[lighthearted music]
- Well, I like painting. I like doing clay.
I like all of my artwork.
- This is one of my square drawings that I've done.
- This is a drawing right here.
It makes you feel good.
And I show my inspiration.
- My name is Jackie,
and I'm gonna take you on a tour.
Mm-hmm.
I show you, there's a ceramics class.
This is the wood crafts right here.
And they're sewing right here.
What you sewing, D'Lisa?
- My magic rope.
[Jackie] Oh, okay, okay.
Her magic rope. Okay.
And that's a teacher right here.
How you doing?
- Art's a great equalizer
that transcends language,
that transcends culture, that transcends disability.
[Tom Di Maria] Creative Growth is about artistic expression
as a form of self-empowerment,
as a form of aesthetic development,
as a form of saying, "This is who I am in the world."
[ambient music]
[Monica] Blue is cold and yellow's warm.
[Matt] How do you know when you're reaching in there
what--what you're getting out?
[Monica] I can tell by the feel.
[Matt] The feel?
[Monica] Yeah, the compartments, you know?
[Matt] So what does the--the feel of green, what is that like?
[Monica] Green feels like freezing. Red is hot.
[Matt] So you're working with freezing and hot right now?
[Monica] Yes.
[Catherine] Monica has been fascinated with color
ever since she was really a wee, a wee child.
And I think losing her sight
opened up a different connection
to the world of light and shadow and color.
[Matt] Do you have a favorite foam shape to work on?
[Monica] I like--I like the logs.
The cubes.
- Mm-hmm.
The little tiny cubes and the spheres.
[Matt] Logs, tiny cubes, and spheres.
[Monica] And the cakes too.
[Matt] Yeah, the cakes turned out great.
[Monica] Yep.
[Catherine] I see her becoming more and more dedicated to her art
and it seems to fulfill her in deeper and deeper ways,
and for that I feel so happy, you know,
because she has so much to offer the world.
[Rosena] Yes, um, my name is Rosena Finister.
[crowd] Whoo, whoo!
[cheers and applause]
I'm from small town in Louisiana where
where all the poor people live at.
That's where I'm from.
This is the first type of art that I started doing.
[Tom] Creative Growth currently serves 162 artists in our studio every week.
When people come to the Creative Growth studio,
for the most part they've never made art before in their lives,
and we kind of welcome that
because it allows us to see who they are.
And we you know, there's no right or wrong.
We don't teach in a traditional way.
We say, you know, "What would you like to do?"
"What are you thinking about? What did you dream about?"
"What color do you like? Tell us your story."
[calm jazz music]
[William Scott] I've been coming here since 1992.
♪ ♪
I like to paint. I like to draw.
I like painting some people, like, different people.
And stars.
Movie stars.
♪ ♪
There are wholesome people.
Wholesome encounters.
♪ ♪
[Tom] What do you like to look at? [William] I like that one.
- This one? - Yeah.
- Look at that one, what this one is.
- Yeah. - This is what? What would you call this?
- The name of this painting. - "The Black Inner Limits."
[Tom] William is just such a brilliant artist.
- And look at this beautiful piece.
- You remember making this? - I remember.
- That's what? "Praise Frisco"? - "Praise Frisco," yeah.
[Tom] He envisions through his work a utopian reality
that he creates for us all to live in.
A world where people who have died have come back to life.
Places where bad neighborhoods are safe.
Where his family is happy. Where the world is peaceful.
♪ ♪
And he believes that the painting
will be colorful enough to make that a reality.
♪ ♪
[William] Riding on a spaceship.
Wholesome encounters spaceship.
It's not gonna be no more evils,
no more aliens, no more monsters,
no more evils.
Uh huh...
[Tom] Creative Growth is really a Bay Area story.
[lighthearted music]
[overlapping chatter]
The disability rights movement in the early 1970's,
Creative Growth really comes from that.
- How--how big the drawing's gonna be, the pictures?
♪ ♪
[Tom] So during that time, people with disabilities
in institutions were suddenly deinstitutionalized.
So artists came together in Oakland
and put paint on a table and said,
"Well these people are going to come here."
"Creativity is a path forward."
♪ ♪
[laughter]
- Pencil for Colleen.
- I'm just doing a tree right now.
[Tom] And people with disabilities can communicate
and be a vital part of society.
[laughter]
♪ ♪
Part of the Creative Growth plan when you come here
and make art is that we represent you
and you show your work in the gallery,
and if the work sells, the artist gets half the money.
and Creative Growth, the non-profit, gets half the money.
We buy supplies and support the artists with that money.
If you came to Creative Growth,
you could buy something for $10
and you could buy something for $75,000.
It's exactly like the contemporary art world.
As an artist's work develops
and it gets into collections and museums,
and is highly sought after, the prices go up.
And Creative Growth artists follow that same path.
Judith Scott is one of the most well-known
Creative Growth artists.
[stirring music]
As an artist, Judith Scott transcended this difficult situation,
where she was separated from her family and institutionalized for almost 40 years
♪ ♪
She was deaf and it wasn't known,
so she never developed language and she was isolated.
So in her 40s she comes to Creative Growth.
And her method her method to talk to us
was art.
♪ ♪
The process was very important to her,
and the result of that process
were these sculptures with hidden objects,
and accumulated, protected things that were
sacred or important to her.
I think Judith Scott's role in contemporary art
is that she's opened the door for a lot of people
to see who an artist can be.
[humming]
[ambient music]
[Dan Miller] Light the bulbs 'round, bring the wrong map, right?
- Right. [Dan] Pull it gently.
♪ ♪
[Tom] You know, Dan's work is based on words.
He builds literally words on top of each other
to form his communication with the world.
[David] Want me to pull it down? [Dan] Yeah.
[humming]
[Dan] Pull it gently, right? [David] Right.
[Dan] Book about kitten, electric. Go together, right?
[David] Right.
[Cara Miller] We still don't know a lot about autism,
but there's this big barrier there.
There's this person behind this barrier,
and he can't communicate
in a way that you and I can communicate with each other.
And to put himself down on this paper,
that's Danny's opportunity to talk to people.
♪ ♪
[Tom] Dan's work has definitely progressed
in the years he's been here.
Dan became more and more interested
in the graphic qualities of the letters,
of how to use paint, how to use the brush,
how to work on massive pieces of paper.
♪ ♪
He's very sophisticated, and he's a colorist.
He's clear about what he wants to do.
♪ ♪
You know, and I think when you see that urgency in his work,
it's because it's so important to him,
and because it's so important for us
to know who he is,
that he has thoughts like we do,
that he's smart, that he's not to be dismissed.
[rousing music]
Dan Miller is in the Venice Biennial this year,
which is this amazing achievement
for him as an artist.
It happens to be in the same room
of the Venice Biennial as Judith Scott.
So here are these two colleagues,
their work looking right at each other,
in a pavilion of contemporary artists
who are using color in a powerful way.
♪ ♪
Not a pavilion of disability,
not a pavilion of the self-taught,
not a pavilion of the freak show.
It's presented as an artist making a statement
about the world today and that's what they both did.
They both have, like every artist,
a history that informs who they are in the world today.
♪ ♪
We shouldn't need to exist.
Dan should have gotten this in school.
Or William should have had this opportunity his whole life.
It shouldn't be that Creative Growth has to be here for those people.
I'm thrilled that we're here,
and we love our artists, but they should have access
to creative outlets.
It's a human rights issue, to be diminished somehow,
to be seen as not creative.
When those prejudices go away,
then our artists have the same potential to lead the culture,
to be a part of our world,
to inform me of who I am as a person.
- Look at all these people,
who--they're all coming back to new lives?
- Yeah, their families.
- And what kind of lives are they going to have now?
- They're gonna have good lives.
- Uh-huh. - Gonna have good lives.
- Uh-huh.
♪ ♪
To learn more about Art21 and our educational resources please visit us
online at pbs.org/art21.
[ambient music]
Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 9 is available on DVD
To order visit shop.pbs.org or call 1-800 PLAY PBS
This program is also available for download on iTunes
♪ ♪