Coming up next on Art Rocks, the many dimensions of working with glass.

Glass is always different and inventive vocal on some bold goes from medieval to modern.

Memorable murals for public spaces and art that reflects both the natural world and the US social order.

These stories right now on Art Rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Let's begin on the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin in the studio of Glass artist Ginger Kelly.

Born and raised on the West Coast, Ginger began her career as a glassblower working amid the vibrant Seattle Glassworks scene.

But a relocation to tiny Breaux Bridge in the mid 2000 inspired changes in both subject matter and media.

Today, Ginger works with colorful combinations of blown fuzed and flame worked glass.

So here's Ginger to tell us what she sees in glass and to show us what she's able to do with it.

I was attending college at California State University in Chico, which is Northern California.

I was in the art department and graphic design, and they happened to have a glass blowing segment of their art department.

And I started taking that blowing glass.

It was great.

I liked working multidimensional 3-D, a lot of problem solving.

Glass is always different.

There's always something new, a new challenge.

It's just a wonderful material.

To me, color and glass looks like wet paint.

It's just beautiful and I've been working with glass ever since.

Blowing glass is my original love.

I love to blow glass, and I've done that for years and years.

But blowing glass is a big ordeal.

You have to have a furnace and you work with other people.

And when I lived in Seattle, I did tabletop drinking glasses, pitchers, bowls.

Very colorful, but very precise pieces.

And I generally showed them galleries and gift shops, high end department stores.

And I did that for a number of years.

And then when I moved down to Louisiana in 2005, I kind of changed up what I was doing.

And I'm just like, you know, I just want to have a good time and not really be beholden to exactly what people want when I do blow glass.

I go up to Seattle where I used to live.

My son is a glass artist there, and he has what we call a hot shop with the furnace and all the equipment.

So I started doing garden art, which is a lot of fun, and now I'm doing these garden heads and they're blown glass.

I make all the parts and pieces.

The eyes, the nose, I fuze everything in the kiln.

And then we lay it out on what's called a hotplate preheated the parts and pieces, and then glassblowing is an additive process.

When you're blowing glass, you gather your glass from a furnace, add the color, gather more glass, and then when you get ready to pick up the pieces for the face, you roll that on and then it's blown out and you're blowing the piece and then come up with these heads.

They all kind of take on their own personality.

Then they go on a copper pole and they go in the yard.

It's all glass color.

It won't peel or fade.

When I work with mosaics, I'm combining sheet glass, fuzed glass.

Even some painted fired on painted glass.

But I'm working on a flatter surface.

Mosaics are similar to stained glass, but not stained glass.

I have a combination of stained glass that is a flat surface and then pieces that have been in the kiln that have a slightly rounded edge.

And to me it gives more dimension.

So it's just combining, I say, parts and pieces to create what I'm looking for.

I make everything, for example, this branch with leaves.

I will take the dark piece of glass fuze on like a 12 by 12 piece of glass fuze on the stripes.

I put it in my kiln, prepare it, bring it up to temperature, and then when it's finished, let it cool down.

That's similar to a ceramic kiln, except when you're fuzing glass.

You work at a lower temperature, the highest temperature goes 1400 degrees.

Ceramic artists work at much higher temperatures.

The heat will make glass melt into the original piece.

So it's all one piece of glass.

Then when that piece of glass is cooled, I can cut it up into my branch.

Shapes, kind of wiggly lines.

And then separately, with my green color, I'll cut leaves and I'm fuzing all that again, and it all becomes one piece.

If you look at the back of this, you can see how those leaves are fuzed into the original branch.

I come up with different ideas and usually the way I work, I'll start out with an idea, kind of a focus point, lay things out and then it gives me the opportunity to change and rearrange things.

I don't like to plan the whole thing out.

Everything's glued on, so that's how it stays.

Whether it's a frame or glass, I glue it on to the glass.

If I'm doing glass on glass, like a window frame, I would have a frame with a total piece of glass, clear glass.

And then instead of gluing the glass pieces onto the wood, I glue it onto the glass, and then the grout fills in the corners and all the cracks.

I am inspired by where I live.

I'm out in the country in Louisiana, and the colors are great.

And there's plants and everything.

I started working on bottled trees where I would have the bottles cut out of glass, but I would use different types of glass that I make, whether it has stripes or colors and more fanciful, you could say.

And then the different stems of the bottle tree.

At times I have pieces that I save from blowing glass longer pieces or cut offs, and I'll put them in the kiln, flattened them so I can create these unique stems for the bottle tree.

And then there's the branches.

The bottles are on there.

So I read way back that originally they put old bottles on dead trees and the evil spirits were supposed to get caught in the bottles.

And I really like that idea.

This is glass on glass.

The idea was like, you're looking through a window, a window with shelves.

And so I have all these little bottles and planted like cactuses, beehive, different things that you might see in a window and then at the bottom of vase with leaves and branches and some bees flying around.

Also, a lot of these pieces are the fired on glass or fuzed components and putting it all together.

This piece I just finished, I had this frame for years and it was always in the back of my studio.

I love the frame, the detail work.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it.

I ended up doing this mosaic that's pretty busy, but I've got my chickens in here and the chickens are just doing their thing.

And then in the background there's the fields, and then there's the hen houses.

Or you could call them the the processing factories.

I don't know.

So it's like the chickens are oblivious.

They don't know what's going on.

And in the back it might be a little more menacing.

This is one of my accordions.

I really like the accordion shape.

You've got the angles and edges, of course, the keyboards, the buttons.

I found this frame that has a curved top and I liked that idea.

So when I make this, I'll make all these parts and pieces first.

Some of these ribs of the accordion have painted on glass.

It's fired on.

I fuze the keys and then the buttons.

Of course, it's not perfectly accurate, but it's the suggestion.

And then lay it out and then I'll do the background where I'm combining some of my sheet glass and mixing it up with different colors.

And then there's some mirror.

So it's a whole combination and it just gives a nice feel and again, that accordion, you've got that nice arch, it's just a great shape.

So I've been very fortunate to participate in Jazz Fest for I think 18 years now.

Different regional shows.

I don't do a lot of shows, but I like that, that I can travel and be in Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama to do some different shows or people get a hold of me.

If art's what you're after, then here are a few of the many exhibitions happening in the weeks to come.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads magazine available in print, online or by e-newsletter.

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Get ready for some cutting edge vocal fireworks out of South Florida now.

Seraphic Fire is a nationally renowned vocal ensemble with a wide ranging repertoire that has made them a staple of both local and national arts communities.

From medieval to modern seraphic, fire performs works that encompass both secular and sacred and delivers performances that glitter with artistry and style.

So sit back and listen to this easy.

These two.

Hildegard is the first known composer.

She's the first person that has her name written on a piece of music that we can trace it back to a historical person.

Everyone before her was grouped under the same title of Anonymous.

Oh, I didn't.

My name is Patrick Quigley.

I am the founder and artistic director of Seraphic Fire.

Oh.

This is, in fact, the opening of our 18th season.

We're quite a versatile ensemble, so we perform music from the medieval era, starting somewhere in 800 A.D., but also from the Baroque, classical, romantic and modern periods.

New Orleans.

A lot of what we do is trying to make the music sound like what the composer thought it would sound like.

We do not perform with amplification.

We're entirely acoustic ensemble draws and whenever we're performing music that is more than, say, 500 years old, we have to participate in some sort of musical archeology, e.g.

this is particularly appropriate for this concert.

Hildegard have been was born at the end of the 11th century.

This piece was written probably sometime between 1140 and 1150 A.D.. At eight years old, her parents committed her to religious life.

It was written for a community of women that Hildegard was the leader of, and so she was a visionary.

She had received ecstatic visions.

And one of her visions was that she should take her women out of the monastery that they were sharing with a group of Benedictine monks and move it to the ruins of an older monastery.

This piece, we think, was written for the dedication of that new monastery.

It's written in a style and in a musical language that we don't have the key to anymore.

We know the notes that she wrote and we know the order that they come in and we know the words that were underneath them.

But everything else is something that we've had to reconstruct.

Hildegard only wrote one line of music at the time that Hildegard was writing.

We hadn't actually gotten to the point where we had multiple lines of music being written on top of each other.

The vocal quality of women singing in unison creates this sort of otherworldly sound, particularly when all of them are singing the exact same notes at the same time, which is very difficult.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh.

The story is about a woman who is trying to choose between a life of the world and a life with the virtues who are in a more celestial realm.

It's remarkable because it's so high.

It's a very, very high piece of music, and it's in a different mode at the time that Hildegard was composing.

We didn't have keys in the way that we have like C Major.

C Minor.

D Major.

D minor.

They only had the white keys on the piano.

So we sing into the interesting things about your lines.

I don't think that we've even come close to scratching the surface of all the artistic things that we can do.

One of the really unique things about Seraphic fires that we don't really repeat repertoire in this performance, one of the reasons that we're doing it is not only because it's a great piece of music, but it's performed so seldomly that we hope that our performance and our recording of it will be something that will encourage other people to take this on as a as a project.

And it shows just how much the contribution of women to music was being made even in the 12th century.

Few things brighten an urban landscape like thoughtful, well wrought public art in Reno, Nevada.

Joe C Rock creates fine art murals for public spaces inspired by graffiti, street art, cartooning and realism Rocks, large scale colorful vistas capture the energy and the individualism of the communities that surround them and give locals and visitors alike a lot to feel proud about.

My name is Jose Rock and I'm a muralist and artist here in Reno, Nevada.

I create all kinds of art, but I definitely tend to have more of a street style graffiti art, but then figure paintings.

My favorite.

But neorealism would be like the biggest key point.

The idea of like urban or grittiness really appeals to me just because that's like who I am.

And I listen to rap music.

I spray paint.

These are all things that are very urban.

I love graffiti.

I love, you know, buildings.

And I love just that chaos of just traffic and people walking and honking of horns.

And that's the other part of it is if you look at my painting, I love just making a mess to, you know, like that crazy chaotic mess and then that beauty on top of it.

If you look at this painting, that same idea, this door is just grows old.

But then there's the girl inside who is just very soft and pristine and painted very nicely.

And it's just that counterplay of ideas that is also great.

I've been drawing my entire life.

My mom taught me how to write really young, and I always just had a pen or pencil or crayons in my hands.

So I just really always had it in my blood.

And when I was, you know, two or three, my mom, she had to like, line the house with butcher paper as far as I could reach because I was like paintings.

I guess I've been doing murals since I've been like three.

I know starting a mural is different every time.

I don't really ever know how I'm going to actually start like putting paint to the wall first.

It just really depends on the finished product as well.

Like the one at the corner.

That one I chop the drawing in first because I wanted a lot of the blue showing through the entire time and then from chalking it in.

Then I went into spray paint and doing that, then going back and cutting back with the wall color, fixing my lines up, then started doing shading and doing the different layers of shading.

It's really hard to judge on how long a mural is going to take.

It can be anywhere from 5 hours to 50 for the same mural.

So sometimes if I'm on it, I can bust out a portrait really perfect in 5 hours and have it be the same that it would take me 50 to render it.

Because you just sometimes make mistakes and it goes, but sometimes everything goes well and it just lines up right from the beginning.

I love when people come up and tell me what they think about it, because I love that when I'm painting something and I never thought about that and someone comes up and they're like, Oh, is that Marilyn Monroe and JFK?

And like, you know, you just hear these things And I'm like, No, but it could be like, I'm not saying it's not so and I love that about it.

I would love for people to come away from my art feeling happy.

Like that's one thing or like moved or just people taking notice of it is great, you know?

And I think art in a public space is just it's great for anyone.

I mean, it just livens up a dead wall, you know, it gives someone something to look at.

Reno is full of murals.

There's murals all over.

If you walk from Plum all the way downtown, there's just this corridor of murals everywhere.

It's an easy way to change an area.

And that's kind of what happened here, was we started painting murals on a lot of businesses because younger people started opening businesses, a building that's looks dilapidated.

If you paint a mural on the side, it becomes an attraction.

You know, it becomes where people are sitting there taking pictures in front of itself and people tend to congregate around them.

So it's just an it's an easy way to change something.

The exhibition, Teresita Fernandez Elemental invites viewers to encounter sublime natural landscapes, often juxtaposed against current politically charged climate of the United States.

We'll visit the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, Florida, to consider the work of a leading contender prairie artist who reflects and challenges perceptions of the natural world, a landscape that might have one meaning for me and another meaning for you.

It opens up possibilities for interpretation that take us to other places based upon personal experience.

My name is Franklin Sermons.

I'm the director of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, and I'm also a co-curator of Teresita Fernandez Elemental.

Think about landscape, for instance, in terms of being a genre specifically of sort of traditional art making experiences.

She explodes that traditional idea completely on its head.

One way that she describes her relationship to creating landscapes is she calls them stacked landscapes.

To suggest this idea that there is almost like sedimentary layers, which relates to geology in the same way, but more metaphorically, and that we are looking at layers of of of time that are part of the experience of any landscape.

So there is a there's a direct reference to a colonial landscape.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what the landscape actually looked like before colonization, the landscape and the land and the Americas was manipulated in very sophisticated ways for thousands of years before Europeans ever arrived.

I like to think of Italo Calvino, this idea of Invisible Cities in a way right there.

They may have a reference point in the mind of the artist or when she's creating them, but they allow for us to see things in a way that is much broader.

This is nocturnal horizon line work that's been created by graphite, all of it painting or shall you say sculpture.

It has elements of both.

When you look at the top of that surface, you see this kind of the sheen, this kind of glare that almost makes it have qualities of reciprocity, of being almost like a mirror.

And then you go down a little bit and the graphite is kind of a little bit thicker, creating this horizon line and creating this kind of texture that almost looks like it could be water, perhaps it could be a seascape.

And then you go a little bit further and it gets thicker and it feels like the earth.

So maybe we've gone from the sky down below to the through the ocean and into the ground below.

Maybe at the end of the day, this is a really beautiful painting.

It's one of my favorites in the exhibition, and I'm glad we got to talk about it a little bit.

Our exhibition ends with a series of works that are around the the somatic of of landscape and fire.

Right now, the entire exhibition being called Elemental.

And you can see the hand in that and you can see like their little tiny pieces of mosaic that make up this whole.

And so much of our work is about looking at the the things that make up a whole in the case of going directly on the wall.

I think there's clearly an immediacy to that gesture that is part of the moment, and it cannot be divorced from the moment.

You know, they they came at a moment where it just seemed completely inappropriate to be subtle.

You know, those pieces were about American violence and they were about the land and like, the destruction of of of the land in many ways.

Right.

And so just the climate to seemed like it wasn't appropriate to just make it about something abstract, to love them, you know, and a part or a big part of who she is is is an activist in addition to being an artist.

And I think those things can be one in the same and in her body and practice.

It really is.

So they're coming to the fore in a much bigger way, I would say, right now.

But they've always been there.

And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But never mind, because you can watch episodes of the show any time at LTP dot org slash Art Rocks.

What's more, Country Roads magazine offers another useful source for thought provoking coverage of events.

The art people in places all around the state.

So until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.