Narrator: Judith K. Brodsky, artist, feminist, activist, and scholar, founded an innovative center for printmaking in 1986.

It's nurtured generations of artists ever since.

Brodsky: This was not going to be a print center for white male art stars.

Narrator: Playwright Helen Banner imagines a near-future world transformed by A.I.

at Luna Stage in West Orange.

Banner: Luna Stage has this amazing reputation as a new-play development hub, and they're like gold dust.

Narrator: And the wild baskets of Steven R. Carty.

He forages for his weaving materials, including the invasive wisteria vine, in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey.

Narrator: "State of the Arts," going on location with the most creative people in New Jersey.

>> Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by... Brodsky: If you were to ask me what my identity is, I would say to you first, "I'm an artist."

The second thing I would say is, "I'm also a woman."

You know, and, of course, I've been deeply involved in the feminist art movement.

Giviskos: Judy Brodsky is a dynamo.

I mean, she just turned 90.

She is amazing as both a scholar and an artist and an organizer, someone who has ideas and then knows how to execute them and get support for them.

Narrator: One of Judith's biggest ideas was the Brodsky Print Center.

Located at Rutgers University, for three decades, this now-world-renowned, innovative print center moved to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2017.

Brodsky: And I thought, "We need a print center that is -- has facilities that are available to women artists and to artists of color."

And that became my mission.

This was not going to be a print center for white male art stars.

Olin: These artists also were innovative, as well, in their ideas aesthetically, as well as intellectually.

It hosted 440 visiting artists, who produced over 660 projects during the 30 years it was at Rutgers.

And what happened is, those beautiful works on paper ended up in museums, collections, and galleries, like the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, which bought a bunch of the prints because Judy carried them to London to share them with the Keeper of Prints.

Brodsky: ...screen behind you, and so I... Burko: Well, I think Judith is a national treasure.

Anything she puts her mind to gets done, because that's the way women are.

You know, we get things done.

And Judy's a visionary, she's headstrong, and she's brilliant.

Narrator: Diane and Judith worked together 50 years ago to organize a groundbreaking exhibition in Philadelphia.

The show, called "FOCUS," featured 81 women artists.

It was one of America's first large-scale exhibitions of work by women.

Brodsky: The issue at the time was that women artists were being shut out of exhibitions at museums.

They weren't being shown at galleries.

Narrator: Now, 50 years later, the two are restaging the 1974 exhibition as part of a whole series of shows and events with women artists.

Dozens of galleries and museums throughout the city are participating.

They're calling it (re)FOCUS.

Brodsky: I think I was really lucky because I grew up in a household that valued art, and my father was a professor of English literature at Brown University, but he was also somebody who was very interested in art.

He collected prints and bought things that he could afford.

My parents realized that I was really interested in making art, and so they sent me to the Rhode Island School of Design on Saturday mornings from the time I was 6 years old all the way through high school.

Narrator: Judith studied art history at Harvard, then married and moved to Princeton with her young family in the late '50s.

In the 1960s, with two small children off to school, she entered the MFA program at Tyler School of Art, determined to become an artist.

Brodsky: My husband -- his mother had died when he was 3, so even though this was a period of women being at home, I said he had no idea about what women's roles were supposed to be, and so I could do whatever I wanted, and he was very happy.

And he encouraged me to go to graduate school.

Narrator: It was there that Judith had her first hands-on experience in a print studio.

Brodsky: Well, I actually just fell in love with printmaking.

I was coming from a literary background, I was coming from a history background, and I had a lot of ideas.

And, also, this was a period when there was turmoil, in the '60s.

So it was the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement.

So, printmaking is a series of processes, and in a way, it became a metaphor for the complexity of my own thoughts.

My prints won prizes in juried print shows, and I had galleries all over the country that were handling my prints, and my prints began to enter museum collections.

The first one was the Library of Congress.

Narrator: Judith started the Brodsky Print Center, originally called the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, in 1986.

A show at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers included over 90 works created at the center between 1986 and 2017.

Foti: This one, it's called "What is an American?"

The artist is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

She is from the Salish and Kootenai Confederation of Tribes.

It's been an incredible journey.

Many of the artists that we started working with in the early days have become nationally and internationally recognized.

Brodsky: We figured we'd better ask them.

Faith Ringgold just had a one-person exhibition that filled the New Museum in New York, and she just had a solo exhibition in Paris at the Picasso Museum.

Ringgold: First, let me tell you this.

I took printmaking, lithography, when I was in college in the late '40s, and I was so bad at it.

I was so awful.

When Judy asked me to come here, that was the beginning of my nouveau experience.

Really, it was wonderful.

And Eileen Foti would come to my house, and we would do the drawings and the plates.

Brodsky: Joan Snyder, in her paintings, is tactile, almost sculptural.

So all the prints she had ever made were flat.

And we said to her, if we use paper pulp and you paint with paper pulp, you can make them just as tactile as your painting.

Snyder: When you're making a print, it's a process that, really, you're working all day.

When I paint, I paint for maybe 3 or 4 hours and I'm done.

It's a different way of thinking.

You have to think in layers.

You know, it'll just bring up some of these browns.

So maybe let's try this.

For printmaking, you kind of have to have a pretty good idea beforehand of what those layers are going to be, how they're going to sit on top of each other.

I mean, do I want it to be an etching?

Do I want it to be a lithograph?

Do I want it to be a woodblock?

Do I want to use digital photography?

And now I'm using all of them in one print often.

So that gets even more complicated.

I think I can safely say that I drive my printmakers crazy.

Yeah.

I mean, I do, you know?

Brodsky: Willie Cole got one of our New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowships.

I think making the print is related to his ideas about the iron and the idea of the scorch of the iron is really a print.

He was already thinking in terms of the iron because the iron has the same shape as the ships in the slave trade.

Diane, of course, is not only somebody who is an activist, but a really wonderful artist.

She did this wonderful woodcut which is in the exhibition.

Burko: The work that I did there was about the Delaware River.

My work has been about the landscape since the beginning.

Well, I am basically a painter, but what's wonderful about the printmaking process, it's a collaborative process, and I wasn't really interested in doing -- I said, "I don't want to really do a litho."

I said, "I'd love to do a woodcut.

I haven't done a woodcut.

Can I collaborate with someone on that?"

And "Sure."

And that's what I did.

Brodsky: Printmaking has been a medium for experimentation often.

Rembrandt, for instance, and Duerer were big experimenters.

Picasso's prints are fabulous.

I happen to think that his prints are more exciting than his paintings, but, of course, they don't have the same value as his paintings.

And that's something that I work on all the time, you know, that prints belong in the same category as paintings and sculptures.

A hand-done print is as labor-intensive as any painting or sculpture.

Yes, they're democratic because there's more than one impression that's pulled from it.

What difference does that make?

That's a wonderful aspect of it.

It means that, you know, more than one person can have this marvelous image.

Narrator: Later on the show, a trip with a basketmaker to harvest the wild wisteria vine.

But first, a dystopian future that reflects on our world today in a new play at Luna Stage.

Banner: Being a writer in the 2020s, you are taking a viewpoint on how optimistic or how pessimistic you are.

It may be that only 30% of any audience is going to like your work, and that feels really good to go for that, to be, like, something that people will have a strong reaction to.

So, this started years ago as a Channel Islander.

I grew up in this offshore-financial environment where global wealth was using this tiny island to protect its assets.

Patriotism, for me, is very different, because when I say where I'm from, I'm from Jersey, which is this 9-by-5-mile island.

It's tiny, but it is an identity as complete as if I say I'm from a more regular nation-state.

So I think it set me off always on a path to be a little bit more of an outsider looking in at the experiences of citizenship.

I decided I had to write a play, that, otherwise, it wasn't going to happen, and I needed to be a playwright.

It's so essential to your identity to feel that you can do this thing that is going to consume you.

I wrote the play really, really quickly over the holidays at the end of last year.

It was a really fast process, I think the fastest process I've ever been involved in.

Becker: You mentioned this play about borders and robots and capitalism, and I was very intrigued.

We met over Zoom and we talked about it, and you had, like, a whole play in your head.

And I think you mentioned you would -- you know, you would write some scenes and send them to me.

And then you wrote a full -- You wrote, like, the first act of the play.

Banner: It's a big request when you ask someone to direct your play.

You should really say like, "I'm just going to take over your life for a year."

I think making theater is extraordinarily difficult, but Luna Stage has this amazing reputation as a new-play development hub, and they're like gold dust at the moment because so many things are pulling back and retrenching.

Becker: The theater industry is really struggling in this moment, and the biggest loss has been in the places that develop new work.

Banner: And, like, we've had to take that into our lives.

Becker: So, we spent many hours from September of 2022 to July of 2023 just reading the play back and forth.

"Westphalia" takes place in a world where you can buy and sell your citizenship on a global market like the stock market.

And a family comes to Cit-Ex, the corporation, that manages this on behalf of the U.S. government, and they're kind of at the end of their rope, financially, because they've become deep in debt.

Banner: How would it feel to have $2 million in your bank account this afternoon, though?

Becker: That would feel amazing.

Banner: Capital that won't be taxed.

Capital you can take anywhere in the world.

Because I can sell you a citizenship in most places of the world.

Kris: Maybe citizenship sales are a way of breaking down the old order.

Banner: If there is, like, a core message that I wanted the play to have, it was the essential kind of abstract absurdity of borders, that they are a totally constructed element of our world.

Becker: Every play is its own world, and you have to figure out the rules of the world.

Like, how do you create this world onstage?

[ Drilling, whirring, pounding ] So, the actors wanted to know, like, how does this system work?

What does citizenship sales like?

What would this look like if it went well?

Lots of questions about like, how does this world function?

Kris: I make this pronunciation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion.

Becker: And then it doesn't.

Banner: I'm not a playwright who knows my ending immediately.

And so the most stress, I think, came, for me, in making sure the final act was where I wanted it to be.

Becker: That was the last piece of the puzzle to settle in, and I feel like it's still -- it's still settling.

Banner: There's normally a lovely moment where we both sit down in the back row and watch.

Becker: And no one can look at us, yeah.

Banner: Opening was great.

Seeing an audience come in and thinking a lot about it and coming out and saying good things, I think it's magical.

-Let's don't get caught.

-The... Leandra: How would it feel to have $2 million in your bank account this afternoon, now?

Edward: [ Chuckles ] That would feel -- That would feel amazing.

Leandra: Capital that won't be taxed.

Capital you could take anywhere in the world.

Where would you like to be a citizen of?

Banner: The whole point of writing a play is an act of communication with the audience.

And so you are thinking very clearly like, "How will this story connect?

Kultur 1: What's that in your hand there?

Kris: Well, I wouldn't assume this is literally me.

Kultur 1: It looks like you.

Banner: The work we're doing is writing and processing and defining this decade.

[ Applause ] Narrator: Last on the show, a second-generation basket weaver forges his materials in the Pine Barrens.

Carty: To me, they're kind of their own silent neighborhood.

People who weren't neighbors in life are now neighbors in death.

My mother's father's family were all Pineys.

His family was back colonial times in New Jersey, I believe the first Bozarth to move up here in 1713.

Evesham.

They called it Evesham Township.

It was all Evesham at one time.

Now it's Mount Laurel.

I come over here at least twice a week, at least once a week, and my house is just over that way.

In fact, I see the top of my house from here.

[ Chiming ] My mother's a basket weaver, so I grew up with it and I learned from her.

But then I started teaching myself wild materials, so I got into that.

Well, these materials are all wild-gathered by me, and there's an advantage to that, gathering stuff from the wild, is that it's complete quality control.

I control it.

So, something like cedar bark here -- I have to kill the tree to do it, but I go where the trees are overgrown, and I can't just take any cedar tree.

I need one the right, like, thickness of the tree, the right length up, that's branch-free, so usually trees that are overgrown and, you know, crowd out by each other.

So it's a good way of keeping the forest healthy.

And you'll often find red cedars growing like weeds in places like abandoned houses and stuff like that, abandoned fields.

See how this one's the smooth side out?

That's the inside of the bark.

And just for aesthetics, I wanted to go with this smoother look here, where this one, I'm doing it a little different, because I like to do them all a little different.

And I get the shaggy end of the bark out and the smooth end in.

It's just about how you want it to look.

The wisteria, though, the vine part is an invasive.

So that's an invasive vine around here.

It grows, like, insane.

I'll clear out a little place, and a year or two later, I got to go back up and pull the same runners.

But what I harvest isn't so much the vines of wisteria.

I'm out there harvesting the runners.

I have situations at times in the woods where private property is a no-go because somebody owns the property and I just can't go in there and harvest wild materials.

Public lands, certain places like state forests, county parks, I can have some misunderstandings with, you know, authorities when I'm removing an invasive plant, which I'm doing the environment a favor.

So, a place like here, though, I have permission to come out here and clear the trail of wisteria.

We're in a section of Whitesbog here.

This part in here is a little holly forest in here.

Holly does occur in the Pine Barrens.

You find little spots of it.

Wisteria is taking over in here, and this will kill these trees.

That's a vine here, and here is a runner.

A very large runner.

The runners I use are more this size.

That's how they start out.

And they colonize from one place to another.

And these are what I pull out to remove, before they get to this big.

So this helps Whitesbog with this trail.

I'm really grateful and thankful to them for letting me come out here and, you know, remove wisteria, which helps them so nobody trips on the trail and it doesn't take over the little forest here and gets me basketry material.

Mueller: Every culture has a form of basketry.

In fact, probably was developed by observing how birds make nests, right?

People learn how to make containers out of fiber.

He's so creative in the way he uses traditional basketry techniques to make contemporary basket forms.

So they're kind of small sculptures.

He's very contemplative, and that, I think, attracts people.

Steven has been teaching for us for over a decade.

He's providing all of the materials for the students and having them learn about the materials and how to harvest them, but then helping them seek out their vision and their forms and shapes.

So sometimes, it might be responding to the pieces of bark that you have.

Reid: This is the wisteria bark.

I have this big needle, and I'm taking pieces of the wisteria, like, thin pieces, as the "thread," and I'm using it and threading it through the needle and going into this cording that I made with the wisteria by twisting it around.

Press: I've got an appreciation for using only natural materials together and not mixing them with manmade things and not using power tools.

Chorun: I always knew about, like, the rattan baskets, but I had no idea how to go about it naturally, so that's been really cool.

Like, a lot of my own work.

I do foraging, too, so -- but a very different way.

So, Steven's been, like, so kind as to offer us to take things home, so I definitely want to do that and try to continue practicing.

Mechanic: We're here in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, so we cannot use materials within park.

So, Steven was able to forage and bring all of his own materials here to the valley.

Carty: One thing that really comes up with the basketry -- I've been more and more vocal about it -- is land use, land-use rights.

Whether I'm on public land or private land, there's always somebody saying, "Don't harvest this" or "Don't take this."

And they can't tell me the life cycle of this plant.

They can't tell me anything about it.

That always comes into this.

I'm always conscious of that going on.

So, most of your South Jersey baskets were white oak.

You get up to North Jersey, brown ash was more prevalent because brown ash trees, at one time, grew that far south.

So, what I'm doing you wouldn't have seen as much traditionally in the Pine Barrens.

People wouldn't have been pulling up wisteria.

They wouldn't have been using, like, cedar bark.

But it's just my way of, hey, I know the materials, I know the wild.

You know, I can figure something out.

Like, "Oh, this bark would work for weaving" or "This vine would work good for weaving."

So what I do is a little traditional, a little modern.

It's traditional in that I just go out, I gather my own materials, I'm making a basket.

It's also contemporary in that I'm finding new ways and using new materials.

I'm using materials that are already here that somebody else didn't think of.

So I'm always trying to rethink something, relook at something, and do my own spin on it.

Narrator: That's it for "State of the Arts."

To watch or share any of our stories, visit stateoftheartsnj.com.

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Thanks for watching.