[ Music ] Coming up on State of the Arts, a Tucson artist expresses black identity on campus, bells chime on university campuses, and found objects come to life.

Stay tuned for these stories on State of the Arts.

Hello, I'm your host, Mary Paul.

Thank you for joining us on this week's show.

As Black History Month kicks off this week, we begin with a look at the work of Willie Bonner, a visionary African-American painter based right here in Tucson.

His work reflects the black American experience by expressing his personal truths on canvas.

[ Music ] I'm Willie Bonner, and I'm an artist.

We see the world individually in an abstract way.

You might see it different than I see it.

You've got to find your voice in the work.

You can't go by the voice of the artist.

What do it make you feel?

So the colors kind of help pull you into that.

Then you start deciphering what you see, what you feel.

I'm communicating to you spiritually.

My parents would take all of my siblings to church.

I was engaged into the artwork in the Bible, and I wanted to tell a story about my existence in the world.

My parents encouraged me to be me.

My father played the blues.

My mother sang gospel in the church.

It was difficult for me to walk around with a guitar and be outside and play.

It was a lot easier to have pen and paper in my back pocket where I could just draw.

He used to go with his father, who was a jazz musician, into the clubs.

[ Music ] Draw the musicians.

He would sell these works to the people at the clubs, and he got enough to have a good meal and a little extra pocket money.

They are pen and ink, hatch mark drawings, so atmospheric.

They're so rich, you know, looking at jazz as part of a cultural history that deserves to be interpreted through art.

[ Music ] Like most kids, when you begin school and you're drawing and painting, you start off doing paintings and drawings of your family.

You start off with a crayola pencil, and you start playing and mixing colors and looking at brush strokes.

I got excited.

I liked what the paint was telling me, more so than what I was trying to do with the paint.

So that became a factor that I liked seeing paint drips, flow, I can control it in certain ways, and there was a language in that for me.

[ Music ] Also as a child, when you go outside, you make mud.

Then you start sculpting, sculpturing things out of mud.

So now you're looking at 3D.

Everything became an investigation.

Nothing off the table, everything where it was supposed to be, but it was on me to find my voice, my language, through these materials.

He never stopped working and pushing his work to the limit.

He's very, very diverse in the work that he does.

We have the paintings, we have installation pieces, we have the drawings, so it just goes to show the breadth of the work that Willie does.

Some of the paintings are in acrylic, some are mixed medium.

Some are tar and feathers.

Some of the patterns in the work is patterning from quilts.

Enslaved people were put into their work to communicate to one another.

I'm not the only one that would use an abstract to speak to the spirit of man.

It began a long time before me.

So I'm taking all this here, different information and different ways to brush the work, and I'm creating like a gumbo.

The struggle that I once had was straddling the fist, being the world of academia, but then there's black culture that's totally left out of academia.

You learn stories of other ethnic groups, but somehow your story is not supposed to be told or mentioned.

The Western view of art was disconnected to who I am.

Most institutions are ran by people of that culture, and black America have very little space in that culture unless you buy into it.

The question becomes, who am I?

What is my identity?

How do I look?

Do I have to be photorealist?

Do I have to be expressionistic?

You know, what does it look like?

What I'm doing, my painting is expressing what's in me.

My journey as a black American and the history of black Americans.

Our history and our contributions to this society and now even more of that is being taken out to the point you feel like you're being erased.

They don't want DEI.

They don't want woke culture.

They don't want critical race theory.

We don't need any of those names.

It's simply our history.

For it to be left out of the schools, we're glad to make up some of that void with it being here in this show.

I'm given that journey of the past, the present, and the future.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

You might not be ready or in a position to receive the truth, and it might take a while for you to cleanse yourself of how our society separate us from not having those conversations.

So the work creates conversation.

He's saying, "I'm a black man, but I'm an American.

This is my country.

We have hope to come together."

He's not an angry man, but he's not going to let you forget the injustices of the past.

Our name is Blue Lotus, and that name was given to us by Willie Bonner.

That is a flower that's really important in Africa, and it's a flower that grows in very harsh environment and to great beauty.

And I thought that made it very symbolic of our struggle in this particular society.

I want people to find their own humanity within the work themselves, considering that we don't want to look deeper than what the surface show us.

That's how racism function.

We all human, right?

So when you look at the earlier work of man in hunting and gathering, everybody worked together.

Are you helping humanity restore, or are you part of the problem to keep us divided?

And then the question is, why?

Why do you feel it's important?

I try not to be around to explain things to people because that's not my job.

I'm not Jesus.

You know, I'm just an artist.

The first of its kind in the United States, Ars Sonora, is a musical sculpture that can be found in the center of the University of Tampa's campus.

We now travel to both France and Florida to see how the design and construction of this 105-foot-tall instrument came to be and the impact it's made on the community.

I remember telling Dr.

Vaughn that we had created something new that we call Ars Sonora, which would bring so much more opportunities than a simple bell tower.

So they offered a new technology that would electronically tie into a keyboard, where each key was tied into a bell note.

This offered a really important advantage that anyone could play bell music through this new technology.

I think the Ars Sonora is kind of a, it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime projects that I think people that go into architecture and construction kind of dream about doing.

Where we are now is bringing it all together into what now is a sculpture, and we're here watching that happen before our eyes.

So what's important to us right now is when this prefabricated structure shows up to Tampa, does it all fit together?

When the nine containers arrived on site, we were able to then assemble the entire sculpture in four days.

That process took us four weeks in France, so we definitely learned a lot from that process, and it went very smoothly in the U.S.

because of it.

You know, when the Sykes and the Vaughns and the rest of the project team were sitting there watching this final piece be placed, it was nice to take that moment to pause and reflect on everything we've accomplished and just marvel at this sculpture that we'd created.

You know, it's just a great shared feeling that we have done this, even though we've got a bit more to go.

Here we've got the sculpture outside in a big plaza, so we still have a lot of adjustment, a lot of tuning of the responses of the keyboard.

This work has to be done with the musicians, of course.

You can hear the right hand?

Yeah, it's much better over there.

I feel that I have to play it too loud to hear it from here, but what does it sound like out there?

So we asked Thomas to use the software developed to rearrange, rebalance this work.

Yeah, it's perfect.

Thank you.

I'm happy.

We now have our musical department set up, and it's going to culminate into the first performance, and we're really excited to hear it.

It will just be a huge crescendo on campus.

I can't wait.

One of my goals for this concert was to just show off that variety of not just what kind of music we can play, but with whom we can also play and collaborate with.

It's been really cool to hear it with all the different instruments in the vocalist.

I think it's going to offer a lot of really cool opportunities for performing.

Yeah, for sure.

Now we have another performance space, which is super cool.

We're so lucky.

Yeah, we really are.

Awesome.

I mean, I can't explain it.

The amount of people that showed up to hear this incredible instrument is really, I think, inspiring, and it gives me a lot of hope for the concerts I have planned for the future.

I think it's important to have music like this in our everyday lives.

It's something I feel is oftentimes taken for granted.

Students come to me and say they look forward to the music every day.

It just sort of sparks a little bit of joy, I think, in some people.

It's just beautiful, just like a masterpiece to look at and to hear.

It's just a great way to get the UT community together in song.

It's so special, I think, to have an instrument like this in the center of our campus to bring everybody together and for them to have that one thing in common.

[bell rings] [applause] The result of so much months of work will be a kind of end to an adventure, so a little bit of sadness still.

For me, I see that as the beginning of a new era.

Long life for Ars Sonora.

To me, UT has always been a very special place, and most people see that in a variety of different ways.

This adds to the specialness.

I hope it will inspire people and add to the enjoyment on the campus.

I hope that this Ars Sonora will bring the students in UT hope when they need it, love when they need it, and music and spirit when they need it.

[music] Here at AZPM, we're located on the campus of the University of Arizona, where bells chime regularly every quarter hour.

In this piece from our archives, we learn about the unique acoustic experience those chimes create, right here beyond our doors.

[bell rings] The bells ringing.

[singing] Sorry, I'm not good at singing.

[singing] You know, if I'm walking, I'll hear those bells.

The bells in the main administration building?

Well, it was the chimes for the clock.

They tell us what time it is, every fifteen minutes and on the hour.

And then, you know, if you hear the right ringing, oh, it's two o'clock or something like that.

Don't even need a watch.

So this is for people without watches?

It's like my grandmother's chime, and she had an old grandfather clock that had a similar chime.

Yeah, it is my doorbell at home.

I've never thought about that.

Well, I guess it gives someone a job, right?

The bell ringer?

[singing] They're not real bells?

It's a recording?

[singing] The Westminster Quarters make up a pattern of notes that we hear all the time if we want to know what time it is.

And it dates back to the late 18th century, when in Cambridge, England, at Great St.

Mary's Church, there was a new clock.

But some musicians, possibly a law professor with the help of a music professor and a music student, came up with this series of notes that we now hear to mark time all over the world.

Now, in 2016, at the University of Arizona, we have the same pattern of notes that we hear at Big Ben.

It's called the Westminster Quarters.

First four notes that we hear.

This is for fifteen minutes.

At thirty minutes, this is what we hear.

[piano music] And so, what we get here at the hour is... [piano music] You don't have to write a complicated melody to make a melody that people are going to listen to, understand, appreciate, or get something out of.

And this is a great example of that.

[piano music] I can imagine that at different places on the mall, you're going to get a very different impression of this tune.

The auditory experience of hearing these bells is different depending on where you happen to be listening.

The mall is set up beautifully to create a lot of reflections back and forth from the north side to the south side.

We picked this particular spot because we're going to make a recording with the bell sound passing by our microphone, and it's going to travel across the mall, and it will reflect off of the very flat surface of the Koffler Building and come back.

And we'll also then record the reflection.

[piano music] Before we do the next recording, I'm going to make a measurement of the distance from this recording over to the Koffler Building.

Six and a half feet.

Three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.

And the middle tile is actually bigger.

That gives us thirteen feet.

Six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty.

Alright, so we counted 104 tiles on this sidewalk.

I'm going to log that in here.

One hundred and four feet.

The other piece of information we need in order to know exactly what the speed of sound is today is the air temperature.

Here at 6.07 p.m.

on July 20, 2016, is 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

[piano music] Last week we made recordings on the U of A Mall of the chimes that go off every quarter of an hour.

I'm waiting now for Matt to come over from the music department, and I'm going to show him some of the analyses that I've done since our recording last week.

Well, I'm looking forward to talking with Brad about what he found out about the Westminster chimes and how they sound in different parts of campus, and what that means for how we experience this piece that a lot of us don't even think about experiencing.

But it's part of our life here at the U of A.

[footsteps] Hi Matt.

Hey Brad, how are you?

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Well, come on in.

I think we're going to show you some data that we recorded last week.

So this is a map of the U of A Mall, and the sound source is somewhere on top of the Administration Building.

The effect that people experience, the auditory effect, is that you get extra beats that pop up, depending, and they're different depending on where you happen to be standing.

[piano music] So the hypothesis is that it's coming from reflections off buildings.

We like to think of music as, here's the score, these are the notes, and we analyze them, but to think that it might have this kind of origin, and that it's still being more than 250 years later, it's still being reinvented just automatically by our environment, that these pitches are being reinvented.

You write the music, but then you launch the music into whatever environment it happens to be, and it takes on the life of that context.

I don't often go outside and think, "Oh, it's 5:55.

I'm going to go check out the Westminster Chimes."

But I think it's something I might start to do, and just really say, "This is part of all of our environment here."

[piano music] And if you think about a typical undergraduate being here, let's just say fall and spring semester for four years, they're going to hear those somewhere between 15 and 20,000 times.

So it becomes a part of every graduate's experience at the U of A. It's the soundtrack for their experience, and it's easy to take for granted.

That along with Bear Down Arizona.

Right, exactly.

This is more heard than Bear Down Arizona.

Absolutely.

Way more heard.

Finally, we wrap up with a Spanish language piece that looks at sculptures questioning pre-established truths.

Cuban artist Bea Trizala Santa Cana's creative spirit becomes evident in the textures, colors, and shapes she uses in her work.

Often incorporating found objects to help tell stories, her work challenges our perception of the world that surrounds us.

And that wraps it up for this week's edition of State of the Arts.

I'm Mary Paul.

Thanks for watching.