[piano intro] - [Heather] From intricate hand-drawn prints to one-of-a-kind kinetic sculptures, we dive into the minds of artists and innovators shaping North Carolina's creative future one fascinating piece at a time.

It's all on "My Home," coming up next.

[bright music] All across the state, we're uncovering the unique stories that make North Carolina my home.

♪ Come home ♪ ♪ Come home ♪ [bright music continues] [sculpture clacking] [CD player whirring] [bright music] [bright music continues] ♪ Mott the Hoople and the Game of Life ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Monopoly, 21 checkers, and chess ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Mister Fred Blassie in a breakfast mess ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ - [Tom] I've always liked things that move.

Adding movement to figures that are normally static and still just adds a whole thing.

It just captures people's attentions.

It brings a certain life.

♪ Now, Andy, did you hear about this one ♪ ♪ Tell me, are you locked in the punch ♪ ♪ Andy, are you goofing on Elvis ♪ ♪ Hey, baby ♪ ♪ Are we losing touch ♪ ♪ If you believed they put a man on the moon ♪ ♪ Man on the moon ♪ ♪ If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve ♪ ♪ Then nothing is cool ♪ - My name is Tom Haney.

I make automata, which is also known as figurative kinetic sculpture.

[bright music] I used to make props and models and miniatures for TV commercials, for still photographers, for movies.

I always had a studio, I had a shop, and I had all the tools and all the paints and things like that.

And I wanted to develop something that I could make a unique thing that would be all my own.

And I got into making a simple, almost like a marionette that is operated by keys.

[bright music] This is the first piece I ever made and it's operated by the keys out front.

My wife and I were making whirligigs and I decided to make a piece, a figure that was gonna hang off the whirligig.

It wasn't, didn't work out the way I wanted it to.

So I said, "Oh, I'll put him on stage and put keys out front and strings on him so he can be basically an interactive, a one-on-one sort of character."

The keys operate his arms and his legs and his hat and his whole body.

So it's sort of very interactive.

When I was making it, I didn't really know what I was making, This turned into a little stage.

This turned into a backdrop and a marquee.

I wanted to put the keys that were out in front.

And so it turned out so well that I decided to make more.

At the time, I was always a freelance person, so I was sort of working on pieces on my own.

And so I did that for, starting in the mid '90s.

And I was in Atlanta.

I would work for Cartoon Network on TBS and TNT.

And, again, had time in between projects to work on my artwork 'cause I've always wanted to be an artist and I've wanted to transition between working for that commercial entity and just doing all my own work.

[bright music] I had a family friend who's a beekeeper and he was like, "Oh, I'd love to see you do a beekeeper."

And at first I was like, "I don't know."

Sometimes I'm not crazy enthused about things.

But I got into it.

He told me a lot of specifics about certain, you know, the tools and the processes that a beekeeper has.

I did some online research.

The carts that get put in and out.

And I was like, "Oh, it's gotta have a lot of bees involved and how am I gonna make the bees?"

And it turned into a really great piece and he loved it.

And there were many people from all over the world who were beekeepers, like, "I love that piece," you know?

One of the funny things that I thought was pretty smart is I needed to make lots of little bees and what I ended up doing, instead of making them by hand, I took black rice and took little pieces of black rice and painted yellow stripes on them and those were my bees.

And so I could make tons and tons of those.

[bright music continues] [bright music] Each one of my pieces have a certain narrative.

There's some sort of story that I want to tell.

But I'm not so specific as, like, this is what this means.

You know, I'm always leaving it open-ended that people can figure out what it means for them.

[machinery whirring] In 2008, I started to get into galleries and that was a whole different thing.

Right now I'm back, I did that for about 10 years and now I'm back to being independent and I survive on my commission.

So I really enjoy the process of somebody contacting me and saying, "I want a piece about this or that.

I'm interested in, you know, rowing," or "I'm interested in dogs and horses," or whatever they, you know, "My family, I want a piece about my family."

But a really interesting commission recently was a guy from New York.

Was an African American guy, and he said, "I want something about the civil rights movement."

And originally he mentioned Rosa Parks and that whole scene from the bus.

And originally I said, you know, "There's not a whole lot of movement to it.

I don't know how dramatic or how interesting it would be."

And I asked him what else could he think of and he gave me some ideas.

And then I went back to the Rosa Parks idea and I was like, "That could be really dramatic of her sitting, as a scene from the bus, her sitting on the bus holding her purse and the bus driver, like, pointing to the back, you know, confronting her and pointing to the back of the bus and her just sitting there quietly and turning her head."

And I didn't realize how powerful that piece would come out, but it was a really powerful, everybody who's seen it really said that, "Yeah, that's her.

That's the story.

That's the incident."

You know, it's just like really a great piece.

And, of course, I shipped it up to New York where the guy was and he was just like, "This is amazing."

You know, he's been a fan.

He's always liked my work.

And he finally said, "Yeah, I want to commission you to do this piece I have in mind."

And so it is a kind of a collaborative process where somebody says, "I'd like this," and some things that people come up with I can't do 'cause they're impossible mechanically.

Like, "I want this person to walk across the room and pick something up," and, you know, there's certain things I can't do mechanically, but so I kind of, we kind of figure it out.

This is kind of a personal story about when I saw a tornado in Ohio.

"When I was 11 1/2, I saw a tornado came to Ohio," specifically Cincinnati.

This kind of completes the story.

This is the front, but I wanted to wrap the story around the piece and this kind of completes the story.

It talks about how I still have dreams and thoughts and ideas about tornadoes.

I have several pieces of art that are tornado related.

But, you know, it's my own story and my wife thought that I shouldn't ever sell.

So that's why it's here in my gallery.

I think about my pieces, you know, you have this concept in your mind it's gonna be a certain way or have a certain feel and part of the process is creating the story of the pieces and the lives.

Like, when I'm sculpting, sometimes I'm trying to make somebody look like a certain way and sometimes I just figure it out on the top of my head when I'm sculpting.

They kind of take on their own personality and their own life because it's like, I'm never 100% sure how it's gonna turn out.

I've tried to do things that are more realistic and subtle 'cause sometimes you just need a head turn or an arm left or somebody doing a little thing that's just like, "Oh, done something."

[chuckles] ♪ Tell me, are you locked in the punch ♪ ♪ Hey, Andy, are you goofing on Elvis ♪ ♪ Hey, baby ♪ ♪ Are we losing touch ♪ [bright music] [brayer squelching] - My role as an artist really is to question.

I put on thought-provoking shows that really challenge the status quo and get people to think differently about the world.

[bright music continues] There's stuff that has happened in art history that we can see unfolding today and, you know, my job is just to mark this moment and record it and to make sure we can't forget it.

[bright music continues] My name is Raj Bunnag.

I am a professional printmaker and my home is Durham, North Carolina.

[bright music continues] [thunder crackling] I started making art as a kid.

You know, we didn't have a lot of money growing up.

My parents, they were working immigrant parents.

They didn't have all the time in the world to kind of look after me.

I ended up drawing a lot of my own monsters and toys out of paper.

Art became that thing that helped entertain me.

[mellow music] The process that I use is relief printmaking, which is a form of printmaking where I'm carving the surface of a linoleum block, rolling ink out on that block, and then printing it using a giant printing press.

[mellow music continues] This process is very much a meditative process for me and kind of how I deal with the world.

Taking these intense subjects, putting them on linoleum, drawing them and carving them out.

I know it's therapy.

The world just falls away.

[mellow music continues] I over-inked over here though.

But this looks good.

The car looks good.

[mellow music continues] When I was a kid, a lot of the art that I was drawn to was art of mythology.

Anything Greek related, Norse related, Native American related that was illustrated, in the library, in the kids' section, I was all over it.

Going from there, I started becoming obsessed with the history of military illustrations, specifically Francisco de Goya's "Disasters of War" and Jacques Callot's "Miseries and Misfortunes of War."

"The Disasters of War" was Francisco de Goya's capturing of French occupation of Spain.

So like the Napoleonic Wars.

"The Miseries and Misfortunes of War" was about the horrors of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe.

Those two works really pushed me to kind of think about what atrocity is happening in our time.

[mellow music continues] This was going to be my thesis.

It's 12 feet long, but I hated it so much 'cause it was so boring.

So I went from doing stuff like this to stuff like that.

Once I started figuring out my style of making imagery, which is very much like a maximalist kind of fill the page, leaving space like that hurts me now.

I have to like fill it up.

It has to like, you can kind of see the difference in just line density, so.

But, yeah, but this one right here started it all.

My "March of the Druggernaughts" series, I mean, I started that work because of my view and experience of the war on drugs.

It was kind of me taking symbols and pop culture surrounding it and just jam packing it into these kind of maximalist images.

[mellow music] I started making larger-than-life prints because, you know, I could have a political print in a little frame and put it on the wall, but it's easy to walk by.

But when you have monsters that are nine-feet tall, it's a little bit more jarring.

[mellow music continues] A lot of graffiti and street art exists in low-income neighborhoods.

Making this type of work, I don't want to put in those places because this violence already exists in those places.

That's why I wanna put them in galleries.

I wanna put them in suburbs.

I want them to exist in places that make people uncomfortable.

[mellow music continues] There's plenty of art that looks good over a couch or looks good over, you know, in your foyer or wherever.

But we need more artists who are willing to have these challenging conversations 'cause it's what we need to heal and to move forward.

The work I'm making, you know, it's very aggressive and so most kids of color will be like, you know, they're taught to, you know, don't be the nail that stands up.

Just be as invisible as possible.

Don't stand out.

One of the things that definitely keeps me going is meeting younger artists who look like me and see my art or are fans of my art.

And, you know, I know when I was a kid there was no one who looked like me making art, you know?

Or at least I didn't have access to them.

And so being able to be that in Durham and being able to inspire other kids who like, you know, you can pursue art.

[mellow music continues] The two-headed bull is based off one of my father's drawings, one of the only surviving drawings that we have of his.

He was a much better artist than me, but he was of that generation where it wasn't realistic for him to pursue that career.

Using that drawing, I made my own bull.

And the reason I gave it two heads is kind of a representation of what it it is to exist as an other here.

[mellow music continues] Using art, it gave me a power that I know nothing else and no other subject in any class has ever kind of given me that power.

[mellow music continues] I hope to die on that printing press.

Like, I'm gonna be printing until I'm dead.

That's my goal is to keep carving, keep making.

Hopefully by that time I have apprentices and like other people to tell them, "Yeah, go carve that.

Go get that paper.

Get," you know, just be a grumpy old printmaker and just keep making what I'm making and have the freedom to keep making what I'm making.

So, yeah.

[mellow music continues] [bright music] - Well, my artwork is a part of the tradition of our people.

There's quite a few mask makers through the years that's been well known and I hope to be one of those that keep the art alive.

[gentle music continues] Osiyo.

I'm Billy Welch from the Snowbird community.

I'm a teacher and a wood carver and I own the shop Hunting Boy Wood Carving just off 143 in Graham County.

[gentle music continues] The name comes from where I live.

We live on Hunting Boy Branch on up the creek on the reservation and it's where I grew up.

Means a lot to me for the cultural side of it.

Some people may not understand that, but it's kind of like a home.

It's your home.

That's where it's based with me is it's my home.

My ancestors walked here, camped here, hunted here, fished here, all the way back to the beginning of time, from what I understand.

You know, all the traditions were handed down.

For my part of it, my grandmother and her family made baskets.

All summer long, they would work and gather their materials to make the basket and then they'd weave all winter long by the fire.

And that would be what you would produce for a product for the spring to sell.

They were made from white oak, split, quartered, scraped.

We used the natural dyes.

And that influence probably brought me to where I am today with what I do.

So we're here at my home place on Hunting Boy to collect a little bit of bloodroot.

A little early in the spring, but we'll see what it looks like here.

If it works, we'll have some orangish-red tint to put on the mask.

This is what it looks like in the woods.

And here's a young one.

This is what you look for.

You can see like the toes, print of a hand.

That one's not too bad.

So we're gonna break this off.

You see the red blood coming out of the root?

That's what we're looking for.

This would've been used for the basket making too.

They require a lot more of it.

For me, it don't take as much.

That's why I have the little patch, and it'll come back every year.

[gentle music] [wood crunching] That'll look good on the mask.

And we didn't waste nothing from the Earth.

[gentle music] Well, why I have my store out off the, I guess you could call it the beaten path, and not in town, it being on tribal land, this is as close as I could get to town.

I gather the wood around the area.

It comes from reservations.

But the piece is made here on the land, on the piece I own.

It's satisfying, to me, for the soul, not the hip pocket.

This is a different version of the medicine mask.

Used the black walnut stain made from the husk, leaves, bark, or root of the walnut tree, and you would rub it on the mask to embed the color.

The red was from the Indian Paintbrush, the red flower you see in the woods.

Sometimes you just see the way it is.

It comes to mind and that's the way I rub the stain in.

That would be a version of the medicine mask, the traditional way.

[gentle music] Been carving for about 30 some years, and I have a lot of various accomplishments in my carving, from speaking at the Smithsonian and having pieces in the Smithsonian.

I don't even know how many masks I've made.

How to carve them and the look of it is something that I don't think you can train anyone.

The feeling of the wood directs me to carve the different masks that I make.

You throw the block of wood up, you open the log up, and it leads you.

It does me.

It's kind of like following a story through the wood.

It's calling to you.

All I'm doing is cutting in just straight through.

Now you see the first ring.

A lot of that comes from years of experience just looking at it.

You can actually see two eyes looking at you.

So you see that line, we'll start right here.

It's still gonna reveal itself here.

If you look at one of the masks and you see it might be following you around the room, you look at another one and it's real bold, standing strong.

It should draw you.

If it don't, then it's not for you.

And if it does, then you know the meaning of what I've done through the wood.

The power, the strength that you see in the mask, it came from the reservation, and you can say I picked it up in Snowbird, on the reservation.

That's a whole lot of meaning to me.

My art is hanging out there where you can see it and hopefully influence someone to take it on and take it further, and I get to live through that mask.

- Join us as we celebrate 10 years of "My Home" as we look back at some of our most iconic stories and where they are now.

[bright music] At "My Home," if you watch, you know that we love a good animal story.

Whether it is a highland cow or a pig or a goat that eats kudzu, our audience has fallen in love with the animals that we have profiled.

But no one's seemed more beloved than Ripken the bat dog.

- [Announcer] Everybody, give it up for Ripken.

[audience cheers and applauds] - [Heather] Ripken loves his job and we love watching him do it.

And I think that's really the charm of this story and why it captured so many folks and audiences across our airwaves.

In that story, we, of course, meet his best friends and handlers, Michael and Melissa, who love him, but also know how much he enjoys his job and love training him for it.

This story was, of course, a fan favorite for us, but it was also a fan favorite at the Emmy Awards and it won the Emmy for Best Editing in 2025.

- I wanna dedicate this to Ripken, who has passed away, but his legacy remains.

And I'm so glad that I got the opportunity to make this video.

- Unexpectedly, Ripken passed away and fans and his owners, Michael and Melissa, were truly heartbroken.

But his little brother Champ was able to come up from the minors to the major league and take on what Ripken had been doing and fans really have responded so well to that.

They remember Ripken, but they see the future and that's really been something special for Michael and Melissa to share with everyone.

And if you happen to be at a game and you see that lovely black Labrador Retriever down on the field, know that there's a great story and legacy behind what's going on and we're so happy we were able to bring that to you.

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