STATEWIDE – This edition of State of the Arts takes a look at artists whose work reflects a Sign of the Times — from the late 19th century painters and illustrators who created images of women on bicycles and in bloomers, to a 21st century collage artist who deconstructs advertising images. The program also features Black Maria Film & Video Festival founder John Columbus as he reflects on the changing world of independent filmmaking and a retrospective of the playful yet socially charged work of artist Willie Cole. This encore presentation of Sign of the Times airs on Friday, February 23 at 8:30 pm, with a rebroadcast on Wednesday, February 28 at 11:30 pm.

• Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of Homer, Chase, and Sargent
State of the Arts producer Susan Wallner visits the Newark Museum to see a 2006 exhibit that explored the changing image of women in late 19th century America. Before the Civil War, the ideal woman was portrayed as a faithful maiden or an industrious wife. Soon after the war, starting with the painter and printmaker Winslow Homer, images of strong, athletic women taking charge of their own lives were seen in paintings and in the popular press. The exhibit’s curators, Holly Pyne Connor and Mary Kate O’Hare, discuss the historical context of the paintings and explain how these barelegged, bloomer-wearing women were seen as scandalous and revolutionary at the time. The exhibit features important paintings by Homer, William Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent, as well as prints by the popular illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (the “Gibson Girl”) and by one of the first female photographers, Alice Austen.

• Willie Cole, artist
Willie Cole's sensibility and abilities as an innovative form maker and imagist have made him an internationally recognized artist. State of the Arts producer Eric Schultz talks with the Wharton resident, just as the Montclair Art Museum mounted a major retrospective of the artist’s works created since the late 1980s. Cole's works track his distinctive New Jersey and Newark-based heritage (he’s now based in Montclair, NJ), movingly melding the social, political, and cultural perspectives of urban African-American experience. Many of Cole's works relate to issues of the urban experience and race in America. As a young man he studied acting, as well as drawing and painting. He has created prints, sculptures composed of found objects, paintings, and drawings. While much of Cole’s work has been inspired by African art — which he encountered first-hand at the Newark Museum — he made his first trip to Africa in the spring of 2006, shortly after taping his State of the Arts interview.

• John Columbus, Founder of the Black Maria Film & Video Festival
In 2006, the Black Maria Film & Video Festival marked 25 years of exhibiting new independent works — most with a cutting edge sensibility. Founded in 1981 by John Columbus, the New Jersey-based festival gives more than 70 screenings a year to audiences around the country and beyond. It also is an Academy Award qualifying festival for short documentary, animation, and live-action films. Columbus got the name for his festival from the primitive studio Thomas Edison built on the grounds of his West Orange laboratory in 1892. The studio was given its nickname by some performers who thought it looked like a police paddy wagon, or “Black Maria.” State of the Arts producer Christopher Benincasa caught up with Columbus at the AMC Theater in West Orange to hear the festival director’s take on the last 25 years of independent filmmaking and to experience the film festivities firsthand.

Rodriguez Calero, collage artist
State of the Arts producer Amber Edwards talks to an artist whose collages make the viewer think about body language, social attitudes, and political change. Rodriguez Calero was born in Puerto Rico, raised in New York, and for the past 15 years has lived and worked in New Jersey. Her 2006 exhibition, "Familiar Faces" at the Atlantic Gallery in SoHo, New York, featured selections from her huge inventory of collage work. The theme of all of Calero’s work is the human figure — in both its private and public environments. Her collages are composed of hundreds of disparate photographic images she finds in magazines and advertisements and then decomposes and rearranges into new images that comment on contemporary urban life. By combining and juxtaposing facial features, body parts, and clothing from so many different sources — different sexes, ages, and ethnic groups — Calero’s collages look like everybody we know—and at the same time, like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

State of the Arts, the award-winning, half-hour arts magazine, airs every Friday at 8:30 pm, followed by an encore presentation each Wednesday at 11:30 pm.

The current episode of State of the Arts can be viewed online at www.njn.net. Individual stories will be available to view following their broadcast by visiting the program online at State of the Arts.

Funding for State of the Arts is provided by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The series producer is Susan Wallner and the executive producer is Nila Aronow.

NJN is available on all New Jersey cable systems, satellite systems, and Time Warner Cable channel 750 in NYC.
State of the Arts is also available via video streaming at njn.net after the original broadcast.
Additionally, the program is repeated on NJN’s JerseyVision available on Comcast Digital Cable in New Jersey.
(Check http://www.njn.net/digital/schedule.html for detailed listings.)
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