Coming up next on Art rocks Point capi artist Henry Watson turns old cypress wood into artistic masterpieces.

I want you to lose the fact of the history that I'm capturing.

You can't capture it all.

But if I put it in the wood.

You'll never forget the hard work of ballet.

Some of them come two hours before class even starts because they want to be here.

They're dedicated a group of skilled glassblowing artisans with old school techniques and spontaneity of the material really lends itself to the fluidity of being creative in the moment.

And that's what really drew me into working with glass.

And we traveled back in time to talk about why there's still so much historic architecture in the city of New Orleans.

There is an epidemic of preservation and restoration, and a desire to go back to the old neighborhoods in New Orleans.

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

We.

Do.

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 thank you for joining us for Art rocks.

If wood could talk, it might speak Henry Watson's language from his studio on the banks of false River.

This point copy parish artist salvages century old cypress boards from dilapidated buildings and then carves plantation homes, cottages and other rural scenes into their weathered surfaces, thereby letting the grain and the texture do the talking.

I chose to use the old cypress because I was introduced to it long time ago when I first started off, but the neatness of it is cypress back then.

They use it for everything.

They didn't know that it would last 100 or 200 years.

I found it from old plantation areas, old farm areas.

I sit there and I look at it and I think about what went on, who lived here, what kind of activity, been around.

So all of that fueled me to do what I do, you know, and I always say, if a board could talk with story, it would tell much is a simple the basic shovel.

When I first started off, we had simple tools that you get from like Walmart or some hardware store, even to date, even 40 years later, I used those same basic tools.

First, you have a board and you draw on the board.

Well, something you got to do.

Then you have a map or two.

Oh, piece of wood.

I could have made my hammer just the right weight for my hands.

And then I used that to carve and beat on the chisel.

So my subject matter, you'd notice that would be the cabin, the trees, some of them up with a lady hanging clothes.

Sometimes I'll just put it steel with the trees.

The beauty.

Because I don't want you to lose the fact of the history that I'm capturing.

But also you just sit and think what went on in those days?

What joy, what sadness.

You know, a lot of things happen, you know, you can't capture it all.

But if I put it in the wood, you'll never forget it.

As I create and carve, it is just different steps foreground, middle, ground and background.

The foreground of this carving, if you look at it, would be the big trees, the little gravel road that shows high winds around all of this is the foreground, and in the middle ground is when you're carving the main house itself.

It takes time because you have to actually put was actually there.

The rails, the windows, the doors.

I put the trees in, I put the shadows on the ground, the shingles on the roof.

I carve it in.

You know, I put everything dimensionless because it is a 3D carving.

And then when you look beyond the top of the house and look beyond into the sky, now you got into the, into the third dimension of it, you see.

So each piece is all hand carved and done and every detail of the house.

I capture it, even down to the mouse hanging on the trees are basically learn the skills.

In Lavonia High School, where I was introduced to carving, we was all learning how to carve.

Then in the school going through those festivals, I met a lady named Miss Lucy Pollard.

She came to that festival and she saw all of the students art.

And so she came to me and she say, I love what you do.

And she said, you are great at it.

And at that time, you know, I was just getting started off.

I said, you really like it?

I say, I said your piece.

So back then she bought the first piece.

So she bought it and she been behind it ever since.

She told me she say, what are you creating?

And the history and all of the things you do, what you say don't change, she say.

Because one day the world a better path to you.

Do.

And that when I was 16 years old, now I'm 55 years old and they come from Germany, Chile.

And I think about that since she tell me one day the world would be the past.

You do.

And now I get people come from all over the world and I don't have to go to them.

They come in here looking for me.

So, you know, and every Christmas, Mother's Day, I call her and I let her know the world is beating the path to my door.

Every now and then I do a piece that I like and I want to recreate and do for myself, because it's something I want to capture.

The time I do that I run across somebody or somebody across me and say, hey, I want to commission you to do something for me.

So commission pieces keep you doing what other people want.

I specialize in doing people's home.

I recreate those as well, you know, from, old plantation homes.

The camps is something that you are proud of.

You are proud of and want to have memories of it and bring me a photograph.

I create it for you.

Once upon a time, my customers used to be, you know, the doctors, their lawyers, you know, people of of wealth.

Now, because of the history I'm capturing and doing in the pieces.

And people are reading the story and people are, are fond of where I come from.

I mean, I came from just a little town called Val Verde, and people have read my story and they want to know more about the artist.

So people now are saving up to get a piece, you know, or I just want something from you because they want to have some kind of way of saying, I know I'm already story.

They want to feel the joy that everybody else feel.

When he was filming the second, the second segment of the Swamp People, the lieutenant governor, asked me to go to New York to represent Louisiana, you know, as an artist, so people there could get used to our culture.

So I end up doing a Corvette of Troy Landry and is at the History Studio in New York.

And after that, I did several other pieces with the history logo on it and everything else there was amazed that I could take just a photograph and carve something in it.

3D for you.

I work for Commuter Coffee today.

I went in there to like flavor coffee for them and I started off doing that.

And now the other part of the job now I create and I core sponsor project for community coffee, you know, for, board of directors for a festival for, foreign companies when they come to town doing vintage cooking in their coffee.

So now, the love of what I do, and to me, the coffee is going hand in hand.

We're on the road to the Midwest now to spend time with the Missouri couple, both of whom enjoyed careers in ballet before opening a studio to teach dance.

One Trujillo and his wife, Stephanie Srinath, and now teaching young dancers the mechanics of ballet, as well as the tremendous discipline that the art form demands.

Once is done.

For these kids, some of them come two hours before class even starts, and not because their moms are like, oh, I need to go somewhere else.

I gotta drop you off early.

But because they want to be here, they're dedicated.

No, we're going to do it together.

And I do have to keep up.

And seek quicker legs and clothes.

So I just think Swan and Stephanie attract people who really want to come here and work.

It's not necessarily a social outlet for them.

I mean, they can do social outlet elsewhere.

Law, allow them to help you to feel their muscles.

What they won't find anywhere near by at least, is an array of Pilates and gyro tonic machines like this.

We're going to do pretty as sculptures designed to help dancers and regular folks alike rehab injuries and gain better body control.

The couple had already been using some in a small business based out of their home until about five years ago.

They decided to up the ante and open a school of their own.

Stephanie remembers the first time they spotted this somewhat unexpected location.

When we drove into downtown Overland Park, there was one parking spot, and it was right outside this building and a big sign that said For Sale.

And, we peeked in the window.

And at that point, we didn't realize how big the space was or what it what it could potentially turn into.

One of the things I always said is that I could never teach for recreational purposes.

So if we were going to get involved in a ballet school, I wanted the ballet school to be professional.

So this is not a favor.

This is not about finances.

This is it is about art.

And if the kids are good, they're moved up.

They're no good.

They have to stay where they are.

We have parents.

They have been with us since we started the school, and they see this progress in their kids and they're fascinated by it.

How serious the kids are taking what they do, even know that they're very young.

How what we teach them here in the classroom, they're able to take it into, everyday activities like we've had many years teaching experience.

And over those years we kind of developed this process that we feel really works for the kids.

It's a real tough love situation.

they know we love them and care about them and want them to be their best, but we expect them to work at 100% all the time.

Now offering six levels of instruction in a complex that's larger than it looks from outside.

It's hard to believe the KSB started with only three students enrolled when they opened up.

We came here, we followed them over and have it look back.

Julie Horton's oldest son, Riley, was one of that original trio.

He's now studying and working with the Houston Ballet.

At 15, her younger son, Connor, aspires to do much the same.

So this is maybe where we spend more of our waking hours than we do at our house.

It's we're very grateful.

I don't think every ballet school feels like family, but this really does look at this.

It's it's a family where language isn't much of a barrier.

Like many Colombian kids, one grew up amidst great poverty.

He credits Inco Ballet, the school he attended in college, with literally changing his life.

So now each summer, students from South America arrive in Johnson County to spend several weeks taking classes and training on the kind of equipment they might not otherwise have access to.

He was in their shoes.

And look where he is now.

And look.

Look at our studio and look at at his career.

And it gives them inspiration that maybe they can do that to.

It's the best part of the summer when the Colombians come and they have no idea what I'm saying, and I have no idea what they're saying.

And but, you know, that's the great thing about dance is that you don't necessarily have to talk.

Oh, yeah, I traffic problems here.

It transforms this studio into something different, which is what I think is so special about it for our home kids.

you know, this, this studio becomes an international dance studio.

It's an amazing experience.

It really is.

I feel like every year, more and more kids from Colombia have been able to participate.

But Monica Guerrero has been involved all along.

She's known Juan for decades now.

Her duties include both training the school's instructors and fine tuning its curriculum.

In fact, 30% of the Kansas School of Classical Ballet students attend on scholarship.

One calls it giving back.

That also describes Let's Move, a new project recently undertaken with KVK hospitals.

It brings basic dance training to troubled youths at a residential treatment facility in Casey K. You know, they're excited for something new, and it's a place for them to get away from the chaos that they're in, to walk in there and be able to just not think about anything else for a little while, but how to move my body and what's going on.

When you're there.

You see these kids smiling.

You see these kids, playing, being creative, feeling comfortable in their own skin to be able as a person, to provide, it is a privilege.

Community support has nurtured this program specifically, and the school's quest for excellence in general.

And then again, as we do that.

But it's hard to picture.

So much growth in such a short time.

If it weren't for the creative couple at its core.

Lift.

As much as I'm saying that we've been for 20 years together, I actually think if we were an average couple, we've been together for 40, right?

Because we live together, we worked together, everything has been together.

But she's an incredible partner.

I think that she's one of the best teachers I know.

She's a very smart lady.

She married right?

One of the most popular attractions at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit is the glassblowing shop.

They're mesmerized.

Tourists watch skilled artisans reduce glass to a honey like consistency as they recreate early American glassware.

Here's their story.

I got started in glassblowing through college.

I went to the College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit, and while I was there, I was kind of an undecided student and fell into a glassblowing class and changed my major.

Right then there, the spontaneity of the material really lends itself to the fluidity of being creative in the moment, and that's what really drew me into working with glass.

What we do here is we create really American historical recreations, and what we do is we'll tell from our collection of early American, glassware, and we will take it and reproduce it for the visiting public.

And you can make glass that is an art or glass that is functional.

And so it really relies on the artists, you know, skill and the artists, you know, conceptual framework.

We are here as our own artists.

Here we are ourselves.

This is what we do year round.

full time jobs.

And we're here to convey the artistry of glassblowing and give people a sense of the history of it as well.

Traditionally, it was, a very regimented factory setting.

So you'd have teams of workers, you know, creating glass at different benches, all working on the same case.

So one team would be starting it, one team would be finishing it, and it would be working full production nonstop.

Historically, what would happen was the glass makers would come from other countries, and then they would bring that with them, their own designs.

And so having a piece that was really reflective of the early American time period, made us really want to try to capture that essence.

What we do is the same traditional techniques that really came about in 50 BC, when the Phoenicians invented glassblowing.

All the tools are pretty much exactly the same.

They kind of got them right, right out of the box, but we would use the same traditional techniques, just modern technology, to fuel our furnaces.

The process of making glass starts with the melting of the silica sand.

Once that is melted for about 24 hours, we'll take that and we will gather it out of the furnace at about 2100°F.

After that, we will take it and shape it below it, and then we will flip it around and do the finishing work.

On the open side, we work in teams of two.

Generally there's what is called a gaffer or the main glassblower and his assistant.

And so what we'll do is the assistant will bring over additional portions of glass called gathers, and the gaffer will take those and manipulate them using the various tools within the process.

It's not just glassblowing, that's what everyone thinks.

And when they come here, they want to see us actually blowing into the blowpipe.

And that is actually a small portion of what we do.

The majority of it is based on using tools to manipulate the glass.

Since the glass is so hot out of 2000 degrees, we can't touch it with our hands.

So we use different tools.

there's jacks, there's diamond shears, tweezers, all these variety of tools that will help us shape and manipulate the glass, depending on the complexity of the piece, will work anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour.

It makes it, very challenging.

the more years you do it, the more efficient you get it working.

But in the beginning, it becomes very difficult to manage your your time well.

And so, you know, you have to really be planning and thinking ahead when we're completed, the glassblowing process, we will take it and we will break it off from the front rod, and we will, put it into one of our annealing things.

It's basically a big electric kiln, and it's set at 900 degrees at the end of the day, we'll run a computer program that will slowly pull it down about 50 degrees an hour.

We've recently expanded our product line from not only historical recreations to more of contemporary designs that we have based on our, collection, but we've taken them and added more of a modern twist.

You know, you can go to a store and get glasses that are made by a machine for pennies on the dollar.

But when you get a piece that is handmade by an artist, you really get to capture that moment when the artist was creating it.

And I feel like that is what will never go away.

People will always want that.

To.

We have dug into our Louisiana Digital Media archives for this week's Louisiana Treasures segment.

We found a clip from 1981 showing the tremendous effort that has been invested in preserving the architecture of historic New Orleans.

Most of the historic rehabilitation work completed or now underway in Louisiana involves business and residential development.

It is development not only encouraged by the desire to preserve something old, it is an investment encouraged by good old American tax incentives.

That's one reason why so many old homes are turning up as offices, and why others are being made into fancy, high priced apartments, and a reason why not all of the smart money today is just being invested in the modern towers of steel, glass and concrete that dominate the skylines of our cities.

There is an epidemic of preservation and restoration, and a desire to go back to the old neighborhoods in New Orleans and that epidemic, on the part of so many, has raised the value of the properties in the older neighborhoods.

So, the price tag has gone up because the demand has gone up.

and I hope it continues.

Henry Lambert is a New Orleans developer who is taking advantage of a 1966 congressional tax law that allows generous investment write offs and depreciation of historic rehabilitation.

Lambert gets the write offs by participating in a government program aimed at preserving historically significant buildings 50 years old or older.

In order to qualify, however, he must meet strict rehabilitation guidelines that are checked by the state Office of Historic Preservation field Representative Gordon McDowell.

Henry once you got into this building and started removing some of the bad stucco and, did you find any structural problems in this building that you hadn't seen before?

Last time I was down here, were looking at Gordon, as you remember, when we went through this building, we found some interior structural problems on the second floor.

Right.

This particular project, the conversion of three shotgun houses in the French Quarter into 12 apartments, represents a $260,000 investment for the property and 300,000 more for the rehabilitation.

But since the buildings are in a historic district, the French Quarter, Lambert and his partners can choose between tax options that allow them to write off the entire cost of renovation in five years, or accelerate the depreciation on another schedule while taking a 10% credit against other taxable income initially.

As far as tax consequences, anyone who's got a certain amount of cash available, it's to their great value that they take advantage of it.

Now, of course, it's to the great value of society that they do so too, because as we were explaining, these buildings were gravely deteriorated.

And they, one of them, portions of it weren't in, danger of collapse.

They had been vandalized and vacant for years.

And, so today you can see them as they might have been seen in 1870 or as the masonry building around 1830.

Of course, efforts to preserve artistic expression aren't exactly confined to Louisiana.

We go north to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Now to see the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be exhibited in the United States.

Museum curator Vivian Green takes us inside the exhibition Italian Futurism 1909 to 1944 Reconstructing the Universe, she said.

Futurism encompasses every art form imaginable, from sculpture to free form poetry.

This exhibition differs dramatically from other presentations in the United States, because it is the first presentation on Italian Futurism that looks at the full breadth of the movement, not just painting and sculpture and literature and manifesting, but also design, architecture, photography, ceramics, film, dance and so forth.

The Italian Futurist movement began with a man named F2, Marinetti, who was an Italian intellectual, and he wrote the Founding and Futurist Manifesto, which he published in the Figaro in Paris in 1909.

He wanted to push Italy into the modern age.

He calls for an abolition of museums and the past, and embraces the machine and modernity and speed.

And those are all the themes that they pick up on.

Umberto Boccioni was a first generation futurist.

His sculpture, A Unique Forms of Continuity and Space from 1913, was originally done in plaster, and then a posthumous exhibition that happened soon after his death.

Dignity had cast stunning bronze.

What we hoped for was to emphasize a little bit of the paradox that is part of Futurism, in that they're claiming modernity, but he's working in plaster, which is a 19th century material.

And when you learn more about the sculpture, you learn that he's also looking very much to Rodin's Walking Man, although he's making an incredible, innovative sculpture, Boccioni is using a single form to depict this idea of continuous movement, and I like to say it's sort of a superhero in the way it looks, because it really does look like he's about to take off into space or something along those lines.

There's something intrinsically modern, I think even to a little kid who looks at the sculpture.

The futurist went from being a radical left wing movement in the early teens to moving to the right, and is now associated very much with fascism, which is a very complicated story.

Because the futurists were not the favorite artists of the fascists.

Marinetti ends up marrying a woman artist named Benedetta Coppa, who goes by the name Benedetta.

She is particularly important because she earns one of the few commissions the futurists get under fascism.

One of them is five large scale paintings that decorate the conference room at the Palermo Post Office.

They are the syntheses of communications and panels address telephone and telegraph, communication, radio, overland, maritime and aerial.

What's interesting about these works is that they actually go against quite a few futurist ideas.

They're citing Pompeii and fresco painting.

They're made of temporary encaustic.

They have the very soft pastel colors, triptychs and triptychs associated with religious painting.

And yet it's being employed for this very modernist room and for these incredibly technological themes.

This particular panel, you have this incredible aerial view with sort of planetary imagery and landscapes seen from above.

The whole idea of these new perspectives of the plane could give you was incredibly exciting for futurists and for other artists.

But I think the understanding of Italy is much the one that Marinetti was trying to break out of, which is it's the Roman Empire and the Colosseum and the Renaissance in the Sistine Chapel.

Italy did have this very important avant garde historical movement and deserves study.

And that'll do it for this edition of Art rocks.

But remember, you can always find episodes of the show at lpb.org/art rocks.

And meanwhile, Country Roads magazine is a great place to find out what's going on in the arts all across the state.

So until next week, I'm James Fox Smith and thanks for watching.