- [Jason] Next on Curate.

(upbeat music) - Making my two lives mesh together is making me create things that are more meaningful.

- For me, my world it just stopped 'cause this is what I do, this is what I love to do.

- You know if it comes out good, that's the kind of mask where I'm like, "Ooh, look what I made.

That's kind of pretty."

- [Heather] This is Curate.

- Welcome to Curate, I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni, thanks for joining us.

If you've ever been to Angie's Bakery in Virginia Beach, you know each pandesal that comes out of the oven, every hopia, every ensaymada is a work of delicious art.

- It's tradition and community that inspires Angie's owner Ken Garcia Olaes to always turn out perfect Filipino inspired baked goods.

But as inspirational as his warm out of the oven pastries are, it's only part of the story.

- [Heather] Ken also happens to be an amazing artist who blends ideas from the classic age with ideas from modern art.

Whether in the kitchen or the studio, creativity and craft make this double threat our 757 featured artist.

(upbeat music) - I look at the temperature overnight and if it's colder, that's going to mean that I got to come in here earlier because it's going to take a little longer for this to rise.

I'm all about routines, making sure everything is done correctly on time.

I'm all about perfecting the craft.

The pandasal, this is a staple food for Filipinos in their breakfast.

It's something that they have to smell in the morning.

They have to have with their coffee.

When Spain came in, they introduced wheat to the Philippines.

So, what they were trying to do is mimic like a brioche and with the resources that they had in the Philippines, they came up with pandesal.

I had to keep this tradition going.

This bakery is a big staple to this community.

This belongs to the people, you know.

This belong to the community, keeping the bakery alive.

That was what was important to me.

And keeping the people happy with receiving what they're used to getting all the time.

I carry this all the time because it helps me escape from the kitchen.

And I think, "Oh, I'm also an artist."

This is my sketch book yet.

This is my recipe book on how I studied Rembrandt, how I studied Caravaggio, how I studied Bouguereau.

Drawings with the brush pen.

My son had a Batman phase.

So, I thought I was going to change my career into illustrator and that I always loved the noir graphic novels and black and white and the dramaticness of that.

This is my wife.

She was reading, I was painting her.

This is James Dean.

I actually started painting a sergeant portrait and the underpainting looked so much like James Dean that I changed it into James Dean.

So I met this guy through the bakery.

He's now my barber.

We're pretty good friends now.

I've always been intrigued with Michelangelo sketches and Leonardo sketches and how much time they put into studying.

It's their curiosity that made me curious to try that myself.

That process has always been interesting to me because that's where the artist kind of lives.

In the midst of learning how to paint, I was suggested to just paint from the masters by copying.

I've always been intrigued by Caravaggio mostly because of his interesting life, his dramatic paintings and his play with shadow and how he brings light to an existence in his paintings is what draws me into his work.

I feel like paintings have a little more substance.

When you look up, what was going on around that artist's time when he was painting this.

I think I was just mostly in love with the design of this painting and the challenge of bringing the characters to life.

This is me stepping back and asking myself, "Well who are you as an artist?"

Before I learned how to paint, even faces and figures, I did a lot of graffiti.

And how can I merge the two worlds?

Because they're both what I love.

I wanted that classical forum to interact the graffiti.

It was mainly to express who I am as an artist.

I'm stepping out of trying to be like Caravaggio and trying to be more like myself because I still want to spray paint.

I still want to feel the cans and warm them up then spray on the canvas, yet I love to paint.

I love to take the time and have a small brush and model the form.

I think doing everything at once right now and making my two lives kind of mesh together is making me create things that are more meaningful.

I like to think like Caravaggio, he was on the run and he had barely any time to paint, yet he would paint masterpieces while he's in hiding just to get Rome's approval to come back to the city.

And I am painting whatever I can because I love to paint.

It's all just a pattern of what I love about art and creating and that's kind of what I bring to everything that I've put my hands on that whatever I do will be art.

Whatever I paint, whatever I draw, whatever I nowadays bake will be art before it leaves my studio, before it leaves my kitchen.

That's just who I am, you know, that's just what I like to make.

And that's what I want to present to the world.

I'm an artist first and I became a baker.

The challenge for me was to find my why.

Like, "Why do you bake?"

It's not even about me anymore.

I think it's about the people, the customers, the community.

It's all about tradition.

It's all about family.

And especially the Filipino culture is all about giving.

It's all about sharing.

And that's a tradition in itself.

- [Jason] Learn more about Ken and all our 757 featured artists at our website, WHRO.org/CURATE.

- All this season, we've been bringing you stories about how local arts organizations are carrying on despite COVID.

This week, we check in with Christopher Newport University.

- Needless to say, this past year's annual fall musical showcase looked different than in years past.

But socially distanced musicians and audiences watching online instead of in-person didn't make the music any less inspiring.

(orchestral music) (orchestral music) - [Sarakay] Music has been a part of my life.

It holds a huge place in my heart.

I grew up with it and I think there's so much value to playing music with others and sharing that with with friends and family.

So when I went home for quarantine, my motivation for practicing went down, I mean plummeted.

Just because you didn't have almost the competition that you feel here when you walk through the hallways, you know everybody's practicing around you, so then you're like, "Man, I want to go practice."

But then when you're totally isolated, it was hard to see a point.

It was hard to practice for no concerts and no recitals and no performances of any kind.

So you kind of forgot the purpose of music for a while.

- When COVID happened, it just kind of stopped everything.

And we saw that we were going home and we all thought we were going to come back but we went home and like within like a few days, they're like actually you're just going to stay.

For me, like my world it just stopped because this is what I do.

This is what I love to do.

- We experienced the gamuts here of emotions when all this hit.

Some of us said, "Oh my gosh, we can't do this.

There's no way we can put together an ensemble well, if the students aren't here."

However that quickly changed.

The more we did our research and then checked with our colleagues from around the country to see what they're doing, because we wanted to be safe.

But the goal was we're going to make it happen no matter what.

Now, granted, it's not the same when you're performing with masks on or with plexiglass shields behind you and in front of you and your distancing and you're wiping things down with a sterile cloth every time you use them and you're catching the condensation from your instrument.

I mean, all sorts of things that we never would have had to do a year ago but it's all worth it as long as we can make music.

- [Sarakay] When we came back, we all kind of got to bond over the struggle that we'd gone through.

Talking about, 'What motivated you?'

or 'What did you listen to?'

'What did you discover?'

'What did you not practice?'

It sounds bad, but once we got back we were ready to get in the swing of things again.

(orchestral music) - [Dr. Mark] We still maintain a concert live here.

Of course we live stream everything and so they can watch at home.

This particular concert, it's called 'The Family Weekend Music Showcase'.

And so every year I try to find a theme based on family values of some sort because that's when the family is like home coming, you know, come back to visit their students here on campus.

To make this happen, we want all of our music to somehow show the humanitarian element of making music.

And so everything we did, I wanted to pull at the heartstrings to make our audience laugh, to make our audience cry.

Whether it's an orchestra concert or jazz or choir but variety is really the secret to those concerts.

- [Olivia] During this time obviously, it's been super foreign for a whole year and performances are definitely something that everyone enjoys listening to.

And so I think us being able to perform and people being able to watch us perform, is just a great way to kind of look at the whole situation and let us kind of feel human again in a way.

We rehearsed as an orchestra all semester.

We definitely had to adjust rehearsing so separate because music is all about listening.

So when everyone's so far away already, it was definitely hard to kind of adjust to learning how to play together but we had a lot of fun.

(orchestral music) - [Sarakay] If you ever went to a concert and you never realized how much you'd miss it when you couldn't go.

So being able to provide that for the local community and then the virtual community is definitely a great pleasure.

And being able to provide that live music experience for people.

(orchestral music) - Music is a lifestyle.

It is absolutely self consuming.

You have to live and breathe the art.

We do have hope for the future and we know that it's right around the corner where we will return to that normalcy and interacting with our audiences again.

But right now, we are making the absolute best of it.

And we're fulfilling that need to make music together.

- We've all gotten to know life with masks a little too well over the last several months, but not all face coverings are created equally.

Key Largo artist Caroline Guyer creates animal inspired masks that are appropriate for the wildest of masquerades.

(upbeat music) - My name is Caroline Guyer and I'm a leather worker who specializes in making theatrical costume leather masks and I live in beautiful Key Largo Florida, in the Florida keys.

It was clear from the beginning that whatever kind of a creative artistic aesthetic is in my head translates well into a leather mask.

I love studying the animal faces, you know, I like looking at animals, so I'm happy to study them and see if I can make a mask.

And at the same time, that is what people seem to want more and more of.

I'll never forget a customer asking me to do a rabbit and you know, struggling with it at first trying to figure out how to do these animal faces and I did the rabbit and people loved it.

There seems to be like a creepy rabbit mask thing that's almost like like a modern archetypal collective unconscious kind of thing where people really respond to creepy white rabbit masks over and over again, regardless of what movie they've been in.

They're in movies again and again and again.

So I find that is something that kind of persists year after year.

And then of course, wolves are always popular and then I'll have people that'll be like, "Oh can you do one of my dog?"

I have people who wear them.

People who hang them on the walls.

And then people who do both, will just leave them on the wall until they have a masquerade event to go to.

But I certainly sell to people who are only going to wear them and people who are only going to hang them on the wall.

(chiming music) I create the masks entirely by hand.

If I have an idea of a mask that I want to make and I don't have a pattern yet for it, in over 20 years, I've got hundreds of patterns, I'll research the design and create a pattern.

And then I trace that onto the piece of leather, cut it out with a blade.

And then I wet that piece of leather, blot it dry.

And then I wait until the leather gets to just the right point for it to be molded.

And that varies from piece of leather to piece of leather.

And also depending on the humidity in the air, stuff like that.

And when the leather is at the right point to be molded, I sit there and I mold it all by hand.

And then I set that on the floor or on a towel or something, let it dry overnight.

Most masks I'll do an airbrush base.

So I go outside and I airbrush the base on.

And then after that striae, I buff it up a little bit and I add some detailed hand painting with acrylic paints.

And then when that's dry, I brush on and acrylic sealer.

And when that's dry, I sand the back so it's comfortable.

I add some felt padding if that's needed, some masks need it, some don't and then I'll put on ribbon ties or so on, elastic straps and then it's ready to go.

I work very hard to make them comfortable and that is one of the hallmarks in my masks.

And that is why a lot of the groups, theater groups, dance companies come back again and again for my masks, because you could put them on and almost forgot about them.

It's my goal anyway.

And that is one of the nice things about the leather is they tend to just breathe a little bit more than a synthetic mask.

I could just make goat masks all day long.

And I have a dream project that I need to do eventually where I want to do all the different breeds of goats, you know, cause there are so many different kinds of goats and I would love to do a beautiful mask representational of each one.

People who buy masks seem to enjoy goat masks.

And then it's always fun to do something like a leopard or a mountain lion.

You know, if it comes out good, that's the kind of mask where I'm like, "Ooh, look what I made.

That's kind of pretty, you know, just like the animal is."

- When Florida artist, Aurora Molina traveled far from home to learn her craft, she found something missing from her life, her grandparents.

She celebrates her love for them and celebrates their generation with her interactive exhibit, Supernatural Humanoids.

(upbeat music) - [Julian] Basically when I saw like the high ceilings, it's like, "What can I do here?"

Like what if I do like a box of puppets?"

It's pretty much like a puppeteer show.

My name is Julian Pardo.

I'm a guest curator here at Pompano Beach Cultural Center.

- And I am Aurora Molina.

I'm an artist from Miami.

Julian called me and he said, "There's this space" and you know, I'm very open to always collaborate.

He's a dear friend of mine so we said, "Okay, tell me about the space."

We consider that we wanted to do an interactive installation.

My grandma was a seamstress so my craft, all of that attachment to the thread also brought in part of the, you know, making of the work.

So I think it comes from a personal exploration to dealing with my grandparents.

I started to do a photography series sort of like capturing their daily routine.

And then I left to Spain to do my Masters and I sort of like started to pay attention since I was away.

And they were 90, 92.

And I think I was getting ready to sort of let go.

My family had been very conscious about taking care of them, so they were with us at home and you know, very involved.

And when I left, I think I had the longing, you know, like they were left behind.

And I remember just, you know looking around and having these moment where I was realizing how the detach we were.

Then I was traveling to other places and I kept paying attention to the elder.

- I connect with her as well.

I live with my grandpa for like 10 years in my house.

So all that, like connections makes everything like, okay let's do something that we can show the people to look out for the elders.

Idea was like to create this pulley system to where they can move each one of the hands or like a group of hands.

So it's more collaborative.

It's more like connecting the family the connecting the like the, the elders with your dad or your mom just looking at you or just stay with you in each one of them.

- And also the fact that you make them come alive.

Like we have this idea, there's two components to a puppet.

There is a puppeteer and the puppet.

The puppet does not come to life on this the puppeteer plays a role into it.

So it was part of like creating that connection.

In general the idea of the whole show, the whole concept, I wanted to create that interactive approach and I'm bringing them to live.

And second, it's to keep the conversation going.

Conceptually it's like, instead of looking at them you have to look up to them.

Cause that was the purpose of making them eight feet tall.

So you literally are looking up to them.

- [Julian] I started to study like what kind of population is around this center.

Most likely it is Haitian people, Latin America and like they speak different languages.

So one of my ideas is to reach more to those communities.

I translated to like Spanish and English and Creole.

So that's why we have like the texts on those three languages.

- [Aurora] But I think the text and the simplicity of the graphics and the simplicity of the walls, like at the eye level also makes you like a little gap on pay more attention and just wonder.

I mean, it's also the softness of the fabric, that tenderness of something that we all have a relationship to.

We all are covered with fabric.

So that was also important.

I think a work of art needs to be open-ended.

Not everyone comes in knowing precisely the concept of the work and understanding there's a narrative behind it other than being a pretty picture.

All these ideas should spike your curiosity.

- [Heather] You can find more Curate content at WHRO.org/CURATE.

Our website features all previous episodes of the show.

- And you can follow Curate on social media.

We're on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

- We're going to leave you tonight with more from the Christopher Newport fall music showcase.

- [Jason] This is their jazz ensemble under the direction of Dr. Kelly Rawsome.

This is their performance of Montega, an Afro-Cuban inspired composition by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Jason Kypros.

- [Heather] And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

We'll see you next time on Curate.

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