Artists have long taken to the outdoors to do their work. Now an
artist in residence program organized by the National Park Service
puts a new emphasis on that important synergy. Jeffrey Brown visited
the Everglades National Park in Florida to see how artists in residence
are creating and sharing their work in nature. It's part of our arts
and culture series canvas.
The sights and sounds of Florida's Everglades National Park of vast
wetlands preserve that first opened in 1947.
The wondrous birds like the great egret.
Insects, including the Lubber, grasshopper and, yes, alligators with
the water so high during our hot summer visit, none showed themselves.
Oh, here and just it's also home to something else. Art. Would you
come out here every day? Kind of looking for what? Yes. So really,
just looking for anything in the environment That really inspired
me. Looking more so hard, Fine. That's right. Not at all, You know,
And I think that's the beauty of being out here is that you're in
collaboration with nature.
Cornelius Tallest, spent a month here in January as part of a program
called artists and residents in Everglades or airy that's brought
more than 190 artists to the park since its creation in 2001.
He grew up in Miami just about an hour, but in some ways light years
away and had been to the park only for a school field trip.
Now we wanted to use his art, which includes painting, architecture
and photography to capture what he came to see as a hidden history
idea that even within this natural environment, there's people who
have lived through this space that there's history. And although
we may not see it now today in this kind of state of its ecology,
but that history still lies here.
Daily Moments in Everglades National Park today transformed through
color and lighting into scenes meant to suggest a lost presence,
especially a little known black presence of workers and settlements
in this area in the early part of the last century, and what can't
be shown from an earlier time the so called saltwater railroad version
of the underground railroad in which enslaved blacks fled south to
Florida through these marshes?
Two boats that would take them to freedom in the British held Bahamas,
whose father is Jamaican was himself learning of this for the first
time. That was something that was surprised me. How did I not learn
about this? You know, living in Florida being in the space is still
nearby and never hearing that my entire life. They were going to
the Caribbean
places where you also have connections. Yes, yes, Transatlantic route
backwards. I think that had a lot of power to me, especially as someone
who's half Jamaican. And you can only imagine, you know, we have
The boardwalks to walk through in different things.
What was this, like for slaves or people moving through this landscape
when you're in the pitch black dark. There's no like exact place
for you to walk or go through. So I think in my images, I also try
to evoke this sense of like what it would feel like to traverse through
this environment.
The American Wilderness has been a subject for artists since at least
the early 19th century Thomas Cole's paintings of the Hudson River
Valley Albert Bierstadt Valley of the Yosemite Thomas Maran's Grand
Canyon of the Yellowstone. These and other iconic images presented
the natural wonder of the land and in some cases helped lead to efforts
to preserve it through the creation of national parks, But they also
often left the indigenous and other inhabitants out of the picture.
Racing part of history.
Today, the National Park Service itself overseas artist residency
programs in parks all over the country, and many artists are finding
ways to widen the lens. The newest artist in residence at Everglades
is Maya Freelon, who refers to herself as a found object sculpture.
She lives in North Carolina and was making her first ever visit to
this part.
I love working in a natural environment one because the wind plays
with you, too.
I love how it dances in place. But I also love how people react to,
um, something seemingly so fragile something that my grandmother
taught me something so fragile is tissue paper, which she uses to
create her own version of a quilt made in collaboration with others
recently held a workshop at the park's visitor center it in half.
Want to have a cup begins with tearing up strips and wedding them,
letting the different colored papers blend into each other
things happening under there When they drive, the group comes together
to glue their individual pieces into what becomes a 20. Ft quilt
told me the stories about making something out of nothing and making
away
Out of no way free launch says she learned from her grandmother reworking
the African American quilt making tradition showed me
That the seam side
Is the one that's down, So you have one flat side. But I decided
as a sculptor and artist that
The same side out was much more interesting.
Delicate and beautiful.
Okay, gently lifted up. Her coming here was an opportunity to help
expand and diversify the residency program.
I love that their initiative to reach out and connect with African
American artists, um, to diversify what's happening here, but also
to help
Expand the knowledge of this area. This way. Tissue paper quilt sculpture
will the winds allowing hang in trees along long Pine Key Lake. For
his part, Cornelius Sulla now has a new role as the artists and residents
programs, head of culture and content.
Not only connecting the artists to the landscape, but connecting
the artists to the audience to other people to show them. You know
all these great amazing things that artists are doing in the park.
This story needs to be told. You know, artists are uncovering and
finding this information but helping them to convey that through
whether it's social media or video or documentation of this experience
that that they are getting in the park. Even like this, you know
these type of conversations to let people know that these are being
had
New ways of bringing together nature and history through art here
and at national parks around the country for the PBS news hour I'm
Jeffrey Brown in Florida's Everglades National Park.