Artist exiled from homeland transforms nature into works of art

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: Finally, tonight we travel into the woods of New England.

Michelle San Miguel of Rhode Island PBS Weekly introduces us to an artist who was once uprooted from her homeland and has spent decades transforming works of nature into works of art. The story is part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Ana Flores, Artist: This is where the glaciers ended 10,000 years ago and dropped a lot of stone and rubble and boulders. So, of course, you will see a lot of stone walls. Some of these lots around here were used for wood by the colonials. So it’s kind of a scrubby forest landscape, but it holds all kinds of histories here.

Michelle San Miguel: Artist Anna Flores is fascinated by the stories the land holds. It’s one of the reasons she likes to start her days by going for a walk in the forest next to her home in Charlestown. This stretch of southern Rhode Island has a complicated history.

Ana Flores: It’s the land of the Narragansett, and they’re still very present. It’s also a place that’s had a history that is very connected to the Caribbean because Rhode Island was part of the slave trade.

Michelle San Miguel: For Flores, the land isn’t simply a muse. It’s also an extension of her studio. She’s searching for materials she can incorporate into her artwork.

Ana Flores: I do a lot of branches. A lot of wood comes in, because all kinds of forms of wood, stones, manmade objects that get left behind and rusted.

Michelle San Miguel: Flores’ work has been featured in exhibits around the world. Her pieces, she says, are rooted in identity, place, and discovery of place. Her work’s been described as evocative and at times, provocative.

Ana Flores: One of the first larger pieces that I made was a piece called Gaia, and it was made out of a root system. It kind of became almost like an Earth womb. It was like the Earth giving birth.

Michelle San Miguel: Flores recalls the piece being censored in the late 90s at a university library. It was moved to a less visible gallery.

Ana Flores: I had a discussion eventually with the dean of the library. And it was quite clear it was censorship. I mean, he just didn’t want it in there. He said too many people are stopping and talking.

Michelle San Miguel: For Flores, Gaia represented how humans have abused the environment. She’s not afraid to make a statement through her work. It’s a privilege she does not take for granted. She was 6 when she left Cuba with her family in the early 1960s as a political refugee. Fidel Castro’s promise of a free Cuba vanished.

Narrator: Castro gloated over his victory and told the world that Cuba was now a socialist nation.

Michelle San Miguel: Flores, seen here as a baby in Havana, ended up moving to Connecticut with her family. She later graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she met her husband. She returned to Cuba in 2002, her first time back since leaving the island 40 years earlier.

Ana Flores: I felt so Cuban. It’s a funny thing to say. It was like this whole suitcase of my life and my memories had been put away for a long time, and that trip brought it out.

Michelle San Miguel: Flores says traveling to Cuba made her feel more rooted in Rhode Island. She spent much of the last two decades devoted to creating work that helps communities connect with their landscapes.

Ana Flores: We do have an environmental problem. We’re not taking care of the planet and of the places we live in, partly because of ignorance. We don’t understand how our behavior can affect it.

Michelle San Miguel: Flores went on to create her Poetry of the Wild project. She’s traveled the country teaching people how to design boxes that look like birdhouses.

Each one contains a poem and a journal where visitors can jot down their thoughts.

Ana Flores: You can tell people there’s going to be bird-watch walks or this or that, and a lot of people won’t go hiking. But if you tell them there’s a poetry box, a writer they might know wrote something for the box, their children might have been involved in making some of the boxes, all of a sudden you get this new audience going out walking. And then maybe you act in a different way.

I never planned to be this kind of artist. It was really this place that made me this kind of artist.

Michelle San Miguel: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Michelle San Miguel in Charlestown, Rhode Island.