- [Jason] Next on "Curate."

- [Pat] Shining a light on mental health, this building was meant to be celebratory.

Good design does contribute to better health outcomes.

- [Nick] We'll get the phone call that they just have a wave that they'll never forget.

That message is worth more than a million surfboards.

- [Renee] There's something deeply spiritual about letting your imagination run wild.

- [Heather] This is "Curate."

- Welcome, I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

If you're an art appreciator in Hampton Roads, you probably recognize the scene going on behind us.

We're shooting on the Friday before the Stockley Gardens Art Festival.

You can see artists setting up their tents and getting ready for what promises to be a splendid autumn weekend.

- [Jason] This art show has been going on since 1984, and there's a spring version of the festival as well.

It's hosted by Hope House, and 100% of the proceeds go back to that great organization, which provides support for individuals with developmental disabilities.

- There's another great organization in Norfolk using art and aesthetics for good.

In fact, if you crane your neck a bit, you can see it from here.

The Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters is responsible for the newest building dotting the Norfolk skyline.

Their brand-new pediatric mental health hospital, which they call Children's Pavilion, brings state-of-the-art care to Hampton Roads.

And a great deal of thought went into the blueprints for their new space.

- Design and aesthetics were carefully considered in creating a space that's safe, healing, and life-changing in the most positive way.

Some of the team members responsible for creating such a therapeutic place were kind enough to give us a look at the new facility and talk to us about how thoughtful design and carefully curated art makes the space the perfect place for a kid to find hope when things seem hopeless.

They are our 757 featured artist.

- I think it's such a important time in a person's life, is their childhood.

And if they stumble in some way that they can be helped early in life, it's such a gift to be able to get that help and to be able to understand that they're not alone in the need of getting that help.

(gentle enthralling music) - Mental health challenges in children, adolescents, and young adults are real, and they are widespread, but most importantly, they are treatable and preventable.

(audience cheers) - The strategy around creating this building was wanting to be a beacon to the community, wanting to announce that intention of filling this gap in service and shining a light on mental health.

This building was meant to be celebratory.

- It's probably no surprise that for a child who's really struggling with stress or mood, the experience of receiving care for that condition, especially in a secured and locked inpatient facility, can be pretty unsettling.

And one of the things we wanted to do very carefully to offset that unsettling experience is to just make it a comfortable space.

- [Pat] Good design does contribute to better health outcomes.

- The design of every floor was done with access to large open windows, natural sunlight, a lot of very vibrant colors, a lot of almost playful or whimsical design elements, as well as the fixtures and facilities.

The furniture, the layout of the bedroom, the artwork that is part of the walls themselves throughout the patient care space was all done so that as they go through the treatment process, they don't even have to think about what their physical environment is like and how to navigate that space.

- It was so important to introduce not only the art of healing but the healing of art.

The ability for our patients to be able to express themselves, whether it's through painting or drawing or singing or rapping or playing a musical instrument, it is so important to their healing and to their therapy and to be able to work with their therapists to be able to have an outlet to express what their feelings are, what their emotions are.

And it really is part of the healing journey.

We actually commissioned art to come into this building.

- The art was a big part of communicating that set of expectations of wonder, delight, hopefulness, and joy.

- [Amy] It was important for us to connect with artists who would connect with our mental health mission.

And we told them what was gonna be happening inside this building, the special care that we were gonna be delivering, and the struggles that our children were going to be facing.

And we asked them to use that as inspiration for their art artwork.

- [Jack] Children who have experienced some type of insult or injury in their lives and are feeling the emotional and psychological ramifications of that are not dissimilar to the insult and injury that an oyster receives from a grain of sand that gets turned into a bright pearl.

- When children come into our facility, we want them to know that they too can be that bright pearl.

The piece behind me is really special.

For us, it was really important to bring art up into the patient care environment because we think it brings tremendous peace and calm and reassurance and the beauty of art into our patient-care areas.

- The 12 jewels are knowledge, wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, equality, food, clothing, and shelter, as well as love, peace, and happiness.

I think that art in a healing space is very important.

My mother worked in hospitals my whole life, so I sort of grew up in hospitals.

I would say that the 12 jewels clearly tie into mental health, starting with knowledge, the use of the mind, but also ending with love, peace, and happiness.

Those are some of the successes of mental health.

- [Amy] CHKD adopted a new mission statement this past year, which is health, healing, and hope for all children.

- What I wanted to do was for visitors to be able to read the whole text but then for the text to flip both positive and negative so that possibly viewers could experience each word as what its meaning is separate from the whole.

I think it's really important to have art in a healing space because you wanna really create an environment that's engaging, that's dynamic, that's active.

I think that one of the things that's so wonderful about art is that it can both transport you to a different place, but it can also locate you to where you are, which is an important part of any healing process.

- As an adolescent, I had my own mental health issues and was no stranger to a mental health hospital.

You know, it meant a great deal to me to be able to make this piece for this audience and to try to make something that would be inspiring and very positive and help to create an environment that destigmatizes mental health.

We are all individuals.

We all have our own stories.

Some of these stories have difficult moments, and yet we all have something of value that we bring out into the world.

- This past spring, students from the Governor's School were asked to interpret their experience, either personal or through their friends or family with mental health, through their artwork.

We were so moved by this that we commissioned one of the young students, and we have two pieces of her art.

They're beautiful.

They're inspirational.

- So I didn't want it to be a specific thing like a person or a drawing of an object.

They're very joyful colors, you know?

They're not dark or unsaturated.

I really hope that people see in my art things in a new way, that they look at things closer, that they look at things unconventionally.

(uplifting music) - [Ann] You know, art is such a healing thing to engage with.

It's a human thing, I think.

It's so wonderful for kids, parents, to understand that and to see that.

(uplifting music crescendos) - Want more "Curate?"

Find us on the web.

See this show again or any from our seven seasons.

Surf on over to whro.org/curate.

Combining art and function is an important part of surfboard design.

Having a board that carves effectively through the ocean is critical for making artistry while in the water.

Having a good-looking board is part of that as well.

Virginia Beach surfboard designer Nick Halleran works both ends of that spectrum so that when he or his patrons get out on their board, they are creating in all of the best possible ways.

(mellow electronic music) - The thing that people say about my surfing all the time is that I surf like I understand what I'm doing, and that makes sense.

I've spent countless more hours in a shaping bay than I have in the ocean on a surfboard.

I remember building things and making things like very, very young, conceptualizing structures that I wanted to build, like try and kind of use my hands and kind of like the mechanics of the world to make something work.

I don't know if that's normal or not.

To me, it was very normal, but I think now I realize that like maybe not.

(film reel clicking) We moved around a fair bit, but I grew up mostly near Buffalo, New York.

It's kind of what I would call home.

Would vacation to the beach here and there and always dreamt of surfing, would try it alongside my dad, my brother, uncles, cousins.

But it was very much a blind-leading-the-blind leading-the-blind situation.

Kind of aspirational, sort of one of those down-the-road kind of things, always, oh yeah, someday I'd like to live at the beach.

Someday I think it would be cool to actually like learn how to surf.

In the middle of my sophomore year of college, I kind of had the realization there was nothing keeping me in the Great White North anymore, and so I made the effort to drop out of college and move to Nicaragua, go work at a surf camp.

Dad put the kibosh on that, and then Virginia Beach kind of ended up being our middle ground.

(mellow electronic music) Our name, MAR Surf Exchange, it is an acronym for Make and Ride Surf Exchange.

Surf shop has kind of become a diluted term that basically means like surf-themed store, and it used to mean like this is where surfboards are built.

And that's still true here.

I started as a hobby, and that wasn't sufficient.

I didn't want to just kind of keep it on the back burner or do it after work.

It's what I wanted to do.

The functional is kind of what drew me in to this art form, if you're willing to accept it as such.

That is really where I kind of spent and focused a lot of my energies early on.

Literally the first five or so years that I was working in this medium, I wasn't making choices, if that makes sense.

I was fulfilling orders.

Those things are pretty standard.

In a lot of ways, that kind of removal of choice for myself and not ever answering the question of what I prefer and what I think necessarily really bogged me down in some ways when it came time to kind of make my own aesthetic choices.

That process of learning what I like and learning kind of what we want to associate with our style of work was a really challenging thing to do, understanding the boundaries of kind of the scientific side of what makes a board do the things that we want it to do.

And it is kind of a free-form sculpting where you have the big picture numbers that you need to hit to make sure that it's going to float the person appropriately and engage with the water in the way that it needs to to make the board feel the way you want it to feel under your feet.

And I know that that is like the least artsy thing of all time, but trying to find that balance between like what appeals to a broad enough audience that we can justify continuing this pursuit and what can we do to play off of that or be creative around those things that sets what we're doing apart enough that it's not just mimicry.

♪ We got some frost now ♪ ♪ Society on the cusp now ♪ ♪ Disintegrate from the top down ♪ ♪ Megalomania is a rough spell ♪ ♪ We are legitimate sick of the megalithic ♪ - [Employee] You need to get to bed.

- It's just below.

The best things so far in this endeavor and also one of the most challenging has been handing off some of the creative process and just the technical parts of the process to other people on our team.

It taught me that I'm a little bit of a control freak and a little bit of a perfectionist, which I wouldn't have called myself until you hand your baby to somebody else and just worry that it's gonna slip out of their hands.

(mellow electronic music) The artist title is put upon me maybe more so than I would claim it for myself.

I think of myself more so as a, probably craftsman, but not even so much in the like technical kind of building something side of things.

What really kind of makes this worthwhile for me is using the physical skills that I've developed to kind of bring out a less tangible experience.

That process of surfing doesn't start when you're paddling into a wave.

It starts when you're checking the forecast.

It starts when you're looking at boards, when you're sitting around telling stories with your buddies.

It's all surfing to me.

And I think that that is really kind of the core of it, is just, it's the pursuit more so than it is the action.

What gets me out of bed in the morning isn't surfboards.

It's not shaping surfboards or glassing surfboards.

If I hear somebody's vision and understand their needs and am able to kind of process the human side like that unknown variable in riding waves and then translate that through the knowledge and experience and practice that I have kind of crafting a board around that person, if I do all of those things right, it'll be a couple weeks after that board's done, and we'll get the phone call, or we'll get the text message or the Instagram message that they just had a wave that they'll never forget.

And for me, that message is worth more than a million surfboards.

- Renee Womack-Keels is an Ohio-based artist who is renowned for her quilts.

Using hand-dyed fabric and African prints, her textured quilts are full of meaning.

- My motto is there are no mistakes in quilting.

There are only design opportunities.

(upbeat music) When I was a child, I learned to sew.

You know, those were the days of home economics, and I made the little apron and the little blouse that you make.

So I fell in love with sewing.

As time went on, I think when I was in high school, senior high school, I made a lot of my clothes.

And then when my children came along, I started making my children's clothes.

Through the years, I kind of got away from it, and then someone I was on a panel with, we were talking about the things that we like to do, and this person was telling me she was a quilter.

And I said, "Well, you know, I've always been a sewer, and when I retire in 25 years or so, I'm going to learn to quilt."

And she said, "Oh, Renee, don't wait until you retire.

Let me teach you now."

So I spent about two weeks with her learning how to make what is called a log-cabin quilt.

I wanted to learn the process.

I wanted to learn the skills because I wanted to learn how to make art quilts.

There are the traditional quilts that you would put on your bed versus the kind of thing that I make now that goes on your wall.

There's something deeply spiritual about creating something.

It's the playfulness.

It's the letting your imagination run wild.

There are quote, unquote, rules in quilting, and while I do try to make sure that my seams are straight, my sewing is straight, my points don't always, you know, match up.

My colors may not necessarily be analogous.

I have put orange and purple together.

I just love the idea of putting different pieces of fabric together and watching how they play together.

(upbeat trumpet music) I consider myself to be a narrative-storyteller quilter, that is, my quilts tell a story, and typically they will tell stories about women's lives.

What I want people to come away from is not only to be inspired, but to learn about the unsung heroes, sher-oes I guess I should say, the women whose stories are not told.

"Wild Women Don't Have the Blues" is the first of a series of three quilts.

I got interested in blues singers of the '20s, '30s, and '40s, Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith.

And I said I'd like to tell the story of these singers in a quilt because sometimes people will never pick up a book and read it, but they might be willing to at least read a quilt that goes on your wall.

The second quilt is called "Cafe au Lait and Brown Sugar Divas" because in the entertainment industry, African American women were sometimes segregated according to skin color.

In that quilt is a little different fabric.

It's yellow tones, it's light brown tones, because I wanted it to sort of mirror the images of the woman and their skin tones.

"Cocoa and Hot Chocolate Divas" is the quilt that I created for darker-skinned women.

Hattie McDaniel, Beah Richards, are in there.

So that's how that series of quilts came into being.

Maybe about 10 or 12 years ago going through some really deep emotional turmoil, and quilting became very therapeutic for me.

(soft poignant music) There's a quilt that I do once a year, and that quilt is for my son, who is incarcerated.

One of the things that I could not do last year was to go see him.

So one of my pieces is called "Your Blues Ain't Like Mine."

And it's blue fabric.

It's blue hearts.

Because I hadn't been able to visit him during the pandemic, that made it pretty difficult and painful for me.

(soft poignant music continues) And as you can tell, this heart is not completely reconnected, and that's on purpose.

That heart is reconnected, but this heart is not.

- [Interviewer] Is there a point where you think you won't need to make one?

- I'm hoping so, yes.

I'm hoping so.

As I quilt, I'm thinking, you're leaving your own legacy of your own stories, and people may not know all of my story, but they will know some of my story.

And hopefully that will encourage them to think about their own stories as well.

- [Jason] Want more "Curate?"

You can find it on WHRO's social media platforms.

Follow WHRO Public Media on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

There is always lots of fresh "Curate" content in the feeds.

- [Heather] And don't forget the web.

"Curate" is online at whro.org/curate.

- Well, that just about does it for our time, but before we go, a big thank you to Ohef Sholom Temple here in the heart of Stockley.

- They were kind enough to allow us to perch up above the action as artists prepare for the big weekend ahead.

- And thanks, too, to the Stockley Gardens Art Festival and the Hope House Foundation.

While we're taping the Friday before the festival, this episode won't air until well after the event.

- [Heather] So that gives us a chance to leave you with the sights and sounds from the festival.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- [Jason] And I'm Jason Kypros.

Thanks for being here with us.

- [Heather] Enjoy, and we'll see you next time on "Curate."

(light jazz music) (people chattering) (people chattering)