Next on Gallery America.

This Lawton based artist is known for big portraits, but his latest is his smallest yet.

And it just might be the most seen piece of Oklahoma art ever.

I've never thought about that.

That would be actually really cool.

We joined the OETA Art Club to see how art is changing students in Oklahoma.

All kids, all backgrounds need to be able to utilize art.

Plus, we'll learn about African-American influence in national cuisines.

That and more coming right now.

Hello, Oklahoma.

I'm Robert Reid and welcome to Gallery America, the show that brings you great art from Oklahoma and around the nation.

Today, we're at the Millwood Arts Academy in Oklahoma City.

To find out about the OETA art club.

But first, this Lawton Painter is one of Oklahoma's most successful artists.

And his latest work is coming to a post office near you, meet Robert Peterson.

my name is Robert Peterson.

And I'm an international contemporary artist based from Lawton Oklahoma, a small military town.

It's home.

It's where I graduated high school, married my wife, had all three of our children and found out who I was going to be.

My background is where I start with first and it kind of sets the mood for the rest of the painting will work.

It allows the story to be told of the people that I'm painting.

Ten years ago, when I was driving the fork truck, it was like I thought that that was what I was going to be doing for rest my life because it was good pay, great benefits.

I was okay with that then.

But looking at where I'm at now and some of the things that I've been able to experience, yeah, I'm so glad that God had different plans for me.

I actually got hurt running on a treadmill.

the treadmill broke,my hip popped, and I immediately felt this horrible burning pain.

And so I went and picked up some paint and some canvases from Hobby Lobby and then went home.

And I think that is a part of what helped to get me to where I am today, because I haven't slowed down and I refuse to slow down.

I mean, like this year alone, I think I've gotten put into like four or five museums.

I got some amazing collectors.

But I don't say it as a brag.

I mean, I say it because like, it's it's mind blowing to me.

I want my art to be a part of what changes the way people, black people are experienced.

What I'm doing is trying to capture a moment of my truth and the truth that I that I see and I experience.

I'm with the people who I surround myself with.

Right.

Because if you look in the media, you don't see our stories.

Told them enough.

the world has said for hundreds of years that you're animals, thugs, thieves, worthless, dumb, a target overlooked and 3/5 of a man.

Let me be the one to tell you that many of us see you and you are so much more than that.

You are worthy, you're beautiful.

You are amazing.

You are brilliant.

You are kind, you're creative.

You are capable.

You are radiant.

listen to me Young black boys and black men of all ages.

You are kings.

It's how I feel.

I feel like if more people heard this and believed this, then we would have greater outcome within the black community.

The way that I actually got involved with doing the Black Heritage Stamp for this year, I got an email from a gentleman named Michael and he said, I love your work.

So I've been following you for about a year on social media, and I love your your paintings.

I love the stories behind the paintings.

And I think that you'd be great to do, you know, a stamp.

And he told me about Ernest Gaines.

And I was like, I have no idea about his.

I said, but I'm going to figure him out.

Ernest Gaines is an amazing author.

I was born on a plantation in 1933.

I started reading and reading and reading.

I fell in love with books, but I was not finding me in the books that I was reading because I was reading novels by white writers, but they were not about my people.

Only thing I could think about was to write about the South, about my home I'd come from.

He told stories of of stories about black life during his time.

I think it was his truth.

I think that it was something that, you know, at the time needed to be spoken about in a way that people could receive it and understand it.

You know, I think that book has helped me become a better person and anyone else would read it by become a little bit better than he was before they read the book.

And that's what I try to do.

And so I think that the same goes with my work.

I think that it's in your face, but it's not so much in your face, so much that you are offended by it, but it still will create some form of dialog to make you question what's going on and want to learn more about what is being said in the painting.

I think peace is greater than love because you have people that will love somebody and they'll be miserable because they love that person so much.

And I think that if you put peace first, it makes everything in life greater.

I think peace is something that I found ten years ago.

I got off the food truck and picked up a paintbrush.

And so this is something that because I've experienced true peace, I want everybody to taste it.

Hi.

Hello.

How y'all doing?

What's going on here?

“were about to do an art project ” is it alright?

Is this seat taken?

May I join you?

is that All right?

Okay.

Thank you so much.

I'll try my best.

What do you need?

I call these art exercises?

Because it's kind of like when you're exercising your body and you don't have to do a a workout.

That's like 30 minutes for it to be an exercise.

You can do an exercise that takes like 5 minutes or so.

All right.

Five, four, three, two, one.

While I'm working on this why dont you check out the story of a North Carolina product who makes face jugs that incorporates Christian voodoo and African influences.

Have a look.

I'm a storyteller, so I tell the story and I tell the story in my jugs.

My jugs reflect the scar ification.

My jugs reflect the rite of passage.

My jugs reflect the struggle I'm doing it to honor my ancestors.

I'm the black power male open area and we'll sit it over here.

I call myself a gypsy potter.

You know, I've never had a studio of my own like this.

I've always had a garage or something like that.

But this is the first time I've had a studio, and it's going to be my studio and I'm going to work in there the way I want to do it.

It's like a potter name.

Hamada from from Japan said moving pottery is like moving a mountain.

Now, the history of the faith shows is that in Africa, that ancestor worship, when they took him into slavery, they took him to the islands to acclimate them.

They picked the voodoo and all that hoodoo stuff.

And then when they got the United States, the commission is quickly tried to convert them to Christianity.

So they amalgamated all those three religion ancestor worship in Africa, woodland, Jamaican Christianity.

And they came up with the ugly jug, the ugly jug premis is, anything that you possess, your hat, your clothing, your props and pants, your spirit resides in it.

And so when you die, they put it on your grave.

You wasn't allowed to have a great marker because they did not consider you a person.

You were chattel.

And so you put the grave marker on the grave and it scared the devil away so you so could go to heaven.

That's what they believed.

The thing about the face jugs for me is to tell the story of what was going on at that time when the lynching was going on in this country.

So I got a jug inside there where Emmett Till, a young boy there, was killed, I think 1954.

It's two sided.

One side looks like a normal child and the other side looks like, you know, all the kind of bad stuff.

now slave potter Dave was a slave who was owned by some people in in edgeville, South Carolina, and dave as a young boy, grew up on the plantation.

So one day they asked him would he like to learn how to throw.

So the person that owned him, they taught him how to throw, but also they taught him how to read and write and set type.

They had a newspaper company called The Hive and Dave could sit, type, read and write.

The one thing that I do now in honor of slave potter Dave.

I write things on my jugs.

Like I can read that they were they could write and read, but sometimes they would spell read r e d instead of R E A D and sometimes they would write things were phonetically and he would write things on them like I belong to Mr.

Miles with a pot boils in the oven.

Give me silver, give me gold.

They're not good for you.

So he would write all kind of things on the jugs and then he would sign it “LM ” that was the people that owned him.

And then they would put Dave and he would put the year.

So I think what I'm going to make now is a face jug body.

So I usually make about four or five bodies.

And then the the revelation or the inspiration of what I'm making comes later.

I'm more concern with trying to stay with the African tradition, everything that you do, oh, join it together.

It's also a design.

And also when I when I give this to the kiln, I can put glass here and have it run down.

I'll put scarification, I'll put the scratching, I'll do all kind of other things to it later.

But I want to get it together today, right now, so that it will be ready to go when I get to that point, because different things come to me at different times and I just I got to be aware and ready to ready to work with.

I get an idea.

I'm not striving for realism, you know, I want to approximate that and do what the slave potters did.

And I think I'm a continuation of what they do.

So I make things that refer to the the black experience.

You know, I'm trying to keep the story alive because if we don't keep store alive, we don't have to do it again.

“guys, youve got about five or 10 minutes to finish this up and then we got to move on to the next step, ok?

” Can you tell me your name?

Warren Pete, what's your role here?

I'm the proud principal of the Millwood Arts Academy.

So OETA Art club ,um, is an after school program.

They do drama, theater, music, dance in the arts.

We target certain students, you know, students that are some sometimes fall between the cracks, you know, you don't really hear too much about them.

*beatboxing * So trying to engage with people who arent normally dancers... *indistinct talking * so, so far it's mostly like, I don't know how to dance, I don't have rhythm.

And that's the greatest part about what I teach is because movement is your dance.

When you walk every day, when you are, you motion to pick up something.

When you're feeling a certain way, when you're down, you kind of slow.

You kind of, you know, when you're up, you're jumping around you.

You know, when you're feeling the best and you hear some good news, you dance.

If you hear a choreographer teach choreography, he's most likely not one, two and three and four.

He's like.

Ha ha ha, Ziz za ziz za ziz za VA!

You get it?

It's amazing and astonishing their reaction there, because the beginning is always a challenge.

There's always a fight.

But I love it.

what do you hope this model.

would hopefully build for this state in relation to art?

To not not put art in a box.

All kids, all backgrounds need to be able to utilize art in many ways and not just think it's more of a particular type of person.

Everyone needs the arts.

Thank you so much for having us.

I really enjoyed this.

Next, we're going to Colonial Williamsburg to meet a historian, re-enactor and writer who traces the very genes of American cooking back to its African roots.

Really interesting story.

Check it out.

This would be less mature than that.

I want do this one.

We're also making Sweet Potato Pumpkin, also known as cushaw.

And that's the big striped pumpkin you see over there.

It's originally from the West Indies and was brought to the American South by enslaved Africans.

Food is a vehicle for conversation.

For food is a means by which we can begin to understand ourselves and neig I think when it comes to Southern food, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it just came out of nothing.

The reality is, is that Southern food is a result of multiple historical and cultural collisions, particularly between Europe, Africa and Native America.

When it comes to people of African descent, AI is extremely powerful, knows that food is how we pass in our culture.

Food is how we resisted enslavement and oppression, and food is how we showed our agency.

It wasn't it wasn't passive.

One of the things that gets me the most concerned is when people refer to African-American vernacular foodways as sort of like what was given to us, know what we created for ourselves or for others.

So I think it's incredibly empowering to learn about that tradition from the historic side, the way I do here at Colonial Williamsburg, Philippines, Black Eyed Peas, we think of them as something you just eat for good luck on New Year, something that you know fills the bill out of meat.

Three black eyed peas, a green soup, potatoes.

And you will make.

Well, it's deeper than that.

When I went to Senegal, West Africa, I went to Goree Island, which is where enslaved people were prepared for shipment to the new world, including some of my own ancestors and the last remaining slave castle.

The message on this glove, they explained to us that Black Eyed Peas were one of the foods that were given to enslaved Africans cooked in palm oil to fatten them up.

One thing about sweet potatoes is that in the West Indies, anywhere they were boiling sugar, they were really quick energy, food.

And when the men would go to the sugar Bowl in house, the job was to pour the sugar all night long time a long ladles molten hot cane.

So that becomes molasses and then it becomes fermented into rum, which of course will then cross the ocean and buy more enslaved people and feed a triangular trade.

But what happens is while they're cooking this the syrup down all night, they're dumping some of it over top of an iron pot.

So we'll see potatoes.

What does that sound like to you?

It sounds like candied yams.

And they would eat that to heat them up all like they had to be up on.

It was a high energy snack.

We every time you eat candied yams.

Now, when you think about an enslaved man in their sugar boiling house, all night long, making that dish happen as a as a means to stay awake.

So I'm not interested in recipes.

I'm interested in formulas.

I don't think about food and cooking the way the people do.

I think of it in terms of big black ideas.

The ultimate is to create something that tastes good.

I do have the best Black Eyed Peas ever tasted.

Amazing.

It's not about how much of this or that you put into it or what technique you use.

Black cooking is more about flavor, it's about spirit, and I think it's less about like gourmet techniques that require a lot of effort because we didn't have that.

All we had was, was our, our, our feeling about the food and feeling about each other.

And for me, I think the epiphany moment was my parents asking, what do you want to be when you grow up?

And I said, I want to be a writer.

I want to be a teacher, I want to be a chef, and I want to be a preacher.

For me, all those elements are conjoined.

This idea of feeding people as a spiritual exercise, this idea of feeding people is being an educator.

So they're feeding people as creating a text that's edible.

All of that, to me, it all makes sense.

It's all part of one holistic worldview, and the secret to the best cooking is trying to find things where everything complements each other.

It's about, to me, creating communalism among your ingredients things.

And that's how you make the food tastes good.

We call our food soul food.

Why?

It's named after something that transcends life and death.

Then about our nation.

It's about our spirits.

And that's what makes me like, so proud of it.

One of the things that surprises people about me is that I'm Jewish.

I became officially Jewish by conversion when I was 22 years old.

For me, particularly in Judaism, food and faith go hand in hand a very particular way.

Every single part of the Jewish diaspora has its unique recipes and formulas.

They go hand in hand with the holidays and they tell stories.

They're there for a reason.

It's not just because people like to eat them.

You sit down in a Jewish household, the springtime we have Passover, Masa and Martha tells the story of how a people who were oppressed and enslaved got their freedom overnight.

How do we make the world a better place?

How can we learn from our mistakes as a human species?

Those are really big questions in Judaism, in Torah, and that's undergirds a lot of my work, including the work I do with food I wanted to write about.

One thing it's important to do is really do your own research.

But I think for African-Americans, one of the struggles we have is that it's not easy for us to find out where we come from, because when we say that our names were taken and our identities were switched around for other people's benefit, we're not joking.

That's that's how it happens.

We have to scale brick walls to get to where other people just have gone back.

For some people, they're satisfied knowing that their ancestors came from Germany.

For a lot of African-Americans, they don't know which countries, plural.

In West Africa, their ancestors came from.

So in the cooking gene, I decided to do all of those pieces.

I wanted to know how did you know my ancestors who were enslaved or what kind of work they do?

How did they process all this crops into consumables?

And to know that if it were not for certain choices and accidents of history, you might be in their shoes and have that sort of feeling of gratitude that you're not.

So, you know, how hard was it for these folks, our ancestors, our forebears, to deal with in situations like that and somehow make a way out of no way.

I never see the word slave as a slave, as an identity, enslaved as a condition.

So we don't want to put on our ancestors a label that they themselves would would reject because it wasn't true.

Once you have that roadmap to where things start, you can kind of have a roadmap to where things are going to go.

And I think that's extremely powerful.

And now a trip back into the Gallery America archives.

My art, I believe is a gift that God has given me is something that didn't just come automatically.

It's something that I had to practice and work for.

I find myself to be an illustrator.

Illustration is something that I really enjoy and it's something that I want to do more of in my mind.

I think my professional career started when I was in high school because that's when I got my first check for doing something for somebody.

So it's been approximately 33 years that I've been getting paid to do art for somebody.

Oh, okay.

I see you gave me a I know you want to be taller.

Yes, I want him bigger than Joseph/ brother.

You know, brother.

Or brother in there.

When Mrs. Hobbes, I guess, in her own personal ministry, has been writing poetry, taking stories from the Bible, and rewriting the stories as poetry, and Dr. Duncan has been illustrating those.

What?

You like it?

Hey, that if I.

Get it going.

Nice to see you.

Victory sees her in Virginia.

Right here.

You see, Dr. Duncan was my professor at Uco.

He's the reason that I'm in Edmond, Oklahoma.

He's the reason that I decided to go that school.

He said that when she presented the script for this next book about Noah's Ark, you know, the Bible adventures, he said, I came to his mind.

He saw me and he called me and he had a project for me.

He thought it would be perfect for me.

And it's a book illustrating Bible stories.

What really thrills me is that Victor, in his career, he's began to even to flower more in expressing himself.

And it makes me feel good as a teacher because it tells me that I have done a lot of things right.

And here he is evidencing what I've prayed for, all these years.

Thank you so much for joining us.

That's all the time we have for Gallery America.

As always, you can see past episodes of Gallery America by going to our archives at OETA Dot TV Slash Gallery America or visit Gallery America Online for more Oklahoma art news on our Facebook channel or on Instagram @oetaGallery.

We'll see you next time.

Until then.

STAY ARTY OKLAHOMA!!

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