- [Narrator] Next on "Curate."

(upbeat music) - [Maya] The Chesapeake Bay, it is so beautiful as a form.

I do like to ground you with what is right outside your front door.

- [Zaria] I'm trying to portray the beauty in these places that are at the forefront of climate change.

- [Jean] Well, I hope when someone sees my award they feel joy in how exciting the indigenous life is.

- This is "Curate."

Welcome, I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

It's "Curate coming to you from the stunning Brock Environmental Center on the Lynnhaven Inlet in Virginia Beach, thanks to our hosts, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, keepers of one of our most treasured resources.

- And we're here today celebrating the work of Maya Lin who has turned her attention to water and specifically the Chesapeake Bay.

- You probably know Maya Lin's work if you've spent some time on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

As an undergraduate college student, she won a competition to design the National Memorial to commemorate Vietnam veterans.

In the years since, she has continued to create thought-provoking and awe inspiring tributes to things important to her.

- [Jason] And this past spring she brought her latest project to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Arts.

Maya Lin: A Study of Water opened to rave reviews.

Now, water has often played an important role in Maya's environmentally focused work and this exhibit features the Chesapeake as a focal point.

The artist came to Virginia Beach to be part of the opening and even made her first visit to the Chesapeake, coming right here to the Brock Center to discover what a gem we have in our backyard.

Maya Lin is now an honorary resident of the Chesapeake Bay region and our 757 featured artist.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - I am Melissa Messina and I'm the guest curator of Maya Lin: A Study of Water.

This was a perfect combination, right?

I mean Maya Lin, you don't get a much bigger name than that, and the work is so incredibly important and I think it's important to have that conversation here.

As a guest curator, I'm constantly asking questions, who is your audience?

What do people want to see?

My role was really to bring all sides together and have a conversation about what is possible.

Maya Lin's representations of water, it's something that she's been interested in and focused on for much of her career so it seemed like a really natural fit to start from there and create an exhibition that really looked at all of her representations of water.

(soft music continues) (audience applauding) - I have been preoccupied with and obsessed with water for at least 30 years, and I don't quite know why.

Maybe there's something that just drew me to water.

I'm very committed in caring environmentalist and water is the lifeblood of our planet and of us.

The Chesapeake Bay has played a very large part in many of my museum studio sculptures and people have asked, well, why the Chesapeake?

From an ecological point of view, it is one of the most critically important waterways in this country.

It is so beautiful as a form.

I love the Chesapeake.

It's called Folding the Chesapeake, and it's made out of industrial glass marbles.

(soft music) I do like to ground you with what is right outside your front door in the natural world, and I'm trying to capture in the mediums sort of a reflectivity, which is so much a part of water.

And so when the sun hits it at certain times of day, it almost, it's like a light switch went on.

We just went out to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and looked at oyster restoration.

Oysters play a big part.

Those oyster reefs could have significant protection for our coastal lands.

These are huge boons for both climate change mitigation, storm surge, and as well as cleaning the bay and bringing back biodiversity.

Blue carbon habitats may stand alone as the most efficient biological reservoirs of stored carbon.

So you are here and the Chesapeake Bay becomes a huge solution to climate change.

If we rethink our farming, rethink the soils, rethink protection of the wetlands 'cause wetlands sequester three times as much carbon as a tropical forest.

(soft music) How does a wave begin and end?

So the piece that you'll see here is called flow, and it became two by four landscape and it actually can't make up its mind if it's a hill or a cresting wave, but that's sort of the genesis.

And I love the ambiguity.

From the front, it looks like a cresting wave.

From the back, it felt like a hill.

Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy.

And I have been finding a lot of my time being focused much more on climate change, obsessed with how quickly we are losing the ice and the glaciers.

Scientists are saying the thickness is disappearing.

So it's going to melt a lot quicker now because it's so much thinner than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

And it's led to a series of works.

So the uppermost level is where we're at today and then the thinness, of course, expresses the vulnerability due to the fact that we're eating away, the water's eating away at these ice areas from beneath.

I realized I needed to deal with what we're losing, especially stuff you don't even realize is disappearing.

The species we will lose if we do not take action.

So it's just a wake up call and a call to action.

(fast classical music) How can I get you to connect to nature in a different way?

Go to the website, explore a history of the world.

There's thousands of ecological histories, personal memories, and there are in-depth timelines.

There's over 100 entries, charts and ecological history of your bay.

What our ecological histories try to do is get you to understand massive abundance, what's missing, not to depress you, but almost weave you in awe of what nature can hold.

Nature's resilient and if you give it a chance, it comes back.

And so there's a whole echo throughout the timelines of that arc.

Nature's incredibly strong.

We're just not giving it a chance to come back.

For me, it was always about can we just think differently about this?

Can we just put it in a perspective that kind of says this is fixable, this is doable.

We could all do something.

We could make a difference here.

(fast classical music continues) (soft music) - Mya Lin's visit and work inspired lots of artists in Hampton Roads, including students who brought their own Maya inspired works to MoCA.

- Schools including Great Bridge, Green Run, Maury and Churchland High School all created environmentally conscious public art installations that lived on the grounds of the MoCA all summer long in an exhibit called Sights Unseen, a collaborative sculpture art project.

- Brandon Mitchell from Portsmouth Public Schools documented the Churchland Project.

This is a look at how they were inspired and found their own voice through art.

(upbeat music) - We are here at MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach to install an environmental work that will be exhibited.

April Taylor Martin, our supervisor, was contacted by them and asked if we could contribute and make an installation work that would match or go with the Maya Lin exhibition that was being put up.

And we eagerly jumped for the opportunity.

We really wanted to get involved.

- We're focusing on the environmental issues here at the Tidewater region and how we can affect how the viewers think about what's going on here.

We are sort of representing this damage to the earth and how human influence has done damage and the strength of Mother Earth sort of trying to bring herself back together despite human influence.

We have our basic structure of the wood pieces overlapping that sort of represent a frame of Mother Earth.

And then we have different elements like earth, water, and air, and the different interruptions that occur, like our air bottles are in varying values to represent pollution.

And our water is made out of plastic for pollution and the earth portion of our sculpture is actually modeled after the Japanese Art of Kintsugi where pottery is broken and brought back together again to make something that's more beautiful.

So that's representative of earth breaking and then coming back together.

- This is an absolutely wonderful opportunity for students to find out the rigor that it takes, the planning that it takes, the research that it takes.

- There was a lot of trial and error.

We sort of pulled together and came up with a ton of different ideas, and then we all sat down and examined each of those ideas and if it is on theme with Mya Lin's work and if it was something that we could actually get done.

But overall, it's a really amazing project that we've been working on and we're all super excited and happy that it's finally coming together and we just overjoyed.

- When you're an art teacher, you have students in a classroom and you can teach them how to draw, you can teach them how to create a sculpture, but you really need to expose students to the many artists that have been recognized as accomplished in these wonderful museums.

So they can get out of their smaller world and they can become part of a bigger world and then they can grow toward them, or even sometimes away from them, but either way they're gonna grow as artists.

- I don't even know the words, like you're at your core, it feels like home and you're working with people who are like you, who have the right mindset who are just creative as you or excited to do this project.

It's amazing.

(soft music) - Staying with the environmental theme, New York based artist Zaria Forman uses large scale pastel drawings to show the destructive effects of climate change.

She has documented her travels through her art and left a stunning interpretation of what may soon be a part of our past.

(upbeat music) - I grew up with an artist mom and she was in love with the most far off remote landscapes she could possibly find and venture to.

And so every year growing up as a child, we would travel to these remote places for at least a month at a time, and that's what instilled in me a love of landscape.

So my mom and I were planning a trip to go to Greenland in 2011 together, but my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer and passed away before we could take the trip together.

I thought that was the end of my traveling days.

I didn't think I had it in me.

(soft music) I decided to do it in her honor as I was spreading her ashes along the trip in several places.

That was also the first time I drew ice.

I hadn't drawn ice before that trip.

The icebergs would just be lit up in this most dramatic way and this fog would hover over the horizon.

(soft music) Standing next to a glacier, you feel so tiny, and coming back from these places and wanting to represent them as best as I can and trying to give the viewer that experience of what it's like to stand next to a glacier or an iceberg.

The only way I feel like I can come as close as possible to that is by drawing as big as I possibly can.

So when I travel, I take thousands of photographs on site and I try to soak up the landscape visually and then I get back to the studio and I work from both my memory of the experience as well as the photographs to make these large scale compositions.

And up close, it does become very abstract in just looking at the line and form and shape and color.

I've just always had an obsession with charcoal and soft pastel, just something about the material.

I love the simplicity of just making a mark on the paper and that's what it is.

And I can move the pigment around and I can change the way it looks.

There's no other factor, other than just me and the material.

(soft music) I just got an email one day.

(laughing) It was like the most exciting email I've ever received that was, you know, someone saying, "Hey, would you like to come and fly with us?

(laughing) Love, NASA."

(laughing) Not exactly like that, but in so many words that's like, it was a very brief email and it was like, here's my number, call me.

Do you wanna come fly with us over Antarctica in the spring?

I thought it was a hoax.

Literally up until the day I landed and met the science team and we had our first science meeting and I was like, okay, this is NASA.

It's extremely grueling work, especially the Antarctica flights.

They're like on average 10 to 12 hours long every single day.

It's like you're flying across the planet day after day after day.

It's some of the most important work that's happening in the world now because there's so much we don't know about how ice moves and melts.

I've been traveling to icy landscapes for a long time now and so I, you know, I felt like I had a fairly deep understanding just visually of ice, but this was like a whole new ballgame and a whole new perspective.

(soft music) And seeing it from that perspective really made me realize not only the scale of ice but the scale of the global climate crisis that we're in the middle of.

I mean, it's just, it's so much ice.

You can really see how like, yeah, if that's melting at the rapid pace that it's melting at, our global sea levels will rise and there's a lot of horrible consequences.

(soft music) This is Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland.

It dispenses the most amount of icebergs into the ocean of any other glacier in the Arctic.

We flew over it for hours and hours.

I took the photo from the plane, so it's an aerial view, but in between those ridges is probably about 150 feet.

There's a whole batch of new colors in this piece.

Some that are really like bright and luminous.

And it's also just personal for me because the fjord where this iceberg dispenses ice directly into is where I spread my mom's ashes.

I feel like she's a part of that landscape.

I'm trying to portray the beauty in these places that are at the forefront of climate change and just give a moment in time and people's life to contemplate it because it's not always a part of our everyday life.

I want people to understand it, I want people to be moved by it, and have an emotional reaction to it and fall in love with the ice as I have.

When you love something, you want to protect it.

It'll make them think, well, what can I do to help protect and preserve these landscapes that are changing so quickly?

(soft music) - California artist, community activist, and Native American Jean LaMarr uses printmaking, painting, video, and other media to communicate what Native American life and culture is truly about.

(upbeat drum music) (singer singing in foreign language) - Well, I hope when someone sees my work that they feel joy and feel the colors and how exciting the indigenous life is and designs.

And these were all created by my ancestors and they were experts in these fields.

- She has been committed to rejecting the idea of the vanished American Indian.

She wants audiences and everybody who sees her art to know that Native American cultures are a living and vibrant culture.

When Jean went away to college at UC Berkeley, she was told by her professors that she couldn't include cultural content in her artwork.

She couldn't paint things that had native relevance or cultural relevance or it would be considered folk art.

Jean has always rejected those types of ideas and she's been committed to forging her own path.

- So I finally realized I have a voice because, you know, we're the product of boarding school parent and students and we're told not to talk, say, dance, do anything whatsoever.

Well finally, we get to be recognized.

We finally get to be recognized and we're proud of who we are.

We know our own history and nobody can put us away because we had a lot of brave people.

Because they were so brave, we're able to be alive now.

(singer singing in foreign language) (upbeat music) Murals are so important because they're like a community statement.

Especially if you can go out and get the oral histories and learn some of the early histories and what really happened to the community.

You can put that image in that community and no non-Indian can come in there and say, "No, that's all wrong."

I worked on a mural in the gymnasium on the Susanville Indian Rancheria with the community.

The Susanville Indian rancher is where we all live.

Most Indian home places are called reservations, but in California they called it the Rancheria.

So this is the beginning of life.

So we heard about the coyote stories.

And here's Mr. Coyote sneaking around, going looking for food.

We showed sage brush and the baskets that are made from here.

It comes around here too.

An era that was ancient from hundreds of years ago.

They had layers and layers of baskets and moccasins.

Then it goes all the way over, goes to the times and Lassen was here.

Then it comes to the contemporary times.

We're still alive, we're still celebrating our heritage and our culture.

This mural is done in Susanville, California on East Lassen Street.

Our ancestors, our future.

So I interviewed all these different people in town 'cause I know they had ancestors here from a long time ago.

We got a lot of good comments, people walking by, "Oh, this is really nice."

The Indian people, I see them standing by their relatives.

All of the love kids standing in front of their relatives and they take a picture of it.

It's just really nice.

It's really nice.

That's what I like to see.

And I respect the fact that murals do need to be changed.

They can't stay forever.

It's not a Michelangelo where they have to keep repairing it.

So it reflects kind of like the times.

If we do murals, that says we're present here and now, that means we're still alive.

(upbeat music) - In the early 1990s, Jean returned to her hometown of Susanville where she established the Native American Graphic Workshop.

The Graphic Workshop is a unique community hub where she brings together youth from the community, elders as well as different artists.

- It' fun for people to do.

It's a kind of an introduction to printmaking, working with the oils, solvents, paper, how to handle the press, how to handle the paper.

I got people that do some fantastic work, but they don't even realize what they're doing when they're doing something beautiful.

(machine whirring) See?

I like how the transparency looks.

It's not too heavy.

- Mm-hmm.

- It's softer.

Then you could bring up some hard lines with a definite imagery.

- All of us here have either learned from her, worked with her, been inspired by her work, continue to be inspired by the work tonight.

We're gonna ask for Jamie and Toby Stump to come up and sing an honor song for jean.

(upbeat drum music) (group signing) - The Nevada Museum of Art is really proud and honored to be able to present this retrospective exhibition of Jean LaMarr's work.

It features over 50 years of her paintings, prints, murals, installations.

As you're looking at Jean's artwork, you'll see a variety of symbols and motifs appear from time to time.

Sometimes that's a military fighter jet flying overhead.

Sometimes it's sort of this ubiquitous barbed wire that you see throughout the American West.

Sometimes it's an American dollar sign and she uses all of these symbols in different ways to critique American culture and to critique what has been a dominant culture that's for a long time suppressed Native American cultures in the United States.

- Everyone has a hope.

Everything has hope.

Happiness in there.

It might look negative, but there is hope for every little thing, or I'm making fun or something.

I would never hurt anybody's feelings on purpose.

That's not my personality because we're really kindhearted people.

There's hope.

There's always hope.

I always have to have hope.

(group singing) (soft music) - So just another quick shout out to our hosts here at the Brock Environmental Center, The Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

- [Heather] The CBF uses advocacy, education and restoration preaching science-based solutions for maintaining and improving the Chesapeake Bay.

- [Jason] The Brock, which generates its own power through renewable resources and was built with the wealth of nature conscious design and engineering, is the Hampton Roads home to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

It's stunning and open to the public.

If you haven't been here, you should plan a trip.

- The Brock is also a favorite spot for nature photographers here in Hampton Roads.

We're going to leave you with some beautiful pictures that show off the stunning nature here on the shores of the Lynnhaven Inlet.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- [Jason] And I'm Jason Kypros.

We'll see you next time on "Curate."

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)