>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen, coming up on Open Studio-- we walk the runway looking at the fashion of Patrick Kelly.

(chuckling): What's, what's happening here?

>> (chuckling): What's happening here is the freedom of the '80s to wear a t-shirt, and tights, and pumps, and it be a complete ensemble.

Just sunglasses, Mona Lisa earrings, good to go.

>> BOWEN: Plus the outdoor art show not everyone can see.

We venture into the realm of Augmented Reality.

>> I mean you're looking through something through your phone.

It isn't a real object although it feels real because you can walk close to it.

You can walk around it.

>> BOWEN: All that, plus our round-up of what to see in Arts This Week.

It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: We're in Salem, Massachusetts at the Peabody Essex Museum and we're about to take a walk on the Runway of Love, this is a fashion show celebrating the late designer Patrick Kelly.

He was born in Mississippi and hit it big in New York and Paris.

Theo Tyson, it's great to see you.

Thank you for meeting us here.

>> Thank you for having me, Jared.

Good to see you.

>> BOWEN: So tell us, who is Patrick Kelly?

♪ ♪ >> Patrick Kelly is and was a visionary.

A visionary with his ambitions for self as a fashion designer.

Born at the height of Jim Crow in Vicksburg, Mississippi, made his way to Atlanta.

But most importantly and what we see in the exhibition is that trip that he took to Paris, where he became an expat, and never looked back.

>> BOWEN: And a fashion star.

>> And a fashion star and still a rising star.

>> BOWEN: Well, let's meet Patrick Kelly in his own clothing.

>> We wanted to make sure people met the originator of some of those design inspirations and influences, which were his matriarchal muses-- his mother, his grandmother-- and so many other Black women in the community.

>> BOWEN: He grew up watching what they did and loved it.

>> Absolutely.

And he comments often on, you know, Yves Saint Laurent has nothing on, you know, the front row of a church in the South on Sunday.

>> BOWEN: Because it was filled with high style.

>> Absolutely filled with high style-- and the hats.

You'll see so many hats and accessories in the exhibition.

So you see those influences of his upbringing in the South.

And I mentioned that no, maybe he never came back, but it never left him.

And we see these beautiful overalls that people look at as something that is sort of domestic workwear, if you will.

And it does harken back to, you know, ideas about working in fields, and slavery, and that upbringing in Jim Crow South.

But it's also a sense of authenticity, and this reclamation of self, and this unabashed, unashamed, unapologetic presence that he had as a Black man from the South.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: You love this particular... >> Like who does a turtleneck bodysuit in black and red with a tulle train for bridal with the candy box hat, right?

And then it's kind of everything-- the bows, the roses, the sweetheart neckline.

And it's also the epitome of the '80s.

(Theo laughing) >> BOWEN (chuckling): What's, what's happening here?

>> What's happening here is the freedom of the '80s to wear a t-shirt, and tights, and pumps and it be a complete ensemble.

(Jared laughs) Just sunglasses, Mona Lisa earrings, good to go.

(Jared laughing) But, I mean, it's a nice way to kind of get to know Patrick Kelly, too.

>> Bowen: And a unicorn hor-- horn.

>> And a unicorn horn.

Everyone needs a unicorn.

>> BOWEN: That's not easy to say-- unicorn horn.

>> Unicorn horn, it's not, but we did well.

(both laughing) >> BOWEN: You did.

I did not.

♪ ♪ He worked 24/7, from what I understand.

>> Absolutely.

>> BOWEN: Would what do you make of that work ethic?

>> I mean, he comes from the South.

You know, that that's a sentiment that you think about.

You, you work hard and you're rewarded.

And he was... he was well aware of all of the potential challenges that laid ahead of him.

>> BOWEN: Here we see Patrick Kelly.

>> Yes.

>> BOWEN: And here's this giant... Before we talk about the clothes more, there's this giant smile.

>> Yes.

>> BOWEN: We see the joy in all of his clothes.

>> Of course.

>> BOWEN: It's just synonymous with the man, with the creation, the art.

>> It is.

It is.

Anyone that encountered Patrick talked about the joy that he imparted on his work and wanting to make sure that people felt loved.

He talks about his mom was like, "No one's going to pay attention to Black women."

He's like, "I'm going to, and I'm going to make sure they feel loved."

>> BOWEN: Where did teddy bears and buttons come into his work?

>> Hm... We have to talk about the buttons first.

He brought that to his original designs and thinking about the way that his mother and his grandmother took these collections of buttons, these jars of buttons that they would have.

And it's like, maybe they don't match, but we can fashion the identity that you want to present.

And you see that in a lot of the accessories.

You think about the teddy bears, those things that, that offer a sense of, of warmth.

There's a sense of domesticity and interiority.

Patrick's inviting you into his personhood as a human being and then as a designer.

And then, again, a lot of this exuberance that we see is that Black queer joy.

And we see it taking the shape in certain forms of resistance as well, and kind of pushing down certain stereotypes and tropes, too.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Theo, here we arrive at the end of the show with this really striking dress.

How did you land on this being the lasting image?

>> I mean, it is a lasting image, right?

And it's something that it is a salute to heartstrings.

And it really acknowledges that this was a career that ended a bit too soon.

And we think about H.I.V.

and AIDS in the '80s and we think about kind of the whole cusp of the conversation we've been having with this exhibition, and this beautiful presentation of joy.

Even though there is a bit of an underlying current of pain, and you see it with this salute and this tribute with DIFFA based in Atlanta and fundraising for the H.I.V.

and AIDS crisis and epidemic.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: How old was he when he died?

>> He was 35.

>> BOWEN: How much do we see his clothing alive today out on the streets?

>> Oh... (laughing): If you take a spin through the, the exhibition and you see the evolution of creativity, and expression, and access as well.

We were talking about the buttons earlier and Patrick Kelly taking exactly what he had at his fingertips and fashioning that into what we could obviously call an empirical legacy in fashion.

You know, we look at Jeremy Scott, Virgil Abloh, Kerby Jean-Raymond, we look at all of these people that have engaged with his inspiration and going back to to Josephine Baker, we see that every day now.

And again, we were talking a little bit about how it used to be something that was a discussion of elitism or class, if you will, to upcycle objects or clothing.

And now we see that as kind of, you know, la mode du jour with upcycling fashions.

And that's one of the truest expressions and Patrick Kelly managed to fashion that into, again, a historical yet contemporary design empire that we're... we see every day-- teddy bears, buttons, and beyond.

>> BOWEN: Thank you so much.

>> Thank you, Jared.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Today, we're going to meet artist Michael Lewy, the man who is putting the A-R, as in augmented reality, in public art.

All around me here is one of the largest public art exhibitions dotting Boston right now.

It oozes across water, hovers overhead, and it fills fields with grunting animals.

Can't see it?

We'll help you.

We're here in Boston's Franklin Park.

Michael Lewy, you're the artist and curator behind this public art exhibition.

But first, how do we find it, how do we see it?

>> So, basically, the way you see it is through your iPhone or Android phone.

And what you would do is you would go to the App Store or the Google Play Store and you would download the Hoverlay app.

And once you are in the area, it will show you where you're near content.

So there'll be a little map, where you open up the app, and it will show you actually where the content is, and you kind of walk towards it, and then reload it.

It's sort of like a little bit of a sort of a virtual scavenger hunt type thing.

> BOWEN: And you and a team of artists have created art that's all around us, but can only be seen through the phone.

>> Yes, it's augmented reality.

So basically what it does is it overlays an image that can be seen through the camera of the phone.

>> BOWEN: One of the things that I find so fascinating about this is this changes the whole nature of how one experiences art.

You can come out here on this beautiful day, and all you need is your phone, something most people have.

You're not paying admission fees.

You're not being intimidated about how you're supposed to look at art necessarily.

How much is this going into your thinking about creating this show?

>> I think it does change the nature of it.

I mean, you're looking through something through your phone.

It isn't a real object, although it feels real, because you can walk close to it, you can walk around it.

Some of them are 3D objects.

So they, they... some of them are flat.

They're video or they're images, but they're also 3D objects where you can walk around and peer into.

>> BOWEN: And as I see here, one of your monsters is standing just a few feet away from us.

What are we looking at?

So you're looking at one of the monsters from my piece called Beta 64.

And basically, it's a video shot against green screen, and you're able to sort of see it in the landscape.

And I've got a bunch of these.

I think they're two in Franklin Park and there are a lot more throughout the Emerald Necklace.

>> BOWEN: It's not all about monsters, though.

Other artists have brought a deal of mystery to their work.

Like Judy Haberl-- hi, Judy.

>> Hello, Jared.

>> BOWEN: So tell me about your piece in the augmented reality show.

>> Well, I was very interested in creating a mysterious, floating, unidentifiable orb that is actually created from egg whites in a pan, but somehow it's transitioned into the sky here, floating in the park.

>> BOWEN: You work in all manner of media, etching... all manner.

So what has it been like to transition into augmented reality?

>> It's exciting to have a new adventure, a foray into a new way of working.

And I was really looking forward to that.

So this is very exciting.

I think it may be the frontier of ways of looking at art.

>> BOWEN: And why do you say that?

>> Well, you know, right now I think most people go to a gallery or maybe to a sculpture park.

But the fact that they can use their phone, which is one of the most common things that people have, it really gives the public a much easier way to access art.

And I think that's really exciting.

And I think Michael has really come up with a wonderful venue for this.

>> BOWEN: I'm really struck at your ability to look.

So, as you just mentioned, you didn't do this in a studio, you did this in your kitchen, in a frying pan, and found art in an egg.

>> (laughing): That's right.

It's true.

I mean, I cook egg whites every morning in a cast iron pan, and, and... but it's always different.

It looks like the moon, or the sun, or something.

And I thought, you know, how would that be as a free-floating thing and not just tied or tethered to the frying pan?

And it, it made the transition really beautifully.

>> BOWEN: And it's got great texture.

That's something I always love about art is you can see the texture and... especially in paintings or whatnot, or etchings, you can see how the artist has worked.

Eggs, great for texture.

- "Eggs-actly".

(both laughing) >> BOWEN: Just as artist Judy Haberl finds art in a pan of eggs-- art in the everyday-- maybe one of the messages that this exhibit is sending us is that art is all around us, We just need to know how to look for it.

Alpha 60 is on view through September 30th.

It's curated by Michael Lewy, presented by Boston Cyberarts with help from Hoverlay.

♪ ♪ This is Arts This Week, your weekly download for arts and culture events in and around town.

The Armenian Museum of America invites us in for some California dreamin'.

♪ ♪ The exhibit is called "On the Edge," and comes from collectors Joan-- who is of Armenian descent-- and the late Jack Quinn.

Throughout their marriage, the couple made art a core of who they were.

They supported and befriended young up-and-coming artists who became very famous ones.

People like Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Works by those artists and more fill the gallery.

But the art also tells the story of how California artists adopted a maverick streak in the 1970s.

They broke out of what was the norm in the art hotbeds of New York and Europe.

Unlike artists in those places, the California artists played with light.

Fortunately, they had friends and collectors like the Quinns to fuel this innovation.

By the way, if you want to go behind the scenes, check out a sketch of Joan Quinn's jewelry-laden hands in the show.

The story goes Basquiat was drawing Quinn's hands while she was talking to Warhol, and just after she'd given some joints left at her home to the performer Divine.

How's that for California cool?

♪ ♪ "Fantasy and Truth" is how artist Jordan Nassar looks at Palestine, and it's also aptly the name of a new exhibition of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Nassar was born and raised American, but with a Palestinian father, he has struggled to reconcile his heritage.

Palestinian blood runs through him, and yet he feels like an American outsider in the Middle East.

So he answers that conflict one stitch at a time, creating massive landscapes by cross stitching, an embroidery tradition woven deeply into Palestinian culture.

The landscapes, he says, evoke both fantasy and truth.

And how the Palestinian diaspora might think of a Palestine they've been unable to visit.

Nassar doesn't do all of the cross stitching himself though.

The more traditional patterns in his panels are done by the women of an embroidery collective in the West Bank.

It's a process layered with meaning.

The American going home to his people.

A man performing a craft alongside women.

This is a practice, after all, typically only performed by women in the Middle East.

And its artistic exchange.

Maybe it's a new pattern for how we can all see the world.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ "Reveries" is the title of a show of paintings by artist Bill Shattuck at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Reveries are dreams, and at first, it seems like a curious title for a show of landscapes.

Because at first blush, they seem to be representations of the gorgeous southeastern Massachusetts coast.

After a few seconds of looking, though, you see they're actually really mystical places.

There are lush green trees, and ground cover, placid waters.

Peer further into the works, and you find an ethereal fog; the threshold into a more mystical realm.

Other of Shattuck's paintings deliver us into a velvety night.

Darkness can be foreboding, but his is magical, where spirits might carouse in the deepest night.

And still other landscapes feature that magical light that comes with sunset.

The kind that sets everything aglow as a final reward to a summer day best enjoyed.

Shattuck paints what he knows.

This is the land he has walked for decades.

But he doesn't paint in nature, doesn't work from photographs, he makes sketches, and then lets the memories marinate until he gets to work in the studio.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> ♪ Up to the stars she shows me ♪ ♪ Dame Street, George's Street, ♪ miles below me ♪ >> BOWEN: Sing Street, a new production of the Huntington Theater Company is a place where hope thrives.

Based on the 2016 independent film, the musical is set in Dublin 1982.

Times are tough and money is scarce.

17-year-old Conor watches as his parents struggle to make ends meet.

It also means he has to transfer schools.

But then he meets Raphina, a gorgeous girl.

To woo her, he wants to cast her in a music video, but that means he has to form a band to make a music video.

So enter hope.

Conor and his new bandmates launch into their own musical vibe.

It's the 1980s so think Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and The Cure.

The music they're writing and performing, they quickly find out, is lifting them out of their dire circumstances.

They realize there's a whole future ahead of them, and it's theirs for the taking.

Another element that really struck me is the way Tony-winning director Rebecca Taichman deftly guides us back to Conor's family and the tender bond he has with his two siblings.

They hold together when nothing else does.

Their relationship is filled with heart, it's real, and palpable.

Sing Street does sing for its storytelling, for a truly exceptional cast of young actors, and for its spirit.

The show, by the way, was supposed to open on Broadway until COVID interrupted those plans.

My guess is that it's still very much Broadway-bound, at least it should be, I think.

So this is your chance to watch this meaningful new musical take flight.

♪ ♪ Next, artist Juana Valdes uses imagery of the ocean, rivers, and seas to evoke the migration experience of her Cuban ancestors and to connect it to the turbulence of today's global refugee crisis ♪ ♪ >> When artists speak, they're simultaneously are using imagery, right?

We're translating everything we do in our minds visually.

It's an automatic.

We don't even think about it.

It became really clear to me that I needed to work with a moving image, right?

There's several sequences that take place underwater.

And there's just no... there was no other way of representing that.

I'm Juana Valdes, I was born in Cuba, and I came with my family to the United States in 1971 through the Freedom Flights.

The exhibition is "Rest Ashore."

The idea was always to do a video in which there would be no physical bodies in the video.

I wanted the viewer who walked into the space to feel like they were occupying that space, that sort of sensation that they were part of this experience.

♪ ♪ As a Cuban, I know what it means to migrate by sea, because we have been as a community experiencing this for the last 50 years.

And so I wanted to use that personal experience and that knowledge and that understanding, and I wanted to take that, and then open it up to the greater global crisis that is happening.

And especially that started to happen in 2015 in Europe because of the Syrian refugees.

When we think of migration right now, we imagine people in third-world countries coming to America, or even to Europe for escaping poverty, sometimes war, or famine.

But we are experiencing the pandemic right now that has made, like if you were in some cities, people have chosen to leave the city and go to the country.

So the whole idea, also partly with the video and not having an individual be represented in the video, wants to deal with that, and due to climate change, or due to some other situation, any one of us at any particular time right now, could or would be forced to migrate.

♪ ♪ When you first enter the space is you sort of dealing with the history of what you are about to encounter.

The very first thing you encounter is a wall of pallets.

So you really don't know what you're entering.

And in that way, it kind of gets a little bit menacing, and it was done intentionally because it was meant to give you the sensation that maybe you were entering the back of a shipyard, right?

And what it would be like if you were going to be taking this kind of risky journey.

Where you go from being a person to also being thought of as cargo and as a package, right?

In here, you're seeing the contemporary artwork.

The video takes you from one day in the life almost.

The journey begins and it takes you through the whole process of what would happen if maybe there was a capsize.

The video ends very slowly with a sort of small view that then enlarges itself over what seems like countless numbers of clothing that have washed up on the shore.

Then, slowly but surely, the video begins to expand, and move up, and you see the ocean again, and then the sun sets and you hear the motor almost very far in the distance.

And the journey begins again.

(waves crashing) ♪ ♪ >> At Locust Projects we're a place of yes for artists.

So we let artists really realize their wildest dreams, most ambitious ideas.

We're really unique in the Miami arts ecosystem in that way.

We commission artists to create these large-scale site-specific installations.

So you'll never see these exhibitions in another place.

Only here at Locust while they're on view.

They're typically immersive.

And we really give artists the opportunity to experiment in new media with new ideas.

In our 2020-'21 season we're focusing on Miami women artists and turning the space over to them.

So we've seen in this season Christina Pettersson, who was able to realize a project she had been wanting to do for more than ten years, which was to create a cemetery, to cover the floors with pine needles, and to fill the room with the sounds of the song called "In the Pines."

And actual tombstones that memorialized really important figures from South Florida's history, but also memorialized the creatures that have been lost due to development in the Pine Rocklands of the Everglades.

In the case of Juana Valdes, again, you're really seeing Locust Project's mission in motion.

This is the first time that Juana has had the opportunity to work in video.

And here she's doing it in massive, large scale.

♪ ♪ Artists, in order to have careers, have to have exhibitions.

And that's where Locust Projects comes in.

A lot of artists will have their very first exhibition at Locust, and more established artists will be able to do something they weren't able to do before.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, on the 100th anniversary of the discovery of his tomb, we go Beyond King Tut, into the new immersive exhibition.

Until then, I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can see us first on YouTube.com/GBHNEWS.

Remember to follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

One last note: every Friday Jim Braude and Margery Egan offer up live musical performances on Boston Public Radio.

So we leave you now with Gregory Groover Jr., Max Ridley, and Tyson Jackson.

They joined Jim and Margery last month to highlight the Mission Hill Arts Festival.

I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for watching.

>> I think it's a great way to really combine all the elements of our music, and what we believe, principally with Negro spirituals, right?

So these are songs that are messages of hope, messages of freedom, and are multi-layered, right?

When you combine all that and you fuse all that together, it really does create a powerful story that tells the story of our country and also of our people.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪