Next on gallery sticks and Stones, Toys and bones, interpretation is left to the beholder.
It is elements of my soul and elements of my world, my experience, my travels.
Well, behold the work of the Skull Master Joey Williams.
Raised in the heart of the Bible Belt, Williams grew up pushing the envelope of his conservative surroundings and used art as a means of social escape.
His fascination of the natural world led Joey to incorporate natural elements such as skulls and bones into his work.
Plus, he calls himself an artistic historian, and he takes that role seriously.
See so many pictures of people who are who have been killed around the world or are suffering through these atrocities.
And it almost seems like they're nameless, faceless people.
Erik Humphries conducts intense research into the atrocities that mankind has carried out against others and then depicts those atrocities in a cartoon style.
His work is gaining admiration for its unique presentation and intense messages.
Meet one of the few artists who practically insists on explaining his work.
You know, people they see these atrocities occur, but they don't often understand why or how they can occur.
Marshall Funding for Gallery is made possible by the Pauline Dwyer Mecklenburgh and Robert Michael and Bert Junior Foundation and by Jasmin and Melvin Moran.
Additional support is provided by the Oklahoma Humanities Council and by the National Endowment for the Humanity.
My name is Joey Williams.
My job is to act as the director of education here at schools Unlimited.
Anybody who's not familiar with the company, we are a biological supply company, and as the name suggests, we supply skulls and skeletons to the educational community.
Basically, this job is perfect for me.
It seems like a natural progression to me because I started collecting bones and skulls at such a very early age.
I started doing art with those items and it kind of led into a natural progression towards ending up here.
Previously, I worked for a nature center at a university and it allowed me to be creative, but not quite to the same level that that I've been allowed to here.
I've been with the company for seven years, and one of my first tasks, why I was hired, was to develop and design the museum of Archeology.
The Museum of US Geology is a nonprofit museum being funded by Skulls Unlimited.
We are going to exhibit upwards of a thousand species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, basically all the vertebrate classes.
We're going to have upwards of 300 individual skeletons on display and several hundred more skulls.
Go ahead.
But I've always had a fascination with natural history, nature, you know, wildlife.
I grew up in a small rural town in Kansas, and biology was always one of my favorite subjects.
Art was also something that kind of came easy for me in an early age.
So I kind of combined the two of those as I was growing up.
Basically, I thought I was going to be an artist all my life.
I went to school for that and decided that I wanted to go back to school and get a degree in biology.
When I was very young, I started collecting natural elements, mostly skulls and bones, and began incorporating those into my art.
Most everything that I use in my art is real.
All of the natural elements are real and, you know, real bones, real insects, real sometimes organs.
Some of my pieces have encompassed plastic, dated sheets, hearts, and yeah, all of those elements are real.
The dark subject matter basically is probably a form of therapy that allows me to express myself and do it in a sense that is a little darker than than some people's art.
But once I express that, then I can move on with it.
In my work here in the museum.
I have had quite a few ideas that have, you know, and I mean, I get an idea when I'm driving to work or whatever, but being surrounded by these elements, it does lend to inspiration.
I guess I should say, in addition to just designing the exhibits, I've been able to use a lot of my artistic ability in putting together elements of the exhibits as well to comparative the exhibit.
Oh yeah.
So the monkey wrench, we're going to go ahead and stick with it up here.
Yeah.
So have his his right side facing out.
Yeah.
So there there are times when working here with bones, working here in the museum with skeletons and skulls.
It definitely lends to to my inspiration for working here is a learning experience and it is something that you have to get used to.
The smell is definitely a factor when you're dealing with any kind of dead animals decomposing vision, the cleaning of of those animals.
There are a lot of interesting smells.
And it's it's something that I guess at a young age, I began to tolerate and know it's not pleasant, but it doesn't bother me anymore, just simply because the end result is is attractive to me, you know, nice, clean bones to incorporate in art or as a specimen.
That end result outweighs the unpleasantries of the smells and all the interesting things that that I see in the processing of the specimens.
There are different techniques for cleaning the specimens, depending on the state of decomposition.
One of my favorites, a lot of people can't stomach it, but I use a lot of maceration, which is basically rotting a specimen on the water and using anaerobic bacteria that's naturally occurring to decompose the tissue.
As you can imagine, that creates quite a smell and it's it it's a little hard for people to stomach personally.
It doesn't bother me that much.
I've actually grown to to kind of like it a little bit, but yeah, it's it stinks.
The specimens that I use for my art typically either come from nature or there are individuals who farm exotic animals.
I obtained quite a few specimens through those channels and I can usually find some sort of use in in just about any specimen, even if it's undesirable or unwanted, by the museum or by the company here, it's not my intent to portray the macabre or the morbid.
Nothing really dark with.
With with my art.
It is elements of my soul and elements of my world, my experience, my travels, you know, my my likes, dislikes.
It's it is good therapy for me.
So it's a good way to not pin everything up.
I can express it.
I can get it out there.
People can either accept it or reject it.
And either way, it's out of me.
And and it's cathartic.
Where I'm at now is basically what it's the culmination of my entire life.
Basically, you know, I'm using all of my interests when I come to work, when I go home and I'm able to express myself through my art or collect skulls or whatever I do, it is a culmination of of everything that I've worked for, everything I've experienced.
So yeah, in my existence I'm fairly content and most people would say, you know, if you've got the perfect job, you know, you're able to do this and you're able to do that and you're able to put it all together.
And yeah, I'd have to agree with that.
I painted about some, some really well known things 911 the attack on the bombing of the Murrah Building.
And, but I've also done about about some singular deaths that I thought were important.
One of the probably the least known was about a girl that was killed by the Nazis, a Russian girl in Minsk, and her name was Marsha Skinner.
And she was publicly hung for supporting the Soviet army against war, against occupation, German occupation, to the whole point is to teach people about history's wrongs and the victims that were involved and and to basically let them know about these historical events, sometimes poorly known about historical events, and keep them in people's consciousness.
We see so many pictures of people who are who have been killed around the world or, you know, or suffering these atrocities.
And it's it almost seems like they're nameless, faceless people.
But but they aren't you know, these are real victims, real people that really existed.
My name is Eric Humphries and I'm an artistic historian.
You might notice that the canvases almost look like newspaper print and the the color soaks into quite a bit.
I just use a standard like a wall primer to prime it so that it has almost a fresco appearance.
Once the paint dries, it soaks in and you notice there's almost no if you're in touch him, there's almost no texture at all.
And that's the point.
I want it to have that almost comic strip quality about the general colors and and the feel.
And like I said, no texture.
It almost has a poster, poster art feel also about it.
And that's the way I accomplish it.
I used very thin paint, extremely thin.
See if I can find.
The comic strip style paintings of Eric Humphries are anything but funny.
They are a lesson of sorts, an attempt to bring us all face to face with the darker side of the human condition.
This is a difficult subject matter for a lot of people, but it's important to note that Eric is not a shock artist.
He's not making this work just to get a rise out of the public.
He's trying to illustrate a very serious atrocity that should not have happened.
And hopefully we can remember to learn from the past and prevent these things from happening again.
The more art.
His latest works are a series of paintings depicting the 1921 Tulsa race riots in June of 2010.
It is on display at the Tulsa Arts Coalition Gallery that sits on the edge of Tulsa's Greenwood District, where the riot actually took place.
Was funded by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Puffin Foundation in New Jersey to make an art exhibit over the Tulsa race riot in 1921.
And the interesting thing about this not only does it combine these bright, stylized canvases like the ones you see here, but it also I was able to write a text that leads you through the roughly 16 hours of rioting.
The Tulsa Artists Coalition is really compelled to exhibit work that wouldn't normally get exhibited elsewhere.
So we're happy to take on work that is controversial in nature, that maybe a fine art scholar who's interested in the bottom line of just selling work would be afraid to take on this painting like Hell I Will shows the really infamous moment of when the Tulsa race riot began.
So what you're seeing here is Rowland, who is a man who's been in prison for supposedly molesting a young white woman.
And that morning, the Tulsa Tribune ran an article saying NAB Negro for attacking Girl in elevator.
75 members of the African community offered their assistance in protecting Rowland from possible rioters, and this man here actually fought for his country in World War One.
He's holding a pistol and an agitated white man comes up to him and says the N-word and says, What are you doing with that pistol?
And he says, I'm going to use it if I need to.
And he says, No, you give it to me.
And he said, Like hell I will.
I think this is a signal instance of where art works on behalf of historical events and acts as a reminder of what people can do to each other.
And sometimes these are great things and sometimes they are awful things.
Ray Piercey is a host for Kumu 1340s talk show community issues on tap.
Eric is used painting and simple representations to convey the chaos and the violence and the rest.
And it's very effective as a consequence.
Well, this depiction is particularly fascinating because it's a representation of the perhaps the single instance in American history where an American town has been bombed by civil authorities, legitimate or constituted civil authorities from the air, the police and some of the volunteers who had been enlisted to forestall the riot, one up in half a dozen planes and bombed the scene in Greenwood.
Terrible thing.
Humphrey's been over a year researching the Tulsa race riot before ever putting brush to canvas in this childlike work of bright primary colors is a great attention to historic detail.
It could take it could take from weeks to months to develop a canvas, depending on how complex a story's to execute.
You actually paint a canvas may only take me a few days, you know, to actually put the take all the drawings that I've been working on and and and put the final product, the final draft, drawing onto canvas in black, outline it and fill it with color.
On this canvas.
A Brief History about World War Two and the internment of Japanese-Americans is a good example of the historic detail in Humphrey's work.
This is this this layer here is you can see this is the USS Oklahoma, which was a ship that was sank in Pearl Harbor and are some sailors.
And this this layer here represents that attack, and it includes this Mitsubishi airplane, Japanese Mitsubishi airplane here.
So this layer here is the first layer and it represents the attack on Pearl Harbor.
A little later in time, you have this this layer here in the middle, which was the forceful internment of Japanese-Americans in a in a camp at the at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California called Manzanar, which was the name of the camp.
And you can see the victims there in the camp.
And the barbed wire in this character represents America's, I guess, overwhelming view of the Japanese at the time.
And this and this is Dr. Seuss's actual face that he drew kind of racially stereotypical values were in actually exaggerated view of what Japanese people were like.
And he did a lot of drawings, very negative Japanese drawings at the time.
And it led to our view of even even very pro freedom, pro-American Japanese people being gathered up and imprisoned and their lives ruined at that time.
And the last letters appear and it shows the Enola Gay and and Paul Tibbets in his air medal that he got for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
And this is is actually represents the what's called the A-bomb Dome now, which is one of the only structures that remained in Hiroshima after having been standing in Hiroshima, after the dropping of the bomb.
You have Hirohito here, who was the Japanese emperor at the time, who's dressed in his military regalia there and holding a burning American flag to show the damage that he did to America with the attack on Pearl Harbor and bringing us formally into the war.
And then you have Einstein, who's holding a letter here.
And Einstein actually wrote a letter to the president of Time, President Roosevelt, urging him to get involved in a nuclear program because he thought that the Nazis would develop a nuclear bomb first.
And of course, it would give him the competitive edge in the war and and enable and enable them to win the war.
And I've painted and sculpted since I was a little child.
So I did paint scenes outside the heat fields in Norman, you know, and I painted nudes for some time.
And, and I experimented with lots of different types of, of art and things that, that I was interested in.
But once I came across this idea, it is absolutely consumed.
Everything that I do in art, I mean, most of my life as well.
The this is a become a compulsion now.
Humphries early works in atrocities simply depicted images he'd found online.
But somewhere along the way, he began putting something else into his paintings.
I like to show the motives of people when they're well defined, you know, when they're clear, when and when.
You can tell what the motives are of both the things that motivated both the victims and and the victimizers in the canvases and I think that that adds an interesting human detail to it because, you know, people they see these atrocities occurred, but they don't often understand why or how they could occur.
Humphries uses provocative religious and political imagery to show motive for human aggression.
At first glance, this imagery might inflame, such as the ever present burning American flag.
But this is one artist who was always ready to offer an explanation for his work because, he says, his paintings are about understanding.
The burning flags.
To me, it's just such a it never was.
Even when I started as the symbol of protest that people have made it.
You know, in our popular culture, it really is more of a of a way of seeing that this country was involved in this really inflammatory, really passionate behavior in that way.
And sometimes, like I said, it's them being victimized.
And this image in the second of three panels, Humphries painted about the 911 attacks on America.
This is a pretty typical bit of symbolism that I utilizan and I try to take recognizable themes and to explain sometimes unrecognizable ideas.
And that's what this is.
When you see these three terrorists after the the attack on Twin Towers holding up a burning American flag.
And it's based on that picture, that famous picture raising the flag of Enigma to them.
It meant the same thing.
And of course, they're wrong, but to them, it meant the same thing that that our capture of a regime meant to us by raising a flag, a regime meant to us, and that victory that America felt then and just to show that that's what they felt that day, I would like to say that they are totally historical and that in that they show what happened, you know, when it happened and and and that I'm completely removed from that.
But of course, you know, I'm the artist and I'm making this and it's hard not to be affected by this very dramatic stories.
But a lot of times I think that they're pretty clean when it comes to that in that I try to show, you know, like I said, what happened and where and when.
Rarely has there been so much to explain about one artist or even about one of his paintings.
So it is difficult to show the body of this provocative artist's work without the time to provide an explanation for each piece.
The mascot may lie, and that's where several hundred Vietnamese civilians were killed by American soldiers.
And this is based on a real photograph of Armenian soldiers hanging Christians over a bridge, their Christians over a bridge in order to frighten the rest of the Christian population, while the nine or three represents the minute after the explosion.
And this represents the fallout with with the field of chairs and the survivor tree and and Tim McVeigh being executed.
And then, uh, and in Christ the Christ statue, they're weeping and all the victims ascending to God's hands.
Lady Liberty in this canvas is depicted as one of the guards who who ended up getting impregnated in the in the prison.
And I think see, there's the symbols for Islam, the nationally recognized symbol, ST Islam there on her stomach, which to me represented the amount of extremism that that her that these pictures would give birth to.
This is called the the City of Earthly Delights.
It's a it's a play off from Hieronymus Bosch, his Garden of Earthly Lights.
And it shows what Islamic extremists thought about America prior to 911.
Your art can be something more than just passive entertainment.
And that's what this is to me.
This is this is educational.
And it's not just passive entertainment.
You can look at it as as entertainment.
I mean, I hope that they also serve that function as being an interesting piece of art that someone would want to look at.
But but it can be more than that.
And this artwork to me is a much bigger thing than just a vehicle to express the kind of the hands on creativity that artists have.
It's it's a vehicle for me to be to do something more important with my life and definitely something more important.
With my artwork.
For more information on our stories, go to the gallery page at Court TV or send us an email at Gallery at OTA, Court TV.
Marshal Funding for gallery is made possible by the Pauline Dwyer, Mecklenburg and Robert a michael and Bert Junior Foundation and by Jasmine and Melvin Moran.
Additional support is provided by the Oklahoma Humanities Council and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Domestic beetles are a type of beetle that occurs naturally in nature.
Basically, they like to eat the decomposing tissue of just about anything.
Without them, we'd all be, you know, neck deep and dead animals.
But museums have been using their methods for years and years and probably 200, 300 years because of how thoroughly they'll clean a specimen.
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