(dramatic music) - [Narrator 1] Ballet and orchestra make a comeback at SPAC, Saint Rose, Professor Robert Shane, discusses art and motherhood in a post pandemic world and hear a special performance from Albany Pro Musica.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA, A House for Arts".

- [Narrator 2] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Lara Ayad and this is AHA: A house for arts, a place for all things creative.

Let's send it right over to Matt Rogowicz who's in Saratoga at one of our favorite summer venues.

- After a dark year I'm happy to be back at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center where I spoke with Elizabeth Sobol about what audiences can expect this summer.

- Thinking back to last March, I think I knew in my heart of hearts on the day we shut down that that was to that we were going to need to brace ourselves &and and prepare for a cancellation.

But I didn't say that to my colleagues because obviously there was a tremendous psychological peace to all of this.

The notion of SPAC canceling a whole season after more than 50 years was just inconceivable.

You know, the fact that this amphitheater stage would be dark was just an unthinkable notion, right?

And yet we had to start thinking the unthinkable.

Finally on May 18, we did announce the unannounceable and had to announce that we were canceling the whole season.

And that was just a brutal moment, but we knew that one way or another, we could not go through another season without our resident companies here.

They're our lifeblood, our DNA and so as early as July of last year we started talking to the resident companies and saying to the community one way or the other these artists are gonna be back.

People have to remember that normally it takes us 12 to 24 months to plan a particular season.

The repertoire they're bringing, the sets for the productions all of that stuff has to be taken into account.

Now, of course, it's made even more complex and challenging by the fact that we haven't had 24 months nor 12 months but really a couple of months because you can't start selling tickets until you know how many tickets you can sell and whether they have to be six feet apart from each other or three feet apart.

Let's talk about city ballet for a moment because that's the probably the most complicated situation we have.

First of all, all of these organizations are governed by underlying collective bargaining agreements.

And so in the case of the New York city ballet they have a clause in their contract that requires City Ballet the organization to inform the dancers by roughly middle of April, what they're gonna be doing that summer.

So cast your mind back to April, vaccinations were still infinitesimal level at that point.

And so there were also these questions about the, how can you socially distance at pas de deux do for instance.

How do you put a hundreds of people who are normally backstage together.

How do you socially distance like dancers and musicians you're running around?

How do you put, you know, the normal, 60 70 musicians in an orchestra pit that's normally packed like a sardine can?

You can't do that.

So we made a joint decision we're calling On and Off the Stage, New York city ballet On and Off the Stage and basically in lieu of a trip of 200 plus we've got 25 people coming up and it's going to be 75 minute performances, the dancers in costume, they will not be doing complete ballets, but excerpts and there will be interspersed with talking from about from some of the ballet dancers, really talking about like why this ballet, how did it happen?

What was the inspiration behind, the music, the costumes?

And I think it's going to give Saratoga audiences a glimpse behind the curtain that they frankly never had with New York city Ballet.

And I find this like stripping it down to its essence, enormously exciting.

(instrumental music) - And then in August the 11th-14th, we do have the Philadelphia orchestra coming back, Yannick Nézet-Séguin again, the amazing, amazing music director of Philadelphia is coming back for glorious, diverse, rich programs, closing night with Joshua Bell during the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

(violin music) The what can I expect question is the hardest one because it's very likely that, you know, two weeks from now the answer will be different, but in general we will be maintaining social distancing in the seating pods that people are buying or have bought or will buy because we think that, until COVID is completely eradicated, this summer it's important to be more cautious than less cautious.

And so there will be social distancing most likely all summer long, we will be requiring proof of vaccination or have a negative test in order to just know that we don't have to the best of our knowledge any live COVID cases coming onto the grounds.

So one really amazing and exciting thing that awaits audiences coming to the SPAC campus this summer, particularly those who did not come at all last summer is the Pines it's back.

Our brand new facility, brand new concessions, brand new bathrooms, many, many more bathrooms than in previous seasons, a covered pavilion right in the middle of the campus where we do lots of amazing, wonderful, new pre-show events and culinary events.

And then the incredible Pines at SPAC facility itself which has our first ever year round indoor education room and a beautiful 2,000 square foot terrace called the Pines terrace.

You'll just be blown away.

And we're so happy to have that awaiting people after this long, long, difficult year.

You know when you constantly thinking about how to fill a 5,200 seat amphitheater, your mind goes in a particular direction with particular types of artists and particular types of presentations, but when all of a sudden that's closed but you have this enormous blank canvas to paint on it gives you so much incredible opportunity to do things you never did before and to do them in intimate ways and that's really exciting.

And what we found um last summer was that these 50 person gatherings around food, around art, around healing arts, around any number of things the sense of gratitude that people had to be back on the SPAC grounds, to be together and to feel safe.

Those are some of the my most memorable moments in the last four and a half years.

- Robert Shane is associate professor of Art History at the college of Saint Rose.

His current book project is called Mirroring Mothers: Witnessing Maternal Subjectivity in Contemporary Art.

I spoke with Robert about his career in art and art criticism and why as a man, he decided to focus on artist mothers.

Robert, welcome to A House for Arts.

it's such a pleasure having you.

- Thank you so much for having me, Lara.

- You've done so many different kinds of things pertaining to the arts on some level, Robert I know you've written several articles about contemporary art and motherhood.

You're working on a book project right now about contemporary American art and maternal, subjectivity, and maternal issues.

I know you've also interviewed artists yourself.

So we've got interviewers here, right?

You've interviewed artists for the Brooklyn Rail magazine, which is great.

You've designed dance costumes, which is amazing.

And I'd love to talk about all these things, but um tell us for right now about your current book project what's the title of your book and what's it all about?

- Sure, it's titled "Mirroring Mothers: Witnessing Maternal Subjectivity in Contemporary Art".

And it's about artists who are mothers making work about that experience.

It builds on a long body of scholarship by people like Rachel Atbowler and Andre Elise who've looked at prominent artists like Renee Cox, Mary Kelly, and Catherine Opie.

And I'm trying to focus on some emerging and underrepresented artists particularly in the last 10 years or so.

Historically, there's been a lot of pressure on artists not to disclose that their mothers within the art world for fear that their work won't be taken seriously.

Same thing happens in corporate America.

They get worried about being passed over for job promotions and even in academia, fear of being put on the mommy track instead of the tenure track.

- Yeah, as if your work and your family life always have to be opposed and in order to make your work progress you have to ignore your family somehow.

And that's particularly tricky for mothers, right?

- Right and what a lot of these recent artists are doing is really pushing back against that marginalization and they're saying that we can be artists and mothers and we can make work about our experience as mothers.

That's important subject matter for art.

- You know, I know you've also curated a show, an art exhibition recently called "The Vision of Care", and it doesn't it also deal with something similar to that, that it deals with it actually features what are called artist mothers or what you've referred to as artist mothers, and it uses the ethics of care to show case painting and photography and installation.

Can you tell us a little bit about that exhibition and on one particular artist that you think was really exemplary of this themes?

- Sure, yeah, I'd love to.

I was super grateful to the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum for inviting me to curate this exhibition the Vision of Care.

I took entries from 23 artists who were working within 50 miles of Woodstock and they submitted work about parenting, about nature and the environment sometimes about loss.

All of this is happening during the pandemic.

The idea for the show first came from the work of artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who in 1969 proposed an exhibition titled Care in her Maintenance Art Manifesto, in which she talked about maternal labor, maintenance labor and sanitation.

- This is the early years of the second wave of feminism, so there were a lot of women artists talking about these things.

- Exactly and it's in pandemic parlance we would refer to all of this as essential labor today.

And Mierle Laderman Ukeles was already dealing with these issues and the environment.

So as I put the exhibition together, it was important for me to foreground the artists mothers in the exhibition because historically a lot of the conversation and theory about care has come out of that kind of work of people like Laderman Ukeles or theorists like Sarah Rodak.

So one of the artists was Kahori Kamiya who made a piece of sort of explosive expressionists sculpture about the challenges she's had breastfeeding as a mother, topic which is often accompanied with unfair feelings of shame, but she gives- - Right and very taboo right a lot of mothers don't feel very comfortable saying, well it hasn't always been a cakewalk trying to breastfeed my child, right?

- And that's so what's so important about what so many of these artists are doing.

They're giving a voice and form to feelings that have often been felt in private.

You had mentioned the second wave feminism and the mantra was always the personal is political.

And I think that that's still operates in this work today.

- That sounds like it.

Now that we've been talking about the personal is political, I'm curious to know Robert, you know, first of all how did you get so interested in contemporary art and more specifically as a man what made you want to learn more about motherhood in particular?

- My interest in contemporary art I owe to Susan Stuart who was my teacher and my painting teacher in high school.

She's a very prominent artist in the region and number of collections.

She introduced me to the word post-modernism.

She used to bring us to the Whitney Museum of American Arts Biennial which every two years they have the most cutting edge avant-garde art, often very provocative.

And she brought us down at a time of the, it was the height of the culture wars in the early mid nineties when work by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano was being censored, but she still had the courage to bring us there and to see she knew this was important.

And from there, I went on to art school and as I was making art, I was just plagued by all these questions, like, why are we making art?

Why is this important?

And I found the space to think through those issues in my classes with art historian, Dr. Lucy Bowditch and in particular her art criticism classes.

And from there, I went on to study Art Criticism in graduate school with Donald Kuspit from very prominent critic and scholar.

And both he and Dr. Bowditch have been just great mentors and friends ever since.

- Right, I mean, the mentorship piece is important.

And then was there anything, a little more, a moment in your own personal life that drove you to be so interested in mothers in particular?

- Yeah, it was interesting cause it started kind of theoretical.

I was looking at a lot of psychoanalytic theory and philosophy that was challenging the notion that as individuals, we become individual by separating with the mother and that in fact we who we are by virtue of our relationship with one another and that people respond to us.

But then a lot of that theory began to intersect with reality when my wife, Claire had our two children during the course of doing her master's degree and I began to see a lot of her experience reflected in the things that I had been reading.

And at that point, you know, I, I could have said, oh maybe I'll start writing about artist parents having just become one.

But it became important for me to bear witness to the experience of mothers.

And I think in part because I saw that our experiences as a mother and a father respectively- - And both in academia, right?

- Yeah to, to some extent.

So at home we try to divide the labor very equally, but culturally we're regarded very differently.

So when I would go to the grocery store I'd have one of our children in this carrier, almost like a kangaroo pouch on my body and our other child would be in the grocery cart and people would stop and applaud and it be like, wow, super dad, look at you.

And I guess that's nice, but women, mothers who go to the store with two children aren't getting that kind of applause.

- They're not seen as heroic, right?

It's just, they're just doing what they need to do.

- Yeah, more often than not, they're given a dirty look if the child, God forbid acts like a child and makes a peep.

So it's culturally motherhood and fatherhood are valued very differently.

And that's why I thought it was really important to bear witness to these maternity- - And it sounds yeah, it sounds like because it sounds like you're dealing Robert with a lot of these ideas about work and the value of work in both what you're curating and what you're writing about, as we're entering this post pandemic era I think it's become very obvious in the wider culture how we haven't traditionally valued the unpaid work of child-rearing and home care that mothers and women have traditionally done.

So I'm kinda curious both from your perspective writing about that and for most of teaching students sometimes, what would you tell younger generations who are now gonna break out into this post pandemic world start their careers, maybe start families?

What would you advise for them to do in terms of how they value work and how they value family?

- Yeah, it's tough for me to give practical advice on how to balance work and home.

I'm still struggling with that too.

But I think the advice I have for all of us is to really be listening to these artists mothers, and theorists because they've been working through these issues of care, which have to do with how do we acknowledge our mutual dependence on one another yet still value each other as individuals.

So I think of someone like Rebekah Tolley an artist in our region who is in the Vision of Care show, she had been making work about contingent labor in academia.

And then when she became a mother started to sort of translate some of that work into that language or Sarah Irvin who figures pretty prominently in my writing.

She had done one piece that consisted of 2,400 cards.

They look like time cards or invoices in which she kept track of her breastfeeding sessions with her child.

And both of those artists sort of point out that we don't quite yet have a language for talking about care, maternity in our culture.

- Why do you think that is?

Why you know, both from kind of thinking on your own experience and also conversing with and looking at the works of these artists mothers, why do you think it is we don't have a kind of supportive language about maternity and care in our culture?

- Yeah, I think it's of really a feminists concern.

It's had to do with the way the labor of women in general and mothers in particular has been marginalized and devalued.

Another reason that as a man writing about this I find it important to use what I can to give voice to these artists.

- I'm wondering too, if, as a man, like do you also see yourself as something like a role model for other younger men perhaps, that when you're paying more attention to this and it sounds like you're showing a lot more empathy to those with experiences very different from yours.

Do you see that as something that could maybe model a sort of new way of thinking about the world, particularly for young men?

- Sure, I would hope so and though I would say it's not a new way of thinking, but a way of thinking that's been forged by many of these artists mothers, and theorists.

So Sarah Rodak talks about maternal thinking, I think it's a kind of thinking that we men need to engage with.

There are problems, crises in childcare, structural racism, environmental degradation that were happening long before the pandemic that have been sort of highlighted in the last year and a half.

- The pandemic has exacerbated all of these issues.

- Yes, absolutely.

And it's not enough to go back to a pre pandemic normal.

So art that's about maternity I really don't see as a niche topic.

It's really getting to fundamental issues about how um structure labor, how we think about care, how we regard genders in our society.

So it's really something that men and everyone needs to be thinking about.

- Yeah, it's absolutely universal.

Robert, thank you so much for being on "A House for Arts".

It was such a pleasure.

- Thank you so much, Lara, for having me here - Please welcome Albany Pro Musica.

(choir humming) ♪ Angels ♪ ♪ Where you soar ♪ ♪ Up to God's own light ♪ ♪ Take my own ♪ ♪ Lost bird ♪ ♪ On your hearts tonight ♪ ♪ And as grief ♪ ♪ Once more ♪ ♪ Mounts to heaven and sings ♪ ♪ Let my love ♪ ♪ Be heard ♪ ♪ Love ♪ ♪ Angels ♪ ♪ Where you soar ♪ ♪ Up to God's own light ♪ ♪ Take my own ♪ ♪ Lost bird ♪ ♪ On your hearts tonight ♪ ♪ And as grief ♪ ♪ Once more ♪ ♪ Mounts to heaven and sings ♪ ♪ Let my love ♪ ♪ Be heard ♪ ♪ Let my love ♪ ♪ Be ♪ ♪ Heard ♪ ♪ Whistling ♪ ♪ In your wings ♪ (choir vocalizing) ♪ Let my love ♪ ♪ Be heard ♪ - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with WMHT on social.

I'm Lara Ayad, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator 1] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.