>> He wanted the person coming into that environment not knowing that it was designed.

It was the art to conceal the art.

>> JARED BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen, coming up on Open Studio: celebrating 200 years of the man who brought us landscape architecture, including draping Boston in an Emerald Necklace-- Frederick Law Olmsted.

Then, the Boston Pops plays on.

Conductor Keith Lockhart joins me.

>> What music means to me, how it touches me, didn't change during that time.

It probably intensified.

Plus, the professionals making the pandemic pivot into being artisans.

>> I have been contemplating carpentry for a while.

>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ First up, more than ever, the pandemic made us enjoy the pleasure of parks.

You could argue Frederick Law Olmsted saw that coming.

The famed landscape designer of New York's Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace is receiving a fresh look on this, his 200th birthday.

And we follow the seeds he planted to bring people together.

>> Where we are now is called the Rock Garden.

He creates these places here that are smaller scale than what he created in other spaces.

>> BOWEN: He is Frederick Law Olmsted, and this is the Brookline, Massachusetts, home that became his hub of landscape design in the late 1800s.

He spent the final 12 years of his career here, and his architectural philosophy was unwavering.

>> He wanted to create a natural environment with intentional design.

But he wanted the person coming into that environment not knowing that it was designed.

It was the art to conceal the art.

>> BOWEN: Olmsted is considered the father of landscape architecture in America, an endeavor he launched after a career as a journalist; after managing a gold mine; and after co-designing New York's Central Park.

Jason Newman is the superintendent of the Olmsted National Historic Site.

>> We call this a place of places.

Because what happened here was the design of so many other places around the country.

We have the Buffalo park system, we have the Louisville park system, were created here within these walls.

>> BOWEN: Olmsted named the home Fairsted and it contains roughly a million documents produced by Olmsted and his firm's successors, including his sons.

They correspond to some 5,000 projects the firm ultimately produced, making parks part of everyday living.

>> That helped to save the Republic during the time of social upheaval during the Civil War.

And so it was important, I think, for the country to come together through different means, but also through the creation of these large public spaces.

>> People watching may think, well, a park is a park.

What's the difference?

>> We have the tendency to take them for granted and not realize that a decision was made that this land be protected and be for the public.

>> BOWEN: Karen Mauney-Brodek is president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy.

The Necklace is a system of parks Olmsted spent nearly 20 years designing, beginning in 1878.

It stretches from Dorchester's Franklin Park to the Charles River.

>> He really designed with nature.

He used the land forms, the way that the water would flow to create systems that were incredibly resilient.

>> BOWEN: Olmsted designed paths for people to escape the city's unrelenting grind.

He crafted the Back Bay Fens to stem a public health crisis by countering the flow of sewage.

He devised open spaces as a way to integrate people from different walks onto common fields.

All sound familiar?

It's why the conservancy is one of a number of groups celebrating his bicentennial with the initiative Olmsted Now.

>> He sort of created an American vernacular, but we need to expand on it.

There also are parts of the city that don't have as much green space as they should have.

We want to make sure that we are uplifting folks that haven't had a voice or have been specifically kept out of decisions, spaces.

>> Olmsted was making parks for people.

He was not making parks for elites.

>> BOWEN: Ted Landsmark's career bears some of the DNA of Olmsted's own, blending civil rights advocacy with decades-long work in architecture and urban planning.

>> Too often we find that people of large economic means are dominating the way we think about parks and open spaces.

But what Olmsted did, in a very radical way in his time, was to say that parks and open spaces should be for everyone.

>> BOWEN: Boston is in the midst of another building boom.

With that come rising home prices, gentrification, and segregation.

So part of the Olmsted Now effort is to bring the city's traditionally overlooked neighborhoods together to plan the future of parks.

>> Olmsted intrinsically increased the diversity of the city and the way people come together to share their cultures and what they know of each other, to eat meals together and to play games together and to come together in ways that are non-threatening.

>> BOWEN: It's why, Landsmark says, a very literal common ground is vital.

And if past parks are prologue, they can be magical too.

>> The joy of the Olmsted network, I think, is that in traversing it, one is constantly finding something new and something magical and something that inspires one to think very differently about oneself in a natural environment.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Just like the flowers now blooming in Olmsted parks, another harbinger of spring is the return of the Boston Pops, which happens May 19.

I recently sat down with conductor Keith Lockhart.

And I'll tell you that we've known each other a long time and it was the most enjoyable conversation we've ever had talking about the season, the difficulty of the pandemic, and what his first year on the job was like, especially in the glare of the spotlight.

Keith Lockhart, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Well, Jared, it's my pleasure.

I haven't seen you in the flesh since, well, you know, before the world ended, back then.

>> BOWEN: It's crazy.

And so... but I thought a lot about you, actually, during the pandemic because we've talked so many times over the years and I know how busy you are.

And I can relate to it to a small degree because I'm out all the time covering arts.

You're just... you're doing your job all the time.

So what was it like for you when it just stopped?

>> It was, it was soul crushing.

I think not just for me, but for a lot of my colleagues, not just the kind of worries about, "Gee, how am I going to make a living in the future," but also just almost an existential crisis about what is it that I am and what is it that I do anyway?

The week before everything ended, I was living the dream of doing exactly what became prohibited days later.

I mean, three weeks before the shutdown, I was in Japan with the Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo.

The week before the shutdown, I was in London with the BBC Orchestra, traveled by Eurostar to Paris to do a concert with them.

Finish the concert, we did elbow bumps with the concertmaster and all that, and the audience thought that was hysterically funny.

And the next day, the French government closed all their venues.

>> BOWEN: Are you different coming out of this?

>> You know, in those... that first month or so, I said, "Now it's finally at the... "I've always wanted to write the great American novel.

This is my chance."

And, you know, it...

I think like a lot of people, those, those things didn't happen.

It was a lot of binge watching, a few too many cocktails, you know, and a whole lot of waiting for something to change.

And then when this turned into, you know, in terms of, of live performance, it was 15, 16 months.

And, you know, there hasn't been that much of a gap in my public performances since I was seven.

So... (laughs) >> BOWEN: I'll get right to the spring season, which is what I want to talk about.

>> Good, that's on a bright note.

>> BOWEN: But this is interesting.

I mean, did the concept of art, did the concept of music change for you during that time?

I mean, obviously it's something you understand so well.

Yeah, when I think about... when I was thinking about art, I missed the smells of museums for some reason, because it just brought me there.

I missed it desperately.

>> I think there are there are, there are, you know, two things that any performing artist thinks about.

One is what music does for me, to me.

And the other is what... making music do that for other people does for me.

That's, that's the performer-- what sharing it does.

And, you know, what music means to me, how it touches me didn't change during that time.

It probably intensified.

But what was weird is to do without, without the idea of this is something that, it's my job, my mission, my, you know, my lot in life to do for other people.

And that is the part I think that gives most, most of us our sense of worth in the performing arts.

But now we're getting to share it again.

>> BOWEN: As you crafted this season, more mindful of what it means for an audience, what it means for you, how did you craft this season?

>> We're starting cautiously.

We have a shorter season than we have had in... than we had in 2019.

But the very fact that we're there, bringing the people back with us, people are having, as you know, different levels of comfort with coming out of their foxholes and silos.

And, and hopefully the, you know, spring being in the air and that great tradition of the Boston Pops spring season will bring us back.

♪ ♪ This year we're celebrating yet again, and but always wonderfully and appropriately, another John Williams milestone because he turned 90 years old.

♪ ♪ We're doing two of his greatest film scores live with projection in Symphony Hall.

And that's become a very popular part of what orchestras do and a really great way to show great film music in the context for which it was intended.

The first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and the second in the Star Wars sequence... we're laughably continuing a series because we did the first one in 2019.

So now we're getting... we're getting to the Empire Strikes Back.

♪ ♪ Amazing scores, amazing music, and being able to hear an orchestra of the quality of the Boston Pops playing that music live is so much more impactful than the way you experience the music in a movie when you go to the theater.

>> BOWEN: Well, there must be such pride for the orchestra, too, knowing his own history with, with the organization, >> Yeah, he's ours.

>> BOWEN: In that room.

>> He's our guy and, and still remain such.

And just as, you know, of not only, you know, amazing living icon, but also is a continually working icon.

He's working on the next Indiana Jones movie as, as we speak.

>> BOWEN: So you also have, what I'm really excited about as well, Brian Stokes Mitchell doing Duke Ellington.

Tell me about that program.

>> Well, that program grew out of things we were thinking about in the wake of having Rhiannon Giddens with us three years ago and starting to look very seriously at how we looked at diverse voices in classical music and American music in particular, which has a very interesting history, a very kind of easy-to-see history, because most of that history is just a little over a century in total.

>> BOWEN: Yeah.

>> But a lot of divergence based on issues like race and gender as to, as to whose music made it into the canon and whose music did not.

It's another branch of American classical music and nobody lorded over the 20th century artistically more than Duke Ellington.

>> BOWEN: Well, that must be so much fun and very invigorating for you, I would imagine, to explore the unexplored.

>> This is the concert of, of all the concerts... if you, you know, if you'd started off by asking me, "So what's your favorite?"

-- which people have done-- I would have said that one because that really is the one that allows us to, you know, to really do something special and original artistically.

And, you know, with that fabulous orchestra and Stokes and Lara, I just think that's really going to be a special program.

>> BOWEN: You celebrated your 25th anniversary with the Pops.

>> No, I didn't.

>> BOWEN: No, you didn't!

(both laugh) You didn't.

I mean, we celebrated a little bit on Facebook Live, I think, for a chat we had.

>> There was a really stale cake around, so... >> BOWEN: So for the audience who doesn't know, it happened but didn't happen because it was during the pandemic.

But when you look back at your 35-year-old self at that point, I mean, who do you see standing on the stage conducting the pops?

>> I see somebody who looks a lot younger.

(both laugh) No, it's hard to believe that now it's 27 years since I started at the Pops.

And... so, this really... this was always going to be, you know... this was going to be a watershed moment coming to Boston, just in general.

But I had no idea that it was going to be, you know, really kind of my life's work as it, as it turns out.

>> BOWEN: With all due respect, you didn't answer my question about who that 35-year-old was.

Were you scared?

Were you cocky?

>> I was...

I don't think I was cocky.

I might have come off to some people as cocky, but I rarely...

I am...

I have way too much self-doubt to be too, too cocky.

♪ ♪ I was scared and focused on the part of the job that I knew.

There were so many new parts-- the, you know, the fan base, the, you know, the People magazine-type interviews, The part I recognized was what it meant to be on the podium and working with an orchestra.

So I think I just stuck my nose in my work.

I think it's certainly... the job feels easier now.

Not easy, but... especially with the couple of new roadblocks that have been thrown in the way.

>> BOWEN: Well, Keith Lockhart, it is great to be back in this room with you.

It'll be great to see you back up at the podium again and just enjoy the Pops.

Thank you so much.

You look good without a mask, by the way.

>> BOWEN (laughing): Yeah, thanks.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: In Provincetown, a Mae West play so gay it was once banned.

It's among the treks to take in Arts This Week.

Monday, home in on Homer.

Author William Cross discusses his new biography American Passage about trailblazing painter Winslow Homer in a New England Historic Genealogical Society virtual event.

Composer Terence Blanchard blends opera and jazz in Champion, about boxer Emile Griffith.

See the Boston Lyric Opera production Wednesday.

Thursday, Mae West's play The Drag opens at the Provincetown Theater.

After it premiered in 1927, the play was banned for its gay themes.

A French bachelor struggles to keep his three flight attendant girlfriends in order in Boeing, Boeing.

See it at the Arlington Friends of Drama Theatre Friday.

Saturday, celebrate the music of Fats Waller and the Harlem Renaissance in Ain't Misbehavin', at Cambridge's Central Square Theater.

Boston's North Bennet Street school-- the first trade school in the nation-- saw a lot of people rethinking their lives during the pandemic, including a growing number now heeding their artistic calling.

This commencement season, we're revisiting a story we first brought you in November.

(playing single note) Before the pandemic, Amin Tabrizi was flying high.

>> I was a what they call first officer or some people casually they know as copilot.

>> BOWEN: But after the pandemic slowed air travel, Tabrizi was laid off and turned to something that had long intrigued him, piano tuning.

>> I used to play piano and I was always interested in looking inside of this thing, like, man, all these moving parts.

So that kind of rejuvenated that urge to want to one day do it.

>> It looks like we're off.

>> BOWEN: Pre-pandemic, Madeline Grant Colety was more than 20 years into her career as an urban planner.

>> Working at kind of a national level on issues around fair housing and disaster recovery, as well as affordable housing and community development.

>> So now, if you guys pull your chalk again.

>> BOWEN: Gnawing at her though was the fact that urban planning isn't the same as hands-on building.

>> Housing and affordable housing and appropriate shelter is a real passion, and I felt like I wanted to see more immediate results in my work.

So I have been contemplating carpentry for a while.

>> BOWEN: So both Grant Colety and Tabrizi have enrolled here at the North Bennet Street School, making a pandemic pivot into becoming artisans.

>> It's not just one or two notes, there's 88 of these things, so.

(chuckles) So, just taking out one key, repair it, fix it, and then move on to the next one.

I think it's both problem solving and takes a lot of patience.

So that's essentially what I'm doing, discovering things about myself as well, so... (laughs) >> I actually have two college-age kids, so, you know, it's important for me to have a good income and to make a big transition like this, I can't do it lightly.

But the pandemic made me think harder about how our individual decisions affect our community and the local impact that we have.

>> Every time I approach a student to talk to them about their work, they're so excited to tell me about what they're working on.

>> BOWEN: Sarah Turner is the president of the school, which this year marks the 140th anniversary of its founding in Boston's North End, a predominantly Italian neighborhood.

>> It was a place that was first giving skills, life skills, hand skills, to the waves of immigrants that were moving to this area of Boston.

>> BOWEN: That philosophy continues today in nine programs as varied as bookbinding, furniture making, and violin crafting.

Studies, Turner says, that are as much about the producing as the producer.

>> When you work with a hand and you work at a small scale, your relationship to community changes.

I think you start to know the people who provide the materials, you know the businesses that you have to intersect, you start to know the field, the community of makers that you're a part of.

>> BOWEN: The 150 full-time students here range from teenagers to septuagenarians-- when classes resumed last fall, Turner noticed that as the world was upended, students were doubling down on what had become urgently important.

>> I remember standing on the sidewalk as school was starting.

They were coming to take a real risk.

I mean to come to a hands-on school, still in a pandemic, is really brave, it's such an act of optimism, I think, and courage to make a life change any time.

But to make it then just was so inspiring.

>> BOWEN: Just weeks into typically nine-month-long programs, the students find themselves out in the world.

Madeline Grant Colety has been at work on a residential project in Haverhill.

>> We were putting up board siding and, you know, there are five or six steps involved and each one has to be just right in order to get that perfect finished product, so it's... breaking that down and demystifying it, is very interesting and more complex than I thought.

>> BOWEN: Do you have doubt about what you're doing right now?

>> Not at all, no.

I feel more like myself, using my hands and thinking creatively.

>> BOWEN: Which, after graduation, Grant Colety will channel into the design firm she's launched.

>> I wanted to really specialize in kind of small home renovation, to help design smaller spaces to make them work better, So for me, that was part of bringing carpentry and design together with that special focus.

>> BOWEN: Amin Tabrizi expects to fly again, but also plans to become a piano technician on the side.

After all, there is a thread between planes and pianos, he says.

>> I would say hands-on coordination, something we use a lot.

And another thing that we use a lot in the aviation world is situational awareness.

So it's just essentially anticipating, okay, I did one part, okay, now what's the next thing?

>> BOWEN: Something he, Grant Colety, and their fellow North Bennet Street School students have already answered for themselves.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Photographer Jess T. Dugan knows the power of representation and she's using her camera to zoom in on the older transgender and gender-nonconforming adults who are often on the margins.

We head now to Miami, where Dugan's work was on view at Florida International University.

♪ ♪ >> My name is Jess T. Dugan.

I'm a photographer who works primarily with portraiture and often within LGBTQ communities.

I'm here at the Frost Art Museum because my exhibition To Survive on this Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, is on display in Miami.

In this exhibition, one of my missions is to educate about issues faced by transgender older adults.

>> Jess is more than on the rise.

She's really quite established now as a photographer who has very much a humanitarian view of different communities.

>> I feel that photography is a very powerful storytelling vehicle, and so I often have my subjects look right out at the camera because I really want the viewer to be engaged in a moment and a relationship with them and to be met by their gaze and have to think about how they feel.

Being in that situation, I want them to reflect on their own assumptions about the person that they're looking at and for the act of viewing the photograph to be a really energized, engaged one, rather than a passive one.

I want them to be in a moment with them and look them right in their eyes and feel this very human connection that I think makes it very difficult to discriminate against someone or to be hateful toward someone if you've really come that close to understanding who they are.

♪ ♪ I made this project in collaboration with my partner, Vanessa Fabbre, who's a social worker and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

And her research focuses on the intersection of LGBTQ communities and aging.

So, when we met, we realized we had overlapping interests from working within trans communities, and we decided to create this project that had both the portrait and the interview narrative from each person.

>> And it is funny because, you know, there's always this conversation in museums about how much text do you want in your text-- you should be looking at the work-- but I think in this exhibition, the stories, they enhance the work of art.

They are a necessary component.

>> The portraits immediately capture people's attention, but then the stories allow us to talk about some of the other issues, some of the things like housing discrimination or employment discrimination or fear that people have about growing older as a transgender person, or, conversely, joys that they experience or triumphs of their life.

One of the subjects in the exhibition, Justin Vivian, identifies as non-binary, and she spoke about her decision to take estrogen, being motivated in part by wanting to have a medical record of her transness because she was worried if she grew older and lost her ability to advocate for herself, that she would end up being treated as a man.

♪ ♪ I met Susie and Cheryl a few years ago, and it's been really great to get to know them because there's such love between them, and there's such a groundedness and commitment that I think is really amazing.

>> All we do is go out in public and just, just be public.

>> Yeah.

>> You know, don't hide.

Because we're proud of who we are, we love each other.

We're not interfering with anybody's lives.

We just want to live our life the best we know how and to show everybody it's okay.

>> Having their story and, you know, reading about how they were together before Susie transitioned and their marriage has morphed and changed, but they're more committed and in love than ever before is really beautiful and really exciting, and I think it gives a lot of hope to people who may be struggling with that question.

I think there is this focus on youth and there's not a lot of representations of transgender older adults, and so they wanted to share their stories and provide a kind of roadmap for what a life could look like for younger trans folks who, in most cases, have never seen an older transgender person.

They've never seen an image of what it might look like to grow older.

And so I was incredibly moved by the extent to which people wanted to help others by sharing their own story.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, Melissa Etheridge and the songs from years ago she's only now ready to sing.

>> It's funny looking at me now, you'd think, you know, that I was always like, "I'm going to be an activist."

But that was not it at all.

I just wanted to play my music.

I didn't want to rock any boats.

>> BOWEN: Plus re-mix Shakespeare and you get The Bomb-itty of Errors.

>> It's funny, it's wacky.

And it's, I think, unlike anything anyone has probably seen in Boston.

>> BOWEN: As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter, @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

We leave you now with images from Venice.

That is where our own Institute of Contemporary Art recently curated the U.S. contribution to the Venice Biennale.

The exhibition features the large-scale work of artist Simone Leigh.

If you can't get to Italy, the show opens here next March.

Without the Aperol spritzes.

I'm Jared Bowen.

Thanks for watching.

♪ ♪