(bright music) (upbeat music) - [Matt] Find peace in the garden and studio of artist Alexandra Higgins, chat with Golden King Studio co-founder Kate Warren.

♪ Oh maybe little baby ♪ - [Matt] And catch a performance from The Lustre Kings.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA."

♪ You're a sweet little baby ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution, and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opakla, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz, and this is "AHA: A House For Arts," a place for all things creative.

Alexandra Higgins is a full-time artist who creates beautiful paintings inspired by her love of gardening.

♪ If you take some time today ♪ ♪ Look around, what do you see ♪ - I am a full-time artist, singer-songwriter, gardener, sculptor, and I live in Mayfield, New York.

♪ There's all kinds of gifts that you get ♪ My art has been sort of evolving for about 30 years.

Most of my work is really colorful.

It's sort of drowning in color.

I see the world in a very sort of colorful, hopeful way, sometimes when it's not.

♪ Learn forgiveness ♪ Typically the subject matter in my work is women in the garden, because the garden is a place that I find a lot of peace.

I have a quote that I love.

"As the garden grows, so does the gardener," because it is about growth in yourself.

♪ All of the above ♪ I was an art history major.

I graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh and I came home that summer and I did a watercolor painting of my grandfather, and of course I took all kinds of classes in college, ceramics, drawing, painting, but I was always sort of intimidated by it.

And I think I wanted to do it, I loved it, but I was too, I guess, insecure in my idea of that I could do this.

Anyway, I brought this painting, I put it on the table, and the guy that I was dating at the time said, "Oh, you can't be an artist.

You can't be, you're not, who do you think you are?

You think you're Picasso or something?"

And I said, "No, I don't think I'm Picasso.

I'm just me and this is what I wanna do."

And he said, "You can't do this."

And my mother said, "Well, why can't she?"

And I thought, "Yeah, why can't I?"

(dramatic music) I think people with very good intentions tell you not to do it, right?

It's because you're kind of jumping off a cliff with no security at the bottom, you know?

And I was willing to do that.

I decided that teaching wasn't for me.

I went into real estate for a while and I had a very tragic event happen.

My brother, who was young, was killed in a motorcycle accident.

And it's one of those moments in life where everything just comes clear.

I said, "That's it, I'm not doing this anymore."

I wanna do something because life can be taken away at any second.

I flipped houses, I moved 15 times when my kids were small.

And it was always a sacrifice to keep doing what I'm doing.

(bright music) I used to be strictly an oil painter.

Now I work with paper.

I use a product, it's a decoupage glue.

Let's say just for the face of a figure, I'll take four different colors of like newsprint for values and shading in the face even before I start to paint.

That only takes about half an hour to dry.

And then I'll work acrylic over that.

The advantage of acrylic and paper is the immediacy of it, right?

You'll put something down and boom, it's there.

I'm more of a fly by the seat of your pants type of painter.

I like to start with an idea.

I'll develop that idea, and it'll just sort of bloom into something else.

The final process is with oil paint.

When you're working in the oils, you can sort of slow down and go, "Okay, I need to be a little more deliberate now.

I wanna focus on every single detail."

About every three minutes, I have to get up.

Because your perspective when you're working on it in the immediate space right in front of you is different than if I walk back and then, oh, I didn't see that before.

(gentle music) You want the viewer to look at your painting and then somehow be able to come out of it.

Ah, there's an end, there's a release to it.

It's kind of like when you write songs, right?

You go through the chorus and then you do the verse, and at the end of the verse you're like, okay, where's the resolve?

How do we end this thing?

And that's how I feel with the paintings.

There's an ending to the painting that you can come out of it and feel something.

This most recent series I did was a series about women in the garden called "Looking Back."

If you look back at 18th, 17th, 16th century paintings, a lot of the women were the subject of the painting.

In this series that I did, they are the one looking at you, the viewer.

So it was kind of a more something that I sort of thought about after the Me Too movement.

Like, you know, these women were coming forward.

I thought very bravely.

I thought, well what about when the women are looking at you, you, the viewer, what are they saying to you?

(bright music) There's a silence that you can find in art.

And I don't mean that in a negative way.

I mean that in a kind of being able to tune out what's out there and being able to find the joy and the peace on your own.

♪ Shall I leave the song and rhythm ♪ I don't see myself doing anything else ever.

Like people say, "Are you gonna retire?"

Um, no.

I have a sign on my studio door and it says, "Instead of planning your next vacation, why don't you set up a life you don't need to escape from?"

I live by that every day.

♪ Raindrops rushing to the ground ♪ ♪ Raindrops rushing ♪ - Kate Warren is a photographer based in Hudson, New York, who co-founded Golden Kin, an inspiring and restorative space for LGBTQ and BIPOC Creatives to work and thrive.

Jade Warrick sat down with Kate to learn more.

- Hey Kate, welcome to "A House for Arts" today.

- Hey Jade, thanks for having me.

- Yeah, I'm super excited to talk about your residency program, but first, I wanna let the audience know a little bit about who you are and your other endeavors.

So let's start with your photography.

I know you're a photographer.

You've been a photographer for about 14 plus years.

So how did you find yourself in that passion, and what kept you going?

- Absolutely.

I have a pretty non-traditional career path, and so I have a business marketing degree from undergrad.

And then I worked in health policy consulting and tech marketing before becoming a full-time photographer in my early 20s.

And so I worked in editorial and advertising photography for the past 14 years, as you rightly said.

And I love photography because before that, I was a dancer and a performer and a studio artist.

But I found the studio art to be lonely, right?

You're alone in a room drawing or painting.

But with photography, especially the kind that I do, it forces you out into the world, right?

You're in and of the world.

And photography is a reason to go anywhere or talk to anyone.

And I love the ability of photography to facilitate meaningful connections with people where I can help them feel more seen and valued as individuals, where the photograph itself then just becomes evidence, affirming evidence of our trust-based interaction with one another.

- Ah, that's beautiful.

And that does tightly relate to your other passion, which is the Golden Kin, which is a residency program that you've created, I believe, with a partner.

So let's talk a little bit about this.

What is this residency, and what's its focus, and how does it relate, again, to that togetherness?

- Totally, so I co-founded Golden Kin with Megan King, who is also an interdisciplinary artist with a background in photography and fiber.

And we found this hundred-year-old farmhouse when we were thinking about moving down to the Hudson Valley.

And it was more space than we needed, but we got the house because we really feel strongly about the importance of sharing resources with the community.

And so we founded Golden Kin as sort of a two part project.

It's an artist residency and a project space.

And so our mission is kind of twofold.

We create space for artists to come live in our house, in this very domestic supported setting to rest and retreat from the world, reconnect with themselves, and reconnect with the landscape because the residency is on a 1,500 acre regenerative organic grain farm.

Now, we do not farm the farm.

There are professional farmers who farm the farm and do a really great job.

But we are fortunate enough to be on this land where you are very in touch with the seasons and we have a panoramic view of the Catskill Mountains.

And so people come to us often in moments of transformation and change within their own personal lives, their artistic lives.

And so they find the ability to sort of rest to be really important.

- Yeah, and I will say radical rest and self care is important.

Is that something that the Golden Kin take seriously?

And how does that look like?

- Yeah, I mean, most artist residencies, you're part of a larger cohort of people often in a physical space designed for that purpose.

We host people in our home.

So when people come and be in residence with us, they join our home.

And they have all the support that comes with that, both logistically and emotionally.

So we have family dinners, we invite them on social outings, we help introduce them to other like-minded creative people in the region because we feel like there are already a lot of people going to the Hudson Valley with sort of a tourism mindset.

And we think it's really important first and foremost for visitors to, in order to more deeply connect with themselves, connect through the local community as well.

Because I think that makes the world stronger.

- Yeah, and what type of artists do you usually get in this space?

Like who does the Golden Kin look for to like step into this residency and share this space with?

- Yep, so our residency specifically focuses members of the LGBTQ community and people of color.

And ideally people sort of living at the intersections of those two communities.

Because so often, those folks are the only one or two from those communities in the room.

And so in our spaces, like it's everybody.

And we think it's really important to create designated safe space for those kinds of folks.

And I know safe space has been a pretty politicized term, but we mean it in a way where you're able to show up as all of who you are as a person, be treated with kindness and respect and dignity, right?

And be able to resonate and learn from the other people who are sort of in that sphere, right?

Because as people first and as artists second, that is the most generative way to be, we think.

- It really is.

And would you consider like, since you do work with a lot of communities that are currently unfortunately being attacked or marginalized, do you see this space creating a space of care and rest?

Do you consider that like an act of resistance?

- Absolutely.

- And why?

- Well, because members of our communities are being attacked politically, legislatively, socially, financially, at every turn.

It's increasingly just dangerous to exist out in public in certain spaces as members of our communities.

And so we're fighting every day just to be who we are, love who we love.

And so to create space for rest and care is resistant to that, right?

Like we shouldn't have to fight for survival, space, love, respect, appreciation in every single area of our life.

And so Golden Kin offers sort of an alternative mode of being and ideally like shows different ways of being that people then can bring out into their other parts of their lives.

- Yeah, and that's really important right now for folks to be in spaces like that and to feel seen and to feel safe and to feel held.

I think right now, one of the biggest things we can do in our communities is to connect.

So what are some of impacts that you have seen?

And what are some of the impacts you want to see come out of this residency?

- Totally, so in addition to the residency, we also, it's a project base.

So we offer programming.

So we have monthly recurring salons, we're hosting workshops, and we collaborate with other regional creative people to really activate the space and make it feel accessible to as many people as possible.

And that's been really generative.

So our salons are all intersectional, meaning they invite people from all different walks of life to join.

And they're intergenerational, which has been really cool because there aren't that many intergenerational spaces anymore.

Our society is pretty ageist, but our elders have so much wisdom.

And the isolation that younger people feel of like, oh, who am I, where do I belong, how do I make my way through the world?

Like a lot of those questions can be addressed by having real social connection with people who have been there, done that.

- Yeah, that's true.

- It's different for everybody.

But we found that through these salons specifically, being able to enter into really intentional dialogue is really fun, exciting, supportive.

And so for our interdisciplinary salon, we have a different theme every month.

So a group of about 20 people gets together and shares work that they make in response to the theme.

So the first month, we talked about care.

The second month, we talked about time.

This month, we're talking about dreaming.

Like what does it mean to imagine different kinds of futures?

- Oh, sounds so comfortable.

(laughs) - Everybody kicks their shoes off when they come in.

I make a big pot of soup, right?

Like these are gestures that like make people feel at home, right?

Like I want you to feel like you're going to your like gay auntie's house when you come to my house.

- I love that so much.

Awesome.

Well thank you, Kate.

And folks hear it there, go reach out, try to be involved.

Sounds like an amazing space.

Thank you so much, Kate.

- Thank you.

- Please welcome The Lustre Kings.

(upbeat music) ♪ Well come little baby let you down and take you out ♪ ♪ Now come on little baby let you down and take you out ♪ ♪ Now maybe little baby I'll teach you what it's all about ♪ ♪ Well maybe little baby if you go as you pa ♪ ♪ Now maybe little baby if you go as your pa ♪ ♪ I'm gonna (indistinct) bopping in a ball ♪ ♪ Like a hollow log ♪ ♪ Now maybe little baby ♪ ♪ You're a cute little baby ♪ ♪ Now maybe little baby ♪ ♪ You're a sweet little baby ♪ ♪ We're gonna dance, jump ♪ ♪ Hop on and holler with me ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ When I look at you I like what I see ♪ ♪ When I look at you I like what I see ♪ ♪ Now maybe little baby you come home with me ♪ ♪ Well listen to me baby ♪ ♪ One pretty night like this ♪ ♪ Now come on little baby ♪ ♪ One pretty night like this ♪ ♪ I'm gonna sneak you outside ♪ ♪ I'm gonna steal a little bitty kiss ♪ ♪ Well maybe little baby ♪ ♪ You're a cute little baby ♪ ♪ Well maybe little baby ♪ ♪ You're a sweet little baby ♪ ♪ We're gonna dance, jump ♪ ♪ Hop on and holler with me ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ When I look at you I like what I see ♪ ♪ I look at you I like what I see ♪ ♪ Well maybe little baby ♪ ♪ If you come home with me ♪ ♪ Well listen to me baby ♪ ♪ One pretty night like this ♪ ♪ Now come on little baby ♪ ♪ One pretty night like this ♪ ♪ I'm gonna sneak you outside ♪ ♪ I'm gonna steal a little bitty kiss ♪ ♪ Well maybe little baby ♪ ♪ You're a cute little baby ♪ ♪ Now maybe little baby ♪ ♪ You're a sweet little baby ♪ ♪ We're gonna dance, jump ♪ ♪ Hop on and holler with me ♪ ♪ We're gonna dance, jump ♪ ♪ Hop on and holler with me ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ Welcome back baby ♪ ♪ It's good to see you ♪ ♪ Laughing and dancing ♪ ♪ Like you used do ♪ ♪ Tell me the story ♪ ♪ Of how you love fell through ♪ ♪ And I'll tell you a story ♪ ♪ To the big blue fool ♪ ♪ I'm not trying ♪ ♪ To get next to you ♪ ♪ You need some pick me up ♪ ♪ And I'm the big blue fool ♪ ♪ That's why I'm here baby ♪ ♪ With advice for you ♪ ♪ Now I'll tell you a story ♪ ♪ To the big blue fool ♪ ♪ I am the only fool who ♪ ♪ Really cares ♪ ♪ For all I know ♪ ♪ You're the answer to my prayers ♪ ♪ You and me baby that makes two ♪ ♪ Now I'll tell you a story ♪ ♪ To the big blue fool ♪ ♪ I'm not trying to get next to you ♪ ♪ You need some pick me up ♪ ♪ And I'm the big blue fool ♪ ♪ That's why I'm here baby ♪ ♪ With advice for you ♪ ♪ To tell you a story ♪ ♪ To the big blue fool ♪ ♪ Now I'll tell you a story ♪ ♪ To the big blue fool ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ When we first met everything was just great ♪ ♪ Now you look at me like a goat ♪ ♪ Looks like a kid, just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ I was under your spell now it's more like a curse ♪ ♪ And hangin' round here is only making things worse ♪ ♪ Just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ Love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ You don't love me and I know it's true ♪ ♪ You don't love me and I sure am blue ♪ ♪ I don't know what I'mma gonna do ♪ ♪ I should have got going when the going got tough ♪ ♪ Now things ain't getting better and nothing's enough ♪ ♪ Just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ You don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ You don't love me and I know it's true ♪ ♪ You don't love me and I sure am blue ♪ ♪ I don't know what I'mma gonna do ♪ ♪ I can pack my bags and leave before dawn ♪ ♪ I don't even think you'd notice I was gone ♪ ♪ Just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ I should have got going when the going got tough ♪ ♪ Things ain't getting better and nothing's enough ♪ ♪ Just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ - One, two, a one, two.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) ♪ You don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ You don't love me and I know it's true ♪ ♪ You don't love me and I sure am blue ♪ ♪ I don't know what I'mma gonna do ♪ ♪ I should have got going when the going got tough ♪ ♪ Now things ain't getting better and nothing's enough ♪ ♪ Just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ ♪ I'm just sayin' you don't love me like you used to do ♪ (dramatic music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution, and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opakla, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.