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THIS TIME, ON COLORES!
NATIONAL HERITAGE FELLOW, SANTA FE SANTERO RAMÓN JOSÉ LÓPEZ SHARES HOW HIS RICH HERITAGE
INFLUENCES HIS ARTWORK.
"This is my Abuelito. He is standing in front of his chapel. But here is a little quote
that I made, "Santeros die but the work remains."
ABRAHÁN GARZA'S PHOTOGRAPHS REMIND US THAT HISTORY IS OFTEN HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT.
"Everyone thinks we knock everything down and put it back up, but a lot of the rich
rich history is still standing."
MICHAEL BISE CREATES INTRICATE, HIGHLY PERSONAL DRAWINGS THAT TRACE THE NARRATIVE OF HIS LIFE
TOUCHING ON THEMES OF FAMILY, LOVE, LOSS, AND HOPE.
"The things that I try to deal with in my work are those very essential things."
THE AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM TAKES US INSIDE THE EXHIBIT OF TINSEL PAINTINGS, A WOMENS
ARTFORM IN THE 1850'S TO 1890'S WHICH HARK BACK TO A RENIASSANCE ARTFORM OF REVERSE PAINTING
ON GLASS.
"They were displayed in the dining room and parlor, in their time, and glowed in candlelight
and later gaslight."
IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!
SANTERO RÁMON JÓSE LÓPEZ SHARES HIS INSPIRATIONS AND ARTISTIC TRADITIONS.
Ramon: I've always been motivated to do artistic things as a child. Somehow I was able to envision
something and make it. When I was child we didn't have gas stoves
or anything. We lived in a one room house but our neighbor would bring wood over....
in a wood pile... and I would have to chop wood with a dull axe.
One day he brought, it was like a, you know how a row boat would look if you got under
it? He brought panels like that, and they were all decorated with saints.
He was a master carpenter and he ended up with all these scraps. That was my playhouse.
When I was growing up here in Sante Fe most of the schools did not provide all of history
of what had happened here in New Mexico or even here in Sante Fe. And I think it's important
to learn about the Pueblo Revolt that happened in August 1680.
There's not any images that people can actually see and people don't understand or can't imagine
what actually happened 400 years ago. The title of the piece "Une Sueno de Sante
Fe" it's a dream. A dream of holy faith. Everything that is on the painting is not
factual; It's like a dream. It's not like a photograph, I didn't document
it or film it. Based on historical accounts you can imagine
a battle similar to that. I think the Indians wanted to eliminate or destroy everything
that the Spanish had created and imposed upon them.
I'm amazed that both the Hispanics and the Indians get along so well together now a days.
These are all natural pigments. I use a lot of black walnut. The blue? The blue is indigo.
The reason I chose to use indigo is because they discovered in the burials of the Franciscan
Priests that they were indigo. This is called "imigre" and you can imagine
just a little saliva or fat and you can make makeup or face paint.
And I paint with buffalo bone brushes. I consider myself a contemporary artist working
with traditional mediums. I try to continue using the same iconography of New Mexican
saints. The New Mexican imagery, most of it is very simplified. It's not like and European
Master's painting. It's like folk art in some degree.
One of my biggest inspirations was my grandfather. My grandfather was a santero, a santero is
a wood carver and he would carve religious imagery of saints. He also built a capilla,
a small family chapel located in Sante Fe. The main reason I try to continue to in the
traditional methods, use the traditional methods is because I see the different quality of
the art work it has a whole different feel to it. In making some of my pieces I use the
hand adz, and chisels and all kinds of hand tools. One of my favorite tools is actually
a needle. Some of the simplest tools that you can use, a knife, a razor...
In fact when I was a little boy, when I realized that I could actually make things.. I was
at my fathers house, he was a cowboy, and he had a pile of cowboy books filled with
cattle and stuff. I saw some kind of a special cow, and I got his double-sided razor, and
I carved out that cow, It was fascinating to me. I realized at that point that I had
a gift. This is a book, it has the images of New Mexico
saints and prayers. The alphabet and numbers one to a million, in Spanish.
People forget how beautiful the illuminated manuscripts were. They're just beautiful.
The calligraphy and the imagery they capture. This is really a simple design, it's not as
intricate as most illuminated manuscripts but, the simplicity of the imagery and everything
else is beautiful in and of itself. This is my Abuelito. He is standing in front
of his chapel. But here is a little quote that I made, "Santeros die but the work remains."
Every artist has a different style, some do it like the old santaros or European style,
but I really honor and respect the artists that focus on there own creativity.
When I was making that alter you see behind me, I was working late at night, I was kneeling
down at the image of St. Gabriel but I removed all the panels off because I was painting
the spirals, all of a sudden this cloud, It's hard to describe, it wasn't this jet black
it was like this cloud of movement and a voice asked me to come into heaven, and I said "I
can't I have too much work." I really believe in the things that you experience
that are sometimes religious, and you keep in your heart forever.
PHOTOGRAPHER ABRAHÁN GARZA CREATES NEW IMAGES THAT BLEND THE HISTORICAL WITH THE MODERN.
ABRAHAN GARZA: Houston Press, how may I direct your call?
I'm actually the receptionist at the Houston Press and I've worked there since 1999. I
started collecting postcards in early, maybe 2000, 2001. And the idea of going out to shoot
them with their current locations just fascinated me. The first photo montage I did was with
a photo of me and my mother. We're standing in front of our house in South Houston. She
passed away three years ago so it was very sentimental to take this shot and it's really
what catapulted this entire project. When I found a picture of our own building,
the entire office was buzzing because nobody really knew what it was before.
So this is the Houston Press building. This picture's from 1965. You can see the Exxon
building behind it, it was built in 1963 so it was pretty new at the time. It used to
be a Gilman Pontiac car dealership. This is where I work, and Bonnevilles used to be sold
out of my office. A lot of times what works for the photo is
lining up the existing architecture. If I have a photo and it has a window or an awning
I try to line it up right. It's all about patience.
The First Methodist United Church, it's been around since the '30s and I think every 15
minutes or half hour, the church bells always ring. It's two blocks away from the Houston
Press building, you hear that all day long. I mean, sometimes I'll take a picture and
it takes me 15 minutes just to get the shot. Whenever there's a photo with people, you
definitely get the date around when it was. You know, people are in suits, people are
in dresses -- it's totally different. This was taken on Main Street, outside the
Rice Hotel, in I believe 1965. You've got the old defunct Houston Press -- which was,
back then, a daily paper -- cafeteria, coffee house, and Main Street. I would say I've become
obsessed with it. There'll be a day when I come across a photograph and I need to take
it as soon as I can. This is Jones Hall. It won an award in 1967 the year it was built.
Jones Hall is literally unchanged and the Gulf building behind it has a 45-foot sign
that can be seen from all over Houston. The original was taken in 1952 and there were
no skyscrapers in downtown. For a minute the tallest building we had was City Hall, and
I guess that's visible in the photo. And I guess in 1952 they thought it was OK to not
have a fence to protect the people walking over the bridge. And as you can see it's all
the same existing construction -- it's all the same, the same pillars, everything.
Cortlandt Place, which is minutes from downtown, this is a little tricky but luckily I have
long arms. It's a private community, virtually unchanged since this photo was taken.
Houston is developing in a way where everyone thinks that we knock everything down and put
it back up, but a lot of the rich, rich history is still standing. You just have to look for
it. ARTIST MICHAEL BISE CREATES INTRICATE AND
HIGHLY PERSONAL DRAWINGS REFLECTING THE IMPACT SUBJECTS SUCH AS ILLNESS AND DEATH HAVE HAD
ON HIM. MICHAEL BISE
My work is influenced by the impulses behind literature and film, which is to say, telling
a story. I suppose that's just a product of the fact that those were my influences as
a child. I was obsessed with Disney and I wanted to be an animator. I was raised in
a very fundamentally religious family. The iconography of that -- Jesus, these images
from the Bible -- all of those things were really, really powerful for me. But I never
felt an inclination to believe in it. When I was 23 and in undergrad, my dad died really
suddenly of heart disease. I started making images over and over of my dad and it was
a way to deal with it. I think I went back to the place that was always important to
me -- telling stories and specifically telling stories about my life. For me it's been a
lot about death because that has been something that has just been present in my life, from
my dad dying to my constant attempts to forestall my own death.
I was born with a cardiac condition called hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy. It's
a gradual and progressive stiffening of your heart muscle so that eventually it just becomes
larger and larger and less contractile and it just sort of ends up stopping. My senior
year in high school I had my first open-heart surgery, so I had a pacemaker for seven years.
And then eventually my heart failure progressed and the pacemaker was no longer effectively
treating that condition. I came in for a regular appointment and the doctor told me, "Don't
leave yet, we may have a heart for you." And so my then-girlfriend -- my now-wife, Adrian
-- we were there together and so they put us in a room and the next day I had a heart
transplant. So the first drawing I made was based very
directly off a photograph that my wife took. And it was an image of me in the bed, still
unconscious, with a breathing tube in my throat and everything connected to me. That first
drawing reminded me a lot of the films of David Cronenberg, there's this fusion of technology
and organic matter. So that one drawing sort of set the tone for how I would approach the
rest of the work. First of all, I sort of see the image in my
head, what I would like it to be. It's something I would envision in a movie, or something
I would come up within my own mind while reading a novel. I start gathering and collecting
photographic sources that I think I can build an image from. And then sometimes I will draw
it from looking at an object. So there's a combination of approaches and source materials
that go into building each drawing. But even though I plan the drawing out in a lot of
detail, it never quite ends up becoming the thing you imagine.
What I try to do in the drawings is use really basic drawing techniques -- cross-hatching,
stippling, shading. I like to imagine that anybody could make the drawing if they had
enough patience and time. One of the images that I took when I was in the hospital was
of a collage that I found in the hallway of the transplant unit. And basically they look
like children's collages from a kindergarten class or something. And they'll say encouraging
things, this one says, "Go, team, go." And it had pictures of all the transplant doctors.
So I thought that that thing was a real condensation of the whole experience, the futility of trying
to be encouraging when in fact you have no control over what's happening with your body.
The waiting room in Methodist has this large cabinet. And inside this cabinet are these
ceramic reproductions of wildlife -- eagles, geese, tigers -- and they all look really
predatory. There's this feeling of something terrible impending. It's a really, really
uncomfortable environment for someone waiting to hear if their loved one is going to live
or die. So that's another place where I thought that genre and real experience could come
together and create something for the audience that they could enjoy, but also understand
the emotion. There's always that moment when you go into surgery. When you're in the bed
and they're about to wheel you off, and you say goodbye to whoever's there and you don't
know if you're going to come back. As I was making the drawing, I was trying
to find a way to sort of cobble together all my family members into an image. I took an
image of my family gathered together that was taken when I was married. It actually
includes myself in the image, and it has my wife in her wedding dress, and the rest of
my family sort of in wedding clothes. That drawing is about the possibility in that moment
of not surviving it, or the possibility of a future, in which you get married. There
are really some universal emotions or themes that transcend sex, race, culture. When you
really burrow down and start talking about death, sickness, love, relationships -- the
things that I try to deal with in my work are those very essential things.
AT NEW YORK CITY'S AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM, WE EXPLORE THE EXHIBITION "FOILED: TINSEL
PAINTING IN AMERICA. I'm Lee Kogan, curator emerita, at the American
Folk Art Museum. We're in the unique exhibition called "Foil:
Tinsel Painting in America." The use of metallic foil was an added technique
to an old technique going back to Renaissance Italy of reverse painting on glass.
This is a woman's art form that was popular from 1850-1890. They were displayed in the
dining room and parlor, in their time, and glowed in candlelight and later gaslight.
The imagery is largely floral therefore, there are wreathes, garlands, bouquets, vases, compotes,
filled with flowers, fruit and we see it was a time of great optimism, and these themes
- particularly the floral theme - shows abundance in plenty. Birds and fountains were other
subjects, which were very popular in tinsel painting, particularly parrots and peacocks.
At the time, the parrot was Queen Victoria's favorite pet. And the peacock was a symbol
of immortality. Also, we see...patriotism as an important
theme, we see religious themes, themes of family life, but there are also architectural
examples and landscapes. Tinsel paintings were primarily paintings
for the wall. But they took other forms but they took other forms as furniture, till-topped
tables, the inside of a box, a tray, the front of a book, they took many surprising other
forms as well. Before the age of mass production people made
their own games and made their own game boards. And during the 19th century, chess and checkers
were favorites. The technique of tinsel painting was a personal
art form. Tinsel paintings were given as gifts to family members and friends. Therefore,
there was no need to sign one's name. One of the most exciting discoveries in this
project was the identification of an actual tinsel painting practitioner -- Alice Knight.
She lived to be 103 and during her lifetime, practiced as an artisan professional. She
painted trays, she painted furniture, she painted landscapes, on oil, but she also painted
hundreds upon hundreds of tinsel paintings -- many of which she signed in pencil on the
back with her name and hometown. Outstanding is one that she did in several versions, which
turns out to be Act II of Swan Lake, the ballet by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
NEXT TIME ON COLORES!
FOUNDER OF SANTA FE'S INNOVATIVE DANCING EARTH CREATIONS, CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER, RULAN
TANGEN, SHARES HER VISION.
"I love that in dance you can become a snow storm, you can become an ancient ancestor,
you can become so many different things, you are not limited."
JEANGUY SAINTUS, FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF AYIKODANS DANCE COMPANY, TALKS ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE
OF HAITIAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE.
"If you want to cry, if you want to laugh, if you feel like you are mad, then I did my
job. Then I am glad with that."
THE HANDSPRING PUPPET COMPANY WON A TONY FOR THE LIFE-SIZED PUPPETS IN THE EMOTIONALLY
MOVING PLAY, WAR HORSE.
"This is Joey. He'll get to know you. He'll smell you. You just reach out. He's no different
from any other horse."
THE LEGENDARY APOLLO THEATER, STARTED IN 1934, MAKES IT'S WAY INTO THE 21ST CENTURY BEING
KNOWN FOR AN AUDIENCE THAT WILL GIVE AN HONEST RESPONSE.
"The audience is letting you know when they love you - and then it also causes trepidation
with artists because they know if they don't come correct on that stage, the audience is
gonna let them know."
UNTIL NEXT TIME, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING.