Coming in a moment on art, rocks, art that reflects and challenges our assumptions about immigration.

I was unpacking these ideas of what it is to seek the American.

Dream.

A historic Gilded Age mansion that built.

When you're walking through the house, you experience some unique things from our history.

Harnessing yoga's power to heal.

We're giving them tools to digest their experiences.

And a colorful visit to a chalk art festival.

Those stories are next on Art Rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, be 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 and thank you for joining us for this edition of Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Much of our news cycle revolves around the hot button issue of immigration at the US-Mexico border.

Most of our views about immigration, particularly along this border, tend to be influenced by a combination of where we and our ancestors came from and also by our life experiences.

Lauren Cardenas grew up in Texas and is now assistant professor of art at LSU.

Her work contrasts her own experiences as a second generation Mexican-American, whose parents came to the US in search of the American dream against the experiences of people now arriving from Mexico and Central and South American countries.

Cadences, pieces invite viewers to question their own beliefs surrounding this difficult subject.

I was creating this body of work entitled Hashtag for New Americano.

So Hashtag The American Dream, which is the translation from Spanish.

As a daughter of an immigrant, my dad is Mexican and my mother is a mexican American.

I was unpacking these ideas of what it is to seek the American dream, and it happened to be examining immigrants that were coming into this country.

These images are of cityscapes or airplane window images of someone looking out.

I was listening to an NPR article about immigration crackdown during the 2016 administration, and this was happening in 2018, and the article was interviewing deportees that ranged from being in this country for 30 years to just arriving in this country and they're being transported back to their homeland or their place of origin.

And on that transport, they are being chartered by Ice Air and they're almost treated like prisoners.

And some of them have never been on a plane before.

And what they're given is a bottle of water and an American cheese sandwich.

So there's no meat.

And the man that they're interviewing, he's from Guatemala and he's just so he's like, no baloney, no ham, just cheese.

And I thought that that was the most American thing to be given.

It's synonymous with this kind of childhood of grilled cheese sandwiches, the way that these images are created as they take the photo from the airplane window.

So I've collected photos as I've traveled.

We either see the airplane wing or we just see a horizon line or cityscape, and then they are trimmed and then printed on tattoo paper and then imprinted on to the cheese.

And so these are plastic pieces of cheese.

But as they're imprinted on actual pieces of cheese, there is a level of squishiness.

And so they are then sandwiched in between two pieces of plexiglass and then utilizing rubber tubing to encase the cheese.

This actually just remains in its original integrity of being plastic.

So this fake idea of what the American dream has become, the ultimate goal of this project was to examine this falsehood that has become the American dream.

Immigrants, particularly seeking asylum, seeking a better place to live when in reality it's deteriorated.

My parents are individuals who were able to benefit from the American dream, and I benefited from their experience of being fulfilled that.

So I have an internal conflict of this bifurcated identity.

I understand the privilege that I am in, and I am in an academic setting.

I am a white passing Latina female, and I am second generation.

But I still have seen what is going on along the border, having my parents live there, having family there, and seeing these things kind of take place in an environment that I call home.

This work is a section of a larger installation entitled 608, and so it's a metaphorical depiction of the border wall that is taking place along the Mexico and the United States border.

It's entitled six eight because along that border there's only 608 miles of wall that has actually been constructed by the U.S.

So there are large, vast areas that are just open landscape.

But this is the portion that I feel like is synonymous with that symbol of the wall.

The piece actually spans 608 inches to represent the 608 miles of wall that actually has been constructed.

This blanket piece is called 545 and it's representative of the 545 children that were separated from their families at the border and then placed into a camp where they were given these emergency blankets, their emergency Mylar blankets, their thermal blankets, the thermal blankets are utilized during marathons or paramedics to use them to insulate heat.

They're very thin.

And I ended up imprinting this image of my soft baby blanket from growing up on to this image.

So it's this soft physical object that is imprinted on a very plasticky, thin, transparent blanket that is given to these young individuals very much to serve a purpose and not so much to serve the security that a baby blanket or some type of object to create comfort.

It's mostly there to insulate heat.

And so that is why I created this work.

And the reason it's called 545 is the representative of the 545 children that were missing from their parents.

And I thought that that was this alarming aspect of thinking that being separated from my own parents at that age and the level of trauma.

And then also the idea of just being given something that was just so flimsy and transparent was just something that kind of stuck with me.

I created these lithographs.

It's a self-portrait of me as Madeline Chair.

She is the interpreter of Cortez, and so she is a native Aztec who spoke multiple languages.

That is why she became the interpreter for Cortez.

And so she became this important female idol in the Mexican-American history.

I drew myself as the native woman.

I drew it on a stone.

But I'm using stone lithography in the traditional sense where I have a limestone which is porous, I've grained the image.

And so utilizing silica and copper, random, which is a very laborious process.

And then I that's how I prep the stone.

The stone.

I've then drawn on it with a greasy material.

So we're using lithographic crayons and drawing this image.

And then I etch the stone.

I've etched the stone with nitric acid and gum Arabic, and after that, doing a second edge, I roll up the stone and a greasy ink, and then the stone is an edge again.

And then I'm prepared to be able to print.

I'm attempting to utilize my voice to kind of push things maybe forward.

But it's bringing awareness.

Louisiana is awash in opportunities to get to grips with the arts.

Here are a few coming your way in the weeks to come.

For more on these exhibits and others, just pick up a copy of Country Roads magazine.

To watch or to rewatch any episode of Art Rocks.

Just visit LP dot org slash rock and you'll also find all of the Louisiana segments on LP, bass, YouTube page.

Louisiana has its fair share of stately old mansions.

To the best of our knowledge, though, none of them could really be described as the house that Behr built.

For that, we're going up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a look inside the Pabst mansion completed in 1892.

This architectural marvel built by the founders of the Pabst Brewing Company serves as a time capsule that preserves some of the architectural marvels of the Gilded Age.

The great.

But the Pabst Mansion is a historical home located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

That represents a lot of the different pieces of history that speak to the city of Milwaukee.

It is the story of German immigrants who started an entrepreneurial beer business and how that contributed to the landscape of Milwaukee during its formative years.

Captain perhaps emigrated from Germany when he was 12 years old, 1848.

Eventually he became a Great Lakes Steamship cabin boy and then rose to the rank of captain by the age of 21.

So that's why we have the name Captain Pabst when he was plying the waters of Lake Michigan, that's apparently he met his future father in law, Philip Best, who owned a small brewery in Milwaukee.

And Philip was traveling with his young daughter, Maria Best.

They met and had a two year courtship and then were married in 1862.

He invested half of his fortune into his father in law's brewing company and purchased a half interest in the Filinvest Brewing Company for $21,000.

Which doesn't seem like a lot of money today, but in those days it was a significant sun that really firmly made Milwaukee his home base, and he committed himself to the life of a brewer by the 1880s that pretty much had national distribution.

And so in 1889, they changed the name from Best to Pabst.

The year that the name is changed from Vesper and Company to perhaps Brewing Company, you start seeing Captain perhaps doing a number of different things.

And one of those important things that he did was to engage in architects to build a large mansion on Milwaukee's Grand Avenue, just today, West Wisconsin Avenue between 1890, in 1882.

The house was built, so they moved in in July of 1892.

The cost of the house was $254,000 and just over 20,000 square feet.

So it is known as kind of the second largest home to have been built in Milwaukee.

The largest was Mrs. Pepper Sister's House, which was twice the size of this home, which is a remarkable.

There are actually five levels to the Pabst mansion.

The first, second and third floor are what the family would have utilized for entertaining and their living spaces.

The rear side or the north side of the Pabst Mansion was the living and working spaces for the staff here.

Those are the levels the guests today will see.

They'll be able to see the main areas that perhaps were entertained in their bedrooms, their private offices and studies here at the house, and then also where the servants would have eaten and helped prepare the food for the family.

So these three principal rooms here on the first floor really, where guests would have spent a lot of time with for the career, perhaps here at the house.

Mrs. Pabst Parlor or the lady's parlor is a more general term for it.

Probably the most formal room in the house.

The least utilized.

Actually, it would have been just for the ladies.

Mrs. Pabst and her daughters did not have formal jobs, but they did have a lot of entertainment to do here in the house.

We're currently sitting in the music room.

A lot of people and this could have doubled as a gentleman's parlor.

But the family utilizes mostly as what we would call a living room today.

The family celebrity Christmas.

In this room, they had a daughter that was married here in 1897 in the music room, and then both further career, perhaps funerals were also held here in this space just to the north of the music room here.

This is the one spot in the home.

The dining room is where the family would have entertained everything as far as entertaining at the home was going to be food centric for the Pap family.

Second floor, probably the section of the home the family spent most of their time in when they didn't have guests here.

You're going to find the four principal family members who lived here.

What we consider year round or full time had their bedrooms on the second floor.

So a central hallway called the FOIR.

And then the bedrooms radiate off of that.

Guests that come to visit the mansion.

They're here for maybe ten, 15 minutes.

And they really, I think, are struck by the intimacy of their house and that this really is kind of a family home rather than a vast mansion.

Each year, the museum of Wisconsin Art welcomes folks to Art and Chalk Fest, both local and nationally renowned chalk artists gather to contribute all kinds of colorful, ephemeral masterpieces to the mix.

So here we go to West Bend to take it all in.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art, or as we like to say, Moa, is located in West Bend, Wisconsin, which is about 45 minutes north of downtown Milwaukee.

We define the museum as a kind of cosmopolitan museum in a quaint small town.

The Art and Chuck Fest is by far our largest event of any given year.

Every summer, the last weekend of July, to do a kind of community based exhibition of chuck artist.

And that's really kind of innovative within the state.

The Chalk Artist is somebody who takes chalk work or sidewalk chalk, soft pastels and creates artwork on a horizontal plane.

So the standard rule of thumb for me is if it's ten by 15, I'm going to stretch my canvas three times longer and one third wider at the top.

This way, when you're standing there looking at it through the camera lens, it's going to morph itself back into proper perspective and create that illusion.

The object in front of you is actually standing there on the ground.

We love Chalk Art at MoMA.

It is so different from anything else that you see inside the museum.

It's definitely experiential.

So the Chalk Artist really kind of perform for an entire weekend.

I talk outdoors, come from all over.

We feel very fortunate that we've had some of the top nationally ranked artists come tomorrow and be part of the festival.

But we also have some great Wisconsin artists, and so we're happy to introduce them.

And then we now include three younger artists, typically high school age.

I was trying to focus on something that would appeal to young girls, because I know young girls love rainbows and unicorns and sometimes Starbucks too.

It's really.

Enjoyable and.

It's such a friendly community of people, too, that travel all across the country.

And it's just such a neat way to express yourself for everyone to see.

I am making Dolly Parton.

I came across this Dolly Parton picture and I was like, You know what?

This is the one.

This is the one I'm going to talk, you know.

I did the grid around it just so that I could do, like, the basic outline and get the proportions right.

And then I just started with the color.

This is a deer in the forest.

And I was inspired to do this because I live on a lake and I like the feel of the lake when I go to it.

And I wanted to portray that in this image.

My favorite part of doing chalk art is the creativity.

You can really just throw in whatever you want.

And still look pretty good.

One of the other things that drew me into chalk art or street painting was the fact that I was going to be out of my studio and in the public eye.

And I find that the interaction with the crowd fuels my energy level and just allows me to express myself better.

Well, here at Moa, they decided not only was I going to help new chalk artists, but maybe I should do a program for the students, for the younger kids.

And I am always all about teaching the younger generation something about art.

It's really great for the students to be able to come to the workshops in advance and meet one of the artists that's going to be on on the ground actually talking during the event.

They're going to learn a lot about what I do, what the other artists do, how we use our chalk medium form.

And then when they get to the event to see the actual show, they're all giddy and excited because they actually know that artist.

I know that artist.

Today I am working on an inspirational piece from one of H.H.

Bennett's images, and it's of his great granddaughter.

What they had done was they'd made this diorama, and then they placed her instantly within the scene.

She looks like this.

Major giant inside.

And I like to do a lot of work with the animation character.

So I decided I wanted to do a 3D animation using that photo as my inspiration.

So a lot of times I'll start with the.

Eyes because that.

Seems to be the most appealing.

Once you get the eyes down, people are so focused on the eyes, then I just branch out from there.

So I did her eyes and did her face work down through the mountains.

And today I get to come back and I get to add another whole nother layer which enhances it even more.

When you come to the art and talk fast, do you actually have a chance to see how the artist works?

And thanks to to ask questions and I don't think there's anything better.

When people come out here to look at these images, I just want them to enjoy the fun aspect of what I've created.

I really love the fact that the public can come and see and check it out.

It's just a whole different medium than just sketching on normal paper, you know?

And I just really love it.

Come with us now to Reno, Nevada, to learn about the Urban Lotus Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches yoga to young adults experiencing violence, addiction, incarceration or homelessness, while learning the physical and mental techniques required for yoga.

Participants develop skills that help them achieve better emotional balance, impulse control, stress management and psychological resilience.

The Urban Lotus Project is a nonprofit here in Reno, Nevada, and we contract with yoga teachers in the community to bring yoga, specifically trauma informed yoga and meditation practices to different agencies that serve at risk or underserved youth and young adults here in the community, specifically those kids that are afflicted or impacted by addiction, violence, incarceration and homelessness.

It's a preventative program we're getting to them before they make the bad decision or even after they do, or even after they've had their trauma.

We're giving them tools to digest their experiences in a healthy and a safe way so that they can reclaim ownership of their bodies.

They can reclaim ownership of their lives before they step into adulthood.

And today, since we started, we've served about 14,000 students.

The trauma informed go days to help ease them into a new way of exercising and becoming mindful of their breath and and how they can learn to adjust and cope with stressors in life.

And I like to do kind of a yoga, Nedra, where it's focusing on each body part and taking them through slowly to become more mindful of their breath and their body.

So actually focusing on each body part, walking them through it, relaxing them, and then finding stillness in savasana, which is corpse posing and just laying still and letting them let thoughts come in their mind and then letting them go.

We are always looking for strong relationships and partners with yoga studios and yoga teachers in the community.

And one of the Urban Lotus Project's longest standing partnerships in town has been Yoga Hood Yoga Studio.

They've graciously offered their space so that we can host our free community classes there and the co-owners there both served Urban Lotus in the past in different capacities.

Our children need support, and this is one way that I can give back that we can give back as business owners in its its whole form.

Yoga offers us ways of living that help us to be happy and healthy in our bodies, in our minds.

Every time we come to the mat, every time we take a deep breath and relax our bodies, we're communicating with our nervous system that it's okay to relax.

It's okay to just be who we are in the world and express ourselves in a world.

And that's really golden for for these young adults that we're working with.

We're taking what we know in the science about how it works with regulating the nervous system.

And we're emphasizing those aspects of the practice so that the student can learn what those changes feel like in the body, to develop a little more self-awareness and a little more centeredness in the present moment.

And hopefully the end goal with that is to maybe inform more mindful decisions and behavioral choices in the moment.

It brings sense joy to my life because I've been doing yoga since I was 25 years old, and I found it through my own trauma, which brought me into yoga and it changed my life.

And it's amazing to see the transformation in a student just even from one class.

It's a completely new way to look at treating trauma, and I can't wait to watch it grow.

And that'll be that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, there are always more episodes of the show to be found at LP b dot org slash art rocks and if you can't get enough culture.

Country Roads Magazine makes a great resource for finding out what's happening in the arts, events and destinations all around the state.

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

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LP B, 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.