Frederick Hammersley Foundation... Urban Enhancement Trust Fund of the City of Albuquerque... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs with supplemental funding by the New Mexico CARES Act and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You.

IN THIS SECOND OF A TWO PART SPECIAL...

LINKING OUR AGRICULTURAL PAST WITH THE PRESENT, ALBUQUERQUE'S ROOTS SHARES HOW SUSTENANCE AND SUSTAINABILITY ARE PART OF A COMMON THREAD CONNECTING US ALL.

"THE MIND OF THE MASTER" PRESENTS AN UNPRECEDENTED VIEW INTO MICHELANGELO'S IDEATION AND PROCESS.

WITH WOOD AS HIS CANVAS, BEN RODGERS USES FIRE, WATER, ELECTRICITY AND INK TO CREATE PRINTS.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

CONNECTING THE PAST WITH THE PRESENT.

Arriving in Albuquerque by train in 1882 Herman Blueher began working for a market gardener.

A few months later, with John Mann, who had arrived that same year, began a Market Garden.

Soon they each established their own businesses.

Blueher's farm grew to almost 20 acres, just east of Old Town and south of Carñuel, now Mountain Road, where Tiguex Park is, not far from the sawmill.

Just across the road, to the north of Blueher's Gardens.... John Mann's farm boasted 13 acres, had an orchard and vegetables gardens.

Blueher's Pond created a little oasis, it was elevated to create pressure for irrigation purposes and there was a gazebo creating a public space where people would enjoy boating.

With this irrigation he was able to employ innovative hot houses which allowed him to grow in early spring and late fall, increasing his yield greatly.

Building a Queen Anne style home in Old Town Albuquerque, Blueher raised his family.

He had a fenced in garden around the back where he could keep his prized melons under his own watchful eye.

A prolific gardener and enterprising, Blueher made shipments of his and other's produce to neighboring states and territories.

The Middle Rio Grande Valley became a major agricultural center.

Fields stretched along the flood plain, north and south of Albuquerque.

Ana Baca: Every person in New Mexico or every person in Albuquerque, every person in this community, I think, has a chile story... With the recipes we have created, the products that we make at Bueno, for us, it has always been important to go back to our ancestral roots.

Ana Baca: My grandfather Refujio, he had worked for the Santa Fe Railroad his entire life and he really wanted his children to be able to be in charge of their own destiny.

When my dad and his brothers came back from WWII, they got educated on the GI Bill and then they couldn't find jobs in post war Albuquerque.

And so they actually scraped together their money and they started a little grocery store which was on 4th street.

And it was called the Ace Food Store.

And so they started that and it was going well for a little while and then the Safeway's and Piggly Wiggly's started coming in and they just felt they weren't going to be able to compete anymore.

So, little by little they started incorporating their mother's, my grandmother's Filomena's recipes.

They started a little carry-out outside of the ACE Food Store.

The neighborhood loved this, but, my dad and his brothers thought, this isn't gonna carry us for very long, this isn't going to last for very long.

And so, how do we become self-sufficient?

So they formed a partnership basically which was Bueno Foods.

The ordinary person was being able to afford a freezer and they were actually sitting around their parent's Sunday evening super table and they started talking about, why couldn't we take our heritage which is growing green chile, roast it over an open flame as autumn tradition dictated and freeze it so that the harvest would last till the next harvest the following year.

There was no equipment so they had to build it, there was no process... and so the really had to invent that process.

So, people for the first time could enjoy green chile year round.

And it all goes back to those family traditions that we're fortunate to have here in Albuquerque and in the state.

Narrator: The post WWII boom changed our day-to-day lives and people grew away from the land.

Much of Albuquerque's farmland was abandoned or lost to urban development.

Yet farming persisted.

And as our community faces new challenges, it is being revived.

Tiana Baca: I very much feel like a daughter of the desert and this is home and this is where I come from.

And I have this really interesting mixing of stories and people that I come from and they are all land based peoples.

And so for me connecting back to this landscape through agriculture is a way of coming back to that history, those roots and that part of my identity.

There's these small points of jumping in that become these catalysts for deeper connection that a lot of folks are striving for.

Tiana with School Children: I know, doesn't it look beautiful right now?

I really wanted to make marigold crowns...

This is all Rio Grande Blue Corn.

So, it's a type of corn that's from the Middle Rio Grande.

Reyna: Farming for me is about following my ancestor's footsteps.

And making sure that the planting, the farming, the seeds that they have brought here keep continuing to grow.

They type of farming that our people have done with sustainable agriculture is making sure we work with We have an arid environment and so capturing and conserving water was the most important thing.

My community in Zuni is a little bit further away from Albuquerque but I got started here farming so that I can learn as much as I can and then eventually take that knowledge with me back home so I can start farming there as well and teach other people how to farm on a production scale.

Tiana with School Children: So as we come here... Tiana Baca: Thinking about how do we feed this community and Albuquerque...

It's now this urban space.

Tiana with School Children: We're not going to open the pods but I just want to show you what the beans look like.

We have four different varieties of Tepary beans that are growing.

By having a smaller surface area they loose less water.

Student: It definitely makes sense.

Tiana with School Children: So some really cool adaptations that this plant has for existing in the desert.

Tiana Baca: It has such an agricultural root.

And I love that.

I love that you're downtown and you're just a few minutes away from the acequias.

Right?

Like, it is here, it is present.

And yet that urban-ness, there's a disconnect from growing food.

Reyna: By the time we usually get foods that are from the store it's been stored and sitting in a warehouses for who knows how long, so having access to local foods means you are getting the most nutrition.

Seth: Farming is really personal for me when it comes to crop decision and planning.

I want to grow things that I like to eat and I want to grow things that other people like to eat.

You know, being a local farmer and trying to define why local is important...

Ultimately for me it has to do with... get people the freshest food possible which means from the ground to their plates and being in close proximity to the people we feed is just how we do that.

Brett: One of the strengths of agriculture and farming in Albuquerque and the surrounding area, in the Rio Grande Valley is that a city, even as big as Albuquerque is actually many smaller farming villages and ranches and ranchitos that have all grown together into this city.

But the basic structure is still there.

Things like the acequia and that's a strength that can be Seth: I love going to the farmers market, I mean it's a chance for us to explain why and how we are growing the food, what to do with it... Market dialogue: These are juicy.

Thanks so much Eric, this looks great!

Alright.

What do you think?

Excellent!

Seth: And to also learn from our community.

Share recipes, get crop inspiration.

Suggestions on things to grow in the future.

That face time with the people that are supporting us and eating the food and enjoying the food.

That connect between the consumer and the farmer is just strengthening the whole community in a good way.

Brett: The landscape here is not only the natural landscape but agriculture has also become part of the landscape.

And there's a lot to read and to learn from that story.

Ana Baca: My grandmother Filomena was just a For her, food was all about joy.

They actually grew cabbage in their family garden and they'd cover it with compost during the wintertime and with bales of hay like 4 feet high and they'd have cabbage throughout the winter.

She was just very ingenious about how she preserved food and having thirteen children, she really created something out of nothing for them and just created this joyful environment surrounding food.

Moisés: The story of the river and acequia is important for us to know.

What I've learned is the importance of learning from the landscape, living with the landscape, not taking too much from the landscape, giving back to the landscape.

Being connected to place.

Narrator: In the last century Albuquerque's identity has been tied to the railroad, Route 66, and Sandia Labs, yet looking back at our history...

It's agriculture that has been at the heart of our communities and sustained us over the centuries.

Moisés: I'd like to think that remembering the Tiguex people, that are the original people of this land, and the anchored landscape that the acequia provides allows us to have a memory... And at the point that we don't remember this cultural landscape, the importance of our river and the importance of our acequia then we are no longer Albuquerque.

The acequias become the cultural landscape that connect communities to communities... and define us as Burqueños.

A VIEW INTO MICHELANGELO'S PROCESS.

>>Carrie: Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor and architect and throughout his career, he worked from sketches.

>>We get the sense from these drawings that he had everything very well planned out before he started to paint.

>>Carrie: Emily Peters is one of the curators of Michelangelo Mind of the Master.

The exhibition features a couple dozen of Michelangelo's drawings alongside replicas of some of his masterpieces, including the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Italy.

>>So on the back of this sheet, it's just an array of different limbs and figures, and you can see that Michelangelo would rotate the sheet, he was working very swiftly probably and thinking through some of the different figures on the ceiling.

This hand right here, this arm and this hand, those correspond to the very famous scene on the ceiling of God creating Adam.

And that is God's hand, which you can see here.

>>No pressure.

You wanna get the hand of God right?

>>You wanna get the hand of God right.

He practiced it many times.

>>Carrie: On the other side of the paper, Michelangelo drew the figure of a muscular male nude, and he worked out the details of the body in motion down to the flexed toes.

>>Two of the drawings for the Sistine Chapel that we have are four figures called Ignudity, which is an Italian word, meaning nude man.

These were very important compositional elements in the Sistine Chapel, but they didn't have any narrative significance.

Michelangelo used them to kind of punctuate the narrative scenes in the middle of the chapel and his contemporaries were completely astounded by these figures.

>>Carrie: Michael Angelo's focus on the human figure continues to influence art today.

>>He was working at a time when artists generally did not study anatomy yet, and also at a time when though artists would sketch from live models, they often didn't sketch from nude models.

Both of those things are really key, even to this day, to art education.

>>Carrie: So which is this drawing here?

>>So this is one of two drawings in the exhibition for a commission for a fresco called The Battle of Cascina.

And it was his first big fresco commission for the city of Florence.

It was a commission that he never completed, however, what we do have are these wonderful preparatory drawings and it was a moment when he's bringing his vision of the heroic male nude to a wide public.

>>It's such a muscular physical drawing that he might look like he's about to race into battle, but it's almost comical when you see the whole picture, he's not in battle yet, he's racing from bath.

>>Right.

(laughing) >So Michelangelo's concept for this fresco was that it was a great battle between Florence and Pisa but he was portraying the moment when the soldiers were called to battle and they were caught in the river Arno taking a bath.

So this really played to his strengths because he could focus on the nude male figure and kind of the rushing aspect of getting ready for battle.

>>These drawings have never been seen together in the United States and they once belonged to a queen.

How did these bee get preserved over the years to now be on view today?

>>Well, it's really interesting.

There are not very many drawings by Michelangelo that still exist, but we do know that this group of drawings was in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden.

She was a very interesting woman who abdicated her throne in the 17th century and moved to Rome and she loved Italian art and then throughout the centuries those albums were sold to various collectors and in 1790 they were sold to the Tyler's Museum, which is a museum in Harlem, in the Netherlands, and they've been in that museum ever since, which is one of the reasons they're so well preserved today and are still together as a group.

>>He was using these drawings 500 years ago as working tools.

He never would have imagined probably that we'd be looking and walking through an exhibition of his drawings.

>>That is true, in fact, he was quite secretive.

He knew that other artists were very interested in his design He was famous even in his own day an artist in particular wanted to see his drawings because it was in his drawings where he was showing some of his invention and so he actually came to burn large quantities of his drawings during his life.

We assume based on the way he worked, that he must have made tens of thousands of drawings during his long 88 years.

However, today there are only 600 drawings remaining.

In 1517 he asked a servant specifically to burn his drawings from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

So the ones we have today are really precious and you're right, he wouldn't have expected them to be on view in an exhibition like this.

>>Was it standard for artists to burn their work at this time?

>>Not at all.

It was quite unusual and I think it goes back to perhaps a particular personality of the artist who was quite guarded about his work and I think with some justification felt that others wanted to look at and maybe take his ideas.

CREATING WITH FIRE, WATER, ELECTRICITY AND INK.

>>I would describe my work as taking a piece of wood with the natural wood grain, the natural feel the smell of the wood and burning it with fire.

Then taking imagery and applying it right over the top of the wood, like painting onto a wooden canvas.

My name is Ben Rodgers and I create Burned Wood Prints.

I'll choose maple plywood because it's very strong and it's very flat and take that piece, cut it down in my workshop.

(WHIRL FROM SAW BLADE) And then I'll router the edges, (ROAR OF THE ROUTER) and then I'll flame the edges.

So I take a torch and actually burn around the piece.

(HISS OF THE TORCH) And then I'll take a bit of water and baking soda solution and spread that over the top to help the electricity conduct.

And it also helps it stay on the surface of the wood rather than going through the middle.

The next stage is to burn it with electricity.

The process of electrocuting the wood is pretty amazing.

So I have a machine that I created in my workshop and I'll take that and run an electric current through the wood, which travels along the surface of the wood, burning natural shapes into it.

People call it fractals or tree limbs or lightning, all reminiscent of what these burn marks in the wood look like.

No two are alike on those fractal shapes.

They're totally unique, just like nature, just like a tree branch or lightning, they can never be reproduced.

Sand everything down so it's nice and smooth and looks really crisp and then run it through a big flatbed printer.

And that puts ink directly onto the wood, creating the imagery that is the final piece.

During the printing process, I'll take an image into Photoshop and I'll take a photograph of the wood and overlay it in Photoshop so that I can see that tan canvas, because basically I'm starting with wood instead of white, like you would on paper.

In recent years, what's also helped, is a printer that has the capability to lay down white ink.

And so as the prints move through, a layer of white goes down first before the color is applied over the top.

And this allows the colors to really explode on the wood Growing up in Lake Tahoe, I've got a ton of Tahoe imagery, and I use combination of my own imagery, but a lot of stock imagery, a lot of trees, bears, Tahoe mountains, and chairlifts, ski resorts, stuff like that.

I love creating custom ones.

People love to have their own unique picture.

That family photo and having a unique canvas that I can create.

One thing that stands out that surprises people is when they pick up a piece of my art, oftentimes they'll smell it.

And it smells like burned wood.

It smells like if they've ever been in Tahoe in the winter time, and they've had a fire in the fireplace, it smells like home, or it smells like a campfire from their childhood or something.

And so that's kind of a unique side effect.

My favorite part of the whole process is giving pieces to people and watching their eyes light up.

When you show them, you hold it up and they go, wow.

The uniqueness of the art drives me and I get positive reactions wherever I go, and it really fuels my desire to keep going with all the positivity that surrounds it.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Foundation... ...Urban Enhancement Trust Fund of the City of Albuquerque... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs with supplemental funding by the New Mexico CARES Act and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You CLOSED CAPTIONING BY KNME-TV