(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, how a nun's vision to save cats has lasted 60 years.

(Annie) The Hermitage is a wonderful place.

There is no cat that won't find a welcome.

(Tom) Meet the man behind some of Tucson's most iconic mid-century designs.

(Demion) These types of works collectively sort of shape this sort of idea of America in the Southwest.

(Tom) Paintings, philosophy and life with Willie Bonner.

(Willie) The question becomes, who am I?

What is my identity?

And take a visual journey with poet Marc David Pinate.

(Marc) A deeper level of balance.

A kind of balance that defies the intellect.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated I'm Tom McNamara.

Back in the 1960s, a Russian Orthodox nun from England moved to Arizona and established a cage-free shelter for countless cats.

Well now, Hermitage Cat Shelter is still helping out hundreds of felines every year, providing them a safe place to live out their lives or be adopted.

(upbeat music) The message here is that sheltering can be done differently.

Cats do not need to be in cages, animals do not need to be in cages.

They can free roam and get along well.

With the proper medical care, kitties with special needs can live a very long and healthy life and are very much adoptable.

We wanna make sure that people know about feline leukemia too, that's a big thing.

We house FELV kitties here.

FELV is not a death sentence.

My name is Tiffany Johnson.

I am a certified veterinary technician and the medical supervisor here at the Hermitage.

I was an instructor teaching vet assistant students prior to coming here and so I would bring students here to practice their hands-on skills.

So in doing so, I learned about this place and then the job became available and I jumped on it because this place is magical.

Just to be here and to be able to treat these cats as individuals is what makes it magical.

Every one of these cats is an individual and we are free to learn their personalities, their likes, their dislikes, their friends, how they prefer everything in life because this is their home.

Back in the medical suite, we can do a lot of things that you can see in any other vet practice.

We are the starting line for every cat that comes to the shelter and through our intake doors and we take care of all the medical needs of the cats.

And so whether it's intake, where we are screening them for diseases, checking their blood work, making sure that they're healthy enough to join the population out where they're free-roaming and not spreading things to them, we monitor them back here.

We also do all of our spay and neutering here on site.

We do dentals, we can do amputations, we can do ultrasounds, we have an x-ray suite.

We can do most things that you'll find in any regular vet clinic.

We are non-profit so 100% of what we do is because of our donors and our supporters and we thank them dearly for that.

Volunteers as well, we're able to save so much money on labor hours because we have our volunteers who do about 250,000 hours of work, which equates to hundreds and thousands of dollars of savings at $15 an hour.

We're very, very lucky and fortunate that we have volunteers who are as passionate as the rest of us to come in here and help these kitties.

(gentle music) I volunteer a couple hours on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday and then three hours on Sunday.

My first day of volunteering was December 23rd of 2017 and I started cleaning the senior cat room and then in April I got my first bubble kittens.

Thunder and Lightning were found in a dumpster in Phoenix.

It was scary as all get out to have such teeny tiny little kittens depending on you.

I got them when they were two days old and they just fit into the palm of my hand and of course you fall in love with them.

The first two kittens I got were Thunder and Lightning.

I was a foster failure.

That's when you don't give your kittens back but adopt them instead.

I have two adult sons who are my human boys.

and these two cats are my cat boys.

We call them the cat boys all the time.

They're like furry sons.

I bet Thunder went into the bottom of the closet.

(gentle music) I need to hold on with one hand so... The Hermitage is a wonderful place.

The Hermitage is my happy place.

There is no cat that won't find a welcome at Hermitage.

They provide cages for TNR, trap, neuter, and return.

They're just a full-service place with wonderful people to make it happen.

(gentle music) Long ago, very long ago when I was in college I spoke with a sister who was just forming this organization called the Hermitage.

The bottom line is she was tough.

She didn't suffer fools.

If you asked her a question about a cat, she would scold you that you didn't know this information already and just lecture you and so on.

So she was very tough but you could see underneath all of it.

Extremely loving and caring about the cat community which was something brand new because back then nobody cared about stray cats--but she did.

If she were alive today I'm sure she'd be thrilled to see this.

If you come to the Hermitage today it's insane how organized, how professional, it's astonishing.

I'm Sara Vanstraalen and I'm here to visit the cats and we're thinking of possibly adopting one.

I'm a teacher at St.

Michael's School and we are big believers in community service and outreaching in the community and this is one of our organizations that we visit with our students.

We come for a day to volunteer and help out in the shelter in any way we can.

I believe that there are so many animals that need good homes already versus going to a breeder to buy one because we have lots of love to give.

How did you hear about the shelter?

It's just full of passion and love here.

To get to work with animals has always been a passion of mine which is why I became a veterinary technician.

I did 20 years in the military and then decided I'd take orders from animals instead of people for my next life.

(soft music) We, absolutely everybody here, is an animal lover.

They say that there's dog people, there's cat people, everybody here is an animal person.

(laughs) (soft music) As Tucson transformed from a small desert town to a modern city, one designer helped to shape that new identity.

Herb Greif's bold modernist style left its mark on everything from business logos to city signage, and at 96 years old, his legacy reminds us that good design can define not just a product, but a city.

♪ SOFT XYLOPHONE PLAYS (Demion) Tucson transformed in the 20th century from 1930 with about 30,000 people to 1960 with 250,000.

It was a massive boom period.

(Herbert) That was a time when there were a lot of incoming people.

They were naturally unfamiliar with what was available in town.

So it was built into their need to have artists to design and produce ads for all the advertisers so that that information would get to all these newcomers.

♪ SOFT XYLOPHONE PLAYS (Demion) The housing stock and the advertising and these graphic arts all played a role in being able to communicate out this optimism of the mid 20th century and Herb captures that.

I'm Herbert Greif, I'm 96 years old.

My wife and I have lived in Tucson Since roughly 1955.

(Demion) He was part of a small group of individuals whose graphic design really shaped the character of advertising in Tucson.

♪ SOFT XYLOPHONE PLAYS (Herbert) There came a time when they needed to update a piece of literature and they gave it to me and management was so pleased with it.

They kept feeding me all their sales literature.

The use of mid-century color palettes that were really of the Southwest are really clear in his--in his work.

The tans, the sort of sage greens, the silvers, all of that sort of speaks to the desert.

(Herbert) I think I was most proud of the stuff I did for Sunset Dairy.

It involved newspaper ads, brochures, signage, and later I designed and illustrated the 100 houses for John Wesley Miller.

♪ SOFT GUITAR PLAYS (Demion) He also worked on political campaigns, notably Mo Udall's campaign, which was very graphically bold and really distinctive and sort of speaks to the age when Udall was running for Congress.

These types of works collectively sort of shaped this sort of idea of America in the Southwest.

♪ SOFT GUITAR PLAYS (Carlos) Herb is an example of--of, as a young man, as a person who decided to go into art, you know, and he had other options, but he felt that was his calling.

♪ SOFT XYLOPHONE PLAYS (Carlos) I mean, he covers everything as far as I'm concerned, but then he has this--this interest in--in aviation and aeronautics and stuff like this, which is also a big Tucson thing.

♪ SOFT LOFI PLAYS (Demion) When Herb started his career, everything was about hand lettering, hand drawing, hand graphics, and mocking them up, taking photos of them, and then getting them ready for print.

That is a very, very different space and time and design practice than today.

♪ SOFT GUITAR PLAYS (Herbert) I think it's still imperative that one understands the discipline of--of design.

A lot of computer programs have ways to kind of do that for you, but it never looks the same as when you have the hand of the artist involved.

♪ SOFT XYLOPHONE PLAYS (Carlos) When I saw the totality of his work, I immediately contacted the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation because these are things that are easily forgotten The work itself is very often destroyed, and so--so any effort at preserving it is important.

(Demion) We do community archiving, so we'll work with a family to make sure that they are put into archival folders to ensure that his graphic arts are protected and find ways to ensure that it's made available for future generations.

That dazzles me, I never expected any such thing, obviously not when I was doing the thing.

(Carlos) He's a real Tucson treasure, and he was a buried treasure, we didn't know.

♪ SOFT GUITAR PLAYS (Tom) You can explore more of Tucson's design heritage and visit an exhibit of Herb's original work at this year's Tucson Modernism Week, November 7th to 9th, 2025.

For more information, head to their website, preservetucson.org/ modernism-week Through his abstract paintings, Tucsonan Willie Bonner tries to find the self in a world that often turns its gaze away.

His paintings carry truths like buried seeds, some quietly waiting, and others breaking through the surface, and they will not be ignored.

♪ SOFT MUSIC I'm Willie Bonner and I'm an artist.

We see the world individually in an abstract way.

You might see it different than I see it.

You gotta find your voice in the work.

You can't go by the voice of the artist.

What do it make you feel?

So the colors kinda help pull you into that.

Then you have to start deciphering what you see, what you feel.

I'm communicating to you spiritually.

My parents would take all of my siblings to church.

I was engaged into the artwork in the Bible, and I wanted to tell a story about my existence in the world.

My parents encouraged me to be me.

My father played the blues.

My mother sang gospel in the church.

It was difficult for me to walk around with a guitar and be outside and play.

It was a lot easier to have pen and paper in my back pocket where I could just draw.

(Julie) He used to go with his father, who was a jazz musician, into the clubs.

♪ JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING Draw the musicians.

He would sell these works to the people at the clubs.

And he got enough to have a good meal and a little extra pocket money They are pen and ink, patchmarked drawings, so atmospheric.

They're so rich looking at jazz as part of a cultural history that deserves to be interpreted through art.

♪ FAINT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING (Willie) Like most kids, when you begin school and you're drawing and painting, you start off doing paintings and drawings of your family.

You start off with a Crayola pencil.

And you start playing and mixing colors and looking at brush strokes.

I got excited.

I liked what the paint was telling me, more so than what I was trying to do with the paint.

So that became a factor that I liked seeing paint drips, flow, I can control it in certain ways, and there was a language in that for me.

Also as a child, when you go outside, you make mud.

Then you start sculpting, sculpturing things out of mud.

So now you're looking at 3D.

Everything became an investigation.

Nothing off the table, everything where it was supposed to be.

But it was on me to find my voice, my language, through these materials.

♪ SOFT MUSIC (Julie) He never stopped working and pushing his work to the limit.

(Laura) He's very, very diverse in the work that he does.

We have the paintings, we have installation pieces, we have the drawings, so it just goes to show the breadth of the work that Willie does.

Some of the paintings are in acrylic, some are mixed medium.

Some are tarred feathers.

(Willie) Some of the patterns in the work is patterns from quilts.

Enslaved people would put into their work to communicate to one another.

I'm not the only one that would use an abstract to speak to the spirit of man.

It would begin a long time before me.

So I'm taking all this here, different information and different ways to crush the work and I'm creating like a gumbo.

The struggle that I once had was straddling the fist, being the world of academia, but then there's Black culture that's totally left out of academia.

You learn stories of other ethnic groups, but somehow your story is not supposed to be told or mentioned.

The Western view of art was disconnected to who I am.

Most institutions I ran by, people of that culture and Black America have very little space in that culture, unless you buy into it.

The question becomes, who am I?

What is my identity?

How do it look?

Do it have to be photo-realist?

Do it have to be expressionistic?

You know, what does it look like?

What I'm doing with my painting is expressing what's in me.

My journey as a Black American in the history of Black Americans.

Our history and our contributions to this society and now even more of that is being taken out to the point you feel like you're being erased.

They don't want DEI, they don't want Woke culture, they don't want critical race theory.

We don't need any of those names.

It's simply our history.

For it to be left out of the schools, we're glad to make up some of that void with it being here in this show.

I'm giving that journey of the past, the present, and the future.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

You might not be ready or in a position to receive the truth and it might take a while for you to cleanse yourself of how our society separate us from not having those conversations.

So the work creates conversation.

(Julie) He's saying, "I'm a black man, but I'm an American.

This is my country.

We have hope to come together."

He's not an angry man, but he's not going to let you forget the injustices of the past.

(Laura) Our name is Blue Lotus, and that name was given to us by Willie Bonner.

That is a flower that's really important in Africa, and it's a flower that grows in very harsh environment into great beauty, and I thought that made it very symbolic of our struggle in this particular society.

I want people to find they own humanity within the work themselves.

Considering that we don't want to look deeper than what the surface show was, that's how racism functioned.

We're all human, right?

So when you look at the earlier work of man and hunting and gathering, everybody worked together.

Are you helping humanity restore?

Or are you part of the problem to keep us divided?

And then the question is why?

Why do you feel it's important?

So I try not to be around to explain things to people because that's not my job.

I'm not Jesus.

[ CHUCKLES ] You know, I'm just an artist.

♪ SOFT MUSIC Next, in our ongoing collaboration with the Poetry Center, poet Marc David Pinate's question, "How do I explain?"

becomes a journey through memory, identity, and the cosmic threads that bind us.

♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING How do I explain?

How do I explain what the colibri's wings whisper in the pink of early morning?

♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING Perhaps you remember what the cricket sang to you on breezy summer nights when you were ten, and one with nature?

♪ OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING I bend myself into new directions and new forms.

And in bending, I transform.

We bend and mold things-- clay, metal, children-- into something meaningful as we bend ourselves into something magical and beautiful.

This is what I have learned from yoga.

And as I strain and stretch, huff and puff to keep my balance, I begin to understand a deeper level of balance, a kind of balance that defies the intellect and resides in your soul or a smile.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC PLAYING The stream runs cold.

The sun shines warm.

And the cottonwood speaks so slowly that most do not hear them.

The 10,000 things unfold so that I may know divine balance and get my own running, shining, and speaking in line with the rest of the universe.

Oh, that I could speak to you as angels do in tongues of fire, spell out the names of every muse and every god within the lining of your soul.

But knowing cannot be told.

Knowledge is never taught.

Rather, it surges like an ocean.

And you don't just hear it.

It splashes in your chest.

Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a multi-part investigative series that we're working on.

Over-billing of electricity in master meter parks is appalling.

Total opportunity for landlords to take advantage of tenants, and they're doing that.

Each time we'd get in the manager, the rent would go up.

In 15 days, we're gonna evict you, and in 30 days, you'll be out of here.

We're burning up over here.

It's hot.

The most vulnerable residents in Tucson are those people that live in manufactured homes.

There were no requirements for them to have any insulation.

The walls were very thin.

They were made of aluminum.

The people that are getting evicted have no choice but to go back home to their children or they're homeless.

This is the last affordable housing.

There's no place that's cheaper than this.

And it clearly is something that is an existential threat and problem for Pima County.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.