[announcer] "Art Loft" is brought to you by.
[ad narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.
The Florida Keys and Key West.
[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners and the friends of South Florida PBS.
[narrator] "Art Loft:" It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.
In this episode: art and pop culture.
The influences run deep.
From the greatest of all time.
I wish I would have had the opportunity to actually meet, see, be in the presence of Ali.
[narrator] To an artist under the radar no more.
[alison] I think that his work transcends even its function as a part of the historical record.
[narrator] And an ode to the art of performance.
[a.g.] And my coping mechanism knows only one dictating truth and that is show business.
I made this decision to sort of open the exhibition with a crescendo, if you will.
The studio that Maryan maintained in the seventies at the Chelsea Hotel was really where he made some of his most radical and important work and where he was really at the height of his mature style as a painter and his power.
We felt that sort of creating this immersive environment for the visitor to enter into and really see the kind of optical assault of Maryan's world in this room that he had created where he hung his paintings floor to ceiling with other art that he had collected, notably African and Oceanic masks, but also folk objects and popular cultural things that he collected.
We really created this visual universe.
There has not been a deep dive into his practice, specifically not outside a Jewish lens and his work, for the most part, has gone unknown and under shown.
So, this was really an opportunity to dig, research, and bring together works that have not been exhibited, let alone published before.
I think the way that Alison curated this exhibition was brilliant in that she deconstructed all the complex layers of Maryan's work.
Everything from having this unique brand of figuration to speaking to his lived experience and trauma, while also connecting it with a larger human experience and, of course, reinserting him into the canon by bringing some of his contemporaries literally into the show and creating these beautiful salon-style installations that are immersive and visually connect Maryan with his contemporaries, whether or not he knew many of them that are on display here.
Some he had personal relationships with, like H. C. Westermann and June Leaf.
Others, like the COBRA Artists, there's no denying that connectivity visually in the work.
We have an artwork by H. C. Westermann alongside the work of Maryan.
While they were friends in their lifetime, to see these two works alongside one another and the similarities and the way that they interact with one another is truly one of my favorite moments.
So, in the exhibition, you traverse a series of bodies of work that were really essential to his vocabulary and his different conceptual concerns.
Maryan worked in series.
So, each room that follows is a particular series.
So, for example, the following room is a group of works that he made of these personage, these characters, that were the main thrust of his figurative practice that he painted in black and white, which was a very particular part and consistent part of his practice.
Those were made in the sixties and, from there, we see other bodies of work like the "Napoleon Series," where he took the iconic figure of Napoleon and degraded him and created this sort of, again, turned him into a vessel for his meditation on the personage and questions of trauma and things that are really unspeakable.
Almost all of the figures have something happening around their mouths.
They're emitting something or taking something in.
There's Technicolor sort of streams coming from their mouths and we realize later in the exhibition, at the very heart of the show, is a series of galleries that really directly reference his experiences in surviving the Holocaust.
"Ecce Homo" is a film that Maryan made at the end of his life and he made that at the Chelsea Hotel with fellow artist Kenny Schneider.
What it is is a black and white experimental film from the late seventies where he's giving a testimonial of his experience in the Holocaust.
But, at the same time, he's introducing news and images from the news of that moment.
So, we're seeing images from the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and other images of dictators.
And he is creating this kind of intersectional presentation saying, "I have experienced this.
These things that are happening now, these horrible, genocidal, fascist things that are happening in my contemporary world are things that I survived."
And he really was driven by this desire to not only speak of what happened to him but to create a connection with other struggles and I think that this is why I had decided to place this room at the very heart of the exhibition.
I think that his significance is not just as a witness, but as an artist who really tried to channel the drive to reconstruct oneself and the very notion of human in all of his paintings and all of his drawings and everything that he wrote and tried to create.
So, I think that his work transcends even its function as a part of the historical record.
I mean, I think he's really a thinker of the struggle to maintain humanity against the worst odds and the importance of expressing these things in whatever form one can.
So, I think that Maryan is an absolutely contemporary figure in that way, an extremely timely figure.
[narrator] To learn more about Maryan, check out www.mocanomi.org.
Street art came of age in the 1980s as works went from subway cars to gallery walls.
WGBH Boston charts the course of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the hip hop generation.
[anchor] Blazing off the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts: the massive paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
He was in New York street artist of the 1970s and eighties who became a darling of the art world.
Three years ago, one of his paintings sold for more than $100 million at auction.
Legend, icon, maverick, he bore all the crowns so frequently depicted in his work before his young untimely death.
He often gets described as the kind of sole Black genius artistically of the time and what we're trying to show is that he absolutely was an incredibly genius artist, but he was surrounded by his peers who were on a similar journey with him.
[anchor] This new exhibition at the MFA is the first to examine Basquiat and his fellow artists in the hip hop generation who changed the chemistry and sound of New York.
[dj] All the way back, yeah!
[anchor] Rammellzee, Fab Five Freddy, Basquiat.
They were among a crop of fresh faced art world outsiders from marginalized communities.
But, they made New York theirs, says cocurator Liz Munsell.
They came from many different boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and then they began to converge downtown.
They were getting a little bit older and they saw this incredible scene of 1980s creatives, people like Madonna around, and they became part of this club scene.
[anchor] But, before that, they were labeled graffiti artists, pursued by police for tagging buildings and, a most prized canvas, the New York City subway.
Painting subway cars guaranteed their work would be seen by thousands of people as trains raced throughout the city.
There's a lot of chaos for the eye to see every day.
[anchor] Writer and musician Greg Tate is the show's cocurator.
He knew most of the artists featured here when they all began to mix with performers, filmmakers, and musicians in New York's downtown scene.
This is a youth movement and, in America, youth is everything.
So, whoever's leading that charge is gonna win.
[anchor] What the outsiders called graffiti, the artists simply called writing, a form Basquiat noted had dated to ancient times and what artist Lady Pink said was like calligraphy.
But, it was all a language the artists shared.
Abstracting it, coding it, crossing it out.
They really, in the vein of hip hop music, are incorporating really whatever they can get their hands on and very freely in an unfiltered way getting all of that into their canvases.
[announcer] But, these artists wanted off the streets and into the galleries.
They demanded they be heard and seen.
The art world took notice and, in the US, two of them, Keith Haring and Basquiat, rocketed into the stratosphere.
[jean-michel] I could see the handwriting on the wall.
It was mine.
I've made my mark in the world and it's made its mark on me.
[anchor] Basquiat's work was fueled by his interest in history, not to mention the years of museum visits he'd made with his mother while growing up.
He charted his thoughts in notebooks.
I went to a party, went to one party at his house once, and walked past his bedroom on the way to the loo.
I saw there was a video of "Superfly" that was on and then all these art books stacked up.
So, when he wasn't painting, he was in there just studying the artists he liked.
[anchor] Basquiat's work is also often populated by random bits of anatomy.
When he was seven, he was hospitalized after a car accident and developed a fascination with the book "Gray's Anatomy."
But, it's this crown that is most ubiquitous in his work.
He said, "My work is about three things: royalty, heroism, and the streets," right?
So, he was also, as someone who had gone to all the major galleries and museums and didn't see any black people represented there, he's letting you know that his royalty is a street royalty.
[anchor] That reign would extend into the art world where Basquiat achieved superstardom.
But, in 1988, he died of a drug overdose.
He was only 27 but he'd managed to see his community of artists get their due and beyond that, says Liz Munsell, they began to influence the A-list artists they worked to be alongside.
Frank Stella, you can see his referencing and he also notes that he was looking at graffiti and trying to find a different surface for his painting in his late eighties work.
[anchor] It was a hard-fought acceptance and for it this singular group of artists hang together still.
[a.g.] I am a self-proclaimed control freak.
Everyone's like, "Oh, you sang so great."
I'm like, "I didn't.
Are you crazy?
I'm not gonna sing live."
This isn't about me being good.
It's about me doing it.
So, for sure that whole thing was prerecorded and I'm okay with that.
I've learned that reality is much more malleable than I think we give it credit for.
I know all this sounds a bit trite, the classic story of the young artist scorned by his inability to cope with society and reality.
But, it does give insight into how I perceive reality and how my coping mechanism knows only one dictating truth and that is show business.
Authentic expressions of the self, along with the rigorous production of your surroundings, that to me is show business and that's my practice.
I went to a performing arts school since I was in the fifth grade.
But, I was always in the visual arts department and the visual arts department is interesting because it allows you to look at things from a more conceptual or philosophical standpoint, as opposed to the performing artists who were in there working every day.
So, I had that distance to see the power of what their training in singing, acting, and dancing could do therapeutically to a creative person.
"Commissioner" tells a story, one that allows me to pause and address the audience directly and this sort of experience creates lasting relationships between us all.
To support an art object, with me, is really to support the player and the whole show and this show has no beginning, nor end.
As a collector, you are now playing a role, a character, a producer, an audience member.
Call it what you will, but you are now part of the show.
[narrator] From WEDU: Muhammad Ali was poetry in motion and in this tribute poetry slam, Tampa Bay poets battle with words to honor Ali and see which spoken word performance is truly the greatest.
So, tonight is a super combination of athleticism and also literature and poetry.
We got four of the best poets in the city who are gonna be competin' head to head.
They wanted a stage to voice their love for Mohammed Ali and his principles and things like that.
[kennedy] The way that the entire event is going to be organized, it's almost like a boxing match.
Please clap it up for your first sacrificial poet, Charles Hines!
So, I focused my poem on resilience and overcoming obstacles and so I spin it into just kind of fighting against depression and those everyday things that prevent you from being your best self, from seeing the light.
Every word they say, just stings.
Like, "Will it ever be all right?"
I am not a champion.
In this moment, you may not feel like a champion or your best self, but always standing up again and just stayin' in the ring until, one day, you look and you're like, "Hey, I'm the champion."
How am I going to put my socks on today and walk a mile in everyone else's shoes while I stay stuck in cement, still trying to soothe?
Someone like Muhammad Ali, even he got tired and exhausted on days, I'm sure, because it's all just so much sometimes.
So, the poem that I wrote is just kind of saying that it's okay to have bad days and it's okay to have days where you focus on yourself and do things for yourself and you're still a great person.
I miss the days when we pulled it out boxing gloves instead of handguns, before fists became semiautomatic pistols and double action revolvers.
In 2017, I started GrowHouse because I wanted to do something different.
The idea was to take the elements of slam poetry and the competition structure and use it for other forms of art.
Nosy shipwrecks resurface to watch dolphins ornament black braid with gold.
She pulls Mount Everest out of her breasts and each nail lines up for its turn at getting even.
2019 is when I partnered up with Dennis.
He's an excellent host and he's a great just people person.
He's a lot more outgoing than I would say I am and so we're definitely a great partnership in that I'm more reserved and he's great at just being a people person.
One of the most prolific and profound poets that I personally know, Walter Wally B Jennings!
Wally B is kind of this tree trunk, right?
And he's kind of brought poetry as spoken word down from Tallahassee.
When he brought it here to Tampa, from that just blossomed all a lot of everything that you see today.
This earth was not built by brick and mortar.
What you do may make you important, but why you do it will make you immortal.
The poem that I have is really about the whole aging process and how it's important for us to really recognize the totality of our life as one cohesive experience rather than these fragmented parts, where we fall in love with one and we hate the other.
And so, with Muhammad Ali, a lot of people kind of are able to segment his life into various sections, when you talk about him as a young champion and then when you talk about the attention that he got as an activist, and then, in his latter years, as he dealt with Parkinson's and a lot of medical challenges.
So, most people they experience or know him and they really, his life resonates with them heavily, usually in one of those three areas.
And remind everyone that greatness is always just over the horizon.
Ali's actually one of the few people that I can be like, "Oh, that is one of my superheroes."
I just look at him as someone who was so dedicated to getting what he wants.
Just going back and watching old footage of him and just seeing how he was able to just come out on top against some of the biggest fighters and then, of course, outside of the ring, he was just an artistic person overall.
He was one of the first, I would say, one of the first well known spoken word kind of poets.
Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!
Rumble young man, rumble, hey!
That's the best type of poetry to me is that authentic genuineness and that's all Muhammad Ali is.
The fact that he crafted himself as his own character and chose to be true to that come hell or high water, with all of the weight that each one of his decision has made, not just for himself, but as a representative of his people here in America.
He got something that he had been training for basically his entire life and he decided to give it up for the good of other people.
I loved him as being a black man who was completely confident in who he was.
At that time, that was very not okay to do that.
He became the first, in my eyes, the first athlete that was more than his sport.
I wish I would have had the opportunity to actually meet, see, be in the presence of Ali, worthy of all praises most high.
The poem that I wrote for this event I was trying to take some of his core tenants and expound upon them and find how I am trying to exemplify them in my life just as a small homage to Muhammad Ali.
And conviction, spirituality, and dedication.
He was respect and giving.
We want Tampa to be a city that people think of when they think of really dope spoken word poetry.
Like, "Oh, we've gotta go to Tampa to go to GrowHouse."
And we really believe in building community and working together with other people in the community who have the same goals as us.
Tampa as a whole, outside of even just poetry, is really blossoming in a beautiful way in the art scene and we wanna be a part of that.
We're all trying to get to the same place.
We all want Tampa to be known as this awesome city and there's a whole bunch of talent here and GrowHouse just wants to be a platform to show that and put Tampa on the map, basically.
[narrator] For more information on the poets featured, visit @blackonblackrhyme and @kitchentablelit Arts on Facebook and dawsontheartist.com Known for flipflops and lazy days, the Florida Keys have a rhythm of their own.
Here music festivals play a starring role, like the annual BayGrass Bluegrass Festival in the Upper Keys.
I was approached because I love the style of music and they wanted a kind of a new thing.
So, the director of Islamorada Community Entertainment approached me to do a bluegrass festival for them.
So, I decided to do it.
Appalachian roots music, before we all had TVs and video games and cell phones, this is what people did.
We hung out.
People hung out and played music.
So, there's lots of people around the festival hanging out, playing music as well.
We play what we like to call outlaw bluegrass.
We change a few of the traditions of the genre and bend them the way we want to.
It's slightly different.
We try to keep our instrumentation and our vocal styles and everything traditional while veering away from tradition with our lyrics.
So, the tradition is something, to me, to be respected, but not necessarily a roadmap.
It's a foundation that you can build upon.
I just hope people find it exciting and I think I try to write music that's that you would want to drive fast to.
I mean, that's basically my goal when writing music.
We came down here last year after playing a bluegrass cruise and just kinda fell in love with the place.
It's just got a really nice vibe about it and they seem to just really love their music down here and so the guy who put on this festival here, Robbie, asked us on back and we were happy to come on back down.
So, yeah, that's how we got introduced to it.
I'm glad to be back.
I think, because we do mostly original material, it's not really considered traditional.
But, I think that people that like old time and bluegrass and traditional music really seem to like our music as well.
It kind of crosses over 'cause that's a lot of what we listen to.
It's a churchyard auction, a sight to see It seems to me, in a lot of these sort of smaller communities, you meet really nice people who are really eager to just spend time with you.
Not just come to the show and listen to the songs, but actually get to hang out with people and talk with them and I think that was what we really identified with the last time we were here and it made us excited to come back.
The house of stone [narrator] The BayGrass Bluegrass Festival happens every January in the Florida Keys.
If you go, tag us on Instagram at @artloftsfl.
Find full episode, segments, and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.
[announcer] "Art loft" is brought to you by.
[ad narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.
The Florida keys and Key West.
[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners and the Friends of South Florida PBS.