Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

ROE LIBRETTO'S PAINTINGS CONTAIN ELEMENTS OF UNIVERSAL STORIES THAT CREATE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR VIEWERS TO GAIN INSIGHT INTO THEIR OWN SUBCONSCIOUS.

THE NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART'S EXHIBITION "INVENTING ACADIA" REVEALS LOUISIANA'S ROLE IN CREATING A NEW VISION FOR THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE.

ANCESTRAL FUNK ARTIST, SIOBHAN MONIQUE IS A CONDUIT FOR THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE HER.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

AN ALLEGORICAL ODYSSEY >>Faith Perez: The allegories you've created, how have they helped you in your life?

>>Roe Libretto: Oh, that's a laugh.

Okay, Cause, first of all, I'm thickheaded.

So yeah, it takes a while for things to sink in.

So it's not uncommon for me to look back at pictures that I have done in the past and realize that all this time the universal unconscious was trying to warn me about something and I just wasn't getting the message.

So I can actually look at paintings and say, oh my God, it's telling me the same story over and over and over again with different colors, with different characters, with whatever.

But it's just haven't picked up on it.

[MUSIC] The Fool's Journey really talks about the moment of leaving, the moment of setting out on your own journey.

So the fool is the guy who's sitting on the back of the faithful steed.

And as a child, the fool had an open mind and very simple needs, but as he grew, he was influenced by his surroundings.

Now, that's a lot like myself.

When I left home, I, I was brought up in a working-class family and, um, Italian girls, right?

Who, I mean, I was born in 1953, so Italian girls were expected to live home until you find a husband who has a good job, and then you get married and you go have babies.

I didn't fit.

I didn't fit, you know, and I had to get over the fact that it's nothing wrong with me, it's just that I'm different than what that norm is.

Because what's a norm?

A norm is only what you used to, right, that's the norm.

And the fool's journey is a perfect allegory for making that step out.

And all of the naysayers that you're gonna see, all the people who know better than you, who are gonna caution you.

You have to decide whose advice is worth trusting and not.

And you see that recurring theme in the little bird in the sky of my paintings, he recurs again and again.

And again, that's the thing of listening to your heart as opposed to the ego.

[MUSIC] The artist painting.

That was a light bulb moment for me.

The overall theme here is how when an artist creates a work, they have to step out of themselves.

So they give up their meat suit and they get down to the, the bones of the matter.

I was like, yeah, well, I know I'm the artist.

That's cool.

That puts me in that hero role.

You know, we all wanna be the hero in life, but we're not always the hero.

And the more I look at that painting, the more I realize that I'm the carnivorous pigs.

I'm the greedy money grunger, right?

I'm the over intellectualizer.

I'm the onlookers, I'm the teacher, I'm all of those characters.

And I love all those parts of myself.

I mean, it's made me who I am.

[MUSIC] >>Faith Perez: What do you seek to make visible with each painting?

>>Roe Libretto: Oh, I want people to have a deeper understanding of themselves.

[MUSIC] I had an instance, a, a perfect example of it, and it was the secret in the grail.

A young person came in and he had several of his friends with him and his friends kept running in and out of the gallery doing whatever they were, lots of things they wanted to see.

And he stood in front of that painting for a damn long time.

And finally, I got up and I came over and I said, what is it about this painting that attracts you?

And he said to me, I think I do this.

So at the time, the story with the painting was looking for your higher self in between someone else's legs, right?

Looking for fulfillment through sex.

And I said, oh, well, if you do this, you must find satisfaction or support in this kind of behavior.

And he started to cry and he said to me, it makes me feel really lonely.

But in that moment of, um, of that person's recognition, I realized that what I was doing had great value.

And that is...

I've had a couple of episodes where that has happened, and those little interactions are the ones that make me wanna just keep painting and keep doing it.

[MUSIC] And I know that the characters that tell the stories are off-putting for some people.

And I know that a lot of people are gonna be turned off by the stories themselves, but that's okay.

That's why there's so many different kinds of artists in the world because each artist speaks a different language.

And there are many people out there speaking many kinds of languages.

So it's important that we have to be out there on the streets and not making the art at home in our closets.

We have to share it so everybody can learn from it.

LANDSCAPE VISIONS Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place In Louisiana is the first big exhibition of Louisiana landscape painting in almost 40 years and it's bringing together artworks from all across the country that includes artists working in Europe, the broader United States, Latin America as well as Louisiana to reflect on the unique culture and ecology and landscape of this place and really in many ways to look at the history of landscape set the stage for both the possibilities and the issues and questions we're asking today about Louisiana.

The earliest thing in the show was in the early 1800s and the most recent thing in the exhibition is around the turn of the century.

The exhibition really follows 19th century Louisiana landscape art from the first painters who came to Louisiana all the way up to more contemporary work.

Many of the painters who came here were used to working in the forest of Fontainebleau in France in this dense forested environment, and they were used to working in the mountains and lakes of the Hudson River Valley and they came here and encountered the flat, swampy, delta, landscape liable to flood and all sorts of other questions and issues and as a result of that the painters ended up having to remake the ideas about landscape painting from within.

If you're used to painting a forest with hills and valleys and lush mountains and you come to this flat delta you have to sort of reimagine what landscape is from the very beginning.

There is no single point of view or perspective, there's no clear way according to ideas about composition and painting to really paint this place.

So that was really an aesthetic problem or question, "How do you make painting of this watery landscape?"

but also political ones thinking about how we relate to a landscape of this place.

Whether you try and make it look like France or New England or whether you try and treat it as what it is.

Many of the artists really are wonderful painters and I think what's wonderful about them is that they are adapting techniques they've learned elsewhere in very different types of landscapes to Louisiana.

But there's some that stand out like Richard Clague who's a painter from France who painted a lot of batteur and flood areas of the city and others Joseph Rusling Meeker who made these visions of the swamp based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Evangeline".

I have a number of favorite works in the exhibition.

I have a number of favorite works from the exhibition; one of them is a painting by this very early Louisiana artist Toussaint Francois Bigot.

He was a river captain that made this very early painting of Louisiana that appears on the banner in front of the museum as well as the front piece to the exhibition and he created this painting of the Atchafalaya Basin one of the largest wetland swamps in the world in the 1850s that shows this scene in the aftermath of a hurricane where you see all of this flooded land, all of these fell trees and all these different waterways that are merging and colliding and also all of these indigenous people that are kind of positioned at the foreground of the canvas; I think as a way to demonstrate a very different way of living with this land and that was often proposed by the European colonists, so really showing the sort of danger of this place but also presenting a vision for living alongside land and water which I think was really quite prescient.

One of the things that I find fascinating about that work is that the artist included no less than seven examples from indigenous basketry from the region in that painting.

I think it's a way to point towards the art and culture that was already in Louisiana at the time the Europeans were coming.

And then two, to me of the most exceptional works in the exhibition, although it's a painting show, are sculptures.

We tracked down this incredible work by this female sculptor, Harriet Hasmer, who created this incredible sculpture of Medusa after she travelled from St. Louis to New Orleans.

The next work I would cite is this work by a sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, called the "Marriage of Hiaiwatha" This is a work that Edmonia Lewis showed at the 1884 World Cotton Centennial Exhibition and a sculpture that like many the painting in the exhibition was inspired by the poetry of Henry Watford Longfellow.

She based this sculpture not of "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" the one set in Louisiana but rather the "Marriage of Hiawatha" in which the true love between two people and the marriage of these two people unite two warring in indigenous nations in a new union.

And, she presented this as one of the first Art Exhibitions by an African American that existed in Louisiana.

This is alongside works by artists from Haiti, and works by African Americans artists from all across the country and presented this vision of unity and coming together at a time where Louisiana was still very fractured as a result of the Civil War and the third work that I would mention is not by an American artist, a Louisiana artist at all, and is not of Louisiana.

We were very lucky to borrow a painting by the artist Theodore Rousseau that shows the swamps in Laundes which is a flooded, swampy region in southwest France.

And, Theadore Rousseau was one of the first painters who is really what we call a kind of environmentalist.

He campaigned for the preservation of the forest, in the France Barbizon and in the 1840s took a trip to the swamps of France and made a series of paintings that tried to show that swamps and flooded landscapes can be beautiful.

In the 1840s as well as really through the 19th century, swamps were seen as these muddy dirty places that shouldn't be treated as places to live, much less places to be celebrated as beautiful.

And Rousseau instead created these paintings where swamps could be thought of as places of beauty and celebrated for what they were rather than as what the common knowledge at the time be drained and filled and made into these productive farmlands.

One of the other I think really important and quite beautiful things in the exhibition is a selection of some of the most beautiful indigenous American basketries that I think I've seen from indigenous nations all across the region, especially the Chitimacha, the Coushatta and Atakapa-Ishak people, but those were also in fact made in that time frame between the 1850s to 1900.

I think in many ways, the culture developed around history and the way people related to land.

So you kind of see this transformation from some of the earliest artists and painters who came here and were painting these sort of wildernesses, swamps and delta landscapes and bayous to people beginning to build shelters, and inhabitations on this landscape and of course you move further into the exhibition, you start to see the development of plantations and plantation economies and begin to have to grapple with a lot of those histories as well, thinking about histories of enslavement and the labor systems that produce this land and the sort of strange ways in which Louisiana was thinking about what it was as a place.

There's several works in the exhibition that are what we call allegories for Louisiana with titles like "Mother Louisiana" or "Spirit of Louisiana" where painters are trying to figure out how you would encapsulate the culture identity of this place and often times they are relying on certain ideas that have been inherited from other places representing for instance Louisiana as this kind of architype of ancient Greece and Rome rather that what it really truly was which is of course this place where you have your European, American, African as well as indigenous American people who are all together and negotiating a very complicated political situation.

You see Louisiana becoming settled, turning into this place we have today moving from wilderness to settled land and in that process there is constantly negotiating and renegotiating what its culture was and how it was going to be NOMA already has a collection of Louisiana landscape art that has been on view in an upstairs gallery for a number of years so we included a number of pieces the museum already had in the exhibition, trying to shed some new light based on some of the researchers and scholars who worked on the show, thinking in new ways about landscapes, there meaning and importance.

We also do hope to continue to acquire in this area.

I think one of the things that this exhibition has hopefully made really clear is that these landscape paintings have been in fact very undervalued and not as recognized within the broader American art tradition but since some really wonderful things have happened as a result of the show.

Museums we've worked with because we found and borrowed the works from their collection have decided to put them up on view and things of that kind so I think a show like this is about pointing out the value of work, um, as much as it about bringing new light to the scholarship, so that's a big part of our goal in making a show like this.

WALKING IN DESTINY - I am Siobhan Monique.

I am a conduit for my ancestors and the daughter of St. Petersburg, Florida.

I am here to fulfill my purpose, walk in my destiny but more importantly, I am here to let my light shine.

Oh My very first performance, I was three years old, I was selected to perform in front of the church.

- She got on stage in front of an entire packed church for a Christmas play.

She grabbed the microphone and just ad- libbed her entire part and just brought the church down.

So we were like, "Oh, okay, well, this is what she wants to do."

(Temptations) - That moment was when I connected to my purpose.

I didn't choose music, it chose me.

- [Melissa] Her personality was an old soul from day one.

Her facial expressions had this kinda old soul type of feel to it and she had a very unique, beautiful darkness to her and I think that's part of this artistry that we see now.

(Southern trees, Bear a strange fruit) - I was in awe the first time that I heard her.

She was such a demure person, a small person but this huge voice would come from her and it was so moving.

(over me) - I can definitely see her sound and her music being something in the '40s and the '50s and connecting with that.

And when you hear her voice, it's like this voice has been here before.

This isn't a new voice, this isn't a pop voice, this is a voice that has a story that needs to be told, so she's continuing to tell the story.

So it really resonates with all generations.

- My uncle, Buster, was a very essential part of the jazz era.

He played with the Duke Ellington jazz band and now that I look back on it as an adult, I can see the seeds that he planted for me and for my life.

- Buster Cooper is my uncle, he is my father's brother, that connection and Siobhan's gift of having that type of ancestral voice and connection to the great jazz legends, allowed the two of them to really connect when it came to music.

- He would always say... my family calls me, boo, so, "Boo never give up."

I got a degree in classical voice, I went to New York and I was a leading role in the Off-Broadway Show and then he got sick.

And I was missing my family at the time and my mom was like, "Listen, your uncle, he doesn't have much time left."

So I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna pack up my stuff, I'm going to come home, I already miss my family, I need to see my uncle."

On his deathbed, he pulls me to him and he said, "Listen, I want you to carry on the family legacy, it's your time.

I give you my blessing and I want you to carry this through."

And I'm like, "Oh, okay, that's... nothing major."

And so with him saying that, I embraced and I accepted the calling in what he was passing down to me and that is what you see before you.

Community is important to me because there is strength in numbers and my community has shaped and molded me into a queen.

You have to give back to what has been given important to you.

- One thing I can say about St. Pete, especially the south side of St. Pete, we are still a generational city.

We know people, we know their father, their grandfather, their great- grandfather.

So there's still that generational connection that I think makes it very unique.

- It takes a village, it takes a village that believes in you and in this case, establishing that base.

You know you can go home.

- She's actually taken on that field to go work to New York, to LA and she always wants to come back to that feeling of family.

- If it wasn't for my village, my community, my family, my ancestors, who constantly reminded me, "No, you are beautiful, you are smart.

Your voice ain't too loud, it's not loud enough, girl, sing, be you."

The moment that I decided to do that, all of the beauty, all of the beauty.

So what I will say to you little Black girl that's watching this right now, you're beautiful.

You're more than just a strong Black woman, you're magical.

Be yourself, love yourself, know thy self.

That's where all of this comes from.

I'm me.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.