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

...and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

BOLD, STUNNING... CURATOR LETITIA CHAMBERS SHARES HOW NATIVE ARTISTS ARE REINTERPRETING CULTURAL NARRATIVES IN THE GROUNDBREAKING EXHIBITION "CLEARLY INDIGENOUS."

JUGGLING HIS LOVE FOR CELLO AND LIFE AS A MEDICAL STUDENT, IAIN FORREST PERFORMS FOR THE MUSIC UNDER NEW YORK PROGRAM.

"MASS ART SOWA" IN BOSTON'S PREMIER ARTISTIC HUB LAUNCHES FRESH VOICES INTO THE ART WORLD.

AT "FAIRGROUNDS ST. PETE, HAVE A FANTASTIC, IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE JOURNEYING THROUGH AN ENTIRE WORLD CREATED BY 64 ARTISTS.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

LIGHT, COLOR AND FRAGILITY.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Letitia Chambers: Well indigenous artists are plowing new ground in essence when they use traditional iconography but in the medium of glass.

♪ ♪ ♪ There's so many things to love about glass, the color of course is maybe the most important aspect from an artistic perspective.

I also like the fragility of glass and it's both durable and fragile at the same time.

Glass can last for hundreds of years but it can also break in an instant.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Ebony Isis Booth: What do you see that just jumps out at you and captures your attention?

>>Letitia: The shapes and the ways that different artists are able to put color and shape together, for instance, Dan Friday takes glass rods in all different colors and he puts them together and then melts them in the furnace then puts it on the end of the pipe and when he blows it he can get a crisscross pattern like a basket by the way that he bundles these glass rods together and then he can blow a vessel.

>>Ebony: And how did that movement begin?

>>Letitia: Well it all started in native country when Lloyd Kiva New, who was then the president of the institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, was working with the Rhode Island School of Design to create a college accredited curriculum and in 1974 Dale Chihuly who was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, came to Santa Fe, taught for a semester at IAIA and built a glass hot shop and that was the introduction of glass art to Indian country.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Ebony: What does this do to your understanding of Native Art?

>>Letitia: Native Art at the time of the first colonization of this country, people were very interested in native arts but it came to be that the colonizers wanted native artists to do exactly what they had been doing at the time of colonization.

They in essence said it wasn't real native art if it didn't look exactly like it had looked in the 1500s or 1600s or 1700s and so native artists felt constrained and so Lloyd Kiva New and a group of other artists began encouraging native artists to first be artists and also work through their native traditions and with the beginning of the studio art movement which interestingly started in the 60s at the same time as the Institute of American Indian arts glass making became an artistic endeavor and so Dale Chihuly was a part of that the very beginnings of the studio glass movement and when he came to IAIA, it was really two movements coming together, the studio glass movement and the contemporary native arts movement.

>>Ebony: Who are some of the first artists to the native glass movement?

>>Letitia: There's a scorpion that was made by Larry Ahvakana and that's the very first animal that we know of that was made in glass by a native artist and he made it in I think in 1975.

Animals are very important in native communities.

Preston Singletary is very well known and has been one of the leaders in the native glass arts movement as has Tony Jojola who began studying glass art in shortly after Dale built the hot shop at IAIA, Robert Marcus who everybody calls Spooner, he lives in the southwest.

He's from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and his work is really amazing for its color.

Bright, brilliant blues, reds and he both blows the works himself and does the carving.

(COSMIC KEYBOARD) ♪ ♪ ♪ >>Ebony: What does this movement say about indigenous imaginations?

>>Letitia: The medium of glass has many features that let artists be very creative as they still work in traditions from the past.

The piece by Tammy Garcia is a wonderful piece that is a version of the Santa Clara black pottery.

She created this in collaboration with Preston Singletary, a Tlingit artist from the Seattle area and Preston blew the vessel and Tammy carved the vessel using the Santa Clara motifs and it's very interesting that the pueblo artists of the southwest, if they make a vessel, they tend to make a pot, a piece of pottery in glass, whereas the northwest coast artists where their vessels were traditionally made of either wood or grasses, tend to make baskets or boxes depending on what the traditional vessels were in their tribes.

There are some beautiful blown pieces.

Some beautiful cast glass pieces and also fused pieces where glass maybe glass of different colors are put together and there's also an artist her name's Angela Babby, who has developed a process where she takes powdered glass, liquefies it and paints with it as if she's painting with oil and the stunning pieces are just amazing.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Letitia: Indigenous artists are very creative and operate out of both their experience and their imagination.

>>Ebony: What is so wonderful about that to you?

>>Letitia: It is both a testament to the endurance and the dynamic societies that are still operating today in Indian country.

That the importance of tradition and the ancestors shines through in contemporary art.

UPLIFTING COMMUTERS.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Iain Forrest: I started cello in fourth grade when our music teacher came around with a cart of instruments.

So I picked up the cello and I played the first note, which was a really low resonant note.

I just love the sound of it, that bass note.

♪ ♪ ♪ But after high school, me and a friend, we actually went out to the streets of Washington, D.C., and we started playing contemporary songs and I remember the reaction of people walking past on the streets.

It struck me like, hey, this could be really something special here.

♪ ♪ ♪ After college, I moved up here to New York City area for medical school at Mount Sinai, and one of the things that drew me to New York City was obviously the culture that we have of the arts.

And as soon as I came here, I saw street musician after street musician and I immediately thought this could be my next home.

That's when I looked up MUNY Music Under New York, and I found that they had a whole audition process, send them an application, did the audition.

♪ ♪ ♪ And thankfully, everything worked out.

And now I can call myself a street musician in New York City.

And the reason why I chose Eyeglasses is because of two reasons.

So I want to be an ophthalmologist.

I want to help people see better, specifically kids who have lost their vision at a young age.

The second reason, which is a bit more light hearted, is that Beethoven, he wrote a piece called Eyeglasses Duet.

When musicians sat down and read the sheet music in front of them, there were so many notes on it.

It was such a tricky, difficult piece to play that the only way musicians could read the music is if they wore really, really strong glasses.

So I absolutely love the story behind that.

I took inspiration from that.

(Hum from amplifier) So I play the electric cello, and it's made by Yamaha.

And it's the exact same four strings as an acoustic cello.

The only difference is they stuck a little pickup inside the electric cello so it can be amplified, so it's louder.

♪ ♪ ♪ What I love to do is also use a looper.

So essentially what I do is I'll play a bass part, a percussion part, a harmony part on the cello, and then I can loop that segment over and over again.

So it essentially comes down to I'm playing nine or ten different cello parts at the same time.

So it just opens up a lot of doors as to what I can do musically.

♪ ♪ ♪ I've had people come down, they come off their subway, they come up to me like, where's the orchestra?

And I'm like, no, it's just, it's just me.

One electric cellist.

♪ ♪ ♪ So unfortunately, there's not much sheet music out there for like nine cellos to play like pop songs or rock songs.

So yeah, oftentimes I'll just hear a song on the radio or on Spotify.

And then once I've listened to it a couple of times, I kind of extrapolate it out and try to create, you know, a cello rendition of it.

♪ ♪ ♪ Amongst all that kind of like chaotic energy of people, you know, bustling and the crowds moving, I think the best part of that is just seeing how the music impacts these people who you know, are either have their headphones on, just watching their phone, trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible and then just seeing them being able to stop, just enjoy the moment for what it is.

♪ ♪ ♪ In medicine and music, you really have to connect with the human being sitting in front of you.

Helping to uplift them with music, I find it actually makes me a better medical student and hopefully a better doctor down the road too.

♪ ♪ ♪ (Applause) Thank you, guys.

Thank you so much.

CONNECTING TO COMMUNITY.

SoWa is a hive for Boston's art scene - a neighborhood where galleries, studios and design firms merge.

Their newest neighbor?

MassArt SoWa.

A white-walled gallery space introducing us to the freshest voices launching into the art world.

"Knowing that people are actually going to see the work is inspiring.

I feel like it opens up doors for us."

Jesus Pizarro is one of eight artists featured here.

All are graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design's Graduate Program.

And the art on view represents their thesis projects-work largely conceived, developed and refined over the last year.

"This work is definitely about the pandemic, definitely dealing with, um, the mental health and the strains of the pandemic."

In his piece "Caution New Normal" Pizarro contends with a year that left him waylaid after he contracted the coronavirus.

"There's like sand, there is Kool-Aid.

Um, and then there's the cast of my face, and I wanted all those things to feel almost heavy, in the work.

In the same way I felt heavy during this pandemic."

In other work he traces family lineage [My Pava is Black], portrays his own Avatar as viewed amid on-screen glitches [Strong AlterEgo] and renders his deep affection for his grandmother-actually a series of paintings that can be reconfigured.

[Abuelita's...] "The original image is, grandma cooking the pastlitos.

And when you move it around, it becomes the Puerto Rican flag.

(Does it change for you that she's rearranged?)

Actually yeah.

//My cultural identity is being Puerto Rican.

Yet I was born and raised here in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up here.

So it's about//the navigating of culture and identity."

"For students to think about what they want their work to do in the world, what they want to articulate, how they want to communicate it.

This gives us an opportunity for what's new."

Lucinda Bliss is the college's Dean of Graduate Studies.

The gallery is her brainchild.

it's a showcase for varied voices and forms.

Video that frees us into fantasy.

Photography that explores America, the beautiful but not always seen.

And an installation that bares its teeth.

"It really is highly individualized.

The best graduate programs are meeting each student where he or she is.

If I'm thinking about Sarah's work, she's in conversation with the history of painting and contemporary painting."

Sarah is Sarah Hull, a painter forever captivated by aerial perspectives.

"This was going back to the same rooftop over fifteen days in Tampa.

Noticing different things each day and then adding them to the composition."

A former nurse/midwife who's turned to painting full time, Hull says that she's always been distracted-in every way an artist should be.

"From as long as I can remember, I've been in trouble for not paying attention.

I've always been interested in how things look from unique points of view.

and that sense of wonder has just stayed with me.

(So I wonder what it's like to walk down the street with you?)

(laughs) I have no sense of direction which is actually really funny.

I remember, based on the purple shadow underneath the tree, or the green sign that had a little bit of red from the leaf."

As disparate as the art here might be, the artists themselves have remained tightly knit-especially during the pandemic-prodding and pushing each other forward online to arrive at this moment with their best work.

Now ready for the outside world and public consumption.

"If just one person connects with my work or sees something they haven't seen before.

if they, um when they take a walk, they notice a shadow or a perspective that they haven't thought about before, then I feel like, something good has happened."

And that change can happen.

Which is what Jesus Pizarro hopes when visitors see this family self-portrait titled Queen and her Knights.

It's his view of his mother and siblings who, in a crown and shining armor, rise above a history of hardship in a piece that pushes into the visitor's space.

"Thinking about BLM and all these different movements.

Art has definitely been a powerful tool in helping social causes?

People oftentimes can hear a story.

But, it's different when you can see the story.

It allows you to be a part of the story and see it firsthand."

ART, PLAY AND JOY.

>>John: Well, first of all, you're about to leave reality.

Walking through these doors is a whole other dimension, but it's up to you what kind of dimension that will be.

♪ ♪ ♪ Hi, my name is John Michael Hines, and I'm the Experience Manager for fairground St. Pete.

♪ ♪ ♪ So, it's an immersive art experience.

Which means it's an entire world created by a bunch of artists, mainly local artists, 64 of them, collaborating to create an entire world that we invite you in to come explore.

We're the anchor tenant of a larger cultural campus, called The Factory.

And The Factory is, you know, a six and a half acre big campus where there's many artists' studios, and creative companies, and we're sort of one of the big anchor tenants of the factory.

So our exhibition is about 15,000 square feet.

♪ ♪ ♪ Fairgrounds St. Pete is a time, ticketed experience.

So we're encouraging guests to reserve their time slot ahead of time.

Once you arrive, our guest experience guides will scan your ticket and give you a brief introduction about what you're about to experience, and from there, you will walk into the wonderful, weird, wacky, world of Fairgrounds.

What I think visitors don't realize yet is it's going to be so different than their normal art exhibition.

They're going to be walking in artwork everywhere, from the ceiling to the wall, to the floor.

Everything's going to be art, and it's going to be a totally immersive experience and a different magical place.

Early on, we really wanted to make a very tangible digital playground.

COVID really forced us to think differently and pivot.

And so we started taking, touch less sensors and creating our interpretation of what a button would be if you didn't touch a button.

So there are many aspects where you kind of hold your hand over something and you get lighting and sound feedback, but you don't physically make contact with something.

So, it was a way to make things a bit safer.

We're also using things like foot pedals, kind of little surprises, that you can kind of step on things, and then something happens, or it activates sounds, or lighting.

It's a lot of traditional theater and stage craft, meets art, meets storytelling.

And so the difference is, is that you don't just sit back as a passive audience member and watch things happen on a stage.

You are on the stage and you are in the story.

So Fairgrounds is a choose your own adventure type experience.

So there is a, a storyline underlying of why, you know, certain things are where they are.

It's up to you to experience that and try to find out the storyline, or just walk around and enjoy yourself.

So, you know, the last part of our loose narrative, is that we're going for the old school, a retro Florida motel vibe.

So we do have a hundred percent Fairgrounds branded motel room with some cool gadgets in there that you can play with or experiment with, or just, you know try to help find the storyline with.

And then other rooms, are nothing like a motel room 'cause they've been taken over by an artist but they are, still have a Florida theme to them, or you know, whatever kind of thing that you might think it is.

So Fairgrounds St. Pete is a celebration of all weird, wacky, wonderful, Florida.

And when we put out the open call to artists, we knew that what we wanted was for artists to celebrate the weird, wacky, wonderful, world that we live in here in Florida.

I feel like Fairgrounds gets me, you know they know that I'm more than just an artist.

Like they know, I love to collect seashells.

I like to just have like a vibe, you know so that's what it is.

Well, what stands out most to me is the Florida Rama room.

That's where we have our small tiny worlds that artists have created, based on our loose narrative that we provided for them.

So they all brought their individuality and their ideas, and they were able to put it in a little box.

I do these customized train cars, and I like the G scale model, train cars, and I'll paint them and make them look like they're grungy, like they have graffiti all over the side of them but this time I knew I was going to have this opportunity, so I didn't want to just put a train in the box, so I've made this entire, almost a dream like landscape with this train going into this water and it has a speaker and lights in it, so you can change the mood of it.

So, more 3D, more interactive artwork, for sure.

So for Fairgrounds St. Pete, I'm doing a large site-specific installation, it's going to be covering the whole ceiling.

It's going to be something you can walk under and truly feel immersed in the artwork.

I'm super excited to experience it myself, you know, as the artist, seeing it through everyone else's eyes.

I've heard the concept.

I have not seen it yet but I know there's going to be a mermaid room.

And that's where my art will be.

And so I'm so excited to see it.

So you guys come out and see it.

♪ ♪ ♪ So our tagline is Art for all, Play for all, Joy for all.

So it's really about everyone coming to enjoy this weird, wacky, wonderful, world that we've created with 64 artists.

What we really are, is a stage to just show a lot of the wonderful art and the artists and creative things that are happening here in St. Pete.

It's really just playful and fun, and there's a lot of humor and adventure.

And I think it's a great place to just have fun with your family or on a date, or just to go explore yourself as an artist and to see great works.

TO VIEW THIS AND OTHER COLORES PROGRAMS GO TO: New Mexico PBS dot org and look for COLORES under What We Do and Local Productions.

Also, LOOK FOR US ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.

"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

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

...and Viewers Like You.

(CLOSED CAPTIONING BY KNME-TV)