(gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Cap off the perfect outfit with Tiff Mansfield.

Learn all about Arts, Letters, and Numbers, and catch performance from Ginger Geezus.

♪ Make way for Ginger Geezus ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chad and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M%T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts and we invite you to do the same.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowic and this is AHA, a house for arts, a place for all things creative.

Tiff Mansfield is an artist that will leave you brimming with happiness.

We caught up with Tiff in Schenectady at her new storefront Hat Pin Peril where she showed us some of the captivating creativity she sews into her bespoke hats.

(upbeat music) - My name is Tiff Mansfield and I am a milliner.

A milliner is a person who makes and trims women's hats.

I have, from the time I can remember, admired women's hats, whether they were my grandmother's hats when she was going to church on a Sunday morning or just being out and about and seeing women's hats in store windows.

So a lot of my style is that timeless vintage appeal with an updated look, updated colors.

(upbeat music continues) I was an attorney.

I was doing estate planning in Virginia and Kentucky for my clients and was trying desperately to run the household.

My husband was in medical residency training, so his schedule was crazy and I was essentially raising these three children on my own.

I had a client call me one day and it was a speakerphone conversation and my eldest child comes tearing in and says, "Mom, child, just flushed a duck down the toilet."

Fortunately, my client was a friend and thought it was absolutely hysterical.

However, in hindsight, as as I was looking at that, I went, hmm, it's probably time for a change.

A month later, I happened to be in a shoe store in Louisville, this was in January, and the woman at the store, the proprietor was going to try to sell me a hat and I kept telling her, I'm not into hat racing, I don't really have any friends that have derby parties, I don't really have any friends at all 'cause we just moved to town and my husband comes and says, "Oh, no, no, she makes hats" and I looked up at him and said, "Yeah, sure, I make," I don't make hats.

I have no idea where this is coming from.

The woman said, "Oh, I'd love to see some of your designs" and I said, "Oh, absolutely."

So I ended up just drawing in an empty notebook that I had and that was on a Saturday morning and by Monday morning, I had an entire ring notebook full of drawings of hats and each one excited me more than the last.

It honestly felt like somebody had taken a tuning fork and put it right on top of my head.

I had never considered myself to be a creative person.

I had never considered myself to be an artist of any type.

You get creative with the law, you tend to go to jail, so I was more excited about this than I had been about anything in a very long time.

(gentle music continues) What has always drawn me to vintage accessories and vintage clothes is the fact that they were made so well.

You weren't supposed to wear something only a handful of times and then by another one the next season, you were supposed to wear it for years.

Heck, a lot of the stuff you were supposed to pass on to your kids.

That's the kind of gold that I have here.

My three things that have been sort of my guiding lights for this is well-made, well-loved, well-tended.

(gentle music continues) I will first pick out a block.

A block is something on which you stretch your material.

I have dozens of blocks, most of which are from the 1950s and before, and many of them are actually over a hundred years old and then I look at that and I go, okay, what kind of material is going to be the best fit for this block?

A block that's going to be large and need a lot of stability to it, you're gonna want a thicker felt for something like that, so you take your felt and you dampen it somehow, you make it malleable and you stretch it over that form and then you affix it so that it retains that form once the material is dried and cooled.

In Europe, you would just have to stretch it out, kind of over the form in order to get it off and sometime that would result in deforming the actual hat, so Americans took to making puzzle blocks.

Puzzle blocks are wonderful because they definitely are one of a kind.

They have to be hand carved.

They have individual pieces so that when you're done and you've blocked around the hat, you turn it upside down and you remove the bottom and then you've got these different pieces that can be taken out one by one, leaving the hat in its perfect shape.

So after you remove the form, it starts to look like a hat, but your work is far from over from there.

Many times I will wire the brim of my hat to maintain its form and its shape and then you put a a hat ribbon in it, the sweatband that goes on the inside of the hat and the fun part begins and that's where you can decorate it.

(gentle music continues) I love sitting here in my shop and watching people pass the windows and look at the hats and smile.

There is something inherently playful about hats.

They add that pop of standing out from the crowd.

Wouldn't it be nice if you're having just a really, really rotten day to just be able to put on a single piece of clothing, look at yourself in the mirror, and instantly feel a little bit better about the world?

I feel like that's something that we could all use a little more of right now.

(gentle music continues) - Arts, Letters, and Numbers.

As a nonprofit arts, education, and publishing organization dedicated to promoting creative exchanges across a wide range of disciplines.

Jade Warwick spoke with its founding director David Gersten and Director of Operations Steven Lawrence to learn more about this creative hub in Avril Park, New York.

- Hey, David and Steve, welcome to "A House for Arts" today.

Explain what Arts, Letters, and Numbers is to a person who just walking up to your space don't even know what they're getting into.

- Well, I'd start by saying it's a school, but it's a school that's different than most in the sense that we don't really have a curriculum that exists in advance of the people who are coming.

So we bring people from many, many disciplines and also from all over the world.

We have probably 50 people on the campus right now, probably from 25 countries.

- Wow.

- And many, many disciplines.

We have poets, painters, performance artists, plumbers and the idea is if you get a bunch of people together with a bunch of different ways of knowing, some of that is disciplines, then there's an interaction that starts to happen and in a way, it's that transformation that is our curriculum, if you will.

It's constantly evolving.

It's kind of like a living system in the sense that depending on who's there, you get a very different set of questions that people are going after, but we're a school.

- At it's core, nice.

- I spent my whole life in higher education, in art and architecture and engineering.

A lot of different disciplines.

- So what made you start this then with that being your background?

- I grew up in Albany and I went to Albany High, went to Hackett Middle School, and my family had a large custom truck manufacturing down in North Albany, down on Broadway, but 40 years ago, I moved to New York.

I went to Cooper Union and started teaching there and then I was a dean of architecture eventually and over the years, I ended up doing things in 20 countries and there was a sort of thing, I kept meeting incredible communities in Bolivia and Beijing and Denmark and Chile and I just sensed how amazing it would be if they could meet each other and so that was about 15 years ago that I wanted to build a place where they could and so I planted it up here because I also wanted people from Albany High and from Troy and Schenectady and this region to be meeting all the incredible people that come to the campus.

- So I know you guys have this philosophy of craft 'cause you work again, as you said, you're working with like, plumbers, artists, philosophers, like all types, like mechanics I think you said, so you have this philosophy of like craft.

what does that mean?

Wanna answer that one, Steve?

- Well, yeah, I'll just quick say I grew up in craft and I feel very lucky.

When I was a kid, I worked in our truck shop from five to 18 years old.

Everybody knows music is a culture.

It's not just making sound and it's the same with craft, with wood, metal, plumbing, heavy timber, leather work, all of them, so I think bringing many different crafts together, including painting and music and performance art, with welding and heavy timber construction.

There's all kinds of shared interactions that can happen.

- I think it's similar if you were to look for similarities between different people in different cultures, they all have language and with the arts, all of the arts, even artisanship, but craft itself outside of what wouldn't otherwise typically be considered an art form, all of the arts possess craft.

So by using craft as an anchor point, we focus on craft in general and then as everyone comes into proximity, the discussions around craft, not necessarily just the art or that particular art form, and it opens up a door for interaction where one of the residents mentioned to me the other day, if you're a master in a art form, it almost requires you to go outside of your form to engage something else on the outside to learn something new and then that's required for genius within your own art form.

There has to be something else dynamic, integrated.

So with the focus of craft, you can touch and draw all those together.

- Yeah, it's kind of like the catalyst or the jumping off point.

- We can all talk about craft.

- Yeah, I love that.

- Right.

- So I know arts, letters, and numbers, you said it gives a yes in advance.

What does that mean?

Why is it important?

- That's funny.

Yes in advance is actually, for me, it's one of the deep parts of the whole project.

Partially it has to do with embracing the unpredictable.

I often say we don't have a lot of rules at ALN, but one of 'em is if we know what's gonna happen, we don't do it and the other piece really comes from my sort of decades long time in higher education, which had to do with a lot of governances and curriculum committees and search committees and endless sort of control.

They present it as quality control, but in my experience, it's actually just control and I really over time recognize that as a systemically detrimental to education, to art, to life and I realized we need it and so when I founded Art, Letters, and Numbers, I really took very seriously this idea because I've experienced decades of these committees as basically older people controlling younger people, shifting vote counting.

It's really terrible and I always say, look, education is an art.

It's an art in itself.

It's an art of creating atmospheres where people can ask their questions, where people can inhabit their questions, they can go after what they're curious about and we have to respect and treat educators like artists.

So if a poet or a painter or a musician had to present their song or a poem to a committee and have this committee then like adjust it for them or tell them how that poem has to be changed to meet these criteria, it would be ridiculous and I feel the same way about teachers.

I think that we have to treat them like poets and musicians and give them a yes in advance.

So the technicality of it, I'll try to be more succinct, but the technicality of yes in advance is this.

There are no committees, there are no search committees, there are no curriculum committees and anybody who comes there, however they get there, has a yes in advance and by that I specifically mean, and I include myself in this, before they tell me what they want to do, I say yes.

and I do that very intentionally because I want them to psychologically have the freedom like they would in their studio.

You're a musician or you're a dancer, you're a painter.

You're not wondering if somebody is gonna approve this.

I don't want anybody wondering if David's gonna like what they want to do.

I want everybody to know I'll help you.

I'm saying yes now.

Tell me what it is 'cause I'll be happy to help you try to figure out how we do it, but I don't want you wondering if it's gonna be approved, so it's pretty significant stance.

- Yeah, it's a very collaborative model as well.

- Operationally, it could look like an artist wanting to be on the roof to paint, so we have a flat roof.

It's up there, but we're gonna get it up there and let's not be foolish about it.

but it means so much to so many people and what's interesting too, briefly, is that when you have a series of artists that are all operating within an atmosphere of a yes in advance and if we know what's going to happen, we don't do it, then there's not a critical eye of the other artists upon the other artists and it allows people to let their guard down so that when they're creating, they don't, as an artist, we're so subtly in the background wondering how this is gonna turn out, how will they approval, how will people think of this, or what will they think of it, and it's such a beautiful atmosphere to be able to finally inhabit, even for a seasoned artist, because there's still the critical eye in the background if it's a client or a piece of work that they're creating, it still isn't a yes in advance.

So if everyone's seeing what everyone's doing, we know that they're exploring, we know they don't know what's gonna happen, and then everyone else can operate at that same wavelength.

It's very liberating.

- Yeah, it definitely is.

So what do you have for like, folks to, I guess, be involved in, I know you have your hands in a couple of different things, residencies, programs, et cetera, but let's give a little bit of breakdown to the audience.

- We run programs year round.

In the summer, we always have a kind of, for many years, the first five to eight years, we'd call it the summer workshop.

That's evolved a lot over the last 15 years and so for the last two years, we've been structuring it as what we call Craft 101 and there's a bit of an invention in there.

We bring in, as I said lots of different people, mimes and they lead programs and the participants come, and again, they are a mix of very international, we have people from Istanbul and Iran and Chile and Bolivia and Berlin all right now and we bring in youth and that's part of the idea is that the young people get to mix and mingle with people they probably aren't gonna meet and one of the inventions is, it's a little cousin I guess of yes or no.

You don't have to decide in advance or stay in any one program, right, meaning you can say, I taught a drawing thing for three, people come for drawing or they come for painting, they come for music or masonry, but using your peripheral vision, 'cause a lot's going on at the same time on the campus, you can just go and veer and get involved in something else, so you could be there fixing lights, do an electric program fixing lights, but then you're hanging the lights in the barn because there's a theater company that's gonna do a play and you could be a 15-year-old kid who just came from the vocational school to learn electric.

Next thing you know, you're in the play and you start sharing your story and so the idea is that it allows a lot of movement of people's questions.

- Then you add the director of the play has an electrical issue at home, so then they take a couple of hours at the Electrical 101 so that they could break it down.

- I always say you spend the morning with the mime and the afternoon with the mason and it changes your life.

Masonry is never the same after you're with the mime.

- I love that.

I like the part of just being able to be around so many diverse cultures and skillset.

You really can become a more well-rounded artist by being at ALN, which is really beautiful.

- One of the really important pieces is the integration.

That's a whole nother conversation, but the integration of what you can take from the experience and then moving forward, how do you integrate that into a world that is in many ways antithetical to what we are doing.

We're doing what we do because of what is not out there.

- It's all related.

Well, thank you folks for stopping by and telling us a little bit more about Arts, Letters, and Numbers.

Can't wait to be more involved myself and I appreciate you both.

Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you for having us.

- Great to see you.

- Please welcome Ginger Geezus.

(upbeat music) ♪ Ooo ♪ (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) ♪ Got my bottle, get my milk ♪ ♪ So I can roll wherever part of town ♪ ♪ I got it going now ♪ ♪ So come on, sugar, just give me a shout ♪ ♪ So bad enough hearing those spots, girl ♪ ♪ Lying like a fool and I'm looking for love ♪ ♪ I know it's gonna be one of those nights, girl ♪ ♪ Just take it to the stars I'm living for ♪ ♪ Love me baby, please don't start ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, all the way through the dark ♪ ♪ Love me, baby, please start ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, give me all that you got ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ Got it going for speed of hell ♪ ♪ Goin' off the rails, now I'm seeing red ♪ ♪ I've got brakes on this one way track ♪ ♪ Ooo, baby, no looking back ♪ ♪ Come now and you can be there at one ♪ ♪ Better watch yourself flying too close to the sun ♪ ♪ Let's go and sippin' outta our fire, baby ♪ ♪ Lock and load lord and take it higher and higher ♪ ♪ Love me, baby, please don't start ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, all the way through the dark ♪ ♪ Love me, baby, please don't stop ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, give me all that you got ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ Love me, baby ♪ (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) ♪ Love me, baby, please don't stop ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, all the way to the top ♪ ♪ Love me, baby, please stop ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, with every bone that you got ♪ ♪ Love me, baby, please don't stop ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, all the way to the top ♪ ♪ Love me, baby, please don't stop ♪ ♪ Love me, sugar, give me all that you got, yeah ♪ (no audio) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) ♪ Flyin' high now, sinkin' so low ♪ ♪ Feeling extra pretty ♪ ♪ Wanna take you to the show ♪ ♪ Runnin' wild with you, like I'm in a dream ♪ ♪ Runnin' on empty now, please more Genny Cream ♪ (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) ♪ Rising tide now, washing out to sea ♪ ♪ I gotta find you before you find another me ♪ ♪ I just can't stand the thought of living without your love ♪ ♪ If you should ever leave me, please God save me from above ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ Save me ♪ ♪ Wow ♪ (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) ♪ Make for way for Ginger Geezus ♪ ♪ A freight train coming through ♪ ♪ Make way for Ginger Geezus ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ Running on empty ♪ ♪ Gonna need some of that real gas ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Get on board or get out of way ♪ ♪ 'Cause we coming through ♪ ♪ With a whole head of steam ♪ ♪ Yeah, baby ♪ ♪ Running through this like it's a dream ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ Make way for Ginger Geezus ♪ ♪ A freight train coming through ♪ ♪ Make way for Ginger Geezus ♪ ♪ A freight train coming through ♪ ♪ A freight train coming through ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ A freight train coming through, yeah ♪ (gentle music) - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, be sure to visit wmht.org/aha and connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz.

Thanks for watching.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chad and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts and we invite you to do the same.