Art Works Podcast

To honor the Winter Solstice, (more specifically, that the days are getting longer from here on in), as well as Jupiter and Saturn having their closest visible alignment in 800 years and to celebrate her recent appointment to a third term in the position, we’re reposting my interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek).  I interviewed her in early Spring, soon after the pandemic, and I find myself re-reading her work and appreciating how much Joy Harjo is a poet for this moment. Joy’s poetry is rooted in landscape and place yet is also transcendent.  In her recent collection “An American Sunrise,”  which is an NEA Big Read selection, Joy draws on Native myth and storytelling as she writes of tribal displacement, a trail of tears that sings of ancestral lands, of a history that remains present, and of a culture that’s essential.  The podcast is a far-reaching conversation about poetry and music (Joy plays a mean saxophone).  She reads some poems and talks about her deep love of poetry and language and her equally passionate relationship with jazz and music. She’s is a great thinker and lively conversationalist. So, enjoy the podcast as we say “good-bye” to 2020 and look forward to the new year!  

Executive Director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) Lora Bottinelli joins me to talk about the central place of traditional art and traditional artists in the American experience.  The many cultures and traditions that shape us a people are a strength that we can lean on as we get to the other side of the pandemic.  This is a bedrock belief of the NCTA--the nation’s oldest producing and presenting organization focused on folk and traditional arts.  As Lora notes, the grassroots nature of traditional arts—so deeply rooted in community— “can prove to be a powerful force to positive change for the country.”  Lora also discusses the ongoing work of the NCTA as it works closely with traditional artists across the country and the profound impact of the pandemic on traditional arts which thrive on community interaction. But, Lora also notes, these art forms and cultural practices have survived many upheavals in society, and she shares some interesting and creative pivots made by artists and organizations, including the NCTA, that speak to this moment.  

Theaters (and all live performance) are struggling to get through the pandemic. Most have been closed since March, and artistic directors are kept up at night with a host of questions: when people will be willing to gather indoors to watch a play together? What will that room even look like? How will theaters keep their actors, crew and audiences safe? How can theaters survive until that moment we can all come together again?  And how can theater speak to this moment? And artistic directors—along with many in the theater community—have answered these questions with wit and imagination. The artistic director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival Rick Dildine, for example, moved theater out-of-doors and gave its audience the chance to voice monologues from a diverse set of playwrights. The project is called “Speak the Speech. ” “Speak the Speech” is set along a self-guided trail throughout Blount Cultural Park. As you wander the trail, you’ll find 14 great monologues…one from Shakespeare, the others from American writers like August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry and Mary Kathryn Nagle (along with short bios of the writers and context for the speeches).  You’re invited to “speak the speech,” to feel the power of those words as you say them.  Rick and I talk about “Speak the Speech,” Alabama Shakes, and the challenges and possibilities this moment offers theater and what theater can give to this moment.   

Teacher and advocate Rebekah Taussig recently published her first book Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. Rebekah, who has a Ph.D in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, has been working through the ideas that appear in her book on Instagram @sitting_pretty. She grew up as a paralyzed girl in the 1990s and 2000s and searched to find a story—any story—that reflected her own. She didn’t, and so she wrote it into existence. Sitting Pretty is a memoir in essays in which—among other things-- Rebekah grapples with the myth of ableism which she maintains revolves around the idea of an idealized typical body that isn’t typical at all but exists only for the very few and only for a short time since we all age (if we’re lucky).  In a conversational tone that makes it feel as though you’re talking with a very smart, funny and thoughtful friend, Rebekah makes the argument that “we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access. This is something that we all should be thinking about and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other.”

Culture-bearer and 2020 National Heritage Fellow Wayne Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe) is one of a handful of birch bark canoe builders left in the United States. The Ojibwe is a nation and cultural community that has a deep connection to waterways, and the birch bark canoe was commonly used for transportation, fishing, harvesting wild rice, and hunting. The tradition of building these canoes had been handed down for millennia. The boats are as beautiful as they are functional; in fact, it is one of the most sophisticated inland watercrafts in the world.  Wayne Valliere is determined to keep this cultural knowledge alive and vibrant—ready to be passed down to the next generations.  In this podcast, Wayne Valliere explains how the boats are made “on nature’s time; “ he takes us through the steps of the boats’ creation and their profound cultural meaning as well as Anishinaabe ways of teaching, learning and being.  

Scott Yoo is a wonderful guide to the music and the influences of some of the great composers of western classical music. [Now Hear This](https://www.thirteen.org/search-results/?q=Now+Hear+This#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Now%20Hear%20This&gsc.ref=more%3Afullepisodes&gsc.sort=)is in its second season—it’s a four-part mini-series from Great Performances. Yoo describes it as influenced by Anthony Bourdain but “substitute music for food.”  But it is a feast for the ears and for the eyes. Yoo travels to the places where composers like Vivaldi, Haydn, and Schubert lived and worked; digs into the cultures that shaped them, the food they ate, the music they heard, and of course, the glorious music that they created.  In a Covid-altered universe where performing art and traveling is out of reach, Now Hear This_ is a series that goes far in filling the breach for the classical music lover, the frustrated traveler, and the curious-minded.

In this podcast, we’re marking Halloween by revisiting interviews with authors who have created work that focus on monsters. We hit all the major horror figures with NEA literature fellow Ben Percy (werewolves), Max Brooks (zombies and vampires) and Kiersten White (the Frankenstein monster). All of the writers are entranced by the creatures they explore—but they also find them oddly safe, non-polemical images that inflame the imagination and  lend themselves to explorations of anxiety, stratification, privilege, sexism and yes, pandemics.

The exhibit Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle is an American epic--depicting moments in early American history from 1775 thru 1817--some well-known, others not-- often seen through the eyes of marginalized peoples. Struggle consists of 30 panels painted by Lawrence during the early 1950s during Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Lawrence is well-known for painting the everyday life as well as epic narratives of African-American history and historical figures—think of The Migration Series. But with Struggle, Jacob Lawrence presented a radically integrated view of early American history—one in which African-Americans and Native Americans were woven into heart of the nation’s story. Yet, Lawrence also incorporates their particular struggles into the work as he examines the messy work of making a democracy. The exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle reunites most of the 30 panels in the series for the first times in over 60 years. Organized by and first exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, it is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–with support from the National Endowment for the Arts--where it was co-curated by Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing and Randall Griffey a Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Sylvia Yount and Randall Griffey join me for a deep-dive into the work of Jacob Lawrence in general and Struggle in particular, his great belief in the past as critical to the present, and the ways that the work of Jacob Lawrence continues to shed light on the moment we find ourselves.

Poet, novelist and essayist Erika L. Sánchez may have been a National Book Award Finalist, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow,  a 2019 NEA Literature Fellow and currently the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University, but she takes nothing for granted. Growing up in Chicago the child of Mexican immigrant factory workers, she understood early on that not everyone was able to realize their lives’ goals.  Erika, often feeling like the odd kid out, found new worlds through books and herself through writing.  And she was determined to make a place for herself in that world. After a long period of struggle, in 2017 Erika L. Sánchez had the year writers dream of: her debut collection of poetry Lessons on Expulsion was published to glowing reviews as was her YA novel I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter which became a finalist for the National Book Award. In this podcast, Erika talks about her traditional upbringing, her rebellion and her longing to see herself represented in literature (I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter was the book she wanted to read when she was 15) and the joy she finds in her first love—poetry.

Maria Manuela Goyanes, artistic director of  Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is a theatrical force of nature.  She arrived from New York City’s Public Theater in 2018 where she had been Director of Producing and Artistic Planning. Her role there included planning and supervising programming at all of the Public’s five main stages, as well as Shakespeare in the Park and Joe’s Pub.  She did all this in addition to teaching and mentoring theater artists as well as volunteering for the job of executive producer for 13P--a collective of mid-career playwrights who each wrote and directed one play which would get a full-scale production which Maria supervised. Did I mention that while she was at the Public she was also associate producer for Fun Home, Straight White Men and Hamilton?  A first-generation Latina-American, Maria Manuela Goyanes is an ideal fit for Woolly Mammoth which is known for producing new plays that are edgy, challenging, and thought-provoking.  It’s a mid-sized theater with large footprint that nurtures talent and takes chances. It’s adventurous theater—unafraid of making audiences uncomfortable and tackling social issues head-on--challenging both its artists and audiences in ways that are sometimes fun, sometimes difficult but always interesting.  In this podcast, Maria discusses what makes Woolly Woolly, how she brings the fullness to her background to her role as artistic director, and the challenges and opportunities this moment offers theater in general and Woolly in particular. Maria is a born raconteur—smart, engaging and engaged, with wonderful insights about theater. Itunes keywords: Maria Manuela Goyanes, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Pandemic, theater, equity