>> Coming up on NYC-Arts a profile of artist Jeffrey Gibson whose beadwork, ceramics, sculptures and paintings are influenced by Cherokee and Choctaw tradition.

Jeffrey Gibson: You know, when you're a foreigner you don't entirely understand what you're looking at or what you're hearing all the time.

So you have this kind of subjective comprehension of the world around you that is an estimated guess.

A look at a highlight in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum.

Stacy C. Hollander: Jean Marcel St. Jacques gathered the detritus of his home and started fashioning what he called wooden quilts, paying homage to his great-grandfather, who was a Hoodoo man and a junk collector, and his great-grandmother, who was a quilt maker.

And a trip to the Met and the major exhibition, Van Gogh's Cypresses, a subject which captivated the artist during the two years he spent in the South of France.

The exhibit marks the 170th-anniversary of Van Gogh's birth and features over 40 works, many of which have rarely -- if ever -- been on view.

>> Funding for NYC-ARTS is made possible by Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, Jody and John Arnhold, the Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for Dance, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, Charles and Valerie Diker, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Nancy Sidewater Foundation, Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation, and Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Additional funding provided by members of Thirteen.

Paula: Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I'm Paula Zahn on location at El Museo del Barri at Fifth Avenue and 105th Street.

It is the nation's oldest museum dedicated to preserving the art and culture of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States.

Having celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019, it was a historic milestone for an institution that started in a classroom and is now at the top of New York City's Museum Mile.

During the spring of 1969, a collective of black and Puerto Rican parents, teachers and activists in Central and East Harlem got together to speak out about the needs of the community and their families.

They demanded from their school district more study materials and lessons that reflected the students' racial and cultural backgrounds.

Raphael Montanez Ortiz, a local artist and high school teacher, took the lead and created materials for schools on Puerto Rican art and history.

But instead of just making a few posters or worksheets, Ortiz re-imagined the project and founded what is now known as El Museo del Barrio.

The name of the museum translates to "the museum of the neighborhood," a nod to the fact that the institution would be of and for the people of East Harlem, also known as "El Barrio."

By introducing young people to this cultural heritage, El Museo is creating the next generation of museum-goers, while satisfying the growing interest in Caribbean and Latin American art of a broad national and international audience.

Currently on view is "Something Beautiful: Reframing the Coleccion," one of the museum's most ambitious presentations in over two decades.

It features over 500 artworks, including new acquisitions and artist commissions, with the displays rotating over the course of one year.

Themes and motifs reappear across sections to create a larger conversation throughout the exhibition.

The title The Streets Transformed is borrowed from the name of a photo by Jaime Permuth which explores the infinite potential of the street.

As sites of civic life, streets offer highly visible platforms for both staged and spontaneous actions.

These community events include performances, parades, strikes and protests.

"Pathos, Hope, Glory" features the portrait, one of the most celebrated artistic genres and among the most important forms of commemoration.

By representing their peers - or themselves - artists create new ties with history, concealing and revealing powerful relations central to the social order.

The works presented here span a vast time period including one example from the 18th century.

Other works depict familiar and unfamiliar faces to convey the widest range of human emotion.

"Abstraccionistas" presents work by women artists whose practices challenge and expand the field of abstraction.

Working across locations such as Los Angeles, New York, Peru and Panama, their paintings, sculptures, textiles and ceramics explore the possibilities of non-figurative art.

The works range from organic forms to more hard-edged geometries.

The art of these innovators reveals the limitations of narratives that have centered on white male artists within Western understanding of abstraction.

Tonight on our program we'll meet artist Jeffrey Gibson.

Born in Colorado Springs, Gibson grew up around the world, thanks to his father's career with the Department of Defense.

He spent his childhood in Korea and Germany before eventually moving back to the States.

After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, he went to London to study at the Royal College of Art.

His beadwork, ceramics, sculptures, and paintings are influenced by Cherokee and Choctaw tradition.

Inspired by sampled and remixed pop music, he combines his cultural heritage with minimalism and abstraction.

His studio is located in Hudson, New York, in an old elementary school, which Gibson and his husband, sculptor Rune Olsen, converted into studio spaceo•now home to a growing artistic community.

Jeffrey Gibson: Growing up as a foreigner, is something that I think about a lot now.

You know, when you're a foreigner you don't entirely understand what you're looking at or what you're hearing all the time.

So you have this kind of subjective comprehension of the world around you that is an estimated guess.

I think about that a lot in terms of how I use materials, because I use a lot of materials that I think many people may not know the context that I'm drawing them from or what the culture is or the history is.

So my mother's family lives in Oklahoma, my father's family lives in Mississippi, and those Choctaw and Cherokee cultures are extremely different.

So when I would go there it would be to visit my family.

I never wanted to observe my family.

You want to be a participant in your family.

So we don't look at each other and think, "Oh, that's Native American."

Then I began thinking you know, what was it about the quilts that grandma made, or what was it about the jewelry that she wore or the dresses that she made, what did the song mean that she would sing?

And then it becomes something culturally specific, I suppose.

But otherwise it's just kind of inherently familial.

It really started from a place of like I want to take part in all of these things.

I want to know how to bead.

And then that starts the pattern, it starts off design, it starts off color choices, it starts off the challenge of what you can actually do with beads.

I wanted to make found object work and over the course of time, sometimes they are mashed together.

I'm interested in exploring the transformative nature of materials and how the language can shift from a beaded triangle to a painted triangle to a woven triangle and what those three different versions of a triangle mean.

There was this period of club music that was the transition of analog music into digital, and it was the sampling and the turn tables where people could sample music that was really, had an impression on me.

So this kind of repetitive nature of repeating and picking something from one context and sticking it into another one and making something new.

I can spend my time in the studio mashing up, remixing, remaking, taking apart, reconstructing.

And I can invite other people to take part in that with me.

I think it's important, just to be transparent about the process.

We acknowledge the assistants all the time, as much as we can.

If it was just me making, for instance, a punching bag, we would be seeing one a year.

The lines between craft and what's, you know, historically been thought of as fine art: the decorative, the embellishment, all of those things, in this environment, are equalized.

If you look at Pow Wow garments they're so loud and colorful.

So with that as my inspiration in many ways, there was no limit to the combinations of colors.

It's more thinking about what the color does in combination with each other.

So it's either really kind of pop or electric or reflective or optic.

I do have an attraction between the idea of minimalism and how minimalism leads towards like maximal density.

I used to think that minimalism was about maintaining this quiet silent place like this void unfilled with things and now I realize that the removal of information, when you're thinking about minimalism, is in an effort to actually be able to see how much is present in a very small space or in a very limited palette.

The idea is to like say slow down the color red and understand how many shades of red there are.

Slow down the color blue, understand how many shades of blue, tones of blue.

And then of course it opens right back up into including every single color.

My training is entirely process based abstract artist.

But the text was always meant to name this entirely subjective language of abstraction.

And at some point when the audience wasn't able to get the content that I felt I was putting into the abstraction, I decided to just start putting the text directly on it.

Most of the titles come from appropriated lyrics.

And then it just kind of hit.

There was something about the understanding that these words describe this that what you're looking at, became a really big part of the work for me.

People who were looking at my work at the time would always question, "Well how does this relate to who you are?"

You know, "How does this relate to you as a Native American person, as a gay person?"

"Is this subjectivity somehow representative of that experience?"

And it seemed no matter how hard I would say, "No it's not", it almost compounded more for people to look for connections in the work.

And at some point I decided to own the words Native American, to own the words gay, and not give them any kind of power over determining who I am.

But I was fine with the work being described in that way because it is true.

This is my experience and in the 20th century at that time and even today, that's very much how we describe each other.

I acknowledge that we are all very, very layered, complicated people.

In our contemporary world we don't always have the opportunity to explore that or to share that with each other, but it's what you can do in art.

Next, we'll visit the American Folk Art Museum, located across from Lincoln Center.

Since 1961, this museum has been celebrating the creativity of artists whose talents have been refined through personal experience rather than formal artistic training.

Its collection includes more than eight thousand works of art from four centuries representing nearly every continent.

Stacy C. Hollander: Jean Marcel St. Jacques identifies as a 12th generation afro creole from Louisiana.

Around 16 years ago when he returned to New Orleans with his family, he bought a house that had been a rooming house for single male musicians run by a woman named Mother Sister.

And he bought this rooming house, but shortly after he moved in, New Orleans experienced the enormous heartbreaking devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Jean Marcel St. Jacques' home was destroyed and rather than giving into despair, he gathered the detritus of his home and started fashioning what he called wooden quilts, paying homage to his great-grandfather, who was a Hoodoo man and a junk collector, and his great-grandmother, who was a quilt maker.

If you look closely at the pieces of wood, they are studded with nails and all the other kinds of architectural and construction elements that you would see in a home.

He uses house paint to paint these pieces of wood, but he was always mindful of the palette of his great grandmother and her strip quilts.

When I asked him about the process that he uses in coloring and making and constructing his wooden quilts, he said, "well, like any good Creole cook, the secret is in the roux, but I ain't telling you all what that is."

Jean Marcel has embedded two self-portraits among the pieces of wood and it shows him in his guise as a spiritual leader practicing what he calls folk magic, as the descendant of a Hoodoo Man.

The title of this piece, "Mother's Sister may have sat in that chair when she lived in this house before me," it's referring to Mother's Sister, who ran the boarding home for single musicians and there are two sides that fashion a chair.

One is upright and one is down, so he has in fact instilled physical remains of her presence in his home into this piece that he has created to pay homage to his ancestors and to his own Louisiana history and to the suffering of those who survived Hurricane Katrina in his Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.

Now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is "Van Gogh's Cypresses," a major exhibition that focuses on the artist's fascination with the cypress tree.

The exhibit marks the 170th-anniversary of Van Gogh's birth and features over 40 works, many of which have rarely -- if ever -- been on view.

Thematic groupings of related paintings and drawings show Van Gogh's exploration of a motif that both captivated and challenged him during the two years he spent in the South of France.

Also included are drawings and illustrated letters, all of which trace the artist's development of the subject.

The first gallery is called "The Roots of his Invention: Arles, February 1888-May 1889."

It highlights Van Gogh's earliest works inspired by the cypresses, created during the fifteen months he spent in Arles.

It was here that his ideas and imagery on the subject took hold, which he further developed in the months ahead.

In a letter to his brother Theo in 1888 he wrote: "I need a starry night with cypresses - or perhaps above a field of ripe wheat."

Shortly after leaving Arles, Van Gogh took refuge at an asylum in Saint-Rémy.

There he created two iconic paintings - The Starry Night and Wheat Field with Cypresses.

Here paintings which have not been exhibited together since 1901 are displayed side by side.

The third gallery shows Van Gogh's continued preoccupation with cypresses during his final months at Saint-Rémy.

Featuring works created in his studio, as well as many plein air views of the cypress, this gallery illustrates the nature of Van Gogh's art as a work in progress, spurred on by his remarkable determination and resourcefulness.

As he wrote again in a letter to his brother Theo on June 25, 1889, "The cypresses still preoccupy meo•because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them."

The exhibition runs through August 27th.

And now, another curator's choice.

Roberta Olsen: Welcome to the New York Historical Society, New York City's oldest museum founded in 1804.

I'm Roberta Olsen, I'm curator of drawings here.

Behind me is an incredible tour de force painting by Louis Lang who was an immigrant from Germany who studied in France and Italy and came to New York and was known specifically for genre and portraits.

This is really his piece de resistance, his major painting.

He did it not on commission, but because he was inspired to paint this work which is the return of the 69th regiment.

The Irish regiment in 1862 from the seat of war Lang has used this as a kind of showpiece to showcase his ability as a genre painter, as a portraitist and as a landscapist landscapist.

The canvas is pre-cinematic, your eye cannot stop.

It flickers over all of the little vignettes that you see here.

There are many things that move you around in this canvas, not only the wonderful small anecdotal details and narratives that you can get lost in, but if you look at the harbor you can almost see the ships beginning to pass.

There is this feeling of the restlessness, the sort of energy of New York that was part of the water and part of the harbor.

The entire painting shows a current event in a very historical, monumental way, 7 feet by 11 1/2 feet, he has blown it up to nearly life sized.

The canvas depicts the arrival of the 69th regiment downtown, near Bowling Green in what is now Battery Park.

To the left is Castle Garden which was built on a fort and it was a sort of clearing place for immigration before Ellis Island.

To the right you see on the very far right the Washington Hotel with spectators cheering on this return of the sons of Erin, the Irish regiment, from New York coming back from their service of three months.

They had just undergone the Battle of Bull Run which was a loss for the Union cause but they had done spectacularly in that and had held off the Confederates.

There are some major historical figures here, the man on horseback raising his hand.

This is Captain Meagher, who was actually an Irishman, a hero during this particular war.

The actual commander of the regiment Brigadier General Corcoran, he is not present physically in this painting but he certainly is in spirit.

Because we see him and his portrait being held up by the newsboy at the far right who is hawking these papers.

He was at the time wasting away in a confederate prison.

He had been captured at the battle of Bull Run but he is here still inspiring the heroes of the regiment.

It's a patriotic painting, notice all of the American flags here you also have Irish flags.

It's a docudrama, it's filled with sentiment, it has all of these things which engage the viewer both emotionally, intellectually and also in terms of current events.

Among the compelling vignettes is the mother in the yellow dress welcoming home her wounded son, you see the two boys fighting over the riffle in the foreground.

You'll see other things.

You'll see like a soldier coming down with his leg bandage and there is a priest who is ministering to these people and then dead center you have the march.

You have all the young drummer boys and you can almost hear the drums going rat-tat-tat as they march up Broadway in this procession that is meant to celebrate the heroes of the Union cause.

Lang's monumental canvas is really a microcosm, to look at the macrocosm of the larger painting collection.

It's kind of a portal, a lens in which to jump into to the rest of the offerings at the New York Historical Society.

I hope you enjoyed our program tonight.

I'm Paula Zahn on location at El Museo del Barrio.

Thanks so much for joining us.

To enjoy more of your favorite segments on NYC-Arts visit our website at nyc-arts.org.

Paula: Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I'm Paula Zahn.

Philippe: I'm Philippe de Montebello at the Tisch WNET studios at Lincoln Center.

Wendy Whelan: Classical and modern dance are extremely different, and I have so much more to learn before I can differences.

Sheldon Harnick: And when I listen to Yip Harburg's lyrics in that, I suddenly thought that's what I want to do with my life.

Gregory Crewdson: My pictures resides in very intimate, very private moments.

Vijay Iyer: My primary way of playing piano is by improvising.

Alice Greenwald: You are in some respects on sacred ground.

Dee Dee Bridgewater: A woman came to see me perform and said how would you like to play Billie Holiday?

Jodi Hauptman: I think one of the essential things we learned is that Matisse used pens to compose his work.

Renee Fleming: Viewers are surprised when you're doing a piece 100 years ago and think oh my gosh this could be now.

Anne Umland: The cardboard guitar is the very first of that moment of realization.

Ivo Van Hove: suddenly you come and present something and get applause.

Great.

You know?

♪ >> Funding for NYC-ARTS is made possible by Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, Jody and John Arnhold, the Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for Dance, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, Charles and Valerie Diker, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Nancy Sidewater Foundation, Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation, and Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Additional funding provided by members of Thirteen.