♪ AZPM INTRO PLAYS ♪ (Mary) Coming up on State of the Arts, history is painted by the victors, putting grief to canvas, and a passionate approach to watercolor.

State of the Arts has these stories and more, next.

Hello and thank you for tuning in.

I'm Mary Paul.

On this week's show, we look at three very different painters and the stories behind their work.

Now, picture this.

You're walking through a major museum in North America and you see a beautiful landscape from the days before the internet, television, even radio.

Back then, American masters painted to document our nation's history.

Let's take a look at one exhibit that invites people to rethink that history.

(Kent) Museums have an incredibly important role in telling the story of this continent.

So, what I've done with my own work is to challenge the museums that I work with to tell the story and to start that story from somewhere else.

I went to college and I actually studied to become an illustrator.

Soon after, I realized that I wanted to be a real painter, to actually return to representational art making because the themes that I was exploring in my art practice had to do with themes that felt very urgent to me and they had to do with the ongoing impact of the colonial project on my family and in my community.

I was also discovering the art history that was made on this continent by settler artists who were looking at indigenous people as subjects for their art.

And that was my entry point to challenge their work, to challenge the subjectivity of their work and to reverse the gaze.

It became a very important project for me to really take on the weight of this art history.

(John) He was doing something that others were not doing and that was intentionally using the colonial gaze to flip the power dynamics in the authoring of art history.

♪ TRIUMPHANT STRING ♪ (Wendy) There are specific figures that you can really empathize with and even when it's talking about the past, talking about the future, talking about imagined scenarios, you just get it.

♪ TRIUMPHANT STRINGS CONTINUE ♪ (Léuli) I was really blown away by Kent's work addressing grand narratives of European art history, European settler colonial practices around the world head on, and to really see indigenous perspectives front right and center.

Large paintings have this kind of authority that I think is what I wanted to also invest my work with.

So that's really what I wanted to do with my practice was to imbue indigenous experience— you know, historical and contemporary—with that same gravitas, that same weight and authority that the Europeans' version of this history has.

(John) The painting "History is Painted by the Victors" is what inspired the entire exhibition.

This particular work I think truly encapsulates a variety of aspects of what we're trying to do in the exhibition and that is to look at the power dynamics on the authoring of histories so you see in this painting Miss Chief painting at an easel and depicting Lieutenant Colonel George Custer in the 7th Calvary.

Of course the romanticized landscape is a recreation of Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Corcoran."

Very rarely have indigenous people been given a platform to even visually express their own histories and their own experiences.

(Kent) Of course there was a great deal of respect and admiration for the level of skill required but I also knew that these paintings had the ability and they had the possibility to tell stories, to hold narratives.

And it was these narratives of indigenous perspectives, experiences both historical and contemporary that I wanted to express through this very sophisticated language of painting.

There is a resistance in my work in pushing back.

I wouldn't describe it as anger but I would say that there is a level of challenge to the authority that their paintings had in our museums telling a very narrow perspective of history.

(Léuli) This painting is titled "The Great Mystery" and it's based on looking at two works within the Hood Museum collection by Mark Rothko of course with this background from 1953 and then a Cyrus Dallin sculpture.

Really stereotypical idea of an indigenous warrior on horseback but instead of that we have Miss Chief with shoulders raised and really offering a perplexed look at the audience perhaps asking what are you going to do with the knowledge that has been imparted with you and also thinking of course about reality, about existence.

♪ SOFT PIANO BEGINS ♪ (Kent) So humor is an important part of my work.

It's a strategy, it's a device I've used to entice people to my work, to soften people with a laugh, to give them a moment to look at some dark subjects but also like a pressure valve.

When settlers arrived and they encountered two-spirit people, gender-fluid people here in North America, they struggled understanding how there could exist a person in a community who was accepted for that and wasn't treated as an outsider or discarded.

Miss Chief Eagle Testicle was created as an alter ego to kind of reverse the gaze and look back at those settler artists and say, "Well, we're here, I'm here and I have a voice and I have a perspective and it's different than yours."

And in creating that character I wanted a very empowered gender-fluid character that could speak to indigenous understanding of gender and sexuality that was very different from the European idea, this very binary version of male-female.

(Wendy) And that's the beauty of a character like Miss Chief, his alter ego, who is a time-traveling, shape-shifting trickster.

Miss Chief can bring together people from different time periods.

So in this painting she's brought together elders, people who can pass along knowledge as well as very young babies who are the future of their tribes and bringing them all together in this beautiful interstellar scene.

And a lot of these are specific myths that inform native cosmology and native astronomy.

It's so hopeful.

A very wise person that I looked up to, an indigenous senator named Murray Sinclair, he advised our community, "Let's not attract more vitriol and hate from our settler neighbours, let's build monuments to our own people."

And so that's what I decided to do.

Because I'm a painter I decided to make portraits, to authorize people in my community that I admire.

It's very important that as my career moves forward that I bring these people from my community and shine light on them.

The boarding school program here in the States, residential schools in Canada, it was about trying to assimilate indigenous people into the mainstream culture by taking children and putting them into basically an indoctrination camp where they would be forbidden to speak their language, where they would be forced to learn English.

Most of those schools functioned as labour camps for young children.

So my grandmother was one of those young girls who was put into a residential school with her siblings.

And that continues to have intergenerational impact in our communities and in our family.

So it really has become an important part of my work to bring these truths forward because most people in North America know very little about this very important part of the history of this continent that had to do with dispossession and attempts at erasure.

(Léuli) I think in this part of the Great Lakes region it's really important to have indigenous perspectives that speak directly to the lived experience of indigenous peoples in this part of the world.

(john) One of the goals that Léuli and I share is that when people walk away from this exhibition we hope that they've learned a little bit more about themselves by the way that they respond to the work.

(Wendy) So I think people are going to have a lot of emotions but I hope what they come out of it with is a sort of catharsis of understanding that as long as we are working together as a community and acknowledging some of our past, we can build a better future.

There are so many great museums all throughout this continent and having an opportunity to bring my exhibition to Ohio is super exciting.

People can read news feeds all day long but there's something about the way a painting also specifically can really grab you.

I think it's unlike anything else.

It's about opening a portal into a whole universe that some people might have never thought about before but it's been here the entire time.

♪ MEDITATIVE STRINGS ♪ Will Swink is an artist who contemplates a challenging part of the human experience... Grief.

Shaped by the loss of his parents, he creates artwork that speaks to his family history.

(Will) One year for Father's Day I did like a helicopter and there was a cloud above the helicopter and lightning bolts hitting the helicopter and my mom framed it and gave it to my dad.

That was this moment where I realized that creating art was something I could do, and it was valuable.

Not just to me but other people.

God only knows what that is but it looks dangerous.

I was I guess a doodler my entire life.

I mean just constantly drawing.

"Right Brain" shoe.

'93 so that would mean 12.

I took AP art in high school and it really was to just have another AP class on my resume.

Art was not a focus at that point for me.

Prehistoric creatures.

Various objects that I was probably forced to draw.

I made a good friend took a trip to South America and we walked by this art gallery every day.

There was this beautiful painting.

Just really resonated with me and went into the gallery asked the guy, "how much it was."

He said, "250 bucks."'

I was like, "wrap it up."

So I started collecting.

It was an evolution of going from buying art, appreciating that product and then eventually got to like, "Oh, I can just do this."

♪ GROOVY HIP-HOP BEAT ♪ I was the only child so all this stuff was a testament to how loved I was in a lot of ways.

The circumstances that brought me back to Williamsburg were not ideal obviously but I think it is the kind of silver lining.

♪ CONTEMPLATIVE GUITAR ♪ Before my mother passed she had been battling dementia for about 10 years.

My dad was her primary caretaker.

In 2021 she fell down some stairs and got a call from the hospital.

It was the doctor who was caring for my dad.

So I called back and she told me that my dad had a heart attack in the waiting room and died.

The crazy thing is his dad at the same age had a heart attack going to see his wife.

And so this thing had repeated itself.

My mom's care was then a priority so we moved back.

Grief and loss is a difficult thing to manage when you're talking about your parents but I think in some ways it's helped being here.

We have so many pictures and heirlooms that came with the house.

I knew my parents well but it's like putting a puzzle together.

Pretty interesting getting to know them after their death.

♪ MELANCHOLY SYNTHS ♪ I gotta find the piece she did but it's a picture of her painting this piece that I really like.

I found it the other day.

I was like, "that is a source photo."

♪ GROOVY BEAT RETURNS ♪ My mom would always take art seminars and classes in the neighborhood.

I can definitely see the influence she had and the work I do now.

Here it is.

She was very shy about her work.

Never really showed it.

Never had any shows but it was soulful.

This is a piece I found.

I'm looking at it now and seeing things that I hadn't seen before.

This is my favorite one of hers.

This cow looks just amazing.

It's beautiful.

I started working on this right after she passed.

She had the most amazing handwriting.

This letter talking about how bad I was at school and how I was not listening and misbehaving.

This is a picture of her when she met my dad who was on R&R during Vietnam.

They met in Hawaii.

I wanted to capture her in her essence.

Absolutely love it.

This was my interpretation of dementia, Alzheimer's and what it does to you.

But as horrible as it is, it was.

It doesn't define her.

I wanted to make sure that she knew that.

And she was remembered for the beautiful person she was.

"P.S.

I Love You."

Name of the piece, her initials.

P.S.

Daddy Swank.

Past, present and future are all right here.

I love you most in the world and Daddy too.

That's something that every night going to bed she would say to me.

I love you most in the world and Daddy too.

My dad was a lieutenant in the Army.

He did one tour in Vietnam.

He told me this story that always stuck with me.

One night a guy from their own company threw a grenade into their tent and killed the other lieutenant.

It was the next night or the night before my dad would have been dead and I would not be here.

I just started working on a memorial type piece of my dad.

He had these green duffel bags.

Then I cut it apart, deconstructed it and it says J.M.

Cannon.

Jim Cannon was his older brother.

My uncle Jim took this bag to Vietnam, got back and then my dad took it to Vietnam.

So it's got a lot of history to it to say the least.

It has value to me but does it have value to anybody else?

Probably not.

So some of the places I'm going artistically is to take that stuff and make it valuable to a more universal audience.

When you lose somebody there's a lot of regret.

Could I have changed something or done something differently?

Probably, yeah.

So it's a way for me to continue that experience with them.

I guess it's part of my complex healing process.

♪ UPBEAT PIANO PLAYS ♪ Living in the house that I grew up in where my parents lived is like the ultimate way to pay homage to them in their life.

I think they probably wouldn't want it any other way.

I could never see myself selling the house.

It's a part of me.

It's part of my family and it's part of my parents' legacy.

So it's important that I cherish it and make it fulfill its potential.

I've thought about getting to this point for a long time, being able to have the work I want in my house, what that would be like, and I feel so lucky that I'm able to do that.

That makes me proud and I know it would make my parents proud 100%.

♪ UPBEAT HIP-HOP BEAT ♪ Antonio Gonzalez-Garcia is a visual artist who was born in Spain, studied in France, and now calls the United States home.

His current work is a study in the importance of building communities.

Here he takes a journey with fellow artists to Genoa, Italy.

A journey that validated and expanded his perspective on making connections.

♪ SOFT GUITAR FADES IN ♪ (Antonio) I use watercolor.

It's a medium that keeps you on your toes, like my daughter does, actually.

And it's spontaneous, but at the same time you need to be very much strategic.

And paint with some degree of being meticulous.

♪ SOFT GUITAR CONTINUES ♪ It brings me jumping in one side to the other.

And you need to do that quickly.

In terms of colors, watercolor has been historically known for being bright.

But I have a background in oil painting.

I like to play with opacity.

And I like to play with sections that are 'non-finito,' and sections that are pretty much realistic.

Other sections that are a little bit impressionistic.

That defocuses 100% the people and what they are doing.

♪ SOFT GUITAR CONTINUES ♪ Social organs, from an aesthetics perspective, it's just painting groups of people that are interacting while a social gathering is happening.

And there is food, there is somebody laughing, all this kind of stuff happening there.

[ INDISTINCT TALKING ] Social organs, I believe it grew up like a seed that you plant for experimenting or creating things.

And then it became on what it is today.

I started painting the people that surrounded me.

The group of friends that I see every day, we gather, and they are so significant in a social way.

And I believe that that is essential for every individual.

Not only in this country, but around the world.

To have these connections, to have these almost weekly gatherings.

It's like you are giving food to your soul, to your social organ.

[ INDISTINCT TALKING ] I started working more on that Because I saw a visual bridge between my creations, myself, and the rest of the community.

Then I started thinking of what I am without the people around me and myself being so social.

And the people who have been supporting me through my whole life.

So I started seeing that— I saw that before, but I never added to a painting.

But then I built that narrative and kept working on this series that become "Social Organs."

It jumped from myself and what I am doing and what the community is doing to me.

To other individuals who have been mentors.

And that are also building some sort of community.

And how their close communities are also impacting and building them.

So from that idea, then I started thinking about how the US has been built with this idea of the rugged individualism.

Versus what I experienced living here.

And what I experienced by talking with these other individuals.

And what their life has been.

Actually like mine, they have been receiving a lot of support from many people.

[ INDISTINCT CHATTER ] I never experienced traveling with fellow artists.

You know, you travel with family, you travel with friends, you travel with other people.

But when you get a bunch of these crazy artists together that all of them think differently and see different things.

It's great.

I mean it's cool.

You feel a little bit like a little kid.

I've seen new things.

And that's important.

Because that's something that you bring back.

And maybe your creations, your paintings will be changing for better.

Or your interactions will be changing for better.

Or you were thinking something of this culture before traveling there.

You were traveling with fear.

But then again those walls fall down.

And you have everything in front of you.

♪ CONTEMPLATIVE STRINGS ♪ It's a very 360 perspective of what you can actually be experiencing.

And of course when you connect with a local artist and you become fellow friends.

And you share, you know, again that culture through the painting or the creation and the food and so on.

That builds connections and that builds actually that hope for trying to build this better world.

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Three painters and three very different stories.

Thank you for watching State of the Arts.

I'm Mary Paul and I'll see you again next week.