- In this edition of Arteffects, Jeff Ross photographs his Quest for the West.

- It was just me and a little camera and using natural available light.

Which was so refreshing for me.

- The Museum of Gaffiti.

- We give context to the walls that you might see when you walk around this neighborhood.

- The magic of astrophotography.

- And the photograph will reveal things that you just cannot see with your naked eye, looking through a telescope.

- And magical realism with Phyllis Shafer.

- For me, I get something from being on location that's vital to my process.

- It's all ahead of this edition of Arteffects.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for Arteffects is made possible by Sandy Raffelli, The June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members, and by... - Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and welcome to Arteffects.

In our featured segment, we tour the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail with celebrated photographer Jeff Ross.

A dream forty years in the making, Jeff set out across the country with his wife and dog as his support team.

Throughout their travels, Jeff used his camera to document the people they met along the way.

It's through his lens that Jeff gives us an unfiltered look at the heart and soul of Americana.

Our journey begins now.

(light guitar music) - Back in 1976, cue diehard cyclist mapped a route off highways, but on paved roads across the country.

From Virginia all the way to Oregon and it's called the Trans-America Trail.

That was the year I graduated high school.

So I thought, what better way to set off in the world than to pack up my bags on my bike right off into the sunset and just do it solo.

But had no money.

Was getting ready to go to college.

So, forty-two years later, I'm married to a lovely woman that I loved dearly.

And she, when she heard that I wanted to revisit that idea, she volunteered to go with me and act as my support team.

And she brought along our dog Buddy, a little twelve pound rashawn poodle mix.

He was with Karen the whole way.

- I'm sitting in the van that we drove cross-country.

Now, normally this is a work van for Jeff.

He's a photographer, he's a commercial photographer.

So, usually this fan is loaded with camera gear.

But for our trip, it was loaded with bicycles and it was loaded with every bit of gear that we were going to need to be on the road for three months to accomplish this trip.

- The TransAmerica route I followed went from coast to coast.

Starts in Yorktown, Virginia.

and ends up either in Astoria or Florence, Oregon.

We ended up in Florence.

Riding my bicycle across the country just gave me a different perspective and opportunity to meet people that I would never have met before.

- [Wife] Before we started our trip, we decided that we were going to keep a blog.

And so, there were a variety of reasons for that.

Because Jeff's intention was to produce portraits of the people that he met along the way.

So, we decided that we would have a blog that explained who these people were throughout the trip.

So, I became the writer for the blog and he was the photographer.

(music) - It was just a treat for me to meet people that were just real.

They weren't models, they weren't pretending to be something they weren't.

But it was a different experience for me because I couldn't bring lighting.

I couldn't bring tripods or I didn't have an assistant.

It was just me and a little camera and using natural available light, which was so refreshing for me.

Just to see what the light was doing on people.

Using it, hopefully to try to bring out some of their personality.

And when you show up on somebody's doorstep or in front of a business, on a bicycle?

Totally a non-threat.

Nobody's expecting you to be anything other than just a traveler.

So, I wouldn't even take out the camera at first.

I would just start talking and finding out about where they live or why they live there, or who they are, what they do.

And then I would ask them if I could take a few photos of them.

So, people kind of opened up to me.

(music) - At the end of each day, Jeff would share with me the portraits he had taken of the people that he had met along the way; along with the story about those people.

And we would jointly decide which were the best shots and told the best story.

And then with the details he provided me, I would write the blog.

- The awesome thing about the TransAmerica Trail, it staves off all the freeways and major highways.

So, you're going on these back roads through the small towns, villages.

Some of them are just, you know, there's just a few people.

And you would meet people that were so proud of where they lived or what they did or they wanted to show you things.

They would take you into their store and show you all the baked goods they sold that day.

Or the fish they caught or whatever it might be.

If I was looking at my map, people stopped and ask if I needed directions or they were just so open and welcoming.

What stood out to me most about meeting people on the road was just how generous they were.

Nobody ever brought up politics or, you know, at that point it was kind of a very contentious political atmosphere in the country.

It never came up.

Ever.

People wanted to know what I was doing and why was I doing it and, 'Are you here all alone?'

And people just went out of their way to be helpful.

And it just kind of renewed my faith in humanity.

(music) The tradition for cross-country bicyclist is, whatever coast you start at, and we started on the East coast, you dip your rear wheel of your bicycle in the ocean and the Atlantic.

And then when you get to the West Coast, you dip your front wheel into the Pacific.

- [Beth] On the day that Jeff arrived in Florence, Oregon, I had arranged for a surprise reception committee for him.

And we had cow bells that we were ringing just like a regular bike race.

And when Jeff arrived, he came riding down the road, we were all ringing our cow bells.

- [Jeff] I could hear it.

As I'm a half mile away, I hear.

'What the.

What is that?'

And they're all ringing their bells for me.

- [Beth] And we greeted him to walk him, at that point, on the sandy beach to the ocean.

And that's where he was able to dip the front wheel of his tire in the Pacific Ocean.

- [Woman Off Camera] That looks like the ocean to me!

- Being a cyclist, most of my life and a photographer.

Most of my life, you know, two main passions I have.

And I thought those were going to be what determined everything about the trip.

But when people wanted to know, if I was going to photograph the scenics and where the place is, and I did a few scenics, but for me it was literally a discovery of the people on the way.

I met some people I'll know for the rest of my life - To learn more about Jeff and Karen's quest for the West visit Jeff ross.com.

Up next, we take you inside the museum of graffiti the first museum of its kind celebrating the storied history of graffiti and the evolution of the art form from a vandals form of expression to an art movement that is celebrated globally.

- My name is Alan Ket and I'm the co-founder of the museum of graffiti - Baillieston Frieden I'm the co-founder of museum of graffiti in Miami, Florida.

- [Alan] The museum of graffiti is the only museum of its kind in the world.

We give context to the walls that you might see when you walk around this neighborhood.

One of the most important exhibitions that we currently have on display is called style masters, the birth of the graffiti the art movement.

And that exhibition takes you from 1970, when this was an art form, started by kids tagging their names on the streets of New York city and Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and shows how it evolved from simple print writing on walls and on trains to an art form that started to have style.

And then we go into the emergence of these artists into the art galleries.

How did that happen?

Why did that happen?

You get to see original works of art created in the 1980s.

And we continue along this timeline to show the emergence of this art form in Miami.

And we go through the nineties, two thousands, now.

As it moves out of New York city travels across the world here in America, goes onto freight trains, and Kris crosses all over the country and introduces this youthful art form to audiences everywhere.

(upbeat music) What separates graffiti from any other art form is the desire for the mastery of letters, how to bend them and tweak them and enlarge them and make them your own.

And so when some people talk about street art and they ask, you know, well what's the difference between street art and graffiti?

Well street art has to do more with imagery.

Graffiti is about lettering.

- [Baillieston] So what we're looking at here, is a site-specific mural by Defer from Los Angeles.

What we teach about every single day at the museum of graffiti is how looking at each one of these walls can give you context clues to where these artists are from.

For instance, in this wall you can see how Defer incorporates inspiration of Los Angeles, gang graffiti by taking something that society typically looks at as as bitter or as violent, he makes it beautiful.

And we like to compare this or contrast it to this wall by JonOne.

And JonOne was a trained painter.

He did huge pieces on the subways in New York city.

And it's so important to see how two graffiti writers who are doing the same genre of art can have such a different take.

- [Alan] This is the world's largest art forum.

It has practitioners all over the world.

That fact that it's sort of expanding and going around the world and very open to anybody picking it up and adding something to it has started to change the perception of this being purely a vandals movement to an art form that is celebrated and accepted globally and desired globally.

- [Baillieston] Communities have woken up.

And that's where we are today, which is that social norms and cultural norms have shifted just the way that they've done in other areas of low level crimes.

People are opening up and seeing the benefit to including this type of art form within our community.

- [Alan] My personal history, I'm from New York city.

I started painting in Brooklyn, New York as a teenager in the 1980s, I painted exclusively, illegally, painted the trains, I painted the walls and I've gotten arrested and it didn't dissuade me from being a participant in this art movement.

As a matter of fact, it made me sort of more entrenched.

And the museum of graffiti today is sort of the project that I dreamed of.

And I was able to convince artists that normally would not give their artwork to anybody to allow me to have it because they trusted me, they know me as a member of the community.

This art form that has not been celebrated by museums in the past, we have to make our own museum.

- To learn more, visit museumofgraffiti.com.

Now let's take a look at this week's art quiz which photography is famous for the Great Depression era image titled 'Migrant Mother' is the answer, A Diane Arbus, B Ansul Adams, C Dorothy Lang, or D Richard Avedon.

And the answer is C Dorothy Lang.

Each year at the winter star party and Florida keys astronomers gathered together to photograph and gaze up at the stars.

Up next, we hear from the director of the event and learn all about the wonders of astrophotography.

(Sci-fi music) - My name is Tymor Khan.

I'm the director of the winter star party, here at Big Pine Key.

An astrophotographer is basically somebody who points a camera to the sky and tracks the sky and takes long exposures that sometimes these exposures can last over several days.

So we might start and take 10 minute exposures take 110 minute exposures in one night and they continue in another night and even a third night.

And we'll take all these images and put them together to get a photograph.

And the photograph will reveal things that you just cannot see with your naked eye looking through a telescope.

The light is so dim that it takes hours or even perhaps days to gather all that light to make the image.

So you cannot just see it instantly with your with your eye.

When I first got into the hobby I used to be like, let me see how many I can do in one night.

And it's the other way around, I would try to do three images in one night, but you don't get a good image.

You get very grainy, noisy images when you do that.

The trick is to do one object over three nights.

A Favorite is the Orion constellation where Bellatrix is the top star is the head of Alfred Hitchcock.

And you'll see an arc, which is called Bernard's loop.

That is the stomach.

And then you have an arm, a very faint reddish arm and beetle juice is like the cigar that he typically smokes.

So that's why we call it the Alfred Hitchcock Nebula.

This is a mega Centauri and this entire constellation.

This is one of the largest globular clusters with millions of stars in it don't know exactly how many millions, but there are several million stars in this cluster all orbiting each other.

The neat thing about it, they say scientists say is if our solar system was inside that cluster it would never be dark.

It would always be, there would always be light.

It's a very interesting cluster.

Everybody loves to come down and see it because it's so big and large it's the largest one that we get to see This is a great place to have a star party.

We have a lot of people that come down about 600 astronomers that set up the telescopes on our, on the beaches because it's one of the Southern most places where you can see objects that are below 67 degrees declination, which basically means we can see certain objects that you just cannot see anywhere else in the continental United States.

So because of that it draws a lot of people down to pointer telescopes low in the horizon and see objects such as Eda Corrina which is one of the largest nebulas that are out there.

So here at the winter star party you'll notice that we don't use a regular flashlights.

We use a red flashlight.

And the reason why we use red flashlight is because your eyes get dark adapted and it takes roughly 25 minutes for your eyes to be truly adapted to the dark.

You're at the mercy of the weather.

You're at the mercy of the equipment.

There's, you know things go wrong.

Even the wires hanging off the scope can cause trailing in the stars because you're following the star.

So the, the, the motion of the stars going across the night sky is so smooth and so precise that there's really not much manmade mechanical equipment that can accurately move in the same way.

It is a form of art in its own right, in its own way because people, different people, have different ways of manipulating the data and showing the photograph or how they do it, or what, how they image it.

And each one is a little bit different.

- To find out more about the winter star party head to facebook.com/wspscas.

Artist Phyllis Shafer is a plain air landscape painter who lives and works in the Sierra Nevada mountains and surrounding great basin.

Let's take a journey with her through beautiful mountain vistas into Reno's Own Stremmel gallery.

We'll see how she engages with her natural environments to create a sense of magical realism that is unique to her work.

(guitar music) - [Phyllis] My name is Phyllis Shafer and I'm a landscape painter and I work in plain air out of doors here in the Sierra Nevada mountains painting the landscapes around us.

When you look at my paintings I want you to know what peak you're looking at or if you're in a Sierra, Nevada meadow or on the coast.

So there's certainly an interest in describing a sense of place and honoring that sense of place.

You can see from looking at my work that there's a lot of stylizing and tweaking and sort of distorting that's going on in order to what I think of is creating more of a narrative.

I think that the brush is my vehicle for getting the forms and the rhythm and the energy that I'm trying to describe in a certain landscape.

You have to really be engaged in process as an artist, because it's a very long haul from the beginning of an idea to the completed piece.

When I start a painting, that definitely happens when I'm out hiking, driving, just standing in nature and finding a place that speaks to me in some way.

And I think it's kind of like a crystallization of an idea.

And if you can hang on to that idea then the labor part comes in by bringing all my gear out there, carrying it and setting myself up with an easel, the paint, the canvas.

And I like to work large by plain air standards.

I think my favorite size is, is usually in the 30 to 40 inch range or thereabouts.

It gives me the range that that feels most comfortable for me.

So there's a lot of labor involved in getting your equipment outside, but for me the get something from being on location that's vital to my process.

So I begin the paintings very loose, very gestural trying to pay attention to the essential gesture or the essential feeling or rhythm or idea that stuck with me when I first found a place.

And then it's a process of layering and developing and really utilizing the medium and the brushstroke and color, color is very, very important to me.

I'm always working warm against cool colors, high contrast low contrast, light, and dark, and the sensations of having colors sitting side by side that creates this kind of vibration and energy that we respond to when we're when we're out in nature.

I have shown my paintings for 30 plus years in lots of different venues, but when I met Turkey Stremmel and everyone at the Stremmel gallery, I found a home and someone who would be an advocate for my work that has really changed my relationship to the community.

I get a lot of feedback now by showing here at the Stremmel gallery and many people come up to me who have bought a painting and they've got tears in their eyes because they feel like this painting expresses something that they've experienced in the landscape.

- Even if it's a painting that I've never seen, I'm intrigued.

Think of, maybe I would love to go and possibly find that location.

There's always something interesting, slightly magical sometimes in her landscapes.

I think she brings the outdoors to you so you can have it indoors.

You know, we all work hard and you know, some of us get beat up during the day, I mean all day long.

And if you go home and you've got something to look forward to and say, okay, I had a tough day but I can look at this landscape and it'll transport me into another place for at least maybe five ten minutes, two minutes.

But you know, maybe it just is a really good thing for you to have in your own soul and your own heart that you've got a chunk of nature that just feels good when you leave it in the morning and you come home to see it in the evening.

- [Phyllis] Hopefully one of the ways in which people can connect to my paintings is that I'm talking about something that is a shared human experience.

And even though there's no figures in my paintings there's very much a sense of self.

And for me, I think it's a subtle thing and I don't want it to be a hamfisted allegory me in the world so much as it is looking to nature and using it as a way to be okay with this process of aging and loving and losing and fighting and caring and trying.

And there's something about nature that is a lesson, because there's always something new being born and something old dying off.

And it makes me feel like it's going to be okay to die that everything has a cycle and you're part of that cycle.

So maybe that's what I'm getting at with my paintings is this is just a way for me to figure out why I'm here and to be okay with it.

- See more of Phyllis Shafer's work at phyllisshafer.com And that wraps it up for this edition of arteffects.

For more arts and culture, and to watch past episodes Visit PBS reno.org/arteffects Until next week I'm Beth Macmillan, thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Funding for arteffects is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, the June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Frank Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman Heidimarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno members, and by...