Photo by Katherine Scherer/LPB.
Artists Suzanne and Pat Juneau, pictured during an interview at their home in Scott, Louisiana for Art Rocks's new season.
In television there’s an old adage about the camera adding ten pounds. Whether the camera also adds ten years is a question that longtime viewers of Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Art Rocks will get to judge for themselves when the program returns this month with a new season (the thirteenth), in a new format, and with ten all-new episodes. Actually, about the only thing that will be the same as the old Art Rocks will be myself, Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith, returning as host for a tenth season—older, grayer, and arguably wiser, than before.
Drawing on LPB audience research confirming viewers’ interest in their state’s vibrant visual and performing arts landscape, new episodes will focus exclusively on Louisiana art and artists. In addition to a longer “Featured Artist” segment, each half-hour episode will now carry an “Impressions” segment in which critics, curators, or collectors weigh in on the significance of a featured artist’s work. And with twelve preceding seasons, plus fifty years of Louisiana cultural coverage to draw upon, every episode will also include a “Vault Rocks” segment, that will connect the dots between featured artists and other Louisiana creatives whose work has influenced or inspired them.
To illustrate, LPB Producer Katherine Scherer points to the experience of acclaimed New Orleans painter Brandon Juan Surtain—subject of the season premiere on October 23. As a middle-schooler, Surtain was displaced from his New Orleans home to Baton Rouge during the 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While in Baton Rouge, Surtain was enrolled at Glasgow Middle School, and credits the art classes taught there by artist/educator Geeta Dave with setting him on the creative path that defined his artistic career. Although she is now retired, Dave was featured in an Art Rocks episode that aired during 2017. When the episode airs on October 23, the “Vault Rocks” segment will acknowledge the creative impact Geeta Dave’s work had, not only on Surtain’s development as an artist, but also on the thousands of other Louisiana children she influenced during the course of her career.
Episodes air at 8 pm Fridays, with a 5:30 pm encore screening on Sundays. lpb.org/artrocks.
