(upbeat music) - Welcome to Movers & Makers.

I'm your host Anne Ishii.

In this episode, we bring you stories from throughout the Delaware Valley about people who took on a passion and went big.

We begin in Fishtown at the Philadelphia Argentine Tango School, where a musician is playing a big role in a tango renaissance.

And later in the program, I get the opportunity to learn a few tango moves myself from studio owners, Meredith and Andres.

This should be really interesting.

(piano music) - I started playing when I was three or four years old.

And it's a funny story because my mom actually had a dream that one of her kids was going to be a pianist.

So I guess she dreams good.

(piano music) I grew up in a beautiful town.

I just remember lots of trees.

Every time you were home, there's always music in my house.

(piano music) We used to listen from classical, a lots of folk music from Argentina, music from Europe also, rock and roll of course.

(piano music) This is my very first piano teacher, Alejandro Hansen.

I met him when I was 12 and I studied with him for a few years.

He recommended me to go to the conservatory, but I still kept studying with him.

He's one of my best friends and we are always in touch and we share music and we listen to music.

Even though I'm from Argentina, people will think that everybody dances tango and everybody listens to tango, well, that's not true.

(piano music) I was playing at a restaurant in Argentina and one day somebody came to me and asked me if I could play tango and I realized that I didn't know any, so I went home and I was like I need to learn one and then two and then three.

And then I got invited to play in a tango show on board a cruise ship around the world.

I was in charge of the orchestra, I was directing and playing the piano.

So that was pretty amazing for me.

It was like a completely change in my career.

One thing is playing tango as a performer, where people are gonna be sitting listening to you and another completely different thing is to play for dancers.

- What do here is Argentine tango.

It started in the very last days of the 1800s and into the early 1900s.

It's an urban dance from Buenos Aires, Argentina and from Montevideo, Uruguay.

There were no smartphones, there was no TV.

There wasn't even radio.

When people wanted to entertain themselves, they actually got together and made music and danced.

They had to actually create the entertainment.

(audience clapping) Around 1920 and largely through Carlos Cardell, the very famous singer and then film star, tango became popularized in films and people got interested in it all over the world.

In the 1950s, when tango dancing fell out of style, tango music took a different route and it went onto the concert stage and it became known around the world as concert music, as music to sit down and listen to.

And because of that, it really stopped being so focused on the needs of dancers.

Today still you go to any vilonga, any tango dance in the world and we're only dancing to recordings from the 1930s through 1950s.

(ochestra music) Emiliano Messiez, it was amazing from the first moment to get to dance to his playing.

- She was like, next year, I want you to present your orchestra and we decided to call it Tipicas Messiez, which is my last name and it was fantastic.

(orchestra music) It's a 10 piece orchestra of 10 musicians.

That was a project that I would've never expected me doing that and that was because of her.

(orchestra music) Even though I don't know anything about dancing, I just like to watch and try to feel like we are connected and we are trying to do something together, right?

- He understands that he's playing for me and he gets great joy and pleasure from.

You could look at this man and tell that he is having the greatest time of his life.

- The first time I heard him, I said, "Who is that on the piano?"

And I was transfixed by his musicality and his ability to kind of fill that big space with his personality and this feel of tango.

(orchestra music) - I got invited to play in a very important show, which is called Forever Tango.

That was pretty amazing.

We play everywhere and also for big crowds and beautiful theaters.

I also saw myself getting into the musicals.

I composed that song for the musical, the guava tree, which is the musical that I composed for Creede Repertory Theatre in Colorado.

A musical for teenagers that went on tour all around the US.

That's why I also love doing musical theater.

You can write from jazz, pop, tango, clesmer like Bordello or like things that I would've never thought.

- The day she ran away.

- [Barbara] Okay.

- What is this song about?

- In Bodrello this moment is that Sophie finally reveals to Raquel how she ended up in this world.

- For me, Bordello it's a perfect example because every singer will do it different.

Every musician will play a little different.

I also like to give room for improvisation.

Yellow is the light, right?

Oh, is it yellow?

- Yellow is the light of a summer day.

- Okay, so the melody would be like ♪ Yellow is the light of a summer day ♪ ♪ When a girl of 12 was sold away ♪ - Bordello is a story the white slave trade that happened in Buenos Aires from the 1880s to the 1930s.

And it's about a woman who had been forced into prostitution, who was the only person who finally had the courage to bring this notorious organization to trial.

♪ Begging for place to hide ♪ ♪ She fled into the countryside ♪ - Tango emerged from the Bordellos of Argentina and it was men waiting for their turns with the women.

So they were dancing with one another.

So initially the dance was very mutual as the men are kind of were working themselves up for the opportunity and then later women were dancing with them.

- The really, really, really cool thing about tango now is that I lead as much as I follow.

No longer is it that just the man leads and the woman follows that it's always a man and woman dancing, not at all.

And the fluidity of that has made the tango community and also our individual experiences as dancers, much, much richer than in a former time when the roles were much stricter.

- It's kinda like driving a car.

You have to be aware of the other drivers on the road as well as yourself.

So the main thing I think about is the music.

That's first.

- There's musicians that come and go and they can play the beautifully, but Emiliano just puts out so much of his own feeling for the music and his ability to communicate with the people that he's playing for.

And that's what just puts him in the league of his own.

(orchestra music) (dancers clapping) - Over 40 years ago, Vicki Manning and her partner opened a small art gallery with dreams of conquering the art world.

Today, the Somerville Manning Gallery located in a historic building along the Brandy Wine River in Delaware, attracts collectors and museums from around the world.

(upbeat music) - You get to see this beautiful historic building as well as the incredible art that's inside.

People love coming here.

I went to art school, came out of art school, a tapestry weaver back in the late '70s, came here to work at the country and make tapestries.

In those days, I made them for big corporations like Scott Paper.

I was living on a farm that burnt down and I had to reinvent myself after that 'cause I lost everything.

I walked into a gallery that was showing my work and the director had quit and they said, "You're in the art world, you maybe you know somebody that wants this job."

So I got the job, I ran his gallery for four years and then my retired partner, Sadie Somerville asked me to go into business.

So I went into partnership with her.

When I in to get a bank loan, I went to four banks in Wilmington who basically left us out being women art galleries.

Ha, we had no track record.

I'm like, "Yeah, I'm a tapestry weaver."

That meant nothing, so they all turned us down, but we did it anyway.

I was in Delaware, which actually had a lot of advantages because it's a corporate center of America, but still nobody thought of an art gallery in Delaware.

I wanted a national profile.

- The fact that we only represent mostly established contemporary artists, it gives us the opportunity to kind of expand their career base a little bit more and place their work in prestigious collections and that is something unique to this area for sure.

- Some of our levels of expertise is the Y Family.

A family of American artists that began with NCY who was the patriarch.

He had five children and his vision was they were all gonna be artists.

And out of those five, four became very famous artists on their own.

The last one was Andrew and Andrew had paintings all over the world with exhibitions all over the world.

(upbeat music) Andrew's son is Jamie who has carried on the legacy.

This is a work by Jamie Wyeth of Warhol.

It's a postmus painting.

Jamie was really good friends with Warhol back in the '70s.

And in this particular work, he was kind of revisiting Andy and it's his glasses, it's his vision and his hands and then his dog really important, significant Warhol elements.

(upbeat music) - (indistinct) by Jamie was such a force in the ballet world forever and still is.

- Yeah.

- This is an original from that time period where Neri was really posing for.

(upbeat music) - I've always been excited about the idea of particularly my contemporary artists getting into museums because it helps give them curatorial credibility.

It helps museums expand their directions.

(upbeat music) We have a lot of artists that went through the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Over the years, that has been a really good connection for them and us.

Francis de Franzo went there.

He does a lot of work about transportation, but the concept of the transportation isn't the physical train itself or the car itself.

It's more about where that was before, where it's going now and a much more esoteric concept about life and how it moves.

Bo Bartlett is highly recognized, collected, and he's incredibly talented and introspective communicative artist.

I also have enjoyed working with Bob Jackson who is a fascinating artist because he works in Trump Loy.

His work is in many museums, including the local ones here.

Sarah McCrae Morton, who is a younger artist from the academy and her work is wonderfully allegorical.

They have to have an individual vision of what they're doing and I don't want it to look like anybody else.

(upbeat music) - I love these trees out there.

I don't just go out and paint anything.

It has to speak to me.

So it's about feeling, it's how you feel when you see something and that's it really is I'm painting what I feel when I go out there.

That's a starter one, I'll get to work on.

- Mary Page Evans is from Delaware and she was inspired a lot by Cezanne and a lot of the French artists from the impressionist period.

She spent a lot of time in France going back and forth, painting in Giverny - I'd seen a show of Monets at the museum of the MET in New York and I thought I've got to go and paint those gardens.

And they gave me the key to the garden so I could stay there as long as I wanted.

It was fabulous.

- Mary Page was friends with Joan Mitchell, also Grace Hartigan very good friends with her and even Elaine DeCooning some of the top recognized artists in the country.

She had a big retrospective at the Delaware Art Museum some years ago.

There's books on her.

Her work is energetic, emotional, beautiful, and there's two in the White House right now.

Mary Page's husband has been an ex Congressman from Delaware.

She has known to Bidens for a very long time.

- I always love this one.

I think that sometimes being women, we care a lot about the relationships that we hold.

And I think that really speaks true to the 40 years that Vicki's been in business that clients and artists have had such longstanding relationships and I think there's a real empowerment to that.

- In history, there were some really amazing women that started galleries in America.

Although it was not a women's game and I had to earn my chops.

It didn't just happen, we had to establish that, that we could be here and people would find us.

(upbeat music) - Next up, we visit American treasure tour in Oaks, Pennsylvania, where what began with one man's love for early automobiles has grown into 100,000 square foot collection devoted to Americana.

(upbeat music) - When I first saw the space, I had actually just walked up the steps.

I had seen the chandelier from the Warwick Hotel.

Virginia gave me the job right when she saw me and she's like, "Do you wanna be the tour guide?"

I said, "Yes."

And so then they brought me through after I had already agreed and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh," it was a little bit overwhelming.

And the realization of what this space is, was a lot to take in, but I've just enjoyed it ever since.

The American Treasure Term Museum is one man's collection.

We have all sorts of pop culture items, dating back all the way to the 1800s through present day, we have about 70 classic antique cars like the ones I'm standing in front of.

We have the largest collection of mechanical music in the country and you'll hear things here that you can't hear anywhere else.

We have stuffed animals, we have the lit brothers depart and store Christmas Colonial Village from the '60s and '70s.

We also have Philadelphia Toboggan Company, rollercoaster carriage from the 1930s that I would never be caught in if I lived during that time.

We just have all sorts of items.

If you can dream it, it is here.

Yeah.

(upbeat music) - American treasured tour was founded by myself and my wife, Virginia, and it's been about 15 years now.

My background is in the antique business as is my 92 year old father who is still going strong at buying and selling antiques.

And the collector was one of our best clients.

And 15 years ago, he looked at me and said "You help create this mess, now figure out what you're gonna do with it."

We came up with the idea of opening it to the public and he resisted.

He often said to me, "Well, it's just my stuff who would want to come see my stuff?"

And I said, "Look, I think there's more interest here.

I think this is something that you need to share with people."

And he said, "Well, give it a try.

If you can make something out of it, more power to you."

- When I first saw this space, I was amazed that anyone could collect that much and have such a broad interest because really more than just mechanical items like music and automobiles, there is such a love here of what people bought and sold and used through the past 100 years in this country.

And I was just overwhelmed by it and then loved it.

(upbeat music) - The collector is definitely a very private person.

- He was hesitant at first to open it up to public, but we assured him that he would remain anonymous, which was his only wish.

- Our collector liked buying things in groups.

I know at one point we bought 900 clowns, so there's 900 clowns within the walls.

- We don't have just one item showing up at a time, we have 300 items coming in at one time or 1,000 items coming in at all time.

So it's just constantly being added to.

- We get so many new items all the time.

Our motto is the there's always room for more.

Up until recently, most everything that people saw when they came here was purchased by our collector.

But once people started to hear about us and we became popular, we started to get phone calls and people were curious if we would take donations.

- We have take in some collections.

Recently, a 1400 raggedy anns came to live here.

I should say raggedy and andy, I know there's andies in there too.

And just in the last week, we've moved 378 telephones to go out on display.

So it is a constantly evolving museum.

I've always resisted using the word museum because we are not a conventional museum.

If you are a museum goer and you expect to see curated collections and dust free cases, we're not the venue for you.

We are definitely a non-museum museum.

- The curation style of this space is pretty much nonexistent.

We have people that say, "Gee, how do you call this a museum?"

But a museum by definition is a collection of historical items, artistic items, scientific, and pop culture and that's what we have.

We have music, we have all kinds of inventions.

We have all of these things here, but because what we show people is such a broad range of things we kind of let it to the public to decide if something should go where it is and we like it that way.

- The American treasure tour doesn't really fit into the normal museum category and it's quirky and it's constantly evolving.

The collector is constantly adding to it and sometimes it's a scramble to put something on display.

And a lot of the time we don't know everything about everything on display.

It's impossible to know everything and it's not stuffy.

I'm not gonna say typical museum is boring, but you kind of go in and you know what to expect and you get a nice placard and it gives you a nice solid description of exactly what it is you're looking at and you go out and you feel like you've had an educational experience.

And when you come here, it's kind of like overwhelming and you're in shock for most of it.

And trying to absorb everything that you're seeing is impossible.

And you go to a typical museum and you go back again a month later, it's the same experience.

And here it's constantly evolving and you have different experience every time you leave here.

You could come on a Friday and then you can come back on Saturday and you'll see completely different things that you missed the first time.

And I really can't think of another place that would give you an experience like that.

(upbeat music) - In today's profile, we head to the University of Pennsylvania to meet with renowned sculptor, Michelle Lopez.

Lopez uses sculpture to interrogate cultural phenomena from consumer waste to national identity to racism.

(upbeat music) Hi, Michelle.

- Hey.

- Hey, is this safe to hug?

- Nice to see you.

- Thank you.

How cool is this?

Oh my God, - It's a smaller sculpture I'm working on.

I'm trying to weld it and see.

- I see that, it looks scary and exciting at the same time.

- So ultimately the single tilts, it will start... Like I actually did some modeling with a hula hoop to just show like that this piece will actually begin to dance and move and kind of be reacting to the storm.

To imagine the storm spinning overhead.

- What is sculpture, if not to you then generally, how would you define its parameters?

- Sculpture has always had that adage of it's the thing that you bump into when you are looking at a painting.

But in my research, we've been trying to change the actual perception of sculpture as something that's broader and more contemporary, but to anything that allows you to stop and offer a moment of pause, you're contending with meaning, you're contending with the space around you and with the objects around you.

It's basically anything that's out there in the world that can be manipulated as sculpture and I think that's what's so exciting about it.

- You seem not to be afraid at all of getting your hands dirty.

You talk a lot about materials and exploring your immediate surroundings.

What do you think drives your appetite for touching things and working with your hands and getting real in the muck?

- I think it's the unpredictability that happens when I'm actually involved.

I mean, I totally believe in getting things fabricated when I don't have that skillset, but there's something interesting and that's a part of the research.

Component, in terms of my work it's researching the material and trying to understand the things that it does naturally, but potentially the things that it could possibly do.

I find that really exciting.

I find failure really exciting because that's the moment of possible invention for me.

(upbeat music) - You had a really lovely sound installation piece recently that was an encounter with the city.

As a participant in that particular piece I was really moved by how inviting it actually was considering the very serious subject matter.

Do you consider sound a part of your sculpture practice then?

Totally, I mean so much of what I think sculpture is about is really contending with engaging the environment.

I decided to work with the Liberty Bell because it's such an iconic piece of Philadelphia, but also interrogate the fact that it's broken and interrogate the fact that at that moment in the summer of 2020 there was the pandemic, there were the Black Lives Matter Protests that were happening everywhere and so we did the sound intervention moving protest around the city with all of the protestors carrying speakers, essentially on their bags.

I worked with a composer, Austin Fisher who basically assembled a series of ding dong sounds.

So bell sounds taken from popular culture, weaved that along also with Anti-Asian slurs of Ching Chung, Ding Dong, and the idea was that we were going to ring the Liberty bell.

- It sounds like you're asking a lot of questions through this very open and adaptable art form sculpture.

Where are you drawing inspiration from these days?

- I think I can't help, but be informed by what's going on around us.

I mean, I was really informed quite honestly, this sense of collapse that I feel is happening kind of globally.

So I've been considering metaphorically how to embody that in sculpture.

And after 911, because I was there at the world trade center when I was installing a show I just became more interested in this relationship really to debris and to the things around us that really are not sculpture or not what we consider sculpture.

(upbeat music) - I don't know about you, but I feel like hitting the dance floor.

I'm Anne Ishii, I'll see you later for more Movers & Makers.

- (indistinct) - All right, I'm so excited.

- Back, step, one more, step, step.

- That was so fun.

(all clapping) Thank you.