♪ >> coming up on NYC arts.

A visit to the Brooklyn studio of a Cuban-American artist whose acclaimed works span a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, video, and large-scale murals.

>> I like the idea of translating a place or an experience from being in a place into a painting.

I've imagined myself dissecting a wall instead of painting a canvas.

Imagining that what I'm discovering by painting is the accumulation of the many years of what other people have done to a wall.

>> and the profile of versatile jazz pianist and composer -- >> music creates community.

It's power that we have as a species to do that.

♪ >> funding for NYC arts is made possible by The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Jody and John Arnold Charles and Valerie diker.

The Milton and salary Avery arts foundation.

The Nancy sign water foundation.

Ellen and James S Vargas.

This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York city Department of Public affairs who partner with the city Council.

Additional founding -- NYC arts is made possible in part by First Republic Bank.

>> First Republic Bank presents first things first.

First refers to our first priority, the clients who walk through our doors.

The first step, recognize that every client is an individual with unique needs.

First decree, be a bank whose currency is service in the form of personal banking.

This was First Republic's mission from our very first day.

It is still the first thing on our minds.

>> and by Swann auction galleries.

>> we have a different way of looking at auctions, offering books and fine arts since 1941, combining knowledge with accessibility.

♪ >> good evening and welcome to NYC arts.

On location at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, just a 35 minute train ride north from Grand Central station.

Located on the banks of the Hudson River, is the largest museum in Westchester County.

Its offerings include exhibitions of American art from the 19 century to the present day.

A state of the art planetarium, and outer empathy or, and a home on the national register historic places.

I'm here in the sitting room of Glenview, the mansion built in 1877 for Wall Street financier John Bon Trevor, his wife, and their family.

Architect of the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan designed Glenview as a magnificent castle like perch surrounded by the beauty of the natural world with views of the Hudson River and the palisades.

It's one of the first suburban homes made possible by the new commuter train lines.

The Glenview mansion is a magnificent representation of the early Gilded Age.

It features design and a core of the era's aesthetic movement, embracing straight-line furniture and handcrafted wood, often medieval in appearance and simply decorated.

The first floor contains six fully restored rooms, all of which are open to the public.

The Hudson River Museum began in 1919 as the Yonkers Art Association, a group of local artists and citizens.

Five years later, the Museum was established era Glenview.

In 1969, the modern wing opened, adding 15,000 square feet of gallery space.

Today, the museum is putting the finishing touches on the new West Wing, a structure overlooking the Hudson with spectacular views and expanded gallery space.

The permanent collection contains over 18,000 objects including decorative arts, historic textiles, paintings, works on paper, and photographs.

Highlights include a direct casting sculpture, created when the artist was artist in residence in the museum in 1995.

Sylvia slaves masterwork, a panorama of a picnic on the banks of the Hudson River.

And works by Hudson River school artists including George Innes and Fitzhenry Lane.

Currently On View is an ongoing exhibition, drawing from this permanent collection.

The Hudson River school was an American artistic movement, credited with inspiring the creation of our national parks.

Whether set in the bucolic Hudson Valley or other locations , these artworks explore romantic themes of the wild beauty of nature.

Also in this gallery is an exhibit patient celebrating an unexpected work by Edward Steichen.

He is best known as one of the 20th century's leading photographers.

However, he began his artistic career as a painter.

On View are three of the seven large-scale paintings created for a private townhouse in New York City.

For each panel, he adorns it with specific flora to convey aspects of their persona.

Edward Steichen, in all siltation of flowers, is On View through February 18, 2024.

On tonight's program, NYC arts visits the Brooklyn studio of a Cuban-American artist.

His critically acclaimed works span a variety of media including painting, sculpture, video, and large-scale murals.

They've been On View in galleries and museums in the United States as well as Cuba, Japan, and the U.K.

Composed of layers of paint, gestural drawing, and found materials, his work lies somewhere between abstraction and calligraphy.

His imagery is inspired by the weathered surfaces of buildings from the cities that he visits all over the world while engaging the viewer's imagination.

His work reflects contemporary political and social issues.

Some of his public works in our area include murals at the Brooklyn Academy of music, Barclays Center, and one World Trade Center.

♪ >> you always hear stories about artists starting off very young.

That was my case.

I was in Miami.

It was the early 80's.

Hip-hop culture was being born.

I felt very much a part of that.

I started painting with my friends basically around the city, painting walls.

My art teacher entered one of my drawings into the Scholastic Art award competition.

That eventually got me a scholarship to Savannah College of Art and design.

There, I got to experiment with all types of art and learn about art history more formally.

But I was also very interested in being true to what I was doing in Miami previously.

I like the idea of translating a place or an experience from being a place into a painting.

So I've imagined myself dissecting a wall instead of painting a canvas.

Imagining that what I'm discovering by painting is the accumulation of the many years of what other people have done to the wall.

But then you also have the environment.

The sun, the wind, the rain, storms.

So my paintings are inspired by what happens outside.

A lot of the techniques that I bring into the work come directly from thinking about construction, deconstruction.

About walls and architectural surfaces.

Why do I pay attention to cities the way that I do?

what am I looking for when I'm walking around?

for me, I'm interested in finding clues as to what is the dialogue that I'm having as an artist with the world.

I love characters.

Either I see a character that I want to photograph or I see something that I character did to a wall that I want to photograph.

So the mark left behind.

I think it's a habit that I developed over the years, looking at walls.

It's a kind of hieroglyphic that exists in our modern time.

It's just interesting.

As you walk along, you see language.

I was given the opportunity to do this mural in a library setting.

I wanted to do something that went to the roots of language.

So I layered tons and tons of writing to form a seascape of words.

The words that were written, although illegible, are the names of languages, tribes, scholars, artists, philosophers.

They are all layered as if you just tapped into this major universal symphony of words, all being spoken at the same time.

So that formed the painting.

Nature of language.

It's been talked about in my work, that is performing painting.

There's a certain movement that I feel is really necessary and a type of speed that is necessary for actual technique to work.

If you are doing a lot of blends and you are working with paint that dries very fast, you have to work really fast.

You have to have a certain agility to pull that off.

Sometimes, I want to do really tall strokes so I jump off a ladder.

When I first did it, it wasn't a decision.

I forgot I was on a ladder and when I did the line, it was too late.

I just kept the brush on the surface.

That is something I can use so I kept doing it.

At first, it was an accident.

Sculptural paintings from he really started when I was still at school.

It was 1992.

Hurricane Andrew came through Miami and devastated the city including my studio.

A lot of the works flew out the window.

I went around with friends looking for debris of my work and found some broken paintings.

I reassembled them without their debris and made the sculptural paintings.

It wasn't until 2014, the 25th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin wall.

I remembered that when that happened, the Iron Curtain was falling.

The Cold War was supposed to be over.

So as the Cuban community, the diaspora worldwide thought, what's going to happen with Cuba ?

what will change?

with Cuba, not much changed really until that same 25th anniversary when President Obama and President Castro announced normal relations that were to start taking place between the two countries.

I thought it was a really interesting time to introduce sculptural paintings that were representations of walls throughout the world.

Walls really exist not only physically but also in our minds.

We are witnessing many more barriers go up and many more borders being talked about, building new walls and things.

Going backwards with humanity, it was a way to show broken walls as a symbol of breaking walls aesthetically, physically, mentally, even spiritual.

When you come from a Cuban family, regardless of with -- if you are in Cuba or Switzerland.

Politics was just part of your everyday life.

Immigration is part of your everyday life.

Your parents are immigrants.

You are also an immigrant and a sense.

For me personally, I was learning English at the age of 10 here in the United States.

People looked at me as an immigrant even though I was born here.

Those themes are not just part of my work, they are part of my life.

♪ It was a project that existed previously with my friend JR.

They did it in Shanghai.

We were invited to the Havana biennial in 2012.

Rather than doing something separate, we collaborated on something.

Havana is one of the most textured cities in the world.

Meaning that its history in a way where you see the deterioration of it.

The people who have witnessed that are the elderly people in that society in Cuba.

I never really ret -- met my real grandparents.

Working with JR on this project, hearing their stories, translating their fortunes into large-scale like this was incredible.

In a country where you don't really have advertising, you have occasional pictures of Che Guevara, they were revolutionary heroes.

Local people automatically thought that if that person was important enough to be on a wall , they were like a revolutionary hero.

We sailed -- said, kind of.

They are survivors.

Art is one of the best tools to interpret the human condition.

There are things you can read in art and see an art that cannot be said verbally.

I think as artists, filmmakers, poets, writers.

What we are trying to do is bring to light the fact that there are many examples of how we can live in harmony.

The painting is 90 feet by 15 feet.

It was a painting commissioned in 2013 as a New York and New Jersey Port Authority.

It was for the World Trade Center.

It was a big responsibility that came with doing such a location.

But I did know that I wanted to make a painting that was respectful to the families of those who had lost people there, but also respectful to New York and that it also had a point of strength and resilience and harmony to bring people together.

I wanted it to have a lot of colors that would make the spectrum of unity, representing many different kinds of people that live in New York.

It really becomes a piece that's about, every day resilience.

New Yorkers and unity that we signify.

♪ >> now, this week's featured profile.

♪ >> I live in New York City.

I make music.

This space has a number of ancestors of my instrument of choice.

It's good to get to know them a little.

♪ I played violin for a long time.

The string and treatments here -- instruments here.

My heritage is from India.

So looking at all these instruments from different parts of Asia and Africa has been really inspiring for me.

My primary way of playing the pie M -- piano is by improvising.

I'm self-taught.

My main role models for how to do that are people like Salome is monk and Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock.

They all came from the African-American community.

They all made music defiantly against all odds.

They were exuberantly creative and brilliant innovators.

Improvisation is something they all do, all the time.

It's the way you walk down the street or drive a car or converse with people.

Another example is if you go out dancing.

Nobody told you exactly what to do or whom to do it with.

[LAUGHTER] So it's very normal to experience improvising.

I guess no one ever told me not to.

So that's what I do.

♪ Improvising with rules is something we are very familiar with.

There are a lot of examples from everyday life.

You can imagine like basketball.

Basketball is an extremely regulated situation with an unforeseen outcome.

That's kind of what we do when we play together.

It's not that different.

We have some ideas of how it could go.

We also try to open ourselves to what's happening right now and respond to each other.

That's infinite, that process.

There is no limit to it.

♪ What I found is that, just making something with somebody else brings out of you that you might not have access otherwise.

It's transformative.

We become something new.

♪ Not just do that.

But through that process, build something.

That takes patience.

That takes a lot of attention.

If -- even if there's repertoires involved, or playing some kind of groove.

It's still about what you do now.

♪ People often ask after we perform what percentage of that was improvised.

I think I understand the impulse to ask that question.

The person who was observing wants to know if I was making choices that she was experiencing.

It's about compassion and empathy.

It's about, we were there together.

Music is a force that creates community.

It's power that we have as a species to do that.

So that's what I'm trying to do.

>> next week on NYC arts, a look at the arts of Japan gallery which reflects 2000 years of fighter stick accomplishments -- artistic accomplishments.

>> a pair of folding screens that date from 1610.

These were made for the interior of the castle.

They have largely gold backgrounds which would have helped to reflect light in the dark interior of the castle and made the rooms more warm and glowing.

>> a visit to the noble maritime collection.

The historic snug Harbor cultural center on Staten Island.

>> our mission is to celebrate the people in traditions of New York Harbor.

We also celebrate the modern waterfront.

♪ >> a trip to the American folk Art Museum.

>> one of the most highly recognized American self-taught artists is the portrait painter Emmie Phillips.

1817 to 1820 or so, these portraits are very dreamy.

Beautiful pallets of these shimmering, muted colors.

♪ >> I hope you enjoyed our program this evening.

I'm on location at the Hudson River Museum.

Thanks for watching and see you next time.

To enjoy more of your favorite segments on NYC arts, visit our website.

♪ >> good evening and welcome to NYC arts.

♪ >> what a privilege to be able to sit down and talk with you.

>> I love being with you.

>> we are at a moment to take nothing for granted.

>> it's a pleasure to be with the curator of this exhibition for Pope.

-- full of hope.

>> the greatest sculptures by the iconic names.

>> classical and modern dance are different.

I have so much more to learn before I can really articulate the differences.

>> when I listen to the lyrics, I thought, that's what I want to do with my life.

>> my pictures reside in very intimate, private moments.

>> my primary way of playing the private -- piano is by improvising.

>> you are on sacred ground.

♪ ♪ Funding for NYC arts is made possible by The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

Jody and Arnhold.

Charles and Valerie diker to get the Milton and Sally Avery arts foundation.

Elroy and Terry Krumholz foundation.

This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of cultural affairs, in partnership with the city.

Additional funding provided by members of 13, NYC arts is made possible in part by First Republic Bank.

>> First Republic Bank presents first things first.

I First Republic Bank, first refers to our first priority, the client to walk through our doors.

The first step, recognize that every client is an individual with unique needs.

First decree, be a bank whose currency is surface in the form of personal banking.

This was First Republic's mission from our very first day.

It's still the first thing on our minds.

>> and by Swann auction galleries.

>> we have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine arts, working to combine knowledge with accessibility.

Whether you are a lifelong collector or looking to sell, information online.