This time on Art rocks.

A conversation with Baton Rouge is elder statesman of abstract painting.

Edward premiered Edgar Degas fascination with the laundry women of 19th century New Orleans and Paris, and an immersive wonderland.

These stories, coming up now on Art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine, the work of Baton Rouge abstract artist Ed Primack has been displayed in New York, Texas and Louisiana.

The highly influential artist also spent decades developing younger generations of young artists.

As Professor of Painting and Drawing in LSU's College of Art and design.

He is said to share with us what goes into his work and what he gets out of it.

The actual first real painting I ever saw was a Bonnard in the African Art Institute, and, they borrowed it from the Cleveland Museum.

Yeah, that's the first really serious, great painting.

I visited the Chicago Art Institute in art school days.

I will never forget walking down a hallway and turning.

And there was this huge red event on the wall, a huge thing on the wall.

And I walked up to it.

I had no idea what I was looking at.

It was just a lot of swirling paint and, but what I realized was I didn't know what I was looking at, but I liked it.

It made a big impression on me.

I read the label, said Mark Rothko.

And, it was the first time I'd seen a painting that was about the paint and about a great mystery that, was built into the painting and left a big, big impression on me.

So there are many things there.

There's not just one experience, but many that kind of woke me up as a kid from the Midwest, raised in a small town outside of Akron, Ohio, where, I suddenly was thrust into the world and in a remarkable way.

And, that's why I really believe in identification so fervently.

I really have no idea what would have happened to me had I not, developed an interest in painting and had this kind of, quality.

You have to understand, when I was in art school, Abstract expressionism was all the rage.

And as a young person, just like young people today, they want to get with whatever's happening now.

And I tended to ignore Impressionism.

But later on, I began to see that when you see what 19th century academic painting was, and when you see what Monet was doing with paint and what the Impressionists did, they, jerk painting right out of the narrative mode and, the use of oil paint to disguise itself to create an image.

Impressionist paintings, about the pain creates light and energy and force, even though they're they're quite beautiful.

They're they're very pretty.

You never look at a monet waterlily painting.

And I say, this is quite beautiful.

But what you see first is brush strokes and you see smashing and you see, transparent colors and impasto, and then gradually.

Oh, this is water.

This is a water or this is something in nature.

While I was in high school, I got introduced to jazz, and I got introduced to the idea that, music can be energy and excitement and, going to hear jazz and clubs and all that gave me a whole other way to experience music.

The Duke Ellington band played at my senior prom, and I got to stand this as close to you as I am to Duke Ellington.

And the incredible front line of that band was ten feet away.

Nobody at the senior prom danced.

They just crowded around the bandstand and listened to the Duke Ellington band for two hours.

Well, I lived in New York in the 70s when black musicians were really angry.

And, I heard Coltrane live many times, and, I was always astonished I'd be in Berlin and Coltrane with Charlie Rich solos, and the band would leave, except for the drummer.

His piano player would leave and walk off the stage because they knew what was coming was going to be a tirade.

It was going to be this incredible tirade that was going to happen.

And, I remember taking more sips out of my, paper cup of Jack Daniels, because I knew he was going to get high and I was going to get high with him.

And, that's what I loved about jazz.

It was a social aspect, and it was going wonderful.

The night my friend, my bros, my publisher called me and said, the lowest monk is playing at the Vanguard.

We should go hear him.

And, I'll introduce you to monk with a totally different experience because I, I really never spoke with a jazz musician before, and monk was very approachable, and he liked the fact that I made abstract paintings and that, he identified with that and was very complimentary.

It was a great education, and I understood about how culture gets translated into music.

I'm an art professor that has a middle class, working class background canvas, not more.

That's no longer in that mean, sweet grandmother.

And, great.

Yeah, she was a powerhouse.

She was a widow.

And, my parents lived with her until I was in about the third grade.

So I was raised in the South, and I was raised, in a family of very strong women.

Later on, I understood why I was named Edward.

Her son Edward, my uncle Edward drowned when he was 13 years old.

So, when I was born, I was named after an uncle who died in his youth.

And I was taken to the cemetery.

To see my name on a gravestone when I was about 12 years old.

And they told me the story that I was carrying forth the name of a uncle who, unfortunate drowning as a child.

And not only that, I learned later on, another child drowned trying to save him.

I mean, it was an it was incredible thing.

I made a beloved painting where I used the Vermeer woman as piano.

Piano.

I created a duet with Bill Evans playing with the Vermeer woman at the piano.

This is how my mind works.

And this is what I like about, what I learned at our school is the most important thing as a painter is to be free.

Yeah.

When I'm out here, I can be free.

The freest I can possibly be.

Intuition.

And, And not really sort of following a roadmap, but somehow being led by what's happening in the process is a wonderful thing.

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Just as Edgar Degas was fascinated with the cotton industry of 19th century New Orleans, he was equally enthralled by the Parisian women who did the laundry.

Thus the exhibit digger and the laundress, which was exhibited in Cleveland, Ohio.

He was not alone.

The activities of laundry ladies moved many artists of Degas era to reach for their paintbrushes.

Let's look closer and try to learn why.

Laundries were prevalent in Paris in the late 1800s.

The pay was poor and the work was difficult, even dangerous.

The work that they did expose them to respiratory illnesses, contagious diseases like cholera.

There were several cholera epidemics.

The shops often weren't well ventilated.

The humidity made mold grow.

It was.

It was an extremely hazardous and unpleasant job.

With only a glance at the paintings, the work of laundries might seem like a pleasant chore, but a closer look at some of his work and paintings of laundries by his peers provides more of an idea of what life was like for these women.

I had always thought of Impressionism in a really particular way.

We, you know, we get so used to images of of things like, you know, the ballet and horse races, nightclubs, things like that.

But there was this whole other series of works that Diego had created that depicted working class women, and that was something that I wanted to know more about.

The Guy and the Laundress women, Work and Impressionism presents works by Degas alongside other artists.

Depictions of laundries.

The image of The laundress was widespread in culture, showing up everywhere from postcards to books.

Anyone looking at the paintings would have had all kinds of associations with these women, and the fact that they didn't really adhere to the standards for for women at the time and when they worked in their shops, which were, you know, facing right on the street, they would often just wear their, their undershirts because of the intense heat and steam and humidity in their shops.

And so that was seen as very questionable as well.

The train had a darker side too, with some laundries supplementing low pay with prostitution.

It may come as a surprise to some, but this is one of several life similarities between the laundries and the ballet dancers.

Tigar also painted.

The women who were working as dancers often came from the same place, sort of socioeconomically as the women who worked as laundries, so they were often young women who, who might wear, have move to Paris from the country, were looking for ways to support themselves and their families.

And, you know, even though we might think of dancing as a more prestigious type of work today, the two jobs were actually viewed more similarly in the 19th century.

Another artist featured is Pablo Picasso, with a painting he created in his early 20s.

During his first trip to Paris.

You know, we think of Dagmar and Picasso as artists from two totally different moments in art history and together, as always, coming before Picasso.

But we see them for this very brief moment, kind of doing the same thing at the same time.

The exhibit concludes with two pastels of some of the gods final depictions of laundress.

Yeah, this is an incredibly striking pastel.

He stopped working eventually because of health problems, and he gradually lost his vision over the course of his life.

Late in life, he's using these incredibly bright colors and really sort of jagged marks.

His work becomes incredibly experimental and abstract, and it kind of all comes together.

And in this late work, more than a century after these works were created, there are many opportunities to make connections with life today.

The sort of the project, you know, in 2018.

So it was before the pandemic, and I just started to think about it differently over the course of that time, you know, as there are more and more conversations about essential labor, about the people who do jobs that, you know, other people might not want to do.

So as the world started to change, it started to seem somehow more and more timely.

And so I hope that people will think about some of those connections to, to contemporary life.

There's an interesting experiment underway in downtown Norfolk, Virginia.

The firm Work Program Architects, partnered with Creative agencies to transform three historic buildings into a people focused, five story campus.

Let's meet some of the people who are driving this innovative project.

Now, this place is a canvas.

This place is an opportunity for creatives just like us to make a mark.

You can do things here and you can't do in other places.

That's pretty compelling.

The assembly was all about.

So let's make a mark to show everyone this is here.

It's happening in a really big way.

We made assembly to be sort of the center of gravity for the creative and technology industries here in Hampton Roads, to bring amazing creative and technology companies together, have them share, sort of a space under one roof, do all the amazing work that they're doing for for brands around the world, products and services, and see what happened when those people all got together.

It's an arresting space.

When you walk in these sort of towering ceilings, natural light everywhere.

The historic character of the building, the terrazzo floors, the exposed ceilings, I mean, it's a stunning space on its own when you think about it through the lens of what it's made to do is, I think where it gets really exciting and we've we've built this huge common area through the middle.

We've cut this atrium through the center of the building.

And that's all about not just creating a travel corridor through the building, but creating those connections between people.

As you walk through this first phase, this first building, you're seeing all of these amazing companies, all the people in this work literally building world class products and services just to take that.

It's not just the character of the building, but the character of what's happening here is probably where it gets exciting on a national level.

When we open WPA, we immediately kind of followed through to the core of downtown, as did many of our other friends who started companies.

It was writers, architects, artists working together to attract and retain talent in Norfolk.

All of us have been grappling with the idea of in order to accelerate our own companies, we needed to have all of these spaces and tools at our disposal.

We needed large meeting spaces.

We needed casual meeting spaces.

We needed podcast rooms.

None of our companies could afford to do any of those things on our own.

And thinking about this in terms of pooled or shared resources, could we do this in such a way that you can outfit a building with 15,000ft█ of shared amenities and, you know, not only save on resources doing that, but actually have these spontaneous collisions where we're running into other people, who can help push us and our ideas and our companies forward.

So that's really the the genesis of the idea.

And then that took a very physical form, in the design of the building.

How do you design a building so that it, it welcomes people in, it draws them up through central spaces where people are, you know, our it was forced to run into each other.

And that's the stair that spans from the lobby up to the fifth floor, the new penthouse.

And that's how we run into each other every day.

We were the first tenant to move into assembly.

We are the front door to the entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem here in Hampton Roads.

And the seven, five, seven.

So privileged to have studios, which is a one of a kind model, be housed in an office campus as unique as assembly, where we're surrounded with innovators and creatives and people that are challenging the status quo and whatever their respective industry is, being able to come together to share ideas, to be able to network, to be able to connect.

The magic comes together all of the time.

Connecting investors, mentors, people that are running successful startups, everything in the middle that all coming together under one roof is just absolutely invaluable.

My grandfather was an architect and he said that anybody can design a building, but what separates the good from the great is all and the details.

And there has not been a detail that has not been carefully thought of throughout this entire project.

It's hard to believe that it's 102 year old building that we're standing in, because it certainly doesn't look like that.

There was certainly a lot of dreaming and a lot of, pinning and sketching and all of that for, for years, probably the better part of a year before we actually sat down and started doing this.

Drew is the type of client that wants to see almost every possible iteration.

So in every programmatic piece or every room in here, we kind of tessellated in every different direction, so you could see what it looks like or felt like to have the sunlight come through with the shared meeting room here in the coffee shop here versus this other location.

So we probably have 50 different floor plans for this building.

It took some time.

Goal number one is bring out the character of the space.

I mean, the character of the space by itself is remarkable.

If we can just bring that out, we get a magnificent building.

And then our challenge was, how do we add to that a modern character that respects the history and feels appropriate for the space, but brings it to life as this modern business hub?

It's the difference in how someone answers the question, why should I go back to the office?

We've all been very comfortable working from home.

We get dressed comfortably, we're close to the fridge.

We could take walks.

Why in the heck would anyone want to come back to the office?

I think the answer is a really well-designed space that allows you to collaborate and to work together efficiently, and have spaces that feel like home and made no sense financially.

It was a stretch, to say the least.

It's, you know, put really everything on the line for this project.

It was about the vision.

And, you know, I think we realized a part of that.

But there's a there's a huge piece of this vision that has yet to come.

And so that's what's keeping me going.

There is a place in Reno, Nevada that is referred to as a potential guest workshop.

Visitors encounter an upside down land, an 11,000 square foot immersive art installation inspired by bedtime stories.

It features more than 200 sculptures and is chock full of color and wonder.

Let's take a look.

I was born kind of in the middle of nowhere in Montana, and they thought I was just so strange, just very, very overactive imagination.

And then I've had a very lucky go at this career.

I sold my first painting when I was six.

I've never done anything else.

Potential.

The workshop is a space where you can come and really create your own dreams.

We have a gallery.

The Savage Mystic Gallery is located here.

Then we have a large space that is currently an immersive.

Upside down land was created by a house of infinite potential.

And that's what the potential is call ourselves.

When we make an immersive, our partner here at Potential is Morgan Savage.

Dared me.

And then, like any moment with any artist, they're like, what are you actually going to do though?

And then the only thing that came to my mind were these stories for my kid, because unlike, I think everyone will enjoy that, I could see the vision from the very start.

I felt transported to childhood.

Definitely.

I think everyone will instantly get it.

Even if they don't know any of these stories.

I think they'll walk in and be like, oh, imagination.

So you start off here in this bedroom.

The bedroom is already odd to begin with, and then you go through the closet.

You wind up in a desert and then you have a choice.

There's a grass root and then a monument or temple root.

And then there's just this cave looking sand castle.

You can go that way.

Each of them lead to these different lands that you can explore.

And if you want to go up things and looks like you should crawl up things, you definitely should go up there because it's totally worth it.

We have 41 artists that worked on this.

Some of our leads, they're all like heads of things of their own, so they all have their own teams.

So we had really an all star group.

I know that's like what everybody says about their group, but it's really rare that many alphas have that many.

Like, I don't need anybody else from my own planet want to make anything together.

I'm Jesse Sprocket Genesee, and I was the lead artist for Octopus Ocean, which is the section of upside down land we started by creating the fabric ocean that's above.

It's a football field worth of fabric.

It took a really long time to hang each piece so that they look like waves.

For me, this project was just a massive teamwork project among so many artists that worked so hard.

Those days where this place was just packed full of people working on things are like some of my favorite days about this project.

It's so beautiful to have made this place with so many different artists, and they each have their own nook and their own like expression and their own skills that they've brought to it.

And then together, they're combined to be this wonderful land.

And what else is better than that, really?

It's a great showcase of the art of Reno.

I really like seeing people come in here and enjoy the place that we made for them.

We had some scenes in here the other day and I could hear them and they were like, oh, are we in the ocean right now?

It even smells like the ocean.

We're in the ocean.

And it was just exactly what I wanted.

And it was so cool to just watch people walk through and have that experience.

The reason that I create any piece of art is one for love.

And then two, I would really like to remind people how made up everything is, and I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think the best you can think of is that it's all going to explode.

And that's like, that's the only way it can go.

We need to have bigger imaginations than that.

So I hope that when you walk through this, that you see, wow, I'm, I'm going to go out and make my street how I want my street to be.

You'll find that your neighbors want that to.

Well, that is that for this edition of Art rocks, part of our 12 consecutive season.

But as always, each episode leads off by showcasing the work of a Louisiana artist.

And you can find every episode in our online archive at lpb.org/art rocks.

And if you love stories like these, consider picking up a free copy of Country Roads magazine, a vital guide for learning what's shaping Louisiana's cultural life all across the state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thank you to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB.

Offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more, West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.