- [Jason] Next on Curate.

- Day by day, song by song I'm just out here trying to make the world a better place, just me and my guitar.

- Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say goodnight until it be morrow.

- This has been awesome.

We're just really lucky to have this group of people - Yeah, absolutely.

- On stage and behind.

- The people that are making this area interesting are the people that I talk about.

The creative visionaries.

- [Heather] This is Curate.

Welcome, I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

Thanks for joining us as we embark on season six.

- [Heather] This week we come to you from The Plot.

The center of Norfolk's Neon District.

The cities first official arts district.

- We'll have more on The Plot and the Neon District throughout the show but we start across the Elizabeth River with the singer/songwriter, whose influences include his hometown of Portsmouth and also lots of great world music.

- [Heather] Blending Reggae, Hip Hop, and R and B influences Greg Gutty has found a unique soulful voice that is the perfect way to get his message and music out.

This week's 757 Featured Artist is singer, songwriter Greg Gutty.

- Music's been apart of my life since the moment I was born.

I wouldn't be who I am without music.

My mother was a singer.

My father was a singer.

My grandfather was a singer.

Music is all apart of me.

It's all a part of us.

It's all a part of everybody.

There's no life without music.

I'm Greg Gutty and this is my story.

♪ Sometimes the road seems hard to bear ♪ ♪ Sometimes the road seems hard to bear ♪ I got my start singing at five years old in the church and it grew from there to doing talent shows and singing at other different church conventions and stuff like that.

♪ I said you're my lord ♪ As a youth, my aunts and family members would play a lot of Otis Redding and different classic soul music and it went from that to Hip Hop and most recently, I discovered the music of Bob Marley and I believe that was the most influential music to me because certain things that he spoke about and his perspective on music is how I was raised.

♪ Sometimes the road is hard to see.

♪ Prophet Williams Saunders Crowdy founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ in 1896.

My family was one of the original members.

They call us colored people.

They call us black, negros.

♪ Oh my lord ♪ Prophet Crowdy taught us that we are Hebrew Israelites.

That's our nationality.

♪ Some say that the world gone crazy ♪ and then with Bob Marley he spoke about peace, love and unity but the deeper message that he had is for Rastafarian.

The culture and the children of Israel and keeping certain traditions from old times.

That's when I was able to connect my roots and I just wanna carry on the same message.

♪ How long must it be this way ♪ It wasn't even like I was intentionally trying to do Reggae music.

It just kinda happened that way.

Yeah.

(mellow music) (upbeat music) I looked in the dictionary and I came across the name Gutty and it meant standing strong through hard times and I was like, wow, that works.

That actually relates to me and it became an acronym, gettin' up through the years, from the bottom to the top.

♪ We're on the move and we ain't got time to waste ♪ When I really took my career serious I'm going to every open mike there is doing seven shows in one week.

Performing from here to New York to Atlanta, everywhere.

I was sold CD's on the street.

That's how I got my name out there so much.

I was like eventually I know I'm gonna need a band to develop the sound that I'm looking for.

So that's when I reached out to different musicians and started putting the pieces together and I named it the Port of Rain.

Which stands for music surrounded by the spirit of the eye, the most high.

Being on stage is an experience you go into another person.

It's almost like you're not yourself.

The people's responses and people singing along to your songs it's a lot of excitement.

The music world's a powerful industry and you definitely have to keep up ya know, it's very fast paced.

For every door that opens, you've had at least 10 or 20 that were slammed in your face.

But I love what I do.

I get to spread my music and the message to the people who really need it the most.

I appreciate the opportunity that music gives me to be able to travel, go to different parts of the world and just meet so many different people and just learn and grow and hopefully my music can help someone maybe far or near.

Whether it's coming to shows, just to dance and have fun or sitting back and really vibing out to the content of what I'm saying.

I appreciate everyone who listens and has supported my career so far.

The journey's just begun.

(mellow music) (upbeat music) No matter how beautiful life may seem you can't really ignore the harsh realities that a lot of us face on a day to day basis.

(piano music) Watching the news, there's always another black man getting killed or police brutality.

♪ I look outside my window ♪ And that really seemed like the only way you can make the news is by having something negative.

It's rough.

♪ So I read my Bible ♪ Me, myself I've been through my own share of hardships from being incarcerated and having kids at an early age but even though things seem like out of control looking back on it, I wouldn't be who I am today without those moments in life.

Now it's like, me being a musician I can share those stories and hopefully prevent someone else from going through certain things that I went through.

Cause that's what music is for, is therapy.

There was always a melody or song or something that got me through my darkest moments.

♪ Til it comes tumbling down ♪ It's kinda hard not to sing or write about it and a lot of times you get lost in the music because you don't really see a way out of the situations that you're in.

At the same time, you have to be optimistic.

It's all about finding the right way to channel that energy and use it towards something positive that can motivate you and inspire you to keep pushing through.

And music gives me that outlet to do that.

That's a beautiful thing.

♪ Come tumbling down down down down ♪ ♪ Tumbling ♪ (upbeat music) Growing up in Portsmouth was bittersweet because a lot of great talents come from here but at the same time it's a very dark place too because there's a lot of underpriviledged people just trying to survive everyday.

♪ So what cha gonna do ♪ ♪ What cha gonna say ♪ ♪ Where ya gonna go when your time ♪ Although you see a lot of destruction around you it's filled with a certain love that we all share.

We just try to uplift each other in our own way.

We look after each other at the end of the day.

Our music will always have that spirit of Portsmouth in it.

Day by day, song by song, stage by stage, city by city, I'm just out here trying to make the world a better place just me and my guitar, fulfilling my purpose.

I feel like that's my reason for even being a musician is to use my gifts to inspire people to do the right thing.

♪ So what cha gonna do ♪ ♪ What cha gonna say ♪ ♪ Where ya gonna go when you're time ♪ That's what I'm gonna keep doing.

That's what I've been doing since I was born.

That's what I see myself doing until I'm gone.

Music gave it's all to me and I gave my all back to music.

Greg Gutty.

(upbeat music) - [Jason] Want to see Greg Gutty feature again?

Well, you can find it on our website, whro.org/curate.

You can find all of Curate's history there.

757 Featured Artists going back five plus seasons.

Plus all of our full episodes and more.

- New Energy of Norfolk is what the Neon District represents It is a funky collection of blocks that include small galleries, as well as the Chrysler Museum cool restaurants, amazing street art, the D'Art Center and the Harrison Opera House.

- The Plot, here in the middle of it all, has hosted concerts, skate board exhibitions, and giant chess matches, among other things.

And this past summer, it hosted the bard.

Tragic lovers, Romeo and Juliet, took to a make shift theater in the round as Shakespeare in the Plot debuted on a hot summer night.

- WHRO's Rebecca Weinstein talked to the actors who portrayed the most famous couple in Verona.

♪ High hats and narrow collars ♪ ♪ White spats and fifteen dollars ♪ ♪ Spending every dime ♪ ♪ On a wonderful time ♪ ♪ If you're blue and you don't know where to go to ♪ - [Rebecca] So it seems like it's going to be kind of immersive out in The Plot, right.

- [Noelle] Deb Wallace, the director, she really likes to incorporate a lot of things in her shows.

Not just the acting, but she's a big fan of having, like, movement.

(jazz music) - Yeah, there's gonna be dancing and fighting and singing.

- Draw if you be men.

- What fools, you know not what you do.

- I have to ask though, I wonder, if it's kinda a torturous process, like, learning, like, memorizing Shakespearean lines.

Cause that's next level, right?

- The hardest for me is honestly, if the character's speaking in poetry not just reciting it like it's poetry and finding those emotional levels and how to protray it as just spoken text rather than kind of falling into I am reciting poetry.

I'll look to like, if looking liking move but no more deep will I endart mine eye than your consent gives strength to make it fly.

- I really love digging into the meaning of the text and like translating every word.

Not just every line, but like, he chose each word for a purpose.

Teach me how I should forget to think.

- By giving liberty unto thine eyes.

Examine other beauties.

- Tis the way that he that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.

Show me a mistress that is passing fair, what doth her beauty serve but as a note where I may read passed that passing fair?

Farewell thou canst...

The more you dig into it, the more you realize like, you can literally tell the audience exactly what's happening if you get detailed enough with how you communicate it.

- Do you have a favorite part of this show, a moment that really sticks out to you.

Is just something you're really excited for the audience to see?

- Honestly, this is gonna be so cheesy of me, but the balcony scene.

(laughter) I still can't believe I get to do the balcony scene.

Like, oh my god, what is happening?

- That was a really funny rehearsal.

We were supposed to be off book and then we're rehearsing the balcony scene and my very first line, I'm like, (laughing) Line... and it was, but soft... - what light - I still can't remember, yeah.

(laughing) - It happens, ya know.

- It instills a lot of confidence in the rest of the cast.

(laughing) Let me stay til thou remember it.

- Tis almost morning, I would have thee gone.

Goodnight, goodnight, oh, parting is such sweet sorrow.

I shall say goodnight 'til it be morrow.

- Yes, it's been awesome.

- Yeah.

- And everyone involved is equally committed - Yeah - and down very talented and I don't know, we're just really lucky to have this group of people... - Yeah, absolutely.

- On stage and behind It doesn't matter, everyone involved.

- Yeah.

- At Scarecrow Jo's Studio on the north shore of Lake Tahoe Halloween is celebrated all year round but it's especially spooky in the waning days of October.

It's paper mache inspired by the macabre.

(lilting music) - The great thing about Halloween is that there's no exclusivity to it.

It's completely inclusive to any kind of train of thought or personality or person or your own personal background.

- With Halloween art you can be gruesome.

You can be vintage.

You can make happy kind of sculptures or really spooky and scary things and I always wanna create something bigger.

Something more monstrous or hideous.

(laughing) For our theme for the studio is basically Scarecrow Jo's Studio Where Every Day is Halloween.

- [Yvette] We make all of our artwork out of paper mache.

- [Jo] Our number one thing that we make are jack-o-lanterns sculptures.

We make trolls, monster busts, life size sculptures, like witches.

Most recently, we started making gargoyle sculptures.

- [Yvette] Scarecrow Jo's Studio is a think tank for Halloween awesomeness.

(lilting music) - I basically start everything out with the old fashioned newspaper, dipped in paste.

(mellow music) and then I apply that over an armature that I build.

I use strips of cardboard to give it a three dimensional look to the eyes and the nose and the mouth and then once that process is done we make our own homemade paper mache clay and we sculpt in the details that way.

After that hardens, that's when Yvette goes in and works her magic with the paint and brings it to life that way.

- First thing, it get sanded to kinda even out the different layers and so that the paint goes on smoothly.

Then it gets a complete coat inside and out of a white primer.

Then it gets a complete coat of black and then after that all dries it gets what's called, a dry brush effect, over top of the black with another layer of white to get a three dimensional look and them from there, after that dries, it gets at least four to five layers of different colors of orange.

- I have a really great support system for my crazy art studio.

Yvette, my wife, she'll ask me what crazy thing are you making and then, of course, when I'm done she's excited to take over from there and paint.

- [Yvette] Besides it being therapy and a way to meditate is a family affair.

My wife and I've been doing it together for six years and the beautiful thing about that is that we still love each other and we haven't killed each other yet.

- It creates kind of a strange bond when you have that partnership with the person that you're married to.

You're creating anything that person it's very special.

It makes me very happy.

I don't think I would be as happy if she wasn't involved in it, to be honest with you.

- It's not so much about the fact that it's Halloween it's about the fact that we do it together.

(mellow music) - The exhibition on Anime Architecture presents Japanese animation before the digital era.

The Morikami Museum in Delray, Florida hosted these drawings and paintings that provided the foundation for these beautiful films.

(mellow music) I'm Carla Stansifer.

I'm the curator of Japanese art at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens.

This is anime architecture.

(synthesized music) This exhibit features four films that came out between 1988 and 2004.

These films are all anime, which is the Japanese animation process and they are all sci-fi and they all also encapsulate a realistic style.

So that's what each of the films have in common and anime is a multi-billion dollar business today.

The original curator of the exhibition, Stephan Reikeles, from Berlin, he started this project back in 2008 and he was fortunate enough to go into studios, meet with the animators and look at some of their work and he was really interested in the process of anime making.

It's amazing, you have hundreds of artists working together to create one film and he talks about how a lot of the artists were hesitant to put their art in frames and on the wall.

They didn't see it as art.

They saw it as just a small part of this whole production.

(synthesized music) The curator went with the backgrounds and not just the characters.

For example, in the Japanese anime process the voiceovers come last.

Ya know, in a Disney production, they come first but in Japan, it's the opposite.

They have a much greater emphasis on the environment and movement.

Ghost in the Shell came out in 1995 and it's based on a very popular manga series.

We really can't underestimate the importance of this film.

The people who created The Matrix say flat out, that this film inspired them and the entire film is about artificial intelligence in the future but how this artificial intelligence interacts with the technology, with the machinery and really they're talking about what it means to be human.

For this film we featured some of the hand drawings by Takeuchi Atsushi and then we have the paintings of Ogura Hiromasa, which actually appear in the film.

So you can see that development process.

How they go from the raw images and ideas into the more technical details and drawings and then the final product and the feel and the emotion that comes out.

It's almost as if the background and the environment is it's own character in the film.

They really want to emphasis that.

We do have some photography, as well and location photography was very important.

Remember these artists were going for realism and the director, Oshii Mamoru, not only worked on anime but he also worked on live actions and he thought why don't we do that for anime?

And I love to point out this piece, right here.

He snapped this picture in a shop after he'd gone in, his lens sort of clouded over and then this is what his art team did with it and I love it because we're not just seeing a copy, they're not copying what they saw they were inspired by this and you can see that added some signage.

They added a building over here.

I also like to point out in this piece, again, it's a watercolor on paper by Ogura Hiromasa and this one would have been captured on film for the final product.

You see these dark colors here, it has this nice broody tone to it but when that transfers to film a lot of that gets washed out but Ogura was a master at finding just the right mix to create these darker tones and still keep them vibrant.

This piece here is from the film, Patlabor, which came out in 1989.

If you look very closely at this piece you'll see a few little bits of tape across the top and that's because there are actually three layers here.

Why would they do that?

Why would they go to all that trouble?

Well, in this particular scene we have a flock of birds that flys through the frame and so we had to have space in between those buildings and they were moving at different camera speeds.

How complicated it gets just for a flock of birds to fly across the screen.

Around 1997, the anime industry moved to entirely digital productions, from concept design, through to the final piece.

It was all digital and it was this great way, this great change that took over the studios especially throughout Tokyo and today there are only five studios left who can do hand drawn backgrounds.

- [Heather] You can find Curate on the web.

Check us out at whro.org/curate.

We're on social media too.

You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

- Aye, my name is Josh Weinstein and I created Norfolk Tour Company.

(upbeat music) Since it's inception, in 2013, the neighborhood has produced more than a hundred works of public art.

Norfolk Tour Company is the go to for walking tours on Hampton Road.

All of our tours focus on the area's food, history, art and architecture.

The public art is the main attraction in the Neon District.

There's over a hundred works of public art.

(mellow music) This is called, We Can Create What We Can Imagine as noted there on the ribbon of the typewriter.

This is by an artist named Esteban Del Valle, who was a pretty well known street artist.

Esteban Del Valle delves into the surreal and the creative process a lot in his murals.

The central figure is this man here at the typewriter and you can see that the man is on the verge of cracking up.

This person is so filled with creative energy that they just have to get it out of their body.

You can see them maddeningly typing at the typewriter.

It shows that this man has pushed himself to the brink for the creative process and that's kind of the idea behind it and maybe there's a little self editorial from the artist as well.

I view myself as an ambassador that is here to communicate the best that the city has to offer.

Here we have a mural by an artist by Mallory Jarrell.

Who remembers their sign language class?

You probably know this one, right.

Everybody, I love you, right?

We got I love you and then NFK, Virginia.

I love you NFK, Virginia, which is the title of the piece.

The true people that are making this area interesting and enriching it, are the people that I talk about.

The artists and the business people and the creative visionaries.

I like to come up behind them and say isn't this cool, look what they did.

- Check out toursofnorfolk.com to get more details the Neon District Tour and all of the tours offered by Joshua and his company.

- Thanks for joining us.

We're gonna leave you tonight with more from Greg Gutty.

- Be sure to check out more of his music on Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros, We'll see you next time on Curate.

♪ Every time I see your pretty face ♪ ♪ Baby girl feel like I need you more and more ♪ ♪ Every time I see your pretty face ♪ ♪ Baby girl feel like I need you more and more ♪ ♪ Aye ♪ ♪ I promise I won't leave you ♪ ♪ If you promise me you'll stay ♪ ♪ These feelings that I have for you ♪ ♪ It just won't seem to go away ♪ ♪ Oh no no ♪ ♪ She said she'd love me long time ♪ ♪ And darling I can't wait ♪ ♪ Hope it don't got you at the wrong time ♪ ♪ Because you brighten up my day ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving you girl ♪ ♪ All the weight is lifted off my shoulders ♪ ♪ I said I can't stop loving you girl ♪ ♪ I wish my time with you was never over ♪ ♪ Cause true love is so hard to find ♪ ♪ Especially when need it really need it ♪ ♪ And it's the best I found my solution ♪ (reggae music)