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The creative power of the family, on this special edition of State of the Arts.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008 @11:30 pm
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home-made music
Steve Turre and Akua Dixon are married with children – and with thriving, independent musical careers: Turre is a sought after jazz trombonist and “conch” player and a regular on the Saturday Night Live Band. Dixon is a cellist with her own group, “Quartette Indigo.” Once in a while, they even play together at their home in Montclair, NJ – State of the Arts visits them for some home-made musical entertainment.
watch a 2001 performance by steve turre & akua dixon
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trombonist steve turre
steve turre playing a seashell
cellist akua dixon
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the brothers gerberich
Steve Gerberich is an artist with a gift for the mechanical – his whirring, animated creations were featured in “Springs, Sprockets, and Pulleys,” a one man exhibit at the Morris Museum in 2004. He’s back at the Museum now by popular demand with a new show, “Gerberich’s Gadgetry: Art That Moves.” Gerberich attributes his career as an artist to the inspiration of his brother, Tim, who is also an artist – but whose career was cut short when he was severely brain damaged at age 22 in a car accident. Tim died (after the story first aired) on February 7, 2005. State of the Arts visits Steve Gerberich’s studio of fantastic mechanical creations, and learns more about the importance of his family and early life in Iowa.
see images of artwork from the gerberich brothers
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“The Gerberich Grand Orchestra”
by Steve Gerberich, 1997
“Sketch of brother Steve”
by Tim Gerberich, 1987
“Altered Species”
by Steve Gerberich, 2004
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a family’s portrait
When Ralph Hunter, the curator of the African-American Heritage Museum, learned that nearby neighbors were moving out, he stopped by at their house to look for antiques. The owners told him that they remembered their father using the crawl space underneath the house for storage, so Hunter returned the next day wearing a jumpsuit and armed with a flashlight, ready to search through layers of mud for African-American antiques. When sifting through the forgotten discards of previous generations, such as bottles and dinnerware, he found numerous charcoal portraits of wealthy African-Americans, dating from the 1890s – 1920s. Hunter intends to have them restored and put on display at the African-American Heritage Museum. In the meantime, he is searching for anyone with information about the family depicted in these portraits.
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courtesy of the african-american heritage museum
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at home with the tsars
In 2004, the main galleries of the Newark Museum were transformed into the private rooms of the last Tsar of Russia, his wife, and their five children in the Alexander Palace at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the tragic fate of Nicholas and Alexandra has been well documented, few people have actually come face-to-face with objects from their day-to-day life, objects that show them not as “imperial,” but as a “family.” This exhibition showed Nicholas not as an absolute monarch, but as a father who used his Kodak camera to document his growing children. “Nicholas and Alexandra: At Home with the Last Tsar and His Family” featured children’s toys, “everyday” clothing, military uniforms, paintings, family snapshot albums and elegant decorative arts objects, including works by Fabergé and rare footage of home movies taken by the Tsar himself.
see more of the Tsar's private home movies and photos. Produced by the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe.
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Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra
The Russian Imperial Family,
circa 1916
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