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.

Director of the Albuquerque Museum, Andrew Connors, shares his excitement about the Museum’s latest acquisition -a 1952 abstract painting by Richard Diebenkorn, a renowned 20th-century artist inspired by New Mexico’s landscape.

[Music] Each episode a postcard from New Mexico to the rest of the World, creator Ken Peterson takes us behind the scenes and shares highlights for the Bands of Enchantment TV Series.

It's all ahead on COLORES!

REIMAGINE THE WORLD >>Faith: So, it's really exciting to hear that the Albuquerque Museum has acquired a Richard Diebenkorn painting.

Can you tell us a little bit about who Richard Diebenkorn was and why his work is so important to modern art?

>>Andrew: Richard Diebenkorn is one of these artists that really transcends any particular period.

He was probably one of the most important 20th-century painters, and he's particularly important for us here in New Mexico because he decided to come to the University of New Mexico to receive his MFA.

So, in 1950, he packed up his family from California and they drove to Albuquerque and he lived here for two years.

And really it allowed him that time and the freedom and the independence to create in a way that he had never really been able to do.

He was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts and he had other obligations previous to that, but when he came to Albuquerque, he really found the time and the space and the independence to be the artist that he would soon become.

And he had always been interested in New Mexico.

So, it was much more the environment that I think inspired him than anything else.

He did do a series of drawings.

He lived in a farm in Old Town, which is now called Old Town Farms, and Bike in Coffee.

That's where- how he lived for almost two years.

And his kids played in the Acequias and they were very much engaged in the wildlife of the farm and the animals and the dirt and the mud.

And so, he did a lot of drawings of animals.

So, he was responding to the natural world and the environment that he found here in New Mexico, but it wasn't really the cultural world that he thought would be one of the major influences.

>>Faith: And how did the environment influence the painting that was acquired by the Albuquerque Museum?

>>Andrew: The earlier paintings that he did in Albuquerque were very much based on sort of small marks and glyphs and hard black lines that then would be covered over with washes.

Shortly after he opened his MFA show in the spring of '51, he also was flown to California to participate in an exhibition in the Bay Area and flying in a propeller plane over the Western landscape fairly low because they couldn't fly as high as jets.

He saw the world in a very different way.

And that influenced his paintings starting in the '52 as basically more fields of dense rich color rather than small mark making.

There we’re sort of fields of color within very ambiguous marks over those fields of color.

And so, I think when you look at some of these paintings, including the painting called "Untitled Albuquerque" that the Albuquerque Museum just purchased, you do see the possibility for landscape.

And if you want to, you can make all of those marks and those fields of color into specific landscapes, if you want to.

But I don't think that that's exactly what Diebenkorn was interested in.

He was not interested in literal depictions of the land seen from the air, but it very much influenced the way that he allocated space in his paintings and would alternate between large expanses of solid color and then small refined marks, and then another large expanse of color.

So, it's the way that we could sort of move across the landscape and look at it from above in a very detached way as pure abstraction, as something that's not about literal depiction.

It's about literal expression and how he can express the feelings of the land and the openness in color and line and mark making.

>>Faith: So, what does it mean for the Albuquerque Museum to acquire this painting?

>>Andrew: At the Albuquerque Museum, we really want to make sure that our community has the best possible opportunities to see the greatest stories of history, to see the greatest works of art that's possible.

So many people in our community don't have the wherewithal to travel across the nation to see the great masterworks or to travel internationally to see those great works.

So, we hope at the Albuquerque Museum that we can bring the best to Albuquerque so that our local community can celebrate that.

And the fact that we didn't have a Richard Diebenkorn painting in the collection really meant that we couldn't talk about this amazing dynamism of our local community in the mid part of the 20th century.

So, having a Richard Diebenkorn painting now allows us to say, "Look, there's so much out there!"

There was so much great that has been done in Albuquerque.

Let's celebrate the past and let's look forward to a future where our community can continue to contribute cutting-edge, the best possible ideas to the United States and to the world.

>>Faith: Why do you think this painting remains relevant today?

>>Andrew: One of the great things about masterworks of art is that they transcend time.

And in abstraction in particular, you don't have to know particularly about Richard Diebenkorn in 1952 to get something from that work.

What we need to do with abstraction is loosen up, sort of shake off our expectations in the way that we look at work and not expect a work of art to tell us a story, but to allow us to find our own story within it.

And abstraction allows us, or basically forces us to participate in a dialogue.

We can't simply be passive when looking at an abstract work of art.

We need to engage with it.

So, it becomes this question and answer, "What does this painting make me feel?

What do I see in it?"

And the more we ask those questions of the painting and ask those questions of ourselves, the more we're going to understand not just that painting, but we'll also understand ourselves.

It's that slow understanding that allows us these powerful moments of interaction with masterworks.

And if we're not willing to sort of be shaken out of our comfort zone, we're not going to get much out of a work like this.

I don't know if you remember as a child looking up at the clouds and finding all kinds of things in the clouds.

Well, unfortunately, as we age, that's taught out of us because we're taught that there's a right answer and a wrong answer, as opposed to there's your imagination that can take you much further than a right answer or a wrong answer can.

And if we as adults can get back to that youthful appreciation of finding meaning in something that we don't initially understand or we're not told about, that's the magic of abstract painting.

And that's the magic of art appreciation.

Artists take us places we didn't know we needed to go.

And if we're willing to go on that journey, a painting like this, Richard Diebenkorn work can take us miles away and take us worlds away from our daily existence to a place that we all need to go, and we just don't go too often.

BANDS OF ENCHANTMENT [Music] [Music] Instrumental >>Rare Americans: [Bell Ringing] here we go Yee haaa, whop, whop [Music] >>Rare Americans: You’re not gonna push me around.

You can’t get me down, down, down, down.

DOWN!

>>Oliver Wood: [Music] [Nats] all right here we go >>Paco Versailles: [Music] when I wake up in your arms, I know that love is alive.

When I wake up in your arms, when I wake up in your arms.

When I wake up in your arms, I know >>Faith: Ken, thank you for being here with me on Colores today to talk about Bands of Enchantment.

So, what inspired the idea for this show?

>>Ken Peterson: My brother and I and our family, we wanted to make a show that championed the New Mexico and Albuquerque, that we know and love.

And, my brother and I wanted an excuse to get back to spend time with our family and friends.

We graduated, many birthday candles ago in the entertainment industry, and went abroad to find work.

And we wanted to come back and make something special.

[Music] >>Faith Perez: Why New Mexico?

>>Ken Peterson: I was born in Detroit and I came out to New Mexico and had a transformative experience, and was introduced to the arts, the music-- I got my first guitar.

It was given to me by, like, a friend.

That's why we give guitars away at Bands of Enchantment.

[Music] >>Ken Peterson: It's a cultural epicenter.

It's, you know, you got all these different communities and cultures and ethnicities.

And it's this melting pot and it's beautiful.

[Music] >>Ken Peterson: So then, I was like, "What if we made a show that championed that and shot it cinematically?"

‘Cuz our backgrounds are in filmmaking.

[Music] >>Ken Peterson: And, yeah.

I guess through that is, that's how it came about.

>>Faith: Yeah, and you've talked about it being like a postcard of New Mexico to the world.

Can you tell me a little bit about how the show embodies that idea?

>>Ken Peterson: Yeah, so the backdrop is New Mexico.

So, and that comes through in the set design.

But we also take the bands to another location.

>>Ken: This is amazing.

This is amazing.

>>Ken: So, in season 3, we took BJ, The Chicago Kid, up the Sandia Tram, and we filmed his acoustic session going up the Sandias on the tram.

>>BJ the Chicago Kid: Is it all right if I sing a little bit for y'all today?

>>Audience: Yes sir!

Yes, please.

>>BJ the Chicago Kid: That's what's up.

[acoustic guitar strumming] >>BJ The Chicago Kid: He’s on that mountain, yeah, and problems don't last forever.

But if we, yeah, just hold on, I know that we’ll, we'll be alright.

Ahhhh!

[Laughing] Finally looked behind me like, “Ahhhh" [Laughing] >>Ken: When they come to New Mexico, we want them to have the New Mexican experience.

So, like, Girl Ultra came from Mexico City.

She had never been, and we took her to the National Hispanic Cultural Center and filmed there.

>>Ken: They're going to take that back.

They're going to share that story.

Off-handedly, you'll always have something, just like my experience, you'll have something kind to share.

[Music] [Singing in Spanish] >>Ken: You know, we bring enchiladas red or green on set.

And like, I just I want all those experiences that I had, and changed my life, to come through and-- for each, everyone's experience, is unique and special, and not just like, “Get on set!” >>Faith: Yeah, right.

[laughing] And the locations are really important too, to this, right?

>>Ken: Yeah.

That's kind of part of the postcard to the world is like, in in a season, you'll get to go to all these places.

I think it adds this, like, fabric to the episode, of you know, weaving in all of the origin story for the artist.

[Music] >>Ken: There's now 30 episodes out there.

So, there's quite a few.

We do 12 bands a season, and we're now doing season 4, so we're adding more to that mix.

Season 1, we had the Levi Platero Band from the Navajo Nation, which was incredible.

>> Levi Platero: And I will bring you back to a place where we started again.

>>Ken: And Levi just kills it.

If you've ever listened to Levi-- amazing on guitar.

[acoustic guitar strumming] >>Ken: It's paired with Sarah Marie Rory from Santa Fe, which is just beautiful.

>> Sarah Marie Rory: The feeling’s great and it touches so honest it never arrives.

I'll see you soon or never, just later not now.

Goodbye is not too much, I'll try not to pride myself on it.

Letting you fade it’s a little but baby I’ll not look back.

>>Ken: Then we had a bunch of other New Mexico bands but one being, we had Max Gomez from Taos, New Mexico, who's gone on to open for Jeff Beck and George Thorogood.

He's extremely talented and an incredible musician.

I could go on forever!

I will stop here.

Just go and watch them-- each episode is unique and amazing, and super-talented artists and bands.

>>Faith: How do you go about selecting the bands and artists?

>>Ken: Deep diving.

It's, it's watching like, ‘cuz someone could have amazing, you know, numbers on a platform, but I like really like checking out that live performance, because it's for television too.

So, it's finding different parts of the country, of the world.

For example, having somebody from Columbus, Ohio, like Lydia Loveless, incredible episode.

Weaving in people from all over because that community will tune in for that artist they know, but they'll stay for artists, and get introduced to new artists that they haven't.

And, then the fun part is it's a lot of listening to music, which is my favorite, favorite pastime.

>>Lilly Hiatt: wings of this city, so small and pretty, you couldn't pump it up with some kind of drug.

Her arms are open, wild eyed and hoping somebody could give her that kind of love.

>>Faith: So, how has the show evolved since it’s inception?

>>Ken: Change and location physically.

We were in Tucumcari for the first season.

We were at, their-- railyards.

We couldn't have audiences.

So, season 2, we have audiences.

We always wanted audiences.

We couldn't, ‘cuz, you know, it was a pandemic.

So that's changed.

>>The Stone Foxes: here's the deal, put your feet to the ground.

Make this shake.

Just like that.

Just like that.

[Music] DJ: Yeah hey, hey!

[repeat] Audience: Hey, hey!

[repeat] [Harmonica solo] [audience clapping] Smoke is rising from the coal, feed the fire in burning soil, don’t need my eyes to see it's wrong, everything I know will soon be gone.

Whoa-o-o-oh, [repeat] [Ukulele Strumming] >>Faith: So, what has been your proudest moment as a producer on Bands of Enchantment?

>>Ken: We're 90 percent crew New Mexico.

So, New Mexicans.

We have over 20 this season, paid, advanced job internships.

We get to work with CNM, UNM, high schools around Albuquerque.

And we get to provide those opportunities.

And that to me is super exciting.

>>Faith: So, what do you hope the long-term legacy of the show will be?

>>Ken: Well, we're trying to make 40-plus seasons.

An Austin City Limits for New Mexico.

>>Uncle Lucius: The devil's in the detail shop, waiting on his old rag-top Wondering where the hell have all the real souls gone.

It's been so long since the reaping’s worth a damn.

>>Ken: We just want to keep adding on and making more opportunities and more ways for people to feel a part of this.

>>Lydia Loveless: Out on love.

out on love, out on love, out on love, out on love, out on love, >>Faith: So, what can viewers look forward to in the upcoming fourth season?

>>Ken: You'll have, Cimafunk, an Afro-Cuban funk band that is incredible.

you'll have Uncle Lucius.

[Music] >>: Additionally, we'll be going to some really exciting locations, and showcasing more awesome places in Albuquerque.

And, continuing the postcard of Albuquerque to the world with this show.

[Instrumental] >>Flor De Toloache: [Singing in Spanish] [Audience applause] 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.