Artbeat Nation, Season 2 Episode 7

>>> And now, an 8 special presentation. >>> In this edition of "Artbeat Nation," train travel is enriched by some unique pieces of art. >> Everyone can come here and bring their families here and be part of this airport. >> The evolution of the guitar gives us insight into the American music of the west. >> Technology helps us to bring the guitars alive. >>> We see where the eye meets art. >> Maybe the Impressionists were just a bunch of people with nearsightedness. >>> And visit Phoenix Sky Harbor's sky train art installation. >> In this case, you want to follow the path from the exit of the train over to the elevators and escalators. >>> It's all ahead on this edition of "Artbeat Nation." >>> Funding for "Artbeat Nation" is made possible by contributions to eight from viewers like you. Thank you. >>> Through his photography, Robert Silvers links art and science. He is the creator of the photomosaic, the pointillism of today. Silvers takes individual pieces of art and puts them together to create one image. For this project, he partnered with mccaran airport in las vegas, nevada and the local school system to create ten unique mosaics for travelers. >> We're in the train station at the d gates for the terminal 3 train. And what we are doing is we are celebrating children's art as part of our public art that is in this train station. >> Eight of the kids are here tonight and we don't want anybody to go home empty handed so we'll start with Josie Adams. >> It's a project we did with the school district that we started five years ago and it's a photomosaic of 10 pictures that were selected from the 37,000 students that participated. >> Seeing my artwork over there, it made me very proud. >> All the 37,000 students' pictures are tiny pieces of these larger 10 pieces. So it's kind of cool that we could get that many schoolchildren involved in one of our art projects. >> I was really shocked that I won at all. It feels great, it really does. >> Five years ago, 37,000 schoolkids submitted watercolor paintings and I arranged them into 10 photomosaics. >> Thank you for coming. I want to give you a little bit of history. These are what I call photomosaics. >> the photomosaic process is something that I invented while a student at the MIT media lab. I've been a photographer and a computer programmer so I found a way to combine my interests. >> What I'm thinking right now is, oh my gosh, people from all over the world are going to see this. >> Right now, through this train station, we have probably about 7% of our total traffic so that's a million and a half people roughly come through this terminal, but over the years, that will continue to grow. It will be millions of people every years that's going to be exposed to this public art of our schoolchildren. >> I've done the cover of "Life" magazine. The cover of "Newsweek" with Princess Diana, "The Truman Show" movie poster and many others. But what's special about this is the number of people involved, 37,000 schoolkids. So each of them is a part of this and can come here with their families to the airport and they can show people and they can feel proud to be a part of it. >> The coordination of 37,000 students submitting a work of art was a challenge, but thank you very much to the school district for taking that lion's share of that work. >> There's 37,000 students participating in this. So that's not only special to each of them, it's actually meaningful to me because I like working with large photo collections and I like working with images that are colorful and images that are all different and unique. So what I did to make it was I took each image and paired every image to every possible location, each little tile location and each of these ten master images and I would pick the watercolor painting that looked most like that area so that when you step back, you see the overall image. >> It partially an automated process because I couldn't possibly go through this many images completely by hand, but what I did was design the process to think and see the way that I would and then it narrows it down for me and I can pick the final choice for each area. >> So we really wanted to make it easy for the students, for the parents, for relatives, for others to be able to easily locate their artwork.mccarran.com and if your child participated in this you can find and locate the image and see them in this artwork. >> Go to McCarran's website, www.McCarran.Com. There's a link to the children's mosaic art and there's a few pieces of information they fill in and then what happens is the photomosaic picture comes up and then the star shows you where your particular picture is in relationship to the whole photomosaic. >> So when you click on the star, it zooms in to the picture itself, highlights that and then when you click on the picture it actually gives the information related to the artist. >> Over time, I think that words going to get out to all of the other students that they can go find their actual piece of art. And I think that students are going to think that's really cool and I think that will get them more excited about art. >> Everyone can come here and bring their families here for decades to come and be part of this airport. So it was fun for me, and I'm sure it was fun for all of the students and I just wanted to thank everyone involved. >> Not only do we get to showcase the art to 88% of our customers who don't live here who can come through and see that we have children who do the same things in school that children in their community do in school, but we also think it's cool that the kids can come back and show off their art pieces to their friends and relatives and maybe their kids and grandkids down the road. We like public art, we particularly like children's public art, and we are just like other communities that do the same things they do in other communities. Not just about getting people in and out, which is important and that's what were all about but it's also about showing people were more than just the strip and casinos, and slot machines, dining and entertainment, all those fun things they come to do. >> I feel great to see it because it's a physical installation, it's not temporary. It's backlit transparencies. It's very well illuminated, it looks beautiful. And so many people are going to get to see it, because it's right at the tram station at terminal b. >> I think it's wonderful. This is such a fun project for us to be involved in and any time we can be involved with children and get them to be encouraged and do better and to do things they can be proud of, I'm glad to be part of that. >> To learn more, visit mccarran.com. >>> "Guitars: roundups to rockers" is an exhibit at the Eiteljorg museum in Indianapolis, Indiana. The show features over 100 guitars that span from 1793 to the present. This will be the first time guitars from such diverse artists from Billy Holiday to Keith Richards are displayed together. The exhibit also gives us an in-depth history of music in the American west. Here's a tour. >> We're here at the museum to help your viewers get a view of The “Guitars: Roundups to Rockers” exhibition. It's an exciting show. And we want people to come. You can see great guitars at other museums, and in private hands, if you have access. We've had wonderful feedback on the exhibit, from the major collectors in the museums that have loaned. And they're telling us that they think it's one of the best guitar shows they've ever seen. It's not an opportunity that you want to miss. “Guitars: Roundups to Rockers” is over 100 instruments, covering the time span from 1793 to the present. You get a wonderful dose of the history of major brands, which is Martin, Fender, Rickenbacker, Gibson, and others. You see prototypes and experimental guitars that are essential to the history of electrifying the instrument. These are pretty telling instruments. As we were planning the looking about -- at what the story was about guitars and the American West, that's what our mission is. But we also wanted to look at what was unique about instruments and music in the West. Not only what was brought to the West, but what was created in the West that influenced the rest of the world. And a big part of that is the history of how people developed new instruments that were louder, basically. And that story of amplifying the guitar, almost entirely is to the credit of people in the American West. Musical forms that originated in Seattle, or the beaches of California, or in the studios of Los Angeles, or popular forms of music, you know, blues in Texas, for example, those are all musical forms that are known to the rest of the world. >> Technology helps us bring the guitars alive. We can have pretty guitars in a case that are completely silent. It can be a good experience. But using technology, we can bring those museum objects, the guitars to a different level. So our staff produced a variety of experiences. You can pick up a guitar and play it. But you can also go to iPads and learn about different types and styles of guitar playing, the different roles that guitars play in a band. You can check out, for free, an iPod. And at almost 70 different locations in the exhibit, you can either hear the precise instrument in front of you being played by a famous player, or you can hear the kind of music played on, say, a very early instrument. So it helps to give a greater dimension and richness to present the real art that came from the instrument. It's an adventure, trying to get them. And we've had a wonderful time working with colleagues at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, the National Music Museum in South Dakota. We normally work with colleagues, studying things they have and arranging to make loans. Being able to contact collectors and players is not always easy. In some cases, we have connections with people like Vince Gill, who are collectors and players, and they're very open to sharing their instruments with the public. And other cases, you can't get a hold of people. The Doug Irwin guitar, made for Jerry Garcia is a guitar named Tiger, as people in Indianapolis know, one of the great collectors here is Jim Irsay, the owner of the Colts. He's passionate about music and guitars. Jerry Garcia's Tiger is one of his collection, and the sound clip that you hear with that guitar is a famous Grateful Dead song “Truckin'”, and we picked a version of that that we knew was recorded at the time that he was playing that guitar. And by coincidence, it was one that was recorded in Noblesville at Deer Creek, so there's a real piece of Indiana there. The case we have on Hendrix is one that we found the most satisfying to do. The experience music project loaned us his early Les Paul electric guitar. It's not the guitar he's best known for, that's usually a Fender Stratocaster, but the fragment we have is the fragment of his Stratocaster that he broke onstage in London in 1969. These are really special things. And there's a magic about them. These are real things. These aren't souvenir guitars that have someone's signature on them; this is the real deal. And that's what you don't normally get to see. >> To learn more, visit eiteljorg.org. >>> The impressionists' blurred brushstrokes shocked the art world in the late 1800s. In this next story, you'll be surprised to find out what some experts now believe was the reason for this style of art. >> When you look at some of the works of the Impressionists, To the first observer of an Impressionist work it just looks sort of blurry. Well, people who are nearsighted see the world without their glasses as sort of blurry. So somewhere along the line some people thought that “well, maybe just the Impressionists were just a bunch of people with nearsightedness.” When Paul Cezanne exhibited in the very first Impressionist show there was an interesting quote from an art critic who was so shocked with the look of this. He must have a diseased retina. He's created this whole new form of art because his eyes must be so poor. Similarly, people look at the works of artists like El Greco and Giacometti and Modigliani and all of those artists would paint or do sculptures in a very elongated, exaggerated sort of fashion. Again someone wondered, well gosh, I wonder if they have some sort of astigmatism? And astigmatism is the condition of the eye where the eye, the curvature of the eye is not perfectly spherical and it causes blurring in one direction as opposed to another. It turns out that Impressionism is way more than just an eye condition. I mean, it's a revolutionary movement in art in France in the late 1800s, and glasses were widely available then, there was no such thing as anybody that went without glasses. Edgar Degas was one of the founding fathers of French Impressionism. He suffered from a loss of vision in one eye in his early 30s and he was legally blind in both eyes by about his mid-30s. He lost vision in the macula, the centermost part of the retina that's responsible for our fine detailed vision, and this shows up in his works where early, he does these exquisite paintings of girls in the ballet school for example and he would paint that over and over and over again. But then there is some very late Degas pastels where he's painting the same theme, a ballet dancer, but you can tell that the contrast between his earlier style and the later style is just a lot more coarse, the details are kind of lost and it's very evident when you compare those two works that he's lost vision. You ask someone about Impressionism and everyone seems to gravitate towards Monet. Well, Monet ends up having cataracts late in his life and these cataracts develop roughly in the 1910s to 1920s and cataract surgery was possible, but it was not nearly as sophisticated as it is now. He eventually after seeing six ophthalmologists ends up having cataract surgery, but up until that point we can kind of see a gradual deterioration in his vision. A cataract will absorb blue, violets and greens and so it leaves the world sort of a muddy color. Monet, in fact after his cataracts surgery, complained bitterly. He talked about how the colors were exaggerated and he couldn't quite get used to the fact that he was actually seeing real colors now and he's been so acclimated to seeing yellows and browns. And nothing probably illustrates this better than something that he would paint over and over, which is the little Japanese foot bridge at Giverny and there are early works of this from around 1900. The water lilies are beautifully reflecting in the pond and there's just really exquisite detail. There's different colors rendered even within a single brushstroke. And then we get to a much later work in about 1922 he paints that same Japanese footbridge and now the colors are way off. They're yellows and browns and very muddy because of a very thick cataract and he's looking through these cataracts and painting through this and that work from 1922 really reflects his poor vision that he was struggling with at the time. He ends up recovering around 1925 and finished the water lilies and he's sort of back to his old style that all of us have come to love. The idea that Impressionism might have been born out of just a need for glasses is probably pretty inaccurate. These are sort of conscious, artistic decisions and not an eye condition. >>> We often think of art being made by one person alone in a studio. However, the art filling the public spaces of the new phoenix sky train at sky harbor airport is different. It was made by artists working in teams with hundreds of skilled thinkers, builders and installers. Created to enhance the traveling experience for the train's expected millions of riders, the large-scale works include terrazzo floors at each station, glass murals and a sculptural ceiling installation. >>> The public arts director for Phoenix discusses the art projects with ted Simons. >> Half a dozen art installations debuted here for the new sky train. The city of Phoenix public art director is here to tell us about the installations. Good to have you here. >> Glad to be here. >> What are we talking about? Five artists, six installations? >> Five artists in artist teams and six installations at each of the new sites and stops. >> And how long in development was this? >> You know, one of the artists likes to say that her project manager was pregnant when they started, and now she has a 5-year-old. So 2008. >> And where exactly is this art displayed? On the train, in the train, around the train? >> The spaces lead up to the train. There are floors, huge floors. If you got off at light rail, cross a bridge, that entire bridge is designed by an artist working with a design team of architects and engineers. East economy lot and terminal four. >> Let's take a look these projects and starting with this one, Daniel mayer? Kind of like calligraphy. >> Well, he's a book maker and a print maker who teaches out at asu and so he uses a lot of fonts as we like to call in the digital world and in this case he wanted to scatter the floor with a path that led you from one part of the train, the exit to the train right over to the elevators and escalators and the scrawl that he had there is limitless is the open and timeless is the open, to draw on the book of travel. >> Isn't that interesting? And Daniel mayer did a couple of glass murals as well? >> He sure did. When you come off the sky train platform, you go down the escalators and there are two bridges that connect the train station to the terminal. He did these remarkable murals that really began with prints of Arizona leaves on aluminum foil, and then he scaled these up and produced them in traditional stained glass technique for both of these bridges and they're beautiful and large and, in fact, you can see these from the drop-off area down below at terminal four on the south side. >> Basically, those are leaf prints aren't they? >> Those are leaf prints and very traditional, but in a contemporary setting unlike any other. >> I would imagine the scope and size that kind of takes your breath away a little bit. >> 115 feet long by nine feet high so you feel like our bug crawling on a leaf. >> Daniel Martin Diaz did a floor at the pedestrian bridge? >> Daniel Martin Diaz did a remarkable floor at the pedestrian bridge from 44th street station over to the 44th street light rail stop. This is a remarkable project. It's almost 500 feet long, 40 feet wide and you can see from some of these pictures the kind of hand craftsmanship that went into this. These were produced right here in Phoenix by the skilled craftsman. Each floor took about 25 workers and this is an ancient technique, it dates back a couple of thousand years. It began with bits of marble from construction and built into cement. Now, we have modern materials that are really beautiful. >> That's absolutely gorgeous. Mandala like up there. Well known in the valley as an artist. You got him to contribute as well, huh? >> We had a competition to select those artists five years ago and they all became the artists to do the projects. Fausto because of his beautiful layering of paintings and imagery got this project and he worked really beautifully with the design team to create a pattern that's spaced on plane wings. >> And it's absolutely gorgeous. A very familiar artist to folks here in the valley, and she did a floor as well? >> She did a floor and it captures all of the whimsy that she has. It's an aerial flyover of the Arizona landscape, which she loves and so you have these wiggling lines of canals and rivers and takes off the topographic map that you often see. >> A floor as landscape. >> This is an outdoor station, so vance had to come up with an innovative new product to make it a durable product in the outdoors. >> There was an international team, as well. This was -- was this a ceiling of clouds? >> At a four street station, the main entrance to that site. You have the international team of -- working with Paul deed. And they had done a good deal of reading about the ancient ocean that used to be here covering Arizona and they also just were infatuated with the blueness of our sky and the landscape. So they combined those two things into this grid that has this rippling like water in the middle. >> These artists, how much control, how much say did they have over what they wanted to do? >> Very significant. They began with drawings and then worked directly with the architectural team to tweak them and incorporate them right into the plans as the entire sky train developed. >> And the overall cost? >> About $5.6 million and change out of a $1.5 billion project. >> And again, the money came from -- >> The city has a percent for art program which means a penny out of every buck the city spends on building itself involves artisans, coming up with these enhancements. >> Are the artists happy? >> They're delighted, thrilled and the response from the public has been inspirational. >> Well, congratulations on a success there. Can't wait to get out there and take a look. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. >> Thanks very much for having me on. >> To learn more, visit skyharbor.com/museum. For more arts and culture, visit azpbs.Org/artbeat, where you'll find feature videos, And information on the arts scene. Funding for "Artbeat Nation" was made possible by contributions to eight from viewers like you. Thank you.