Next on Gallery America, we drop by legendary Chickasaw artist Mike Larsen's studio That and more beginning now.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America, a show that brings the best of art in Oklahoma and around the nation.

Funny thing about art is, if you think about it, no one has a clear set definition for it.

And at best, we only have like a temporary agreement of what art can be.

well, this first artis piece of me is an Oklahoma icon.

Chickasaw artist Mike Larsen.

And he believes that art tells history better than words to meet Mike Larsen.

I think I'm a better painter than I was ten years ago.

Better than I was maybe a year ago.

And I would like to think that each painting is a little better than the last because painting is called ‘why we dance.

It's a group of chickasaw dancers.

why we dance?because that's who we are.

We have always danced.

We dance when we're happy.

Where that's when we're sad o that's when new babies are born.

We're dance.

When people die, it's our culture.

I did not discover truly that I was chickasaw until I was just like a teenager.

My dad was chickasaw, but I never lived with him.

Like I said, I was a teenager when I started looking for my history.

So once I started looking I found out how wonderful I was.

It became a life's work.

And we talk about the most important things that we have doen,.

I'd think the ballerina mural is Probably first, “the flower spiri kind of the spirit” painting..

Here we have five ballerinas, all Native American all from Oklahoma, all renowned at roughly the same time in history.

We have some really yummy things down there.

At the culture center, the arrival, the sculpture piece.

The arrival is a depiction of the Chickasaw people when they arrived out here in Oklahoma Territory.

We did seventy two paintings of 72 living elders.

We always had a facilitator with those who spoke chickasaw, because some of these people we painted did not speak English.

And so we would go we would interview these people with a facilitator.

I would sketch.

Martha would take a couple of hundred photographs while this person is talking, will have ha an incredible effect on us both.

I think.

Well, we're both artists, which is awesome.

Turns out I'm a better businessperson than I am an artist.

I paid the web page.

I take care of business.

I do photos for every project.

You know, Here's a photograph from Sunrise from our front porch.

And, you know, Mike is known for his sky scape because of the Centennial stamp.

And we wrote a book together.

We've written a couple of books together, but we have a new work of historical fiction out that we wrote together.

We are a team, a two person team and we do everything together.

Sometimes I'll think something and Martha will say, Do you see?

It's almost like we're connected.

Yeah, almost like.

Like we like each other.

We like each other.

The fire started about the same time the rain did.

And by the time fire crews arrived, the flames were shooting through the roof.

Where?

Well, studi fire in Oklahoma City in 1991.

I have some really good Indian artifacts and of a wonderful library.

And it all went up in flames.

Up to that point, I was painting things that I kne would sell, play muted colors, browns, yellows, that kind of thing.

And so after the fire with determination, we made our change.

And I starte using a lot of very pure color, a lot of red, a lot of right yellows, brilliant blues, pure color.

I discovered quickly that it worked.

This is called Mikey Red.

I hate going into a gallery or something like that.

And you see somebody just that close to a painting and listen to them say, Wow, look at the detail.

One detail does not make the painting.

You see, I'd rather people get this far away.

They're Wow, look at that painting.

Instead of saying, Wow, look at that detail.

If you look, thi part is exactly in the center.

The center of the painting is right there.

I wanted to focus there.

But, you know, even though it is a focus, very important that that part is in there, she is holding it.

Emily DICKERSON full blood chickasaw a woman she was holding a part made by another chickasa artist named Johanna Underwood, who is very famous for her pottery.

my thinking is art is history and has been been since the dawn of man.

Those paintings and things that they did eons ago told the history of those people.

Quite frankly, to me, better than words.

And I think, you know, in a small way we are a part of history now because of the paintings that we do.

I do try and leave off anything before someone would call it finished.

We leave something for you, the viewer, to look at and maybe find yourself.

This next artist is from Lawton, Oklahoma, and his paintings have been bought by all kinds of big name celebrities.

The goal of his art isn't history, though.

It's the present.

How we change the perception of African-Americans today.

meet Robert Peterson.

Robert Peterson.

my name is Robert Peterson.

And I'm an international contemporary artist based from Lawton Oklahoma, a small military town.

It's home.

It's where I graduated high school, married my wife, had all three of our children an found out who I was going to be.

My background is where I start with first and it kind of sets the mood for the rest of the painting will work.

It allows the story to be told of the people that I'm painting.

Ten years ago, when I was driving the fork truck, it was like I thought that that was wha I was going to be doing for rest my life because it was good pay, great benefits.

I was okay with that then.

But looking at where I'm at now and some of the things that I've been able to experience, yeah, I'm so glad that God had different plans for me.

I actuall got hurt running on a treadmill.

the treadmill broke,my hip popped, and I immediately felt this horrible burning pain.

And so I went and picked up some paint and some canvases from Hobby Lobby and then went home.

And I think that is a part of what helped to get me to where I am today, because I haven't slowed down and I refuse to slow down.

I mean, like this year alone, I think I've gotten put into like four or five museums.

I got some amazing collectors.

But I don't say it as a brag.

I mean, I say it because like, it's it's mind blowing to me.

I want my art to be a part of what changes the way people, black people are experienced.

What I'm doing is tryin to capture a moment of my truth and the truth that I that I see and I experience.

I'm with the people who I surround myself with.

Right.

Because if you look in the media, you don't see our stories.

Told them enough.

the world has said for hundreds of years that you're animals, thugs, thieves, worthless, dumb, a target overlooked and 3/5 of a man.

Let me be the one to tell you that many of us see you and you are so much more than that.

You are worthy, you're beautiful.

You are amazing.

You are brilliant.

You are kind, you're creative.

You are capable.

You are radiant.

listen to me Young black boys and black men of all ages.

You are kings.

It's how I feel.

I feel like if more people heard this and believed this, then we would have greater outcome within the black community.

The way that I actually got involved with doing the Black Heritage Stamp for this year, I got an email from a gentleman named Michael and he said, I love your work.

So I've been following you for about a year on social media, and I love your your paintings.

I love the stories behind the paintings.

And I think that you'd be great to do, you know, a stamp.

And he told me about Ernest Gaines.

And I was like, I have no idea about his.

I said but I'm going to figure him out.

Ernest Gaines is an amazing author.

I was born on a plantation in 1933.

I started reading and reading and reading.

I fell in love with books, but I was not finding me in the books that I was reading because I was reading novels by white writers, but they were not about my people.

Only thing I could think about was to write about the South, about my home I'd come from.

He told stories of of stories about black life during his time.

I think it was his truth.

I think that it was something that, you know, at the time needed to be spoken about in a way that people could receive it and understand it.

You know I think that book has helped me become a better person and anyone else would read it by become a little bit better than he was before they read the book.

And that's what I try to do.

And so I think that the same goes with my work.

I think that it's in your face, but it's not so much in your face, so much that you are offended by it, but it still will create some form of dialog to make you question what's going on and want to learn more about what is being said in the painting.

I think peace is greater than love because you have people that will love somebody and they'll be miserable because they love that person so much.

And I think that if you put peace first, it makes everything in life greater.

I think peace is something that I found ten years ago.

I got off the food truck and picked up a paintbrush.

And so this is something that because I've experienced true peace, I want everybody to taste it.

This next artist from Norman, Oklahoma, is a unforgettable character, Barry Zimmerman.

He is going to give us a demonstration on something that he has done tens of thousands of times.

Chalk art as Barry will say, as you'll see right on!

My name is H. Barry Zimmerman.

I'm fixin to draw with my eyes closed with both hands.

I never know where I'm goin to draw up to the last second.

I have no idea.

But there's a thing that is just like in charge.

Sometimes it will not let me go any like, Nope, we're going to go draw right now.

Barry, That guy.

I like him in charge.

I let him loose.

I'm let him loose.

Know it is.

I'll come out to just be like evil.

Look at clouds.

I've been doing this forever.

I've drawn 20,000 of these drawings in this building.

It's the only way to get good at anything.

You're just doing it and doing it and doing it.

Good.

You have bands, you would practice, songs you would go play and people would show up and you had a built in audience with that.

And when I quit the band, I lost my mind because I didn't have an audience.

I'll still make an art and it seemed pointless.

And then social media happened and I could share things if people were like, man, that's cool.

Let's go write my thingWhich is, You're not my blueprint.

I've been saying that my whole life because it's true.

It's a message for the kids in punk rock.

You got to be who you be because that's in you're carrying around that your house.

I know I used to do a lot of art where don't buy anything, just what you find.

And I used to clean the chalkboards here for you for years and years.

They told me to throw away their chalk.

They're using that sidewalk chalk, throw that away because they're going to ruin the boards.

And I was like, I can't throw this away now.

I got to figure out something to do with it.

And so this is I can't see very well.

I can't drive.

I've got to walk everywhere.

So I draw from my house to here on the sidewalk.

And then that thing kicked off this chalk thing In the late fifties, early sixties, there was a drug they used to give pregnant ladies to help them with morning sickness.

It caused a bunch of birth defects.

And I was one of those kids.

And really the damaging thing was that every day I did not have my homework because I could not read, but I did have where I could sit by myself and just draw and just write poems and and just daydream.

All my art come from my poetry thing in my head, and I think everybody's got a poetry.

It is what it is.

Gentlemen, my friend Barry Zimmerman, first of all, check out these new pants out tonight.

Like I write a lot about my depression and my emotional anxiousness and all that.

And then I got all thi Willy Wonka Hanna-Barbera stuff going on, that's awesome.

And I love that stuff that got turned up pretty good.

that guy turned out pretty evil looking.

It's like I would have never drawn those drips kind of thing to go down all the way out that when you close your eyes you definitely free yourself up.

But you don't want inspiration to catch yo like laying around doing nothing When inspiration shows up, when you're going to do the great thing you need to be drawing at that time, you're not going to do the great thing all the time.

So sometimes you've got to be drawing when you're doing the craft, the sometimes the the thing will happen and you're telling your story and there you are.

You know, the thing the thin I always say I am on the earth.

I am the greatest, very Barry Zimmerman style drawer of all time.

to see more of Barry's artwork.

Follow him on Instagram at eight.

@HBZart Last, we're going to meet an artist from Florida who, like Barry also used to be a punk rocker.

But her art form uses something a little more malleable than chalk.

Have a look.

Name is Osa Atoe and I'm a studio potter and I was living in New Orleans, Louisiana back in 2013, and I was working at a coffee shop.

My main thing back then was being a musician.

I was a punk musician.

I played in bands since I wa probably in my early twenties, so to make ends meet.

I made coffee during the day and one of my coworkers mentioned that there was a new pottery studio in town and he just thought that I might be into it.

So I ended up taking one class and just falling in love with it.

If you have a bunch of, you know, manufactured cups or plates or bowl and they are all in a matching set, you just grab on and you throw some food on it.

But with handmade pottery, you know that someone's time is invested in it.

You know that that time is now as a physical object.

And you are using something that has has literally come from somebody's mind and it makes the mea more significant or the beverage or anything like that.

One of the things that's so special about clay is the fact that you can use it in so many different forms.

I think that it gives people a grounding sense.

I mean, you're literally working with Earth, but the fact that you can use it as a dry powder, a liquid in its plastic form, you can't do that with wood, right?

So I think there's just something about it being a mutable material and the fact that you're literally workin with the ground under your feet, it's just an interesting experience.

Here locally I feel she's definitely going to be one of those artists that opens up the doors for other artists.

So she's doing something with her work, her art, her collection of pottery that no one else is doing.

I collected wild clay samples for many years before I even used it.

I just thought it was interesting.

We're Sarasota Bay and we're just a couple of blocks from my house before settlers came.

This is an indigenous meeting place for millennia.

You can find fossils here.

You can also find clay.

Some of the clay that we found fires to kind of a pale yellowish color.

But this is native Florida clay from Sarasota.

Well, when it's wet, it' a little bit on the sandy side.

It's very plastic, though, and easy to mold.

I've made little pinch pots with it and fired them.

People who use wild clay i their practice need to be able to collect large amounts of it to build their entire body of work on.

And up until recently, I didn't have access to large quantities of clay, which is partly why I didn't use it.

Being in my industry I'm kind of in the construction industry in general, and so I kind of have my ear to the groun on where projects are happening, where the earth is being disturbed or moved.

And so those are actually really good opportunities to access the clay, which could be buried under, you know, six, eight, ten, 12 feet of soil.

We probably have clay beneath our feet here, but we have no way to access it.

Commercial clay.

And while clay are just it's like it's night and day.

The way that they feel in you hand, it's completely different, the way that they behave.

And then also just the amount of labor.

So commercial clay is wonderful because it's just it's already processed, it's ready to go.

But wild Clay, there's a lot of labor that goes into that.

I would say it's almost a difference between going to the grocery store and buying a bag of spinach and eating spinach out of your garden.

It is work.

It's not a hobby.

It's not like it's more than an interest.

It runs through like every vein in her body.

I think because of who she is and because she doesn't typically fit into a box of an artist, specifically a ceramic artist, you don't think that someone like Osa, that's Nigerian-American, would even be interested in that type of work.

But she is.

And it's just really cool to see someone who doesn't typically fit that particular art medium.

Doing that work.Kaabo Cla Collective was founded in 2021.

Kaabo means welcome in Yoruba.

That's the languag my parents speak to each other.

It's a social and mutual aid network.

For Black Ceramicist.

I did start pottery in New Orleans which is a majority black city, but I was always the only black person in any of my classes.

It's not just the absenc of black people in those spaces.

It's the absence of black culture.

We have so much to add to culture.

We have a long histor of making pottery and sculpture.

So Kaabo clay, it's just been invaluable to me personally.

It's kind of like building wha I needed and then understanding that if I need it, other people need it too.

There's a lot of art in Sarasota, plenty of it.

The landscape, I feel like, is it needs a little bit more diversity and I feel like there's a lot more of hidden talent in Sarasota amenity that people don't know about.

And that's kind of where OSU kind of falls into that.

She's one of those up and coming artists that people may know outside of the region that a lot of people do know outside of the region.

But here in Sarasota, I feel like she is not as celebrated as I feel like she should be.

The lesson tha I get from working with Clay in general is having to collaborate what the material, especially when I work with while Clay, it doesn't behave like commercial clay and I have to change the way that I respond to it.

If I just try to force my will on it, it just won't work.

Also, there's so much about clay that's about waiting for the right time to do a specific thing.

And if you're impatient, it just won't work.

It just will not work.

So Clay has taught me to be more patient if I need to be more gentle.

But there's infinite lessons that Clay is always teaching.

that's all the time we have for Gallery America.

Thanks for joining us.

Remember, as always, you can see past episodes by visiting our Web site, OETA dot TV slash Gallery America or visiting the PBS app.

But before I let you go, I have a quick announcement.

After four years of producing and hosting Gallery America, this is my last episode.

I'm going to be moving to Oregon to be with my daughter.

And it has been an absolut honor presenting Oklahoma art, not just for you Oklahoma viewers, but we share these stories with art programs on PBS around the nation.

What fascinates me about art is that it is so open by its very definition.

It can be realistic paintings.

It could be paintings are a little more abstract.

It could be steel sculptures you see on the street.

It could be a dance.

It could be a song about personal pain.

It could be a comic book.

even a message that's painted on a motorcycle garage facing the highway.

So who gets to ultimately decide what art is?

Answers here.

You do?

Art is whatever you want it to be.

That's why we end every show in these works.

Stay arty Oklahoma.

Oklahoma.

Stay arty Oklahoma.

Stay arty Oklahoma.

They are arty Oklahoma.