- In this edition of Artistic Horizons, photographing Malls across the Rust Belt, - I know that the photos I take are important and they are important to people who engaged in those spaces, - Painting for decades.

- When I pick my subjects, they sort of pick me because if I see something and I have a reaction to it, emotional reaction to it, I'll try to capture it.

- Transforming medical textbooks into meaningful collages.

- We have this central experience, we have this lived experience, and it's valuable beyond, like the factual, - A musical about Louis Armstrong.

We've been working on this for a very long time to get to this moment, and the fact that it's here just feels so incredible.

- Oh yeah, it's all ahead on this edition of Artistic Horizons.

Hello, I'm Mark Cernero, and this is Artistic Horizons.

Since 2016, photographer Jessica Anschutz has been documenting shopping malls across the Rust Belt, infused with nostalgia.

These pictures spark memory and discussion.

We head to Akron, Ohio for the story.

- This photo is of me, and I was 18 months old and my mom had me at a Chapel Hill Mall and she was approached by a photographer from the Akron Beach Journal who asked if her child would pose with some tiger cubs, and my mom said yes.

So this picture ran in the Akron Beacon Journal in 1978.

My name is Jessica Anit.

I am a documentary photographer and a storyteller.

My dad is a bricklayer and one of his first jobs was working at Rolling Acres Mall during the building of the mall.

So quite literally from the first bricks of that place, my family has been involved.

I basically grew up there.

I've always joked that it's my, it was my childhood home because I lived three miles from it.

I went on my first date at that mall, at the movie theater.

I had my very first job at the mall.

So it was, it was always a presence in my life.

I started photographing malls in 2016.

I've wanted to pick my camera back up.

So I did with the intention of starting a daily creative practice.

Well, I've always been interested in architecture and buildings, and I drove by rolling Acres on my way to my mom's house, and I was like, oh, okay, I think I'm gonna go take pictures of the old Kaufman's because it was falling apart and like it was also on the cover of the Black Keys Gold on the Ceiling album.

So, you know, it was a very familiar, iconic piece of local architecture.

Every season I would go and take different pictures because, you know, there were trees growing up in the parking lot and like the leaves would change.

And it was interesting juxtaposition of, you know, this decay, but also life from plants.

I really didn't get like nostalgic for 'em until I started doing this, until I started photographing 'em.

From there, I started doing more research and I ended up at Canton Center Mall.

And so you're, you're in this space that is familiar.

You can look at the storefronts and know from like the colors and patterns, like what store used to be there.

There might be a label scar, but all of the plants were dead.

The fountain was empty.

It just, it smelled old and moldy and musty, but it still, you know, it was a mall.

And that was the one that I was like, yes, this is, this is what I need to be doing.

There's, there's clearly something happening and I want to capture this with malls now, like they've taken all the seating out.

You know, you don't see fountains like even plants are, are hard to come by, and it's just this big white box that you go in, you shop and you leave.

Finding places where I can still go sit in a conversation pit by a fountain and like enjoy the sights and sounds for like 10, 15 minutes.

That's my jam.

That's what I want to do.

A lot of times when malls close, they just leave the plants in.

This plant started from a little clipping of the plant that was on the fountain at Chapel Hill Mall.

When I visit malls, I am very immersed in the actual experience of it.

I shop while I'm there.

If I can, we'll get a snack, we'll go sit by the fountain if they have one.

You know, we, we engage in the space and I think that lends itself to photos that are a little more atmospheric.

And I feel like my photos are a little more intimate.

I've always had a camera, my parents put one in my hands very young.

I didn't go to school for photography, I went to school for journalism.

So I think that's where the nonstop curiosity has come from.

Like, I will see something or experience something and if it's impactful enough, I wanna know everything about it.

I wasn't anticipating this, but I love it and I've just dug into it.

And it's endlessly fascinating because people dig into it from so many different aspects, you know, like I am, I'm looking at it from more of a like, wanting to document these places while they're still around and engaging with people and just enjoying the nostalgia.

But I'm also not a person who is like, and I think malls should still exist in a lot of ways.

The time of the mall has passed.

I do think it's important for photos and the folklore of a mall to still exist.

This is my favorite piece of mall ephemera that I have is this Chapel Hill Mall is not closing sign because there was like this big campaign probably the year before they closed, where it was just like, no, we're not closing, we're not going anywhere.

And you know, the writing was on the wall, everybody knew they were closing and it was just like these optimistic posters just hanging everywhere.

There's definitely an interest and I've noticed, you know, locally, like if I post pictures local people are just like, oh my gosh, I haven't thought about that place in so long.

And, and it just, it sparks all of these memories and discussions that reinforce what I'm doing.

I know that the photos I take are important and they are important to people who engaged in those spaces.

And if I can be the person who helps them spark these memories and spark these conversations, then that's fantastic.

I love it.

- And now for the artist quote of the week, based in Ogdensburg New York, John Morrow is an artist and gallery owner who's been painting for over four decades.

He takes inspiration from his surroundings depicting scenes in watercolor, acrylic and oil paint.

Take a look.

- My name is John Morrow.

I'm a north country artist.

I've been painting here for the last 50 years.

I started at a very young age being interested in art as far back as I can remember, my grandmother and father liked to paint by number, so they always had leftover paint afterwards.

And I would take that paint and compose my own compositions using those colors.

And I was probably seven or eight years old at that time.

I just loved to draw and it just grew over the years and, and I took art in high school and then in college and then I became an art teacher.

I had a philosophy that our goal in life is to learn and our duty is to teach.

And so I've always wanted to give back to society and to students the knowledge that I've learned.

So that sort of led me into teaching.

I actually work in three mediums.

I work in watercolor, acrylic, and oil, and each one of them has a particular quality that I prefer, depending on the subject, depends on which one I would pick.

I find that the north country is, is very rich in a lot of subject matter.

And I painted the valley, I've painted the river, I've painted the Amish, the old farmhouses, and I've also gone into Maine and painted some of the scenes from there.

And I like to travel.

I've done scenes from out west, but I guess it's just a matter of finding something that emotionally moves you and trying to share it.

Last year someone brought me a print to have framed and the artist was from the 18 hundreds and it was a winter landscape and I really liked the feel of the painting and the composition.

So I decided to develop something similar to that piece.

So what I did was I first did a sketch color sketch and worked out some of the elements of the composition.

I then proceeded to a larger sketch, which is this one here, working out the color.

And this is the beginning of the painting with some of the elements in it.

But I decided that I would probably put a birch tree on this side here and change the banks a little bit.

And the original painting did not have a waterfall here.

But I'm not satisfied with this waterfall yet.

But I will, I will keep working on this until I get it the way I want it.

So basically it's gonna have the same feeling as the painting that I originally saw.

But with my own sort of interpretation, when I pick my subjects, they sort of pick me because if I see something and I have a reaction to it, a motion reaction to it, I'll try to capture it usually with a photograph and then bring it back to the studio where I further develop it.

But probably I only paint maybe one in 500 images that I end up capturing.

So then becomes another selective process where I go through and, and often I will rearrange the photographs, I will change things, add things, take things out, change colors and values.

So - John was born in Ogdensburg, New York, but as a child moved to Schenectady and later Buffalo, after graduating from Buffalo State with an art education degree, he moved back to Ogdensburg in 1971 to take a position as an art teacher at Ogdensburg Free Academy where he taught art until 2003.

He and his wife Brenda, have six children between them and 16 grandchildren together.

John and Brenda own the Clark Art Gallery in downtown Ginsburg, which exhibits John's work.

The gallery also includes a frame shop.

- The gallery is located in the historical Clark house, which you spend here in Ogdensburg, and was built in 1802 to 1804.

And when this became available, it seemed like the perfect ideal spot to have a gallery and a frame shop in the house.

So that's more or less how it, how it started.

You'll find original works of art.

You'll find sheet clay prints both on paper and on canvas.

We have everything from small eight by 10 souvenir editions all the way up to original works.

- John's artistic talent has allowed him to enjoy a career that has spanned over 50 years, filled with honors competitions opportunities, and of course hundreds of beautiful works of art.

- Growing up I had a lot of encouragement from people around me and I, I call it feeding the person, you know, just giving them encouragement, giving them art materials, helping them in any way you can.

Taking 'em to art shows when it's possible, art museums and that sort of thing.

But let 'em let 'em grow at their own natural speed.

- Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

Up next we take a trip to New Mexico to meet visual artist and emergency medicine.

Doctor Kristin anchors through her creative work, she looks to heal the relationship between body and mind by re-imagining medical textbooks as collages.

- So Kristin, you transform medical textbooks into these very intricate collages, bridging the gap between the scientific and the artistic.

So I'm curious, what inspired you to fuse these disciplines in your work?

- So in college, when I was studying life sciences, I was also studying philosophy.

And so when I studied philosophy, I learned a lot about the division of mind, body, spirit and the calculative nature of science and how it's dividing and mechanical things.

And I kept returning back to the humanities and to the art.

And so it's always been married for me.

And in medicine, especially emergency medicine, it's so chaotic and unpredictable and it's so based in the lived experience of people that you can't, you can't divorce it from, from life.

And so in residency when I was really stressed, because it's a long and arduous training process, many years I had this stack of books I've been carrying around from all my training textbooks, medical textbooks, and they were essentially useless.

They become valueless once a new edition comes out.

And I think one day I looked at them and I was like, how can I repurpose this?

And I was like, okay, I'm gonna focus on this meditative act of like marrying the lived experience back into the scientific body.

And so I just started cutting it up and putting it back together in a new way.

- So this piece is title Tree of Life.

So tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind the title and the imagery.

- My very first piece when I was on the floor, like very much not expecting to be a collage artist, but just like letting the, the work move through me has a plant coming out of the head, coming down through the esophagus as a bolus.

And it was already trying to interpret our relation with plants.

Like what does it mean to be interconnected?

And I'm sort of returning to that theme in my most recent pieces, which I'm now titling a series of tree of Life.

And this one has at the very bottom res, which is a, is a name of of wood.

It's essentially like the root system, but we use these words all the time in, in our body.

So dendrites are the end of neurons in our brain.

Our limbs are the same as tree limbs.

And in this center is the intestinal system and the vasculature that feeds or pulls from that sort of representing roots.

So it's like food is moving through just as like the, the trees are pulling nutrients up from the earth in relation already to all of the gut flora we have in our system.

Just like roots in the ground are in relation to the all the fungi and other things that are helping them collect their nutrients.

In the background is the star material, which is continuing to reference the fact that we are made of star stuff in the vast void that we're flying through right now.

Space comes up in a lot of my, my work.

Why is that?

I, I think like some of my early work was looking at where are we, where did we come from, what are the leading hypotheses on like the material that make us up?

And some of that is that like these materials flew here, you know, in the collisions from space and that collision is necessary for life and that it's both infinite and wondrous and part of exactly who we are.

- So you've talked about reconnecting the body with the lived experience.

Can you explain what that means and why it's important to you?

- It basically means I'm not just a body moving through world, I'm a body who experiences a story like I was born into this family with these genetics in this culture, however that is, and my body's in relation to that.

And you can't just treat everybody the same way.

Like you have to look at the, the circumstances of their lives or our lives in order to move with that, to facilitate that along.

And I think furthermore on like a philosophical level, just remembering that we have this central experience, we have this lived experience and it's valuable beyond like the factual, we need the poetic, we need the art, we need the, the life force that moves through us to to shine through just as much.

- And now here's a look at a few notable dates in art history.

In this segment we visit New York City to hear about the Broadway musical, A Wonderful world, the Louis Armstrong musical starring Tony Award winner James Monroe Engelhart.

As Armstrong, the renowned artist's life is brought to life on stage.

- I don't even think there's any words for how excited I am tonight.

We've been working on this for a very long time to get to this moment.

And the fact that it's here just feels so incredible.

This cast is amazing.

The creative team has been fantastic and it's been one of the coolest, hardest, but most fulfilling journeys I've ever been on.

- It's really great that we finally have a musical based on one of the greatest musicians that ever lived in a seminal figure in jazz and popular music.

- And you know, the music is so rich and steep in our culture.

I'm just so excited to hear it out in the streets.

People dancing, music that has going all over the world, that has brought so - Much joy to people, right?

That it brought humanity together.

That's what's important.

- This show means so much to me, to my entire family.

Being the great great nephew of Louis Armstrong is, it's incredible to be here and to tell his story and to bring this story of hope and optimism and love and wonder to New York City.

The influence of not - Only scatting on record began with Louis Armstrong and heebie-jeebies, but Dina and the early records was a combination of Louis Armstrong working with tap dancing and buck dancing crews in Chicago.

And that sort of rhythmic tap worked its way into his scatting and playing as a trumpet player and cornet player.

- Ha - You know, I actually didn't know when I first started this project that he had four wives.

I always knew about Lucile Wilson, but I didn't know that there were other women.

And I definitely didn't know that his first wife was, you know, this woman of the night - Back when I was Louis' wife, he was making his debut into Hollywood.

And so Alpha is embodying the glitz and the glam and also the ups and downs of what Hollywood can be, especially for a black person in that era.

- I learned absolutely a lot about his triumphs and his failures, about how he navigated his way through his artistic career.

Being the king of jazz, - It's important to tell stories about artists and and art.

And the art really a journey of a man's life.

And when you can take a step back and see the entire journey and where he ends up and the growth that he goes through, it's amazing.

- Not only are you gonna get some great music, but you're also gonna get a history lesson of our country and how it's changed and how it hasn't changed.

- He lived through so much, especially as a black artists struggling through that era, which was awful, but he survived.

And it teaches us to survive however bad the wonderful - World might seem.

We are exploring through music and through this thing that basically says the only way to get through it is through love and compassion and thinking about the other person.

And that's what this show talks about.

Sky - Bright.

- What a wonderful, - What a wonderful word.

Oh, yay.

- And that wraps it up for this edition of Artistic Horizons.

For more arts and culture, visit wpbs tv.org.

Until next time, I'm Mark Cernero.

Thanks for watching.