The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, meet an artist who's reclaiming black stories with intention.

(Allison) Black people weren't included in like the Renaissance or painting in general until we did it ourselves.

(Tom) Do you have photos or memories locked away on media you can no longer use?

Well, one lab is here to help.

(Stacey) Here in this little enclosed space and everyone feels a little vulnerable and they start opening up and it's very heartwarming to see.

(Tom) If you drive, bike or walk in Pima County, you'll want to know what the RTA is planning for the next 20 years.

(Titus) Despite how I feel about it, I know that we do need better roads in Tucson.

(Tom) And meet the man behind this traditional Yoeme mask.

(Louis David) I go out there and educate people and then they understand the purpose and meaning of who we are.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

First up, Allison Miller is a second generation muralist and visual artist from Tucson.

Her work is deeply connected to community, history and identity and her paintings challenge stereotypes and celebrate black humanity.

(Allison) I didn't want to go to art school and I still wanted to contribute and do art and public art matched kind of the civic engagement I was interested in doing.

When I moved back to Tucson, after going to school in Brooklyn, I started to volunteer and do murals.

I got the Buffalo Exchange Fine Artist Award.

They gave it to me because of all the murals I've donated to the city.

Once I learned how to glaze, I really felt like I could paint.

I would be doing this even if I wasn't getting ready for a show and that's why I think I got the shows because I was just painting.

[ LAUGHS ] And for no reason other than it makes me feel good.

Now that I'm not working on anything, I'm like, "What do you do all day if you're not painting or making something?"

♪ LOFI MUSIC One of my favorite moments in all cinema that I've always wanted to see a slave turn around and whip a slave owner, you know?

Yeah, Quentin Tarantino, like "Django Unchained", like one of my favorite moments in all cinema and he gave that to me.

But I think he's done a really bad job of showcasing Blackness to a lot of people who don't experience Blackness on a daily basis.

They experience it from his films.

And it just doesn't feel appropriate for him to be telling certain stories.

♪ LOFI MUSIC Some of these paintings or movies as a little Black kid were important to see representation of Black people in roles that aren't necessarily stereotypes.

I really like referencing when gender's played with.

Futurism is a big part of my work in sci-fi.

So really wanting to highlight those moments which are really brief in a film, but I think they should have some permanence.

Especially in this Mahogany film, there's a moment where she felt particularly beautiful and powerful and those aren't really roles I see Black women given.

And then the Grace Jones, she was the only Black vixen in a James Bond movie.

There's a scene of her dominating the white patriarch and discarding it.

♪ ENERGETIC MUSIC "Purple Rain", Prince looking in the mirror and kind of questioning his choices.

But also, you know, the song talks about maybe I'm just like my father.

Kind of looking past your trauma, your past history and kind of finding your own identity, which I think he did in that moment.

Really highlighting who you wanna be, who you wanna identify as.

♪ ENERGETIC MUSIC Black people weren't included in like the Renaissance or painting in general until we did it ourselves.

So it was very important for me to revisit these moments that are really beautiful and highlight the spectacular nature of Blackness without including some of the trauma that is promoted in those films.

We often feel underrepresented in media and media is so powerful.

It controls a lot of how we navigate the world and how we see ourselves, other people's perceptions of us.

So I would hope that these moments resonate with people, even people my age, people who grew up in the 90s, seeing these limited representations of Blackness be reworked and have a new piece of their personal story.

I'm much more visual than articulate in explaining like the process or the motivation, but I rather people have time to reflect on and see themselves in the piece or find their own meaning to the piece.

[ CROSSWALK CHIRPING ] While most of the world has gone digital, many of us still have memories tucked away on VHS or old cassettes or even floppy disks.

I think I have a few of those left.

So next we're going to show you a service from the University of Arizona library that can help you dust off that old media and then digitize it for free.

♪ CALM MUSIC (Erin) So my name is Erin Garolos, and I'm here at the Wildcat's Memory Lab so that I can digitize a bunch of VHS videos that are older, some that are from the 50s and the 60s, and then others that are a little more recent in the 90s before we had digital, and a ton of photographs.

Some of them were older photos of my grandfathers from when he was in World War II.

I was able to scan a lot of pictures of my mom from when she was younger, and she passed about 12 years ago.

The pictures that I have of my own kids have been really fun to digitize and hold onto because I wanna make sure that they each have their own digital album.

And so it's been such a great adventure here in this little memory lab to kind of go through those old memories and keep them fresh.

♪ CALM MUSIC (Stacey) The Wildcat's Memory Lab is a do-it-yourself digitization lab that's open to members of the University of Arizona community as well as the greater Tucson community.

And it's really just a space that gives people the opportunity to reconnect with their old memories and put them in a digital format so they can share them with friends and family in their community.

So we have a scanner available for digitizing photos and documents.

We have a slide scanner for working with slides and negatives.

We have a video machine for working with all different types of camcorder formats and VHS and Betamax tapes.

And then we have an audio machine for working with vinyl records and cassette tapes.

(Erin) So the VHS tapes that I was preserving today were from 1994.

It was a Miss National pre-teen pageant from when I was a kid.

And so finding these VHS tapes was really special because it was a fun time in my childhood.

And just kind of nice to bring me back in time 30 years to enjoy some memories with people that became lifelong friends.

These machines don't exist anymore.

They're not making VHS cassettes and it would be really expensive for me to try to recreate this in my own dining room.

God forbid in a fire things get completely destroyed and now you don't have them anymore.

So to be able to scan it here, to know that it's saved, to know it's stored in the cloud is really valuable just for peace of mind.

Everybody's got that box of photos or video tapes and there's a real risk of loss of tremendous amounts of memory.

A lot of these things are just essentially locked into formats that are no longer accessible.

Joe made an appointment to come in and he has a ViewMaster reel.

So we had to be kind of ingenious in how we scanned those materials on our flatbed.

(Joe) So yeah, my problem was I had a ViewMaster.

Those are those old round slide items that you would put in a little apparatus and you would click them and you could see them through the light and point them at the light.

My mother has dementia.

I like giving her photographs to look at because it jogs her memory and I could see that perks her up a little bit.

So I could tell from the photos that they were the wedding day.

I could see that my grandfather took her out of the limo and walked her into the church.

I could see her bridesmaids.

The whole family kind of lined up in front of the church.

Some of these images were starting to degenerate a little bit so it's better to get them now while you can still kind of make out with the images is.

For me, learning her history gives another dimension to our relationship.

I really didn't understand her background.

My mother came from Mexico to the United States by looking at these photos, talking about the people and talking about her stories of that day and her relatives and her family.

I learned a little bit more.

(Stacey) It's very cathartic to see people connect with their history, their family's history.

I feel like I was kind of born to be an archivist.

I just always had that desire to save things that were important.

(Erin) When I see photographs of my mom who passed and pictures of her when she was young and of my grandparents or photos of my own kids, I really reconnect to those moments in time when you see a picture.

(Stacey) You're in this little enclosed space and everyone feels a little vulnerable and they start opening up and it's very heartwarming to see, so.

♪ CALM MUSIC This March, Pima County residents will have the opportunity to vote on RTA Next and that would renew a half-cent sales tax for the next 20 years of road projects.

In this segment, we look back on the last 20 years of the Regional Transportation Authority and in what's on the road ahead.

(Bill) Tonight on the Friday night round table, a green light for the $2 billion regional transportation plan.

Mark, the RTA, the Regional Transportation Authority, they've been, how countless meetings they've been holding for the past couple of months on this plan.

They finally agreed.

Is there enough in this plan that voters will go for it?

I just don't know.

When this whole process started, you-you-you thought this is the one that's gonna work.

After four failed attempts to convince Pima County residents to raise a half cent sales tax to pay for transportation improvements, in 2006, the RTA plan passed by a three to two margin.

The proposal has so far invested $1.6 billion to road improvements, bike and walkways, and alternative transportation.

Major projects were completed along Houghton, Tangerine, Valencia, and along Silverbell among others.

Midtown streets like Grant and Broadway underwent extensive road widenings.

RTA partially funded the street car and the controversial Downtown Links project that is still under construction.

But what does the average citizen think of the RTA 20 years later?

I know it's the regional transportation, something.

Is it the road traffic association or something like that?

I have no idea what that is.

The road project for the underpass, I think about The aftermath in the four or five years it took to get to where we are now and kicking artists out and the impact it's had on our neighborhood.

When I think about RTA, it's just been this obstacle.

I used to walk through this neighborhood back and forth to Downtown all the time.

One thing most people can all agree on is that driving, biking, and even walking in Tucson can be frustrating and our roads need work.

But deciding how to do that for a county of over a million people, all with their own needs and preferences is a challenge.

And we have to make a project here appeal to a larger group, which is really you know the heart and soul of the RTA is that it is voter approved.

So this is really driven by what the community here needs and what they want They need a lot of work.

There's a lot of potholes.

How the roads are, they're not that good cause I've lived here all my life.

I've replaced my windshield many times and I'll continue to do so.

I think the city does have issues with our transportation network.

(Patricia) It's not good for the people that run or ride their bikes or our cars.

I think we have transportation needs in this town and I've seen the traffic grow just over the past couple of years at this intersection.

But would it have been that much worse if we wouldn't have had the two billion?

I don't know, so I can't answer that.

I hear regularly, "why doesn't Tucson solve its transportation problems like Phoenix has?"

And to me, the direction that Phoenix went was great for that time, which was expansion and development.

And I kind of like Tucson being a little bit less convenient for automobile traffic.

I'm more of an alternative transportation guy myself.

(Mike) I like, I love to drive.

Just like everybody else.

But being able to just come, go out of the door and get onto a ride and go somewhere is just great.

It's just wonderful.

I love public transportation.

So when the plan was developed, we did an outreach effort where we went out to different communities, to different organizations, came to communities like South Tucson.

Overwhelmingly, we heard that roadway reconstruction was a big issue.

(John) In the past, the overwhelming majority of the funds has been used to widen roads.

Widening a road to solve traffic problems is like buying a fatter belt to address weight loss.

We could just optimize the roads we have.

We could pass funding infrastructure that just improves the existing roadways, repaves it and keeps it in good condition.

We don't need large capital improvement projects that super expand our sprawl into the desert.

There really isn't an alternative in terms of using local funds.

We would have to look, you know, for the state or the federal government to help out, which isn't always a good option.

Those funds often have strings attached to them and they're also very limited.

On March 10th, 2026, 20 years after the first RTA election, Pima County residents will have an opportunity to vote on RTA next, which will continue the existing half-cent sales tax and the regional transportation authority for another 20 years.

Major improvements are planned for Irvington, Drexel, Prince, Orange Grove, 29th Street and the new Sonoran corridor.

(Jeremy) Sometimes projects take for fricking ever.

If it started and there's no one there for weeks or months and the project has been initiated and not finished, that doesn't make sense.

(Logan) This new iteration of RTA, they're saying, yes, we know it went poorly, but we promise it's different this time.

And I just find it hard to imagine that things will be that different from the 20 years experience we've had.

We need to support our community, Tucson, so we can have better roads for, for everybody.

I would be upset, I suppose is a word that I would use, about more of the same.

If conditions remaind the same, we could expect 48,000 jobs.

(Jeanette) Between now and when the ballots go out in February, we're here to provide information to anybody, any organization, any community group that would like more information.

That's what we're here for and we're happy to provide that.

Despite how I feel about it, I know that we do need better roads in Tucson and we need to put more thought into that and invest.

Yeah, for sure.

If we wanna continue driving cars, which we don't have to, we could all just do golf carts and bikes, I think it'd be cool.

[ LAUGHING ] (Tom) The RTA Next election is all mail-in voting.

The ballots go out Wednesday, February 11th.

The last day to mail in your ballot is March 3rd and you can drop them off to the recorder's office until 7 p.m.

on March 10th.

Stay with Arizona Public Media for more on this important story and election results.

Well, you heard a new voice on that piece and I'd like to introduce you to the man behind the voice.

Meet David Lee, our new News Director and the host of The Press Room on Friday nights here on AZPM.

David, you came to Tucson a long way, all the way from Seattle, Washington.

Welcome.

Well, Tom, it's great to be here.

Yeah, I came from Seattle.

I was at the Cascade PBS station there for four years, so I was real familiar with kind of nonprofit news and working with PBS.

And when an opportunity came to come here, I jumped on it and now I'm happy to be here.

(Tom) You've been here just a short while.

I know a matter of what, a couple of months, barely.

First impressions, what do you think about our PBS and our town?

(David) I think in general, this is a great place to be.

You know, I'm very happy with the staff that I have, a lot of hard workers.

I think one of the things that's really important for me at this point is to absorb myself into all of what is Tucson, to learn as much about it as possible because news doesn't happen necessarily in our newsroom.

It happens out in the community and that's what's important.

Yeah, you have had a remarkable, interesting career in a lot of places.

Tell us about that.

You know, I started out in front of the camera doing a lot of what you do.

I was a sports director in several different locations.

I've had the opportunity to work in LA, San Francisco, Memphis, New York, and in the D.C.

area.

And then I have a daughter who was going to high school and it was in California.

I wanted to be closer to her, so I got out of the on-camera stuff and started working my way back up in the newsroom.

PBS has obviously been a great fit for you in Seattle, but I know you have big plans while you're here too to sort of take us to another level.

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I think I've been really fortunate at is I've been able to work on the commercial side of news.

And so I know that kind of the challenges that come with that.

And then for the last four years in Seattle and now here, working with public, you know, nonprofit media, there's a passion.

There's something that's a little bit different with it.

And I think it is because you don't get into this business to be rich.

You're really getting into it because you want to do something for the community.

You want to give the community information that is coming out.

You want to hold those accountable that you can.

And then you want to be able to do the news coverage without kind of any outside, you know, issues coming in, no car dealer or anything like that, saying you can't do that story.

It's really personal that, you know, with nonprofit news, which is really important.

One of the reasons I came here is because the reputation of the AZPM was outstanding.

You know, obviously working with PBS and NPR, you've got a great base there.

But the on the ground, the work that the journalists were doing here was really important.

And it's something I hope to encourage and continue and grow.

You couldn't have come in a better time.

We have this brand spanking new beautiful building.

(David) Yeah, you know, Paul and Alice Baker Center for Public Media is a great place to set up home base, right?

It's right on the corner of Kino and 36th.

People can see it.

It's a great place for us to do our job.

We have every bell and whistle you can imagine.

And it's going to be a great recruiting tool to get journalists to come and be here.

But again, the important thing will be how much we get out into the community, how much we are able to hear and respond to what the community needs are.

And that's the most important for me.

And I know you have a lot of vision and a lot of plans and all that.

What are the items that keep you up at night that you can't wait to get going on?

(David) Well, you know, the nice part about being in news is there's something that's going to keep you up every night.

(Tom) Right.

(David) You just have to figure out how to shut it off sometimes.

You know, I think, you know, we're coming into a midterm election, which is going to be a key thing and very important.

We've got a governor's race here, which is also going to be very important.

And I think it's our chance to, again, hear from the community, see what's important to them as we go through this next year and hopefully amplify some of their concerns.

And then to just really be nimble.

I want us to be nimble, to be able to adjust to important stories that happen from time to time.

Well, David, we are happy to have you.

Welcome to Tucson.

And I look forward to working together and seeing you around the shop.

Tom, I'm really glad to be here and hope you and I can work together for a long time.

All right.

Thanks.

Next, we meet an artist who began carving Pascola masks in the late 1980s.

And before carving, he painted Yoeme stories on wood and canvas.

Well, over time, the carving became more than art.

It became a path guiding him toward who he was meant to be for his tribe and his culture.

[ wind howling ] ♪ SWELLING FLUTE MUSIC Right now we're at the Pascua Yaqui Reservation, honoring our people and the knowledge of the history of the Yaqui tribe.

So now I've been carving for 47 years.

Right now you are talking to the last traditional woodcarver, mask maker here in this side- in the United States, on Old Pascua here in Tucson, Arizona.

I am working and teaching people the knowledge that was given to me through my elders.

It's about here and here.

That's the spiritual part.

Well, traditional wise, I go harvest the wood.

Before I enter the forest, the Huya Ania, the desert world.

I ask permission from the creator Mother Earth that I'm going to take the piece of wood to produce a piece of art that represents my nation.

And when I see a piece of wood, I see the image there.

It comes to me through the spirit of the art world, the spirit of my people.

It's a whole process because first you have to come out with the spiritual part of what you're going to bring out.

Then you have to sand it.

You have to form it.

I do get a big old cottonwood and I split it with a wedge across all the way down and do work on six to eight masks at the time.

I do forming first and then I start forming the faces, then I turn it around and I start digging out.

After the faces are formed of what it's going to be, I dig them out, then I cut them out with a machete.

On the Pascola mask, across, they have the cross on the floor of the head.

That blesses the dancers and their families during the ceremony.

It also represents the four directions of Earth and the sign, the sun symbol.

The triangles under around the mask represents the beam of life, the mountains.

The triangle under the eyes represents the raindrops because we're known for farming.

It also represents the teardrops of the revolution between the Yaqui and the Mexicans back then, when before the Yaquis came across for the freedom.

The dots on the mask represents the stars of family members.

The red represents the sewa, the flower, the loss of the bloodshed in the revolution.

The white represents purity, but also a candle lighting of every human life.

It's horse hair because the Pascola Man represents the old man of the fiesta.

Before the deer dancer can perform, the Pascola dancer has to dance three songs to bring the spirit of the deer from the flower world.

The Sea Ania world to honor all animals in city and human life, not only to bless our tribe, all Indigenous tribes, as much as all the world.

That's why we don't allow people to take photos of the deer dancers.

Once the Creator calls me, I think it's lost and nobody picks up, but that's my dream because for a while I didn't had nobody learning this.

I do have apprentices that learn this, and they're good during the weekends.

I go out there and educate people, and then they understand the purpose and the meaning of who we are and the symbolism that we carry on a mask or any carving because very spiritual powers.

I was taught to show respect, and this is what we teach as elders, is to be humble and grateful who we are as people.

♪ SERENE FLUTE MUSIC Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.