- [Voiceover] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Voiceover] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

- [Gabe] In this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus," an exhibition showcases moving photos from the Vietnam War.

- [Gabe] A monument celebrating voting rights.

- [Female Speaker] I think everyone can find a piece of themselves in the memorial.

There's the story of everyone in this piece of art.

- [Gabe] A post-war American artist.

- All he did was paint, and the paintings that we're sitting amongst, these are paintings that he made in his 80s.

- [Gabe] And a cartoonist's craft.

- I think that's what a comic strip is, it's taking tiny, tiny moments out of peoples' lives and finding the humor in them.

- It's all coming up next on "WEDU Arts Plus."

(upbeat music) Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is "WEDU Arts Plus."

The Vietnam War was a long, devastating conflict, as illustrated by wire photos that were beamed across the world in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

A recent exhibition in Tampa brought these images back into the spotlight, as local art collector and retired physician, Dr. Robert Drapkin, partnered with the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts to present Vietnam War photos from his collection.

A warning, some viewers may find the images disturbing.

(mellow piano) (gentle piano) - When you think of Vietnam, some images come to mind.

These are the, what we call icons, symbolic of a greater meaning.

And I think one of the first photographs we think of is this little girl fleeing her village.

She's totally naked and burnt from the napalm that was going off in her village.

That's a very strong image.

- We can't really, on our emotional level, on a personal level, connect with the suffering of millions of people, but we can very well connect with a suffering of one person.

And I think the image of a burning little girl is something that still brings tears into our eyes.

- I had a draft number 135, so I just said, "Might as well go before they..." I mean, they was gonna call it anyway, 135.

That's why I went.

When I was in Saigon, I lived right behind the heliport.

And they would bring bodies in, and I volunteered to go over and help 'em get soldiers off the helicopter, and take 'em on, put 'em on the gurney and get 'em over to the hospital.

The photos that made the most impression on me is the the helicopter rescues and the soldiers getting out of the helicopter.

- Another strong image is a picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting somebody directly in the head.

But what's important, not just the emotional content of these images, what's important is the context.

The person he shot was a Viet Cong terrorist who had just killed this officer's friend, his wife, and two children.

That's a very strong anti-war image, and it should be, but it's also completely understandable given the context.

Another icon is a photo of Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in the middle of Saigon.

It was one of the reasons that the United States and JFK felt they were supporting the wrong people in South Vietnam.

- Before the Tet Offensive, Saigon was like any other city.

You know, you had your taxi cabs, your kids playing, and then that offensive hit.

A lot of people lost their lives.

- It was very difficult, the first time the United States would lose a war.

So nobody wanted to be the first President to lose a war.

And everybody feared being called "soft on communism."

And one of these pictures shows Eisenhower and JFK in deep discussion, because Eisenhower was giving JFK a problem that he could not solve.

(gentle piano) The United States was involved in the Vietnam for over 18 years.

The Vietnam War was the first war brought to everybody's television set every night.

And every day you would see photos in the newspapers, and magazines, about the Vietnam War.

And so it was a war completely supervised by the American public.

And the North Vietnamese were smart enough to realize that they didn't have to win the war, they just had to not lose the war, and the American public will make our soldiers come home.

And that's exactly what happened.

- In '75, they signed the treaty, and shut it down.

I think it was one we could have won, so I'm gonna leave it like that.

- The power of the image in documenting the horrific events are a wonderful gift, and that's one reason why the Photography Museum is such an important element in our community, because we can bring stories the way nobody else can.

And so in many parts of our life, in environment, in social issues, in human rights issues, we can help.

And we do want to use the power of the visual storytelling to implement the right changes in our life and in our community.

- [Gabe] To learn more, visit fmopa.org.

Near the Utah state capital, there is a monument that pays tribute to the courageous women who fought for equal voting rights.

In its design, the sculpture conveys the historic fight for suffrage.

(soothing music) - We knew that the year 2020 was going to be a big year for these voting rights anniversaries.

It would mark the 150th anniversary of the first time Utah women voted, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to many women across the country.

And the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which broke down many more barriers facing women and men of color, when they were trying to vote.

So as a nonprofit, we approached the state of Utah, and talked about putting up a memorial to honor those anniversaries in this important year.

And especially to honor the role of Utahans, in kind of pioneering ways and breaking ground for the expansion of voting rights.

This new monument is called "A Path Forward," and it's a beautiful sculpture.

It's got concrete, and bronze, and stainless steel in it, and it looks a little different than normal monuments, or the way that we're used to, a statue of one figure.

This monument is a series of doorframes.

There's an interior space, a domestic space, with a table and chairs, and a path that winds through doorframes leading towards the state capital.

So this monument is meant to represent Utah women's work for voting rights.

(gentle music) The artists, Kelsey Harrison and Jason Manley, had a beautiful vision for what this would look like.

And they knew that they wanted to have additional door frames leading from the 19th Amendment forward, talking about legislation that expanded voting rights for different groups of people.

And so we worked with them to research, and talked with local community members.

For example, the Division of Indian Affairs here in Utah, so that we could make sure that we were characterizing that history accurately.

So you'll see, as you visit the memorial, that there's inscriptions on the insides of those doorframes, talking about the laws that they represent in this widening of the path, this symbolic way to open up the pathway for more people to participate in a political process.

- The beauty and the brilliance, I think, of "A Path Forward," this memorial, is that it's a way to honor this long, complicated history of voting rights here in Utah and in the nation.

And it's not a statue of just one person or even a small group of people.

It's more of a visual representation and a commemoration of the work of thousands, even millions of Utah women, over the course of over 100 years.

And so, rather than being just one specific moment in time, or one specific person in time, this memorial really, I think, everyone can find a piece of themselves in the memorial.

There's the story of everyone in this piece of art.

(gentle music) - After the monument was unveiled, my favorite part was that we had family members there representing the women whose work makes up different pieces of the memorial.

So Seraph Young, the first voter whose footsteps start off on that path.

Or Elizabeth Hayward, a state Senator in Utah, who introduced the bill to ratify the 19th Amendment when she was serving in our legislature.

Or the family of Alice Kasai, who worked to expand voting rights and make citizenship available to Japanese American immigrants.

And the family of Mignon Barker Richmond, a civil rights leader and activist here in Utah.

So as we heard a little bit from our narrator of our program about what each of these women had done, their families walked along that path carrying photos of these women, large photos in frames.

That was really touching to me, because I could see how the legacy of these women's work has played out in future generations.

We could see daughters, and granddaughters, and great-grandsons of these women, whose work we were memorializing, who were proud of their ancestors' contributions to Utah.

And who are making Utah a better place in their own ways today.

So that was very touching and meaningful to me, to see that contribution embodied in the future, in the generations that have come.

So every time that I pass the memorial now, and walk through the door frames, I think about those specific families at those different points.

- [Tiffany] My favorite part is the ever-expanding doorways, and the ever-expanding pathway that's part of the memorial.

As I walk along that path, I recognize that the doorways of opportunities that are open for me are not always open for everyone.

And maybe it's open for people who look, or live like me, or live where I live, but someone else who really does have the same innate value and right to experience those opportunities.

But because of restrictions, or cultural norms, or popular opinions, they're not able to walk through that doorway of opportunity with me.

And so that, again, puts it on me, in my community, in whatever way I am going to make a contribution, to make sure that that I am looking around myself as I walk forward and say, "Who is not able to come through this doorway of opportunity?

And how can I work to make it so that the doorway's bigger, or the path is wider, so that more people can come?"

- I think one of the things that's really important about the way we look back at voting rights now is that sometimes we think one victory was all that it took.

And once the 19th Amendment was ratified, for example, that everyone was able to vote.

And that's not true, because there were so many different barriers in different places for peoples' voting rights.

So I love that the artists were willing to work with us as historians and with community leaders in Utah, to make sure that we could represent that story, that we could talk about everybody's struggle in an appropriate way, and also in a way that helps us understand that there's a lot of work to be done.

There are a lot of ways that our history and our past have created structural barriers for participation in the political process.

And as we become aware of those and work to eliminate those, we'll have a better society when we open up decision-making in government to more people in our country.

(relaxing music) - [Gabe] Explore more capitol artwork at utahstatecapital.utah.gov.

Hans Hofman was an artist and teacher whose noteworthy vivid canvases influence individuals to this day.

In this segment, visit the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts to see some of his striking works.

- [Male Anchor] To artist Hans Hofman, process was as important as painting.

And he's not just using a brush?

- No, on this one, I think you can see a pallet knife, you can see a brush.

He may have squeezed pigment directly onto the canvas.

Once in a while we find fingerprints.

- [Male Anchor] This is Hofman's "Indian Summer," painted when he was 79 when he was in the midst of an artistic rebirth.

- [Lucinda] This is an amazing landscape, or mindscape of what might be fall colors, this bright, bright orange, intense blue.

- [Male Anchor] In fact, many of the works in this Peabody Essex Museum show, where we find Hofman exploring the nature of abstraction, were completed toward the end of his life, says curator Lucinda Barnes.

- All he did was paint, and the paintings that we're sitting amongst, these are paintings that he made in his 80s.

And there's an enormous scale to them, there's enormous energy.

- [Male Anchor] Hofman was born in Germany in 1880.

In Europe, he was a painter and teacher.

He was also part of an artistic circle that included Picasso and Matisse, that would prove to be hugely impactful.

- There were a number of German expats who were in Paris at the time, and they'd kind of hang out at the same bars, and they'd go to the same exhibitions.

You see that influence of Picasso, and Matisse, and Cezanne very clearly.

- [Male Anchor] In the 1930s, Hofman moved to the United States, escaping Nazi occupation and World War II.

Here he took the teacher track, ultimately in New York and Provincetown, where Hofman set up a studio and classroom called The Barn.

- In that barn, he taught generations of students for over 20 years.

He returned there every summer to teach, and also recharge his own artistic practice.

- [Male Anchor] Lydia Gordon is a curator with the Peabody Essex Museum, which is putting the focus on Hofman as an artist.

But it's hard to ignore his impact as a teacher, whose students included some of the most well-known artists of the 20th century, including Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell.

- Hofman was inspirational as a teacher, because he encouraged that individual creative practice.

So it actually didn't matter what the end result looked like, but it was how his students got there, how he got there.

And you could really see that in his own paintings that we have in this exhibition.

They're really full of movement, it's almost as if he was dancing when creating them.

- [Male Anchor] In Provincetown, Hofman thrived.

He tapped into an artist community, just like in Europe.

And then there was the beauty of Cape Cod.

- He goes out and the landscape outside of his own studio, outside of his window, is very evident in the early landscapes that we have.

He's very much using those (indistinct) colors, those purples and those yellows, to demonstrate the energy, the spirituality of nature that he's after.

- Many of the rules around painting were moving away from a pictorial photographic image of the world.

And how do we delve deeper into the soul of the artist?

- [Male Anchor] Hofman closed his Provincetown school in 1957, and began painting full-time for the first time in more than 40 years.

- It was a total life commitment.

- [Male Anchor] For much of the next decade, until his death in 1966, he was an unrelenting force, says Curator Lucinda Barnes.

- [Lucinda] The experimentation, I think in his late paintings, was more in the way of pushing the boundaries for himself.

You see much more use of dark color, and ranges of black and velvety greens, and that's not easy to do.

- [Male Anchor] Hofman famously distilled his method of making into the very simple phrase, "Push and Pull."

- [Lucinda] He referred to it as expanding and contracting forces.

Really polar opposites, almost magnetic forces.

And with push, you have pull.

- [Male Anchor] If you find some of the concepts challenging, you're in good company.

Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential art critics of the mid-century, labeled Hofman, "One of the most difficult artists alive, both to grasp and appreciate."

- [Lucinda] What Greenberg was saying at the time was that Hofman was very hard to pigeonhole.

He was hard to put into one category, and that was intentional on Hofman's part.

He had said if he had one style, he was dead as an artist.

- [Male Anchor] Which is why, even late in the game, Hans Hofman never settled.

- And he always had his paintings around.

He said, "Well, if I can't live with my painting, that painting isn't good enough."

And so that was a test for him, he needed to be continually inspired and continue to have conversation with his works.

(gentle music) - [Gabe] Discover more at pem.org.

For 30 years, the comic strip "Pickles" has been delighting viewers across the country and around the globe.

Up next, we head to Sparks, Nevada, to meet the artist behind the comic, Brian Crane.

(quirky music) - "Pickles" is a comic strip about Earl and Opal Pickles.

It also involves their grandson, Nelson, a daughter named Sylvia, and a dog and a cat.

It's about family, and looking at the funny side of family relationships.

(quirky music) I kind of grew up in what I think of is the golden age of comic strips, when everyone took a newspaper, and everybody read the comic strips.

One of my favorite cartoon characters is Popeye, I used to watch his cartoons when I was a kid, and I've started collecting a lot of Popeye memorabilia over the years.

It just brings back good childhood memories.

(quirky music) I never took any art classes in high school or anything, but I always drew, that's where it all started, was just scribbling on my school papers.

(quirky music) When I went to college, I majored in art, with the idea of going into commercial illustration and things like that.

Because I didn't think I had a chance of becoming a cartoonist.

When I was in my late 30s, I started thinking of my childhood dream of doing a comic strip.

So I decided to think of an idea for a strip, and spent a lot of time drawing different characters in a sketchbook until I finally came up with this elderly couple that gave me all kinds of ideas.

And the word "Pickles" kind of reminded me of the term "getting into a pickle," which is kind of like the situations they get into.

"Pickles" has syndicated in about close to 1,000 papers around the world.

Been doing it for about 28 years now.

In the morning when I sit down to the drawing board, I go through a file of things I've written down over the past few weeks.

I just look for situations that happen in real life that I can place my characters into.

(cheerful music) Once I get the idea, then I draw the panel.

I usually work with four boxes, I just rough out the first panel with pencil, and I'll go over it with a pen.

I still use the old fashioned pen that you dip in a bottle of ink.

I just enjoy the process of holding a pen in my hand, dipping it in the ink, and scratching it on the paper.

There's very tactile sense of that that I enjoy.

In my mind, I've broken down the idea into four sequences: a little story with a beginning, a middle, and then a punchline at the end.

And hopefully that's the payoff where someone will chuckle and see themselves in it, or something like that.

(cheerful music) I scan them on a scanner, and email them to my daughter, Emily, who colors them on Photoshop.

(cheerful music) From that point, when I have done a week's worth of those, I send them in to my editor at "The Washington Post."

And she checks him over for any grammatical errors.

Occasionally a retired school teacher somewhere in America will find a misspelled word or something and will let me know about it.

My wife is always my best editor, she can tell if something's funny or not.

(chuckles) (cheerful music) I really do agonize over each strip, you know, trying to come up with an idea.

Most of the ideas I get I don't use, because I don't think they're good enough.

So I'm my own harshest critic, I think.

I'm very seldom, when I see in my strip in the paper, do I think I really nailed it.

I usually just think, "Oh, I could have done this better, I could have worded that better, or I could have drawn that better."

So I'm always critical of my efforts, but I think that's a good character for an artist to be critical of their work, and not just think anything they do is wonderful.

(quirky music) I love making people laugh, the big payoff for me is when I hear people who say that my cartoon makes their morning, or it reminds them of someone they love, or something like that.

That makes me feel like I'm contributing something to peoples' happiness.

And it's so much easier now to write my strip, because when I began, I was a a 39-year-old writing about old people.

And now I'm an old person writing about myself.

- [Gabe] See more at picklescomic.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "WEDU Arts Plus."

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Gabe Ortiz, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Funding for "WEDU Arts Plus" is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

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