- [Narrator] Welcome to "Kalamazoo Lively Arts," the show that takes you inside Kalamazoo's vibrant, creative community and explores the people who breathe life into the arts.

(upbeat pop music) (logo whooshing) (slow music) - [Announcer] Support for "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

- [Narrator] On this episode of "Kalamazoo Lively Arts," Jacklyn Brickman teaches kinetic imaging which involves illustration, sound art, performance art, 3D modeling and so much more.

And Bishop James Bailey shares his wealth of experience with his paintings, books and charity work.

But first, "Jammin' in Kalamazoo," a musical storybook, which pairs a children's book with music.

- Today I am talking to Von Washington, who is the executive director for The Kalamazoo Promise.

But today I wanted to talk to him a little bit about a book that was written by a Kalamazoo author, Sonya Hollins, it's called "Jammin' in Kalamazoo," and he narrated it.

So thank you so much for talking with me here today.

- Oh, thank you Kim, it's my pleasure.

- Well, you know, I just adore Sonya.

I think she's just like the most innovative woman that I've met in a long time.

What was it like working with her and what was it like doing the show?

- Well, I've had the honor of knowing Sonya for well over 10 plus years and doing work with her and her family.

And it's just always a pleasure.

Her ideas, her creativity and absolute enthusiasm for life just rubs off on you.

So anytime a project comes up and it features an opportunity to work with Sonya, the answer's yes.

- So tell me about this show "Jammin' in Kalamazoo."

You narrated it, what's the story?

- So Sonya and her husband Sean have actively been looking at and searching out experiences, especially experiences for African American youth to put into books.

And they just put together "Jammin' in Kalamazoo" with music commissioned by Branford Marsalis, the unbelievable musician and creator.

And so it was just fantastic.

And it's all about being in Kalamazoo, a group of young children trying to put something together positive and do it through music in the instruments that they have.

And also about a music instructor, a teacher that they had who faced the challenge of a house burning down, but still insisted that music be the way to bring communities together.

And so I had the opportunity to read on behalf of the debut of this, and it was just amazing.

- [Kim] Now, Edward Callahan was the pianist in this production, but tell me a little bit, there's a history that goes along with this.

- Absolutely, Edward was in the first class of The Kalamazoo Promise.

And so just to see what he has done, how world renowned he has become, the fame that is destined for him and success.

But knowing that he was able to utilize The Kalamazoo Promise Scholarship to finish school with little to no debt, and to be able to then put his efforts and emphasis and his family support towards continuing to build his career is what The Kalamazoo Promise Scholarship is all about.

It's all about helping remove those barriers, giving families and students the opportunity to use their resources to elevate their lives.

And Edward is just a prime example of that.

We're very proud of him.

- You know, you're involved, you know, heavily with The Kalamazoo Promise.

Talk a little bit about what that's done for the city, for really, you know, the country getting people even thinking out of the box.

- Yeah, Kim, and thank you for mentioning the broader scope of it because The Kalamazoo Promise being announced in 2005 was known then as the First Promise Scholarship paying tuition and mandatory fees for students to go to Michigan colleges and universities.

That just caught wildfire and there are over 300 programs across the country now.

Now, one thing we do know is there no program has the generosity that The Kalamazoo Promise has.

It's 17 years later, over $200 million has been invested in human capital and these students that are going on to open up their minds and further their education.

And so it's just been tremendous for the community and it just continues to go as it's promised by these anonymous donors in perpetuity.

So we get to continue to do the work that's necessary to help students be successful.

- Oh, wonderful, you know Von, I just wanted to thank you so much for talking with me here today, I know you're so busy and your time is a hot commodity.

So thank you so much for sharing a little bit with me.

- Well, thank you for letting me share, always time for something like this, especially when it comes to Sonya and Sean Hollins and the work that they're doing and then the work of children.

So thank you, Kim.

- Well, today I am talking with Kalamazoo born and raised Edward Callahan about "Jammin' in Kalamazoo."

It's a musical storybook concert.

Thank you so much for talking with me today.

- Of course, thank you for having me.

- So tell me a little bit about this production 'cause you know, it started out really as a baby seed and grew into something huge.

- Yeah, so originally the very first book that my mom, Sonya Hollins, is my mom for those that don't know.

She wrote a book about me called "Little Eddie Goes to Carnegie Hall."

And this was a book to just not only motivate me, but motivate kids to go for their dreams and you know, let them know if they can dream it, they can do it.

And then from there, the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra reached out to her about doing a book with something about the music with Kalamazoo.

So that's kinda how that happened.

And Branford Marsalis, the iconic musician, he put the music together for that and- - [Kim] I was gonna ask you, what was that like working with Branford Marsalis?

Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine?

- Oh my God, like a living legend.

It was just such an honor to stand next to him, you know, like just thinking about all the times at Western when I was in Dalton practicing and hoping to get to that level.

And so, to be able to just, you know, hear him say, "Great job, great playing," was like, that's all I needed.

- When you look back over your life really, you know, there were pivotal moments all throughout it, right?

What, how did that lead you to where you're at now?

- Yeah, one of the big moments was like the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, as a child, my teacher Billy Nettaroth, we always used to go to the festival.

She would have her music and we would, we had the programs and we would get autographs from everybody who was performing.

This was every year.

So I was able to meet iconic pianists like Mitsuko Uchida, Ingrid Fliter, Jeremy Denk, I mean, I could, Andre Watts like the first black classical pianist, you know.

So I have a picture, me, Raymond Harvey and Andre Watts on the side of me, and it's like, it doesn't get better than that.

So some of those moments, you know, I will always cherish just going to the festivals.

And I recently performed in the Gilmore Festival a few years ago, so it was like a full circle moment, like.

So that, that's kinda like the number one moment that really stuck with me.

- Your first CD is "The Minor Keys," so I already read a little bit about it.

As soon as I saw Chopin, I'm like, oh, he's my favorite.

Tell me a little bit about it.

- Yeah, "The Minor Keys" was my first album recorded in 2019, and I envisioned it to be like a relaxing album.

So something you can do homework with, if you're taking a shower, if you're studying, just something to just play and like if you're getting ready to go to sleep.

So that was the vision I had.

And of course, every song is in a minor key, so you have like the Chopin "Nocturne" in B flat of.

(gentle piano music) Right, you like have one of those, you know, you have the.

Right, you have that of.

Yeah, it hits the soul, it's really emotional.

Like you can just breathe, you can be one with it, you know, like it's my therapy in a way.

Like, it's just when I'm having a bad day, when I'm feeling down, you know, I can just sit at this piano and just let it all out, so that's great.

- Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's beautiful, and it debuted as one of the top 10 traditional classical albums on the Billboard chart.

And it was number one on the iTunes chart.

- Yes.

- What were you feeling?

- It was crazy because I just had a lot of support, a lot of hometown support.

Like, you know, people don't really buy albums anymore, but everyone bought the albums, so that's what made it like skyrocket to the charts.

And it was on iTunes number one for like the whole week.

And I'm like, wow, like this is, this is great.

So yeah, that's how it happened.

And then that's when I released, after that I released the second album, which was crazy.

"A Tunes," that one went number one, everyone bought that one and then went number one on the Billboard charts, making me the first black pianist to ever go number one on the charts.

- Oh, my God, that's great.

Congratulations.

- So, it's like.

- Oh, my gosh.

- Thank you.

- What message do you want kids to take away from basically watching you and your life, and how it unfolded?

- If I can say one thing I'll say, it only takes one person to say, yes.

You can have many nos, you're gonna get a lot of nos, but you have to keep trying.

And once one person says yes, it can literally change your life and it can open up so many doors.

So don't give up, know what you have in yourself, know your talent, know, you know, that you can do it and believe in yourself.

Those are the things that I have to tell myself even nowadays.

But just keep going and you can do it.

You can make it happen.

If you can think about it, if you can dream it, it can happen in real life.

- What's that saying, "If your mind can conceive it and your heart can believe it, you'll be sure to achieve it."

- I like that, I like that, yeah, that's it, that's it.

- Edward, thank you so much for talking with me here today.

It has been such a pleasure.

It was so much fun learning all about you.

- Oh, thank you so much and I hope to see you soon, and hopefully in concert one of these days, you'll get to see me.

- Oh, piano, it's my thing.

- Yay.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - Who is Jacklyn Brickman?

How would you describe yourself?

- Well, I'm a multidisciplinary artist and educator.

My work is playful.

I'm interested in tackling social and environmental topics.

And really at the heart of my work is people.

I'm interested in how people engage with one another, how they engage with their environment and their surroundings, and how they engage with me and my work.

- When did this all start, were you a young little budding Jacklyn artist?

- Yes, I, from a very young age, I knew I wanted to be an artist.

It's really the only job title I can remember wanting.

I drew, I did a lot of sewing, I was always creating things.

- So how did we make this career happen?

What were the steps?

- So many steps, I knew that I wanted to be an artist and right after high school I went to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

I started out as a photography major.

I love optics and light and space, and I found that I love photography and how it works, but when I hang a photograph on the wall, it just doesn't feel like the work to me.

And so I ended up switching to sculpture because in a sculpture setting, you can really think about space and relationships and people and bodies and how they occupy that space, and engage optics and light.

And I think really, I was always after this idea of kinetic imaging without knowing what it was at a young age.

- [Shelley] Let's stop there, kinetic imaging, what is it?

- Yeah, it's really moving images.

So kinetic imaging here at Western has three tracks in video, art, game art and animation.

All of those tracks involve moving images of some kind.

- Let's expand in more into your students, their involvement and how they are benefiting from your talents.

- They are learning a lot and we're having a lot of fun.

We are a brand new program, I should say, we just started last fall.

So I started with the first batch of students that came in.

We have mostly freshmen and sophomores right now in the program.

And I've been spending a lot of time teaching our foundation class, which is called Time and Process.

And that class is really focused on giving the students small bites of all things KI, they start out making GIFs, they design books.

We work in augmented reality so they make face filters for Instagram.

We work in virtual reality and then we view their VR worlds in a headset.

And all of those different avenues are directions they can choose to go with their degree in kinetic imaging.

- So that is what they want to do when they grow up.

- Right, yeah and what's so great about it is, you know, with a degree in KI, it is a bachelor of science and that gives us a lot of flexibility within the curriculum.

Students can be an animator in an animation studio.

They can edit and shoot video.

They can work on making games and they can also be artists.

- What do students need to succeed in this business?

- That's a great question.

I mean, we live in a digital world and we live in a world that evolves very fast.

Technology evolves very fast, to be able to stay abreast of new technology, you will constantly be learning and growing and evolving.

- Let's talk about your whole art as a performance.

Give me an example of the beginnings of a project, to stage presence.

- Really, I think all of my works starts out with being curious, being curious and noticing are really important parts of my practice and my teaching.

I love teaching because I love learning.

So being curious and asking questions and combining things that are unlikely is also of interest.

- Let's take a little trip in your office where we are.

- To talk about the onions you asked about earlier.

The goal was to grow a planet B with onions.

I was interested in onions, that's where it started.

I was curious about onions.

I had a beaker and I set one onion on top of a beaker and I watched the roots grow and then the idea kept evolving.

And so in the end it was a four week exhibition and performance, but it was durational performance, where I'm working in the exhibition as a laboratory tech and moving onions from different growth chambers in different stages, and then performing different experiments with the onions.

And preserving the planets that are failed, which are all of them, but yes.

- I bet that's fun dinner talk at the family.

- Yeah.

- What'd you do today?

Worked on my onions.

What is up here where you have, looks like water colory paintings of black and white Batman's.

- Sure, those are from a visiting artist, Ash Arder, who is an artist based in Detroit, came last semester and worked with my Time and Process students.

So those paintings are painted by students with conductive paint.

And then it's copper tape that's conductive.

And we had little micro computers hooked up to the ends of each of those panels.

And then a synthesizer hooked up to the microcomputer.

So because the paintings are conductive when the students then touch the paintings, different sounds were made.

- And what is this, are these bright lights with, looks like some surgical gloves ready to go to work?

- [Jacklyn] Sure, so that's a relic, so to speak, of a performance, "Grass Grows in the Icebox," that I recently worked on with Kelsey Paschich and Kevin Abbott.

It was a performance where the three of us had some live animation, animation that Kevin made in unity, animation that I made with a program called EbSynth.

Really the idea was about preservation.

So grass "Grass Grows in the Icebox" was the title of the exhibition.

We harvested some grass from the parking lot outside of the exhibition.

And then the performance aimed to explore how that grass is preserved through time.

Is it frozen, is it in an ice box?

Is it pulled apart and dissected?

- Talking about working with other professors, a lot of collaboration in this niche of your KI?

- Yeah, I think collaboration is incredibly fulfilling, generative in terms of ideas and also just fun.

I love working collaboratively, particularly cross discipline collaboration because it's an opportunity to learn something new and to bring minds together to create something that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

- Why support the arts in Kalamazoo?

- You know, the arts help us move through life.

The arts are a way that we can empathize with other people.

They're a way that we experience life collectively as a group.

And Kalamazoo is a great place to make sure that we do that as a community.

I should expand a little bit and say, I'm really interested in humor and absurdity and sometimes like the planet B made out of onions.

I think addressing difficult topics with humor and absurdity are ways to have a conversation you might not otherwise be able to have.

- And how long will those onions ultimately last in that jar?

- Well, that's a good question.

It's been three years and they've, they're not disintegrating yet.

So that's an experiment that I'll have to update you on.

- We'll be back in three years, thank you for your time.

- Thank you.

(upbeat music) - So today I'm talking with Bishop James Bailey.

He's a lot of things, I even have to refer to my notes.

He's an author, an artist, a poet, a songwriter and a resident of Kalamazoo since 1961.

Thank you so much for talking with me here today.

- My pleasure to be here, thanks for inviting me.

- So you've been an artist pretty much for all of your life, right?

Tell me a little bit about that.

- Well, it started with my mom, I was about six.

She was good at drawing the "Cracker Jack" man and I wanted to do that too.

I got frustrated, threw my paper away.

She made me go get the paper and come back and practice until I could get it right.

And since then, I mean, I've improved.

I was able to beat her drawing the "Cracker Jack" man, as a matter of fact.

- And do you remember when others first recognized that you had like the special gift for art?

Like you weren't like everybody else?

- Yes, I do, as a matter of fact, when I was, I think I was around 11 or 12, they asked me to participate in an art contest for our school system.

And Minneapolis Art Institute was sponsoring it.

And so I won the contest for our school and we got a bunch of supplies, which was wonderful.

I was upset 'cause I couldn't take 'em home.

- And going through all of the beautiful art that you've created, it seems like there's kind of like more of like a Bible theme to it, right?

- It is, there is.

- And when did that journey begin with you, you know, becoming a Christian and expressing that through art?

- Well, that's kinda got a little bit of a history to it.

The Christian part of it, I'd say, I always believed there was God but I had a personal experience with Him when I was 25.

I was an alcoholic until that point.

And I fussed Him out, I chewed Him out royally because I've been in this planet 25 years, I've never seen you, I've never encountered you.

If you're for real, you show me that and I'll live for you.

He showed me, boy did He show me.

So I got to studying the word of God.

And the more I studied is the more I can envision the scenes that I read about.

And when I can envision a scene, I wanna paint it because I want other people to see it too.

We might not see it the same, but if I can put it out there some kinda way graphically, and you can, maybe just stir you a little bit to maybe study it some more or take another look at it or something.

- I wanted to talk to you about a few of your paintings.

Okay, because they're so intriguing.

Let's start with this one right here, what inspired that?

- This, there was some postings in different places I saw, and it says faith over fear.

And I thought, what would that look like if you really had that on display, what would it look like?

- Yes.

- The scare crows design and purpose is to scare the crow.

But if the crow is not scared and he take control in the environment of the scarecrow, he can live on top of them and not worry about 'em.

- [Kim] I love that.

How about this one right here in the middle?

- Okay, these are like village children.

They say it take a village to raise a child and this one was related to poverty.

And I did this specifically because I signed up with the United Way to give them 10% of the proceeds from my art sales on Saatchi.

And I look at all of that that they're trying to do.

I don't have enough money to do at all, you know, to help but to contribute to something.

And that one on the end, that little guy on the end is just saying, all I need is one of you, just one of you to support.

And of course prayer in the middle and all referencing that little cross with the blood running down and saying that this goes all the way back to Christ, come to help everybody, including the depraved.

So it takes prayer and reaching out to get support.

- So you're not only an artist, you also write, you're a songwriter, you've written books and you also have a bachelor's degree in Biblical Counseling, master's degree in Biblical Studies and a doctorate in Theology.

So you know, your stuff.

One of your books is called "The Blood Throughout the 7 Dispensations."

How did that come to be?

- This one right here kinda shocked me.

I had just graduated from a Ministry of Training Institute, got home, and these scriptures started coming to me and I couldn't sleep.

So I got up and started writing them down.

So this book took me 18 hours of nonstop writing, some of the words I didn't understand, I had to look 'em up later, I mean, they were just words coming.

- Oh, I know.

- So I looked 'em up to find out what they meant and then I had to go back and study the book again to see what did I actually say?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So yeah, this is the very first one after I graduated.

- "The Inducer."

- "The Inducer," okay, this book is talking about that thing that would make you make your mind up.

Residents stay halfway in between, I should do this or I shouldn't do this, I probably will, maybe I won't.

The inducer is the spirit that make you decide and do what you need to do or really want to do, and you're suppressing it rather than go ahead and do it.

So this, it's actually a fictitious story, but it's designed to help you to understand that the resident.

The Bible says in a, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."

Well, the inducer takes out the instability.

It says, "Okay, this is what you need to do.

This is what you wanna do, do it."

- So Bishop, tell me what, like the art culture in Kalamazoo mean to you.

- Okay, I think Kalamazoo really has a lot of undiscovered talent there.

You know, they're painting the buildings.

You see murals on buildings now that they've started doing that, which really adds, I mean, some of it is like a throwback.

You look at that and go, oh my god, I can remember.

So, but it really, it changes that feel for that community 'cause most of the time communities, it's like that there's bags all on the ground, plastic, glass.

But once they put that painting up there, that stuff, it goes away.

- Yeah, the beauty, the beauty has to pour in once you have art around you.

- Yeah, I think so.

- James, thank you so much for talking with me.

Man, you are like an artist, just an artist of artists.

You're just a creative spirit.

So I appreciate you taking some time today.

- No problem, if I may say one thing is, the Lord gifted me with a lot of different gifts.

And I had prayed and prayed and I still do that I don't go to the grave not using what He gave me.

So the painting, the writing and all these different things that I do, I wanna be a help and a blessing, you know, and use all that He gave me so nothing is left behind.

- I think you're off to a great start.

- Perfect, thank you, thank you.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

♪ Yay ♪ (gentle music)