[announcer] "Art Loft" is brought to you by, [male announcer] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

[announcer] "Art Loft".

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

[t. eliott] This isn't necessarily easy work thinking about mourning.

[announcer] In this episode, galleries and collectives providing the artist a space to activate their work, and the viewer a chance to connect to art in a more meaningful way.

[narrator] These assemblages invite viewers to think about how individuals express mourning.

They ask us to examine how we deal with our pain, and how memorials lessen the impact of trauma.

"For Those Gathered in the Wind" explores black grief and death through art, and reveals the profound relationship we all have with mortality.

Hello, I'm T. Eliott Mansa, I'm an artist.

This isn't necessarily easy work thinking about mourning.

Just mentioning "Those Gathered in the Wind" is acknowledging an invisible presence, and that could be people that are dying yesterday and it could be people who died hundreds of years ago that are still linked to our modern reality 'cause we're still dealing with the division.

We're still having to face these questions about who we are as a country.

Going back to Columbine, Columbine was one of the first times that the nation took part in this collective experience of not just mourning, but people would come to Columbine to leave Teddy bears and to leave flowers.

So there was a roadside memorial that became massive.

It was unprecedented.

If you drive down the street, and you see these roadside memorials, and you recognize a combination of Teddy bear, candle, you're already kind of thinking about this tradition.

[narrator] Spiritually and visually, mourning is one of the deepest lasting connections to Africa throughout the black diaspora.

Mansa uses these connections to recreate and reimagine objects that honor those who've lost their lives too soon.

This work takes a political stance by publicly memorializing those wrongfully killed, and by providing protection to the community with hopes that soon it will no longer be needed.

When an artist deals with found objects, it is also this way to incorporate the community, and incorporate the history of the object itself, right?

They're skewed to childhood.

And that is a conversation about how that childhood isn't something that can protect you.

It's not something that, that black children are given charter, right?

Because we, we see with the shootings of Tamir Rice who was playing in the park and was killed within seconds.

Even Trayvon Martin, another child, like Michael Brown another child.

A lot of these objects are primary colors right?

So when I'm taking these bright, colorful objects and layering them with layers of black paint and someone steps into a room, they're immediately aware that something is off because these things exist within normal rules and I've shifted that.

It plays with the time it takes to see what's in the piece.

It demands that they get close and they look and I think this is something that we are really gonna have to do regarding these topics is that we're gonna have to demand that we get close and that we look and we discuss.

[donnamarie] Hi, my name is Donnamarie Baptiste and I'm the curator of the exhibition "For Those Gathered in the Wind" here at LNS Gallery.

Hi, I'm Sergio Cernuda and I'm co-owner of LNS Gallery here in Coconut Grove.

In 2017, my wife Louisa Lignarolo and I decided to open our gallery.

Our mission was to showcase and represent the local Miami art scene and all the great talent.

An exhibition like this so subtly speaks to the beauty of mourning which is something that you don't really think about you know, and only an artist would have that kind of wherewithal to be able to take something potentially or traditionally or normally so tragic and make it so incredibly beautiful like this show.

The use of color in the exhibition is very specific.

T. Elliot references Africa in all of his work and how those memories of Africa traveled through the Transatlantic slave trade.

The color blue traveled with slaves and was brought to plantations across, throughout the South.

So the color blue is a protective color.

And it's now used all throughout the South as decorative, but its history is steeped in African tradition and lore and spirituality.

In African tradition, the color black is actually a color of joy and color of life.

We are big fans of installations.

Mansa came up with just this amazing idea which was to make the project room look like this voodoo store and put this beautiful fabric that he had found, wrapped the project room with that fabric really elegantly and just letting that light, that black on black feel to again, have us rethink the use of black.

I think Sergio and I spoke about this, but you know, T. and I talk about it quite often when, when referencing the color black and mourning.

During slavery, during the days of slavery, death was seen as a release, so it was a joyous celebration for the enslaved and saying goodbye to loved ones was saying see you later.

And it was really about sending their loved ones off into the next life because African spiritual traditions believe that this is not the end, there is another life after this one.

So what a beautiful way to think about this body of work, as we talk about mourning is that it's also a celebration.

And I think that's very prevalent in the African-American traditions of home goings.

Where we're not, they're not saying goodbye, they're sending you home.

Go home to my Lord and be free.

[announcer] To see more from the gallery, visit LnSGallery.com and to check out the latest work from the artist, head to Instagram at T. Elliot Mansa.

I would love to say that I'm an artist, but I was actually a professional athlete when I got into what we're doing here.

I mainly did action sports.

So, through different events and traveling around the world, kite surfing, skydiving, wakeboarding, I ended up meeting a lot of really awesome people.

You know, artists, street artists.

I ended up contacting all these guys that I had worked with over the last 10 years.

And I'm like, man, everyone needs to kind of come, get together at this spot and see what we can create.

So my partners and I started with a wake board park and then it turned into, you know, a botanical garden, an organic farm, a art installation place for different guys that were kind of running out of Wynwood at the time because of what it's blown up into.

Wynwood was this awesome place of expression and, you know, an evolution of different things with street art.

And then all of a sudden it was like, Oh, you can't just tag that.

All these people that you know, used to be able to freely express themselves there, where do these people go to do the things that they want to do in the raw, organic kind of counterculture way that they did?

And so to have this down here is kind of a haven for them.

Every year, we have an Earth Day festival and we'll invite anywhere from four to 12 artists to come by and paint a big piece.

And each piece is in line with human effects on the environment.

There's no end date to any of these walls.

So now we're actually creating movable walls, so on eight by 16 foot marine-grade plywood.

We're doing is we're having artists paint these and we're gonna set them up all the way around the park, all the way around the Lake to create a huge, half mile artwalk.

I have a two in the building we're sitting in right now.

One is a Flamingo that's showing its skeleton.

For our earth day festival, I just finished a sawfish, which is critically endangered here in South Florida and all over the world really.

What I ended up doing inside the body of the sawfish was adding native Florida wildflowers.

Mosquito fumigators and things like that all over the Keys are destroying all these wild flowers.

Tourism is the big industry here.

So you only got 70,000 people that live in all of the Florida Keys, but we get about 5 million visitors a year.

So how do you explain it to people where it doesn't seem random and you can give them a story.

[announcer] To find out more about new art installs, head to Instagram at KeysCable, and stay tuned for later in the season, when we feature sculptures you can also view along their art walk.

Next up, a collective of California Native American tribes teach the traditional art of basket weaving.

Member station KVIE takes us there as they keep the past present.

Everything is connected and that's what makes string and especially some of these other materials so special is that it's part of this life cycle.

It's part of the earth, it's part of these things that are native to this area, just like we are.

Each basket tells a story.

Some stories have purpose.

Some stories have meanings for each individual person.

You might be going through a hard time.

And so you would just make a basket to help you out of that dark space.

I think it's about bringing people together and being able to share the traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation, from our ancestors.

Come back, flat.

So you just eyeball it about where it's going to be at.

I've been doing Tule now for about, I'll say 15 years.

And what I like from it is talking to the kids about, we have a plant that has given its life to us and we need to treat that life with care, respect it.

It's part of our culture.

Our kids sometimes will get caught up with the games that they could play on their phones or the TVs.

I don't think we're losing it.

I think we're just not taking the time to to understand it and gather it.

And that's what we need to do.

I think today, a lot of youth are having a hard time figuring out who they are, what it means to be Indian or, or anything like that.

Growing up, we didn't have the luxury of knowing a lot of things traditionally, you know.

A lot of them we've learned later.

And so the connection was kind of, I think it was disconnected just slightly.

And it's nice to know that we're making it again and that hopefully nobody forgets, and we don't have any type of other thing that interrupts that knowledge again.

Basketry tells the story of how our people have survived.

It's the one thing that remains constant in our culture.

Because for us, everything is connected, especially you know, speaking as a native person in general, everybody's always said these things, but everything is connected.

The baskets and the ceremonies and the string and the food and the land and the stories and the animals.

Attention, everybody.

We had a young lady last year, she did a Tule mat and she came back and she did a bigger one.

Her name's Sally.

Look at this beautiful piece of artwork that you made.

That's special because not everybody can do that, you know?

And so we see value in every single thing that's done.

You have little kids right now at our gathering and they're making little Tule rugs, or Tule mats, you know.

And for us, those are like the most beautiful things ever because that's what this is all about, is passing on that tradition.

[cristina] Everybody that makes something is part of this big collective of people that are creative and that can make something out of nothing.

Seeking those people out that know how to do it and you know, and sharing their knowledge.

And then, and that's the wonderful thing about this is people teaching other people.

[carrie] So I think that's what we we're trying to do is we're trying to preserve that knowledge and promote it in different ways.

It's like the essence of our community, you know?

And so it's part of us.

[announcer] We continue our series with Commissioner.

Here they profile a gallerist who is connecting to her community through art.

My name's Christina Gonzalez and I am one of the partners here at Primary.

Primary is an art gallery.

It's a trio that focuses very much on doing research and on exhibitions that are in the space.

But we also work with a lot of artists in the public realm.

I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and as a young kid, art was very much a part of my life.

My mom is an industrial designer and she has a Masters in Visual Arts.

And then she has a Master's in Art History.

I used to go with her and do studio visits and hang out with a lot of her artist friends.

I was so young that I didn't necessarily know how much of a bad-ass she was.

All of this was just like part of growing up.

And it very much influenced the way I live and what my interests are as a grownup.

The gallery started in 2010.

Really the beginning goes back to being in spaces that we knew we didn't have ownership, right?

And so we knew that no matter what, whether it was a five-year lease or whatever year lease, that eventually we'd have to move.

So we knew at one point that we were gonna have to make an investment.

I think where we're creating most of our community now is here.

I think it has to do quite a bit because I live here.

So I invest a lot of time now being in this area.

There's no like nine to five to create community.

You're part of the community all the time, right?

And I think now that I'm here, you know, when I wake up and I see my neighbors or being able to have like an artist come by really quick in the morning and just have coffee, or patrons, collectors, like being able to spend time with them in a way where it didn't feel like, okay, these are our business hours, this is when we can do this.

We learn about them and you get to know them in a different way, like a little less transactional, a little more warm, just more human I guess.

You know, culture and community and all of these things are starting to be a part of our everyday life and I think there's a large group of people that are interested in being involved but they don't know how to be involved.

How do you enter a gallery and how do you ask questions?

Or how do you go to museums and looking at an exhibit?

How do you begin that process of like, hey I wanna purchase the work, I'm interested, or I want to learn more, I want to invest in you.

I think that's how you build communities.

[announcer] And finally, let's travel to the University of Ohio.

WOSU Public Media introduces us to a group of fabricators bringing a prominent pop artist's work back to life for students.

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.

It's the most fun thing I've ever done.

When Lichtenstein became first known as a pop artist and these pop artists came from the word popular artists but they were using popular subject matter in a kind of a critique or an alternative to a very painterly style of abstract expressionism for the 1950s.

Well, Roy was a very dedicated artist.

I mean, 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 art, studio art, and Ohio state University was one of them.

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

Back in the forties, 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.

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.

And this is a posthumous addition, and that it would be donated to the university in Roy's memory.

I mean, 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.

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 the 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 eighties.

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.

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 MacPherson labs.

Which actually is closer to Roy's personal interests.

But Roy was an engineer.

He was a draftsman.

He worked in engineering companies.

He liked making mechanical things by himself anyway.

I mean the whole purpose of art is really to engage people in thinking about imagery, what it means.

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

So I want to thank everyone in Ohio for making this as a good opportunity for us to have a work here that could 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.

[announcer] Continue the conversation online.

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Find full episodes and segments on a brand new website, ArtLoftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft" is brought to you by, Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] And The Friends of South Florida PBS.