Annc: COMING UP ON KVIE ARTS SHOWCASE... WE CELEBRATE WOMEN ARTISTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD AND RIGHT HERE AT HOME.

AN ARTIST FINDING CONNECTION THROUGH MULTIPLE OF ARTFORMS Kellie: Using art to just navigate my feelings Annc: PORTRAITS FULL OF MEANING Mickalene: I want people to feel that sense it's not just me choosing and plucking a woman from some obscure place and thinking about them, that these are relationships that are built.

Annc: A PHOTOGRAPHER'’S PURPOSE Dana: The journey of awakening as an artist and a human being takes time.

This work was created over 30 years.

Annc: AND HOMEMADE CERAMICS Ghada: I like to use different kinds of techniques for decorating because my process is mostly about decorating, about illustration and about texture.

Annc: IT'’S ALL UP NEXT ON KVIE ARTS SHOWCASE... ♪♪ Marinda: Sacramento Artist Kellie Raines has discovered there is always something new to learn within the process of creating.

Kellie, There are many dynamics to the type of art that you create.

And I mean, it's from painting to drawing, playwright, acting, and even as a voice talent, associate producer and technical director at PBS KVIE, but what is it that drives you in all these different dynamics of your art and creating.

Kellie: Uh, for me, I think it's three things.

It's definitely storytelling.

I love storytelling, whether it's reading or creating it.

I also love the connection with an audience or a spectator.

And it's also just about the sensory enjoyment, whether it's the sound of words on a page, that's then brought to life on stage, or it's the feel of pastel hitting the surface on a painting.

Um, it's so it's definitely storytelling connecting with an audience and the sensory enjoyment.

Marinda: What were some of your early influences with art?

Like when did you know?

It was more than just a hobby?

Kellie: Um, I always wanted to dance.

So as a little girl and my parents had me in dance, I tap danced.

I think that was my entree into art and performance.

And I was always telling stories.

All my, my siblings would make fun of me about doing make believe in the hallways or whatever.

So I made stories.

And I knew I loved performance.

So I have a degree in dramatic art from UC Davis and that's my entree into the art world.

And I had to take a break from that a few years ago to help both my parents who had some pretty serious health issues.

So I needed to find something that I could do on my own time.

And I picked up some pencils and some chalk and started painting.

And, uh, now I'm doing visual art as well.

Marinda: Tell me a little bit about how you use art when it comes to the good, the bad, the highs, the lows, just of your journey in life.

Kellie: Yeah.

Art is a very meditative, um, elixir kind of, at least for me.

And I know a lot of artists and a lot of people who are just going through their everyday lives and have struggles.

Oftentimes if I have a bad day coming home and.

Putting some color in my hands and getting the surface dirty.

I, I can kind of escape that part of my life and just focus on something that's just very soothing and meditative, but also times when you don't want to escape those issues and you really want to explore how you're feeling about it and navigate the healing process.

It's really great to put, you know, ideas down on paper and to express yourself that way.

Kellie video clip: Only the memory of more than faces half-lit.

My father died before he could die.

This man, the son of a mountain witch who kindled logic and sugar science.

This man who joined my tea parties.

Kellie: Recently, really that's been a big part of my life.

Like I mentioned, my both, my parents had some pretty severe health issues and I lost my father recently.

And using art to uh one, just navigate my feelings and using it as an escape, but also using it as a way to get back in touch with my dad, because he always encouraged me to paint, especially.

He didn't quite understand the performance because he couldn't really hold it, but paintings, he really encouraged me to do that.

And I think it's very poetic.

And I love the connection now that I have to my dad through my art, because.

Uh, I'm doing something that he encouraged me to do and I'm doing it well.

And it's, so again, it's just a way for me to connect to him.

So it's a great way for me to navigate that portion of, you know the feelings and the emotions and the everyday life that every human being goes through at some point.

Marinda: Tell me, what do you want, kind of the viewers of your art rather it's um, on the stage, um, rather it's creating content, rather it's painting.

What is it you want the audience to get from each of those perspectives of your art?

Kellie: I want them to get whatever they want to get out of it in that moment.

Sure it's about me.

That I'm creating it.

And I'm enjoying that.

But whether if it's just for them to get a laugh and to escape and to be happy in that moment, or it's for them to confront an issue that they've never thought about, or they see something portrayed on stage that they've gone through and they are able to have it expressed out loud where they may not necessarily want to be the one who voices that.

One time I did a play and, uh, a woman came up to me after the show and she told me that hurt my performance really helped her navigate something she had gone through.

And that she didn't really want to talk about herself, but she was really grateful to see that it was being talked about.

So for me, it's people being able to access it, how they want to access it the way they want to access it and take from it what benefits them the most.

Marinda: There are some times as artists, um, there are those that kind of have an insecurity about their level of where they're at as an artist and they kind of sometimes make the comparable.

How do you feel, are, would you say to someone that kind of has those insecurities of, you know, I paint, but I'm not really an artist.

How would you help them to understand ways of just kind of honoring what they're creating and not just comparing to someone else?

Kellie: That's such a great question.

It's making me tear up a little bit.

Cause I think it's an important question not just for artists like humans to hearing us.

It's just such a, it leads you to a negative place oftentimes.

And I did that when I started painting, I kept saying, well, I'm not really an artist, but then I would paint a bird.

And then people started buying my birds and I thought, well, maybe I am an artist.

Um, for me, I always go to a quote by one of my favorite playwrights, Samuel Beckett.

And he said something like.

Ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.

It's in the mistakes that we, um, I think find our voice and find what's find what works best and what we like.

And if you are stuck in the cycle of comparing yourself, use that to your advantage.

Marinda: You had made a statement before that, um, within art, you're always learning.

Does there come a point to where you kind of, um, say, okay, I'm at a point where I don't need any need to learn anymore?

Or what is that?

What does that constant need to learn more?

Kellie: Never.

I, there is always something to learn.

I've been doing theater for 30 plus years.

There's still something new to learn.

Every time I go see a play or I read a play or I do a part.

I'm still learning with writing my poetry.

When I go to open mic and I hear somebody else do something a little differently, especially with my visual art.

And I put materials down in front of me and I don't know how to use it.

For me, what I love about art, whatever the medium is the process and figuring it out and even making mistakes, so I know what works and what doesn't that, that's what I love.

I think love it's about art outside of the connection and storytelling, is the process.

♪♪ Annc: NEW YORK BASED ARTIST MICKALENE THOMAS EXPLORES RACE, GENDER, IDENTITY, AND SEXUALITY.

WE HEAD TO THE WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS IN COLUMBUS, OHIO.

♪♪ Lucy: Mickalene Thomas, she was born in 1971 in New Jersey.

She's based in Brooklyn.

A lot of her work deals with the gaze, also with thinking about her gaze as a queer black woman and what that can bring to a conversation about art history, what's been absent, and how she can kind of claim spaces for particularly in this show, women of color, black women who -- when she was looking at art history, she wasn't seeing women who looked like her, women who looked like the people who were heroes and idols and mentors to her in her life.

Her mother, her family, her friends.

So, it's really about inclusion and empowerment.

Michael: Um, The Gaze is that art historical practice, primarily of men, looking at their female muses.

And there's kind of ownership that takes place, mostly that we're aware of, through the sort of art, historical lens.

Mickalene has sought, I think very consciously from the beginning, to turn that concept of gaze on its head, so that basically the gaze doesn't denote ownership.

It denotes collaboration.

Mickalene: It's the first time that my work has been given this platform to present the sitters forward.

Put them forward, put them in front.

To sort of really celebrate them in a way we can see the various bodies of work that has come out of each sitter.

And how my relationship is with them.

And how I'm investigating and looking through different tools and materials.

And I think a lot of times, you know, there's this idea or lack of understanding that these are real women.

Right?

And I want people to feel that sense it's not just me choosing and plucking a woman from some obscure place and thinking about them, that these are relationships that are built.

Lucy: So the first gallery'’s devoted to her mother, Sandra Bush, which was her first muse in grad school at Yale.

She was asked by a professor, a photography professor, to make a series of work about someone she had a difficult relationship with.

And she and her mom had a very fraught, estranged relationship.

And so there was a lot of kind of healing and rekindling their relationship through that series.

And as time went on, her mom was, at one point, an aspiring model.

So was very confident, beautiful, statuesque, and subsequently informed, I think, Mickalene's interactions with her sitters.

The next gallery is devoted to Mickalene herself.

And she talks about how, thinking about self-portraiture, and using herself as a subject was really vital to think about how she was depicting others, sort of kind of put herself in that position, was really critical to think about -- thoughtfully about what it means to be a subject.

Mickalene: All of those photographs came from, sort of, this search of who I was and identity and breaking down stereotypes of black women in mass media.

♪♪ It's about visual play.

And it's about visual manipulation and desire, right?

And women are beautiful.

And I'm attracted to women, you know?

It could be my libido lust, I don't know.

But, yes.

Sexuality, desire, all of those things that I put in my painting is very important to me, right?

Because, it's how I see the women in my life.

It's how I want the world to see them, you know?

And it's putting them on the same platform of sort of the ideology of beauty.

Also validating and seeing - and allowing people to see us so we can be seen.

So we can represent ourselves and say, "We are here.

And we are present."

and so often there's so many other images to look at us as the other in a negative light, right?

So for me, it's a way of celebrating.

Celebrating who we are.

I think that is important as an artist to, whether it's personal, conceptual, whatever your genre, theory, your working from, whatever you're working from, whatever that basis is, is to find how it impacts the world.

For me, it's all about trying to inspire and make young girls, when they walk into spaces like these, that they feel a sense of themselves.

And that they can see themselves, right?

They see that.

They feel that they're represented.

♪♪ Annc: THROUGH HER ART AND ACTIVISM, LOS-ANGELES BASED PHOTOGRAPHER DANA GLUCKSTEIN HIGHLIGHTS THE INDIGENOUS PERSONS LIVING IN OUR WORLD, BRINGING ATTENTION TO THEIR CULTURE AND THE HARSH REALITIES THEY FACE.

WE TRAVEL TO NEW YORK TO VIEW HER EXHIBIT.

I'm Dana Gluckstein.

I'm a photographer.

♪♪ The journey of awakening as an artist and a human being takes time.

This work was created over 30 years and I was not an activist when I started, that grew over time when I realized what was happening on the planet and that I needed to be a voice that stood up for maybe other voices... people in these places that wouldn't be able to do that.

The early calling was for a city girl from L.A. to experience the places that still had a very deep connection to the earth in a traditional way.

And in so doing it really opened a door to something that I never could have expected about how native peoples from all over the world are fighting for their land, their water, their air, their respect, their culture, their language, their dances, the very essence of their being.

I feel a deep responsibility and I'm very aware that I am not of a specific tribe.

I'm a white woman.

I come from Los Angeles.

I'm of Jewish descent but it was my deep lifetime calling and I can't really intellectualize why that was.

Why do we take the path... the turn in the road- that we do.

But this was my calling from a young age and it developed over time.

♪♪ In 2009 it was recommended through lovely woman who was representing my work that I was ready for a book.

She said "You're ready."

"And I think that there would be a great partnership with Amnesty International.

They're doing important indigenous rights world work internationally.

...if I was going to be dedicating 30 years of my lifetime body of work to this book to the global anniversary of Amnesty that we make it do something.

And around that time I discovered that our country the United States had vetoed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand in 2007 when 144 other countries at the United Nations voted for it.

And I said let's make the book about that.

♪♪ We need to continue to urge our government to do the right thing.

And that'’s what the United Nations declaration is about now.

We have a template for what to do.

The right thing.

For our own people.

Our first peoples.

Something very dear to my heart.

And what I want people to know especially students here at the University, is that we can make a difference as individuals but we need to do it in collaboration.

Everybody here, are you in the history?

Art classes?

Just give me a general idea.

You're probably wondering, "what does my area of interest in profession that I want to go into have anything to do with the show?

Anybody kind of wondering that?

The area each area that each of you mentioned has everything to do with the Indigenous voice that you see here.

Even those that said accounting and business because the corporations around the world, most of them have done the most to destroy these beautiful cultures, the lands, the resources, and what the contemporary Indigenous voice.

says that's part of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is, "Hey, Corporate America, Corporate World, wake up because if you don't figure out how to save the world's resources and use them in some beneficial way for humanity, that benefits all and doesn't destroy our lands, our air, our water, we're all going down."

So sorry guys that are here today in the business of and accounting world, you have a huge responsibility now on your shoulders.

♪♪ I think she's so beautiful.

I'm touched by her innocence and her radiance and that she is the generation coming up.

And that there is... there is a future.

♪♪ Annc: GHADA HENAGAN IS A LOUISIANA-BASED CERAMICIST.

FROM PLATES TO MUGS, WALL ART TO ORNAMENTS, SHE MOLDS CLAY INTO A VARIETY OF FUNCTIONAL AND DECORATIVE CREATIONS.

♪♪ Ghada: I was born and raised in Lebanon.

It'’s a small and beautiful country in the Middle East, in a small village called Sidon.

I grew up at a time when the things we needed, most often, they were handmade; from bread to clothes, to bed sheets, even toys sometimes.

My mother was a seamstress.

She was very meticulous.

My father was a builder, but his real passion was like making things.

After he retired, he started making small tables from collected stones and scraps of wood.

And, they were great.

I was making miniature furniture from used card boxes.

And, I use to sew clothes for my doll.

So my whole world as a child was outdoors play time or indoors crafting time.

And, it was great.

It was the best.

As a child, I have never was introduced to clay or seen clay or in my life.

After high school I went to college and kept switching majors until I finally graduated with sacred art degree.

During my studies in sacred art, I was introduced to clay for the first time.

I took one course of ceramics.

But, I never thought I would work with clay again.

After I graduated I went to a 9 to 5 regular job.

Later my sister; she is a nun and an artist.

She asked me to work with her.

She wanted to expand the embroidery studio and add ceramics.

And, of course, I said yes.

I was so excited.

She knew I didn'’t know much about clay, but she took the chance.

I became a potter by chance.

The studio was only one room, built with a big embroidery, noisy machine and we didn'’t have even a table for me so we put 2 chairs and a piece of wood and I worked there on that thing.

But a little bit at a time, we had a kiln.

We had a bigger studio.

I had as many tables as I want.

It developed a little bit at a time and it became a big studio.

So, I worked there with her for 5 ½ years and I was making religious items, but, never functional parts.

My only resource was books and experimentation and this is how I learned; just reading books, experimenting and just getting better at it a little bit at a time.

After I came to the United States, I was so surprised and fascinated by the ceramics world and how they teach it in college.

I have been here since 2006 and I established my own studio in my dining room as you can see behind me since 2007 and I'’ve been working with clay ever since.

I had to start all over again, making functional pottery so I started taking ceramics online classes and I attended the visiting artist workshop at LSU in the ceramic studio.

So those 2 things were really helpful in establishing my career as a potter plus tremendous support of my husband.

I didn'’t have a wheel so I did it by hand building later on my husband and brothers they got me a wheel for Christmas and I put it on the kitchen sometimes on the kitchen counter when I need to work on the wheel but since I didn'’t have space for the wheel all the time, to just keep it there, and work whenever I want to, I started to just hand build more stuff and I got used to it and now I like it more because the pace of hand building is slow, meditative I can control it better.

My focus is mainly on functional parts, so I make mugs, ♪♪ bowls, ♪♪ jars, ♪♪ plates ♪♪ but I also make some decorative things like vases, wall art and ornaments.

Most of my illustrations are inspired by my childhood memories and stories from childhood like some of the animals that I draw, I had like a personal connection with these things from back in Lebanon.

I also draw my inspiration from nature forms and textures and what I see around me and of course from living in Louisiana.

For example, when I first started going to market people would ask, do you have any Louisiana design; I would say no I didn'’t feel it yet.

I was still adjusting and when I don'’t feel something, I can'’t make it so it took me 8 years to live here and to feel like it was really home and suddenly out of nowhere I found myself just drawing the pelicans and the bees and even the pelicans and the bees they have connections to Lebanon too.

I like this applicate technique that you can cut something.

It is also called sprigs in clay terms is that you make something out of the shallow mold and then you apply it to the piece when it is not too dry and I like to use different kinds of techniques for decorating because my process is mostly about decorating, about illustration and about texture After a few years of using different glazes, I finally settled on those translucent bright color glazes because they show the texture and all the drawings I put underneath so I can at the same time draw, put texture, highlight the texture and use those translucent glazes to show everything that I drew or all the texture that I put on my parts and I like that.

The ceramic process for me doesn'’t get easier.

It'’s a long process from making, decorating, drawing, firing, then glazing, then firing again.

Plus, working with clay has a lot of possibilities.

I am always learning and making something new.

However, I am more experienced now so I have learned how to manage my time.

I have learned how to manage my creative blocks.

I also learned how to solve problems.

I go back home to Lebanon every other year.

And, I usually stay for six weeks.

I like to give something I made especially because I live here and everybody else lives there.

And, they don'’t get to see or use my work.

I learned how to pack efficiently.

I only use cardboards and I put them between clothes and I fill my backpack as much as I could handle.

My hope is that the people who have a connection to my work; my piece of work will brighten their day, a little bit more.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Annc: Episodes of KVIE Arts showcase along with other KVIE programs are available to watch online at kvie.org/video.