Episode 3

- [Announcer] Next on "Curate" - [Maurice] It comes to me in dreams.

It's constantly changing and growing, and I really think that's wonderful.

- [Clay Barr] I can work on this collection to keep his name alive.

In a way, it's been a real emotional support for me.

- [Will] I hope that people are really drawn into a kind of different way of looking at portraiture.

- [Jason] This is Curate.

- I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

Thanks for joining us as we come to you from the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, and specifically we are in the Tiffany Glass Gallery.

- The Chrysler Museum has been the center of the Norfolk art scene for more than 50 years.

It was founded during the Great Depression in 1933, and came into his own when Walter P. Chrysler Jr brought his collection to the museum in 1971.

This is Woman in Pergola Wisteria made by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the preeminent stained glass maker of the early 20th century.

- We'll explore the museum more during the show, but we start this week with an eastern shore artist whose work has been described as folk art, abstract realism, contemporary fine art.

And while it's challenging to put a label on Maurice Spector's work, just about everyone who experiences it agrees that it is unique.

- [Heather] Because of his independent spirit and the beauty of his work, Maurice Spector is our 757 featured artist.

- He's a crow.

I mean, maybe it doesn't look like a crow.

It's what my interpretation of a crow.

It's actually from a drawing that I did.

I liked the drawing and decided to make a sculpture out of it.

(soft serene music) I love the solitude, I love the water.

It's always changing.

It almost vibrates with history.

Something's here.

This is a very peaceful place.

People have told me that have lived here before I lived here, you feel at ease here.

I mean, the house is in very good shape.

I don't have a lot of money.

I'm not gonna fix it up.

I'm just in the perfect spot to be out of town, but pretty close to town.

I don't consider myself a folk artist anymore.

I think I've moved way beyond that, and still developing my art.

You know, it's constantly changing and growing, and I really think that's wonderful.

It's really great for my head.

I finally found one of the best things I do.

This is a spirit painting.

This is like a spirit in the creek, kind of the creek that I live on and she's returning to the bay.

And that's fun to do.

They have all these little dots that I do with my electric pen.

Saved me a lot of work and a lot of time.

She's a spirit.

Half in the water, half out of it.

I've got insects in it, there's little animals, the tide's going out and she's going out with the tide.

- We met Mo when we moved to the shore, and he was in a gallery and had this flamingo sculpture that was just too funny for words.

And then I think about six months later, he invited us to his house for lunch.

Maybe he just invited me 'cause he's into girls more than boys and girls.

And I thought, man, we've made it, we have made it to the shore.

Mo invited us to his house for lunch and he's one of our very best friends.

He's just a wonderful human being and an incredibly talented artist.

But what he's gonna come up with tomorrow, I don't know.

He does crows, and fish, and birds, and naked women, and cows, and horses, and Abraham Lincoln several times a year.

What the hell that's about, I have no idea.

- I've lived here for 23 years.

When I was a child, I lived on the eastern shore of Maryland on the seaside on a farm in a very rural area.

And I lived there 'til I was five years old.

Our driveway must have been like two miles long, and I didn't have any children to play with.

We had pigs and ducks and my father made baskets in a town called Snow Hill.

The farm was right on the bay, and you could see the barrier islands 'cause it was really far out.

We moved to Philadelphia when I was five, and my father went into the family business, and I was thrown in from this country upbringing to center city Philadelphia, and I was supposed to go out and meet children.

I mean, I was scared to death of children, and it took me a hard, it took me a long time to get, you know, to get accustomed to dealing with other kids, and I think that affects me today.

Maybe that's why I live here.

- How delicate and humble, and the strength that he is able to find and create.

And then he can just turn around and make these sculptures that are unbelievable.

The delicateness of his, of how you'd work.

It blows my mind.

- I don't like compliments.

- Basically I have this altar to Mo, and his carvings and then the whimsy of the paintings, and they're just, they're magical.

That's how I think of his work.

- I find it fascinating that Mo kind of operates on a spectrum, and I would put it in the genius category.

And what he can bring out of the subtleties of wood or paper with his large hands and yet delicate touch is exquisite.

I love it all.

(dramatic music) - It comes to me in dreams and just, and it just happens to pop into my mind.

If I try to work at it, it doesn't work usually.

They call it writer's block.

I don't get writer's block.

It'll probably happen to me, but I just have something to do all the time, which can be kind of annoying too.

But I've learned how to deal with that, and it's still if you're not working, you're not completely full or happy.

Writers and other artists have always come to the shore 'cause it's cheap to live and it's beautiful.

People don't know about it.

They drive down to Cape Hatteras, and they pass through the shore on Route 13 and that's not the real shore, that's just what you see from the highway.

We have the ocean and the barrier islands on one side, and we have the Chesapeake Bay on the other side.

Sometimes it's lonely.

During this pandemic, it got real quiet out here.

I don't have as many visitors as I used to.

The solitude can get to you.

I usually have a dog.

I don't have a dog now, or I have a girlfriend.

I don't have a girlfriend now.

But that'll change I hope.

- I very much love art.

Many of my friends are artists.

I am always thinking, what is art?

What makes art different than anything else?

Currently to me, it's about ideas.

And certainly Mo qualifies for that.

His art is about ideas and the question is, okay, what idea is he gonna have today?

What I love is he makes his living doing art.

Mo gets up every day and paints, sculpts, whatever he decides to do, little, big, and that's his life.

It's remarkable to know somebody like that who's so close to you who's the real deal.

- I'm gonna take this down in case the wind comes up.

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This past summer, the Chrysler Museum hosted a unique exhibit featuring a collection of Torah pointers or yads.

The collection has been assembled by Norfolk's Clay Barr to honor her late husband, Jay.

Yad is the Hebrew word for hand, and these instruments are used by readers of the Holy Scrolls to help preserve the parchment.

Allowing the reader to follow without touching the holy writings.

Originally, these were often little more than sticks, but have evolved into creative works of art.

The collector herself walked us through the exhibit talking about her inspiration and perspiration in assembling this extraordinary collection (upbeat dramatic piano music) - We read from the Torah three times a week.

It is the five books of Moses.

It is a scroll without punctuation and without any guidance of how to read it.

You cannot put your hand on the parchment itself so you need something to guide you as you read it, and that's the reason for a Torah pointer.

There is nothing anywhere in Jewish writing that has any dictates as to what a Torah pointer should be, which has allowed me to go to contemporary jewelers, cabinet makers, et cetera, to make Judaica a better product.

And so I think I have done a lot to bring Judaica into the world of contemporary arts and crafts.

In the Jewish religion, if your name is mentioned, you're considered still alive.

My wonderful husband died at a very early age of 57.

And I, in the last days of his life, was trying to figure out what to do to memorialize him.

I was thinking about the fact that he had donated two antique Torah pointers to our synagogue Beth El here in Norfolk, and he loved the hand in art.

So like an epiphany, I had the idea.

I will build a great Torah pointer collection.

And for 28 years I have devoted myself to building a great Torah pointer collection.

And here it is finally at the Chrysler having traveled across the country to various venues.

- The Chrysler serves a broad and diverse audience.

We also celebrate creativity in many, many forms, and an exhibition like this really brings those aspects of the museum and museum's life together.

It has both very important historic objects.

So going back to the Renaissance and the Baroque period, and a whole range of media, But also there's a very strong feature is that many contemporary artists are included in the collection, and they bring their ingenuity to a very, very well established traditional object.

- The first piece I actually bought was this beautiful coral in gold.

It's 19th century, northern Italian beautifully carved and gilded.

The other piece in this case that is truly breathtaking is this one on the end.

The car is an absolute perfect replica of a 1940 German car in which the Jews were transported to the death camps.

The saying that comes down the front which in German is work makes you free.

It just all bespeaks the Holocaust, the horrors of it, but how we were able to survive the horrors of it as a religion.

And I consider that one of the most important pieces in the collection.

Another absolutely ravishing one is this one, a porcelain.

It's made by Jennifer McCurdy, and her description is that she bakes very high quality white ceramic porcelain 'til it is leather hard, not completely hard, but leather hard, and then all of that is carved.

And to highlight the detail she then gives it.

It is beautiful.

A really fun one that people will be interested in is this one.

It's also by a Norfolk artist, a young man by the name of Spencer Tinkham, and he said he liked to work with driftwood and things he found.

And after quite a conversation, I said, you know, my grandson has a broken skateboard.

That is a skateboard yad.

The wheel became the point, and the wood of the skateboard became the body.

I had no idea skateboards were quite so beautiful.

I nicknamed my husband was the bun, we have a collection of crystal bunnies.

He took one from the dining room table.

It is an exact replica.

And Spencer Tinkham just did a wondrous job, and I truly loved that one.

Very touched by that one in particular.

(dramatic music) It has been a long, hard 28 years without Jay.

We were best friends.

I can't fix him dinner, I can't hug him, but I can work on this collection to keep his name alive.

So in a way, it's been a real emotional support for me to have it to do.

(soft dramatic music) - Photographer Will Wilson's beautiful portrait photography shines a light on what it means to be a Native American.

His project, the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, uses historic techniques to capture his subjects in the perfect light.

- Well, I'm an artist and a photographer.

I'm the program head of photography at the Santa Fe Community College.

I grew up between San Francisco, California and Tuba City, Arizona, which is on the Navajo Nation, and my dad was Irish and Welsh, and my mom was Navajo.

I think one of the reasons I was so drawn to photography because when I found photography, it was like this language that enabled me to kind of express myself in a way that I, you know, I couldn't linguistically.

Some of the kind of early forms of photography that I was involved in, you know, traditional black and white.

I was really drawn to that kind of documentary kind of style.

You know, 36 shots to a roll.

It was a different, different time.

You know, now I use a digital camera all the time, but I am drawn to historic process.

So, you know, in particular, some of the images you're seeing in this show were made with a process called wet plate, a wet plate collodion.

It was developed in 1851, and was kind of the photographic process until about 1880.

So first step of the process is to take this plastic off.

With the wet plate process, it's a bit labor intensive.

You're essentially making your own film.

They call it wet plate because it has to stay wet throughout the process, otherwise you don't get an image.

Step one is you get a plate, either glass or black metal, and you pour this stuff called collodion on that plate.

Collodion pretty much sticks to anything, and it also has some chemistries in it that when it's combined with silver nitrate, and this happens in a dark room, right?

So you pour the collodion on the plate, you take that plate to a bath of silver nitrate, you drop it in there.

Three minutes later, a emulsion has formed, a light sensitive emulsion.

And so at that point, you have to use a safe light or do this in the dark, right?

And so you load that plate into a film holder, carry that film holder to the camera and, you know, you've already kind of set up your subject and they're kind of waiting.

You make the exposure.

And then with this process, you know, one of the great things is you can take the subject with you back to the dark room, and they get to like experience the actual kind of magic of analog photography, right?

And so you have that exposed negative, you take it out of the film holder, you pour a developer on there, and a negative image starts to form and so you kind of judge that, and then you stop it with water.

And then when you put it in the fixer, this amazing thing happens.

And at that point, you can actually turn the light on.

So it kind of does this transition, this magic transition from a negative image to a positive image.

So it kind of becomes this foggy kind of, you know, it's not something that you can read.

And then out of that emerges this like beautiful positive image.

And, you know, people are I think really moved and fascinated.

And every time I see it, I'm just like reenergized.

I'm like, yeah, let's go make some more.

So with the CIPX project, or the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, which is what it stands for, I'm using a historic photographic process to kind of investigate portraiture, kind of thinking about what photography would be if indigenous people invented it.

You know, would there be a different kind of set of ideas, kind of protocols in relation to making someone's image?

It's a fairly kind of intimate process.

You know, I think there's a certain level of vulnerability that you kind of extend or offer.

When I use wet plate, it enables me to kind of slow things down.

It takes about 30 minutes to make one portrait so I can have kind of a, you know, a slower engagement with an individual in kind of deciding how they wanna be represented.

- [Speaker] Po'pay, years ago you served the people in the Pueblo revolts In 1680.

- I was also incorporating another technology, a 21st century technology called augmented reality with this historic photographic process.

Through the augmented reality technology, I have been able to bridge like this historic photographic image of her with her performance as a dancer, and I've called these talkington types.

(somber violin music) Will Canam is a violinist, and he did a rendition of "10 Little Indians," and he talks about like that song that nursery rhyme's relationship to kind of the history of genocide.

And so, you know, you're kind of, I guess moved by this nursery rhyme almost.

But then like hit over the back of the head with like what it's really about, you know, and his kind of reframing of it, I think is, you know, it's a pretty powerful kind of expression of indigeneity today.

I hope that people are really drawn in to, you know, a kind of different way of looking at portraiture.

It's kind of unusual.

There's a certain level of uncertainty with this portraiture.

You know, there's these strange chemical like aberrations that occurs.

In terms of the indigenous folks, hopefully people like are moved by like the diversity, the, you know, agency of the people.

Yeah, and I mean, on a broader level, I hope that it makes people think about what it means to to share the portraiture process with someone.

Slowing things down and, you know, thinking about what it means to make yourself vulnerable to make yourself like available to this kind of engagement.

I mean, every time I have one of these kind of engagements or work with people in this way, I think it, you know, it excites me to make more and it just kind of propels the project forward.

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That's going to do it for this episode of "Curate."

- Thanks again to the Chrysler Museum for hosting us, and thanks to you for joining us.

I'm Jason Kypros.

- And I'm Heather Mazzoni.

We're going to leave you with more from the Chrysler, including the world renowned Glass Studio.

We'll see you next time on "Curate."

- So when I'm heating the glass, I'm trying to read the color.

That orange glow.

So we got our neck nice and refined.

Now we're gonna work on heating the base, and glowing and shaping that part down.

Let's go one more time.

(upbeat bright jazzy music)