♪ Hey, everybody, I'm Felicia Curry, and welcome to "WETA Arts," the place to discover what's going on in the creative and performing arts in and around D.C.

We're celebrating our banner year at the Capital Area Emmy Awards with this episode featuring three of our winning stories-- a special exhibition at the National Museum of African American History and Culture... Now is the time for the truth.

[Applause] Curry: renowned pianist Brian Ganz.

Ganz: How can music be so beautiful that it hurts?

Curry: And we feature the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum and its exhibition of artist Jabari Jefferson's work.

The arts is such a powerful vehicle for sharing Black history.

These stories and more on "WETA Arts."

♪ I'm so excited to celebrate the opening of "In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World."

Isn't this an amazing night?

Ten years in the making.

[Cheering and applause] In 2016, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, NMAAHC for short, has been dedicated to a full accounting of African Americans in our nation's story.

The exhibition "In Slavery's Wake" expands that mission.

This history is ours, and we must reckon with it.

A lot of people think about slavery as something that is relegated to our past.

♪ "In Slavery's Wake" helps us understand that this past really continues to shape our present.

Singers: ♪ Wade in the water, children... ♪ We really lean on this metaphor of the wake.

We're thinking about the wake of a ship going through water and the waves that sort of form in its trail.

♪ We're still feeling the reverberations of things that have happened in the past.

Curry: The museum's congressional mandate is to tell the story of African Americans in the United States.

The exhibition "In Slavery's Wake" tells a global story.

Obenda: We have collaborating curators from across 4 continents and nearing to 200 objects and artifacts.

Gardullo: This spirit of collaboration has really broadened our horizons, not just about what this museum can do, but what museums should be doing.

Curry: This exhibition innovates how history is told in museums.

Gardullo: Many exhibitions lean into the systems of violence and tend to leave out the stories of freedom-making and the perspective of those who were enslaved.

Obenda: The story of Tahro was actually proposed to us by one of our collaborators in Belgium.

Tahro was trafficked from what at that time was the Kingdom of Kongo aboard a slave ship called the "Wanderer."

A big group of survivors arrive in Edgefield, South Carolina, and they're forced to work as enslaved potters.

Tahro was one of those potters.

Scholars today believe those survivors also made personal pottery for themselves.

And they make a lot of connections between these face vessels and different Central African ritual objects called minkisi.

We're able to bring that cup together with a minkisi from our partners in Brussels, and we're able to tell the story of illegal slave trading that might not be familiar for a lot of our visitors, but we're also able to think about how enslaved people like Tahro are forced to make new lives for themselves on the other side of the Atlantic world.

Gardullo: In the course of our research, we came upon this thread of people who were enslaved mounting rebellions and revolutions and rallying under banners of freedom.

But there's just traces of this history.

Instead of saying we don't know, we embrace the idea of, What can we know?

And this is what led us into conversations with artists.

Obenda: Artist Nyugen E. Smith has created flags in honor of historic anti-slavery movements and anti-colonial movements.

They're his interpretation of what's recorded in the history and really sort of an homage.

Smith: It struck a chord with me that banners or flags were actually created by those who were fighting for their literal lives.

Haiti has the tradition of creating Voodoo flags that incorporate sequins as a way to create the illustrations on the actual flags themselves.

And so this is a nod back to Haiti being the first successful Black revolt.

We have the Tailors' Revolt.

The flag has the white stitching as a border, and then some of those stitches just kind of hanging was one of those ways I'm thinking about people who were part of the rebellion themselves.

Curry: An 1800 Richmond-area revolt called Gabriel's Rebellion was planned by an enslaved blacksmith.

Smith: My uncle is a blacksmith, Anthony Phillips, and immediately I knew that I wanted to collaborate with him to create these flags as a way to, one--connect this blacksmithing tradition and to connect my family and lineage and legacy within this project.

Gardullo: Through the incorporation of art directly into the exhibition, we are pushing the envelope of what history exhibitions can do.

Curry: In this exhibition, the word freedom does not mean the abolition of slavery.

Gardullo: We look at freedom as a process of making freedom, and we thought that this concept was so important that we cede a large portion of the space to have an artist help visitors not just think about that idea but feel it, to inhabit it.

Minter: I began it with a simple idea of the people who were brought over here in slave ships and how they manifest their desire to build a world for themselves.

The whole background is collaged, torn, ripped in pieces, and quilted back together to form pattern and texture.

You walk in and you hear the sound of water.

[Water flowing] Woman: ♪ Mm... ♪ Minter: Then you hear the sound of my mother singing.

Woman: ♪ Mm... ♪ Minter: The image of hands weaving became a really strong metaphor for freedom-making.

Woman: ♪ Mm... ♪ Minter: Are only historians allowed to say what happened?

No.

Everyone can do that.

Obenda: Daniel Minter captured a space that's meant to be serene, to really provoke and invite reflection.

I think that's a way that I would like to learn this history.

Minter: I hope that people can feel the connection to that history and that they can see a future that this history is building on.

Obenda: To infuse art into a history exhibition has been really exciting for me.

It's something I'd love to carry forward in future projects.

Gardullo: Museums should be transformational spaces.

That's what people are sort of hungry for, is this deeper sense of what these institutions mean and can do, not just as dictating thought or ideas.

Woman: ♪ By the waters of Babylon... ♪ Gardullo: This exhibition is a bridge between peoples, periods of time, and between ourselves and our responsibilities to making the world better.

We can't change the past.

It is only when we confront it that we can forge a basis for unity amongst ourselves.

[Cheering and applause] Curry: NMAAHC is at 1400 Constitution Avenue NW.

For information, go to nmaahc.si.edu.

In 2011, the National Philharmonic and Maryland pianist Brian Ganz launched Extreme Chopin, a series celebrating one of history's most influential composers.

♪ Ganz: Chopin is, for me, the greatest storyteller in the history of music.

♪ He knew how to take this language of music and tell vivid stories that are emotionally-- sometimes gut-busting.

♪ I remember falling in love with the "First Ballade in G minor" and doubling over and thinking, "How can music be so beautiful that it hurts?"

Now we're going to hear it in one of the most gorgeous, emotional explosions of joy you will ever hear in a piece of music.

♪ I sometimes say Chopin wounded me and that wound shaped my life.

♪ There is no therapy better than playing that passage.

[Chuckles] ♪ My intention after falling in love with Frederic Chopin's music was always to play his complete works.

♪ There is nothing by Chopin that I don't want to play.

♪ One of the aspects of Chopin's music that absolutely captivated me is Chopin's evocation of mystery.

♪ The piece ends, but it does not resolve.

And that, for our ears, is pure mystery.

And this is what I love most about his music and what I'm so eager to share about his music.

Curry: Ganz started studying piano at age 9.

Ganz: My grandfather was my first inspiration.

He could sit down and just tell a story with the piano, and I knew that I wanted to do that someday.

Curry: His teachers inspired him to immerse himself in music, and his performance career began.

Ganz: So I couldn't leave school officially until I turned 16.

But at age 15, I was already traveling around the country to play concerts and I was playing with orchestras and I was playing solo recitals.

Curry: Ganz eventually dropped out of high school and fully devoted himself to music.

Ganz: I was practicing 6, 7, 8 hours a day.

I wanted to be the best pianist in the world.

I was 17 the first time I played at the Kennedy Center, and Arthur Fiedler was conducting the program with the National Symphony.

I played the Prokofiev "Third Piano Concerto."

It was a phenomenal privilege and thrill, but it was not an entirely positive experience.

There was a certain amount of unhealthy perfectionism.

The slightest mistake would embarrass me.

And I thought, "No.

I've got to step back."

I had to find answers.

Curry: He found answers in a spiritual book called "A Course in Miracles."

Ganz: I fell passionately in love with that book the way I fell in love with Chopin, and it became my spiritual bread and butter daily.

And I spent hours and hours reading it and meditating, and it saved my life.

It made it clear it's not about me.

It doesn't matter if I'm the greatest pianist in the world.

It doesn't even matter if I'm the best pianist I can be.

What matters is that I contribute to the beauty in the world, that I have something to share, and that I share it with love and with eagerness and with passion.

And the more I immersed myself in that, the more I felt ready to return to solo playing... ♪ until finally--I can remember.

I was listening...to one of the great Chopin etudes and thinking, "How can I live with not playing this?

I can't.

I cannot live with not playing this piece."

I went back.

I was 25 years old.

This was 1985, and my first concert back, all Chopin.

I couldn't get enough.

[Chuckles] Curry: Ganz went on to perform internationally.

Ganz: Just after I went back to solo playing, there was an opening at St.

Mary's College of Maryland.

And I didn't know whether they would be interested in somebody who hadn't even graduated from high school.

And they said, you know, "Well, that's not great, but come on down and audition for us."

So, I went down and I played the G minor "Ballade."

They hired me as the piano teacher there, and I found my home.

♪ Better.

That was the best one.

♪ So--this is an excellent candidate for juxtaposition.

We have... ♪ Dee da ♪ and then... ♪ Deee daaa!

♪ Can the second one have a little more power?

-Yeah.

-Try it one more time.

♪ Ganz: I could never live without teaching.

I can be teaching a piece I've played dozens of times, but when I'm teaching it, I will see something that I did not see when I was just playing it myself.

♪ Good, good, good.

That was gorgeous.

The deep listening is taking effect.

Performing, teaching.

I'll never stop either one, voluntarily, at least, [Chuckles] till the day I die.

Here's our first waltz of the piece.

It's a slow, mournful waltz.

Curry: And in this lecture at St.

Mary's, he dissects the first G minor "Ballade."

This, by the way, is where I doubled over in pain as a 12-year-old-boy.

[Chuckles] ♪ What was it that was so beautiful about that?

I think it was the dissonance, resolution.

Dissonance, resolution.

♪ New chord.

♪ And then that intensifies and things get more dramatic.

♪ [Applause] Thank you.

Thank you.

Woman: He plays like nobody else, and he explains his music that goes to your soul, to your head, to-- to all of you.

He's just magnificent as--not only as an artist but as a person.

Ganz: This is about contributing to the beauty in the world, inspiring others, about sharing my love, my joy, my freedom as best I can.

That has been the journey of being a musician for me.

Curry: For more on Brian Ganz, including upcoming performances, go to brianganz.net.

♪ Curry: In 2025, the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, celebrated the deeply personal art of Jabari Jefferson in his first solo museum exhibition.

I'm so excited to see this piece in particular, because I know it's about your family and your family's history, and I'm noticing immediately the Metro station signs.

Jabari: Yes.

Yes.

This is my homage to D.C.

and my D.C.

upbringing as a fifth generation Washingtonian.

I had to celebrate that with this sculpture, which in my opinion is a family tree.

So you see my mother smiling, greeting all the guests.

The Metro stations are how I navigated the city growing up, and then on the back is my father, and on the opposite side of the sculpture is his lineage that came from Virginia.

My mother's side, they all came from the Carolinas.

A recurring motif in the show is human migration and human movement.

Hmm.

It's a really intentional conversation about gentrification in the city, and it was a curatorial choice to have the first room be just a bit of an introduction to who I am as an artist before we get to the main section.

Curry: Martina Dodd curates the museum's temporary exhibitions.

You're thinking about the exhibitions that go in the rotating space.

What are you thinking about so that it speaks to what's here in the permanent collection?

The exhibit is called "Sacred Spaces."

Through mixed media, installation, and paintings, Jabari is really thinking about what we think are sacred objects and stories and how are we telling those stories, how are we preserving those histories, and how are we letting other people know that it's important to preserve them.

How does the permanent exhibition speak to the mission of the museum?

The mission of the museum is really to collect, preserve, and interpret material culture about Maryland, but centering African American voices and stories.

So we start off the permanent gallery seeing this installation of us on a ship.

We're starting with this idea that there were bodies of people and communities who were brought over against their will and produced labor and contributed to the commerce of this city and the state, but when you walk into the gallery, you learn even more.

We're not just talking about the labor of African Americans.

We're also thinking about the wisdom and skill and knowledge they possessed.

We're also looking at movements like civil rights movements and education efforts made by African Americans, and then you're getting to see objects, artwork, documents, books that help tell that story.

♪ Curry: Dodd led me to the renovated church, where the rest of the exhibition is displayed.

Curry: My eye is immediately turning to this floor-to-ceiling piece right over what would have been the pulpit in the church.

How did a piece like this come to be?

This beautiful tapestry is really honoring the founding commissioners of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture, so these individuals came together to preserve this physical building in the 1970s.

Jabari really was inspired by that history and made a altar to the founding commissioners.

Curry: I met with the executive director, Chanel Johnson, to learn more.

Can you tell us how this museum came to be?

So in the 1700s, Charity Folks was enslaved in the city of Annapolis.

Johnson: She was later manumitted, and she became a property owner in our state's capital.

Her family would sell the property to a congregation of African Americans just 10 years after emancipation to build Mount Moriah AME church.

The congregation was here for 100 years and, in the 1970s, sold the property to Anne Arundel County.

Well, the county wanted to tear it down and turn it into a parking lot, but community activists, local historians tapped the newly legislated Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture.

They finally won national preservation status, and in 1984, it opened as the state's first official museum on African American history and culture.

What are the challenges you face as an organization dedicated to the history of Black people?

This is a really challenging time on a federal level when it comes to the consistent attempt to erase and minimize Black history, art, and culture, but our agency was born out of the Civil Rights Movement.

We were born out of the Black Power movement.

We have the archive to prove and to showcase that we've been through this before, we've seen this before, and we will consistently resist, we will consistently preserve and share our history as a tool for community building, as a tool for connection, as a tool for inspiration for others to be positive forces where they live.

That is literally the foundation of Black history in this country.

How did you decide that you wanted to include Jabari's work in your museum?

Oftentimes, we look at artists as the artist and the historian in two separate spheres.

The arts is such a powerful vehicle for sharing, for preserving, and for teaching Black history, so having Jabari here in conversation with our collections, intertwining it with his own family history and love for Black history was incredible, and it really was a transformative project for our team and for Jabari.

Curry: The 18-foot tapestry tribute to the founding commissioners connects to the museum's mission in several ways.

So when you pull your phone up to the tapestry, a video pops up... Curry: Oh, wow.

that was created to tell us about the history of the church and then the museum.

On multiple occasions, people were invited to bring in their discarded clothing.

They helped cut and strip these materials and then attach them to canvases that eventually made this tapestry, so I think that builds a legacy of how community members were coming together to save this church and community members came together to build that tapestry.

So here's another... Curry: I got the rest of my tour with the artist himself to get more insight into his perspective.

Was it the space that led you to the title "Sacred Spaces"?

No.

It was working closely with the curator, Martina Dodd, but the reason I fell in love with that title, not just because this was previously known as a place of worship.

I looked at it as like, man, this is like an alternate reality in which it wasn't turned into a parking lot, and now it gets to host contemporary artwork in it.

I think I'm looking at your picture on there.

Yes, yes, yes.

The piece is featuring Thomas Jefferson, but more importantly, the subject matter of just my family ties.

My family's relationship with enslavement dealt with Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation in Virginia, so I was never really interested in broadcasting that information.

However, I did feel this would be appropriate because the building that we're sitting in was built by freed slaves.

I heard you have a piece here that is-- that speaks specifically to migration.

-Yeah, yeah.

-I'd love to see that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's called "Exodus."

It's one of-- one of my favorite romantic pieces.

The piece was inspired by one of my favorite artists, Jacob Lawrence, who did a series of 40 paintings that told the visual story of Black people moving from the South to the North for jobs.

That left such an imprint on me when I was a child that I always longed to be able to make work that was actually talking about important things such as human migration.

Curry: What do you think is the unifying thing that you do in your art that when we look at it, we immediately say, "Oh, that's a Jabari Jefferson piece"?

I would say the visual overload aspect of it.

Every single canvas may have between... 50 to 60 different sources that it came from.

The reason I use clothes that were used is I look at it as 50 different articles of different human beings that I would never meet that are now archived in it.

So it kind of gives it a life quality.

I think the pieces that are about you, that are about your history, that are very personal, I think that's a hard thing to do as an artist, and I appreciate that you gave us that gift, so thank you for that.

Thank you.

That means a lot to me.

Thank you for acknowledging that, as well.

Curry: Learn more about Jabari Jefferson at jabarijeffersonart.com and visit the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum at 84 Franklin Street in Annapolis.

Thank you for celebrating "WETA Arts" with us.

Join us for season 14.

And be well, be creative, and enjoy the art all around you.

I'm Felicia Curry.

So I told you guys it was a banner year.

We won eight Emmy Awards, including one for yours truly.

She's heavy.

[Chuckles] Announcer: For more about the artists and institutions featured in this episode, go to weta.org/arts.