Coming up, this time on Art rocks, one of the world's largest financial institutions, makes an artistic investment in Baton Rouge and one woman's work to preserve the craft of Native American basket making in the Empire State.

These stories coming up now on Art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and program 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, the LSU Museum of Art has accomplished something extraordinary.

Unveiling a huge collection of paintings by important American artists and owned by one of the world's most powerful financial institutions.

Bank of America.

The exhibition In a New Light American Impressionism, includes masterpieces painted during seven decades that spanned the height of the Impressionist movement.

Here's LSU Museum of Art curator Michelle Schultz to share some history.

Both of the collection and of the artworks it contains.

The LSU Museum of Art is really proud to present in a new Light American Impressionism from 1870 to 1940.

Works from the Bank of America collection.

This partnership came about through the Art in Our Communities program that Bank of America started in 2008, and that was really a community partnership program.

Bank of America realized that they had all of these wonderful resources of American art and American art, spanning all the way from the 1800s to present.

And they wanted to share them with their communities.

And so they started putting together curated shows that then could be lent out for free to different communities, not only in America, but across the world.

The LSU Museum of Art is really lucky.

We're the first museum in Louisiana to be able to get one of these shows, and we are thrilled that we're starting with American Impressionism.

So for this particular collection, it's all focused on American artists.

We're going to start as a history of American art, really, from the burgeoning of our own American unique style, which came about during the Hudson River school.

And that starts in the early 1800s.

And then we're going to watch how the paintings and the styles evolve.

And the Hudson River Valley School.

All of these paintings of which are examples of that time period, was considered to be one of the first truly American styles.

It wasn't necessarily a school, it was truly a style.

These paintings occurred about the 1800s, and so the artists were coming to America.

I remember were very young country at this point.

We had just gotten through the American Revolution.

We're starting to form our own identity as a nation and as America.

And so artists wanted to add to that identity, and they were presented with these amazing landscapes that were so much different than European landscapes.

And in their mind also, they were coming to an untouched, unexplored continent.

Now, of course, this isn't true because the indigenous populations had been here for thousands of years.

But to the American colonists, they really, truly felt like they were discovering something new, that this land that was blessed by God.

They went out into the landscapes, and they were trying to find these scenes and depict these scenes in their paintings that really, truly showed the transcendence nature of the environment.

The paintings are often really romanticized.

They're realistic, but there's little elements and painting techniques that they use to enhance certain areas to really push forward the idea that God is within nature.

And so they wanted you to really learn that and express that as you're watching.

And so this piece right here is a wonderful example of a Hudson River Valley School painting.

You can see that it's it's vast and open, and there's dramatic coloring in sky between this glacial formation here, the snow capped formation here, and the peak right here that is bursting out and going into the sunlight.

And this artist did not work outside.

And so that's one of the primary things that we're going to talk about as we move through this exhibition.

During the 1800s, artists were taking their cues from European art academies, and European academies taught that artists work in their studio, their meticulous, they do lots of preparatory sketches, and they really should focus on history and religion.

And landscapes were at the bottom of the valley.

They weren't really considered high art.

Americans, though, they took this idea and they twisted it.

They said, well, we want to still work in our studios, but we want to really focus on this beautiful land that we now call America.

And also the revolution of paint that didn't dry out immediately was not invented until the 1840s.

And so even if you wanted to work outside, you could only use watercolor, and watercolor was considered a low art.

That's what you used to sketch with you didn't use that to make a finished piece.

And so in the 1840s, painting tubes, it was invented.

And so more artists were able to move outside.

Well, the Hudson River Valley painters, they rejected this idea initially they wanted to follow those academic traditions.

But as America grew, they decided that they didn't need Europe to tell them how to do things.

They decided that they wanted to make their own style.

And so some of the painters, like George Innes here, he started to move outside to do his painting.

By this time, French Impressionism had come onto the scene and that was a really revolutionary type of idea, where not only would artists move outside and paint outside, but they would also do these glimpses and scenes of everyday life, and they would start to model their paint with visual colors and brushstrokes and things like that.

And so while other American artists were taking cues from the French Impressionism, George Inness decided that he wanted to stay really true to the Hudson River Valley idea of the flat surface of this transcendent landscape.

But he wanted to take that idea of moving outside into his paintings.

And so he was one of the first Hudson River Valley School painters that really embraced the idea of setting his canvas up outside and painting in plain air.

This is a wonderful example of an American artist really embracing the idea of French Impressionism.

Now, French Impressionism came on the scene about 1860, in Europe.

It was started by Claude Monet, who most people know of as the painter of the water lilies and the haystacks and he really rebelled against this idea of academic art.

As a reminder, academic art really stressed historic and religious scenes, portraiture still lives genre scenes, but not just scenes of everyday life that didn't mean anything.

Genres, scenes that had allegorical or spiritual messages and at the very bottom of their idea of hierarchy were landscape paintings, and academic art at this time was also very formal.

It was very realistic.

It was highly detailed, and it was almost over detailed to the point of adding things that would make a more classical example.

Well, the French Impressionists came in and they wanted to work outside.

They wanted to play with the idea of how light affects color and how light affects the surface.

They wanted to go in and crop scenes and snapshots of everyday life.

They wanted to do a genre that didn't have an allegorical or spiritual message.

And so this is a wonderful example of an American artist who took those ideas and incorporated them into his painting, while still holding true to some of the Hudson River Valley School painting characteristics that we've seen.

You can see that the coloring is much more muted, and we still have this idea of a landscape that's a little bit more vast and expansive, but we're starting to come in a little bit more.

But the best detail in here that really emphasizes the fact that this is an American Impressionist painting or a painting that takes on Impressionism, is the surface quality.

You start to see where the artist is no longer concerned about making you believe that this is an illusion into real life.

He wants you to look at the surface.

He wants you to see the paint and how it reacts on the canvas, and how it's built up higher in areas and scraped away in other areas.

He wants your eye to do the color blending.

And so in here, instead of just one color, there's multiple colors that are laid next to each other, and that allows your eye to do the visual mixing itself.

And also it's a lightened color palette.

Will still embracing those deep, rich tones that we've seen in the Hudson River Valley School paintings.

Also, as we move through the different images, we start to see how the area in which you paint, in the area in which you study, really affects how the compositions look in the end, and also about what time of year you're going out.

Because again, now we're painting outside.

And so the seasons have a drastic effect on the end composition and the effects on the lights and the landscapes.

And we can see that really well as we move down through this hallway.

As the scenes move from autumn to winter to spring.

This example is by child Hassam.

He is arguably one of the most well known American Impressionist artists that worked in America during this time, and this piece was actually one of his latter pieces from 1917.

He was very active in New England.

He trained in New York, and he also spent some time with Claude Monet in Germany.

And so you can really see the influence that he took from the French Impressionism in this example, because this one is really the coloring and the light aspects and these visual mixing that the French Impressionists were really well known for.

So this is a great example of how we incorporated these French ideas.

But Child Hassam did something special in his.

Now, granted, this is 1917.

By this time in Europe, French Impressionism was not as popular as it had been.

Remember, it was introduced in 1860, but America was still embracing it.

But what child Hassam did is he started to focus on architecture.

And this was very unusual for Impressionism.

If you think about it as a European genre in America, it wasn't because we're a building nation.

We're coming about, we're starting to do more building.

France had been established for thousands of years.

And so Charles started to integrate architecture into his paintings.

And if you get really close, you can see there aren't really shapes that are formed by just actual lines.

He's using literally lines and dots and blocks of color to create the shapes with on the canvas.

And if you come down here and even look at the flowers, they're not birds or petal shapes, they're just flickers of yellow that he's gone and placed in here.

And your eyes transform them into flowers because we know what we're looking at.

And so his use of color to create these effects is just amazing.

Now this example is by Ernest Lawson.

Ernest Lawson is also a painter who really took his cues from French Impressionism.

But again, he's making it a bit more American style.

By this time.

You can see that this composition, it's an outdoor scene, it's nature.

But he has made it so abstracted that it becomes very flat.

He has pushed the background forward.

There's really not much delineation between the two, and he's really cropped in and cut in.

And you can also see he's painting very quickly.

The trees are literally these lashes that come down and the water is just horizontal piling of colors that actually is very textured.

Americans didn't just focus on landscapes when they were working in an impressionistic style.

They did something that, again, just like child House and the French really didn't embrace.

They started to focus on urban scenes.

This is a wonderful example of an urban scene that was done by an American Impressionist.

This one is Guy Carleton Wiggins, and as we can see here, we have this urban street, this cityscape of an industrial sized America.

Now, by this time, this was done in 1938.

We are deeply past the industrialization of America.

We've built our skyscrapers.

We're moving into cities where recovering from the Civil War, and we've moved on, and we've built these mammoth towers that go up into the sky.

American artists wanted to document this, particularly if they lived within those landscapes themselves.

And remember, a lot of the art schools and art academies are in big cities.

So this is what artists would have seen every day.

And so what we're going to do is really challenged himself to paint something that is not perceived as as lovely as an outdoor scene or mountain scape, or the winding river that's going through a lush forest.

He wanted to do these gray buildings, and then he challenged himself any further.

He wanted to do these gray buildings with snow.

And so how do you portray snow and that feeling of just haze as you're stuck in a snowstorm, but still do it in a way that's beautiful.

And so he's managed to create this white glaze on top that he's gone through and scraped with his brush, which really gives you that effect without having to push those details any further.

And he's really done it with a just a beautiful surface treatment.

And as you look down at the people again, we're still going with the visual mixing.

We're not doing these delineated forms.

We're just using little dashes and dabs of paint to show people.

And then your eye is doing the composition for you.

So this is another wonderful example of a cityscape, an urban scene in the winter.

And it's much different than Wiggins.

This one is by James Jeffrey Grant and again it's another East Coast scene.

We haven't moved to the West yet.

We're still mainly focusing on the East Coast because that's where artists are really gathering.

And this artist is taking a completely different approach.

We start to become a little bit more formal.

The lines are a little bit more heavy and stark, but as you get down here, you look at the automobiles, you can see again, they're just blobs of color put together to form that sort of vibration for your eye.

And it's really apparent down here with the people.

It's just little marks of color, but yet our eye recognizes them as people.

He's translated snow completely differently as well.

You can see he's put flakes and as we all know, that doesn't come down in those large flakes.

But your eye understands what's going on and it completes the composition for you.

We're going to talk now about this piece by Lila Cabot Perry.

She is one of the few female artists represented in this exhibition, and she's also one of the most well-established artists during the American Impressionist style.

At this time, women were generally not allowed within our art schools.

In order to get training, they had to travel to Europe or find a mentor within their region.

And Lila Cabot Perry was from an affluent family, and she was very well blessed in the fact that she could go to Europe, and this afforded her opportunities.

For instance, she was able to spend about ten years during the summers learning and befriending Claude Monet, who, of course, was one of the masters of French Impressionism.

And you can really see Monet's influence on Lila as she painted this particular picture called The Poacher.

Especially up in here, we really do get that influence, that coloring those pinks and those lime greens that we often see in French Impressionism.

And what's so wonderful about this painting is its sheer scale.

It is large, it is endless life size, and this just causes this emotional reaction as you walk up to it.

And also within this scale, again, for a female artist, for an artist, and anyone at this time is really impressive.

And I love that you can get in here tightly with the details and see how she's put in these colors, particularly the purples and the pinks and the greens and yellows.

Using this contrasting color to really make the the surface vibrate and to really push this emphasis or emphasize the background.

And then we have the dollar coloring that she's using on the clothes.

And so it's really flattening the scene as you look at the picture.

So this painting is by Lorton Parker.

And we've now moved to the Midwest starting about the 1900s.

Artist again, just as we talked about earlier with Westward expansion of Everyday Americans, artists were also seeking out the West.

It was opening up.

We have the national railroad system.

It's becoming easier and safer to now move to the Midwest.

And so Lawton Parker was from Cincinnati, which surprisingly was also a art center during this time.

And there were, as was Saint Louis and Chicago lot.

And Parker is really fascinating.

He was one of these artists that went over to Germany to study with Monet.

And you can really see French Impressionism influence on his paintings.

Now, this is done in the 1900s, again, 40 years after French Impressionism came on the scene in Europe and so, well, in Europe, they were doing they were taking cues from other movements.

Americans were still embracing the techniques, but again, making it their own American style.

What's fascinating with this is you have this wonderful, classic impressionistic scene, which is an everyday snapshot of a mother and child, but this artist has taken great strides or great pains to try to portray white well using color.

So how do you portray essentially what's considered the absence of color in color?

And so if you come in here, there's very little pure white represented within this area.

But yet your eye still recognizes it as white.

And so he's really looking at how the light and the atmosphere because he's outside painting effect the whites and the shadows and how shadows aren't necessarily black or gray.

Shadows have color.

And so within the shadow here we see purple and reds and pinks and blues, especially down here, it's really prevalent, even moving over into green, which also reflects the outdoor scenery, the greenery that's behind the sitter.

So this is Louis Rittman and Louis Rittman again is from Chicago.

He's one of our Midwestern artists.

And this painting was done in 1915.

And what's really wonderful about this is we now see this progression where American artists are taking these impressionistic ideas and they're almost experimenting.

They're moving forward and going almost into that Post-Impressionism era.

Post-Impressionism came on the scene in Europe about 1886, and so this is a good well over 20 years from that time.

So Louis Rittman has done something that I think is fascinating.

There's almost quadrants of techniques here.

You start down here with these dots and blobs of color that represent flowers.

You move over here and they're getting a little bit more horizontal.

And as your eye moves up with this tree, these are horizontal swaths of green and blues and orange that are moved in here.

And then you come over here and all of a sudden, this house, this architecture is much more fine lined.

It's crisper.

It's not nearly as as a most blurry, you would say, as these other areas that adjoin it.

And that's because he's really playing with spatial planes.

And then as you come down here you finally see the sitter.

Her face is almost so clear and realistic.

It almost looks like she's pasted on.

And again, this is all his playing with their canvas surface, playing with space, playing with your eye and how how the color and how line and technique can sort of make you perceive one thing or the other.

And it's a really fine example.

So these paintings are by Ransome, Gilbert Holdridge, and they date from about the late 1800s.

And what is really fascinating about Ransome is he was originally a Hudson River Valley School painter, and so he took those East Coast ideas of going out to nature and seeing this transcendent beauty and the godlike essence that our natural world afforded us here in America, especially a growing America.

But he was one of the earliest painters to travel out West.

A lot of the Hudson River Valley painters actually moved from the East coast, and as the west opened up again through railroads, through trails that were now accessible, these painters decided they had done a lot of the East Coast.

They wanted to go see the grandeur of nature in the West, and when they get out there, it's a completely different landscape.

We're now dealing with incredibly rocky, snow capped mountains, vast plains, deserts, and it's a completely different environment than the East Coast.

So Holdridge went out there and he wanted to still stay within the tradition of his Hudson River Valley roots, but he wanted to bring on Impressionism.

And the other really interesting thing that he did is he also realized and acknowledged that America was not unexplored.

That was one of our thoughts, is that we had this vast, unexplored West, while the West had been populated by the indigenous population for thousands of years, it was not unexplored.

It was unexplored by American colonists.

So Ransome wanted to paint these images that would help people understand that there were already communities living in the West.

And so not only did he go out there to paint, he also went out there to live with the tribes.

And so he embedded in cells within these communities.

And as you can see here.

So he's taken this idea of this vast, expansive landscape.

He's taken this idea of this romanticized skyline.

It's like it's opening up and God will appear out of it.

And this beautiful lighting here he's gotten or achieved with the the snow capped mountains, but he's blended it now with the with the brushy, quick strokes that Impressionism would do.

So you look in here within the tree line and we have all kinds of deep, rich purples and blues that are trying to translate the greens.

And then also, if you look back here at the population again, we're going back to just those little strokes of color, those little dots of color to signify people.

The LSU Museum of Art is very thankful to Bank of America for allowing us to show this wonderful exhibition in the Baton Rouge community.

Not only is it a great example of a truly American art style that lasted all the way from the 1800s to the 1940s, it is also a beautiful exploration of the founding of America.

Through these paintings, we really see the establishment and the growth of the East Coast all the way through westward expansion through the Midwest, going all the way to California.

We're hope that when people see the exhibition, they not only truly appreciate the quality of the paintings and the compositions themselves, but looking at the history of America as we went through and founded ourselves on one side of the continent to the other.

To watch or rewatch any episode of Art rocks again, just visit lpb.org/art rocks there you'll also find all of the Louisiana segments available on LPB YouTube channel.

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

Now to New York, where Native American basket making talent is alive and well.

Kari Hill is a basket maker from Agua Osney, Mohawk territory in New York.

She learned the craft from her aunt and practices the ancient basket weaving tradition of her ancestors, transforming black ash splints and sweetgrass into functional and exquisite works of art.

Here's a story.

My name is Kari Hill, and I am a sweetgrass and black ash basket weaver.

I grew up in a cousin born and raised my whole life.

I never really lived anywhere different.

I mean, occasionally I would go and visit places, but I lived here my whole life.

Growing up, my aunts always made baskets and I would watch them and it was just kind of always on my family.

And then when I was fortunate enough to be a stay at home mother, I asked, my aunt was like, Auntie, could I would you teach me how to do baskets?

And she was like, sure.

And so I started doing the things and doing the weaving and putting the pieces together.

And it was just something I fell in love with.

It felt like something I was supposed to do.

My waves were tight, my curls were uniform.

Like.

It was just really, really cool.

And I just I loved it because I finally had a way to express creativity.

I never really had that before.

My enthusiasm has grown because my skill set has grown, so I just really push the boundaries on what I'm doing.

Like, I started making simple flatware of over under baskets with the black ash and the sweetgrass.

And then eventually I started to ask my auntie and I was like, Auntie, could I try this?

And her answer was always, try it.

So the try it was like an encouragement to be as creative as I wanted with it, which was fantastic because I went from making simple, plain, flat weave baskets to works of art that, I mean, I've gotten some ribbons and some accolades from.

It's not why I do it, but it's really nice to have.

Well, I don't know that I have like a set goal in mind for the future as far as basket weaving, I just only hope to do it as long as I can and as long as I have access to the materials that are usable.

I just plan to make baskets until I can.

So that is that for this edition of Art rocks!

Part of our 12th consecutive season, each episode showcases the work of a Louisiana artist, and you can find every one of them archived online@lpb.org.

Slash art rocks.

And if stories like this move you consider subscribing to Country Roads magazine.

It's a vital guide for learning what's shaping Louisiana's cultural life all across the state.

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 LPB.

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.