- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[Music] - Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by Charles Rosenblum, Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, the State of Florida, and Division of Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In this edition of WEDU Arts plus, a pianist journey through music.

- Although he's not able to communicate verbally or function independently, he wakes up with a purpose of playing or practicing.

- Creating a spooky haunted house.

- Junkies Dark Corner Haunt is an elaborate, immersive walk through experience.

- A museum designed by a world renowned artist.

- He was a spectacular academic sculptor at 1920, and then very quickly realized that he was becoming the poster boy of a passé art form.

- And watercolor portraits.

- My subject matter is a lot of times it's, uh, African American and, uh, I like to show positive images.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

[Music] Hello, I'm Dalia Colon and this is WEDU Arts Plus Meet Milosz Gasior, a pianist with autism who communicates through his music.

Despite challenges he graduated as the first piano major from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts.

Today, Milosz shares his extraordinary talent by performing in Tampa Bay.

[Music] - Milosz is a pianist.

He was diagnosed with autism at the age of two and a half.

[Music] His diagnosis was moderate to severe autism.

[Music] So when Milosz was diagnosed, I was afraid.

But you know, my son was alive after all, and I wanted to do everything that I can to give him the best quality of life he could get.

No matter his medical diagnosis.

[Music] And here...what did you do over here?

- The tree sap.

- Milosz has severe speech delay.

And he didn't talk at all when he was little.

So, at around age of seven, in my search for a connection, I guided him to an electric piano.

And I helped him press the middle C key with his little finger and he looked at me.

It was almost like he would say, you know, mom, I'm here.

I want to talk to you.

I just don't know how.

[Music] That was really something incredible because he didn't have eye contact.

[Piano playing] Excellent.

And that was the beginning of our musical communication.

[Music] The first real success was when Milosz was allowed to join the middle school jazz band.

He played there for two years and it was time to transition to high school.

We chose Pinellas County Center for the Arts because it offers a piano major.

[Music] - I first learned about Milosz when I heard that there was going to be an autistic person coming to audition.

Immediately, I was curious and I just wanted to know more about him and what he could do and what his skill levels were as an eighth grader.

[Music] He really challenged me to think about how to teach in so many modalities at the same time.

Sometimes it was not just visual, sometimes it wasn't verbal, but it was also auditory as well as kinesthetic.

Like we had to get up and move because like if we tried to speak, it was always like him repeating the last 2 or 3 words that I said.

But if I said, let's get up and just do this, he would get up and then dance with me and shuffle and say, this is how you feel, a waltz move as he did that, you know.

He never made eye contact, but he would smile this huge smile.

And then when he sat down again, I was like, you know, feel this, right?

Remember how you moved your feet?

And then he would play it that way.

And it was just amazing.

- One Czech music is very mathematical.

You know, the patterns, the counting one and two and three and four.

And I think that is a big part of Milosz's love for music.

- Oh.

- Play.

[Music] - At HUG, which stands for Help Us Gather.

We are a non-profit based in Clearwater, Florida, and we are dedicated to promoting inclusion and also improving the life of people with disabilities.

[Music] So HUG has an opportunity each year where they give out an award called Mr.

or Mrs.

Inspirational to a friend that we really feel that inspires us.

And we watch really captured that.

[Music] His talent put us in awe and we were just so amazed.

[Music] - As Mr.

Inspirational, Milosz had the honor of performing at the Tampa International Airport.

When he performed there, Mark Schoenfeld, a Broadway creator and impresario heard him play.

He encouraged me to write my story, and I have written a book about my life journey.

I heard the light.

[Music] With me which has achieved.

Wouldn't be possible without a village of people.

You know, sometimes we say it takes a village to raise a child.

It takes a village to raise a child with special needs.

And we've been blessed with so many people.

[Music] ♪ Way up high ♪ [Music] - I'm very grateful to Milosz and his mom, because I feel like they gave us a chance to sort of prove how we could come together and build this community so that we can actually, um, grow as teachers and as people.

- Bozena she is a super mom and I think it makes such a difference having such a strong advocate in your corner.

She has really moved mountains to allow me wash, to express himself and have these really amazing opportunities to showcase his talent.

- For those of you who face challenges.

- In life, I have this advice seek out and boldly ask for help.

Never give up and never accept no as the first answer, because eventually someone is going to take a chance on you, on your child, on your loved one.

I want to share my son's story because although he's not able to communicate verbally or function independently, he wakes up with a purpose of playing or practicing or preparing for possible next event on his calendar.

It is my hope that he's going to continue to play but most importantly, to perform for others.

- Perform for others.

[Music] - To hear more, visit asdvirtuoso.org.

Get a behind the scenes look at the Dark Corner Haunt in Reno, Nevada, last Halloween.

This immersive haunted house spooked visitors with live actors, special effects, and more.

- The story you are about to see may contain graphic images of blood, gore, flashing lights, and sharp noises.

But hey, it's all in fun.

[Music] - Hi there.

My name is Guinivere Clark and I'm a PBS Reno content creator.

I'm about to go inside the Dark Corner Haunt in downtown Reno at the National Bowling Stadium.

As a scare actor for this haunt.

I get to take you behind the scenes with me.

So come on, let's go.

[Music] So we just got a tour of the place, walking around now, getting a feel for it.

It's gonna be really cool.

Like they put a ton of work into this place.

It's gonna be awesome.

[Music] I'm really looking forward to opening night when we get to scare some people.

But in the meantime, let's meet the artist who organized this whole thing and put it all together.

[Music] - I'm an artist.

I went to art school at Savannah College of Art and Design for fine art sculpture, and during college I got involved in Netherworld Haunted House.

Little did I know, I was working for one of the most wonderful and elaborate productions in the haunt industry.

This form of creativity and the people I met and the family that I got out of it, and the way it helped me push my creative endeavors has always affected me as an artist.

The people you can meet and the friendships you can make.

And really, the family environment that I have had working in the haunt industry is something I want to bring to Reno.

[Music] Junkies Dark Corner Haunt is an elaborate, immersive walk-through experience for Halloween lovers.

It will be a theatrical production where you walk through sets and fabricated environments where you will encounter theatrical trained actors and monsters jumping out at every corner to give you a thrill and a Halloween experience.

- This year, we will be located in the National Bowling Stadium, downtown Reno.

It's a great location.

It's in a building that a lot of people know about but drive by and have never been in.

- The plot of Junkies Dark Corner Haunt takes place in a haunted antique mall, so the audience will go through an antique mall, reach some tragedy in the storyline, and wake up in the hospital where Doctor Stain will bring them back to life, and the audience will escape the hospital to get out of the haunted house.

In the show, everything you're going to see was created or fabricated by us.

We made the walls, we've fabricated the props.

We've built the pneumatics.

We've distressed the deco.

- I've been hard at this since June with them nonstop.

Pretty much every weekend.

Every available time that I get, I've helped out with building, fabricating.

I've helped design one of the major scenes here.

I've also helped with wiring electronic speakers.

Yeah, everything.

[Music] - When who's going to edit this video that you're watching now has been on the team since the middle of the summer as well.

And as a scare actor, you're going to see her implanting some of the storyline into your head at the beginning of the haunt.

[Music] We learned from Hollywood set design, how to make walls.

So they're built in a panel construction that's lightweight and bolted together where they can move in any placement we need them to.

So in following years, we could redesign this haunt with a different wall layout.

Since spring, we've been working on fabricating props so we could decorate in between the walls.

And quickly after that, we knew because we wanted to be an actor driven show, we would need an amazing cast.

So we quickly started calling out for anyone interested in being a scare actor.

- Well, downtown Reno is literally buzzing with street vibrations.

We are at the National Bowling Stadium today for the first official day of training.

Very exciting.

Very excited to see how the haunt goes.

And yeah, it should be fun.

- What makes a good scare actor is somebody who's willing to just wait for the perfect moment, who's willing to sit there and watch the crowds and learn from the reactions and know that, oh, I scared the front of the group this time.

Didn't quite work.

And wait, scares the middle of the group next time.

Oh, that worked a little better.

Learns and grows and adapts.

At the end of the season, that final walkthrough.

When you go through and you see it all together, it's really magical.

You can transport people and take them to a different place.

You can suspend their disbelief for, you know, 20 minutes and scare the crap out of.

[Music] Some people haunt one day a year and some of us we haunt 365 days a year.

Just one day, a little bit more.

Getting a bunch of people who come together and they have a collective goal to make something cool and fun and an experience for other people.

And watching all of these people come together to make this is just absolutely the best part to me being here.

- I want it to be a safe place and a family environment, and where people that feel like maybe they're weirdos or outcasts or artists, or just not like everyone else can come and meet people the same and different as them and be accepted.

[Music] - And some people are more actors, some people are more makeup, some people are more design and build.

Some people are more deco.

There's all these different facets, though, that bring everybody together.

And by the end of the season, you got, you always walk away with a friend or two, if not a family of a whole bunch of people who love you for the creativeness that you are, or the acting that you do, or the, you know, something that makes you, you.

[Music] I want everybody to know that like, this is just year one and it only gets better from here.

So I have high hopes that all of us in the future are going to keep scaring Reno's pants off.

- It's really incredible what we've pulled off this year.

We've all worked so hard, and I can't say thank you enough to my team who has helped me put this together and has really Seeing the vision and helped make it a reality.

- This experience has been way more creative than I ever would have imagined.

I hope the special behind the scenes look has made you want to check it out for yourself.

Thank you, Dark Corner Hunt for the spooky time.

And here's to a spooky future.

[Music] - See what's haunting visitors this season at darkprison.com.

Isamu Noguchi was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.

In 1985, he founded a museum dedicated to his work located in Queens, New York.

The Noguchi Museum features the artist's innovative sculptures, drawings, and models.

[Music] - Noguchi was born in 1904.

He was born in Los Angeles, California.

His mother was an Irish woman from New York.

She was born in Brooklyn.

His father was a traveling poet from Japan.

Noguchi wasn't even named until he was almost three years old.

His mother just called him Boy or Yo.

[Music] His identity was complicated from the very first moment of his birth.

He was biracial, chose to be multicultural his whole life, but at a time when it was much harder.

[Music] He enrolled at Columbia in pre-med.

His mother felt that he was destined for bigger things than being a doctor, and by that she meant being an artist.

[Music] He was a spectacular academic sculptor at 1920, and then very quickly realized that he was becoming the poster boy of a passé art form.

[Music] He really wanted to change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic good.

He wanted to make it an active part of our everyday life.

That's why he never stopped making furniture.

His Akari lamp series.

He made playgrounds, he made playground equipment.

He made sets for theater and dance.

He had long collaborations with people like Martha Graham.

[Music] The museum was founded in 1985, but Noguchi had been here for almost ten years.

He bought a derelict factory building, which is the red brick building behind me, and started using it for storage and staging.

[Music] Sculpture is all about physical inconvenience.

Everything is big and heavy and takes up space and requires equipment to deal with, so sculptors always need more room.

[Music] He decided that in order to encapsulate his perspective or his point of view, his way of thinking of things, that the best thing to do was to build an institution.

And so he began to turn his private garden and space into a display space.

When the museum opened, it was seasonal.

Noguchi would be here himself.

You could ring the bell and he'd come down and walk you through.

One of the things that you'll notice when you come to our museum, probably right away, is that we don't have wall labels.

We do that not because Noguchi hated wall labels.

When the museum first opened, there were labels identifying all the sculptures somewhere near them in a kind of traditional museum fashion.

Gradually, he just removed them.

And it's because he wanted your experience of the work to be primary.

The fastest way to kill an artwork is to pretend that you've solved it.

The museum is really about a direct and intimate relationship with these objects and these things, and more important, the larger sense of an environment that they create.

They really produce an atmosphere.

And we're standing in this garden, which isn't even two thirds of an acre.

It's teeny tiny.

It's a postage stamp.

He called the museum an oasis on the edge of a black hole.

The black hole is New York City and the urban maelstrom.

And as small as it is, you come here and you just soak it in and you soak it in through osmosis.

It's like visiting a forest, not like going to the museum.

[Music] Maybe Noguchi's most successful sculpture overall are his Akari lanterns.

He called them lanterns rather than lamps, because he said he wanted them to be as movable as butterflies.

So traditional paper lanterns in Gifu City, specifically, are made with a particular kind of continuous bamboo ribbing and washi paper that's made with the interior bark of a mulberry tree, and it produces a laid paper that's just more durable, more flexible, and more resilient than classic laid cotton paper.

Break Through Capistrano is made out of Japanese basalt.

A basalt column is a single crystal of basalt, and Noguchi worked with harder and harder stones because he wanted the material to resist him.

What he really liked was stones that had already been marked by some process that he would then incorporate into the work.

You can see the lines of drill holes.

Those drill holes were made manually with hand drills, and then they'll push two bamboo wedges into the hole and fill the hole with water.

The bamboo wedges expand enough to crack the stone.

Noguchi loved that, and he loved the product of this breaking process.

So he would take these stone columns and set them upright, slice the bottom off so that it would stand up and then make as few adjustments to turn them into sculpture and air quotes.

[Music] The well, that's right behind me, this wonderful variation on a tsukubai that is a circulating fountain.

The water just cascades out over the stone.

That's another one of those basalt columns just lopped off with a coring drill, making a hole in it.

[Music] Some of these sculptures are eroding, but the trees are growing.

Their relationship to each other is changing constantly.

Over time, he planted all of the trees.

So the magnificent Katsura tree that provides the canopy that dominates the garden.

It really was a sprig.

It was a quarter inch sapling.

And now you see what that's become.

And that's why the heart and soul of the Noguchi Museum is this garden.

[Music] - Find out more at noguchi.org.

Meet Emmy Award-winning artist James Gayles, who loves to paint with watercolor.

Through this medium, he portrays ancestral icons like Nina Simone, Miles Davis, and Maya Angelou.

[Music] - Watercolor lends itself to spontaneity, flow, and expression.

I can do my type of style for the shadows and the highlights.

[Music] My name is James Gayles.

I do watercolor portraiture.

[Music] I work here in my studio on Dickerson Road in Reno, Nevada.

[Music] My subject matter is a lot of times it's African American, and I like to show positive images of that segment of the population to give the people pride in themselves.

[Music] I was born on the East Coast in Newark, New Jersey, which is right across the bridge from New York City.

[Music] As a teenager, I snuck a lot across the bridge over to New York jazz nightclubs.

New York City is great, you know, because everything's there.

It's the center of everything fashion, music, art.

[Music] So it was great for me, I loved it.

[Music] As far back as I can remember.

I like to paint and draw and do Dude.

[Music] My mom was one of my biggest encouragers.

[Music] I kind of always knew that I was going to be an artist when I grew up.

I started out in oils when I was a teenager, but I discovered I was allergic to the oil.

So that's when I switched to watercolor and acrylic.

[Music] I graduated in 1970 from Pratt Institute.

Basically, I'm self-taught long before I went to school.

School just enhanced it more.

[Music] I start with the eyes.

To me, the eyes are the most important thing that can convey the person's spirit.

[Music] I break up the face into shadows and highlights cheekbones and nose.

The lips.

Watercolor is very good for that.

I go through a lot of paint, a lot of color because my paintings are saturated with color and paint.

So I go through two very quickly.

[Music] Capturing the spirit of a person is the main thing that I'm striving for.

[Music] A lot of people find watercolor hard.

I find it easy because when you're painting, there's bound to be mistakes.

But I like to use those mistakes to work on it.

They create a better end product once you solve those mistakes within the painting.

[Music] It's kind of hard to explain how I do it because I kind of go by feeling.

It's kind of like a spiritual type thing, you know, relate to the subject and you kind of try and bring out the, uh, the spirit.

You know?

[Music] I do a lot of musicians, Nina Simone, Miles Davis...Miles Davis is another very good subject.

He has very intense eyes.

John Coltrane and you know, a lot of icons that they look up to, like Maya Angelou and Martin Luther King.

[Music] It's a good feeling, you know, that I've accomplished something.

Reno is kind of growing on me.

It's a lot different than New York or Oakland, because New York and Oakland are very diverse and very multicultural, you know?

So I kind of made it my mission to bring African American art to Reno.

My advice to young, struggling artists who struggle with their work, I say don't be discouraged if things don't work out the first time.

You know, stick with it.

They must love it because there are lot long hours and a lot of work they got to put into it in order to be successful.

So you have to love it, and you have to kind of like be a sponge and absorb any all the artwork, you know, look at art whenever you can in the museums, galleries, magazines, you know, see what the other artists are doing.

And, you know, so you can kind of gauge yourself where you're, where you fit in the whole art scene.

[Music] - For more, go to jamesgayles.com.

And that wraps it up for this episode of WEDU Arts Plus.

To view more, visit wedu.org/artsplus or follow us on social.

I'm Dalia Colon.

Thanks for watching.

[Music]