(bright dramatic music) (baseball bat hits) (dramatic music) - [Matt] Keith Landry takes us (crowd cheering) out to the ball game with his cut card art.

Egyptologist Peter Lacovara discusses the Albany Institute's Dowes Dunham Exhibition.

♪ Tell her I know ♪ - [Matt] And catch a performance from Erin Harkes.

♪ Tell her it's all part of the show ♪ ♪ Tell her I'm fine ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and The Robison Family Foundation.

(bright upbeat music) (bright music concludes) (screen whooshes) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz, and this is AHA.

A House for Arts, a place for all things creative.

Have you ever wondered what to do with all those old baseball cards you've got in the attic?

Well, artist Keith Landry has a creative solution for you and it involves a pair of scissors.

Take a look.

("Take Me Out To The Ballgame" instrumental) - I'm Keith Landry.

I make art by cutting up baseball cards.

And I'm a math teacher in Niskayuna High School.

(scissors snip) Most people think I'm crazy and my students will say, who have seen it, you know, I don't have the patience and that's usually what I get from most people.

I have no patience for something like that, which is funny 'cause many of the students that I run into are artists in their own right and they paint and they draw.

Even artists that have seen my work that I've bumped into along the way say you gotta be outta your mind to cut up that many small baseball cards.

Many people who played baseball, which I did, their first love is baseball.

My first love is actually drawing.

I remember drawing before ever playing baseball, and it's something that I've just always loved to do.

I never wanted to do it or intended to do it professionally in any way.

I always just did it for enjoyment.

And it's led to some really fun opportunities.

I've gotten to meet some baseball players as they've signed different pieces that I've drawn and brought to ball fields or autograph sessions.

(crowd cheering) (baseball bat hits) (upbeat music) My love of baseball really started four or five years old.

My grandfather, who I at this point really have no memories of.

He died when I was very, very young.

My father told me that he would bring me out back to play catch with him.

And then ever after that, my father did.

My father was a baseball player before me.

He was a good pitcher with a good curve ball.

And so he would pitch to me and he'd play catch with me in the backyard and hit me ground balls and pitch to my sister, let her hit balls into the outfields and I'd chase them all down.

So I always loved baseball.

My love of baseball is almost addictive and problematic.

I still play to this day.

And I went on to play baseball in high school and American Legion and a little collegiate ball and some semi-pro ball.

So now I play in the amateur leagues with a bunch of my buddies and we play old man baseball.

It's not pretty, but it's a lot of fun.

(laughing) (lively organ music) Where this all started two years ago, I went to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and I had just finished an art project that I spent years doing 'cause through the pandemic, I just wasn't in the mood for drawing.

So when I got to the hall, I saw this piece on the wall, and it was a jersey that was made of cut baseball cards of Atlanta Braves pitcher, Phil Niekro.

And I thought to myself, "I think I can do that."

So I went home and a couple weeks later, I had produced a Tom Seaver jersey (organ music continues) and, you know, it's rudimentary and it looks okay, but the thing that I found great about it is the most forgiving medium I've ever worked with.

When you draw something or paint something, you make a mistake, and the painting's kind of ruined, or the drawing's kind of ruined.

With the baseball cards, you just cut up another piece and stick it on top.

So the freedom of just being allowed to just go wherever artistically you feel like you want to go without concern for making mistakes really appealed to me.

So, you know, then I made another one and another one, and before you know it, I was making these about one a month.

♪ Hey ♪ (upbeat dance music) - So I'll find an image and then bring it down to the school copiers and blow it up to a size that I think that I want to make it.

And from there I'll cut out that image and make a large template out of baseball cards.

Every piece that goes into making one of these pieces of artwork is a cut up piece or a complete piece of baseball card.

And from there, you just kind of size up different sections, whether it's the name plate, whether it's the number, the face, and you kind of do them in separate pieces.

The challenge gets to be finding baseball cards that have the correct coloring, tone, shading, and you really actually don't know until you've cut up hundreds of them and lay out all these little cut pieces to see the gradation of light to dark.

Then you work on the face, then you work on the jersey and before you know what, it starts to fill in.

And the great thing about it is as you get to the end, you almost look at, or I look at it kind of in shock that I've made this thing out of ridiculousness of little cut baseball cards.

And the further away you stand from it, the more realistic it looks.

It's a lot of fun.

(suspenseful music) (scissors snipping) (character laughs maniacally) There are numerous cards that I won't cut up.

I mean, anything probably, I mean, if you wanted to price it out worth a dollar or more, let's say.

I won't cut up any of my favorite Red Sox players.

I have a bit of a problem with my Boston Red Sox fandom.

But no, I have some valuable cards.

You know, I've got, you know, the occasional Hank Aaron card and things that are older.

You know, I just don't touch any vintage things, but the vast majority of what I'm cutting is from the late eighties and early nineties.

And none of it's worth a penny.

(bright instrumental music) When I make these pieces, there is a three dimensionality to them because every section, whether it's a ball player's jersey, their numbers, a helmet, a glove, a face, in the background, the little people that are in the background getting ready to celebrate, every one of those is its own individual piece.

So all of these pieces get stacked on top of each other as they get assembled.

So there is some depth, and when you have a reproduction of it, or a photo of it, you get the impact of what it looks like, but you really don't get the sense for where there's depth and movement to it.

And every time I do one, I'm so pleased with how that comes out.

(upbeat music continues) The piece that I really wanted to do was a Jackie Robinson piece.

As soon as I started getting good at doing this, I thought, I think I'm ready to tackle that piece.

And it's one of the few pieces I've done that I already had the vision before doing it, of exactly how I wanted it to look.

And I was thrilled when it did exactly that.

Jackie Robinson's always been a hero of mine.

I read his autobiography when I was just a kid.

And there are only so many people, let alone players in the history of the country that have impacted the world the way Jackie Robinson did.

(upbeat music concludes) As far as the next piece that I'm gonna do for this card cutting era, I'm gonna do a Shohei Ohtani, just he's the greatest ball player that ever lived.

And then I'm gonna continue on to do, try to do one of every single team.

So there'll be a Bobby Witt Jr.

for the Kansas City Royals.

And I'm looking forward to do a Johnny Bench from the Cincinnati Reds.

I really don't know where this is going, it's just the latest thing that I started doing.

And for all I know, I'll get to the end of that project and call it a day and never make another one.

Or I'll just run out of baseball cards.

♪ For it's one, two ♪ ♪ Three strikes, you're out ♪ ♪ At the old ball game ♪ - Peter Lacovara is the Consulting Curator for the Egyptian collection at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Currently showing at the Institute is an exhibition celebrating the remarkable career of Dowes Dunham, Hudson Valley born archeologist who left an indelible mark in the field of Egyptology.

Jade Warrick sat down with Peter to learn more.

- Hey Peter, welcome to a House for Arts.

- Thanks.

- Yeah.

So I'm excited to talk to you about this exhibition you're a curating at the Albany Institute.

It's called From Hudson to the Nile.

Do you wanna give the audience a little bit of background about what this exhibition is all about?

- Sure, it's about Dowes Dunham who was from the Hudson Valley from an old New York family, and became one of the greatest archeologists of his generation of the 20th century working in Egypt and Sudan.

So it covers his life and career.

- And like, what will people like see within this exhibition?

You know, what would it look like for like, the average onlooker walking in?

- So there are photographs of the excavation and that he worked on, and then artifacts that he discovered and models that he helped create of sites.

Like there's a model of one of the pyramids at Giza.

- Cool.

So why Dowes Dunham?

Like why is this exhibition centered around him and why do you take so much care to highlight his work?

- Well, a bunch of reasons.

He's from the area to begin with, but he's never really gotten the attention he deserves being such an important figure.

And I actually was fortunate to know him .

When I was a young student in Boston, he would come, still come to work in his nineties in the museum every day to work on publications.

So I got to know him and know his stories.

- Yeah, and what would you say, like, 'cause he's an archeologist, correct?

So what is his like, legacy like to you, in your opinion?

Like what legacy did he leave behind?

- Well, he excavated so many important finds, which is why he's such an important figure and why we did the exhibition.

And he also wrote a lot.

He was great at publishing what he discovered, which is what archeologists are supposed to do, but they don't always.

But he really took it to heart and did an incredible amount.

- Yeah, he sounds like an amazing guy.

- Yeah.

- So I know like in this exhibition, you said that there was a tomb that it took you like two years to like excavate.

And you even, like you were saying, like maybe there's only like, just like fragments pieces to it.

- Yeah.

- You know, it's not like this whole intact thing like, you know, two years and you're still just getting like fragment pieces.

But you said it was so important to have this in the exhibition and to highlight.

So why was this so important to have in the exhibition and why was this an important discovery to you?

- So it was a major discovery.

It's the earliest royal tomb ever found intact in Egypt.

And it was by accident.

They were photographing the Great Pyramid, just taking pictures of it.

And they noticed one of the camera tripod legs sunk into the ground and when they looked closer, they saw it wasn't stone, it was plaster.

And so they took away the plaster and there was a shaft going 90 feet straight down into the ground.

And when they opened it, they found a sealed tomb door.

But when they opened it, there was the sarcophagus, but then it had been filled with gilded wooden furniture, gilded and inlaid.

But all the wood had decayed, it had turned to dust.

And so everything had crumbled and fell in little pieces on the floor of the tomb.

So in order to understand what was in there, they had to photograph and map each tiny little fragment and take it out piece by piece, which is why it took them two years to clean a space the size of this, a little bigger than this rug here.

- Wow, and like how do you transport that to like the Albany Institute, like what's the transportation process for something so fragile?

- Well, all of that stuff actually stayed in Egypt.

So some of the artifacts were given to the museum by the Egyptian government as a thank you.

- Yeah.

- But some of them were then they made reproductions of it.

- Oh, okay.

- 'Cause he had to, by studying the fragments and studying representations, he was able eventually to reconstruct all the furniture that was in the tomb.

And then- - That's cool.

- There was no structure over it, so they didn't know who it belonged to.

But luckily there was a carrying chair that she would, the queen would be carried around in and it had her name and titles inlaid in gold hieroglyphs on it, and they'd all fall into the floor of the tomb in order.

So on the floor they could read out who it was.

- That is so cool.

- Yeah.

- That fact that it didn't even move like at all.

It's like a perfect, like lay.

- Yeah.

Perfectly.

- So I know you knew Dowes.

- Yeah.

- As you said, he worked well into his nineties.

- Yeah.

- Must have been very passionate about his work.

- Yeah.

- So how was he?

- He was great.

He told great stories.

He had a great sense of humor.

It's funny, he was telling one story once, somebody came in and said, "I am Amon-Ra."

And so without skipping a beat, Mr.

Dunham said, "Oh, I'm glad to meet you.

I've been having trouble figuring out the inscription on this artifact.

Can you tell me what it said?"

And so Amon-Ra took a look at it and scratched his head and said, "You know, it's been so long, I've forgotten."

- Well, he seemed like a really funny guy, you know?

- Yeah.

He was.

- Yeah.

And like, how did you meet him?

Like how did you build this relationship with like a legend in your field?

- I was lucky.

I took a class in Egyptian archeology that as an undergrad that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was giving and then volunteered there after 'cause I was interested and he again would come in every day.

So he would, you know, have lunch and tell us stories and- - Ah, so he actually, you could tell he had a lot of care and kindness towards it because he wanted others like you to like work and grow within the field that he was passionate about, which is a beautiful thing.

So you've mentioned that archeology without publication is destruction.

- Yeah.

- And that publication is really vital to not only Dowes' ethos, but also yours as well.

- Yeah.

- Why is that?

- Well, because you want, the whole reason for doing archeology and uncovering these things is to have a record of them so that people know what was there and can interpret it.

And our interpretations change over time.

So that's why you need to have a record that people in the future can see.

And it has to be as accurate as possible, which he sort of believed in, which most of us believe in.

- Yeah.

And where does the destruction part come in?

- Well, anytime you take apart a site, every time you dig, you're just removing it from its original context.

So you have to be careful to record that.

- Yeah.

- You know, we're like crime scene investigators.

Everything is a clue.

And we don't always know what that clue is until we kind of study it.

So that's why we really need to know the exact context.

- Yeah, so that intention is really like purposeful and important.

- Yeah.

- So I know the exhibition connects Egypt and Nubia together, and I know that was really intentional for you.

So like why was that important to have that in the exhibition?

- Because he worked in both those areas.

So that's part of it, but also so people can understand that there's more to the ancient world than just Egypt, that there were lots of African civilizations that were as inventive or even more so than the Egyptians.

And it's an important heritage for people.

It's like the Nubians were, a Nubian queen actually defeated a Roman army.

So one of the few people that are able to defeat the Romans.

- Yeah, that is true.

A lot of people do think of like, oh, Egypt only is like this.

Where it's like, nice that this exhibition really like highlights multiple, you know, Diasporan areas.

- Exactly.

- Within the African nation.

So where can people, when can people see this exhibition?

When is it happening?

When can we just walk in and like, enjoy this beautiful work that you curated?

- So the museum is open, the show is open now 'til the beginning of May.

- Awesome, are you doing any tours or do people need to book a tour with you or we just walk in?

- You can just walk in on your own.

We have two videos, including a movie made by his great grandson who's a filmmaker.

- Nice.

- And there are also school tours and that you can book for a school group.

- Awesome.

Well thank you so much, Peter, for visiting our studio today.

- You're welcome.

- And talking to us about this wonderful exhibition that's happening and I can't wait to visit.

- Yeah.

Great.

- Awesome.

Thank you.

- Thanks so much.

- Please welcome Erin Harkes.

("Die For Me" by Erin Harkes) ♪ You said no one would ever love me like you do ♪ ♪ God I hope that's true ♪ ♪ That was long before I ever really knew ♪ ♪ What love could be ♪ ♪ Before you tried to steal that away from me ♪ ♪ Yeah you told me ♪ ♪ You'd lie for me die for me ♪ ♪ I can't believe that was ever me ♪ ♪ To be ♪ ♪ Impressed with you lest you be ♪ ♪ Dangerously coming after me ♪ ♪ And you wont be ♪ ♪ Able to find me ♪ ♪ I never dreamed that would ever be ♪ ♪ Where you lost me ♪ ♪ You lied for me but didn't die for me I'm still waiting ♪ ♪ And it's all so very childlike ♪ ♪ But not in a whimsical way ♪ ♪ Like a bully on the playground ♪ ♪ Where nobody wants to play ♪ ♪ You can take your balls ♪ ♪ And go home ♪ ♪ You'll have nothing more of mine ♪ ♪ You couldn't have my heart ♪ ♪ Or my sleeve ♪ ♪ Or my time ♪ ♪ And you told me ♪ ♪ You'd lie for me, die for me ♪ ♪ I can't believe that was ever me ♪ ♪ To be ♪ ♪ Impressed with you lest you be ♪ ♪ Dangerously coming after me ♪ ♪ And you wont be ♪ ♪ Able to find me ♪ ♪ I never dreamed that would ever be ♪ ♪ Where you lost me ♪ ♪ You lied for me but didn't die for me ♪ ♪ I'm still waiting ♪ ♪ You said no one would ever love me like you do ♪ ♪ God I hope that's true ♪ ♪ 'cause you told me ♪ ♪ You'd lie for me, die for me ♪ ♪ I can't believe that was ever me ♪ ♪ To be ♪ ♪ Impressed with you lest you be ♪ ♪ Dangerously coming after me ♪ ♪ And you won't be ♪ ♪ Able to find me ♪ ♪ I never dreamed that would ever be ♪ ♪ Where you lost me ♪ ♪ You lied for me but didn't die for me ♪ ♪ I'm still waiting ♪ ("Tell Her I Know" by Erin Harkes) ♪ You're not the first man ♪ ♪ To come around ♪ ♪ But this aint the circus, babe ♪ ♪ I don't need a clown ♪ ♪ You think that you're clever ♪ ♪ Or think I'm naive ♪ ♪ Neither is true ♪ ♪ No matter what you believe ♪ ♪ And she runs when I am coming ♪ ♪ So I know she's not your friend ♪ ♪ She wants what she can't have, babe ♪ ♪ So I know it's gonna end ♪ ♪ Tell her I know ♪ ♪ Tell her it's all part of the show ♪ ♪ Tell her I'm fine ♪ ♪ She wins this time ♪ ♪ Tell her I'll go ♪ ♪ Tell her I wont put up a fight ♪ ♪ 'cause when she can see what you don't mean to me ♪ ♪ It'll be over ♪ ♪ Tell her I know ♪ ♪ Stop the drama babe ♪ ♪ You've lost its queen ♪ ♪ All you're left wearing is ♪ ♪ A crown without its sheen ♪ ♪ Don't think that you've won babe ♪ ♪ 'Cause you ain't no prize ♪ ♪ For once you'll see ♪ ♪ Through somebody else's eyes ♪ ♪ I know because some time ago ♪ ♪ I was that woman too ♪ ♪ And when she has you to herself ♪ ♪ She's gonna get bored with you ♪ ♪ So just tell her I know ♪ ♪ Tell her it's all part of the show ♪ ♪ Tell her I'm fine ♪ ♪ That she wins this time ♪ ♪ Tell her I'll go ♪ ♪ Tell her I wont put up a fight ♪ ♪ 'cause when she can see what you don't mean to me ♪ ♪ It'll be over ♪ ♪ Tell her I know ♪ ♪ She runs when I am coming ♪ ♪ So I know she's not your friend ♪ ♪ She wants what she can't have, babe ♪ ♪ So I know how it's gonna end ♪ ♪ You tell her I know ♪ ♪ Tell her it's all part of the show ♪ ♪ Tell her I'm fine ♪ ♪ She wins this time ♪ ♪ Tell her I'll go ♪ ♪ Tell her I won't put up a fight ♪ ♪ 'cause when she can see ♪ ♪ What you don't mean to me ♪ ♪ It'll be oh-oh-oh-over ♪ ♪ Tell her I know ♪ ♪ Tell her I know ♪ (bright music) - Thanks for joining us.

For more Arts, visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz.

Thanks for watching.

(bright upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.