Next on Gallery America, a Tulsa artist makes Life-Size drawings of Depression era photographs that are very realistic.

I want to create an experience in which the viewer walks into a room and goes, Oh, wow, look at that photograph.

A lifelong artist explains how the exaggerated features of caricatures help him get to the true essence of his subject.

What it is, is an investigation into exactly what makes a person unique.

A Connecticut artist is shifting the gaze and historic paintings by drawing attention to details that are often missed.

There's more written about dogs in our history than there are about this other character here.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America, the show that introduces great artists from Oklahoma and around the nation.

I'm here in Oklahoma City's Alice HArn Park because this bench here was made during the WPA, or Works Progress Administration.

I'm wanting to sit on this bench because the first artist we're going to meet uses WPA era photos as a source for his Life-Size drawings, which he makes with a really big goal in mind.

Meet Joel.

Daniel Phillips.

I moved to Tulsa five years ago for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

We subleased our space in San Francisco and sent back in a year, and we're just going to go do a year of experimenting in Oklahoma.

Right now, like I'm proud.

You get to Tulsa and there are people on the sidewalk saying, Hi, how are you?

You're like, Oh my God, this is wild.

It's a whole different space.

And it really did welcome us with Open arms.

I think I am officially a Tulsa artist.

That's a strange thing to say out loud.

Hi Mom.

I'm from Tulsa now.

I play in the Tulsa city Saturns.

I've never played baseball in my life, actually.

Yeah.

So I showed up and immediately took a ball to the throat and then drink some more whiskey and said, I love this.

This is amazing.

Like, everything else I do has ego involved.

I know I believe that there's a conversation that we are all sort of having collectively right now as a society.

About what truth is.

We're in the era of fake news.

Fake news.

Fake news, fake news.

False news.

Deepfake videos, misinformation, fake vaccine cards.

How do we wrestle with this moment?

How do we learn how to believe each other again?

Why does realism matter in an art world that has in most ways moved past it?

And I want to create an experience in which the viewer walks into a room and goes, Oh, wow, look at that photograph.

And I step up closer and they realize it's not a photograph, it's a drawing.

And then they have to ask themselves, Is this a real image or is it not.

Is this real realism in the era of fake news?

starring: Joel Daniel Phillips you know, I think that black and white simplifies things, whether it's a hand or an oyster shell, it's all there.

But it removes the complication of color.

So it allows me when I'm working to really sort of hone in on what I feel like is there the meat and bones of a thing Killing the negative is a collaborative series of drawings and poems in response to censored government photographs from the Great Depression.

We have a tendency to think of it as a time in which everyone was sort of equally screwed.

And the reality of the Great Depression was that it actually had a similar socio economic breakdown to what COVID has had for for Americans and people all over the world.

In a couple of years ago, I was on a photo blog and I stumbled on this photograph.

There was this big black dot in the middle of it at that somebody had taken a hole punch to the original film Negative.

I stumbled on this whole set of photographs that were censored during the Great Depression.

Most people in America have seen the famous photograph by Dorothea Lange, the migrant mother That photograph was commissioned by the US government during the Great Depression to bring attention to the plight of migrant workers who are, by and large leaving Oklahoma and Kansas.

What folks don't know is that there was a man in a dark room who was deciding what was seen and what wasn't seen, and his name was Roy Stryker.

Roy Stryker, his boss told him, You, your goal is to show America to Americans.

The point of these photographs was actually to sell the New Deal.

Here's a problem here's a woman on a side of the road that needs your help, and Congress needs to vote for that.

And we need to fix this problem.

There were eventually about 270,000 photographs that were shot, of which approximately 100,000 were killed, whether they were a hole punched or thrown away.

So I fell in love with those images.

What rain must come for black men to wet What sound makes us fall?

The deep rivers of my hands, dry creeks, my forehead to Arkansas, heat I long to forget.

I found that image the first time I went through the archive and I was like, Oh my God, this image is as powerful as my grandmother photograph, and I've never even heard of it.

How is that possible?

There's a visible interaction between this African-American agricultural laborer and the photographer who is a white man.

Who are you to pause my son up with your whiteness and picture box to demand stillness in a land that little rewards idle.

Joe and I are both Tulsa artist fellows, and so when they happen to be passing by studio and the door was open and I saw the initial studies of this project, I was immediately struck by the gentlemen facial expression.

And I said, these images, these people need narratives.

So they need they need voice.

Every day the sun is angry.

This coat's tired as my hope, starving little ones on my brow harvest a dream buried in dust.

Good day, sir.

This is number 60.

And in the killing the negative series he's an oyster chucker, and he's sitting on the front step of a weathered building, shucking oysters.

I think this actually might be the largest drawing ever made.

It changes the way you interact with it.

It becomes like there's a person in the room instead of an image in the room.

I think that looking at historical images sort of forces you to wrestle with the complexity of our history and how it could have gone a different way.

It wasn't predestined I don't know if it fixes anything.

I wrestle with that a lot, actually.

Yeah, I wish I could say like, yeah, I believe in art and its ability to change the world.

I do.

There's a Don't Do It, which maybe tells you that I do as much for me as for anyone else.

This is my way of wrestling with these questions as if, you know, even if it doesn't result in somebody else rethinking or reconsidering something.

At the very least, I've wrestled with it and I've learned something from it.

And I think that's valuable.

Joel's work recently won him honors from a Smithsonian competition that shows off the best of American portraiture every three years.

You can see more of his work and learn about his book by visiting his website.

Joel Daniel Phillips dot com or following him on Instagram at Joel Daniel Phillips.

Next, we meet an artist who is also attributed by the Smithsonian.

But his approach is very different.

He uses the often exaggerated brush strokes of caricature sure to find the true essence of his subjects.

Meet John Kascht.

There's a conception, and it's a misconception that caricature is about distortion.

What makes people think of distortion is that it's very exaggerated and very amplified.

But there's a big difference there.

I'm amplifying in the direction of what makes that person unique.

My name is John kascht and I am a caricaturist Caricatures, not cartooning.

It's not illustration.

It's not a comic strip.

Caricature is a very specialized form of portraiture.

Like all portraits, caricatures are interested in nailing the likeness What it is, is an investigation into exactly what makes a person unique.

And if you find the things that make you different from everybody else, and then those things get amplified, and the more of the nuances that make that person unique that I can observe and then get into a drawing, the more complete the likenesses and the and the greater the recognition on the part of the person looking at it where they say, Yes, I recognize that person I was very much that kid in the back class drawing the teachers.

And the thing about me is I never stopped.

I'm still kind of drawing the teachers or the authority figures anyway.

But now it's politicians, performers, you know, that kind of thing.

I've drawn primarily celebrity is, you know, notable public figures.

So when I'm drawing an idea that I have, I usually do very quick thumbnail sketches just to kind of start mapping out the the way the piece could look.

I draw on vellum, transparent vellum, so that if I have something in a sketch that I like, I'll slide it under a fresh sheet, draw over the top of it and keep the parts I like.

Don't keep the parks I don't like until eventually I've got the fully realized sketch that I want to paint from.

I use watercolor and paint in light layers of glaze.

Ideally, if I have 16 hours to 20 hours on something, you know, obviously each piece has its own requirements, but 16 to 20 hours is a great amount of time for me for an average piece in my style.

The Waukesha County Historic Society Museum was founded in 1914.

So we've got more than 100 years behind us of celebrating what this region, what Waukesha County has to offer in the world and what impacts we've made in the world.

Making Faces is our future exhibition.

The artist John Kasich is originally from Waukesha City.

Waukesha graduated of Catholic Memorial High School just a mile and a quarter down the road from here.

And so a really lovely way to celebrate someone from this part of the world and to really take and appreciate his accomplishments the wonderful nature of the work that John does is that he is the artist gets to retain very often the original that he makes.

And so he's been kind of sitting on this incredible back catalog.

30 years worth of work.

The exhibition here is a collection of about 100 ish pieces that are my favorites.

Bill Murray is one of the large format prints, and we put him kind of front and center right inside the gallery space as you walk and so we really start with just in general, what goes into his character in portraiture work, things like body language and also what the process is to get to a finished product and really take people on that journey from appreciating what this art form can be when it's done to the expert level that John's able to achieve on through its multiple iterations and kind of uses My favorite piece is a first piece of work he ever sold.

It's a political cartoon that he sold to the Waukesha Freeman.

One day I just went down to the Waukesha Freeman offices with a bunch of my drawings of teachers, of family members, and I just I went in and asked to see the editor because I had in my mind that I wanted to do political cartoons because that's where I was seeing caricature work.

Jim Houston is his name.

He was the editor of the Freeman at the time.

I think because he was puzzled.

He agreed to meet with me.

I was 14.

And amazingly, he said I could submit cartoons to them.

And in retrospect, I realize he did me a great favor, a great service there.

Professionally, he took me seriously at that age, and I started identifying myself as as a professional.

And to to start with that piece and to be able to see everything that's come after that.

It's just this incredible story of what a lifetime of work can do.

My favorite things in the exhibition, actually, are the sketches because to me, that's where the creativity really is.

The likeness is happening or it's not.

And when it's not, boy, it can be tough.

But then when I finally capture it, it's really still, to me, feels like a miracle when that person is looking back at me from the paper with caricature, you think of, you know, big nose, big chin, big ears, that stuff's all part of it.

But so are nuances, like a person's particular skin tone.

Do they slouch?

Do they sit up straight?

How do they use their hands a lot.

Are they more contained and don't reveal much?

All of those nuances convey ultimately who we are on the inside I'm still amazed that how we hold ourselves outwardly so, so much and so accurately, who we are in the inside I feel in some ways I'm trying to learn about myself one person at a time.

To see more of John's artwork, visit his website at John kascht dot com and last We're going to meet a Connecticut based artist who has a very clever way of shifting the focus of historic paintings to help address parts of history.

We often miss Meet Titus Kaphar When I say shifting the gaze, I'm imploring the viewer to set what feels natural aside for a moment and try a different route through the work.

And you do that through a painting, even a familiar painting.

You might find something you never expected to find composition.

There are techniques and strategies for guiding the gaze through a particular composition.

I've spent a lot of time studying art to spend a lot of time studying them.

They work.

I'm shifting it from the strategy of the original artists pathway way through the work and trying to find some other way to see not giving in to what will feel most natural What I've been doing is actually trying to separate those black characters from the other characters in the paintings who were or pressing them to give the viewer the opportunity to contemplate these characters on their own terms, on their own merit, without the pressures of this oppression that exists within the compositional structure of the painting itself.

I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this.

There is a reason he is the highest in the composition here There is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here He's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in this paintings.

Painting is a visual language where everything in the paintings is meaningful, is important.

It's coded, but sometimes forms because of the compositional structure, because a compositional hierarchy, it's hard to see other things There's more written about dogs in our history than there are about this other character here, about his dreams, about his hopes, about what he wanted out of life.

I don't want you to think that this is about eradication.

It's not the oil that you saw me just put inside of this paint.

It's linseed oil.

It becomes transparent over time.

So eventually what's going to happen is these faces will emerge a little bit.

What I'm trying to do what I'm trying to show you is how to shift your gaze.

When people say I'm racing history, they're pointing to the fact that they don't recognize that I'm actually uncovering what was already there.

I'm attempting to make you look at a different part and not a racing history that takes a kind of structural institutional power that I actually don't have.

We can look at institutional structural power and we can look and see the ways in which history has been erased.

It has been erased by some random black dude in Connecticut making paintings.

Put white paint on it.

Is how it works.

I don't go into museums.

My mother worked really, really hard.

My mother had me.

She's very young.

She was 15 years old.

She worked three jobs, usually just to make sure we were taken care of.

I found art very late in my life.

I was 27 by the time I realized that this was really what I want to do.

So I take my kids to the museum every time I have a chance, whether they like it or not.

We were in New York City and we were going to the Natural History Museum in New York.

And as we were walking up the stairs, we came upon the Teddy Roosevelt sculpture that's out front of the Natural History Museum, and Teddy Roosevelt is sitting on the horse looking really strong, boldly holding that horse with one arm and one side of him as an African-American man.

And on the left side of him is a Native American man.

And as we were walking up those stairs, my oldest son saved me.

And he said that how come he gets to ride and they have to walk?

And it was one of those moments where you as a parent, realize this is going to take way longer than we really have.

But you can't pass up those kinds of teachable moments.

And so we sat on the stairs for a little bit and we talked about it.

And in my house, history is a really important thing.

It's alive and we try to help our kids understand that understanding the past is about understanding the present.

That painting behind the myth of benevolence is about the dichotomy of this country itself, of our country.

And so you have the individual who probably wrote more eloquently about liberty than anyone to ever of Thomas Jefferson.

Right.

And you have that same individual who values liberty more than life itself.

With.

Holding liberty from hundreds of people who make his very light possible.

The character in the paintings, a woman in that painting, is at once Sally Hemings in quotations and at once a stand in for all of the other black women who are on that plantation.

There are over 300 other enslaved people on that plantation, at least 50% of them are women.

And so it's easy for us to focus on that one part of the story and forget that there were other women who were abused in so many different ways in that painting.

It's a literal pulling back the curtain to again shift our gaze We can't just simply demonize our founding fathers, but it's also important not to defy them.

Let's just find the truth in the middle.

The forgotten soldier I've been working with this concept for a little while now.

It came as a sort of fascination of the process of making sculpture.

In this particular work, I decided that I wanted the mold to be the finished work.

That is, I wanted you to be able to look in this case and George Washington, one of our founding fathers, in his absence, is complete his perfect absence.

But in his perfect absence is, as I said, the pure potential for all of the good things.

But the reality of the bad things as well in front of that is this figure.

The soldier on one knee prepared for battle in profile.

The black figure in the front is about those forgotten soldiers, the ones that were there, that participated that for some reason history forgot.

Let's be honest, it's not for some reason it doesn't work with the narrative that slavery makes sense.

Slavery is good for the nation.

Black people like to be enslaved.

So we write out those kinds of histories.

We just ignore them because it challenge other aspects of what we believe.

My intention is that we see both of these characters at the same time that there is a visual dialog between the character who sits in front, this black soldier and George Washington.

We have this tendency to kind of write our history thinking about those people sitting on that horse.

But there is a lot of other characters or soldiers on the ground that actually give their lives for that.

In this particular exhibition, we're talking about the black soldiers who were, by and large, forgotten to history, erased from history.

And putting them together, I'm trying to say let's not prioritize either part of the conversation over the other.

Let's have both of the conversations at once.

You can see more of Titus, his artwork by visiting his website, Kaphar Studio dot COM.

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