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!

SEEKING TO CREATE DIALOGUE BETWEEN DIFFERENT WORLD VIEWS, SANTA CLARA PUEBLO SCHOLAR DMITRI BROWN SHARES AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT FROM A TEWA PERSPECTIVE.

CUBAN MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST JUANA VALDES CREATED "REST ASHORE" TO EXPLORE THE MIGRATION EXPERIENCE AND THE REFUGEE CRISIS.

REIMAGINING THEATER, NATASHA TSAKOS WANTS TO CONVERT THE ENERGY AND EMOTIONS GENERATED BY "HUMANODE" TO POSITIVELY IMPACT BILLIONS OF PEOPLE.

JACKSON POLLACK'S 1950 DRIP PAINTING "AUTUMN RHYTHM" CHANGED THE VERY CONCEPT OF PAINTING.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

CREATING DIALOGUE.

[Music] >>Ebony Isis Booth: The Manhattan Project moves into New Mexico and the nuclear age begins in the mid-20th century.

Why are you interested in this history?

>>Dmitri Brown: Because of my family connections to Santa Clara Pueblo, because of growing up and visiting Santa Clara and feeling or recognizing this strange mysterious relationship between Los Alamos and the Pueblos and I wanted to know how that began and that took me back to 1942 when Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves and other Manhattan Project officials were searching for a scientific headquarters for the Manhattan Project and they started off at a site around Jemez Springs on the other side of the Jemez mountain range from the Tewa Pueblos and he remembered from horseback riding trips and his youth that there was this boys ranch school that had magnificent views across the Rio Grande valley and toward the Sangre de Cristo mountain range and he said, "let's go there."

And so these group of officials traveled over the mountain range and they saw this site and realized that this is the spot and they ended up in the western edge of the Tewa world.

>>Ebony: What's interesting about that to you?

>>Dmitri: It's very easy to think about Los Alamos as a gravitational force.

There were physicists from all over that came to Los Alamos, there were Tewa maids, Tewa workers that were bused up to Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

There's the idea that Los Alamos was a center and when we think about history in the 20th century especially Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project are, that's a pivotal moment but there were also other centers of the world just down the valley in the Tewa Pueblos and I think it's important to look at that history, the history of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos from Tewa Pueblo perspectives as well.

>>Ebony: How did you first learn about it?

>>Dmitri: I first learned about it through stories that I grew up hearing as a child, and so my grandmother never gave me books.

I think she maybe gave me two and American Prometheus was one of those books and it always felt like when my grandmother gave me books, if and whenever she did, that I should probably read them because there's something important there and I'm normally a very slow reader but I read it in about a week or two and I, because I was so excited to talk with her about it and I remember sitting in her living room on large brown swivel chairs and kind of going back and forth about the book and she asked me what my favorite part was and I just thought Oppenheimer is amazing.

He's such a genius.

He's got all these interesting quirks.

He's a controversial figure.

He's the father of the atomic age and she kind of just nodded patiently, listening to me talk.

She just kind of smiled there and nodded and then she said that her favorite part of the book was that so much of it had taken place just up the road, and as I was reading through the whole book I didn't realize that proximity.

I didn't realize how close it really was and it is just a 15-minute drive from her house in Santa Clara Pueblo to get to Los Alamos and that opened up a door of possibilities.

What else was there in that relationship and the connection between the Pueblos and Los Alamos and the proximity between the Pueblos and Los Alamos?

>>Ebony: How did you respond to Oppenheimer's theories?

>>Dmitri: He gave a speech in 1953 where he talks about the 'house called science', and he describes it in such a loving way.

He describes his room of atomic physics and the men who built, it the architects who built it, and who arranged the scaffolding or even arranged the furniture and it becomes a way to relate to Oppenheimer, to appreciate his deep love of what he was doing on a scientific level and I think that was really important for him because he could only make sense of the atomic age, of creating atomic weapons because he was able to isolate his deep love of science from the practical implications of that scientific project.

The building of atomic weapons, to him, was not science.

The way he thought about it was this magnificent structure that built into the unknown.

My grandmother, coming back to her again, Rina Swentzell was an architect and has described houses, the importance of houses, what houses meant in the Pueblo.

So, Oppenheimer's idea of the house called science became a way to then put ideas of physics in relation to be Tewa concepts of houses and they're very different.

The house of science exists on this sort of, in a void of sorts.

It's a beautiful structure and Oppenheimer clearly appreciates it but that's so different from houses in the Tewa world, is kind of, being built from the earth.

Emerging from the earth, being connected to the earth, being also alive in many ways, too being living breathing entities, that live and also die too, and go back into the earth houses as being almost members of the community and to have this juxtaposition between Tewa houses and the house called science where there's there is love and beauty involved or invested in both but being able to center on that metaphor of the 'house' as a way to put physics or science and Tewa philosophy into dialogue was, I felt, a really productive way of approaching this history.

>>Ebony: What does it mean to you that the Manhattan Project took place in the Tewa world?

>>Dmitri: Speaking with elders about the significance of the Manhattan Project has shown me that many aspects of Tewa culture struggle to accommodate the changes that the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos brought to the Pueblos, to Pueblo life, and you know, rather than seeing Los Alamos as, Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project as only a negative thing that exists on the Pajarito plateau and causes environmental degradation and leads to destructive weapons on a global scale, without the balance that there can be communication and dialogue I think we're stuck in an 'us versus them' mentality.

We're stuck with just sheer antagonism and I think part of what Tewa philosophy tells us is that we have to come together, we have to share stories and memories and it's through those sharing of stories and memories from all perspectives that we can then move forward.

>>Ebony: Thank you.

A RISKY JOURNEY.

When artists speak, they are simultaneously using imagery, right?

We're translating everything we do in our minds visually.

It's an automatic.

We don't even think about it.

It became really clear to me that I needed to work with a moving image, right?

There's several sequences that take place underwater.

And there's just, no...there was no other way of representing that.

I'm Juana Valdes, I was born in Cuba and I came with my family to the United States in 1971 through the Freedom Flights.

The exhibition is "Rest Ashore."

The idea was always to do a video in which there would be no physical bodies in the video.

I wanted the viewer who walked into the space to feel like they were occupying that space, that sort of sensation, that they were part of this experience.

As a Cuban.

I know what it means to migrate by sea because we have been as a community experiencing this for the last 50 years.

And so I wanted to use that personal experience and that knowledge and that understanding.

And I wanted to take that and then open it up to the greater global crisis that is happening.

And especially that started to happen in 2015 in Europe because of the Syrian refugees.

When we think of our migration right now, we imagine people in third world countries coming to America, even to Europe for escaping poverty, sometimes war or famine.

But we are experiencing the pandemic right now that has made like...if you were In some cities, people have chosen to leave the city and go to the country.

So the whole idea, partly with the video and not having an individual be represented in the video, was to deal with that, and due to climate change or due to some other, situation, any one of us at any particular time right now could, or would be forced to migrate.

When you first enter the space is you sort of dealing with the history of what you are about to encounter and the very first thing you encounter is a wall of pallets.

So you really don't know what you're entering.

And in that way, it kind of gets a little bit menacing and it was done intentionally because it was meant to give you the sensation that maybe you were entering the back of a shipyard, right.

And what it would be like if you were going to be taking this kind of risky journey, when you go from being a person to also being thought of as cargo and as a package.

In here, you're seeing the contemporary artwork, right?

The video takes you from one day in the life.

The journey begins and it takes you through the whole process of what would happen if maybe there was a capsize.

And, the video ends very slowly with a sort of small view that then enlarges itself on what seems like countless numbers of clothing that have washed up on the shore then slowly but surely the video begins to expand and move up and you see the ocean again.

And then the sun sets and you hear the motor almost very far in the distance.

And the journey begins again.

At Locust Projects.

We're a place of yes for artists.

So we let artists really realize their wildest dreams, most ambitious ideas.

We're really unique in the Miami arts ecosystem.

In that way, we commission artists to create these large-scale site-specific installations.

So you'll never see these exhibitions in another place, only here at Locust while they're on view.

They're typically immersive.

And we really give artists the opportunity to experiment in new media with new ideas.

In our 2020/21 season we're focusing on Miami women artists and turning the space over to them.

So we've seen in this season, Christina Pettersson, who was able to realize a project she had been wanting to do for more than 10 years, which was to create a cemetery, to cover the floors with pine needles and to fill the room with the sounds of the song called In the Pines.

And actual tombstones that memorialized really important figures from South Florida's history, but also memorialized the creatures that have been lost due to development in the pine Rocklands of the Everglades.

In the case of Juana Valdes, again, you're really seeing Locust Project's mission in motion.

This is the first time that Juana has had the opportunity to work in video.

And here she's doing it in massive, large scale.

Artists, in order to have careers, have to have exhibitions.

And that's where Locust Projects comes in.

A lot of artists will have their very first exhibition at Locust and more established artists will be able to do something they weren't able to do before.

FROM THE LITERAL TO THE IMAGINED.

Here.

I want to show you something.

My name is Natasha Tsakos and I am...are you ready?

A Show maker.

I went to New World School of the Arts for college and realized very quickly is that I, I didn't want to just be an actor.

I wanted to tell my own stories.

I was excited about the potential of theater, but not so much about its execution at the moment.

I create things that do not exist...yet.

Meanwhile at New World I was performing in nightclubs and performing in the streets to support myself.

When you're street performing or when you're interacting, with this level of interaction, you are sharing a magic moment.

And so all these worlds sort of collapsed and coalesced naturally, right?

The club culture elements came in and the rawness and the interactivity from the streets, the classical training.

And so I think naturally when I graduated, I realized, well, I want to write my own shows.

And I started doing that.

And the result was so rigid and linear.

You know, what I was imagined was shape-shifting, it was like a, like a drug trip.

I don't do drugs, but I feel like I naturally trip.

And I feel like that is how I want to express the stories and the journeys, um, that I want to share.

I realized that I didn't want to produce those linear, rigid shows.

I had this epiphany and realized the words were the very problem, because the words grounded us in the literal, instead of lifting us up to another level, and that is what's interesting.

So I stripped the words from the equation and I said, well, where do I go from, from there?

So I started doodling, literally my next story, and just, and the doodles took form and one doodle and next and the next and the next and the next.

And then I suddenly I had an adventure.

I had a journey.

I had a story.

Upwake tells the story of zero, who is a modern day toon character, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to make sense of the two.

And it's, it's definitely a commentary on the modern day life.

In a way I want to make it dynamic.

And I wanted drawers to open and crazy things to come out and I wanted, Zero's co-workers to be headless.

Um, of course, because zero while he's always dreaming is the only one who has his head on his shoulder.

And, and then making his way to a ginormous, almost like what, what, what is now a data room, right?

Uh, uh, folders and files where all these headless, men come out.

Boop!

And then of course it has to scan himself because we know we need to be more than one in order to do anything these days.

We're living the, the, the literal life.

All of us.

The unliteral is so much more the abstract, right?

It's so much more interesting.

And I, and that is sort of the realm in which I like to, to live in.

The story always comes first and then the technology needs to support that process.

But then there's sort of a feedback loop because as we then start to go into production, technology will also inspire, um, possibilities that I might not have thought of.

I'm not trying to do anything with the stage.

I'm trying to do something to people.

And that leads me to, HUMANODE, which is what I've been working on for, for four and a half years nearly.

So I went to a program called singularity university based in NASA and Moffett field, California.

We are tasked to come up with an idea that will positively impact the lives of a billion people.

How can we convert the emotions and energy generated during a show into tangible actions that have positive impact and then scale that?

HUMANODE tells the story of the last human brain kept captive in a surreal scientific traveling show led by a demented headmaster.

And tonight the brain escapes into people's homes, as it tries to make sense of the world.

We are going through this extraordinary ride, right?

That highlights and raises awareness on some of the most important causes.

And then at key moments, your phone is being triggered to do something about it.

If you want to, you'll actually get to donate, sign petitions.

It will be a live, epic production when the time is right, but it can also be an interactive reality movie.

I push the envelope by asking what now, what next, and what if?

I am...imagination.

RHYTHM AND CADENCE.

Randy Griffey: We're looking at Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" from 1950.

The painting came into the collection in 1957, and it's one of the treasures of the Met's modern collection.

Pollock is most remembered as a key figure in American art of the 20th century for these large scale, so called drip paintings, which he started to do in the late 1940's and into the early 1950's.

These works have a great sense of immediacy for a range of reasons.

One is that they're large, which relative to your own scale makes you feel a little bit small by comparison.

One of the ways in which Pollock played a key role in changing the very concept of painting is that he moved the canvas from the easel to the floor, and he also began working with common household enamel paint, he liked this paint because it was very viscous.

And so it's the kind of paint that you can throw, and it creates these dynamic, drips and dribbles and these whips of paint that seem to be captured in space on the picture plane.

In the case of "Autumn Rhythm," some of the paint is thin and elegant, and quite graceful, whereas other passages are dense and more aggressive and thicker.

There are passages also of the impasto where he's used parts of the enamel paint that have dried and created a kind of skin, a three dimensionality on the surface of the picture even as the paint registers is flat.

When people first encounter Pollock's work, they perceive it as fully intuitive, improvisational, without any kind of plan or guiding principle.

But in fact, as you look at multiple works by Pollock, you can see that each canvas is distinct and different from another.

If you look closely at "Autumn Rhythm," to the right of center, and toward the bottom, as we see it on the wall, there's a little flick of red paint.

It's a little drop of red paint, once you see it, you can't unsee it because it seems so anomalous.

One wonderful thing about Pollock's technique is this embrace of accident, and embrace of the effects of chance.

The title "Autumn Rhythm", the word rhythm really wonderfully ties to the sense of rhythm and cadence that's part and parcel of his gestural painting style.

And what I love about this work is that this great sense of growth and evolution in a way ties to the change of seasons and the ebbs and flows of nature in the course of a year.

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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.