Coming in a moment on art rocks, a house built to fit its gardens.
When you come up the driveway, up the Ocala, you're going to see the west side of the house.
And that is Palladian inspired.
A mixed media artist bears witness to the world around her.
And from the Florida Keys, unique pieces made using what the ocean brings.
These stories are up next on Art Rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.
West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.
Hello.
Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.
With me, James Fox Smith of Country Roads magazine.
As the city of New Orleans expanded in the 1920s and thirties, philanthropists Edith and Edgar Stern became convinced that the house they had built at the corner of Metairie Road and Garden Lane was no match for the emerging splendor of the gardens they'd built around it.
So they started again working with the architects William and Geoffrey Platt and visionary landscape designer Ellen Biddle.
SHIPMAN The Stones created a house and garden design that is today considered one of America's finest.
Today, long view is open to the public.
So let's listen.
A site historian and curator Leonora Custer shares the story of a spectacular home inspired by the great House and garden estates of Louisiana, Europe and Africa, and built on wealth generated by Sears, Roebuck and the business of brokering cotton.
Longview is a family home of Edith and Edgar Stern.
We are a national historic landmark because our landscape architect, Ellen Bill Shipman, is one of the first women in the fields of landscape.
Architecture is one of the first four who had their own businesses and held their own.
She designs over 600 projects in her career, and of the 600 projects, there are only about ten that have a piece of them still open.
And we're the only one that's fully intact.
When we say fully intact, we mean that we have all eight acres that she designed, as she designed them for the original owners any time we need to do work on the site, we go back to the original 44 plans that we have in our archives, and we pull them out and we make sure that things match to her desired specification.
Since building on this property, the Sterns had a first house.
We refer to it as Longview one and that was built in 1923.
They meet Ellen Shipman in 1935 and she starts to develop work on the south side of their home.
They then go on quite an interesting trip from 1936 to 1937, all over Europe and North Africa.
When they returned from that trip, they really have loved what Shipman has worked on.
She's had 14 months for her work to develop and mature, and they realize based on the inspiration from Europe and her work, they really do want a different home that can better meld with her design ideas.
So they pick up the first house and they move it down the street.
It goes one block to another family's lot, and then they start in 1939 to develop the house that you can come and visit here today.
This house is completed in 1942.
The architects are William and Geoffrey Platt.
They are familiar with Shipman's work.
Their father, Charles Platt, had been her mentor and had gotten her into the business and taught her drafting.
The Sterns are really looking for a house and a garden that can be one cohesive plan.
Platt And Shipman, together with the Sterns design, the house that we have, it is roughly 22,000 square feet.
It's on four floors, has a below grade basement, which is very unusual for South Louisiana.
And we have eight acres of gardens for the facade of each of our four sides of the house are based off of other homes.
They want the house because the furniture is old.
They want the house to feel like the furniture fits in with it.
When you come up the driveway, up the Ocala, you're going to see the west side of the house, and that is Palladian inspired.
Palladio was a architect from 15th century Italy, and it is very similar in that it has a raised house, there's a pediment.
It's got two dependencies that are connected with colonnades so shuttered areas that can protect you from the rain and all the environments.
When you move to our south side, it has the largest garden view off of it that is based off of the Beauregard Chi's house, a charter street in the French Quarter.
And then our east side is based off of shadows on the Tesch plantation off of Bayou Tesh and then the North side is a Georgian home.
Georgian is one of those wonderful sort of earlier versions of architecture where really it's all classically inspired.
They all still have the pediment, they have the engage columns, but it's not directly related to any one house.
What is really unique about Long View is that Shipman only did the interiors for about eight projects.
This second home here on the property was designed with Shipman being both our landscape architect and our interior designer.
Shipman is most known for two design elements.
She really loves axial views, so they're all like axial, like they go in long straight lines.
And she also designs what she refers to as garden rooms.
Each one of our spaces, we have 16 garden rooms designed by Shipman that all sort of orient on an axial plan from the house.
They radiate out and they go out into the gardens, and sometimes the gardens radiate out and come back into the house.
The garden rooms will be separated out based on not just walls and things of the sort, but mainly the actual architecture of the gardening plantings.
So we have an East Lawn in Ocala.
We have a wonderful Spanish court at the South Side and between the house and the Spanish court, we also have our Portico garden.
So each one of these are going to have different garden plans.
The flowering plants closer to the house are very specific.
They have lots of color in them, whereas the farther out you go from the house, they get a little bit more just interested in the shapes of the plants.
As you go farther out, you have our wild garden.
The wild garden is a full acre of native plants.
So we have three paths.
We have an iris path, a wildflower path, and a camellia path that all bloom at different times of the year, and they are in a more wooded environment.
So it feels a little bit more natural, like you've just come upon them in the forest.
Whereas closer to the house it's much more Foxwoods that have been trimmed to match a certain shape.
All of the gardens are going to have a space between the house and themselves.
So that sort of allows for that flow and movement from visitors and the family and the home to sort of walk out into the gardens.
The light is sort of a good trick the brothers came up with because as the sun goes down, then the house has a very warm and inviting glow and it sort of brings you back, each of you, when you look out of a window, is going to be to that one garden area that's designed for that room.
Our ceilings are at different heights that allow for us to have conduit for our electrical and our air conditioning systems to run through it.
Most importantly for this home, we actually have air conditioning.
1942, a private home, having air conditioning is sort of unique.
We are the first private home to have air conditioning here, definitely in New Orleans, but especially sort of in our immediate regional area around the Gulf Coast.
You would have found lots of air conditioning in commercial buildings, hotels and places of that sort, but not in people's private homes quite yet.
One of the things that I love the most is how all of the plasterwork, both in our ceiling medallions and our crown molding, will have been based off of our mantel pieces.
So the mantel fronts that we have in all of the rooms come from much older homes, between 100 and 250 years older than the house we have here.
And so they already had them.
They were preexisting.
They were in the first house.
They moved on to the second house.
And what the plaques would do is that they would look at all those details.
So if you notice, sometimes there might be an egg and dart or an acanthus leaf or sort of a garland of flowers.
They would then take those design elements and use them in the plasterwork.
So it looks like the mantel piece that we know is old and the plasterwork in the house were all put together at the same time, even though there might be 200 years between them.
We have a wonderful mantel piece in the second floor drawing room that actually came from a barn in North Carolina.
Mrs. Shipman's had a car break down and while she was waiting for her car to be repaired, she asked what she could do in town.
The gentleman fixing her car said, Well, what do you do?
Oh, I do landscaping and I do houses and goes, Oh, I have some interesting things in my barn.
Go take a look.
So the second floor drawing room needed to be a certain height to be proportional to the furniture they're planning on putting in there.
And so she just picks it based off of the height of how tall it is.
But after they do some removing of old layers of paint, they discover it's actually a memorial to George Washington.
This works wonderfully for the Sterns because they are avid American history fans.
The House is a definite mix of wallpaper paneling and plasterwork.
The Dining Room has a wonderful floral Asian inspired while covering.
It's not actually intended to be wallpaper.
It's intended to be screens that would have been hung on a wall as decoration.
It's made of rice paper and it would have been hand-painted.
Shipman promised the Sterns that they could have something like on her dining room walls where she lived.
And unfortunately, when it became time for them to find it in the 1940s, we were at war and she was not able to go to Asia and procure them.
So actually the walls that we have here are covered with the actual wallpaper from Shipman's apartment in New York City.
The Upper Hall is the only room that is a public room for the visitors to see that is not with its own windows and views of the gardens.
The wallpaper is panoramic wallpaper.
It is scenes of the City of Lille from 1823.
It's by a man named Felix Sylvania.
His atelier would have been out of Paris and Leon was picked mainly because it was wallpaper that was the right size to fit the space.
I think it's a wonderful connection because it's a French city on a river.
It loves food.
We're a small French city on a river that loves food.
There's a nice connection there.
The staircase on the second floor continues up to a wonderful third floor stair.
That gives us a view of a circular skylight.
And so we're getting in the natural light through our ceiling.
We do have American wallpaper as well.
So there was a woman named Nancy McClellan out of New York City.
You'll notice a lot of our design elements come from New York City because both Ellen Shipman and the Platt Brothers businesses were out of New York City.
So Nancy McClellan was a woman who specialized in furnishings and interior design.
She especially worked with a lot of textiles for curtains and upholstery and wallpaper.
She both procured wallpaper from other companies, but she also would design her own.
We have some wonderful McCullen chintz wallpaper and our ladies reception room and then there is also additional wallpaper that they procured from her, but not designed by her in the second floor room.
So we have things in both hallways, one that goes to the sleeping porch and the other that goes to the master suite.
This house was definitely designed and built as a way to be able to work on the Stern's philanthropy.
Edgar was a Republican and Edith is a Democrat.
They really designed this house so that they could invite groups of people in to have conversations and to discuss different ideas of how best to sort of move the world forward.
It would sit at either end of the table and want to make sure that they had conversations about things so they could figure out how to work together to get the same end goal.
They would frequently invite groups of people to the house that they knew may or may not get along sometime as we got new public programing, we got housing.
Sometimes we would get a new hospital or a public park and sometimes people would see each other.
And I'm not going to have dinner with that person and just walk out before they took their hat off.
So because of this, we need to be able to have lots of tablecloths and lots of different dishes.
We have three sets of silver, 9 to 11 sets of China, depending on if you count the dessert sets only as its own set.
And then thousands of additional just pieces.
The Sterns loved something they referred to as cream wear because it would not distract from the wallpaper that we have in here.
This wallpaper is very subtle and they didn't want it to be too distracting.
One of the parts of Long View collection here is that we have a room called the Modern Art Gallery, even starts collecting contemporary art in the 1960s, we have mostly up and kinetic pieces from the works of Hepworth, and viscerally we have Aaps and a gumbs and a Picasso.
But really we use that room more than anything as a reason to continue our contemporary art collections and exhibitions.
Edith would, if she were still alive, continue to collect contemporary art.
We are sure of it based on her personality.
So we want to make sure that contemporary art is always going to be flowing through the house.
And so we continue that work by having creative residency programs and particular artists that might come in and display their work either in our gardens, our temporary exhibition gallery or throughout the property and all of the rooms of the house.
Edgar is a cotton broker.
His father had immigrated as a 16 year old from Bavaria and worked his way up to a partner of a cotton brokerage firm.
Edgar's money is coming from selling cotton it.
His father's a man named Julius Rosenwald.
He ran Sears and Roebuck and is probably best known for having started 5000 schools across 15 states in the South.
Edgar worked a lot with Rosenwald, his father in law, doing projects like that.
Julius Rosenwald started working with Tuskegee and Booker T Washington, making sure that all of these schools were in rural areas to give the best sort of foundational education that they could around the country.
I think it made sense to him because when he spoke to Washington, when Washington asked for him to work on this project with him, what he realized is that everyone who would go to Tuskegee, they may not know how to read and write and learning.
Once you're a teenager or 20 or 30, it's very difficult.
And so Washington was saying how they really needed children to learn how to read and write and do basic math as soon as possible.
And the best way to do that was to provide all of these schools that should have been provided by counties and states around the country to begin with.
But they needed a little somebody to come in and push them a little bit to get them the right direction.
Both Edith and Edgar were definitely trying to push all sort of boundaries as much as possible.
They realized, being a Jewish family, that they sort of sat outside of the traditional white Catholic families that they have here and the city of New Orleans.
And they were able to work closely and willingly with the African-American population in the city very often.
One of the biggest projects they probably worked on was designing and helping to create Dillard University and Flint Cottage Hospital.
Now, these are institutions that definitely were part of previous existing universities, St and New Orleans College, but they definitely needed sort of extra political influence and forces to sort of join together and make the Dillard University that we have today.
In 1969, Edith was in an article for Life magazine, and in that article she mentions that the project she's most proud of, of all the things she worked on is something called the Voter Registration League.
This is something that was started with about ten women, Jewish women here in New Orleans.
The Times-Picayune Loving Cup is awarded by our local newspaper every year to the people they feel have given the most of themselves to the city of New Orleans.
For the year prior, Edgar and Edith were the first couple, and until 2009, the only couple to both receive one.
Edgar received his in 1934, helping with the founding of Dillard University and Flint Hospital.
Edith received her award in 1964 for Country Day and New Country schools and Louisiana.
Perspective altering art is all around.
The trick is knowing where to look.
So here are some of our picks for standout exhibits coming soon to our part of the world in.
For more on these exhibits and others like them, consult Country Roads magazine available in hardcopy and online to see or share any episode of Art Rocks again.
Visit LP B Dawgs Art Ross.
And there's also an archive featuring all of the Louisiana segments of the show available at LP B's YouTube page.
We are off to Detroit now, a big city with a lot going on and many situations that are making life hard for those who call it home.
In her art, painter and muralist Sabrina Nelson reflects on the world around her.
Here, Nelson offers us a glimpse into that world by giving us a tour of her exhibition.
Why You Want to Fly Blackbird?
I think my medicine is art.
My language is art.
I think the term artist means to be responsible for what's happening in the world, how you see it, how you record it, how you make things that are a result of what you are trying to say, whether it's a question you're answering or a story you're trying to tell, or Here's something I need to make because it's just embedded in me like I have to make something.
Detroit is embedded in who I am.
I've been here all my life.
Since the rebellion in 1967.
That's when I was born.
And so everything around me becomes a part of the story I'm trying to tell or the question I'm trying to ask.
My superpower is being able to visually communicate how I feel about what's happening in the world.
Nina Simone says, If you're going to be an artist, it's your duty to reflect what's happening in the world and in the world that I live in from the time I can remember remembering.
There's always trauma and hurt and pain, and I'm not always talking about that, but you can't ignore it.
And on this day, I think about the lives that are lost, that are constant coming at me through different mediums.
And so I'm thinking about homicide, AIDS and deaths of young people and how I am affected by it.
But I'm talking about death where people aren't considered people like you don't matter, you're not important.
So I'm just going to take your life.
I don't care how old you are.
I don't care who you belong to.
And when that person is missing from our communities, not just the blood family is affected.
We are all and we should all be concerned.
You know, a life is a life.
A human is a human.
And so in this work, I'm talking about that pain.
The name of the exhibition is Why You Want to Fly Blackbird.
And I got it from Nina Simone's song, who talks about black women like, How dare you try and be happy in your life?
How dare you not expect pain?
Pain is going to come.
You have to move through it and you have to live.
But pain will be here.
I didn't want the colors to be so seductive that it draws you in as pretty.
Like, I don't like the idea of my work being pretty.
I want it to be impactful.
I want it to be deeper than just what you see.
And I wanted it to be large enough to have some girth to it.
So these particular pieces are very large drawings.
They're also reliquaries, if you will.
So they talk about, like, the body, the housing of the bodies that we have, like the home, and then what it's like to have a nest with no eggs in it.
Thinking about the empty nest of children who never return, You know, I don't care how old they are, they never can return.
So I'm just talking about the darkness in that in expressing it with the most eloquence that I can.
The Florida Keys are nice this time of year, which is probably why you'll find Glenn and Nadine Lahti there in the village of Islamorada.
Rendering nautical artwork out of lobster trap wood with nature as their partner and their guide, the lattes repurpose what the water brings them.
Making one of a kind frames that embody the free spirit of the Florida Keys.
I'm Nadine Lofty.
This is my husband, Glen Latte.
We're here at the Lobster Trap Art Gallery in Alhambra.
My wife and I retired back in 1996 and bought a home in the Keys, and we just didn't do much other than fish.
Snorkel, relax.
And then one day I was walking and I picked up some lobster trap wood on the road, and I said, I'm going to make some frames for our family.
So we made them lobster trap frames and they go, These are great.
Youcould sell these.
And I go, You think?
And this is what happened.
Every year when they take all of the lobster traps out of the water, they repair them.
And what we do is we collect about a hundred truckloads of used traps that they can't repair.
Some of it is very weathered.
Some of it has barnacles.
We leave the staples on nails, we the shells, everything, just like it was a working trap.
And then we use the lobster trap rope to highlight the frame, the larger pieces.
We put a lobster trap tag to give it authenticity.
We always say we collaborate with nature.
We have different mediums that we put in each frame.
We started off painting, showed our work in art shows, Robbie's where they feed the tarpon, and we started to get very popular with people.
My wife does mainly the animal paintings turtles, manatees, birds, lobster.
And I do the landscapes and seascape.
So anything with a palm tree, a beach scene or lighthouse is one of my means.
Well, I just love the animals, the sea creatures, the birds.
I mean, they're just so beautiful down here.
And people get a memory of the keys.
And then we started doing underwater photography in depth about three years ago.
And we've taken probably hundreds of thousands of pictures.
Everything is shot in the Caribbean, Most of it here in the Keys is all Caribbean fish, Caribbean lobster, Caribbean octopus, vivid colors.
We have a lot of turtles and unusual things like octopus being like, well, where did you get you know, it's really unusual.
So it would be crazy.
We call it crazy.
I don't know if that's even a word cheesy or Caribbean or tropical art.
We just love what we do.
We love enjoying it.
We can't wait to get back on the water, take more pictures.
And we love that.
People love it.
And that'll be that for this edition of Art Rocks.
But that's okay because you can see and share episodes of the show and help be Dawgs Rocks anytime.
And if you love these sorts of stories, remember that Country Roads magazine is a useful companion for getting to grips with Louisiana's boundless cultural treasures each and every month.
Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thank you for watching.
West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.
West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.