- Next on Curate.

(upbeat ambient music) - When my students started doing extraordinary work, that would motivate me to get back into the studio.

- I wanted a super immersive science documentary that allowed the viewer to be a part of this flow state.

- Ceramic is very fragile.

It's about fragile condition of all of us.

- This is Curate.

Welcome, I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

We are coming to you this week from Old Town and the Portsmouth Art and Cultural Center.

- They're in the midst of their annual winter wonderland exhibit.

It's a very popular experience this time of year, so thanks to them for hosting us.

- Appropriate that we are in Portsmouth because we start the show with a Portsmouth artist whose work has appeared right here.

Jean Ben Benvenuto's paintings are beautiful, compelling, and thought-provoking.

What has been her motivation for creating such a moving portfolio?

- Well, it's her work as an art teacher.

This artist has inspired countless others to make art and that has in turn made her creative fire burn even brighter.

- Jean Benvenuto is our 757 featured artist.

(upbeat ambient music) - I think no matter what your discipline is or what you teach, as an educator, you have to educate yourself in order to share.

And over the course of my career, I learned to appreciate so many other artists, so many other movements.

I would never have anticipated how much I would benefit from teaching in that way.

Well, excuse the mess.

I'm in the middle of getting ready for three art festivals, reviewing inventory, making labels, price lists, deciding what will go to the show and what will not.

The body of work I'm preparing to feature is my "Happily Ever After" series.

And then in these boxes I've got, I don't know somewhere between 30, 35 drawings framed and ready to go.

Getting organized, it doesn't look like it, but it's getting organized.

I use a metaphor of setting ships to sail as students of mine have graduated and moved on into art related careers or as visual artists.

It's very gratifying.

When Laura Shum graduated, she and her parents gave me a letter she wrote when she was in third or fourth grade and she knew she was gonna be an artist, and this was her gift to me when she graduated.

"My best subject, my best subject is art, I like drawing."

You asked me, "Did I ever feel inspired by my students?"

and I turned it around a bit and I said, "When my students started doing extraordinary work, I would feel them nipping at my heels and that would motivate me to get back into the studio."

I'm gonna do a little bit more right through here.

I want this to be brighter.

I want this to model more gently and I'll refine the hands.

But this is the palette that I'm using right now.

And when I say a cool highlight, I'm gonna go to the (indistinct) Green, probably a little bit of Sienna or Rose and the white and that's gonna give me the cool highlight that I want up here.

Some of it is already in the face and I've got to judiciously choose how to use it and be sure that I model it well.

It's like I guess the gas tank in your car, and I did an enormous amount of creative problem solving with my students all day long.

Situations I could never anticipate, it'd be on the fly solving a design problem or materials problem all day long.

But I thrived on it.

I was trying to figure out what worked the best.

So you probably recognize a lot of the color that is in that big painting.

Being included, curated into this show by Gail Paul is definitely a milestone in my career.

- Wonderful.

- Thank you.

- Being in the company of nationally recognized artists is significant to me.

It's not something I take lightly and I'm very humbled.

The concept for the painting comes from my visits to the retention pond at the corner of High Street and Cedar Lane.

I was first attracted to that retention pond because of how beautiful it was on that October afternoon.

Thunderstorms were rolling in and I pulled my car over, parked, got my camera out and just watch the wind activate the surface of the water and dried lily pads.

I knew what I wanted to do and I had to psych myself up almost like that theme music in the tornado scene when the witch is on her bike in the tornado, dun, dun, dun, dun.

So I'm getting psyched up because I want to use really aggressive marks, especially in the sky and in the clouds and have that energy, that movement translate onto the canvas.

I was following the pond through the seasons of the year, the changes the pond went through, and I became acutely aware that the lily pads, the lotus pods, the seeds, the flowers, that it was all metaphor for our own journeys in life.

The things that we experience that maybe are more difficult, and then holding on to the idea that things are going to get better.

You know, there's a promise in the seeds in that lotus pod and the promise is they will go down into that mud and find their way up again and bloom.

When I have any kind of struggle, I think about the power of regeneration, the regeneration that seeds can create.

I have made a few personal contracts with different things that I've planted.

That's kind of the underlying metaphor with the pond series, but it's also finding beauty in something that is not necessarily beautiful.

- [Jason] Want more Curate?

You can find us on the web, whro.org/curate is your web-based destination.

- There you can see this show again or any from our catalog of seven seasons.

One of the items you can find in our archive is a feature produced by former Curate U student Lizzie Fowler.

Curate U is a series we do overseeing an old dominion documentary class and helping students learn the craft of documentary filmmaking, the best features from that class air on Curate.

- [Jason] A few years ago, then student Lizzie Fowler produced a story about Navy veteran brothers who now shaped surfboards.

It was an exceptional piece.

- Lizzie has evolved well beyond student filmmaking, now creating a documentary that has a very personal connection to her own life.

Here is what Lizzie has been up to since you last saw her work on Curate.

- Lizzie remains one of the most talented kids to ever come through that class.

Working with her as a student was great, but one thing I didn't know at the time was that she had just recovered from a very traumatic accident that she had had as a college athlete.

- So I was running towards the middle and our back row player, her knee hit the back of my head at full impact and knocked me to the floor.

My temple bounced off the floor twice and then flew straight back.

I was in Mission Hospital and I was unconscious.

When I woke back up a few weeks later, I had to re-meet my mom and I was blind.

When I got my sight back, I realized I didn't know my family, I didn't know my mom, my sister, who I was, not knowing who you are, it was the most terrifying experience.

I have a tear in my occipital lobe and a tear in my temporal lobe and so that makes it really hard to process what we call a working memory.

That was really hard to accept for quite a few years that there's just this huge piece of my life that's missing.

- Lizzie had moved home at that point and picked up her education at ODU, which is where our paths crossed in that dot class.

I think her accident encouraged her to find a more creative part of herself to explore.

- After that, I realized I needed to get out and really explore.

I moved to the outer banks, got into surf photography and film.

Really love the action sports 'cause people are so alive in their element.

Then I moved to Oahu and got to shoot surfing out there.

Worked with the World Surf League a little bit, 'cause like all these little elements of where I moved around and got to work with different talent around the world fused into what I make now.

Challenging flow stemmed out of an art documentary that I was shooting in Aspen, Colorado and got to work with Kelly Peters.

Super psychedelic, beautiful art that had so many elements in it and I was like, "There has gotta be a story behind how she makes this."

She carries her canvas into the back country, either skiing or hiking.

She drops into these really immersive states when she's painting to where her whole body language shifts, and she starts pouring water all over it.

And then she'll throw the snow into the canvas working in all of the elements.

This is not how normal people paint, and she thrives in that lack of control.

I started to notice this and I started collecting footage of the way her hands were moving, the way her wrist would relax.

And I had my film crew, they pulled me aside and they were like, "You guys are both in a flow state right now."

Apparently I was getting so immersed, I was falling into a bush, and then Kelly was so immersed in her painting that both of us were so disconnected in our own craft and my crew said that they couldn't stop watching it 'cause it was just synchronistic.

So that's when I truly knew that this flow state was very real and I went online and started researching if anybody else had found this exact phenomenon, and found that a lady named Janet Banfield out of Oxford University had found the exact same thing through her research.

I was sitting down at the round table and I asked Jan, "How did you get into neuro research?"

And she was like, "I had a traumatic brain injury."

And everybody looked at me and then I was like, "Oh, my gosh."

And they were like, "She did too."

It was this weird connection that she started opening up about her injury, I started to open up about my injury and how having that insight on life has completely flipped our careers, what we're going after now and it's this need to give back our insight that we both gained through that experience.

I wanted a super immersive science documentary that allowed the viewer to be a part of this flow state.

So not just speaking to them from a scientific point of view, but allowing them to be immersed into their research.

It sticks in the back of your head and makes you ask questions days and days later about, "What is my flow state?"

How do I connect with it?

So the story has evolved a little bit along with Helly Peters.

We're working with generational spear fishermen.

These fishermen dive for about four to five minute breath holds.

They'll just hold their breath until they catch enough fish.

We're expanding into other areas, social flow, so looking at when teams go into flow state, maybe Formula One, maybe even horses and human, and I would love to do traumatic brain injuries because there are so many amazing stories.

It's interesting being able to put that into a storytelling form because through video, you have to explore all these different avenues to tell stories and I think through having that coma experience, it allows me to connect more with ways to be able to do that.

Through making this film, it's been hugely healing.

I learned that your mindset is like the one thing that you can control and you can't control anything else but that.

- New York City artists are stepping up to shine a light on a big ecological problem.

(upbeat ambient music) They're creating amazing murals to bring awareness to the many species of birds that are threatened by climate change as part of the Audubon Mural Project.

(upbeat ambient music) - I had opened a gallery and wanted to bring some attention to the gallery.

So asked the one fine artist I knew who also did, quote unquote "street art" to paint a mural on the adjacent gates to this art gallery.

And he's from Florida and he said to me, "I'm gonna paint a flamingo for you because I'm from Florida and bring it some Florida flavor."

And I made the connection, John James Audubon, birds and that's how the project really got started.

- I said, "Wow, this is a great idea.

Get the word out about the threatened birds, beautify the neighborhood, but let's feel a more ambitious, let's not do just a dozen birds, let's do all 314 threatened birds."

- So it's really nice to sort of publicize one of the great Americans and really one of the most interesting Americans to people who are familiar with the name but unfamiliar with the actual person.

- John James Audubon (tranquil ambient music) was possibly America's greatest bird and natural world artist and an extraordinary pioneering ornithologist.

He spent the last 10 years of his life here in Washington Heights.

- The center of the project really has shifted to what was once the Audubon estate between 155th and 156th Street and Broadway.

And it's appropriate because John James Audubon's final resting place is in Trinity Cemetery on 155th.

We made the decision to paint from approximately 135th Street West to 193rd Street, which is the end of Audubon Avenue, and there's no great logic to it, but we sort of thought it would be nice to keep the project uptown.

Picking the locations is a bit of a challenge, but one of the things we decided from the beginning was we weren't just gonna paint anywhere, we're looking to beautify.

So we're seeking out spaces that are in need of some sort of fix, some sort of improvement.

So the big walls that we've painted all had crumbling paint and really were in a state of disrepair.

We've worked with landlords to secure spaces, like empty alcoves that are boarded up and we can work with studio artists who are painting panels that we then install into the building.

We're mostly working with artists who are from the neighborhood or from the greater New York area.

We work with them to choose a bird.

We try not to paint the same birds twice.

We really ask them to do what they they want within reason.

There are challenges to painting outside, but there are also benefits to painting outside.

So there are people who come while an artist paints and they're engaging the artist and it's a little bit distracting, but the positive is that they're engaging the artist and they're learning about the project and they're learning not just about global warming, they're learning about art.

I'm from the neighborhood originally and I wanted people uptown to be able to see the sort of art that you would normally have to go to Chelsea or the Lower East Side or maybe parts of Brooklyn for.

- One of the things I love about coming up here to look at and for the murals is that you can't be sure on any given visit which ones you're going to see or that you're gonna see them all.

In that way, it's sort of like going out for a birding expedition.

You can't know which birds you're going to see.

When you're talking about half of all North American birds being threatened, you're gonna see some birds there that you wouldn't expect to see.

They will shift, they will move, the Baltimore Oriole is predicted to no longer be able to be seen in Baltimore.

The common loon, which is the state bird of Minnesota is projected not to be able to be found in Minnesota.

I think that sort of seeing these murals of birds in this urban environment in a particularly urban sort of art form is something that gets people's attention, and I hope they will sort of investigate and see like, "What is this?

Why are these murals all here?"

And really learn about this threat to the birds that we are used to seeing around us, even in an urban environment.

I hope that it inspires people to think about that and to kind of be inspired to do something about it.

- On 163rd, we have one of my favorite murals, it's by the artist Cruz who's a New York based artist and it's a painting of three tri-colored herons.

In the mural, the polar ice caps have melted and sea levels are rising and the three herons are sort fighting for the last food, in this case a snake.

There's so many things I'd love for people to take away from the murals an understanding of the threats that the environment faces.

More neighborhood pride for uptown Manhattan, a sense that art is accessible.

- I strongly encourage people to get up here because it's really an extraordinary experience.

- Shahpour Pouyan creates art in New York, but originally is from Iran.

Through an array of visual art forms, he examines history, politics, and power.

- I make ceramics and at the same time I do painting, drawing, photography, everything.

The fun part is doing everything with my own hands.

I grew up in Tehran, and live in Brooklyn now.

Iran is a modern name.

I mean, in political terms, Persia of course, it has a 1000 years of history.

I don't think it's about Iran, it's not about the specific geography, it's more about the culture and interactions that happen.

(tranquil ambient music) Projectiles are based on this old practice of producing armor in Iran, which has been around for 2000 years, 3000 years.

The physical process is about bringing this very old medieval technique and just bring it back to life.

Armor is layers of history, layers of aggression.

And at some point it turned to be a very poetic product, which is covered by decoration, the poetry, and layers and layers of rich culture.

These works have very strong roots and misunderstanding between different cultures, so I would say is layers and layers of misunderstanding, which is the truth.

I collected, selected this very specific miniature from medieval and 15th, 16th centuries.

With very important historical moments, and then I removed all the figures, heroes, anti-heroes.

So what you see is this empty landscape or architectural scene.

There is a story there, however you can read it or not.

So is just, I would say outdated.

I do many sketches.

I keep doing sketches and just doing again, again and changing and changing and changing, but they're all coming from an idea.

So I have something in my mind and I have like a concept and something that has to get a three-dimensional form and then I go to studio and sitting and start building the ceramic piece.

(upbeat ambient music) Working with clay is amazing because it deceive me.

Every day you go and you waiting that somehow it's going to surprise you with something, with a new crack, with a change, with deformation, with many other things.

But what I do is get that essential alphabet in form of architecture and bring it to my sculptures.

(tranquil ambient music) When I was working on this city scale, I was thinking the best way to celebrate a nation is architecture.

Ceramic is very fragile.

It's about fragile condition of all of us, as people as a nation.

So everything happened is the truth that you try to find, but how much is correct?

You never know.

(upbeat ambient music) - That's gonna do it for another week.

- A big shout out and much gratitude to the Portsmouth Art and Cultural Center for hosting us.

Their Winter Wonderland will be on display through the end of the year.

- Thanks for joining us, I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros, and we'll see you next time on Curate