovered in the 1930s.

In the 1960s, the bridge became a symbol of racial tension.

What's happening is the center of Cleveland, which is where many of the African-Americans are living at the time because it's just after segregated.

It's a great migration coming during and after the war, the population increased.

Some of it moved eastward into the Hudson Glenville neighborhoods and others followed.

Went along woodland in Upper Non Kinsman so that neighborhoods shifted to African-American.

During the 1950s and 60s, blighted homes in Cleveland were torn down while new public housing was going up.

Notably, Garden Valley.

I grew up on 78th Street near kinsman.

It's a very nice little street.

There were frame houses, so my parents said their six children lived in the little house on 78th Street was a good life.

And I remember when we moved to 78th Street, there were no Garden Valley housing projects on 78th Street.

We watched them demolish houses, and the neighborhood flipped very quickly.

In the early 1960s as those families moved out and those houses were torn down, and then the brick apartment buildings and townhouses were built, and they were very nice, too.

In the early years.

And so you have an African-American population across from the white ethnic population, and the children go to the public school.

It's called Todd Public School.

It's on the yes Clover side.

And they come over the bridge.

So we have black children coming through.

And mostly a white community has had time.

And if people in the neighborhood weren't using the bridge, they were aware of it.

Doctor Regina Williams and her siblings didn't cross side away to get to school.

They attended schools near the kinsman neighborhood.

The bridge was something that I always admired from a distance, you know, we could always look toward the other end.

We were warned very early on in life that you don't go there.

This is early 1960s, and I had no business going over there.

I was a little kid, but we all had bicycles and we would ride through the neighborhood, 78th Street to 71st.

It's not so far as a little kid.

Go on your bike.

You don't dare think about going across that bridge.

And, and that problem was solved for us, right?

In 1966 with the Huff riots.

And somebody on the Slavic Georgia church call the side of the bridge decides that they want to close the bridge down.

So they begin to pull up some of the boards which form the basis of the bridge, and they try to set fire to it.

And so the bridge is impassable.

And basically that's basically putting border between the white community and black communities.

And that's what we're looking at here.

And it's never, never replaced.

So the bridge has been closed since 1966 since then.

So it's maybe it is not.

Maybe it is a symbol of racial divide in Cleveland.

More than 50 years have passed since the Sideway Bridge has been in operation.

Parts of it claim by nature, yet most of the structure still intact.

While a question still lingers.

Could it once again be used as a connector between Kinsman and Slavic village?

There's not a ton of discussion around it.

It's more one of those things you mentioned and people are like, wait, where's that?

You know, we have a suspension bridge in Cleveland.

But it's gained more recognition after being placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 for its significance in the civil rights movement.

Kind of nice that people are, and recognizing that we have it, and there's a value to it, and there's a lot of history there.

In early 2023, Cleveland City Council also granted the bridge landmark status.

The bridge sits in the Ward five district where Councilman Richard Starr grew up.

I learned about Sideway Bridge when I was a kid.

When I think of the Sideway Bridge, I think of a bridge that was bridging the gap to a different neighborhood.

That's.

The bridge has been closed for some time now, and throughout that time period, some development has, has spearheaded and occurred.

What I mean by that is we now have opportunity corridor.

And one of my plans and goals for Opportunity Corridor is to be able to do exactly what the name of that project is, bring opportunity to residents in Ward five to take advantage of those.

Meaning if we we we refurbish this bridge, get it up and run, it can really, really, really help our neighborhood.

That would take the work of several different organizations, including the City Planning Commission, community development corporations on either side of the bridge, and structural engineers to determine the scope of the work, with some structural analysis and that kind of thing.

You know, I think it it could be put back into use.

There's certainly a need for connecting neighborhoods.

The times have changed so much since it was built with, you know, the access to automobiles and that sort of thing that, you know, foot bridges aren't really something that we think of or use too often anymore.

But they can be great ways to, you know, get, get around the neighborhood or from one area to another without, you know, having to drive around the block, a little pedestrian bridge where kids can walk over and hang out with their friends, come back, you know, no problems.

That would be great.

And if a bridge can do that, bring two communities together east side of the Cuyahoga River.

Why not?

I'd walk across it this time and walk across the early 60s and walk across it.

And that is that.

For this edition of Art rocks, each episode showcases the work of a Louisiana artist, and you can find every one of them archived online at lpb.org/art rocks.

And if you love stories like these, consider subscribing to Country Roads magazine.

It's a rich resource for learning what's shaping Louisiana's cultural life all across the state.

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

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB.

Offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more, West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Can.

Care for.