This week on Arizona Illustrated, a new art gallery of Tucson creates space for under-represented artists to get experimental.

(Racheal) I saw Lizs work and I was like, who is this person?

and why have I not seen her work in Tucson before?

And we went and did a studio visit and It.

Was.

On.

(Tom) - Find out why the owner of this German restaurant in Sierra Vista is so angry.

(Dennis) - To somebody that doesn't speak it, it sounds like such an angry language, (Dennis speaking in German) (Tom) Our story on Tucson's Homestretch Foundation won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award.

(Kathryn) We're seeing change happen, but we still have to continue to lobby for this inclusion.

And author and poet Javier Zamora reads his poem “Aniversario ”, for an exciting collaboration between our program and the Poetry Center.

(Javier) - There's another verdin couple who don't need to build a nest.

(Blistering guitar riffs by XIXA Hello and welcome to another new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we're joining you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

You know, it's a great place to escape the summer heat.

The air conditioning in here is terrific, and it's also a wonderful place to take in the largest stand alone collection of poetry in North America.

Our show will be teaming up with them for the next six weeks, visualizing poems from some highly acclaimed local poets.

We'll have more on that later on in the show.

Snake Bite is a unique little gallery in downtown Tucson.

It was designed as a creation space by its owners Geneva Foster Gluck and Racheal Rios, a place where underrepresented artists could be more experimental and show their work.

Artist Lizz Denneau was invited to show her work, and she used it as an opportunity now to test her thesis work that explores hidden and erased histories of the black diaspora.

(Sound of footsteps on stairs) (Mysterios piano music) (Lizz) I came from a family of sewers on my mother's side and fashion design was a form of expression and something that happened because I was poor.

So I started, to my mother's dismay, cutting up clothes and sewing them back together.

And when I got into my twenties, I went to Pima and immediately started doing fashion shows and eventually was well-known enough to start a fashion week here in Tucson.

And my business grew mostly online, and I got tired of sewing the same dress like 100 times.

So I spent a couple of years figuring out what I wanted to do.

By that time, I was in my thirties and I went back to work in school systems.

All the time I was making visual art like 2D art, but I wasn't really thinking about it as a practice until I got to art school at the U of A. I think everybody creative has this kind of intuition and thread of understanding materials and objects and are in deep relationships with them.

And so mine is these like discarded vintage, sometimes broken things that I can then collage together in a piece to tell a story.

I am probably attracted to specific pieces like specific types of it, I love porcelain like, but I also love like rusted tools and things like that.

So I collect them and they always eventually tell me what piece they belong in.

I'm working with hidden histories.

I'm working with discarded peoples and cultures, and these objects all at once represent the past and present to me.

These pictures, these men are like in everything.

Three planters after 1845 is what it's called.

Don't they just look like plantation owners?

The what you would expect them to look like?

I also collect what Nick Cave, the artist, calls relics, and these are sometimes listed kindly as African-American Americana.

But they really are racist.

Sad.

Decorative items.

And oddly enough, when I find them, I'm not sad about them.

I just know that they have a story to tell that is alternative to what has been given to them.

One of the reasons why I chose to do a residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for my MFA was because of the faculty and because of the diversity.

As a black artist who's doing work, I need another black artist to be like, Yo, that's awesome.

Or you're missing the mark there.

And I'm also somebody who didn't necessarily grow up within a culture, right?

One, because I was in Tucson and two, because I was raised by my maternal family.

And so you need that companionship, you need that support, you need that critical eye.

Everybody needs that to grow as an artist.

And that's really important.

And I wish we in general had more spaces like that in Tucson.

You know, we can open an Art News or even a Juxtapoz and be like, Oh, women and people of color are having a moment in the art world but the statistics and the numbers tell us differently, right?

We're not being acquired by institutions or collectors.

Things have not changed that much.

I think the most special part of Snakebite is Racheal and Geneva.

They're really approaching it in this very like contemporary fashion.

They are an example of people who are trying to create those spaces.

They have had a lot of people of color show there, and they've also had a lot of women show there.

(Racheal) I feel like we balance each other in such a great way that it's... (Geneva) I agree.

(Racheal) Yeah we cover all the I like to say scholar and street.

If we had a show... (Geneva) I have to be the scholar!

Welcome.

Before we begin, there are a few things we would like you to know.

(Racheal) Geneva and I do performance together.

And we had been looking for a studio space as an artist and also as a consumer.

The relationship begins where you're making work centered around the monetization of it.

It gets hard.

You aren't allowed to fail and you're not allowed to try new things.

And it feels so great to be able to give space to artists that I just particularly like.

For me, it feels defiant.

(Geneva) We've had the opportunity to travel and to see like residencies and performance festivals, different ways and models to create this type of space.

And it just wasn't really in Tucson.

It really feels like providing a little steppingstone for practice.

That is where we both want to go and where we love seeing people arrive.

(Racheal) I saw Lizzs work and I was like, Who is this person and why have I not seen her work in Tucson before?

And I reached out to her and we went and did a studio visit and it was on.

(Lizz) When they asked me to do an installation.

And then I realized it's a really huge opportunity to test out my thesis.

When I started working strictly in 3D, I was moving on instinct a lot and I was creating a piece.

The first of its kind for me about the antebellum South.

I grew up with the white half of my family.

I don't know the black half.

And so in an attempt to understand my ancestry, I started doing research because like many people in the diaspora, we just you had a dead end.

Everything started to emerge as I learned about these systems that we've created since the beginning of our country and how they have evolved.

And we're still living under them and we don't always know that we are.

And so that is the concept of you've made this house your home, this idea of house being a metaphor to the systems that we live in and that, you know, maybe the house is passed down generationally and you're not aware of the different societal constructs that are actually bad bones.

It's only recently that we started really thinking about patriarchal structures and we're now calling attention to our words and our thoughts and these things that were taught to us over time.

And part of it is also a call to communities of color, my community saying let's examine what's going on within this umbrella of white supremacy, these concepts of class and respectability politics, and where those came from.

That heritage is really important.

And to change that, it's like that therapist saying it ran in my family until it ran into me, you know?

But that's not going to happen until we take a good look at those systems that we might have been engaging in that we didn't know about.

Or maybe some hard histories of our family.

Last month, we brought you an entire episode from Sierra Vista, and we were surprised to learn that this town of fewer than 50,000 people has not one or two, but three German restaurants, each with their own unique approach to the cuisine.

Well, now, in part two of our three part series, Sierra Vistas Germany, we meet the owner of Angry German.

[♪ German style polka music ] [Dennis speaking German] [♪ German style polka music ends ♪] (Dennis) All right.

Just to make sure that you really.

You.

You had those zucchini bites rahmschnitzel.

Beautiful.

All right.

My name is Dennis Davila, and I am one of the one of the two owners of the “Angry German ”, here in Sierra Vista.

My business partner, Duane and I, we both worked for corporate restaurants in Tucson.

We had an idea that we wanted to open up our own restaurant.

And I had I had known the previous owners of this restaurant for quite a long time.

One day I'd come here for lunch with my mom and and Michelle, the previous owner She said, You know, Dennis, I'd really like to retire.

From there the dream essentially was born and we rebranded it.

We made it our own, and we decided to to have some fun with the name.

And we called it the Angry German.

That really comes from just a play on what they used to call me in the corporate world.

So anytime my mom would call me, she ignores me if I speak to an English, so I had so to speak to her in German and to somebody that doesn't speak it, it sounds like such an angry language.

[Dennis speaking German, sounding gruff] So they kind of nicknamed me the angry German.

So we just decided to have some fun with it.

(Dennis) The feast is on its way “Bravo 2?

Bravo 2!

” 2021.

Yep, November of 2021.

It's been.

It's been very, very good.

Our take on the German restaurant is a little bit more fusion style.

It's more American meets German, some of that German flavor, some of that German flair, but also kind of mixed and blended with with things that an American audience would be familiar with.

Lamb and beef style gyro meat and then fresh tzatziki, onions, tomatoes and our housemade coleslaw as well.

Our potato salad is is quite literally a mixture of a German recipe and an American recipe.

And we've played with that too, and decided to call it “NATO ” potato salad.

We also have an active bakery.

We bake cakes, we bake pastries.

Most of the pastries.

We make our French style.

We're not German style pastries.

We do have a few German styles, but most of them are French.

And that's kind of what we were going for.

(Dennis) Granulated sugar, mac mix, Beautiful.

Let me grab you a check.

My friend and I have one of the boys come and do that real quick.

Yeah.

I was originally born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and my mom married and an American soldier, and he adopted me.

And that's how I became one, an American, and two, how I got a very Hispanic last name, Your total damage is $30.44, on that one.

People do talk about the fact that there's three German restaurants in Sierra Vista and there was actually until recently, there was four.

And one of those ladies recently retired.

And she was not not far from here either.

I think it's the military base that that drew that.

And it just kind of became almost a natural thing to have German restaurants so close to a military base.

All right.

If you need anything else, just yell at the top of your lungs.

Okay?

All right.

Thanks.

Looking back on it, I think I probably made the best decision that I could have possibly made.

[German style music] (Dennis) “Thank you,behind!

” Opening up your own restaurant.

It's not easy.

And the first year can be, It can be challenging.

The one that you had today, the cheddar with the green chili.

So kind of.

They kind of dance well together.

I think I would say to anybody out there that's considering doing it, put a plan together and chase your dream.

You won't regret it.

(Dennis) Well Im here to do more than just look pretty.

[Music ends] ‘Scuse me.

Last month, winners were announced for the 2023 Edward R. Murrow Excellence in Journalism Awards.

And Arizona Public Media won six awards.

Five of them came from this show, which means that this show singlehandedly won more Murrow awards than any other public media television station in the country.

That's nice.

Well, this next story on the Tucson based organization, the Homestretch Foundation, which focuses on the myriad challenges faced by professional female cyclists, won the Murrow Award for sports reporting.

So congrats to producer Liz Scherffius and videographer Nate Huffman.

[music] (Rebecca) There's nothing more that I like than riding my bike and racing.

I love the adrenaline and I like to fly down mountains.

(Heidi) Being here really gives me a chance to just focus really hard on getting high quality training.

(Flo) Sometimes you don't want to train, it's hard like you don't feel as good as you want to.

It's hard to train, it's hard to race.

Also, it's kind of an unsure career, like, what am I going to do after?

Will I get there?

Will I be able to win money with my bike racing?

So being here, being like with other girls, that feel the same thing makes you feel like you you belong somewhere.

(Celine) Everyone has their own goals but they also, like genuinely want to see you reach your goals.

I got a flat.

The tiniest little thorn.

I got a flat there's a lot of thorns here in Tucson, so it's pretty prevalent occurrence.

I think it's good for everyone to know how to fix their own flats, because when you're training, sometimes you have to go alone and it's good to be self-reliant, self-sufficient.

I love doing my tempo intervals up Lemmon because it's just such a steady gradient.

And you can really just get in the zone and listen to your music and hammer it out.

And then the better you do your interval, the more you get to descend.

So it's rewarding.

(Kathryn) The Home Stretch Foundation came into being when I was a pro cyclist and I was really struggling to make ends meet.

I'd made it to the world tour level and had I been a man at the World Tour level, I would have had a minimum base salary.

But the women were deemed, quote unquote, not to deserve one.

And that made no sense to me, and I remember thinking, we need to fight this.

And at the same time, I was like, If I'm at this level and there is no minimum base salary, then I might have to quit the sport.

But I wouldn't have to if I were a man at this level.

So that was difficult for me to, you know, to handle.

When we started Homestretch Foundation, you know, the base salary for men was about 35,000 euros, which is roughly equivalent to 40 K U.S. dollars.

I saw women leave the sport because they couldn't make ends meet.

[music] Athletes can apply for a two to six month residency.

And for them, being able to live here and not have to pay rent and utilities is huge when their paychecks are that small that it makes a big difference.

(Flo) I waitress so I just stand up for twelve hours straight.

So on my bike after, even if I don't feel it, I know that I have less energy to train.

So being here, I have more energy to focus in my training (Rebecca) Really struggled back home, resting enough because I worked part time job and if I wasn't working, then I was I was cycling.

So it's been really nice to be able to to rest properly and stretch, and it just keeps all of the niggles and injuries prevented.

(Kathryn) By 2023 the women of the World Tour will have the same base salary of the men at the Pro Continental level of professional cycling, which is the minor league equivalent to the major league of the World Tour.

We will still have to continue to fight and say, no, it's not enough that we just have the same base salary as the Pro Continental men.

We need the same salary as a world torment.

We're seeing change happen, but we still have to continue to lobby for this inclusion.

[indistinct television audio] (Jo) Being a woman in cycling, gender equality is like pretty much all you think about.

I feel like the gender equality fight is moving, but moving slowly.

I'm not sure if it's going to be fully equal when I end my career, but there's big steps that are being made.

(TV announcer) we are ready for faceoff.

(Caileigh) This is the medal that I won in Tokyo.

On the side here you can see it, says rowing and women's pair.

It's very heavy, [laughter] previous to cycling, I rowed when the pandemic hit, we couldn't train in boats.

I bought my first carbon road bike and then that was primarily what I did for most of my training.

And then I guess I just fell in love with cycling to the point that I was like, OK, I could see myself switching over once the Tokyo Olympics were done.

[music] (Kathryn) Welcome to the Homestretch Spin with the Stretchies.

We encourage you to ride next to someone you don't know.

And that's one of our things for our athletes will find their way next to someone they have not yet met and it's a nice, easy chill chat ride.

All right.

Shall we roll it?

Whoo.

All right.

On Fridays, we have an event called Spin with the Stretchies, the Stretchies being the nickname for the Homestretch athletes.

Term of endearment.

So on Fridays, we have a ride that leaves from Le Buzz on Tanque Verde and just lasts for an hour.

It's 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and we go out at a very slow pace, you know, tops 15 miles an hour.

And we ride so athletes can talk to members of our Tucson community who might not be professional bike racers, but they just want to get to know, you know, what's it like being at Homestretch?

And you know, what's it like being an Olympian?

What's it like being an aspiring pro?

(Cyclist) Well, it was fun riding with you.

(Flo) Yeah, it was really nice.

No problem.

Well, have a good rest of your ride.

(Cyclist) Thank you.

You too.

Yeah, you're racing, too.

Yeah, I've come watch.

(Jo) Oh perfect.

Cool.

(Flo) I think we have time to grab coffee before we leave.

(Kathryn) Community group ride that's open to anybody that wants to come out and join us, and it's pretty awesome to see the connections and the kindness that comes from that.

(Heidi) Together we're unstoppable!

(Kathryn) So far, we've been able to help 75 athletes from 17 different countries and we've just started our sixth year.

And you know, we're we're growing and it's a beautiful thing to see how this effect has helped so many.

Next up, we're doing something a little bit different for our show.

As we mentioned earlier, for the next six weeks, we're teaming up with the Poetry Center to bring you a series of poems written by local poets and then visualized by our team of producers.

First up is Aniversario, or We moved to Tucson during the pandemic, which was written by poet and author Javier Zamora as a tribute to his wife, Jo Cipriano.

(birds chirping) Aniversario or We Moved To Tucson During A Pandemic for Jo Cipriano First time in our porch on the first morning, we woke in our fully furnished apartment because we don't own anything but books.

We saw a small gray bird with a yellow head grab the curled beans of the mesquite.

We watched Voltaire, who we now know is a Verdin build his nest every single day.

Turns out that was his display nest.

Turns out that was the first time either of us signed a lease with someone else.

And now we moved to a “casita ” and co-bought our first bed, couch, table, chairs, and a hammock.

Voltaire is elsewhere with his love an equally gray, yellow and red bird who helped V build the real nest.

In our new place there's another Verdin couple who don't need to build a nest, but whom I watch search for food every morning when I wake minutes, sometimes hours before you, to turn on the computer screen to relive the time when I searched for food, water, a different home.

It took me years to find you.

Or you found me by sitting across the table as I ate a vegan meal at the Buddhist monastery The Dalai Lama calls his home when he's in the United States.

Im vegan now, because I can't eat next to you and not share.

I've learned from the Verdins to sing you awake whenever I want you near my branch, eating the same tiny leaf from the mesquites outside our bed.

Please stay tuned to Arizona Illustrated to see more of this series of poems.

And we'll be screening the series on the big screen in conjunction with the Poetry Center at the Loft Cinema on Tuesday, July 18th at 5 p.m..

This event is free.

It's open to the public, and we'd love to see you there.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you next week with another new episode.