Coming up on Art Rocks, a Baton Rouge artist who's shedding light on the struggles experienced by African-American men.

I paint large paintings for the feeling that I have a behind the curtain glimpse at the inner workings of a theatrical production.

The lights play a very key point in the safety reference for the artists.

They're used to seeing a beam at a certain angle and an engaging science fiction expedition.

These stories up next on Art Rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, 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.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Please meet a Baton Rouge painter whose primary passion is to create art that captures the souls of African-American men based on struggles that have endured for centuries and continue today.

Mike Weary says that to find fuel for his work, he draws on many of his own experiences and emotions.

I don't paint for esthetics.

Paint for feeling and store.

I want you to pay attention to the painting.

I want you to engage with it.

I don't want it to be.

Oh, this is something to look pretty on my wall and you forget about it.

I don't want that to be the conversation.

I want there to be a deeper conversation.

A why while you're staring at the painting.

I use a darker style.

Gothic.

Dorian Gothic is what I phrased it as and is just a reflection of being black in the South.

Is how we have a good time.

Our culture is beautiful, we're beautiful.

But there's a very dark past with that and trying to cope with that.

I feel like in some way it symbolizes bringing light from the dark, but also just with value.

It shows more depth coming from those dark areas.

I painted James Baldwin because I usually paint people who are influential to me and through his readings and I listen to a lot of his speeches even back.

But the one line that always sticks out for me and hits me at my core.

He said to be Negro in America and to be relatively conscious is to be in a constant state of rage.

And my entire life I've always felt this state of rage and not really knowing how to place it other than in art.

The way he is so on the nose, he doesn't hold back.

He tells you exactly like it is.

And for me personally, I always felt like out of Gaslit as a child, it's like, I know I'm not crazy and I know these things are happening.

I know a lot of it has to do with my skin color and having someone like Baldwin explain it and say so clearly to me, in particular to young black men and black children in general and telling us about our history.

It's just a lot and it just hits home and it gives me and he gives me courage to just paint what I want to paint and speak on the issues that I want to speak on.

To see his painting of James Baldwin, it's almost like you're peering into his soul.

James Baldwin is the soul of America, because there were some things that he helped us to realize and to see.

And no matter how far we try to get away from it, we always come back to him in what he's written, a painting, Nelson Mandela, because I find that he was one of those revolutionaries that was lost in time.

They nice and him up.

They made him seem a lot less radical than he was.

Same with Martin Luther King and just being in apartheid and being in Africa in general.

Sometimes we forget just how much colonization affected that region is, not just America.

This is a global thing.

Racism in general is a white.

Supremacy in general is.

I want to uplift those figures that rail against the status quo of the world in general.

I grew up learning all these figures in our history.

My parents were very serious about teaching us our history more than just what our schools were telling us.

I found Junebug dangling from a rope.

That's the name of it.

And I have been having conversations with an older gentleman that would walk past my studio on a daily basis.

And the painting came about from just me looking at his face and saying, You know what?

I see a lot of story here.

And he told me about himself and he told me about him being an artist, actually, and conveniently, and for me to kind of make that connection.

And it's a weird thing.

It's like I paint these men and the story always has some type of relevance cross with other men and other people of color in general.

I actually had a man standing in front of the painting and he was just looking at it, and I walked up and I asked him, okay, you know, do you like it?

He was like, Yeah, man, it reminds me of my uncle also.

Okay, what about if I could just bring an emotion?

And he was saying his uncle was lynched in the eighties in Shreveport, and this entire painting, my writing stemmed from lynching and anti-lynching bills that hadn't been passed at the time yet.

And to have that context lay into it is just always eerie, otherworldly, sometimes.

The man's name is Brian, but we call him Junebug because the black community, everybody got along with Junebug or somebody in their family named Junebug, and that's the cultural tide I wanted to keep with us.

There's also a Junebug on his lip, and that's just signifying the other side of the white viewer that may see that and go, Oh, he's talking about the bug and trying to just correlate the humanity in Junebug, the person versus someone who may not see the human and only see the inside.

Some are dream 2020 is an extremely important painting for me, is the one that I kind of hoard and I try to just put it in exhibition and when it's not, I kind of just put off too.

I don't like too many people to see it.

It's like my baby.

It's important to me because I was creating it right around the pandemic and I suffer from extreme exhibiting sometimes, and the pandemic just heighten that for me.

And obviously that was around the time that we had the social unrest in 2020.

And it's just been odd because I painted this painting in February and March of that year and George Floyd was murdered in May that year.

But everyone sees this as a George Floyd painting and it's just eerie and otherworldly.

Sometimes how art mimics life is very personal for me.

And another painting that I really love is Teen Summit.

That one was extremely personal to me.

That was the 12 foot by six foot painting.

And the reason I painted that was from an experience I had.

We had a concert in New Orleans every year called Teen Summit, and at an afterparty I had a gun pulled in my face and that was the first time someone had put a gun in my face.

Unfortunately not the last, but it shook me to my core.

It was something that I've had excited about ever since.

It was a group of people that I knew.

So I had for the longest time didn't think that the situation was over with living with that and I lost a lot of friends over it, but I never talked about it through my life and that was my first time just expressing it.

And I wanted it to be loud and be just myself in it.

And I didn't really think a lot while I was painting it.

But it's extremely personal for me because all I can think about is what if I did die that day?

Like what would of my parents would have thought of me?

Just all these different questions that a 13 year old shouldn't be asking themselves posing in that is me, my wife and my son.

And then there's a second line image in the background of it.

Even though this is a current reference, it is about in general, the young men in New Orleans who fall victim to gun violence.

And it just hits me every time something happens in the city.

And the reason why I put the second line on the back is because in Louisiana or just in black culture in general, even in Africa, funerals, we we dance and we celebrate the promise of the the juxtaposition of having the mother holding her dying child and having the second line in the background, which is this is especially in Louisiana, in the south, it's like we sometimes blur that line between are we healing or are we just distracting ourselves from how it is down here?

Of the stories that I want to tell from my personal experiences or friends and, you know, different people in generations?

I'm an African-American male.

That's the that's the lens I see through.

And that's the my truest voice.

I paint large paintings for the feeling that I have, but I want this to be something noticeable.

I want it to be something that people have to stop and gaze at.

And I'm not thinking about how can I sell this?

It's about how can I get this message across, How can I get this story across?

I make the majority of my income in.

We'll put food on the table from doing live events, paint at weddings.

I painted corporate events, I painted festivals.

A lot of people want to see the process.

People have questions.

It encourages people, especially young people, to want to paint.

I get a lot of people saying, Oh man, I haven't thought about pain in years, but you got me inspired to do it again.

Most of my paintings, I paint fairly fast.

Everything is impromptu, every color I don't prefix, I just go straight to canvas.

Junebug was painted in two weeks.

Some of it was two weeks.

The man in a red dress.

I painted that in the day.

Rosa Parks was painted in 30 minutes and Jack Johnson was painted 30 minutes.

And you can kind of see that in the painting sometimes, like the Jack Johnson and Rosa Parks are very loose.

I use a full body acrylics, I use metals.

I use anything that'll just stay stiff.

I'll try to just stick it on there and just to give it a different texture, but mainly full body acrylics and metal, the different metals mixed in with those acrylics gives a different interest in textures to achieve the look in style.

In my paintings, through my strokes primarily, I'm extremely deliberate when I put a stroke down and normally traditional painting style, especially with portraits, will blend a lot of the edges of their strokes, will blend between values purposefully.

Don't do that.

And I believe that by leaving those gaps between each stroke and having those hard edges, it forces the audience to do a little bit more work between the painting.

It's not just, Oh, I'm looking at an entire eye.

Okay, this this is consisting of what seems to be a thousand strokes.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

But it forces you to pay attention that this isn't blended the way a typical painting would be.

Like you're Renaissance masters would blend those values and those edges to where you couldn't tell that there were any space between the strokes at all, which is commendable and extremely hard to do.

But I find, again, simplifying and stepping back and trying to force the audience to do a little bit more work.

Has the audience engaged with it a little bit more?

I paint on wood because wood is extremely sturdy.

I'm a chaotic painter.

Everything I do is impromptu and I use knives that I use different metals and certain linens and cottons won't really take that type of abuse.

So wood is very durable and it lasts for extremely long period of time.

I'm a self-taught artists.

I've been drawing since I was six years old.

My mom was an illustrator and I've been painting since I was 15.

So coming up on 20 years and it all started just from my mom showing me how to draw and then from knowing how to draw, you can pretty much do anything visually, artistically.

After that.

I saw the works in a studio.

He wasn't not there.

I did not know him, but I find myself looking through the glass.

People at the works and trying to figure out who's here and backwards.

Making Renaissance type works with the kind of Baroque look and all this kind of neoclassicism look to it and then expressionist colors and form It boggles my mind how he can be that creative, studying on his own in Louisiana, thought provoking art is all around.

The trick is knowing where to find it.

So here are some of our picks for standout exhibits coming soon to your part of the world.

For more on these exhibits and scores more cultural attractions, consult Country Roads magazine available in hardcopy or online, or to see or to share.

In the episode of Art Rocks Again, visit LTV dot org slash Art Rocks.

There's also an archive of all the Louisiana segments of the show available on LP B's YouTube page.

Cirque du Soleil has built an enduring reputation for the hallucinatory beauty and the jaw dropping athleticism of its shows.

So we're excited to be given an opportunity to go behind the scenes of six newest show, Cardio.

It tells the tale of a festive parade, as might be imagined by Mauro the Clown.

So let's go behind the curtain for a glimpse at the show and a chance to meet the performers who are bringing it to life.

And now we invite you into the world of cocktail.

Of course, it means cortege or procession comes for an Italian because the show tells a story of a clown who is dreaming about his own funeral, but in a carnival atmosphere.

You're going to see his friends from all over the world and different circuses coming to see him show all the amazing skills they have.

It's the telling of his loves and triumphs and faults all while the audience is being a part of it the whole time.

They get to sit and feel like they're on stage with him as he goes through these memories in his mind.

Even though the main theme of the show is his own funeral, the show is a celebration of life.

Ladies.

It takes us about a 12 hour day to set the show up from an empty floor to ready to go for the artist to arrive.

The first 9 hours of that is us getting the set, actually built, installed and everything.

Cable and the last 3 hours for the lighting department and the sound department is checking everything in a dark room.

They are going through each act of the show, every single moment of the show.

They need to go through that and make sure that we have the lights in the right position and the right color as well.

So they are checking the lighting.

We have the rigging team, also checking everything that we use to make our performance fly, not only the performance, but also flying apparatuses.

We have the automation team making sure that everything that moves on stage, on the floor in the air is also in place.

The lights play a very key point in the safety reference for the artists.

They're used to seeing a beam in a certain angle and a certain part of the set lit up.

That's where they know where they're at in a roll or a tumble.

And they can always stop right on the same spot because they know the edge of the light is where it is.

But it's a subtle thing we can play to help them be safer.

This show is very unique for any other Cirque du Soleil production because of the way the stage is set up.

It's right in the middle of the arena and the audience is sitting on both sides of it.

There's way, too, when you're watching the show, we see something extraordinary happening on stage and the reaction of people on the other side of the stage.

You have the feeling of the actors.

So you know how does it feel to be on stage and how do you see the reaction of people when they see something amazing happening in front of you?

You do have to change the way you perform.

You have to be a performer every angle.

That was something that took a little getting used to, like I've been in in other shows, but I've never been in a show where I'm being watched from every single angle.

There's moments where you you feel like nobody's missing a trick.

And if you make a mistake or something, you feel right in the middle of everyone's eyeline.

The creator of the show, Daniela Finzi Pascha, he wanted the technicians to also have some visibility because they're as important as our performers as well.

They are part of the show as well.

So by the end of the show, all the performers, they will look back to the center of the stage and all the technicians run and cross into a high five with each other from one side to the other.

It's a very small moment so that they are being part of the show somehow.

But it's beautiful to see that our director recognizes the hard work not only from people on stage, but also off stage as well.

We're here to set the mood and help suddenly influence people into completely leaving the world they're in.

And remember, they're not in an arena and feel like they've moved into wherever he is at any point, whether it's the warmth in the air or just a subtle little sound coming out of the speaker behind them, it's enough to just take them away to another world.

There is an amazing sound that comes out of almost every audience at some point during the show, which is just you hear them collectively all gasp at the same time, and it's the most spine tingling moment for somebody running the show because, you know, you've made an impact this much.

I'm reminded the only time our job titles matter is when the show is actually running.

We have 52 performers from 18 different nationalities.

They come from the most different backgrounds.

We have musicians.

You have singers, actors, dancers, people coming from gymnastic circuses.

School is a very mixed group.

We're about 110 people on the road together.

And when the show finishes at the end of the night, we eat in the same catering.

We're living in the same venues.

We travel together on the same plane or bus, and seeing these people from so many different places, working together and being able to put this beautiful piece of work on stage every week is definitely one of the best things that we could have.

When the show is over, we are 110 family members.

We're there for each others.

We support each other.

If you're having a bad day, somebody is going to be there to support you.

And if you're having an amazing day, you've got this 109 troupe behind you that wants to celebrate your accomplishments with you.

If you've ever wished that you could just open a hatch and escape into another world, we've got a story for you.

In Columbus, Ohio, there's an immersive art experience that invites visitors to do exactly that.

The 32,000 square foot other world installation is 40 rooms of large scale interactive art, mixed reality experiences and secret passageways, creating a surreal world of science fiction and fantasy.

So let's step inside.

Well, this is Scott Snyder over here, and he's sculpting yourself right now.

A spider creature head where needs Columbus on This is going to be the site of other world rights.

32 in some change thousand square foot interactive art installation that we're building.

It's kind of a combination of like a children's science center and an escape room and a haunted house and an art gallery.

So we're kind of mixing and matching a lot of different genres of art and entertainment.

We're hoping that it can appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds.

So when you arrive here, you're actually arriving at the headquarters of other world industries.

It's a company that is they've kind of doing this alternate realm exploration.

They sort of stumbled across this dream realm that's kind of like the base reality of it.

But once you go into this, this other world, there's all sorts of these little mini adventures almost.

So almost like different choose your own adventures that are loosely intertwined.

So when a visitor walks in, our goal is for you to be completely overwhelmed.

We really want you to not be able to predict what's around every corner.

It's almost like a page turn of like a graphic novel or a book where you turn that corner and just get like the moment.

That's our goal.

This is the church.

So what you're kind of seeing is the reaction of our sodium light.

What this does is it takes the color spectrum out of the room.

So part of the room scale activation is going to involve bringing that color spectrum back in.

So if we take a normal light, then it kind of brings back the color.

So kind of putting these scenic changes in the hands of the viewer.

Every single piece here we fabricated, in-house, designed and fabricated on our own.

So there's nothing that's been bought off the shelf from anywhere else.

It's all custom, one of a kind pieces.

So there's people with all sorts of different skill sets here to make something like this come together.

So kind of entering into the focal point of the space is their tree.

This is where we're kind of flexing the most muscles.

We have welding, scenic tech, textiles.

There's also going to be some interactive elements that can change the color of it.

So pretty much everything that's making Otherworld Otherworld is rolled up right in our center.

Almost every single surface is interactive in some way.

There are a ton of LEDs.

There's a lot of interactive projection mapping.

We have some interesting new concepts I'm trying out with projection mapping, so we have a lot of like laser laser tracking.

We're tracking people throughout rooms using light out, which is the same technology used in self-driving cars.

We have these this 3D infinity room that has a three dimensional array floor to ceiling of like led noodles inside of a room where all the walls are mirrors.

So kind of what we're in right now is a giant three dimensional leaded pixel grid.

That is then maps by our tech team.

So upon opening, there is actually these large scale 3D animations that we can put in this room and put some music.

So it's not just kind of a Zambian fact, but you can actually have like light physically traveling in 3D space through the room.

This is also the standard selfie room.

This isn't an escape room.

This is more like a children's museum.

So, you know, you have to think about how is this going to be used, how is it going to wear over time?

How can we reduce the number of mechanical elements If we have to use mechanical elements, what kind of materials can we use and how can we make sure that the electronics stay nice and nestled and don't get damaged?

So I'm the production director.

My role is to make sure that all the things that we design on paper get built in real life.

And then my favorite part is the creative problem solving, where it's just like weird challenges come up when you're making things that no one's ever done before.

It's really great to work with people who specialize in like the physical world.

So that way I can focus on like electronics and code, which are the things that I'm good at.

Another thing is we have this interactive harp, this Spiderweb harp device that we're figuring out how to rig up into the air 12 feet up so you can still pluck it and there's not too much vibration going on the sensor that it keeps tripping, but there's enough vibration that it trips the sensor and then kind of creates the harp effect.

So this is the same system.

This is another one of our many narratives within the space.

Without revealing too much, there is this seamstress character who has a bunch of spider children and is creating these kind of fluffy animals to feed to the spiders.

Or is she?

We'll find out.

So all of this webbing was hand webbed, hand glued, all the spiders were welded together, custom and then upholstered.

So when it's fully operational, when you pluck the colored threads, you get a room activation where it actually becomes a giant harp.

I think this project has been able to bring together a lot of creatives and has given them the opportunity to speak up and have their ideas be heard and have them communicate it and challenge each other.

And I think we're showing a production model here where kind of everyone gets to play to their fullest.

And I'm just hoping that later that we can set an example for that and more creative spaces around the city.

I'll just come check it out.

It's me.

This is what I want to do forever.

So, I mean, yeah, there's nothing else like it anywhere.

And that'll be that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But that's okay, because you can see share episodes of the show at LTV, Dawgs, Art Rock anytime.

And if you love these sorts of stories, remember country Roads makes a useful companion for getting to grips with Louisiana's boundless cultural treasures each and every month.

So until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI be 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.