Major production funding for Art Rocks!

is provided by East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

The library's art collection includes local and regional artists and highlights the diverse styles, themes, and techniques of their work.

The collection is located at branches throughout the parish or online at EBRPL.com.

And by generous support from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

This week, Art Rocks!

is diving deep into the heart of Acadiana.

There, we'll meet husband and wife metalsmith Pat and Suzanne Juneau who have been forging the framework of fine craft in Louisiana for more than five decades.

We'll speak with Terry Palmer, manager at Lafayette's Sans Souci Gallery, about how the Juneau's mentorship is still guiding up and coming artists today.

And while we're in Cajun country, we'll look back at the legacy of New Iberia native George Rodrigue.

All that this time on Art Rocks!

Hello and welcome to Art Rocks!, the series that invites you into the studios and shares the stories of Louisiana artists both established and emerging.

I'm James Fox-Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine, and today I'm perched on the porch of Old Crow Gallery in Saint Francisville.

We're here because Old Crow has the examples of Pat Juneau's colorful metalwork that you see behind me.

Pat is one half of a metal smithing duo, and with his wife Suzanne, they are recognized throughout Louisiana as pillars of their craft and their community.

The Juneaus helped to establish the Louisiana craft skilled in the 1990s, and now their children, Andre and Angelique, hold equal billing in Juneau Metalworks.

We just visited the Sans Souci Gallery in Lafayette, which presents work by the Juneaus alongside that of hundreds more Louisiana Crafts Guild members.

So let's listen, as gallery manager Terry Palmer explains how the Juneau family is carrying the torch for Louisiana's fine craft community.

When it comes to the Juneaus and the crafts community in Louisiana, they are a driving force.

They really are because they attend so many festivals.

I really don't know how they do it, but they are always there helping.

They're always helping the artists.

They're helping the festival.

They're helping whatever they can do because they know it's important to Louisiana and it's important to any community to have a showing of art within that community, and they're on top of it.

As long as I can remember, the Junos have been affiliated with the craft skill.

Pat and Suzanne, Andre and Angelique always support the Louisiana craft skill.

They're always there if anything's needed.

Suzanne Juneau does a very good job, and she's been the standards head for many years.

I couldn't even tell you how long it's been.

She's always been, it seems like.

But she just makes sure that when someone comes in wants to be a member, that we have a member who's already established on the jury to judge their work.

If they do not make it the first time, we do offer a mentorship so we can get them to get their standards up and become a member.

She's going to help artists get into the craft skill because she wants to see them succeed.

Pat's the same way.

Andre the same way.

Andre will will take someone aside and tell them exactly what they need to do to make their artwork acceptable to the craft skill.

Angelique and Andre, following in their parents footsteps, is one of the most unique things I've witnessed in our art community.

Rarely do you have that kind of camaraderie within a family.

Andre and Pat do their yard art, which is must be almost in every house or yard in Lafayette.

Pat█s even done a portrait of my wife and myself, and we have it hanging on the wall in my house.

I will have customers come in and go, oh, I bought that up in Nashville, or I bought that, you know, one of those pieces in another state and yeah, that's right.

Because they attend all of these festivals.

Suzanne's and Angelique█s jewelry creates an idea for people to think.

I mean, they do some.

For instance, they do some of these little pins that are little women and sisters are women who have sisters will come in and buy.

Oh, that's a sister pen.

There'll be two or there'll be three of these little women in these pens, and they're going to buy them because they are sisters pens or.

And then there's other themes that they do, but it's always something you can relate to.

These are some signature pieces of Pat and Andre Juneau and they're really do a great job on faces.

Very moving, but we sell a lot of flowers.

They're made out of aluminum, very light, and they're coated with car lacquer.

The way I understand it.

And they will last forever.

Last week I sold two, two foot and four one foot flowers to one couple so they could decorate their patio and yard.

And it's amazing how many people come in just to buy their flowers.

That's what we sell the most of.

Of course, the gators are very popular too.

Well, this is some of Suzanne's and Angelique█s work.

They are very popular in the art world.

And I'm going to show you a couple of things.

Dragonflies are some of the most popular.

Almost everyone has dragonflies.

Everyone loves them, but they do the earrings.

These are the little girl pins I talked to I may have talked about earlier.

These are very, very popular.

Then we have hairpins, and this is a new item we had never had before.

This is a large spoon and they work with brass.

And they also work with semi-precious stones and put them together and make beautiful jewelry.

We love it and we sell a lot of it Now you've gotten to grips with the metal work and the mentorship of the Juneau family, let's see where the torch is lit, with a visit to the home and studios of Suzanne and Pat Juneau.

Their property is a bit of a nature sanctuary, which, as you will hear, serves as a source of inspiration for the couple, who have been creating art since first meeting in 1967.

If you've attended one of the many fine arts and crafts festivals in Louisiana or around the United States for that matter, you've possibly already seen maybe even shopped for jewelry by Suzanne and metal sculpture by Pat.

Juneau Metalworks has become a multi-generational family affair, with Andre Juneau now creating sculpture alongside his father Pat and daughter Angelique making jewelry with Suzanne.

Why is metal the medium of choice for this creative family?

Let's find out.

First of all, I am going to light acetylene.

This tank right here is acetylene.

I love metal smithing because I get to play with fire.

The acetylene is not a clean gas.

Let me turn off the oxygen.

You can see how dirty it is.

Look at that.

There is nothing more fun.

It's addictive.

It's just, it makes you focus right down to the smallest entity that you could possibly focus down to.

And it's just a love affair with being able to concentrate.

Metal is a complete commitment.

You know you have to melt it.

You have to put it together.

You have to clean it up after it's done.

You have to finish it in certain ways.

So it's a start and a finish.

And I think that's why I like metal about it.

I like to do flowers and musicians.

I do alligator musicians is probably the chief thing that I do.

So, you know, I, I get up in the morning and want to do something.

It becomes my signature piece for the day.

I do make repetitive pieces because I know they'll sell and I know people are interested in them.

It's kind of like Dolly Parton singing her favorite songs.

You got to do it.

But there are other things that you make that are just something that will be one of a kind and are really special.

Usually they start around a particular stone that I find that is an odd shape, something that is very interesting, whether it's a fossil, a mineral, a finished stone, Louisiana opal, you know, just something that really interests me and that I know I have to make something different than anything else, and they go to special people.

That's what makes them even better, is that the people who buy them will be your friend forever, because they will consider it special as well as I considered it special.

Well, are you making a ring that's this big?

Are you making some of my pieces that are like eight feet across or ten feet tall?

It's all a piece of metal that you've manipulated, you welded on, and you soldered on and you beat on and you put together in certain ways, and then you finished it.

I grew up in New Iberia, and I would guess my aunt was my best inspiration.

She talked my mom into giving me art lessons with a bunch of old ladies when I was probably eight years old or something like that.

So I did that, and I always loved to paint, draw, fool with stuff.

Didn't make any difference what it was, but rearranging stuff until I was happy with it.

I really don't think of myself as an artist.

I think of myself more as an inventor, or somebody who discovers a new techniques and new principles of doing things.

I started making things when I was very early, maybe 5 or 6 years old.

I would get various things out of the yard and put them together in different ways, make toys and make art.

I guess if if I said it was art, it was art.

But I never really thought of myself as an artist until I met Suzanne, who was, you know, college educated artist.

At UL, in any form of art that you took, you needed to take electives.

That's the one thing they made us do.

And I took sculpture and learned to weld in sculpture.

And I took a jewelry class.

I mean, you know, I took one of everything, I took printmaking, I took you name it, I took one of it, and I loved every one of them.

But when I graduated, I really wanted to continue that camaraderie that you have in art school.

And so I joined the Lafayette Art Association, and it was the one thing I had room for to be able to make and tools that I could afford to use to make stuff with jewelry.

If I was done welding and and soldering and stuff like that, and jewelry became something kind of like Suzanne.

It was small, didn't take a lot of metal and take a lot of tools.

So you could you could work that way.

And later on I started, I did blacksmithing and and I did a casting, I did casting big bronze sculptures.

And then my last thing is constructing sculpture, constructed sculpture out of steel and aluminum and painting it was was was the big thing.

After I made it, it just didn't seem like it was right.

You know, it needed color to it.

And that's what I do now is put color on it.

The Lafayette Art Association, which is the organization that I joined in 1966, is already probably 20 years old.

George Rodrigue was one of the founders.

Yes, it kind of got started, but it was all painters.

Everybody was a painter, pretty much.

And there were a few of us, you know, David Wortmann is a potter and us and a couple of other people.

And, you know, there's a lot of traditional people who are doing wonderful things, but really not that much contemporary.

And what happened was, is that the state of Louisiana asked all craftsmen if they would be interested.

It was a survey of finding funding in organization, Louisiana Crafts Association, and we said, yes, that would be wonderful.

So we had a meeting and it took place at Festival Acadiana, which is here in Lafayette.

And I was the chair at that time.

And so we sat down and said, yes, we would like to.

And they said, okay, y'all start one.

So we did.

And we had a lot of people join.

We had 50 original members and we're now up to 300.

So we're excited.

Yes, for my $0.02 worth, I think Lafayette has more interest in crafts and art than most towns that size, but I think even before we got here, I think, I think there was an interest in crafts and art.

But you have we have such a much larger, much diverse and much richer, I guess you would say group of customers and patrons, you know, that support you now.

So I think, you know, one of the one of the good things about doing this is the people you meet, friends and patrons and whatever.

So we have friends in, in Atlanta we have friends in Philadelphia and New York City.

Wherever you go there and you see your friend, you might not see them, but every ten years, you know.

But a lot of them you see them every year or two.

So so you consider them still to be close friends.

And that's fellow artists as fellows, patrons, you know, even people you meet because you go to an art show, it's like the jazz festival.

It's the people who are most involved in music and jazz and art and folk art and regular art.

More people, more percentage of people will be there than any other place there is.

You know, we're still one of the oldest people who still participate in jazz festival.

From almost the beginning, we always loved doing it.

It was always fun.

I took my kids as babies and they slept underneath the displays, and we went and sat with strollers, listening to jazz or listening to blues.

From the time they were six months old, a year old.

I took them all over the country.

We went to every amusement park, every president's home, natural history museums.

They loved those.

So we went all over.

I think I'm proudest of my children because they have decided that what we did was valuable, and it became what they are doing now.

Being an artist as professionally, of course.

It is also really beautiful to understand now how the mindset of being an artist is and taking that forward with me.

I'm really proud that they could pass that on and I can make that part of my life.

My parents have been working as artists since the early 70s, so more than 50 years of experience in metalwork and just art in general is incredible.

They have a breadth of knowledge and experience that is unmatched and is so incredibly valuable that I feel very privileged to be able to carry that forward and use that experience as a tool.

As I create art and as I teach others to create art as well.

Most fun part about being part of my family in Juneau Metalworks is going to events and seeing people you haven't seen in a while, and getting their stories about how much they enjoy stuff and how much that they they value, that experience that they had with you when they bought it or the place they bought it or whatever.

Dad likes to bring up on Christmas morning, thinking about all the people that are opening presents that you made.

It is kind of a kind of a touching thing to think about that, you know, you've made these hundreds of pieces that are all over the country and all over the world there, getting given as gifts that you're part of that experience all over where you don't even can't even dream where it is.

It's always fun to think about.

Living in Louisiana is such an inspiration.

There is no place like it on the face of this earth.

We have a different language.

We speak differently.

We talk to each other differently.

We are a friendly group of people.

We love each other.

We care about each other.

And I guess the most important thing is that we go through disasters well.

We care about our neighbor.

We care about our friends.

It's the inventiveness of the people here.

And I suppose the reason for the inventiveness is from the very beginning.

In Louisiana, we just didn't have have money, we didn't have all the availability of tools and and supplies and whatever from, you know, back in the, in the early 1900s, you know, or even before that, you had to make do with what you have.

And that's what I appreciate the most about Louisiana is people, you need something welded?

I'll take out my welding torch and weld, that sucker.

And people just don't think twice about making something that they've never made before.

And that has changed a lot, you know, over the years.

But with me, that's what that's what probably influenced me the most to do what I do, because I never thought twice about, oh, that sounds like a good thing to make.

So I'll make it just, you know, it might take me a couple of tries, but I'll do it.

Look around you, beautiful colors.

And, you know, that's just so wonderful.

The forms and shapes, everything moves just beautifully through space.

I mean, that's how my metal is.

I want everything to move.

I want the form that I'm making has to move.

I mean, I love leaves, I love flowers, I love birds, I love, you know, butterflies and dragonflies and insects and all of the things I see every day.

I mean, they all inspire me.

And how can you not be in the water?

Just looking at water, you know, it's just beautiful.

We have we we've such a wonderful place here.

And, you know, that's the one thing wonderful about traveling is because when you come home, you really appreciate where you are.

And I think it makes me feel good that I leave and I can come back and I say, wow, isn't this wonderful?

I used to live.

Can't ask for better.

Since visiting the Juneaus█ studio took us into the heart of Cajun country, we couldn't help but be reminded of another Louisiana artist who left his indelible stamp on the creative culture of Acadiana.

The acclaimed painter George Rodrigue.

So in this episode█s Vault Rock segment, George's son Jacque gives us a firsthand glimpse into the world of the iconic artist whose influence remains so prevalent today.

We put together these shows to to really showcase dad's work from the last 45 years, and to tell the story of how he evolved as an artist where the Blue Dog came from.

And so it's all curated by my family, and it's about 75 paintings in this location here in New Orleans.

An only child, George Rodrigue grew up in the small town of New Iberia in the 1950s.

It was in third grade when, recovering from polio, he discovered an interest in painting and by age nine decided he would become a professional artist.

After high school, he studied art at USL in Lafayette, Louisiana, and then at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.

He didn't know what really an art career looked like.

He and so when he moved to Los Angeles and started to go to school there, he learned from some of the greatest artists of the time that were living in the LA area.

He was there when Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can was on the front page of the LA times and had the show at the Ferris Gallery, and all of those kind of things inspired him.

And he learned from, you know, all these guys who had been doing it professionally for so long, so that when he came back to Louisiana, he could apply all those things that he learned to the Louisiana landscape.

He wanted to paint the landscape, how he saw it, a very pop art kind of version with this oak trees and landscapes.

And that's where the show starts.

He wanted to tell the story of who the Cajuns were.

He realized how unique we were here in Louisiana and South Louisiana, and he wanted the world to understand that, because most people didn't know about Cajun culture in the 60s, it wasn't even a word in popular culture.

And so some of those early Cajun pieces or here and then actually the first Blue Dog painting ever painted that's here, it's called watchdog.

So in 1984 was when the World's Fair was here in New Orleans, and he was commissioned to do a book of Cajun ghost stories.

It was 40 stories, and he was commissioned to paint 40 paintings to go with each of the stories.

And one of the stories had a story about this Lugaroo , Cajun werewolf dog that haunted this house.

And so he painted this painting using a model of his old dog named Tiffany, and painted her blueish grayish as if she was under the full moon.

And it was actually the public that called these Lugaroo paintings the Blue Dog.

And that's when it changed his mind, and he realized that he could create this blue dog as his new pop art symbol, his new Campbell soup can.

While his previous work had drawn from the past and the history of Cajun culture.

This new subject gave Rodrigue a way to comment on life today, and his palette took on the bright colors of pop art.

The Blue Dog became a hit worldwide.

Ad campaigns for Xerox and Absolut Vodka solidified Rodriguez new icon of pop art.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, we formed Blue Dog Relief with a series of prints that raised about $2.5 million for recovery post-Katrina.

From this relief and recovery stance, Rodrigue chose to become more proactive in his charitable giving, establishing the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts.

For years, students and teachers all across the world really had been painting their own blue dogs and sending them to us.

So we decided that we would start a foundation that was all about arts and education, having no idea what that meant.

And so we looked for models to replicate across the country and found this great foundation in Arkansas called the Theia Foundation, and borrowed the ideas of some of their programs and brought them to Louisiana, and really began to understand exactly what the research shows about students who learn through the arts.

You know, they they score higher on their tests, they have fewer discipline problems, and they have a higher intended rate.

They actually want to come to school.

Our biggest, most ambitious program is called Louisiana A+ Schools.

And with that program, we actually train entire school faculties how to use the arts in every classroom and every subject, using music to teach English, using visual art to teach some kind of math concept.

And when you do that, it really unlocks the material, gets the students to engage with it.

And that's why we could see those research results.

The entire scope of George Rodriguez influence in the world of art will include the impact his foundation has on a new generation of artists.

To explore all episodes and seasons of Art Rocks!

and to enjoy some Art Rocks!

Unframed digital extras.

You can head to LPB.org/artrocks anytime.

And if you enjoy stories like these, I invite you to also visit CountryRoadsMagazine.com, which makes a vital guide to exploring Louisiana's cultural life and how it is evolving all across the state.

So that is that for this edition of Art Rocks!

Until next time.

I've been your host, James Fox-Smith, and from all of us at LPB, thanks for watching.

Major production funding for Art Rocks!

is provided by East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

The library's art collection includes local and regional artists and highlights the diverse styles, themes, and techniques of their work.

The collection is located at branches throughout the parish or online at EBRPL.com.

And by generous support from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.