Coming up next on State of the Arts, Fighting erasure with Art, Paper Silhouettes with a three-dimensional message, and Filipina Futurist Artworks, this week on State of the Arts.

Hello, and thank you for joining us this week on State of the Arts.

I'm your host, Mary Paul.

On this week's show, we'll meet four artists whose cultural heritage and upbringing have deeply influenced their work.

We begin in the borderlands.

Our first artist was raised in Nogales and carries within her the tension of two worlds, worlds marked by beauty, grief, migration, and resistance.

In this world, women often fall victim to violence and human beings easily become statistics.

Artist Vanessa Saavedra reminds us through her work that behind every statistic is a life.

(Vanessa) If you tell anyone in Mexico you're an artist, they're gonna be like, "Okay."

[ LAUGHS ] My mom always supported me.

My dad didn't object.

[ LAUGHS ] I mostly work with oil painting, acrylic painting, chalk pastels.

I recently started to work with insulation.

In my paintings, I mostly work with themes that are socio-political, like femicides, the border, and its issues surrounding it.

Sometimes I work with analyzing myself and things like that.

♪ SOFT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC ♪ The definition of femicide is the killing of a woman because of her gender.

The biggest problem in any country that lets this happen is impunity.

Violence against women is a global health problem.

I started to talk about it because I feel like that's the power of the artist is to show your personal perspective about anything.

I used that license of being a Mexican woman to talk about this problem and even going even into more specific.

In 2020, I was listening to the news and I listened about the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla, a 25-year-old woman.

That was very shocking for Mexico, for the whole nation.

And then days later, they find Fatima Cecilia, a little seven-year-old girl in a garbage bag.

That moment, I had the idea of this painting.

As women, we were not safe.

We were not being told, "You're gonna be okay."

It was the opposite, like stop complaining or blaming the victims.

A lot of social indifference, and that all turned into a lot of emotions within me, a lot of anger.

And of course, I wasn't the only one.

There were huge protests happening in Mexico and that's when the pandemic started.

And I thought of making my own protest at home through art so I could share it online because that's where almost everyone was living.

The name of my thesis is "En Memoria Digna," "Indignifying Memory."

It's intended to be a memorial for them, a very respectful memorial.

And I started to want to add to the humanizing narrative of femicides.

I'm a woman as well and it's just really sad and scary to go out and people telling you to take care of yourself because something can happen to you.

And then, you know, if something happens to you, they could blame you for it.

I don't know, it's just like you put yourself in the shoes, you know, as a woman.

I am just empathizing and it's my reality as well.

It could happen to anyone I know.

So that's mostly why I do it.

This installation that you see here, it's a small part of my thesis.

My thesis is originally seven by seven feet.

It's a representation of Ana Paola Jaramillo, a women victim of femicide from Nogales Sonora.

My thesis consisted of speaking to two families of women victims of femicide.

I contacted Ana Paola's family.

She was just a 13-year-old child.

She was such a ray of sunshine.

She loved to dance.

She loved her family, her pet.

She loved her friends.

She had so many friends.

So I started to look at specific victims, women victims, because the media just like turns them into numbers of statistics that they, oh, one out of 10, one out of 10.

But she was the whole world for her family.

These families are indirect victims of femicide as well.

The pain that they have after that is just out of this world, honestly.

I don't know how to even describe it or understand it even.

I'm not attacking anyone or asking for answers or investigating.

I'm not doing any of that here.

And I don't want it to be misinterpreted to that ever.

It's just about them, you know, and for the families and for them.

I hope that other women artists also chime in and make work about specific women victims of femicide.

There are so many artists, there are so many women victims.

It would be a way of helping these families heal.

Our next artist uses black paper, sharp scissors, and a lot of patience and technique to create highly detailed silhouettes, an art form with origins in his native Mongolia.

Through his craft, which he has perfected over 30 years, he celebrates his Mongolian heritage, his love for nature, and an appreciation for a simple lifestyle.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC ♪ (Turburam) My name is Turburam Sandagdorj I am a Mongolian-American professional silhouette artist.

I create silhouettes called Tsagasun Baru.

Tsagasun Baru is the paper silhouette art in Mongolia.

My father influenced me as the artist.

In the college, I learned ceramics.

Ceramics is three-dimensional.

The ceramics and the paper cuts is not different.

It's the same thing, it's the same feelings.

Just you're using different tools and materials.

You need to grab the paper and scissors and start to cut.

It's very important in the silhouette, the tools, the scissors.

I try with using that aggressive tool into the fragile materials.

I'm using hot pressed paper.

It's very thin, it's almost like silk, and you just cut straight into a curve.

I always think about connection.

Without connection, all your lines just collapse down.

I try to start to end just one image, one meaning, one feeling.

Sometimes you see this whole concept in your mind.

A lot of my art express the life of the nomads.

The nomadic lifestyle also is very minimal.

The nomads love their nature.

That's my message.

I love their nature.

You see the open space, and the sky like the blue like the ocean.

And the night you see just the Milky Way, a thousand stars.

And you just connect its talks with you.

I always simplify everything.

It's kind of minimal.

I just choose the minimal life for me, it's the works for me, and also expressing it into my art.

I illustrate more than 40 books, mythology, the folk tales, poetry, and history.

I love the history.

It's made me think about where I came from.

Raised between cultures and driven by truth, Rowena Federico Finn transforms her personal history into works that explore Filipino-American identity, into works that explore Her research process, together with her unique use of indigenous materials, creates distinct Filipina futurist artworks that bridge the gap between legacy and discovery.

♪ GENTLE MUSIC ♪ You can't make really good art if you can't be truthful.

Because a lot of people think that truth is gonna be painful, and yeah, it can be sometimes.

But there really is beauty and simplicity in it, even for all the hurt.

My dream growing up was, I'm going to be a realistic painter, I'm going to paint things just like Leonardo da Vinci, and maybe someday I'll end up in a museum.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ The oldest drawing I have was from when I was about four, four and a half years old,and it was two women and a men.

The women were wearing like big fancy hats.

And for some reason, the guy had this little baby, and he's not like even holding it or anything, it was just kind of perched on his shoulder.

And while I was drawing, I lost count of fingers.

So I started drawing fingers up this side of the arm.

The guy has like maybe 11 fingers on one hand, and he still has his other hand.

So, you know, I got better at drawing hands.

I believe in understanding the techniques that are the foundation for being an artist.

So understanding drawing, understanding color, knowing how to paint a little.

Teaching art has been great because it's not something I had ever intended to do, but I kind of stumbled into it, and I found that I really enjoyed it.

And what I really like about it is that it makes me a better artist.

And it definitely helps being married to somebody who's been teaching for, you know, almost 20 years.

And also parenting helps, because when you're a parent, you have to teach.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ I met my husband at JMU.

We're both students there.

When I look back at our pictures, I thought, "We look so young, I think.

Who the heck allowed us to get married, because we look like little kids?"

When we decided to start a family, I would stay home with the kids.

Like, I wanted to, which really surprised me, because I never thought of myself as being a very motherly type, but I have learned definitely I am.

It's really cool like getting to see who my kids are and what they're interested in, and, you know, trying to take that step back and let them be who they are.

And I think a lot of that just comes from my experiences just comes from my experiences of me trying to be an artist, like, when I was growing up, because it wasn't something that was supported.

When I was taking art classes in school, that was fine.

But when I wanted to take it seriously and make it a career, that was a big no-no.

And over the years, I've come to realize, like, that is a huge part of my identity that I feel like my family didn't understand.

And so to not have that understood or supported was very difficult.

So as a parent, it's a really, really big thing for me to every day start afresh and see them as they are right there in that stage.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC ♪ When you sit there and you have to really pay attention to something and look at the values and the colors and the shapes of things, it really forces you to slow down and really pay attention.

And so that is something that I carry into all of my other work because you can't really see something.

You can't really understand something or someone unless you give yourself permission to slow down and really be present, really pay attention.

And that's very difficult to do.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC ♪ I've always felt like a black sheep in the Filipino community.

I don't like singing and performing on stage.

That's not my thing, which is a huge thing in the Filipino community.

Like, I don't even do karaoke.

And so if you're not part of that, it doesn't really feel like there's a place for you a lot of times.

And I'm also, I'm very outspoken, but my kids are half Filipino.

And I want them to be more aware of that part of their culture than I was growing up.

I want them to at least feel like the door is open for them.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC ♪ Quilts are not something in Filipino culture.

And I grew up with a lot of friends who had quilts in their houses, and I've always thought that they were really beautiful and interesting.

I love the history of them.

I love how they're made.

But being born and raised here, being part of the culture, but also kind of not part of the culture, it's sort of this weird in-between place where you're trying to figure out, you know, how you really belong.

♪ BASS MUSIC ♪ When I decided to dig into what it means to me to be Filipino-American, what does Filipino-American art look like?

I just decided, okay, well, you know, what are some materials that are exported from the Philippines or that, you know, you think of when you think of the Philippines?

And I just got on the internet and ordered a bunch of stuff and just figured, let's get the stuff in, let's see what it can do.

So I'm making a kapis quilt using these square cut kapis shells.

And like the pina fabric, they're another major export from the Philippines.

They look fragile, but they're actually surprisingly durable.

And you can see images through them, which is nice because for me, that's like another metaphor for humanity.

Balut is this fertilized egg.

You're supposed to crack it open, slurp up whatever soup is in there, and then just eat it.

And that is just something that I can't see myself ever trying.

But it's also such a huge part of Filipino culture that I was determined to see if there's some way that I could find a connection to it.

In my piece "Transfer of Power," it's a very maternal piece.

I thought about being a mother, creating life, raising these kids, hoping that someday they will be good people, and they are good people, but hoping they'll stay that way, and thinking about what I'm passing on to them, but also what they've given me, and also what I've gotten from my mother and my grandmother and my aunts.

♪ HIP HOP MUSIC ♪ For a lot of my life, I would feel paralyzed trying to make art because it wouldn't come out the way that I wanted it to, so then it was just easier to not do anything, rather than just plunge in and let the art take you where it will, experiment, have fun, let loose.

It took a really long time to learn that lesson, and I'm still learning it.

I love drawing and painting, but it's also very tedious and kind of boring for me.

But now the work that I'm doing, it's very invigorating, and I have enough ideas for at least a few more shows.

And as I dig deeper into my heritage, it's also opening up more questions and more avenues for research.

I want to fly back to the Philippines and visit the museums and the libraries, and I want to visit the villages, I want to learn about the weaving, I want to learn about the tattoo culture.

I want to go hang out with people who are fishing.

I just want to get to know the country for itself so that I can bring that into my work.

Finally today, we take a trip to an art gallery and event space in Florida to see the work of artist Carlos Navarro.

Born in Havana, Cuba, and now based out of Miami, Navarro combines pop art with a distinctly Cuban aesthetic to create canvases full of color and nostalgia.

(Carlos) When we were growing up, it was always like this world of all these cool dudes with tuxedos and the go-go girls in the background, laughing if you remember that show.

So it's just like you didn't have a choice but to be influenced by the cool.

It was always there, you know.

Around 1999, I wanted to start doing my art and painting.

At that point, I was in the corporate world.

I did sales, marketing, real estate.

I was sitting in my living room one evening listening to a collection.

It's like a little cigar box with some CDs, and it was called "I Am Time" was an anthology of Cuban music, which my dad had given me.

While I was looking at this painting that I had done around 1993, I had no idea that I was going to be doing this full-time, and it was like a pop art style that I had done, and that's when the little light bulb went off.

I said, "You know, no one's ever done all these Cuban themes in a pop art style."

And that's kind of like the spark that really got me going.

And then that first exhibit that I did, which was in January of 2000, was a collection of very Cuban traditional things but in a pop art style.

And again, the rest is history.

That was like the first domino.

Welcome to the vault.

It's kind of like a speakeasy, but it's for art instead of for liquor, because it's nondescript from the outside.

You can't really tell, but definitely when you walk through that little vestibu and you walk inside, it has that wow factor, because nobody's expecting the visual once you walk through the door.

The coolness of this venue is that the history of what it used to be, where the brinks, armored trucks would bring the things that they would pick up, whether it was cash, money, or gold bars, and they would pass them through these little things, and that's all still here, the bulletproof glass.

Some of them, if you go through it, I don't know what the story behind them is, but there's bullet holes and some of the bulletproof glass.

So each room has its own little vibe.

From here on in, there's a couple of pieces from the new exhibit, but all the other rooms basically contain remnants of exhibits passed, 25 years worth of doing art and shows and everything, and then inevitably there's a few that stay behind waiting for their right home.

And so I had to yank them out and bring in here to fill in all the amount of wall space that we have.

We have the actual vault with this door that weighs more than a house, but it's where the bulk of the character of this place comes in, and then now, yeah, we're inside the actual vault, the namesake of the gallery.

We put some of the racier images in here, and then we also have in the corner, you'll see actual safes that they used to use to store gold bars.

This new collection, Huellas, which is fingerprint in Spanish, is specific things that I selected that have directly impacted my life or left a life lesson or something that influenced me as the years have gone on.

Just to kind of capture the fact that it is things that have left an imprint on my life, and it's actually not size-wise, but it's my actual thumbprint in all of them, depending on the piece that I played around with the placement and stuff like that, but it's visible in all of them in some way, shape, or form.

These paintings, although they have less color than my older stuff, they actually have more layers because, you know, it's just a buildup of things to end up with the final piece.

But the other ones had more color, but they were more flat.

In this case, I wanted to add more depth to it, so I kind of did like that shadowing effect.

And when I was finished, which wasn't part of the original plan, it turned out that it does look like it's like a metal sculpture floating.

My mom had saved a little sketch, a little doodle that I had done when I still lived in Cuba.

I almost had been like two and a half, two years old, and she had kept it with all her stuff.

So when I found that, and I had that little piece of paper put away, and then when I started this, I go, "There's no way I could do everything without starting with the start, the actual starting point."

And there may have been others, but that's the one that's there.

So then I just took that little original sketch, and I depicted it as a full-blown painting, which is really, you know, like when people ask me, "How long have you been drawing?

How long have you been painting?"

It's like, "There's the answer that long."

It's kind of like the natural transition or the segue from this, because the next thing is, yeah, it's called Patria Axilio de Liberta.

You know, we lived and left Cuba, came to Miami at that time, and we were here for a while, and then ended up in New York, and everything that that stood for at that time.

You know, it wasn't only that we were in New York, but it was the process of liberty and freedom.

I tried to kind of capture that whole diaspora in one piece.

I wanted to capture how much TV was an influence to everyone in the 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s, because all this programming popped up, and TV as a concept was a new thing.

These images were like in your house, you know, and then you would turn on the TV, and all those shows that we grew up watching were original in every sense, because there was no predecessor to them.

We would turn on the TV, and there was all this coolness, you know, because it was like, it was The Beatles, it was Elvis, it was Tom Jones, it was Playboy, it was Dean Martin, it was Frank Sinatra, we had just coolness abounded.

This is my second Batman.

I did a pop art Batman some years ago, more pop art, but my Batman was Adam West, you know, in the 60s, you know, and then this is actually me in 1966, dressed as Batman.

And what's weird about this is like, you look at the little date, and it's in April, so it wasn't even Halloween, it was just Batmanning for the sake of being Batman.

It's funny, because depending on who the person is, they'll relate to one piece more than the other.

You know, like some people love that station wagon one, because they're like, "Oh man, I remember when we.." So they can relate.

The Rolling Stones, James Bond, everybody could kind of relate to their own memories of that specific subject.

Things that we may not think about on a daily basis, things may no longer be a part of my life today, but they were at one point, but it still leaves a mark, it still leaves an imprint.

The artists we met today represent just a small handful of ways people honor their cultural heritage at an individual level.

As always, art can serve as a pathway to discover more about the world than you can imagine.

Until next time, I'm Mary Paul.

Thanks for watching.