♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Talley Dunn: Here I get to some fantastic work by Vernon Fisher.

This is a chalkboard painting, which is a real signature work of Vernon's.

We have to say it over and over, there isn't any chalk.

This isn't a photograph, it's a painting, this isn't chalk on a chalkboard, this isn't anything you can erase.

These are these incredibly intricate and complicated paintings.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Michael Auping: There are any number of really great regional artists.

Artists who don't leave town.

Art isn't just made in New York.

Frances Colpitt: What's unusual in Vernon's career is that he was able to do it all based in Fort Worth.

Bob Ackerly: Vernon's work is every bit as good as anything that is being made in New York today.

One of the best painters of his generation.

George Neubert: The idea that he had an exhibition simultaneously at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum.

Talley: He was sat on a stage with artists such as Warhol, Basquiat, he was legendary.

speaker: What Vernon has created is this multi-decade dialogue, conversation, commentary on the social issues of the day, in a way that kind of might bring you laughter, but it could also bring you to tears.

Talley: History, pop culture, science, writing, and fiction, I mean, it goes on and on and on.

Vernon Fisher: There's a lot of painting in the work I do, but there's a lot of other stuff as well, there's, like, a text, which is one thing, and then a representational image, and then a sculptural element.

There's cartoons, diagrams, cutouts, sometimes it's satirical, sometimes you're really serious, sometimes it's comic.

And in a lot of my best pieces, I think I have all those kinds of things going on at the same time.

Terrell James: It's like there's this code hidden within it and you wanna break the code, you wanna figure out what he's telling us.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Dave Hickey: He likes the everyday-ness of being an artist.

He gets in his car and goes to the studio and works there and then comes home.

He doesn't like to go to openings, he doesn't like to fly to Paris for an opening, he's not that sort of person.

The opportunities are there, but Vernon's interest is not there.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Vernon: Okay, this is my mom, my sister, and my father.

My father's name was Vernon Landers Fisher, my name is Vernon Lane Fisher.

He was a typical '50s father.

When I was born, he was a farmer, later on he became a dress manufacturer.

He was a supportive father in some ways, but absent.

Oh, this is a photograph of my mom, Geneva, back in high school.

She was a member of a hard-shell Baptist church, it was very fundamental.

My mother kinda ran the religious part of our family.

And this is me with my sister, Judy.

The obstetrician wasn't there on the day she was born, and she was injured.

Ninety-nine percent of the books are about the child that's on the spectrum, you know what I mean, or mentally handicapped in some way.

There are a few books and articles you could find on quote, "the normal one," you know?

And I'm the normal one.

What you're left with is a life where you kind of try to balance the scales, you know.

To the extent she can't, you do, kind of thing, you know?

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ray Peters: Vernon Lane Fisher was born and raised in Granbury, Texas, Hood County.

He grew up in a sheltered life, in a good community.

He went to First Baptist Church, his mom played the organ there.

As a kid, we would go leave home in the morning, ride our bikes, and be gone till dark, and then when it's dark we'd come home, and our parents never worried about us.

♪♪♪ Ray: I don't think any of us really knew what we were gonna do when we grew up.

You know, as far as an artist, a painter, if you talked about a painter in Granbury, it was somebody that painted houses, nobody painted pictures.

You know, I don't know of anybody that was an artist, and so I had no inkling that that's what he was doing.

I guess we grew up and went our own ways.

I lost track of Vernon after he was a sophomore in college.

Vernon: You think you should have an idea of what you wanna be when you grow up when you go to college, you know.

When I went to Hardin-Simmons later, I decided, well, I was really good at math, so I'd be a math teacher in high school somewhere.

And over a period of time, I would just talk to other students and find out who was a really good teacher and I would take their class no matter what they taught.

I was also taking a literature class, and we read this poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and it spoke to me in a way that was important.

So, I changed my major to English.

George: I met Vernon Fisher because I was an art major at Hardin-Simmons in the art department.

He was a literary major, and then all the sudden he decided to change and become an art major.

He realized extraordinary oases that the art department really provided in the university setting.

Hardin-Simmons was under the domination of the Southern Baptist, which really had a somewhat bigoted and racial background.

We're talking about a time of great social and political upheaval.

The president was shot and killed in Texas.

The Civil Rights movement at it's peak.

So, there was great anxiety and somewhat distrust about systems, establishment, and that kind of thing.

Well, the art department at Hardin-Simmons was on the supervision of Dr. Neidhardt.

Neidhardt really created an environment of freedom of expression and ideas that was unparalleled within the university system.

It was really an oasis that people were drawn to, and so we became kind of, I guess you would call them rebels, within the system.

Vernon, he decided to organize a group he called the Abilene Artsy Craftsy Guild.

And what it was, was a makeup of a group of us who were somewhat rebellious in the environment, who gathered around him and talked about ways of challenging the university's administration.

I think it was Vernon who brought our attention that the leader of the John Birch Society, a right-wing group, gonna be giving a talk and lecture in Abilene, Texas.

Together, we decided to-- let's protest his presence.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ George: Which ended up being one of the first student political protests in a hundred years in Abilene.

When you talk about Vernon's leadership, he may have wanted to make sure that some of us didn't say the wrong thing politically to the TVs that were gonna be there, and so he wrote, hand-wrote a statement, this is our statement, so that everybody had a clear understanding of our expectations.

♪♪♪ George: "We are going to demonstrate against the John Birch Society tomorrow.

We are not against their right to hold their opinions, or to voice them in the public, but against their indiscriminate, blanket accusation of anyone who is critical or questioning of any of America's political institutions, social relationships, or economical practices."

This statement reflects the extraordinary issues, tension, and ideas that were apparent at this time in 1965 that are very much parallel to many of the issues that we face today.

Vernon Fisher was not bombastic, Vernon wasn't one that went out of his way to draw attention, but was strong in his beliefs and expressions in other ways.

Vernon: I took college very seriously.

Even at a backwards school like Hardin-Simmons, you could, you know, with the right teachers, you could learn stuff, and I did.

And so, I took Art Appreciation course, and I stressed up a canvas, and I started painting.

I got hooked.

So, I changed my major to art.

I felt like somebody for the first time in my life, you know.

George: It was a remarkable transition from the literary background to this incredible visual language that he developed as an artist there at the department.

Vernon would spend his last year and a half finishing, also, a degree in painting.

And then, used that to turn around and get a major, full ride grant to the University of Illinois, which was one of the top fine art departments.

This was an extraordinary feat.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Jerry Savage: The University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana was very popular.

We would have about six openings a year, and we would have about 300 applicants.

So, we had a lot of talented people, you know, the cream of the crop.

♪♪♪ Bea Nettles: This place was one of the best programs in the country for painting.

I drove up to Illinois the summer of 1968, and my colleagues were mostly women.

There were a few guys in the grad program in painting, and Vernon was one of them.

Vernon was married, he had a little boy, and was already dealing with family life and those kinds of responsibilities, but Vernon was very driven to do his work.

His work was noisy, he had this spinning painting device that he'd set up in-- he had these square canvases that were set on a rotating machine of some sort.

And then he had an airbrush to add paint to it.

So, when he cranked up and the painting was spinning and the airbrush was going, you knew he was there.

There was no missing that.

The art of the time was Andy Warhol, field painting, and Vernon's work with the spins, the circles, sort of fit right in.

It was abstract, I would even call it abstract-expressionism.

It was all about color and vibration and the visual sensation of just looking at color in these target paintings.

Vernon: I wanted to name them after something elemental, some foundational notion.

And the simplest atom in the periodic table is the hydrogen atom, so I named 'em after the atomic weight of hydrogen.

At that moment I still believed in things like authenticity and honesty and truth and the absolute.

I was sincere and without the broadest experience in the world.

Jerry: There was a painter in New York doing circular paintings.

I said, Vernon, do you think there's room on the stage for two of you, both of you?

Which was a shock, he sort of gave me a double look.

I wanted these students to draw from their heart, I wanted them to be aware how unique they are, and the only way you could discover that is this journey inside yourself.

Who are you, Vernon?

What moments in your life did you discover and appreciate?

Vernon: He was inviting me to broaden my horizons, so he did me a favor.

When I graduated from there, Dick Neidhardt offered me a job at Austin College that was temporary, part-time job, that might go full-time the next year.

I just took a chance that it would.

Mark Monroe: The story of Vernon Fisher at Austin College really starts with Richard Neidhardt.

Richard Neidhardt was a professor here, he taught art history and painting, and he had also been at Hardin-Simmons, where Vernon Fisher had been.

Bob Barrie: Dick was older, he was a World War II veteran, he'd flown bombers during World War II, so he was another generation.

I think he was more of a father figure to Vernon.

Mark: World War II was known for taking the boy off the farm and they can't go back, and I think that that experience changed him profoundly.

Dick was known for taking travels across the globe, he went to Egypt, he went to, you know, Paris and Rome.

Vernon would just go over and talk to him, and I think was really enthralled with his stories.

And you'd later see it in his paintings, you'd see the planes and the maps and the globes and the things that you'd talk about.

And that comes back to these, just sort of these narratives that became the stories really.

Tracee Robertson: By that point of 1975, Vernon was breaking with abstract-expressionism and with modernism.

So, I saw the brushstrokes as characters, and they float in space, very much like the current work.

So, I think that structure is still there, I think that structure has always been there.

Michael: You see a lot of references to World War II in Vernon's work.

If you look at an early work, like Lunga Point, Lunga Point is where a lot of activity took place.

You know, the Pacific Theater, as they called it.

So, Vernon began to incorporate his literary side with his interest in painterly abstraction.

Vernon: I was making these vinyl paintings, desperate for some idea which would take me somewhere I hadn't been.

And got quite depressed.

The cliché, you know, darting out of the soul and all that kind of stuff, you know, where everybody takes out their work and, like Baldessari did and burned everything before and started anew.

I didn't burn everything that came before, but I did start anew.

I started making little books from scraps of paper, different things that I would find, like, in the trash or on my studio floor.

It was during the making of the little books that I got the idea for the narrative paintings.

I saw paintings 8 feet tall.

I knew I was gonna make 'em as representational, I knew they were gonna have stories, it was just like a eureka moment.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Vernon: I am crouched beside the camper, holding my arm down between my legs.

Blood streams from under my shirt sleeve and down my wrist and off the tips of my fingers.

It is making bright red flecks on my shoes as it spatters off the rocks between my feet.

I am lying down, looking up over the side of the camper, I can see the dark sky, almost indigo and white drifting clouds like cotton.

They are suspended in the sky.

It is everything else that is moving.

I shut my eyes.

Beneath me, I think I can feel the turning of the earth.

A small boy is riding a merry-go-round.

It is his first time ever.

He is smiling.

The music stops suddenly, without warning, and the merry-go-round begins to slow.

He turns his head with a puzzled look.

Is this how it ends, or what?

I made this piece in 1979, called 84 Sparrows.

As I made it, I felt very tearful and I had no idea why, I couldn't even imagine why.

And the meaning of the work unfolded over the following years.

I didn't fully understand for many years, exactly, that I had just painted a picture of my family.

Aunt Fritzi, actually my mother used to wear her hair like that, my mother was quite handsome when she was young.

Nancy, with her mouth hanging open, reminded me of my sister.

My father's nowhere to be found, and then I'm the one who's bleeding, in pain, but no one notices.

There's something about writing that takes you places you can't go in painting.

I had no idea how far I had moved, you know, from being part of that family, you know.

You, one day, you just look up and everything's gone.

I don't guess there's anything I would change about anything, because if I changed that, then I'd not be who I am sitting here.

Jim Malone: He was just laying it all out there.

It was really astounding.

He made several of these different steps, they were really profound in regards to his life.

They included some of his kids, and he was going through a divorce at the time.

But I think it fixed Vernon's reputation in people's minds that this was one serious guy.

Somebody to watch, it was serious stuff.

Very serious stuff.

Laura Carpenter: When he moved on from the vinyl pieces to the other pieces, they revealed more of his personality.

Well, I think some people were confused and wondering why was there a change to some sort of complete abstraction to work with words.

For me, I found the work more interesting as it evolved than the vinyl pieces, so I was happy.

And I think there were a number of collectors who felt the same way.

That work became more important and was paid more attention to by critics.

Bob: At that time, his focus was completely on art.

It was clear that he was becoming more successful and more successful.

Laura: This opportunity gave him a vision for what could be and how his career could go, just even envisioning having a career as an artist, as opposed to being just a teacher.

That was a shift.

Vernon: So that kind of got me on the edge of a map.

Every now and then people would come through, meet with artists to see whether they were gonna be put in safe, the Whitney Biannual.

People had come through before and I'd been on what you might think of as short lists.

They were gonna do a show at the Guggenheim, Peter Frank was the curator of that show, and he came through and visited my studio in Sherman.

There was a curator from the Hirshhorn who came by.

And then the curator from the Whitney came by.

And I was careful not to tell one that I was in the show of the other, you know.

So, surprise, surprise, I end up in all three shows.

♪♪♪ Vernon: It was an interesting moment because I sort of did feel feel I had arrived a certain length, you know, suddenly I'm in a lot of group shows, I'm in a lot of articles, I'm in-- there're a lot of catalogs being done.

So yeah, it was a heady moment.

Tracee: Vernon came to the University of North Texas to be a teacher at a time when his career was taking off.

Vincent Falsetta: The results of those positive career moves did entice him to stay here longer.

He had the best deal of all the faculty, perhaps the highest salary and perhaps the least amount of classes.

When your priority is to be an artist, it's a very good deal.

And that may have helped his decision to stay here, I don't know for sure.

Whether, like, family had something to do with it or not, but he did choose to stay in Texas, he made being here important.

Jeff Elrod: Vernon was my first painting teacher.

It wasn't even my class, but I was sitting in on another class before I started taking painting classes.

Then I just saw him, and the way he talked about art, and it was fascinating.

He was teaching us how to be an artist in the real world.

He was in shows internationally, with this group that was, at that time, representing, basically, the state of contemporary art.

And so, Vernon was a player, and he was at our school in Denton.

So, he had an aura around him that was kind of interesting.

Vernon: I remember one student who was quite gifted, and I was encouraging her.

She realized early on that if she followed her instincts and the path that seemed to be appearing before her, that what she would lose connection with her family.

So, she quit art, backed off.

I don't know if that's a bad decision or not, you know, it's not a decision I made.

Michael: It was a very, very busy time for Vernon, and he was being asked to be in a lot of exhibitions.

And he generally said yes.

speaker: He's been in some major, major exhibitions.

Frances: First thing that comes to my mind is the Project Tournament MOMA at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The major museum for modern art in this country.

Jeff: His assistant at the time was Helen Altman.

Think they needed some extra help in the studio, so Helen asked me to go down there with her.

And it turns out, you know, he was doing a show in New York at the Museum of Modern Art.

He did a large installation, a lot of painting on the walls, and hanging paintings on the walls.

They were diagramming science pages and all these crazy detailed drawings that were really beautiful, it was incredible.

Michael: I think the blackboard paintings are some of his most important paintings.

The perfect expression of an inner self, you know, so someone like Vernon who's trying to go into himself through his writing and through literature could see that painting was trying to do the same thing.

So, to do a show of Vernon's work in New York at that time was not just to acknowledge Vernon, although that was, of course, what it did, but it was to acknowledge Texas as a fertile ground for new art.

At the time, I was the chief curator of the Allbright-Knox Art Gallery.

One of the greatest collections of modern art in American.

The greatest Gauguins, some of the greatest Van Goughs, impressionism, futurism, abstract expressionism, you name it, they have some of the greatest of it.

There was another associate curator there named Cheryl Brutvan who was a huge fan of Vernon Fisher's work.

And we both decided that we should take this Vernon Fisher retrospective and show it in Buffalo, that it would be a very good thing to do.

♪♪♪ Michael: That was a very, very high point in Vernon's career.

I mean, he had gone from not just combining abstract painterly-ness and stories, but he had gone to multiple materials, and he had come off the wall.

So, there were things that would be on the wall, there would be things that would be scattered on the floor, all of these relating to a story of some kind.

There was a great room in which a train, a small, toy train on a track went over your head and just back and forth all day long, it was a fantastic piece.

And I think it relates to a bridge in Granbury where he grew up.

Again, going back to his childhood.

Vernon: When I grew up in Granbury, there were two works of art in our house.

One of which was by one of my mother's boyfriends.

It's a painting of the Granbury bridge.

That form found its way into my work at several moments.

I don't know what that means exactly, but I would suspect is had something to do with Oedipal thinking, you know what I mean?

Michael: So, it was a key point in Vernon's career, in terms of not just him being acknowledged as a good artist, but the complexity of it was there.

Dave: Critics just want to be amazed.

My experience with Vernon's work is it's usually has a little edge of amazement in it.

It's all good work and I think we're all better for having artists like Vernon that work like that.

Michael: He had a very, very good art dealer, Barbara Gladstone, in New York.

And she dropped him.

Dave: Barbara said, "Well, Vernon, you've had this big show, you've done the piece at the modern, we don't expect much of you for a few years, so I'm letting you go."

So, that's the art world.

If you lose, you lose, and if you win, you lose, you know, so that's the way it is.

Michael: Vernon, of course, was totally perplexed, really hurt by the whole thing.

I talked to Barbara not long after that, and Barbara said, "You know, the guy didn't want to move to New York, he didn't want to spend any time here.

And I have to sell objects, that's what I do, that's how I keep money in his pocket, that's how I keep money in my pocket."

Vernon: I remember at an opening, one of my own openings, later on I was talking to someone who had asked a question.

And I spent quite a bit of time with 'em, and they had wanted to keep the conversation going, I suppose, and Barbara interrupted me and took me away, and she said, "You don't have to talk to those people."

You know, because it had already become something I didn't understand at that point, you know.

And I had grown up in a world where, as Dick had promised, that art would be about a process of self-discovery, and it didn't have anything to do with the commercial aspects of art.

Michael: Vernon could have moved to New York.

But I think, in his mind, subconsciously at the very least, he would lose a lot of the content of his art.

I often wonder what kind of art Vernon would have made had he moved to New York.

Because his content is so about him growing up in Texas.

♪♪♪ Michael: As a result of leaving Barbara's gallery, he kind of went inside himself trying to figure out, well, where am I, why is that?

Dave: I think he came out of that period, even though he didn't have a gallery anymore, a much better artist than he went into it.

And he's perfectly comfortable with his weirdness at this point.

You know, because Vernon had never really been comfortable with doing what he was doing because it's not what they do in Granbury.

And I was sort of proud of him for having had this sort of train wreck, successful train wreck, and just continue working the way he did.

Hiram Butler: Artists don't have a career, they have careers.

They're known, they're exhibited, they're collected, they're written about, and then there are quiet times, which are inexplicable.

Vernon's a long distance runner, and he's in it for the long haul, and he makes consistently new, good paintings all the time, and that's not gonna stop.

He's not a flash in the pan, where you hit it big and then it's over.

Michael: He just kept making the art, that's what good artists do.

You just keep making the art.

Vernon came out of it at a point when he realized, yeah, I'm just gonna make what I make, and I'm gonna use the content that I have, and the New York Gallery will pick me up or they won't, and of course they did.

Jeff: It was him, specifically, that kind of gave us the model that you could be from Texas, you could be provincial and figure it out and then do it.

It was hard to do without a model or a picture, it just was like, do you really have to be from New York and live there your whole life to be a part of the New York art history.

He changed my life in a lot of ways, I'm sure tons of students think that way.

And I think that's what good teachers do, they sort of really affect people in the long run, so he did that to me.

Dave: The hardest thing about being a famous artist and teaching is when you're an artist, you do one thing, you know, when you're a teacher, you have to do everything.

And I think that takes the edge off of the work of people that teach.

In Vernon's case, he's not like somebody who does a good piece every ten years.

I think any of us could go in and make our own selection and it would be a good selection.

It's all good work, you know.

Michael: At some point during my tenure here, it was really important, as chief curator, that I did a Vernon Fisher show because of his importance to Fort Worth and that it would be this museum.

And Vernon was a very important part of the contemporary development of Fort Worth, you know, through his teaching and also through his art.

And so to me, it was very important to do a show and to do a retrospective, and it was a huge success.

And I could just see a lot of what I had seen in Vernon's work before, but in such a spectacular and theatrical and dramatic way.

Talley: What stands out to me is his encyclopedic knowledge of so many different disciplines, whether it is political history, art history, pop culture, science, astronomy, there's so many different topics.

He's going to touch upon film, he's going to touch upon Freudian thought, he's going to touch upon philosophy and literature and writers, and it's this encyclopedic knowledge of this interdisciplinary world that he lives in.

Michael: I think the themes just continued to circulate.

The end is always in the beginning, and at the end of an artist's career, they always go back to where they started.

I can't tell you, after 40, 45 years as a curator, working with many, many artists over their entire careers, this is what happens.

♪♪♪ Bob Ackerly: I've been looking at art my whole life, I travel around the world.

I see work by all these big names in painting, and these works stand right up against that work, as well executed, as deeply thoughtful.

In every way, he's done what an artist tries to do in a career, he's created a very unique body of work that's important, that really speaks to us as a culture and speaks to the human condition.

Talley: I know that galleries and museums are taking a hard look at the work that they're presenting.

A social kind of consciousness and awareness about commenting on the world that we're living in right now, and Vernon's very good at doing that.

Vernon asks questions that are so relevant to all of us.

We're in a time that speaks to some of the subjects that he deals with, failure and loss, and I think there's just been a lot of searching of who we are as a society.

Again, it's that relevance.

Maybe that's why, when a younger person looks at his work, they feel like maybe a contemporary has made it, there's a freshness to it and that there's a questioning of things, it's not status quo.

I think the artists that are, for the moment, really going to be embraced are ones that have something to say.

Baseera Khan: A lot of the way that we're engaging with art has to do with identity right now.

People wanna know where you're from, what school you went to, and how you developed your vernacular through your local environment.

Vernon is an interesting subject because he was analyzing his own family structure and thinking about being raised within the South.

He was thinking about these bigger subjects like the psyche, the White psyche, and it's relevant.

That's something that I get out of Vernon's work.

He was painting, but he wasn't painting, he was a philosopher.

Bob Ackerly: I think Starry Night is a real tour de force in terms of creating a narrative and telling a story.

It's kind of the story of the creation of Mickey Mouse, and somehow Mickey Mouse has come to represent this kind of moral compass, right, that somehow it's good.

Most of the systems in our life, our culture, it's all been created by other people, and for better or worse.

These are things that we've evolved, and we have to think about them, you know, think about-- what's good about them and what's not good about them?

And so Starry Night is a very prophetic piece, I think, I think it really forces the viewer to really kind of think deeply, you know, about human culture, and that is an amazing achievement.

Vernon: All these things are social constructs of reality, and the job of an artist, I think, is not necessarily to point these out, but to be honest about it.

We find that many of the things we thought were true and natural and the way things are, may not be so.

Terrell James: Vernon is always trying to disrupt complacency, seeing through convenient truths that are culturally pervasive because they help the system roll forward.

Vernon does present this idea that it's a individual's choice to look at things in a way that is more than one dimensional.

♪♪♪ Tracee: I think it helps to understand why the work is so complex and so layered and deep in meaning.

Vernon is dealing with those depths of our humanity, such as our mortality.

The existence of good and evil, that's a reality, and the question that we all have about why are we here, what is our purpose?

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Vernon: I want my work to be entertaining, but not in the popular sense.

Other words, not entertaining, like a Kong versus Godzilla movie, but entertaining in the sense that it encourages you to be enjoying the working out of what it could possibly mean.

With a math equation or if you're working out some physics problem, how it ends might be very important, I'm sure it is, but if you read a novel just to see how it turned out, then you're reading the novel for the wrong reason.

Same with movies, you know?

Sometimes when I'm making a painting, they feel more like making a movie.

It's not the last line that counts, it's the experiencing of it all as it unfolds.

So that's how I work, that's how I think.

Did I get out of line?

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Dennis González: Probably the best way to define myself is to say that I'm an artist, musician, teacher, broadcaster, et cetera.

Dennis: Good evening, this is Dennis González, you're listening to All Night Jazz on News Classical Jazz, KERA 90.1, Dallas Fort Worth, and what you just heard was from Poland.

Dennis: When I'm in the studio, I feel that I need to be as much an artist in dealing with all these technical things, such as the control board, the tape machines, that kind of thing, as I would in picking up a horn and playing it or orchestrating a piece of music or maybe painting something.

Dennis: The next thing is I think something you'll enjoy, I've been getting a lot of requests for this, this is my new album.

We're gonna do some music, some mariachi music called Dos Cosas, and I think you'll enjoy this.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Dennis: Any of my music really relies on my musicians to give it form, to breathe life into it.

When I deal with my musicians, they give of themselves to my music, and so their music becomes mine.

♪♪♪ Dennis: I'm a very selfish person in that I take everybody else's music and make it mine, just like an education.

I learn more, I'd say, than I teach.

♪♪♪ [singing in Spanish] [singing in Spanish] Dennis: Okay, let's go that far.

Let's stop on one tanamera, right there.

Okay, from the beginning, one, two, three, four.

The reason that I teach is because in teaching, I have to learn.

So actually, in a way, it's a selfish thing.

I love to learn, and when I learn to teach something, then I really learn it.

And that's the way my art and my music and my being an educator works out.

I paint because it's important for me to express things that I can't say vocally or musically.

In the same way when I paint something or put color on canvas or on paper, you should be able to hear it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Dennis: I have always said my visual art and my music are the same thing, they're waves, and some of the waves are perceived by the eyes, some of the waves are perceived by the ears.

So my paintings are, I guess, musical statements.

When I play, I try to paint something.

I'm telling you exactly the same thing as my paintings are telling you.

And people will say, well, what are you trying to say?

I'm trying to say that which cannot be expressed in words.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Dennis: I think that everything that I deal with in my life has the potential to be an instrument, I also feel that I've been given talents and that these talents, if I don't use them, that I'll lose them.

And so I'm very careful that all these instruments that I have, I use, and not just musical instruments, but visual art instruments, technical instruments, whatever.

These instruments are essential, and if people learn to use them, they can work miracles in their own lives.

Life is a-- to me is a joyful experience, and I'm glad to be here, and so throwing all this confetti in my painting is just like going, yay, I'm glad to be here.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ Say goodnight ♪ ♪ And close your eyes ♪ ♪ Shape up, your mind ♪ ♪ Is waiting ♪ ♪ On the other side ♪ ♪ Silhouettes in line ♪ ♪ Under your covers tight ♪ ♪ Beneath the moon and sky ♪ ♪ A dream with you up high ♪ ♪ That's clear has now appeared ♪ ♪ All nightmares rest regret ♪ ♪ So easy to forget ♪ ♪ Without a face or name ♪ ♪ No worry and no shame ♪ ♪ The past will fade away ♪ ♪ Until the break of day ♪ ♪ Run toward the sun ♪ ♪ The earth goes on ♪ ♪ You find despair ♪ ♪ Is all but gone ♪ ♪ Bring to me a swan ♪ ♪ With all that's come and gone ♪ ♪ The singer and the song ♪ ♪ The coming of the dawn ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Audra Scott: We are getting up early on a Sunday morning.

We are late night therapy sessions at the salon.

We are big styles and loud voices.

We are silent jokes and hushed laughter.

We are strong willed and enduring.

We are afro-textured and alluring.

Our hair is a polished diamond, dazzling and durable enough to cut through your tongue, whiplash discrimination.

We are more persistent than your prejudiced policies.

We are not your standard of beauty.

I am not ghetto, I am not unprofessional, I am not unruly, I am not a thing.

I am not dirty, I am not greasy, I am not rebellious, I am not unmanageable.

I am not difficult, I am not a threat, I am not an animal for you to pet.

I am proud, I am not the norm.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Cheniece Arthur: Black hair is thick kinks and curls, Black hair is bouncing coils and waves, Black hair is heavy hands and hot combs.

Black hair is tender heads and quiet tears, Black hair is castor oil and cantu, Black hair is durags and silk wraps.

Black hair is afro combs and afro pics, it's spending hours to get your edges slick.

Black hair is rice water for condition and repair, it's convincing your mom to stop perming your hair.

Black hair is beautiful braids and weaves.

Black hair is whatever we want it to be.

Black hair is not your norm, but Black hair is our normal.

Our normal is natural, our natural is beautiful.

Black hair is beautiful, I am beautiful, we are beautiful.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪