- [Narrator] Support provided by the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the state of Connecticut Office of Film, Television, and Digital Media, and Connecticut Humanities.

(gentle music) (engine starting) (upbeat music) (bright music) - Hi, I'm Ray Hardman, and welcome to "Where Art Thou."

Today we're in North Central Connecticut.

Rolling hills, farmlands, and idyllic views of the Connecticut River.

This area is steeped in history, with reminders of their tobacco growing past almost everywhere.

But today I'm more interested in the artists that live and thrive here in this part of the state.

And to help me learn more about them, I have our "Where Art Thou" North Central Connecticut curator, Liz Bologna on the line.

Liz is the executive director of Art Center East in Vernon.

Hi, Liz.

- Hi, Ray, thanks for having me.

- Of course.

Tell me what's going on at Art Center East.

I know you always have some really good things happening.

- Sure, so at Art Center East, we have lots of classes and workshops that people can take, and all of our exhibits are free and open to the public.

They include our artist members, and artists throughout the whole state, and even larger parts of New England.

- Now, I know things are kinda quiet up there in North Central Connecticut, but maybe you could tell me a little bit about what's happening, what's the art scene like there?

- The art we have here is really interesting, 'cause like you mentioned, there's a lot of history.

So we have this interesting mix of traditional mediums and traditional techniques that are blended with new media, and it creates something wholly unique.

- Oh, that sounds great.

Where are you taking us today?

- First, you're headed to Nowashe Village in South Windsor, Connecticut.

You're gonna meet with Liz Glaviano, their education director.

And Nowashe Village is this really interesting living history site that focuses on the Podunk indigenous people, also known as the Nowashe tribe in Connecticut.

- That's awesome.

And we're gonna meet some artists there?

- Yes, you're gonna meet Taylor and Miciah Stasis, who both practice traditional indigenous art.

Taylor is a basket Weaver, and Miciah is a jewelry maker who works in this medium called quill embroidery.

She'll tell you more about it, but it dates all the way back to as early as the 1600s.

- All right, so some traditional arts and crafts, I love that.

Where else are we going?

- You're gonna drop in on Rick Stromoski in Suffield.

He's a cartooner and an illustrator who has figured out how to bring his art into a digital space.

He makes videos to teach kids how to draw, and he also has this web-based cartoon called "Andrew's Journal," which is about a very sweet, optimistic six-year-old boy.

- All right, well, I'm excited, we've never had a cartoonist before.

Liz, great picks.

Thank you so much.

- It's been my pleasure.

- All right, well let's check it out.

(gentle music) Liz, just a fantastic property you have here.

Tell me a little bit about Nowashe.

- Sure.

Well, the name Nowashe is an Algonquin term meaning place between two rivers.

And Nowashe Village was built because we wanted to expand our educational offerings to bring the indigenous experience to life.

- [Ray] What do we know about the indigenous people that lived here hundreds of years ago?

- Indigenous peoples lived in South Windsor and in this region for thousands of years.

And through the archeological record, we can date them to approximately living here 4,000 years ago.

- Oh, wow.

- Yes.

And indigenous people still live in this region.

The tribe that lived here was called the Nowashe tribe, commonly now today referred to as the Podunk tribe.

That word came into existence right around, like 1660s, 1670s.

And today what we do is we invite indigenous people to come here and to educate everyone.

We support the indigenous economy by hiring indigenous people and employing the indigenous marketplace.

- This is part of the Wood Library.

And I know at Wood, they have a bunch of artifacts as well.

- [Liz] We have over 20,000 artifacts relating to the indigenous people that lived here.

We have quite a lively collection.

An enormous amount of stoneworked tools and beautiful, beautiful steatite bowls that were carved.

- Yeah, well I know we've got two artisans here today.

I'm excited to meet them, why don't you lead the way.

(gentle music) Miciah.

- Hi.

- How are you?

- Good, how are you?

- Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you as well.

- This is what you do?

- Yes, this is my Birch bark porcupine quill work.

- Oh wow.

Miciah, you're a member of the Herring Pond Wampanoag community.

- Yes.

- Tell me about the history of Herring Pond and what the community is like now.

- Yeah, so our community at the Herring Pond tribe is actually one of the five that are left here in the Wampanoag Nation.

So we are a smaller community.

A lot of people know about Mashpee, but we are a little bit smaller and we are state recognized.

But our people have been here for thousands of years, and like I said, one of the few that are left.

So we are based in Bourne, Plymouth area, what now is Plymouth, but back in the day, Patuxet.

A small community, but still thriving, still here, still keep up with our language and our culture and our traditions, which is what I do here.

- I wanted to talk about your quill work here because this is absolutely beautiful.

- [Miciah] Thank you.

- Tell me about this.

You got a blue jay there.

- Yeah.

This here is made from Birch bark, which is the back right here.

These are dyed porcupine quills that we gathered, and these are blue jay feathers that are on the bottom of the hairpiece.

So the porcupine quills we get from roadkill a lot of the time.

- Is there?

- Yeah.

So we're lucky because of the fact that with the roadkill, it allows the porcupine to have another life.

It continues living, it's never dying, because we're making it into another beautiful art form as well.

- So you're actually manipulating the quills into a design.

- Yes, exactly.

- Oh, that is so neat.

- So technically the quill work is actually one of the oldest art forms for the native people, especially here on the East coast.

That was before we started doing bead work, which was represented in the 1400s when they came over and started doing trading.

But we started doing this before.

It's not something that's practiced as much nowadays, just because it's so time consuming.

(gentle soothing music) - [Ray] It seems like it would be difficult to embroider quill onto Birch.

- Yes, it's definitely a lot of steps that go within it.

So you usually take a piece and you'll poke a hole in it, and then you'll go and take porcupine quill and modern day tweezers.

- [Ray] Yeah.

When did you determine that out of all the arts and crafts from your ancestors, this one suited you?

- I've always loved to do crafts in general since I was younger.

For me, I wasn't really immersed in my culture when I was little, so I kind of went off on my own, me and my sister to find ourselves.

We knew who we were, but we didn't know anything or really about our people.

I don't want it to die out with our people, it's something that is absolutely beautiful.

And I think it's also a great representation of the beauty that we have with our arts.

- Well, Miciah, just a fascinating craft you have here, I knew nothing about it, this is really great.

- Thank you so much.

- Yeah, I'm gonna go visit with your sister.

- Okay, all right.

I'll sit here and finish this up (laughing).

- All right, thanks so much.

- You're welcome.

(bright music) - So, Taylor, I'm so glad to meet you.

- Yeah, you too.

Thank you.

- This is your handy work?

- Yeah.

- Oh, it's beautiful.

What do we have here?

- This is traditional style weaving.

I come from the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe.

So this is something very common you see out where we're from.

Traditionally made from either milkweed or dogbane.

Our women would wait until usually end of summer, early fall, and they would take the stalk as they dry out and then they would almost like coil them on their knees very, very, very fast.

And so that would create a twine you see.

To get these colors, what we'll do is pretty much almost anything you can use.

Ochre for reds and yellows, you can get the greens from like chestnuts right as they fall off the trees.

You'll see as you cut open the shell, a nice green, yellow color.

Hardest color to get though, and still to this day, naturally is blue.

Blue is one of the only colors that you wouldn't really see due to the lack of resources you have out there.

- [Ray] How did you get involved in weaving?

- Around when I was like 16 or 17 years old, I had one of the elders just kind of approach me and she was working on a beautiful bag and I just was kind of peering over her shoulder and she's like, "Do you wanna learn?"

And I was like, "Absolutely," and so it's something that I hold a lot of pride in because your bags were things that you could tell stories on things that you were trading, you were holding any type of produce or dried things for the wintertime.

They say that our ancestors would weave these so tight that you could hold water in them.

Yeah, so very, very special thing.

And I'm very thankful for that elder for showing me, 'cause I've been doing it for about 10 years now.

- Yeah, and you're doing it in the traditional way?

- Absolutely, yeah.

As traditional as I can get.

I mean, like I said, resources are a little tough to be dying string, but it's all hand woven.

- But the weaving part.

- Absolutely, yes, yes, all hand woven, yeah.

- Was it a journey for you to go from learning how to do it, to getting to this point where it's so beautiful?

- Yeah, yeah, it was.

Actually this bag here, which I brought specifically because this was technically the first bag I've ever finished, and I made this bag over 10 years ago and I carry it every single day with me, it's like my purse, you know?

Besides this thing that I wove this strap to, but I love telling people about this bag because it was the first one I ever made and it has, like I said, some mistakes, these things, but it's the strongest thing that I own.

So I just take a lot of pride in the work and I think it's a beautiful thing and it represents on how strong we are as a people and women especially, 'cause we're the ones who do majority of the weaving.

Telling your story and representing who you are through your work is what basically we take pride in.

You know usually, and even today, whose work is what work, depending on how it's crafted.

- Is that right?

- Absolutely.

- So this was really the first art in the Americas.

- In a way, yeah, absolutely.

- What later became the America.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, you would take pride in your color choices, in your designs, and even depending on what material you'd use.

Like I said, we would use a few different types of materials to create the string and depending on what your preference was, your bag was gonna look a little different.

So absolutely, it was definitely one of the first arts here in the Americas.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, Taylor, thanks so much for telling me your story and showing us this beautiful craft you've got here.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

- Yeah.

- Thanks.

(bright music) - Miciah and Taylor Stasis, keeping the artistic traditions of their ancestors alive.

Great stuff.

Up next is what's in your attic.

And we're not in an attic at all today, in fact, we're in a large, rather secret airplane hanger at the New England Air Museum in Granby.

Let's check it out.

So I'm here at the New England Air Museum with Nick Hurley, he's the curator for the New England Air Museum.

And we're at kind of an undisclosed location.

We had to kind of go down some very lonely little pathway to get here a little.

- A little bit, yeah.

- And you call this Area 51.

- We do, we do.

I couldn't tell you who came up with the name, but it has stuck over the years.

So yeah, welcome to Area 51.

- [Ray] We see all this stuff here.

I wanna ask you first about this.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So this is what we call a people mover car.

It was one of two built for an AGT, automated gateway transit system for Bradley Airport back in the 1970s.

It was built by Ford and it was basically meant to transport 15 to 20 people.

These were built specifically for Bradley Airport.

The system was tested, built, constructed.

And in 1975, Governor Grasso, newly elected, decided to cancel the program.

Thankfully the cars were saved and they were brought to the Connecticut Trolley Museum right here in East Windsor just down the road.

They sat outside for many years.

People that are local to the area probably remember driving past them and seeing them out in the yard.

- I certainly do, yeah, yeah.

- So in 2020, our car was brought here back to Area 51 and dropped off, and it's now awaiting restoration.

- So in the museum you have airplanes, aircraft in just pristine condition.

- [Nick] Yes.

- [Ray] But it has to come here first, is that right?

- Not always.

Sometimes aircraft are donated to us or loaned to us in display-ready condition.

Other times we go out and find these aircraft and acquire them through one means or another, and they're not in the greatest of shape, but they're worth saving.

- Well, I gotta say, Nick, I'm dying to see what's in the building behind me.

Can we go open the door and check it out?

- Absolutely, there's a lot to look at.

Let's go take a look.

- Okay, all right, let's go.

How big is this facility?

- Where we're standing right now is about an 11-acre parcel that actually used to be a Pratt & Whitney engine test facility.

All the buildings you see on site here besides this one are from the Pratt facility back in the '60s.

And there's a couple of pieces in particular that I wanna show you.

- Okay.

- After you.

- Okay.

Okay.

- I wasn't kidding.

- Nick.

- Oh my gosh - Yeah, sensory overload.

- No kidding.

- It's a lot to take in.

So as I said, this is the main storage building for Area 51.

Anything that we've accumulated over the last 60 years, aircraft parts, engines, you name it, usually finds its way down back here If it's not up in our storage hanger ready to go on display.

- Okay.

- This biplane right here.

What we're looking at here is another really unique piece in our collection.

So this is a Grandville Brothers Model A biplane, also known as a Gee Bee.

They were a Springfield Massachusetts-based aircraft company in the late 1920s.

The kind of unique thing about this aircraft is that it is one of two surviving Gee Bee aircraft in the entire world.

- Oh wow.

- Most trainers and biplanes that you would see during that time had seats that were one behind the other.

When you think of a biplane, that's usually what you think of.

This one did not, it had side-by-side seating.

Normally, with cockpit controls, you have your joystick that kind of comes up from the floor.

Because you had two sets of legs in order to reduce what they called sort of cockpit floor clutter, they actually mounted the controls on the instrument panel, which was another unique thing for that time.

So it kind of gives a little bit more leg room for each person that's sitting there 'cause as you can see, looking in there, it's pretty tight quarters to begin with.

- Yeah.

And it looks like the passenger had some work to do.

- A little bit, yeah.

So this could be used as a trainer or just a private leisure type aircraft.

Unfortunately, the timing for this was not great.

So the first flight of a Model A was in 1929, March of 1929.

We all know what happened in October of 1929.

- Yeah, the Great Depression.

- Stock market crashes, the Great Depression starts, and demand for private aircraft really dried up.

I'm hoping that within the next year or two, we'll see the Model A back fully restored and looking just like it did 50 years ago.

- Yeah, yeah, that's really unbelievable.

- Absolutely.

So you know, it's- - Oh, wow.

- Yeah, this is a little more congested than on the other side.

But this is the aircraft that I wanted to show you next.

- This looks like an early jet.

- Yeah, good eye, good eye.

This is a Grumman F9F-2 Panther, very early jet.

One of the first operational carrier-based jet aircraft for the Navy and Marine Corps.

These were introduced, they had their first flight in 1947, and they really had their heyday during the Korean war.

This was the primary ground attack and jet fighter for the Navy and Marine Corps during the war.

And it actually beyond that had a pretty limited service history.

It was withdrawn from frontline service in 1956.

By the 1960s, it was pretty much outta the inventory.

This is a good example of our restoration process, it's very deliberate.

Sometimes it takes many years, it takes a good amount of money.

Every project is different, but all of this work is done by our volunteers, which I can't say enough good about.

They're all volunteers, they do this because they love it, and we couldn't have the displays that we have without our folks from restoration.

(bright music) - [Ray] Tell me about this hanger because you've got some amazing aircraft in here.

- Yeah.

So we have now left Area 51, we're standing in our storage hanger.

Most of the aircraft and engines that are in here are display ready.

This area is crucial for us, that we can kind of store things until we're ready to bring 'em out onto the floor.

And occasionally we do open it up so that the public can kind of take a peek inside and see everything that's in here.

'Cause as you can see, looking around, there's a ton of aircraft in here.

- Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it's amazing.

Well, Nick, this has just been incredible.

Thank you so much.

- I wish you could stay longer.

- I wanna stay longer.

- Yeah, well, you'll have to come back and see us again soon.

- Thanks for the sneak peek in Area 51, that was unbelievable.

- My pleasure.

My pleasure, Ray.

- Yeah, thank you.

(bright music) I'm really excited about this next segment because we've never had a cartoonist on this show, but Rick Stromoski is so much more than that.

He's illustrated for children's books, reading cards, calendars, he teaches children how to become cartoonists.

I looked at a bunch of his stuff online and I gotta say, it's really fun, it's really silly, and it's kind of twisted in a fun way.

Anyhow, you'll see what I mean, let's check it out.

Rick.

- Hey, Ray, how's it going?

- Good.

Good to see you.

- Good to see you too.

How are you?

- I'm doing great, how about you?

- Good.

I can't think of a better setting to sit and draw than this.

This is amazing.

- Oh, it's a beautiful day, and it's also just so nice to be outside after this long, hard winter.

- Yeah.

- It's great.

- How'd you get started?

Were you one of those kids that just in class was drawing all the time, all your book covers were covered with art?

- That was me.

I was always getting in trouble in school for drawing.

I would be in middle of a spelling test and I would flip over the page and see all this white space and thought I would be getting some extra credit for that, but usually got me in trouble.

But yeah, I was always drawing ever since I was a little boy.

- Now, Rick, for you was a career in cartoon a given or did you kind of follow a different route before you found cartooning?

- I knew I always wanted to draw, but I didn't know how to do it.

My early 20s I started sending magazine gag cartoons to magazines and was making some sales here and there, but didn't really know much about it.

Then I just essentially taught myself.

I didn't go to art school, I just bought every book I could about the business of art and took that advice and started applying it, and I started to get a lot of assignments that way.

It started off kind of slow at first, but like anything, the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it.

So you started in cartoons, but you've had several different iterations of your career over time, haven't you?

- Yes.

I started off of gag cartoons for magazines, then I moved to greeting cards, then I started promoting to book publishers and educational material type of publishers and started getting assignments for those kinds of things and did a comic strip.

Now I'm doing graphic novels for young readers and I'm doing some online teaching.

- Well, Rick, I'm really excited to see your studio and all the great things you do.

Shall we head upstairs?

- [Rick] Sure, let's go, let's do it.

(bright music) - [Ray] Rick, I've been to a lot of places where artists create their art, this is spectacular.

- [Rick] Oh, thank you, thank you.

- [Ray] Why does it work for you?

- [Rick] It's just very conducive to creativity.

There's a lot of space, there's a lot of functional space, some great light, it's just very conducive to doing creative process.

- [Ray] So you pulled up one of your graphic novels here.

- Yes.

This is a middle grade graphic novel called "Take a Hike."

These characters I developed, Tatertoes and Schnozzer, two really stupid dogs who are looking for their mother.

It's a very funny story, every page has a laugh on it, and it's been really fun putting this together.

- Rick, tell me about your teaching, 'cause that ties into the computer.

- [Rick] Actually for the past 30 years, I've been doing a lot of library programs, mostly just around Connecticut and central Western part of what Massachusetts.

I would do maybe 10 or 12 programs a year, just teaching kids how to draw comics and cartoons.

And when COVID hit, a lot of these places, they needed programming, but they couldn't do anything in-person, so I started just doing things through Zoom.

And I've done over close to 500 programs in the past two years.

- [Ray] Tell me the pros and cons of making art in the digital world and then making art with traditional materials.

- Well kind of using conventional materials like pen and ink and paint and watercolors, you have an original piece of art at the end of it.

The drawbacks with using conventional materials, you have to be extremely careful.

If you make a mistake, sometimes it's catastrophic and you can't fix it, so you have to start all over from scratch, especially at the end of a drawing, that's something that makes you wanna jump out of a window.

Well, with digital, it's very convenient because if you make an error, you can just click a button and undo it.

Also there's a lot of speed involved.

The only bad thing is, well, one of the bad things is, there's no original art.

And there's not the tactile pleasure you get from working with conventional materials.

This is zen-like feel, it's almost like, I describe it in the past as, it's like kissing someone through a window.

It's not the same thing.

But yeah, there's good and bad things on both.

- Yeah.

Tell me about this guy.

- This is just a sketchbook I'm working on, some just various sketches, just working out.

Working with conventional materials, 'cause most of the work I do now is digital, but I still wanna keep my hand in creating work using conventional materials.

This is called a watercolor wash where you kind of dilute the color a little bit and just kind of bring it along.

And a lot of times you'll start off a little bit lighter and then concentrate the color by adding another layer and you could see how it kind of like bleeds a little bit.

So you get this nice kind of effect.

- [Ray] And the subject matter here, is it just something that popped into your brain and- - Yeah, a lot of times when I do my sketches, I don't really have an idea of what I'm gonna draw, I usually just draw whatever comes to my mind.

I mean, I've had a lot of difficult times in the past few years and I found that working with conventional materials calms me down.

This is so much better for my head.

It's a personal thing, but it's also, it's very calming.

When I do these kinds of things, it's mainly for my state of mind.

It helps my state of mind to relax.

It's better than going to the bar and drinking or just doing something that's a little destructive where this is so relaxing to do this kind of thing.

- Well, Rick, thanks so much.

Thanks for kind of letting us into your world here.

This is kind of fun world you've created for yourself up here.

- It's something I've always wanted to do ever since I was a little boy.

It's been my life's work and it's never felt like work.

It's just always, every Monday I get up, I get to draw.

(bright uplifting music) - Well, we had just an amazing day here in North Central Connecticut.

You know, it's people like Miciah and Taylor and Rick that make this part of the state so special.

Hey, maybe there's somebody in your town, in your neighborhood, that's doing amazing creative things.

If so, I wanna hear about it.

Drop me a line at wherearthou@ctpublic.org.

Join me next week, we're gonna meet a Ukrainian American artist who is reacting to the news out of Ukraine with some surprising art.

You won't wanna miss it.

Until then, I'm Ray Hardman.

Thanks for watching "Where Art Thou."