>> JARED BOWEN: I’m Jared Bowen, coming up on Open Studio, for artist Lavaughan Jenkins, creative inspiration is literally the stuff of dreams.

>> I dream a lot about artists.

(chuckles) Most of them are dead, which is kind of weird.

>> BOWEN: Then, Philip Guston, whose work can be the stuff of dreams and nightmares.

Plus, we remember Harry Belafonte, the activist artist who pushed boundaries and broke barriers.

>> If you say anything that is challenging to the norm, you are punished.

Play the game or don't play at all.

>> BOWEN: It’s all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ First up, artist Lavaughan Jenkins found his calling twice.

Not ready for the pressures of early success, he retreated from the art world, only to be prodded in his dreams by legendary painters Goya and Philip Guston to get back to work.

Jenkins recently wrapped up an artist residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art, where his work is on view through July.

Lavaughan Jenkins, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Yeah, thanks for having me.

>> BOWEN: So you have just had this artist-in-residence program, residency, at the Addison Gallery of American Art.

I know how important that is for artists to just have the time, the space, the freedom to just be, to just create.

So what surfaced there for you?

>> Once I moved into that space, and to have what, like, you said that free time to just make art, the work instantly changed.

Paint got bigger and colors changed and the energy was a different energy.

>> BOWEN: Were you surprised at the end of it, what came out?

>> I couldn't believe the jump that had happened, which I guess I should be used to it-- I work in, like, bigger jumps and ideas of creating.

And there, whatever that energy was of that space took over.

>> BOWEN: Well, I'm wondering, so where does the energy come into play in some of the motifs or maybe even ideograms that we see, the fashion, shoes, Black women, it all comes together as we see in your, in your series of works.

>> Yeah, I mean, I'll say fashion, start... like fashion is my starting point for color and texture and my obsession with it.

But as opposed to the women... My, my family, it was like a big kickstarter for when I needed an idea, an object to paint.

I'm surrounded by a lot of amazing women, not just family, but the people I work with in galleries.

The majority of them are women, but also, I think, like, for the country, so many women have played such huge roles in getting this country to where it is, but also how it's moving forward.

And that's, that's enough inspiration, I think, to paint a lifetime.

>> BOWEN: I want to ask you about we see hooded figures in your work, very Philip Guston-like hooded figures, which, as we were reminded in the recent MFA retrospective, a show that's traveling the country right now, these were his processing what happened to him in life as a Jewish man with the Ku Klux Klan.

But I understand that you had a dream where Philip Guston spoke to you.

I mean, he's dead now, for people who don't know.

>> Sure.

>> BOWEN: So how... what's happening in that mind of yours?

>> So, well, I dream a lot about artists.

(chuckles) Most of them are dead, which is kind of weird.

But, um, but yeah, um, I had a little studio in my apartment.

And the dream set off that I had a knock at my door, and I open the door, and it's Philip Guston.

And he's sitting there, like, smoking a cigarette, and he's like, "I'm going to give you a crit."

And I'm like, "Sick!"

(laughs) Let's go, you know?

And he came in and we talked about my work.

Primarily then it was like all 2D work.

And, and I had thoughts of always trying to make 3D work, but not really sure how it would even go if I wanted to do ceramics or, you know, what materials I would use.

And long story short, he was like, "I know what you need to do."

And he's like, "You need to take these paintings on the wall, rip them off and put them into real space."

"So you're essentially going to make three-dimensional paintings."

And I was like, "What?"

Like, and he's like, "And you need to look at my work more "because we got a lot of similarities that you're not connecting to, so."

>> BOWEN: This is a very detailed dream.

>> Oh, I... soon as I woke up, I was like, writing everything down.

And I immediately went to the art store and I started buying building materials and trying to figure it out.

And I always said, like, jokingly, but seriously, if things work or don't work, I would just blame Philip Guston.

>> BOWEN: You've also had dreams of, of Goya, too.

You said you dream a lot about artists.

>> Yeah.

>> BOWEN: Do you think they're only dreams?

I know I'm being a little ethereal here.

>> I mean, I think that I look at... the artists that I love, I look at them a lot, and I think it's only a matter of time that they seep into my subconscious and come out into dreams.

But also, you know, when you're looking at this artwork, I mean, obviously they're dead.

These paintings have being made, these sculptures have been made.

And so it's, it's my opportunity and my job to figure out how to pull them forward.

Like, with me, because this is the-- the process of going to art school and studying art history is, like, you get all this information and now what do you do with it?

And I love that part of history.

So I want to bring it forward with me.

>> BOWEN: You left art for-- was it eight years?

>> Six years.

>> BOWEN: It was six years that you walked away, as I understand it, just for a variety of reasons.

But then you came back to it and you're having a lot of success now.

And when I look at something like that, I think, is this more than just fate?

Was this... you were supposed to do this?

How do you look at it?

>> Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I think, I think we're all-- we all have things that we're put here to be a part of, and I'm one of the lucky ones that figured it out, or found it, however it happened.

But I think I'm here to make art.

And if I needed some, some cues or some nudges, those dreams are there to really reinforce what I'm supposed to be doing.

And the great part about the Guston thing was before I made the Guston paintings-- or I call them Guston paintings-- I didn't really talk too much about politics or race and how this country is in those paintings.

Taking Guston characters kind of forced that out of me.

>> BOWEN: You could see he was such a political painter himself?

>> Yeah, and, and what better time than during a pandemic when all this stuff is happening and we're able to watch it?

You know, regular days or watching sports or having jobs and doing other things in life, and the pandemic kind of stopped that.

And these Guston-like moments are now on TV.

And so taking his character, especially the hooded character, taking that character and twisting it into mine felt like the right thing to do, especially at that time, so.

>> BOWEN: Well, Lavaughan Jenkins, it's been such a pleasure to get to know you and to talk about your work, thank you so much.

>> Yeah, thank you.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, after that conversation about Philip Guston making late-night visits to Lavaughan Jenkins in his dreams, we thought it was a good moment to take another look at Guston’s work by way of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts last year.

Philip Guston was the Jewish son of immigrant parents from present-day Ukraine, who learned early on what it meant to be a Jew in America.

>> The seminal moment for him is in 1933 in L.A., when he submits a work showing Klan violence to an exhibition, and it's vandalized by the red squad of the L.A.P.D., which has affiliations with the Klan.

>> BOWEN: The event marked him deeply enough that within four years, the then Phillip Goldstein changed his name to Guston, and he embarked on a career that, alongside his high school friend Jackson Pollock, would make him one of the most famous names in 20th-century art.

>> Guston is, in the '40s, '50s, one of the great Abstract Expressionist painters selling out shows, but always feels the limits of that approach to painting.

>> BOWEN: Ethan Lasser is co-curator of the nationally touring exhibition Philip Guston Now, which recently opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

It's a retrospective that charts how hate and anti-Semitism churned within Guston.

>> In 1968, as he's watching TV, he's watching Kent State, he's watching Vietnam, and he says, "What kind of man am I, going into my studio "to adjust a red to a blue to make abstract paintings?

"What can an abstract painting actually say in the world of civil rights?"

>> BOWEN: So the painter made a pivot, walking away from Abstract Expressionism.

It was abrupt and, to the art world, unforgivable.

Taking cues from the Sunday comics, and Krazy Kat in particular, he started painting cartoonish images, often in pink, a comics color, but one that can also be read as fleshy and raw.

And, in a motif that would appear throughout most of his 50-year career, he painted the Ku Klux Klan.

Guston did not discuss his work.

That's been left to interpreters like Lasser.

>> What he paints are images of Klansmen who had haunted Guston since he was a young artist.

Images of himself in a hood, as a Klansman, painting.

Images that call to account the underlying, I think, structures of racism in the art world and in America in general.

>> How do you create a way for those images to be understood?

>> BOWEN: Matthew Teitelbaum is the MFA's director.

He, along with the heads of the three other presenting museums, were caught in a firestorm of controversy in 2020, when the show was set to open at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. >> We're marching for Black life.

>> BOWEN: In the wake of George Floyd's murder and ensuing protests, the museums-- which also included MFA Houston and London's Tate Modern-- chose to postpone the show four years, when, they announced, the work, including its KKK imagery, could be, quote, "more clearly interpreted."

>> We felt it was a very charged moment to talk about race and to not have the community voices helping us interpret how these images would be received.

It was never about whether or not Guston had a voice that we needed to hear at any time and at all time.

>> BOWEN: But that's not how the art world saw it.

Thousands of artists, curators, and writers signed a petition blasting the museums' decision and accused them of, quote, "lacking faith in the intelligence of their audience."

And worse.

How much did it hit you when you were accused by artists, you being the four institutions, of cowardice?

>> I never had anybody say that about me before.

And it wasn't something that I even thought about.

It wasn't about avoiding something.

>> BOWEN: Instead, the MFA is now launching the national tour two years ahead of schedule.

It's curated the show unlike any other, inviting museum staff to weigh in, engaging a trauma specialist, and expanding the curatorial team to four, including guest curator Terence Washington.

>> The debate around the controversy talked about this exhibition as being the one that would start a conversation about whiteness.

And it would hold up a mirror to people who had stormed the Capitol, dot-dot-dot.

And I just thought, yeah, but, like, are those people coming in?

This feels really abstract.

>> BOWEN: Washington's approach had less to do with Guston than museums themselves.

Are they, he wonders, as accessible as they claim?

>> To me, that's the central thing.

How do we understand why exhibitions are done and for whom they're done?

All these places are open because they're supposed to be for everybody.

And I'm just not sure that that's the case.

>> BOWEN: Each of the four museums is devising their own plan for showing the work.

Here at the MFA, some of Guston's most searing hood paintings are on view in a single gallery.

If visitors prefer to avoid them, they're invited to circumvent the space.

If they do enter, it's deliberately claustrophobic.

>> We hope that will cause people to be a little less comfortable, or cause people to aestheticize them and, and neuter the paintings a bit less.

>> BOWEN: Because Washington wants to ensure that we never get so used to seeing Klan images that we don't really see them anymore.

Just as he doesn't want museums to get used to programming with the same old, limited perspective.

>> Whiteness is not abstract.

Whiteness is structuring the conversation around this exhibition.

It's not something that we can put on and take off.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And finally now, we remember Harry Belafonte, who died last week at age 96.

The singer and actor was central to the Civil Rights Movement, taking the fight for equality into the 21st century.

I had the privilege of sitting down with Belafonte in 2016 when he was in town to talk about race and justice for the Armenian Heritage Park.

Harry Belafonte, thank you so much for joining us.

It's a privilege.

Let me start... you have been at pains throughout your career to describe yourself as an activist turned artist.

Why did it go in that order for you?

>> Well, people are always making the assumption that those of us who gain a platform, a popularity in the world of culture, turn to other interests during their life expectancy as celebrities.

But I often remark that my whole relationship to the arts was really based upon my sense of active engagement in our community.

I was born in Harlem, born in poverty.

I watched our community struggle desperately with the inequities of that economic class.

And I watched my mother in particular, who was an immigrant woman, who came here suffering terribly from the absence of opportunity... most of that absence, absence of opportunity, was based upon issues of color.

I just made it my mission to... if I ever had the opportunity and the power to change the way in which we experienced life, that I would do everything I could to make a difference.

So I'm often asked, what do I think motivated me to become an artist?

And I said it was the act of coincidence.

I went to see what a play was.

In that place, they had a Black theater group-- small, made up of people like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

On my first day in that theater group, I walked in the same time Sidney Poitier did.

Then the curtains parted, this play began, and I listened, and it really was an epiphany.

And I looked at this thing that I had never seen before, because the only actors I had ever seen really were actors from Hollywood, in the movies.

We always played menial parts.

We were servants, or buffoons, or something to be laughed at.

And therefore I didn't see in the performing arts any real passion to want to take that on as a profession.

But when I saw the play, I said, "There was more here "than I had imagined, and I think this is a place I'd like to know more about."

So I kept going back, volunteering to do anything they would have me do to become part of this group in Harlem.

>> BOWEN: Well, it's one thing to see it and appreciate it, and another to think that you can do it.

Did that come right away?

>> Well, no, I just knew that I wanted the environment.

And the environment meant that I was around people who seemed to be driven by purpose.

While there, I met the real game-changer of my life, who was a man by the name of Paul Robeson.

He was a remarkable artist, a great singer, a man of profound intellect, and he was also deeply driven by social cause-- the issues of race and war and things.

And I saw in him the model of what I wanted to be.

>> BOWEN: How did you weigh using that platform and knowing that there were some people who only want to see somebody sing or go to their play without hearing any of the other social justice conversation or any activism?

>> Well, I think it's important, for those who want to know, that it was in fact activism that drove me to what made the theater have deeper meaning for me than just being entertained.

Fortunately for me, the plays that we did were all plays that had social content and mission.

And then when the environment denied me the opportunity to learn as much as I needed to learn, I then looked for an acting center to study.

I went and auditioned and asked...

I wanted to learn.

And I did.

I walked into my class on the first day, and I looked around at a very motley crew of would-be actors and I just thought, "My God, we've all made a mistake."

I'll have you know that that group that I didn't think much of at the time that I first saw them was made up of Marlon Brando, and Walter Matthau, and Rod Steiger, and Bea Arthur and Tony Curtis-- the cream of the crop.

>> BOWEN: Does that feel like a lifetime ago, or does it still feel like yesterday?

>> It not only seems like a lifetime ago, but it almost seems like a dream state because so much has changed.

The taste of American culture, the way... the ends to which we have been driven, the things we aspire to as a nation in the arts leaves a great deal to be desired.

I don't think we are at the forefront of our learning process as we need to be.

We have taken the study of art out of the public school system.

I think the absence of that kind of feeding or nurturing our young people in the world of theater has robbed us of becoming the kind of wholesome community we still are aspiring to be.

>> BOWEN: When you look at what's happening in this country right now around race, and you think back to what you did with Dr. Martin Luther King, who you marched with, who was a friend, how do you measure where we are today versus what you were trying to do?

>> I measure it by those who would hear such commentary on my part as an extreme.

But I genuinely believe that what we had experienced in the days of Dr. King-- both in Hollywood as well as on Broadway and in the theater-- was a very active community of intellectuals and thinkers who wrote to purpose.

>> BOWEN: And you've been very critical about artists today not doing enough, people who have the platform.

>> I think artists, you live in a democracy; you do what you want to do.

These artists have the right to choose the kind of life they would like to live.

No place lives in the hearts and minds of people as do artists.

We are in everything you read, we are in everything you listen to, you go to the movies, you watch television.

Artists are all over the place selling ideas, selling thoughts.

And unfortunately, we do not select the opportunity to tell things that are much richer in the information and the promise that they bring to the viewer.

>> BOWEN: In speaking the truth as you've always done, and not really having a filter, did you ever worry about your career?

Did you feel that you had to worry about a career?

>> Yes, but what I understood that there would be a consequence for truth, the challenge was very, very intense.

I can say this and be happy in my heart that I did what was right, or what I thought was right, as opposed to playing the game and becoming nothing, becoming just another figure or relic.

And when I saw the people who made that kind of commitment and that kind of sacrifice, nowhere was this illustrated more fully than during the periods of McCarthyism, when the arts was crucified by this pursuit of "communist thinkers," as many of us were called.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

>> BOWEN: A lot of people will say that there aren't the audiences around today who want to see that, that they want a different kind of entertainment, or they just want the sitcom or what have you.

Did you find that audiences were more receptive when you started out?

>> In a way they were, because... for one simple reason: commerce did not command the culture.

Once commerce began to take over the engines of culture, once they began to say sponsors will want you only if you are of this style, of this type, of this condition, only if your play says these things will we sponsor you...

If you say anything that is politically incorrect, you are dropped from the show.

If you say anything that is challenging to the norm, you are punished.

Play the game, or don't play at all.

I think that's the place in which we find ourselves.

>> BOWEN: And finally, before we close, I just have to ask about "The Banana Boat Song"-- is... because it is such a phenomenon.

It is so much a part of our culture.

Is it as personal to you today as it was the first time you sang it?

>> Yes, because the song, as rewarding as it has been to have found that wonderful nugget in my experience, it became the entrée to where I found most of my music.

♪ Day, me say day-o ♪ ♪ Daylight come and me wan' go home ♪ I looked at what folk songs were about, the songs of the people, the songs that came from various sectors of social experience.

In my youth, growing up in Jamaica, I watched the plantation workers, the workers who planted the sugar cane and harvested the fruits of labor.

I watched them sing to help with the burden of cold, hard, underpaid labor.

And nothing revealed that condition better than the "Banana Boat" song.

"Day-oh, day-oh, daylight come and me wanna go home."

The choice for most workers was night labor, because the days were cooler, you could do things in the cool of evening.

"Daylight come and me wanna go home."

I chose to, to look at that song as a measure.

"Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana, work all night on a drink of rum."

These images just stuck with me and it was part of the whole folk culture, this environment which nurtured me, were part of my daily diet.

And I think that I was really blessed to have been given the opportunity to develop a cultural space in America.

>> BOWEN: Well, as are we.

Harry Belafonte, such a pleasure.

We need so many more like you.

Thank you so much for joining us.

>> Thank you for the opportunity.

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

Next week, Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper and his wife, actor and writer Marianne Leone, working together for the first time in decades.

Plus, Jill Medvedow celebrates 25 years as director of the ICA.

We talk about what's driven her to ensure contemporary art thrives.

You can always visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

And you can always see us first on YouTube.com/GBHNews.

We hope to see you here next week.

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

♪ ♪