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!

ALBUQUERQUE PAINTER, DAVID KASSAN IS DEDICATED TO ENSURING THE LIVES AND STORIES OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS ARE NEVER FORGOTTEN.

PHOTOGRAPHER JESSE CLARK'S EXPLORATION OF HIS IDENTITY IS NOT LIMITED OR DEFINED BY THE MOLDS AND PRECONCEIVED NOTIONS OF THE "BLACK MAN".

TAKE A JOURNEY THROUGH GEORGIA O'KEEFFE'S HOME IN ABIQUIU, NEW MEXICO AND THE EXTRAORDINARY LANDSCAPE THAT INSPIRED HER WORLD-RENOWNED PAINTINGS.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

SURVIVING HISTORY >>David Kassan: I met Elsa- kind of a random kind of thing, because I'm not from Albuquerque.

My wife's lived here for about 13 years and she used to shop with Elsa.

Elsa used to have a boutique on Nob Hill called The Elsa Ross Boutique.

And I guess somehow Elsa had seen my work on social media when I started dating my wife Shayna, and she went up to Shayna and she said "hey, you know I saw the paintings that David's making of Holocaust Survivors, and I don't tell anybody this and no one really knows but I'm also a survivor.

And I don't really share my story very often and I'd love to meet with David to talk to him about what I've been through."

and she's just like this cute- she has kind of a little bit of a British European accent.

Which is very kind of stately.

It's cute, she just likes to have fun.

We used to go to the Grove all the time too for brunch.

So, I never really had grandparents and she's kind of turned into like a grandparent.

I mean how can someone hate Elsa?

She's so freaking cute!

She was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto when she was five years old and never saw her parents again.

Um- and so she says the Nazis' like took everything away from her, and then after World War II she was in a Catholic orphanage.

I remember she talked about how she had seen the silhouette of the person coming for her at the orphanage and she thought it was her mother at first, and then she saw her come into the light and she found out that it was an aunt by marriage and it wasn't her mother and she was heartbroken.

I want to kind of make the paintings as authentic and real as possible.

The idea that this is a human being in front of you when you see the painting.

That it has the kind of things that you see unconsciously of your grandfather or your grandmother.

You know that you could feel the texture and the tactileness of their skin, like holding their hands.

And I want that in my paintings, and that's kind of to humanize them.

You know, as a painter I want to paint things that are meaningful to me and that could be meaningful to other people.

As a way of like marking history and if I wasn't a painter I'd probably be a historian or an anthropologist.

Painting's kind of the excuse to get to know these people and hear their stories firsthand, and I love that.

I don't really know much about my own family's history, because my father and his father were estranged, so my grandfather I never met.

But, there are stories that my grandfather had written a book about him escaping ethnic cleansing in the Ukraine and Romania to come to America, and the family being in a displaced persons camp in Austria, and then finally making it to the United States and settling in Long Island.

And I think that was something that kind of opened my eyes to trying to figure out what was going on with my own ethnicity, being Jewish.

Like when I was growing up, kids would throw pennies at my feet because they found out I was Jewish and they wanted me to pick them up, and I'm like "what does that even mean?"

my mom's like "well, we're Jewish."

I'm like "what does that mean?"

and kind of meeting survivors, hearing kind of these- fragments of what they went through in their lives, was kind of putting a face to kind of what my family had gone through in a way for me to connect with my own heritage.

And I was like "how can I make work that humanizes these people, what they've been through in their struggle that can also help humanize other cultures?"

It's Hannah Davidson- Pankowski, her mother was an artist.

I met her in San Antonio in 2017.

She tells the story about how she was coming home from summer camp on the school bus, like kids do, right when Poland was being invaded.

You know she talks about how they had um- all the you weren't allowed to walk on a certain side of the street if you were Jewish.

You weren't allowed to study, you weren't allowed to learn to read and write at certain points, um- and so you just see like this box kind of closing in around her as she tells her story.

We had a museum show- in 2019 at USC, and it had an opening night where the survivors came in and saw this big painting I had done of them.

At the opening actually was John Adler's birthday and I had done a painting of him.

He was a Survivor that escaped before World War II and he joined the British Military, and then fought Nazis in the desert.

And it was his I want to say- like 97th birthday was on the night of the opening and it was his last birthday, unfortunately.

But, when he saw the painting he was like "that's me!"

like "hey you!"

like talking to it.

It was-- it's like insanely heartbreaking.

Paintings have kind of a staying power.

There's contemplation that happens there, it's a venerated object.

It slows people down to want to learn about the person in the painting.

It's important to immortalize them, because these stories need to be lasting and they personalize what the Holocaust was all about.

And that's what I want to do.

I wanted to make it so you can't erase it, you can't delete it.

CAPTURING TRUTH >>Jesse: It's easy to be put in this box, and it's easy for a lot of people to tell you who you are, or who you're supposed to be.

And often that is limiting, 'cause no one knows you better than you know yourself.

Awesome, amazing.

I'm Jesse Clark.

I am a third- year student at Ringling College of Art and Design.

I major in photography and imaging.

All right, I'm gonna go a little closer on you.

So I was born in Haiti.

I was adopted in 2003.

So I grew up in Lakeland, Florida in a family of four brothers.

And my mom homeschooled all of us.

And so during my homeschool year, so elementary, she kind of introduced me to like the masterworks.

Having me study both paintings, DaVinci, or Van Gogh, Rembrandt, things like that.

And that kind of was what introduced me into art overall, and so I started that journey becoming a painter, and an illustrator, and when I got to high school is when I picked up the camera and started exploring that.

And that opened new doors for me, capturing the world in a whole completely different way for me.

>>Thomas: Jesse is not only incredibly talented as a technician, everything he did very early he kinda mastered the lighting, and the fundamentals of, of picture making, and he then moved into subject matter.

Very specific issues that I think he gives a very fresh, and contemporary take on identity.

Specifically Black identity within the context that we're in right now.

- One of my biggest series and something that's a turning point for me was a series that I titled, "Through Dark Eyes."

And so that's a series that I worked with my friend Jordan George, who I'm here with today.

And that was exploring how I see myself.

So there are images like the pink background that he was showing like the softer vulnerable side.

The images with the floral face mask as well.

Also kind of this idea of the Black male carrying a beautiful image.

I have experience in ballet.

So learning to, you know, be strong, but also sort of kind of land softer.

And so when I am representing the Black male, I'm thinking about the side that's a little softer, the side that you don't typically see in movies and things which they always show the aggressive, the jock, or even sometimes criminal.

So showing okay how are we really a soft person, the creatives, you know, welcoming.

So one of the biggest things in my photography is the gesture, taking inspiration from my experience in ballet.

So kind of like a, you know, sort of upright, and soft sort of movement.

>>Jordan: I love that Jesse knows what he wants to see.

I love that he can help me figure out how to position my hands, contort my body left and right, how to control my face, and my overall demeanor for his projects, it really helps a lot with what I want to do with modeling and stuff.

It helps me learn my body more.

It's just a very comfortable space.

He makes it very comfortable.

He'll talk to you about you and you're just as much a part of his piece as he is so it's your world that you share with him.

It's very fun.

- Clothes I always get from Goodwill.

Formal clothes, often kind of earthy tones, pastels, and silks, and velvets as well.

So something we typically don't see the Black male being represented in.

Along with that, I often shop in the women's section of Goodwills too.

Looking at blazers, button downs, and sort of more floral tops as well.

- [Jordan] For Jesse to be doing this, and for me to be one of his muses, to help push this forward, I want any Black person, especially Black boys you know like, "Hey you can wear this if you think it's cool.

Don't, it's not that deep."

Like you're like you can express yourself how you wanna express yourself, and people always gonna say something.

- [Jesse] I think that's kind of the struggles that I, and maybe some friends have, is being judged before people get to know us.

And even during photo shoots, we've had that issue as well.

You know, I make the joke, like we are dressed like Shakespeare in the park photographing at this tennis court, but someone had an issue with our presence there, and we were, you know, dressed very nicely, and we'd think that that would change their thoughts on us, but you know, that's not always the case.

There's that fear there I know that I can be feared by others, and that's certainly what I, what I don't want.

Having that comparison, especially like to my, some of my brothers who are white, so how we navigate life a little differently.

So growing up in that family, and kind of noticing those differences is kind of what drove me to produce work like this.

- [Thomas] Photography matters today because it tells us about ourselves.

Yes, everybody has cameras on their phone, but the art side of it is a little different, because art means you have to stand for something.

You have to put something on the line to talk about issues.

And in terms of Jesse, that's always involves quite a bit of courage actually, to speak about issues that matter to you.

- I think it's really important, especially right now I feel like a lot of men in a lot of spaces, and a lot of spaces in art, are breaking the molds of what it is to be a man, and I really think that's important, especially for a Black man to see that I can be vulnerable, to see that I can be soft, and I don't have to be tough all the time, to know that it's okay to cry.

This body of work, these pieces of work that Jesse is creating right now, are going to help a lot of kids in the future.

- [Jesse] Now representation is important because there's so much we can learn about other people.

And I certainly can't speak fully on a whole other group of people, but I can speak on myself.

And if that helps another person, then I'm doing something right.

1, 2, 3.

THE FAR AWAY Narrator: Georgia O'Keeffe first travelled to Northern New Mexico, a popular destination for artists at the time, in 1929.

She stayed with friends near Taos, returning for a second trip in 1930 and then again in 1934.

Late in that summer of 1934, O'Keeffe visited Ghost Ranch, then a dude ranch-a vacation ranch for tourists-owned by Arthur Pack.

The colorful cliffs and hills immediately appealed to her, and for the next few years O'Keeffe stayed there when she visited New Mexico.

"It's the most wonderful place you can imagine."

Narrator: She came here because of the vast open land, the shining stone, the endless open skies... Georgia O'Keeffe called this area "The Far Away".

She drew her inspiration from the landscapes surrounding her homes.

From the Chama River Valley, to Cerro Pedernal, to Ghost Ranch, this land has been sacred to those who live here for thousands of years - inspiring a rich tapestry of art and culture that continues to thrive in the communities here today.

"All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands."

Narrator: In 1940, she purchased several acres and a small adobe house located on the Ghost Ranch property.

It was surrounded by the desert forms she had come to love.

Until the death of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1946, she split her time between New Mexico and the New York home she shared with Stieglitz.

Narrator: While staying in Taos, O'Keeffe met Maria Chabot, a young woman who was in New Mexico trying to make her way as a writer.

O'Keeffe invited her to live with her at her Ghost Ranch home, where they spent the next four summers.

Narrator: It was impossible to have a garden with the dry, claylike soil of Ghost Ranch so O'Keeffe and Chabot often visited Abiquiu, in the hopes of buying a property there.

On one of her first trips to the area, she saw a large, adobe house perched on the top of a cliff in the Abiquiu village.

Although it was in ruins, it offered a spectacular view of the Chama River Valley below that O'Keeffe loved, as well as a large garden, which could satisfy O'Keeffe's desire to grow her own fruits and vegetables.

Narrator: And most important, the property had water rights which the local community had kept active over the years by using the water regularly to irrigate the gardens they had planted on the property.

Narrator: O'Keeffe set her sights on the three acre property, however, the house was owned by the Catholic Church and was not for sale.

In 1945, after 10 years of trying, she succeeded in persuading the church to sell it to her.

"The house was a pigpen when I got it.

The roof was falling in, the doors were falling off.

But it had a beautiful view.

I wanted to make it my house, but I'll tell you the dirt resists you.

It is very hard to make the earth your own."

Narrator: She asked Chabot to oversee the restoration of the property.

Shortly after, Stieglitz died and O'Keeffe returned to New York to settle his estate.

Over the next three years, O'Keeffe and Chabot sent letters back and forth while the design and construction of O'Keeffe's Abiquiu home was completed.

Narrator: Chabot worked with members of the Abiquiu community to reconstruct and renovate the home.

She utilized locally sourced materials, incorporated indigenous and Spanish techniques and styles, while also incorporating contemporary architectural features.

Narrator: In 1949, O'Keeffe finally moved to Northern New Mexico permanently and alternated between her Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu homes.

The diverse and spectacular landscape of Northern New Mexico, provided decades of inspiration for O'Keeffe's artwork.

"The View from the house across a wide green valley toward a low mountain is very fine.

The tree series I did from my window in Abiquiu looking down in the valley."?

Narrator: Today both houses are owned by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Both reveal the less-is-more aesthetic by which she lived.

And their simple, large glass `windows fill their interior spaces with light and in turn provide expansive views of the natural world, thus creating a dynamic relationship between the inside and outside worlds.

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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.