Funding for COLORES was provided in part by Fredric Hammersley Fund for the Arts, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.

Join us for a special musical Christmas performance with Chuy Martinez and Otilio Ruiz as they keep holiday traditions from Veracruz and New Mexico alive.

Singing in Spanish.

Evolving from a visual arts collection to a performing arts venue, the Cleveland Museum of Art launches the innovative Creative Fusion Composer series.

Since 2016, Latin X artists have been invited to the Julia the Burgos Cultural Arts Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to transform doors into art.

It's all ahead on COLORES.

Feliz Navidad >> Otilio Ruiz: La Rama.

It's music from Veracruz.

It's a Christmas song, a traditional Christmas song.

And I think we are the only state that plays La Llama and La Rama is every Christmas.

People, most mostly the kids.

They bring the coffee plant like a brunch rama means a brunch.

We decorate it so that we didn't have the decorations.

So we used to gather branches like coffee plants to decorate it and sing verses that we made with the family, with the kids.

And we go, How is my house?

People give you money.

So they are collecting money to celebrate on Christmas when we have no no money so that we're collecting money for a Christmas party.

So that's a part of the the history of La Rama, it's a very very old Christmas song at a state of Veracruz.

[SINGING IN SPANISH] >> Chuy Martinez: Los Comanchitos actually It's a celebration.

One time when I saw Comanches this was like 20 something years now, almost 30 years ago where the women were singing on on one side of the street and the men were on the other side.

The women were playing rattles and the men were playing drums and they were answering back and forth and it was a beautiful interaction between the the the women and men, because a lot of times that's how you create community and people come from all over the place.

Sometimes people move out of their town, are there Pueblo.

But when, when there's a traditional celebration they come back and and shared [SINGING IN SPANISH] Making Music >> Narrator: Since first opening its doors in 1916, the Cleveland Museum of Art became renowned worldwide for its visual arts collection.

But two years after opening, the Cleveland Museum began another lesser known legacy.

When the New York Philharmonic performed there in 1918.

In 1922, the museum's curator of music, Pulitzer Prize winning composer Douglas Moore, asked, Is there not a real service that a museum may render to the community by offering a musical standard as well as a pictorial one?

So began a century of the performing arts inside the Cleveland Museum of Art, and more recently, outside.

the Performing Arts series as a perfect companion to what the visual arts collection is itself.

As director of cinema's performing arts series, Tom Walsh wanted to build on the museum's musical tradition in 2009, when the Cleveland Museum of Art welcomed back visitors to the then freshly renovated East wing galleries.

We all knew that we wanted to have a celebration, and out of this came the idea to create the solstice.

It was a really fun, high energy night, sort of a spasm of love and music and energy and a ton of fun.

And we knew immediately that this should be could be an annual event following the success of Solstice on cinema's front lawn, the museum took the live music to the streets with a new summer program in 2013.

We added a series called City Stages, and that is free to all family friendly, outdoor world class concert programing of bands from all over the planet.

And that means close the roads, put up the beer tent, put a giant stage out there and welcome bands from all over Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and have a fun in the sun.

Summertime night.

However, despite more than a century of performing arts presented by the Cleveland Museum of Art, something was missing.

The one thing that our predecessors had not done was commissioned new work at a high level that is to say, all the presenting institutions around the world.

One aspect of being the major force in performing arts is to commission and create or cause to create new compositions.

And the Cleveland Foundation came to us and said, We'd like to explore that idea with you.

And they said, Let's go on this journey together.

The result is the Creative Fusion Composers Series, featuring a group of international composers from Japan to Italy, Serbia to Chicago, Africa to Turkey.

So in a partnership, we organized a plan to invite six composers from all over the world to this museum with the idea that if we turn composers loose, what would we get?

I totally jumped at it.

I mean, tell any artist you can do whatever you want pretty much, and we're going to fund it and we're going to produce it.

We're going to make it happen.

I mean, that was pretty much the request.

So of course they jumped on it.

One of the first composers to finish the commission is Genk Aragon, a Turkish composer who's lived in the United States and Europe.

I think of all the composers of his generation.

He doesn't sound like anybody and nobody sounds like him.

Besides the fact that it had to be somehow informed by the museum or the city, there were no strings attached.

I think he has such a singular voice that we immediately thought to invite Genk to the museum to see what would inspire him.

So it was just wide open and all I had to do was decide what I wanted to do.

So I think that's that's kind of unique.

To my surprise, he was taken immediately, overwhelmingly by the architecture of the building, specifically the Ames family atrium.

I had some free time between rehearsals and and talking to people where I had to do nothing.

And I just sat here and listened and observed.

And I really fell in love with the space even more.

For me, what's special about here is, well, it's vast.

It feels very big and spacious.

I feel free.

So that's great.

In May of 2019, Air Gun premiered his piece for Murray, featuring a chamber choir.

A children's choir, three harpsichords and four trombones, performers spread throughout the immense space of the atrium, allowing the audience to wander among them.

It was unlike anything air guns ever written.

Most of the work I've created has been for the concert stage, where all the performers are in one place and the sound is coming from one place.

So that was actually the most important influence on how the piece took shape was the fact that it's in this space and the performers are several feet away from each other.

In the case of the two trombone duets, it's I think it's close to 300 feet.

So covering these big distances and trying to make some sense over such a vast amount of space was the big challenge.

The audience was impressed.

It was really an incredible experience.

It was, as they described it, very meditative and it changed throughout the hour.

And just hearing the different vocal pieces from the children's choir and all aspects of it, it was absolutely amazing.

I thought it was really very mesmerizing and it reminded me of Tibetan monks and the horns that they use using.

And their ceremonies are very, very much evocative of that.

People were very quiet, lots of people just milling about very quietly, and the tones of the instruments would come through and it would just make me feel like I was really being uplifted into a new environment.

The Cleveland Museum of Art relaunched its performing arts season earlier this year following a hiatus due to the pandemic.

And now plans are afoot for more public music performances presented by the museum this summer.

Opening doors.

Doors for the Bario was started in 2016.

It was just an idea from a donation of doors that I received from a friend.

And at first I was just thought, What am I going to do with these doors?

We kind of came up with the idea behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitars.

We decided that each door would represent a Spanish speaking country.

So the great thing about this is that we received funding for Hispanic Heritage Month and part of that funding was to commission artists to do some work for us.

And I thought this was a perfect time to kind of bring the project back to life and to to finish it.

We still have several doors that need to be completed so that we can the collection will be complete.

I really feel that each story, each door has a story behind it.

And, you know, I, I have a sentimental attachment to them [SPEAKING SPANISH] my door for the project I was actually given Spain as my theme because bullfighters are very common in Spanish artworks and everywhere it's a matador in a purple suit.

Matador suit.

And these is kind of like pulling the little blanket, like when the bull goes by him and it's I courage for that.

It looks like the flag of Spain, although the colors are inverted.

That was kind of unintentional.

So I did Bolivia and I wanted to include like the indigenous population of Bolivia, because a big percentage of their the people are indigenous.

So it's the Aymara Quechua people.

So I included the two women and looking at the Andes, and then I included a sunset.

So one of the rays is the Wihpala flag, which is actually also like a national flag, and it's represents the indenous people, which I've never heard of that before.

So yeah, I've never heard of like a flag, an indigenous flag being included as like a flag of a country.

And I got Uruguay back in the colonial times.

It was a place where the Africans came and it was a place where they came for freedom and that was where they kind of dispute that distributed themselves into the two Americas essentially.

So that's where I kind of have all these different melting pots of people in this small little door.

I have a lot of my art is mostly colorful skin tones like blue, magenta, sometimes green.

So it was different, but it was also really cool to try to do all of these different skin tones, but also create incorporate those colors around them and have their skin tone sign as the as the main feature.

Every time somebody walks into this room, they immediately take out their cameras.

There is like a kind of like a gasp.

And, you know, they they're very impressed, like impressed by the collection.

First of all, they're on doors, you know?

And second of all, I think it's very impressive that we have such talented local Latino artists in our community.

It was great for me.

It was a great chance to get myself out there as a striving artist.

It is opening a door up to like the artist itself, to this country.

And not only that, I feel like in Cleveland we want to have exposure of what next people?

So the doors of like a passageway to our culture, which is really beautiful.

The main population, Latino population in Cleveland is Puerto Rican.

And we have a growing population of, you know, different Latino cultures.

You know, Mexico and Cuba and Salvador.

So we have all these growing Latino populations in our city, and we wanted to celebrate that.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] Well, when I came to Cleveland, I couldn't really find my Latin X peeps or my people.

So I think just being part of it just means that like there is a community here and we're thriving and we're getting our name out there and I never really felt part of like Cleveland until I started working with them where to go.

So it means a lot to me.

It feels like I kind of like find my space here, [SPEAKING SPANISH] the award winning Arts and Culture series COLORES is now available on the PBS app YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and at NMPBS.org From classic episodes to brand new shows, COLORES is everywhere.

Watch now on your favorite NM PBS platforms.

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts, New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.