(upbeat music) Coming up next on State of the Arts, the craft of Hopi jewelry, exploring collective memories, and the beauty of the in-between.

This week on State of the Arts.

I'm Mary Paul.

Thanks for joining us as we tour the art world this week.

We begin with the story of Eveli, a jeweler originally from Algeria, raised in the vibrant cultural landscape of Morocco.

Between 1968 and 1972, she lived among the Hopi where she apprenticed under the legendary Hopi jeweler, Charles Loloma, and eventually became the only non-native American artist ever to exhibit at the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hers is not only the story of a jeweler, but also of a woman who listened to her heart to pursue a dream.

To wear the jewelry of Eveli is to feel the spirit of the earth, to be held by the rawness of the stone, bone, gold, and silver, to acknowledge our own spirit.

Eveli is the connection to Charles Loloma, who's one of the most important Hopi artists, period.

She has a spiritual connection with her artwork, her jewelry, and her sculpture.

To wear the jewelry of Eveli is to be seen and touched by beauty, to receive the honesty of an artist's heart.

I was born in Algeria, North Africa.

(gentle music) I grew up in a lot of isolation when I think of my childhood.

It's like a huge empty space.

You don't have any toys as a kid.

You're just on your own, out there, playing with rocks and lizards and snakes.

But of course I was surrounded by verbal culture.

In the house, all the rugs and all the blankets were Moroccan weavings.

The implements in the kitchen were all brass and copper.

My parents were not of the high class.

I was considered to be French because my parents sort of French and Spanish descent, but I never felt really French.

I was very affected by listening to the muezzin five times a day calling for prayer.

For me, that was one of the greatest mystical and spiritual moments that I had in life.

All of my life, for some reason, I've always had teachers take me under their wings.

Going to France with a high school teacher because I was already 18, so I was okay.

I would be going to university receiving scholarships.

I did not feel at home in Europe and I became very ill.

When I came back to living state, I remember saying, "From now on, "I'm gonna live on vacation."

The first thing I did is start painting, embroidering, making puppets.

As I was recovering, I would listen to temple music.

It would be boom, you know?

It kind of put me in a different state of mind and this big voice came through me telling me I had to go to North America.

I immediately went to the American alliance.

Somebody was selling a ticket to San Francisco.

Even though I was scared to death, I could not help myself.

I had to go.

I was starting to look for Indian people.

Somebody invited me to go to a concert at the Fillmore.

I saw a group of people.

They were talking about a Native American resisting the draft.

You know, it was still Vietnam War.

They said that there would be a trial at the federal building.

I went there, I pressed the button to get the elevator, and this huge elevator came up with two big doors opened up.

It was filled with all the Native people from the southwest in their ceremonial regalia.

Just stood there, my mouth dropped, and I thought, "Wow."

And so I stepped into the elevator, they made room for me, and they immediately started talking.

And the people who communicated with me were people from Hopi.

And then we went through the whole trial.

At the end of the day, they told me, "Well, you want to come with us?"

At the inter-tribal house in Berkeley.

It was in a big room.

I was the only non-Indian in the whole group.

After we ate, they started drumming and dancing.

So here I am, among all of them, dancing with them.

All of a sudden, I get through my whole body, if I like.

I was, like, blissful and thinking, "Oh, my God, I finally got home."

They left me an address, and a couple of months later, the same thing happened to me, like, when I was in Paris, telling me, "It's time to go to Hopi."

I took off for the reservation.

I said, "I came to see the bean dance."

I thought, after the bean dance, that I would leave.

And they said, "No, you can sit there if you want to."

I said, "OK."

This man came and sat right next to me.

He immediately started talking with me.

Well, I didn't know who Loloma was, but that was Loloma So he told me, "Would you like to learn how to make jewelry?"

I said, "Of course, of course I do."

That's how I started to make jewelry, eventually.

Now that Charles is gone and he can't contradict them, everybody claims to have apprenticed with him.

Truthfully, only two, maybe three people did, Verma and her sister Sherry, and Eveli.

You could see her influence with Loloma but then she also influenced him.

It is very essential for our own health and happiness, mental happiness, to find beauty, see beauty, and create beauty.

And I found that we're making jewelry and working with stones.

This piece she brought in for me to sell.

It's a snake design, as you see, I have another snake on.

And it was like, "I don't want to make money off it.

I want to keep it forever."

This ring, the Hopi mesas, just reminds me of being up at Hopi.

I'm working at Loloma's style, and I used exactly the same material that he was using.

Parallel to that, I was doing a lot of bone work.

So this is like a steak bone.

This is a lid.

Inside there is an empty space.

The first thing we did together was a piece from one of her clients.

A piece of inlay had fallen out and she asked me, "Is this something you can fix?"

I quickly realized, here's the teacher right in front of me.

It was really exciting, kind of getting a peek into her process.

Then the book started looming.

So this book is a manual for her light.

She's showing it to people and saying, "This is how I've lived."

She carried a piece of every place she went with her.

When she hit Hopi, it all kind of came together.

Hopi and yoga have been the ground of survival for me as an unmarried woman and as a forever foreigner, wherever I am.

(MUSIC) Hopi really reconnected me to earth.

Yoga connected me with the reverence we need to have in everything we do.

Traditionally, before you do a yoga class, you offer it.

And at Hopi, everything you do, you offer.

This is the state of mind in which I created my jewelry.

They were all offerings, every one of them.

I spent a week photographing two or three hundred pieces of her works.

She never repeated a single piece.

And every piece had this incredible respect for the materials.

Other jewelers would say, "Why are you using that piece of turquoise?

It's mottled or it's cloudy or it's not good quality.

It's not valuable."

She was finding the strengths in their imperfections to tell the story because they looked like clouds or they looked like dappled pools of water and reflections coming off the water.

In formal jewelry, people always use the best quality material, which is fine.

But I was using the stones as pigments.

So I was interested in all the different hues and the different inclusions and really weird stuff that was happening in the stone.

Eveli didn't find her artistic vision just to jewelry.

It was about sculpture, drawing.

It was about her approach to life.

Eveli did some bronzes, and she's not known for this, and they really kind of represent Eveli.

She says life's a journey to the center of who you are and discovering your link to infinity and how you relate to everything else.

Community is very important to her.

She, at 83, gets together with friends all the time.

She bikes, she hikes, she teaches yoga twice a week.

I want to be Eveli when I grow up.

Significance starts on a void, and it will end on a void.

And the void will circulate throughout, using open passages from one page to the other.

Through these passages, the immense being of the universe unceasingly breathes with the deep vibration of tubas resounding in infinite harmony.

Through these corridors of never-ending life, the great force at work attracts and pulls all living things, giving birth, shaping our lives, and taking us away.

Next, we meet Dennis Scholl, who is both a documentary filmmaker and visual artist.

As part of his studio art practice, he reflects on history and a collective memory by acquiring and assembling archival material.

Let's find out what it means to use art to tap into our shared memories.

My practice primarily works with memory, but it's not just my memory.

In other words, I'm not making work about when my dad got me a bike when I was 10 years old.

I'm making work about collective memories, big events in our history that did just impact me, but impacted a lot of people.

My name's Dennis Scholl, and I'm an artist and a filmmaker.

I've been a filmmaker now for about 15 years, but the thing I learned very quickly is that it doesn't take one person to make a film.

It takes 15 people to make a great five-minute film, and so as a director, mostly in my film practice, I find myself having to give away pieces of the film and take them back and give them away and take them back, and I was really looking for something beyond that where I could just sit in a room and obsess about making things, having a creative practice that I could do 24-7, and so about 10 years ago, I started to make studio art, and it wasn't very good, and I did it for about five years, and I threw it all away at the end of five years, but then I found this thread that I've been working through, and I began to make things that I was happy with, that I felt were good enough to show people and interesting, and it was a real revelation for me to become an artist, and I've enjoyed it very much.

I'm the oldest emerging artist that you'll ever see at this point in time.

That is a very, very big part of what drives me, is to try to find a conceptual idea that you can also turn into something that's aesthetically pleasing.

I like to make work that works on two levels.

I like to make work that when you're far away from it, you see it, and you see, in my case, a lot of symmetry and a lot of repetition.

So then, as you get closer, you see that there's more to it, and you have to dig into the work, and that comes from using objects of desire, objects that are well-known, objects of culture, objects of history, and so sometimes you'll get really close and you'll see a newspaper that's part of the practice, and in a work, and you'll want to read the newspaper.

So I want you to look from far away and see the symmetry and the repetition.

Then I want you to come really, really, really close and look and see what's going on, and hopefully I can trigger some interest in your life about what I'm showing.

The one question I always ask people is what is your most vivid collective memory?

What is it that you remember like it was yesterday that we all also remembered at the same time?

Now, for me, it was the Kennedy assassination.

I was eight years old.

I was in the Christmas play rehearsing.

My teacher came running down the stairs.

She was crying.

I'd never seen a teacher cry before, and I went home and sat in front of the TV with my mom for like three days in a row.

Those kind of memories are things that really have shaped our nation and also shaped how we feel about each other.

When you have those collective memories, the country tends to come together in various ways.

And so a lot of the practice is about me out there trying to find these historical artifacts and assemble them in a way that will trigger a collective memory for the viewer to draw the viewer in, because we shared the same experience that day when that happened.

That's about trying to remind you, the viewer, what happened that day when you were in class and you were 14 years old and they trotted out of television and put the Challenger launch on and then right before your eyes, it explodes and those astronauts are lost.

Those are things people don't forget.

They never forget that stuff.

Using memory in my practice has been almost therapeutic, if I can say that.

I'm not somebody who looks back a lot.

I have always been looking for the next idea, the next opportunity, the next ambitious thing that I wanted to pursue.

And yet when I started making art and I sat down and I began to think about what is it that I want people to see?

It was about memories and maybe it's because I'm getting older, I'm not sure.

I'm trying to take these big moments in time, the 1972 Munich Olympics when the terrorists came and took the Israeli athletes hostage and we lost them all.

The space landing when we landed on the moon.

I'm trying to take those memories and kind of bring them back to the fore.

The most interesting thing I think that happens is when somebody walks up to a piece and looks at it and they say, "Oh, I remember that.

"Let me tell you where I was that day "and let me tell you exactly what I was thinking."

Boy, that's a win for me.

I love when that happens.

And I ask everybody I meet who is interested in the practice, what is your most vivid collective memory?

(upbeat music) It's about assembling these objects, whether it's newspapers or it's cypress knees, all sorts of different objects.

But there's an underlying architecture to the practice and that is I work with the dodecagon, which is a 12-sided figure.

Now I've chosen that because the 12-sided figure represents the hours on a clock, the months in a year, the zodiac, and the dodecagon has a long history of being very important in architecture and religion.

And so I use that as the underlying infrastructure, if you will, of the practice.

And then when I get these objects, I acquire them at auction generally.

I just have to go out and search for them and search for them.

But when I get these objects, I build them on this idea of this grid, this 12-sided figure to give you, I guess, the feeling of time passing, thinking about the months in a year, the hours on a clock, the zodiac.

So it's really about using that as the underlying infrastructure to show you that time is passing and I'm taking you back in time.

I don't start the day with a paintbrush in my hand or a chisel with a piece of marble.

I start my day by looking at 30,000 objects a month on the internet at auctions.

And all I do is I get my iPad and I go, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

And I'm looking for that one object that I can make into a piece of art.

And I would say at the end of the month, I probably found about 10 things that could be a piece of art.

The problem is I didn't find them on the street.

I can't pick them up and bring them back to the studio.

I have to actually bid on them at the auctions.

And so at the end of the month, I really wind up with about one or two things that I can turn into a piece of art.

Sometimes it's a group of things in one lot where I can acquire them and voila, it's a piece of art instantly as I scroll through and I scroll through and I scroll through.

I say, that could be something, or maybe that could be something.

Anybody that knows me knows that I've been an art collector for 47 years and I've acquired over 2,000 works of art during that time period.

So it's a natural extension of my collecting practice in the way that I'm making art now.

It would have been disingenuous, I think, for me to become a painter and announce that I was a painter.

But this is really taking the skillset that I've developed over so many decades and now turning it into a studio art practice.

I'm basically just transposing my collecting gene, which I can't do without.

I mean, I would stop breathing before I would stop collecting.

And so I've taken my collecting gene and I've been able to turn it into a studio art practice.

And people are responding, which is really joyful.

I've been able to show in London, in Berlin, New York.

I'm gonna do a show at Piero Achigari Gallery in Miami.

So it's been an exciting time.

I knew that I wanted to show elsewhere for a while before I came home with my practice because this is my hometown.

It's important to me.

I revere the artists in my community.

And if I'm gonna show work in my hometown, I want it to be something that I can be proud of and that people will wanna come see.

So I've spent the last four years showing work pretty much all over the world.

And now I'm finally gonna bring it home.

I'm nervous.

I can't lie.

There are so many great artists in our hometown and we'll see what happens.

I'm excited about the show.

It takes you back in an instant.

And that's what the work's about.

Just trying to bring you to that place that you probably haven't thought about for a very, very long time.

Not every story announces itself.

Photographer Dave Chance finds meaning in the in-between.

Fleeting light, worn textures, quiet moments, transforming everyday scenes into images rich with grit, history, and a story waiting to be seen.

(whooshing) My first solo exhibition, the title was Vestige.

I've always been sort of intrigued by that concept.

Like, I'm photographing vestiges of things that have happened.

This hit this and made this.

And then the photo becomes a vestige.

(dramatic music) I don't like things to be too neat and clean.

I like them to have a little grit.

I've been fortunate enough to travel quite a bit.

First time I went to Europe, I was 17.

And then the next time I was in architecture school and I went to see all the buildings and photographed them.

When you travel, you sort of get outside of your normal routines, and you sort of see things a little differently.

I wanted to draw blueprints.

I thought I did anyway, and I like to build things.

The program at Virginia Tech is not really about that at all.

I mean, it was very much more art-based than I had any idea about.

And if I'd known, I might not have gone there, but I'm glad I did.

The architecture school there is based on the sort of Bauhaus model, and they encourage you to experiment.

My second year design studio professor gave an assignment to shoot a role in slide film, then we'd all look at him.

There was a photo of a string of stoplights against the blue sky, and he was like, "Oh, wow, great."

And so I proceeded to photograph stoplights in any which way you could, and probably beat that to death.

From that time on, I was really focused on photography.

(dramatic music) I do enjoy Italy quite a bit.

I like patina and rusty things and peeling paint, and there's a lot of that there.

I spent a good bit of time in Ireland, too.

For the last four or five years, it's been Cuba.

And I always said I wanted to go to Cuba before Applebee's got there, and I think I made it.

I met my wife in Matilda in Cuba.

I went to Sancti Spiritus because I wanted to see the city, and I stayed at her bed and breakfast, and then I decided to go back a year later and sort of investigate things further.

I had to learn a good bit of Spanish quickly.

This is Sancti Spiritus in Cuba, also.

I waited for the train.

It comes by like once or twice a day, and it took me a few days to figure out exactly what time it did come by.

The fact that those two guys were standing there was just dumb luck.

The people in the street, it's just how they come.

I don't like to stage shots.

There's a series of streets along here in this town, and I do stand on certain corners at certain times of day and try to wait for things to happen.

Like three blocks away, you know.

There's like this light coming down.

This door I loved, and it was kind of a dance to photograph it because the dog was sleeping, but the dog isn't there, then the dog is, (dog barking) The dog has since passed on, unfortunately.

I actually made a print of this and took it and knocked on the door and gave it to the people.

All of Cuba has some beautiful morning sun.

I took a picture, not that one, of somebody with the sun like that and the shadows, and so consequently I went back the next couple of mornings at about the same time.

That's how I ended up with that photo.

(upbeat music) This is New York City.

There's the World Trade Center.

It's the shot you have to take, I think.

But funny enough, I didn't notice it at the time, but there's a girl with a Lady Liberty hat just sitting, just staring out the window.

I think this is in Brooklyn, isn't it?

Whatever that bridge is, a Manhattan bridge?

I mean, that's a hot rivet.

It's an old school thing you don't see anymore, so whenever I see it, I like to photograph it.

The calendar's kind of random, other than it's from the year before.

When I pick the photos, I try to roughly represent what I've done, like where I've been.

In this particular event, maybe 350 people get a calendar every year, and they all got an invite in the calendar.

And I think my neighbor posted it on her Facebook page, so who knows who might show up.

I think I've developed my photography just by doing... I mean, I took a lot of photos, like a lot.

I kind of think a real, a good, I mean, a good photo, I mean, an art photo, needs to sort of exist on its own.

Otherwise, it's kind of a vacation photo.

And then if I showed you my vacation photos, you'd probably be bored.

I see beautiful things, and I like to show them to other people.

(upbeat music) And that will wrap up our show this week.

I'm Mary Paul, and thank you for watching.

See you next time.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)