Coming up this time on Art Rocks, a Baton Rouge native who's made an international name for himself in contemporary art.

We'll consider the rhythms of jazz.

Dub, dub.

And visit a Florida museum dedicated to contemporary glass art.

These stories are next on Pop Rocks.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Good evening and thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

We begin with a man born and raised in Baton Rouge, but Matt KENYON had to spread his wings to take a place at the forefront of the American contemporary art scene.

KENYON now lives in New York and teaches at the University of Buffalo.

He returned to his birth city to exhibit a collection of works that have earned him a place among an elite group of contemporary artists who work with emerging technologies.

He is Matt to pick up his own story.

I started out as a painter and a printmaker.

As I moved through my studies and following my curiosity, I started to acquire an interest in kind of emerging technologies.

Well, video, for instance, some of the works take advantage of tiny little video cameras that suddenly had become very inexpensive.

I could buy them as an art student, and because they were small, I could do things with them that you would never do with a more expensive camera.

Like put it in your mouth or hang it out the window of a moving car.

Artists have always been pushing the limits of technology.

Making art with technology is different than the way we normally use technology.

It's a way of kind of taking this tool out of the realm of kind of commerce and using in a way that kind of shows us something about our world.

But but from another angle.

So the project enough.

When you look at enough, at first it just seems like one of these ubiquitous zip tie handcuffs that we've seen, unfortunately on the hips of law enforcement officers, at protests, at border crossings.

And the zip tie handcuffs are similar to the zip ties you might have in your taco box or something like that.

But they're used to zip tie handcuffs off people when they arrest them.

And they're disposable.

They're plastic.

And in my opinion, they facilitate the overpolicing of communities of color and people who are new to the United States.

And so what I wanted to do is turn those handcuffs into a protest object.

And so I did some research on some of the original early sound recording tools, these wax cylinders that would record audio, the things that were precursors to the record player record and found a way to encode the audio into the geometry of the zip tie so that when the zip ties pulled shut, instead of making that ubiquitous zipping sound, it says the word enough.

Time is a project I made in response to the 2016 flood of Baton Rouge.

All of my families here in Baton Rouge, and they were all impacted, as so many people were.

I was out of state watching this through media, through broken cell phone conversations and things like that.

And I set about creating this sculpture that is a ten foot tall champagne glass pyramid in the champagne glass pyramid, normally as a symbol of opulent exuberance at like weddings or something like this.

But I chose it because it's an incredibly fragile form.

It's very hierarchical.

And inside of each glass is a tiny little sculpture of a house.

And these are actual houses, either in Baton Rouge or in the city of Buffalo, where I live.

And they're made out of a special material, a polymer that has the exact same refractive index as water.

And as the water fills the glasses, the houses move from being visible to becoming nearly invisible.

My experience with so many people who were impacted by the flood after the media and the news moved on, they felt completely invisible.

And we have a lot of stories about trickle down economics and about how rising water is lift all boats in the United States.

And I don't buy it.

I think the thing that trickles down most often from the top to the bottom of the negative effects of climate change are the consequences of failed policy in providing for the most vulnerable in our communities.

And so at the top of the ceiling is a pump that is activated by information, that's driven by foreclosure and eviction data and also climate change data.

And so it controls the frequency of the pump dripping.

And over the month of the exhibition, the glasses will slowly start to fill and the houses will move from being visible to becoming nearly invisible.

Supermajor Well, I grew up in Louisiana, surrounded by oil and gas culture, and I took it for granted.

I thought everybody's town had an oil refinery that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other.

And I'm glad that we don't yet live in a culture where that's the case.

But family members that work in the oil and gas industry.

My brother Doug drove a boat and helped with the cleanup in the Gulf.

And I think there's this dream of endless oil.

And I think a lot of marketing and a lot of the big corporations sort of push this idea that it is endless.

And we know and science tells us that if we just continue to burn the remaining resources, we will make life on earth uninhabitable.

And so I wanted to take something that first looked like the laws of gravity had been suspended and then to show that kind of dream as a nightmare.

And I like to tell people that it's a little cheap illusion in the gallery to point out a larger illusion that these corporations are constantly pushing over on us, that that this oil comes out of the ground like honey is free of consequence, and hopefully get people to think creatively and critically about our own patterns of consumption and to hold those corporations accountable for the destruction to lives, to environment and livelihoods.

Spore is one of my earliest projects, and it's a project I made with a collaborator, Doug Easterly.

Spore isn't a self-contained ecosystem for a rubber tree plant purchased from Home Depot and has many of us now.

Home Depot guarantees the plants that they sell.

So if it dies, if you don't have a green thumb, you can bring the plant back with your receipt and get a living one.

Doug and I connected the lifecycle of the plant to the Home Depot stock value at the end of the week, at the stock value for the Home Depot Corporation goes up the plant receives water, and if it doesn't go up, it received no water, and if it died, we would return it.

What was really exciting about that piece is that because it was connected to the livestock market data and that was a difficult thing to do back in 2000 for those before smartphones and things like this, it surprised us because the plant kept dying and we didn't know why.

And then finally we figured out that the stock value is going up so fast it kept drowning the plant.

And what we only figured out later was the United States was experiencing an unprecedented housing bubble.

Everybody was spending money at Home Depot, putting in new countertops and things like that.

The growth of the corporation was too much for the organism.

Cook is it is a robotic umbrella that moves across the floor of the gallery by opening and closing.

And on its belly.

It has a sensor.

It has a video camera for an eye.

And it's programed to seek out puddles of Coca-Cola that I had placed on the gallery floor.

And when it finds the coke, it drinks it up through a mouth in its belly and sprays it through a nozzle on the top of the umbrella, where it rains down in the gallery and onto the umbrella.

And over time, the coke eats through the umbrella and it drips down onto the circuits of the robot and it short circuits and dies.

Coke is it follows the marketing and the messages to consume and to consume to the point where it can consume no more.

The robot is a stand in for a person and the umbrella starts off as a shiny branded umbrella.

But as the coke eats through the umbrella, it's made of a special material.

It starts to take on almost like skin, like qualities.

And it's encouraging us to think critically about our patterns of consumption and the role of marketing in our lives.

Log World is a micro print project.

What looks like lines are actually micro printed text and they contain 5700 individuals who lost their lives to COVID.

And the form of the paper is logarithmic.

Paper and logarithmic paper is a special kind of graph paper that's used in science and engineering to chart exponential growth.

And so, as we saw during the pandemic, the way we represent the curve, the way we represent the growth of the virus and its spread has a direct effect on policy.

It affects our ability to judge risk.

And this paper is sort of substrate that the data scientists use to calculate this risk.

And although it looks like an empty page, it's a very heavy project.

And as we've lost over a million United States citizens to COVID, it's something I want to memorialize it.

In 2015, I was privileged enough to be accepted as a TED Fellow Ted Fellows program helps take people who are maybe at mid-career and helped amplify their message.

And they're scientists, they're activists, they're artists, they're writers, they're musicians.

And they're all these intersections between.

I was able to go to the TEDGlobal conference in Vancouver and share the Notepad project with the audience and also share it with politicians and activists and thought leaders.

And the video has been seen something like 800,000 times or something like that.

Notepad looks like an everyday yellow legal tablet of paper, but all the horizontal and vertical lines are micro printed text, and they contain the details of individual Iraqi civilians who died as a result of the US invasion of Iraq.

I was born in Baton Rouge.

I went to Southeastern Louisiana University, coming back to Baton Rouge.

I never even hoped to dream of the level of reception that I had.

The opening was amazing.

We had over 750 people in attendance.

The gallery was so full of people.

I became very nervous about the champagne glass pyramid, but everyone was wonderful and respectful and had amazing stories to tell.

I was able to talk to so many people about their experiences with the themes of the work.

Our lives are tremendous, enriched by enjoying the creative endeavors of others.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits happening soon at museums and galleries in our part of the world today.

For more about these and loads more events in the creative space visit LP dot org slash art rocks.

There you'll find links to each episode of the program so to see or share any segment again visit LP dot org slash ibrox.

Pretty much all of us know what we like in music when we hear it.

But for a minute, let's consider things from the perspective of a man with a deep appreciation for the actual building blocks of music and the stylistic possibilities contained within.

Darren Kramer delves deeply into the sounds of jazz and offers tips on how exactly to listen to a song.

Jazz I think it starts getting different with harmonic intensity.

That's steering Kramer.

Not oatmeal, but maybe oatmeal with walnuts and cinnamon and honey and all sorts of crazy things in it.

He's a jazz musician.

So trombone is really an identity for me.

I would say.

Turned jazz aficionado.

I just have always been attracted to the way it makes you feel.

Music has been a part of his life forever.

Baba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.

B.A.

And now he's getting other people, jazz traveling around the Denver area, giving workshops he calls Sonic Tonic.

Sonic Meaning.

Sound waves and tonic is traditionally a medicinal substance to make you feel better.

The gist how to listen to Jazz.

Top of the tune.

Is proven.

Using the four main elements of music.

Rhythm, melody, harmony and the lyrics.

Some different bridge.

To create a better experience for music listeners.

Let me show you how to listen like a jazz musician.

Let's go inside the music and realize his.

We're not playing the melody.

And it's not just three notes, it's more.

Maybe there's 27 different notes in it.

So it's a little more.

It may.

Okay.

We had to put Darren's knowledge to the ultimate test.

Our team collected music samples from Denver's Five Points, Jazz Fest and.

So this is going to be fun.

Yeah.

So you've brought in some clips from the recent Five Points Jazz Festival, and we're going to listen to a couple of clips and then do a little mini sonic tonic on these so that we're saying, what would somebody listen to or how would I listen to it?

So here's our first one.

He's the kind of guy when you get everything, strum your heart.

So all to the do.

I like it?

It's mellow, serious groove.

I'm noticing the cross stick on that drums.

Believe it or not, I'm listening right past her as a musician, not just a singer or a general music listener.

I'm kind of going different levels, so I love that little guitar that's happening.

It's tapping or in a major key.

Yeah.

Ha ha.

Today her voice is great.

Great nuance, great tone.

She has a nice little story she's talking about there.

And this particular recording, I'm not hearing enough bass for me.

Plus, we're listening on my laptop speakers, but I notice that my music engineer side comes down.

Go.

I want to feel like I'm laying on this like bass sound.

Right?

All right, here's a new one.

Yeah, dig it.

That's kind of old school, you know, like a folk jazz, right?

And some of this stuff.

Gypsy jazz, when they have a lot of different instruments, like a violin.

This had a clarinet in it.

And it's so fun.

It's got its own sound.

So maybe you don't even know what a clarinet is.

You haven't noticed that woodwind instrument has a reed way different than trombone, but that gives this its own vibe.

And there's a sax tenor sax there.

That's that's the clarinet.

And it's fun.

It's happy.

Right.

And here's the last one.

I've got to know what your band style and style is.

I'll give you that.

I don't know who you're seeing that you got to know who your big shit is.

That's my kind of thing.

Funky jazz, right?

Vocalists.

Sounds very good.

What do I notice?

Right behind that is some of those hits in the drums.

He's not just, like, phoning it in.

Hey, man, we're kind of playing now, man.

He's like, Check out these hits.

I've got to do that snare and style and those on the high hat you that they're going to do it again probably.

I got to go.

You'll be coming.

Horns are hitting on those down beats.

Right.

So this to me is way more interesting than, you know, just to be that great sounding bands.

And they're all quite different as we're hearing.

Right.

So jazz doesn't just mean one thing.

So if maybe you have an idea that you don't like jazz, maybe give it another try.

There's lots of jazz going on on a weekly basis in downtown Denver and in Boulder.

In Saint Petersburg, Florida, the Imagine Museum highlights the history and the artwork of the American Studio Glass movement with over 500 pieces of glass on display, visitors get to experience this remarkable art form in its gorgeous, glittering entirety.

Here's the story you know.

I think it's important to understand even what Studio Glass is, as I tell the visitors as they come through, you know, they hear the term studio glass, but then have no idea.

Have no idea it was even a movement.

So why do we call it Studio Glass is the first question.

In the early 1960s, there were ceramic artists and other sculptors who wanted to work in the medium of glass.

Prior to that time, believe it or not, all the glass that was being manufactured was being manufactured or being produced was being produced in factories.

So in 1962, Harvey Littleton was the first pioneer who determined that he was going to create the furnace that could go and be in an artist's studio so that the artist individually and independent from the factory could create their art.

And that's pretty much how the movement was born.

Believe it or not, The Ultra Holy was one of his first students in the first MFA program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to study Glass.

That was a pretty important period of time in those sixties.

When you know, these creatives have come together and with the idea that they were going to transform sculpture by air, by being able to make it work and glass and have the transparency and the reflection of light that prior to that time had not been possible.

Hence Studio Glass, Furnace in the studio.

The museum opened at the end of January in two 2018.

We have a wonderful benefactor by the name of Trish Dugan.

Trish decided that she wanted to open a museum.

Then she determined that it was going to be a studio glass museum.

And she worked with a colleague, Corrine Hansen, who is the president of the Habitat Galleries in Royal of Michigan.

And they discussed what would be the collection and what they would like to show.

And Corey helped her understand that there was not another museum in the United States that showed the history of the Studio Glass movement and showing that solely there were there's other glass museums and they have the history of glass, but they have it from the beginning of time.

So there was no museum that just was focused on this history independently of anything else.

Corey set out and worked with all of the artists and collectors in the area and put together a collection of 500 pieces, 55 artists covering 55 years.

And so Trish brought the collection for the museum, and that's what you see here today.

And these gallery's part of the collection we had was of Paul Stankard, some work from the earlier part of his career to the later part of his career.

So you actually can see an evolution of his work as well as when you're in the first nine galleries down here that you can see the evolution of many of our other artists work and and technique that they put into it.

Paul Stankard is like the he is the maestro of the paperweight and I really just hate to diminish that concept by saying paperweight because really they are beautiful forms with and why would we call it unseen worlds it's because there's there's basically in that tiny little glass ball is is a world that a few people see.

I mean, it's the world that Paul Stankard has put together in his mind.

And when you look at those glass orbs, all of the flowers, the insects, the human forms, those are tiny acts.

All of those elements that are in there, we're actually done.

With a torch.

And a rod of glass providing all of those extra details.

So when you.

Look at it, they're just.

Magical.

Magical worlds inside of these really perfectly formed glass balls.

It's one of those shows you'll have to get close to to truly appreciate it.

We have this opportunity not only having this gorgeous collection, but we have the opportunity to create programing that does inspire, that does uplift, not to just really have to be focused with Studio Glass, but we can open that door a little wider.

That gets to our, you know, the spark of our humanity, which is the arts.

And in a much broader sense.

And that's going to do it for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, there are always episodes to see and share at LP B Dawgs Art Rocks.

And if you want to go deeper on the art and culture of Louisiana, Country Roads Magazine is a resource for discovering more of what's on offer in the arts, events and destinations all around the state.

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

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and.