- [Narrator] Next on Curate (upbeat music) - [Artist] Travel is such a big part of my work.

I do think we're realizing how interconnected everything is.

- [Comedian] I still get nervous when we're doing improv but when it really clicks, there's so much joy in that.

- [Music fan] I'm very proud of the fact that my program from Newport '65 now lives in a glass case with Bob's leather jacket.

- This is Curate.

- Welcome.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

We're coming to you from Town Center in Virginia Beach.

We're outside of The Z, the Zeiders American Dream Theater.

- And just up the block, you can see the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts.

This is definitely a hub for arts and culture in Hampton Roads.

We'll have more on some big events coming up here later in the show, but we start off with a Virginia Beach artist who is having a moment.

- Heather Beardslee's year has been pretty remarkable as her work has been on display in three significant exhibits in Hampton Roads.

She was featured earlier this year as part of Flora | Fauna | Fiber at the Torggler Center for Fine Arts in Newport News, and is currently on display at ODU's the Barry Art Museum, and here in Virginia Beach as part of MOCA's More Than Shelter exhibit.

Having spent much of her twenties traveling throughout Europe and South America, Heather is now home in Virginia Beach, so the shelter exhibit comes at a fitting time for her.

Heather Beardsley is our 757 featured artist.

- [Heather] A lot of what I have been focused on in my work is humans' relationship to the natural environment and how things are connected.

Thinking about how we can do better, how everything's connected.

You can't just do what's best for humans and ignore everything else and think that that's going to work cause it's all one big system.

(tranquil music) Art's always more powerful when you're trying to get people to have something to think about and form their own ideas and opinions instead of just dictating my ideas and opinions.

And especially if you're gonna try to make art that incorporates things from cultures and countries that aren't yours.

History is something that is a deep interest to me.

I listen to history podcasts while I'm working and audio books.

Travel is such a big part of my work and I think to really understand where you're traveling and get the most out of those experiences and those cultural exchanges it's important to try to also understand that history.

You can't really enter a culture without some level of understanding.

My interest in Eastern Europe first came about- we had a girl from Belarus stay with us one summer when I was 10 as part of a program to try to get kids out of radiation.

I did a trip with my middle school the summer after I finished eighth grade and saved up money to be able to go.

I was always really independent when I wanted to have the freedom to explore and, you know, wander around museums at my own pace.

If I saw somewhere cool, I wanted to be able to stop and look at it, and I wasn't able to do it.

Think it was a bit of a letdown because of that.

My last couple of years of college and for a year after I had taught English in Italy during the summer with the program that allowed me to be able to travel, and on those trips I was able to explore Europe on my own.

That's when I really started doing embroidery a lot in my work.

I knew I wanted to do something with conceptual map making to also engage with history.

Vienna has the only globe museum in the world.

That collection, the national library also has a lot of maps.

So I ended up finding these historic maps from the Franco-Prussian War to World War II era that personified all the different countries into kind of stereotypes.

Used those as a base using transfers onto cotton paper.

I sewed the outlines of those maps and then over top sewed infographics from the refugee crisis, because when I arrived in Vienna in September 2015, that when it was at its peak.

Hundreds of thousands of people were coming from Syria, other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, a lot of European countries.

It was also around the time of World War I anniversaries.

I wanted to make that connection for people of how the open borders in the EU, people were rebuilding walls, you know, layer those together and adding that tactility I think is really helpful cuz infographics are very cold.

(upbeat jazzy music) - This is my project for the exhibition More Than Shelter here at Virginia MOCA.

The title of the project is Cross-Pollination, and I was addressing this theme through looking at the lens of biodiversity and how caring for other creatures in our environment actually improves our lives.

They're called bee hotels.

They don't actually live in them.

What they do is they lay eggs in them, and the eggs mature and then you get the new native bees that way.

Ensuring the next generation basically is what these will do.

And then we placed in different locations outside after the exhibition.

When approaching this, I was thinking about what I could do within this realm of biodiversity, and I really loved the idea when I was thinking about bee hotels of making something that is literally a shelter for this exhibition.

(joyful music) I do think we're realizing more and more how interconnected everything is and that we can't keep going the way we are.

I think that there are new projects that are starting to address that.

So I am hearing a lot more about native species and native plants more and trying to find ways to protect them as we're realizing all the mass extinctions that are happening and how endangered many of our ecosystems have become.

- As you may know, next weekend is a big one for my co-host Jason.

Each year on Thanksgiving weekend, the laugh-inducing troupe he co-founded and performs in, Plan B Comedy, does their annual holiday show.

It's called the Leftover Show and plays right here at the Zeiders American Dream Theater.

Here's a little look into what Plan B is all about and what you can expect if you come out next weekend.

- (Announcer) And now it's time for some Plan B comedy.

Put your hands together, and let's have a good time!

(Person laughing) (high-energy rock music) - [Comedian 1] Well I guess we should meet the group.

- [Comedian 2] Let's do it boy band style.

I'm Beatty.

I'm the copacetic one.

- I'm Brendan, and I'm the rebel.

- I'm Leanna, and I'm the mysterious one.

- Hi, I'm Jason.

I'm the hairy one.

- Hey, I'm Nikki, and I'm the star.

- I'm Michelle, and I'm the new meat.

- I'm Ryan.

I'm the got-kicked-in-the-head-by-a-mule- when-I-was-a-child one.

- Jason Kypros and I were doing "Importance of Being Earnest" at the Little Theater of Norfolk.

- We realized that we had a love of doing improv and writing sketches, and we decided that this would be a fun thing for us to come together to do.

- And so we decided to give it a shot and did a video where Jason played a character named Mr. Stavros, and I played a waiter.

He was hiring so that he could fire them.

- If I can't fire you, I can't hire you.

- I'm sorry, I don't understand you.

- Come on, man, gimme a reason why I should fire you.

- [Brendan] We had a lot of fun with that, and so we did auditions, got other people in the group, and started performing.

Been doing shows ever since.

- [Jason] Well we were trying to figure out what we were gonna call ourselves.

We had all these names on a sheet of paper, and there it was - Plan B.

It made all the sense in the world because hey, everybody needs a plan B, especially in show business.

And that was 11 years ago.

We do a lot of improv, but we also do sketch.

(upbeat rock music) (dramatic music) - Thanks, Brant.

In live PBN exclusive, we have detected a blizzard set to hit the east coast in February of 2097.

Snap.

- Thank you Janice.

Thank you Brant.

Buy snow tires for your cars and get some (beep) milk.

It's the big one.

- We actually have a lot of really talented performers in our group.

It allows us to really work well together, and have a really strong foundation in order to go out and make people laugh.

At least that's the goal.

(laughs) - Everybody in the group has been in the group for at least three or four years, some of them much longer.

So- and the people that are newer I've known for a really long time as well.

The group right now is super tight.

So you really know exactly who you're with.

You know exactly what they're gonna do in the best way.

It's not like it's a predictability thing, it's just like, oh, okay, I know that Leanna's strong suit is this kind of word play.

So I'm gonna do something that allows her to play the character that will give her, there'll be one of her strengths.

- I still get nervous when we're doing improv, you know, you never know how it's gonna go, and I don't know what's gonna come outta my mouth.

But when it really clicks, when it really clicks, when we really feel it and know it, and the audience is really into it, there is nothing like that.

It is so great.

There's so much joy in that.

- So about seven years ago, we started performing at the "Z" - the Zeiders American Dream Theater in Town Center.

So one of the first things we did was a Leftover Show.

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

It was a way for us to take our sketch comedy, our video production, our improv comedy, our standup comedy, all of the talents from everyone in the group and put 'em into one tight show.

This year will be our eighth year doing the Leftover Show.

It's so cool.

It's one of the longest running shows at the Z.

All of the people in the group are beautiful, wonderful, kind, and funny.

And we share that with our audience.

November 26th.

No, it's- no, it's the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Eight o'clock.

Perfect.

Bring the family.

Come on.

It's ridiculous.

Yeah, you should air this before the show.

Maybe we'll get more people to come.

(laughs) - You can find out more about Plan B and the Leftover Show at planbcomedy.com.

- Well, growing up in the south in the sixties and seventies had a profound effect on artist Dean Mitchell.

His life experiences are reflected in his amazing watercolor paintings.

Pictures that shine a light on issues that we still wrestle with 50 years on.

(harmonica playing) - So when I was a kid, I experienced racism very early on, and it's an irony that I used to pray, if I could do anything with my work, it would help us heal those wounds of racism and segregation.

A lot of these things have shaped my sensibility about what I do.

So a lot of it is not just because I think it's interesting in terms of light and this and that and shadow which does interest me, but the main overture about the work is about poverty and the marginalization of people and how those spaces affect our whole sense of self in a space.

That's been just a part of who I am.

This art thing, however you want to describe it, is a huge part of my life.

And so I want it to mean something.

If I can change the world in any way, it would be to help break down certain social constructs that I think are detrimental to us as human beings.

And there are plenty of them.

- I think he's a very strong worthy artist, and I do think he stops people in their tracks, and it's very contemplative.

He's not grabbing you with the brightest color, he's not grabbing you with bells and whistles.

He's grabbing you in a different way.

He's asking you to like come in very slowly, examine what's going on, feel that nuance, and that's what he brings to the table.

So if you're 30 feet away, you would say that's realism, and it is, it conveys that emotion.

When you look really closely at how he's laid down the watercolor layers, there's a lot of abstraction, there's a lot going on with the design.

What he does, he plays with dark and light, and everything in my opinion with Dean's work is keyed in on a strong design that sets up everything for the painting.

- Dean Mitchell is beyond that of a master.

If you have one where you say, this is apprentice and this is a master, well the apprentice learns how to do a this or that; and then once they're able to demonstrate that, then they say, oh, okay, now you're a master.

Dean Mitchell is an enigma.

Dean Mitchell was born to do what he does.

When I look at Dean Mitchell's work, I do see science, I do see philosophy, I do see religion, because some of those pieces like "Rowena", when you see that particular piece, that is a religious piece, that is an icon, that is an actual Mary that you say, "Oh my God, she speaks of humanity."

Where in the world with someone painting like Andrew Wyeth, and in some cases better than Andrew Wyeth, come from?

And therein I think lies the spiritual quality, because if you look at Dean's background, Dean achieved not because of, but in spite of, in spite of is when God takes place, therein lies the miracle.

- I was raised by my grandmother from 11 months old, and so I was sort of a highly active child.

And so I would often walk to town with her, you know, cuz I grew up in the panhandle of Florida in a little town called Quincy, and I had no idea the kind of wealth that was in Quincy because we basically stayed in the black community.

A lot of us, when we first got our first bikes we would ride over in the area, and we would see these huge mansions.

And so I began to look at the wealth discrepancy, and I said, How could somebody have a house that big?

Really didn't, you know, didn't really understand it.

But I think through the years, as you become more educated, more socialized, you begin to recognize how you fit into the social structure or social order of things.

And then when Martin Luther King started emerging on the scene, we would watch him on television.

So a lot of these things have shaped my sensibility about what I do because I do a lot of things.

A lot of the environments that I do are a window into poverty, and a window into that psychological space in which I emerged out of.

As teacher, Tom Harris - there was four of us who were really interested in art, and he introduced us to local art competitions.

And so we were often the only black people at these shows with Mr. Harris and his wife, who were Caucasian.

- I called it the crucible of competition, you know, which can be good or bad because it puts pressure on kids.

He was even as focused then as he is now.

But there were so many negatives.

A lot of it was the black-white thing.

He paints what he wants to paint because he feels the need in here to make a visual statement about what's going on, and that's the strength of Dean Mitchell's painting.

Half of his focus and intensity is based on, "This is- what I'm doing is extremely important, and it's never been done before, And whenever or however, whatever the recognition is, I have to do it my way."

Which to me is almost a definition of what art is and what art's supposed to be.

- I will be gone at some point, but what I leave, will it really make the world better in some ways and make us examine our own human behavior toward one another?

- He didn't paint to sell.

Okay, that sounds ridiculous, because he had to make a living.

He painted because it's something he had to do and something he had to say.

- He wants people to examine this work on a deep level.

So I do think he's very important now and I think his work will be very important a hundred years from now.

- I think art has a way of mirroring back to us what we've become.

And it also provides us history in which we can reflect back on to not keep repeating the same mistakes.

It's that kind of troubling world that feeds my passion to try to figure out how to derail some of the destructive behavior.

- This past spring, Tulsa, Oklahoma cut the ribbon on a brand new space dedicated to the life and work of a pop culture icon.

A tour of the new Bob Dylan Center shows exactly why the enigmatic Dylan is a significant voice in our times.

(dramatic intro music) (record scratches) (mellow guitar music) - What Is Bob Dylan?

- What is Bob Dylan?

- Yeah, that's not an easy question at all.

- Could you ask the question again?

- The most important American popular artist of the 20th century.

- He received the Nobel Prize in literature.

- I think he's one of our great singers.

- He's a jokester.

- He's inscrutable, he's an enigma.

He's weird.

- I don't know, you know... - [Interviewee 1] He's a moving target - [Interviewee 2] An apparition in a lot of ways.

- [Interviewee 3] And every time you think you've nailed him down, you know, he wiggles free.

- We are finally at long last opening the Bob Dylan Center right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(audience clapping) (guitar-player singing) (audience clapping) - This is an archive of a hundred thousand items, give or take, all dedicated to the life and work of Bob Dylan, who I think it's safe to say has stood alone in American music and culture for the past 60 years.

(soulful singing) - Dylan reminded us in his poem songs that every one of us has a story.

- All right!

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Let's open the Bob Dylan Center!

(people cheering) - The idea from the get go was to build a home, create a home for these materials, which really provide an unprecedented deep look into Dylan's life and work for folks who are either Dylan diehards, usually self-professed, the Dylanologists from all around the world, and folks who maybe have a somewhat more casual knowledge of Dylan.

More than half of the 29,000 square feet is given over to public exhibition space.

- [Attendee] The films come out just the way they come out, like in a dream.

- [Steve] And you walk into the immersive film experience.

So you'll be immersed in this, and I hope emerge about 18 minutes later, having felt like you have a good sense of Dylan's origins.

Then you walk into the Columbia Records Gallery.

This is quite a large space where you have, along the perimeter walls, the closest thing we have to a chronology of Dylan's life and career.

We go deep into six songs.

So we have things like, "Like a Rolling Stone", "Tangled Up in Blue", "Jokerman", and the quadrants reveal the writing, the recording, the producing, the performing of these songs.

(playful guitar music) ♪ Your babies are crying louder now ♪ ♪ It's a-pounding on your brain ♪ ♪ To the nightingale tune ♪ ♪ Bird fly high by the light of the moon ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh, oh Jokerman ♪ ♪ They're selling postcards of the hanging ♪ ♪ They're painting the passports brown ♪ - [Steve] Dylan himself didn't know to save all of this stuff.

He wasn't saving ticket stubs from his concerts.

Right?

But these collectors were, they were the ones that were recording these, all of these shows, yes, surreptitiously against the rules that are pinned up everywhere.

Whenever you go to a Dylan show, no recording devices, we'll throw you out, you know, without question.

They manage to sneak their recording devices in.

That has become an integral part of the archive.

This archive would not be as interesting or as rich as it is if we hadn't had these collectors doing this extraordinary work.

- I started acquiring things early on.

You know, I've been listening to Bob since approximately '62, and I saw him live in '64 for the first time.

It all starts with the music.

It would include cassettes, open reel tapes, DATs of course, a lot of the flyers, the programs, all of the decoratives, the chachkas of that world.

Collecting can be type of a disease, compulsive obsessiveness.

I'm very proud of the fact that my program from Newport '65 now lives in a glass case with Bob's leather jacket.

♪ Like a complete unknown ♪ ♪ Like a rolling stone ♪ - When I first heard that the Dylan Center was going to be here in Tulsa, I had the exact same reaction as everybody else.

I thought, why is that happening?

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But then of course, when I thought about it perhaps being somewhere else, in New York, it seemed weird.

I mean, for a lot of different reasons, this seemed like the perfect place.

- There's the beautiful synchronicity of the Woody Guthrie archive already being here, and Bob Dylan himself has mentioned that that is one of the reasons why he is very happy with his material going to Tulsa, because Woody Guthrie was such an important influence on Dylan.

- There's a rich cultural ecosystem here that I'm proud to say the Dylan Center and our sister organization the Woody Guthrie Center, I think are a part of, and there's something here, you know Dylan just characterized it recently as the hum of the heartland that I think sets us apart say from the coasts.

♪ Once upon a time ♪ ♪ Never comes ♪ ♪ Again ♪ - That is going to do it for another great episode of Curate.

- We're giving thanks to you for joining us this week, and thanks to our host, Zeiders American Dream Theater, for having us on this perfect afternoon.

- Here's more from Plan B Comedy.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- [Jason] And I'm Jason Kypros.

We'll see you next time on Curate.

- I gently brought the tiny creature up towards my face.

The creature was me.

Tiny, action figure-size version of myself screaming as it looked into my eyes.

I slowly brought the tiny meat towards my lips, and I devoured it.

- Well that seems logical.

- And now it crawls inside me, searching for my heart.

- So is that why you're not wearing any pants?

Did the creature eat your pants?

(lighthearted outro music)