The Story Of Art In America | S02 - E07 | Jackson, MS

I know I was born to do this. I think we're all given talents. I think we just have to find a way to tap into that. My name is William Goodman, and I'm a mixed media artist. And I've been based here in Jackson, Mississippi. I had some very hard years when I was a teenager. From those experiences, I'm able to express that in my work. And even in my work that I make today, I pull from whether it's good, bad, or ugly, it's there. And I'll get it out of me. I have to get it out of me. Whether I was happy, or I was sad, or whatever I was feeling, I wanted to draw it, or I wanted to paint it. I mean, I don't want to make work that's not honest. And that's what I've always done. And I don't care if somebody doesn't like it. I mean, making a painting for me, or whether I'm working on a mural, or whatever it is, I mean, that's the process for me. It's like life, the journey. That's the exciting part, getting an idea, and then executing that idea. And the process along the way is the exciting part. And how do I get it from here to here? And how do I do that in the realest, truest way? And that's my job as an artist, to put something out there, and hopefully, hopefully, I can reach somebody, and they can connect their own life experience with it. There's always some kind of message in my work, good versus evil. I don't like to try to explain it too much. I like to just leave it up to interpretation. And I don't like to try to pinpoint myself too much in one kind of genre, or anything like that. But I think all art has a message. If you look for it, everything in life has a message. It's close to being done. So this bird was kind of the last thing I decided to do up here. It needed something here at the top, to kind of bring it on home. And so I sketched out this bird yesterday. Now I'm just painting it in, doing the black, glass. So all the images on my work are always in black and white. Most of the time when people think of Southern, they think of Gentile, or Scarlet O'Hara, or some conflated idea of what Southerness is. My name is Enrica Williams, and I am Chef Creative, owner of Fauna Food Works. I have been a chef professionally 22 years, but I believe that I've always been a chef since I was around five. I grew up with my grandmother. She cooked, and every reason was a reason to celebrate. So I just grew up loving the reaction that people had with food. I saw how it connected people. And so I wanted to be a part of that. I think a lot of times people feel that Southern food is in deficit. A lot of times people feel like, you know, the go-to for Southern and Mississippi food is catfish and barbecue and those things, and that's true. But there's so much nuance to the food in Mississippi. When I think of chef, I think of it more as an artistic expression. It is the dedication, and it is the discipline of saying I'm committing myself to it. I'm always honing my craft. I'm learning all the time. I am researching. You have to have an imagination as a chef. You have to be creative and a little bit crazy to make it all work. Social media has made it very easy for those who have not bled, sweated, and cut themselves and burned themselves and been yelled at and have worked 14, 16-hour shifts, 14 days straight, swollen feet, bad back, any of those things that are associated with what one has to do in order to earn their space as a chef. And so you get on social media and you can put chef in front of your name and you can sprinkle dried parsley on some things, and then you can become a chef, and I get it. But for me, as someone, and those of us who have sacrificed so much and who never put this to bed, this never goes away, I don't wake up and say, oh, today I'm gonna be a chef. You need to put respect on the fact of what it really requires, which is the heart, which is the integrity, which is the sacrifice to be a chef. I'm a little sensitive about that. Coming from the country, yes, we had schools and roads and indoor plumbing and all of these nonsensical things that people wanna associate with people from the country. I have structure, I had a great education, I had a great family, and I'm proud of that. I'm not trying to be this strong, resilient superhero when it comes to being a black woman in the industry. I understand the nuance and the frustration and the exhaustion that comes with having to constantly do more beyond, extra, in spite of, because of, all of the time. And the one thing for me is that I know that I'm not alone in it. I like being soft, and I like being creative. But I also don't ever want it to be twisted that I cannot outcook you. Don't ever take for granted that just because I'm a woman, that I'm going to let you come in my kitchen and outcook me, absolutely not, it won't happen. Practice almost six days of the week, six out of seven days of the week, and perform on that seventh day most times. So we're with each other a lot. It takes a lot for us to perform and to produce. So we're practicing and making sure that everything is right, everything's up to standard with what Jackson State University expects of the Sonoma of the South and the Princeton J-State. My name is Chloe Ashley Crowley. I'm the director of the Princeton J-State for Jackson State University. I am born and raised from Jackson, Mississippi. I attended Jackson State from 2005 to 2009. I was also a Princeton J-State and a former captain, and I went to get my master's in dance education from New York University, and I came back home and decided to be the director of the Princeton J-State. Dance is just a passion of mine. It's true, near and dear to my heart, and so just being able to be the director of this infamous squad, this collegiate dance team, is just really amazing. To really appreciate it, you have to know the history of HBCU and the fact that historically black colleges and universities were founded for the black community and for African Americans to educate themselves. To be a director means a lot of hard work, a lot of creative vision, a lot of innovative ideas, bringing new things and staying relevant in the dance world because dance is evolutionary. Just moving the Princeton J-State forward from where we've come. We were founded 50 years ago in 1971 by Miss Shirley Middleton Blakely, and her idea was to accompany the band and to accentuate the music that the band played. Playing in with musicality when you have dance is just showing a more vibrant picture of the music. So one thing about the Princeton J-State that's unique to any other collegiate dance squad is the fact that we always have a wow factor. There's always something different in our choreography, more namely that people haven't seen before. We're always trying to think outside of the box and what we can do to wow our fans and move them to want to see us perform again. Putting on a show and performing for millions of fans in person and on social media, and so to know that and understand that they're working their hardest, they're doing their absolute best, I think it would resonate with people to know that these students just love to perform and they love what they do, and that encompasses everything that you would want to feel to know that they're doing their best. The most important detail for me is the precision, precision and accuracy, and the energy. And so if we encompass those, then we have everything that we can need. As glass artists, that's really our mission, is to continue to find new ways to express ourselves with our glass. I'm Andrew Cleary Young. I'm the owner of Pearl River Glass Studio in Jackson, Mississippi. I've been working with glass for almost 50 years. A sculpture is gonna look always the same. A painting on a wall, when you flip the lights on in a museum, the painting is always gonna look exactly the same, but not with glass. Glass is influenced by the weather, by the different light of the day, depending on when somebody's looking at it in the morning, in the afternoon. There's always this dynamic change of the type of light that is coming through the art glass, and so human perception, the way we see is a binocular vision, so that we see things in depth perception. So what I'm trying to do with my glass is to engage the creative imagination of the viewer. And in that creative imagination, they will get new insight into their own problems or issues. They're gonna come in and see one of my windows and become so engaged with their own creative process that's gonna give them a lift, that's gonna give them some new inspiration that they wouldn't have had before. The earliest stained glass windows were made in Northern Europe, goes back over a thousand years, leaded stained glass windows. Even the earliest stained glass windows had glass paint, so the artist was altering the surface of the glass to create different levels of transparency or to create a narrative as far as the glass goes. And so, you know, the Christian church, because of these stained glass windows, they were telling a story. It's a narrative story that was being told about the life of Christ. And then over time, glass is the most innovative material. It has to be man-made. It doesn't occur in nature. There's obsidian, which is volcanic glass. Obsidian exists, but that's made by a volcano. So in order for me, as an artist, or any other artist who's gonna work with glass, it's a man-made process. It has to be created. And so I'm standing on the shoulders of a lot of other creative types that have manufactured the glass, and I take it one step further. We stock all types of glass materials. This is antique glass. This is the same material that was used to build the stained glass windows a thousand years ago. We're using language to describe these things, and language is a shortcut of ideas and thoughts. So the mind works the same way. If you were to try to process everything that you saw, you really wouldn't get much done, because you would just be trying to think and see everything and understand everything. So the mind makes shortcuts. Stained glass renders color and form into symbols. So we create symbols. The symbols are understood by the people that see the stained glass. And so my job is to understand that stained glass is a process of creating symbols and images. And so I can create something for the church, or I can create something, architectural art glass, but I'm always dealing with this narrative story about how we see and symbol. And I think that artists definitely have a role to play. Everybody's aware. I don't have to describe how challenging the world is today. So if we don't have artists that are providing us with creative images and ideas and our imaginations, stimulating our imaginations, that helps us, as human beings, to come up with a new way to solve a problem, possibly, because we've been given this new inspiration. The Mississippi Museum of Art. We're in Jackson, Mississippi, the state's capital, in the center of downtown Jackson. The museum has been around since 1978 as a professional museum. This exhibition is inspired by the poem written by an African-American poet who was important to Jackson, Margaret Walker. She really, through her kind of epic poem, brings to bear all of the different themes of ancestry and migration and social justice and music, all of the kind of elements that combine to create a very specific history for Mississippi. We are very interested in investigating all of the parts of Mississippi. This particular wall of the exhibition is really focused on the civil rights era in Mississippi. This portrait over here is of Medgar Evers, whose assassination in 1963 really launched the national civil rights movement. He was a field worker for the NAACP, but he was a native of Mississippi and really galvanized the civil rights effort. This very haunting piece by a Mississippi native who is Native American and African-American, grew up in Mississippi but had his career in New York. His name is Joe Overstreet. He just died a couple of years ago, but this is called Strange Fruit, and it's a very haunting scene of a lynching, actually. We found it really important to not shy away from conversations about our difficult past, but instead use artwork as the launching pads for conversations between people and among people in our community to reveal their own personal stories that may be related to what's going on in some of these paintings. Part of Mississippi's history that is both very rich and also very haunting is our relationship to our land. It's a very fertile place. Cotton was, in fact, the major crop and a commodity that was produced out of Mississippi for a very long time. And of course, the cotton industry was also part of the history of using enslaved labor, stolen labor, as well as stolen land. We had a very important Native American presence here before the colonials came to Mississippi. This artist here is a woman named Marie Hall. This is actually an abstract painting, but it really is kind of a view across the Mississippi River with the bands of the horizon and the river and the reflections of different types of light across the grass and the water. And in this part by Hale Woodruff is really important to us. We have Hale Woodruff, you may know, is the kind of grandfather of African American painting and ran the art program at Clark University in Atlanta and taught many, many people, organized the Negro Annual Art Show that was there. And he did travel around through the South and teach.