The Center’s Studio Podcast’s 100th Episode: An Audio Exhibition, Pt. 1

Part 1. Why We Make Art - We celebrate our 100th monthly episode with a survey of special moments from our history. This first of four episodes, Why We Make Art, is a sampler of a few stories of artists and why they create or in some way a description of trying to see the big picture. These stories come from painters Brian Kershisnik and Fidalis Buehler, scholars Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley, dancer/choreographer Lisa Hess Jones, and artist/animator Annie Poon. I wanted to share some performances of artists, too. Included, too, are short clips of Lance Larsen reading a newly published poem and Stephen Anderson talking about and playing music inspired by the Dominican Republic. 

Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.

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Hello everybody. It's time to celebrate, and I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Woohoo! This marks the 100th episode of the Center Studio Podcast, a monthly series that started March 21st, 2018, many, many years ago. If this podcast is new to you, I'm your host, Glenn Nelson, and it's a series of in-depth one-on-one interviews with creative artists who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To my mind, these interviews have become an important introduction to a global range of artists as well as a vital record of oral history, and I'm excited to look back at some special moments. We've recently passed an important milestone of 25,000 downloads, and I couldn't let these two occasions pass by without looking back. So I decided to curate an audio exhibition to capture some special clips. As I re-listened to approximately 80 hours of previous episodes, I rediscovered that so many great stories are in them. I was surprised how many times I laughed out loud and how often I shed a wee tear. It was heartbreaking to hear from artists right in the middle of COVID or when they were experiencing great highs and lows in their careers. There were so many great stories that I decided to split this audio exhibition into four separate episodes, each one on a separate theme. Why we make art, stories of artists talking about why they do what they do, then moments of faith, artists revealing how they've had powerful spiritual experiences connected to their work. Third, unexpected insights, a selection of interviews that provide behind the scenes or intimate stories that reveal why art matters. And finally, emotional moments. These are samples of times when our interviews became something more personal and heartfelt, including when I made people cry. It's not my fault, I couldn't help it. I'll wrap it up by sharing a few things I've learned because of the podcast and how it's changed me through a crazy unimaginable decade. I decided to limit myself to under one hour or five to seven clips in each of these episodes. Not an easy job. Sound good? Let's go. When you sit down with an artist to talk about their new projects or about their lives and background, you never know what's going to bubble up. It's like a little light bulb goes off above their heads, and you suddenly see the connections between who they are and what they do. This episode, Why We Make Art, is a sampler of a few stories of artists and why they create, or in some way a description of trying to see the big picture. These stories come from painters Brian Kerschisnik and Fidalis Bueller, scholars Mason Kamana Alred and Amanda Beardsley, dancer choreographer Lisa Hess Jones, and artist-animator Annie Poon. I wanted to share some performances of artists too. I'm including short clips of Lance Larsen reading a newly published poem and Steven Anderson talking about and playing music inspired by the Dominican Republic. Brian's up first. I like to look at the fact that you have two people who are even connected to each other and know each other very well, possibly even are married or in the same family, and it is very difficult for the one standing two feet from the other to really know what is happening for that person right there. And that that mystery that is just right in your living room that's fascinating to me. And it obviously it creates comical misunderstandings, tragical misunderstandings. Yeah, all kinds of things. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's the complexity of daily life. Yeah. I mean, you you've occasionally written about it, uh, about the mundane and somehow the elevation of those things, but everything around us is so complex if you really break it down. Aaron Powell It is. And unknowable. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah. And I remember in art school they used to say, uh, you know, be sure you paint what you know. And my response was, but if you paint what you don't know, that that's so much larger territory to explore, you know. And my view is like, who knows anything? Yeah. I didn't know all this international stuff about you at all until kind of recently. And I had this experience that I will tell you about. So one day I was minding my own business at the Metropolitan Museum, and they had just installed these new Islamic art galleries that are just gorgeous. I mean, like, they really did it right. I'm always attracted to the intersections of art and literature, so illuminated manuscripts and artist books and things like that. I was looking at the Metz collection of medieval Persian manuscripts, and all of a sudden I thought of you. Yeah. There were these flat figures, they were pretty two-dimensional, um, not trying to be realistic regarding depth, and sometimes they were completely separate from their background, and other times they were acting sort of fancifully, you know, maybe unrealistically, surrealistically, against a backdrop of colorful geometric patterns, and sometimes they were doing supernatural things too. And they commonly added text to the image, kind of describing it or sort of giving it a title or a context or something. And I said to myself, oh, that's like a Brian painting. Well, I uh and that's I think that those observations are are spot on. I I I I love that work too and have been fascinated by it for a long time. And and I actually, you know, there's this element that you mention of they're not they're they're not realistically depicted. And and I think that that's I think that's an accurate description. However, it feels to me like they're they're aiming for a different kind of accuracy that a photograph would miss, that a that a an exact painting would miss. The reality we experience is not just a visual reality. And if we're too fixated on it being visually accurate, then we m then it is sometimes metaphorically inaccurate. It happens to us all the time when we tell stories about fantastic things that happen to us. And sometimes I've had the experience where I was also present when someone is telling that story, and my sensation is that's not exactly how it happened, but I realize that the storyteller is being true to how it felt. And if he just gives you the cold sequence, then it's true, it it is it is visually accurate, but it is not at all true to how the experience felt, you know, and so sometimes fictional elements in all of the arts are necessary to make them truer. Here's Fidelis Buhler. Let's shift a bit and talk about teaching. I loved in the story that you to you told on BYU TV, uh you were describing one of your professors at University of Hawaii, Mike Marshall, and how he gave you a key to the studio to work whenever you wanted, and he showed you a side closet with all of his materials and said, you know, you could use them if you wanted them. And I saw that you became emotional telling that story. What did these early voices of encouragement from your brother and Wayne Miyamoto and Mike Marshall mean to you? Uh bringing back old feelings again. It's just uh it's hard to think that we should ever go through this life without looking down and grabbing the hand of the next person below you and lifting them up. I just feel none of the work makes sense without providing some type of care for the people around you. I tell this to my students that art making is useless and pointless without serving others, without giving of your time and energy to to humanity. Not in a church sense, but just in the sense that you're a human being. I need to acknowledge you as a human being and at least on the on the base on the most basic level, let them know that you exist and uh and that you acknowledge their existence. And I feel like you know, we've got amazing human beings like Mike Marshall who who said, Here's the space, use it. You obviously need to be in the space, and um I'm going to share these supplies. I don't even think it was a question of whether or not I was using his supplies. It was a matter of making sure this person was able to access the things that they needed to access so they could move forward. I uh and then I returned back to like a statement my mother says, and she says she's she's been through a lot and um she's never felt uh like she's ever been abandoned by God. And she said when you're doing the things that you're supposed to be doing, how can he ever abandon you? When you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, you will always receive what you need. And I've always felt like that when you're doing the thing that you're passionate about and you care about that there are people on the other side who are right there with you. They say, Okay, this person cares. I I got your back and I'm I'm gonna help you I'm gonna help you get through this and and um it it just becomes even more pronounced when you say, Okay, I'm and I'm also going to give back to and I'm also gonna going to help and find ways to help others and it's it's made a world of difference when my life has been dedicated to service and when it hasn't been, I've noticed that everything falls apart. It doesn't matter to me that the paintings work. It matters to me that I'm doing these other things and the paintings will eventually work, they will get there. And it's just it requires all these other things to be in place first before before the paintings arrive at anything remotely meaningful. Next is Lisa Hess Jones. Dancing for Balanchine was my dream. I mean, it was a dream come true, but it had so many different aspects. It was a challenge, it was hard work, it was frustrating, it was jubilant. I mean, there are just so many things. I I will, you know, I I I did get some one-on-one rehearsal time with him when I did Sugar Plum. And of course, that was an experience you just hold in your heart forever. So I think Valentine was um a very I think faith and religion, and I think he was very spiritual in his own ways. He loved the Russian Orthodox Church. He had a connection with the priest in New York. He would the priest would come, his priest would come to the ballet quite often. But I think he really respected that. I think he liked the idea of people being having a faith. And I, you know, I he and I never really talked about it, but I think he liked that in dancers. Some of our listeners are going to be wondering about the overall picture of dance in America. I think it's hard for them today to understand how much dance was front and center in the culture, in American culture in the 70s and 80s. Like it was front-page news when Nareev and Bruce Nikov and Makarova and others defected from the Soviet Union. And it was very easy to see great dance. You were talking about PBS broadcasts. So there was a lot on PBS and network TV, and Hollywood films featured dance all the time. In Holly, in hindsight, it was kind of a golden age in a way. I don't know if you felt about that the same. So amazing to see Balantine. It was almost as if Berishnikov was the prodigal son, as you watched Valentin rehearse with him. I mean, just bringing tears to my eyes, watching him rehearse the part where uh, you know, the son returns to his father. And Balanchine, it was just so amazing to watch the two of them together. I've seen photographs of that where Bereznikov, you know, in the choreography, is at his feet and slowly kind of climbs up his body to being held by him. And he wraps his cape around him as our father would, you know, embracing him. And so I think there was a lot of emotion packed into that episode. And it's so exciting for me to know that you were there. You've talked a lot about Ballanchine as as is fitting, but there were so many choreographers working then that were just titans in their in their fields, like Ballanchine, Jerome Robbins, Kenneth McMillan, Frederick Ashton, Anthony Tudor, Twyla Thorpe, Agnes DeMille, Michael Kidd, Robert Joffrey. I mean, Eugene Loring, Elliot Feld, Ben Stevenson, Arthur Mitchell, and then the the contemporary choreographers, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Nurse Cunningham, Jose Limone, Alvin Ely, Mark Morris, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Alvin Nikolai, and then on stage and film, Bob Fossey, Michael Bennett, Patricia Birch, Gower Champion. I mean, wow, that was all happening all at the same time. And you were right in the middle of a lot of that. It was amazing. It was an amazing time. Like I say, it was pretty surreal. Today marks a milestone in the Center for Latter-day Saint Art's history. It is the production of a beautiful new volume, Latter-day Saint Art, A Critical Reader, published by Oxford University Press. I'm here today with the 664-page book's co-editors, Amanda Beersley and Mason Kimana Alred. What are your thoughts with the book officially out now? Mason, I'll let you go first on that. I'm so excited. In fact, I'm actually a lot of in a lot of ways, I'm relieved. Because there were several moments in this huge project where I was kind of like, oh man, how do we do this? How is this going to work out? What's it going to look like? Is everything going to come together? So honestly, right now I'm so like happy and relieved and super proud of what it became. So I'm feeling great. I'm really excited to talk about it just because I think it is really worth talking about, worth promoting, and I'm excited for people to dive into it. I'm feeling really similar. Um, relief is a huge one. This has been um how long? Like five-year project. Uh we started before the pandemic, um, and it went into the pandemic and it continued on and on and on. At the same time, it's been a really, really um enriching project, one that I've learned so much from, and I've loved collaborating with all of the authors in the book, as well as the Latter-day Art Center. And also, I'm really excited because it's one of the first, for me as an art historian, like first art history books in Mormon studies. And that's monumental. It's similar to like a book on Catholic art. It this is a book, this is the book on Mormon art. I was wondering after Oxford signed a contract with us, why they wanted it. But when they started writing their ad copy, this is what they said. Nearly every major religion has a significant artistic tradition. And religion's relationship with art, sometimes inspirational, sometimes antagonistic, often complex, has generated a substantial body of writing stretching back centuries. In nearly two centuries of existence, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has produced, inspired, and provoked a wide range of artistic responses. Yet, that artistic output has not generated a commensurate amount of critical examination. So it sounded like to me that they saw this as filling this gap. And they continue here, the the Latter-day Saint art, a critical reader, seeks to fill a substantial gap by providing a comprehensive examination of the visual art of Latter-day Saints from the 19th century to the present. It defines Mormon art broadly as art by, for, or about Mormons, including work by artists who share a Latter-day Saint identity and by those with no personal attachment, who have responded artistically to Mormonism. The volume includes 22 essays by scholars from various disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds, who offer rigorous research and analysis of Latter-day Saint artistic production and culture, alongside elegant reproductions of more than 200 works of Mormon art, including panorama paintings, quilt, architecture, sculpture, cartoons to film, gallery installations, indigenous works, and more. This final sentence here from Oxford, Latter-day Saint art, a critical reader, explores Mormon visual art in unprecedented breadth and depth. So that was that's kind of a lot to live up to. Amanda, you were kind of hinting about audience a second ago. So let me ask you a couple of questions, the two of you, about that. Who do you think this book is for? We really wanted as broad of an audience as possible. Like for me, as I was writing, I was thinking of my grandparents actually, who um grew up LDS and who practice and were very uh devout members. And I imagined it maybe sitting in their house, even though they aren't like rigorous academics. I imagined them really enjoying the just looking at the art if they found some of the essays to be um too, I don't know, academic. At the same time, we have curators in the book and we have also independent scholars who kind of work outside of the academies. And that was something that at least for me, I hope I really wanted to strive against is like some of the kind of like pretentious language that we see. So I wanted it to be legible to my grandparents, and I wanted it to be legible also to my colleagues, though, at San Diego State University and the women's studies department. So I wanted it to have um that kind of breadth. And I feel like it achieved it through the different voices that we integrated. I would echo that, but I'd almost take it the opposite direction because I agree with Amanda. But I would say that this book, what's so amazing about it, the way it ended up, is it holds its own in the most rigorous university classroom. You know what I mean? Like it really is legit on that level. It is academic, it's deep, it's smart. There's great analysis linked with like context and form and all of this. But most of these chapters are written in a way to kind of welcome anybody in to appreciate this. And it does work. I see it also, as Amanda does for grandparents, it's also kind of almost like the best coffee table book. Like it's beautiful and it's got all these great images to just kind of peruse through, to capture like the uh the captions throughout. Even if you don't want to read the full chapters, everybody's gotta read that intro, look at these images, and just kind of touch here and there because it works both ways in the front room, living room, but in the classroom too. It just works. It's a very important thing. So they gave the impression of being autobiographical, but he made a lot of things up. So this poem is called Work Experience, and it started with me listing some of the weird jobs that I'd had, but they weren't weird enough. They they were sort of run of the mill. And so I thought, well, what if I wasn't employed as uh a human entity? And so I tried some others. So this is a kind of resume, work experience. Well, let's see. In my life as a lizard, I lost my tail twice. As a penny, I never came up heads. As a foxglove, I spilled my pollen helter skelter thanks to bees that buffeted and ants that climbed. As an abacus, I favored geishes. As a subway saxophone, I bust broken ballads at forty-five miles of darkness per hour. As a cookbook, I savored spills shaped like Florida. As a wormy apple, I was munched by a flirty mare, but never took root. As a rabbit's foot, I glowed neon orange, which multiplied people's luck. All of it bad. As a soldier fly, I had no organ to drink with, but Lord, what papery wings. As a storm cloud, I herded picnickers back into their dented cars and kept the naked bluff to myself. As a used dictionary, I tore in half between lusty and lute and fell apart in a rainy alley. As a funeral vase, I drank nothing but air. But as a raspberry sucker travelling mouth to mouth between two sisters on a bus, all the way to Poughkeepsie, I was sweet, sweet, sweet. Here is Annie Poon? The painting that first inspired me was a painting of Napoleon rearing on his horse, and I just remember I was the height of the horse's haunches. And so I stared at the way that the fur was painted on that horse's haunch, and that was when I thought, I'm gonna be a painter someday. I want to do something just like that. So it's really a far, far journey to go from that painting being my main inspiration to now. How old were you? I was five. The art fair that matters to me most and that I make sure to go to every year is the outsider art fair. When I go there, I feel like there's a little trapdoor that opens in the top of my brain and all these sort of twisting, writhing, strange influences will crawl in. And in fact, the first couple of years when I went to that art fair I actually had to leave after seeing the first two exhibits because I felt like I felt like I wasn't strong enough to take it all in. I connected so much with it that I felt like my mind was coming unhinged and I actually skipped it. Yeah. In in 2016 you created an etching called Los Negros and it has some of these images from the that that are the same ones in this new film of yours, these kind of demonic little characters. Are are these characters kind of recurring in your stories? Yes, because they're recurring in my life. I remember when I I asked you when that print was new, I said, Where does this come from? Because I was thinking that maybe it was a dream or maybe it was, you know, you're you're just imagining things. And you made some kind of comment that no, this is what I see sometimes in my house. Right. Um it's interesting. Some things I do see, some things with my eyes closed, I I sense and I know they're they're there in my mind. I don't have to actually see them with my eyes. I do see things with my eyes, but these guys, even with my eyes closed and my arms covering my head, I can still see them in my mind. And these ghosts actually are a product of something that I saw as a kid when I saw the movie Ghost. There's a scene at the end where the criminal dies he's he he dies by being impaled with glass. And then you see these black ghosts rise up out of the sewer and come and drag him down. And seeing that forever affected me, and so now that's what comes into my mind when I'm having these episodes. Steven Anderson is a critically acclaimed composer and pianist whose work has been published on 19 compact discs, many of which have appeared on the Grammy Awards and Latin Grammy Award ballots representing their Summit Records label. His work for the Dominican Jazz Project, Marim Jazia Latin Jazz Ensembles, has led him to perform at multiple festivals in the Caribbean, as well as in Central and South America since 2014. Associated with the 2022 Jasmania Jazz Festival 4, and as founder and director of the Dominican Jazz Project, Anderson was formally recognized and distinguished by the Minister of Culture, Senora Milagros Herman, government of the Dominican Republic, for quote, his research and contributions to the national musical heritage that have generated pieces and compositions whose contents are based on the roots of native Dominican music that have traveled with our seal of identity. There's so many things we could talk about, but I'd love to focus on the Dominican Jazz Project. It's such a fascinating and productive idea. So can you describe it for our listeners and tell us how it got started? Well, since you know this is uh for the the center here, I'll just say I feel like it's the grace of God. I served a mission in Mexico and learned to speak Spanish there and I just love the culture. And I always enjoyed keeping up my Spanish by trying to talk to people and the Dominican Jazz Project got started when um a gentleman who was quite a legend in the Dominican Republic in like the sixties, seventies, and eighties by the name of Guillo Carillas. His son got a job in all places of in Carey, North Carolina, which is right by where we are, it's just a little ways down the road. And uh he used to come hear my trio play, and I'd always try to play at least one Latin number in a set, you know, something Caribbean. And he used to come sit in with us, and he was the kind of guy that could play by ear, would tune pianos by ear, and just played several instruments well. And then one night he just said, I would love to take you to my country. And and I I tell you, you know, as a return missionary, instead of on when I we'd take breaks, instead of just going off outside or something, I would always try to meet people in the crowd. So I would always go out and shake hands and just try to get to know them and get familiar with them. And that's how I met him and his wife. And then he invited me to his country and he said, Love to play a concert with you. I said, Where's that again? He goes, Yeah, Dominican Republic. And I think I even had to look it up at the time, you know. And we went, and um, that's where Columbus first landed, and they're really proud of that. There, we played this old historic Catholic church of you know, period, I guess it's like 17th century uh construction, just amazing facility. And we played out in the courtyard and the people were just beautiful. The concert started an hour late, and nobody worried about it. At the concert, I met this great drummer that we played with, and he spoke perfect English, and he said, I would like to invite you to come back for another festival three months later. Well, that was Guy Fromata. And Guy Fromata toured for like 18 years with this renowned um Latin star named Juan Luis Guerra. He's about as famous as Justin Bieber in Latin America. So you can see him, you know, on YouTube videos, like playing stadium-sized crowds. So anyway, he invited me back and he stopped touring with him and he was he's records out of his home. He invited me back and then he introduced me to his friends. And these guys are the most famous musicians in their country. And that to me is like a just a blessing that if I had tried to meet them on my own accord, it wouldn't work out. It was just the hand of the Lord, you know, that I got to meet them and they're somehow we're just like brothers. When I listen to jazz, I don't know what I'm listening for. So I think it might be fun now to listen to an excerpt from one of the Dominican Jazz Project tracks. But before we do, can you set it up like as we're listening? Is there something in particular we should keep in mind as we listen? Sure. Well, the track I think I'd like to listen to, even though we've done two CDs and you know, we've been touring mostly doing a music from our new CD, but the the track we still always go back to that's our closer for every concert is called Salida or Exit. Here's how it works with these guys, just like I've always done. I was what should I be listening to? And they'll say, Well, there's this part of the island that has this tradition or this rhythm, and you should listen to that. And here's some tracks, or or they'll just say, look up videos on this subject, you know. And a lot of this isn't widely out there outside of the Dominican Republic. So one rhythm that they have is their historic rhythm is called palche. And it's actually um a made-up word that means palm beach. And it has to do with the Dominicans that traveled to Florida and would play at like the Florida hotels, and the gringos that would come in would always say, play that rhythm again, play that rhythm again. And they always wanted a pombiche rhythm. Um, so that's their word for it. And so it just has a certain rhythm to it. And so I've written a few pieces that have pombiche. It's like it's it's like um, it's similar to merengue. And so, like in Cuba and Puerto Rico, you might have tumbaos or um you know mantunos that sound like this, and we can decorate them. Those are things that I've been playing since I was in my twenties when I was first trained. Um, but the Dominican has sounds like this. Or like this. Now to the Gringo ear, they sound the same, but to people in these countries, they're worlds apart. Um, even the different rhythms. Um, so this Pombiche had uh this sound in it. Right in the middle, and that's the dance part. And so when we play that, if there's ever any Dominicans in the crowd, they will all jump up and start shouting and clapping, and they just love it. It's it's their home, you know. So every tune that I've written has some really modern elements that aren't necessarily Dominican, but then it will always go to that at some point, and something that they will recognize. In these first seven clips, I wanted to highlight a broad range of artistic disciplines and personal histories, and yes, it was torture choosing between a hundred available podcasts to just find a few. I guarantee that if you search through all of the Center's Studio Podcast series, you'll find perfect interviews for you. Since I'm in a look back retrospective mode, I ask myself what I learned from these interviews. So many things. But maybe most importantly to me was how open artists are, how eager they are to share who they are and what they do. I think that as they found in me a friend, they felt comfortable to talk about hard things, scary moments, and vulnerable places in their lives. This is really a gift to me, and I'm grateful to these artists for their confidence in me and in the center. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that we spend so much time keeping people at arm's length. It's for protection, I guess, and out of fear. But I have to wonder what emotionally distancing ourselves really gets us. I love how artists put themselves out there for everyone to see. They just open their hearts and minds. I think of two well-known quotations. James Baldwin said, The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers. Artists are great at asking timely and complex questions. They want to look at things from many different angles, and as they hold up a mirror to themselves and society, they reveal to us who we are as well. I love that about the creative arts. And I love how every work of art is a personal history. As Pablo Picasso said, painting is just another way of keeping a diary. Thanks for listening to the first of our four celebratory podcasts. I invite you to join the conversation about art by leaving a comment and by visiting our website, Center for Latter day Saint Arts. I'm your host, Glenn Nelson. Goodbye.