>> You think about the crews at the time who were on these.

These were 18-year-old kids.

They weren't experienced.

They were young boys who were scared of being there.

>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen, coming up on Open Studio, the new museum traveling through the history of war, one tank at a time.

Then, during the pandemic, the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra is the band that played on, and on, and on.

(playing music from "Peter and the Wolf") Plus, America the beautiful... and unvarnished.

>> He wants to validate the people who are on the margins.

>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ First up, one of the newest museums in Massachusetts is housed in a space the size of an airplane hangar in Stow, a place large enough to exhibit some 50 fully restored tanks and armored vehicles.

It's an awesome array, but make no mistake, the American Heritage Museum has a mission of remembrance.

Step onto the mezzanine of the American Heritage Museum and you survey what seems, from a distance anyway, like a sea of overgrown toys.

They are anything but.

>> These are the vehicles, the artifacts that have the chronology of how war came about.

>> BOWEN: Down on the floor, staring up at these behemoths, you find a hulking history of war.

Tank after towering tank-- tools of one of mankind's darkest trades.

♪ ♪ >> They were manned by humans, by men and women in the case of the Soviet tanks on the Eastern Front.

And all of these have a remarkable story of sacrifice, of perseverance and resilience.

>> BOWEN: Rob Collings is the president of the American Heritage Museum, which opened in 2019.

Most of the tanks come from the late private collector Jacques Littlefield and are housed in a custom-built, 65,000-square-foot facility spanning this country's war record.

In terms of tanks, it moves from 1917 and the first mass-produced American one, to the M1A1 in use today.

>> The collection is the best in the world of these artifacts.

There are at least a dozen, they're the only examples on display in the U.S., and a handful are the only one of their type in the entire world.

They're all restored and they're running condition.

>> BOWEN: So almost any of these tanks could roll out of here into the field behind us?

>> Not only can they, they do.

(vehicle rumbling in distance) In fact, you can hear one right now.

(chuckling) >> BOWEN: The source of the thunderous rumbling that interrupted our interview-- a Sherman tank from World War II making laps on a field behind the museum.

>> These could land on the beaches of Normandy and drive all the way to Berlin.

And you think about the crews at the time who were on these.

These were 18-year-old kids.

They weren't experienced.

They were young boys who were scared of being there.

But also they had these mechanical skills coming off the farm.

And it's a lot like a very large tractor.

>> BOWEN: In non-pandemic times, the museum typically offers demonstration weekends and World War II re-enactments.

Helping to make those happen is Dick Moran, whom we found nearing the end of a six-year-long restoration of a Panzer 1, produced by Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

>> It was maneuverable, it was small, two-man crew.

It was the best of the best at the time.

What's really interesting, if you want to look up inside the turret, you can see the machine guns in here.

The hatch, the sights, ammunition boxes.

>> BOWEN: And this is exactly where the museum often returns-- to the deadly reality of war.

To the fact that these were killing machines, not to mention literal death traps.

Tanks were the most obvious and often easiest targets on battlefields.

This Jumbo, which lumbered through the Battle of the Bulge, still bears the scars of bombs and bullets.

As mighty as they are, their crew rarely survived assaults.

>> One day we actually went to a lecture, and a this gentleman stepped up and he said, "'Do you know the life expectancy of a tank crew?"

And he said, "If you go into battle, it was 25 minutes."

And we all sank into our chairs.

Wow!

>> BOWEN: Colin Rixon is the museum's lead docent and a veteran of the British Army who patrolled the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.

He and a host of veterans, doubling as docents, tour visitors through exhibition highlights like the Prime Mover-- an artillery vehicle later driven by actor Lee Marvin in the film The Dirty Dozen.

They visit the Higgins boat that delivered infantry onto the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and the so-called Churchill Crocodile, which incinerated anything and anyone in its path.

>> This is my father's uniform that he wore when he was commander on a troop of Churchill Crocodiles that went ashore.

>> BOWEN: The personal is paramount here.

Rixon says a steady stream of veterans now make pilgrimages to the museum with their families.

Is it good?

Is it it bad, as they remember all of these things, seeing all of these pieces?

>> So, many of them, it brings the story to... it helps them because they're able to talk about it now.

That's the way to get over it, because you bottle it up inside you.

>> BOWEN: And it's where the museum leaves us, with five men, part of a U.S. Marine tank crew, who saw their commander, Marine Sergeant George Ulloa, killed in an I.E.D.

explosion during the Iraq War.

In this video, they discuss the attack in front of his now-restored tank.

(explosion) >> That was an I.E.D.

>> (expels air) They blew up.

>> BOWEN: It's a very cut and dry reminder that everything here holds a history of horror, making this the rare museum that, in one regard, hopes to never expand.

>> A lot of people will say, coming in here, "Is this a museum that glorifies war?"

And by the time they get to the end, they realize it's an anti-war museum, because to totally understand war, you will never want it again.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, the pandemic has dealt a body blow to many arts institutions, forcing them to slash budgets and programs and to lay off employees.

One organization bucking that trend is the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra.

It's increased staff and raised more money in order to serve more students, all the while presenting concerts like this one.

(playing "Ode to Joy") Federico Cortez, music director of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, thanks so much for being here.

>> Thank you very much for having me here.

>> BOWEN: Well, let me just start with a little bit of a pop quiz, one-word answers.

How much... did you lose any money during this last year in the pandemic?

>> You won't believe it, but no.

Eventually... we were ready for the worst and actually things went well.

And, no, things have gone also financially fairly well.

>> BOWEN: All right, I'm going to move ahead in our pop quiz.

How much... what was the attendance like for your students?

>> 100 percent, 99 point... (chuckles) >> BOWEN: And your enrollment was... >> Was higher than it has ever been.

>> BOWEN: All right, so that was a trick question because I knew some of the answers, which is why I wanted to do the segment.

What did you guys do so right during the pandemic?

And I mean, I'm very thrilled to be able to tell a good story, but we have heard about so many organizations which suffered greatly during the pandemic.

But that was not the case with you.

>> I think we prepared for the worst and we tried to, to change our programs, what we were offering, and adjust it for the... to support the students and at the same time to offer something that was viable, possible, and fruitful.

>> BOWEN: Well, let me back up a little bit.

For people who don't know the orchestra, what is the orchestra?

What is the caliber of students that you have playing with you?

>> Well, it's a system of, of youth orchestras.

And they start... most of them start when they're very little, like six year old, seven year old, and they go all the way to the end of high school.

And it's a system, let's say, a pyramid of orchestras.

And they get training at the same time they get the experience of playing in groups.

And, and then when they get to the top orchestra, which I'm lucky to conduct, we do very difficult repertoire.

We do full operas... >> (singing opera) >> BOWEN: So when the pandemic hits, you decide you'll keep going.

What was the thinking behind that?

>> We decided fairly early that we were going to be on... remote.

So how do you rethink your Sundays, our Sundays, that's when we we rehearse.

You know, that normally we are in larger groups.

And so we decided to, to have smaller groups.

>> So can you tell how you go down, down, down, down... >> That, of course, requires an investment because we need to hire more people and there is a different ratio-- teacher, students.

And which was very beneficial in very many ways, not only because we managed to keep all our... all the musicians who work with us, but actually we increased our, our personnel.

>> BOWEN: As I've covered the pandemic, I've talked to so many people, so many teachers who experienced kids not showing up to class.

Obviously, people are suffering greatly.

There was a difficulty in having engagement, but you kept it.

What do you attribute that to, or have you been able to talk to the students now and figure that out?

>> Um, first of all, it's a group of students, they really love what they do.

They love music.

♪ ♪ To be sure, kids have suffered during this pandemic.

And then it was up to us to be flexible enough to understand when we were asking too much and we gave, for instance, a couple of Sundays off when we felt that we had given them enough work for quite a while, we tried to guess beforehand what, what they may feel.

We were not just waiting for their exhaustion to, to react.

>> BOWEN: What about, and I've talked about this over the years on this show, the healing power of music?

Did you feel that that came into play during the pandemic?

>> You know, for all of us who love music, music is, is our love.

And as all love affairs can be difficult and can be wonderful, I think in this case, even in this imperfect way, not complete, it was a wonderful thing for all of us.

And I'm putting myself and the coaches, for all of us, just to be able to talk about music, to, to coach them, to listen to what they were doing, putting together these remote videos, it's a way to... for us to be alive, frankly.

>> BOWEN: What about the technical challenges of this?

We saw these great videos that have come out over the course of the last year where you have musicians from all around the world in their little boxes playing, but we hear the symphonic sound come together.

Of course, it doesn't come out like that.

If you put a bunch of screens together, we all know how Zoom works now, it doesn't sound like that.

So what did it take for you to bring the students together in the great performances that you've had over the last year?

>> There is sound editing work that needs to be done, for sure.

And we were very lucky because we have one of our staff member who turned... it turned out, I didn't know, was a great sound editor.

So we worked together and you just need, you know, to align, to make sure to add a little reverberation.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: You are releasing Peter and the Wolf, a video, we were talking about videos and tailoring them in this age.

Tell me about this piece this year.

>> We did several videos for children.

And again, what I was saying, when you do a video, you try to say, "Okay, I'm going to do this big effort for a goal."

So we did a young person's guide by Britten.

>> The woodwind are a superior varieties of the pennywhistle.

They are made of wood.

♪ ♪ >> And now Peter and the Wolf.

♪ ♪ And we have been distributing the young person's guide.

And now we will start distributing Peter and the Wolf to all kinds of schools, children's hospitals-- Boston Children's Hospital, and children's hospital throughout the United States-- senior retirement homes.

All places where some music-- but also music played by kids, can, can mean something.

>> BOWEN: Well, Federico Cortez, thank you so much for being here.

It was important for me to tell a positive story.

We've told so many of the, the difficult ones over the last year.

Congratulations on making it work.

>> Thank you so much, and thank you for having me.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Imagine rowing across the Atlantic.

You won't have to after catching a new musical that's part of Arts This Week.

♪ ♪ On Sunday, head to the Addison Gallery of American Art to view Seeing Things in Things, a retrospective featuring more than 60 of Mel Kendrick's sculptures and two specially commissioned outdoor pieces.

Visit MassMoCA Monday and experience Glenn Kaino's In the Light of a Shadow, a collection of installations inspired by commonalities between Bloody Sunday protests in Selma and Ireland.

Speaking of Ireland, Tuesday marks Irish writer Samuel Beckett's 115th birthday.

His best-known work, Waiting for Godot, was named the "most significant English-language play of the 20th century" in a British Royal National Theatre poll.

>> Ordinary women don't row alone across oceans.

I am no ordinary woman.

♪ I feel the spirit!

♪ >> BOWEN: Tune into Row, an Audible musical, presented by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, on Wednesday.

This world premiere tells the story of the first woman to row alone across the Atlantic Ocean.

Starting Saturday, stream Until the Flood, Merrimack Repertory Theatre's play about the aftermath of Michael Brown's killing, based on real-life interviews.

It's a solo show with a documentary-style approach.

Next, this last year has been a time in which we've been taking a hard look at America.

In the 1950s, photographer Robert Frank did the same, for better and for worse, in his project The Americans.

This is the last weekend to see the work in its entirety at the Addison Gallery of American Art.

So we're revisiting a story we first brought you last fall.

This is the America of the 1950s.

Champagne chatter.

Warm nights at the drive-in.

And Hollywood poise and glamour.

This is also 1950s America.

A divide on the streets of South Carolina.

Political fervor and labor traced beneath fingernails.

This is photographer Robert Frank's America.

>> He wanted to document a civilization.

>> BOWEN: Armed with a Guggenheim fellowship, the Swiss photographer drove 10,000 miles throughout his adopted country in 1955 and '56, taking some 27,000 photographs and whittling them down to a series of 83.

He considered it a poem, says curator Alison Kemmerer.

>> It's not documentary photography.

It's not a declaration of "America is this" or "America is that."

So it's this idea of this kind of rhythm stanza.

You hit a flag, you kind of pause, reset, think about where you've been and then continue the journey.

>> BOWEN: Frank published the series, titled The Americans, as a photobook, first in France and then in the United States in 1959.

The Addison Gallery of American Art is one of only four museums to own the entire series.

It's presented in the same sequence here as in the book.

>> This is a Fourth of July picnic in New York.

Equality, freedom, opportunity... children in white dresses, that sort of innocent, buoyant energy.

>> BOWEN: However... >> However-- >> BOWEN: There's a big "but" looming here.

>> Yes, and I would say there's a clue, too.

The flag itself is transparent, it's kind of like we're seeing through that symbol to see something a little deeper, perhaps.

What is behind the veil?

So the next image takes us to New Orleans, a trolley car-- the racism, the segregation.

>> BOWEN: A little bit later on, the series grows seemingly menacing in the intent faces of two hitchhikers Frank picked up in Idaho.

Then we're back on the street as a car, in all its energy, races past a group whose racing days are over.

Maybe the same for the car in the following photograph.

And then life itself in the next.

>> In the early '50s, things had changed.

So there's escalating Cold War, the dawn of the civil rights movement, McCarthyism, the Korean War.

There was just an underlying anxiety, suspicion, and negativity.

>> BOWEN: Which Frank toyed with.

In this photograph of a young Kim Novak, we're not actually drawn to the Hollywood actress.

>> And it's less about the starlet than it is about all the gawkers surrounding her.

And, you know, it's a very subtle but powerful comment on our celebrity worship... (chuckles) And the value we place on fame and glamor.

>> BOWEN: Frank developed a mistrust, even an anger, toward the ruling class.

Especially as he made his way through the segregated South.

>> He was arrested several times on the trip.

He's... he was not yet a citizen, so he was a "foreigner," he was Jewish, he was held overnight in jail.

He wants to validate the people who are on the margins.

>> BOWEN: The photographer returned again and again to symbols of America-- lunch counters, cowboys, and jukeboxes-- but as you've likely figured out by now, he captures them all with twinges of Hopper-esque loneliness.

In fact the painter Edward Hopper was an influence.

>> There was no prescribed, "I am going to do this."

It's more, "I am going to travel, look, see, feel, and see what I learn."

>> BOWEN: And did he stay an observer or did he interact?

>> He did not interact.

There's actually a great image that he cites as one of his favorite of an African-American couple in San Francisco.

And they're lying down having a picnic and they're turning around because they notice him.

And it's obviously expressions of suspicion.

He loved the way... the Black couple contrasted against the very white city.

>> BOWEN: When The Americans was published here, critics pounced.

At a time when Ansel Adams defined photography with well-lit, crisp images, Frank tended toward the blurred, the grainy, and the provocative.

>> People did not like that.

(laughs) But at the same time, that style and that exposure of truth influenced a generation of photographers, writers, artists and viewers.

>> BOWEN: Who can still look at The Americans and sometimes see them stare right back.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Finally now, we visit the exhibition Beyond the Cape: Comics and Contemporary Art at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.

It looks at the artists who've been inspired by comic books and graphic novels.

And a programming note-- this was filmed before COVID.

♪ ♪ >> They have an urgency about them, there's something very topical.

♪ ♪ So the exhibition Beyond the Cape is really looking at those artists who are inspired by comics but in different ways.

They're about the environment, politics, race relations.

There are many artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol who are influenced by comics, by pop culture.

But this, you'll find, are artists who really are telling a story that's sometimes quite deep, quite dark.

Kerry James Marshall is looking at the streets of Chicago.

William Wiley's tapestry is looking at the shooting of a man who police thought he was pulling out a gun, but in fact he was pulling out his wallet.

♪ ♪ >> I'm finding right now in this moment, just kind of seeing my work against these other artists' work, is that they actually are speaking clearly without holding back about what is actually important to them and what's actually happening in their period of time that they are living.

My name is Mark Thomas Gibson.

I'm originally from Miami, Florida.

I am an artist.

I'm also an assistant professor at Temple University, Tyler School of Art.

I kind of play with pop culture, I play with comics, I play with history, I play with, like, little bits of everything.

♪ ♪ This book had a lot to do with this idea of utopia.

Once I actually start engaging with the practice of drawing, then I'm starting to formulate whatever my actual answer is about that subject.

In the case-- this one was utopia and so by the end of it, I actually come to an answer for myself and I don't think I could've actually find that type of answer any other way.

♪ ♪ Every page is an individual drawing, 350 of them that tell the narrative of my main character.

I use, like, as my protagonist a werewolf character, which is the idea of someone who has been traumatized but then now is a traumatizer.

I think about that a lot in America, how we have a lot of that.

That kind of continuously... it seems to happen where people become traumatized by either being economically oppressed or being... seeing a loved one murdered or seeing culture act and respond to them as an "other" when they are actually a part of the fabric of this country.

And then that gets passed on, like to your kid, that gets passed on to your community.

Some of them become paintings, some of them do not.

Most of them do not.

But in this case... this would later become "Library One and Two."

♪ ♪ I wanted to kind of show an area that had been lived in and kind of overgrown in thought.

My main character in this narrative that this comes from, don't really know even what time period it is that he's in, so you have, like, a sword and kind of a hilt, a kind of a spear.

You have, like, books that are kind of contemporary.

So there's "Utopia" of course.

And then there's "Beloved" you know, by the great Toni Morrison.

I think about books that I've read growing up that told me something or made me think about relationships around slavery, relationships about American expansionism, all of these things that we kind of think about when we're talking around America as these kinds of canons of, like, who are we?

Where are we?

Part of what I figured out in this whole utopian thing was that it really kind of comes down to communication, so we have to actually work with each other to actually navigate what it is that we want.

♪ ♪ >> This exhibition I think is yet another good example of what we have been pretty good at here, and that is to break the boundaries between these silos of art forms, where you have the graphic novel, the comic, and you have fine art-- well, here you have this sort of blending of the two.

>> And it was kind of hard because when you would have that kind of influence in your life and you'd go to an art school per se, they say, "Oh, that's not art," and they would throw that aside or kind of demean it or demote it.

Many people throughout history actually worked within illustration, worked within political art, worked within caricature, it's, it's really kind of embedded in art practice.

And if you go all the way back to Lascaux and look at those, like, caves, I mean there's some caricaturism kind of going on in that as well.

So that way in which we kind of think through narrative and sequential art, it's always been present.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: That is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, the new documentary Beethoven in Beijing explores the effect the Philadelphia Orchestra had in re-introducing classical music to Chinese audiences-- after almost a decade of it being outlawed.

♪ ♪ Until then, I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

And as always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪