Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts …and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

LIBRETTIST FOR THE SANTA FE OPERA'S WORLD PREMIERE "THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE," DIANA SOLOMON- GLOVER SHINES A LIGHT ON THE INSPIRING STORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER FANNIE LOU HAMER - WHO SPOKE TRUTH TO POWER AND SENT SHOCKWAVES THROUGHOUT THE NATION.

THROUGH HER LARGE-THAN-LIFE PASTELS, ZAHIA FOREMANS WANTS PEOPLE TO CONTEMPLATE, BE MOVED AND DISCOVER THE BEAUTY SHE FINDS IN GLACIERS.

PAINTING WITH GLASS, TERRI ALBANESE'S VIBRANT MOSAICS HAVE THE POWER TO HEAL.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

A BEACON OF HOPE >>Diana Solomon-Glover: I think if she were alive today that she would be like a I don't know superhero freedom fighter.

That is Fannie Lou Hamer, a warrior.

>>Faith Perez: So tell me about Fannie Lou Hamer's story and why you were drawn to it.

>>Diana: Fannie Lou Hamer, there's a lot to tell about her actually.

She was born in 1917.

The youngest of 20 children born to sharecroppers in what's known as the Delta region of the Mississippi and so um Fannie Lou Hamer uh left school at the age of I think about 12, 13, the sixth grade.

She made it through the sixth grade but then was forced to drop out to help the family make ends meet so you know life went on like that until she was in her mid-forties.

Early to mid-forties.

When she learned for the first time that she had a right to vote she did not know that was such was the education of the children who were you know, the families of sharecroppers but from the time she learned, she devoted her life to ensuring that Mississippians, black Mississippians were elevated to what she called first class citizens uh in other words that they knew that they had rights and that people would be registered and vote.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Diana: One thing that we've learned in this, you know, the social reckoning era, the black lives matter era, is how this movement, the black lives matter movement, can trace its lineage back to those civil rights heroes and particularly Fannie Lou Hamer, that she didn't give up.

She knew that what she was trying to achieve was so much bigger than her, than her body, than her desires even, her aspirations.

She had a certainty and I'm sure there were many many many moments of doubt and anguish.

I know there were.

But through that, through all of that, she never stopped, she just kept going toward the light.

She just kept seeing a different reality ♪ ♪ ♪ >>Faith: What aspect of Fannie Hamer's life did you connect with on an emotional level?

>>Diana: After devoting so much time to researching and living with Mrs. Hamer, I felt called to go to Mississippi.

I wanted to feel the ground that she walked on under my feet and breath the air and especially after the social reckoning that that began in in 2020.

I was looking for a restoration ♪ ♪ ♪ >>Diana: And Fannie Lou Hamer eventually became known, has become known as one of the mothers of the movement and so in that spirit, I was searching for some reassurance, some motherly reassurance and so I felt called to go to Mississippi.

To visit the place that she called home.

To visit the place that um that created a Fannie Lou Hamer and I uh after going there after being there with her last surviving daughter Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, whose nickname is Cookie, I did connect.

I did connect as not just a daughter of Fannie Lou Hamers of course a daughter of Fannie Lou Hamers but also a daughter of the movement, a daughter of the Civil Rights Movement.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Faith: How did it help you to better tell her story by actually physically going to these places and talking to her daughter?

>>Diana: Getting to meet her and go around with her to all these places that were significant in Mrs. Hamer's life was a real gift.

We went to the grave site, the what's called Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Park, where she and her husband Perry are buried and there's also the huge statue of her there's a famous picture of her holding a microphone in her hand.

So Cookie and I are standing there in the Pavilion in the shade of the Pavilion and it was very was very hot there um looking on the graves and the and the statue and Cookie just starts to sing um uh and it was just, it was transporting, it was like being like I imagine being with Fannie Lou Hamer.

>>Faith: What did she sing?

>>Diana: Walk with me Lord, walk with me, while I'm on this journey, walk with me.

Very, very beautiful.

♪ ♪ ♪ >>Diana: When Fannie Lou Hamer was with, you know, other Freedom Fighters, when she was you know, with a group, they were about to go do something or they were somewhere where you know the crowd the other people started to feel afraid or she felt needed some lifting of spirits, she would just break into song and one of the songs she sang a lot was This Little Light of Mine, and so um that's the title of the Opera, This Little Light of Mine.

>>Faith Perez: What feeling is inspired by that song?

>>Diana Solomon-Glover: Well, the words are, this little light of mine, I'm gona' let it shine everywhere I go all through the night, I'm gonna let it shine.

It is, you know, it evokes a beacon, no matter what you might be going through, what your travails, there is a light inside of you that can light the way for not only yourself but for others.

That can comfort and heal and I suppose you always know that no matter how dark things look, you look toward the light.

♪ ♪ ♪ FALL IN LOVE WITH ICE ♪ ♪ ♪ I grew up with an artist mom and she was in love with the most far off remote landscapes she could possibly find and venture to.

And so every year growing up as a child we would travel to these remote places for at least a month at a time and that's what instilled in me a love of landscape.

So my mom and I were planning a trip to go to Greenland in 2011 together, but my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer and passed away before we could take the trip together.

I thought that was the end of my traveling days.

I didn't think I had it in me to plan those kinds of expeditions that that she did.

I decided to do it in her honor.

So I was spreading her ashes along the trip in several places.

That was also the first time I drew ice.

I hadn't drawn ice before that trip.

Greenland is epic.

The sun is at a much lower angle and so the icebergs would just be lit up in this most dramatic way and this fog would hover over the horizon.

Especially my iceberg drawings, I see them as portraits.

By the time I'm finished with a drawing of an iceberg, it's likely completely melted or looks completely different.

Undertaking that trip, I think, is what gave me the confidence to continue.

Standing next to a glacier, you feel so tiny, and coming back from these places and wanting to represent them as best as I can and trying to give the viewer that experience of what it's like to stand next to a glacier or an iceberg the only way I feel like I could come as close as possible to that is by drawing as big as I possibly can.

So when I travel, I take thousands of photographs on site and I try to soak up the landscape visually, not always having the camera right in front of my face, and then I get back to the studio and I work from both my memory of the experience as well as the photographs to make these large-scale compositions.

As I'm drawing, I'm recalling the experience I had in that moment, you know, on the zodiac, looking at the iceberg and remembering what the light looked like and how that experience felt, so I tried to imbue the composition with as much of my memory as I can.

I want it to look as realistic as possible and so that's what I use the photograph for.

And up close it does become very abstract.

I'm just looking at the line and form and shape and color.

I've just always had an obsession with charcoal and soft pastel, just that something about the material.

I love the simplicity of just making a mark on the paper and that's what it is.

Like, I can move the pigment around and I can change the way it looks.

There's no other factor other than just me and the material.

I just got an email one day.

It's like, the most exciting email I've ever received.

It was, you know, someone saying, "Hey, would you like to come and fly with us?

Love, NASA."

Not exactly like that, but in so many words that's- like, it was a very brief email and it was like, "Here's my number, call me.

Do you want to come fly with us over Antarctica in the spring?"

I thought it was a hoax literally up until the day I landed and met the science team and we had our first science meeting and I was like, okay this is NASA.

It's extremely grueling work, especially the Antarctica flights.

They're like on average 10 to 12 hours long every single day.

It's like you're flying across the planet day after day after day.

It's some of the most important work that's happening in the world now, because there's so much we don't know about how ice moves and melts and I've been traveling to icy landscapes for a long time now and so I- you know, I felt like I had a fairly deep understanding, just visually, of ice, but this was like a whole new ball game and a whole new perspective.

And seeing it from that perspective really made me realize not only the scale of ice, but the scale of the global climate crisis that we're in the middle of.

I mean, it's just it's so much ice, you can really see how like, yeah, if that's melting at the rapid pace that it's melting at, our global sea levels will rise and there's a lot of horrible consequences.

This is Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland.

It dispenses the most amount of icebergs and to the ocean is of any other glacier in the Arctic.

We flew over it for hours and hours.

I took the photo from the plane, so it's an aerial view, but in between those ridges is probably about a hundred and fifty feet.

There's a whole batch of new colors in this piece, some that are really like bright and luminous.

And it's also just personal for me because the fjord where this iceberg dispenses ice directly into is where I spread my mom's ashes.

I feel like she's a part of that landscape.

I'm trying to portray the beauty in these places that are at the forefront of climate change and just give a moment in time in people's life to contemplate it, because it's not always a part of our everyday life.

I want people to understand it.

I want people to be moved by it, and have an emotional reaction to it, and fall in love with the ice as I have.

When you love something, you want to protect it.

It'll make them think, well, what can I do to help protect and preserve these landscapes that are changing so quickly?

A MOSAIC OF HEALING ♪ ♪ ♪ I describe my work as painting with glass.

♪ ♪ ♪ As a child.

I loved drawing.

Loved it.

I've always painted more as a stress relief as opposed to having it be my life.

♪ ♪ ♪ Then Frank and I were married.

We took a trip over to Italy and I fell in love with mosaics.

We just finished a wine tasting and the sun was shining.

It was just a glorious fall afternoon.

So we're walking down the street in Monte Pulciano.

And I looked up and maybe about ten or 12 feet above the ground was this mosaic sign in front of a boutique hotel.

And the sun hit.

The gold hit my eye.

And it was just like this light.

And I thought, Oh, my God, I've got to do something with this.

I, I've got to do something with this.

When I illustrate, I illustrate on the diagonal.

So then what I started to do was to take sheets of glass, cut long thin strips, set them on the diagonal that then would emulate my illustration style.

And that I mean, it just clicked at that point.

The glass I use is handmade glass.

It's made in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania.

The glass studio called Youghiogheny.

To give you an idea.

Each piece of glass is an original piece of art in itself.

Look at this purple.

This deep purple with a white striations.

Once I've got the illustration finished, I'll choose the glass I want to use for the glass painting.

And then the cutting glass process begins.

So glass has been cut by now.

Have my palate and as I build piece upon piece, you'll see this petal start coming to life.

Although mosaic is at the basis of it, it's still a true unique art form for me.

The technique is mine.

No one else is doing it.

I butt joint the pieces because to me grout stops your eye.

You may not realize it, but it's almost like a period at the end of a sentence.

And I didn't want that.

I wanted to be able to paint with glass.

And that flow comes from being able to, butt joint the pieces so you don't have that visual separation from piece to piece.

I can't forget that moment.

I will not forget that moment.

So what I do in each of my class paintings, I incorporate a piece of the gold smalti.

And smalti is the class that's used in the classical setting and mosaics.

And as you can see here.

This is gold on one side, and then they've got it on top of blue to give it more depth as they create it.

So I always incorporate a tiny, tiny piece of this in my class painting, and it's to remind me of that inspiration, to remind me how quickly our lives can change for the better in the second if we just follow that inspiration.

So each class painting will have one of these pieces, of smalti in it, and I place it.

For instance, in this flower I think about it the sun were to kiss this flower, where would it be?

And that's where I place the smalti.

I'm often asked who inspires me as an artist?

And when I think of the Masters, for instance, I think of Renoir.

I mean, it goes back years ago when I was studying at CCAD.

I fell in love with Renoir and his paintings.

I mean, I could stand in front of them just totally immersed and mesmerized by the beauty.

But then when I learned his philosophy, that's when I really fell in love with his work.

He was painting a very dark time, too, and his philosophy was, There's enough darkness in the world.

I don't want to bring more.

So his word was pretty.

He says, I want to paint pretty things.

I want to bring pretty into the world.

And that's how I feel.

I feel that as a person, I was created to create work that brings light, that brings hope, to bring a sense of healing.

And I believe in the connection between art and healing.

So it's my ambition to bring into the health care industry more information about art in healing and the importance of that connection.

Two years ago when our state of Ohio started closing down because of the pandemic, I was haunted by the thought of the health care workers going into the hospitals willingly to care for people their hold in the hands of our loved ones.

Who's caring for them?

You know, who's saying thank you?

Who's saying we appreciate you.

So I was moved to do something.

That's when I came up with the concept for a garden of Gratitude.

So what I did was I identified 18 different characteristics that I saw in the health care workers, everything from courage to resilience, inner beauty, compassion.

And I then did research and found flowers that symbolize each of these characteristics.

So a garden of Gratitude is an exhibition of glass paintings that will be touring Ohio hospitals and the University of Kentucky to think are what I call wounded healers.

When I see my work resonate with somebody, I'm moved and I know I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation… …New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and Viewers Like You.

[CLOSED CAPTIONING BY KNME-TV]