>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen.

Coming up on Open Studio, painter Christopher Volpe shows us Moby-Dick is very much a tale for our time.

>> I saw the parallel between the hubris of Ahab and the peril of America and the globe as we're tempting the gods with continued fossil fuel extraction.

>> BOWEN: Then we look at the outdoor art exhibition that's hiding in plain sight.

We venture into the world of augmented reality.

>> I mean you're looking through something through your phone.

It isn't a real object although it feels real, because you can walk close to it, you can walk around it.

>> BOWEN: Plus, is it art or is it a motorcycle?

At Madhouse Motors, it's both.

And for artist Lavaughn Jenkins, creative inspiration is literally the stuff of dreams.

>> I dream a lot about artists.

Most of them are dead, which is kind of weird.

>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ We're bringing you a special edition of the show with a focus on local color-- the artists who not only call New England home but have made the region a more vibrant, expansive, and enduring home for the arts.

First up, we are a nation that just can't quit Moby-Dick.

In a series of paintings at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, local painter Christopher Volpe showed us why.

He explored how Herman Melville's dark whale tale charted a course to today.

We return to this exhibition and my conversation with Volpe, which we first brought you in 2022.

The cobblestone streets still invite clatter.

Lamps continue to light the way, and clapboard buildings beckon as they always have.

This is the New Bedford from whence Herman Melville launched Moby-Dick.

>> It's a New England tale.

He talks about the damp, drizzly November of his soul.

There's always been a darker side to American art and literature, particularly in New England.

>> BOWEN: People still gather here every year in person or virtually for a marathon reading of the novel.

This year actor Sam Waterston was Ishmael.

>> Why, upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you feel yourself such a mystical vibration when first told that you, and your ship, are now out of sight of land?

>> I think you can see Moby-Dick as a portrait of America, and our worst impulses, and where they will take us if we don't rein them in.

>> BOWEN: Artist Christopher Volpe has painted a series of works that seemingly tear out of the novel's pages.

They're now on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, in an exhibition named after Moby-Dick's first chapter.

>> The title is "Loomings," and it seemed an appropriate one for a... what's looming on the horizon.

You know, just the sense of, a sense of foreboding, hints that we're getting, hints of apocalypse.

>> BOWEN: Apocalyptic darkness swirls in these paintings as Volpe charts Melville's course from the 19th century to the 21st, when the world's reliance on whale oil eventually gave way to petroleum.

>> I saw the parallel between the hubris of Ahab and the peril of America and the globe, as we're tempting the gods with continued fossil fuel extraction.

>> BOWEN: So what we find here-- these dark, ghostly images of ship, storm, and belching smoke, are rendered not in black paint, but tar.

>> Both of these paintings started as fields of tar.

There's a couple of different ways that I can approach a painting.

One way is to just grab a big brush, and just begin making lines, making shapes, gestures.

The other is a subtractive method, sort of the opposite, where I'll coat a whole canvas with tar, and then go in and remove tar with rags, and look for the shapes within there.

>> BOWEN: And all while wearing a gas mask.

>> I have to wear a respirator, because it's pretty toxic.

>> BOWEN: Pretty great symbolism in the fact that you have to wear a mask as you're painting.

>> Yeah, yeah, and it's... there's a great quote: art recycles the culture's toxins.

And literally I'm doing that, I'm taking this poisonous gunk, which wants to pull us down into dissolution and death, and I'm trying to invest it with beauty.

>> BOWEN: In college, Volpe was a poetry major who arrived at painting by way of his love for 19th century landscapes, for all their beauty.

>> But that became problematic when I realized that, you know, nature is on the run.

I fell into what the poet Shelley said, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

>> These paintings are like poetry, right, they have a meter.

They have a moment that you kind of, you can move through and interpret.

>> BOWEN: Naomi Slipp is the museum's chief curator.

She says by design, we find Volpe's paintings in a gallery that looks out beyond the city's historic streets, to a waterfront that once floated a whaling industry, and now a thriving fishing one.

>> And you see the docks and the ships and the kind of activity of the waterfront as it continues.

And then you can come into the exhibition spaces and hopefully find exhibits like Christopher's that speak to the larger challenges of addressing global warming, ocean warming, and marine mammal health.

>> BOWEN: It's a conversation that Herman Melville launched in 1851.

And says, Christopher Volpe, in his work, he's realized it's time we shape up, or ship out.

>> Maybe it's time for a new kind of beauty, a beauty that doesn't sugar coat the darker side of reality.

But redeems it somehow, by making it visible, and yet not repugnant, and allows us to see things we wouldn't ordinarily see, and to be able to deal with them in ways that maybe we haven't yet.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, art is all around us.

We just need to know where to look for it.

And when it comes to augmented reality, it's also about how to look for it.

Last summer we caught up with Michael Lewy, the curator and artist behind Alpha 60, which brought 19 installations to the Emerald Necklace.

Also joining us, artist Judy Haberl.

It was free, abundant, and it changed what it means to take a walk in the park.

Today, we're going to meet artist Michael Lewy, the man who is putting the A-R, as in augmented reality, in public art.

All around me here is one of the largest public art exhibitions dotting Boston right now.

It oozes across water, hovers overhead, and it fills fields with grunting animals.

Can't see it?

We'll help you.

We're here in Boston's Franklin Park.

Michael Lewy, you're the artist and curator behind this public art exhibition.

But first, how do we find it, how do we see it?

>> So, basically, the way you see it is through your iPhone or Android phone.

And what you would do is you would go to the App Store or the Google Play Store and you would download the Hoverlay app.

And once you are in the area, it will show you where you're near content.

So there'll be a little map, where you open up the app, and it will show you actually where the content is, and you kind of walk towards it, and then reload it.

It's sort of like a little bit of a sort of a virtual scavenger hunt type thing.

> BOWEN: And you and a team of artists have created art that's all around us, but can only be seen through the phone.

>> Yes, it's augmented reality.

So basically what it does is it overlays an image that can be seen through the camera of the phone.

>> BOWEN: One of the things that I find so fascinating about this is this changes the whole nature of how one experiences art.

You can come out here on this beautiful day, and all you need is your phone, something most people have.

You're not paying admission fees.

You're not being intimidated about how you're supposed to look at art necessarily.

How much is this going into your thinking about creating this show?

>> I think it does change the nature of it.

I mean, you're looking through something through your phone.

It isn't a real object, although it feels real, because you can walk close to it, you can walk around it.

Some of them are 3D objects.

So they, they... some of them are flat.

They're video or they're images, but they're also 3D objects where you can walk around and peer into.

>> BOWEN: And as I see here, one of your monsters is standing just a few feet away from us.

What are we looking at?

>> So you're looking at one of the monsters from my piece called Beta 64.

And basically, it's a video shot against green screen, and you're able to sort of see it in the landscape.

And I've got a bunch of these.

I think they're two in Franklin Park and there are a lot more throughout the Emerald Necklace.

>> BOWEN: It's not all about monsters, though.

Other artists have brought a deal of mystery to their work.

Like Judy Haberl-- hi, Judy.

>> Hello, Jared.

>> BOWEN: So tell me about your piece in the augmented reality show.

>> Well, I was very interested in creating a mysterious, floating, unidentifiable orb that is actually created from egg whites in a pan, but somehow it's transitioned into the sky here, floating in the park.

>> BOWEN: You work in all manner of media, etching... all manner.

So what has it been like to transition into augmented reality?

>> It's exciting to have a new adventure, a foray into a new way of working.

And I was really looking forward to that.

So this is very exciting.

I think it may be the frontier of ways of looking at art.

>> BOWEN: And why do you say that?

>> Well, you know, right now I think most people go to a gallery or maybe to a sculpture park.

But the fact that they can use their phone, which is one of the most common things that people have, it really gives the public a much easier way to access art.

And I think that's really exciting.

And I think Michael has really come up with a wonderful venue for this.

>> BOWEN: I'm really struck at your ability to look.

So, as you just mentioned, you didn't do this in a studio, you did this in your kitchen, in a frying pan, and found art in an egg.

>> (laughing): That's right.

It's true.

I mean, I cook egg whites every morning in a cast iron pan, and, and... but it's always different.

It looks like the moon, or the sun, or something.

And I thought, you know, how would that be as a free-floating thing and not just tied or tethered to the frying pan?

And it, it made the transition really beautifully.

>> BOWEN: And it's got great texture.

That's something I always love about art is you can see the texture and... especially in paintings or whatnot, or etchings, you can see how the artist has worked.

Eggs, great for texture.

- "Eggs-actly".

(both laughing) >> BOWEN: Just as artist Judy Haberl finds art in a pan of eggs-- art in the everyday-- maybe one of the messages that this exhibit is sending us is that art is all around us, We just need to know how to look for it.

Alpha 60 is on view through September 30th.

It's curated by Michael Lewy, presented by Boston Cyberarts with help from Hoverlay.

♪ ♪ We continue our focus on local artists with the mad genius of Madhouse Motors, which is also a coffee house and an art house.

Operating out of Roxbury, it's where mechanics work wonders on motorcycles, which are both machines and masterpieces in motion.

We bring you our revved-up ride through Madhouse, which we first took last October.

It's a rumbling repository for motorcycles.

But also a coffee shop with Middle Eastern flair.

And, to bike aficionados, it's Eden.

How do you describe this place?

>> The coolest place I've ever been.

>> BOWEN: Nick Timney is the manager of Madhouse Motors in Boston.

It's a place for tune-ups and repairs, but also much more than that.

A place where antique bikes live, where they take on new personas, and where people like Timney, who grew up riding dirt bikes on West Virginia trails, are drawn to test their mettle.

>> I would come to the shop at, like, 8:00 in the morning, and I would work until 5:00, when I had to go to my bar job, and I would work until 4:00 in the morning.

Something like two years of that.

And I think I kind of proved myself to her.

Then I became a mechanic at Madhouse.

>> BOWEN: She is J. Shia, owner of Madhouse Motors and sculptor of motorcycles.

>> Yeah, so there's a lot of parts on both these bikes that are abnormal, everything from, like, where you put your feet on these to the tail lights.

You know, tail light on this is an egg slicer.

It functions, it has a purpose, instead of it just being there for aesthetic appeal.

>> BOWEN: Picasso did that a lot.

>> He did, but people don't talk as much about his, his sculpture work.

>> BOWEN: Shia and her team run the creative arm of Madhouse Motors like an artists' workshop: a place of design, discussion, and experimentation with every bike.

>> We want it to be composed properly, and be aesthetically beautiful, and be able to carry a storyline.

Yeah, we view it like making a kinetic sculpture, and if someone calls that art, I think we're all ecstatic about it.

>> BOWEN: How much does the bike tell you what it should be?

>> Oh, the whole time.

It's like, I'm really not in as much control as I would like to be.

>> BOWEN: Motorcycles are in her blood, an interest Shia inherited from her enthusiast father, and before that, her grandmother, seen here in Lebanon.

It's also an interest influenced by her photography studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

>> I hated working on bikes, I'd show up to school dirty, and smell like gas and oil.

And I didn't enjoy it.

When I got older, I realized that I trained my brain to look at a machine, or look at a motorcycle, or look at a custom build, and say, "All right, this, this color palette's off," or, "This shape is wrong," or, "What's the point of this?"

The same way that in art class we would dissect and digest a piece of work.

>> BOWEN: 13 years ago, she named the shop after her family home-- a "madhouse," as she describes it.

>> The community watering hole.

And so people from all over the world, all different walks of life, would go there, and have meals, and decompress and sleep there.

>> If the soil is fertile, things will grow, and this place is very fertile.

>> BOWEN: Rami Al Bishara is the shop's newest member.

He arrived from Beirut, where both he and his own bike shop fell victim to the Port of Beirut explosion in 2020.

>> The roof of my house caved in.

My shop was destroyed.

It was a very testing time.

I've lived in a lot of places where there's war and conflict, and this probably was one of the worst things that I've experienced.

>> BOWEN: He rebuilt, but with Lebanon's economic collapse, and after a chance meeting with Shia, he moved to the U.S.

In his new Madhouse Motors job, he's losing himself in a wonderland of motorcycles he's never encountered.

Museum pieces, he says, like this 1972 Honda CB500.

>> When this hit the market, nothing was going as smooth, as reliable, and as fast.

I know it doesn't look like it, but this is just poetry in motion.

>> BOWEN: Like Shia, Al Bishara also has a formal arts background, designing fonts before bikes beckoned full-time.

>> A typeface that works is the one that you can't notice.

If you're reading a headline in a newspaper, it's the headline that matters, not the typeface.

>> BOWEN: So then how do you apply that to motorcycles?

>> They got to run.

(chuckles) They got to work and they have a look and feel.

>> BOWEN: Feeling, he says, may be the greatest measure of success.

>> A motorcycle is a collection of parts until you get on it, and you start it, and the engine becomes alive, and then it becomes an experience.

It's now, you are ingrained deep into the function of the motorcycle and what feeling it will instill in you.

>> BOWEN: So it's here in this madhouse that ideas rev to fruition.

Where a saxophone can play the exhaust.

And where new beginnings are had for man and machine.

♪ ♪ Artist Lavaughan Jenkins found his calling... twice.

Not ready for the pressures of early success, he retreated from the art world-- only to be prodded by legendary painters Goya and Philip Guston in his dreams to get back to work.

Jenkins recently wrapped up an artist residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art, where his work is on view through July.

We bring you a conversation we had earlier this year.

Lavaughan Jenkins, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Yeah, thanks for having me.

>> BOWEN: So you have just had this artist-in-residence program, residency, at the Addison Gallery of American Art.

I know how important that is for artists to just have the time, the space, the freedom to just be, to just create.

So what surfaced there for you?

>> Once I moved into that space, and to have what, like, you said that free time to just make art, the work instantly changed.

Paint got bigger and colors changed and the energy was a different energy.

>> BOWEN: Were you surprised at the end of it, what came out?

>> I couldn't believe the jump that had happened, which I guess I should be used to it-- I work in, like, bigger jumps and ideas of creating.

And there, whatever that energy was of that space took over.

>> BOWEN: Well, I'm wondering, so where does the energy come into play in some of the motifs or maybe even ideograms that we see, the fashion, shoes, Black women, it all comes together as we see in your, in your series of works.

>> Yeah, I mean, I'll say fashion, start... like fashion is my starting point for color and texture and my obsession with it, right.

>> BOWEN: I have to ask what you wear when you're painting.

Because you're a very fashionable guy, as I see before me.

>> I still... so, older pieces that I don't have any more or I accidentally got paint on become studio clothes.

>> BOWEN: Okay.

>> So, like, I'm a big fan of Virgil Abloh for Off-White.

So my typical uniform is, like, an Off-White t-shirt that's, like, destroyed.

(laughs) And, and joggers and, you know, so...

But as opposed to the women... My, my family, it was like a big kickstarter for when I needed an idea, an object to paint.

I'm surrounded by a lot of amazing women, not just family, but the people I work with in galleries.

The majority of them are women, but also, I think, like, for the country, so many women have played such huge roles in getting this country to where it is, but also how it's moving forward.

And that's, that's enough inspiration, I think, to paint a lifetime.

>> BOWEN: I want to ask you about we see hooded figures in your work, very Philip Guston-like hooded figures, which, as we were reminded in the recent MFA retrospective, a show that's traveling the country right now, these were his processing what happened to him in life as a Jewish man with the Ku Klux Klan.

But I understand that you had a dream where Philip Guston spoke to you.

I mean, he's dead now, for people who don't know.

>> Sure.

>> BOWEN: So how... what's happening in that mind of yours?

>> So, well, I dream a lot about artists.

Most of them are dead, which is kind of weird.

But, um, but yeah, um, I had a little studio in my apartment.

And the dream set off that I had a knock at my door, and I open the door, and it's Philip Guston.

And he's sitting there, like, smoking a cigarette, and he's like, "I'm going to give you a crit."

And I'm like, "Sick!"

(laughs) Let's go, you know?

And he came in and we talked about my work.

Primarily then it was like all 2D work.

And, and I had thoughts of always trying to make 3D work, but not really sure how it would even go if I wanted to do ceramics or, you know, what materials I would use.

And long story short, he was like, "I know what you need to do."

And he's like, "You need to take these paintings on the wall, rip them off and put them into real space."

"So you're essentially going to make three-dimensional paintings."

And I was like, "What?"

Like, and he's like, "And you need to look at my work more "because we got a lot of similarities that you're not connecting to, so."

>> BOWEN: This is a very detailed dream.

>> Oh, I... soon as I woke up, I was like, writing everything down.

And I immediately went to the art store and I started buying building materials and trying to figure it out.

And I always said, like, jokingly, but seriously, if things work or don't work, I would just blame Philip Guston.

>> BOWEN: You've also had dreams of, of Goya, too.

You said you dream a lot about artists.

>> Yeah.

>> BOWEN: Do you think they're only dreams?

I know I'm being a little ethereal here.

>> I mean, I think that I look at... the artists that I love, I look at them a lot, and I think it's only a matter of time that they seep into my subconscious and come out into dreams.

But also, you know, when you're looking at this artwork, I mean, obviously they're dead.

These paintings have being made, these sculptures have been made.

And so it's, it's my opportunity and my job to figure out how to pull them forward.

Like, with me, because this is the-- the process of going to art school and studying art history is, like, you get all this information and now what do you do with it?

And I love that part of history.

So I want to bring it forward with me.

>> BOWEN: You left art for-- was it eight years?

>> Six years.

>> BOWEN: It was six years that you walked away, as I understand it, just for a variety of reasons.

But then you came back to it and you're having a lot of success now.

And when I look at something like that, I think, is this more than just fate?

Was this... you were supposed to do this?

How do you look at it?

>> Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I think, I think we're all-- we all have things that we're put here to be a part of, and I'm one of the lucky ones that figured it out, or found it, however it happened.

But I think I'm here to make art.

And if I needed some, some cues or some nudges, those dreams are there to really reinforce what I'm supposed to be doing.

And the great part about the Guston thing was before I made the Guston paintings-- or I call them Guston paintings-- I didn't really talk too much about politics or race and how this country is in those paintings.

Taking Guston characters kind of forced that out of me.

>> BOWEN: You could see he was such a political painter himself?

>> Yeah, and, and what better time than during a pandemic when all this stuff is happening and we're able to watch it?

You know, regular days or watching sports or having jobs and doing other things in life, and the pandemic kind of stopped that.

And these Guston-like moments are now on TV.

And so taking his character, especially the hooded character, taking that character and twisting it into mine felt like the right thing to do, especially at that time, so.

>> BOWEN: Well, Lavaughan Jenkins, it's been such a pleasure to get to know you and to talk about your work, thank you so much.

>> Yeah, thank you.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And watch us first on YouTube.com/GBHNews.

I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for watching.

Every Friday, Boston Public Radio hosts live music at GBH's studio at the Boston Public Library.

So we leave you now with Castle of Our Skins.

They're celebrating ten years of Black artistry with a new album titled Homage.

Here they are performing "Wade in the Water."

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪