Speaker 1: Art Loft is brought to you by... Speaker 2: Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

Speaker 1: The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners and the Friends of South Florida PBS.

Speaker 3: Art Loft, it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, finding art in community, a textile artist focused on human interaction, a Pompano Beach arts residency reborn, and an artist reflecting on community and its impact.

A rebirth of Pompano Beach's arts residency at the Bailey Contemporary Arts Center.

We meet some of this year's artists and learn how the program is changing lives and attracting a crowd.

Kimberly Fergus...: It's been radical.

Honestly, it's been amazing to be able to be so connected to the community.

I didn't realize exactly how many folks came out to enjoy local culture.

I think that's super important.

We've lost a lot of that, I think, over the pandemic, so it's nice that it's coming back.

My name is Kimberly Ferguson, and I'm a ceramic sculptor.

I'm also an artist-in-residence at the Bailey Contemporary Arts Studio.

Gregory Dirr: This residency program lasts for nine months, and you're obligated to stay the nine months, and then there's various other obligations like having the Artist of the Month.

You have to be here for Old Town Untapped.

You have to do onsite and offsite community engagement events.

But residencies are just a thing in the art world and in a lot of other worlds.

Scientists do residencies.

Photographers and videographers do residencies.

It's kind of a way for you to get a crash course and extend your practice.

My name's Gregory Dirr.

I'm a visual artist, and I do the traditional painting and sculpture, but I'll also do things like video, installation, music, calligraphy, textiles, pretty much anything that I feel is a good fit for me at the time I'll do.

Ty Tabing: We continue to do our monthly Untapped event, which is, by numbers, our biggest event.

We usually attract from three to 5,000 people the first Friday of every month.

My name is Ty Tabing, and I'm the director of Cultural Affairs for the city of Pompano Beach.

I'm very proud of really the Artist in Residence Program being revamped.

We've brought in new artists, and they are all dynamic artists who do fantastic artwork, and they're really great people, so they've been wonderful to be on-site and get to know them and really celebrate them and, hopefully, provide some professional development to them along the way.

Manzi Liu: This program is dreams come true, to me.

I just love to be with the other artists.

It's very different than when I was in art school.

We're all established artists already.

I also love the program.

They pick very different artists, and I love that.

I love to see what the other artists do, and I love the feedback they are giving.

My name is Manzi Liu.

I'm a multi-medium visual artist.

My work is inspired by the beauty of human culture, nature, and the historical object.

I'm also influenced by my Asian culture, also my inner dreams, and memories.

Darcy Roberts: I like to incorporate tile, stone, glass, found objects, especially rusty metal items, and break them apart and then recreate something whole again, reimagined.

So it's exciting work, and it's never the same twice.

I'm Darcy Roberts.

I'm a mixed-media mosaic artist.

I'm a resident artist for eight months, and this has been an incredible opportunity.

I get to work in this historic building.

The sunlight in this building is fantastic.

The people here treat us like rock stars, but really they just give us space.

And we bounce ideas off of each other, and that's truly the magic of this place because normally, we're home alone in our individual spaces, and it's very isolating.

So the fact that we can be here together, we connect, and we learn from each other.

Leonardo Montoy...: I love the human figure.

That was my first love.

I learned to paint, actually drawing cartoons and superheroes.

And I guess, eventually, my love for women it's what prevails about everything else.

For me, it's very important to highlight their personalities more than their beauty, which is obvious.

I love to paint these strong characters and make an echo to their lives and their careers.

My name is Leonardo Montoya.

So far, it's been amazing.

We are eight of us.

We are all very diverse.

We work with different medias, and we even have a dancer among us, so that's good because we can learn from each other.

We share our practices and our knowledge, so that's fantastic.

Shanna L. Woods: I am Shanna L. Woods, and I use dance as a mode of meditation and movement.

I believe that we should all rest, that we should all get somewhere and sit down, like our mothers and our aunts and grandmothers taught us to.

And I really believe in pushing the audience to reflect on their choices, their decisions, and how they decide to move through life.

This is part of the reasons why I have these questions, like what do you need in your sanctuary, and what brings you joy?

So my piece is called The Ritual.

It's the journey to thriving.

It's a space in my life that I'm still discovering.

I thoroughly enjoy the people that I'm co-creating with.

Everyone has their own voice, and we share ideas.

They've shared so many ideas with me of how I could use paint when I create, how I can use mirrors or mosaic work.

It inspires me to want to learn how to do it, and to me, that is a major goal.

When you influence someone else who may think that, oh, that's not my ministry or my lane, as other people would say, then you've done your job.

Ty Tabing: Our goal is that at the end of this residency, all of the artists are better artists at the conclusion than they were at the beginning of this program.

Speaker 3: Textile artist and community organizer Michelle Lisa Polissaint recently joined the ranks of Commissioner artists.

Her work focuses on the fabric of our lives, from the nature of human interaction to memory and her ethnic background.

Michelle Lisa P...: I remember one time talking to a Dominican friend because she lived with me and my sister, and we're Haitian.

And I forget what we were cooking, but she was like, "Oh, that looks just like this dish," and I was like, "Makes sense.

It's the same island."

My name is Michelle Lisa Polissaint.

I am a visual artist and arts organizer based in Miami, Florida.

So a lot of my work focuses on my past and history and how I can respond to contemporary issues or contemporary conversations through my work.

My project for Commissioner is inspired very heavily by shared meals I've had with my friends and family, who are all from different parts of the African diaspora.

In sharing these meals, there's this kind of overview you get of a table that is filled with these staple foods that oftentimes look very similar to each other because they have the same root, and I really wanted to create a project that flattened the diaspora in a way that made it, so it was less about the cultural differences that are based really just on location and more about the things that make us so similar to each other.

I appreciate projects like Commissioner because they give me room as an artist to be a little bit more playful about how I produce and how I respond to an inquiry or a prompt.

But in this case, Commissioner is very open about what we want to do, and I think it's important to have a collective base that's open to trusting the artist to produce something good.

Speaker 3: It's hard to believe that Miami's Reginald O'Neal began painting just 11 years ago.

Here, Oolite Arts documents O'Neal reflecting on his career and the community.

That has been one of his greatest influences.

Reginald O'Neal: My dad is in prison.

He's been serving in a 25-year sentence for trafficking.

He's been there since I was nine years old.

Yeah.

My dad has always been a part of my life.

I'm always in search for my father in a sense.

I talk to him a lot.

That's like my real dawg.

When I went to go see him in these prisons and I see all these black men and all these men, in general, but mostly black men, and just the way the contrast fit with their uniform and their skin tone.

It was just like that play, just color and theme.

It's a lot of black men that are in prison right now that are away from their family, so I'm not unique to that experience.

The more I paint, and the more I grow up, is the more I learn about the condition that has been placed on people like myself and inner city communities and stuff like that, on taking the father out of the equation.

Just didn't know that that was a thing that I could have as a medium to express myself.

So it's people and places and all of these things, how they correlate to your own life.

I think that I draw the most inspiration from that because these people were doing the very same thing, I think, way back then.

Rather they were painting kings and queens.

It was almost the same thing as what I'm trying to do in a sense.

I'm trying to portray a specific place and a specific time, and specific people.

I was a freestyler when I was a kid, just listening to rap music, probably even before I could talk.

The reason why it's so polarizing, and it's so beautiful and dynamic, is because they're saying stuff that's completely honest.

What I'm more drawn to in things that you probably would see is just like, this is my life, and also in hip-hop, these are these people's lives.

I was born and raised in an Overtown in Miami, Florida, and I stayed there for 27 years of my life.

The apartment complex where I lived for a very long time is going to be torn down, and my mom moved out.

I don't know what it feels like to not have a community in a sense.

People who lived in my neighborhood watched me grow up, and I watch their kids grow up.

And man, the culture there is really amazing.

It gave me a full understanding of what life can be.

I've been in residencies before, and this is just different because it's a different setting.

Coming from Miami is very different.

We didn't grow up playing with snow at all, having snowball fights at all.

I feel like being an artist sometimes can be a bit lonely.

And when you're put in a place, everybody's secluded from their own family and their own day-to-day, people that will champion you but also give you a hard time with what you're working on too and push you.

You need a community.

It's very, very important as an artist.

That particular piece is just me being in my friend's house.

And his sister being there washing dishes and me talking to him.

And me looking at her while she's in the back of me, and I see her washing dishes in this light.

And I'm like, I have to paint this.

So I went to my aunt's house for my birthday in Jacksonville.

And everybody goes to see my dad on their own, and she had this photo on her dashboard.

And I was like, dang, I've never seen this photo before.

He was just holding my little cousin.

And so the way the light was hitting his face and hitting the blue and all this other stuff, it was a very beautiful thing.

I thought my dad's stance and the way he wears his uniform, it was just like, let me try to get my dad's essence and how big and grandiose he feels to me in a very small painting.

Clarence is my little brother.

That's my youngest brother, that I just found out about.

So I did three paintings of him.

I did the first two when I didn't talk to him and black and white when he was in jail.

And then I did another piece of him, which when he got convicted, and he got sentenced.

And that's when he had to cut all his hair and cut his mustache, and that was just his first mugshot.

Just getting to know him and talking to him.

It's just like, man, I love this dude already.

And for me to see him in that position, it's just like I see through him being a prisoner and his crimes and stuff like that.

I see Clarence.

I see my brother.

Just by my father being away, it just allowed me to grow even closer.

The older I got, the more I started to search for myself, but also search for him and being able to talk to him.

It just allowed our relationship to be like crazy.

I don't know.

That's usually my what you looking at face.

Or if I'm looking at something, I usually squint all the time like I can't see, but I can see all the time.

Speaker 3: Potter Lynn Loftus is toiling away in the Florida Keys and putting the literal pair of dice in paradise.

Lynn Loftus: I love the whimsical sculptures that I work on.

I love teapot forms.

I like taking play on words and making them into an object that has some humor to it, makes you think, makes you enjoy it.

I'm Lynn Loftus, and I'm a professional potter.

I've been working in clay for 45 years.

I'm here in Marathon, Florida, in the beautiful Florida Keys.

I do a lot of things that are Keys oriented.

I do make a Cheeseburger in Pair-O-Dice, which is sitting in between two big wheel-thrown dice.

And I'm very technically oriented in my work.

I do laugh, though, and say, "I haven't been considered seriously as an artist for years since people come in and look at my stuff and start laughing."

But I am very technically involved in what I do as well.

Life is Just a Bowl of Chairies, which is a thrown bowl and little clay furniture, little chairs inside, Bowl of Chairies.

I made a One Nightstand, which is a little wicker night table with a lamp and ashtray and cocktails on it, Just One Nightstand, very whimsical.

I do primarily throwing on the potter's wheel.

I like a combination of the round pieces with handbuilt.

I do teach a lot more handbuilding and people on the potter's wheel.

After so many years, it's really a joy to be able to share it with other people and see them get the passion for it as well.

If you're going to throw on the potter's wheel, you definitely need a wheel.

You need your kiln.

You can make a lot of the tools that you're using.

I sometimes use a potato peeler to get a surface on a particular pot.

Then as you go on, you're going to need your glazes to do the firing of the pieces, too, so that they're complete.

Basically, you're placing the clay on a wheel, either a kick wheel or an electric wheel.

We use electric wheels here.

And then, actually, start with a little bit of speed and muscle to get the clay perfectly centered and then slow down and then the finesse and just bringing up the walls of the pot.

The beauty of it is once you start, the clay is reusable, so if you aren't doing good pieces, you can reuse the clay and do it again.

So it is good to learn because it's not real expensive to get started.

When you're starting with the clay, you're starting with the wet clay.

When you make something, whether it's on the wheel or handbuilding, then you allow it to dry.

It can sometimes be a week or so.

It depends on the dampness of the clay.

Once it dries, then you're going to put it in the kiln for the first firing, which is called a bisque firing.

When it comes out, it'll be fired.

Our clay is white when it comes out of the bisque firing.

Then it's absorbent, and that's when you start doing your glazing, applying your colors, and then, after that, it's fired a second time, and everything comes out with all the pizzazz and the magic.

I define myself as a potter, so it's part of who I am at this point in my life.

It's just a joyful medium to work in.

Also, I love playing in the mud.

I have never outgrown that.

This is like Confucius said, "Pick a job you love, and you never have to work a day in your life."

I've been very blessed to pursue a career as a potter.

Speaker 3: Jazz in the Gardens is back in its 16th year.

Miami Gardens' hometown event has grown into an international celebration of Black music and culture.

Among the national and international R&B, neo-soul, and reggae acts gracing the stages, be on the lookout for LaVie.

She'll be on the local stage heating up with hits like this.

Here's Queen.

Speaker 15: So.

No, I'm good.

How about we go back to my place and maybe catch a movie or something?

LaVie: Well, this is our first date, so I don't really think it's a good idea.

Speaker 15: First date?

LaVie: Yeah.

Speaker 15: I'm trying to get to know you.

LaVie: Yeah, but I have a lot of things to do.

Some things to take care of.

Speaker 15: You got things to do, huh?

You got things to take care of, huh?

LaVie: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 15: How about you take care of that, then?

LaVie: Excuse me?

Speaker 15: Bartender, let me get another one of those.

LaVie: You have a good night.

Speaker 15: Man.

She fine, though.

She fine, though.

LaVie: (Singing).

Speaker 3: Art Loft is on Instagram @artloftsfl.

Tag us in your art adventures.

Find full episode segments and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

Speaker 1: Art Loft is brought to you by... Speaker 2: Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

Speaker 1: The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners and the Friends of South Florida PBS.

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