Coming up, this time on art rocks.

Remembering the Blue Dogs.

Humble beginnings.

A dance that's all about identity.

How a band creates a blended sound and building a mural bursting with meaning.

What are you going to do with this?

What are you going to do with that?

And I've said, I'm not sure, These stories are next on art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated.

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.

Wendy Rodrigue Magnus was married to iconic Louisiana artist George Rodrigue until his passing in 2013.

Ten years on, she's still working to preserve Rodrigues creative legacy.

Today, Wendy meets with school groups where she introduce his Louisiana kids to Rodrigues body of work and explains the unique portrayal of Louisiana culture that the artist and father of the iconic Blue Dog image brought to life.

George started off painting on the banks of the Bayou Tash, and he really saw the river as something that could lead to a horizon within his work.

Life begins and it leads to a bright light, hopefully at the end and a horizon.

And George saw that through all the way to the end.

And this show starts that.

It starts with his beginning.

Early paintings from his twenties all the way to a mature artist and man in his late sixties.

And even after his cancer diagnosis.

When that light comes to mean even more in terms of symbolism where his life is going.

George started off painting when he was in the third grade.

By the time George Rodrigue, one of America's most important painters, one of Louisiana's greatest treasures by the time he reached the third grade, he had never painted a picture because there was no art in his school.

There were no museums in the town, no galleries in the town, no art books.

In the third grade, George hit bottom.

He got very sick with polio and he was lying in bed.

And sure enough, he lost the use of his legs.

And of course, it's very contagious.

So he couldn't nobody could come visit him.

He couldn't go to school, couldn't run around outside with his dogs, nothing.

He had no brothers and sisters.

So he was bored out of his mind and his momma went to the little store on Main Street in New Iberia and asked them if they had anything that could help George's momma.

Like for many of us, every penny was precious.

She didn't spend money lightly.

And of course, in her case, she lived through the Depression.

So it was really forefront in her mind.

And the gal she knew who worked there said over there in the corner, we just got in those art supplies.

Try that.

And George's momma said, Art supplies to our son like art.

George didn't know art.

And literally, out of desperation, George's momma took those precious pennies and she bought her a paint by number kit.

They were invented that year, by the way, And the very first painting that George Rodriguez ever saw in his life was his own.

And he painted things that he missed and love.

Great stories all through high school and then art school.

He went to UCLA first in Lafayette, now Lafayette.

But he eventually got bored because he really wanted formal art instruction.

And he heard about this school in California called the Art Center College of Design.

It is still there today and one of the best art schools in the country.

And he applied and imagine how hard that was back in that time.

It's not like he could email off his portfolio.

He had to send his actual work to California place.

He'd never been had no idea if he'd ever see it again.

And he was accepted.

And he gets off the train and he gets to art school.

And it's not until his first day of class that he learns that Art Center is a graduate school.

And I don't know if it's still true or not, but at that time, George Rodriguez was the only student they had ever accepted who did not have a degree.

Eventually, George got a car and he'd be coming back home to Louisiana.

And George is very visual course.

And what's the big state we all have to cross to do that?

And of course, Texas is known for its big, big skies.

And what George noticed was that as you cross the Sabine River into Louisiana, suddenly the skies are small.

And, of course, they're small because of the magnificent trees that we have here.

He started thinking about it that here in Louisiana, we don't look at the sky up here.

We look at the sky from underneath these oaks.

So through the branches and from underneath, he thought, how am I going to show the world how?

Louisiana is very different from, say, California?

George came back to Louisiana and said, I'm going to do this at home.

I want to capture Louisiana.

That will be my subject to cut the tree off at the top.

No one had ever done that consistently before in American landscape painting.

He changed American landscape painting George did in 1988.

He had a show in Los Angeles at the upstairs gallery in Beverly Hills, and it was all Cajun paintings, of course, and some of these Luka roux paintings intermixed.

And in that show, George overheard people on the opening night saying, I like those Blue Dog paintings or talking about those Blue Dog paintings.

And George used to tell it like this.

He'd go, Blue Dog, Blue Dog, What are they talking about?

Because for him, it was Luca Roux.

And those early ones, by the way, didn't look like what you see today.

They were very pale, gray, blue.

It's an artistic decision.

He thought the night sky would cast that shade on its fur.

The very early ones have red eyes.

Supposed to be scary, red.

Nothing scary about it.

I mean, not to me anyway.

What it ended up becoming.

But the early mist was supposed to be scary.

And so he thought of it as Luca Roux.

He didn't think of it that way.

And and but when he got back to Louisiana, he said he would lie there awake at night thinking about that.

And he said he had just gotten back.

And the next morning he woke up and he said, I have to do this.

And he went into his studio and painted this gigantic canvas seven feet tall by five feet wide.

It's just this gigantic blue dog that's really wild looking.

He had changed the eyes to yellow, but it's in a very thick goopy oil, so very intense and no landscape.

It was the first painting in 25 years that George had done that did not include the Louisiana landscape within it.

That was big and it was a real aha moment for him because he said he knew immediately that he had painted something exciting for him.

And that's the key here.

Exciting for him.

Nobody else liked it.

Nobody when it premiered at all.

He was energized and excited by this expression that came from deep within him.

And I think that that is part of what so inspires particularly children when they come and they see this work because it kind of just burst the door wide open on what you can do creatively.

If that's what cranks your track to, here are a few of the many exhibitions happening in the weeks to come.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads magazine available in print, online or by e-newsletter to see or to share any episode of Art Rocks again, visit LP dot org slash Art Rocks.

There's also an archive of all our Louisiana segments at LP's YouTube page.

We're off to Cleveland, Ohio now.

A dance teacher and choreographer Dominic Moore Dunstan has created the Black Card Project.

Its objective is to explore African-American identity, culture and history through more Danson's chosen form of creative expression, the theatrical production.

So let's take a look In sixth grade.

Miller South.

I'm sitting with the seven other black boys in my grade at the time, and we're all sitting at the same lunchroom table and we're talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up.

And one of them says, I want to be in the NBA.

I want to play like LeBron and other ones were.

I want to be in the NFL.

I want to be like Michael Vick.

When it was my turn to say something, I said, Well, I want to dance in pairs or play professional soccer in England.

You know, this deafening silence that we were on table.

And one of my friends looks at me and says, Bruh, that ain't black.

And all the kids started laughing.

There's this overarching feeling that like, well, you know, if I don't know this about the black culture, if I don't know this kind of music, I'm not black enough.

If I don't like this kind of food, I'm not black enough.

You know, sometimes I feel like I was supposed to learn how to be black somewhere and but nobody there's no program to learn how to be black.

You know, I kind of sat for a while and I was like, what if there was a school?

What are the school are like?

Someone learned how to be black.

And that's where it started.

And I was like, What if there's this kind of weird, interesting character who's kind of like me, but like a different version of me in my head?

And what if, you know, he kind of went through all these classes and it kind of felt like a really weird version of The Wizard of Oz because you have a singular character who runs into all these different characters and learns all this stuff.

So it's kind of like the structure that we used.

Kevin Parker When I asked him to collaborate on the show, I didn't know really what the show was yet.

I was talking to him and we went out to an Applebee's and we sat down.

I was like, So I have this idea.

I kind of want to talk to you about like what it means to be black.

And we started just kind of like joking and laughing about all of these things that we knew about sort of personal high school, which is my alma mater.

I graduated from Firestone in 2008.

It's hard to talk about how important it is to me because this moment is full circle.

At 14 years old, I was learning the foundations of what it meant to be a creator.

At the same time, I was dealing with all these internal struggles of, Well, can I dance?

Should I be dancing?

Can I play soccer?

Should I be playing soccer?

But coming into this place was like a very safe space for me to explore who I really, really knew I was as an artist at such a young age and to be, you know, 16 years later, bringing my 90 minute work, a very large word for somebody around my age and knowing that, wow, just a couple of hundred feet that way was on stage.

I started this process.

I would say I've never really seen a show quite like this.

This was completely different.

The fact that it only had two people in it doing an entire story was enough at that to set it aside from most things I've seen, I guess I never really thought about a black car like ever having a black card and like, realizing that it is a thing like, oh, like there are things I don't know about that existence like happened within my community.

I would say the slight stereotypical ness of it.

It was pretty funny.

Like the, the little gangster walking, the stereotypical clothing.

It was it was pretty funny.

The problem with humor is it's actually the hardest thing to do on stage because you have to think about your own biases as what you think is funny versus what other people think is funny.

So that's one of the first barriers inside of this conversation.

We wanted to use humor because we wanted to pull people into our world, and making people laugh always does that.

You want to pull people into the show before you hit them with the really hard topics.

We couldn't start the show with the history section because it's it's too raw and it feels too close to home.

So you invite people in by making things funny, by making them fun playing their favorite music, and all of a sudden they're willing to go on the journey with you no matter where you take them.

And we realized that's what we needed to do, because I've seen a lot of modern dance shows, and often when you talk about race, the piece is very heavy and a lot of times you'll see people who are singing forward start to lean back and disengage because it feels like too much for them.

So we're like, okay, well, what if we did the opposite of what if over time we got them to lean forward and then they would stay there?

So also take it out if you like.

We have these characters where these stereotypes, but what if we broke the stereotype and made you learn something about that that changed you a little bit?

CPTPP Hey, who's the thug?

He doesn't think he's funny.

He's very, very serious.

But as you saw on the show today, the kids will laugh as soon as they see him.

The part that was really difficult actually, was making sure every character had integrity.

And it wasn't my emotional feelings about that character that came out because me and Kevin talked about we can't be hypocrites.

We can't say there's no one way to be black, and then say, Well, the way that thugs doing it is wrong.

And I knew I wanted to do something, had to do with black history but didn't know what.

So I'll just go in through clips and things like that.

And one day I had this dream that I was running and I was just like, you know, there's slave master with me there.

The dog happened and all this stuff.

And then I had another dream about being in the Jim Crow South and what that felt like.

And then I had another dream right after that.

That was like the sixties Black Panther movement and then another dream that was kind of being this Trayvon Martin Tamir Rice type character.

So the section is actually literally a dream I had.

All you can really hear is whipping things and getting hit with batons and all of that.

And I would say that that kind of is really reflect for on our history.

I feel like it was that was probably the part that made it most impactful was just like the way they drawn in the audio with the with the dancing.

And I would say like that all and just came in and made it so powerful.

I would love for this piece to tour nationally, to tour to all these large cities, especially where there's a large African-American population, and to get into the schools just like we did here.

And but also the show was also built for the students, both of their families.

It's really, really important.

Mom, dad, grandma and grandpa, auntie, uncle, see the show.

Because what I would love to happen is everybody goes home.

That night and then they talk about it.

That's the point, right?

The mission of this project is to create conversation around the narrow aspects of the black identity and then how that relates to economic development in the black community.

This is living proof that you can literally do whatever you want to do.

And even though you may get hit, you may get hurt, you may get broke down a little, you'll still be you and be able to go forward to wherever you're trying to achieve.

Today was the first performance where I can see the audience a little bit, but it felt like 80 to 90% of the audience was the exact target audience the show is for.

And it gave me a sense of like, This is why we did this.

Key West, Florida is where you need to go to see and hear the band Billy the Squid and the Sea Cow Drifters playing Live.

And Why not?

This eclectic collaborative of singers and musicians blends various genres to make music that is one of a kind.

So listen to this.

I'm Billy the Squid.

This is Gerard Iceman, Weird Billy the Squid and the Sea Cow Drifters like I'm the lead singer and harmonica player.

I play guitar electric guitar.

Lead guitar and go somewhere along this road.

When we first started out, it was super country.

Very country, very.

Country.

We had, you know, like slide and slow and swing in country stuff.

I think Jared was just trying to ease me and.

Try to make it a rock and.

Roll or out of it that makes it like wreckage on the road.

Definitely a lot of infusion of really every influence that we've picked up in our musical careers along the way.

We all kind of brought this all together into one band and consolidated it into one kind of strange sound.

You got to take that.

We're born.

Oh, you're heavy, right?

All right.

Kind of like spaghetti Western surf stuff.

We look a little out of place, I think sometimes in sound a little out of place because it's a lot of music.

Like he's saying.

He's singing like cowboy songs.

He grew up on a ranch, and I mean, but we're starting to we're starting to kind of fit it in with not really an island sound, but just kind of a laid back sound, which is just laid back, just kind of mixing the sounds together.

But definitely it stands out.

He was also had a had a long history of folk and country musicians coming through here for a long, long time.

I'm just happy we can kind of bring it back to, you know, more of that original sound, The Wallflowers.

But for me, it all goes all around it Well.

in Norfolk, Virginia, Gary Wang, was asked to create a mural in the city's railroad district inspired by trains, trolleys and the footloose folk who live their life on the open road.

His resulting mural is a celebration of life on the move, I don't feel like I'm just a dog pissing on the wall.

I feel like I'm making a piece that I want to have some meaning and some substance, as well as being a large visual thing.

And I got a phone call from Ace Jackson, Ace and Can and Carrie in the street Museum people, they just said, You come do something.

I think they have ten murals going.

Let's see what happens in L.A. At the time when I was a kid, the streets were lined gridded with electric street cars, and I grew up from jumping on trolleys and trains going from here to there.

As I got older, in the summers when I was a kid, I'd take trains and go up to Oakland, California.

Born.

I'd see the hobos, I'd see the trams.

I'm curious.

I got with the secret symbols and signs that they leave for each other.

They tell you whether it's cool or not.

It's a mean dog, a vicious dog.

You can bathe your arms available.

So I have this whole vocabulary since I was a kid of that kind of lifestyle.

And so it's in me.

And then when I saw the railroad tracks in the Big Justin, that's the wall for my work generally rotates around storytelling, poetry, mantras, any number of things that I may be in the moment of.

And so I got to do a piece on this guy.

A number one.

Leon Ray Livingston was deemed the king of the hobos at one time, and they made a movie.

I managed to run with Jack London.

He's got all these stories about life on the rails.

What I'm going to do is write eight number ones warning about wanderlust.

His warning is Don't ever jump on a moving train, because if you do, you get hooked and you're doomed to a pitiful existence.

And I want that text to be able to understand what's going on up there by reading it, even though it might cause a little difficulty.

But you know, nothing.

Usually I would just obscure my concentration is what the brush is doing and what the medium is doing.

You know, sort of remove myself from the source of know what the words are.

They just become Marx.

At this point to me, I'm not even reading.

I'm just writing it down in my style.

I'm totally dyslexic and colorblind, so I don't involve myself with having to pick and choose colors, and I don't involve myself with reading backwards, upside down, or because I do that anyway.

So I've taken those qualities that I have naturally, that I've gotten in trouble all my school life.

Using is as one of my tools I think is honest.

The wall stars talking to me about, Yeah, this is all right.

This is not all right.

What are you going to do with this?

What are you going to do with that?

And I'm sure I'm not sure, but I hear you.

In the process and the flow and evolution of the piece.

I asked him if I could do the windows and he said no.

And then he said, yes, go ahead, do the windows.

And then from that, I just decided that I wanted to do this.

Oh, because he is so much the hobo himself.

I mean, his whole fascination with the railways and tramps and their secret language and everything really comes from his wandering spirit.

Meg and I, my wife, we've been working on the wall, and every day it's been like this phenomenal or something.

The train goes by first you hear it, it's in here, it's there, you know it's coming.

It's dangerous.

It's big, It's, you know, it's an iron horse and I'm waving the conductor.

You get a boo boo, right?

So now this site that we're sitting there, you know, I'm just goofing on has become a living thing.

And, you know, so I'm not talking to hobos and tramps, even though I am.

I'm just talking to everybody, especially those that will be passing this away.

Mainly the guys that ride on the trains.

You know, my days of riding the rails are over.

But certainly the need, the desire and the love to make a mark is forever.

I think after all is said and done, how can you not be satisfied with the activity and the opportunity to express and share and learn and give and take and communicate from coast to coast?

and that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But never mind because episodes are available anytime at LP B dot Ogre Art Rocks.

And what's more, Country Roads magazine offers a useful source for thought provoking coverage of events the arts people and places all around the state.

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 LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated.

Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.