- [Jason] Next on Curate.

- [Freeman] I have made guitars out of some my everyday things, there's something about that wood, you just won't believe, some of that wood was telling the story.

- [Truly] Emergence, is our first ever teen juried exhibition, really letting them express and be truly creative.

- [Marcelo] Our goal was to use space as an instrument.

- [Jason] This is Curate.

- Welcome.

I'm Heather Mazzoni, - And I'm Jason Kypros, thanks for joining us this week as we come to you from the Portsmouth Art and Cultural Center in Old Town Portsmouth.

They've graciously opened their home to us this week, as they are preparing for their winter holiday exhibit.

- We start with an amazing story that speaks to the way art, history and humanity are so intertwined.

Blues guitarist and luthier, Freeman Vines has always sought out interesting and off the beaten path items to make stunning musical instruments, but one thing in particular has been the foundation for some of his most powerful and haunting creations.

WHRO's Lisa Godley traveled down to fountain North Carolina to meet our seven five seven featured artist, Freeman Vines and share his story.

♪ I want to be at the meeting, ♪ ♪ I want to be at the meeting, ♪ ♪ I want to be at the meeting, ♪ ♪ When all saints get home.

♪ - [Lisa] 79 Year old Freeman vines has been making and playing guitars most of his life.

For five decades, this self-trained luthier has cut, sanded and chiseled amazing instruments out of materials that encompasses past.

Things like tobacco barns, radio parts, and mule troughs.

- [Freeman] Oh, back y'all know one day, they had a horse barn out there, and I see this thing over there and I asked her man, "Could I have a finer of mule trough?"

Now these are his words, he said, "Mule slobber, may have preserved that wood," I could not rest till I made a guitar.

I have made guitars out of some of everything, I can't even remember all of them.

- [Lisa] But nothing has impacted his life and his work, like the guitars he created from the wood of the hanging tree.

♪ Southern tree bear strange fruit.

♪ - That tree produces only the most horrific and different things you just won't believe.

I bought some wood from a white fella and as I would load it on the truck, he told me he said, "That wood that you bought", he said, "a man was hung on that tree."

I didn't believe it.

- [Lisa] He shared his story with his friend, Tim Duffy who decided to do a little digging and uncovered the bone chilling truth of the horrific lynching that had occurred in 1930, not too far from Freeman's home.

- [Freeman] He had newspaper clippings, and he had done infiltrated them folks and found out that it was true by the way, a man was killed on that wood, shot him 200 times and cut off stuff and stuck in his mouth, and it was horrific the way he died, and that were the beginning of hanging tree wood.

And there was something about that wood, that you just won't believe.

Some of that wood was telling the story.

By scraping out the little pieces of deteriorated wood and stuff, you will find out that it had a pattern.

It had features in there that, all you had to do with, (indistinct) Here would come stuff that will scare you to death.

Most had features like skulls, terror on faces, snakes coming out of skull's mouth and eyes and all like that right there dead.

All I had to do was spray for a little bit, then get the bad wood from the good wood, and when I get those scraping, I screamed "God almighty, let me leave this alone".

I ain't never had my hand on some wood that had experienced and seen and heard what that wood had.

I had to break myself from working out that night.

Have you ever been somewhere standing in line or maybe in a store shopping and you know somebody's looking at you behind your back and you ain't seen him.

That's the way it did me, I would be working and I would catch myself, glancing all around and stuff.

I said, "I got to quit this. "

And then some people highly educated people told me and said some supernatural power had me.

(ominous music) One day I was sitting on my porch.

Now I had that (indistinct) again, so I got my hammer, I hit and that flat piece fell out.

I messed around a little bit then smoked a cigarette and looked, I hit the other part of the knot, when it came out, it was a shoe, and if you see the John Brown figures of that way in that wood and stuff, you know nobody could have carved it in there, It's too direct and perfect, and I said, (indistinct) He said that the guy that was lynched on that tree said that, he wore (indistinct) That solved the mystery of what this shoe thing was in the tree.

- [Lisa] Freeman says, while he's glad he knows the truth about the hanging tree, he has no desire to see the spot where the tree once stood, or ask his neighbors about who was involved.

- See you get to dig into deep and you live around here, one old guy traveling in the field by there, one old guy over here working at night, and so you might create a problem.

You know the deal, about (indistinct) say they ain't changed all that much.

They changed faces, but didn't change that much.

Like I said, leave they toes alone, they leave you alone.

- [Lisa] Meanwhile, his mini guitars travel across America, each instrument telling its own unique story of wood once used for both good and evil purposes.

- [Wendy] He works with a lot of found materials, which I love, and there's a really deep tradition of that in the south.

So not just the wood and pieces from trees, but some of the masks that he uses, so an African mask that he may have found on the side of the road, or perhaps in a flea market that he then turned into a guitar.

I thought that was a really powerful image.

And again, something that I think resonates with our viewers of looking at sort of this make, do attitude that we have in the south, of just finding something and making it work, he really embodies that and that's something that we've lost a little bit, I think, in this modern age, but when people see it done well, they really respond to that.

He is a contemporary artist and he's creating these wonderful sculptures, and so I think that that's something that's important for people to remember.

We do have these contemporary artists who are perhaps of an older generation and they're not going to be around for much longer, so we do need to appreciate them and show their work while they are still here.

♪ I want to be at the meeting.

♪ - [Lisa] As Freeman Vines' guitars travel from museum to museum, they bring with them stories of life in rural North Carolina, and some of them specifically the hanging tree guitars, pull a history that is seldom told, one that embodies the horrible acts of racism committed in the Jim Crow South, a story brought straight out of the wood and into the world.

♪ Then we'll have a meeting around the throne, ♪ - Freeman Vines Exhibit is coming here to the Portsmouth Arts and Cultural Center in 2022 from May 1st through August 1st.

- You can find more about that show and all the great work they do on their website, Portsmouthartcenter.com.

Freeman's artwork will be the third exhibit featured here from the Music Maker Relief Foundation, an amazing organization that highlights these musicians, promotes their work and helps to make sure they are sustained and looked after.

Learn more at their website musicmaker.org - [Jason] And you could watch Freeman Vines' story, anytime on our website, see all Curate content, including full episodes, seven five seven featured artists and other features.

It all lives at whro.org/curate - Young women take center stage in Virginia MOCA's newest exhibit, Emergence, on display at the main museum and satellite gallery, WHRO's Rebecca Weinstein sat down with some of the people involved in the project, giving further voice to young women who are emerging as talented artists with important things to say.

(upbeat music) - Well, thanks for coming in and chatting with me today.

First and foremost, I guess, how are you doing and how have things been at MOCA?

- I'm doing great.

Things are good I wouldn't say back to normal, but visitation's up and it's good to have visitors back in the space.

- [Rebecca] This exhibit Emergence, can you tell me a little bit about how this idea came to be?

- [Truly] Sure.

So Emergence is our first ever teen juried exhibition, so that means the call for applications was open to young women, ages 13 to 19, and then those applications were judged by a jury of young adults, a jury of their peers.

- [Rebecca] Looking through the pieces that were submitted for this exhibit, what were you looking for?

- [Truly] We had over a hundred applications and we ultimately chose 60 artists to be included in the show, so the jury was just looking for creativity and personal voice and vision, they just wanted to see originality.

- [Rebecca] It's funny, I think about being a young woman or a kid right now, going through the pandemic, so I imagine they came up with some really interesting stuff.

- [Truly] I think if you're thinking about like themes found throughout the exhibition, it varies so wildly.

- [Rebecca] You know, the age range for the exhibit 13 to 19, I feel like that's such a vital time for like finding and activating your creativity, so I think it's great that you guys are doing this.

- [Truly] One thing that really excited me about this opportunity for these young women, is there's so many chances for them to express themselves, letting them be seen and heard in a space that's not their schools, opening their creativity to a wider audience in a museum setting, really letting them express and be truly, truly creative.

- [Rebecca] Folks who visit and experienced this exhibit, what do you want them to walk away thinking about or feeling?

- [Truly] I want people to come away inspired, I want them to be inspired by these 13 and 16 year old women who are creating really, really powerful art.

I want them to take away some insight into the minds of young women and realize how complex young women are, and I think back to when I was a teenager and if anything, I'm inspired by them, I think they're more ambitious at that age.

To me, it's inspiring, and it gives me hope.

- [Rebecca] It's great that you guys are doing this, It's a great opportunity for young artists.

(upbeat music) - Sound as art is all around us, and we can all relate to being moved by a piece of music, but Stereotank takes it much further.

Stereotank is a design studio focused on the relationship between sound, art and architecture, and this clever group from South Florida may make you rethink the sounds you hear every day.

- [Sara] It's a sound installation that creates music or rhythms with water.

Stereotank was born in 2009.

- Our goal was to use space as an instrument, so sort of like you can inhabit the musical instrument.

Of course, that evolved into many other durations.

- We've been trained as architects.

- We moved to New York and then while we were working in architectural offices, we on our side, we started to do our projects in the city, public art, temporary installation and so on, and that was also like a perfect territory to experiment this idea of combining public arts and sound or architecture and sound into immersive installations.

- We found several opportunities, grants, and awards, to be able to propose quick installations that could be done in the city, just targeting some areas that were underdeveloped or underused that needed activation.

- [Marcelo] We try to experiment with sound always sort of in a very primitive way.

The first sound installation we did was actually called Stereotank, and that's where our name came from.

We took this huge plastic water tanks side by side, and then connecting them.

- [Sara] So the actual string that was creating the sound was also part of the structure of the installation because it was keeping it together, we liked that idea of kind of joining architecture and sound even through structure of a project.

So we were invited to propose a project for Times Square.

We won luckily this competition, and we had to design a heart shape installation.

That was the premise of the proposal.

- It had to be related to love, and we never saw ourselves doing anything like that.

So we took it really sort of our way and looking at the heart more from a acoustical point of view.

We had to add some drums embedded, so people could stop and play, there were actually like six different acoustical percussion instruments.

- [Sara] They're in low frequency sound, beating with a light.

All of these was pulsating while the heart was not being played by people.

We had to figure something out that was sturdy enough, and we went back again to the plastic tanks, thinking about the afterlife of a project, we design the heartbeat project for being able to be transformed after it's used in Times Square as a another project that is called HeartSeat.

We're going to show a sample of the Cargo Guitar.

The Cargo Guitar was a project that we did in Japan, this extra long string, it's within a shipping container, so that's how we came up with the name.

This string is amplified, but it doesn't have any kind of effect.

So the string becomes smaller, and the tone higher.

- [Marcelo] When we arrived in Miami, we couldn't really treat public spaces the same because it's completely different.

So what we started doing is actually going first inside of galleries, where we could experiment with space and also people, so the first one we did is called Generative Drop Sequencer.

- To engage more with public space here in Miami as well, we've been working with some students at FIU on a seminar that has to do with a public space and art.

- [Marcelo] I think we have to mention about the Little Free Library project.

- [Sara] It's basically turning the standard Little Free Library format into an inhabitable Little Free Library.

We've also been working on our own project, our own house studio.

- [Marcelo] We started with one idea, but we never really know how it will sound until we finish it.

- [Sara] That applies to sound, but it also applies to working with given materials in general, because when you have to work with an object that already exists, that has its own properties, then you really need to adapt to it.

So that's, we think the beauty of working with materials and with systems that have been designed for other purposes.

- Art can have a variety of profound effects on us, for Detroit photographer, Asia Hamilton, it has helped her find her identity and document her life, and now her photos inspire, educate and heal the souls of those who see it.

- [Asia] Every human being, they have a uniqueness about them that you can grasp with a photograph.

Photography saved my life, it was exactly what I needed to do and what I was born to do.

I grew up on the Northwest side of Detroit.

Photography has been a way of being my therapy, one of the things that I want to talk about specifically is how mindful photography is and how it requires for you to take your thoughts and focus on something else, and it was a time where my mother, she had gotten ill, she had a stroke and I was in a stream panic and I needed to take a walk and I was just walking around and, I saw the way this, the light was hitting the building and the textures on the building, and I was like, oh my God, it's so beautiful, and I had to take out my camera and started just taking pictures, and it literally took me out of that element and had me focused on something else.

The meaning for the textures is just the history behind it.

How did those textures come about?

What did those places look like beforehand?

And a lot of the portraiture and stuff that I shoot is the documentary of history.

It is like a way of just remembering a time, and so those textures are bits and pieces of a time that has passed.

I love to take posed candid photos, there's always those instances of a glimpse of a person, and a lot of times when I start to shoot, I'm looking for that in between just so that I can capture the real essence of a person.

There's a photo called West Side, I literally pulled up on these people.

They was a father and a son standing outside, and it was the golden hour and photography, the sun was shining and they looked, it just looked beautiful.

I took a picture of them in the midst of asking them, "Can I take a photo?"

And I continue to photograph them a little bit more, but it was that first shot that got it, for a long time I photographed a lot of nude women, black women specifically, and it was because there really wasn't enough black women being shown in a way that was artistic, and I wanted to present them as beautiful in their body, and that was a learning process for me too, because I had to become comfortable with myself.

The series of mixed media photographs that I did with merging the textures and the portraiture together was really, embracing our history, our lineage, how we go through life from beginning to end, those textures, all of that information in there in our being and how we interact with each other, So there is a photo of a man and a woman, they're like my grandparents, starting there at that unit was pretty much the head of the family, we look to them for our wisdom, and then I have another exact photo of a younger generation of a young boy and a young girl, because that's our beginning, that's where our start is.

There's this one picture, it's just a bunch of kids on the playground, and I was like, "Hey, y'all come together, get together, let me get a photo of you."

and the post that they gave me was so fierce, that's one of my favorite pictures.

You want to be able to educate people with your work, that doesn't always have to be in the form of, a protest.

It can be in the form of just healing the people as is.

That's what I do, I use it as a way to heal myself and whomever else that comes in contact with it.

I love to give back because I had some amazing mentors, I've taught, middle and high school students photography, I started a business called Photo Sensei, which is photography tours and workshops around the Detroit area.

Another thing that I've done is open up the Norwest Gallery of art, the Norwest gallery is in North Rosedale park on Grand River between Evergreen and Auto-drive.

Norwest comes from the Norwest Theater that used to be on Grand River, just on the other side of Southfield freeway.

This is an opportunity for me to create a platform for artists who are emerging, all the way up into strong professional artists, that's been doing it for years.

It was really a matter of wanting to create a platform and space for people to exhibit and show their work, express themselves in a way that it's a safe space to just be yourself.

I love curating shows, I like to get people to feel, so it's a big part of my art.

I come up with a concept or an idea and just push it to the limit.

I select the artists that I think would be able to convey that message in their medium, and it's super exciting to me.

The gallery has definitely taken on its own life, and it is a necessary place for this neighborhood.

I show Detroit how Detroit performs by just being myself, I'm always going to be Asia in my work, in how I greet people, how I run my space.

It's all very calm.

When people come in here they're smiling, and they're like, "oh my God, the energy here is so good."

And that's because I want you to know that I'm sharing a part of my love with you, this is my passion, this is my home, so it's like me opening up my home to you.

- [Jason] Hey, you want to experience more Curate?

You can find us on the web at whro.org/curate.

- [Heather] We're on social media too.

You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

We want to say thanks again to the Portsmouth Art and Cultural Center.

- And if you want to keep an eye on what's going on here, you can visit their website at portsmouthartcenter.com.

Now we're going to leave you now with more blues from Freeman Vines.

- Thanks for joining us, I'm Heather Mazzoni.

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

("I Don't Want No Woman If Her Hair Ain't Longer Than Mine")