Funding for Colores was provided in part by New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nelita E Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, McCune Charitable Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.

Art historian, Carlos Ravello explores the enduring friendship and shared resilience that connected Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe, two women who redefined what it meant to be an artist in the 20th century.

Keith Haring, Against All Odds at the Akron Art Museum, traces Herring's remarkable journey from subway artist to cultural icon.

Fascinated with abandoned buildings.

Milwaukee photographer Kim Cunningham invites us to see beauty where others see decay.

It's all ahead on Colores.

Two journeys, one era.

>> Rovelo: One of the first things I did to understand the relationship of Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo is to place them in the era that they met.

This is 1931, so if we look at how women were defined at that time, they were defined by being spouses, having children.

D.H.

Lawrence wrote a piece during that time would also say women are defined by their husbands.

And submissive.

So that was the way that they were perceived.

On the other hand, they also were married to older men, powerful in their own artistic environment.

Alfred Stieglitz and incredible photographer.

When Stieglitz marries O'Keeffe, he was 60 years old.

O'Keefe was 37.

When Diego married Frida Kahlo he was 20 years older.

So you can see how this age disparity made their spouses, Stieglitz and Rivera, more powerful.

>> Faith: How did they then challenge those traditional gender roles, especially in the shadow of their powerful husbands?

>> Rovelo: I think that there is constant negotiation, you know, because they want to survive, but also they were married to men that appreciate their intellect.

You know, intellectual love sometimes is stronger than just heart love.

And Stieglitz respected O'Keeffe intellectually, but also O█Keeffe understood Stieglitz█s character that was able to negotiate with him that would also allow her to come to New Mexico, doing long stays, and kept Stieglitz in New York.

In the case of Diego and Frida was a little bit different, because when we look when Frida arrived in New York with Diego, Frida was just the spouse of Diego Rivera, Mrs.

Rivera.

And Frida was also learning at that moment how the American culture placed her.

You know, because it was not Frida who got invited to New York.

It was Diego.

And at that moment that they met during Diego Rivera retrospective at the moment.

So here you have the two couples and Diego and Stieglitz, well, they already knew each other because they were on their own, you know, narcissist modus operandi of living.

[unintelligible] they saw, Frida.

You look amazing.

Your outlook, all those stones, all that.

Mayan, Mesoamerican look, your dress and your blouses.

And then you have O█Keeffe to wear her own brand of clothing of framing themselves.

>> Faith: What misconceptions usually exist about these women?

>> Rovelo: Well, the first misconception is about emotional affairs, you know, which kind of even in the movies that is presented is the element of sexuality that often is applied to women.

You see how often they say the Georgia O'Keeffe flower were sexualized, that they were female organs.

And O'Keeffe will say, well, that's not what I'm thinking.

For that playing to that, selling the brand.

Right.

And in the case of Kahlo, that she was lesbian and all these affairs, when in fact, Frida has spent so much time in bed that for her to have physical sexual affairs as they are described, is totally nonsense.

And these come directly from Christina Kahlo, which is one of the family members of Frida, descendant.

That that's impossible.

Frida has over 30 surgeries and she had to spend a lot of time in bed.

That's why she painted the bed so many times because she spent time in bed.

>> Faith: They both had a lot of health struggles.

Right -- >> Rovelo: Absolutely.

>> Faith: And there was like a parallel there too between them.

So, like, how did their health struggles influence their art -- >> Rovelo: And you know, as we know that Stieglitz had a lot to do with O█Keeffe█s health struggles and that was the nervous breakdown that she had in 1933 when Frida wrote that letter.

>> Faith: Yeah.

>> Rovelo: So that letter in 1932 was written by Frida from Detroit, March 1st, 1933, and the letter was sent March 1st, 1933.

So you can see that there was an urgency on the side of Frida to express to Georgia how she felt about.

Okay, so that nervous breakdown, expanded several -- O'Keeffe was not painting and there is enough evidence that it had to do more with the relationship.

The same thing happened with Frida and Diego, where Frida said, the worst thing that happened to me after my accident was you, Diego.

And it's because for Frida, Diego was that emotional destruction that later ending on the on the divorce and then remarry.

For O'Keeffe, I think, was the physical separation coming to New Mexico because she wanted to stay with Stieglitz all that time and still having all these, you know, young girls, you know, he was a guy that was charismatic and he knew everyone.

So you know and a young, upcoming photography will be attractive to hang around with.

>> Faith: Yeah.

So I kind of want to talk a little bit about the parallels in their artwork.

How did they -- did they influence each other artistically and like what were some parallels because you also brought some props along that kind of talk about that.

>> Rovelo: I seen the biggest influence, obviously at the beginning was for Frida Kahlo, because meeting O'Keeffe, she saw someone that really established.

Remember she was older than Kahlo about 20 years.

Secondly, she had a job.

She already has sold work, where Kahlo was just beginning to figure out how things play out in America, you know?

By the time Kahlo goes to Detroit, she was already under the influence of Georgia O'Keeffe█s flowers.

And we start seeing some of those flowers in one of Kahlo█s paintings between the border, where Kahlo is standing between America and Mexico, smoking a cigarette.

And in the back you had the Ford automobile company, and on the left you had the Aztec pyramids.

But she places flowers at the bottom.

That was something new for Kahlo.

The other part too is that color was influenced by the Great Depression.

And she also paints the Great Depression with buildings, with high rise buildings.

Just like O'Keeffe.

had already painted high rise buildings in New York City, something that Stieglitz criticized when she was doing that.

So you see this architecture being painted by Kahlo, in the painting called, My Dress Hangs There.

That eludes the Great Depression.

And obviously that was based on something that she had seen O█Keeffe already doing.

>> Faith: Okay.

That's interesting.

And then there was also the whole Frida paints skeletons, Georgia paints skulls -- >> Rovelo: Yes, yes, you know when O'Keeffe begins to come to northern New Mexico.

She falls in love with bones because they were part of the landscape.

Bones was a mortuary dead issue.

She loves the forms.

She loves the negative spaces.

She looks at the bones in a way that are part of a landscape of endurance.

Okay, for Kahlo, the skeletons has to do more with the negotiation with death.

Because since Kahlo had the accident, she constantly has to negotiate with life and death.

Over 30 surgeries, living in constant pain, physical and emotional.

And that's why when Kahlo passed away, one of her lines was, if I ever return, I don't want to return in this body, because for Kahlo, her body represented the imprisonment of of a life that she has to use her imagination to keep moving forward.

She was constantly in pain.

She was medicated.

When you look at Kahlo█s dresses long, that never show her feet is because at the age of 4 or 5, she suffered of polio, so one feet was shorter than the other one.

Then in 1953, she got her leg amputated due to gangrene, but Kahlo kept going.

She would wear a prosthetic leg and she would put a sounds in the leg.

So when she will walk, her leg will make sounds like chin, chin and belts.

Because what Kahlo did, she told the audience that was, you know, she held court, right?

That the joy of life has to be bigger than the misery of life.

And that's something that is part of the Kahlo brand, right?

Did she have an easy life?

Absolutely not.

But Joy to Life, her last painting.

And I seen this Kahlo and O'Keeffe, and there is two that, in spite of the adversities that the responses and relationship represented, they define themselves on their own terms.

>> Faith: So what can we learn from both of these amazing women >> Rovelo: You know, I think the first thing I would like to commence about Georgia having this is called Horses Calling Northern New Mexico and say, I'm going to take it to New York and I'm going to paint that is called in Lake George and do a painting.

How crazy was that for a stickler for everyone else here, you had this woman bringing bones from New Mexico.

No one was doing that.

So that reflect again, O'Keeffe.

Resilience.

I want to be me.

I want to be me.

I want to do something that I'm feel connected to.

The same way with Frida.

Frida, say, I don█t paint dreams I paint my own reality.

And that's why Frida reflects her emotional, especially selfies.

Is her emotional turmoil physical challenges.

For me, Frida is the first selfie.

Before iPhones were created, freedom was already doing selfies, describing in a way that was very transparent what she was.

And often we are not capable of doing our self and this area If we want to look idealistic where Frida, she was there, this is who I am.

I just have a miscarriage and I cannot fake it.

I want to paint it.

And that's why sometimes it's hard to understand Frida's compositions and will give compositions because we don't know them enough to understand them, so we sexualize them.

We are scared of them, like so many students tell.

Oh, how do you like that painting?

It's so miserable because I'm not looking at the painting.

I'm looking at the character they created.

Character.

>> Narrator: Against all odds.

>> Katzin: The first thing that I'd say about Keith Haring is if you don't know him by name, you've probably seen his imagery somewhere or other.

It's on T-shirts and shoes and posters and all sorts of things.

One thing that people might not know about Haring is that before his career really took off, which was right around 1980, he was actually doing abstract art, video performance, a whole variety of things that aren't necessarily what people know him for.

And he put all of that into primarily painting and drawing, and he would do painting and drawing almost as if it were a performance.

So to combine his interest in performance and then his desire to shift into really accessible works with simple human figures that people could understand, he brought all of that together, really.

One day when inspiration struck, he was down in the New York subway station.

He saw that when an advertisement was out of date, it had been covered over with black paper, and he realized that that was just an empty canvas available for him to use.

And so he went, bought a simple piece of chalk, and did a drawing on that unused advertising space.

And that was so exciting to him because he could do it in front of people.

And he started doing it more and more and doing it at rush hour on purpose.

And between 1980 and 1985, he made thousands of those drawings.

And that's really what caused his career to take off, because people started to see them all the time and get used to seeing them.

And he became part of the fabric of New York City.

We do have some earlier works in the show where you can see that his lines are just a little bit more angular, a little bit more broken up.

They're not quite as sort of organic and flowing as they become later on.

So over the course of just doing all those many drawings and always being incredibly prolific, he very quickly got better and better and really sharpened his skills.

We have a variety of other artists represented in the show.

One gallery really puts herring in a space with his close friends and contemporaries.

There are a number of artists like Jenny Holzer and John Ahearn, who were going out onto the streets of New York in different ways, and then he also drew inspiration from other artists from earlier generations like Andy Warhol.

We have an Andy Warhol Elvis image in our own collection.

We made it part of this exhibition because it's such a perfect fit.

Warhol's ability to take pop culture images and blend them into fine art is something that Haring really enjoyed.

He saw Warhol's art during a high school trip to Washington, D.C., and it stuck with him, and I'm sure that he was really excited by the mid 80s when he got to meet Warhol and become friends with him.

And then finally, Jean-Michel Basquiat is another artist who I think many people are familiar with.

His art is just wonderfully dense, creative with materials, creative with symbolism and imagery.

We have a wonderful work of his from the Rebel Museum on view as part of this show.

He's another artist who was drawing from his own black American, Haitian, Puerto Rican identity, from hip hop, from graffiti, all sorts of different things, and just blending them together into something that looks really intentional and really fully finished.

I think Haring really like to bring that similar sort of a blend to his work, and he described Basquiat as his favorite painter, and I think that's really a big part of why.

So in order to reach the broadest possible audience, herring was very keen to sell merchandise with his imagery on it.

So T-shirts, posters, buttons, stickers, all manner of things.

It became particularly important to him when his art started to sell for really high prices that wouldn't be accessible to regular folks, and he wanted to make sure they could still have some connection to him.

He was really more comfortable with merchandizing than he was to selling to art collectors who had a lot of money.

And so to really take that forward, in 1986, he opened up a store that he called the Pop Shop in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.

And it was in and of itself, something of an art installation.

He painted every surface from floor to ceiling, all over the walls.

And then on top of that, he pinned up a variety of shirts and posters and all of the merchandise that he had for sale.

So it was, I think, a really important part of of his art.

It's not just a matter of making money through selling some t shirts, but it was really a way for him to make his art accessible and to reach as many people as possible.

He really calibrated his art differently for different contexts.

So when he was working in the New York subway, he really tried to keep things light because he knew that all sorts of audiences were going to see what he was doing.

They might not have chosen to come to see it like they would with a museum or a gallery.

But then when he started to work in art galleries and to make works that were for museums or for fine art collectors, he really was much more able and willing to bring out his social position, his political ideas.

He really highlighted his gay identity very prominently in his work, which was really important to him.

During the 1980s, during the height of the Aids crisis.

He was out and proud and an activist really through a lot of his work.

I'm glad that we have a couple of works in the show that represent that.

I hope you can see behind me his series of 20 drawings titled Against All Odds.

This is the piece that inspired the title of our exhibition.

It's also one of Herring's very last works.

He did the drawings in 1989.

In 1990, he did an introductory text for it when it was published as a book, The Series of Drawings.

And then he died of Aids related complications in early 1990s.

So this was really completed just a couple of weeks before the end of his life.

And in that context, it's particularly, I think, striking that the series delves into economic exploitation, violence and especially threats to the environment, all things that Haring touched on throughout his career and even in this moment where he was facing the end of his life and he knew that he was, he ends it with an optimistic message of continuing to fight for the future of humanity against all odds.

>> Narrator: Mystery and wonder.

>> Cunningham: My focus on my photography is finding beauty in places where you wouldn█t expect to see it in.

My favorite type of room to explore in abandoned buildings would be the boiler room.

I'm fascinated by these big machines or these big like pieces of equipment.

We all register things differently through our eyes, and for me, I want people to be able to look at my scenes and still see beauty in it.

like an old staircase with peeling paint and, you know, dust flying around.

There's something that looks like beauty to me when I see that kind of scene.

And for me, that always has this sense of like a wonder mystery.

I hope that people can see what I see.

The staircase theme.

For me, that seems like there is hope.

Just light the top of the top of the staircase.

You see your bottom is dark.

Something can be hopeful up there.

Something interesting up there.

Those kind of things draw me like open doors, open windows, lights in the froth distance that kind of draws me.

This is my nephew.

I photos of him a lot and he was younger, so he's about a year and a half old here.

He's now grown, married with two beautiful kids.

So it's interesting looking back on these photos.

So I started in art at an early age and I always wanted a camera.

And when I was 13, my friends welcome my first camera.

It was a small Vivitar 110 and I've just taken it everywhere and take photographs.

So this is a photo.

I took a 1995 of my father downtown when I was in high school.

I love taking my night photography.

My parents would take me out at night and drive around so I can take photographs.

I was taking pictures, actually, of the using yours building, and my dad was just leaning into the building, waiting for me to take my photo of the water and everything, and I thought, oh, it's a great full of dad, of great leaning there, great, great, great pose, I took a picture of my father and my favorite photographs that I've ever taken.

I was a shy kid.

I didn't talk much because I had a stutter.

And sometimes, you know, being able to photograph things.

And that kind of helped me kind of explain, you know, how I was feeling or how my thoughts are.

One of my undergraduate degrees is in photography.

During that time in college, started thinking about how my photography is being viewed and what was I actually trying to say, communicate to people.

So it made me think about just not as my only just, oh, I'm photographing this, this, this.

Maybe I should think about what I'm doing and why I kind of look more inward to myself.

So I keep going back to the Gary, Indiana.

Initially it was because it was easy access.

the city has a small tax base than most cities.

And Milwaukee, when a building closes down, is boarded up, and police patrol around to make sure no one goes in to damage it.

And Gary, when a building closes down or the owners move away and they'll take care of it, you know, it doesn't get pour it up.

It just kind of starts to decay on its own.

It's like this, this weird husk just dying on a vine, almost.

And I started getting really interested in those buildings because I kind of thought, well, the beauty is still there is just hidden underneath that.

decay, I need just a spray paint hidden behind and broken windows or broken glass.

One of my favorite buildings in Gary was called Memorial Auditorium.

It was a building where they would have concerts and plays, you know, I think, Frank Sinatra performed there.

I think they mentioned MLK may have spoken there as well.

When I was in Gary in 2020, one of my first trips, I saw that the building was being torn down.

They were in process of tearing down, so one wall was already down.

I figured, let me just go inside and take a look.

And I walk inside and there's this pink piano just sitting in a lobby area.

I entered that photograph in a contest that they Barnett Gallery was having just for local photographers, and it was accepted into the finalis And there's a contest where people will come in and vote for their favorite photograph.

So actually won second place, which I was very happy about.

In a world where everything is so superficial and everything is very TikTok or social media focus.

This may seem corny, but go outside, look around there things that you may not notice there Right in front of you.

>> Narrator: The award winning Arts and Culture series Colores is now available on the PBS app, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and at NMPBS.org From classic episodes to brand new shows, Colores is everywhere Watch now on your favorite NMPBS platforms Funding for Colores was provided in part by New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund and the and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, McCune Charitable Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.