>> JARED BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen,
coming up on Open Studio, for artist Lavaughan Jenkins, creative inspiration is
literally the stuff of dreams. >> I dream a lot about artists. (chuckles) Most of them are
dead, which is kind of weird. >> BOWEN: Then, Philip Guston,
whose work can be the stuff of dreams
and nightmares. Plus, we remember
Harry Belafonte, the activist artist who pushed
boundaries and broke barriers. >> If you say anything that
is challenging to the norm, you are punished. Play the g
ame or don't play
at all. >> BOWEN: It's all now
on Open Studio. ♪ ♪ First up, artist Lavaughan
Jenkins found his calling twice. Not ready for
the pressures of early success, he retreated from the art world, only to be prodded in his dreams by legendary painters Goya and
Philip Guston to get back to work. Jenkins recently wrapped
up an artist residency at the Addison Gallery
of American Art, where his work is
on view through July. Lavaughan Jenkins, thank
you so much for being with us. >> Yeah,
thanks for having me.
>> BOWEN: So you have just had this artist-in-residence
program, residency, at the Addison Gallery
of American Art. I know how important that is for
artists to just have
the time, the space, the freedom to just be,
to just create. So what surfaced there for you? >> Once I moved into that space, and to have what, like, you said that free time to just
make art, the work instantly changed. Paint got bigger
and colors changed and the energy
was a different energy. >> BOWEN: Wer
e you surprised
at the end of it, what came out? >> I couldn't believe
the jump that had happened, which I guess I should be used
to it-- I work in, like, bigger jumps and ideas
of creating. And there, whatever that energy
was of that space took over. >> BOWEN: Well, I'm wondering, so where does the energy come
into play in some of the motifs or maybe
even ideograms that we see, the fashion, shoes, Black women, it all comes together as we see
in your, in your series of works. >> Yeah, I mean, I'
ll say fashion, start...
like fashion is my starting point for color and texture and my obsession
with it. But as opposed to the women... My, my family, it was like a big
kickstarter for when I needed
an idea, an object to paint. I'm surrounded by a lot of
amazing women, not just family, but the people
I work with in galleries. The majority
of them are women, but also, I think, like, for the country, so many women have played such
huge roles in getting
this country to where it is, but also how
i
t's moving forward. And that's, that's enough
inspiration, I think, to paint a lifetime. >> BOWEN: I want to ask you
about we see hooded figures in your
work, very Philip Guston-like
hooded figures, which, as we were reminded in
the recent MFA retrospective, a show that's
traveling the country right now, these were his processing
what happened to him in life as a Jewish man with
the Ku Klux Klan. But I understand that you had a
dream where Philip Guston spoke
to you. I mean, he's dead now,
for p
eople who don't know. >> Sure.
>> BOWEN: So how... what's happening in that mind
of yours? >> So, well, I dream a lot
about artists. (chuckles) Most of them are
dead, which is kind of weird. But, um, but yeah, um, I had a
little studio in my apartment. And the dream set off
that I had a knock at my door, and I open the door,
and it's Philip Guston. And he's sitting there, like,
smoking a cigarette, and he's like,
"I'm going to give you a crit." And I'm like, "Sick!" (laughs)
Let's go, you know?
And he came in and we talked
about my work. Primarily then it was like
all 2D work. And, and I had thoughts of
always trying to make 3D work, but not really sure how
it would even go if I wanted to do ceramics or,
you know, what materials I would use. And long story short, he was like,
"I know what you need to do." And he's like, "You need to take
these paintings on the wall, rip them off
and put them into real space." "So you're
essentially going to make three-dimensional paintings." And I was
like, "What?" Like, and he's like, "And you
need to look at my work more "because we got
a lot of similarities that you're not connecting to,
so." >> BOWEN: This is
a very detailed dream. >> Oh, I... soon as I woke up,
I was like, writing everything down. And I immediately went
to the art store and I started buying building
materials and trying to figure it out. And I always said,
like, jokingly, but seriously,
if things work or don't work, I would just blame
Philip Guston. >> BOWEN: You've also
had dreams of, of Goya, too. You said you dream
a lot about artists. >> Yeah. >> BOWEN: Do you think
they're only dreams? I know I'm being
a little ethereal here. >> I mean, I think that I look at...
the artists that I love, I look at them a lot, and I think it's only a matter
of time that they seep into my
subconscious and come out into dreams. But also, you know, when you're
looking at this artwork, I mean, obviously they're dead. These paintings have being made,
these sculptures have been ma
de. And so it's, it's my opportunity and my job to figure out how
to pull them forward. Like, with me, because this is the-- the
process of going to art school and studying art history is,
like, you get all this information
and now what do you do with it? And I love that part of history. So I want to bring it
forward with me. >> BOWEN: You left art for--
was it eight years? >> Six years.
>> BOWEN: It was six years that you walked away,
as I understand it, just for a variety of reasons. But then
you came back to it and you're having a lot of
success now. And when I look at
something like that, I think,
is this more than just fate? Was this... you were
supposed to do this? How do you look at it?
>> Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think, I think we're all--
we all have things that we're put here to be a part
of, and I'm one of the lucky ones
that figured it out, or found it,
however it happened. But I think
I'm here to make art. And if I needed some, some cues or some nudges, those dreams are t
here
to really reinforce what I'm supposed to be doing. And the great part about
the Guston thing was before I made the
Guston paintings-- or I call them Guston
paintings-- I didn't really talk too
much about politics or race and how this country
is in those paintings. Taking Guston characters
kind of forced that out of me. >> BOWEN: You could see he was
such a political painter himself?
>> Yeah, and, and what better time
than during a pandemic when all this stuff is happening and we're able to
watch it? You know, regular days or
watching sports or having jobs and doing other things in life, and the pandemic kind of
stopped that. And these Guston-like
moments are now on TV. And so taking his character, especially the hooded
character, taking that character
and twisting it into mine felt like the right thing to do,
especially at that time, so. >> BOWEN:
Well, Lavaughan Jenkins, it's been such a pleasure
to get to know you and to talk about your work,
thank you so much. >> Yeah, thank yo
u. ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, after that
conversation about Philip Guston making late-night visits to
Lavaughan Jenkins in his dreams, we thought it was a good moment
to take another look at Guston's work by way
of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts
last year. Philip Guston was the Jewish son
of immigrant parents from present-day Ukraine, who learned early on what it
meant to be a Jew in America. >> The seminal moment for him
is in 1933 in L.A., when he submits a work showing
Klan violence to a
n exhibition, and it's vandalized by
the red squad of the L.A.P.D., which has affiliations
with the Klan. >> BOWEN: The event marked him
deeply enough that within four years, the then Phillip Goldstein
changed his name to Guston, and he embarked on a career
that, alongside his high school friend
Jackson Pollock, would make him one of the most
famous names in 20th-century art. >> Guston is, in the '40s, '50s,
one of the great Abstract Expressionist painters
selling out shows, but always feels the
limits
of that approach to painting. >> BOWEN: Ethan Lasser
is co-curator of the nationally touring
exhibition Philip Guston Now, which recently opened at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It's a retrospective that charts
how hate and anti-Semitism churned
within Guston. >> In 1968, as he's watching TV,
he's watching Kent State, he's watching Vietnam, and he says, "What kind of man
am I, going into my studio "to adjust a red to a blue
to make abstract paintings? "What can an abstract painting
ac
tually say in the world of civil rights?" >> BOWEN:
So the painter made a pivot, walking away from Abstract
Expressionism. It was abrupt and, to the art
world, unforgivable. Taking cues from the
Sunday comics, and Krazy Kat in particular, he started painting cartoonish
images, often in pink,
a comics color, but one that can also be read
as fleshy and raw. And, in a motif that would
appear throughout most of
his 50-year career, he painted the Ku Klux Klan. Guston did not discuss his work. That's
been left to interpreters
like Lasser. >> What he paints are images of Klansmen who had
haunted Guston since he was a young artist. Images of himself in a hood,
as a Klansman, painting. Images that call to account
the underlying, I think, structures of racism in the art
world and in America in general. >> How do you create a way for
those images to be understood? >> BOWEN: Matthew Teitelbaum
is the MFA's director. He, along with the heads of the
three other presenting museums, were caught in a f
irestorm
of controversy in 2020, when the show was set to open
at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. >> We're marching for
Black life. >> BOWEN: In the wake of
George Floyd's murder and ensuing protests,
the museums-- which also included MFA Houston and London's Tate Modern--
chose to postpone the show four years, when, they announced,
the work, including its KKK imagery, could be, quote,
"more clearly interpreted." >> We felt it was a very charged
moment to talk about race and to not have
the community
voices helping us interpret how these images would be
received. It was never about whether
or not Guston had a voice that we needed to hear
at any time and at all time. >> BOWEN: But that's not how
the art world saw it. Thousands of artists, curators,
and writers signed a petition blasting the museums' decision
and accused them of, quote, "lacking faith in the
intelligence of their audience." And worse. How much did it hit you when
you were accused by artists, you being the four i
nstitutions,
of cowardice? >> I never had anybody
say that about me before. And it wasn't something that
I even thought about. It wasn't about avoiding
something. >> BOWEN: Instead, the MFA is
now launching the national tour two years ahead of schedule. It's curated the show
unlike any other, inviting museum staff
to weigh in, engaging a trauma specialist, and expanding the curatorial
team to four, including guest curator
Terence Washington. >> The debate around
the controversy talked about this
exhibition as being the one
that would start a conversation about whiteness. And it would hold up a mirror
to people who had stormed the Capitol,
dot-dot-dot. And I just thought, yeah, but,
like, are those people coming in? This feels really abstract. >> BOWEN: Washington's approach
had less to do with Guston than museums themselves. Are they, he wonders,
as accessible as they claim? >> To me,
that's the central thing. How do we understand
why exhibitions are done and for whom they're done? All
these places are open because they're supposed to be
for everybody. And I'm just not sure
that that's the case. >> BOWEN: Each of the four
museums is devising their own plan for showing
the work. Here at the MFA,
some of Guston's most searing hood paintings are on view
in a single gallery. If visitors prefer
to avoid them, they're invited to circumvent
the space. If they do enter, it's
deliberately claustrophobic. >> We hope that will cause
people to be a little less comfortable, or cause peopl
e to aestheticize
them and, and neuter
the paintings a bit less. >> BOWEN: Because Washington
wants to ensure that we never get so used to seeing
Klan images that we don't really see them anymore. Just as he doesn't want museums to get used to programming with the same old,
limited perspective. >> Whiteness is not abstract. Whiteness is structuring
the conversation around this exhibition. It's not something that we can
put on and take off. ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And finally now, we remember Harry Belafon
te,
who died last week at age 96. The singer and actor was central
to the Civil Rights Movement, taking the fight for equality
into the 21st century. I had the privilege of sitting
down with Belafonte in 2016 when he was in town to talk
about race and justice for the Armenian Heritage Park. Harry Belafonte, thank you
so much for joining us. It's a privilege. Let me start... you have been
at pains throughout your career to describe yourself
as an activist turned artist. Why did it go in that orde
r
for you? >> Well, people are always
making the assumption that those of us
who gain a platform, a popularity in the world
of culture, turn to other interests during their life expectancy
as celebrities. But I often remark that my whole
relationship to the arts was really based upon
my sense of active engagement in our community. I was born in Harlem,
born in poverty. I watched our community struggle
desperately with the inequities of that economic class. And I watched my mother
in particular,
who was an immigrant woman,
who came here suffering terribly from the absence
of opportunity... most of that absence,
absence of opportunity, was based upon issues of color. I just made it my mission to...
if I ever had the opportunity and the power to change the way
in which we experienced life, that I would do everything
I could to make a difference. So I'm often asked,
what do I think motivated me to become an artist? And I said it was the act
of coincidence. I went to see what a play was. In
that place, they had a Black
theater group-- small, made up of people
like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. On my first day in that
theater group, I walked in the same time
Sidney Poitier did. Then the curtains parted,
this play began, and I listened, and it really was an epiphany. And I looked at this thing
that I had never seen before, because the only actors
I had ever seen really were actors from Hollywood,
in the movies. We always played menial parts. We were servants, or buffoons,
or something t
o be laughed at. And therefore I didn't see
in the performing arts any real passion to want
to take that on as a profession. But when I saw the play,
I said, "There was more here "than I had imagined,
and I think this is a place I'd like to know more about." So I kept going back,
volunteering to do anything they would have me do to become
part of this group in Harlem. >> BOWEN: Well, it's one thing
to see it and appreciate it, and another to think
that you can do it. Did that come right away? >>
Well, no, I just knew
that I wanted the environment. And the environment meant
that I was around people who seemed to be driven
by purpose. While there, I met the real
game-changer of my life, who was a man by the name
of Paul Robeson. He was a remarkable artist,
a great singer, a man of profound intellect,
and he was also deeply driven by social cause-- the issues of race and war
and things. And I saw in him the model
of what I wanted to be. >> BOWEN: How did you weigh
using that platform and
knowing that there were
some people who only want to see somebody sing or go to their
play without hearing any of the other social justice
conversation or any activism? >> Well, I think it's important,
for those who want to know, that it was in fact activism
that drove me to what made the theater have
deeper meaning for me than just being entertained. Fortunately for me, the plays
that we did were all plays that had social content
and mission. And then when the environment
denied me the opportun
ity to learn as much as I needed
to learn, I then looked for an acting center to study. I went and auditioned
and asked... I wanted to learn. And I did. I walked into my class
on the first day, and I looked around at a very
motley crew of would-be actors and I just thought, "My God,
we've all made a mistake." I'll have you know that
that group that I didn't think much of at the time
that I first saw them was made up of Marlon Brando,
and Walter Matthau, and Rod Steiger, and Bea Arthur
and Tony C
urtis-- the cream of the crop. >> BOWEN: Does that feel
like a lifetime ago, or does it still feel
like yesterday? >> It not only seems
like a lifetime ago, but it almost seems
like a dream state because so much has changed. The taste of American culture,
the way... the ends to which we have been driven, the things
we aspire to as a nation in the arts leaves a great deal
to be desired. I don't think we are
at the forefront of our learning process
as we need to be. We have taken the study of art
out of the public school system. I think the absence of that kind
of feeding or nurturing our young people in the world
of theater has robbed us of becoming the kind
of wholesome community we still are aspiring to be. >> BOWEN: When you look
at what's happening in this country right now around
race, and you think back to what you did
with Dr. Martin Luther King, who you marched with,
who was a friend, how do you measure
where we are today versus what
you were trying to do? >> I measure it by tho
se
who would hear such commentary on my part as an extreme. But I genuinely believe
that what we had experienced in the days of Dr. King-- both in Hollywood as well as on
Broadway and in the theater-- was a very active community
of intellectuals and thinkers who wrote to purpose. >> BOWEN: And you've been very
critical about artists today not doing enough,
people who have the platform. >> I think artists,
you live in a democracy; you do what you want to do. These artists have the right
to choose
the kind of life they would like to live. No place lives in the hearts and
minds of people as do artists. We are in everything you read,
we are in everything you listen to, you go to the
movies, you watch television. Artists are all over the place
selling ideas, selling thoughts. And unfortunately,
we do not select the opportunity to tell things that are
much richer in the information and the promise
that they bring to the viewer. >> BOWEN: In speaking the truth
as you've always done, and not r
eally having a filter,
did you ever worry about your career? Did you feel that you had
to worry about a career? >> Yes, but what I understood
that there would be a consequence for truth, the challenge
was very, very intense. I can say this and be happy
in my heart that I did what was right,
or what I thought was right, as opposed to playing the game
and becoming nothing, becoming just another figure
or relic. And when I saw the people
who made that kind of commitment and that kind of sacrifice,
nowhere was this illustrated more fully than during
the periods of McCarthyism, when the arts was crucified
by this pursuit of "communist thinkers,"
as many of us were called. Nothing could have been
further from the truth. >> BOWEN: A lot of people
will say that there aren't the audiences around today
who want to see that, that they want a different
kind of entertainment, or they just want the sitcom
or what have you. Did you find that audiences
were more receptive when you started out? >> In a
way they were, because...
for one simple reason: commerce did not command
the culture. Once commerce began to take over
the engines of culture, once they began to say
sponsors will want you only if you are of this style,
of this type, of this condition, only if your play says these
things will we sponsor you... If you say anything that
is politically incorrect, you are dropped from the show. If you say anything that
is challenging to the norm, you are punished. Play the game,
or don't play at a
ll. I think that's the place
in which we find ourselves. >> BOWEN: And finally,
before we close, I just have to ask about
"The Banana Boat Song"-- is... because it is such a
phenomenon. It is so much
a part of our culture. Is it as personal to you today as it was the first time
you sang it? >> Yes, because the song,
as rewarding as it has been to have found that wonderful
nugget in my experience, it became the entrée to where
I found most of my music. ♪ Day, me say day-o ♪ ♪ Daylight come
and me
wan' go home ♪ I looked at what folk songs were
about, the songs of the people, the songs that came from various
sectors of social experience. In my youth,
growing up in Jamaica, I watched the plantation
workers, the workers who planted
the sugar cane and harvested
the fruits of labor. I watched them sing
to help with the burden of cold, hard, underpaid labor. And nothing revealed
that condition better than the "Banana Boat" song. "Day-oh, day-oh, daylight come
and me wanna go home." The choice
for most workers
was night labor, because the days were cooler,
you could do things in the cool of evening. "Daylight come
and me wanna go home." I chose to, to look at that song
as a measure. "Come, Mister tally man,
tally me banana, work all night
on a drink of rum." These images just stuck with me and it was part of
the whole folk culture, this environment which nurtured
me, were part of my daily diet. And I think that
I was really blessed to have been given
the opportunity to develop a cult
ural space in America. >> BOWEN: Well, as are we. Harry Belafonte,
such a pleasure. We need so many more like you. Thank you so much
for joining us. >> Thank you
for the opportunity. ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for
this edition of Open Studio. Next week, Oscar-winning actor
Chris Cooper and his wife, actor and writer
Marianne Leone, working together for the first
time in decades. Plus, Jill Medvedow celebrates
25 years as director of the ICA. We talk about what's driven her to ensure contempor
ary art
thrives. You can always visit us online
at GBH.org/OpenStudio. And follow us on Instagram
and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH. I'm @TheJaredBowen. And you can always see us first
on YouTube.com/GBHNews. We hope to see you here
next week. Until then, I'm Jared Bowen,
thanks for joining us. ♪ ♪
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