Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by Entergy.

Louisiana is strengthening our power grid throughout the state.

We're reinforcing infrastructure to prepare for stronger storms, reduce outages, and respond quicker when you do need us.

Because together we power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is a historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana.

And the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and viewers like you.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone.

I'm Karen Lichtblau, and I'm Dorothea Wilson.

On this week's edition of Summer SWI, we're focused on Louisiana as unique artists, musicians, and tradition bearers.

So we are going to start with folk artist Henry Watson.

He travels the backroads of Louisiana in an effort to keep the state's history alive.

Watson salvages wood from old abandoned buildings and uses it as the canvas to chronicle our history.

We are taking you to Saint Francisville to watch Watson create his hand-carved masterpieces.

If these old cypress boards could speak, what would they say?

Folk artist Henry Watson gives them a voice sculpting their stories with a mallet and chisel.

I'm trying to save that bygone era of not just washing away and not have any history of it.

I am putting into Hollywood where you can still look at it everyday.

Henry searches the back roads of Louisiana for old buildings, on the verge of being lost to history, and salvages the wood to turn into canvases for his 3D artwork.

So I start with a blank board like this, and I start just imagining what was there.

And I love you.

See that?

I love the trees because the trees was a very important part of life.

So most of all of the historical homes and building is all built on these huge oak trees, all these huge popular trees.

And these trees will have moss hanging down and drip there from them.

And all of that captivated me.

You know, those days of all.

And when I get this wood from these old buildings, the first thing I start thinking about is what would fit the board and how I could tell that story.

The self-taught artist began carving cypress wood in high school in his hometown of Livonia.

Today, his works are on display around the world, chronicling Louisiana's landscapes, building and people, making him a sort of cultural ambassador.

His painting of the Pope sits in the Vatican.

This piece is his last remaining work, sold at the 1984 World's Fair.

Henry also connects with thousands of travelers to Louisiana, arriving on riverboat cruises that stop at his new road studio.

I've been chiseling and beaten with this for over 40 years, so you got to know with 40 years of hitting and chiseling, this side at some point is going to be this side.

And when that happen, this man is going to be retired.

So it's almost like I'm in the mix.

It takes to get to the so the mallet is going to retire, but are you going to retire?

Henry draws inspiration from Louisiana landscapes, history and heritage.

As we walk the grounds of Butler Greenwood Plantation Bed and Breakfast, a place he retreats to from time to time to work in solitude.

He talks about his muses.

I'm thinking about how things would have been 100 years ago.

I get inspired by just looking at the trees and the home itself, and even the plants and things that's around it.

I mean, I'll tell the story.

My job as a woodcarver is to capture those memories and those stories.

Look at this.

This is Louisiana at his finest.

Wow.

There's a lot of it on the property.

All over this place is just draped with it.

Here, on the grounds of this early 19th century plantation.

Under the canopy of ancient moss draped oaks.

Henry hears the landscape whispering.

More stories to tell.

Etched in the wood of Louisiana's official state tree.

Somewhere tucked away is a little cabin, an old barn.

Wood that would.

Actually continue to tell a story of south Louisiana.

Everybody's come in where they grew up, where they come from.

But when I put it in this hundred year old wood, it's going to live on forever.

From exploring the great outdoors at one of Louisiana state parks to beating the heat and one of the state's great museums or art exhibits, let's check out what's happening across Louisiana this week.

We're here at the Capital Park Museum in downtown Baton Rouge.

Just one of the neat places highlighting Louisiana's history and culture.

Joining me now is James Fox Smith.

Now you're the man to know James.

He's the big shoes to fill, Dorothy.

Oh, well, that's okay.

Your shoes can fill them.

Okay.

Yeah, I'll do my best.

Let's talk about the rich culture and keeping it alive in some of the indigenous culture.

Early Native American history.

So let's start with the museum in Marksville.

That's right.

Okay, so the Tunica Biloxi Museum in Marksville is the place to see the Tunica treasure that is a collection of hundreds of Native American and European grave goods that would unearthed from graves near Angola.

In West Feliciana Parish that were there as a result of a battle that was fought in, like the 1730s between two Native American tribes.

Okay.

Now, this collection was originally discovered by an Angola prison guard with a metal detector out there.

Whoa.

Like, way back in the.

In the 30s, I believe.

And he.

After he and I unearthed all of these things, he tried to keep hold of them.

He said that they were his, and.

But that sparked a big ownership crisis.

That collection went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard.

It spent time at the Cabildo before finally being repatriated to the Tunica Biloxi tribe.

And the museum was built to that in Marksville.

Wow.

Fascinating insight into the history of the Tunica Biloxi tribe, and the ways in which that those settlements were in early Louisiana life.

Ooh, now, that sounds interesting.

Now, you know what else sounds interesting?

Tell me about the chairman, John Cherington.

Certainly.

Okay, so the cheetah matching museum is run by the immature tribe who have their their home grounds are in Chance and Louisiana, and they have a museum that the documents, the customs, the lifestyles, and particularly the material culture of this tribe, which at one point stretched across the whole of South Louisiana, literally from New Orleans to the Texas border, there were a huge and very powerful cultural group.

One of the things that they were most renowned for was the making of these beautiful river cane baskets that were woven and from different painted canes.

They made them in hundreds of different styles.

And those, those styles have been passed from generation to generation, all the way down the line for hundreds of years.

And some of the finest examples of those baskets are available to see at the museum in Charleston.

Oh, wow.

So let's move on to a place that I am just a little bit familiar with.

And that is Poverty Point.

That's right.

Poverty point in Louisiana is possibly the best known, but also not very visited, Native American site in the state.

It's also virtually the oldest.

The poverty Point mounds were built literally 4000 years ago.

Very little is known about them.

Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of rock and material from hundreds of miles away from the site.

Part of the a part of the mounds themselves.

And literally, archeologists have very, very little understanding of what these were built for.

The were they residential?

Were they ceremonial?

Were there and trading center there?

Probably a little bit of all three.

And that the Poverty Point Museum, the exhibits and the material and the artifacts that have been unearthed over a century, really, of archeological discovery are on display.

That sounds magnificent.

That's a look at what's happening this week.

James will be with us each week talking about the rich culture and traditions that you can still engage in to beat the heat this summer.

Now, if you want an exclusive look of what he has to talk about in all of the places you can visit, you can visit his website at Country Roads mag.com.

Each year, Louisiana celebrates Folklife Month in October, with officials recognizing the culture bearers who keep Louisiana traditions from fading away.

That's right.

And that includes musicians like Waylon Thibodeaux, known as Louisiana's rock fiddler.

I sat down with Waylon last year to talk about how he is passing on his gift to the next generation.

One, two, three four.

Waveland Thibodaux is known as Louisiana's rock and fiddler for his toe tapping Cajun tunes.

He performs internationally, sharing Louisiana's Cajun culture and heritage with music and storytelling.

It's our roots music.

It's our culture.

And, you know, you play it a little bit differently.

You got a whole lot of bowling going on and things like that.

And, and, of course, when you play along with the Cajun accordion, that makes it that much sweeter.

That makes the Cajun sound for sure.

Waylon taught himself to play the fiddle as a teenager growing up in Houma, and today teaches the next generation of fiddlers.

Can I see your instrument?

Have you been practicing?

You remember how to play the rhythm Queen GNC.

One.

Two.

Three four.

Do we need to keep musicians going down here?

Because unfortunately, the younger kids, they're not learning the instruments too much down the bayous here and stuff, you know, the the accordion.

You know, there's no young kids wanting to play all those instruments.

So that's why we need to put it in their face and say, hey, would you like to try something really cool and something really different?

And so that's why I'm, I'm really excited about doing the fiddle lesson and stuff is trying to get the young kids involved and, and, make sure that we can hold on to our musical culture for sure.

Whaling created Cajun themed music lessons, teaching students how to play the fiddle by ear.

Songs include Mary Had a Little Crawfish and Old Mack.

Boudreaux had a farm buggy day, but on early Learning on cymbals.

First time I came in here looked at that melody.

I'm like, what is this?

I'm never going to be able to play this.

I'll show what a rhythm is and how to start in a single song, depending on how long it is.

And what would you say to other kids who might be interested in trying out the fiddle?

Do it.

It's fun and practice a lot because practice makes perfect.

It's fun and I really like this.

How does it make you feel happy?

The 2024 Louisiana Folklife Ambassador has earned the distinction as a tradition bearer of Cajun fiddling.

It's rooted in a danceable style originating in Nova Scotia in the 1700s.

As Whalen says to his young students.

If you can sing it, you can play it.

And his hope is the next Generation plays on.

I was really honored, really shocked.

You know, I, I, that's a that's a very high achievement for sure.

And, I'm very proud that they, chose me to do that.

I love performing, and I love bringing our story to people, and and, it's just a great blessing from God that, I'm able to do this.

And I've been doing this my whole life.

How about that?

I think it's so clever how Waylon Cajun Eyes is, you know, these traditional songs like Mary Had a Little Lamb and all.

MacDonald had a farm, and it really resonates with children.

I love that.

What a way to keep Louisiana tradition alive.

Now, in today's world of mass production.

Master craftsman are rare.

Karen and New Orleans master blacksmith Darryl Reaves creates functional works of art seen in the balconies and fences of the French Quarter, and one of his creations is also on display at Disney World as part of Tiana's Bayou Adventure.

Check it out.

When I take these things apart, somebody is talking to these people and going from here.

200 years of better.

In his New Orleans seventh Ward workshop, Darrell Reeves hammers hot iron, forging a shutter guard.

It's a piece you can't buy in your local hardware store.

In this world of mass produced everything, objects aren't made like they used to be.

Except here Darrell is a master blacksmith.

His skills are self-taught.

That education came out of books.

Chisels in school.

Take him to the library.

I had a particular type of latch or hook to make.

I dig up old blacksmith book in a library.

They're doing their work.

I started doing them.

I started educating myself.

The proper way of doing it.

Nobody was doing it right.

I started making authentic hardware, and the market just took off.

Darrell's hand forged metalwork caught the attention of preservationists.

That led to commissioned work on high profile projects, including the presbytery gates and the iron fence around the Cabildo, both in the New Orleans French Quarter.

He put the fest together.

We all beat the spindles out like this.

We're going to put this box underneath it.

And we're going to put a shape on top of this.

And a restoration of the Chalmette Cemetery main gate.

Originally fabricated in 1872.

Each piece he restores is a portal to the past based on centuries old blacksmithing techniques.

I've seen every form of restoration because my being in New Orleans, you have African blacksmiths they brought from West Africa, you have the French, Spanish and German.

No matter where you come from, everything looks the same.

When you look at when you tear it apart.

It's a different story.

Everybody has a different method of putting together or depending on where you come from in a world.

On a sweltering summer day, Darrel smelt metal at 2100 degrees.

Taming the molten iron into intricate shapes and functional pieces.

Blacksmithing is a disappearing art form, trade and craft.

Darryl aims to preserve it by teaching the next generation of artisans, including Karina Rocha, his apprentice.

Karina showed up unannounced at Daryl's workshop after watching a PBS documentary of his blacksmithing skills that piqued your interest and passion for iron working.

I always secretly wanted to be an iron worker.

I lived in New York City for a long time, and I did urban farming.

So just like expanding my intimacy with the built environment, you know?

What does that mean?

To preserve, ancestral ways of being and becoming and, so.

Long story short, 2020 happens.

I'm in Brooklyn, New York.

I make a crazy decision to move to New Orleans a month before Covid.

Together, the duo forged one of the workshop's most visible projects to date a weathervane with a functioning lightning rod atop Walt Disney Worlds new attraction, Tiana's Bayou Adventure.

They wanted me to design this thing myself.

They wanted my style.

That's a very huge, They adorned the weathervane with Adinkra symbols, a visual language that originated in West Africa.

The top piece is a Far Eastern dance.

It's basically strength.

You don't give up.

The symbol underneath that is Mother Earth.

Take your mother Earth, mother.

It'll take care of you.

The bottom one is one of my favorite.

They call it Sankofa.

This symbol means family, ancestry, respect and learn from your family that came before you.

The meanings are just lovely and just the level of intention that Disney had with curating this space is really like seeking out folks from New Orleans to really bring the culture to that built environment was really nice thing to see.

And, to be a part of.

Yes, is was awesome.

On the day we visited, Daryl was working with his team to restore fence post.

Each pointed tip is precisely hand forged and cast as it originally was crafted centuries ago, giving new life and new stories to old things.

Half of these pieces we take apart, we'll never know the names of the folks that put them together.

But for what we are putting into the world 100, and 50, 200 years from now, when they take that apart and they see that Da, they're going to know exactly whose hands crafted them.

So to be a part of adding on to this storytelling, to this, to this endless loop of, this intergenerational knowledge is just it's really a blessing.

Daryl's passion and purpose as a blacksmith earned him the distinction as a 2024 Louisiana tradition bearer.

He's one of six statewide honored by the Louisiana Folklife Commission and the Louisiana Folklife Society.

At 74 years old.

This third generation blacksmith is crafting a legacy that lives on in buildings and beautiful things that tell Louisiana's multicultural story.

Everybody wants to remember, you know, if I could be remembered for my trade.

I like that idea.

I'd say that was a big honor.

What I found so fascinating about Daryl's skills and talents.

He is self-taught.

He went to the library, read books about the history of blacksmithing, and taught himself the skills and his passing it on to the next generation.

Just a beautiful tradition, bearer.

Well, that takes next level creativity to be able to teach yourself to do something like that.

A lot of commitment.

Well, you cannot talk about Louisiana art without mentioning the iconic blue Dog artist George Rodrigue, and that's for sure.

And many of Rodriguez works are on display right now at the Cabildo in New Orleans.

Opening in parallel with a documentary about his life and art, I tour the exhibit alongside one of Broderick's sons, who shared memories of his father.

And he talked about his passion for Louisiana.

Here we are in the Cabildo, and I'm excited to show you dad's exhibit.

Rodrigue.

Before the Blue Dog.

So it's a great chance to learn more about dad's history as an artist.

And this show really focuses on his early Cajun works.

Starting, of course, with the Louisiana oak tree.

Dad grew up in New Iberia, but went to art school in Los Angeles, and when he came back from school in the late 1960s, he viewed the oak tree as the symbol of South Louisiana.

And he was in LA when Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans hit.

And so he thought, in those pop art principles of this oak tree as his Campbell's soup can.

The Cabildo Museum in New Orleans chronicles George Rodriguez evolution as a world renowned painter, exploring his signature style of depicting Louisiana landscapes and Cajun culture.

For dad, when he walked and saw the swamps and the bayous, the sky was always underneath the oak tree, with the oak tree cut off at the top.

And there was that glow behind the horizon line that he really wanted to capture.

Over time, Rodriguez oak tree scenes included people luminescent Acadians.

In contrast to the dark, moody Louisiana landscapes.

In 1971, he had to come up with the idea of what would a person look like if they walked out from behind one of the oak trees, because he wanted to visually interpret his history on canvas.

And so in paintings like this, you see these figures that glow white as if they're cut out and pasted on the landscape.

They have the pride of their history and their culture and their food and their music all coming from within, even though they're under trees and there's two lights in every Rodriguez painting that that light from within, but also the light beyond the horizon, which represented the hope of the Cajun people.

The exhibit also acknowledges Rodriguez global success with The Blue Dog, showcasing his first painting of the icon inspired by the family dog, Tiffany.

It was painted for the World's Fair, which was in New Orleans in 1984, and there was a book of ghost stories in this book and that illustrated the story of this luga roo haunting this red house.

And so he used an old picture of his dog Tiffany, as the model.

And painted this piece.

And you can see from the fur from everything.

It wasn't the pop art image that we knew of it today.

He was painting this Luger as if it was one of his Cajuns.

And so this is a really rare opportunity to come and see the first ever Blue Dog.

Jack says Tiffany died before he was born, but you can learn more about the famous family dog in the documentary.

When he was painting Tiffany as you know, the Luna Roo, it was kind of frightening to me because it looked so different from like, her actual fur color.

He painted the eyes like, you know, intentionally to be frightening.

And it worked on me as we were doing the film.

Everyone around the world seems to know Blue Dog.

Not a lot of people are aware of the story.

Before Blue Dog or the vast talent that George has given beyond what a lot of the public has seen.

You know, we got to go into the art troves and see behind the scenes and pull out art that no one's ever seen.

There is a lot of thought and a lot of real existential thoughts in his work that people weren't aware of.

Evangeline, the character in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow famous poem of two Cajun lovers separated during the expulsion of Acadians, was one of Rodrigues earliest muses.

We would come out here and take maybe 100 or 200 pictures, and I'd go to his house and he'd say, oh, look, I just painted you another Rodriguez vieux joli blot the character in a traditional Cajun waltz.

The film introduces viewers to Rodriguez original Jolie Blom, all so windy.

We are sitting in front of your husband's painting, Joe, on a favorite subject of his, and some say you were his real life.

Jolie.

What?

What do you say to that?

George.

His first painting of Yoli Blond is from 1974.

So this particular one, which is so lovely and romantic, is her 1982.

But the first one that he made is his most famous from 1974.

And he made her up in the middle of the night.

He, like, dreamed her up.

And when we became us, which was in the early to mid 1990s, he said the most romantic thing to me.

He said, Wendy and you, at last I have found my Jolie LeBlanc.

The exhibit paints a complete picture of George Rodrigue, the man and his art beyond his fame, Blue Dog, and his palpable passion for Louisiana's Cajun roots and culture.

Rendered on canvas.

That's what frustrates me the most is that the dog is stronger than Rodriguez.

Now that is the wife in me, the person who loves him saying that.

Because ultimately, if I twist that and look at it a little different.

The dog brings people to Rodriguez so people know Rodriguez and come to know him because of the Blue Dog.

And it is that doorway that brings him to beautiful works like you see here.

There's several ways to look at.

The walk in here and see him and see him jump out of the canvas at you.

Because it's not just a painting.

You can see in their faces the expressions and the feeling of the people of that time.

So I encourage everyone to come out and see this.

This is a very special opportunity to see his early work and, and, and what they meant to the community and the people who painted.

What I really appreciate about the exhibit is that it emphasizes Jorge Rodriguez earlier works, all of his Cajun paintings that really chronicled our culture that came way before The Blue Dog, which, of course, he's most famous for.

It has an incredible body of work to celebrate what I love to see in Louisiana, on the map and all over the world.

That's right.

That is our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything LPB anytime, wherever you are with our LP app.

That's right.

And you can catch LPB news and public affairs shows, as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook and Instagram for everyone that Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

I'm Karen LeBlanc.

And I'm Dorothea Wilson.

Until next time.

That's the state we're in.

And.

Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by Entergy.

Louisiana is strengthening our power grid throughout the state.

We're reinforcing infrastructure to prepare for stronger storms, reduce outages, and respond quicker when you do need us.

Because together, we power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is a historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and by Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center.

Visit Baton Rouge and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and viewers like you.

Thank you.