-You can't own the sky, you can't ban the sun or its rays, the heat in the palm of our closed fists.

-At NJPAC, poetry and hip hop come together at the Dodge Poetry Festival.

-[ Rapping indistinctly ] -How do we let folks know that poetry is everywhere?

And poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

Narrator: At the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, work by artists with disabilities in a show that focuses on accessibility.

Cachia: This exhibition here, Smoke & Mirrors, it's really trying to introduce audiences to the barriers that disabled people face as they navigate exhibitions.

Most of the time, museums are not accessible for folks with disabilities.

Narrator: And at the Jersey City Art and Studio tour, painter/muralist Lawrence Ciarallo on making art that makes a difference.

-The one thing I always think about with my art is what unifies us.

I don't know if my art can change, you know, a community or the world, but I think it can definitely improve people's mental health and their mind-set.

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

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 the Pheasant Hill Foundation, Philip E. Leon, and Joan L. Mueller, in memory of Judith McCartin Scheide.

And these friends of "State of the Arts."

Reyes: Detox the ghetto.

Detox the ghetto Detox the ghetto.

Love, tagged on the ghetto grottos of closed stores and main avenues.

It's when the doors of businesses shut that the church outside the churches restore their session.

-Turn back Harlem into Chicago.

Turn back Bed-Stuy into Brownsville.

Turn the Bronx back into Gaza, back.

You will taste this strange and bitter American history.

-See, infant me was afraid to be seen.

Petrified of other sight while marching in line with the infantry.

Fatigued by fatigues, taking toddler steps past death's defenses.

-I was wind and they tried, to make me language.

Tried to translate, to empire me.

-I had a dream that they played God with lives they did not own.

Fake prophets profiting off the apocalypse.

-Connected to the pulse of Mother Nature Embrace her and you're in the shaman.

Shaman, integrated darkness, illuminated chakras.

My influence, a virus inspired.

An entire League of Titans, we're site beyond site.

Black, brown, red, yellow, white.

ThunderCats of the light, on the door from the Bronx.

Rodriguez: And spoken word is not meant to be put in a museum.

It's meant to expand and grow every single time it's done.

And that's the excitement of Dodge poetry now.

It has a message, it has a meaning, and it allows artists the tools to do their job and the license to do that in an expansive manner.

-What you call me.

-We've also included hip hop artists to draw in crowds who may be familiar with Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte.

And then you throw in some fantasy poets like Mahogany Browne and Caridad de la Luz, La Bruja, and you spice it up and they say, hey, oh, there's totally a tie in here.

There's totally a connection here.

-Can we rock it side to side, a little U-N-I-T-Y?

I met him in a club, hangin out one night.

He said hello, uh, highlight.

How's everything going, huh?

How you doing?

Hope everything's fine.

Oh, and, uh, can I call you sometimes?

Can I get your digits and the address so I can come visit?

I gave him the digits -How do we let folks know that poetry is everywhere?

And poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

-Welcome to Newark, New Jersey, y'all.

Baraka: Poetry is very important to this community, to this city.

Brick City.

There's a long history of, uh, spoken word artists here in this town.

[ Scatting ] [ Scatting ] You can't own the sky.

[ Scatting ] You can't own the sky.

You can't ban the sun or its rays.

The heat in the palm of our closed fist.

You can't arrest the wind or the birds wings high above the mountains.

You can't reverse the earth on its axis or unlearned the learn, no matter how many books you burn.

[ Scatting ] -It would be impossible to be more fortunate than to have a mayor who's an artist, who grew up as an artist.

LaTorre: We always say we are a city of poets.

Our mayor, Ras Baraka, is the son of Amiri Baraka.

There's poets who serve in the city council and work for the mayor's office.

So I'm glad that Dodge has recognized and welcomed in a lot more Newark artists because as a Newark born and bred kid, I feel incredibly valued being invited here.

De La Luz: What Dodge Poetry is in Newark is what Nuyorican Poets Cafe is in the Lower East Side.

Poetry is treated often just like art is treated, kind of like a hobby, where we treat poetry as a necessity.

Hatred planted a seed whose branches bleed from the heart of the leaves that hang from the trees.

Strange fruit pitted against the land and the free.

Bastard child, call it patriarchy.

-I want to break tradition.

Respecting elders can no man respect.

And keeping in touch with distant relatives that don't give a flying coño about me.

Because blood is supposed to be thicker than arroz con dulce.

But you see, my friends are my family because they love and accept me as [ Speaking Spanish ] and don't consider me one una desgracia de la familia.

-We're changing the face of the festival.

Might as well give Nuyorican a home here.

We worked with La Bruja and the Children's Arts Education program, and we're going to have them back because they're one of those pillars of the poetry community.

-Since high school... -I've been the girl with a big ass bag.

-That always took up too much space.

-The spare seat on the subway.

-The whole school hallway.

Gonzalez: Social justice can truly be joyful work, and that's something we often lose track of.

We think of this as this gritty thing, which it is, and it can be.

But also there has to be time for restoration, for praise, for reclamation.

-[ Rapping indistinctly ] Rodriguez: We had done the program Represent the first time last year, based on the same focus of social justice and racial healing, and it really celebrates spoken word artists, whether they be in hip hop or whether they be traditional poets.

-Like, um, with lyricism, you have a way of expressing your thoughts, your life, what you're going through, what you've seen other people go through, and when you express it properly, you never know who you may affect.

-When you're reading poetry and you're writing poetry, you're saying something about the world, about yourself, about your relationship to it.

You can't reverse the earth on its axis or unlearned the learned, no matter how many books you burn.

And sometimes you express the things that other people are saying that they can't express.

Gonzalez: The Dodge Poetry Festival carries a long tradition.

We've always had diverse poets.

We've always showcase folks like Lucille Clifton.

I mean, we've always highlighted the greats.

But here I think we are in a moment where we can take it just one more step further.

We have to create spaces where folks see themselves represented on the stages, of course, but also feel like NJPAC can be their home.

-What is your best piece of advice for a young, um, Latino artist who is trying to navigate through this space right now?

-Tell the truth, you know?

Speak your truth, even if it's something that you think people don't want to hear.

-If they don't call her by her name, will she remember she was once someone's baby?

A dream they wished for, wished on, that she was born on any day the lord made.

If they don't say it to you, then I will.

You belong, sis.

You deserve, sis.

You are good.

[ Applause ] Narrator: From social justice through spoken word to art that's accessible to all.

[ Horns honking ] Shannon: I'm very aware of, like, when someone is behind me who wants to pass me and moving to the side.

That's kind of a classic New Yorker thing, is to feel annoyed with people who are going a different pace.

I've been disabled my whole life, since I was born.

It primarily affects my movement.

I move slower, I walk with a little bit of a wobble.

My pace is the best pace for me.

Strother: Finnegan Shannon's work has appeared in galleries around the world.

Finnegan explains to me how disability informs their art.

Shannon: My background is in drawing and printmaking, but now I really work across all sorts of mediums and disciplines.

But the real core of my work is thinking about access.

I'm really interested in other disabled people as the primary audience for my work.

Some of my work is really rooted in, yeah, my own experience going to or trying to go to museums or galleries and feeling like I don't have what I need to be there and to participate in those spaces.

Strother: Give me some examples about how your condition affects your ability to appreciate art.

-A big one that seems like it's a solvable problem is the lack of seating and places to rest in galleries.

A big thing for me is like standing for long periods, walking for long periods.

Lots of kind of like chronic pain.

I basically realized that I could, like, work around that by making artwork that was also functional as seating, that it was a way of like kind of, um, shoehorning some seating into spaces where there might otherwise not be any.

Strother: Some of Finnegan's works are on display at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, including what some might consider an unusual installation.

Shannon: So I've been dreaming about putting a massaging chair in a gallery for, like, years.

I just feel so excited about the idea of not only offering a place to sit and pause in this space, but also for me, massage is a real tool for pain relief, and, like, having that on offer in the space felt really exciting.

Strother: Works by Finnegan and more than a dozen artists who identify as having a disability are featured in Smoke & Mirrors.

The University of Houston's Amanda Cachia is guest curator.

-This idea of like an illusion, so to speak.

I'm trying to play with the tension between concealing and revealing access.

So this idea of that, even though we might think that there's an illusion of access, in reality, most of the time, museums are not accessible for folks with disabilities.

The contemporary artists in this exhibition, they're actually using the materials of access as the conception for their art, the material for their art.

It's also to do with for people who are of short stature or in wheelchairs, that usually works of art are hung much higher on the wall, and so it's hard to be able to visually access it.

Thinking about Braille, for example, a large print font.

In contemporary art, we see a lot of film, we see a lot of video.

What about providing captions or ASL?

There's so many aspects to an exhibition design and the wayfinding experience that really need to be revealed to an audience.

-On a personal level, what have you learned about accessibility from the different artists whose works are portrayed here in Smoke & Mirrors?

-It's not really possible to meet the needs of everybody who have disabilities.

-There's no one size fits all solution.

-Correct?

-Strother: For accessibility?

-Yes, and that even half way through an exhibition, it's okay to adapt and make changes, the Zimmerli Art Museum staff decided to work with a disability community locally, and they recommended all the steps that the museum needed to take to be more accessible for its publics.

But disabled community also said, "And we want representation.

We want to see ourselves on the walls."

Strother: And on the floor.

Amanda, tell me about this exhibition.

What is it called?

Who is the artist?

And what is the artist trying to show us?

Yes.

This is a work by an Irish artist named Corban Walker.

Coburn has achondroplasia, which is the most common form of dwarfism.

He is 4'3" tall, the same height as myself, actually.

And so what he's created is this series of stanchions.

Stanchions, of course, are used in museums as a way for to keep people away from an object.

They're used to protect artwork.

But for people of short stature, like Corban and myself, they often, you know, really prohibit that experience and they really get in the way.

Strother: Another experience that isn't prohibited at Smoke & Mirrors is touching some of the art, like these 3-D sculptures that represent the movement of a mobility cane by Fayen D'Evie, who has low vision and dances with that aid in this video on display at the Zimmerli.

Cachia: We need to be able to touch the work for visitors with disabilities, but in fact, not just folks with disabilities that all of us could really benefit from having a more multi-sensorial approach to engaging with art.

Strother: And this is where I had my own multi-sensorial experience.

Man: The following is an audio description for various sculptures and works on paper created in 2022 by the artist Liza Sylvestre.

Strother: I have a low vision condition and have my own challenges viewing art.

These sculptures in Memorabilia are made of cochlear implant parts, devices that recreate sound and are used by some people who are deaf, including the artist.

But I wouldn't know any of this without the galleries apps' description track.

Man: These sculptures were 3-D printed from cochlear implant parts and Lego pieces, which were arranged to create decorative accents resembling tendrils, barnacles... Strother: Even though all of the works at Smoke & Mirrors have audio description, I asked Amanda Cachia to explain the significance of this piece by Finnegan Shannon.

Cachia: The clock is like looking at days of the week as opposed to the hours, because time operates differently for disabled people.

And it operates differently because of the way that our built environment has been designed without disabled people in mind.

Strother: That includes galleries as well as the streets of New York.

A day of the week clock hangs inside Finnegan Shannon's studio.

The artist says there was just something about this device that struck them when they first saw it.

Shannon: I often feel a kind of out of sync-ness with the pace of more normative time.

Like, another thread of my work is thinking about this big and I think ultimately unanswerable question of like, what is disability culture?

And there was something for me when I saw that clock where I was like, "This feels really resonant for me."

Narrator: Accessibility is part of social justice.

Social justice also motivates the work of painter and muralist Lawrence Ciarallo.

Ciarallo: Jersey City is always changing.

It's very transient.

As costs go up, a lot of artists had to move out and weren't able to stay in the neighborhoods that they helped build and nurture.

They evicted all the artists, and they demolished the building, you know, under the guise that they were going to build, like, you know, a luxury tower.

And so this has been a vacant lot for over 10 years.

-For a lot of the community, they don't know what's going on in the arts in Jersey City.

-I used to have a studio where now it's a condo building.

-I've lived in this neighborhood for 18 years.

We were called the Powerhouse Arts District, and we've struggled to, in my mind, sort of maintain that.

Ciarallo: Despite the changes and despite some of the industrial spaces where artists had long lived and worked, you know, no longer being here, there's still a strong support from the community.

You have Jersey City Mural Arts Program, Pro Arts, Art Fair 14C.

You also have the Jersey City Artists and Studio Tours and a lot of other organizations that are committed to making sure the arts stay vibrant in Jersey City.

If I'm doing a mural or a painting, you know, the abstraction kind of represents the chaos of living in such a densely populated area where it's just nonstop.

I use the words "entertain", "engage", and "inform."

I hope my art is just something beautiful for people to see.

What once was a blank utility box or a blank wall now has a burst of color on it.

So on their commute to work, their walk around the neighborhood or in a museum, it's just a little something to brighten up their day.

-The 2024 New Jersey Arts Annual Exploring Our Connections is part of a unique series of exhibitions that are sponsored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and we received over a thousand submissions this year.

Lawrence's work really is large scale.

It's bright.

It's colorful.

-The piece that I have in the Montclair Art Museum is called Just Tell the Truth.

Look, in the summer of 2020, hip hop duo Run the Jewels came out with their fourth album, and there was a song on there.

The title was "Just", and the chorus says... Man: Look at all these slave mastas posin' on yo dolla!

Get it?

-I had made a kind of lattice, and I attached about eight skateboards to it, and so on the skateboards with some mixed media, I just spray painted "Look" again and again.

So what I was really going for was you have this long, sordid history filled with capitalism, but there is always beauty that exists within that.

You think about Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, the most horrible thing a person can experience.

But the underlying beauty is she escaped slavery and was able to free not only her family, but freed hundreds of other slaves.

And I really wanted to depict the beauty that exists despite all the darkness that can be present in our daily lives.

On a personal level, for me, it's very therapeutic.

No matter what's going on in my life, if I can get into my studio and work on a painting, just simply working with some bright colors will, you know, make you feel happier.

I use a lot of different elements -- collage, mixed media, acrylic because I really want to engage the viewer in a meaningful way, you know, bring them into the painting, so to speak.

Have them search out all the different elements, and you're going to want to analyze, you know, all the little details.

And then another thing I've recently been doing is incorporating my daughter's drawings.

A lot of the subject matter I use can be maybe political or current events or cultural things.

So using the headlines of the day can give more context or depth to the subject matter.

As a son of an immigrant, you come to learn about the history of this country.

We as a society are fighting some of the same battles, if you will, that they were fighting in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

I choose a lot of those activists from the 20th century Civil Rights movement to depict.

I just think of all the obstacles they faced, the adversity, the violence that they went up against and they never despaired.

John Lewis.

-When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something.

-[ Cheering ] -Do something.

Get in trouble.

Good trouble.

Necessary trouble.

-Shirley Chisholm.

-Chisholm: Give me your help at this hour, join me in an effort to reshape our society and regain control of our destiny.

-James Baldwin.

-I am not a nigger.

I am a man.

The white population of this country has got to ask itself, north and south, because it's one country, who are the white people that invented it?

And you got to find out why.

Ciarallo: Thought it was very important when I painted it in the summer of 2020.

There had been a number of horrific deaths by the hands of law enforcement.

The quote was just as relevant then as it is now, as it was when he said it in the 1960s.

I felt the need to emphasize the "I'm a man" part because we think of that hatred, that racism, people that espouse those kinds of hateful rhetoric need to ask themselves the same question -- why they need to vilify others, and just to reiterate that they were human beings and deserving of respect and dignity.

I always look to use my art to uplift people, and so hopefully the JCAST community can see that.

Man: Ready or not, here I come.

Ciarallo: Today, we're here for the 35th annual Jersey City Artists and Studio Tours.

Artists will have their studios open, and so hopefully people can appreciate, you know, all the hard work that not only myself but all the artists in this building put into their paintings.

-There's not a lot of things for the community to see art on first hand basis out of a studio.

I think it's educational for a lot of people.

The spaces like this that open up and are helpful for artists to have a little faith is so necessary.

I was commissioned by JCAST to photograph all of the artists.

I went to every studio all over Jersey City that's open today.

Bray: I think it's important to open the studio just because it really helps bring artists together and the community together.

I mean, I've met, you know, people and I see them every year now.

Maloy: Jersey City has changed.

I mean, it's gentrified a lot, but it's grown in a lot of ways.

And as an artist, like your journey is always growing, and hopefully you're always trying to improve.

It could be really good for all of us as artists.

-The one thing I always think about with my art is what unifies us.

I don't know if my art can change, you know, a community or the world, but I think it can definitely improve people's mental health and their mind-set.

I think it can definitely do that.

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

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Thanks for watching.

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