♪ (female narrator) This program is underwritten by... ♪ Two Lowcountry natives exhibited jointly for the first time at the Spoleto Festival USA... "Rhythms of Life: Selected Works by Jonathan Green" and "Myths and Metaphors: A Retrospective of Art by Leo Twiggs."

♪ It was indeed a homecoming.

♪ In many ways, these two artists are similar.

Green and Twiggs are both African Americans.

Both can claim the Lowcountry.

Green grew up in Gardens Corner, while Twiggs was born in Saint Stephen.

Both men are visual storytellers.

They both pay homage to a maternal culture.

And they both draw upon memories of their homelands for inspiration.

♪ Jonathan Green and Leo Twiggs differ in many ways as well.

First, they are of different generations.

Green is a painter and printmaker.

Twiggs, an innovator in the ancient art of batik.

Green is a full-time artist.

Twiggs spent a lifetime as an educator.

Where Green speaks in bold, direct colors, Twiggs cloaks his ideas in hushed tones with muted hues.

(female speaker) Both of these artists are of national significance, but the stories they tell are really... reflections of this, um... of the Lowcountry community, this region.

It's a win-win, a positive for both, because you walk through here and the visitors see that these artists I've seen elsewhere are really hometown heroes in a way.

(female soloist) ♪ Where is my mother?

♪ ♪ Where is my father?

♪ ♪ Where is my sister?

♪ ♪ Where is my brother?

♪ ♪ Down, down, down ♪ in Egypt land!

♪ (choir) ♪ Down, down, down ♪ in Egypt land!

♪ There is never a time when I feel that I'm not learning.

I'm constantly learning.

I'm learning how to paint, how to use paint, how not to overpaint.

I'm learning how to simplify.

I think the maturity in most artists has to do with simplification.

I think that the more you use a material, the more you can be selective in order to simplify.

And simplification... becomes a beautiful thing in that you need not as much information in order to give a message.

And, therefore, most people can look into the painting and immediately know what's going on.

Jonathan is... better than good; he's a great artist.

He's a very sophisticated artist.

He's well trained.

He's a very skillful synthesizer of the things that he perceives.

We see the rhythms in his work in terms of the formal rhythms, the waves of the marsh grass or the waves of the ocean.

And he will repeat forms and figures, and that creates kind of a visual rhythm.

In many paintings, there's a sense of actual movement.

Jonathan seems like the perfect poster artist for this year.

His work is kind of wonderfully... vibrant with color, vibrant with life, and there's sensuality to it.

There's also a kind of mystery to his work.

In fact, there's a mystery to the "Eyelets" piece on the poster.

There is no-- you don't see a face.

There is no character that you see.

The figure in the painting is off in her own private world.

You conjure up a world of mystery that you have to discover for yourself.

It's very exciting for us to have had the opportunity to partner with Spoleto.

The reception has been absolutely overwhelming, both relating to people who are from this area and those who have traveled near and far to not only participate in Spoleto, but to also get a sense of the visual arts of the region.

And I really think that there are few artists who better present the sensibilities, the memories, the...the... experiences of the Lowcountry area.

(Green) The universality of my work comes from what people are doing in my work rather than their ethnicity, their color, or even their age.

♪ (Fleming) People just respond so positively.

They just feel good when they wander through the Jonathan Green exhibition.

The works that I seem to hear most about are the "Swing Series"... and then the sheets blowing in the wind, like the "Corene."

People love his "Eyelets" painting.

While they've seen it around town as part of the Spoleto poster, they're really struck by the size.

It is a massive painting.

(Green) The title came from the eyelets onto the skirt.

I like it because it has, again, mixed meanings.

You know, you can look at the eyelets as a window to look through something, or a peephole.

(Fleming) ...most people respond to, is they immediately think about being on a swing and how free they are and not worrying about, you know, what their clothing's doing, where they are, this sense of, um... powering yourself further and further up into space.

(Sokolitz) The thing about Jonathan's being so popular and so beloved is this universalism he manages to capture in the figures.

It's a moment, it's an attitude, and he makes it so dramatic and arresting for you as a viewer by sort of mixing up what you might expect.

So the figure fills the screen, it's upside down, but... it's remarkable.

♪ (choir) ♪ Hooooooope... ♪ ♪ in the valley.

♪ ♪ ♪ Jooooyyyy... ♪ ♪ in God's valley!

♪ I was raised by my grandmother.

Most African-American kids in the South, they're all raised by their grandparents because their parents are out working.

So I saw very little of my mother.

I thought of my mother as a...fairy.

My love for my mother does not come out of, necessarily, mother and son.

It comes out of her... her tenacity to want to take care of and support her children and her parents.

♪ His healin' ♪ pow-ow-ow-er... ♪ (Green) A huge portion of my life was spent in the church.

That's where I was certainly every Sunday, and I was there two or three times a week.

I come from a very large family structure that was centered around the Huspah Baptist Church.

(female soloist) ♪ ...haaands.

♪ ♪ I want you ♪ to know your healin'.

♪ ♪ Yes, your healin'!

♪ (Green) As a child, gospel music has always been a part of the Southern vernacular for me, and I can't, to this day, remember or recall a time when there was not any form of gospel music being played.

♪ And my grandmother, the beautiful thing is she not only went to this church actively, she went to all the churches.

She went to every funeral because she knew so many people.

I was always at a funeral or wedding.

(choir) ♪ Take me away, Lord... ♪ ♪ to the valley.

♪ ♪ ♪ Peace in the valley.

♪ ♪ (Green) I feel most comfortable in a cemetery.

I feel more comfortable in a cemetery than I would in someone's home, because when I'm in a cemetery, I'm amongst my people... generations of them.

When I was kid, I used to remember people putting shard objects on graves, and I knew the meaning of it and all these things.

And seeing the faces of those people and to know that... 40 years later... 45 years later... you know, they're still with me.

That's my grandmother Eloise.

Yes, yes, because she was very African and Indian in her behavior and her demeanor.

(choir) ♪ Take me away, Lord... ♪ ♪ to the valley.

♪ ♪ ♪ Peace in the valley.

♪ ♪ (narrator) Green was born with a veil, a fact he claims marked his life from the beginning.

(Green) In the African culture, when you're born with this placenta membrane, you're between life and death, meaning that if it's not removed fast enough, you die.

That's why children born with this veil, they are people that it's questionable whether or not they are living, because they are-- they live between worlds, so you are treated that way.

I never had to socialize with kids, play with them.

I was always around elders, and they educated me, because when you're born with this placenta membrane, everyone in the community is saying this is a miracle, that we are getting our leader, someone to take us out of darkness, help us go beyond.

So there is no surprise as to my success as a person because I have been groomed for it all of my life.

When I am in the presence of people, because of how people want to be close to me and touch me-- and that's an unbelievable amount of power that is bestowed on me.

My first reaction after the overwhelming success of Spoleto was that even though I know I'm a lover of people-- I love being around people, like touching people, but I have never been accosted like that by so many people, and I felt that all of my nerve endings were loose.

And it was very frightening.

I don't know how you explained the quality of being so...beloved.

Certainly when people do meet him, they see a very serene person who's comfortable with himself and what he's doing.

(Green) I think I've worked...hard... all of my life, I really have.

Seven days a week.

And, uh...

I'm just learning to relax and enjoy myself.

But I have to do that and balance the... success coming from the public.

How are you?

Are you having a good time?

A great time, thank you.

♪ I feel like I live between worlds.

I've never been an entirely black person, nor am I white.

I'm a man that has had a lover for 25 years.

I've never been married.

Yet I am part of the culture and community, and part of my lesson to everybody is just let people be.

Everyone will find their way.

It's a matter of being able to accept differences in our culture.

I think my art, it has allowed me-- people have allowed me the space and the dignity and the grace to express these things.

♪ Welcome.

♪ (narrator) Green makes his home in Naples, Florida.

There he has both his studio and a showcase gallery.

This is one of my earlier paintings that was painted in 1990.

This is the house I was raised in in Gardens Corner, South Carolina.

I chose to incorporate the sheets in this painting because it was such a major part of the landscape, and also large oak trees.

And this barrel was used for collecting rainwater, and to give you a sense of farm activity with the chickens in the yard and, of course, all of the shadows from the clouds and the house and the sheets on the line there.

(narrator) In addition to his large, two-dimensional paintings, Green has been experimenting with a sculptural form... paintings in 3-D.

These are my temple toys, and I've been working on this...design... for about eight to ten years, and I have several shapes as a part of this design.

Basically what I wanted to do was to continue to paint, but to paint on a three-dimensional surface, rather than to do sculpture as a very cold and sterile, um... artwork.

After I came up with the design, I realized that I could actually allow the paintings to almost move, if you will.

So it creates almost... the effect of film and, uh... and camera.

This is a very nice addition to seeing large paintings and small paintings, to see a three-dimensional work that you can actually walk around or just turn.

♪ (choir) ♪ Jooooyyyy... ♪ ♪ in God's valley!

♪ (Green, voice-over) Everything I paint is from memory.

I just feel like I have a memory of so many things.

I have a memory of the feminine, of the masculine.

I'm in the middle.

I'm actually in the middle.

I've always felt that way.

I think I have a... an innate talent of being able to illustrate and paint the beauty, the femininity, of a woman.

I think it's a knowledge that's very personal, the way it's painted.

The way I paint women isn't the way a man would, but it isn't the way a woman would.

It's the way a person would paint it that has experienced some of... the feminine and the masculine.

(female #1) ♪ Oh, I love to praise Him!

♪ (female #2) ♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah.

♪ (Green) This was the river.

This is low tide; that's why it's dry.

But there was a little bridge here or something.

Come stand on the mound with me.

And, uh... this is, uh...

I was baptized over there somewhere.

(choir, repeating quickly) ♪ Praise Him in the morning, ♪ ♪ praise Him in the noonday, ♪ praise Him in the evening.

♪ ♪ Praise Him in... ♪ (Green) I went through my baptism at the age of 11.

I remember going out into the woods for 12 days and 12 nights and having my dreams and remembering all my dreams.

But I remember the firstness of being, uh... accepted for a candidate of baptism.

And that's when... you know, you get up in the morning, and you just stand there.

And you're in the nude... because you have to be stripped of everything.

And you have two women putting this white... gown on you... and you're sent out into the wilderness.

And the wilderness is simply into the woods, where you are for 12 days and 12 nights.

You only eat bread, and you drink water this whole time... you know, breaking into the body of Christ and drinking the blood of Christ.

Then you get into this hallucinative state of mind.

And my grandmother was my, um...guru.

I reported to her every day.

I would have to recite to her my dreams, in the order, and I had almost 30 dreams.

My last dream was entering through the gate of Huspah Baptist Church, which was my acceptance.

♪ (narrator) Much of Green's imagery can be attributed to his memories of growing up in Gardens Corner.

♪ (Green) I'm painting... my experience, my journey.

I'm painting the landscape.

I'm painting the people that are in the landscape.

I'm not so interested in painting a specific person, or a particular relative, friend.

I'm interested in painting sort of a, um... archetype, if you will, of... persons living and working in that environment.

I think that, through these people, you sort of sense a microcosm of the world.

They're doing what everyone on this planet has to do in order to survive.

(narrator) The work he admires most is farming.

(Green) I know about canning.

I know about preserving meats, about salting it and hanging it so it can air dry.

I know about smoking.

I've done all those things.

I've done everything imaginable, from, uh, creating gardens, to nurturing the gardens and weeding it and harvesting it.

I mean, I've ridden mules all my life.

We've made mattresses out of moss.

I've helped my granddad making moonshine liquor.

I know about cooking.

These are all things I've learned.

I've done laundry, all those white sheets.

I could do laundry as well as any woman.

I can take care of a farm as well as any man.

Because when you're born under the condition of the veil, you're taught everything.

You're taught to be self-contained to survive.

(female soloist) ♪ Oh, won't you ♪ take me away, Lord?

♪ (choir) ♪ Take me away.

♪ (soloist) ♪ Pleeeease... ♪ (narrator) These memories also provide clues for understanding his trademark stylings.

Hats are very prominent, for one thing.

(Green) The relationship of hats, as it relates to my work, is visual.

It's what I saw all the time as a child.

(narrator) Then there's this matter of looking at his subjects from the back.

(female soloist) ♪ Peace in the valley.

♪ (Green) The back view.

When I was a kid, I spent most of my time walking behind someone.

(narrator) What about his insistence on those brilliant patterns and vibrant primary colors?

(Green) My favorite colors are the primary colors, and the framing of black and white with primary gives you everything that's needed.

He does use very brilliant color.

He sees the world in color.

It's a... a dreamlike color.

He takes the color as far as he can for the viewer in terms of its brightness and its luminescence.

(Green) The abundance of colors in my painting really comes from putting things together.

It's almost a design element.

The grass, then, becomes a huge design perspective in my work.

Each blade of grass is painted separately, and then it's painted again with tint and tone.

And that creates a three-dimensionalness to each blade of grass.

♪ The...skies in my paintings, the enormous blue skies with billowing clouds, you know, that is also a... pattern for direction and design element, in that I use clouds very particular in terms of what is in the base of the painting, the landscape of the painting.

That dictates, for me, the clouds.

And early in my paintings, I painted faceless people because from the perspective of a child, you only identify people based on their shape, their color, and patterns they wear on their clothing.

And as adult, I'm less inclined to give them a face... out of respect mostly, than anything else.

(narrator) Green uses that bit of personal history to jump-start his most recent work, the "Moonshine Series."

(Green) Uh, the "Moonshine Series," it was an activity and a profession that my grandfather took with great honor.

My aunt Corene is the spitting image of my grandmother Eloise.

They were twins, to look at the both of them.

My aunt Corene in my paintings is usually the woman that's in the house doing something, either cooking or cleaning up... raking the yard outside, that's my Corene.

(Sokolitz) People tend to think of his works as just representing joyous moments in life, but there are several examples in this exhibition that show the spiritual side of life or death.

There's the graveyard scene.

Um, that... is a very interesting, kind of a still-life landscape that describes Gullah burial practices, but it also relates to the whole continuity of life, that there are joys, but there is sadness and loss, and there is spirit in life too.

There's one that shows a woman in a landscape, and, um, it's "From Earth We Came."

It just seems very, sort of, spiritual mingling of the landscape and the figure.

And, obviously, the evocation is something very much more profound.

The "Crossroads" painting... shows several figures, and it appears that a man has fallen ill by the railroad tracks-- maybe he was a worker-- and, uh, there's this sense of... urgency that everybody is very worried about this fallen man.

So it's not all just... fluffing the sheets in the beautiful Lowcountry sun.

It is the full continuity of life from birth, the rituals of life, baptisms, going to church, um...social life in the... juke joints that he recalls.

His grandmother ran nightclubs and juke joints in Gardens Corner, and he was part of that scene too.

(Green) So it's not just about art and painting.

It's about showing people that there is a beauty, there is a love, in a very minute, minuscule... area--like Gardens Corner, South Carolina-- and using that as a microcosm for the world.

(Sokolitz) You tend to identify with his figures.

Because they're anonymous, you link up with them, and then you experience the view that they're looking at.

(Green) When people are looking at the paintings... they are looking at themselves.

And they are looking at themselves with such tremendous compassion and respect and dignity.

You know, that's something that many African Americans have never been afforded an opportunity.

Um... when I go into museums and I don't see us represented in our beauty as a culture, as a people that has given so much to this state, to this country, to this world, I feel that it's my right... to make some adjustments to that, to help to correct that.

(narrator) These days, Jonathan is bent on expanding his art into even broader horizons.

(Green) I think I would like to become more involved with performing arts, not as a departure from painting, but as a connectedness... between the two forms of art.

(narrator) Green's first major venture toward realizing that goal has already met with critical acclaim.

The collaboration with choreographer William Starrett resulted in the Columbia City Ballet's world premiere production of "Off the Wall and Onto the Stage: Dancing the Art of Jonathan Green."

(Green) Most people will be able to see the wonderful collaboration between William and I and know that it was something just destined to happen.

♪ (choir) ♪ Carry me home.

♪ (Green) I'm sort of, um... unblemished, if you will.

Even though I have gone through some obstacles and extreme measures in my life, it is miniscule in comparison to growing up with the placenta membrane, growing up, uh... a man of homosexual origin, growing up as an African-American person, uh...living in a bicultural world... in a black world, in a white world.

And even though you are looked upon by people in terms of your contribution as an artist, you're still looked upon, I think, also, as your contribution as a... as a human being in your humanity.

And I've always believed that honesty, in terms of my part, if I'm going to be honest to my work and to the deliverance of my work, I have to be honest about who I am as a person.

And I take that chance and... not risk, but I take the chance in expressing and explaining to people tenderly, through my work, about myself.

♪ It's fascinating to see the contrast between the work of Jonathan and Leo Twiggs.

Jonathan Green is an academically trained painter.

I mean, he was trained in art school to paint... in Western European tradition--subjects.

Leo Twiggs, on the other hand, is using batik and kind of "found" objects to create stories that are perhaps not as directly, um... oh, figurative as Jonathan Green's, but that use a technique that is Asian, is African, and uses it in a very personal way.

♪ ♪ ♪ (Leo Twiggs) I think in the South there are so many stories, there are so many contradictions, and there are so many different kinds of things going on in our environment... the mythology of the root doctor, the mythology of, of, of... stories that we have been told, the African myths we've brought with us.

And I see those myths as part of the heritage.

Once you look at the work, you realize that Leo is not a batik artist.

What he is, is a painter with dyes.

(voice-over) For me it was nothing new to look at this technique used to decorate fabric and say, What if I tried to paint with it?

And so since, batik tradition, there is a method of decorating fabric, painting with it meant that I had to do some adjustments.

There was nothing to read, nothing to look at... no books to consult.

Everything that I do with these dyes and wax, I learned on my own and developed on my own.

And after I learned the language... the technique... and worked in it for years and years, then the technique became the method of speaking, in a sense.

(Fleming) Most art historians think that Leo Twiggs' use of batik is so extraordinary.

He's pushed that medium in ways no one ever imagined doing.

I don't think... the process is what really...interests... people who come through and look at his work.

It's like, Let me see what I have to do now.

What's next?

Yeah, what's next.

(Fleming) What they love is the kind of-- the mysticism, the surprise.

They love trying to kind of figure out what's going on.

I especially like this one.

Mr. Twiggs, all of his collections to me are like pieces of a quilt.

You can put 'em together and climb on in especially with the fabric and the batik.

Not many artists these days really paint on batik anymore.

Dr. Leo Franklin Twiggs' strength as a painter I think comes from who he is and that he's telling us a story of memory and the South and family and relationships and history, um, what it means to him as a man who grew up through the '40s and '50s in a segregated South, and how he, um... has a sense of... of who he is and how he fits into the context of that tradition.

The other strength is that he's a tremendous colorist.

There's just this tonal quality, these rich blues, these almost jewellike colors.

They're beautiful, yet they're intellectually stimulating, and they're heartfelt.

How much more can you ask of an artist than those kinds of things?

(Twiggs) Those colors come from my mother, growing up... when I grew up and my mother wore those patterns.

I just remember a lot of the greens and blues and grays and blacks and purples... lots of purple.

♪ My grandmother-- and my mother-- told me a story that my great-grandmother was seven years old when freedom came and that she was taken to worship in that church.

And ironically, we lived on the same road.

I grew up on that same road with that church that had a kind of mystery for me.

♪ My great-grandmother was Sarah, and the painting that I speak of is "Sarah Remembered."

The story that my mother and grandmother told me is that she was born, and her mother died during the childbirth.

And I think about our picture, "Remembering Sarah."

It is a portrait of his great-great-grandmother, who they believe was a house slave.

It's a portrait of a lady through batik, but he makes very particular use of lace, and then he includes in that portrait a ball, ribbon, um, buttons... things that he has heard were really important to her in her life.

I think one of the truly, um... you know, really human connections, is when Leo talks about the matriarch, about the maternal, about that connection.

(Twiggs) I think that comes from growing up with my mother and grandmother.

My father died when I was in tenth grade, and my grandmother and mother really raised us.

I have five brothers and a sister.

And when my father died, I became, really, the breadwinner in the house.

I think I grew up really fast, and I think my mom gave me the responsibility of taking care of the family.

I knew that I was getting my strength from the power and the wisdom of my mother and grandmother.

And so you see those women lurking in my pictures.

They're always very strong.

They're always people who seem to know and seem to have the wherewithal.

♪ Very early on, when I did children-- you see that in the painting "Blue Wall"-- these were my friends, the kids I knew growing up.

But growing up, even though we played together, in them I saw a kind of loneliness.

And as I grew older, I just-- there was this kind of seeming loneliness about them, this kind of alienation about them.

♪ This picture was actually earlier than "Blue Wall."

This was one of the first paintings.

But you'll also notice that the figures are rather detailed.

You can see some hair, and you can make out some facial features, although I try to still maintain the shadowness, the shadow in the figure, but eventually it evolved into a...almost silhouette, because I felt that I could economize and get the same feeling that I got with this without putting the facial features in.

I think as an artist that's what you search for... how could you say what you have to say and get it across using the minimum amount of whatever you use to do it?

♪ (narrator) During the exhibition, Twiggs traveled back to his native Saint Stephens.

There, met by his brother George, he ventured inside the house where he grew up.

♪ ♪ (Twiggs) We built this house for Mom, and when we built it, you know, she was-- she wouldn't let us tear it down.

She just wanted it to be there, as a reminder of where she came from, I guess.

Now, you probably can meander inside the house.

You want to do that?

You can go inside?

Sure.

♪ (narrator) Abandoned many years ago when Twiggs and his siblings built a new home for their mother, the old house, nevertheless, still stands, a reminder of times gone by, a keeper of memories grown dim.

Grab this and get out of the way.

Move that drawer off the floor, where he's walking by there.

Boy, he goes in some real weird places, huh?

Yeah, I been in some really, really weird places.

This is my room right here, and that's that window.

See that window right there?

That's the window that you see in "Night Bird."

My bed was over in this corner here.

We all kind of slept in that same bed, with about four of us.

Sometimes they'd all go to sleep, and I'd look out that window.

I remember looking out and trying to think of what that bird would be looking at from where the bird was and what the bird would be thinking about and what the bird would be seeing.

That's why I call it "Dream Bird," because, as a black kid growing up in the South, I mean, that bird was kind of a... a symbol of my aspirations, so to speak.

Yeah, and that's the chifforobe over there.

This is the chifforobe that was in my mom's room.

This edge of that...

I know that's been there so many times.

You look at one of the works called "Victorian Era," and you see that... that shape and the similarity of that shape to this.

These curves find their way very often into my work.

This was the leg of a coffee table that we had in our living room, and I remember that so well, the shapes and the images.

And again....

But many of these curves find their way in my painting.

You should have listened to it on that.

This also-- see that?

It was all so much a part of that...that lace, that painting that I did about-- "Sarah Remembered," 'cause I was always... impacted by those old things.

♪ Make your way out.

Boy, this brings back all kinds-- oh, I haven't been in here in 20 to 30 years.

♪ I worked at a theater.

I had to come down from the theater and come here every night.

Sometimes I'd come down the road there.

The road that you came down was all dark.

When you made that turn, it was dark halfway down that road.

The pavement ended where the last white person lived.

So I had to come down that road and make that L-turn on this road.

It was dark, no streetlights, and I'll never forget that I would see the light in the window.

She'd always leave a light, and when I turned the corner and could see the light, I knew I was home free, so to speak.

She always left the light and always stayed up.

The movie ran until 11:00, so I had to get out of there after 11:00, and I had to come home.

I think she was always scared of what could happen to me because I was a projectionist, a job black folks really didn't have.

And I was young-- 16 at the time-- and there were white kids there.

She just felt I could have said something they could take the wrong way and anything could have happened.

So I think she always worried.

And after I grew up, I interpreted that to be, really, the birth of the blues.

I don't believe my mom was different from any other mother, you know, across the South, who felt that their son might not come home, and that's what translated into that sequence called "The Birth of the Blues," where I added people like John Lee and B.B., people who probably... knew how to make music about it and make songs about it.

So it was a very, uh... important experience that when I started painting, I started exploring.

It's amazing that you could live and the older you get, the more you come to appreciate how important those things were growing up.

♪ My dad came to... South Carolina on the railroad.

He was a cook and never did go back home.

Somebody once wrote about my male figures as "slipping into darkness," which I thought was quite...interesting.

That was just the way it was.

♪ (narrator) It is the "Commemoration" series, which, perhaps more than other, has catapulted this artist into the annals of social art history, due primarily to his use of the Confederate battle flag as an artistic construct.

♪ ♪ (museum guide) He is a black man.

Why would he be painting the South Carolina flag?

He said that it is part of his past also, and he said, in the South, you always have those who celebrate it and those who want for it to go away.

(Laufer) I think one of the most memorable things for visitors will be experiencing what we call the flag paintings, his references to the Confederate flag.

Now, my experience with those images has to do with, um, being a Northerner and, and, and... and having a kind of reaction to it as, Why, Dr. Twiggs, aren't you resentful?

Why are you including this?

What are you doing here?

What are you doing with this work?

What is this emblematic of?

I would think you wouldn't want this kind of reference in your artwork.

But what he has done is he has claimed it.

If he is, in fact, a child of the South, a native son, part of this tradition-- and he is...no one can take that from him-- then all of things that are emblematic of the South are part of his tradition.

Whether they cause him great joy, whether they cause him tremendous pain, they're part of who he is, part of his makeup.

And as an African American from South Carolina, for him to be willing to say, "And this is part of me too," I think is an enormously brave thing, and it also... takes all of the, um... the power.

For racism, for intolerance, for anything that that flag may have held for certain people, it deflates it.

It takes all of that emblematic power away from it completely, and it becomes a symbol of...of what?

Of a time past.

"Commemoration" is about... opening up the attic, or going into an old chest, and then finding this thing.

And what you do is you love it, and you say, Boy, this happened to me, but it's from another time.

It's an album; it's in a book.

And the "Commemoration," my flags are always faint or tattered because... it is a moment in the past.

I think we all tend to hold on to those moments, but we don't fly them in the face of others.

Twenty-five years later, 1997, I decided to revisit that whole theme.

I did about six or seven works back then.

Springs Mills bought one or two.

They were all sold back in the '70s...1970.

So I decided to revisit it.

So I did a series called "Commemoration Revisited."

What I did was not only paint the flag...

I also had... soldiers and, and... images and ovals that seemed to suggest that particular time period.

The amazing thing about that encounter, though, it had brought me full circle back to my own... my own...experience growing up again.

(Laufer) Most interesting to see the emblem of Saint Andrew's cross.

That cross pattern most recently has altered from the actual flag image to become a graphic design image of crossing, of a train crossing, of the kind of thing-- the symbolic idea of a crossroad.

(Twiggs) People are always asking me about the imagery that they see in my flags and how that relates to the images that I have in my "Silent Crossings."

You look back... That's an image that I remember from growing up.

And as I began to paint, I began to see similarities between that image and the images that I use on my flags.

The relationship between the crossing you see here and the flag is that we, as human beings, have to cross over things.

We have to get to the other side of things.

The way we do that is that we put it behind us.

And I always saw a railroad crossing as crossing over that particular thing.

I think the Confederate flag is an image that both sides have to get over, they have to get across.

The "Silent Crossing" is that sometimes we cross those images, we cross those ideas, we cross those feelings in a kind of silence.

We don't say things about them, but we're going through them and have to find our way over.

♪ ♪ So I see the "Silent Crossing," I see the cross, as a metaphor for the life that we live.

I think the final crossing is probably death.

I think my series grow.

That's why I sometimes return to them, like I returned to the "Commemoration" series.

I'm now doing a series that I call "Sanctuary" because as I've gotten older, I believe that my painting became a sanctuary for me.

That's how I have been able to sustain it while I did other things.

♪ ♪ (Fleming) When I was curating the exhibition, I was looking for certain themes that I knew were part of Leo's work, and what he has done is he revisits themes.

So it's not like, Oh, this is the period he dealt with landscape, or the period of time that he dealt with, um, the river... uh, African heritage.

What you find is that the theme recurs.

And once you recognize that, you want to pull those threads.

(Fleming) I've watched people wander through, individually or in pairs, and they're trying to figure out, What is this?

Why is this titled this?

Why are these things in here?

Who is this person?

It's the same with the Hurricane Hugo series.

I've heard different people say, "Ooh, I know that's a Philip Simmons gate!"

So there are important references in these works.

Then they think, Why is this Hurricane Hugo?

It's maybe the speed of the figure that seems to be moving across that Philip Simmons gate.

But they love to try to work their way into these pictures, and there is something very evocative that draws them into them to want to figure out what's going on.

(Twiggs) The hurricane series became more than just a series about the wind.

When I started doing it, it translated into... the adversity that African Americans have to overcome, and it was standing fast in the face of all that adversity.

Then I thought, the adversity that all of us have... you know, that we have to stand fast, that nature... presents adversity... humans, other humans, present adversity.

So in my series called... Hugo, the Hugo series, my figures are standing fast, and the wind is blowing them back.

(Laufer) I think that, um... in the case of Dr. Twiggs, that his evolution is really a self-discovery.

It's kind of a process of finding himself and finding ideas that reverberate for him.

When the University of Georgia decided to do a retrospective, I remember seeing it for the first time, and I saw my life.

It flashed before my eyes 'cause I remembered each of those pieces, and they became like my children.

And then when that show came from the University of Georgia to Charleston-- and that's the place where I believe my grandmother and great-grandmother were first brought ashore-- I just thought that I was coming home and, in a real sense, they were meeting me.

And...to be back in the place where you got your beginnings, to see and to feel the vibes from the old house and the old place, and to see those images returned was, for me, a homecoming.

♪ (Fleming) Our hope was people would probably come in knowing one artist or another and leave thinking, Wow, these are two amazing artists!

There are similarities in terms of their backgrounds, in terms of their ethnicities, but they are so different in how they represent their-- how they go about creating and how they represent certain life experiences in the South.

How do I describe my style of painting?

I'm just--I'm still learning how to paint.

I mean, some people look at it and see realism.

Some people even see surrealism.

Some people see folk.

Some people see naiveté.

Some people see, um... uh, impressionism.

But it's very hard for me to define my work because I'm painting out of the borders, or exteriors, of traditional styles of painting.

I think, um...

I think art has to be about something.

It can't be about nothing.

What I paint is out of my experience, out of the results of my own encounter with the world, and when I paint out of that experience and because I paint out of that experience and because I create what I create out of that experience, I believe that's what connects it to the human experience because I think what art is about is the human condition.

That human condition might be... birth...death... adolescence.

It happens to everybody, no matter what culture.

All of those things happen.

We all feel sad, we all feel happy, we all have despair, and when you treat those human things, then they connect with human beings.

So to me, that's what it's about.

Even though art might look abstract, beneath the abstraction... is a human connection.

(choir) ♪ Oh, I love to praise him, ♪ ♪ God of glory, ♪ Lord of loooove.... ♪ (narrator) They are sons of the South with messages and meanings influenced by their heritage, refined through their memories, and reflected through their artwork.

(choir) ♪ Praise Him ♪ in the morning... ♪ (narrator) This program is underwritten by... ♪ Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪