Funding for Colores was provided in part by: New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers like You Paul Hutton delves into his book, The Undiscovered Country and uncovers how the frontier shaped the Nation.

>>Hutton: And often, people wanted to reinvent themselves in this -- in this new land and so, The Undiscovered Country speaks to that yearning for something new.

Artist Nolan Anderson transforms goldleaf, color, and culture into vibrant portraits that celebrates subtle moments and connect audiences to the soul of black art.

It's all ahead on Colores!

>>Faith: Crossing into the unknown -- >>Hutton: Crossing into the unknown -- and we're all fearful of the unknown.

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY >>Faith: Paul, thank you for joining me today on Colores to talk about your new book, The Undiscovered Country.

What inspired you to write The Undiscovered Country ?

>>Hutton: Well, it's really all Walt Disney's fault.

When I was six years old, along with millions of other Baby Boomer kids, I saw Walt Disney's Davy Crockett and that just -- got a coonskin cap and hooked me on history.

And I just became a fanatic about, Western history in particular, Davy Crockett in particular.

But also, it just led to my interest in the broader story of America and really world history.

And so it just hooked me out of history.

And certainly that's what Walt Disney did for generations of kids with his history shows.

>>Faith: What themes did you focus on in this book?

>>Hutton: Well, it's really the story of the American West from the time of the French and Indian Wars in the 1750s through the Revolution, and then all the way, of course, across the continent, here to the Southwest, across the Sierras to California in the conquest of California, and then back to the Great Plains for the last Indian Wars.

And the story of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill and it's really, to me, the story of America, because I believe the West is what made us an exceptional Nation, not exceptional in the sense that we're better than everyone else, but exceptional in that we're unique because we have people coming from everywhere who came together to forge the Nation.

And often it was a story of conflict thus triumph and tragedy are part of the subtitle of my book.

And so I wanted I wanted to capture that.

And by 1900, with the end of the book, we've also reached the end of the first epoch of American history.

>>Faith: And what are the triumphs and tragedies?

>>Hutton: Well, I think I put a positive spin on the story of America.

I'm an unabashed patriot.

I love this country.

I'm actually an immigrant myself.

I came on a boat from Germany in 1952, as a baby.

And, I see the power of this country.

How you can come from nothing and, re-imagine yourself and make yourself into into something.

That's why people went West and you could reinvent yourself, you know, over and over again.

And so it is a triumphant story because this builds a continental Nation that makes us into a great power so we can face down the twin evils of fascism and communism in the 20th century -- but it's also a story of tragedy because there's a great price that has to be paid in the birth of a Nation, birth is painful.

And certainly the story -- the creation of our country was painful.

And so you don't -- Native peoples are displaced.

The environment is, in some cases ruined -- environmental spoilation -- and so I wove all of that into the story.

I really wanted to show both the highs and the lows.

>>Faith: Why did you title it The Undiscovered Country?

And what does that say about America in the West?

>>Hutton: It's Hamlet soliloquy and the undiscovered country in Hamlet -- his death, he's contemplating suicide you know, better than the travails of life.

And of course, my story is a story of conflict and death.

And so that was part of it.

But more so the undiscovered country is what's out there.

And certainly Shakespeare's talking about that with Hamlet, what is beyond, you know, am I going to reinvent myself?

Is it something different to something greater?

Am I being held back by my anxiety?

By my fear?

Well, think about it.

The people who went West.

This was a special breed because you're cutting yourself off, you know, no cell phones, no internet.

You're going and you're leaving everything behind.

So you had to be a special kind of person to do that.

And often people wanted to reinvent themselves in this new land.

So, The Undiscovered Country speaks to that yearning for something new or something different.

>>Faith: Yeah, like crossing into the unknown -- >>Hutton: Crossing into the unknown -- and we're all fearful of the unknown, you know, in our own lives making these decisions, you're going to take a new job.

You're going to have a baby.

You're gonna, you know, move across the country even today.

I mean, it's a big -- it takes some courage.

And certainly the people that went West had an abundance of daring and courage.

And the people that resisted them and fought for their homeland and fought for their way of life.

They're also, of course, showing incredible courage.

>>Faith: Can you tell me a little bit more about each of the protagonists?

>>Hutton: I picked my protagonist based on both chronology and geography.

And so I picked, Daniel Boone.

Red Eagle, the leader of the Creek Indians, Davy Crockett.

Mangas Coloradas, of the Apaches.

Kit Carson, so famous here in Southwest, and controversial Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.

And through their lives which sometimes interrelate.

I could tell the entire story of the West in chronology, but also in terms of geography.

Boone, of course, the American Moses leading the pioneers into Kentucky, opening up this new land, establishing Boonesborough as the outpost of Liberty during the Revolutionary War.

And so the early part of the book is about the Revolution.

and how the West played such an important part in the Revolution.

The Creek Indians were also part of that Revolution, and Red Eagle inherited the leadership of the Creek.

Even though he was 3/4 white, and he led the Creeks against the Americans in the War of 1812, Davy Crockett was part of that war.

He had made a reputation young hunter in frontier Tennessee.

But then he went off and became famous as an Indian Fighter in the war.

Although he hated the war, and he and he identified more with the Creeks that he was fighting than he did with the planter elite that had kind of set that war in motion.

And then, of course he takes the West to the East as a congressman and becomes the most celebrated American outside of Andrew Jackson of his time, and eventually opposes Jackson over the question of Indian Removal, the movement of the Five Civilized Tribes to the Indian Territory, Oklahoma, and loses his election because of it goes to Texas in the Alamo.

And of course, I do the Texas Revolution and that brings on The Mexican War and makes us a Continental Nation thanks to James K Polk.

the most underrated President in American history.

and then Kit Carson, of course, is a Mountain Man -- heads out as a teenager on the Santa Fe Trail.

Becomes a Mountain Man in the last days of the Fur Trade, then becomes a scout, leading John C. Fremont across the country on his celebrated expeditions.

And that makes him, a national celebrity.

And then with Fremont, is instrumental in the conquest of California during the Mexican-American War emerges a great hero from that, carries the dispatch of the discovery of gold back to Washington, D.C.

the first dispatches telling President Polk about the gold strike at California.

Then, he, of course, lived in Taos, had married into a prominent Hispanic family and came back to Taos became one of our best Indian agents with the Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches, but also an Indian Fighter.

And, of course, here in New Mexico.

He's most famous, of course, for the Navajo Campaign.

And even though he was not in charge of The Long Walk, it was his campaign that set it up.

So, that makes him a very controversial figure, I think unfairly so.

He's like the Forrest Gump of Western history.

He's everywhere.

He's doing everything.

And then he fights for The Union in the Civil War with the rebel invasion of New Mexico.

So just a fabulous character.

And he knew a young Buffalo hunter out on the plains after the Civil War.

By the name of William F. Cody.

And so there's this great connection between Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill.

And Buffalo Bill is the real deal.

He's a scout.

He's a hunter.

And not one of the hunters that slaughtered the buffalo for their hides.

He was working for the railroad, and he was killing buffalo on horseback.

Single shot rifle, just like the Indians did to feed the railroad workers.

Well, he became so famous as a hunter that he went East and he was on the stage for ten years and then eventually established in 1883 his Wild West Show, and that toured the world and in America.

And it really established the American West as the ideal of what America was, made the Cowboy into a National icon brought real Indians into the arena and and showed their way of life, which he celebrated in the show.

And one of those was Sitting Bull, who's the last of my characters.

And Sitting Bull and Cody became great friends, even though they had fought each other in the war in which Custer was wiped out at the Little Bighorn.

But then Sitting Bull toured with the show, and he and Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley were the headliners, it was just incredible.

He was the living, breathing Wild West in the arena, the show for 25 years, all around the world.

It was a sensation, especially in Europe, where it's still well remembered.

And in 1893, Cody's show played the Chicago World's Fair, and at the same time that he was, entertaining millions of people at the World's Fair, the American Historical Association was meeting nearby, and a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner, read a paper called The Significance of the Frontier in American History and he said how the frontier had really shaped our national character.

Well, he won the intellectual battle with his historical theory and it soon was embraced all across the country in all the colleges and universities.

And at the same time, Buffalo Bill won the popular culture story because the story of the Wild West became the story of America.

>>Faith: Wow.

That's so -- it's so interesting how each story really just leads -- each person leads into another part of the story, and then meeting another person -- >>Hutton: Right -- >>Faith: There all kind on connected -- >>Hutton: That's really what I tried to do.

That was the whole idea in selecting these particular characters, and also for geography.

So I could do different parts of the country.

I mean, we're doing -- the book starts in Pennsylvania you've got Daniel Boone in Kentucky, Davy Crockett in Tennessee, Red Eagles down in Mississippi, Alabama.

Kit Carson is just everywhere, of course.

But especially here in the Southwest, Mangas Coloradas, Arizona, New Mexico, but so -- we get to tell the geographic story of the country and how it shifted -- as well as telling these individual lives.

>>Faith: Yeah.

How does including the voices of, you know, Native leaders really reshape the traditional frontier narrative?

>>Hutton: Well, certainly, Native American history has always been an integral part of American history, but it's always been told, of course, from the side of the winners, no question about that.

And I grew up reading, you know, books by Paul I. Wellman, Dale Van Every, Bernard DeVoto, these kind of great nationalistic, popular historians and -- and I loved history written as literature.

And Natives are often just the protagonists.

If you think of so many -- Western movies, often Natives are portrayed as wronged people, no question about it.

But they're still a threat to the heroic, you know, pioneers and you can't really frame a story that way anymore.

Dee Brown did that in 1969 with his seminal book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Vine Deloria, Jr.

Custer Died for Your Sins They led to a revolution in writing and to the establishment of Indian Studies programs all across the country.

And so to tell the story of the American West without having the powerful voice of Native protagonists is just simply impossible.

you're not telling the complete story, and you want to tell it as well from their point of view.

How does it look for them?

And so, in my book, I try to shift the -- the point of view, from these white protagonists to the Native protagonists.

And then you see a character like Davy Crockett who's in conflict, obviously, you know, at the Alamo.

and also in conflict, unhappily, with Native peoples.

And even Carson was very unhappy to have to be doing what he did.

You know, he's an agent of the government.

He's taking orders from those above him, which goes right to Abraham Lincoln during the time of the Navajo Wars.

But he wasn't pleased with the assignment.

It was a very unhappy time for him.

>>Faith: Yeah, and it seems like, you know, most of them made friends with these Native leaders and Native people, right?

>>Hutton: Well, they did, and you look at someone like Boone, who late in his life moved out to Missouri, and by that time, many of the Indians he had fought, like the Shawnees had been removed, as well.

And he went on hunting trips with them.

It's like old veterans getting together and talking about the old days.

I mean, it was intense.

And, you know, in the settlement of Kentucky Daniel Boone lost two sons, a brother and a brother-in-law.

So he paid a terrible price in blood to, you know, win -- that land that he felt was such a Paradise.

And, well, Native peoples had suffered as well.

So they had a shared experience.

And Crockett saw that as well.

He saw that -- the pioneers that he represented in Congress, were being exploited by the Slave-ocracy and by the planter elite in the same way that the Natives were.

I mean, the Trail of Tears was the result of the cotton culture moving into that rich land in Alabama and Mississippi.

The Indians hadn't done anything wrong.

They just were in the way and it was all about greed, land They wanted more acreage.

They wanted more slaves.

And, of course, eventually that all would fall apart for them with the coming of the Civil War a war that really -- the spark for that war really comes about as a result of The Mexican War and the new Western Territories.

Will they be slave?

Will they be free?

They couldn't settle that debate and Civil War's the result.

>>Faith: What do you hope readers take away from this reexamination of the American West?

>>Hutton: Well, I hope they get of, how heroic this story was and how essential it was to us as a Nation, how it shaped us as a people, how it made people from all the corners of the globe into one people with shared values.

And that was so important to the country coming together.

You know, by the end of my story in 1900, as we faced a new century with new challenges -- and I want them to have a great read.

I think it's a great adventure story.

I hope it's a page turner.

I really tried to shape it as literary history.

I mean, it's true history.

But -- I hope it's like a novel that you want to see what's going to happen to the characters.

And do you want to get to that next chapter to see how the country's going to be shaped by these incredible events that are going on.

>>Faith: What is it about the American West that fascinates you so much, and why have you been writing about it for over 40 years?

>>Hutton: Well, I just love the West.

I love everything about it.

I love -- I love the big sky everywhere we are -- come West, come West, reinvent yourself.

This is the place where all the American dreams, came to fruition.

And certainly my American dream came true in the West.

REFECTING IDENTITY >>Anderson: I started painting probably around 4 or 5 years old.

It started with comic books, you know, superheroes the human figure was always my first interest when it came to drawing and painting.

After high school, I took up advertising at The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale.

After graduating from there, most of my work was always as a freelance illustrator.

During those years, I would design Judaic greeting cards.

They used a lot of gold and a lot of silver film that I began to use in my personal art, and that's how it's been for me as an artist, doing so much work for different people.

I sort of like picked a little from this and that, and it has influenced the work that I do now.

For about ten years I worked as a restoration artist in the yacht industry down in South Florida.

We did a lot of faux painting in the interior part of the yachts and sailboats.

I applied the techniques from that in the work that I do now.

You know, the certain look of wood I know from doing the restoration work.

I have eventually moved to Tampa, Florida, and began to focus on my personal art and painting the things that I enjoy doing.

Working as a freelance illustrator.

It wasn't that often that I got a chance to paint people of color.

As I started doing my own personal work, I wanted to paint images that look like me, that reflect who I am.

I wanted to show that, you know, we are everywhere and with a lot of pieces that I paint, I put them in different settings, and I try to do things in a way that you couldn't quite pick up what era it is.

And I sort of give a story to this -- in my head.

There's one called, The Pimp of Charlemagne Duvalier but it's really -- its two old men playing chess and an old, mangy, little dog, besides the main characters wearing this purple fedora.

And I used to term The Pimp of Charlemagne.

Not pimp as in someone who's taken advantage of women or anything like that, but someone who's like taken advantage of life Like they're pimping life, so to speak.

That character I've painted several times in different paintings.

[Upbeat Music] [Music Fades] >>Anderson: I think the subtle things -- are more true or genuine, I would use nature.

I would involve flowers or, birds and butterflies.

That's moving around, because I want that to be a part of that subtle moment that just caught.

A lot of times I'm just painting.

I'm not really giving any thought to what I'm doing.

I just start throwing things around and see what happens.

I try not to overthink when I'm creating a piece.

I guess it's like musicians winning when they play a muse.

They have a jam session.

You just playing.

And I think that's the best stuff that comes out you're not overthinking -- you're not trying to think about it.

You're just jammin away.

[Upbeat Music] >>Mcdowell Sr: I had the opportunity to connect with Nolan Anderson while I was the operations leader for the while I was the operations leader for the Renaissance International Plaza Hotel.

We were partnering and working with another local artist by the name of Meclina Priestley.

She said, “you know what?

I' have the perfect brother that you've got to meet.” Not only, is he the foundation of what Tampa is as an artist, his art is second to none.

I so I got to meet this guy, Nolan, and see what Nolan is all about.

So we set up a meeting.

Nolan came in, and, honestly, he had us at, “Hello.” >>Anderson: I was invited to hang some work at the Renaissance Hotel.

Talib transitioned over here as General Manager of the AC hotel.

And we wanted to do something a little different with the artwork.

>>Mcdowell: Antonio Catalán was the founder of the AC brand in Spain.

Our objective was really to, you know, pay homage to Antonio Catalán and everything that he built at the same time, while, yet telling that story also show a little bit about my background as an artist who liked to paint black art.

After doing a little research, I found a woman by the name of Yinka Esi Graves from out of Spain who does Flamenco dancing.

She was the blender of -- you know, this Flamenco dance infusing the African dance So, we said, “Alright, we're in.

It's beautiful.

They wear these wonderful dresses.

They have so much that you could do in that piece.

And then the texture that would come out of that would be outstanding.

The only ask was that it takes up a whole wall.

If you look closely at the, the artwork there, there's that mixed medium, there's the concrete and there's some sculpture going on.

There's the gold leafing in there.

The gold leafing was the influence from years of doing the Judaic artwork.

I knew a rough idea of what I wanted to look like, and as it began to take shape, then I needed direction to go.

[Flamenco Music] >>Anderson: Every first Saturday of every month we host an event called Elegant Saturdays.

That event for me as an artist, I'm there to do life paintings to connect with the community, to let them see the process.

>>Mcdowell: They're getting a chance to meet the actual artists.

That is our resident artists in the space.

He's given an opportunity as well.

So when we do curate our next art show, now, the people that have been coming every month, to Elegant Saturday, now they feel part of what Nolan's doing, right?

So now they're going to show up and they're going to support Nolan as well.

>>Anderson: A lot of times when I'm creating in a studio, not so much that I'm creating for someone else, I'm creating for me, but I don't get their feedback until after the piece is done.

But when I'm doing live painting, you know, I get the interaction with people.

I get to hear what people are thinking about.

>>Mcdowell: When you meet an artist like Nolan.

He gives off this aura of patience, of sophistication, of luxury.

Where I see the future for for Nolan.

I see him across the United States in multiple different brands, and really showcase his work, but not just showcasing his work, giving the hotel an opportunity to display something worth displaying and inviting the community in to their hotel to make it vibrant.

>>Anderson: What I would say to other artists just keep painting even if you don't feel like it.

Paint.

Even if you don't know what you want to do, just paint.

You know, don't try to overthink anything.

Just keep doing it.

Try to do something every day and don't worry about what the final piece is going to look like.

Just go with it.

Don't overthink anything.

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Funding for Colores was provided in part by: New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers like You