[jazzy music] - In this edition of WLIW Arts Beat, a day in the life of an arts leader.

- I think that my job more than anything else is to support and realize the work of my artistic collaborators.

[jazzy music] - [Diane] A band's unique sound.

- Definitely a lot of infusion of really every influence that we've picked up in our musical careers along the way.

We all kind of brought this all together into one band.

- [Diane] Lichtenstein's "Modern Head" sculpture.

- The sculptures of Roy Lichtenstein are often thought of as very technical, almost scientific in nature.

- [Diane] The story of an historic play.

- How do we describe or catch a moment in time, when we as a country, all of our neighbors, all of our friends, all of our family are in danger?

- It's all ahead on this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you, thank you.

Welcome to WLIW Arts Beat, I'm Diane Masciale.

Grab your coffee and hop in the Prius with Tom Dunn, the Executive Director of the Southampton Arts Center on Long Island.

From the morning commute to evening ping-pong matches with notable East End artists, WNET's All Arts joins Dunn for a day in the life of this Hamptons institution.

[upbeat music] [jazzy music] [guests chatting] [jazzy music] [guests chatting] [acoustic music] [music reversing] - We're in my kitchen.

We're in Huntington, New York.

And I am about to head out to Southampton for the day for a typical day at work.

All right.

Got the Prius, 'cause we drive 60 miles each way.

[car beeping] We're off.

I did see the check engine light on.

I'm sure it's nothing.

I was born in Levittown.

Ended up an English major at Fordham University in the Bronx.

And then a real consequence for me professionally, I got a temp job at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, in their press office.

I was at Lincoln Center for 16 years.

Was the Founding Director of the David Rubenstein Atrium.

And then finally I was in an operations role at Lincoln Center.

In early 2018, my wife and I loaded the kids into the car and we drove out east for a day.

There's a little traffic here; this is a total surprise.

And that very night I saw the job listing for the Executive Director post at Southampton Arts Center.

And I instantly knew that this was the right next move for me.

[jazzy music] Good morning.

Amy, how are you?

Oh, sorry, you're on the phone.

This is the office.

Best part of the office is that I have view down into the gallery below, which just couldn't be more beautiful.

- [Producer] What's in the attic?

Or should you not talk about what's in the attic?

- I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to discuss what's in the attic.

So, this is the entirety of our administrative staff here.

We've got Amy Kirwin, our Artistic Director.

Got Godfrey Palaia, our Director of Production and Venue Operations.

But as you can see, it's pretty small.

All right, so why don't we do this meeting?

- [Amy] Okay.

- So, the meeting that we're about to have is a calendar and operations meeting.

- Saturday morning, we have a drum circle at 9:30, sorry, 10:30, which requires nothing of us.

I'll be here, but he brings drums and they sit in a circle, and it's really fun.

- Has anybody ever written to Jay Schneiderman?

The Town Supervisor.

- [Amy] To tell him about that?

- 'Cause he's a drummer.

- [Amy] I know, yeah.

- He's a percussionist.

I will do so- - [Amy] Okay.

- 'Cause I think it would be a fun way to engage him.

- [Amy] Yeah, totally.

- I know he cares about that.

[jazzy music] The physical location of Southampton Arts Center at 25 Jobs Lane is literally at the crossroads, at the center of this village.

In 2013, it was incorporated as the Southampton Arts Center.

Over the last four years, our programs and our audience and our reach has quadrupled.

We're in the Hamptons, which is world famous and utterly affluent, but we're also a year-round residential community.

And a lot of our neighbors and members of our community are underserved and underrepresented.

We endeavored to design a program and an experience to make sure that everybody in this community knows that this is an organization for them, that they're welcome here.

Out on the west lawn there's an open gate.

For many, many years the fencing went straight across.

But when the founders organized, they felt it was important to open up those gates symbolically to let everybody know that this was a place for everybody.

You know, this is my first ED role.

I knew this was the next place for me to go.

It brings together 20-plus years of work as a creative and as an administrator and as an operator at Lincoln Center.

My time at the David Rubenstein Atrium is directly influencing the good and important work that we're doing here at SAC.

The exhibition that we have on view right now is called "Takeover."

We've invited nine East End based artists to have pop-up studios and to be in residence here at Southampton Arts Center.

The idea here is to sort of throw the doors wide open.

We're demystifying the process.

What goes into making works of art?

Part of the job of the Executive Director is to represent the institution publicly.

And a lot of what I do is getting out there and telling our story.

It's not enough to just send an email or to do an e-blast or to put a poster out.

We literally have to engage and find people from the community who care about the types and nature of shows that we're presenting, literally pull them in by the hand.

So, for the duration of "Takeover," every Thursday night we extend our hours and we have what we're calling hangouts.

Which is in effect just an open house.

We bring in some additional talent.

Tonight we've got a singer/songwriter.

There's nothing exclusive about what we're doing here.

There's little or no barriers for entry.

The idea of these hangouts are just squarely in the sweet spot of what we're hoping to accomplish.

As I mentioned, there's only a handful of us here.

So, what's nice about an organization this small is that I literally have my hands in everything.

What we've got here is a ping-pong emergency.

[acoustic music] The net broke moments before the hangout.

And Amy and Godfrey are doing emergency surgery to make sure that- - Scalpel!

- Make sure that ping pong can happen tonight.

Otherwise there will be angry mobs.

[jazzy music] [acoustic music] [guests chatting] Do you know about this altar behind this temp wall here?

- [Amy] It's an altar behind a temp wall.

- That is an altar behind a temp wall, of course that we hang art on.

I think that my job more than anything else is to support and realize the work of my artistic collaborators.

To ask and answer questions.

Is this the right project for SAC right now?

Is it on mission?

Are we serving our constituencies?

Are we being mindful of who we want to attract and bring into the institution?

It's my job to sort of help focus everybody and prioritize on how we're gonna continue to professionalize and concretize the operations here.

Another hangout in the books.

Nice turnout tonight.

I think that's enough for the day.

And I am gonna go home.

So, I guess you would call that a typical day in the life of an executive director of a small arts center, if there is such a thing as a typical day.

It was great to have all the artists, all of everybody here to participate and to interact with members of our community.

I think it was a pretty special day.

[jazzy music] - [Diane] For more information, visit www.southamptonartscenter.org and www.allarts.org.

And now, the artist quote of the week.

[jazzy music] Up next, we hear from the band Billy the Squid and the Sea Cow Drifters, based in Key West, Florida.

This talented group of singers and musicians blend a variety of sounds to make music that is one of a kind.

Have a listen.

[upbeat rock music] - I'm Billy the Squid.

This is Jerrod Isaman.

We are Billy the Squid and the Sea Cow Drifters.

♪ Yee-Haw ♪ [rock music] I'm the lead singer and harmonica player.

- I play guitar, electric guitar, lead guitar.

[rock music] [guests applaud] ♪ Go somewhere along this road ♪ - When we first started out, it was super country.

- Very country.

- Very country.

We had slide and it was just slow, kind of swinging country stuff.

- I think Jerrod was just trying to ease me in.

[Billy laughs] - Yeah.

Trying to make a rock 'n roller out of him.

♪ Makes it like wreckage on the road ♪ Definitely a lot of infusion of really every influence that we've picked up in our musical careers along the way.

We all kind of brought this all together into one band, and consolidated it into one kind of strange sound.

♪ You've gotta take that weight, boy ♪ ♪ And haul your heavy load ♪ [guests applaud] All right!

[guitar picking] - Kind of like spaghetti western surf stuff.

We look a little out of place I think sometimes, and sound a little out of place because it's a lot of music.

Like he's saying, he's singing cowboy songs.

He grew up on a ranch, you know what I mean?

But we're starting to kind of fit it in with not really an islandy sound, but just kind of a laid-back sound, which Key West is just laid back.

Just kind of mixing the sounds together.

But definitely it stands out.

- Key West also had a long history of folk and country musicians coming through here for a long, long time.

I'm just happy we can bring it back to more of that original sound.

[rock music] - [Diane] Discover more at www.billythesquidband.com and www.facebook.com/billythesquidk.

Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

[jazzy music] Artist Roy Lichtenstein was a major figure in the Pop Art movement.

Recently his iconic "Modern Head" sculpture was installed at Ohio State University.

In this segment we travel to Columbus, Ohio to see how this project came to be, and to get a look at this impressive final product.

[dramatic string music] - It's a little different than most other sculptures that we've done for the Lichtensteins.

It's about 31 feet tall.

Weighs in, we believe it's going to be about 5,000 pounds.

[dramatic string music] It's the most fun thing I've ever done.

[dramatic piano music] - Roy Lichtenstein became first known as a pop artist.

And these pop artists came from the word popular artists, but they were using popular subject matter in a kind of a critique or an alternative to a very painterly style of abstract expression from the 1950s.

- Roy was a very dedicated artist.

I mean, he fell in love with art when he was a young boy.

And when it came time for him to go to university, he wanted to be able to study art.

And at that time, there were really only a handful of colleges where you could get a degree in art, studio art.

And Ohio State University was one of them.

- Well, you know, we're proud to count Roy Lichtenstein as a double alumnus of the University.

Back in the forties he achieved both his bachelor's and master's degree here in fine arts, and was part of our teaching faculty for some time following that.

- And Roy always held Ohio State University in high regard because of this experience he had here in the Art School.

- In more recent years, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has actually been looking for ways that they could continue to engage with the University.

And so, it's really through the Foundation that we have this tremendous opportunity to actually be considered as the location for something as amazing as this "Modern Head" sculpture.

[peaceful piano music] - The "Modern Head" sculpture, we figured we could build one to do a memorial, non-commercial cast of an addition; there used to be four.

We decided to make one more addition to it.

This is a posthumous addition.

And that it would be donated to the University in Roy's memory.

- I mean, we wouldn't really dare make [chuckles] anything new.

In fact, we got the plans from the original producer of the piece.

And we worked with a fabricator that Roy had worked with on many of his pieces, Paul Amaral.

[upbeat music] - We're in Rhode Island on the East Bay, just a little bit east of downtown Providence, Rhode Island.

And we're ready to build a Lichtenstein sculpture.

This one had been built before by other fabricators.

That was the challenge, to build it from other people's drawings and design parameters.

The input information that I got was analog, hand-drawn pieces from the early eighties.

So, we had to correct all that stuff and get it right so that we could have complete faith in the computer file to produce a piece that is the shape that Roy intended.

Everybody started feeling really confident towards the end, when we started producing small-scale versions out of a water jet or a laser machine.

And everything lined up and matched and did what it was supposed to do.

- The sculptures of Roy Lichtenstein are often thought of as very technical, almost scientific in nature.

And so, when folks from the Foundation came and walked across campus, they found this space in the North Campus area, that actually aligns not only with where we're enhancing our Arts District, but also provides this really amazing synergy with some of our science buildings, particularly Smith and McPherson Labs.

- Which actually is closer to Roy's personal interests.

Roy was an engineer, he was a draftsman.

He worked in engineering companies.

He liked making mechanical things by himself anyway.

- I mean, the whole purpose of art is really to engage people in thinking about imagery, what it means.

So, I'm curious, I'll be very curious to see how the students at OSU deal with this, what they wonder about it.

- So, I want to thank everyone in Ohio for making this as a good opportunity for us to have a work here that could be provocative for the 10s of thousands of students who will be passing by it.

It's just a nice opportunity to maintain a relationship.

- [Diane] And here's a look at this week's art history.

[jazzy music] Paula Vogel's thought-provoking, award-winning play "Indecent" is about an important moment in theater history.

We visit Boston, Massachusetts to meet the creative team behind the show, and to learn more about the production and its remounting at Huntington Theatre Company.

- We have a story we want to tell you, about a play, a play that changed my life.

- [Reporter] "Indecent" is Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel's new play about an incendiary one.

Written more than 100 years ago, "God of Vengeance" is a Yiddish drama by Polish playwright Schalom Asch.

It's about a brothel owner, eager to see his daughter move up in society by marrying a rabbi's son.

- The only hitch is the daughter has fallen in love with a prostitute downstairs.

So, imagine this being written in 1906.

The first love presented between two women, and certainly the first kiss.

- [Reporter] In "Indecent," Vogel tracks the play from its inception to its resurrection during World War II.

She's found a kindred spirit in channeling the youthful, audacious playwright.

- Once upon a time, I was a young playwright myself.

So, I do think that there's a young playwright principle where you want to walk into the salon and light the bomb and throw it into the salon.

Here's my new play, boom!

- [Reporter] Despite it's lesbian subject matter, when "God of Vengeance" first debuted, it actually wasn't controversial.

- The love between women was seen as a kind of pure and beautiful love story.

By the men in the Yiddish salon, in the Yiddish Renaissance, it was seen as something that was beautiful.

It went on tour from 1907, all over Europe.

- [Reporter] The scandal came when "God of Vengeance" finally opened on Broadway in 1923.

An anti-immigration sentiment was taking hold in the U.S. And seeing the play for the first time, the mainstream Christian audience was unnerved.

- And what is happening is that there is a great deal of hatred.

The rise of the KKK, and the Jew is seen as someone who was invading American soil.

So here, I mean, all of these issues, when people say, what is "Indecent" about?

Yes, it's about a play, but it's really not about the censorship of the play.

It's really not just all of the multiple love stories.

It's how do we describe or catch a moment in time when we as a country, all of our neighbors, all of our friends, all of our family are in danger?

- It was a real lightening rod for tremendously important issues and questions about immigration.

- [Reporter] Rebecca Taichman is Indecent's Director.

She discovered "God of Vengeance" as a graduate student at Yale, which also houses Schalom Asch's papers.

- He's asking about, in a deeply corrupt world, is there the potential for true love?

In a world that conspires so heavily against the basic principle of love.

- [Reporter] Shortly after the play opened on Broadway, it was actually a rabbi who filed a complaint, concerned over how his community was being portrayed.

In short order, the cast, producer and theater owner were put on trial for obscenity.

What was the tone of that trial?

- Nobody was allowed to get onto the stand.

So, the deck was really, really stacked.

- The writer of world literature, I couldn't walk into that court.

- [Reporter] Roughly 10 years ago, Taichman brought the story to Vogel, who then spent the next seven years writing "Indecent."

- [Vogel] I got to imagine, well, what was it like when my grandparents came to this country?

What was it like to walk down the Lower East Side?

What was it like to speak Yiddish?

What was it like to know all of those songs?

[Yiddish music] [cast vocalizing] - [Reporter] Music is both instrumental to how "Indecent" unfolds and how Vogel writes.

She creates soundtracks to guide her through each act.

♪ Of all the boys I've known, and I've known some ♪ - [Vogel] At my computer, and the music is so, so very beautiful.

It made me weep every night.

♪ My heart collide and this whole world seemed new to me ♪ - I feel that music is the most pure art form.

I hope I don't get drummed out of the Dramatist Guild for saying this, but I feel that music is pure emotion.

- [Reporter] When it opened on Broadway in 2017, "Indecent" marked the legendary playwright's long-overdue Broadway debut.

And Taichman won a Tony for her direction.

- Musically, it feels like we bottom out for too long at the site of the pause.

I don't know that I see it as a personal validation, but a real deep kind of honoring of the power of this story.

- [Reporter] The production here is a rare remounting of the Broadway one, with nearly the full cast intact.

As "Indecent" continues to find life, its creators say it also continues to find resonance.

- I'm heartbroken honestly to say it feels more and more relevant than I wished, I ever could have wished it would.

- I am done being in a country that laughs at the way I speak.

- I feel that this is a play about us knowing in this moment of time, who are the immigrants in America?

Who is this happening to now?

What side are we on?

Are we paying attention?

- Go to www.huntingtontheatre.org/indect for more information.

That wraps it up for this edition of WLIW Arts Beat.

We'd like to hear what you think.

So, like us on Facebook, join the conversation on Twitter, and visit our webpage for features and to watch episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Masciale.

Thank you for watching WLIW Arts Beat.

[jazzy music] Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[jazzy music]