Jack. I'll start with you. Take us back to the beginning of this whole project. What sparked the idea for it in the first place?
Jack Lucido: As a PBS member station, we are privy to grants that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other PBS and public media entities put out, and we applied for a civics and elections grant for $20,000, and it was highly competitive. I think dozens of stations across the country applied, and we were awarded a grant. And we're a very small PBS station, compared to the big ones that we know of, like KQED in San Francisco, for example. And so with that, we followed through. We wanted to highlight young artists and moved forward, having received the grant last August.
Congratulations on that grant. I know that's huge for a small organization. Now, the artists are described as change makers, so what are some examples of how they're challenging injustice and prompting conversations in their communities?
Lucido: Grayson Johansen, who's on the line with us, is a great example. Grayson is a community activist. Grayson has made a place once or twice a month with new events for people to come of all ages. I mean, it's targeting youth, but it’s for all ages to come and speak their truth and recite poetry or have an out-loud conversation. So, that's amazing. And Grayson is a poet himself as well, right? There's five stories altogether in the documentary. There's a fiber arts group at Arcata High School in Arcata, and they knit and crochet clothing and other items, then sell those publicly, then give the proceeds to Doctors Without Borders. So it's those kinds of civics things that are happening with the creativity of these amazing young artists.
I love to hear about that from young people. And those fiber artists are Arpita Panta and Julia Oberlander.
Lucido: Yeah, and several others in that club.
And we'll hear a poem from Grayson and hear about his experience a little later in the interview. But we have a clip to play in a minute, and this is going to start with the voice of Savannah Burke, who says, “My art is my voice.” So tell us a little bit about Savannah, just to set this up.
Lucido: Savannah is a friend and cohort of Grayson's, and Savannah is an artist and a poet, so she has her own segment in the film, and we see her art and hear her story. And I think her her core theme, I'm just going to say teen mental health, making her art, allowing people to be comfortable, to have their emotions, express their emotions, highlight their emotions. That's, I think, Savannah’s mission with her creative work.
Okay, let's hear a clip from “Artists Breaking Barriers," a new documentary on KEET PBS.
[Clip of "Artists Breaking Barriers"]
Voice 1: "My art is my voice."
Voice 2: "There's a lot working against the process of life right now."
Voice 3: "I really wanted to be able to do something greater with our art, telling a story, an emotional problem that I have come across, and how I try to overcome that using art."
Voice 4: "And that reading poetry: You finally broken the barrier of not speaking your truth, and you were doing it!"
"I believe in feeding the people, physically and metaphorically, always."
Grayson Johansen, let's go to you. You've described yourself as a poet and open mic organizer, creating space for First Nations and other underserved communities. How long have you been doing that work, and how did you first realize the need for it?
Grayson Johansen: I'm not really sure how long I've been doing it. I'm going to say about a year now, and the reason I started it was because of the Sacramento Poetry Center. I don't know if you've heard about that and what they do down there, but I just really wanted to bring that sense of community up to Crescent City with me. So I did, and it's been going strong for a while now, and I definitely have created my own little family of people who are all connected through art and poetry.
That last voice was you in the clip that we just played. What did you mean by your statement that people are finally breaking through and speaking their truths?
Johansen: I guess what I meant by that was just that, like they're finally opening up to not just themselves, but also to realize, “Oh, hey, I'm not alone. There are other people here with me that feel, if not exactly the same, at least a little bit the same.”
Okay, and that sense of belonging can be really powerful. Can you describe what one of your open mic events is like?
Johansen: So, we always start off with food, because I believe in feeding the people, physically and metaphorically, always. So we'll gather around and just eat food for a while. And then we have a list that you can either write your name and put that you're doing a poem or showing a piece of art, or even singing a song. And then after we go through the list of having people go up, we sit in a circle - I call it circle time - and we kind of just talk about poems and other things. I call it bounce back poetry, where I'll recite a poem and somebody else will recite a poem, and I've heard people say that it's like a poetry AA meeting, where people are just venting towards one another. That's really where people start to connect and realize, “Oh, hey, this is really fun. And I do actually really enjoy spending time with other poets.”
So Grayson, can you share a poem with us?
Johansen: Of course, I can. So this poem I wrote kind of a while ago, but it's one of my go-to poems. It's called “My planet," and it goes like this:
I feel as if I'm constantly too much.
I don't want to be a burden.
Maybe I don't mean as much as I thought I did.
I look at the stars filled with no purpose for us,
but yet they are so they are admired by all.
I wish to one day become a planet, not a sun.
Stars are nice, but I'd much rather take care of things.
I'd much rather be a home for life, although the creatures on the planet I've become do not so much think about the damages they do.
Understand they're just living like me right now.
Maybe I'm a planet already.
Maybe I hold life.
Maybe someday, the creatures I hold in my hand will realize I am slowly being destroyed by how they live,
or maybe we will all die together.
What a powerful metaphor there. And at the same time, your words are something that probably seems so relatable to many young people and older people. I'm wondering if this documentary was your first experience with television; you're getting pretty media savvy.
Johansen: Yes, it was my first experience being on television. Now, when I was younger, I was a big Facebook star, where my mom would post Facebook videos of me. So that was as much media as I got.
"We would love to continue to lift up young artists as best we can."
Well, you're ramping it up lately. Last question for you: I hear that this documentary had its premiere screening just Wednesday in Arcata, and there were nearly 100 people in the audience. And actually, it makes perfect sense to put this film out on the big screen in the community for a shared experience, considering the subject is partly about making change in the community. So, how did the audience respond?
Johansen: Well, during the different interviews, everybody was reacting differently. Personally, when they got to mine, I felt horribly embarrassed and also so proud of myself, but everyone thought I was just absolutely hilarious.
In your mixture of pride and embarrassment. Well, that's terrific. Jack, can you tell us more about the other artists? Just to start that we heard from in the clip, there's Olivia Gibson, a poet, Sage Juarez….
Lucido: Absolutely. Sage was the first segment. Sage is 25 years old, and all the other artists are 17 years old. We put out a wide net with local, indigenous tribes and arts groups for nominations. And we weren't overburdened with nominations, but we had about twice as many as we could actually feature. So we got this amazing group. Sage is an artist, not from this area, from Southern California, but now lives here and showed and discussed their work. Sage is focusing on environmental issues and focusing on queer community. There’s also some good respect for their Mesoamerican ancestry, their Mexican ancestry.
I told you about the Arcata Fiber Arts group, and then Savannah Burke, definitely someone that goes to school with, and is also a graduating senior with Grayson. And then the last one was Olivia, who is recently trans and is a drag artist, drag performer, also a musician, and then also a poet. So we get to see a drag performance, and we get to see and hear a poem being read in the film. And it's interesting, because Olivia really breaks the boundaries of what poetry and drag are. They're not what you would sort of think in terms of a drag performance. It’s much different, I feel, much more powerful than the sort of drag performances that I have seen. So yeah, that's kind of our group, and we're very proud of these folks.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit as far as the drag performance?
Lucido: So, Olivia doesn't dress in a way that's about Olivia's physique and hairdo and so on, like what you would think - if you've ever been to a drag performance type of show. Olivia dresses down and in a different light, and uses makeup, but really uses physicality and her sort of interpretive dance approach to telling her story about feeling sort of trapped in her body and making the decision to finally come out just a few years ago. So, that's it. So it is drag, and there is a song being played, and she's lip syncing to the songs, but it's not drag like what you would think if you saw a picture. If you Google drag and put up an image, that's not what you're going to see. You're going to see something just differently authentic.
Okay, thank you. Well, given the success of this so far, do you have any plans to make another installment, especially considering you received more applications than you could use this time around?
Lucido: We would like to do that. It's a matter of securing funding. I mean, we're a nonprofit, and we're a PBS member station, and we're kind of under attack with the current political climate. So I think it'd be a matter of applying for grants or finding an underwriter partner that wants to do this sort of thing. So it's a little too soon to know if we can go there, but we would love to do that, maybe do a series, where you have two or three artists per half hour or something like that. But that's all in the dream stage right now, and good dreams to have. We would love to continue to lift up young artists as best we can, absolutely.
Lastly, before you go, are there any future community screenings, and how can people find out more?
Lucido: It’s available on KEET.org, and it'll broadcast on our airwaves. The premiere is Tuesday night, May 13, at 8pm, and there'll be many encore broadcasts. Our viewing area is huge, way down to Northern Mendocino, all through Humboldt County, big parts of Trinity County, Del Norte County, Crescent City, and Southern Oregon - all the way up to as far north as Coos Bay, believe it or not, you can pick up our signal. We do have a very, very big viewing area on the north coast and south coast of Oregon.
