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00:00We're the last remaining factory that manufactures artificial flowers.
00:07The company was started by my great-uncles.
00:10They were immigrants looking to provide for their family,
00:13and so they picked a craft.
00:15Why not flowers?
00:18I am working on a series of quilted portraits
00:22using these glittery African fabrics.
00:26I want black people to see something that speaks to them
00:31about where they came from.
00:34I consider silver the most beautiful metal,
00:37much more beautiful than gold.
00:39As you walk around an object,
00:41you see all the reflection change.
00:43In my work, I try to make silver dance with lights.
00:49I learned how to make my own pop-up books,
00:52and then I incorporated pop-up mechanisms
00:55with my photographs.
00:58It just seems like magic.
01:03When I'm weaving, I forget everything else.
01:06It's a great pleasure.
01:07It's what I've always wanted to do,
01:09so I've never, ever thought I would do anything else.
01:13The work I do is primarily representing
01:16the community that I come from.
01:18My first introduction to art was graffiti,
01:21and so I started to draw and paint.
01:23I told myself that I was gonna have a career in the arts
01:26at all costs.
01:28You walk New York City, the Garvin District in particular,
01:45You walk New York City, the Garment District in particular, and you look up at these buildings
01:59and you have no idea what's going on inside of them.
02:07At M&S Schmalberg, we're a fourth generation family business that manufactures artificial
02:12flowers.
02:16We are the last factory in the country doing this.
02:27You grow up and your dad is a plumber, an electrician, a flower man.
02:32I never really processed that he was the only flower man.
02:37Hello ladies, Lucia, Miriam.
02:40I'm retired, but I worked at M&S Schmalberg almost 50 years.
02:45Look at you.
02:46How are you?
02:47Hi.
02:48Sometimes I'll come back just to help them out because it is a family here.
02:53Beautiful.
02:54Very nice.
02:56What we do here is we take fabric of any type and create artificial flowers and leaves
03:03and petals, still making them by hand as we have for 109 years at this point.
03:13The company was started back in 1916 by my great great uncles Morris and Sam Schmalberg.
03:19They were immigrants looking to provide for their families.
03:23And so they picked a craft.
03:25And why not flowers?
03:27In those days, there were probably 30, 40 flower companies in Manhattan alone.
03:32And some of those shops had as many as 100 people working for them.
03:36What's up?
03:38How are you doing, buddy?
03:39I'm good, you?
03:40I'm good.
03:41What's up, gentlemen?
03:42Good morning, Warren.
03:43All right.
03:44Senor?
03:45Mr. Warren.
03:46Father and son team here.
03:58Right after the war, my dad came to America.
04:02He was a Holocaust survivor.
04:04He was in his teens when he was sent to a concentration camp.
04:09His mom and dad and his two brothers and his sister perished.
04:15He was surviving the camps.
04:17He was in the Nazi death marches.
04:20But one morning, he was woken up by an American soldier who said, you know, hey, here's some
04:27water.
04:28You know, it's over.
04:29You're going to be OK.
04:30And he said to my dad, you know, who's left?
04:34Who can we contact?
04:35And my father said, I don't have anybody.
04:36But in New York, in America, Schmalberg, Flowers, and this American soldier contacted Morris
04:43and Sam, and they got that on a boat.
04:46They stayed in their attic, and they would come to work and learn the business.
04:52When Morris and Sam passed on, my father boarded from their spouses.
04:57In those days, it was a thriving garment center.
05:01These streets were lined with factories.
05:03We were the flower guys for the dress industry, and there were other flower guys for theater,
05:09other flower guys for hats, and they all just couldn't make it.
05:18The first thing we do when we get any material is we cut into panels about 50 inches square.
05:27And there's a few different starches that we use to give it extra body.
05:32You wring it out as best you can, then you stretch it on the frames to dry.
05:37Once the fabric is starched and dry, we make layers out of it.
05:43We then take our vintage dyes and cut out the flat petals.
05:52You're cookie cutting just whatever shape the dye might have.
05:57And we have hundreds of different dyes.
05:59Most of them are flowers, but there's leaves, there's butterflies.
06:05Started out like these with the hand-held dyes.
06:09And they're beautiful.
06:10Like this is a four-leaf clover, a four-paw we call it.
06:14And you see the detail on that as opposed to this one, totally different.
06:22In the old days, there was no machine like Alex is cutting.
06:26And everything was cut with a mallet and a boom.
06:32Just imagine cutting a dye like this, this heavy dye, it's probably 10, 12 pounds.
06:40Cutting this through fabric by hand.
06:46The next step is the embossing.
06:49The molds date back some of them to the late 1800s.
06:53And they resemble a waffle iron.
06:56You take your flat petal, put it between the molds.
07:02And with pressure, heat, and the starching from before, you're embossing the petals.
07:08Now they've been cut, they've been pressed, and then finally they go to assembly where we
07:12put them together to make the flowers.
07:15We're not horticulturally on the money here because it's not nature, but we do some beautiful
07:27things close to nature.
07:34The whole business is a combination of tools that are irreplaceable and people and skills
07:41that are irreplaceable.
07:44Hey, Al, when you're done with that, I have two orders for Catherine.
07:50Alex has been with the company since I was a kid, almost 40 years.
07:54All right, no problemo.
07:56Thanks, Al.
07:57Miriam worked with my grandpa, Harold.
08:00She's a master flower maker, master artisan.
08:05What if we did something with wired cores, and then you could make a center?
08:08What do you think?
08:10We don't have a panel.
08:12I defer to them.
08:14I respect the experience that they have.
08:17What if we take one of the poinsettia petals?
08:19Does that make sense?
08:20Yeah, we have to create the flowers.
08:22Okay.
08:23All right.
08:24When I'm creating the new flowers, sometimes my mind comes a flash and I stop and I create
08:34something.
08:35If they like it, I love it.
08:41I love it.
08:44Nowadays, sadly, there's no garment district.
08:48You don't see trucks in the morning.
08:50You don't see push carts on the streets.
08:53Artificial flowers are coming from offshore.
08:57Copies of our flowers.
08:59But today, there's enough domestic things between theater and fashion and operas and TV shows that
09:06keeps us okay.
09:08And then there's the Met Gala, where all the couture designers dress the stars of the world.
09:16If it's a season where flowers are in, our stuff is on the red carpet for the event.
09:22One of Vera Wang's senior designers asked if we can make a parrot tulip.
09:32So I went on Google.
09:33I looked up pictures of a parrot tulip.
09:35We've been making that flower.
09:36It's about 14 inches.
09:38It's been worn by Emily Ratajkowski.
09:41And then they asked if we can make even larger ones.
09:44They sent us 50 yards of this chartreuse fabric.
09:48It was worn by Gwen Stefani.
09:50Make flowers, a lot of work to make these things.
10:00Each generation brings something different to the table.
10:04Now there's social media, there's online platforms.
10:08These have become a big part of our business.
10:11Every day somebody comes in here, tells me they found us on Instagram, and can I buy a flower?
10:15Which the answer is always yes.
10:21Could you imagine what they would think that we were still here?
10:25That I'm sharing Instagram videos, selling flowers on Etsy in 2025?
10:34We're very lucky.
10:35We're very lucky.
10:36You got grandpa up there keeping an eye on both of us.
10:38Up to the dive, yeah.
10:39You know, my dad was that Holocaust survivor.
10:44And I think his skills and his thinking were inherited to me and to Adam.
10:50He set a path for us, you know, to keep it going.
10:54And we love this.
10:55We love making flowers.
10:57All of us understand fabric.
11:25From the moment you're born, they wrap you in a blanket.
11:28They put that little hat on your head.
11:30Your whole lives you're surrounded by fabric.
11:35And I think it becomes a deeper understanding of what is being communicated in my portraits
11:42because nobody has to sit you down and explain to you the rules of this.
11:48This is fabric.
11:49It's touching you at all times.
11:56A piece of Butler is known for these visually eloquent quilts that really speak to African
12:08in an African-American past, a kind of diasporic story.
12:13Her work is based on photographs of Black people.
12:18She's going back into history, looking at archives,
12:21looking at thousands of photographs
12:23to find just the right ones
12:26to show us something that we've never seen before.
12:30I'm drawn to Black and white photos.
12:33I'm wondering who are these people
12:35and what was the circumstances of their life?
12:38I'm sketching on top of the blow-up of the photograph.
12:44I'm looking at what's the lightest light, the darkest dark.
12:48The Black and white allows me to imagine,
12:51how can I use color and fabric
12:54to tell this story about this person?
12:58If I'm using a lot of blues and greens,
13:01I'm using that cool color palette
13:03to say that this person had a more calm demeanor.
13:09But if I'm creating a portrait of somebody
13:11who I really want to express and is very powerful,
13:14you might see me use a lot of colors that look like fire.
13:17I really like African fabric.
13:23This is Nigerian wax resist.
13:28Originally, these patterns were done as a part of a secret society
13:34and a secret language that was only understood by a few.
13:40So this is known as speed bird in the Congo.
13:45It meant that for them, money is easy come, easy go.
13:49Once you have it in your hand, it speeds right out.
13:52I use this fabric in so many of my pieces in different colors.
13:57It was originally called Le Cour de Cheval,
14:01but in Ghana, the women called it,
14:04I run faster than my enemies.
14:09A lot of my portraits, I'm trying to embellish them
14:12with messages taken from the patterns to reinforce the story.
14:22Bisa and I met in college at Howard University,
14:30and I was a DJ then.
14:32I'm a DJ now.
14:35She was an artist, a visual artist, so I'm an audio artist.
14:39So that's what made us connect.
14:42I'm playing for all of Bisa's exhibits, for her openings.
14:47I share a studio space with my husband, John.
14:51He's playing music while I'm working.
15:01It really helps to have another creative person's perspective
15:06to think outside of my own box.
15:13After I graduated from Howard, I thought, well,
15:17I want to be an artist, so I should paint.
15:21But it didn't mean that painting really spoke to me.
15:25I wanted to make a portrait of my grandmother.
15:29We all knew that she wouldn't be with us that much longer.
15:34I used my grandmother's fabrics, remnants.
15:37And that made the portrait that much richer
15:39because it was made from her life.
15:42That was the first portrait that I created.
15:47I decided to go to grad school.
15:49And my master's degree was in teaching art,
15:52and so I was an art teacher.
15:55But after about 12 years of that, I
15:57went to being an artist full time.
16:02She elevated from just a person who could sell some pieces
16:05to then saying, now I can really take this to another level.
16:10Bisa can create a face that you would actually think
16:12is someone looking at you, but it's all fabric.
16:15It's pinpoint precision.
16:17And that's where Bisa is with it.
16:21We are in a time where people are very separated.
16:24So I'm looking for images of people who
16:27are intimate and tender.
16:33The piece that I'm working on right now
16:34is of a young couple taken in the 1970s.
16:40I'm drawn to their gaze.
16:42They look so proud to be a couple.
16:44And I remember that feeling in high school,
16:46like your boyfriend and girlfriend.
16:50So the fabrics for their clothing, I want to reflect.
16:53Yes, these are children of African descent,
16:57but they're very much American children.
16:59And they're very much in the 1970s.
17:03So I'm using the African cloth.
17:05And then I'm also layering that with colored vinyl
17:09on top of it.
17:13All of these glittery fabrics emulate the light
17:18that I feel is shining from these people.
17:27I'm looking forward to my show at the Smithsonian American Art
17:31Museum.
17:32It is going to open in fall 2027.
17:39The Smithsonian American Art Museum is incredibly fortunate
17:43to have Bisa Butler's largest, really the largest quilt
17:47that she has made.
17:48I spent so much time with these guys.
17:53The quilt is called Don't Tread on Me, Goddamn.
17:56Let's go Harlem Hellfighters.
18:01In World War I, France needed boots on the ground.
18:05And the United States said, we can loan you these black soldiers.
18:10The Harlem Hellfighters were a segregated unit.
18:15They suffered the largest number of casualties
18:18out of any other unit in the US Army at that time.
18:23They fought fiercely for their country.
18:26And they're fighting for their own dignity.
18:28And they're fighting to stay alive.
18:30And the photo that I'm drawn to is the soldiers on the boat.
18:36Before they land at New York Harbor,
18:38they're getting ready to be greeted by a ticker tape parade.
18:42They marched right down Fifth Avenue.
18:45You could feel the thundering of their boots as they came.
18:49And for the first time, black soldiers were being cheered on
18:53by an interracial audience.
19:01It's a monumental quilt.
19:06You get in close and see the intricate stitching
19:09to create this illusion of three dimension and layers
19:13to make this piece come alive.
19:16This fabric, the blue and the pink,
19:20is Nigerian wax-resist.
19:23You see the circular symbols within the cloth.
19:26Yeah.
19:27That represents the idea when you drop a pebble
19:30and water in the rings.
19:31Wow.
19:32How your small input affects the whole world.
19:36Wow.
19:37Wow.
19:38Yeah.
19:40Her work is really a lesson in empathy
19:42and a way of helping us understand
19:44and commune with a past that has often been forgotten,
19:47overshadowed, or deliberately buried.
19:52I do want my work to make people feel good when they see it.
19:59But when black people look at the artwork,
20:01they should see something that speaks to them
20:03about where they came from.
20:10To feel the emotional resonance of the artwork.
20:13Where they came from and were used to be quite experienced,
20:20being quietly.
20:35early morning.
20:36I am a silversmith and goldsmith, a metal worker, an alchemist, art historian, all these
20:53things put together because I like life and I like to explore things.
20:58So maybe I can say I'm an explorer.
21:04Silver has been an extremely important metal since antiquity.
21:11And I consider silver the most beautiful metal, much more beautiful than gold.
21:16I find gold a little vulgar.
21:21But silver is beautiful because it reflects lights.
21:29As you walk around an object, you see all the reflection change.
21:34So in my work, I try to control those reflections to make silver dance with lights.
21:47The soup to win with the fish and everything was created with the reflections in mind.
21:52But all the movement are the movement of a boat.
21:56It's just an undulating, calm sea that is the one the fisherman prefers.
22:09My family in Rome were four-generation silversmiths and goldsmiths.
22:14My great-grandfather, his name was Ribaldo, like me.
22:17He opened his shop and then my grandfather had his shop.
22:21And then my father did his own workshop by the time he was 24.
22:26The family concept was that the moment you reach a certain age, you would go on your own and
22:33open your own workshop.
22:37Yeah, that's fine.
22:40This is good.
22:45But to be a silversmith, the training is, no, you don't just to work the metal.
22:50The training is to study art, art history, and design.
22:55So I was sent to the Academy of Fine Art and Sculpture in Rome.
23:02I was a great admirer of Pope John XXIII, and I created for him in my father's worship,
23:09a gold inkstand and the pen.
23:13It was given to him as a gift.
23:16I was 17.
23:19There was this American girl that I met at the Academy.
23:27And that was the reason why I came to America.
23:30September 27, 1967, a few months later we got married.
23:37I worked in New York for nine months.
23:40Then I opened my own place and I got a commission from Tiffany and then Stubenglass, Cartier.
23:48I was very fortunate.
23:57Most silversmith use the repoussé method.
24:01That means being chased from both sides.
24:07This is actually an impression from a 17th century German basin.
24:13Once I make the drawings, these drawings will be put on a piece of metal that is embedded
24:20in pitch.
24:22And we trace the drawings down into the metal.
24:27Then we start sinking the masses.
24:33Once you have totally sunk the figure from the back, then we remove from the pitch and
24:39we turn it around.
24:41And that's what we have, the relief.
24:44From this on, now you have to finish the front.
24:49You're putting all the details on and the sharpness of the figure.
24:57For the goldsmith, silversmith metal worker, the hammers are the most important tool.
25:07And to use my favorite line from a Michelangelo poem, no hammer can be made without a hammer.
25:14So with the forge, we can make our own.
25:21Each one of them has their own use and you can see they're all different.
25:28This is a planishing hammer.
25:30You do not strike it, you just caress it so that you are smoothing down the silver.
25:40This is my favorite.
25:44I've used this probably 10 times more than any other.
26:00My family constantly restore objects, both for museums and private collections.
26:09One time there were religious objects, like the Judaica.
26:13I restored several Torah crowns.
26:16They were in terrible condition.
26:18You can imagine they were buried during the war.
26:21We restored the original beauty, but I will not touch it until I research the history of
26:27the object.
26:29You want to transpose yourself into the person you created.
26:34It's almost like the artist that made it telling you, that's what I meant.
26:39Make sure you respect me.
26:44When I was a teenager, maybe 18, I went to see an exhibition on the American Revolution.
26:51One of the things that caught my eye as a silver smith was the Liberty Bowl.
26:57It was made by Paul Revere.
27:01A lot of Paul Revere's silver is fairly regular and some is quite spectacular.
27:08After the Revolutionary War, he's doing fluted teapots, which are really the hallmark of his
27:13ability.
27:14They're really quite remarkable.
27:18His father, the Paulus Revoir, was French.
27:21He came to Boston at the age of 13, learned the trade.
27:25He opened a shop, brought his son Paul into the shop to apprentice.
27:30Paul does eventually take on his father's shop.
27:34Paul Revere carves out his niche as being a silver smith that can make whatever you need.
27:39Paul Revere is not only doing this himself, he has a team of apprentices and journeymen
27:44who are working in his shop.
27:46So he's already starting to think pretty early about how he can expand his business.
27:51The Paul Revere house, which was built around 1680, is the oldest surviving building in original
28:03Boston.
28:05By the time the Revere family moves in, in 1770, it's a little bit of a fixer-upper.
28:10But his silver smith shop is going to be located a few blocks away, so the location's perfect.
28:17The build-up to the Revolution is not military action.
28:20It's community activists.
28:23Liberty Bowl is actually commissioned by the Sons of Liberty, this rebellious group that's
28:27stirring up troubles here in the colony.
28:30Their ideas are that we are being taxed without representation, the idea that we will separate
28:35from the United Kingdom.
28:38On this bowl, Paul has engraved the names of those Sons of Liberty members.
28:43This is a kind of revolutionary act that he is doing to be affiliated with this act of rebellion.
28:48Next to it, in the exhibition, was Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre with the name
28:56of the Patriots that died.
28:58It moved me tremendously that a silver smith made these objects.
29:04So he's the person who's chosen for the Midnight Ride, one if by land and two if by sea.
29:13It turns out the British troops are going by water.
29:16And so Revere is rode by two friends across to Charlestown.
29:21He borrows a horse and rides off.
29:24He gets to Lexington.
29:25He has alerted people along the way.
29:27The British troops are coming.
29:30And so he becomes our favorite patriot and silversmith, Paul Revere.
29:43After I moved to America, I restored more than 12 objects of Bori Verre.
29:50I remember the first one was a simple teapot.
29:54And I say, is it probably like looking at an old friend?
29:56Like say, you know, I met you in Rome.
29:59You don't remember me, but here I am.
30:02When I'm weaving, I forget everything else.
30:04When I'm weaving, I forget everything else.
30:28it's a great pleasure because the wool is wonderful to touch
30:36and i'm totally absorbed
30:41it's what i've always wanted to do so i've never ever thought i would do anything else
30:49helena hernmark is an absolutely masterful tapestry artist
30:58she combines skill with incredible design talent
31:04weaving tapestries on a truly monumental scale
31:08for architectural settings throughout the country
31:11she has woven many of these pieces at her own studio on her large 11-foot looms
31:15many of them are also woven at her kind of partner sister studio in sweden
31:21i grew up in the old town in stockholm which is very charming island
31:26my father was head of decorative arts at the national museum
31:31when i was 17 he took me to visit alice lund who had a weaving workshop and my father said
31:38do you want to be a textile designer and that decided my fate
31:43after four years in art school i married a danish fellow and it was with him i moved to canada
31:50to be a textile designer and it was a textile designer and it was a textile designer and it was a
31:59national film board commissioned me to make a tapestry for the lobby of the labyrinth
32:05their building at expo and the design i made was a snake that was like a labyrinth and lit from behind
32:14like a stained glass window i felt that if you want to make an impact in the lobby you do something big
32:21that was really the market that i would seek would be lobbies
32:30this is like watching grass grow it's all very slow now it's more like embroidery than weaving
32:39when i got the commission from the warehouser company i was told fly to seattle stay in the
32:49tall hotel go up on the roof and wait for the helicopter to pick you up so there i am 29 years
32:56old like james bond on top of the roof they flew me to walk around in the rainforest and in those days
33:05i hadn't done much photography so i decided to work from a picture they had and then i went back to
33:13montreal and wove the rainforest tapestry and that was my breakthrough helena has evolved this historic
33:24tapestry medium to reflect photographic vision and so weaving with this incredible sensitivity to color
33:32and focus is something that she has innovated in 72 i had by then married an englishman
33:44we then moved to london but the next big commissioner goes was for bethlehem steel
33:50three tapestries i was just given the photograph so i said well that's great i can do it like that
33:57you have fire lights coming in one direction and the daylight is coming in another direction
34:07i like that mix of light
34:12in 75 i moved to new york america was where i could enlarge on my career i couldn't do that in england
34:21particularly or sweden i then married the industrial designer nils different he grew up in mississippi
34:30and he turned out to be very clever going to cranbrook having a fulbright and then focusing on
34:37ergonomics and the human body and he developed the human scale chairs which was really totally unique
34:45nils designed this room for me walk into the studio and the first thing you see is the wall of wool this
34:57is more than 2 000 colors and arranged according to the spectrum
35:04i've got all these colors but they're never exactly what i need so i combine them
35:09i have a sample of what i'm looking for and then i lay them out so it's in fact five different yarns
35:18so then i go up and find each one that's one then this is
35:28this one
35:31and then we have the green over there and then we have a light one like that
35:36okay so in effect i'm making one color out of five colors
35:48and then i can tie on to here then it will continue
35:54in 2013 nils got cancer
36:00for eight months i stopped my work to take care of him
36:03but i felt that i could allow myself one hour a day to do something that i would enjoy and that's
36:12what these are i made probably 200 of them before he passed away
36:18what you see here is an overview of my tapestries if i look around it's almost every state
36:33has a piece this is atlanta that's the biggest one we made is 400 square feet
36:39and these are oklahoma the history of oklahoma and then the history of money and the future of
36:46banking so banks are involved and this was for pitney bows originally these tall abstract works
36:55and they've now belonged to the minneapolis institute of art and this is in texas
37:03it hadn't occurred to me until then that you could weave in focus and out of focus that was the first time i did that
37:14the hudson yards commission was an incredibly ambitious project
37:19they wanted two tapestries for the elevator lobby
37:22and the client said i wanted to go up the wall and along the ceiling
37:27of course we've never done anything like that but you always say yes never say no
37:34for the better part of four years there were two weavers in sweden weaving both the wall tapestries
37:39and then the ceiling tapestries and then simultaneously here at helena's studio we
37:44wove various ceiling hanging solutions we needed to keep the ceiling tapestry exactly flat
37:51so at every inch there had to be a carbon fiber tube
37:55this backing would allow it to be suspended flat across the ceiling
38:07i'm trying to get what i want
38:35but it's a particularly tricky piece of weaving right now
38:51pop-up books are this flat object and then all of a sudden you open it and this scene emerges
38:59it just seems like magic
39:05and that's what intrigued me
39:19i was born about an hour from downtown philadelphia
39:23my parents immigrated from mainland china they both came in the 1950s and it was a pretty happy childhood
39:36back then parents just wanted you to assimilate they didn't want you to learn their native language
39:43when i became a teenager i wanted to hide that i was chinese i used to peroxide my hair
39:49and i wouldn't eat chinese food my father was an engineer i think he always wanted me to become an
39:57engineer but that's the one thing i didn't want to be because he wanted me to be that
40:03then after college my mom found a tour for me to china
40:08the tour visited yunnan province quenming is the capital and it's where my mom was born
40:21yunnan has almost half of the 55 ethnic minority groups of china
40:28when we visited the university for ethnic minority groups the dean asked me if i wanted to teach english
40:35there i was offered that job because my great grandfather long yun was governor of yunnan province
40:43and general of the army and he had this nickname the king of yunnan for them it was like an honor to
40:51have a descendant of long yun at the school so i taught english and i also started traveling
41:05i learned during my first trip to china that my mother was from an ethnic minority group called the
41:10nosu yi so i wanted to explore the cultures of the different minority groups
41:19i stayed for three years taking pictures of things i'm seeing and experiencing
41:24and then i went back to the states to get my mfa in photography but being a photographer is really
41:35competitive and so i thought how can i make my photographs more interesting i just went and did
41:42some like research in the bookstore like what what can i do now i used to go there to to think
41:49and in the children's section i saw for the first time pop-up books
41:58i took them apart and analyzed them there were parallel lines and angles a lot of mathematical
42:06relationships also a whole story could be told without words
42:12so i learned how to make my own pop-up books and then i incorporated pop-up mechanisms with my
42:23photographs three years later i went back to yunnan province to create a series of pop-up books called
42:32we are tiger dragon people
42:41the most difficult part is actually not the mechanics it's the story
42:49i wanted to have a reason why it's three-dimensional
42:54festivals or celebrations are good because people want to be photographed
43:02the mechanics of a pop-up are a series of simple basic structures combined together
43:23to create something more complex
43:26and then adding photographs makes the viewer look at it with surprise
43:39this series has three eggs with images from my trip to see the meow people
43:47the meow are very well known for their festivals and for their paper cutting
43:52i went to this cave where a family has been making paper for 19 generations inside
44:04the meow believe that their originator was called butterfly mother and butterfly mother gave birth to 12
44:12eggs and these eggs are the origin of all living things including the meow people
44:22the meow people
44:28this sculpture is called noodle mountain
44:33i wanted to understand the history of chinese laborers coming to the u.s during the 19th century
44:45the chinese helped build the transcontinental railroad
44:48and chinese laborers were working in the salmon canning industry
44:55but the locals wanted them out because they claimed that they were replacing american workers
45:02so the chinese were targeted with massacres hangings
45:08the red sauce represents blood and fire represents the many chinatowns that were burned down
45:15in 1875 the page act was the first legislative act that targeted immigrants
45:25and it mainly banned asian women from the country
45:30and then in 1882 the chinese exclusion act excluded all chinese men from coming to the u.s
45:38but there was a loophole that allowed merchant visas for businesses
45:42and one of those was restaurants leading to an exponential growth of chinese restaurants
45:55the crank reminds me of when i was little and my father would use a manual pasta maker
46:04he always wanted me to become an engineer
46:06but he was just happy that i had found something that i liked
46:11and then the irony is that i am an engineer now a paper engineer
46:20i come from kensington in philadelphia
46:34another name for kensington is the badlands
46:38it's where a lot of impoverished people live
46:42that's how people look at it from the exterior but from the inside i see that it's a community of
46:50resourceful people and there's a lot of creativity that happens in this place
46:55i am a potter poet an artist
47:08the work i do is primarily representing the community that i come from
47:12i am trying to find my identity through that work
47:35my parents are both from puerto rico they did immigrate here
47:39they come from less means than i did
47:42in school we didn't have art classes that wasn't really a thing
47:45i would say my first introduction to art was graffiti
47:48i had some big cousins and i just wanted to be just like them
47:53we all did graffiti together when i would tag a wall with my name
47:58made me feel like my life mattered and so i started to draw and paint
48:02years later i took a community college art class and the teacher just happened to be a potter
48:12that was why i initially pursued ceramics
48:16it was the first time really where people started to tell me that i was good at something
48:22i told myself that i was going to have a career in the arts
48:26and i was going to do it at all costs
48:32my practice became defined when i started to acknowledge where it is that i'm from
48:44it was telling the stories of kensington
48:48but also paying homage to all the people that paved the way for me to be here
48:54in this piece i wanted to make something based off of nina simone and i wanted it to be the era of the 70s
49:02i do design directly on the work but a lot of it is just back and forth between me and the pop
49:15roberto lugo is really important to this neighborhood and to really the whole ceramic
49:19community nationally and internationally
49:25we have his beautiful mural that's on the side of our building
49:28and he wants to make sure that young people from his community have a chance to do ceramics
49:34which is really empowering and gives kids agency in a world where they often feel powerless
49:45roberto loves to go out into parks and throw on the wheel
49:50it's a surprise for people seeing someone doing this thing that they really have never seen before
49:55it so make your fingers like this yep and you're gonna put it right in the pot oh isn't that cool
50:01yeah you want to try to make some pottery since i winded up being somebody who has a career in art
50:09it becomes more important for me to share that perfect you're doing so good mia look at that
50:17yeah so what would you eat out of this cereal cereal yep good job
50:27just recently i got to teach people who live in kensington about pottery patterns
50:31and how they're made and they got to make their own patterns
50:38we use those patterns to paint three public sculptures
50:41so the public sculptures are not only in this neighborhood where people don't think public
50:47sculptures belong but they're created by people from this community as well
51:02i'm inspired by ancient greek pottery and those potters are working in the same exact way that i'm
51:08working today except they did it several thousand years ago just to be a part of that lineage for
51:15me is really exciting
51:22in this exhibition we have incorporated ancient objects together with roberto's work to show
51:28how ceramic vessels tell stories both in antiquity and today how that medium really enables these
51:35stories to be told and shared among a community if we look at ancient greece the pieces are telling
51:42the stories of gods and incredible parties and heroes but you don't really see the poor people or the
51:51enslaved people and for me it's so important to tell their stories we have his work called same boy different
52:00breakfast where on one side of that vessel you see a teenager sitting in his room at his desk
52:06in the back of the piece that has the very same boy but in a prison cell it tells my experience of
52:13growing up with young men who are innocent but they wind up somehow in prison in this particular piece
52:20i was thinking a bit about when somebody passes away and they create these street shrines sometimes people
52:25will pour out some beer for the departed it reminds me of a type of scene that you see on greek funerary
52:33art where the living and the dead are shown holding hands like this and that's really what
52:39what you see here with these individuals reaching out to each other in the face of death it's just very
52:46powerful one of my works is at the smithsonian american art museum it's actually a life casting of my body
53:02broken up into all the different parts of my dna
53:05and it was part of an exhibition directly named in the presidential order to remove the idea of race
53:15from art institutions i feel like people fear because they feel like their lives or stories don't
53:22matter but all of our stories matter and we should celebrate them all
53:28so when you cut the arts maybe you cut the heart strings off the body that freedom rings if you cut
53:38the arts to fund war what are we fighting for they tell us to paint houses but not to paint a canvas
53:45you'd rather see us in encampments than exceeding on a campus without art how you gonna dance when you
53:50ace that math test who's gonna sing your praises when you get that high mark without art we're quick to
53:56draw guns after seeing war cries dance around the issues you want to stop violins pick up some violins
54:04you see because those who draw good are the last to draw blood and those who throw pots were the last
54:09to throw shots so so when you cut the arts baby you cut the heart strings off the body that freedom rings
54:26those who draw good are the last to draw good play and there's more trouble
54:34stream more craft in america on the pbs app
54:42craft in america is available on amazon prime video
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