Coming up next on Art Rocks, the Alexandria sculptor called upon to create works of art for presidents of nations and A-list entertainers.

I've been at this for about 60 years.

In school, I would just doodle things.

And rather than be paying attention to the academics taking place, an opera theater with a mission to help train developing artists, the mission of the organization was to help the emerging professional artists to bridge the gap between the academic world and the professional world.

Bringing a community together with the arts.

So we really do serve it community.

We serve the region.

I think there's nothing else like us in the area and we get acquainted with sugar Rush and I'm inspired by cartoons and actual candy, the colors and candy and the whimsy and kind of childlike feel that goes along with all of that.

That's all right.

Now on Art Rocks.

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

Hello, and thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

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

First up, meet Alexandria, Louisiana, artist Maurice Taft.

THOMAS His fans have included folks like Nelson Mandela, Alex Haley and B.B.

King.

And just recently, former President Jimmy Carter ordered one of his pieces.

As you get to know Thomas's work, it becomes easier to understand its popularity.

Maurice Taft Thomas's work has brought him into contact with politicians, entertainers and notable art collectors the world over.

They've come seeking his creations in wood, clay, paint, iron and other metals.

The artist has excelled in everything he's tackled.

But that success comes from decades of practice.

I've been at this for about 60 years.

In school, I would just doodle things and rather than be paying attention to the academics taking place, I was sketching.

I got discipline quite a bit on that.

I walk outside and look at the clouds and saw the cloud formation.

The cumulus cloud and other clouds make and shapes and making forms.

Now get a piece of clay and look up there, man, and try to emulate what I saw in the clouds.

Thomas's interest in art led to him being introduced to the great Louisiana sculptor Frank Hayden, while Thomas was still in high school.

Walking in his studio, I look at all those massive things and clay that he was working on and I asked God, I totally said, No, you're going to do better now.

He has a piece of clay.

He said, Go apply to the one I'm working on now.

I was petrified, but I did it.

And from then on I was the bug bit me as to potential becoming a sculptor.

Thomas went on to study art in college and later learned to weld a skill that has led to the creation of some of his most visible works, like the butterflies swarming around this floral arrangement.

This piece will be part of the permanent collection at the LSU Museum of Art.

Another of Thomas's pieces is a permanent fixture at the LSU Library in Alexandria, and this one on display at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

I tried to implement creatively in my sculptures and especially a metal sculpture is to show movement in a static position.

This is done by arranging the figure of the composition where the viewer will look at one section of one portion in the eye where it is certainly move around the entire composition.

In doing so, you'll capture what you want to do in terms of bringing out the movement within a figure that doesn't actually move the dancer that comprise 42 pieces of metal well together.

It takes some skill, it takes some time.

That is not just pulling the trigger, a delicate touch.

If you get too close to it, it's going to burn all the way through.

Thomas finds inspiration from many sources.

The Lion dance was a vision of my singing.

A group of 12 men on the stage in Lafayette, Louisiana International Festival, 100 Lions.

And so they did a lion dance, and the stuff that it did were radiating.

You could hear almost a quarter of a mile.

It was just a rugged.

So what kind of sculpture would he create for the late South African president, Nelson Mandela?

The magnolia, in addition to several masks that I designed for him, one in steel and one in mahogany.

President Carter wanted the popular magnolia.

I said, How long you want and say, Lord, you can make it.

I said, I can make as long as you want it.

So this was about maybe 18 inches in one direction, maybe 1920 inches the other direction, where an excess of 12 or £14.

Thomas says he begins every piece with the sketch and gives you an idea in terms of proportion.

Dimension decides the value of the likeness of dogs of the area, and also the scale in which you like to work.

Many of Thomas's sketches evolve into portraits.

I like to bring out the inward individual is not surface.

I studied the eyes and from the eyes it tells you a lot about the individual.

I can read a person by looking through the eyes.

Not at but through the eyes.

The curvature of the mouth and the shape of the face.

All those things are important.

And so the only thing is to to use values are like dogs, how you can put them in a particular light situation.

I can put to a dog situation.

Much of Thomas's work requires great physicality.

All of it requires intense focus.

Is drained me.

I am depleted mentally and sometimes I have to go into rest, maybe an hour or 2 hours of drills and get back to it.

I'm a member of the National Sculpture Society in New York City.

They communicate with me on a regular basis, and I always encourage me to have what you need to take part in this exhibition.

And so to keep me going.

Louisiana Governor Mike Foster once called on Thomas to design Louisiana's ornament for the White House Christmas tree after the presentation.

Thomas and his wife had an opportunity to meet then President George W Bush and his wife, Laura, an experience he says he treasures even if he isn't a Republican.

No matter where you live in Louisiana, opportunities to connect with the arts are everywhere.

If only you know where to look.

So here's a list of some of the goings on coming up around the state.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, visit LP dot org slash Rox or pick up a free copy of Country Roads magazine LP's Art Rock's website also features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any segment again, just log on to LP b0rg.

Now we're off to Michigan, where the Arbor Opera Theater in Ann Arbor is using opera to combat the stigma of depression and other illnesses.

Recently, the group performed an adaptation of La Traviata with the goal of increasing awareness of mental health issues.

However, Opera Theater was founded in 1999 by three singers who had finished their schooling.

And we're looking for a professional level performance opportunity.

The mission of the organization was to help the emerging professional artists to bridge the gap between the academic world and the professional world.

For the first, oh, I'd say seven or eight years that the company existed.

The that was really the focus.

Just how can we provide these experiences for singers?

And I think also to provide the community with an extension of the existing arts programing.

We incorporated and produced our first opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, in 2000 and have typically done an opera each June along with chamber operas, recitals and cabarets throughout the rest of the year.

Aot decided to do this particular adaptation of La Traviata to draw awareness to the stigma around mental illness that often results in suicides.

And we were influenced by the death of Robin Williams, and also some of us had experienced suicide in our own families.

Oh, I didn't.

So the story has been around for a long time.

And when I looked at this story and I decided that we were going to be doing this production, I really wanted to break it down and say, what?

Why is this story still relevant 163 years later?

Why are we still why do audiences still like it, as has this beautiful music?

But there's more to it than just the music.

So when I really broke down the characters and looked at sort of the archetypes of Violetta as the victim and Alfredo as the knight in shining armor and the father representing society and the forces that try to keep them apart, I realized that this story wasn't so much about a courtesan and tuberculosis and death, but more about the societal stigma.

So as I updated this story, I really wanted to focus on what would be a societal stigma in our current time.

And as I sort of queried with people and asked them what they thought that was, many ideas came up with the theme of mental illness kept coming up over and over again to tell the story in this way about something that affects so many people depression and anxiety, you know, not just bipolar disorder, but any sort of mental illness.

It's it's you know, it's a it's a profound thing to have someone in your life who's affected by those or to be affected by those things and to share that story through this incredible music.

So beautiful, but to share this in a way, I think it's going to touch a lot of people and be a really cathartic experience for both those of us in it and the audience.

I think the attraction of La Traviata is not only is it one of the most beloved operas of all time, but also it has themes that are readily transferable.

So it's not just about a specific historical event or specific historical figures or something that was going on in history.

It's about specific themes, themes that are more easily adapted to other to moderate to different time periods.

I actually knew the La Traviata story.

I knew about its theme.

I knew about the turmoil.

I knew about the letters death, the stigma that kind of led to the problems that she had had with family members of someone she loved.

And we needed to adapt it to the current day and age to change the story.

So that was done with the goal of making it relevant to what the National Network of Depression Centers does, which is to attack depressions and bipolar illnesses.

So in this rendition, this adaptation, she has bipolar illness, and that's what we're using the bringing together of of art, music and science to really move us forward.

We played a really interesting thing that I found out in working with some of the cast members is how many of them have in their families or personally themselves have mental illness.

And it was really interesting to hear what they said.

One of the one of the cast members talked about how really emotional it was for her at rehearsals because this was so personal and this hits so close to home.

Mental illness actually runs in one side of my family.

I have a grandmother who's bipolar and her sister was schizophrenic.

My mother and I both have struggled with depression on and off anxiety.

When I was younger, I actually struggled quite a bit with them, with cutting and with self-mutilation.

That's kind of hard to admit and to talk about on camera.

But what better place to, you know, to shake that for myself to them with this production?

That was something that for me was a long journey.

So you have an illness that's treatable, but people are reluctant to often go get help.

Why is that?

Because there still is a bit of prevailing shame.

We're making progress.

But that stigma gets in the way as sometimes I'm fond of saying I don't like it, but stigma kills, and in some cases people who don't get treated even get so much in despair that they die of suicide.

So we're trying to essentially use a medium of art and music to send a signal that most people emotionally as well as scientifically to understand better while going into a framework of I'm going to be a voice to take these things on my group.

We know from brain research that music impacts another part of the brain and that people react to music and other ways into art than they do just a spoken text.

So this is a way of really moving people at a different level than they would be moved if they went to a symposium on mental illness or they read facts on the NDC website or something like that.

And inevitably this and other approaches like this are the way that you cut through stigma.

We've got to talk about these things.

Small stuff.

So I love opera.

And when I met when I met Shaun and he first started talking about this production, I was absolutely mesmerized by the idea.

I thought, Oh my gosh, to bring together something that was so important to someone that I love so much, my brother with what ended up killing him.

It's just meant to be.

And in looking at the finished product, it was a very emotional performance for me, especially the first time I saw it.

It really hit home, which is why I think it's so important for people to see it.

Traveling now to New York, where Troy is home to the arts center of the Capital Region for more than 50 years, the Arts Center has provided a vibrant space for artists and community members to explore their creativity.

Join us now as we go inside the facility and watch the artists at work.

Art Center has been around for 52 years and it's a multi arts organization.

We have four galleries.

It's a black box theater.

And I was finishing up my hair.

I noticed a small string on the have of my dress and classes in the arts, everything from culinary arts to pottery.

We serve a wide range of ages, from six year olds to 96 year olds and a wide range of economic backgrounds from people who can pay the tuition and those who need financial help.

So we really do serve our community.

We serve the region.

I think there's nothing else like us in the area.

One of the amazing things about the facility itself is the breadth of our program.

So it takes a while to realize all the things we have to offer.

And that's been fun for me because I really love to work across mediums.

So it's exciting to sit with our teaching artists and then devise new ways to kind of present the same old thing.

We have a lovely wood worker.

He really basically has been in residence here because he started to look across mediums, discovered clay, and then this thing has occurred because we gave him a little space when he wasn't teaching.

I started two years ago.

I teach woodworking 1 to 1 relief, printmaking, furniture 1 to 1, and visual fundamentals.

The Arts Center gives me great space and exceptional learning environment.

There are so many mediums being taught so close together that all the instructors can are allowed to collaborate.

And it's just it's really conducive to creating the Potters who has been, I guess, most dedicated to us as a potter is John Visser.

And so we've made him Mark Potter in residence.

So if you just open this immediately, the top can get really wonky and go all over the place, bring it up.

It was something we could offer him for all that he's given back to us.

So those are ways that I'm trying to, you know, make the facility more open to artists and to pull in the local community.

I'm trained as a sculptor.

I'm a mixed media artist, and I traditionally work with nontraditional building materials.

I'm lucky enough to work at the art center now for the next six months, writing an artist in residency program, which will be a new program allowing local artists or capital district artists to move into our space here at the Art center, create a new body of work and work to build a little community outreach.

I was meeting with one of our teaching artists, and he's a puppeteer.

He wanted to actually learn how to make a stop motion film and to create the armature in the set.

And so we gave him the space and made him our first artist in residence.

And now we have just welcomed in Claire Sherwood, another local artist, and see part of her responsibilities is to actually develop that program and to make it more codified so then we can make out a call.

Artists who have residency opportunity will be able to move into the studio, have 24 seven access.

They can have access to any of the facilities here in the Arts Center.

The Arts Center is really a really important cornerstone of the community right now, especially with all the education cuts happening in our public schools.

I think it's really important for artists to be involved in the community giving back to the community.

It's part of our job as artists to kind of feed into that cycle of creativity.

And the Arts Center is one place in the capital district that does a really great job of that.

If you can't come here and get excited, then I don't know.

I think you should just try and wake yourself up because there's just so much to do here and so many different ways to make something Bringing it back home.

Now for our Louisiana Treasures segment.

Many of us watched in awe.

The Academy Award winning movie 12 Years a Slave, which is based on a true story that unfolded in central Louisiana in the years leading up to the Civil War, a house closely associated with the film is open to the public.

And if you are in Alexandria, a visit is not to be missed.

This house was owned by Edwin and Malvina Epps on Bayou Beth here in central Louisiana, and it was built by, of course, the labor of their enslaved persons, one of whom was Solomon Northup.

He was an enslaved person who been kidnaped and sold into slavery.

And he had been living here with Mr. Epps for about, I believe, eight, nine years By that point, probably nine closer to ten weeks.

He was here for a total of 12 years.

And in building this house, he came into contact with the architect in this Creole style, Mr. Samuel Bass from Canada, Samuel Bass.

He was an abolitionist and he and Northup got to talking in North and told him about his family in New York.

Mr. Bass helped him, right.

And then smuggle letters to Northup's family in New York so that they knew exactly where he was.

They knew he was enslaved.

He had been gone nearly 12 years.

At this point.

Bass was able to get those letters of North Epps up to Northup's family and a member associated with the family was able to come down and present a case.

They it was a legal case.

They tried it in the courthouse in Marksville Wills Parish courthouse and able to ensure eventually Mr. Northup's return to freedom.

But if Mr. Epps hadn't decided to build himself a new house and had not included Mr. Bass, then Northup and Bass would not have met.

Maybe Northup never would have re obtained his freedom.

He may have died here in slavery in obscurity.

So it's really quite an important piece of Mr. Solomon Northup story.

The map was created by a former professor, Dr. Sue Egan, and Rapids pair surveyor River Smith, and they created a map to show the footsteps of Mr. Northup as he was here in Louisiana.

So you can follow the footsteps that he took this map is it's a beloved artifact here in central Louisiana because it shows so much of our history here.

Director Steve McQueen picked up the book and started reading it and fell in love with Northup's narrative and realized what would make a good movie.

And he was correct.

The movie is as good as the book at Louisiana history every semester.

I always use 12 Years a Slave is one of the readings for several reasons, one of which is that Solomon Northup was a free man and he knew what that meant when he lived in New York.

And suddenly all of that was taken away from him so he could make comparisons that someone who grew up in slavery might not be able to make.

And then secondly, it's important because it tells us the story of slavery from the slaves perspective.

And we have very, very few of those because slaves weren't able to read and write.

The owners quite often made sure that they weren't able to read and write.

They couldn't leave behind the records, the letters, the diaries that the plantation owners left for us.

We can know their side of the story.

Solomon Northup tells us the slave side of the story.

We have a piece of William Prince Ford's mill that Solomon Northup writes about working in.

And we have artifacts that are very typical of the sort of tools that workers would have used, slaves would have used on a plantation during the mid-19th century.

Finally, there is something new to discover.

With each encounter with the work of Sacramento, California, artist Jared Connor.

PINSKY Yes, it's the rush of color that first draws you in, but then take a closer look and you might discover that things aren't quite what they seem.

When I sit down at a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper.

And the process that goes through my head is I want to take whatever happened that day, good or bad, and translate it into my world.

And therefore I feel like I have a control in such a chaotic world.

And someone described it and I love the term.

They said he creates sugar rush art.

I'm inspired by a cartoon and actual candy, the colors and candy and the whimsy and kind of childlike feel that goes along with all of that.

But there's also a slight darkness to it within the colors, the bright colors.

So like, Candy's delicious and good, there's still it's not really good for you.

Technically, I get a lot of mixed reactions with my work.

I'll have kids that just totally get it and they'll come up and I'm thinking they're just attracted to the colors, which may have brought them to it at first, but they get the monsters.

They love the monsters.

There's funny with adults.

Some adults do get it, but there's some adults that refuse to see the darkness.

They'll see the light colors and they'll see it's adorable.

And I almost have to point out, look, there's it's not all sweet that confuses them at first.

They'll buy a piece and sometimes they'll message me later and say, I did not see that there is this darkness happening or this monster.

That's right.

In that background, it's just a matter of what they experience.

First, you have these talents.

Why not draw whatever you want to?

I'm not really worried about what people are going to think about it.

There's always just the personal thing that's going on with me that I'm just getting it out almost like it's almost like therapy sort of.

However people will see it and they will translate messages to it and how they apply it to their lives and what they're going through.

And I don't think it's wrong interpretations.

I think all those interpretations are right.

That's almost where the art becomes something new to me as far as my inspiration with the dark side of things and the lighter side of things is I feel life is just full of that.

There's so much beauty and ugly happening at the same exact time.

So I put that into my work.

When I first started this whole art thing, I never thought it can actually get to where I'm at now.

I've had opportunities I never thought would be possible.

They've had it in museums.

I've been published in magazines like The New Yorker, and I don't have a specific goal to see where it goes.

I kind of like the organic branching of it.

I just kind of like seeing where it takes me sort of a destiny thing, I guess.

That wraps it up for this edition of Art Rocks.

You can always watch episodes of Art Rocks at LP B dot org slash art rocks.

And I might be biased, but Country Roads magazine is another great place to learn what's going on in the arts and culture all across the state of Louisiana.

Pick up a free copy or find it online at country roads mag dot com until next week.

I'm James Fox Smith and thanks for watching.