>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen, coming up on Open Studio, artist Titus Kaphar's Midas touch-- how he uses gold and tar to tell the stories of incarcerated men.

>> Our neighborhood was devastated by the influx of drugs into that community at that time.

My father was impacted by that.

And then the plague of mass incarceration also impacted almost everyone in my community.

>> BOWEN: Then, we mark Veterans' Day with a visit to a military museum with a strategic mission.

>> You realize it's an anti-war museum.

Because to totally understand war, you will never want it again.

>> BOWEN: Plus, how renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi's legacy is literally carved in stone.

And our weekly round-up of everything to see in Arts This Week.

That's now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ Here at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum right now, we find a show of Italian Renaissance artist Simone Martini, who worked with the luster of gold.

The museum carries that forward to contemporary artists, like Titus Kaphar, who renders incarcerated men in gold and tar, the tar commensurate with their time incarcerated.

Titus Kaphar, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Of course.

>> BOWEN: Well, just to start.

Tell me about the genesis of the Jerome Project.

>> It didn't start too much as a project.

It started as me trying to figure out my relationship to my father.

I think a lot of times when people see this work, it's really easy to think of it within the social and political context of this moment.

But fundamentally, it was an attempt to find a way through my process to heal my relationship with my father.

When I started doing the research... research-- when I looked my father up on Google, I found his mug shot and 97 or so other Black men with exactly the same first and last name and their mug shots.

And that's how it all began.

>> BOWEN: And has it always been natural for you to process things and respond to things through art?

>> If I can figure out a way to get it into the studio, get it onto canvas, I feel like I have more control over the process of absorbing that information.

So if it's on canvas, I can look at it, I can turn it upside down, I can look behind it.

In some ways, I guess, it's about controlling the problem.

>> BOWEN: Do you know why that is?

>> Because I'm a control freak, I mean.

>> BOWEN: (laughs) >> Seems pretty obvious to me.

Dealing with the situation that felt so unmanageable on an emotional level, I think there was something about the size at first that really appealed to me.

These are works that I made in my hand, different from the rest of my process, where I work on the wall.

Hold it in my hand with a small brush.

And, you know, your orientation to that object is very different when you're cradling it.

>> BOWEN: So you're thinking about your father, and where did this interest in empathy and the other men come into play?

>> I realized that my father was a part of a larger structural problem.

It was difficult for me to find the emotional space to include him in all of that, and at the same time, address my particular problems with our relationship.

>> BOWEN: And where do-- I'll ask each, tar and gold, and where each come in?

>> So... (chuckles) Where to begin?

I grew up in Michigan and my father and I worked.

There was not a lot of leisure, baseball, football, play, there was not a lot of that.

We worked.

And one of the ways that we made money is we picked up people's trash in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood I grew up in Michigan didn't have trash pickup.

Folks burned their trash in the back yard.

And so we would take those burning barrels and throw them in the back of the truck and take them to the dump.

The other thing that we would do for money is any kind of handyman repair stuff that we could do.

So tar was a material that I knew as one from work.

But for me, it was evoking my relationship to my father specifically.

>> BOWEN: As you're working with that, is he with you?

Are you thinking about him?

What's happening in that moment?

>> I mean, in that moment, I'm remembering being on a woman's roof at the age of ten years old, and in the middle of the winter in Michigan, and patching a hole in her roof, that's what I remember.

Using tar and shingles to, to make sure this woman can, uh, can keep her home dry.

As complicated as my relationship is with him, (chuckles) and it is very complicated, he gave me the work ethic that I have.

Those are the kinds of things that are going through my mind as I'm, as I'm contemplating, as I'm thinking about my father in relationship to that work.

And then also just recognizing that, my mother and my father were very young when I was born.

My mother was 14, my father was 15.

They were children.

And our neighborhood was devastated by the influx of drugs into that community at that time.

My father was impacted by that.

And then the plague of mass incarceration also impacted almost everyone in my community in that neighborhood, along with the drugs that were there.

>> BOWEN: So now, the gold.

>> Yeah.

Along with work, church was the other thing.

My father, before his challenges, was a minister.

And if you ask him today, he would still say that's his calling.

And so the religious connotation came from a conversation I had with him where I asked him, "How did you get the name Jerome?"

And he said his father, my grandfather, who was also a minister, gave it to him because-- these are his words-- "Because Jerome is the one who translated the Bible."

And that was his father's relationship to the Word of God, was so esteemed it was an honor, to be given that name.

>> BOWEN: I'm thinking of you holding these small pieces and especially the eyes; is there something special that happens there?

Is there something different that happens there?

I guess I'm basing this on my own response to them.

>> We are always compelled by eyes.

It's how we take in the world.

So I think in that way, it's special.

Dwayne, behind me, my buddy.

He has intense eyes, he's an intense person.

He has intense eyes.

>> BOWEN: Is there a role that you see?

I mean, you've kind of talked about this, but I think about NXTHVN as well, and the conversations you've started with your art and, and how people carry them now, do you see yourself as having a bigger role in society?

>> Uh, no.

(chuckles) No.

Um, I don't think about it like that.

>> BOWEN: We'll talk about your TV work in a couple years.

But you already are entering film, how does that play into it?

>> As a mom, and just... >> I found myself moving into film because it feels like a more democratically accessible medium.

I have, I have a painting at the Metropolitan Museum.

I have a painting at MoMA.

Friends I grew up with never have seen that.

Will probably never see that.

But damn if my cousins haven't, like, posted, tweeted my TED talk a million times, right?

Like that is accessible to them.

It's there, it's manageable.

(on camera): Painting is a visual language.

Where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important, it's coded.

(interview): In some ways it's really about just trying to talk to my folks.

The more success I was getting, the more away I felt from the community, separated, I felt, from the community that I grew up in and communities like that.

I have a tendency to move into work as the work asks me to.

I didn't sit down and go, "You know what I want to do?

I think I want to make films."

It really wasn't like that.

It was first just filming a couple of things in the studio, and then realizing that over time, that was developing into something and following it.

>> BOWEN: And finally, to circle back to your father, what is the relationship with him?

>> I, in fact, wrote an entire film (chuckles) based on our relationship.

The film is called Exhibiting Forgiveness.

And it really is about an attempt at healing that relationship for... frankly, for the purpose of my two sons, I felt really strongly that I did not want to pass on the kind of frustration and anger that I had towards my father.

I didn't want my, my children to adopt that.

>> BOWEN: Well, Titus Kaphar it has been such a great pleasure to speak with you today, thank you.

>> No problem, nice talking to you too.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, we mark Veterans' Day, revisiting our trip to the American Heritage Museum in Hudson.

It's the size of multiple airplane hangars, and home to some 50 fully restored tanks and military vehicles.

While it's a mighty display, 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 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: The renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi did not leave his legacy to chance.

Instead, he literally and figuratively took it into his own hands, creating and designing The Noguchi Museum.

Nestled into a nondescript neighborhood in Queens, it's an art lover's oasis.

♪ ♪ >> Noguchi was born in 1904.

He was born in Los Angeles, California.

His mother was an Irish woman from New York.

She was born in Brooklyn.

His father was a traveling poet from Japan.

Noguchi wasn't even named until he was almost three years old.

His mother just called him boy or "yo."

His identity was complicated from the very first moment of his birth.

He was biracial, chose to be multicultural his whole life, but at a time when it was much harder.

He enrolled at Columbia in pre-med.

His mother felt that he was destined for bigger things than being a doctor.

Um, and by that she meant being an artist.

He was a spectacular academic sculptor at 19, 20, and then very quickly realized that he was becoming the poster boy of a passé art form.

He really wanted to, uh, change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic good.

He wanted to make it a, an active part of our everyday lives.

That's why he never stopped making furniture.

His Akari lamp series.

He made playgrounds, he made playground equipment.

He made sets for theater and dance.

He had long collaborations with people like Martha Graham.

The museum was founded in 1985, but Noguchi had been here for almost ten years.

He bought a derelict factory building, which is the red brick building behind me, and started using it for storage and staging.

Sculpture is all about physical inconvenience.

Everything is big and heavy and takes up space and requires equipment to deal with.

So sculptors always need more room.

He decided that in order to encapsulate his perspective or his point of view, his way of thinking of things, um, that the best thing to do was to build an institution.

And so he began to turn his private garden and space into a display space.

When the museum opened, it was seasonal, Noguchi would be here himself.

You could ring the bell and he'd come down and walk you through.

One of the things that you'll notice when you come to our museum probably right away, is that we don't have wall labels.

We do that not because Noguchi hated wall labels.

When the museum first opened, there were labels identifying all the sculptures somewhere near them in a kind of traditional museum fashion.

Gradually, he just removed them.

And it's because he wanted your experience of the work to be primary.

The fastest way to kill an artwork is to pretend that you've solved it.

♪ ♪ The museum is really about a direct and intimate relationship with these objects and these things, and more important, the larger sense of an environment that they create.

They really produce an atmosphere, and we're standing in this garden, which isn't even two-thirds of an acre.

It's teeny tiny, it's a postage stamp.

He called the museum an oasis on the edge of a black hole.

The black hole is New York City and the urban maelstrom.

And as small as it is, you come here and you just soak it in and you soak it in through osmosis.

It's like visiting a forest, not like going to the museum.

Maybe Noguchi's most successful sculpture overall are his Akari lanterns.

He called them lanterns rather than lamps, because he said he wanted them to be as moveable as butterflies.

The traditional paper lanterns in Gifu City specifically are made with a particular kind of continuous bamboo ribbing and washi paper that's made with the interior bark of a Mulberry tree.

And it produces a laid paper that's just more durable, more flexible and more resilient than classic laid cotton paper.

Breakthrough Capestrano is made out of Japanese basalt.

A basalt column is a single crystal of basalt.

Noguchi worked with harder and harder stones because he wanted the material to resist him.

What he really liked was stones that had already been marked by some process that he would then incorporate into the work.

You can see the lines of drill holes.

Those drill holes were made manually with hand drills, and then they'll push two bamboo wedges into the hole and fill the hole with water.

The bamboo wedges expand enough to crack the stone.

Noguchi loved that and he loved the product of this breaking process.

So he would take these stones, columns, and set them upright, slice the bottom off so that it would stand up and then make his few adjustments to turn them into "sculpture," in air quotes.

The Well that's right behind me, this wonderful variation on a tsukubai that is a circulating fountain.

The water just cascades out over the stone.

That's another one of those basalt columns just lopped off with a coring drill, making a hole in it.

Some of these sculptures are eroding, but the trees are growing.

Their relationship to each other is changing constantly over time.

He planted all of the trees.

So the magnificent katsura tree that provides the canopy that dominates the garden, it really was a sprig.

It was a quarter-inch sapling, and now you see what that's become.

And that's why the heart and soul of the Noguchi Museum is this garden.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: It's time for Arts Anytime.

We're revisiting some of my favorite arts and culture venues that are permanent fixtures in and around Boston.

♪ ♪ The Boston Public Library has one of the most extraordinary collections of books, art, and manuscripts in America.

Its Special Collections department requires nearly seven miles of shelving to house its treasures, from early Shakespeare folios to original prints by artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, to the Bible on which Mayor Michelle Wu swore her oath.

The Department has just completed a years-long, $15.7 million dollar renovation, and now reminds us the collection is available to everyone.

You don't have to be a scholar, an author or have any other special credentials to gain access to this wealth of material, to see and read for yourself an original printing of the Declaration of Independence or the abolitionist paper, The Liberator.

All you need to do is make an appointment and this wealth of materials is yours to experience.

After all, the Library's motto is "Free to all."

♪ ♪ The Punto Urban Art Museum, a public art district where art lives through some 75 ever-changing murals in the city's neighborhood known as El Punto, or the Point.

Here buildings double as towering gallery walls, featuring portraits, landscapes and dreams.

It's a museum for and of the community, because all of the murals are emblazoned on buildings owned by the North Shore Community Development Coalition, a non-profit group providing affordable housing and health services to the area.

The artists behind this maze of murals are a combination of Salem residents and artists with a Hispanic background who take time to learn about the community before making their mark.

So take a stroll and keep your head up, literally, because at the Punto Urban Art Museum, art is everywhere you look.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Boston has a new museum composed around music.

And it's sprung up quite fittingly in one of the city's grandest concert halls.

The Bach Center's Wang Theater is now also home to the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame, or FARHOF, and with a curatorial pedigree that extends to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Bruce Springsteen Archives, the inaugural show has terrific might.

Titled Boston: A Music Town, it's chock-a-block full of the city's musical history.

And it's expansive, telling stories in jazz, folk, hip hop, rock, blues, bluegrass and classical music.

There's Pete Seeger's banjo and hat, Terry Lynn Carrington's Grammy nomination certificate, and Leonard Bernstein's tuxedo and baton.

Case after exhibition case reminds us that there have been long- standing ties, community and creativity here.

It's the Bach Center's hope that FARHOF will become one of the city's preeminent museums.

That's a lofty goal in this museum town.

But so far, and with shows centered on Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie in the offing, it's hitting all the right notes.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ The new MIT Museum is awesome.

I mean that in the truest sense of the word.

This is a brand new space with a collection that will leave you in awe.

The future breathes here, even if with its A.I.

emphasis, they're often synthetic breaths.

But let me back up for a moment, for years the famed school told its story in a cramped, nondescript building in Cambridge.

Now it's moved down the street, into the heart of Kendall Square in an exquisitely designed three-floor space that intends, the school says, to turn MIT inside out.

That means seeing some of humanity's greatest innovation for yourself.

The starshade petal that's allowed NASA to photograph exoplanets.

Part of the machine that helped sequence the human genome.

An instrument playing a 200-year-long song partly inspired by whales.

Now for the even more awesome and sobering.

The MIT Museum devotes considerable attention to artificial intelligence, work of the past and of the now.

There's also A.I.

collaborative poetry.

The A.I.

program and I wrote a poem together.

It was a process I found both seductive and disturbing.

And to that end, MIT wants there to be discussion and critical thought here.

So it also populates the museum with artists interrogating innovation.

I have never been in a space like this, and for it, I was changed.

♪ ♪ And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, we visit the newly renovated, and rebooted, MIT Museum.

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

And you can see us first on YouTube.com/gbhnews.

Remember to follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for watching, and we'll see you back here next week.

♪ ♪