This time on rocks conversations with Baton Rouge ceramicist and painter Tyrese Knowles, a former New Orleans musician, finds new inspiration in clay and an award winning drum and bugle corps.

These stories right now on are rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Although ceramicist and painter Tyrese Knowles was born in New Orleans, she's lived in Baton Rouge for years.

Growing up around Mid-City cemeteries, Teresa found inspiration in the beauty of cemetery art.

Her grandfather was a stonecutter who created many of the angels that adorn the city's tombs, and this influenced Teresa's work today.

Whether she's working in clay or on canvas, Teresa's art exhibits a reflective expression of life and people's connection to one another.

Let's watch.

Every morning I go for a four mile walk or run around the lake.

So the birds are very important to me.

You look at a bird or the birds, and they have this sense of freedom about them.

And it's almost as though you're looking out to the horizon, and it's like a quiet line, and your body becomes quiet and you're listening to these beautiful musical birds.

So birds are incredibly important to me, and you'll see them throughout all of my work, whether it's in ceramics or in paintings, and doing a little small doodle throughout my day of my birds.

Then I thought, well, that would be an awesome image to recreate.

On to ceramics.

The difference between a painting which is a two dimensional surface, and then I'm dealing with a three dimensional surface in the round.

I have to think about not only the exterior space, but I have to think of the interior space.

And so transferring that tree on to a piece of pottery, maybe a vase.

I can then tell more of a full story about what's happening.

So that particular tree went on to the front because that's how I started my morning.

But on the other side of that piece of pottery is a rocking chair, which is my great grandmother's rocking chair that sits in the living room.

And so that's the chair I walked my children on.

I was rocked in.

My mother was rocked in.

So the rocking chair is very important to me.

So that was the beginning of my life.

And somehow I see the trees as being toward the end of my life and reflecting back on both parts.

That brought me comfort, and it was always surrounded by trees and birds.

Growing up around City Park in New Orleans.

I do a lot of layers in my two dimensional surface, and then that's went on to my ceramics because to me, once you fire a piece of pottery, it's just fired.

But where can you take it to push it to the next level and then to the next level, which is why I do a lot of firings on a single piece.

That's all been transcribed into my paintings, as well as because it's about building and layers and layers.

In the late 60s, I had go to the museum Delgado Museum, which is now called the New Orleans Museum, because I live close by.

And I remember seeing a de Gaulle painting in there of his cousin, and I remembered looking at that painting and realizing that painting was layers.

And that was my first art class, really, was a de Gaulle painting.

And that painting inspired me to realize that I had to do a lot of layers in order to get what I wanted.

With the 3D, you have a whole bunch of more surfaces to deal with.

You have the internal surface, you have the external surface.

Then your external surface and your internal surface.

How does that all relate?

And how can you can take of three dimensional composition and make all that composition balanced?

That particular piece of pottery took me three months, so I threw it.

It had to dry.

The next step was to fire create a bisque where it's hard.

The next firing is a glaze firing, but I use neutral color glazes because I have another vision that's going to happen to that.

And then I create all of my decals using computers, and from my sketchbook I make all the decals to help tell a story around the piece of ceramics.

And then I move on from that.

I fire those, add another temperature.

I have googled all over the place and found vintage gold decals, and I have those shipped from different places like Italy and Spain, and I use these vintage decals as another firing.

And then I use a over glaze firing for the gold.

So it's a total of five firings.

It's a tremendous amount of work just to share with one particular piece, whether it's a cup or a very large piece.

It's all about a story.

I think we're all stories, and I think if it relates to you, then it relates to your story, and it makes me feel good to know that somebody has a connection.

A friend of mine had her wedding dress from the 1960s, and it was a crocheted wedding dress, and she asked if I could make some vases for her friends using her wedding dress.

So I went about experimenting with slip.

I would throw the pot, and then I would dip the fabric into the clay, slip the same type of clay but wet, and then I would wrap that, and then I fire it.

And once I fire, the fabric itself becomes ash and dissipates, and the rest which is left is texture.

I thought it was important that he or she was able to give a part of herself to her best of friends, and so she gave them as a gift from her birthday to them as her gift of celebration.

Her life.

And so I really have enjoyed making things, using a lot of texture and fabric.

I had a friend who was kind enough to let me make a plaster mold, and from that plaster mold, I took some old sheets that I got of goodwill and dipped that also in slip.

With that, there's no substrate to it.

Literally.

It is just the fabric holding that piece up again.

There's going to be birds on it.

And again, floral is important to me because it's just a part of my life is growing things.

And so it was symbolic.

Originally it had a bird nest inside and it was lit up.

So you would have to look inside and you would see the baby eggs and things like that.

Visual arts, a painting is something that people see on the wall and they're afraid to touch.

They're told not to touch it.

But if you take that same value of art and incorporate it into a ceramic piece, such as a simple cup or a small bowl that becomes a tangible thing that people can use and people can relate to that.

I actually threw that very large piece in two parts, and then attached the two large bowls together to give me a nice sized piece.

Of course, it has shrunk quite a bit 13% because of the type of clay body I've been using that has a lot of black iron oxides in it, so it gives it that metal feel as opposed to being clay.

That particular piece really is talking about a reflection of my life at this time, of becoming more of a minimalist and realizing I don't need a whole lot of anything, and I don't have the struggles anymore that I used to have as a young person that I now I'm just happy that I'm here and I don't really need anything more than that.

Potter's brings a human aspect to art.

They bring the things where we eat out of.

They bring that teacup that has the perfect lip and the correct handle that you drink your coffee or tea out of in the morning.

It's the most human aspect of the arts for me.

And so I felt it was important, my transition, being a painter, then moving to ceramics because I wanted to be able to not just give the painting, but something that was functional, that a person could have with them and carry with them and have the repetitive message of knowing that the world is okay for them.

That day.

I get up in the morning and I've already had several canvases or several pieces of wood primed and ready to go, and I pick up words that I think I might need through the day.

And I doodle, which is what I call my paintings, is more like doodling and creating compositions.

A lot of my themes start with my sketchbooks.

My sketchbook is something I usually carry with me everywhere, in case I just find something, rather than taking a photograph.

Because a photograph you capture the whole thing.

But when you're doing a drawing, you're actually capturing the little bits that put together everything, and it goes back to taking those little bits and pieces of our life and finding a place where it's comforting and quiet.

And in my paintings, I can take all of what's going on throughout my day, including those words that I began with.

You will find breathe, because I think we forget to breathe, and I think we forget how lucky we are because we're breathing.

Another word is love.

Because I think we don't reach out to people or tell people, even though we're close to them, that we love them.

So you'll see that word a lot of times, I think people will buy a piece of my work that has that a message, because they cannot verbally say it to that other person.

So they feel safe in giving them something that might have words on it that they wish they could say.

Another one would be gratitude.

To be thankful for everything that we have in this world, to wake up and to be given a new gift called your life.

Today you'll see words that are more uplifting, but there are some times I do use words that I find that if I'm not having a very good day, I use those words as well, because I know other people don't have such good days, and I want them to know that they're not alone.

By the end of the year, I'll have a lot of these little paintings, and I have to decide what I'm going to do with these little paintings.

I decided to try to make my own books out of them.

They open up.

She was an adventurer at heart.

This was a message about an adventure, about a person who needs to sit down and have a cup of tea before they move forward in their world.

So with this and that's me.

Every morning after my run, I come back and I have my cup of tea and so this was about that particular story of being a person who is an adventurer.

And so if you notice that around here, you'll see birds circling the person's head and how that relates to seeing the world outside, and then the birds come closer to the simple things of having tea and finding that perfect chair to sit in.

At the end of your day.

And with just a little bit of a map letting us know that we've traveled as adventurers in this world, my grandfather was a stone cutter, so he would be working in the cemeteries, graveyards, and I would go and play in the cemeteries because that's what we all did as kids.

He worked with marble and cement and concrete, and so I think that was my first bit of realizing that religious art was just absolutely beautiful.

I have since gone back there and did negative images of my grandfather's work, where I would do angels and pieces like that.

So I felt like there's a legacy of my grandfather still part of my life.

Across Louisiana, museums and galleries present exhibitions with the power to illuminate our home state in new light.

So here are some standout exhibitions coming soon to a museum or a gallery near you.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads Magazine available in print, online or by e-newsletter.

To watch or rewatch any episode of Art rocks again, just visit lpb.org/art rocks there.

You'll also find all of the Louisiana segments available on LPB YouTube channel.

Some artists cultivate connections between their mediums and the pieces they design.

Odessa at Toi is one who does the former New Orleans Museum now creates wheel thrown pottery in Sarasota, Florida, emulating the volume and proportion of the coil built pots that her ancestors would have made in her process.

Also searches for commonalities, plumbing the connections between her Nigerian ancestry and the indigenous people of the Florida coast.

So come along to Sarasota and we'll learn more.

My name is Odessa Toy and I'm a studio potter.

I was living in New Orleans, Louisiana.

back in 2013, and I was working at a coffee shop.

My main thing back then was being a musician.

I was a punk musician.

I played in bands since I was probably in my early 20s.

So to make ends meet, I made coffee during the day, and one of my coworkers mentioned that there was a new pottery studio in town, and he just thought that I might be into it.

So I ended up taking one class and just falling in love with it.

If you have a bunch of, you know, manufactured cups or plates or bowls and they are all in a matching set and you just grab one and you throw some food on it.

But with handmade pottery, you know that someone's time is invested in it.

You know that that time is now is a physical object, and you are using something that has has literally come from somebody's mind.

And it makes the meal more significant or the beverage or anything like that.

One of the things that's so special about clay is the fact that you can use it in so many different forms.

I think that it gives people a grounding sense.

I mean, you're literally working with the Earth, but the fact that you can use it as a dry powder, a liquid in its plastic form.

You can't do that with wood, right?

So I think there's just something about it being a mutable material.

And the fact that you're literally working with the ground under your feet.

It's just and it's an interesting experience.

Here locally, I feel she is definitely going to be one of those artists that opens up the doors for other artists.

So she's doing something with her work, her art, her collection of pottery that no one else is doing.

I collected wild clay samples for many years before I even used it.

I just thought it was interesting.

We're at Sarasota Bay and we're just a couple blocks from my house.

before settlers came, there's an indigenous meeting place for millennia.

You can find fossils here.

You can also find clay.

Some of the clay that we found.

At fires, to kind of a pale yellowish color.

But this is native Florida clay for Sarasota.

Well, when it's wet, it's a little bit on the sandy side.

It's very plastic, though, and easy to mold.

I've made little pinch pots with it and fired them.

People who use wild clay in their practice need to be able to collect large amounts of it to build their entire body of work on.

And up until recently, I didn't have access to large quantities of clay, which is partly why I didn't use it being in my industry.

kind of in the construction industry in general.

And so I kind of have my ear to the ground on where projects are happening, where Earth is being disturbed or moved.

And so those are actually really good opportunities to access the clay, which could be buried under, you know, six, eight, ten, 12ft of soil.

We probably have clay beneath our feet here, but we have no way to access it.

Commercial clay and wild clay are just it's like it's night and day, the way that they feel in your hands.

It's completely different the way that they behave.

And then also just the amount of labor.

So commercial clay is wonderful because it's just it's already processed.

It's ready to go with wild clay.

There's a lot of labor that goes into that.

I would say it's almost a difference between going to the grocery store and buying a bag of spinach and eating spinach out of your garden.

It is work.

It's not a hobby.

It's not like it's more than an interest.

It runs through like every vein in her body, I think because of who she is and because she doesn't typically fit into a box of an artist, specifically a ceramic artist.

You don't think that someone like Rosa, that's Nigerian-American, would even be interested in that type of work?

But she is, and it's just really cool to see someone who doesn't typically fit that particular art medium.

Doing that work.

Carver Clay collective was founded in 2021.

Carver means welcome in Europe.

That's a language.

My parents speak to each other.

It's a social and mutual aid network for black ceramicist.

I did start pottery in New Orleans, which is a majority black city, but I was always the only black person in any of my classes.

It's not just the absence of black people in those spaces, it's the absence of black culture.

We have so much to add to culture.

We have a long history of making pottery and sculpture.

So Cabell Clay, it's just been invaluable to me personally.

It's kind of like building what I needed.

And then understanding that if I need it, other people need it too.

There's a lot of art in Sarasota, plenty of it.

The landscape, I feel like, is it needs a little bit more diversity.

And I feel like there's a lot more of hidden talent in Sarasota and Manatee that people don't know about.

And that's kind of where Ozark kind of falls into that.

She's one of those up and coming artists that people may know outside of the region.

A lot of people do know south side of the region, but here in Sarasota, I feel like she is not as celebrated as I feel like she should be.

The lesson that I get from working with Clay in general is having to collaborate with the material.

Especially when I work with wild Clay, it doesn't behave like commercial clay, and I have to change the way that I respond to it.

If I just try to force my will on it, it just won't work.

Also, there's so much about clay that's about waiting for the right time to do a specific thing.

And if you're impatient, it just won't work.

It just will not work.

So Clay has taught me to be more patient.

I need to be more gentle.

But there's infinite lessons that Clay is always teaching.

Carrying on to canton, Ohio now to admire a world class drum and bugle corps.

The blue coats each season, more than 100 young adults are selected to join an educational training program, followed by an unforgettable cross-country tour.

Let's have a listen.

I can remember the experience I had as a drum corps performer, and I know what it can do for a young person with regard to dedication to excellence.

You can work really hard and try something that maybe you didn't think you could achieve before, while also being expressive and showing your values.

That type of work ethic that I learned from drum corps, it plays into everything I do, including my job and building relationships, organization, all that kind of stuff.

So I really think it's a broader impact than just the music.

It's all the skills you learn along the way.

It's all kind of building to what makes this activity so great and what makes it so successful and competitive.

I just haven't wanted to go anywhere else.

It's always been the dream to end up here, so I've been enjoying this ride for the last five years.

It's always been my dream to be a bluecoat, so to finally be able to put on a uniform and just perform as a bluecoat, it's it's going to be amazing.

The Blue Coats are a 50 year old drum and bugle corps that was founded in canton, Ohio by the Canton Police Boys Club, and it was a after school outreach program started as a parade corps, just an opportunity for kids in the canton area to pick up an instrument, or spinning a rifle or a flag and perform in parades.

And gradually over the years, that became a show corps and then a competitive corps and then the corps competing in DCI, which is drum corps international, is sort of like the major leagues of drum corps.

50 years later, it's one of the best in the world, and it's 165 marching musicians and tall guard performers.

These members are pouring their hearts out and working hard every day.

It's an emotional experience, right?

It's not just something that they do and you know, they're done and they don't feel anything.

When I get to help them achieve at the highest level and feel that music and feel the excellence that they're creating, regardless of how they place or medals or anything like that, just that they feel good about what they're executing.

I get this real satisfaction from seeing them grow in that way and seeing them just be happy, you know, to be performers in a group like this.

There's definitely some really hard days where I just wanted to give up.

But it's just really I think it's the community, of people here and they would just like, offer like a kind word or just tell me, like, you got this, you can keep going.

So yeah, we just all push each other through the hard days.

Yeah.

Certainly I think when young people are being creative, they learn things about themselves and what interest them, and all of those things wrapped up in, you know, one summer is a transformative experience for a kid just one summer, let alone a couple.

And, that means a lot to us.

But by the end of season, you you really have an idea of how people receive your show.

And hopefully it's good.

in my experience, it's always been good.

So that's always been a comforting feeling.

Coming into the last performance.

Obviously there's some nerves, when it comes to the competitive aspect of it, but at the end of the day, we do this for ourselves and for the people watching us, and that's really the most important part for us is just knowing that no matter how we play set, they're all going to enjoy it just the same.

It's really it's a really rewarding experience.

And that is that for this edition of Art rocks.

But that's okay because more episodes of the show are always available at lpea.

The doors slash rocks.

And if you love stories like these.

Country Roads magazine makes a useful guide for learning what's taking shape in Louisiana's cultural life.

All across the state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.