[Tom] This week on Arizona Illustrated Art Alley Gallery.
[Josie] This pandemic had been a real hard on all of us.
And then I got the idea of creat an art gallery in the alley.
[Tom] Body of work, Nicole Mille [Nicole] It's made of molds from Michael Jackson's actual b [Tom] Pole dancing in Tucson.
[Katrina] They're doing somethin that's good for their bodies.
It is for regular people.
And Ellen and Lacy.
[Ellen] Lacy like that little po I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me.
And what can be the use of it as more than I can see.
[Tom] Welcome to Arizona Illustr I'm Tom McNamara, and we're her at the Tucson Botanical Gardens on a brisk fall day.
It's beauti You know, these gardens are an o in the heart of Tucson, and out can be great for our mental heal and our social connections.
That was certainly the case during the pandemic when gatherings indoors were di Former teacher Josie Zapata grew closer to her neighbors during And together, they used their al and their miles east west neighborhood in Tucson to create a shared sense of com Josie: The last five years of my teaching experience, I had the best job ever.
I taught a class called outdoor learning.
And basically allow me to use my philosophy that I believed in, which was letting children be able to play outside, to be learning from their environment to respect public spaces, and to be stewards of keeping that space beautiful that they want to be part of.
The alleys is a public space, and we basically have taken ownership.
I lived in this neighborhood for 40 some years, and I have become real close to my neighbors, Rosanna and Luis are one of my closest friends.
This pandemic had been a real hard on all of us.
I lost five family members, close friends.
And so I try to do positive things to keep myself going.
And then I got the idea of creating an art gallery in the alley because the alley was used for dumping old furniture, Rosanna and Luis were the first one, They said, yeah, let's do something with it.
And so I was amazed at what they created.
Luis: We lost our chess teacher and I lost my grandpa as well.
And just like my dad still miss him.
I lost them when I was eight years old, and it was hard getting through that loss and everything.
Every single Saturday, we would have a music night and he would put on different types of music.
And that's why I started loving music and then I started doing art.
I just really like to just free draw and just lots of coloring and drawing.
It expresses my my emotions a little bit because the loss of my dad and everything, it brings it ou just a little bit more, but not that much.
Josie: The sixties and the pandemic were very similar to me in emotion.
I grew up in a generation that was very scary.
The same feeling because I was in high school when they first killed the first soldiers in Vietnam.
And it turned out that I lost friends from high school and relatives.
At the beginning of the epidemic I felt the same feeling of not understanding what's happening.
And as a pediatric nurse and educator, I have been real worried about the long impact of isolation for one year.
And parents are worried about their jobs and they're also isolated with their work.
And children didn't have the experience to play freely outside and express their feelings, their fears and making happy experiences.
Luis: My friend Autry.
His parents, they were nervous about the pandemic, and I don't blame them because it's pretty scary.
And he had a lot of anxiety.
So playing video games with him, helped him and telling him, like, hey, you can make art and then you just send it to me and I'll hang it up.
We're slowly going back to normal.
But I always want to encourage people to like love art.
And virtually everyone already does.
So half my work is already done.
Josie: Since we've had the gallery, we haven't had any furniture dropped off.
We haven't had trash and we've had a good response from people walking.
And it's an opportunity to meet new people and opportunity to share ideas and feelings.
And so it's going to be an ongoing process, as long as I'm healthy and and have the energy we'll keep doing it.
Luis: After the construction is done, it'd be pretty cool, like having a whole entire art gallery alley way, just like walking through it and hanging up pictures or paintings like saying helpful words to get through the pandemic and for them to be calm and encouraging them.
And that like me and maybe just a little bit hard, but you can get through it.
Josie: I think the pandemic we're healing in in different ways.
I see a lot of compassion and love and wanting to help.
Those skills are not lost in children.
Especially Luis.
He's had difficult losses, and to me, he's my hero.
[Tom] Nicole Miller is a renowne and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient with roots in Tucson.
Her work includes video installations and sculptu that often depicts black bodies in this piece.
She reflects on her current proj And we look back at her previous that, as she describes, allows to speak through another languag that isn't words.
Michael in Black is a bronze scu that I made here in Tucson.
It's made of molds that I got a hold of that were from Michael Jackson's actual body in the 1980s.
And so I made the sculpture with Michael Jackson's body, which is a kind of body that wa constantly in real time in front of us, in the media.
I think this idea of celebrities are sort of turning a human int and how we can sort of consume p in that way or turn them, transform them into something th consumable is very much what that work in that show was and specifically black bodies.
I made a work called Anthony Aquarius before that that's a portrait of this man named Anthony Aquarius, who's de his life to embodying Jimi Hend and he had told me that he had sort of decided at the age of 14 to try to compl embody what it meant to be Jimi So he always speaks with a kind that sounds like Jimi.
He learned to play the guitar with his teeth, with his left h And so this idea of like embodim is very much a part of a lot of my work.
And you and I see the shotgun.
And he's nervous, he's shaking.
And now it occurs to me that I'm in trouble.
I had read about this finding by a neurologist named Ramachandran, and he had f to help people with phantom lim who had lost an arm and were suf from phantom limb syndrome.
And he found this very simple ex where you would put a mirror, we are missing arm say is he in a way kind of prov looking at something could sort of physiologically c you kind of mend your relationsh to reality or to oneself.
I made this work with this man I met named David, who had a mi And I approached him in the stre and I asked him if he had this And he immediately got really excited because it is that had ruined his life, reall I mean, people with phantom limb often really suffer quite a bit And I brought it to my studio and he told me the story of how he lost his arm while he did the exercise for the first time.
I think, you know, I started getting into this idea of embod as related to this process, which led me to make this work about Anthony Aquarius and then and to this work that is an actual sculpture instead of a moving image that maybe the closest embodiment of Jackson we can have at this poi not being with us anymore.
The whole universe of planets, moon stars, animals, everything in life wants to expa That's what roots are doing when they penetrate the earth a That's what gyms are doing with their radiance.
That's what humans are doing in their lives.
You want expansion.
So from when you began as an emb to when you're about to leave th you have transformed your life.
You've gone on a journey and you back at the end of your life an well done because you don't want to be as you've been.
And this is a psychological anti You want to have grown.
You want to have expanded into your expansion, gets into infinity.
To the Stars is a film that I ma that was commissioned by SFMOMA It's a film and a laser light installation.
It's a kind of mosaic that's a portrait of many peopl like Alonzo King's Lines valet, who does this incredible speake that also can express amazingly through the language of dance.
And I ended up finding this and just brilliant, amazing wom Yvonne Cagle, who is an astronau Her area of study is what happens to the body in I know the only way to experienc and learn from the full capacity of the human body and our resil Both as humans and humanity is for us to allow ours to evolve in a planet outside of our origin.
So as we evolve, the question is what will we look like?
What will we feel like?
How will we care for each other?
How will we love each other?
I think if you're next to the sc it feels maybe that you are nex to a kind of ghost or a dead bod that doesn't exist anymore, and it's even more profound because he's not with us and al his history is so complicated and disturbing.
Artists speak through another la that isn't words.
The material of the bronze is li and it's very dark and solid.
It is a kind of language.
Cinematography is a language that expresses so much emotionally, intellectually, without using words.
The lasers that I make are pure Light as a means of communicatio A lot of what I consider to be my craft is in those languages.
The body of work is a kind of conversation.
Social media apps like Instagram and TikTok have helped to popularize the art of pole dancing in recent years.
And now Tucson has become an une hotbed for this burgeoning fitn You know, it started in strip cl but it's become mainstream.
And now one local organization is even leading the charge for to become an Olympic sport.
It was kind of a dream of mine, and then the building became open and I decided that I was going to do it.
Hi, my name is Brenna Mirae.
I'm the owner of Kinetic Arts Tucson pole dance and acrobatic training studio in the heart of downtown Tucson So just go ahead and follow along with me.
I've been pole dancing since 1998.
I started at Curves Cabaret when I was very young.
I was at a fitness training for a different fitness certification.
The place where the class was held was next door to a pole studio.
And I literally put my face on the glass and I was like, oh, that is where I'm supposed to be.
There were all different body types, but these women were still just absolutely gorgeous.
And how they moved and they looked so empowered.
Hi, I'm Katrina Wyckoff and I am the owner of Tucson Pole Fitness and the president of the U.S.
Pole Sports Federation.
I had a local dance studio here.
We put up poles at our dance studio.
We just had a massive influx of people who wanted to come and try to pole dancing.
If you want to, you can put your hand underneath.
Pole was a reclamation of my sexuality, sensuality, femininity.
But most importantly, power.
It's a reclamation of power.
Pole is one of the hardest sport literally, that ever existed.
It's so challenging.
Not a single muscle in your body does not get worked That arm is so significantly less strong.
The poles now spin.
They spin these days.
They didn't always spin.
They've only started spinning within the last 10 years, which has really been a game changer for the industry.
Like there.
Yeah, you got it.
People want something to make them feel good.
There's so much, there has been so much depression and just hard times that people have gone through.
And when they come and they do pole, they're surrounded by people who are cheering for them.
they're surrounded by people who are cheering for them.
They're doing something that's good for their bodies.
It is for regular people.
We have grandmas.
We have their children that come with them.
I have definitely had grandpas who have come and tried the class before.
We help people to feel sexy.
And now that can mean so many different things.
To us feeling sexy is more about being very, very self-confident, being powerful, feeling beautiful in the skin that you're in.
My daughters started teaching dance classes at the dance studio that Katrina has, and it was part of our family package.
My younger daughters did it, too, for a while.
And then I'm the one that ended up being the lifer.
First goal are like climbing the pole, and then you see other people doing cool tricks and you're like, oh, now I want to do that.
And then you just keep like leveling up and just there's no end to pole.
It just seems like every time you reach some kind of goal, you're like, oh, well, there's the next thing.
So in 2015, we started competing with the US Pole Sports Federation.
I competed with a woman named Brianne McClanahan, and we did a doubles routine.
And so we were the national champions.
We went to several world championships.
We competed all over the world.
We were the delegates for the World Games.
2020 in February, I took over that organization.
So now I'm working as the president of the US Pole Sports Federation with the ultimate goal to bring pole to the Olympics.
Late 2018 is when I discovered this place and discovered it because they were doing a pop up strip club here and it was like inclusive.
Women, men, whatever gender.
I started doing it and I just never stopped because I loved it so much, because it's like I need to do something physical, you know, in order to, just for like my mental health.
But I hate going to the gym and I don't like most sports.
But this sport is so artistic that it it captures my interest.
I started dancing when I was 17 years old.
That was is in 1998, and back then pole dancing was not really a thing.
There were some girls that knew like a move.
But for the majority, people just use the pole as a prop to walk around, to hold themselves from not falling down in stilettos.
Pole dancing is an industry that was built by dancers.
That's like the really important piece, is the story starts in the strip club.
We in and of ourselves are not teaching stripping here, we're teaching pole fitness.
But we honor and appreciate and realize that this does come from the stripping industry.
However, it's evolving, you know, like it has evolved, it's beyond the clubs, and it's amazing that these people, like all different kinds of people, can access it.
I think it will continue to grow for many reasons.
If you get out in front of people, you dance and you don't have very many clothes on, it's like, you know, there isn't much left to hide.
And it forces you into a situation where you have to be OK with that.
And it's not just body confidence.
It's like, it's been a way for me to explore like more femininity and things that most of my life I felt like I didn't have a space where I could, you know, explore that side of me.
[Tom] It's been proven that pets can provide therapeutic benefits for their owners when Ellen More adopted Laci back in 2010.
The two quickly became constant companions, and Ellen to share that bond with others providing comfort and friendshi So here's a look back at our sto about the bull dog and the owne who found their calling.
- Come on.
Come on, let's go get the ball.
I'm Ellen Morell and I'm a chaplain for Harmony Hospice.
And this is Laci and she's my therapy dog who goes with me to visit my patients.
Come on.
And we just visit people and enjoy ourselves.
Good girl.
Good girl.
(laughs) Hi, Donna, this is Ellen from Harmony.
I was just checking in to see how you're doing.
You've been through a difficult period and I hope that you will take a day or two to relax and refresh and rejuvenate yourself.
I try to check on the diagnosis before I go to see people because sometimes it makes a difference.
I have been a dental hygienist, which I did for 10 years.
I have been a planned giving consultant, which was lots of fun, helping rich people give money away is not a bad way to make a living.
And then, finally, I succumbed to the call from God and became an Episcopal priest.
On my way, when I decided to move to Arizona, on my way here, I had another call that said you need to be a hospice chaplain so I came and applied and got a job and here I am.
(water running) Let's go, go see the veterans.
(dog panting) Let's go, come on.
You see the puppy, huh?
- [Woman] Do you see it?
- Laci, can you sit?
Can you wave to the little boy?
Wave.
Good girl.
(laughing) Were you in the Army?
We thank you for your service, 'cause what you did made it possible for us to do what we do, so we really thank you.
- This is my husband, Bob Budak.
He's a Vietnam vet.
He worked, he was in the Army.
This, actually, is a wonderful place.
We've worked really hard to get him here and we're very excited.
And you notice how alert he got and how excited he was to see Laci, so, he's very receptive to therapies, receptive to having people and talk with him and he enjoys it and he smiles.
He smiles, yeah.
- Laci has been my friend, my sidekick for years and years.
She's eight-years-old.
I got her when she was just a puppy.
My son had her mother and I went to see the puppies but told him I would not, under any circumstances, take a puppy home.
And I don't know how it happened, but on the way home, I looked over and there she was.
(laughing) And we have been pretty much inseparable ever since.
- So if you go to our website harmonyhospice.org and you look at meet the employees, Laci is very, on the very top.
(laughs) She has her own professional photo and so we often joke, again, she's the boss.
(laughs) - I read his book and I thought he was a good man.
- Oh, yeah.
- Yeah.
I've had lots of dogs in my life.
I've always had dogs.
And I've loved them and I've cared for them but I've never had one that I actually called my sidekick because Laci's like that little poem, remember, when you were in grade school.
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me and what can be the use of it is more than I can see.
Well, that's Laci.
Everywhere I go, she goes.
If I happen to come in without her, the question always is, "Where's Laci, where's Laci?"
(upbeat music) Hi.
I brought Laci to see you.
- [Woman] Laci or Stacy?
- [Ellen] Laci, like lace on your dress, like lace fabric.
- Oh, how can anything be so ugly and so wonderful?
(laughing) - I like to tell the story about when I first took her to some people.
There was a lady who had advanced dementia who could not say anything intelligible, who sort of just chattered all day.
I walked in with Laci and she looked down at her and said, "Nice dog."
(laughs) So, Laci touches people in many ways that are surprising.
More than once, when she's been invited, she's climbed up in bed with somebody and laid with them as they were dying, so that they die with their hand on a nice, soft, furry head.
(gentle music) She failed agility, she failed obedience, she really failed motherhood because it took us two-and-a-half years to get her pregnant and then she ended up with three living puppies and hated them.
Really hated them.
Sit.
Wave.
Good girl.
But she's finally found her calling.
She's as good a therapy dog as you could have.
Hey, you've made a friend.
You know how to make dogs happy.
- She's great.
- [Ellen] I consider this part of my service to God.
- I like animals.
- And even though I'm not as religious as a lot of chaplains are, I don't insist that people pray, I don't insist that they find salvation in Jesus, I think this is my ministry to the world.
And Laci's ministry to the world.
So, we're doing this, truly out of a sense of call, as a minister would say.
[Tom] Ellen Morell is now retired and Lacey unfortunately passed away a few Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.
I'm Tom McNamara.
We'll see you
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