Coming up, this time on rocks.

Louisiana wildlife like you've never seen a museum dedicated to contemporary glass art and what it really means to be immersed in art.

These stories up next on Art Rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on lab offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

We've all heard the old saying that the early bird catches the worm.

So it stands to reason that if you want to catch the bird, you have to get up early.

Indeed.

Lafayette photographer Gary Myers does that rising hours before the sun to be in place to photograph wildlife at the golden hour, which is to say right as dawn breaks his Gary to explain why his passion for photographing Louisiana wildlife keeps getting him out of bed in the morning.

Welcome to my office.

Living in Lafayette, I can go 80 miles in any direction.

100 miles at the most and find a rookery or a place to shoot or birds or feeding I like every aspect of birds as my favorite, whether they're feeding or fighting or breeding.

There's just all kinds of things that they do.

And I tend to lean toward action shots where they're doing something.

Their wings are in a certain position.

I like the birds in flight shots, and in order to do that, you have to have a fast shutter speed.

With digital photography nowadays, everybody can go out and take a pretty decent picture.

So you kind of have to have a niche specialty or something that you need to kind of make you stand out from the rest.

Watching, emerging, and doing it for so many years.

I know their habits and their mannerisms and what they're fixin to do, and the chicks are so different than the adults.

And so just to watch them lay their eggs and build the nest and then the chicks hatch and then grow up and it is fun to watch and document through the whole cycle.

I've been told I've had the patience of do sometimes just sit there for hours waiting for something to happen, but I don't use a tripod much.

So I'm kind of with the camera waiting, waiting, wait and wait and hold in my arms and get tired.

And inevitably when I finally get enough and put it down and that's when something happens, a lot of times I get lucky and gets the the shot or whether it's a bird taking off or waiting for the parent bird to fly in and feed the baby and get those shots.

A lot of patience is required of stuck myself in the middle of some woods and sitting down with spiders on me and snakes crawling by just to get a shot of a bobcat or leaning on a black bear.

So that's always fun and exciting.

Gets the adrenaline going.

I recently did a series of pictures on birds landing and most of them egrets, some small birds and then I did another series of them taking off the take off shots.

Things were up and fixing to push now for the thrust to leave the branch.

And so you have to be ready for that shot.

So I try to have my settings correct and just be ready for anything and everything.

A lot of stuff is surprisingly just spur of the moment.

And if you have the right settings and you click, then you can get it.

Other times I'm just focused on one thing and I just know kind of what that bird is going to do.

Just from years and years of watching them and studying them and waiting bird rookeries, you have snow egrets cattle, egrets, little blue hair and roseate spoonbills, great egrets, great blue herons.

You also have yellow crowned night herons, black ground night herons.

And so all these birds kind of mist together.

It's like a communal type thing, their safety in numbers, and most of them nest where alligators are present.

Alligators actually provide them protection.

There's alligators there.

You get less predators swimming out to the trees and climbing and decimating the eggs, whether it's snakes or raccoons or whatever kind of a predator, the alligators actually protect them.

Now they do get their share of food from the mess.

The object of the fight and dance around and try to get fed and they get knocked out of the nest.

Or you might have one bird jump in and try to take over a nest from another species and knock the birds out.

Nature's kind of brutal sometimes.

Well, I spent a lot of time and photography.

I go out as often as I can.

A lot of people avoid shooting into the sun.

I kind of do it on purpose sometimes just to get the backlit feathers and just a unique kind of picture.

When the sun first comes over the horizon and they're shining on your subject that you're shooting.

It's called the Golden Hour, Golden Light That can be good because it gives you a little bit different hue on your birds when it gets up a little higher.

It starts getting brighter.

And so you kind of change settings the whole time.

You can go and shoot before daylight, but with low light like that, you have to have an ISO and a slow shutter speed.

And then late in the evening with the sunset, same thing, you just turn around and shoot the other way We're sitting at PJ's farm near Bill Platt, and it's a working farm to be known as causing his lake.

There's a rookery on the property here.

The management has allowed people to come and shoot.

They have fishing passes, they have photography passes, and you do have to pay to get in and shoot.

There's a daily thing.

There's a yearly membership.

They've been kind enough to in trust me, with leading the photographers as their guide out into the rookery area to get a close up shots of the birds in the rookery, which is a fine line.

You don't want to get too close and spook them off, but you want the people that are paying you to be able to get good shots.

I love coming here.

I go to Lake Martin, I go to buy you.

Been watching the Jeff Mason Anderson Lake go down to Morgan City area for bald eagles go down to the coast.

Some more point Holly Beach for pelicans and shorebirds and other part time of the year.

I just love shooting hummingbirds it's the bees, it's the butterflies.

It's the bird, it's the bear, it's the bobcats, it's the anything starts with a bee plus anything else.

Wildlife.

I'll just shoot anything and everything is just fun.

I'll sell a few prints here and there.

One of my favorite ones and most popular is one called Light Through Paradise.

And it's a great egret and big white bird flying through Lake Martin with the cypress and the moors in the background.

And they had the lily pads and the lotus flowers in the foreground.

I've actually found this picture all over the internet, people using it as their background.

I found sites offering it free for download for wallpaper for their computer.

That's why I usually downsize my photos that I post online so people can't really blow them up and make money.

And then I have one with two egrets that are just kind of side by side and they have the breeding plumage and all the pin feathers.

They're on an angled blog and they're both standing next to each other.

And it's just kind of a unique picture with the breeding plumage.

The Rosette Spoonbill is probably my favorite bird.

It's only available in certain parts of the United States.

People come from all over the sea and they're unique.

One minute they're really graceful.

And the other minute they're really goofy.

A lot of them are here year round.

They do nest here, which is a fun to watch when they're chicks and they get their mating colors.

They're breeding colors over the years, the birds kind of change yearly, and one year you may have less than others, but every time we've had like a La Nina weather situation, they have been a little late.

You know, when you had the El Nino on there, about right on time.

So a lot of that is just weather pattern, but there are less birds now than there used to be.

And a lot of it's because of pesticides and habitat laws.

But here in Louisiana, there's a lot of stuff that actually is showing up more, and that could be because of the climate.

Birds, like from Lampkin which is never here in Louisiana until a few years ago because we had these invasive apple snails.

The Lampkin eats apple snails.

And so they showed up in Louisiana and now they're getting pretty plentiful.

They're nesting here.

Now, we got the crested Karikari, which was mostly a South American bird and mostly in Texas and South Florida, or they're in Louisiana now.

So a lot of birds kind of showing up.

I follow the birders.

The birds are great for saying, Oh, I saw this rare bird here, and they'll get the exact location and sometimes I'll go chase them so I can get a picture of them.

There was a ring, Kingfisher and Lake Martin back in 2014 that one of the birds saw.

I went and got a lot of good shots of that.

It's supposed to be in South America and Mexico had a few sightings in South Texas, but the one here was the furthest east it's ever been seen.

And it was that Lake Mark right in our backyard.

I do a lot of the landscapes with Cypress in the Moors.

Those are real popular with the sunsets.

And if it's got a bird and that's just an added bonus, that's my most popular social media is how you get noticed.

I have a personal page, my Gary Myers page, and then I have image after one page, which is I'm just a bit of business page.

They're basically mirrors of each other.

It's all photography.

There's no religion, no politics, it's just pictures of wildlife.

My image on a one page, I've got 130 334,000 followers.

I have probably seven or eight external hard drives full of pictures.

I've got thousands.

I could quit taking pictures today and post one every day for the next ten years.

Sharing it with people really makes me happy because some people can't get out and do it anymore.

They just kind of live vicariously through you.

These have pictures that they just enamored with and like they're kind of living it through through you and it it just makes you feel good to be able to share it when we expose ourselves to the artistic perspectives of others, we get to see the world through a different set of eyes.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits and events in the arts coming soon to museums and galleries in your part of the world.

For more about these and loads more events in the arts, visit L.P.

The dot org slash art rocks.

While you're there, you'll find links to every episode of the program.

So to see or to share any segment again, visit LP again across the chemistry behind Making Glass has been around for thousands of years.

But in St Petersburg, Florida, the Imagined Museum focuses on highlighting the artwork of the American studio glass movement, which flourished in the 1960s and seventies with more than 500 pieces on display.

Museum goers get to explore this remarkable creative outpouring in its entirety through you.

I think it's important to understand even what Studio Glass is.

As I tell the visitors as they come through, you know, they hear the term studio glass, but then have no idea, have no idea was even a movement.

So why do we call it studio glass is the first question.

In the early 1960s, there were ceramic artists and other sculptors who wanted to work in the medium of glass prior to that time, believe it or not, all the glass that was being manufactured was being manufactured, are being produced, was being produced in factories.

So in 1962, Harvey Littleton was the first pioneer who determined that he was going to create the furnace that could go and be in an artist's studio so that the artist individually and independent from the factory could create their art.

And that's pretty much how the movement was born.

Believe it or not, they are truly was one of his first students in the first MFA program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to study glass.

That was a pretty important period of time in the sixties when, you know, these creatives have come together and with the idea that they were going to transform sculpture by Abe, by being able to make it work in glass and have the transparency and the reflection of light that prior to that time had not been possible.

Hence Studio Glass Furnace in the studio.

The museum opened at the end of January in 2018.

We have a wonderful benefactor by the name of Trish Duggan.

Trish decided that she wanted to open a museum.

Then she determined that it was going to be a studio glass museum, and she worked with a colleague, Corey Hansen.

Who is the president of the Habitat Galleries in Royal Oak, Michigan, and they discussed what would be the collection and what they would like to show.

And Corey helped her understand that there was not another museum in the United States that showed the history of the studio glass movement and showing that solely there were there's other glass museums, and they have the history of glass, but they have it from the beginning of time.

So there was no museum that just was focused on this history independently of anything else.

Corey set out and worked with all of the artists and collectors in the area and put together a collection of 500 pieces, 55 artists covering 55 years.

And so Trish bought the collection for the museum, and that's what you see here today.

And in these galleries part of the collection we had was of Paul Danker.

It's work from the earlier part of his career to the later part of his career.

So you actually can see an evolution of his work as well as when you're in the first nine galleries down here that you can see the evolution of many of our other artist's work and and technique that they put into it.

Paul Stankiewicz is like the he is the maestro of the paperweight.

And I really just hate to diminish that concept by saying paperweight because really they are beautiful orbs with and wide.

Would we call it unseen world just because there's, there's basically in that tiny little glass ball is is a world that few people see.

I mean, it's the world that Paul Tankard has put together in his mind.

And when you look at those glass orbs, all of the flowers, the insects, the human forms, there's little tiny ants, all of those elements that are in there were actually done with a torch and a rod of glass providing all of those extra details.

So when you look at it, they're just match local magical worlds inside of these really perfectly formed glass balls.

It's one of those shows you'll have to get close, you know, to to truly appreciate it.

We have this opportunity not only having this gorgeous collection, but we have the opportunity to create programing that does inspire, that does uplift you, not to just really have to be focused with studio glass, but we can open that door a little wider.

That gets to where, you know, the spark of our humanity, which is the arts in a much broader sense.

Many Native American tribes carry on the ancient tradition of basket weaving far more than just a vessel for storing or carrying stuff in Native American culture.

A basket can also tell a story, teach a lesson, or serve as a vessel for preserving and transmitting memory from one generation to the next.

So let's see how it's done everything is connected, and that's what makes you so strong, and especially in some of these other materials.

So special is that it's part of this life cycle.

It's part of the earth, it's part of these things that are native to this area, just like we are each basket tells a story.

Some stories have purpose.

Some stories have meanings for each individual person.

You might be going through a hard time, and so you would just make a basket to help you out of that dark space.

I think it's about bringing people together and being able to share the traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation, from our ancestors come back.

So you just eyeball it about where it's going to be and I've been doing Tulley now for about, say, 15 years.

And what I like from it is talking to the kids about we have a plant that has given its life to us, and we need to treat that life with care, respect, to the process that's part of our culture.

Our kids sometimes will get caught up with the games that, that they can play on their phones or the TVs I don't think we're losing it.

I think we're just not taking the time to, to understand it and gather it and that's what we need to do.

And I think today a lot of youth are having a hard time figuring out who they are or what it means to be Indian.

Or or anything like that.

Growing up, we didn't have the luxury of knowing a lot of things traditionally, you know, a lot of them we've learned later.

And so the connection was kind of I think it was disconnected just slightly and it's nice to know that we're making it again and that hopefully nobody forgets and we don't have any type of other things that interrupts that knowledge.

Again, I just basketry tells the story of how our people have survived.

It's the one thing that remains constant in our in our culture because for us, everything is connected, especially, you know, speaking as a native person in general.

We you know, everybody always separate things, but everything is connected.

The baskets and the ceremonies and the string and the food and the land and the stories and the animals attention, everybody.

We had a young lady last year.

She did a met and she came back and she did a bigger one.

Her name's Sally to get this beautiful piece of artwork that you made, that's that special because not everybody can do that, you know?

And so we see value in every single thing that's done.

You know, you have little kids right now that are gathering and they're making little truly ducks or truly maps, you know, and for us, those are like the most beautiful things ever because that's that's what this is all about, is passing on that tradition.

Everybody that makes something is part of this big collective of people that are creative and that can make something out of nothing seeking those people out that know how to do it and, you know, and sharing their knowledge.

And then, you know, and that's the wonderful thing about this is people teaching other people.

So I think that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to preserve that knowledge and promote it in different ways.

It's like the essence of our community, you know, it's so it's it's part of us you find your faith we're off to Englewood, Colorado, now for a look at Nature Obscura, an immersive self-guided exploration through a surrealist forest that combines art and sculpture with the latest in augmented and digital technologies.

A chance to lose one's self amid trees and fantastical woodland creatures.

Nature Obscura encourages exploration and discovery through light and wonder immersive art to me, is an experience that completely envelops the viewer.

It's multi-layered.

There's visual.

Obviously, there could be audio that could be sent working with Prince Magic, we knew we wanted to do an immersive project.

We knew we wanted to be around nature.

So we partnered with them in addition to about 30 other artists in total.

Prince Magic is an immersive art company whose mission is to harness the power of art to transform how people look at themselves.

And the world nature obscura is is big.

It's about 6000 square feet.

You want to manage the space above.

So we have paid as much attention as possible.

To installing art above as well as on the floor.

So now you're sort of physically completely surrounded and then we'll layer other sensory inputs on top of that we had to use a variety of techniques, a lot of projection mapping.

There's also Arduino technology sensor based technologies.

So if you move in front of this sensor, it'll trigger a reaction.

The augmented reality application that compliments the exhibit had to be quick to understand it had to be intuitive because in all honesty, we don't want people searching through menus when they should be taking in the space so augmented reality gave us an awesome opportunity to allow these characters that otherwise couldn't have a dialog with the visitor to be able to speak.

And since most great journeys are performed in words, that's where we focus our attention What makes this exhibit so compelling is it allows you and it facilitates exploration.

There's a certain beauty that their relationship with the piece is their own choice in the exploration.

So some people will find certain things that others won't it brings that sense of playback technology will really play a monster role in the future of the arts.

When it's done right, it's going to surprise a lot of people they'll feel a sense of wonder that they didn't have before and that'll be that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, there are plenty more episodes of the show at LP B dot org slash art rocks.

And if it's arts and culture that cranks your trek to country roads, magazine makes a great guide for discovering cultural adventures all across the state.

So until next week, I've been James Fox Smith, and thank you for watching West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LP, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you