- [Male Endorser] This is a production of WEDU PBS.

Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(light music) - [Female Endorser] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

- [Gabe Ortiz] In this addition of WEDU Arts Plus.

An exhibition covers 500 years of Cuban history and its Tampa connections.

- [C.J.

Roberts] We're telling stories about Cubans who went through different experiences at different times.

And I think there are lots of lessons there for all of us.

- [Gabe Ortiz] A walkway that unites the homes of two historic artists.

- [Betsy Jacks] The connection of these two sites is so fantastic because they've been linked by history, and they've been linked by themes and by stories.

- [Gabe Ortiz] Weaving baskets full of meaning.

- [Carrie Garcia] I think it's about bringing people together and being able to share the traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation, from our ancestors.

- [Gabe Ortiz] And forced perspective photography.

- [Ken Hendricks] We're time traveling.

And we want people to kind of travel back to that time with us and remember what it used to be like.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

(jazz music) Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

The Tampa Bay History Center presents Cuban Pathways.

An expansive exhibition that tells the story of Cuba with more than 100 objects, documents and images that span 500 years.

Experience the culture, music, and history of Cuba, and its ties to Tampa through this special collection of artifacts.

(light music) - The relationship between Tampa and Cuba stretches back hundreds of years.

Cuban fisherman used to come to the shores of Florida's west coast to fish, and then of course we have cigar workers that come to Tampa in the 1800s through the 1900s.

The Tampa Cuba connection is really interesting in that it goes really far back in its multifaceted, and that's a story that we wanted to tell in this exhibit.

- Well, we knew that we needed to partner with people in order to achieve over a hundred objects in this exhibit.

Our own collection is great but we don't focus on Cuban history, so we had to reach out to other institutions and explore their collections.

And they really worked with us to tell that story.

- The hardship of this exhibit is telling a 500-year story in 2000 square feet.

But for us, it was important that we told a very broad-based story.

So as our guests walk the gallery, they're gonna see stories about Spaniards in Cuba.

They're gonna see stories about Afro-Cubans.

They're gonna hear stories about Chinese-Cubans and it was difficult for us to find items to tell all of these stories.

So what we did to solve this problem was we reached out to some partner institutions, the Mel Fisher, the Daytona Museum of Arts and Sciences, even the Delta Flight Museum.

And they loaned us items that help us tell a fuller story and to tell a very diverse Cuban story.

(light music) - They're not just one monolith.

And so we really wanted to explore the different cultures that make up the Cuban people.

And so we really wanna take people through an experience of a little bit what it would be like to grow up or live among one of those cultures.

And then we actually have a pathway, bested in Cuban Pathways, where you can take on the kind of the persona of a Spaniard and Afro-Cuban or a Chinese-Cuban, and kinda see how your culture was affected and helped affect the growth and history of Cuba.

- One of the pieces for the show that we were really excited to be able to get was a painting by a free person of color in Cuba, named Vicente Escobar.

And Vicente Escobar painted the treasure of Havana in 1800.

And his story is so interesting because he's a free Black painter that's so successful.

He's ultimately able to go to Madrid and become the painter of the Royal Chamber.

Other pieces we're proud of are items from the Asorin family.

This was a family that came from Spain, to Cuba, to the United States, and it tells a revolutionary story.

And that's a story that a lot of Cubans in Florida really understand because a lot of them experienced that or something similar to that themselves.

- The Asorin family in the turn of the century manufactured clay products in Agost, Alicante.

Around 1917, when my father was only seven years old, the anarchist started moving into Spain and started stealing the small businesses in that part of Spain.

One of those businesses was the Asorin family business.

And so they headed on a ship with barely any means to Cuba, to start all over again.

As their business grew, it thrived, it was a very large industrial business by the 1960s.

And then all of a sudden there was a movement that had started on Christmas Eve of '58, and Fidel Castro declared himself a communist Marxist.

So on October the 13th of 1960, the communist agents came to the brick plant and told my father they had frozen our bank accounts, that none of the Asorin properties belonged to them anymore, they were now the property of the communist Cuban government.

I had just turned eight and I watched them coming up the staircase, there were two militiamen wearing their militia uniforms carrying rifles over their shoulders.

And they basically said, in Spanish, that this no longer belonged to us.

But that everything in the house had been inventoried.

And we were told that if we wanted to leave we could only bring one suitcase per person when we left.

So on November the 13th is the day we landed in Miami airport and it was stamped Miami, Florida.

Never to go back.

- Well, I think one of the things that makes this such an effective show is that it is focusing on people.

We're telling stories about Cubans, who went through different experiences at different times.

And I think there are lots of lessons there for all of us as we follow, and we understand what those folks went through.

So I think it makes for an educational show, but a show that we can all relate to.

(light music) - Curation is an art form.

We don't just throw things on the wall chronologically, and just think, "Well, people will engage them as they will."

The goal is to create spaces that what we like to say, have different textures.

So when you walk into the exhibit you're gonna see a map from 1511.

You're gonna see an elaborate oil painting from the 1800s.

You're gonna see a set of bongo drums.

And you're seeing all these things in particular places for a reason.

The idea is that we wanna have different textures that meet people at different places and tell different stories about Cuba.

- One thing that caught my attention is the picture of the first Tainos.

From where we are, in Puerto Rico, Tainos are a very important part of our history from the center of the island, so it's good that part of the Tainos are making all the way into these exhibit.

So very, very excited to see that here.

- We also didn't stop at 1950 or 1970.

We brought the story up to literally the presence.

And so there are still people who are trying to make the very dangerous 90-mile trip between Northern Cuba and the Florida Keys.

And we have an example of that with one of the tugboats that came ashore with 12 people aboard in September of 2021.

'Cause it's still very difficult to live in Cuba, and there are people who try to leave every single day.

- There are things that will touch your heart, there are some things that will make you cry, but mostly we want people to learn the importance of the Cuban pathways and how it relates to Tampa.

It makes you realize that Tampa is truly a pathway for so many immigrants, including the Cuban immigrants.

(light music) - For more information, visit tampabayhistorycenter.org.

The Hudson River Skywalk is a spectacular path that connects the homes of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, two famous Hudson River School artists.

Learn more about these painters and how this walkway came to be.

(light music) - Thomas Cole was the founder of an art movement that we now know as the Hudson River School, which was the first major art movement in America.

And it started with Thomas Cole in about 1825 when he was just 24 years old.

And extended into the late 19th century, so it dominated American visual culture for over 50 years.

- Olana is one of the most magnificent places in the country.

It's Frederic Church's home and studio, and 250 acre designed historic landscape.

Frederic Church was a founding figure of American art.

His mentor was Thomas Cole.

(light music) - What we've done with this project is we've taken the two founders of the Hudson River School, and connected them.

(light music) The Hudson River Skywalk is a literal connection, a trail that you can walk on.

It's three miles, one way, six miles, really good workout if you do a round trip.

It's this true connection and trail that is open to the public now for their enjoyment.

- The connection of these two sites is so fantastic because they've been linked by history, and they've been linked by themes and by stories.

And Thomas Cole, when he was in his 40s, had this young student Frederick Church who was still a teenager, and he took him over to the place where Church would later build Olana, and showed him this magnificent landscape.

And so these two places have been intertwined throughout the centuries.

And now people can think of them in the same breath, they can visit them in the same day, they can walk between them.

(light music) - The Hudson River Skywalk concept began in 2015 when Olana and the Thomas Cole site had a collaborative exhibition called River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home, and we were celebrating the opening of that exhibition.

The bridge authority folks were invited and present.

- These two artists are on opposite sides of the river, only divided by our bridge.

- This bridge is really a tourism asset and should be promoted as such.

It had a walkway on it, although a walkway to nowhere, you couldn't go anywhere once you get to the other side.

But nonetheless, a spectacular experience.

- It was at that moment that the people in the room who had hatched the whole idea of river crossings began to see that this could be the future of a new combined destination.

Many partners came together understanding that it's art and art history, that we have a historic treasure right here.

That's what motivated us all to get together and work for two, three years.

- It was an uphill challenge because on the Olana side of the bridge is a very busy intersection with lots of highways coming in in all directions.

And we talked about it for a long time, how would we get people over this busy intersection?

What could we do?

We talked about a bridge or a tunnel.

It became a beautiful park, with a circle and crosswalks, benches, a sitting wall, it just instead of a place that you zoomed through it became a destination to stop and appreciate the beauty that was there.

- The public can come and walk across the Hudson River Skywalk, experiencing the three dimensional versions of the paintings of the Hudson River School.

It's also a significant new economic engine for our region.

The goal is to really create a new tourist destination that will be nationally known, if not internationally known, that will draw people from around the world and around the country to this region.

And this region we're defining as the city of Hudson, Olana, across the bridge to the Thomas Cole site, and then to the village of Catskill.

So the skywalk is really a great thing in the sense that it builds on that infrastructure to create connection between peoples and culture and history.

(upbeat music) - The Hudson River School is a loose affiliation of artists as well as the writers that inspired them that had a thought that they shared which was that these landscapes here are national treasures, and that the beauty that and the nature that we see all around us in this country was something that we should celebrate and something that could be lost.

They shared this belief also that by being in nature, it was a healing experience, it was something that we as a country should experience more and it could cause our spirits to be lifted, it could cause a moral uplift in the citizens of the United States, and was something to be proud of as a country.

I think what's so exciting about what's happening now is that we've heard it, we've heard this message.

And we do realize that this is precious, and that it's ephemeral, and it's easy to lose.

So projects like this, the Hudson River Skywalk, brings attention to the fact that this is here, it is still available to us by the efforts of so many people, Scenic Hudson, New York state, Olana, Thomas Cole.

So many people have worked on making sure that this beauty is still here.

And this is an opportunity, it's giant platform to appreciate it from.

(light music) - To find out more, visit hudsonriverskywalk.org.

In this segment, native American tribes come together to embrace tradition, share their culture, and create wonderfully woven baskets.

Each basket is a special work of art.

(light music) - Everything is connected and that's what makes string, and especially some of these other materials so special is that it's part of this life cycle, it's part of the art, it's part of these things that are native to this area, just like we are.

Come home, making dinner for your family or your kids.

- Each basket tells a story.

Some stories have purpose, some stories have meanings for each individual person.

You might be going through a hard time, and so you would just make a basket to help you out of that dark space.

(light music fading) I think it's about bringing the people together and being able to share the traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation, from our ancestors.

- Come back, come in front, see this eyeball, it about where it's gonna be at.

I've been doing tule now for about, I'll say 15 years.

And what I like from it is talking to the kids about we have a plant that has given its life to us.

Okay.

We need to treat that life with care, respect it, it's part of our culture.

Our kids sometimes will get caught up with the games that they can play on their phones or the TVs.

(kids laughing) I don't think we're losing it.

I think we're just not taking the time to understand it and gather it.

And that's what we need to do.

- I think today, a lot of of youth are having a hard time figuring out who they are, what it means to be Indian or anything like that.

(light music) - Growing up, we didn't have the luxury of knowing a lot of things traditionally, a lot of them we've learned later.

And so the connection was kind of, I think it was disconnected just slightly, and it's nice to know that we're making it again and that hopefully nobody forgets and we don't have of any type of other thing that interrupts that knowledge again.

- Vast tree tells a story of how our people have survived.

It's the one thing that remains constant in our culture.

- Because for us, everything is connected, especially speaking as a native person in general, and everybody always separates things but everything is connected, the baskets, and the ceremonies, and the string, and the food, and the land, and the stories, and the animals.

(light music) - Attention, everybody.

We had a young lady last year, she did a tule mat, and she came back and she did a bigger one.

Her name's, Sally.

(crowd cheering) (crowd applauding) - They get this beautiful piece of artwork that you made.

That's special because not everybody can do that, and so we see value in every single thing that's done.

You know, you have little kids right now at our gathering and they're making little tule ducks or tule mats.

And for us, those are like the most beautiful things ever because that's what this is all about, is passing on that tradition.

- [Christina Gonzales] Everybody that makes something is part of this big collective of people that are creative and that can make something out of nothing.

Seeking those people out that know how to do it and sharing their knowledge and then... And that's the wonderful thing about this is people teaching other people.

- [Carrie Garcia] So I think that's what we are trying to do, is we're trying to preserve that knowledge, and promote it in different ways.

It's like the essence of our community, and so it's part of us.

(light music) - To learn more, head to ciba.org.

Larry Patchett and Ken Hendricks are a creative duo who traveled back in time through their forced perspective photography.

See how they play with perspective to make an unforgettable image.

(car engine revving) - Lewis Hine, said, "Photographs never lie, but liars can photograph."

Photographs never lie, but ours do.

We like to think of ourselves as pretty good liars sometimes.

(Ken laughing) - With integrity.

- With integrity, yes.

(Larry laughing) Forced prospective photography is basically shooting models, making them look full size and fooling the eye.

We're taking 24th scale models, bringing them out into the world and trying to make them look as real as possible.

One 24th scale model was a half inching equals one foot in the real world.

- Yeah.

Basically, if you're a foot away from the model, you need to be 24 feet away from the background.

- [Ken Hendricks] We shoot a wide angle lens, which gives you greater inherent depth of field.

And we also shoot a very small aperture like f25, f29, which gives you even a depth of field.

So everything is in focus from a foot in front of the camera to infinity, which really helps sell the illusion.

A little over two years ago, we started doing the force perspective photography.

Larry said, "Well, you've got a camera, and I've got some models, let's do this."

And so we went out and tried it, and our first photos came out beautifully.

We've been having so much fun ever since.

- [Larry Patchett] We're making very ephemeral dioramas that don't last any longer than it takes us to take a few shots, and then it all goes back into the boxes in there.

What really seems to set ours apart is the quality of Colorado light.

- [Ken Hendricks] We've gotten quite a few comments on our photos of how beautiful the blue sky is.

- [Larry Patchett] And in a way, the secret to this is the props.

The first one we did was an ice wagon, and I found little bitty blocks of ice, and made a set of ice tongs out of a paperclip, sack of potatoes, case of Coca-Cola in the back of a pickup truck, cobblestone street.

- [Ken Hendricks] Posters.

- Fake lamps, some milk bottles on top of it.

It's that additional touch that makes it time travel and helps fool your eye.

- Every once in a while, I'll take a few models out in the backyard and shoot 'em, just to have a, like a catalog of which models we have available to us.

And I thought it would be idea to shoot it behind the scenes shot of this to just kinda show people how simple it is to get a really good shot of a model car.

So I took a cell phone photo of the setup, and put it up on Flickr and it went gangbusters, The first weekend it was up, it got maybe 85,000 views, that's up to 105,000 views right now.

It's our most popular photo.

- Yeah, we spend all the trouble on beautiful sets, and beautiful models, expensive cameras, and our most popular shot was done with a cell phone.

- People from all over the world are seeing our photos, and that's really quite an honor.

When I bring my models, I usually dust 'em off at home, but Larry lets me dust off his models.

So I get out a little makeup brush and dust off all the dust because the dust is actually full-scale dust, it doesn't look like 24-scale dust.

More full-scale dust I can get off of the small cars, the less Photoshop work I have to do.

- [Larry Patchett] You got it.

You got it.

- I have spent hours kind of fixing dust on models.

(both laughing) (light music) We're time traveling.

And we want people to kind of travel back to that time with us, and remember what it used to be like.

And we're using models from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, and setting up in front of buildings that were around at that time.

We tried to make everything as authentic as possible.

When I was a kid, we had a late '40s Studebaker Champion that we rode around in, and then we upgraded to a '54 Chevy, and thought we were living large.

- I grew up with Packards in the garage, but they were already history by the time I was old enough to know what I was looking at.

This car is a time machine.

Like, it doesn't say DeLorean, you won't find a flex capacitor anywhere under the hood or the taillight, but it's a way to travel through time, which in short is what we do with the force perspective.

We're able to go back in time to an era that evokes nostalgia into people looking at the pictures or just a sense of whimsy.

- [Ken Hendricks] Some of these photos that we take just bring back memories.

And the younger people kind of get to see what it was like back in the day.

- This car has four ashtrays and not a cup holder to be found.

So just in subtle little ways like that of the different way people viewed the world in the 1950s than we see the world now.

And our time travel efforts help let us highlight little bits and pieces of those worlds.

- That's hilarious.

(both laughing) We both love old cars and we both love photography, and when you can combine a passion with a creative outlet, that's gold.

And we're just having the most fun that we've ever had.

- I can't improve on that.

(Ken laughing) (light music) - To see more forced perspective photography, visit flickr.com/photos/one24thscale.

And that wraps it up for this edition of WEDU Arts Plus.

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time.

I'm Gabe Ortiz.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Female Endorser] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

(dramatic music)