- [Narrator] Live from your public media studios WVIA Presents Keystone Edition Arts a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and central Pennsylvania.

This is Keystone Edition Arts.

And now Erika Funke.

- Welcome to Keystone Edition Arts where we'll explore creativity and the arts as we age.

Paula Lazar paves the way.

- [Paul] Imagine a room full of students add colored pencils, paints, a piano and a teacher.

While these are all resources for a school-aged children's art and music class these could also be resources for a class of older adults.

Research shows that for older adults, creative and cultural activities provide meaningful ways to connect with others, find personal fulfillment and expand their understanding of our shared world.

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, chair of the National Endowment of the Arts said all people have the capacity to be creative, imaginative, expressive.

It's also important to value the creative process itself, the process of making, of figuring something out, of being fully engaged intellectually, emotionally physically, and the experience of expression whether individual or collective.

Rene Chamberlain, the program director of the Northern Tier Partners for the Arts, recently spoke with Kat Bolus from WVIA news about an art residency program in Benton at the Northern Columbia Community and Cultural Center.

Renee shared that what we find when the seniors engage they're really shocked by their abilities.

They have a sense of pride and confidence that they didn't have before starting the program.

Some individuals are looking to continue exploring whatever art form they have learned and develop a new hobby a new way of relating to people.

But some people are not interested in continuing with that art form, but they are interested in continuing with the relationship they've developed as part of that residency with other individuals in their peer group.

For Keystone Edition Arts, I'm Paul Lazar.

- We may not realize it, but as we talk about the arts and aging, underneath the images and the stories will be the whole notion of time.

This is a painting by artist Mary Lapos that is titled We Are Running Out of Time and is many layered and rich in meaning.

Mary tells us that ultimately the painting is about the return of possibility and hope.

Hope that balance will be restored to nature, this country, people's relationships and our daily lives, seated centrally is an older woman who represents wisdom, feet planted solidly on the ground.

And with our guests on this show, we'll find that the arts can be a key to creating meaning and hope.

Whether we sense we're running out of time as we age feeling alone and bereft even while all those anxieties are being magnified on a global scale, or whether we just wanna keep growing and developing as long as we are able to.

We welcome Dr. Catherine Richmond Cullen, who is president of Neuro Learn LLC and director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Partnership Program at the Northeastern Educational Intermediate Unit.

She's a former associate professor at the University of Scranton, and her most recent project is the Academy for Creative Aging.

Artist Juan Espino, a native of Mexico who settled here in Hawley in 1988 and founded with his wife a looking glass gallery.

He paints in the style known as naive or naive.

Think of Ari Russo or Grandma Moses.

He's received numerous commissions and has shown his work widely in this region also in the state capital in Harrisburg and in Canada and with COVID around the world.

Juan has been a lifelong community activist in his home state in Mexico and here in northeastern Pennsylvania with a focus especially on the arts and historic preservation.

And Mary Lapos a mixed media artist who has her studio on her family farm in Danville where she's lived for 50 years.

Her work is held in public and private collections in the US, Europe, and India.

Her largest body of work titled Painting Invisible People focuses on social justice issues in India, Haiti, and the United States.

Welcome to you all, but welcome, Catherine, tell us before anything, a story of someone you've worked with or someone you've known who might as an older adult have been struggling with the sense of passing of time or wanting simply to grow and that person's life was changed by an experience in the arts.

- Well first of all, thank you so much for having me tonight Erika, with these esteemed artists, I'm really grateful for the opportunity because of the new creative aging initiatives with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the Department of Aging and in the Pennsylvania Council and the arts, we in this region have been granted money to provide creative aging residencies to older adults and their caregivers.

So in one of the programs we have, we had a man who was a hundred years old with his son neither had ever painted, and they had an opportunity to work with Liz Perry Feist and Gina Rice and Don Lees and they began painting and writing poetry together.

And this gentleman began telling his stories, stories about when he fought in the war, stories about his childhood, and remembrances came upon the painting and in the poems.

And the artist were phenomenal in just allowing him to express his life story, which is what artists do, talk about life and their experiences.

So that would just be one of many, many people who have really had wonderful experiences in the creative aging residencies - And bonding among generations, father and son.

- So important as well.

- Well, you have really been in the world of facts and research and programs that are experimental and there is a big body of work now that really does show the impact on the quality of life, mental cognition.

Tell us something about that and the programming that you have been developing here.

- Well, as a researcher at the University of Scranton I was commissioned to be the lead investigator on a project that looked at self-reported loneliness in older adults after they worked with artists in residence.

So some worked in dance music, visual arts theater and writing across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

And the results were wonderful and we found that not only did people feel less lonely but they felt confident socially they had reported better self-expression, their memory was better.

They had really great emotional reactions to the art and to one another.

They became storytellers and became more social.

I believe I had said that but had more friends after the experience.

So instead of the sadness and loneliness of self-isolation and isolation in general, as we age these people came together and really discovered nuances about their own lives and became more healthy, Erika, which is so important not only mental health but physical health.

- And you have developed programs to train the trainers or to train the artists so that they can work and get the results that you just spoke about.

- Correct, I was asked recently by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to create a website that is a professional development training module for professional artists.

And although it's a Pennsylvania, gem I'm going to call it, it's being received well nationally.

And so the Academy for Creative Aging is an opportunity for artists to learn and discover how to use brain-based strategies to become effective teachers and to meld that into the information that we give them on adult development and learning.

So we have sample videos of artists who I've worked with to help structure their teaching into an effective way to assist older adults in learning in the arts.

So it's been fabulous, thank you.

- Very exciting and we thank you Catherine, and we want to welcome you Juan and Mary too.

We'll be speaking to each of you because each of you we can welcome as a practicing artist and that's very important too.

And your experience in your own work and in the communities you are part of will help us have a conversation with the programming that Dr. Richmond Cullen has been developing.

And one of the things that's I would love for you to start with is a sense of the worldview, a way of understanding life and the passing of time.

And I thought of the work that you have displayed in the past in the fall at the holy silk mill, the ofrenda for the Day of the Dead, and how that's a part of your tradition, not just your immediate family but the tradition of your culture as a native of Mexico and also that you paid tribute to the heritage of artists who have meant something to you.

And I wanted to ask you about what something like that tells us about, for example, the culture of Mexico as opposed to our culture and its relationship with life and the passing of time - Well before anything, Erika, thank you so much.

I thank my cultural background and professional that allowed me to have the opportunity to meet extraordinary people in all my 83 years of life.

And this is one of those moments.

Thank you for allowing me to be with you and to be with friends around here and yes indeed, I have very deep in myself the sense of the cultural background where I coming from.

I was born in a small town in Michoacan, my life basically until 16 years old, I moved to Mexico City.

But all the time I have my roots and my family in my hometown.

I was possible six years old when my father, who was at this point a politician and a social community activist make a visit to this beautiful place called Pátzcuaro.

Pátzcuaro is one of the cities in Mexico that has been protected by the organization of the United Nations.

The city has a lake, called Lago de Pátzcuaro, Pátzcuaro lake.

And in the middle of the lake they are an island Janitzio.

It's a beautiful world, Janitzio.

So this night we arrived to celebrate the day of the dead.

My father was very welcomed because as congressman introduced a lot to teach Tarascan language and Spanish in the elementary schools I'm talking about 1940.

So the possibility that everybody could have the language and have some acknowledging of original language that this law pass.

And my father was very welcome.

I remember at six years old to walk and to see all this beautiful simple decoration of the small houses with paper, cut paper in the streets in the small one room house, an alter, the pictures of the family, the flowers, cempaxochitl, we call over over here Marigold, that's the flower for the celebration, the flower for the celebration.

And to see that they make a special preparation to celebrate this night, the arrival of the spirits of the family that pass.

And they will come to celebrate this day.

So around midnight, everybody go to the cemetery and they have the friend in the graveyard and stay all night over there with the candles and everything waiting for the arrival of spirits to have that this particular experience stay in my mind for so many years.

I visit for myself through the years few times only to enjoy this moment.

And when I have the wonderful moment in my life to marry Mildred and two months after our wedding we make a visit and we stay all night over there.

As American, she was born in Brooklyn, it was a wonderful experience for her and it was a way I tried to connect my heritage with who will be my companion of the life.

This is the story.

- So you are not afraid of passing because you know that, what's the impact in terms of the passing of time and the work that you do in art?

- Well, particular what you are asking, this year I have the opportunity and of course very nice people encourage me to do that.

I share this idea before I will move to a different area to do for first time this celebration in holy.

I talked with Milli and I talked with their friends Grand and Jinny Geringer that by the way they celebrate the day of the dead in Mexico I think it was in 2016.

And they sent me a beautiful picture when they was having celebration over there.

So that's encouraged me to put all this together and to start working to try to make for first time a completely authentic decoration almost follow all the recipe, how to celebrate that even in my family home, they continued doing for so many years and I was so really incredible happy about the response of the people that made me feel very special.

- You are special and we know that and we know how important the work that you do in the community, how many people you touch by sharing your own traditions, but helping other people in the community to share their own voices and their own communities, either in your own gallery or in libraries or community festivities all around.

You're a very important, generous person and we are so grateful that you're with us.

And Mary, we turn to you because we have just talked with Juan about time and running out of time and the return of spirits and the generations, you are painting running out of time sets a tone for us in a way.

And what I've learned in talking with you is that you don't view getting older as running out of time but as the gift of more time to paint.

So tell us about your relationship to time that, that yes you are more limited physically, but it's something that's given you a real gift, yes.

- I think so.

I look at that painting, it's hanging down the show right now that I have in Millersburg but I miss it being home here with me, because it's not much about my running out of time so much as we as human species are running out of time and the women at the table I don't know if you want me to go down that road say that they've been waiting a long time to participate in major decision making, but in our country we're woefully behind the rest of the world having women in positions of power to make big decisions.

So that's a long story all by itself.

- But you have chosen to, and we can let our viewers see perhaps on your website the woman, the strong older woman you put in the middle who represents wisdom.

And that gives me a chance to segue to the fact that you have come to paint a series of self-portraits marking perhaps the passage of your time in life.

But there's one particular portrait that is so powerful and you title it inside out and it's a painting that you painted as an older adult but of an earlier time.

Talk to us about the relationship of your self portraits and what they have been suggesting for you over time.

- This one was rather unique in that I was simply going to experiment with line making.

That was my formulation in the beginning.

And I had already done a self-portrait.

It was very similar, but it was a traditional portrait.

And so I wanted to see if I could bring my line making habit into a painting and habit work.

And it did, except I don't remember doing half of it.

That was the more intricate part with all the lines.

And I didn't really know what I had painted.

I woke up in the morning, I was sound asleep on top of the painting.

It's a watercolor and fortunately my pen didn't leak but it took me a while to realize what I was looking at.

And I was looking at a time when I had cancer, I had breast cancer and two mastectomies and it was a devastating time for me and I thought I had taken care of all of it.

I thought I had gone to counseling after the surgeries and all of that that you'd try to do for yourself.

But this was 30 years after the fact that this painting happened.

And when I realized what it was, I just cried like a baby.

It was all still in there and I've been carrying it with me all those years and it was a powerful moment for me and I felt healed for the first time, truly healed.

- And you wouldn't have been able to paint a portrait perhaps that did that when you were 30 years younger?

- Oh, I wouldn't have even thought of it.

And I don't know if I thought of it this time either.

It just sort of materialized in front of me and I was confounded when I first looked at it and I thought, what?

And then I realized what it was.

It was everything that had been unsaid.

I didn't think I had left anything unsaid but apparently I did.

And it's a picture of when I had cancer and after they did the mastectomies.

And I am not the typical Mary person in that painting.

I am angry.

I'm a formidable force at that point much later.

And I've carried that with me as the replacement for all the other stuff that was inside and needed to get out.

And I've hoped that the painting can find its way into the counseling world 'cause I've watched women look at this painting at shows and I know they get it and they kind of are looking for a chair to sit down in somewhere without taking their eyes off the painting.

And they have a visceral reaction to it because they know somebody else knows what they've been through and they can come out the other end and go on with their life.

It doesn't need to be the end of anything.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

- And you are, when we look at your, that portrait I think we would find that you are so fully present to the truth of your condition, that it is that you are someone who's had a diagnosis and that you had surgery and there is a sense that you give us permission, whatever our trials may be to be fully present to them when we're ready.

Catherine, when you hear a story like that about, about what a work of art can do, either somebody painting for the first time or somebody working in the teaching artists that you work with that's some of the power of what you're working with.

- Well, anyone watching hopefully knows the power of the arts.

I was really touched by both of your stories and I appreciate you telling them so candidly, I can relate to childhood experiences, Juan and also Mary, to being a survivor.

So that was a really touching story for me both, thank you.

The power of the arts is incredible and my research is about how the arts align to the brain.

And so when we're making art, we're actually stimulating all parts of our cerebral cortex.

And it's so fascinating to me that we are literally made to be artists or creators that we have a brain that paints that draws, that sings, that dances, that writes and we're designed to learn in and through the arts.

I mean, we have a hundred billion neurons at birth and neuron is Greek word for bow strings.

So it's interesting how the Greeks knew that we were music.

We are music.

So I find that, when you discover yourself in your paintings, you remember your childhood your traditions, your life experiences, your illnesses as we age, we can manifest our wonderful lives and our painful lives.

And, but all of that we are, all of whom we are as as humans can be so well stated in the act of creation and creativity.

- Well short time as we have, we want to thank our guests Mary, Juan, and Catherine and you for watching and for more information on this topic including links to our guests and resources please visit wvia.org/keystone and click on Keystone edition Arts.

And remember, you can watch this episode or any previous episode on demand anytime online or on the WVIA app for Keystone Edition, I'm Erika Funke.

Thank you for watching.

We'll ask Bobby Baird the much loved jazz trumpeter and band leader from northeastern Pennsylvania to play us out.

Baird was the youngest member of the US Navy Band to be named trumpet soloist.

He went on to play with many jazz greats, including Jade and Crupe, backed up Rosemary Clooney and Peggy Lee.

Here's Bobby Baird with the Doug Smith All Stars in 2020 when he was 92 years old playing his longtime theme song, Tin Roof Blues.

(Jazz plays)