Coming up next on rocks, important works from a groundbreaking collection of African-American art right here in Baton Rouge.

As you grow older, he went to Howard University in Washington, D.C. and while he was there, he was really exposed to museums and the arts.

Hand-painted glass art from the hands of a Louisiana expat and one of a kind face masks.

These stories right now on art rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI be offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Thanks for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Today we're coming to you from the LSU Museum of Art in downtown Baton Rouge, where African-American masterworks from the vast Paul Jones collection are currently on display.

Who was Paula Jones and why is this collection so significant?

Here's museum curator Michele Schultz.

To put all the pieces together for us, Michele, thanks for having us here today.

So tell us, who was Paula Jones?

This is Paul Raymond Jones.

It was a gentleman that was born and raised in Bessemer, Alabama, which is a little tiny town right outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Paul grew up in a rather poor area of town.

His parents were part of the Tennessee Coal iron and Railroad mining company.

And they grew up in a camp there.

But even though they didn't have a lot of money, they instilled in him a really deep appreciation for education.

They wanted their children to succeed.

Throughout his lifetime, Paul knew that he wanted to achieve.

As you grow older, he went to Howard University in Washington, D.C. and while he was there, he was really exposed to museums and the arts.

But as I was traveling to these museums and looking at different galleries and exhibitions, he just didn't see himself an African-American man within the paintings, in the prints and sculptures that he was viewing.

And so he knew early on that he wanted to eventually become a collector and amass enough artwork to give it to a university system upon his death.

Paula Jones did just that.

Over his lifetime, he collected well over 3000 works of art, and he donated the bulk of the collection to the University of Alabama in 2008 and then subsequently, after his passing in 2010, he left an additional 300 works.

And those works were the roots or the basis for the Paula Jones Museum at the University of Alabama.

So why the University of Alabama?

He loved his home state.

He loved Alabama.

He loved his community of Bessemer.

He loved Tuscaloosa.

After he graduated from Howard University with a degree in political science, he actually applied to the University of Alabama.

And this is 1949.

But, of course, he was denied because of his race.

And he did go on and finish a degree at Governor's University in Illinois later on in the seventies.

But he always took pride in his home state.

He traveled around the country and took different jobs with the government.

And he returned to Alabama in the eighties, and he decided that he wanted to change this attitude and thought and be a part of the solution with the University of Alabama in the state of Alabama in general, because, as you remember, Alabama was the sort of drugs through the civil rights movement.

And they were one of the last states in the United States that really embraced desegregation policies.

And so in the last ten years of his life, he really interacted with the university in the college art department, and he decided that he wanted to give them his collection in order to build that voice by the University of Alabama, establishing the museum that focuses on the Paula Jones collection.

And their mission is really to show and exhibit and collect African-American artworks.

He started a legacy that's going to continue to grow.

Okay.

So talk to us about Sam Gilliam.

Sam Gilliam is a really a pivotal figure in American art.

He was born in Tupelo, Mississippi.

So he's a southern gentleman, eventually making his way to Washington, D.C., to work as a full time painter and an educator.

While he was in D.C., he became involved with the Washington Color Group.

And these were a group of artists who were exploring color field painting, which is a movement where it's literally what it sounds like they were painting images of just color and really studying and investigating color on a surface, but watching the color.

So they were blending this idea with abstraction.

And Sam was a pivotal person within this movement.

What Sam is really well known for are his fabric sculptural works.

He was one of the very first American painters to remove a painting, in this case, colorful abstractions that really focused on emotion and texture and layering of hues.

But he was one of the first artists to remove that from the wooden stretcher and to take the canvas and make it malleable and fluid.

And so what he was essentially doing was he was abstracting not only the surface of the canvas, but abstracting the substrate itself and creating these beautiful folds.

And so in this piece, we can really see how that translates to a flat print, because there is no actual dimension to this print and it's a solid 2D work.

But you can still see his ideas of folding and manipulation of surfaces and colors within this Screenprint And Gilliam also has an interesting history with relation to the Venice Biennale.

Yes, in the 1970s, the very early 1970s, he was the first African-American man to be represented by the United States in Venice.

And that was really a triumph, if you consider that the Venice Biennale.

He did not see a solo show of an African-American artist until 1997.

So from Sam's very first appearance there through several decades to 1997, you can really see the impact that Sam had on that particular event.

So he was a pioneer and a trailblazer in more ways than one he was.

Let's move on to the dream of the blue horse.

Yes.

This is a lithograph by Louis Dysart.

Del Sur was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, which, of course, is within the vicinity of Harlem.

His parents were a part of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a golden age of African-American art and culture that took place between the 19 tens and the 1930s.

And so Louis was privileged to grow up knowing many of the really important figures from the Harlem Renaissance.

Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Langston Hughes.

They were all part of his childhood.

And so he experienced art and theater and literature very early on.

And he was fascinated by this sort of infusion of African-American culture that he saw around him as he grew.

He became a painter.

He was a full time artist, and he was really well known for his canvases, which were deemed illusionistic.

And so while they're still very representational, you can see what's going on.

The figures are somewhat abstracted, but he creates these beautifully surreal scenes, and he does this by layering different textures and colors and characters over and over again.

So he'll start with the base scene and he'll do a painting and then he'll walk away from it, let it dry, and then he'll come in and he'll add more layers of colors and characters and textures, and then he'll walk away and he'll sometimes do up to 10 to 12 layers.

And while he's really well known for his paintings and getting this deep textural effect on his paintings, you can see the technique very clearly in the prints.

This is quite special, right, Because within not a number of prints, but this is one of the few surviving.

Yes.

So this is an edition of 30, which is a really low addition of of print Making prints generally come in a limited number.

And the lower number that are made, the more valuable or the more sought after and and the more collected they are.

What numbers is this one's number ten.

And so they're all numbered at the bottom generally.

And you'll find that's the information.

And it's really just a beautiful piece because it looks like the artist came in and manipulated the actual surface of the paper.

But he didn't.

He achieved all of that through the printmaking process.

So works from the Harlem Renaissance, a well represented in this exhibition, right?

Yes.

So here we are with a real genuine giant of the American art scene, Romare Bearden.

Tell us about this piece.

Romare Bearden was a gentleman from North Carolina and he moved with his family to New York.

And so he was part of the Great Migration northward.

He was especially interested in abstract art and taking scenes from history.

He was looking into African-American arts and cultures and everyday scenes and then abstracting in a way that he was infusing different types of references to other cultures, including West African art and Mesoamerican art.

And I think from Vermeer, Bearden was really well known for his close work.

He was one of the great American collage innovators and one of the Americans to introduce collage to the mainstream art world.

Of course, Europeans had been doing it since about the 19 tens brought on by Picasso and George Brock.

They're big names in the art scene, especially in Europe.

But Americans, this student embraced it right away.

So Romare Bearden wanted to change this.

He wanted to take that medium where you're just looking at bits of 2D materials, fabrics, scraps, collage or magazines, any kind of bits of paper and putting them on another 2D surface to create a new composition.

And Vermeer was so interested in collage that after World War Two, he of course, served during World War Two.

But after World War Two, he traveled to Europe to meet Picasso and to learn from him directly.

He came back to the United States and he really began innovating with his artwork and adding collage elements to them.

And so he's really one of the great pioneers in American art and introducing that technique into the mainstream art world.

And it was really well accepted.

And now tell us about Thornton Dial.

Thornton Dial is arguably one of the South's most popular or well known vernacular artists.

And when we say vernacular artists, I'm describing somebody who is self-taught, who created art just from this innate sense of having to make and having to create.

Thornton Dial was born in 1928, the same year as Paula Jones, But in Emil, Alabama, and as a child, he moved to Bessemer, Alabama, where his family worked within the Pullman Standard Factory.

He eventually worked himself, and Thornton was really fascinating.

He just wanted to make art.

And so he started collecting bits and pieces of scrap wood, bones, materials, pieces of metal, and constructing them into assemblages that he would decorate his home with and decorate his yard with and give to his friends and neighbors.

He was sort of discovered in a way.

In the 1980s, he was fortunate enough to meet Bill Arnett.

Bill Arnett was a very well-known gallerist and art collector based in Atlanta, Georgia.

And Bill Arnett, Scott Thornton dial out.

And because of his relationship with Bill Arnett, he was able to get his work into museums.

And also, Bill not only supported him artistically, he gave him art supplies.

He he gave him new materials, but he gave him this new look how to show his work.

And so Thornton Dial, arguably, because of their citizenship with Bill Arnett, was so widely recognized and so well known that upon his death in 2000, he was showing in New York at the University of Alabama.

The collection is really based on the original gift, a few thousand pieces.

And Paul Raymond Jones mainly collected prints.

They were widely available.

They were easy to obtain and they were affordable.

So he could be an art collector on a mail cost budget.

In addition to prints, he also collected and donated photographs, paintings and sculptures.

Our thanks to curator Michelle Schulz for introducing us to the collection, if that's what you're after.

Here are some other notable exhibitions taking place in the weeks to come.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads magazine available in print, online or by e-newsletter.

To see or to share any episode of Art Rocks again, visit L.P. Dorgan.

Art Ross.

There's also an archive of all our Louisiana segments at Lcvs YouTube page.

Destination Duck Island, Florida.

That's where Louisiana native Debbie Bodin has chosen to play out the current chapter of her career as a glass artist.

Bowden creates striking, hand-painted fuzed and stained glass designs.

Often, she incorporates salvaged broken glass, repurposing abandoned and overlooked materials to create priceless pieces all over again.

It is a complete and original.

I will never make this pattern again.

I wanted it to look like her hair is just fluid washing everywhere.

I do each individual pattern.

I use vellum paper so I can see my drawing under here.

That way I can see all the striations in the glass and to what I want it to look like.

Then I get to cut it out.

All I'm going to do is follow my lines, and you can see all the scrap mosaic.

Artists love that.

Now, once you have your piece, it doesn't necessarily mean that piece of puzzle is going to exactly fit.

So you have a lot of fitting to do even after this.

See that bar?

That's what I'm doing.

I'm just trying to get off.

What didn't break off.

And when I get this done, then I copper fallen.

See, that's going to be hair that this was this pattern.

So say she goes in.

I started out as being a professional ballerina.

Then I messed up my hip really bad.

So I was home maybe a year in retirement, so to speak, and was going nuts and started working on stained glass.

I've taught myself a lot.

I started out with the bathroom windows, cabinet doors, transformers, that kind of thing.

I did go to class to learn how to do the bigger pieces.

When you're doing an installation window, those are different.

I knew how to paint and I went to a few classes to learn how to do the painting on glass.

There's not very many of us that do the hand painting on the glass because it's such a process is very difficult.

It's very time consuming and very costly.

You have to have a kiln, you have to have all kinds of equipment to be able to do that.

And it takes anywhere from 8 to 12 hours for each firing.

And then if you mess up one little thing, you have to start all over again because it's permanent.

You can't just wipe it away like you can on canvas.

Once I started doing that, the churches really started picking up a lot.

I restore church windows a while back, while living in Louisiana, Katrina hit a gentleman that lived in Alexandria, Louisiana.

He showed up on my doorstep one day with these two pieces wrapped in sheets.

They were covered in mud and the bulldozer while cleaning up after Katrina found these two pieces in a ditch about two or three blocks away.

The story was his great grandmother had made those two windows, so because they were so destroyed.

He brought me pictures of what they looked like and I put new glass that matched it as best I could and totally gave him to brand new windows again.

And on this piece, the customer had the back of the house renovated to have three windows across the back of the house.

When the sun goes through the back of her house and it comes around, the sun hits a beveled piece.

And you see there's several in here, the fish, the shells.

It throws prisons and rainbows all over inside the house.

And I think she'll enjoy that aspect of that.

It started out as a little drawing with this, and she chose from three or four different ones.

You can see I give the clients different drawings on what they would look like.

And she chose, of course, the mermaid swimming across the windows and then I had to draw it to scale.

You can see my notes all over it.

What goes where.

We have to flip it over each piece here and soldered the back.

Then we have to do the same process again and flip it back around and then I have to glaze it.

Then you have to polish it and clean it.

And it takes me hours to detail one.

Just because when you put this much into a piece, you want it perfect before it leaves.

Now we're off to Carson City, Nevada, where Charles Addams has things all wrapped up.

You see, Mr. Adams has found fame for the craft of extreme gift wrapping, which elevates any object to a work of art even before the paper comes off the do almost anything can be elevated to an art form if it's done beautifully, tastefully, beautifully nice texture and nice colors.

It's just that people don't think of gift wrapping as art.

And yet my name is Charles Adams.

And when it comes to gift wrapping, I guess I look at it differently from other people.

Gifts are given on special occasions, and in my mind, in order for the recipient to feel special, the gift wrap must be special and geared to them.

And when my gift wraps are extreme and out of the ordinary, I call it extreme because I think about who the recipient of the gift is going to be.

But I always include humor and gift wraps, and I think this kid has a funny personality.

He laughs a lot.

He's mischievous.

He's a pain to his parents, but basically he's a good kid.

I'll put an ad on that.

Kids appeared, and of course, when he sees it, he just comes unglued.

So you deal with this like you deal with everything else in life.

You try to make it work for who others receive it and that's the difference between my gifts and most other people's gifts.

There's just a very few people that take the time and energy and effort to take gift wrapping to a higher level.

It can be kept simple and you can do like a shoelace bow on a nice paper with a nice ribbon.

And it's very simple, clean and easy to do.

Anybody can do it.

Or you can think about the gift as as art, where you want a stacked bow or you want to use certain colors.

You want it to grab the eye and you want the gift to sort of represent its own message.

In other words, the gift speaks for itself.

When you see it, it's adorable.

You're going to love it.

They're going to love it just because it looks so good.

Doesn't matter what the gift is.

I worked at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood as a decorator, and my life was very interesting because I had been on sets with stars.

As you get older and you've had a productive life and you've met some of the top notch people in the world.

You can't just become sedentary.

You got to still be active and you have to keep your mind going.

Uniting Twin Passions for Fashion and Sustainability.

Designer Melissa michelson uses the ancient technique of marbling to create vibrant, beautiful and reusable masks.

So we go west to Mickelson's California studio to find out how.

My name is Melissa Michaelson.

My brand is Love Mert.

It's a sustainable accessory brand that I started 20 years ago.

I source my materials mostly from secondhand shops, and then I also source recycled bits of leather from a couple suppliers that get giant amounts of offcuts from other productions.

And then I buy 30, 40, £50 at a time.

My stuff really does well in small independent boutiques because everything's just handmade versus mass produced.

I was always passionate about fashion and wanted to be a designer of some sort, and I've always been an artist and grew up in a family of artists, so I guess it just it was hard to escape.

So I kept making things and over the years things have evolved.

Esthetically and I started messing around with screen printing fabrics for a while, and then I fell into marbling and I thought, marbling is a, you know, an ancient technique they've done for, you know, for thousands of years.

And I thought it would translate really well on fabric.

And I started making some really cool pieces of fabric that I was turning into other products like canvas pouches and some really nice home textiles, pillows and whatnot.

And then I started making some eye masks, and those were doing really well for me, just like relaxation eye masks and a heart shape.

And then the pandemic happened.

And so I thought this fabric would be really beautiful to make a mask out of because, you know, if you're going to wear a mask, lot of people want to have something unique or that speaks to their their individuality, I guess.

I mean, we all have to wear them right now.

Right on is one wear, one that's kind of fun and colorful.

The process of me making a mask starts with marbling, the fabric.

It's a little bit of a wet process.

It's a messy process.

It's got many steps.

I kind of use the water as my canvas.

You have a tray of water.

The water has a cellulose in it, so it makes it a little bit gelatinous.

Then I when you place the paints on top of the water, the paints flow and you're able to kind of move them around and they, they disperse with each other, they push each other around you layer and layer it.

And then once you get what you think is what you want, you get your fabric and you lay it down and you pull it back up and the result on the piece of fabric is amazing and you never get the same thing twice.

Although I can kind of control color combinations and a little bit of technique to do a production run of sorts, but everything's always going to be a little different.

And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But never mind, because you can watch episodes of the show anytime at LP dot org slash Art Rocks.

And what's more, Country Roads magazine offers another useful source for thought provoking coverage of events the arts, people and places all around the state.

So until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI be offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.