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00:00For the mathematical problems we are trying to solve.
00:03We try to integrate the math and the art together.
00:06I kind of like it.
00:09Climate change is scary. It's terrifying.
00:12But artists can translate the science so that everyone can understand it.
00:18Biology is the study of life.
00:20And I carve feathers into intricate art.
00:24People say I capture the essence of the birds.
00:26I kind of just feel them in my body.
00:29Through generations of passing knowledge from person to person,
00:33people in our family make very distinct pottery.
00:37It is a cultural science that 50 years ago we didn't even think was scientific.
00:44My mission was going to be at the International Space Station.
00:47Now that I've tried my hand at sewing in space, I can say it's tricky.
00:59The motto of MIT is mens et manus, which is mind and hand.
01:09So it's not just about thinking about things and solving problems in your head, but it's also about physically doing things.
01:19My dad and I started getting interested in art and craft because we were trying to solve math problems.
01:29We'd work on a problem, get stuck, and then build something that helped explain it.
01:43Computational origami is quite useful for the problems we were trying to solve.
01:55As we made more and more models to understand what was going on geometrically, at some point those models started looking beautiful.
02:05Now we try to integrate the math and sculpture making together.
02:19The more we do it, the more we view them through the same lens.
02:23At least I like to think about art also as a problem-solving endeavor.
02:32I'm a theoretical computer scientist and usually we're trying to understand what problems are easy for computers to solve
02:38versus which ones are hard for computers to solve.
02:42But I got interested in folding just because it seemed interesting mathematically.
02:47I was curious about becoming a lawyer. I went to law school for a term and decided I definitely did not want to be a lawyer.
03:00So I headed to Northern New Brunswick, Canada, and I built a log cabin.
03:06It made me not afraid to try anything.
03:09I homeschooled my son. I became a single parent before he was three.
03:15What I decided about learning is that it's not what you learn, it's to become excited about learning.
03:23I think our first collaboration was the Eric and Dad Puzzle Company when I was five and six years old.
03:29We made and sold wire take-apart puzzles to toy stores across Canada.
03:34I helped design the puzzles. Marty made them all.
03:39And then we split the money 50-50, which was pretty cool as a six-year-old.
03:44In the beginning, Eric wasn't interested in math, so there was no pressure to do math.
03:50I was playing lots of Nintendo. I asked my dad, how do people make video games?
03:56And a neighbor had one of the early personal computers.
04:00We borrowed it and made a video game.
04:05I took advanced calculus, and then I really saw the beauty in mathematics.
04:10You have this ultimate truth. You can prove that some theorem is true and know for sure that that is true.
04:17I think there's no other aspect of human existence where you have that kind of certainty.
04:27What was it like to be a 12-year-old in college? It was great.
04:30My peers, of course, were much older than me. They treated me like any other student.
04:36They invited me to parties. They tried to keep the drugs in another room, I'm told, so I didn't know that was happening.
04:43But I ended up doing undergrad in two years. And then I was like, well, I want to learn more stuff, so I guess grad school?
04:50And I saw this world of origami mathematics that seemed really cool.
04:56Finished my PhD when I was 20 and was lucky enough to get a job offer at MIT.
05:02The unusual thing is that when Eric was offered a job, they also offered me one because we had a reputation for working together.
05:12Well, that's not bad. That's a good test.
05:15Eric and I have published 100 joint papers.
05:18Interesting.
05:19The most important problem now is to prove that mathematically these curved forms exist.
05:36We use a ball burnisher to put indentations into the paper.
05:40When we first started folding paper, we used a laser cutter, and then we decided everything had to be handmade, every step.
05:59The paper wants to fold along the score lines, but we have to really encourage it to go around all the creases.
06:06And as we do that, the paper just pops into this 3D form.
06:12Nice.
06:14It's a very simple constraint in origami that you're not allowed to stretch or tear the paper.
06:20And so all you're allowed to do is deform it by folds.
06:25It makes it a little bit harder.
06:27It makes it a lot harder, to be honest.
06:30You're doing a better job than I am.
06:33When we started working in computational origami, I think part of the appeal was that it seemed useless.
06:42But years later, it turned out that if you want to build a structure that can change its shape, folding is a pretty natural way to do that.
06:51Like if you want to make a giant telescope lens in space, you first need to fold it up into something small, so you can put it in a shuttle to go into space, where it can then unfold.
07:05So origami is actually super useful for engineering and medicine and things like that.
07:10Let's go up, maybe.
07:17Yeah.
07:19My dad and I had been trying to understand the mathematics and explain how paper behaves in curved crease folding.
07:27And we were starting to realize, hey, geometry is cool. Let's try to make them even more beautiful.
07:34Yeah, I kind of like it.
07:39Around that time, MoMA contacted us and said, hey, we're doing this show. It's about science and art. Got any cool objects?
07:47That was quite a surprise. And so it ended up in their permanent collection.
07:53I guess rarely does an art career start with MoMA.
07:56And soon after, various galleries would say, hey, we're doing a show about paper. Are you interested?
08:06Hey, we're doing a show about book art. Do you have some pieces?
08:09And so that became, let's make more and more sculpture and explore that deeper and deeper.
08:15Now the main idea is we're threading a string or a few strings through a series of disconnected components such that when you pull the string tight, now this is like a pretty stable structure.
08:35I think I tend to attract the students who are also interested in building physical manifestations of their work.
08:41Vertices.
08:42That means there's two strings going through that tube.
08:45It's not always easy to do that in mathematics.
08:48Exactly. Yeah.
08:49But I think it enriches the whole experience.
08:52Yeah.
08:54So the shape of the pieces might affect it, I think.
08:56A couple of years after being at MIT, I get this phone call from the MacArthur Foundation and they're like, you've won this award.
09:03The MacArthur Fellowship exists to say, that's cool that you're working on things that other people don't explore.
09:12That confirmation for me sort of encouraged me to go even more in that direction and explore the more obscure things and whatever I found exciting was okay.
09:22As an artist in the 60s, I tried different things.
09:31And then I saw glass in a school in England.
09:36I spent nine months there and then returned to my log cabin and started a studio to make art glass.
09:43I had never seen my dad blow glass before. It was all before I was born.
09:53At MIT, we just jumped back into glassblowing.
09:58And then I got to learn to blow glass so we could play in that space together.
10:02We've evolved blowing these hollow forms and then the idea was you can't just have a playing glass vessel.
10:15And one of the techniques is almost randomly putting cut glass over the glass.
10:23And that produces an optic effect that distorts what you see inside.
10:29We wanted to combine these two interests that we have of blowing glass and paper sculpture.
10:40Those are two materials that generally are thought of belonging together.
10:48This is the complete works of Shakespeare, but only the words that have red in them.
10:54I see Frederick, labored, favoredly. All of these have red highlighted in the middle.
11:02Here's a folded one.
11:04And we're going to embed this paper inside the blown glass vessel.
11:15Come on in.
11:16Yeah.
11:26Sculpture, I guess, is not a normal activity as an MIT professor in computer science.
11:32Oh, that's nice.
11:34Staying coiled like that.
11:36Whoa, that's awesome.
11:38But I think for us it's really a benefit to have two careers instead of one.
11:42Doing art we inspire new mathematics.
11:53And doing mathematics we inspire new art.
11:56I think some of my most interesting art comes out when I am just pissed off.
12:21Environmental issues have been a theme throughout my life.
12:25And our addiction to fossil fuels has very serious consequences for the entire globe.
12:34Climate change is depressing.
12:37It's scary.
12:39It's terrifying.
12:42But artists must be leaders.
12:45And leaders must be artists.
12:49Clay transmits all of my feelings.
12:52If a person is drawn in by a piece of my art, maybe the story I'm trying to tell about climate change will reach them.
13:06I did not begin my ceramic journey until I was 30 years old.
13:22I had a career prior to that as a teacher.
13:25And I decided to enroll at Otis College of Art and Design Extension ceramics classes.
13:33You want this blended in, huh?
13:37Yeah.
13:39I had no art background when I arrived at Otis.
13:42Zero.
13:43But as soon as I touched clay, I knew that this was going to be something I could do for a very long time.
13:50My mother was actually a beauty queen.
13:55And my father was in US military intelligence during World War II.
13:59He was educated as an architect.
14:03He could draw anything.
14:04He could build anything.
14:06And so when I told my parents I was going to quit my job at Crossroads School in Santa Monica,
14:11my mom looked like she was going to go into complete cardiac arrest.
14:16And my dad said,
14:19you've finally come to your senses.
14:23Otis College of Art and Design has a hundred year history.
14:26The first campus was close to downtown Los Angeles.
14:31Many prominent Los Angeles artists at some point graced the halls of Otis.
14:39Peter Volkus arrived in 1954.
14:43Volkus could throw beautiful pots and he started tearing them apart, abstracted them.
14:50Pete Volkus opened the doors for all of us to create much more expressionism in clay.
15:00I became a faculty member at Otis teaching English.
15:04And faculty can sit in classes.
15:07I, of course, took ceramics classes.
15:10Ralph Vissera was in charge of the program.
15:13He taught us so many technical skills from glaze chemistry to plaster mold making to potter's wheel,
15:25hand building, slab building, coil building.
15:29It was rigorous on all technical fronts.
15:32It was the Harvard of American ceramics.
15:37But when we moved to the new campus, Otis closed the ceramic program.
15:45Later on, the school decided to bring it back and I was tapped as the ceramic instructor.
15:52The idea is to make this part blue and then cover the whole thing in red.
15:57If you do the bottom side first, then you don't mess up anything.
16:04Joan's biggest influence is her belief in her students.
16:09Her belief is so matter-of-fact so strong that you start believing yourself.
16:16These are going off to your first gallery, huh?
16:20This one just came out of the cone.
16:22That's sexy. Really sensitive glazing.
16:24I've been an extension student of Joan's for the past year and a half.
16:30And just from, I think, day one, she really took an interest in my work.
16:34I have met so many interesting extension students.
16:38Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
16:39Yeah, somebody's going to cut themselves.
16:42You're going to draw a little blood with that one.
16:45I really like surfers because they have strong upper body strength.
16:49I also like dentists and orthodontists because they have good hands.
16:54That's why I...
16:56Same problem.
16:58Yeah, I can't sell those, but...
17:00You won't ever do that again.
17:02No, definitely not.
17:03Right?
17:04Yeah.
17:06Joan really helped our ceramics department recapture that past prestige.
17:11Her work has appeared in the Smithsonian and just been in a lot of different museums internationally and nationally.
17:20Her shows are taking on environmental issues through representations in clay.
17:25My brain and my heart are connected to my fingertips.
17:35That's how I transmit my thinking.
17:41As we create more greenhouse emissions, we have atmospheric tipping points.
17:46So I have one cup that's tipping with SUVs spilling out.
17:57And then I did another one with a little sushi that have oil derricks on them, along with all these contributors to climate change.
18:06Whether it's airplanes, cars, or the way we produce food in America, overconsumption is what we do best.
18:22About 2009, one of my students came back from Christmas vacation with a bag full of bleached coral.
18:29And she gave me a few pieces and she said, these are all over the shores of Guam and our coral reef is sick.
18:40And she said, what used to be the colorful coral is now just turned white, breaking apart and landing on our beaches.
18:51The warming oceans are creating bleaching events.
18:54And because the coral are so sensitive, the entire ocean ecosystem is under pressure.
19:05I carried that bleached coral in my apron for a couple of years thinking about it.
19:13And finally, I decided to switch my work from flamboyant, colorful theatrics to all white.
19:24I started thinking of the bleached coral events as the canary in the coal mine, warning us of climate disaster.
19:35I think this is the next step in the climate change series.
19:48It's called Water Warrior, and it is about the future issues of rising sea levels, but also of potable water for people.
20:01We can all do our part to decrease our carbon emissions, like growing your own food or buying what you need and not waste your food and throw it out.
20:22We can avoid climate disaster, and artists can translate the science so that everyone can understand it.
20:35We can avoid climate change on the climate change.
20:37We can avoid climate change in the climate change, and we can avoid climate change in the climate change.
20:46Feathers are symbols of our aspirations.
20:50Of flight and hope.
20:53Kind of our dreams.
20:56those ideas are why i chose to use feathers in my art
21:04people say i capture the essence of the birds and that's really a compliment because
21:17i i like to feel them like kind of just feel them in my body
21:26biology is the study of life
21:37birds shed their feathers and i carve them into intricate art
21:44this feather is from an asian jay and this is about as small as i go
21:55this is part of the wing it's not the main wing feather they're little coverts they're called
22:06they cover up the other feathers and this just has these little bits of blue on them
22:12i want to support laws that protect birds
22:18most of my feathers come from natural shedding in zoos and private aviaries
22:25so i can be sure that they're legal
22:28this is from an argus pheasant
22:35some of the biggest most heavy feathers in the world
22:39these are the primaries
22:42it's what the bird powers its flight with and these are the secondaries and on most
22:48birds secondaries help the bird just float in the air
22:52these are beautifully patterned so the bird uses them for display kind of like a peacock
22:58but when its feathers are all tucked in it just blends into its forest background
23:07feathers are made out of keratin which is the strongest of animal materials
23:11it's like your fingernail but then inside it's more pithy because the other thing about feathers
23:17is they're really light
23:21another function feathers have is to enhance the bird's sense of the environment
23:26this is like one big lever that goes into the bird's nerve-rich skin
23:33each flight feather is attached by a muscle and a tendon
23:38so they can move those feathers more or less separately
23:43they can do things that we can barely imagine
23:54i grew up near seattle
23:56my father was an eye surgeon
23:58my mother was a professional artist
24:01but having three sisters and no brothers
24:03mostly i would just go out and explore the woods
24:12i was a biologist
24:14and i focused on entomology
24:17i do know the plants and the creatures
24:21and then i worked with the hydropower industry
24:25i was sitting behind a desk in meetings
24:30so ten years ago i was thinking about what's my mission in life
24:37and it appears to be to foster appreciation and understanding of the natural world
24:46my father used these glasses for eye surgery
24:50i need them especially as i get older
24:53and these were my dad's tiny little forceps
24:58they're grooved so they don't slip back and forth
25:02and these were his scalpels they're really sharp
25:11my mom really encouraged creativity
25:14she would teach classes in her home and paint
25:19after she died i got her notebooks and i'm looking through one of them and there's there's birds that she's just probably
25:25she saw outside the wind and went
25:30from her drawings i've made some pieces
25:34i wish she was around to see the results
25:46i'm carving these little bugs from feathers of the central american oscillated turkey
25:55they're shiny like a bug
25:58so i'm making what i call bug bird
26:03i want to honor the birds and i want to honor the feathers
26:07i could paste them flat against the background
26:11but i don't
26:13i pull them away so that they have their natural curve
26:21voila
26:30when i photograph it i want to get the light just right
26:33so that i can capture the shadows
26:39what i feel is important is this feeling of space
26:44and design
26:47and also a feeling of motion
26:55i have a barn that the swallows love
27:00in the spring there's hundreds of them
27:03when i'm watching the swallows i have this kinesthetic sense of soaring with them
27:22i'd like to dance and i get that same feeling of lightness
27:33my art is seen all over the world
27:40and if somebody can see feathers in a different way hopefully it can give them a new perspective
27:48and financial world
27:59and the national world
28:01and the national world
28:03and the national world
28:07and the national world
28:13come on in come on in come on
28:22for me
28:23everything starts with the pencil
28:25the pencil is the application of the thought to the paper
28:28so you start just fooling around with a direction
28:36and once you see the direction you begin to see that this could work in this space
28:41then the idea begins to develop to be able to be functional and built
28:46i'm dealing with glass steel water and light so all of the senses can be experienced seeing hearing touching smelling
29:01there's never a boring moment that's the beauty of being an artist
29:25i've got a lot of different ideas going all the time
29:27i'll be working on something for 40 minutes and then i go to something else it's just my nature
29:40john is like an overgrown eight-year-old
29:43it's either full speed ahead or stop nothing in between
29:50i remember my first week in kindergarten we did drawing we did cutting things out
29:56we were just having fun as kids
30:01frederick froebel was the inventor of kindergarten
30:05in the 70s and 80s i spent time studying his work
30:10froebel was born in germany his father was a lutheran minister
30:15in university he studied botany mathematics and he was an apprentice of samuel weiss
30:21weiss at the museum of crystallography samuel weiss was one of the discoverers of how crystalline
30:28structure develops drawings of samuel weiss show how the cube grew to the other crystalline forms
30:35after having an education in sciences froebel worked as a teacher that changed the rest of his life
30:44you know as a little kid i wanted to be an architect
30:56but in college architecture was mathematics so i got into majoring in art
31:01and i started working in clay i loved the feeling of the you know how you get manipulated
31:09so i got a master's in ceramics and then that's when i went to europe
31:13i was working with a queen's royal blue delft company they established a factory in delft in 1653
31:27we built ceramic murals some that were 50 by 150 feet
31:32in the netherlands i also worked with leardom glass
31:35i saw transparency translucency and all those qualities of glass that everything else in the
31:43sculptural world did not have i was kind of wooed into that glass world when i said i got to do this
31:57the educational system pre-1800 was rote learning strict discipline the teachers were dictators
32:06and then froebel published his philosophy in 1826 for him the kinder is the child the garden is for
32:15planting things and growing so within the mind of the child that seed would grow and he helped nurture
32:23that growth with his kindergarten teaching system which is based on the crystalline structure concept
32:29from samuel weiss
32:31cube
32:32cylinder and the sphere
32:37by spinning this cube it becomes a cylinder
32:42and this one when you spin this cylinder
32:44it becomes a sphere
32:49froebel began to break it down into its elements the solid cube becomes a fragmented cube
32:57the children begin to arrange it in the different ideas
33:00so this is the gift of knowledge like mathematics halves quarters the gift of beauty is to take the
33:08shapes and to arrange them into any kind of a pattern and the gift of life the children create
33:16buildings out of blocks chairs out of blocks after the block system they play with parquetries
33:24paper cutting paper folding peas and sticks
33:27so froebel was presenting objects for the children to learn through sense perception experiential contact
33:37with the world
33:43when i got back to america i didn't have a job but i found a teaching position in la
33:49and i liked it because it was fun my approach to teaching is actually froebel derivative because it
33:56deals with opening up freedom of expression and freedom of of feelings but in order to express that
34:03freedom you have to have the techniques and i always felt that you must understand your media in order to create anything
34:15i made a series of small blown forms
34:19i played with this idea i thought that's kind of cool that's fun
34:24but once i took this apart and i looked at this form i saw it standing 10 feet tall
34:33now in order to make that 10 feet tall you have to have furnaces that are big enough to be able to put
34:39the glass in to bend it so i built a walk-in kiln
34:48you start with a flat piece of glass
34:50and you put it into the kiln suspend it over the mold we used steel pipes
34:56we run that up to a temperature of about 1100 degrees 14 to 16 hours to get to the bending point
35:05then the cooling takes three to four days
35:11once those pieces are bent in the large kiln then we transfer those to the taping table
35:16he does all that taping single-handedly freehand and they're perfect
35:28from the taping process i wheel them into the sandblast booth
35:35once the piece is sandblasted surface is etched then we bring it into studio remove all the tape
35:42so the pattern then is finished
35:50in 1817 froebel built a school in kilhow and then in 1837 the kindergarten in bodblankenberg
35:59which is over the hill and he would hike back and forth it's about nine miles
36:05from there froebel's system spread around germany and then around the world
36:12england japan russia the usa
36:16can you open the door and put your finger in
36:22what can you do with these blocks
36:26the froebel system was kind of lost in the mid-20th century but it's really coming back
36:34froebel usa is trying to get this into the kindergarten system today
36:38it's the rebirth of freedom in education
36:50now this is controversial but froebel's kindergarten is the origin of modern abstract art
36:56children learning that system became 20th century painters sculptors designers frank lloyd wright wrote
37:07in 1876 my mother went to the philadelphia world's fair and saw the presentation of the kindergarten system
37:14and he says when my mother introduced these blocks to me they changed the way i saw the world
37:23piet mondrian began as a teacher so he knew the froebel system
37:28i think that he integrated that totally into his work another perfect example is buckminster fuller
37:37he said i discovered my geometric structures my geodesic domes from froebel's peas and sticks
37:43goldie and i went to germany in 2019 we went to his birthplace we went to where his schools were
38:00john's got froebel on the brain
38:04so we tracked the froebel trail and went up to the hill
38:08and on the top is a monument to him the cube the cylinder and the sphere 10 feet tall almost
38:18i'm getting goose pimples now because it was just something this really exists
38:24go ahead go ahead you're up we got it we got it go up
38:27perfect perfect perfect perfect i learned so much about life from froebel
38:39his ideas connected me to a whole new world a visual world
38:57modern superpower soldier
39:05pottery is such an integral part of our family
39:10and things like where to dig for clay and the polishing method how to fire pieces
39:17those traditions have been in our family every single generation for the last thousand years
39:25I knew it was important when I went on a field trip to a museum and my mom's pot was in there
39:34and her mom's pot and my great-grandmother's pot and my teacher was like oh my goodness that's your
39:40family Sergio and Joseph are brothers they come from Santa Clara Pueblo each Pueblo has a different
39:51style of pottery that they traditionally make and it really is based on the type of clay that is in the
39:56surrounding area New Mexico has so much variety and types of clay oh that's cool yeah so this is
40:06really pigmented stone so this we would pulverize to make slip and we'll find different color ones
40:15and that's why you get variations of different types of reds I've been working with clay since
40:23I was about three I was told by everybody you're gonna be making pottery it's it's kind of it's
40:30expected when we build the pots we use what we call Pukki and it's basically just a pre-made bowl
40:37it's all coil built and a lot of the process is dependent on the weather you don't want it to
40:47be humid because if your piece is too wet it will collapse it won't be strong enough to hold its own
40:52weight but if a piece dries out too much the coil will crack a lot of it is just feel and knowing from
41:01experience Joseph Lugo his pieces are thoughtful and he really thinks about Pueblo culture Santa Clara
41:12culture in particular as the foundation for the pieces that he makes unlike pretty much every other
41:21tribe we make our pieces very thick so we are able to carve very very deep and create a lot of dimension
41:29I had my first show when I was seven years old it wasn't something I really wanted to do and I took
41:40a break for a very long time and one day I just I fell in love with it again it's really cool to show
41:49people what you can create with your hands Sergio Lugo is part of this younger generation that take
41:58traditional aspects of the work and make it part of their contemporary world the van you or the water
42:04serpent is a protector of water I created my own water serpent I wanted to make it more modern I've always
42:16thought that polishing is the most technically difficult part we're using just basic materials a
42:24mixture of clay and water to make slip and polishing stones no glaze at all everything's traditional method we
42:38all use in the family her grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's stone and just knowing that it's past so
42:44many hands it gives me a lot of confidence to do the same thing that they did
42:50at Santa Clara Pueblo the people were farmers so typically the women made pottery men might paint
43:00or design pieces but they didn't necessarily make pottery pottery was meant for utility and for ceremony
43:09but in the late 1800s when the railroads were developed they would stop at every Pueblo and there
43:17would be people selling pottery about 50 years ago the men began to make pottery as well
43:24generational knowledge is passing information from person to person one person that did a lot of that was
43:33my great-great-grandmother Serafina Tafoya she had different types of impressed pieces painted pieces then she
43:44was a massive influence to the next generation after her especially my great-grandmother Margaret Tafoya
43:52Margaret Tafoya is one of the most important Pueblo potters of the past century she's one of the few
43:59potters that won best of show twice Santa Fe Indian Market two years in a row when she was already in her
44:0480s so they come from a lineage of extraordinary potters Joseph and Sergio's mother Nancy Youngblood is
44:12also one of the leading potters working today we still ask her for input all three of us my brothers
44:19she's taught us to make everything handmade hand carved hand polished traditionally fired it is a
44:29cultural science that is about Pueblo life Pueblo art and it's all learned knowledge that's something
44:37that we're starting to understand is a really important part of science today that 50 years ago
44:42we didn't even think was scientific there's so much time and effort you put into a piece of
44:50pottery that you don't want to lose it to the wind or major temperature change my mom created the
44:58shed to control all of them each pot is red before the firing and the firing dictates if the pot is black or
45:09red when we started the fire the pieces were getting sooty once we put the boards on the fire gets
45:24really hot and all of that soot starts to burn off you have to look in and see exactly when the soot is
45:36burning off the piece if it gets over fired the piece will dull out it's starting to burn off here
45:49too oh yeah when it reaches that perfect temperature the finish is very shiny yeah my pot's done once it
46:03kind of reaches that molten stage that's when we cover it with manure this shredded manure it keeps
46:13all of the smoke inside beautiful that's how the color change is happening it's a chemical reaction of
46:22the manure and all of the smoke we've covered the fire now cutting off the oxygen if you didn't cut off the
46:32oxygen the pieces turn brown and they're just sitting in like a cloud of smoke right now let's get it nice and
46:40packed just making sure that temperature goes down slowly is the key to a successful piece we don't know the
46:55scientific detail of it but we know what happens when you do certain things and we know it works
47:01swipe it a little bit it's a whole lot of work but when it comes together it it's magical after
47:20everything's clean we gotta sign the wall you know I look around and I see dates and history and relatives I
47:29can add my name to them and keep it going I think that 500 years ago they would have had no idea that
47:41we would still be doing this but it is because of the resilience that they had that we have continued
47:49to pass it through every generation I remember the first time I saw the full curvature of the earth I
48:05could not believe what I was seeing the vibrancy the colors just how thin the atmosphere is against the
48:15blackness of space in 1978 NASA selected the first group of astronauts that had women I had just turned
48:34eight years old and that's about the time I said I want to be an astronaut I grew up on a lake in
48:40Minnesota I was drawing and crafting when I was little and asking my mom can I use the sewing
48:47machine can I use the sewing machine apparently I was a little bit annoying about it in college I
48:52studied mechanical engineering got a PhD NASA hired me as an engineer and I was selected into the astronaut
49:00class of 2000 my first flight was on the space shuttle Discovery in 2008
49:10when those solid rocket boosters ignite it's like boom a kick in the pants and it's like okay we're going
49:16somewhere now after about eight minutes the main engines cut off and we're in space
49:25I'm like I did it I'm here this is the goal I had when I was a little girl
49:32unbelievable we rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station then there's so
49:42many tasks to be done with the robotic arm I had to take the Japanese laboratory out of the payload bay
49:50of the shuttle get it onto the space station and then after two weeks we've landed at the Kennedy Space Center I remember thinking somebody could convince me I've never done it you know if there weren't pictures because it seemed so dreamlike it was just so fast and surreal
50:09all the way through my time as an astronaut I would do drawing and sewing as a kind of relaxing outlet I even went on a couple quilting retreats to learn techniques and just started dabbling in it and trying it and now it's my favorite thing to do to turn a picture into a quilted art piece
50:33my second flight was five years after the first I was now married to Doug Hurley who was also an astronaut we had a three-year-old son
50:51I was launching out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan getting to the space station on the Russian Soyuz
51:02my mission was going to be six months long rather than two weeks
51:10the International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes
51:15it is a collaboration between the United States and Russia Japan Canada and the European Space Agency
51:24the interior part of it is about the size maybe of a five-bedroom house it's quite spacious
51:32one of my favorite things to do was go to the cupola which is a set of seven windows
51:38there's a round one that faces directly towards Earth
51:42from there I really liked taking photographs
51:45I would see a view and try to get the different textures of Earth from the mountains to the deserts the coastlines and farmland
51:54you notice the cloud patterns and the different colors of water like in the Bahamas it was amazing
52:01the space station is mostly used for science we probably had at least 150 different experiments on board
52:11and we would do maintenance on all the different hardware because we had a life support system running
52:18thermal systems running we also do two hours of exercise every day
52:25when we were living there for so long there was a little bit of downtime
52:30this is Mission Control Houston one of the things that astronaut Karen Nyberg has been doing on board the space station
52:34she took up some sewing supplies to make a piece of a quilt
52:38now that I've tried my hand at sewing in space I can say one thing with certainty it's tricky
52:44you know you can't you can't lay things down and measure and cut the fabric doesn't
52:49I found myself taping the fabric to a surface
52:52I'm almost done with with one single nine by nine quilt block that has taken me quite a while
52:58a lot longer than than you would expect
53:01I'm inviting all of you to create your own star themed quilt blocks
53:07we'll be combining them with my block to create a quilt for next year's 40th anniversary
53:12International Quilt Festival in Houston
53:20the Houston International Quilt Festival ended up getting enough blocks for 30 king-size quilts
53:26they got over 2400 blocks from people all over the world over 30 countries
53:34there were space enthusiasts who had never in their life quilted anything that made a block
53:41and there were blocks from quilters who were now excited about space which I think is pretty cool
53:47from space there are no borders every border on earth is imaginary
54:05everybody on earth we have so much more common than we do different as human beings
54:09and it makes me just empathize with people more
54:15even if I don't know them I never will meet them
54:18but they're my neighbors we're all neighbors here on this planet
54:21back then they're my neighbors here on this planet
54:32Watch all episodes of Craft in America online.
54:54With additional videos and more, visit Craft in America at pbs.org.
54:59This episode of Craft in America is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
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