Susan Crile

Transcription

♪ [Theme Music] ♪ TINABETH PIÑA: Welcome to Study with the Best, the magazine show that's all about CUNY. I'm Tinabeth Piña. Today's show highlights the visual arts. From the subway platforms of New York City to the deserts of rural Mexico, from the Brazilian favelas in Queens to a pop-up art shop in Manhattan, we're looking at art across the CUNY spectrum. First up, the Brazilian slums known as favelas have a harsh reputation but that perception is changing with the help of Brazilian artists and Queens College. JOHN COLLINS: What's behind me is Projeto Morrinho, the Morrinho Project, which has been called a social sculpture, in other words a sculpture whose borders between art and everyday life are not clear. It's something put together by a group of artists in the Pereira da Silva neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. As children, they were living in their neighborhood at a moment of intense conflict between drug traffickers and police, and this was an escape, a way that they could stay safe and enjoy themselves. What they developed was a role-playing game. It's a virtual reality. They used Lego avatars to depict different archetypes of Rio citizens. People soon began to notice what they were doing. They appeared on a variety of Brazilian TV shows, a National Geographic. They themselves have travelled to Berlin, to London, to New York, to East Timor. This is their first installation in the United States, and it's one that we really prize, I would say, most of all, in relation to the engagement between CUNY students and these young people from Rio. MARY PENA: I was basically part of the whole creation process. I started painting bricks from the very beginning, and then assembling them and arranging them. I didn't know much about the favelas. I had seen them depicted in films like City of God. I knew that they are a social phenomenon in Brazil. From working with the artists, I just learned that much has changed in their community. They were like evaluating and interpreting what was going on in their surroundings through the active play, as they called it. MOHSHIN CHOWDHURY: Before I was talking to you about the film City of God, which was my only impression beforehand of favelas. According to that film, it's all violence. These kids who grew up were the same kids who came here to work with us. I got to work here on the favelas. I got to build them, I got to paint them, and I got to know the people who I worked with. They have kind of a cynical way of looking at things. They can't trust the police there, obviously there's that but, you know, there's a kind of innocence behind it as well. PETER HIMMELMAN: I helped with the project in many different ways, from the initial stages of the actual painting of the Brazilian bricks to mixing the concrete. It's changed my awareness of favelas. Getting to meet the people who actually came from favelas, you got to see what they're actually like, and they're actually just regular people. JOHN COLLINS: Favelas are often seen as sort of these dangerous or exotic zones that are outside of the city, and the best sociological work indicates that in fact they're essential parts of the city that are tied in to labor markets and consumption, and all sorts of politics throughout Rio, and I think that what they're doing with this is enacting that message. MARY PENA: It's very inspiring that an environment that we might perceive as being a very violent space, an impoverished space, that something so creative and smart and dynamic can come about. JOHN COLLINS: It recognizes that favelas are places of inequality and violence and even drug-dealing. It presents a much more complex picture of the community. People who live in a neighborhood where there's discrimination or poverty are not constantly simply reacting to that discrimination and poverty. It's not like you can explain everything they do through that but people around the world look for joy, and it's not simply an antidote to pain. Oftentimes this is seen as outside of art, or naïve art, and I think that they very much reject that designation, that this is art that is about the core of what it is to be from Rio. TINABETH PIÑA: Susan Crile is a renowned artist whose work hangs in the world's most prestigious museums. We went to her Manhattan studio to hear more about her latest work, which she describes as moving between the folds of beauty and horror. SUSAN CRILE: My work has been a kind of interweaving over the years where I pick up a theme, it may disappear for a while, and then it picks up again in another incarnation from another angulation. In 1991 when the Gulf War happened, I had a real break and a shift in my work, and that's when the work turned sort of overtly political, and from that point on until now, I've worked in a bifurcated way. I'm always working on something that has more to do with the beauty side, whether it's the fading, disappearing colors of the walls of Rome, or whether it's the sort of ancient, worn tiles and patterns of some of the great cathedrals in Italy. That sort of gives me a sense of beauty and that other side while I'm working on 9/11, the burning oil fields, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib. There is something to unacceptable that we would torture people, you know, given all of our rhetoric about human rights and so forth. The internet really played into this so much, and I felt that I couldn't disassociate myself from those photographs. This man was in Egypt who was taken off an airplane. It was a mistaken identity. He was standing on his tiptoes in that. He would have drowned if he had let go, and that was testimony that I had read. He finally did get released. The doctors, psychologists were involved, and complicity involved in creating the circumstances of what happened in these black boxes. They figured out what were the phobias that these men had. These were actually the size of the black box, and that's exactly how they fit into it. I've tried to show the distress and the discomfort of what it must be like to be in a container like that for hours and hours, and possibly days on end. The metaphor for me was when I found basically the white line, the chalk line with all of its associations at a crime scene that's drawn on the pavement or whatever, or when there's an accident where the body was. I also thought about Pompeii where what was left after those terrible fires were these voids of where the human beings had been, and what they then did was to pour plaster into these voids to recreate the figures -- that sense of the void and of that fragility of what that line is. The skin is a protection, it's a major protection, obviously, for the body, and when someone is tortured, what happens I believe is that protective layer is gone. It becomes porous. It becomes no longer there. I do think that beauty has been an entry point into some of this more horrific work because if all you see is the horror, you just automatically turn off. I think that if you can enter it and then begin to feel and experience the horror, I think it's a stronger experience. I need that balance. The eventual thing that I want to do is to finish the third part, as I see it, of the trilogy -- the first being Abu Ghraib, the second being Guantanamo, and the third I would like to investigate the American prison system because I think they're all interconnected. They're all interconnected with torture, abuse, with rationalization of things that are simply unacceptable like how can you say that 10, 20, 30 years of solitary confinement is not torture? I would hope that one is able to connect in with one's own experience about what it is to be in pain, what it is to inflict pain, and to maybe think about it and feel it in some way. TINABETH PIÑA: LaGuardia Community College has a new photo exhibit on display that's off the beaten path. Rodolfo J. Caballero's Between Heaven and Earth captures the harsh reality of the desert in Northern Mexico as well as the uncommon occupations of its people. RODOLFO J. CABALLERO: It's very emotional for me to see the photographs over here. When I came here for the very first time and I saw all the galleries at the Soho and Greenwich Village, the museums, and I say to myself, "One day you have to show your work here," so now I am doing it. You have to be very careful with these photographs because they are in color, and color can be tricky. When I use these strong colors, it is because I'm Mexican and that's the way I see it, but my photographs are kind of sad for me because things for all these people should be better than they are. As far as I can see, we are not connected to Mother Earth, so to speak, and because of that, we are not connected to Heaven, so we are living in the space between. When I think about it, I say to myself, "What are we doing to survive in this space?" I can see a lot of struggle in order to make a living over here. I was driving a truck with some friends, and in the middle of nowhere, all of a sudden we saw this cavern, and inside of the cavern I found this beautiful lady. She made all these basket in order to get some money for her and for her baby. It's a lot of order inside, a lot of beauty, a lot of color, with the most humble element. This photograph is from an area of Durango, Durango state, and the name of the place is Dinamita, like a dynamite, because there used to be a factory for DuPont but they left, DuPont left, so it's now a kind of ghost town, a beautiful place, and I used to go very often because I found this place very quiet, very strange. I really liked to be here in the desert. Then one day all of a sudden from nowhere, this guy appears, and then he said, "I work here in this quarry getting the stones to sell it and get some money," but what really attracts me was this guy is the same color as the stone. These guys, they are very, very young, and nevertheless they are working on their own business, and the business is a very complex one because they fly balloons. I don't know how to fly a balloon but they know. I feel a lot of love from Mexico because I spent all of my life in Mexico, seeing the color of the food. Sometimes I feel I miss the foods, sometimes I miss some friends, some relatives, and I really miss the color. I really miss the color. TINABETH PIÑA: A recent exhibition here at the James Gallery focuses on a realist painter who lived to be 112 years old. STEPHANIE HACKETT: Theresa Bernstein was an American artist who lived from 1890 to 2002. We actually believe that she exhibited in every decade of the 20th century. She paints Gloucester, Massachusetts, which is where she had a summer home. She paints daily scenes in New York City including the elevated trains, people on the street, Suffragette parades. Theresa Bernstein, I think because of her interest in scenes of daily life, has been aligned with the Ashcan School of artists. The Ashcan School wanted to paint everyday kind of gritty reality, so Theresa Bernstein would go out on to the street and sketch things, and then she'd go back into her studio and paint them. With the vibrancy of color and the types of color she's used, and the emotionality to her paintings, I think she can be aligned with the German expressionists. This is Theresa Bernstein's painting Lost from 1920. This one in particular is extremely autobiographical, directly related to Theresa Bernstein's emotions about having lost a daughter. This is one of the paintings that is very expressionistic in the use of color and in the brush strokes. She's trying to show her emotion through the painting. The window, there is actually a baby carriage, a woman holding a baby in front of a house, and then the angel of death here. Then there is also a small angel here in the vase, and then there is a vase holding three peaches, which I think you could argue represents, William Meyerowitz, her husband, the baby, and Theresa Bernstein, but also the peaches appear in another painting as representative of the different stages of life -- of youth, maturity, and adulthood. By looking at an artist like Theresa Bernstein, who made a very definite choice to stay a realist artist, we can learn a lot more than we already know. There is so much art history of the United States, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, that we haven't studied and that needs to be studied, and by studying Theresa Bernstein's life and her career, I think that that broadens our understanding of our culture. TINABETH PIÑA: Commuters in the city might not know it but there is a wide variety of art created by CUNY artists as part of the MTA's Arts for Transit Program. AMY CHENG: I've been doing public art commission for about ten years now. Even though I had never worked with laminated glass before -- they told me it was a laminated glass project -- because it was this fabrication technique, I could basically make the design as complex as I wanted to. So then I just thought, well, why don't I make it as bright and cheerful and startling as possible. The panels were installed in the summer of 2012. I have four laminated glass windscreens. When it was first installed, people would actually just kind of stop in their tracks, and a lot of people would look, and some would photograph, and that was actually -- it was just nice to see that it gave them something. The title of piece is called Rediscovery. I'm talking about the fact that the world is magical, and that at one point we discovered this but we kind of periodically have to rediscover it. My work is very intricate and ornamented, and I use a lot of pattern and repetition, and I use a lot of layering. It is in this way that I get kind of a sense of complexity even though all the individual elements are very simple. All of the patterns are basically based on nature. There are a lot of circles. There are a lot of spirals. There are a lot of bubbles, dots. I think that the work also just references a lot of things. It references flowers. It references pearls. It references fabric. If you look at the station, it's just a very functional station. It's not unattractive but there's nothing particularly attractive about it. A little lifting your day visually is a good thing. ROBERT HICKMAN: It's one of the largest subway commissions in the system. It was a $300,000 commission. You know, it was originally pitched as a gateway to the Upper West Side. This is 14 years ago. The Upper West Side has changed quite a bit in that time. Back in the '70s, '80, Verdi Square was known as Needle Park. Junkies would hang out there, and they would leave their works, and before we built that station, it was a rat-infested, not such a nice place, but I saw that location, Verdi Square, as a departure point. There were talking about how to bring light down into the tracks below, how to bring light down into the station. I said, "You have to use light," and because I had done so much studying in how the light would work, I could show them exactly what it would do. I did my research. I studied the Crystal Palace, which that design is based on. I researched Giuseppe Verdi. I researched Rigoletto, one of his operas. I thought that mosaic, an Italian tradition, combined with Verdi and his musical scores, and this notion of Crystal Palace, the train shed -- how can we combine all these together? The whole project took five years from start to finish. It was so much pressure. It took a year just to place all the pieces. The paving around that station matches the pattern that I created, the quatrefoil pattern that I created in my mosaic. That artwork, that design, it's not just the skylight that I made but it's the whole Verdi Square. I did the engineering, and to know that millions of people are walking underneath my glass, and that it's safe in addition to beautiful, it's a great feeling. For artists, it's an honor to be a permanent part of the fabric of New York, to have a piece that will survive you. It will last much longer than me. JULES ALLEN: All my life, I grew up watching boxing with my family on Friday nights in San Francisco. All my father's friends would come over on Friday nights, and they would watch Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, and these guys would all talk and bet on every round, and talk a lot of trash. This place is really alive. The magic of it is still here. MALE 1: What's your name? JULES ALLEN: Jules Allen. Iran Barkley: I'm Iran Barkley. JULES ALLEN: No, no, no. Oh, I saw you fight a lot, man. JULES ALLEN: Yeah, my name is Jules Allen. I'm a photographer, and I teach at Queensborough College in New York. I'm interesting in social aspects, life and living. I like the way people move in the gym. You have to pay attention and be alert. I like all the movement of the bags, the rhythm, and I like the sound of it, you know? It's beautiful to watch, man. It's beautiful to watch. The photographs that I make are about African-American culture in effect, I mean, being responsible and mature. I mean, I hate photographs of black people sitting around being dependent, victimized, criminalized. I can't stand that type of imagery. You aren't going to shut it down but you can counter it. This is a book that was shot in Gleason's Gym between 1983 and 1986 when Gleasons on 30th. The book was published in 2011. You can't just walk in here with a camera and start photographing. You have to be part of the community. My trainer, Bobby McQuillan, he said, "What do you do?" And I said, "I photograph," and he said, "whatever you do, if you train with me, you'll be better at it." The crazy part is he was right. He improved my focus. His name is Rodney Watts. I boxed Rodney for three rounds, and the only reason that I'm here today is Rodney had mercy on my soul. This is a gentleman, Rocky, we argued for two years, and I used to mess with him all the time and tell him he didn't know what he was talking about. He raised up his pant leg, and there was a pistol in his ankle, and I said, "Are you crazy?" We laughed about it but he carried it everywhere he went. So this is great to see that this has been able to sustain itself, you know what I mean? In trying times and troubled times, that this gym is still holding up and that boxing is embraced this way. TINABETH PIÑA: Thanks for watching Study with the Best. For all things CUNY, log onto our website at cuny.tv or you can Facebook and tweet us. See you next time. Bye. SUSAN CRILE: I spent I'd say almost ten days in the burning oil fields so I took about a thousand photographs. I hadn't been able to read what I was looking at, it didn't make sense, and when I got there I understood because it was like Mad Max is meeting, you know, Alice in Wonderland. I mean, everything -- the scale, the dimension of it.