- [Jason] Next on Curate.

- [Harvey] When you're listening to music that you've composed you have this feeling that you're sharing a part of yourself.

(upbeat music) - [Nastassja] Being in the line with them, watching them move and sing I was like, okay, we are shaking up some stuff.

(upbeat music continues) - I love welding.

I love putting stuff together.

I love the hot metal.

I feel happy.

- [Heather] This is Curate.

- Welcome to Curate.

I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

Thanks for joining us.

Hampton University Professor Harvey Stokes is a music dynamo.

In addition to teaching at HU, he is also the founder and director of the school's computer music library.

- Dr. Stokes also plays.

He's an oboist for Symphonicity.

He's written two books about music and perhaps most impressively, he composes music.

His compositions have been performed on at least four continents.

And recently right here in Virginia Beach.

- [Heather] Dr. Harvey Stokes is this week's 757 featured artist.

(happy music) - We perform for the love of music so the notion of us not performing music, well, that's not gonna happen.

We're gonna perform somehow.

(upbeat music) There's a certain sort of adventure element to anything the Symphonicity Orchestra is involved with because this ensemble involves itself in doing new things.

When the call came to participate in the MOCA program we kind of jumped at it.

In Symphonicity, we've always been in a place to expose new audiences to what we do and this is a great way to do that, even in the COVID environment.

(mysterious music) I had a brother.

He played the tuba, he played the oboe, and he was a dancer in Broadway musicals, and did a lot of acting in Broadway musicals and so forth.

So I watched him like a hawk and one day he said, I'm not gonna play the oboe anymore.

So he gave me his oboe.

He taught me a few notes.

And that's when that bug started happening.

(energetic music) I went to Norview and tried out a bunch of instruments while continuing to play the oboe.

Then my brother went down to East Carolina University to study music.

He studied for one year.

So I did the bachelor's degree at East Carolina and developed down there, and playing the oboe, and learning about music, and so on.

Then I left there and went to the University of Georgia.

This was around 1979 and there was a gentleman at University of Georgia, John Corina, who played the oboe.

He also was a composer, an organist, and he was a theory professor.

He basically took me under his wing because I was an oboe player, I wrote a lot of music, taught a lot of theory courses, and so forth.

After I left, I went to Michigan State University.

I went there because Adolphus Hailstork went there.

He was writing music and I wanted to write music.

(dramatic music) We've written a lot of music right on this machine.

We is me and my muse, God, we kind of work together.

(dramatic music continues) We write it here then we put it on paper.

It's got to be in your mind first.

I have in my mind what the instruments sound like as well as what each individual instrument can do in terms of the various melodies that I would devise.

So it's very important to have a sense of what instruments sound like and what orchestras sound like, what bands sound like.

And there's no way to do that unless you listen to a lot of music.

(dramatic music continues) We are approaching about 70 compositions.

This is a piece for a violin orchestra here.

We have a bunch of string quartets in here.

That's "Quartet Number Nine."

We try to write three, four pieces a year.

Sometimes it ends up being two pieces because of the length aspect.

If you're writing a symphony it kind of takes a while.

I got to Hampton U in August of 1990 and I've been at Hampton, what, 31 years.

There is this band it's called The Fuzz Band.

They tell their story and a lot of their music they wrote as a result of chord progressions they learned in my theory class.

(indistinct singing) It's good to see everybody here at Hampton.

Let's see if we can get our review done today so we can give you a test on Friday.

They told us to not come to campus, so all of us are in rooms that we specifically set up for instruction.

I've got a little mini studio in there where I've got computers, and synthesizers, and drum machines, and things like that.

And we engage the students that way.

(brooding music) The work that I chose to base this quartet on was the piece entitled "Motherless Child."

I happened to have known that piece for a while and in this particular quartet we sought to merge that tune with my particular way of writing music.

(brooding music continues) So you have that fusion between the Negro spiritual and the sum total of my musical experiences as a composer.

(brooding music continues) When you are listening to music that you've composed you have this feeling of elation.

You have this feeling of joy.

You have this feeling that you're sharing a part of yourself with people.

(brooding music concludes) - [Jason] Learn more about all our 757 featured artists at our website, whro.org/curate.

- Nastassja Ebony Swift makes art with wool.

Really amazing, beautiful, larger-than-life pieces.

You've got to see this to believe it.

- Mikquan Johnson along with Alicia Sokolovsky, Darian Harris, and Ivee Harrison from Old Dominion produced this feature about her.

- They are part of our collaboration, Curate U, in which we engage with college students to create Curate content as part of their college curriculum.

(gentle music) - It was a curated outdoor performance that took place in Richmond.

Visually there were eight black women and girls ranging in age and they had on these large felted masks.

So I knew I wanted the project to be all women because I was interested in my presence, and the space that I take up in Richmond, and the way that space speaks to my history.

And I wanted to put together a piece or a project that invited other black girls and women to be a part of this reflective moment.

My mom was an artist.

She didn't finish.

She went to two years of college.

Her portfolio from college was what I would look through when I was little.

And that was kind of my introduction into art outside of my coloring book or whatever I was doing as a kid.

And understanding that because it was in this enclosed thing that there was value to it.

And I think that that kind of planted a seed in my understanding of art as being valuable.

My background's in painting.

I picked up oil painting specifically in high school and they didn't teach oil painting because the ventilation system couldn't handle it.

Then I was like, I'm gonna teach myself how to work with oil.

My elementary school art teacher, Mrs. Richardson, which was actually at Woodstock, she pulled me aside after school one day and she was like, you need to apply for the Old Donation School's satellite program that they have for kids.

And she helped me fill out the application, went over what I needed for the portfolio, and she just was very adamant about making sure I put a good amount of energy in getting into that program.

I feel like Mrs. Richardson was this domino effect that knocked all these other things into place.

It was her, and then Old Donation School, and then Salem, and then BCU.

and then professional artist.

So I do needle felting which is a specific kind of felting process.

So needle felting is cool because you can work both two-dimensionally and three-dimensionally with it.

This, which I think is awesome, is really the only tool that's necessary.

It has these little tiny barbs where my fingers are kind of measuring it out and they circle around like a little staircase.

They're super tiny, you can feel them when you swipe down.

And what happens, I like to describe those little barbs as hands and when you puncture the surface of the wool those little hands start to grab small little fibers in and they're tangling them.

So when the wool starts pretty parallel in terms of the strands of wool fibers, and they're rolled into the start of a shape, the wool poking through, however many times, I wish I could count the number of times I have to poke to get it to stay, they start to tangle.

So they go from like that to that and then they compress and become a dense little object.

But I teach felting as well.

I primarily teach fiber workshops, specifically either 2-D needle felting or 3-D felting.

So I teach a felt your pet class and a drawing with wool class.

And they're all beginner, well, I mean, there's no experience required and I think what's most exciting about working with people who are either not familiar with wool or felting, or had seen it and haven't really tried it, is that I get to expose them to something and to show them the way wool can be manipulated in a way that they may not have imagined.

My dolls, they mean multiple things and I think they're very layered in how they came to be conceptually.

I'm gonna fix her lip while I'm talking.

So my mom has been collecting porcelain dolls, black porcelain dolls, since she was in her twenties.

And so dolls, outside of play, are very normal to me.

And I don't think I ever planned to start making dolls.

These were a way for me to make people and for me to make people outside of my paintings.

So I think that the necessity of me to only have black dolls and understand the value of representation through those objects subconsciously plays a role in why I only make black dolls.

And I think that the importance of valuing all complexions is the reason that I make black dolls in multiple complexions.

- [Narrator] Every breath I take is magical.

It means that I survive.

It means that someone in my history had to fight.

(drum music) It means... (drum music continues) Power.

Sisters.

Sisterhood.

- It was the biggest collaborative thing I've ever done.

And each person brought their own kind of energy both mentally, physically, but also spiritually.

Being in the line with them, watching them move and sing, I was like, okay, we are shaken up some stuff in this city.

It definitely felt like there was an ancestral presence which is what I was kind of hoping that that moment would feel like.

I don't wanna just have these conversations with people that it feels safe with.

So to know that my work opens up something between me and other people, I think is what I wanna continue to keep doing.

(soft music) - You can find more Curate U content on our website, whro.org/curate.

One person's scraps are another person's chair.

At least if welder Cindy Wynn gets her hands on those scraps.

She creates eclectic furniture out of scrap metal in her South Florida shop.

(electronic music) - I'm Cindy Wynn, I've been making furniture for the last 30 years.

I build furniture out of scrap metal.

I have probably about 200 to 250,000 pounds of scrap metal in my welding studio and I have an idea, or the scrap metal gives me an idea, and I go out and I start collecting parts, and I keep at it until I have the whole design.

Usually I design about 10 to 12 pieces at once so there's pieces and parts everywhere that I have a future as furniture.

Either lamps, tables, or chairs is usually what I make.

Furniture can be art.

The functionality, people think, oh well, if it's functional, it's not art.

But I really think it is because it changes people.

Just because you can touch it and sit on it, doesn't mean it's not art.

I first got started in college.

I took all the basic classes, drawing, painting, and then I glommed on to ceramics for about three years, which was six semesters.

At the end of the sixth semester, our ceramics teacher said, you guys get all your stuff out of here.

And I thought, well, I'll just take a break then I'll take sculpture two, which was welding.

I learned how to weld really easily and I was frustrated because I hadn't made anything creative, so I just made my partner a chair as a joke.

And it's like my brain lit on fire.

(rock music) An idea can come from the materials or it can come from my head, and then I squeeze the materials into my idea or vice versa.

But I study all kinds of furniture, especially 18th century.

18th century furniture has really a lot of amazing details.

I use some glass, some wood, but mostly it's all scrap metal.

I go out into either, if I'm up north, I go out into a real scrap yard or if I'm down south here, I go out into my own scrapyard and I look for parts.

I do a lot of welding, a lot of cutting with a grinding disc, and a lot of cutting with a torch.

And then welding is the most fun step.

And then the final step is to put a final coat of lacquer on it and take it down to the gallery.

The grinding is still rough, but the cutting, I love cutting and I love welding.

I love putting stuff together.

I love the hot metal, even when it burns me, I don't mind.

I feel happy.

I'm working on a number of projects, so what I'm gonna show you today is the end of a series called wrench chair.

And I've learned a new thing about spring steel.

You can't really weld it, so I catch it in a little cage.

So that's the final step on this wrench chair.

So it'll still have movement with the spring but it won't be in danger of breaking.

My most recent commission, I did the headboard on commission.

I have four panels to carve the headboards all complete except putting it together and carving the last three out of the four wood panels.

And for speculative, I usually do pedestals, console tables, end tables, a lot of chairs.

Chairs are my favorite 'cause chairs are really where I think the art is in my work.

Because I make them so that people are very trepidatious when they see them.

And then when they sit down I can see for an instant everything evaporates, and they're back into a childlike state, and they start laughing 'cause it moves and it's comfortable, and usually down here it's hot and the chair is cool.

I just like that moment when they changes their perception of what furniture is about.

It makes them feel differently about furniture and the way people interact with furniture changes when they see my stuff.

(rock music) - Roy Lichtenstein was a major figure in the pop art movement.

He is celebrated at his Alma mater, Ohio State, with a monument.

His sculpture was recently installed on campus.

This is the story behind the impressive piece, "Modern Head."

(robust music) - It's a little different than most other sculptures that we've done for the Lichtenstein's.

It's about 31 feet tall, weighs in, we believe it's going to be about 5,000 pounds.

(robust music continues) It's the most fun thing I've ever done.

(robust music continues) (dramatic music) - Roy Lichtenstein became first known as a pop artist and these pop artists came from the word popular artist, but they were using popular subject matter in a critique or an alternative to a very painterly style of abstract expressionism for the 1950s.

- Well, Roy was a very dedicated artist.

He fell in love with art when he was a young boy.

And when it came time for him to go to university he wanted to be able to study art.

And at that time there were really only a handful of colleges where you could get a degree in studio art and Ohio State University was one of them.

- Well, we're proud to count Roy Lichtenstein as a double alumnus of the university.

Back in the 40s he achieved both his bachelor's and master's degree here in fine arts, and was part of our teaching faculty for some time following that.

- And Roy always held Ohio State University in high regard because of this experience he had here in the art school.

- In more recent years, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has actually been looking for ways that they could continue to engage with the university.

And so it's really through the foundation that we have this tremendous opportunity to actually be considered as the location for something as amazing as this "Modern Head" sculpture.

(gentle music) - The "Modern Head" sculpture, we figured we could build one to do a memorial, non-commercial cast of an addition that used to be four.

We decided to make one more addition to it.

This is a posthumous addition.

And that it would be donated to the university in Roy's memory.

- We wouldn't really dare make anything new.

In fact, we got the plans from the original producer of the piece and we worked with a fabricator that Roy had worked with on many of his pieces, Paul Amaral.

(joyful music) - We're in Rhode Island on the East Bay, just a little bit East of downtown Providence, Rhode Island and we're ready to build a Lichtenstein sculpture.

This one had been built before by other fabricators.

That was the challenge.

To build it from other people's drawings and design parameters.

The input information that I got was analog, hand drawn pieces from the early 80s.

So we had to correct all that stuff and get it right so that we could have complete faith in the computer file to produce a piece that is the shape that Roy intended.

Everybody started feeling really confident towards the end when we started producing small scale versions out of a water jet or laser machine, and everything lined up and matched, and did what it was supposed to do.

(joyful music continues) - The sculptures of Roy Lichtenstein are often thought of as very technical, almost scientific in nature.

And so when folks from the foundation came and walked across campus they found this space in the north campus area that actually aligns not only with where we're enhancing our arts district but also provides this really amazing synergy with some of our science buildings, particularly Smith and McPherson Labs.

- Which actually is closer to Roy's personal interests.

Roy was an engineer.

He was a draftsman.

He worked in engineering companies.

He liked making mechanical things by himself anyway.

- The whole purpose of art is really to engage people in thinking about imagery, what it means.

So I'll be very curious to see how the students at OSU deal with this, what they wonder about it.

- So I wanna thank everyone in Ohio for making this a good opportunity for us to have a work here that would be provocative for the tens of thousands of students who will be passing by it.

It's just a nice opportunity to maintain a relationship.

- [Heather] You can find Curate online.

Visit our website whro.org/curate.

Our website features all previous episodes of the show.

- You can also find links to the artists we've featured and you can follow Curate on social media.

We're on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

- [Heather] You're looking at works currently on display at the TCC Perry Glass Wheel Arts Center in the NEON District of Norfolk.

- [Jason] We want to thank Tidewater Community College for providing a backdrop all season long.

- We're going to leave you tonight with more from Symphonicity's recent performance at Virginia MOCA.

This is Dr. Harvey Stokes composition, String Quartet Number Five.

- [Jason] Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Jason Kypros.

- [Heather] And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

We'll see you next time on Curate.

(symphony music)