Coming up next on Rocks, a tale of how dedicated teachers got an acclaimed artist.

Find a shell to accomplish extraordinary things.

I didn't know anything about going to college.

I didn't know what a bachelor's was.

I didn't know what a masters were.

Extracting beauty from things thrown.

Away.

Once I learned to be able to tool the spikes and bend them this way and that it made the figures just come to life so much more.

And a brass band blowing its own horn.

When you hear the music, I want you to be able to feel that part of to these stories.

Up next on Up Rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, 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.

This story begins in Monroe, where a young artist from a tough background is garnering national acclaim for his ability to capture and celebrate the African-American experience on canvas.

Today, Vida Shell is an instructor at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston.

But he's been making art all his life, having earned bachelor's and master's degrees from some of the nation's most prestigious art programs.

While this is a story of an accomplished young artist with extraordinary talent, it's also a tale of how dedicated parents, high school teachers and college professors helped A young man who grew up in the projects, sit far reaching goals and attain them.

The goal of my work is to make these connections between old and new.

I think a lot of times we live in a bubble and we forget that we got here through all the things that happened before us.

I'm always trying to unpack those things as being hidden.

And I like to travel because I visit other communities similar to communities that I grew up in.

And that helps me to understand that it's not this this thing that just happened in one place is a thing that's happening all around the world.

So with my work, I'm trying to make those links between now and then.

And with that, it helps me to understand the world in a broader sense and and even have more empathy for people in communities that come from where I come from.

The way I make decisions when I paint is the thing I've been doing since I was three years old.

It's really me trying to understand the world around me through my art.

I've always drawn portraits, even as a five year old or a seven year old or 15 year old.

It was documenting what was going on around me, and I think I'm still doing the same thing with the work.

It's really me documenting and examining what's happening around me.

I don't think you go too far away from the things you did as a kid.

You might do things that's more mature.

I dig into the black experience.

I think in so many ways I think about my work through music.

First, I'm listening to a lot of contemporary music.

I think about the musicians, the rappers, the singers as modern day philosophers.

And with that, I try to make broader connections, are historical connections through their mediums.

And I think a lot of times we, especially when it comes to black culture, we don't think about the contemporary artists as these historical philosophers.

And even if their music connects to things that aren't the best parts of the culture is still connected.

Documenting that history, even if it's talking about pop culture, is still documenting pop culture the same way.

Iceberg Slam Documentary Film.

Coltrane.

His books in the seventies, The Go Everything pieces are about connected to the bling bling era, but also history or portraiture.

And historically, portraits were for the royal, and it was usually white men that were being painted.

So my pieces are about taking contemporary black folk and starting them into that conversation.

And the gold frames that I use are about those historical gold frames that these quarters were put in.

My gold frames aren't perfect, and the history of portraiture is an imperfect story, especially when it talks about including everybody in that story.

So my works, it's a play.

On growing up in the nineties, you know, in the early 2000s and how bling bling and gold chains Go Grillz time.

My creative process starts with me taking photos of my models.

Then from there I work on my opinion from my iPad.

I draw my images on paper.

I draw using a projector for my under drawings in there.

I don't have to worry about proportions.

I'm using pencil or I'm using acrylics because it's about time.

It's always me trying to get things done in a timely fashion.

I paint on paper, I cut things out, and then I create these collage canvases in the background, which I paste my portraits on top, and then I create layers on top of that, and then I protect it with like an acrylic poly acrylic finish and put grommets in the corners.

And I like that on stress canvas because of the presentation of it.

And I like that it's easier to shoot the piece.

All of the above.

The motto in the piece is Nice.

CC I met CC through a model car.

I usually do model calls through my Facebook page.

CC was a little quiet on the set, but our attitude was loud when I chose this photo.

You can definitely see so much of her attitude, so much of her charisma that was unspoken.

Things that you can't just put into words.

And even when she walked in a room for the shoot, you can tell she was quiet, but it was something about her.

The top of the line piece was a piece that I started in 2019, when I took photos of the model.

It was a real reserve guy.

He didn't say much during the photo shoot, but after looking through the photos, his photographs, I think, say more than he did.

He really had this really strong kind of regal look like he was like a protector, I guess.

Ah, he was just like, real quiet and but the photo was like, real loud.

So from there, when I was making this painting, the ownership idea came out of thinking about ownership.

This history of ownership, especially in America and especially amongst black folks.

That whole thing of owning things and being home, the culture, music, people know us from doing these things, but a lot of times we don't have that ownership, that long history of no agency within those things.

The top of the line was also our song title from one of the Cash Money records, and that song talked about a lot of braggadocious ways about ownership.

When I looked at him, it kind of connected to that history and that song.

When I was in high school, I had two teachers that really pushed me to really explore art.

My sophomore year, I had a lady by the name of Linda Ward that really pushed me to explore two mediums, and in my senior year I had an instructor named Charlie Me who really pushed me to explore going to school for art on a college level.

That year he gave me a list of colleges that had scholarships, and I started looking into the colleges.

Originally, I didn't know anything about going to college.

I didn't know what a associate's degree was.

I didn't know what a bachelor's was.

I didn't know what a master's was.

I got into Memphis, then I got into Savannah College of Art, and I chose Memphis because my dad was like, if you go to Savannah and your vehicle break down, I'm not going to be able to help you.

So I chose Memphis because it was close.

I think Memphis was the better choice because in Memphis, I got a full education, not only through the schooling, but also an experience working with the artists in Memphis.

And even being on the scene there was growing at the time was a good place for me to be.

I was introduced through the dean at my school, Alonzo Davis, to a lady named Brenda Joy Smith and Brenda Joyce Smith was working artists in Memphis and seeing her practice where they live and work her in her husband, Robert.

That made me want to take art series.

I learned the business from Robert and then I learned the practice from Brenda as far as like, use a reference photos, how to archive things.

And then from Robert, I learned how to kind of navigate the art business.

They kept me around for years as a college student.

Sometimes your funds are low, so sometimes I would eat with them and sometimes I would travel.

The first time I went to New York and California was with Robert and did the business for her.

In 2003, I got my first big project, which was a public art project due to urban art permission in Memphis.

And I worked in this community called Orange Mound.

It was a historical community, one of the oldest black communities in the country.

I did some murals of people from the community.

One of the schools, which is a historical school, produced a lot of NFL players that came from that community, but they had lawyers and doctors.

I went into grad school at the University of Mississippi in 2005.

I received Masses of Fine Arts Award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

That really opened up a lot of doors.

That same year, I got into a prestigious program called Skowhegan School of Art in Skowhegan, Maine.

All those things happened in the same year, and from there Skowhegan opened up doors for me to do other residencies.

So in 2013, I did the Joan Mitchell residency.

I was part of the first pilot program at the John Mitchell Center in New Orleans.

I've done about 12 different residency programs over the years.

My biggest, most recent accomplishment has been about about it show that I did at the Hill Museum on a university, Louisiana and Lafayette's campus and about about it exhibition really took a lot of time to make the work.

I made bigger work.

All the work was pretty good size.

I made one of the biggest pieces that I've ever made for that show, ten by 12 Feet, which on a wall it looks like a mural in itself.

To me, the importance of residencies is it gives you time and space to work.

It gives you time to think.

A lot of times while I'm at residencies, I like to travel and get to know those neighborhoods and surrounding areas.

Some residencies are educational based.

They might introduce you to workshops and talk about like maybe the business of being an artist.

I think each residency has its strengths, but all of them, you make connections with other creative folks.

2021 I received an email that I was nominated to be the Artist of the Year for Louisiana Life Magazine.

A couple of months later, I received another email letting me know that they wanted to come and photograph me to be in the magazine.

And it was kind of like I didn't understand at the time what the whole thing was going to be.

After the photo shoot, I got another email saying that they were going to use me to be on the cover of Louisiana Life as the Louisianan Artist of the Year.

From there it's been I don't really know how to explain it.

It's just been like the experience.

I go places and people like look at me like a little longer than they normally would.

But it was because I think because of that, the cover being on the cover.

And sometimes I had to go buy magazines for our family members, people like this on the cover.

And I was like, Yeah, that's me.

That's me.

So it's just been an interesting experience.

And for me, it's one of those trophy type of achievements that you don't fully grasp to hold loving until later.

The more I travel, I feel a little bit more like the importance of it.

When people come into my studio because we have open studios here, when they see the magazine cover that really concretize what I'm doing here for them.

Being compared to Langston Hughes and W.E.B.

Dubois, for me, I just think about it's a continuing effort to contain these fights that they started.

That's the only way I think about it.

I try not to get too caught up in any of that conversation.

I just try to do what I can on my own and in my own ways.

I try to build my platform and then pull other people up.

So I think about it being more of a giving more people agency to fight these same fights.

In Louisiana, inspiring art is all around.

The trick is knowing where to find it.

So here are some standout exhibits coming up in our part of the world.

For more on these exhibits and scores more cultural attractions, consult Country Roads magazine available in hardcopy or online.

Or to see or to share in the episode of Art Rocks again, visit L.P. Be bold slash art rocks.

There's also an archive of all the Louisiana segments of the show available on LP's YouTube page.

Heading west now to California, where artist Pat Blyde creates utterly unusual sculptures using discarded metal.

Blyde says All it takes are the right tools, a bit of imagination, and the conviction that in one man's trash could very well be hidden another's treasures.

Let's take a look.

I am a metal sculptor.

I learned my trade through being a metal fabricator, worked on a lot of farms in the Midwest, then came to California and started working at Spurs, doing the same thing and started from there.

When they say artists pay their dues.

All that is is learning your trade.

I got so much better when I became a full time artist, and that's all I did.

So I had 8 hours a day to come up with art.

Do art.

Whole different world and coming home from an eight hour job and then doing art.

So when you're immersed in all day long, it is amazing how much better you get just because you're doing it all the time.

I like working with reclaimed objects because I do a lot of traveling out in the desert and I see a lot of it.

I live in a big ranch valley, and most of the ranches have a big metal stockpile that I ask to go through and they have all kinds of sprockets and gears and the name and all kinds of metal.

One of them, my number one piece is a metal I like to use are the river spikes because they're quite plentiful.

There are all the red spikes that were used on the transcontinental railroad, so they got quite a bit of history behind them.

I used to walk the tracks with the pickle bucket and fill my arms dropped off and then I found out after 911 that it's $350 fine for trespassing on the tracks.

So now I buy them from the railroad salvage place.

Apparently there's 10,000 spikes per mile of track, so I figured I'll have spikes for the rest of my life.

As far as using the spikes, I have to use two big fans blowing on me because there's still creosote oil in the spikes.

So that heats up.

It gets off pretty noxious fumes from working in a windstorm pretty much all the time.

When I first started, I kind of got the basic Da Vinci man and I found the feet, the hips, the shoulders, and a lock washer that they used bought the tracks together I used for the head.

At first I didn't know you could bend the spikes as easily as you could.

And once I learned to be able to tool the spikes and bend this way and that it made the figures just come to life so much more by putting little nuances of movement into the sculpture, like a downhill skier and their hips just crossed a little bit.

The little things like that that, you know, before I didn't pay that much attention to, but now I'm refining the movement more and more.

The reason I do all the sports figures mainly is because I am a partner of a art gallery in Truckee and people buy the stuff that they do.

So all the skiers, mountain climbers and you name it, any sport that happens in Truckee Mountain biking, paddleboarding, people who do that stuff.

I just the drawn to those sculptures because it is what they do and and I guess they see a bit of themselves and in the sculpture which is awesome because the more sports that get invented, the more I get to challenge myself and making stuff.

We are New York bound now to listen to the vibrant Brass House trio.

Too many zoos.

This group of musician comes together to play dynamic pieces of music that listeners love.

And when we first started, we were just improvising.

Honestly, we like, decide which songs to play based off how much money we made.

If one song was making a lot of money, we're like, Oh, we're going to play this song.

And so it kind of like forms songs.

Every part that we're playing is a part we wrote real time.

We were changing things about our set, about our appearance.

We made a lot more money today, like they'll keep on dancing like.

Eventually we had to make a name.

None of us came up with the name.

I actually just took it for my friend that was not going to use it for band.

It organically came through Destiny.

I come from more of a traditional music background, like African music, traditional folkloric music.

In that experience, it's a little bit different.

It's more about the ritual and experience than it is about the performance.

I love all the music that was made in the past, but I don't feel the need to recreate it.

I feel the need to just speak from my experience today.

It's really important for me to me and what I do to keep people moving in that tradition.

That's what the drummer did.

It kept the community moving, brought the community together.

There have been so many collaborations that we've tried that we think are going to be amazing for us with working with with Beyoncé.

That was just we're serving her project and so happy to do so.

I have nothing but amazing things to say about that whole experience and working with her and her team and everyone.

I think a lot of it is time and place and where each respective party is at musically.

Also having the ability to leave your ego at the door and kind of come to that situation ready to work with others.

I never really heard the term busking until like we became viral.

I always considered myself a street performer, even before I was in this band, I was performing.

It's what I always call myself.

We realize how fortunate we are.

The real special thing about this band is that everyone believes in themselves individually.

There's a lot of risk up here.

When you go down into the subway to play, you don't know if you're going to pay your rent at the end of the month.

You go down there with a certain thing.

If I don't, at least I went down there and I played and that's what I'm here to do in New York.

That's that's what I'm here for.

It is sort of kind of misconstrued about our experience.

I don't want people to misunderstood that.

You just go and you just play and someone puts a camera on you and it just sort of magically happens.

There's a lot of sacrifice.

When you hear the music, I want you to be able to fill that part of it to that that that angst or that thing is celebrating the fact that we get to do what we get to do.

Well, that'll be that for this edition of Art Rocks, but never mind, because you can see or share episodes of the show at El-P, The Dawgs, Art Rocks at any time.

And if these sorts of stories rouse your adventurous spirit, remember that Country Roads magazine is a resource for making the most of Louisiana's boundless cultural treasures each and every month 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 LP, 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.