In this edition of Art Rocks, we discover how exquisite textiles from past stages are given new life.

I think we're the ultimate recyclers and Saint Joseph, Louisiana, and we don't let anything beautiful go to waste.

We'll see how a pilot's love of maps direct her to the art.

I really got interested in maps and mapping, and I feel like most of painting is kind of a mapping process.

A designer strives for clean lines and a cleaner world.

I think you have to build things to last.

And we'll meet a creative type whose lifelong love of architecture informs his artistic style.

Believe in what you do.

It's all ahead on this edition of Art Rocks.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello, I'm James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

And this is Art Rocks.

In our first segment today, we'll see how the finest of fabrics and embroidery from years gone by find another chance to be enjoyed.

Designer Rebecca Vizard collects antique textiles and transforms them for home use from her studio on the shores of Lake Bruin.

In the studios of Beevers Design, you'll find a collection of antique textiles, salvaged gold embroidery work and some of the finest fabric made today in this rural setting on Lake Bruin.

Designer pillows are made with the precision, patience and loving care of the old world.

Designer Rebecca Vizard grew up in the small town of Saint Joseph before setting out for Newcomb College in New Orleans and aiming her sights for the world beyond her signature.

Pillows now featured in national magazines, came about when she was working as an interior designer for a client in New York and having difficulty finding the pillows she had in mind.

That's when her creativity took over, sending her career on an adventurous path.

I decided to finally make try to make something for my client myself.

So I went down to the flea market at 26th Street, and I found a beautiful curtain panel that had some gold filigree on it.

And behind it in another booth was an antique vestment and the color of the metallic trim on it was the same patina as the curtain.

And that's what gave me the idea to take apart old things and use similar patina as that's kind of what my pillows are known for are antique elements, but very nice clean lines.

The pillows began to sell in New Orleans shops and Vizard saw an opportunity to expand her business.

So I went to market in Dallas.

I think they set me up next to some snow globes or something.

And so people were covered kind of thinking, these pillows are kind of expensive.

And I would go, Well, you know, it takes a lot of work and the elements are so expensive.

And the next thing you know, Neiman Marcus walked by and they bought for 22 of their stores.

And so I had to immediately hop on a plane and go to France and find a lot of antique textiles.

The New York flea market was not big enough for me anymore.

I started out, of course, in Paris, because I think so many things filter through Paris from all over the world, and that's where I first saw Turkish pieces that I like.

It really made me want to go to Istanbul, the most amazing place I've ever been.

I felt like all my senses were on fire.

It was just the the colors you see, the design, the history.

And the people were so wonderful in Istanbul, I would find old vestments that were in terrible shape.

But the gold work was still somewhat good.

And I have to say one of my best purchases at a flea market one time was a whole big box of antique metallic threads.

So now we have all these different containers of thread that we can use to repair all this old gold work and nothing makes me happier than feeling like I saved some beautiful piece that was about to go to the trash.

A lot of these pieces were made by nuns or they were special guilds that made them.

We repair them in the same manner where the gold thread is so valuable.

We bring the thread over, usually a little padded piece.

Sometimes it's a cardboard, sometimes it's on the wood.

But anyway, we bring the thread over, take another needle and catch it and bring it back over.

You don't waste any of the gold thread going around the backside and it's so as you can imagine, it's very labor intensive.

Eventually, Vizard returned to her hometown, where her husband now helps run a family business.

She recruited labor from the local community for her studio and found a staff of individuals willing to take the time and care to produce fine handmade products.

In addition to the antique elements.

She began using exceptionally fine fabrics made today because probably of the ornate ness of a lot of these pillows.

I had a lot of requests for Fortuny.

Mariano Fortuny was an Italian designer from Venice, and he was just a remarkable creative genius.

The company is still going today, which is just wonderful.

The fabric is just some of the best in the world.

I would have little strips that were maybe an inch wide or so, and I never could throw them away because the fabric is very expensive.

So I've never wanted to to waste it.

And I didn't know what to do with all these little one and two and three inch scraps.

Well, my daughter was in the studio one day and she said, Mom, why don't you make dog collars?

So now we make dog collars out of Fortuny fabric for, you know, the most posh pet you can imagine.

So I think we're the ultimate recyclers in Saint Joseph, Louisiana, and we don't let anything beautiful go to waste.

Vizard is following the recycling path to create new products for her design business.

Actually, years ago I was in a shop in Paris and they had the whole shop was made out of recycled things from Africa and it gave me the idea there are so many beautiful things in there that were made from trash.

And I kept thinking, Gosh, this is a way to make money out of nothing.

Somehow I thought of the idea of bottle caps, and I figured out the process of making a chandelier out of bottle caps.

And so we have coined it the beard earlier.

And anyway, it was such a big hit that I realized this is a perfect opportunity to help kids to make extra money.

So I had a team of kids working for me, hammering out bottle caps and stringing them together, and I would pay them by the bottle cap and I would make them get the math right before they got paid.

So it became kind of an incentive to to make money and to realize that math is important.

And these kids just loved it.

The people in this little town, I mean, the job opportunities are very slim.

And I just love the fact that I've ended up being able to employ so many people and improve people's lives.

So that's that ended up being the most fulfilling part of this.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

I get to live on a lake and make beautiful things every day and see people prosper.

And it's just it's wonderful.

To see more, visit.

Thieves, Scum.

Now let's take a look at some of Louisiana's arts and cultural events in the coming week.

For more information on these events, visit the website at LP Doc slash Art Rocks.

And to find more arts activities, check out Country Roads Man Tor.com.

Up next, a trip to Truman's burg, New York, for a visit with artist Barbara Page.

Once a pilot page tells us how her love of maps turned into a passion for painting while experimenting with mixed media, Page has created art that literally spans millions of years.

My painting career started as a fluke.

I never thought about being an artist.

I decided to take flying lessons and I really loved looking at the world from aerial perspective.

From my interest in flying, I really got interested in maps and mapping, and I feel like most of painting is kind of a mapping process.

A look at the world instead of on a horizontal view.

I tend to look at it on different levels, so I've painted paintings of the cosmos, stars all the way down to the bottom of the sea.

Time and space have always been my interests in my work.

I'm basically a painter, but I'm an artist who works from ideas rather than techniques.

So if I have an idea that doesn't involve painting, I'll just figure out how to do it, what materials to use and so forth.

Piece I did at the Museum of the Earth is a history of Life.

I did one panel for every million years, beginning with visible life, and that was 543 million years ago.

So there is 543 panels which are arranged in a sequence according to geological period, and the panels are all 11 by 11 inches.

I did get a commission as a result of doing the piece at the Museum of the Earth from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and they said that they would like to have a piece like I did at the Museum of the Earth with the history of life so that people could experience it as they walked down the bridge.

The bridge was 140 feet long.

It's a way of kind of bringing a big picture to evolution in one piece.

I am creating this reading history, starting when I was a kid and working up to the present.

So it's an ongoing piece and these are cards from the books that I have read in 2013.

This piece wouldn't be that interesting, except that I realized in the process of doing this that I was kind of giving a history of American social culture over the past 60 years.

I think what is unusual about my work is that I'm really eclectic and I feel comfortable moving from one thing to another, which is not very savvy career wise.

But I just really stimulated by working on different things and thinking about things from different perspectives.

I'm really happy when I'm doing a project where I have to learn something new.

I just feel like it expands my universe.

The most exciting thing about being an artist is the fact that you can get up on any day and start something new.

You can reinvent your life and you can explore subjects as deeply as you want.

In our next segment, we learn how designer Kenji Kondo is changing the way we think about manufacturing goods.

The blueprints for every condo design from small household items to large pieces of furniture can be shared electronically and hence created by manufacturers wherever condo happens to have customers.

We catch up with this innovative artist in his Albuquerque atelier from a very young age.

I was influenced by design, and I always knew that everything that you touched was designed.

I remember growing up and even going to a restaurant with my family, and this every meal was started this way and my dad would make this little object out of the wrapper of chopsticks, a pair of chopsticks, and it would become the rest for the chopsticks.

Everywhere you turn, somebody's designed something that you're touching.

The cost of machinery has come down so drastically that anybody can buy the equipment and start working.

The technology has kind of put manufacturing basically on its ear.

What this has done is made it almost like going to Kinko's when somebody comes in and they if they know what they're what their end product is, then obviously it's very easy.

If they don't know what their end product is.

All of us can help them find their end product.

And not that it's any new concept.

Industrial design houses have done it forever, but it's at a much more accessible level.

So you can walk in the door, hand somebody a jump drive, and a day later or 30 minutes later you can walk out with an object.

Our first step is taking our idea and bringing it into the computer.

And in this case, will we bring it into a 3D program after we're comfortable with the drawing?

Will either take it into a process called rapid prototyping, or in this case, we build a model using a laser cutter to cut all the pieces in and once the fit of the model is correct, we can then take it and bring it up to full scale and we bring it on to sea and see Rooter, which cuts the parts out of plywood that can then be assembled, painted in delivery and then you can get all the mistakes out of the drawing pretty much on one shot.

And it's going to be an action other notch as well will line up.

And that way when it goes into the real material, we now know that the fit is correct.

My my range of design goes from a tissue box cover all the way to a furniture.

We've pretty much cut everything that you can cut in a laser or on a CMC router or a plasma cutter.

One of the main reasons I started looking at this avenue for manufacturing was that for a long time I was on the road a tremendous amount and I had all this equipment and it was lying dormant for 50% of the year.

For me it felt like it was a way to have it running and give access to people.

Once somebody purchases an object, it can be made quickly with just a push of a button and at the same time it can be made both locally and I can send that same file to Brooklyn and have it manufactured there as well.

So your carbon footprint is decreased because there's no trucks involved.

So that means that the manufacturing points are also saving that dollar for the consumer.

I came from a sculpture in architecture background and in sculpture you make objects that initially make you happy, first with the hope that they make somebody else happy or they understand what you're what you're thinking about.

To me, it's it's really a design is trying to make objects that people will keep.

When I was growing up, I grew up with great design and a lot of those objects I still have.

I think you have to build things to last because the resources aren't there to not do that.

I mean, I want my objects to last.

I want them to be around for a very long time.

What's important in my work is that it's solid in the people, recognize it and appreciate and I think good esthetics almost create peace in people.

For more, visit Kenji Kondo Scum.

Now it's time to explore another of Louisiana's treasures.

Each week on art rocks, we celebrate and examine an artistic or cultural element with unique ties to Louisiana.

This week, we'll hear the story of a statue nicknamed Uncle Jack.

The statue that is known as Uncle Jack by many was actually erected in 1927 in the city of Natchitoches, Louisiana, really to honor African-Americans and their service as slaves, though they were enslaved on plantations, they did remarkable work.

They had cleared the land and they made this huge accomplishment, made Louisiana the great agricultural state.

It was in 1927 and still is.

Jack But he was a local businessman and planter, had this statue erected.

He hired horns.

Sure he was.

He considered the monument man to make the statue and an enormous amount of money from over $4,000, which was enormous in 1927.

And it was put at the foot of French Street in Natchitoches, where it stayed for over 40 years.

And in 1968, things turned and simply because another generation saw the statue differently.

The statue is bent slightly, tipping his hat and greeting on the street that was so common in the first part of the 20th century, 1968.

This is seen as subservient and is an insult to African-Americans.

And it was protested.

The city took it down, and it went into storage for a number of years until 1972, when Steele Barton, who started the Rural Life Museum, found out about it.

And it was brought here to this museum, and it was actually donated to us in 1976.

It's the most important artifact we have here.

It still evokes emotion to our visitors.

Everybody has a different opinion about it.

Some reminisce, some are curious, some are insulted.

And but it is an artifact that brings discussion of slavery and race relations in Louisiana that is something very current in today's discussion.

Smithsonian wants it very badly.

They say that is the first monument dedicated to African-Americans, solely African-Americans in the United States.

And finally, we travel the world, take in cityscapes, and gaze up at the ceilings of the finest concert halls all through the eyes of an artist.

Meet Steve Lasky.

His work might be described as frenetic, with its many squiggly lines and splashes of color.

But indeed, it's this energy that helps transports Lansky's viewers to the faraway places that he depicts.

To me, it's always been almost a compulsion to draw.

I feel like I'm primarily an observer.

Then I capture what I see in my own style.

My name is Steve Lasky and I'm an artist, and it seems like I've been drawing pretty much my whole life.

I'd say I started out just drawing everything around me, but but I developed a particular interest in architecture visually, just the excitement of the manmade environment of creating.

I have a degree in architecture from the University of Wisconsin.

So, I mean, I always I had that.

I thought architecture was a way of combining my interests and in in buildings and in drawing.

I started out being very interested in a lot of the historic buildings in Milwaukee.

I had done the Miller house in the Judge Jason Downer house on the corner of Prospect and Juneau because I was just inspired by the history of those buildings, the excitement of what we've created, the manmade create and contrasted with the natural environment.

And I think also a part of my work has been the contrast of the of the new with the old the historic architecture, with modern architecture that I find very exciting.

What you're seeing in the piece is 23 drawings from what has become over 300 drawings that I've done in concert settings.

Some of the earliest ones were at St John's Cathedral in Milwaukee.

So the title of this piece is Drawing Music and Art in various places, mainly the Chicago Cultural Center, where I go almost weekly to to draw in that setting.

It's a beautiful setting and the old Chicago Public Library.

I like the combination of drawing during a concert, letting the music flow as part of the drawing.

I found through this process that that the music really does feed my my artistic outlook.

Most of these drawings, I give myself the time of the concert, which is less than an hour to complete one of these drawings.

You're capturing the artist, the environment.

You're surrounded by the music you feel, the energy from the artist.

You're there among the people listening.

It's the entire experience.

I generally start with the musicians.

I am so taken with that space that I've drawn it from every angle now.

But I've always done this as part of my travels too.

I've always been inspired by them, by what's around, and when I travel, I always find, you know, exciting new places to be.

These drawings that I do there, it captures a moment in time that I find really exciting.

I like to draw when I travel and capturing different cities and their skylines.

It just seemed like a natural thing for me to do of the skyline.

I did one of the Chrysler Building in New York, which was exciting to me because it was a combination of an actual scene and creating a piece using a model I had built of the Empire State Building as a vantage point for this drawing.

They started out to make doing my drawings and adding color to those drawing.

Over time, you know, the color got bolder.

I started doing just paintings in color, getting away from the line, but I always end up going back to drawing, which I feel like is so such an intrinsic part of my work.

The mural behind me is actually funny because it's it's the back of the Bandshell in Millennium Park, which throughout the summer season in Chicago, there's free concerts there all summer long.

The idea behind these murals was to depict different Chicago neighborhoods, particular or scenes of Chicago Chicago architecture.

One of my favorite exhibitions that I've done is a show of portraits drawn from life, from live sittings.

Taking this thing we've talked about with buildings and applying that to the dynamic, drawing another person and capturing them in a drawing that was done directly in ink, not sketching it out first in a limited time period.

That was very exciting to me.

Drawing is so important to all aspects of art.

You might not see things as drawing based, but you know you have to be able to draw to communicate your ideas, put it out there and be okay with it.

Just letting line and color flow believe in what you do.

And that's it for this edition of Art Rocks.

Don't forget to visit the website at LTV dot org slash Rock's where you'll find feature videos and information on upcoming arts events.

Until next time, I'm James Fox Smith and thanks for watching.