next on, rocks.

Baton Rouge contemporary art pioneer Jim Johnson.

A man who has mastered many mediums and woodcut, printmaking, especially in multi-color.

Every color that you're going to print, you have to carve a separate block.

Musicians collaborate to create a sound garden, weaving culture into costumes.

That's all.

Next on Art rocks.

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Hello and welcome to Art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

If you don't already know Jim Johnson, it's time you met this Louisiana original who has spent more than six decades pushing back the boundaries of contemporary art in Baton Rouge.

Be it painting woodcuts for printmaking, or creating sculptures out of bronze and wood.

Back in 1965, Johnson was one of eight young artists who launched what evolved into Baton Rouge Gallery.

And when you look at his collection, you begin to understand why the institution has endured to become the oldest continually operating public gallery in the country.

I like to do anything in nature to birds, animals, wildlife in general.

But I like to do them as accurately as possible.

I'm very interested in the human body because, I was majored in zoology, and I took, I even took, went up to comparative anatomy, which is pretty tough cause it compared everything, all animals up to the human body in everything from, the nervous system to the musculature and bones.

Everything.

And so when I changed over to art, I pretty much kept, the anatomy.

Correct.

If I could rescale and woodcut printmaking, especially the multicolor.

Every color that you're going to print, you have to carve a separate block.

It has to be designed for that color, whether it be the black block or the blue block or the red or the yellow, whatever.

And you have to have a way of registering all these blocks so that when you print one color, you can take the sheet off and hang it to dry the next day, come with a different block, a different color, and lock it in place.

With this framework that I have and put the sheet back in exactly the same position it was before to print that color.

Most of them are around 3 or 4 different blocks.

for the most common, I've got my wild turkey print.

I had to use seven different blocks for it.

That was a lot of carving, because my blocks that I'm doing these large prints with are 24 by 32.

I do some, single color every night and usually black.

I love doing the bronze sculptures.

That's additive.

And you can create and do whatever you want.

The bronze is the lost wax method.

You you create your, your art in wax.

After you have the wax figure, you then cast that in a mold and, and in such a way that you can take them all apart and make reproductions of the wax.

It takes a long time and quite a bit of money.

Every time I've cast one of these pieces of bronze, you're talking about 700 to $1000 just for the casting for me, because I don't have a foundry.

Plus I have to do all the chasing and finishing it and, patina using it and even mounting it on whatever the rocking horse is.

That's something I started.

I had to cut the pieces out and then put them together, you know, for the legs.

Everything in such a way that especially on the first one I did because I didn't paint the first one, now I just use it.

It was natural cypress from a sugar mill, and I wanted that that old cypress look to it was beautiful.

The other two that I did, I used a poplar, which is a non-descript type of white wood, which I painted them one up, painted a dapple gray, and the other one I painted an Indian or war pony, you know, with the wood war paint on it and the feathers and hair and all that stuff.

But those took 10 to 12 years to do, because I just work on them off and on, because I, I knew they were the market for it and not down here anyway in Louisiana.

They just took such a long time to do.

Same with decoys.

It just requires so much work and everything.

I couldn't make a living making.

I've been buying some of that snake or cypress from a man down in French settlement.

These pieces of wood that I'm doing, they've been in the mud for over 200 years out in Moore.

Paul Small, I'm buying the outside pieces that, before they get to the good lumber on the inside of the trunk, and they have barnacles and marine wormholes and all that kind of stuff, which I love that the texture of the outside base.

I'm leaving that wood, what you call a live, texture on the outside of my pieces.

And I'm carving into the beautiful wood that's on the inside.

And, I'm just loving that wood.

I've always been drawing all my life.

This painting here, I, I had I was down in Florida, heading home on the turnpike, going 90 miles an hour.

And I looked out across the field on the other side, and they had about 20 or 30 of those whooping cranes out in that field.

And the field was black.

It had been filled up, and they were out there doing that courtship dance, and it was beautiful.

I almost ran off the road.

You're back and you can't turn around.

I had cameras and everything, but you couldn't turn around for 20 miles.

So I just had to remember all that.

And, you know, you can.

I can get the anatomy of the places, but I had to remember the way they were dancing out there in that field.

And don't do any commission.

I'm going to do only the art I want to do for myself.

If someone wants to buy it five.

If they don't, fine.

I'll pass it on to my grandchildren and.

No matter where you live in Louisiana, opportunities to connect with the arts are everywhere.

If only you know where to look.

So here's a list of some of what's going on in the arts and culture all around the state.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, keep your eyes peeled for a copy of Country Roads Magazine.

And while we're at it, PBS's Rock's website features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any episode again, just log on to LPB dawg.

Skipping across the state line now to Texas, where musicians of many genres are gathering to build on San Antonio's music scene with what's being called a music garden.

Take a listen.

This is a concerted effort to kind of like combined forces with people.

If somebody is good at programing drums, what you get with somebody who's got like kind of cool keyboard bits and then bam, you might have something on.

But I think that's what big cities have is they just have more people doing that.

We kind of need some center for people to do that.

We have libraries.

We have, geek building type things for tech people, but we don't really have anything like that for for music.

So, x I am Edwin Stevens.

I am founder and CEO here at San Antonio Sun Garden.

It's a co-working space, where the number one, only co-working space, really, for musicians here in San Antonio.

we've got normal business hours, 95 and musicians or small record labels or anybody that's a musical entrepreneur.

Creative, really.

You can come down here.

and it's a place to be around like minded people and other creatives.

Let me try.

in the city where you don't have a concentration of music industry and you don't have, the opportunity to network and meet other musical producers who are using these kind of, these approaches to building their business.

You don't learn because a lot of that happens.

The whole business is relationships.

And so, that's been something that people have really enjoyed a lot is being able to come down here, as somebody who does know from a legal perspective and from a business perspective, what steps do I need to take, to be more professional sometimes as people who are a couple of steps behind, and sometimes they need to be around people who are a few steps ahead, but then some of us guys who are a few steps ahead and like we learn a lot from some of these younger guys who are, thinking in ways that, you know, that I've never thought of a. I heard about Soundgarden at a local show.

I just moved back and I was trying to get into the local music scene.

We have metal.

We have to know.

We have hip hop, we have jazz.

We have, electronic dance music.

We have so many more.

But you never know because it's not in one place.

So I think one of the great things about Soundgarden is doing here is that they're bringing all of these different genres together, and they're making a big community out of something so separate.

Geographically, San Antonio was sort of offset from the rest of the country, but we're very close to Mexico, so we have this great confluence of cultures.

But it's difficult for people to, like, believe like a band from San Antonio can become a nation or a worldwide sensation.

But there's several who have, because I think musically we have tons of talent, and it's a it's a cool culture to come through.

When I was growing up, I really wanted to move to another bigger city.

But right around that time, I met Michael Michael Morales, who kind of, hired me to play in his band.

And it was through him that I ended up doing these productions and learning how to produce records for him.

And so I ended up staying here, and I've been working with all my friends, and it's been fantastic.

It's been great.

The town really could use something like this here.

It feels like you would be around a collective of people who really do want to just start creating things together.

only wanted to make you feel you to form.

It's all about just being around, getting all the creatives, all the musicians in one space, concentrated.

I think that there's something to having that critical mass that, you have an opportunity for, just magic and a collision of ideas, made in the day.

Oh, my hope is that story, because I think people are get attached to stories so much more that the stories of these different artists start to emerge.

And you think about Eric and Joe like, they're such interesting people, some of the stuff that they've done, their catalog of work that like, nobody knows about, it's just like really performance of art, like in a whole nother like, you know, people will discover it someday, like, oh my gosh, these guys are here in this whole season.

So we'd like to tell that story now, and we'd like to get it all out to everybody, to go to, cool.

you you're full.

at of, we made a mistake.

made a mistake.

Getting out of town for a bit, we went to Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts to experience their production of cabaret.

Kim David Smith, a cabaret veteran of New York City stages, gave us an insider's tour of the show.

Here in this well-worn club a delirious, free wheeling frenzy of song, sex and sensation.

But this cabaret is on the verge of collapsing.

The Third Reich has all but consumed the world outside.

If you could see her smile.

You.

What is one?

The hot whore.

If you could see us for my eyes I got you it.

For the classic musical cabaret which we caught in rehearsal.

Open this week at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis.

It's star playing the emcee is one of New York's hottest real life cabaret acts.

Kim David Smith.

I'm talking about tonight in Rotterdam, where the right tonight, people of all the town would do what they could in that night's neighborhood of black Max.

Cabaret is, I think, one of the most ephemeral, genre of performing.

It can be whatever anybody says it is.

It's drag, it's high brow, it's low brow, or it's like me deeply investigating, Weimar Republic culture and interjecting Kylie Minogue and the Supremes and sneaky ways the Australian native has been fastened by cabaret performance since he was a teenager, and his father gave him a Marlene Dietrich biography.

He was mesmerized by the German chanteuse she was so, masculine, sexual and so clever with, the so clever with what she had available beyond this modern day cabaret.

It's the storied music halls of the Weimar Republic that have captivated Smith most.

That's where in the 1920s and early 30s, Berlin's avant garde lights burned brightest.

The scene was kicking with swing dancing, high flying ax and jazz.

Censorship was out.

Satire was in and in this free and easy circle, female black and gay performers could take center stage.

It was relief for a city dispirited by postwar financial strain, political turbulence and poverty.

But the era was short lived.

Hitler's rise brought the Weimar down, having crushed civic and artistic freedom.

A few years after the Allied occupation of the city, cabaret came to Hollywood.

Berlin born Dietrich resurrected the nightclub culture for the big screen.

In a foreign affair, foreigners could leave Hold on during the.

Today, the gender fluid Smith dons Dietrich's signature top hat for his cover of illusions, a tune written specifically for the songstress he would love for illusions.

Tom, I built songs I think a lot of, trans meaning a song is about spellcasting, it's about magic and really like conjuring, conjuring images in people's minds.

but also drawing them in with with incantations and things.

It's what brought him here to the Cape Playhouse, a storied theater is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year.

Known as the Place Where Broadway Goes to Summer, the Playhouse employed Betty Davis as an usher before she landed on its stage.

Henry Fonda and his young daughter Jane appeared here, as did Humphrey Bogart and a host of other A-list thespians.

So what is it like to be in this summer theater tradition, especially here, where Betty Davis was an usher at one point?

I mean, that is the most exciting aside from Gertrude Lawrence's ghost still occupying the space.

I can totally.

It's the land of 40,000 gazebos.

Cabaret is the show Smith has always yearned to play live, strong, with the friends.

To me, he takes on the role of the emcee, the character who guides us through the demise of the Weimar period with an edge.

Who is the MC in the musical cabaret?

Well, nobody knows, and I like to keep it that way.

I like to preserve his mystery.

Sometimes I'm like, well, he's a day laborer who, like, then likes to put on a little, like kerchief and dance with gorillas in the evening and, or I think sometimes he's like a vampire or a ghost, and he just shows up when the sun goes down.

Well, what we do know for the cabaret artist playing the cabaret emcee, he's a master mystery.

Alaskan artist Clarissa Rizal creates weavings and button blankets that are highly prized for their unique beauty and the stories they hold.

In this segment, we'll see how art reflects history to preserve a people's heritage.

Yeah.

I may be coming from the okay, how do you.

The reason why I weave, it's like no other medium that I've ever worked in that connects me to the past and the present and the future.

I take the fiber from an animal and a plant.

And I weave them into these ceremonial robes.

And in so doing, it is the act of the weaving that puts me in touch with all that there is.

And it's the wearer who feels all that power and the energy.

Our art was depicted in in Everything.

And that was a way to portray, you know, our identity.

You know, where we came from.

Since it was a matrilineal society.

but also it was our written language.

We wore our history in our regalia.

We still wear it.

We didn't have a written language.

It was all oral translated, you know, passed on from generation to generation.

But with the oral history, there was always an art object that went with every story, that went with every historical event.

The stories come from everyday life.

Whatever happens, whatever it is that you want to preserve for future generations, we want to, tell the people where they're from.

What happened?

How did they come to be where they are?

It's not just livelihood.

It's part of retaining history.

I call this piece resilience.

And it's resilience struck out, Rob.

And what that is, it's like it's a visual document of the ability of a people to adapt to outside forces that came into the culture.

In that image, you'll see the foundation of our clan system, the eagle and the raven in the center.

And then there's the outside influences.

Within the eagle and the raven, you'll see the Alaska Native Brotherhood A and B and the A and S, and these civil rights groups gave fight to the rights of the indigenous people.

And then at the bottom is, the tail.

And what that represents the it's the C Alaska Heritage Institute logo.

And they are now the present day rudder.

As far as helping to retain and perpetuate the native cultures in present day Western society.

Resilience, the ability to adapt so that we continue to to thrive.

I keep stories alive because there's always something to learn.

And even when the story is repeated over and over and over again and you hear them, you know, 20 times in your life or 100 times in your life, right?

You at that stage in your life, you always get something else.

And the story.

They are that is new is high up.

They look little socks or socks.

CB socks, I look at them when we tell our stories.

They are a guide from the past through now into the future.

That's why we tell stories.

Like.

Don't have.

That's going to do it for this edition of Art rocks.

But remember, you can always watch episodes of the show@lpb.org slash, rocks and if that's not enough, Country Roads Magazine makes a great resource for finding out what's going on in all areas of the arts all around the state.

So until next week, I'm James Fox Smith, and thank you for watching.