Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, 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.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

DJ, B-BOY, AND ARTIST - RANDY BOOGIE BLENDS HIS INDIGENOUS ROOTS WITH HIP-HOP TO CREATE A WORLD ALL HIS OWN.

INSPIRED BY THE QUILTS HIS GRANDMOTHER MADE, PAINTER OF QUILTS JASON WILSON, RETHINKS THIS TRADITIONAL ART FORM.

PAINTER JOHN W. CARLSON BEGAN A MOVEMENT CALLED AMERICAN EMOTIONALISM.

THAT ART SHOULD NOT BE DIDACTIC, BUT INSTINCTIVE AND INTUITIVE.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

HIP HOP THROUGH AN INDIGENOUS LENS [Music] >> Randy Boogie: Hip hop is spiritual because it has the same elements that are found in my indigenous culture, the dance is the medicine dancers, we have the turntables to act as the drummers, the Shaman's chanting is the MC's doing Party Rock chants, the art, you know the way we tell the story, is the petroglyphs transformed to Graffiti.

Finding hip-hop was my very first experience, so it was the biggest culture shock ever and it was like, it was very exciting!

It's always exploding, you know, like when you look at graffiti, like it pops off the trains, it pops off the walls.

The dance is the same way, so the whole culture itself, you know what I mean, like it's meant to elevate, and I just love the elevation part of hip- hop.

There's like certain steps within hip-hop that are called like, the Indian step, right?

And all it is, is they took from Pow Wow.

I started realizing why I was so good at hip-hop when I was so drawn to it, because it was just embedded in My DNA.

The parallels just spoke to me, and before you know it, you know, I just brought that indigenous style.

[Music] >> Randy Boogie: I look at graffiti as like ancient petroglyphs, pretty much is what it is, so what I do is I mix the two.

I call it Future Primitive.

[Music] When I look at like petroglyphs I like, stare up and I'm like thinking, I'm like, I wonder if they got in trouble, did they get arrested too?

[Laughs] For doing the "forbidden art" I don't know, who knows, right?

[Music] I've always been very inspired by rainbows.

The rainbow is, like, it's found in a lot of, like, Navajo stories and I just love, like, the old stories.

And they would say, like, the hero twins would travel through the rainbows, and the way I look at it, I was like, "oh that's how you time travel", you just jump on a rainbow and, like, you can go wherever you want to go.

So, me being a young kid that's kind of how I took these stories, you know, these songs.

[Music] >> Randy Boogie: Blessing Way, and prayers, what they mean is, you're analyzing your life, you're sitting with yourself, and you're asking your future self; what it is that you want?

It's all about creating solutions, that's what art is, you know, when you're painting, like, this abstract painting, you're playing with it and you're finding your way, and you're constantly finding, like, a balance, is what you're doing and you're just, you know, you're just making order out of all this chaos.

And that's, the same could be said with hip-hop, especially if you're doing it right and your expression is true, coming from your heart, and you're going to find that nirvana, that happens in any element.

You know, it is a story of the way I grew up, this world that I'm creating.

It's the world that, it's meant for me, and as an artist, that's like, the highest, like, elevation, creation, that you'd want to do, is you create your own world, and that's what, essentially, what you're doing as an artist, you're like, "Step into my world everyone."

It's bright over here, the colors are magnified, you know, and that's what artists do.

GENERATIONAL THREADS When I create my paintings, I want them to be perfect.

I want there to be no distractions.

I want the edges to be really hard edge.

I don't want you to see paintbrush strokes.

I want it to be so clean and so precise that it's just like, wow, that's a painting?

I'm Jason Wilson.

I have been an art teacher in the state of Oklahoma for 31 years.

I'm now a professional artist, trying to be, and see what happens with that.

I'm known kind of as a painter of quilts, I embrace that.

I think its part of the legacy that I hope to leave.

I've always had art in my life.

Growing up as a child, I remember going to my grandma's house.

Quilts would be hanging, uh, from the, from the ceiling.

And I used to be fascinated with the designs and the patterns in those quilts - and especially the 3D ones.

Ma Wilson was my great grandma.

I never ever remember going in Ma's house and not seeing a quilt hanging.

She was in the paper a lot for her quilts.

She made quilts for, uh, several of the Democratic presidents and governors, but only the Democrat.

She was quite a character, she'd tell you exactly what she thought.

This quilt is at least 55 years old.

And it was made by Ma Wilson.

Why do I keep the quilts that I have from my grandmas?

I cherish those because now they become a part of me because of the art that I have developed out of the style of seeing and being inspired by their quilts.

When I start a painting of my traditional style, I will draw it to scale on a piece of grid paper.

It kind of goes back to the technique in quilting where they did quiltings by blocks, but I do it on grid paper.

Then I get the canvas and I start bringing that up to the canvas.

It has to be so precise because if you, if you get it off, lines won't match.

I had my students through the years say, 'Mr Wilson, that's cheating, you're using tape, I can do that.'

And I'd say, here, go do it.

About two days later, they'd bring it back, 'OK Mr Wilson, you can do that, I can't quite handle it..' It took me years to discover this, to figure it out.

You know, this brush here was the big secret because I learned to varnish those edges basically.

I decide the colors after I have the, uh, grid drawing.

I will draw it to the canvas and then I will set it aside.

And I may wait three, four weeks before I start, because I'm trying to figure out the color scheme.

And it's weird because you start painting in your head at night.

And so those colors end up kind of coming from your dreams.

Because you go to sleep and you're dreaming about this piece.

And those colors sometimes end up being the colors that you use in the actual painting.

It's tedious, but I enjoy it and not everybody does.

A lot of times people think that it's computer-generated, and sometimes they think that insults me.

But to me, that's a compliment that I can, I can get it that clean.

That's the part that scared me the most after the wreck.

In October, October the 7th, I was in a very serious car accident.

I was on my way to work.

And, uh, I was in a head-on collision.

I had three broke or fractured ribs, a fractured sternum, a severe head injury with a severe concussion.

My ankle was bent completely in two and crushed.

I was scared that I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to return to what I loved.

In this world, we can't control anything.

It's just chaotic.

But when I am creating that painting, that's the one thing I can control.

I remember going into the dining room and sitting down and developing a grid painting.

Because I wanted to know that I could still come up with an idea.

So I sat down and I drew this piece out on the grid paper, and it ended up being the first painting completed after the wreck.

It's called 'Fractured.'

I know that some of my paintings are very busy and they can, that can be part of the reaction they provoke.

I think a lot my art does need to be seen from a distance, because from a distance is when that visual movement happens.

That kind of goes back to the perceptual art.

People see what they want to see in it.

Sometimes the ones that I think "I don't like" that the first one's a sale because somebody else will see it and they love it.

I had always thought, well...

I'm doing art inspired by my grandmas and great grandmas' quilts, and the patterns I see of other quilts.

I wanted to bring together a group of professional quilters who would take the paintings that I had painted inspired by quilts, and then they would do quilts inspired by those paintings.

And so I've been dreaming of this for a long time... And so I put a deal on Facebook, 'if you're a professional quilter, and you're interested in going down this journey together - where you're doing quilts inspired by my paintings, and I'm doing paintings inspired by your quilts - just let me know.'

...I was wondering, who is this person?

So I looked him up.

And when I saw his paintings, I knew right away, I wanted to make quilts based on his paintings....

...I just kinda went gaga... ...

I love his use of color... ...

I really liked the strong geometric sense that it had... ...and we said, 'oh my gosh, this guy is basically just painting quilts'...

It's a neat group of people because all seven of them are different.

And that's what I wanted.

...Qu'aint is QU for quilting, and the 'ain't' part is for painting... ...We don't copy it.

We just do an interpretation of his painting...

...I took the basic stripes components he had, the stripes...

...I wanted to with this piece to show not only what was going on, but the highlights and darkness...

...So the 'Boom Power' came from an actual comic book...but also the way these drawings are put together is very much what you would see in graffiti out in the street... ...We've been calling it the 'invasion quilt.'

As soon as I saw this, because I was like 'I don't know what I'm going to do,' and then I saw that.

And I was like... that's it!

Look a spider bot!

I think if Ma Wilson came in here, she would be astounded at the colors... ... People always already look at painting as fine art, and we'd like to see them see quilting more as a fine art - and not just as a craft...

...The people who put those together really took the time to think about how the colors work together, how the patterns work together and to create something beautiful... ...we hope that they'll see on the wall how beautiful they are together... maybe to make people look a little closer... ...we might just step up and show Oklahoma first of all, show the United States and -- hey, who knows, maybe show the world?

-- what the Midwestern art quilts and art can be like today...

I haven't seen anything like Qu'aint.

And I think that's pretty good because I think it's going to gives us something unique to offer the art world.

This is kind of, just a, dream come true to be honest with you.

That we finally have got to this point.

And I look forward to continuing because we still want to go further.

I often think what would my grandmas think about this.

I think that they would enjoy seeing what I've done.

And I hope I've, they would be proud of what I've accomplished.

Now I'm in national shows.

Uh, I'm in several publications, and my first book I was published in this year.

It just, it blows my mind where I've gone since 2014.

It just amazes me that the journey has been as successful as it has been.

And I'm enjoying every second of it.

I love it.

A LEGACY REMEMBERED As a painter and as a person John W. Carlson was known for his empathy.

He had an uncanny ability to make you feel that you were the only person in a room by truly listening and paying attention to you.

He always took the time to speak with people at openings.

He'd see someone even sitting over by themselves, and he'd go over and start a conversation with them.

John had this superpower to go up to anybody and immediately, within a short period of time, get out of them.

What their creative passion was.

The things that he talked about, whatever he put out in the ether.

You could feel it.

Born in Ashtabula, Ohio, Carlson gave up on art school after one year, preferring the steady paycheck he got as a garbage man in his hometown.

He joked that he had an MFA in being a trash man, but that that influenced his art career because he started to see people in their most human form, and he started to study the landscape around him with a different eye.

When he painted, he painted how he felt, and it was a both to me, the pain as it relates to what he felt with his son.

Much of Carlson's empathy came from his own personal grief.

In 2010, Carlson's 26- year-old son Ryan died of a drug overdose in Nebraska.

He was all torn up because he did not go to collect the body, did not go to Nebraska at that time.

And that stuck with him forever.

In the decade that followed the death of his son, Carlson channeled his grief into art.

He frequently used charcoal.

He specifically said it's the fact that it's created by fire.

It's the remnants of of being burnt.

Almost kind of like the symbolic meaning of it is something that he said was also powerful.

John was one of the most raw individuals that I've ever encountered in the art world.

He was not afraid to talk about his past.

He was not afraid to open up about addiction and then the grief and the loss and dealing with that.

And I think that's why the community felt so connected with him.

John, in my conversations with him, seemed to think so much and empathize with the emotion of the figures that he was going to depict what the figures are doing with their hands, their body language, but also the physical expression.

But even more than that, it's what's going on outside of the figure.

It's the way he's manipulating the materials, the paint, the charcoal, whatever he's doing has an expressiveness of his own, as if you could almost feel the emotion as an extension of the way his hand was moving.

Carlson and his life partner, photographer Shari Wilkins, began a movement called American Emotionalism.

The whole point was to create art that elicits emotion.

The labels, the didactic, shouldn't explain everything that you should feel it.

You should look at a piece and feel it.

It's instinctive.

It's intuitive.

You don't need to have it explained to you.

In 2019, Carlson and Wilkins made a pilgrimage to Nebraska so he could see the house where his son had died.

He had in his mind that it was going to be, you know, like a horrible place.

And then when you went there, it was like, you know, an average neighborhood with a nice house.

It was totally the opposite of what he had imagined.

I got out to take photographs of the house for him.

He sat in the car alone and he said that he could feel Ryan's spirit.

After the trip to Nebraska.

A change took place in Carlson's work.

He began adding color.

I remember going into his studio and seeing the use of like bright greens and yellows and at that time he was just painting is a singular portrait of someone.

But then the color palette started expanding and all of a sudden I was seeing pibks and neons and fluorescent.

The change to color was, I think, kind of trying to kind of work through the grief and shed some of that heaviness and looking more towards enjoying the color.

Carlson was a musician as well as a visual artist, and the music he loved to play was the blues, mixing his passion for music with his grief and then closure over his son's death led Carlson to the most acclaimed work of his career, the Blues Series.

The Blues exhibition was his best, most well-received exhibit that we'd ever hosted at the gallery.

Yeah, that that blues exhibition was just a knockout.

He was the most proud of the work that he created in the Blues Series.

It wasn't just about the music.

What he painted was.

What people felt that created the music.

He wanted you to feel the anguish in the Middle Passage.

The anguish in people who are fleeing slavery.

For me, he painted what his pain looked like, and it resonated in the way he did.

He was definitely hitting his stride and it was so exciting.

After the series.

The next question was Where do I go from here?

On December 20th, 2020, just ten months after his Blues exhibition, John W. Carlson died from an abdominal aneurysm.

He was 66.

His death was so tragic because it was so sudden.

One morning he'd been playing guitar with his grandson, and then that evening he was gone, basically.

Even in death, Carlson showed his empathy as an organ donor.

He donated his kidneys and his liver.

So he was at the hospital longer.

And what they do is they have an honor walk.

They're taking the body down for harvesting of the organs.

And so it's like the last it's like the last walk or the last time that you have with the person.

You go down the halls and all of the doctors and nurses and everything.

You feel supported because your loved ones honored.

His donation, you know, enabled three other people to carry on.

I think so.

It's probably to me probably one of the biggest impacts and legacies that he has.

His legacy for me is in the lives he touched is in our voice as we speak about John.

That is where I think his legacy lives.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, 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.