Frederick Hammersley Foundation... 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!

OVERCOMING PTSD, OSAGE ARTIST DANTE BISS-GRAYSON, A COMBAT VETERAN OF KUWAIT, IRAQ, AND AFGANISTAN FINDS HEALING THROUGH PAINTING.

WITH EXPERIMENTATION AND EXHUBERANT COLOR, PAINTER JOAN SNYDER DECONSTRUCTS ABSTRACT PAINTING IN THE 1970'S.

SHIFTING THE GAZE, BY EXAMINING THE HISTORY OF REPRESENTATION, TITUS KAPHAR CLOSES THE DISTANCE BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT.

A MIX OF RAW EXPRESSION THE GRAFFITI STAIRWELL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO IS AN OPEN CANVAS.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

PAINTING THE PAIN AWAY.

(WHIRL OF TRAFFIC) (DOG BARKING) (FOOTSTEPS) >>Dante Biss Grayson: Sometimes you gotta just rip the band-aid The trauma series is abstract expressionism, and what it entails is being able to express and externalize raw emotion.

Raw trauma.

I was through multiple different traumatic incidents so it was hard to separate them.

So being able to just have a platform where I could yell, scream, throw the canvas around, remember what happened, different flashes of memories, and pull that raw emotion, and put it on the canvas as a healing way.

>>Dante Biss Grayson: As a veteran, multiple tours you get exposed to helicopters crashed.

You get exposed to people shooting missiles at you.

People shooting rockets, mortars, guns, small arms fire.

It was as a matter of responding so that we can save somebody.

And it didn't matter who.

We wanted to make sure that we saved somebody.

But during those incidents, we didn't save everybody, right?

And a lot of people died in our hands.

But at least they knew that they had somebody.

There's a couple incidents that were, we recovered, you know, 18 U.S. troops out of a Chinook helicopter, side of a mountain, right?

One of many days.

One of many incidents, you know, and so it kind of all just I mean the the brutality of war.

They, they were putting makeshift bombs inside of kids.

And it was, you know, definitely, it was difficult.

Seeing things like that, you got to press on.

And so coming back to the United States, started unpacking all of that.

I can see why we have so many veterans who commit suicide.

They say there's 22 every single day.

Abstract expressionism was the perfect platform for it, as far as being able to, this is the emotion I need to get out of me and heal >>Dante Biss Grayson: I started out saying I'm going to do 22 paintings to honor the veterans.

I painted the paintings with different knives as a, you know, as a reflection of that's how people are killing themselves.

Put that medicine there.

It's a big medicine.

And so after the 22 paintings, you know, I moved into, you know, expressionism.

This is soldiers, you know, caught in a storm.

Kind of an allegory of, you know, the warriors in my tribe.

Hunting.

Surviving.

Thriving.

War.

Caught in a storm but also, a little bit of sunlight on the horizon.

A little bit of hope in there.

I wanted to capture the feeling of war through another, you know, platform.

Yeah.

This one definitely started the new journey, the new chapter in healing.

And, it's how I connect with New Mexico and the beautiful landscape.

The colors.

And then the giant clouds that we have here are just so and something's coming on the horizon like another war.

But it's nice because, it always goes away.

It kind of, you know, a nice little light rain.

So that connection, when I start the expressionist series with the land, is very healing.

The idea here is, you know, after the hunt.

A successful hunt.

When you go out to war, you want to succeed.

You want to win.

And these hunters, after the storm still on the horizon, but they came back successful.

So as the evolution of, you know, healing, there are some good days, as well.

And it's nice that I got to that point where, you know, from the expressionism, just the raw emotion, to something that could be serene and joyful.

This was even further evolution of painting to survive.

Painting for therapy.

These works are me expressing freedom.

>>Dante Biss Grayson: I've been painting my whole life and grew up around the arts.

And it's been different aspects of finding myself and finding a platform for my voice.

And New Mexico is amazingly beautiful.

>>Dante Biss Grayson: It's a symphony, you know?

It's like a living, breathing symphony, where you hit this moment like an aria.

Like at the crescendo at the top of it.

And you're like, it's like, "that is really beautiful," to the point of, you know, like, you're overwhelmed with the emotion that it's just so amazing that we're here, you know, as beings, you know?

And then you start thinking about like the connection to it.

Like, where we've been and how we're going to be going forward.

>>Dante Biss Grayson: We come from the land, right?

And there's just such beauty out there.

And if you open your ears, your eyes, your heart, you can tune into it.

(SCRAPING) There's cycles of death.

There's cycles of amazing torrents of storms.

Like, really rough.

But it also opens doors to serenity.

There's these moments of the day that are beautiful.

Just absolutely beautiful.

>>Dante Biss Grayson: You don't have to focus on the storms.

You don't have to focus on the tornadoes.

Because if you've gone through the tornado that is all every day is going to be like that, right?

But it gradually goes into life.

Like, let's say there's a burn scar.

Everything's gonna burn out.

Eventually, a little plant will come again.

It shows you that you can heal and that we can heal.

After a scar in your heart and your soul, then you can, you know, see something that's beautiful again, right?

Cycle of life.

Like, I had my daughter.

She saved me as well, and my wife.

And you, know, it does heal.

It shows you that after that burn scar you can rebirth.

You know, painting the pain away.

PERSISTENT EXPERIMENTATION.

>>Randy Griffey: The colorful and attractive painting behind me is "Smashed Strokes Hope" from 1971 by Joan Snyder.

Snyder is one of the contemporary artists featured in Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera.

The exuberant color and the sense of experimentation breaks from the intense formalism of minimalism, specifically the minimalists grid that was considered to be the most desirable template or touchstone for composition and design for so many artists, painter, and sculptors coming of age in the late 1960s and seventies.

This is a painting on canvas, but she's using a wide range of paint, oil, acrylic and spray enamel.

She's applying paint fairly traditionally in certain instances with a sequence of very clear brush strokes most of those are with the oil paint.

But in other instances she's exploring mark making in other Her process is both additive and subtractive.

She makes strokes by adding individual brush marks, but she also executes strokes in a subtractive matter in some cases, scraping into thick paint to make an absence of a stroke.

Part of the appeal of Joan Snyder's painting is that it almost expands, blows up in scale what an artist's palette might look like where you have globs of paint and you get a sense of the paint being mixed and there's a sense of the full range of an artist's palette that she's preparing to use.

The paint in certain instances and certain passages is piled It's thick and impastoed and coagulated.

But in other instances, she's experimenting with the paint diluted and allowing the strokes to run and to pour over wide expanses of the painting.

The painting serves as a kind of inventory or catalog of painters strokes, some thick, some thin, some stable, some strong, others fluid, others weak.

Snyder here walks a very fine line between experimentation and deliberation.

REVEALING UNSPOKEN TRUTHS.

When I say shifting the gaze, I'm imploring the viewer to set what feels natural aside for a moment and try a different route through the work, and when you do that through a painting, even a familiar painting, you might find something you never expected to find.

Composition.

There are techniques and strategies for guiding the gaze through a particular composition.

I've spent a lot of time studying it and artists spend a lot of time studying it, and they work.

I'm shifting it from the strategy of the original artist's pathway through the work and trying to find some other way to see, not giving in to what will feel most natural.

What I've been doing is actually trying to separate those black characters from the other characters in the paintings who were oppressing them to give the viewer the opportunity to contemplate these characters on their own terms, on their own merit, without the pressures of this oppression that exists within the compositional structure of the painting itself.

I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this.

There is a reason he is the highest in the composition here.

There is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here.

He's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in these paintings.

Painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important, it's coded, but sometimes because of the compositional structure, because of compositional hierarchy, it's hard to see other things.

There's more written about dogs in our history than there are about this other character here, about his dreams, about his hopes, about what he wanted out of life.

I don't want you to think that this is about eradication.

It's not.

The oil that you saw me just put inside of this paint is linseed oil.

It becomes transparent over time.

So eventually what's gonna happen is these faces will emerge a little bit.

What I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to show you, is how to shift your gaze.

When people say that I'm erasing history, they're pointing to the fact that they don't recognize that I'm actually uncovering what was already there.

I'm attempting to make you look at a different part of the painting, not erasing history.

That takes a kind of structural, institutional power that I actually don't have.

We can look at institutional, structural power and we can look and see the ways in which history has been erased.

It hasn't been erased by some random black dude in Connecticut making paintings and putting white paint on it.

That ain't how it works.

I didn't grow up going to museums.

My mother worked really, really hard.

My mother had me when she was very young, she was 15 years old, she worked three jobs usually just to make sure we were taken care of.

I found art very late in my life.

I was 27 by the time I realized that this was really what I wanna do, so I take my kids to the museum every time I have a chance whether they like it or not.

We were in New York City and we were going to the Natural History Museum in New York, and as we were walking up the stairs, we came upon the Teddy Roosevelt sculpture that's out in front of the Natural History Museum.

And Teddy Roosevelt is sitting on the horse looking really strong, boldly holding that horse with one arm, and one side of him is an African American man, and on the left side of him is a Native American man, and as we were walking up those stairs, my oldest son Savion, he said, "Dad, how come he gets to ride and they have to walk?"

And it was one of those moments where you as a parent realize this is gonna take way longer than we really have, but you can't pass up those kinds of teachable moments.

And so we sat on the stairs for a little bit and we talked about it.

And in my house, history is a really important thing, it's alive, and we try to help our kids understand that understanding the past is about understanding the present.

That painting, "Behind the Myths of Benevolence," is about the dichotomy of this country itself, of our country itself.

You have the individual who probably wrote more eloquently about liberty than anyone to ever walk.

Thomas Jefferson, right?

And you have that same individual who values liberty more than life itself withholding liberty from hundreds of people who make his very life possible.

There's a character in that painting, the woman in that painting, is at once Sallie Mae Hemming, in quotations, and at once a stand-in for all of the other black women who were on that plantation.

There are over 300 other enslaved people on that At least 50% of them are women.

And so it's easy for us to focus on that one part of the story and forget that there were other women who were abused in so many different ways, and that painting, it's a little pulling back the curtain to, again, We can't just simply demonize our founding fathers, but it's also important not to deify them.

Let's just find the truth in the middle.

The Forgotten Soldier.

I've been working with this concept for a little while now.

It came as a sort of fascination of the process of making sculpture.

In this particular work, I decided that I wanted the mold to be the finished work.

That is, I wanted you to be able to look, in this case, at George Washington, one of our founding fathers, in his absence, his complete, his perfect absence.

But in his perfect absence is, as I said, the pure potential for all of the good things but the reality of the bad things as well.

In front of that is this figure, this soldier on one knee, prepared for battle, in profile.

The black figure in the front is about those forgotten soldiers, the ones that were there, that participated, that for some reason history forgot.

Let's be honest, it's not for some reason.

It doesn't work with the narrative that slavery makes sense, slavery is good for the nation, black people like to be enslaved.

So we write out those kinds of histories, we just ignore them because they challenge other aspects of what we believe.

My intention is that we see both of these characters at the same time, that there is a visual dialogue between the character who sits in front, this black soldier, and George Washington.

We have this tendency to kind of write our history thinking about those people sitting on that horse, but there is a lot of other characters, those soldiers on the ground, that actually gives their lives for the battle.

In this particular exhibition, we're talking about the black soldiers who were by and large forgotten to history, erased from history.

In putting them together, I'm trying to say let's not prioritize either part of the conversation over the other, let's have both of the conversations at once.

LAYERS OF EXPRESSION.

The graffiti stairwell is this fabulous place in the corner of the Church Fine Arts Building on campus at the University of Nevada Reno.

The Graffiti Stairwell came about pretty organically.

It's my recollection that it started with the painting professor's invitation to his students to use the stairwell as an alternative canvas during a small more intimately scaled summer class.

And it sort of took off from there.

Every square inch of that space is covered and it has been done and redone and redone.

It's just, I mean if it's been more than a decades worth of people painting on those walls, it's gotta a lot of history and a lot of layer.

There are times when, just by the nature of what it is, it can get pretty messy and because people that are painting and participating are not necessarily art students or trained artists, the craftsmanship or the aesthetic quality of things are not always really visually appealing.

But that's okay, I mean I think that it doesn't have to always look beautiful.

The juxtaposition of the really beautifully executed artworks with a lot of the other kind of just present things is just part of what it is.

Graffiti by its very nature comes out of a history of being a kind of guerrilla activist activity and the stairwell is really no exception to that.

Most of the time the works are not attributed.

People are not taking credit for them.

And my understanding of it is that even some of the nicest works that have ended up in there are not art students per se, there's rumor that there's an engineering student that's been doing some really great graffiti in there and former students that have come back.

And have done some things, and so, we don't have an actual way knowing who's doing the work.

Art in and of itself is a tool for communicating ideas and it's often trying to get those ideas that are beyond what we can readily apply language to.

The graffiti stairwell is just the epitome of what that kind of expression is.

And it's important to protect that.

Sometimes that means that things get said that are difficult or challenging and maybe even hurtful.

It's not the intention of the stairwell or our desire to protect that stairwell to protect those kinds of ideals, but rather to protect ideas of using art as a tool for expression.

If there is anything about this stairwell is it's always evolving, it's ever changing.

And so that means if there are difficult things in the hallway that somebody has placed there chances are somebody else is coming right back in over the top of that with another level of expression.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Foundation... 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.

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