[Announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by the Friends of South Florida PBS.

[Narrator] Art Loft, it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, murals, mobile homes, and more.

Serge Toussaint, the Little Haiti artist and muralist with three decades in the game, shares his story.

Artist Najja Moon takes to the court with a Project Backboard marriage of her favorite passions, art and basketball.

We learn about the art of the lowrider bike from New Mexico PBS, and photographer Diego Waisman documents South Florida's disappearing mobile home parks.

Three decades ago, Serge Toussaint came to Miami on a family trip and never left.

Instead, he started painting signs and murals in Little Haiti, and before you know it, his work was all over South Florida.

Here he talks about his career and the legacy he hopes to leave.

A lot of people see the Serge, but never see my face.

If you go around, if you've been to Little Haiti, there's no way you going to tell me that this sign, you do not recognize that sign.

Yeah, and it's me.

My name's Serge Toussaint, born and grew up in Haiti but raised in New York.

I'm an artist, all my life.

That's all I know is the paint.

Ever since I was a little kid, this is all I do.

I'm just sketching, painting, paint, paint, paint, paint.

Never been to school for art, nothing.

I was just born with that.

I want every Haitian to know that they fit in.

I want all the Haitians to know that their stories matter.

You know what I mean?

That their pieces matters.

And most of my murals that I painted, it has something to do with Haitians, got something to do with the community.

Mind you now, I just don't paint Haitian art.

I do all kind of work.

'Cause Miami is like divided everywhere.

I got works in Calle Ocho.

I got works in Overtown, leaving the city, Miami Gardens.

I don't paint Haitian stuff there.

You can see, I bring a picture of Malcolm X.

Like if I go to Overtown, those are the kind of work that they want to see.

I can't go to Overtown and paint a picture of Dessalines.

They gonna be like, what, who is this?

You have to be able to do things that goes with their own community.

But me as a Haitian, so I really do things that my people, can identify as, you know what I mean?

So Dessalines, I did the work down on the next block of the big Haitian flags.

You learn from my work, you learn from, what is this supposed to be?

What is that supposed to be?

When you come to Little Haiti, by the time you leave Little Haiti, you leave with a little piece of what this culture is about.

You know what I mean?

Because whatever country you go to, there's a piece that's caught your attention for you to ask questions.

I rode my bike to a little Havana, Calle Ocho.

The minute I got up there, I just, goosebumps.

You know, you stepping in a different community because you see a picture of Celia Cruz, you see José Martí, you saw the Havana buildings.

As an artist, you have to respect people's community.

And this is, when I left Little Havana, I left with a piece of their history.

So I want people to come to Little Haiti, when you leave little Haiti, I need you to go home with a piece of what my culture is about.

This is where my art comes from.

30 years, 30 years, yeah, 30 years and one day at a time.

Not only that, it's been crazy here.

It's like I'm an old pop.

Those graffiti artists, they called me The Godfather, which I never knew.

We have a famous artist called Hacksaw, famous graffiti artist.

We have the Buk 50, the famous graffiti artists, you know what I mean?

I can name 'em, they are very great artists.

And now mind you, now they were telling me that I inspired them.

I'm like, whoa, this is something good.

You a mind-blowing artist, man, you're doing freaking murals, you're huge in Miami.

And then you telling me that I'm the one that inspired you?

It's 'cause when I came in 1994, Overtown, I mean, Overtown with Wynwood, that was Overtown.

There wasn't nothing on there.

But by them riding their bikes over Little Haiti start seeing my work, I inspired them to do tags, to start spraying.

And then they started spraying.

They don't wanna come here, it's next block to me.

They start doing their own thing.

So they called, no, this Godfather Serge did this, we are not gonna touch Serge's work.

They have that respect for me, so, you know what I mean?

I love it, man.

That got me thinking like, I'm doing something positive in this community.

I've been doing canvas all my life, so.

But mural was always something that I love to do.

I'm more into showing the work to the world because it's not a lot of people that come to art galleries.

It's something special.

It's a privilege to come to an art gallery.

So that's the reason why you don't see me having too many canvases.

But since Ronald offered me to come to do artwork, I figured like, okay, why don't I just do the opportunity to showcase a few of my work?

I wanted to bring him to a white cube space and exhibit his works differently as a curatorial challenge.

And I think it works.

I'm really satisfied with the way it's come out.

It's something I've been doing all my life.

I started painting when I was 10, 12 years old.

It's already stacked up there.

When, like I said, I don't paint too many canvas.

It's something I paint fast.

I did this last night, you know, to show the old signage before there were computers.

This is how we started with the paintbrush.

I make sure it's a old piece of plywood I find in my backyard.

I cut it in half and freestyling and it looks old.

It looks like back in the days.

Serge's works on canvas, they look aged, they look vintage.

And that's hard to achieve.

I mean these pieces are all from this year.

You could tell me these pieces were made in 1994 and I'd believe you.

He's got that expertise in sign making and, you know, adorning the storefronts with the businesses and the products that they sell.

I just cannot bring the business in there.

And when I look at this white wall, man, it's like, whoa, I want to paint something there.

Don't let me see anything white, 'cause I want to paint something on it, yeah.

I love huge work, huge exposure.

I grid on big work, like the one I did for the Miami World Center, it's 80, 50 squares, 30 stories up.

That you have the grids because there's no way that you have to go, you could go back and look at what you're doing.

You have to put it on scale.

So that's the kind of work that I create, so huge work.

But most of the time I just freehand it.

I just, stuff like that, I just come outta my head.

I don't have to see this to paint that.

I already got that stuck on there.

That's why it only take me one day to do it like this, 30 minutes, 40 minutes.

I paint those fast because it's already registered up there.

But if it's a huge wall that I cannot go back and I'm on top of a lifter, then I grid that, I put that on scale and I sketch it first then I put the colors next.

I also have a little school, an art school to teach kids at the Little Haiti Cultural Center every Saturday, every Sunday.

I like to give back, you know what I mean?

Like they said, I'm getting old.

It come to a point where I don't want people to just talk about Serge.

I want people to talk 10, 15 years from now when I'm no longer around for my name to be a legacy, for other kids to grow up, to have my style.

And when they ask him the same question, for him to say that, hey man, it was Serge that taught me, he been gone, about 30 years he been dead.

But it was because of Serge that I became this, I became that.

So this is why I teach kids.

I have grown-ups wanna come to my class, they're welcome.

But I'm more concentrated on teaching the children, you know what I mean?

Helping them to know that, don't let your mom and dad let you know that it's not a great career to be an artist.

If you want to make it a great career, you can.

Because I made it a great career out of my artwork.

I ended up taking care of my kids.

I ended up buying my houses, my house is paid, you know what I mean?

All because of the brushes.

I like to teach, give back, so when you're no longer around, so people will know that I didn't die with my talent.

I passed it on, yeah, to all the children that's coming up, for the kids of the future.

Still today, 30 years later, Serge is still here.

Getting old, but I'm still here.

People still telling me that, man, this is my husband, this is my wife.

But I've been watching you once I was in middle school.

Yeah, but I'm still here, one day at a time, I'm still here.

I'm still making changes in my community.

I'm still here painting stuff that are hurting my people.

You know what I mean?

If something happens to Haiti right now, I don't write it, I'm not a writer.

But I'm a paint it.

Well, I like to send out messages, you know, by you looking at the word, you going to stop and look, even though you don't speak no creole, this one says ANMWEYYYY.

You want to ask questions.

What's the word Anmwe means?

Anmwe means help, help.

People asking questions, if you look at the work, you'll see two hands squeezing a flag.

If you squeeze the flag, that's a sign of hurting the flag.

The flag represent Haiti by squeezing it.

It's like they can't breathe.

And the work name is, we can't breathe.

We need help, we choking, that's what my work is about.

Haiti is choking, Haiti is can't breathe.

My message is, has something to do with what's going on actually in Haiti And you see the SOS, we got blood dripping on it.

I wanted the community, the world to know that that little blue and red flag country, they asking for something, they asking for help.

'Cause there's not a lot of people that listen to the news.

There's a lot of people that don't watch TV, but you drive a lot going up and down the streets.

You will one day ask, what is this all about?

This looks mean, but it's a message.

I like to send out messages with my brushes.

[Narrator] Artist Najja Moon has two passions, art and basketball.

Here she talks about her latest work with Project Backboard that brings those passions together.

The basketball court isn't entirely visible from Biscayne, but every time I drive by, I do a little, you know, trying to see what I can see.

And so sometimes I'll pull in just to watch who's playing.

My name is Najja Moon and I'm an artist and a basketball player.

I'm grateful that an organization that I really admire reached out to Project Backboard.

And they have been approached with opportunity with partners based in Miami to execute a basketball court mural and asked if I'd be interested in participating.

So Bigface Coffee, The Salty Donut, JDS sports were wanting to fund a court in Miami.

And so the process kind of rolled on from there.

I guess for me, I was trying to think about the ways that this kind of coalition of people came together, what we had in common.

And then from there just kind of started making sketches.

Maybe a dozen sketches or so, and then I started to collage them in the computer.

And one of the reoccurring themes for me that kept coming up was uncommon.

And I was thinking about how atypical it is for me to have played basketball all my life and to now be a working artist.

I was thinking about Jimmy Butler's route to the NBA and how unorthodox that was.

And so as I'm thinking about the gestural mark making that shows up in my work a lot, I was curious how those marks could be uncommon suggestions for how to navigate the court.

If a basketball court is a drawing that promotes choreography, how could I contribute to that?

And so that was kind of the thought process in making it work.

Thinking about the ways that people are responding in real time on the court, I'm starting to see the drawing also as some kind of abstracted shot chart.

People are kind of picking a dot to shoot from or a section based on a color.

Yeah, but I'm excited to see what else comes from that.

I'm looking forward to seeing more scuff marks on the painting.

You know, adding more marks to the drawing.

It's like, it's becoming a kind of collaborative piece in that way.

I think I have a long history or resume of, you know, working in teams to keep the basketball metaphors going, you know?

I'm not a ball hog.

So this was a beautiful collaborative experience.

I mean, I guess, if anything it encourages to continue working that way and affirms the ways in which I had already been working.

I played basketball my whole life.

I played in college and after that I didn't really touch a ball.

I say, you know, when you don't have to do two a days anymore, you don't.

The last three years of my life story goes that, you know, I had gained a ton of weight during the pandemic and I wanted to look in the mirror and feel hot again.

I was like, I need to get in the gym.

And so what started as riding the bike and lifting weights slowly became doing a shooting workout, became playing three on three, half court, you know.

My knees are old.

And then when I felt good, I started playing full court five on five and all of a sudden I was like, oh, I play basketball.

That happened again, you know?

I think the foundation of my practice starts in a collaborative community- based way and I've done a lot of work with my drawing and connected to poetry.

I've collaborated with O Miami a bunch.

It's another organization I really enjoy.

And my work is starting to move more into the performance space where I'm making sound-based work that are translations of my drawings.

Yeah, there's like a bunch of different tentacles to my practice, but I think that there's also a lot of really great Miami based organizations that have helped push my practice.

When I think about, O Miami or Pioneer Winter Diaspora Vibes, those are all folks who have really encouraged, you know, my unorthodox way of exploring myself and my work.

One of the things that I explore in my mark making sometimes with all of the intersections of mark making is I'm thinking about how do I build a life where there is less separation?

You know, I don't want my work and leisure time to be different.

I would love for my life to just roll, everything to roll into each other.

And I think I spent a large chunk of my life separating from my experience as an athlete.

And so to get to this point where I'm making work that directly combines the two feels like I've arrived to a point that I wanna get to.

The install process took about a week.

Initially there was grinding and sanding, trying to clean up some of the divots on the court.

Then, you know, put the resurfacer down and then all the paint that you see is, you know, outdoor sport court paint.

The same thing you would paint a tennis court with.

The larger swaths of color are mostly done with large squeegees.

And then pretty much every mark, circle, line that you see was individually taped off and then painted.

So it was tedious.

We used like a gridding process.

Chalk grid lined the whole area to then kind of sketch, resketch out the drawing and taped them out.

We cranked it out in a week, one Saturday we kind of had a open volunteer day, so I had a bunch of friends come by and help as well.

People were visiting from the farmer's market being like, hey, what's going on over here?

So, you know, everybody had a hand in it.

I've gotten photos from folks that live in the condo over here, you know, getting aerial view pictures of the court while it's in process, folks sharing images of their kids playing here.

I'm grateful that it's a park that is used by people who live here and will continue to care for it.

This is a functional object, the basketball court, you know, it's to be used and that's probably the best part, as somebody who does play, you know, I'm excited to see the way people use it and add to it.

[Narrator] For Aaron Gonzalez, a bicycle is a work of art.

With skill and vision, he builds custom lowrider bikes known for their style and character.

New Mexico PBS introduces us to his creative process and his role as cofounder of Albuquerque's Odd Fellas Bike Club.

I think it's the shiny wheels and the candy paint and you know, the flaked out patterns and I mean, I just, I think it's beautiful When it comes to the bikes, I have a certain style.

Anybody that comes to me wanting a bike, they already know that it's gonna be lower to the ground.

If you want something high, then I'm probably not the person to come to.

♪ I can't make a move ♪ The first low rider I ever seen was a 50 Chevy truck.

It was all black, it had chrome rims on it.

And then I picked up my first low rider magazine when I was younger and I saw the bikes and I saw the art and everything about it.

I fell in love with it.

♪ Baby if you run away ♪ ♪ Baby ♪ When it comes to flow, when it comes to design, I always look at body lines on old cars and that's where a lot of the designs come from.

The fleet line is something that I designed and that's kind of where that design came from.

A 48 fleet line.

I was once told, when you're designing something, especially a bicycle, you should be able to look at the bike from the beginning and not stop all the way to the very end.

And that's when you got perfect flow.

And that's something that's always stuck with me.

When I'm in the zone, there's no distraction, there's nothing that can break my concentration.

If I'm having a bad day, I just build bikes.

I have no fabrication background, I have no welding background.

I didn't think I can do it, but I started doing it and I fell in love with it.

It's my art, it's my passion, I love everything about it.

Just being able to create rideable art and create something that not only I can enjoy but other people can enjoy.

And I think that New Mexico has a big culture when it comes to the lowrider scene.

♪ It's gonna be alright ♪ And we're all different, you know, just nobody is the same and that's just kind of how the bikes are.

Every one of these bikes are different.

Just like shoes or anything else.

You know, it just kind of fits the individual person that's actually riding the bike.

When it comes to the Odd Fellas, it's all about riding together.

♪ It's gonna be alright ♪ ♪ It's gonna be alright ♪ ♪ It's gonna be okay ♪ ♪ It's gonna be alright ♪ ♪ I feel it in my heart ♪ While we're all riding, people kind of gravitate towards these bikes.

They come out their house, they're all smiling, they're happy, waving, you know, it's just a really good feeling.

♪ Time to get your ♪ It always puts a smile on someone's face.

♪ If you won't try, you won't know ♪ ♪ When next year's gonna come ♪ ♪ You've got to ♪ I'm just saying it's the bikes that bring us together, but it's the people that make us stay.

It's about family, it's about finding your gift.

It's about doing something that could take you away from the everyday distractions.

You know, whatever you're going through during the week, when you're on these bikes, you don't have a choice but to just slow down and take everything in around you.

It just brings everyone together and it just, everyone's on the same page when we're riding.

We're just in the moment.

♪ Carry on, it'll be alright ♪ ♪ Carry on, carry on ♪ ♪ Let it go, carry on ♪ ♪ It'll be alright ♪ ♪ Let it go, let it go, carry on ♪ [Narrator] Artist Diego Waisman has spent the past six years documenting South Florida's disappearing mobile home parks.

Here at his Sunset Colonies exhibit at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU, he shares how the project began.

This is a show that portrays the disappearance and gentrification of mobile home trailer parks here in South Florida.

And these images that you see here are coming from a book with the same name that took about seven years to be documented and researched through a process of going through these communities and talking to the different neighbors, especially the ones that were facing eviction.

And also trying to reconcile what was their way forward.

And also looking at the path, how these communities came to exist here.

These type of communities are disappearing or are being purchased by private entities and they are increasing their rent for these people.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where they were taken, it's what they say and how they are affecting the people that live there and are watching the images.

Alberto, he has been living there for 30 years.

He told me that the community that I was walking through was actually three times its size, but through different renovations, they started selling some of the land and then constructing stores and residents on the other place.

He was not completely sure where he was gonna move to, but he understood early on that the apartments that were gonna replace the community were not gonna be for him.

And he also shared that he couldn't really move, his house, the trailer with a crane because the cost of the crane was exceeding the price of the trailer.

We have already normalized the situation to the point that nobody really cares.

And I kind of took it upon myself to go to these places to document something that was going away that I felt it was historic.

You might see it on the news cycle, but then it will be gone and nobody will remember these people and they will be completely forgotten.

It was interesting to see the differences between the senior residents that have been living there for a long time versus the young people, some of them immigrants that just moved there a few months ago and they had no attachments with the community, so.

The older generation didn't have so much time left in order to rediscover another place for them to move to, where the young ones could be there today and somewhere else tomorrow.

When the sky is evenly lit on a cloudy day, the colors look completely different.

And that kind of allowed me to enhance like the uniqueness of each one of these trailers because they are paint in different colors that you will not necessarily expect yet in a very Miami way.

And also the decorations, right, from the ornaments, from the garden gnomes to the flamingos.

All those added to the identity and belonging of those.

And it told a completely different story of Miami, right?

And that was the whole point.

It's not this idyllic summer paradise.

It was something else.

And it kind of created a disruption because of the contrast, the colors and the subject matter that was in front of the audience.

In a way, it's creating a unique set of images and stories about these people that definitely are not gonna be here anymore for the future and for other people to consume and to see what happened here before, what was their story and what condition of kind of trailer they lived in.

So it's providing a lot of information for people that have not really experienced trailer parks.

And at the same time, for maybe people that are interested in the history of South Florida and the evolution of that.

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