- [Announcer] If you wanna know what's going on.
(upbeat music) (bright music) (bright music continues) (static crackling) (gentle music) - Contemporary art is not just painting, it's not just installation art, it can be dance, it can be performance on the street, it can be even activism, you know, building a community garden.
Hi, I'm Natalie Cohen.
I'm the director at Central Contemporary Arts.
Central Contemporary Arts is a nonprofit arts organization which focuses on expanding access to the arts in Providence and in greater Rhode Island in general.
We recognize that sometimes people won't be able to come into our building and see our gallery shows, but we wanna make art accessible to people all around Providence.
So one way is having a public art program beginning with billboards by Andrew Moon Bain.
(gentle bright music) Bain's work explores the ideas of the environment and living in a community and questioning identity and connectivity in a very broad sense.
You know, he allows people to come to their own conclusions about what those mean to them.
(gentle bright music) - Sometimes I feel like delivering work that's beautiful and palatable, but if you look closer, there's a deeper message that is agitating and connecting and representing culture where it may not have been represented before, you know.
Greetings.
I'm Andrew Moon Bain, visual artist, record producer, musician, songwriter, designer.
I add a songwriter this time, so that's the one I want you to use.
(Andrew laughs) - Songwriter is your forte.
- Yeah.
Making art and being inspired is, it's really a lifestyle, it's really, it's like a part of practice and passion and vision.
I've been very blessed to travel and been curious about other cultures, and I just naturally gravitated to the Caribbean when I was young.
Those experiences, those people, those colors, all bleed into the visual artwork I'm creating.
A lot of my work is inspired and kind of honoring and related to the natural world.
I'll feel a set of colors are innately African and I'll use that in a series of paintings that I'm feeling kind of a ancestral pull or retention being expressed in my work at that time.
♪ No longer my concern ♪ ♪ Right now me say girl it too late ♪ ♪ Look how dem tables turn ♪ ♪ Don't come back girl it too late ♪ ♪ Don't play around with fire ♪ ♪ When the fire blaze you get burned up baby ♪ ♪ No you a straight up liar ♪ ♪ Flirting yourself and you swear you hurtin' me ♪ - I grew up in Seattle.
(gentle guitar music) When I was younger, I got bit by, you know, kind of inspiration with music and went from classical music into guitar and into hip hop and started writing rhymes, and then that evolved into songwriting that led into me producing records, not just for myself but for other people.
And I had a good mate that I grew up with who had gone to Jamaica to teach school.
He came back with a 45 vinyl that he produced when he was there.
That kind of set us on the trend, Lustre Kings Productions.
We started a record label and really stayed at it in the early 2000s and then started networking with other artists in Jamaica, going back to Jamaica often, and recording a whole stable of artists and releasing 7-inch records all over the world.
♪ We want to know what it's like to be free ♪ - Not only do I produce records, I do a lot of the graphic design and album art.
So I've done, you know, over 100 album art covers easily.
Part of what drove me to music is that kind of elitist mentality of having understanding of what, you know, is being applauded in the art world, even to appreciate it.
(gentle upbeat music) Public art and a project like AD SPACE is so meaningful 'cause you don't have to jump over any type of hurdle or social classist barrier to access it.
A lot of the billboards that came down, it was kind of dense on slot of advertising services.
- He has a really great way of connecting his individual works in exhibition and also in speaking to people directly through his artwork.
One piece that he has shown on Broad Street that says "Love Thy Neighbor," and so what does it mean to love your neighbor in terms of occupying, I guess, space in a community and occupying that with art rather than with advertisements.
- You know, I tried to keep some of that messaging as simple as, can you see that we're all made of carbon, interconnectivity?
Things like that.
You hope that you're doing something in a positive way for the passerby or for somebody in community transit or riding their bike or even walking or playing.
It's like a chance to share oversell.
- So I hope the billboards just inspire conversation between people in Providence.
I hope that people are more reflective about what they see in their neighborhoods and I really hope that it connects different parts of Providence.
And though it's very different that everything can come together to form this one whole, you know, this one art or this one exhibition, you know, the city itself.
(gentle upbeat music) (bright music) (bright music continues) (static crackling) - [Announcer 2] Watch more "ART inc." with new episodes uploaded every Wednesday on ripbs.org/artinc.