Tom - The summer's been so hot, it feels like you could cook on the sidewalk and actually you can.

We'll introduce you to a local group doing just that.

Joe - Solar cooking to me really just seems like the most natural thing in a place where we have just an abundance of sun.

Tom - A gallery in Tucson provides a space for mid-career artists to thrive.

Emily - Artist and art represents being human.

It really is the thing that allows connection, expression, hope.

Tom - A nationwide research program partners with Tucson's Chinese Cultural Center.

Li - See how beautiful we humans come from different backgrounds, not only have different food, different thoughts, different cultural heritage, but the purpose is all the same.

Tom - And a mesmerizing classical guitar performance.

Ana Maria - I've always had a strong connection with the sound of the classical guitar, the intimacy it evokes.

[Music] Tom - Hello and welcome to an all-new season of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

This is the 10th year of our magazine-style iteration of the show, but the program's been on the air for over 40 years now.

That's a legacy we are very proud of and we're thrilled with the stories we've been working on all summer long for you.

Today we're coming to you from the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center dedicated to quote "deepening the appreciation and understanding of Chinese culture" and we'll have more on this important local gathering spot a little bit later in the show.

But for now, here's a story about Tucsonans taking advantage of our most abundant natural resource, the sun.

(Narrator) You have fresh and wholesome ingredients, a good selection of spices and delicious recipes.

But what about the energy that will power the cooking as part of your preparations?

For some residents in Arizona, it's as easy as getting out of the kitchen and turning to the sun.

Literally.

This star is an essential cooking tool that is clean, abundant and free.

(Sonya) I don't think of it as a hobby.

I just, it's just the way I cook.

(Narrator) Sonya Norman started her sun powered oven exploration nearly 20 years ago when she heard about an annual solar potluck event in Tucson.

She wasn't able to make it to those gatherings, but the subject did spark an interest that perseveres.

(Sonya) I remember one year my father was asking me, what could he get the kids for Christmas?

And I didn't have any good ideas.

I said, but I know what you can get me for Christmas.

And he bought me the solar oven and I've been using it since.

Any time before the clouds come are good times to be using a solar oven.

It's hot outside.

You'd have clear blue skies.

Might as well take advantage of all that sunlight.

(Narrator) Joe Black also likes to use a solar oven when possible.

He found his model on Craigslist.

(Joe) I actually kind of grew up around solar cooking because I grew up next door to Sonya, and for as long as I remember, she always had a solar oven.

And so it was always something that interested me.

And when I moved out and got my own place during college, I actually went out and bought myself the solar oven before I bought myself a microwave.

(Sonya) Oh, yeah.

Get some of that oil on them.

Go ahead and open that Joe.

And then, you know, if you get it.

Oh, my God, that smells great.

(Joe) Oh, wow.

(Sonya) Okay.

(Narrator) Both cooks say the process is simple, although you do have to pay attention to the sun's direction.

Be on standby to move the ovens when necessary.

(Sonya) Is there anything you think we should do with the rice, Joe?

Do we need to angle it better or steeper?

(Narrator) It is very convenient than doing everything in the kitchen, but worth the effort they say.

(Joe) Solar cooking to me really just seems like the most natural thing in a place where we have just an abundance of sun.

It's really advantageous because during the hot summer months you don't have to actually turn on your stove or your oven that would heat up your house more.

(Narrator) That's one of the messages that's being promoted by participants at the annual solar potluck.

It's held at Catalina State Park, north of Tucson.

(Pat) We're going to be serving up some hot Italian sausage, mild Italian sausage with a delicious blend.

My name is Pat Murray.

This is the solar potluck which has been going on for about 40 years.

Actually, the 38th one because of COVID.

But I'm the chair of Citizens for Solar, Solar Guild.

Two organizations really blended into one to do both solar cooking and to do PV Solar, which is producing electricity from the solar panels.

We are an educational group and we do everybody from 5 to 98.

Solar ovens are angled stainless steel that takes the rays of the sun directly inside the insulated boxes and then a plexiglass type glass goes over the top to hold the heat in.

So these ovens right now are probably running about 375 because we've been opening them and serving hot Italian sausage and sauce.

But it's simmering right now.

So the same thing as my mom's pot of spaghetti used to do on kitchen, kitchen stove where you can let it go.

She always let it go three days and we just kept adding sausage and mushrooms and meatballs.

You try it.

(Attendant) It's delicious!

(Pat) Good, good, I'm glad you thought so.

(Attendant) I love it.

(Pat) There are ovens that are expensive, and there are ovens that do the same thing but are not expensive.

The ones that we're using here are sometimes in the price range of $350 to $400.

(Cecilia) I have been interested in solar energy for many years.

In fact, I have solar panels on my house already and I have been very attracted to the entire environmental field, including water reclamation, use of greywater.

It's kind of a natural for me to be drawn into the whole field of solar energy.

I think solar energy is really important, particularly for Tucson, for the state of Arizona, and it's important for each one of our backyards.

We should have been really ahead of every other state already.

Arizona should be leading the way.

(Narrator) The efforts have been simmering for decades, and proponents hope to inspire a new generation of solar cooks.

One tasty dish at a time.

(Joe) I guess I'm just kind of an environmentalist all around.

That kind of pervades everything I do.

It's my work and it really is fairly easy and it's not something you need to do every day.

Those sort of little collective actions really will add up if we all start to do those.

(Narrator) Back at Sonya Norman's house, she and Joe Black are serving a feast with all the fixings.

They've invited a group of guests.

(Sonya) I ended up with a meal that seems to be pleasing everyone.

One of the dishes is empty and I like to feed people, so it's really fun.

(Michael) This is my first solar cooked meal, and so I was really impressed with this.

And so that's what I really enjoyed about that meal, it had taste to it.

I'm from the Hopi reservation and, you know, and we kind of have our own system of cooking, but I can see that being incorporated into that because right now, the way the cost of propane fuel is and even electricity now is getting really more and more expensive.

I am ready to start dinner.

I'm going to grab my spoon and [Spanish].

Tom - Tucson is often lauded as a great art city, but making a living and managing a gallery can be extremely challenging.

Ina Rohr and Emily Hallowell are the founders of the Untitled Gallery, and they invited us to their opening exhibition called Passages, where we discuss the joys and frustrations of running the business.

They believe that art connects us all.

[soft music] (Inna) I love finding beauty in these mundane situations because that's kind of where our life is most of the time.

It's just that daily grind.

How do you make that existence beautiful?

And how do you see beauty in perhaps those telephone poles or wires or perhaps some unattractive scene?

So that's where I lived for a while with my creativity.

My name is Inna Rohr.

I've been living in Tucson since 2004.

I moved here from Estonia, a small country in Northern Europe.

I actually founded the Untitled Gallery in 2019.

It was quite a serendipitous chance, perfect timing right before the pandemic.

I have a studio at Untitled and also, you know, like created this collective gallery space.

Emily has joined us two years ago, and so now we co-own Untitled together.

(Emily) Artist and art represents being human.

It really is the thing that allows connection, expression, hope.

My name is Emily Hallowell.

I am a photographer.

Together, we curate the shows and hang the shows.

I am able to show my photography here, and I do all the social media and a lot of the promotion.

But we are focusing on artwork made by Tucson artists who are mid-career, mastered the medium that they're working in and have a real clear vision and voice in their work.

A lot of the artwork that we show here is by artists who are nationally and even internationally recognised.

(Rosanna) I am Rosanna Salonia, and I do mixed media photography, sometimes installation, photo-based, image-based.

It's very important to me the interaction part.

I want them to sort through the photos as if it was found artefact in an antique shop with mysterious photographs of people and events in faraway unknown places and then find their own meaning or dream or memory.

Emily Hallowell, who co-directs the gallery, she invited me, and here I am, and I'm very thankful to show my work in a gallery space with real walls and a good roof, good lighting, you know, the professional setting that any serious hardworking artist needs and dreams about.

And at this time, in this occasion, at no cost to me, other than a very reasonable and small commission for sold works, so I'm very, very thankful to be here.

(Inna) Tucson does have a very vibrant and diverse art scene.

We want to keep the scene alive.

We want to keep sustaining this place so we can keep feeding Tucson with art and also keep introducing people to the artists and kind of like get to know their artist community more intimately, and that's exactly what they can do in our gallery, like during our first Saturday art walks, you can meet all of these artists that exhibit in this place.

You can talk to them, you can connect with them, and of course you can support them.

(Will) My name is Will Whitehouse and my relationship with Untitled Gallery, it's changed over the years.

I used to be one of the original members when there were seven of us.

I've come back as part of the Invitational group.

I've got some art on the walls here and it's just great to be part of the gallery because it's such a great space and they show such wonderful art in here.

I used to have no interest in abstract painting and I used to think that abstract art was for people that didn't know how to draw and was a cop-out kind of thing.

I like to think that I've arrived at abstraction through an honest journey or whatever you'd like to call it.

My figures used to be more representational and then I started to become a bit more expressive with that and then through that started to explore just the beauty of paint and what paint can do and focus on what is it that this color is doing when the red is vibrating against the green or the formal relationship is happening on the canvas.

(Emily) The space that we're in is in the Steinfeld Warehouse.

This is one of the buildings that the Warehouse Arts Management Organization purchased about 20 years ago to save from demolition.

Their mission was to save the buildings and then provide spaces for artists.

We're really grateful for WAMO, for allowing that and these spaces for artists to really thrive.

And so we're extending that mission by making sure that we have really exceptional shows, really quality work.

I think community is such a big part of what we're doing here and what we get out of it and what we're providing.

Tom - The All of Us program is a national endeavor by the National Institutes of Health to collect the genetic information of one million people to help aid in the acceleration of precision medicine and prevention.

The Tucson Chinese Cultural Center is a part of the Asian Recruitment Corps here in Tucson and they've been holding monthly meetings about the program and a series of guest lectures about a wide range of health topics.

(Narrator) This is the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center.

the center honors the history of Chinese immigrants among the earliest settlers in Tucson who came here over 130 years ago during the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad line.

The center caters to the needs of Chinese and non-Chinese residents of Tucson.

By providing a wide range of cultural, educational and health programs.

Chinese language and history, the arts of calligraphy, painting, Chinese dance, tai chi and mahjong.

They even have a new pickleball court.

Health and longevity have always been core tenets of Chinese culture and is integral to the center's mission.

They continuously seek out partnerships to provide people the tools they need to maintain wellness in all aspects of life.

One such partnership is with the National Institute of Health.

(Susan) Tucson Chinese Cultural Center was awarded the All of Us Research Program from the National Institute of Health in the Asian Recruitment and Corp Coalition, August of 2022.

The mission of our grant is to promote, educate, eating and living healthy Asian style and trying to help the All of Us Research Program to recruit people nationwide to participate in volunteering their medical health and medical records for research.

(Narrator) Historically, the field of medicine has advanced with little understanding of individual differences, and people of color have often been left out of the conversation.

The mission of the All of Us Research Program is to address these inherent disparities within the field of medical research by collecting genetic and health data from 1 million people nationwide.

In creating an extensive national dataset for more diverse populations, researchers hope to collect the genetic information necessary to accelerate medical breakthroughs and enable the advancement of individualized precision health care and prevention.

(Barry) These are part of the lunch we're doing today of of our plant based diet.

(Narrator) Part of the grant from the Asian Recruitment Corps and National Institutes of Health, is this sponsorship of a monthly series on eating and living healthy Asian style, with guest speakers on a variety of health topics.

(Barry) People as they are getting older, they have a lot of health problems, a lot of health issues.

Diabetes is a concern and heart disease and there's a lot of things that we can change by changing little things in our diet.

So a lot of it is getting out of the routine of what we normally do with our foods.

How can we put something together in a simple way but still taste good?

(Dr. Li) The tips and tricks are arranged like a toolbox.

Basically, it's like a cue to all of us.

(Narrator) One speaker was Dr. Li Schmidt, who has devised a system for people to easily remember healthy habits.

By harnessing the knowledge attained over her career, Dr. Schmidt has created a vocabulary that allocates various prompts to numbers and letters of the alphabet that can be personalized for anyone's health needs.

(Dr. Li) I want to share with people called Maximize Health via the Magic of Numbers and the Letters.

I thought about self-advocacy.

I'm lucky I grew up in China until I was 22.

Constantly talked about, your parents, your grandparents would say eat 70 to 80% full.

Mandarin pronunciation [speaking in Mandarin] means full.

I start from zero.

Most of us don't want to be in pain.

So that's at zero.

Then good things to do a lot of times are difficult to do.

Right?

You want to initiate.

How about just one?

I work with my patients with a tobacco addiction or chocolate addiction.

They know that's not good for them.

One thing many of them didn't know.

Usually cravings, they don't last more than 5 minutes.

But of course, you can feel that five minutes like five years.

So whatever numbers of repetition bring out positive feelings and motivation out of you, do it.

I'm the first subject to practice things.

If it doesn't work out for me, that means things needs to be tuned.

And then I work with others.

I was in the collective wisdom.

See how beautiful we human come from different backgrounds, not only have different food, different thoughts, different cultural heritage, but the purpose are all the same.

Your hands know how much should press as hard as you can without producing pain.

And then count one Mississippi, two Mississippi to your age.

You say, oh my gosh, that's too much.

Okay.

[laughter] Halfway is fine.

Nature, nurture, culture, shape us.

Body, brain, mind kind of directs us.

(Curtis) As a gay kid growing up in Detroit, I love Detroit, but the city was falling apart.

(Narrator) Mental health is also an important focus of the series.

In partnership with the Asian Studies Department at the University of Arizona, the center invited Curtis Chin, a prominent filmmaker and author who came to speak about his new book.

(Curtis) So I wrote this book.

It's called Everything I Learned I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant and it's about growing up Asian in Detroit, a very black and white city, but also coming out to my working class immigrant family.

And it's all set in the eighties, which was a very, very difficult time in the city.

Not only did we have crack cocaine, we had AIDS.

I knew five people that were murdered by the time I was 18.

But it's a humor book because despite all the craziness going on me and around me, I always had this family and this Chinese restaurant which made me feel safe.

All the things that we had to fight for back then, whether it was fighting AIDS or even things like marriage equality, those are things that really, really defined our generation.

And I think about young people these days who have no consciousness of that.

And it's good, right, because they don't have that burden.

But as we're seeing a backlash against the LGBT community now, maybe they do need to know that stuff and they can be proud of this idea that our community has faced tougher battles in the past and we've won.

We defeated them, and that we will defeat these forces again.

I think about that a lot, of being that legacy from that generation that had so many battles.

But when he was opening his grocery store, he wanted to bring over the rest of his family to America.

But because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, he couldn't.

Growing up in Detroit, like in Tucson, we're one of those flyover states, and it's a different type of Asian-American experience.

Because we were smaller communities, we didn't have the access to larger institutions, larger networks.

And so the community centers like this were really, really important for us because it was really was the one place where we could feel whole, feel nourish, where we felt that our identities were validated.

And so I know that the experience of growing up in a place like Detroit and a place like Tucson is probably much more similar than you might think on its surface.

Well, what is what what does it mean to be Asian-American?

Where do we fit in and how do we use the privileges that we do have to make sure that equality is shared with everybody?

(Susan) We have so much happening, so much great partnerships with people.

It's just nonstop activities.

And we welcome everybody here at the Chinese center.

Tom - Anna Maria Iordake is a classical guitarist from Romania who's pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music.

Well, she took a break from her busy world concert touring schedule to sit down in front of our cameras for an exclusive performance, and told us how the instrument has transformed her life.

(Ana Maria Iordache) I've always enjoyed and I've always had a strong connection with the sound of the classical guitar.

The intimacy it evokes.

Guitar, and in particular classical guitar creates this beautiful atmosphere between the performer and the audience.

You feel way closer to your audience and you feel more exposed.

In my case, guitar feels like second nature.

It feels like an extension to my body.

It's about finding that perfect balance between what you want to say and when to let go and let the guitar talk.

And know when to, you have to push her and be there and when when to let it go and just let the instrument do the magic.

My goal as a performer is and has always been to manage to capture for a couple of seconds, the people in the audience and make them listen to the music and breathe with the music as I am breathing.

This instrument always pushes me.

It always makes me question things about life and what's your purpose and what's the music that you're playing?

How does that influence what you want to say?

The beautiful thing about it is that you don't have to have all the answers and it's the beauty in what you're doing is through the process.

I've always been a person that loves control.

That's a part of my personality.

So through playing music, it's beautiful because the instrument and the whole experience teaches me of how to let go and how to let life happen and how to let beauty happen and just enjoy.

Because at the end, this is all what it's about.

Tom - Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another all new program.