- [Jason] Next on curate.

- [Kristen] My photographs are about how they present themselves to the world, what's important to them and how we communicate to an audience, who they are as people.

- [Jordan] We're not really in the genre that you make money with.

It's really just a love for music.

- [David] We really wanted to preserve the architecture and the statement that our existing building made.

It really is a piece of art.

- This is "Curate".

Welcome, I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

Thanks for joining us for the first episode of our seventh season.

- We come to you today from Williamsburg and the campus of the College of William & Mary.

- Specifically, we're at the Muscarelle Museum, the home for the college's vast art collection, which has been growing for more than 300 years.

The museum stands at an inflection point with extraordinary new endeavors on the horizon.

- We'll have more on the Muscarelle's exciting future later in the show, but we start with another Williamsburg artist.

Kristen Skeese works in multiple art forms, combining fiber, photography and an imagination both fun and clever.

She has created a series of photographs of family and friends, colleagues and acquaintances decked out in her signature cozies, a sort of sweater but with fewer holes.

Her works are now showing up in collections and museums.

We caught up with the artist to learn about her inspiration for these quirky works.

Kristen Skeese is our 757 featured artist.

- So I knit cozies for people.

I think tea cozy.

(triumphant music) Like a British tea cozy.

Just a warm covering to keep something warm and snugly, but my cozies are a little more aggressive in their cozying.

They are full body coverings that covers most of their identifiable features.

The legs, they're almost always bare because I find that hysterical to feel like people aren't wearing pants under the cozy, and I also think knees are kind of funny.

I love art history in general, so I was really inspired by portraiture painting and estate painting with people showing off their estate by posing in a painting.

And so I thought of these very constructed, very posed, very formal photographs, and that's how I kind of began to think of them not as cozies but as cozy photographs.

So, for me, the photograph is the piece.

The cozy is a part of the piece.

Through that, I kind of have this conversation with them about how they present themselves to the world, what's important to them, and how we communicate to an audience, who they are as people.

It started with my friends and family because they are very willing to go along with my ideas.

Oh, yeah, there you go.

Yeah, there you go.

My crazy artist things that I come up with.

So they're used to that.

This is very first of the series, and it's my mother and dad.

And basically how it went was, "Mom, dad, can you tow your Airstream to the Walmart parking lot and stand in these knitted things for me?"

"Okay, fine, I guess."

I had planned their cozy colors to coordinate and also go with the silver of the Airstream a little bit and feel a little mid-century in palette.

I wanted you to know where they were and I wanted the mountain landscape in the background.

And then this yellow strip up front is just a nice pop of color.

This was kind of at the height of that, like, a culture of RV, people who would camp out in Walmart's, which felt very Americana to me.

It just felt like a portrait of a certain segment of America.

And now every time this is shown in a gallery or I sell a print of it, my dad asks for a commission.

I'm like, that's not how this works, but thanks.

Once I had done a few and people saw the photographs and saw what I was doing, I had some requests, I have other friends wanting to be a part of it.

Usually it's somebody I know and have a wonderful idea in mind for them.

This one was particularly made for the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham, was my good friend Pat who I worked with.

And she always had cargo pockets full of stuff, so I couldn't imagine making a cozy that it didn't have pockets for her.

So that's how that design decision came about.

But I also do cozies for people who I've never met before until we have a conversation about the cozies, and I'm excited about them or they're excited about me and we have a really interesting dynamic and we can do wonderful photographs that way.

So it's grown and sort of changed over the years.

If I cozy you, it's meaningful to me as a person to be like, I wanna cozy you because it means you're sort of important in my life.

This is one of my newer photographs, Jay in the Dismal Swamp.

And it's an interesting story.

We went and scouted this location, wilds were puffy and perfect and the sky was blue and we had this beautiful horizon line and I thought that would be a wonderful shot.

And then I knit the cozy, we go out there, the sky was overcast and moody and cloudy and where I had framed it up, it was much flatter, it was on a dock, and they had replaced the railing and it was just not the same shot, and I was very disappointed.

And at the last minute I was like, go stand on this boat ramp.

And I saw this corner and I saw the trees and I saw the really dramatic clouds, and I think this photograph is better than what I imagined it to be and I love when that happens.

I think this one just has so much drama the way the light is hitting and the cloud.

I do love this photo.

The way my projects come together sometimes feels more perfect than others, and I think this one just all the elements wound up being there for me.

(gentle serene music) (knitting machine rattling) So the actual sitting down and knitting is when I get to go to my studio.

I can't even really listen to music or podcasts or anything because I have to keep count.

So it's a lot of setting up the machine, which, she is old and finicky, so I have to oil her down with WD-40 before we begin and make sure she's ready to go.

The stitch pattern is pretty unique.

It's something I develop early on in the series, and it's like two stitches, skip a stitch, one stitch, skip a stitch, two stitches, and it's just something I made up.

I liked the pattern, I liked that it was a little, had a little gap there and created a vertical stripe.

So that is, in everyone, is always that sort of three stitch pattern.

And then I have to do the threading and make sure it's just right before I start knitting.

I start it the same way every time.

I have a very specific pattern to begin with.

I do sets of 20 and I always start on the same side because I do have ADHD and if my mind wanders and I lose count, I have to kind of start all over.

So I have a clicker and I have a system so that I keep myself on track.

It's very meditative, just emptying my mind and counting is nice to do.

Anytime my mind wanders, I am in trouble, so I have to...

It is very much a practice.

That's the second half.

Well, I'm always happy to have like a whole conversation and see what kind of interesting things we can come up with 'cause it's so fun.

And I enjoy talking with people and working with people and I like to facilitate these experiences.

I think it's memorable and interesting and I like that people are a part of my work.

I never thought that people would be as weird as me and I love that they want to just get on board with this strange cozy train.

(gentle serene music) - [Heather] Want more "Curate"?

Find us on the web.

See this show again or any from our seven season.

- [Jason] Go to whro.org/curate for our entire catalog of content.

Norfolk accountant by day, hardcore punk record label owner by night.

Jordan Greenough has figured out how to live his life his way.

Greenough, as he's known by his peers, puts all his profits back into the music to make sure this genre always has a place.

(upbeat rock music) - I got into music, specifically punk music, through my older brother.

I would just go into his room all the time and just steal CDs.

I don't know if he knows that.

I've never heard anything like that before.

I never heard fast music like that.

That's really how I got into punk and hardcore music.

The first hardcore band that I ever came across was a band called 7 Seconds.

I just thought the art looked cool, but, like, what is this?

(upbeat rock music) Not For The Weak Records started in 2016.

My band Lethal Means wanted to do a tape of our demo.

We wanted to put a label on it to make ourselves seem more legit.

We just wanted to try to seem more serious so we can get on out of town shows.

It definitely didn't work, but that was the first time that that logo was on anything.

Around the time of the third record that we put out was the time that I was like, all right, we should probably take this seriously, and started actually promoting the label as an actual label.

I do the label, I play in Reckoning Force, I play guitar in that.

Lethal Means, I play drums in that band.

I play guitar in Bato, and I played drums in Self-Inflict.

(gentle upbeat music) But my day job is as an accountant, and I know that might sound weird.

I'm not like an aggressive person on my day to day.

I just go type on a calculator all day, and then at the end of the day, I come here, pack some records up, ship 'em out.

Working as an accountant has definitely helped me with the label.

Accounting is like a big part of any business, so it's really just helped me make business decisions, I guess, if that makes sense.

A lot of the stuff I learned was just through other labels.

Kind of taking what they did and kind of running with it.

It wasn't necessarily like through asking them, it was more or less like going to their website like, oh, how many records did they press?

That seemed like the pretty common number of records that people are pressing, so maybe I should do that.

When we first started, it was just a thing that we did for our own bands, but at a point, I just started coming across stuff that I really, really liked and there wasn't records for them, and I would just reach out to the bands and ask them if they wanted to do a record.

And most of the time, when you reach out to a band like that, they're pretty honored that you wanna press the record.

So I've had pretty high success from just reaching out to bands and asking if they wanna do a record.

And we've done bands here in the States and we've done a few international bands and we have other projects in the works.

I usually send stuff to people like, what do you think about this?

Do you think that this is cool?

I think it's really awesome, I want your input on it.

I'll do that a lot.

But the operations, the day to days, who's picking what to press and stuff, that's all me.

I think we're doing the right thing, and then one time it works, and one time it doesn't work out as well as other times, but I'm still learning every day just like everybody with everything.

You still learn as you go everyday.

With the work you put in, you get back from it.

(upbeat rock music) This studio here, and we call it 239B.

This is actually the second location.

The first location was in Norfolk.

(upbeat rock music) We would do shows there and we knew it was a matter of time before we would get kicked out, but we did it just because hardcore music is really community-based.

We needed a place in our scene that we could just always have shows when we needed them.

So if it was gonna be small, we could do it inside.

If it was gonna be big, we could do it outside.

The comfort of just having a place already was huge for us.

Anytime a band hit us out, yeah, we got you.

What day?

(upbeat rock music) So the one place that we have now is called West Beach Tavern.

And if they're booked up, we just can't do a show.

There's just no other places that we can do stuff at.

Places around here, once you say you're gonna do punk music or hardcore music, they don't want anything to do with it.

To just have this mindset that hardcore music is violent is not really painting the right picture in my opinion.

Some people just go to shows to show how tough they are, and that's not really in the scene that we're about.

We're just into like kind of circle pick kind of stuff where you might get bumped, pushed a little bit.

It's hard to tell people in words that doesn't sound stupid, but I could definitely see how it looks weird from the outside looking in.

Slow dancing looks weird if you don't hear the music and you don't know what's going on.

(upbeat rock music) (gentle music) I don't think there's really like a end goal for Not For The Weak Records.

We're not really in the genre that you make money with.

It's more like, if you're in love with it, you do it.

But I like to see bands get excited when I offer to do a record for them or something.

If I can just keep getting money from doing records to just do another record, or if I can do a recording to get gear to do another recording, it's really just a love for music.

- Academy award-winning costume designer Ruth Carter has worked with Hollywood elite, including Spike Lee and Oprah.

Now a collection of her best known work is on exhibit providing museum goers with an intimate knowledge of what has inspired the looks of some of movies most enduring characters.

- [Interviewer] This is one of Oprah Winfrey's ensembles from the film "Selma" by director Ava DuVernay, one of countless costumes Ruth Carter has designed over her 30 plus year career.

- We had Oprah's character who was Annie Lee Cooper who had a scene where she was gonna attempt to register to vote.

- You work for Mr. Dunn down at the rest home, ain't that right?

- [Ruth] Annie Lee Cooper was a domestic, so I first gave Oprah kind of her uniform, and then Ava said, "No, I feel like this is a special occasion for her.

Let's have her dress up in her Sunday best for this."

- [Interviewer] And why would she have had a broach?

- Well, you know, I remember broaches and earrings when I was a little girl in church.

So that's a little bit of my heart in the costume design.

- [Interviewer] At the New Bedford Art Museum, this is a collection of costumes Carter has personally kept over the years.

From her work on the "Roots" reboot, to a polyester panoply from the comedy, "Dolemite Is My Name", to Spike Lee's groundbreaking, "Do the Right Thing".

- Always do the right thing.

- [Interviewer] How overtly political was your work in "Do the Right Thing"?

- We all knew that we were doing a protest film.

This was about one hot day in New York City.

The colors in "Do the Right Thing" are very saturated, almost in a surrealistic form that at night you could see these colors almost ignite.

- [Interviewer] Carter's career began in Springfield, Massachusetts where she interned in a college costume shop after a brief spell as an actress.

- I actually could feel how important my wardrobe was to my performance.

- [Interviewer] Her job, she says, is literally in the details, the little things she does in color, fabric, and accessories to manifest a mood.

- The aging of the jacket, the billowing of the pocket, shoes that are run over all silently tell the story.

- She's like unmatched in the field and just a really, really special, thoughtful person.

- [Interviewer] Jamie Uretsky is the museum's curator who spent two years sifting through Carter's costumes, sketches and mood boards, but her chief inspiration was the designer's Oscar acceptance speech in 2019 for her work on "Black Panther", making her the first black person to win an academy award for costume design.

- "Black Panther", Ruth Carter.

(crowd applauding and cheering) - Thank you for honoring African royalty and the empowered way women can look and lead on screen.

- I think that her as like a powerful black woman who is just like, had her hand in over 40 films that are imperative to understanding American history and the black experience.

She makes the experiences of these people feel real.

- [Interviewer] When she first started out in Hollywood, Carter says there was a limit to how black people were portrayed on camera.

- Every time a black person was cast, they were a gang banger or they had their hat turned backwards, or they had a big gold chain, and there were so many more stories in the community that weren't being seen.

- [Interviewer] Carter is now a world away from that time, in the world of Wakanda, the fictional setting of "Black Panther".

Her looks came from deep research into African tribes and influences.

And after the film's blockbuster success, Carter's designs on Wakandan culture melded into our own.

- I hate to tell you, but you can't get to Wakanda.

It's totally made up.

But it's kind of an aspirational place.

We want to create that place that you wanna go to because it looks like the perfect place to experience culture that has not been appropriated or has not been spoiled by colonization.

- [Interviewer] Spend some time with Carter and you quickly realized she may be most proud of how much research she's done, tracing the path of indigo from Sierra Leone through generations of Africans as she illustrated in "Roots", noting how tight Martin Luther King Jr. kept his collar or sitting down at the Massachusetts Department of Correction to read the letters of Malcolm X.

- Learning was very important to him and growth was very important to him.

When I look at Malcolm X, I can see my intent.

The color palette is very vibrant when he's a young dancer in the dance halls.

It kind of washes itself away with the denim in the prison.

And then when he comes out, it's almost like a black and white film.

- [Interviewer] A fitting if not poetic description from a woman who has always been able to dress the part.

- Our host today, the Muscarelle Museum, is getting set for some substantial changes over the next couple of years.

David Brashear, the Muscarelle director, joins us now to tell us about the exciting future here.

Now, from the looks of things, the new and improved Muscarelle will be quite the place.

David, what motivated the expansion?

- Well, in 2023, we'll be celebrating our 40th year of being a museum on William & Mary's campus.

Our building's quite old.

It's lacked a number of things that we wanted to have in it, and this gives us the opportunity to put those pieces into place and have a much more interesting next 40 years.

- Now, are you looking to expand the collection with this renovation?

- We have an expanded collection.

Our collection, you may not know it, but we were one of the first universities to actually collect art.

That collection has grown through the years to now almost 8,000 objects.

Obviously, there's no museum that has 8,000 objects on display at any one time, we certainly won't either by the time we're done, but we'll have a lot more exhibition space, about three times the exhibition space to get our collection out in front of our patrons that come to visit.

- So what are some of the things that we can expect to see in the newly renovated building?

- Well, it's gonna be exciting, Jason.

We have an existing building at about 17,000 square feet.

We're gonna be renovating that space and then adding on about 42,000 square feet, bringing us to just under 60,000 square feet.

In all of that new space, we'll be doing things like tripling the amount of gallery space we have, more than doubling the amount of art storage space we have, we're gonna add a number of educational rooms, some seminar rooms, a big event hall, and we're gonna be renovating and expanding our staff offices, really setting us up for the next phase of life in this museum.

- Okay, David, so help me understand.

What is the existing part here?

What are we looking at in this space?

- Well, the model is a great way to sort of visualize what's coming down the pike.

So if you take a look, this side is our existing building.

We're primarily one-story building.

We have galleries on the second floor.

This entire piece to the west is our new wing.

We'll be moving our entrance from this side service road to the middle of the new building.

There will be a big central atrium that runs from the front door to the campus side door, and we'll have everything new to the west.

So, second floor will continue to be galleries in both wings, we'll have a number of education and event spaces on the first floor of the new wing, and then staff offices down in the basement of the new wing.

We really wanted to preserve the architecture and the statement that our existing building made.

We'll have this great new space and it will work, as you can tell architecturally, really well together.

- Yeah, it's always nice when you see a museum that is, in itself, almost like a piece of art.

- It really is a piece of art.

- So this is part of an arts and cultural expansion on the campus here at William & Mary.

- We are at William & Mary right now digging deep into an expansion of what we call the Arts Precinct.

So that includes a renovation and expansion of Phi Beta Kappa Hall which is our primary theater building here on campus, the construction of a brand new music building, which is gonna be phenomenal, just to the east of Phi Beta Kappa Hall, and then we'll be sitting here.

We sit to the west of Phi Beta Kappa, we'll be sitting here in two years with our new wing.

- That's fantastic.

So bringing it all together in a central location.

- Theater, dance, music, and the visual arts all in one place.

- What's the timeframe?

- We'll be starting construction in January of 2023.

It's about a 20-month construction project, and we'll be looking to reopen in August of 2024.

- David, we wanna thank you so much for hosting us today and we look forward to coming back and seeing what it looks like in a couple of years in the future.

- We'll see you in 2024.

- Okay, see you then.

- Thank you.

- That's gonna do it for this episode of "Curate".

- We wanna say thank you to our host, the Muscarelle Museum here at the College of William & Mary and Director David Brashear.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

And we'll see you next time on "Curate".

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music)