Craft America S17 Episode 1
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Short filmTranscript
00:00The company was started by my great uncles they were immigrants looking to
00:07provide for their family and so they picked a craft why not flowers I am
00:14working on a series of quilted portraits using these glittery African fabric I'd
00:22want black people to see something that speaks to them about where they came
00:27from I consider silver the most beautiful matter much more beautiful
00:33and gold as you walk around an object you see the other reflection change in my
00:39work I try to make silver dance the lights I learned how to make my own pop-up
00:47books and then I incorporated pop-up mechanisms with my photographs it just
00:53seems like magic
00:57when I'm weaving I forget everything else it's a great pleasure it's what I've
01:03always wanted to do so I've never ever thought I would do anything else
01:08the work I do is primarily representing the community that I come from my first
01:14introduction art was graffiti and so I started to draw and paint I told myself
01:19that I was gonna have a career in the arts at all costs
01:23on and paint I'm going
01:27to a
01:31and
01:32and
01:33and
01:37and
01:38well
01:40on
01:41well
01:42well
01:43You walk New York City, the Garvin District in particular, and you look up at these buildings
01:54and you have no idea what's going on inside of them.
02:02At M&S Schmalberg, we're a fourth generation family business that manufactures artificial
02:07flowers.
02:11We are the last factory in the country doing this.
02:22You grow up and your dad is a plumber, an electrician, a flower man.
02:27I never really processed that he was the only flower man.
02:32Hello ladies, Lucia, Miriam.
02:36I'm retired, but I worked at M&S Schmalberg almost 50 years.
02:40Look at you.
02:41How are you?
02:42Hi.
02:43Sometimes I'll come back just to help them out because it is a family here.
02:49Beautiful.
02:50Very nice.
02:51What we do here is we take fabric of any type and create artificial flowers and leaves
02:58and petals.
02:59Still making them by hand as we have for 109 years at this point.
03:04The company was started back in 1916 by my great-great-uncles Morris and Sam Schmalberg.
03:15They were immigrants looking to provide for their families and so they picked a craft and why
03:21not flowers?
03:23In those days there were probably 30, 40 flower companies in Manhattan alone and some of those
03:28shops had as many as 100 people working for them.
03:35What's up?
03:36How are you doing, buddy?
03:37I'm good, you?
03:38I'm good.
03:39What's up, gentlemen?
03:41Good morning.
03:42All right.
03:44Senor?
03:45Mr. Oren.
03:46Ta bien?
03:47Yeah.
03:48Very good.
03:49Father and son team here.
03:53Right after the war, my dad came to America.
03:56He was a Holocaust survivor.
03:58He was in his teens when he was sent to a concentration camp.
04:03His mom and dad and his two brothers and his sister perished.
04:09After surviving the camps, he was in the Nazi death marches.
04:14But one morning, he was woken up by an American soldier who said, you know, hey, here's some
04:21water.
04:22You know, it's over.
04:23You're going to be okay.
04:25And he said to my dad, you know, who's left?
04:28Who can we contact?
04:29And my father said, I don't have anybody, but in New York, in America, Schmalberg, Flowers,
04:35and this American soldier contacted Morris and Sam and they got that on a boat.
04:41They stayed in their attic and he would come to work and learn the business.
04:46When Morris and Sam passed on, my father boarded from the spouses.
04:51In those days, it was the thriving garment center.
04:55These streets were lined with factories.
04:58We were the flower guys for the dress industry.
05:01And there were other flower guys for theater, other flower guys for hats.
05:05And they all just couldn't make it.
05:08The first thing we do when we get any material is we cut into panels about 50 inches square.
05:21And there's a few different starches that we use to give it extra body.
05:26You wring it out as best you can, then you stretch it on the frames to dry.
05:31Once the fabric is starched and dry, we make layers out of it.
05:37We then take our vintage dies and cut out the flat petals.
05:42You're cookie cutting just whatever shape the die might have.
05:51And we have hundreds of different dies.
05:53Most of them are flowers, but there's leaves, there's butterflies.
05:58It started out like these with the hand-held dies.
06:03And they're beautiful.
06:05Like this is a four-leaf clover, a four-paw we call it.
06:08And you see the detail on that as opposed to this one, totally different.
06:16In the old days, there was no machine like Alex is cutting.
06:19And everything was cut with a mallet and a boom.
06:26So imagine cutting a die like this, this heavy die.
06:32It's probably 10, 12 pounds.
06:34Cutting this through fabric by hand.
06:40The next step is the embossing.
06:43The molds date back some of them to the late 1800s.
06:47And they resemble the waffle iron.
06:50You take your flat petal, put it between the molds.
06:56And with pressure, heat and the starching from before, you're embossing the petals.
07:00Now they've been cut, they've been pressed.
07:03And then finally they go to assembly where we put them together to make the flowers.
07:07We're not horticulturally on the money here because it's not nature, but we do some beautiful things close to nature.
07:22The whole business is a combination of tools that are irreplaceable and people and skills that are irreplaceable.
07:36Hey Al, when you're done with that, I have two orders for Catherine.
07:42Alex has been with the company since I was a kid, almost 40 years.
07:48All right, no problemo.
07:49Thanks Al.
07:50Maryam worked with my grandpa Harold.
07:54She's a master flower maker, master artisan.
07:58What if we did something with wired floors and then you can make a center? What do you think?
08:04We don't have a, um, a petal.
08:07I defer to them. I respect the experience that they have.
08:12What if we take one of the poinsettia petals? That make sense?
08:15We have to create the flowers.
08:17Okay. All right.
08:21When I'm creating the new flowers, sometimes my mind comes a flash and I stop and I create something.
08:29If they like it, I love it.
08:38Nowadays, sadly, there's no garment history.
08:41You don't see trucks in the morning. You don't see pushcarts on the streets.
08:47Artificial flowers are coming from offshore.
08:51Copies of our flowers.
08:53But today there's enough domestic things between theater and fashion and operas and TV shows that keeps us okay.
09:01And then there's the Met Gala, where all the couture designers dress the stars of the world.
09:09If it's a season where flowers are in, our stuff is on the red carpet for the event.
09:21One of Vera Wang's senior designers asked if we can make a parrot tulip.
09:26So I went on Google. I looked up pictures of a parrot tulip.
09:29We've been making that flower. It's about 14 inches.
09:31It's been worn by Emily Ratajkowski.
09:35And then they asked if we can make even larger ones.
09:38They sent us 50 yards of this chartreuse fabric.
09:42It was worn by Gwen Stefani.
09:44Big flowers. A lot of work to make these things.
09:46Each generation brings something different to the table.
09:58Now there's social media. There's online platforms.
10:02These have become a big part of our business.
10:05Every day somebody comes in here, tells me they found us on Instagram.
10:08And can I buy a flower? To which the answer is always yes.
10:14Could you imagine what they would think?
10:18That we were still here. That I'm sharing Instagram videos.
10:22Selling flowers on Etsy.
10:25In 2025.
10:27We're very lucky. We're very lucky.
10:30You got grandpa up there keeping an eye on both of us.
10:32You know, my dad was that Holocaust survivor.
10:38And I think his skills and his thinking were inherited to me and to Adam.
10:44He set a path for us, you know, to keep it going.
10:49And we love this. We love making flowers.
11:02All of us understand fabric.
11:19From the moment you're born, they wrap you in a blanket.
11:23They put that little hat on your head.
11:25Your whole lives you're surrounded by fabric.
11:27And I think it becomes a deeper understanding of what is being communicated in my portraits.
11:37Because nobody has to sit you down and explain to you the rules of this.
11:42This is fabric.
11:44It's touching you at all times.
11:45Bisa Butler is known for these visually eloquent quilts that really speak to African and African-American past.
12:05A kind of diasporic story.
12:07Her work is based on photographs of Black people.
12:10She's going back into history, looking at archives, looking at thousands of photographs to find just the right ones to show us something that we've never seen before.
12:24I'm drawn to black and white photos.
12:27I'm wondering who are these people?
12:30And what was the circumstances of their life?
12:32I'm sketching on top of the blow-up of the photograph.
12:38I'm looking at what's the lightest light, the darkest dark.
12:42The black and white allows me to imagine how can I use color and fabric to tell this story about this person.
12:51If I'm using a lot of blues and greens, I'm using that cool color palette to say that this person had a more calm demeanor.
13:03But if I'm creating a portrait of somebody who I really want to express and is very powerful, you might see me use a lot of colors that look like fire.
13:11I really like African fabric.
13:18This is Nigerian wax resist.
13:23Originally, these patterns were done as a part of a secret society and a secret language that was only understood by a few.
13:34So this is known as speed bird in the Congo.
13:39It meant that for them, money is easy come, easy go.
13:44Once you have it in your hand, it speeds right out.
13:47I use this fabric in so many of my pieces in different colors.
13:52It was originally called Le Cour de Cheval, but in Ghana, the women called it, I run faster than my enemies.
14:04A lot of my portraits, I'm trying to embellish them with messages taken from the patterns to reinforce the story.
14:22Bisa and I met in college at Howard University, and I was a DJ then.
14:26I'm a DJ now.
14:27She was an artist, a visual artist, so I'm an audio artist.
14:33So that's what made us connect.
14:36I'm playing for all of Bisa's exhibits, for her openings.
14:41I share a studio space with my husband, John.
14:45He's playing music while I'm working.
14:47It really helps to have another creative person's perspective to think outside of my own box.
15:07After I graduated from Howard, I thought, well, I want to be an artist, so I should paint.
15:13But it didn't mean that painting really spoke to me.
15:18I wanted to make a portrait of my grandmother.
15:23We all knew that she wouldn't be with us that much longer.
15:27I used my grandmother's fabric remnants, and that made the portrait that much richer because it was made from her life.
15:35That was the first portrait that I created.
15:41I decided to go to grad school, and my master's degree was in teaching art, and so I was an art teacher.
15:49But after about 12 years of that, I went to being an artist full-time.
15:53She elevated from just a person who could sell some pieces to then saying, now I can really take this to another level.
16:03Bisa can create a face that you would actually think is someone looking at you, but it's all fabric.
16:09It's pinpoint precision. That's where Bisa is with it.
16:12We are in a time where people are very separated, so I'm looking for images of people who are intimate and tender.
16:27The piece that I'm working on right now is of a young couple taken in the 1970s.
16:33I'm drawn to their gaze. They look so proud to be a couple, and I remember that feeling in high school, like your boyfriend and girlfriend.
16:44So the fabrics for their clothing, I want to reflect.
16:48Yes, these are children of African descent, but they're very much American children, and they're very much in the 1970s.
16:56So I'm using the African cloth, and then I'm also layering that with colored vinyl on top of it.
17:08All of these glittery fabrics emulate the light that I feel is shining from these people.
17:15I'm looking forward to my show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is going to open in the fall of 2027.
17:34The Smithsonian American Art Museum is incredibly fortunate to have Bisa Butler's largest, really the largest quilt that she has made.
17:42I spent so much time with these guys.
17:47The quilt is called, Don't Tread on Me, Goddamn, Let's Go, Harlem Hellfighters.
17:54In World War I, France needed boots on the ground.
17:59The United States said, we can loan you these black soldiers.
18:04The Harlem Hellfighters were a segregated unit.
18:08They suffered the largest number of casualties out of any other unit in the U.S. Army at that time.
18:17They fought fiercely for their country, and they're fighting for their own dignity, and they're fighting to stay alive.
18:24And the photo that I'm drawn to is the soldiers on the boat.
18:29Before they land at New York Harbor, they're getting ready to be greeted by a ticker tape parade.
18:36They marched right down Fifth Avenue.
18:39You could feel the thundering of their boots as they came.
18:43And for the first time, black soldiers were being cheered on by an interracial audience.
18:49It's a monumental quilt.
18:59You get in close and see the intricate stitching to create this illusion of three dimension and layers to make this piece come alive.
19:10This fabric, the blue and the pink, is Nigerian wax-resist.
19:17You see the circular symbols within the cloth.
19:21Yeah.
19:22That represents the idea when you drop a pebble in water in the rings.
19:27How your small input affects the whole world.
19:30Wow.
19:31Wow.
19:32Yeah.
19:35Her work is really a lesson in empathy and a way of helping us understand and commune with a past that has often been forgotten, overshadowed, or deliberately buried.
19:47I do want my work to make people feel good when they see it.
19:52But when black people look at their artwork, they should see something that speaks to them about where they came from.
20:05To feel the emotional resonance of the artwork.
20:22I am a silversmith and goldsmith, a metal worker, an alchemist, art historian, all these things put together because I like life.
20:49I like life and I like to explore things.
20:52So maybe I can say I'm an explorer.
20:58Silver has been an extremely important metal since antiquity.
21:06And I consider silver the most beautiful metal, much more beautiful than gold.
21:10I find gold a little vulgar.
21:19But silver is beautiful because it reflects lights.
21:23As you walk around an object, you see all the reflection change.
21:28So in my work, I try to control those reflections.
21:34To make silver dance with lights.
21:37The soup to win with the fish and everything was created with the reflections in mind.
21:47But all the movement are the movement of a boat.
21:51It's just an undulating, calm sea.
21:54That is the one the fisherman prefers.
21:56My family in Rome were four generation silver smiths and gold smiths.
22:09My great grandfather, his name was Ribaldo like me.
22:13He opened his shop and then my grandfather had his shop.
22:17And then my father did his own workshop by the time he was 24.
22:20The family concept was that the moment you reach a certain age,
22:26you will go on your own and open your own workshop.
22:31Yeah, that's fine.
22:33This is good.
22:35This is good.
22:39But to be a silver smith, the training is no.
22:42You don't just to work the metal.
22:44The training is to study art, art history and design.
22:48So I was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts and Culture in Rome.
22:57I was a great admirer of Pope John XXIII.
23:01And I create for him in my father's workshop,
23:04a gold inkstand and the pen.
23:08It was given to him as a gift.
23:10I was 17.
23:11There was this American girl that I met at the Academy.
23:21And that was the reason why I came to America.
23:24September 27, 1967.
23:29A few months later we got married.
23:31I worked in New York for nine months.
23:34Then I opened my own place and I got commission from Tiffany.
23:38And then Stubenglass, Cartier.
23:41I was very fortunate.
23:43Most silver smiths use the repoussé method.
23:56That means being chased from both sides.
24:01This is actually an impression from a 17th century German basin.
24:06Once I make the drawings, these drawings will be put on a piece of metal that is embedded in pitch.
24:15And we trace the drawings down into the metal.
24:20Then we start sinking the masses.
24:25Once you have totally sunk the figure from the back,
24:30then we remove from the pitch and we turn it around.
24:35And that's what we have, the relief.
24:38From this on, now you have to finish the front.
24:43You're putting all the details on and the sharpness of the figure.
24:51For the goldsmith silver smith metal worker,
24:55the hammers are the most important tool.
25:01And to use my favorite line from a Michelangelo poem,
25:06no hammer can be made without a hammer.
25:09So we're the forge.
25:11We can make our own.
25:15Each one of them has their own use.
25:18And you can see they're all different.
25:22This is a planishing hammer.
25:25You do not strike it.
25:26You just caress it.
25:27So that you are smoothing down the silver.
25:32This is my favorite.
25:36I've used this probably ten times more than any other.
25:41Mwah!
25:55My family constantly restore objects, both for museums and private collections.
26:00Sometimes there were religious objects, like the Judaica.
26:07I restored several Torah crowns.
26:10They were in terrible condition.
26:12You can imagine they were buried during the war.
26:15We restored the original beauty, but I will not touch it until I research the history of the object.
26:21You want to transpose yourself into the person he created.
26:28It's almost like the artist that made it telling you,
26:32that's what I meant.
26:34Make sure you respect me.
26:35When I was a teenager, maybe 18, I went to see an exhibition on the American Revolution.
26:45One of the things that caught my eye as a silversmith was the Liberty Bowl.
26:51It was made by Paul Revere.
26:52A lot of Paul Revere's silver is fairly regular, and some is quite spectacular.
27:01After the Revolutionary War, he's doing fluted teapots, which are really the hallmark of his ability.
27:09They're really quite remarkable.
27:11His father, the Paul Revoir, was French.
27:14He came to Boston at the age of 13, learned the trade, he opened a shop, brought his son Paul into the shop to apprentice.
27:24Paul does eventually take on his father's shop.
27:28Paul Revere carves out his niche as being a silversmith that can make whatever you need.
27:34Paul Revere is not only doing this himself, he has a team of apprentices and journeymen who are working in his shop.
27:40So he's already starting to think pretty early about how he can expand his business.
27:50The Paul Revere house, which was built around 1680, is the oldest surviving building in original Boston.
27:59The time the Revere family moves in, in 1770, it's a little bit of a fixer-upper.
28:04But his silversmith shop is going to be located a few blocks away, so location's perfect.
28:10The build-up to the revolution is not military action.
28:15It's community activists.
28:17The Liberty Bowl is actually commissioned by the Sons of Liberty, this rebellious group that's stirring up troubles here in the colony.
28:24Their ideas are that we are being taxed without representation, the idea that we will separate from the United Kingdom.
28:31On this bowl, Paul has engraved the names of those Sons of Liberty members.
28:37This is a kind of revolutionary act that he is doing to be affiliated with this act of rebellion.
28:42Next to it in the exhibition was Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre with the name of the Patriots that died.
28:52It moved tremendously that the silversmith made these objects.
28:58So he's the person who's chosen for the midnight ride.
29:05One if by land and two if by sea.
29:07It turns out the British troops are going by water.
29:10And so Revere is rode by two friends across to Charlestown.
29:15He borrows a horse and rides off.
29:18He gets to Lexington.
29:20He has alerted people along the way.
29:22The British troops are coming.
29:23And so he becomes our favorite patriot and silversmith, Paul Revere.
29:37After I moved to America, I restored more than 12 objects of Bolivar.
29:44I remember the first one was a simple teapot.
29:47And I say, it's probably like looking at an old friend.
29:51Like say, you know, I met you in Rome.
29:54You'll remember me, but here I am.
30:17When I'm weaving, I forget everything else.
30:27It's a great pleasure because the wool is wonderful to touch.
30:33And I'm totally absorbed.
30:38It's what I've always wanted to do.
30:40So I've never ever thought I would do anything else.
30:43Helena Hearnmark is an absolutely masterful tapestry artist.
30:53She combines skill with incredible design talent,
30:58weaving tapestries on a truly monumental scale
31:02for architectural settings throughout the country.
31:05She has woven many of these pieces at her own studio
31:08on her large 11-foot looms.
31:09Many of them are also woven at her kind of partner or sister's studio in Sweden.
31:15I grew up in the old town in Stockholm,
31:18which is a very charming island.
31:20My father was head of decorative arts at the National Museum.
31:25When I was 17, he took me to visit Alice Lund,
31:30who had a weaving workshop.
31:32And my father said, do you want to be a textile designer?
31:34And that decided my fate.
31:37After four years in art school, I married a Danish fellow.
31:42And it was with him I moved to Canada.
31:45We were there just in time for Expo.
31:50And people at the National Film Board commissioned me to make a tapestry
31:58for the lobby of the labyrinths, their building at Expo.
32:02And the design I made was a snake that was like a labyrinth,
32:07and lit from behind like a stained glass window.
32:10I felt that if you want to make an impact in the lobby, you do something big.
32:16That was really the market that I would seek would be lobbies.
32:19This is like watching grass grow.
32:27It's all very slow.
32:30Now it's more like embroidery than weaving.
32:34When I got the commission from the warehouser company,
32:39I was told fly to Seattle, stay in the tall hotel,
32:44go up on the roof and wait for the helicopter to pick you up.
32:47So there I am, 29 years old, like James Bond on top of the roof.
32:54They flew me to walk around in the rainforest.
32:58And in those days I hadn't done much photography,
33:01so I decided to work from a picture they had.
33:05And then I went back to Montreal and wove the rainforest tapestry.
33:10And that was my breakthrough.
33:11Helena has evolved this historic tapestry medium to reflect photographic vision.
33:23And so weaving with this incredible sensitivity to color and focus is something that she has innovated.
33:29In 72, I had by then married an Englishman.
33:38We then moved to London.
33:41But the next big commission I got was for Bethlehem Steel.
33:45Three tapestries.
33:46I was just given the photograph, so I said, well, that's great. I can do it like that.
33:55You have fire lights coming in one direction and the daylight is coming in another direction.
34:01I like that mix of light.
34:03In 75, I moved to New York.
34:10America was where I could enlarge on my career.
34:14I couldn't do that in England, particularly, or Sweden.
34:18I then married the industrial designer, Nils Diffriant.
34:22He grew up in Mississippi.
34:25And he turned out to be very clever going to Cranbrook, having a Fulbright,
34:29and then focusing on ergonomics and the human body.
34:34And he developed the human-scale chairs, which was really totally unique.
34:43Nils designed this room for me.
34:47Walk into the studio and the first thing you see is the wall of wool.
34:52This is more than 2,000 colors and arranged according to the spectrum.
34:55I've got all these colors, but they're never exactly what I need.
35:02So I combine them.
35:04I have a sample of what I'm looking for.
35:08And then I lay them out.
35:10So it's, in fact, five different yarns.
35:13So then I go up and find each one.
35:16That's one.
35:18And this is...
35:22This one.
35:23That one.
35:25And then we have the green over there.
35:28And then we have a light one like that.
35:32Okay.
35:34So, in effect, I'm making one color out of five colors.
35:42And then I can tie on to here.
35:45Then it will continue.
35:47In 2013, Nils got cancer.
35:55For eight months, I stopped my work to take care of him.
35:59But I felt that I could allow myself one hour a day to do something that I would enjoy.
36:06And that's what these are.
36:07I made probably 200 of them before he passed away.
36:20What you see here is an overview of my tapestries.
36:24If I look around, it's almost every state has a piece.
36:28This is Atlanta.
36:30That's the biggest one we made is 400 square feet.
36:34And these are Oklahoma, the history of Oklahoma.
36:38Then the history of money and the future of banking.
36:41So banks are involved.
36:43And this was for Pitney Bowes originally.
36:47These tall, abstract works.
36:50And they now belong to the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
36:54And this is in Texas.
36:57It hadn't occurred to me until then that you could weave in focus and out of focus.
37:03That was the first time I did that.
37:05The Hudson Yards Commission was an incredibly ambitious project.
37:13They wanted two tapestries for the elevator lobby.
37:17And the client said I wanted to go up the wall and along the ceiling.
37:22Of course, we'd never done anything like that.
37:25But you always say yes.
37:26Never say no.
37:28For the better part of four years, there were two weavers in Sweden
37:31weaving both the wall tapestries and then the ceiling tapestries.
37:35And then simultaneously here at Helena's studio,
37:38we wove various ceiling hanging solutions.
37:41We needed to keep the ceiling tapestry exactly flat.
37:45So at every inch there had to be a carbon fiber tube.
37:49This backing would allow it to be suspended flat across the ceiling.
38:01And a lot of peopleálves around the world could've now moved and moved certainly over the rise.
38:04And this would allow it to be a clear opening of Carriент.
38:08We had completely tried those things and were met up to ourselves.
38:24And it was a mentioned firmist.
38:26How do you go back?
38:27I'm trying to get what I want,
38:31but it's a particularly tricky piece of weaving right now.
38:46Pop-up books are this flat object,
38:50and then all of a sudden you open it and this scene emerges.
38:54It just seems like magic.
39:00And that's what intrigued me.
39:14I was born about an hour from downtown Philadelphia.
39:18Come on, Nora.
39:19My parents emigrated from mainland China.
39:25They both came in the 1950s,
39:27and it was a pretty happy childhood.
39:31Back then, parents just wanted you to assimilate.
39:35They didn't want you to learn their native language.
39:38When I became a teenager,
39:40I wanted to hide that I was Chinese.
39:42I used to peroxide my hair and I wouldn't eat Chinese food.
39:49My father was an engineer.
39:50I think he always wanted me to become an engineer.
39:54But that's the one thing I didn't want to be
39:56because he wanted me to be that.
39:58Then after college,
40:00my mom found a tour for me to China.
40:03The tour visited Yunnan province.
40:10Kunming is the capital,
40:12and it's where my mom was born.
40:16Yunnan has almost half of the 55
40:19ethnic minority groups of China.
40:23When we visited the university for ethnic minority groups,
40:27the dean asked me if I wanted to teach English there.
40:30I was offered that job because my great-grandfather,
40:35Long Yun, was governor of Yunnan province
40:38and general of the army.
40:40And he had this nickname, the King of Yunnan.
40:44For them, it was like an honor
40:46to have a descendant of Long Yun at the school.
40:51So I taught English.
40:54And I also started traveling.
40:57I learned during my first trip to China
41:03that my mother was from an ethnic minority group
41:05called the Nosuyi.
41:07So I wanted to explore the cultures
41:10of the different minority groups.
41:14I stayed for three years
41:16taking pictures of things I'm seeing and experiencing.
41:19And then I went back to the States
41:25to get my MFA in photography.
41:29But being a photographer is really competitive.
41:31And so I thought,
41:32how can I make my photographs more interesting?
41:36I just went and did some, like, research in the bookstore.
41:40Like, what can I do now?
41:42I used to go there to think.
41:44And in the children's section,
41:46I saw, for the first time, pop-up books.
41:53I took them apart and analyzed them.
41:56There were parallel lines and angles.
42:00A lot of mathematical relationships.
42:03Also, a whole story could be told without words.
42:07So, I learned how to make my own pop-up books.
42:15And then I incorporated pop-up mechanisms
42:18with my photographs.
42:21Three years later,
42:23I went back to Yunnan Province
42:24to create a series of pop-up books
42:27called We Are Tiger Dragon People.
42:29The most difficult part is actually not the mechanics.
42:40It's the story.
42:44I wanted to have a reason why it's three-dimensional.
42:49Festivals or celebrations are good
42:52because people want to be photographed.
42:59The mechanics of a pop-up are a series of simple,
43:14basic structures combined together
43:18to create something more complex.
43:21And then adding photographs
43:24makes the viewer look at it with surprise.
43:29This series has three eggs with images
43:34from my trip to see the Miao people.
43:42The Miao are very well known for their festivals
43:45and for their paper cutting.
43:49I went to this cave
43:52where a family has been making paper
43:55for 19 generations inside.
44:00The Miao believe that their originator
44:02was called Butterfly Mother.
44:04And Butterfly Mother gave birth to 12 eggs.
44:07And these eggs are the origin of all living things,
44:10including the Miao people.
44:12and the Miao people.
44:23This sculpture is called Noodle Mountain.
44:28I wanted to understand the history
44:31of Chinese laborers coming to the U.S.
44:34during the 19th century.
44:36The Chinese helped build the Transcontinental Railroad,
44:44and Chinese laborers were working
44:46in the salmon canning industry.
44:50But the locals wanted them out
44:52because they claimed that they were replacing
44:54American workers.
44:57So the Chinese were targeted with massacres, hangings.
45:01The red sauce represents blood and the fire represents
45:08the many Chinatowns that were burned down.
45:12In 1875, the Page Act was the first legislative act
45:17that targeted immigrants.
45:20And it mainly banned Asian women from the country.
45:24And then, in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act
45:28excluded all Chinese men from coming to the U.S.
45:34But there was a loophole that allowed merchant visas
45:37for businesses, and one of those was restaurants,
45:41leading to an exponential growth of Chinese restaurants.
45:44The crank reminds me of when I was little
45:53and my father would use a manual pasta maker.
45:59He always wanted me to become an engineer,
46:02but he was just happy that I had found something that I liked.
46:06And then the irony is that I am an engineer now,
46:10a paper engineer.
46:14I come from Kensington, in Philadelphia.
46:29Another name for Kensington is the Badlands.
46:34It's where a lot of impoverished people live.
46:39That's how people look at it from the exterior,
46:41but from the inside, I see that it's a community
46:45of resourceful people.
46:47And there's a lot of creativity that happens in this place.
46:58I am a potter, poet, an artist.
47:02The work I do is primarily representing the community
47:07that I come from.
47:09I am trying to find my identity through that work.
47:13My parents are both from Puerto Rico.
47:19They did immigrate here.
47:20They come from less means than I did.
47:24In school, we didn't have art classes.
47:25That wasn't really a thing.
47:26I would say my first introduction to art was graffiti.
47:28I had some big cousins and I just wanted to be just like them.
47:30We all did graffiti together.
47:46When I would tag a wall with my name, it made me feel like my life mattered.
47:47And so I started to draw and paint.
47:48We all did graffiti together.
47:51When I would tag a wall with my name,
47:53it made me feel like my life mattered.
47:55And so I started to draw and paint.
48:00Years later, I took a community college art class,
48:03and the teacher just happened to be a potter.
48:07That was why I initially pursued ceramics.
48:11It was the first time, really, where people started to tell me
48:13that I was good at something.
48:17I told myself that I was going to have a career in the arts,
48:21and I was going to do it at all costs.
48:32My practice became defined when I started to acknowledge
48:36where it is that I'm from.
48:38It was telling the stories of Kensington,
48:43but also paying homage to all the people that paved the way
48:46for me to be here.
48:49In this piece, I wanted to make something based off of Nina Simone,
48:53and I wanted it to be the era of the 70s.
48:59I do design directly on the work,
49:01but a lot of it is just back and forth between me and the pot.
49:05Roberto Lugo is really important to this neighborhood,
49:12and to really the whole ceramic community nationally and internationally.
49:20We have his beautiful mural that's on the side of our building,
49:23and he wants to make sure that young people from his community
49:26have a chance to do ceramics, which is really empowering and gives kids agency
49:33in a world where they often feel powerless.
49:41Roberto loves to go out into parks and throw on the wheel.
49:45It's a surprise for people seeing someone doing this thing
49:48that they really have never seen before.
49:50So, make your fingers like this.
49:52Yep.
49:53And you're going to put it right in the pot.
49:54Oh.
49:55Isn't that cool?
49:56Yeah.
49:58You want to try to make some pottery?
50:00Since I winded up being somebody who has a career in art,
50:03it becomes more important for me to share that.
50:09Perfect.
50:10You're doing so good, Mia.
50:11Look at that.
50:12Yeah.
50:13So, what would you eat out of this?
50:15Cereal.
50:16Cereal.
50:17Yep.
50:18Good job.
50:22Just recently, I got to teach people who live in Kensington
50:25about pottery patterns and how they're made,
50:27and they got to make their own patterns.
50:33We use those patterns to paint three public sculptures.
50:37So, the public sculptures are not only in this neighborhood
50:41where people don't think public sculptures belong,
50:45but they're created by people from this community as well.
50:57I'm inspired by ancient Greek pottery,
51:00and those potters are working in the same exact way
51:03that I'm working today,
51:04except they did it several thousand years ago.
51:08Just to be a part of that lineage for me is really exciting.
51:17In this exhibition,
51:18we have incorporated ancient objects together with Roberto's work
51:22to show how ceramic vessels tell stories,
51:26both in antiquity and today,
51:28how that medium really enables these stories to be told
51:31and shared among a community.
51:34If we look at ancient Greece,
51:35the pieces are telling the stories of gods
51:38and incredible parties and heroes,
51:42but you don't really see the poor people or the enslaved people,
51:47and for me, it's so important to tell their stories.
51:52We have his work called Same Boy, Different Breakfast,
51:56where on one side of that vessel,
51:57you see a teenager sitting in his room at his desk.
52:01In the back of the piece,
52:02it has the very same boy, but in a prison cell.
52:06It tells my experience of growing up with young men who were innocent,
52:10but they wind up somehow in prison.
52:14In this particular piece,
52:15I was thinking a bit about when somebody passes away
52:18and they create these street shrines,
52:19sometimes people will pour out some beer for the departed.
52:23It reminds me of a type of scene that you see on Greek funerary art
52:28where the living and the dead are shown holding hands like this,
52:32and that's really what you see here
52:35with these individuals reaching out to each other
52:38in the face of death.
52:40It's just very powerful.
52:49One of my works is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
52:55It's actually a life casting of my body
52:57broken up into all the different parts of my DNA.
53:03And it was part of an exhibition directly named
53:06in the presidential order to remove the idea of race
53:09from art institutions.
53:14I feel like people fear because they feel like their lives
53:16or stories don't matter, but all of our stories matter,
53:21and we should celebrate them all.
53:27So when you cut the arts, maybe you cut the heart strings off the body
53:31that freedom rings.
53:32If you cut the arts to fund war, what are we fighting for?
53:37They tell us to paint houses but not to paint a canvas.
53:40You'd rather see us in encampments than exceeding on a campus.
53:43Without art, how you gonna dance when you ace that math test?
53:46Who's gonna sing your praises when you get that high mark?
53:49Without art, we're quick to draw guns, apt to sing war cries,
53:53dance around the issues.
53:54You wanna stop violins?
53:57Pick up some violins.
53:59You see, cause those who draw good are the last to draw blood
54:02and those who throw pots were the last to throw shots.
54:05So when you cut the arts, baby, you cut the heart strings
54:09off the body that freedom rings.
54:10Stream more Craft in America on the PBS app.
54:31Craft in America is available on Amazon Prime Video.
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