AOTA-240209 - Bryan Byrn, Spotlight The Starlets

This week on Art in the Air, our whole show features a visit with Brian Byrne, the Curator of Exhibitions and Education for Elkhart, Indiana's Midwest Museum of American Art, sharing his over 40-year career there and as a practicing artist. Our spotlight is on The Starlets, who will be featured February 13th by the Lakeshore Community Concerts at Munster Auditorium with founder and show producer Amy McAndrew. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. You're in the know with Esther and Larry, Art on the Air today. They're in the know with Mary and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. Welcome, you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, WVLP, 103.1 FM, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. I'm Larry Breckner of New Perspectives Photography, right alongside here with Esther Golden of the Nest in Michigan City. Aloha everyone. We're your hosts for Art on the Air. Art on the Air is supported by an Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant, Southshore Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Art on the Air is heard every Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM also streaming live at lakeshorepublicmedia.org, and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Also heard on Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP, 103.1 FM streaming live at wvlp.org, and Tuesdays at 4 p.m. on WDSO, 88.3 FM. Our spotlight interviews are also heard Wednesdays on Lakeshore Public Media. Information about Art on the Air is available at our website, breck.com slash aota. That includes a complete show archive, spotlight interviews, plus our show is available on multiple podcast platforms, including NPR One. Please like us on Facebook, Art on the Air, WVLP, for information about upcoming shows and interviews. And this is Art in Your Spotlight. You're just hearing the Starlets, who will be appearing at the Munster High School Auditorium for Lakeshore Community Concerts on Tuesday, February 13th, and you can still find out information. We have Amy McAndrew, who is the founder of Well Sunset Singers, which are also bringing the Starlets to us, and she's going to tell us a little bit about what you're going to hear, what type of group, and also some of the other groups. Amy, welcome to Art on the Air Spotlight. Thank you so much for having me. Aloha. Hello. Yeah, well, we are really excited to come to Munster and bring the Starlets to you. Yeah, so the Starlets is our act that does 50s and 60s, mostly girl group hits. So we have a lot of really fun songs that a lot of people would remember or even recognize. So we have Be My Baby, Heat Wave, These Boots Are Made for Walking. We have some really fun costume changes from the era of the 60s and a lot of choreography. You may have some audience interaction. We bring somebody up on stage, which is always a lot of fun. And, yeah, it's a really great show. Everybody seems to love it from the young kids to the people that actually grew up in the era and recognize the music. Well, Amy, the costumes are so fabulous. Who weighs in on them? Oh, thank you. So, yeah, Sunset Singers was founded by myself and my husband, James. And, you know, the great thing about our company is that we come from a creative background and producer background. So we, you know, we basically come up with the show from the ground up. So we come up with the concept. We choose the songs. We have the arrangements done. We choose the costumes. And, you know, the gold costumes, the gold sequined costumes that you see in the show are custom designed by us and made by our costumer for each individual singer. So we really like, you know, to be reminiscent of the era in terms of our costuming, but also have a little bit of a contemporary style to it, too. Yeah, they fit beautifully. They look great. Thank you. So the Sunset Singers also has other groups, which, of course, like The Starless. So tell us about some of the other groups that you produce. Yeah, of course. So we have The Suits, which is another show that is touring right now. It's four gentlemen, four genres, and four decades. It has a lot of really fun music from the 50s through the 80s, and it's Motown, doo-wop, pop, and rock. So the great thing about that is there's going to be, you know, four iconic decades that are covered in that show. They do everything from My Girl by The Temptations to Songs by The Beatles. They do Uptown Girl by Billy Joel, Don't Stop Believing by Journey. So that's a really fun show that covers a lot of material, and these guys are amazing dancers. So it's not just the music. They are dancing the whole entire time. Yeah, we saw them last year. Oh, yes, yes, yes. So you guys would know. Yeah, and they're still touring now, so that's going well. And then we have another one of our groups is the Sugar Plums, and the Sugar Plums are a Christmas group. They were the winners of the CW's Christmas Caroler Challenge, which was a competition where, you know, carolers and Christmas groups came from around the country and competed on the show. And they were the winners. It's a really fun holiday show. Yeah, and then we do everything from we have a 1940s act, The Hollywood Dolls. We have The Sweethearts, which is more of a sock hop 1950s act. And we are also expanding and creating new shows all the time. It sounds like you're busy. Briefly, in a few minutes here, tell us about your quick journey. You started in New York. You were off Broadway and everything, and how you got from there to L.A. Yes, well, you did your research, I hear. So, yeah, I went to college in Colorado, actually, for musical theater and moved to New York, was a performer there for many years, doing, you know, regional productions and Broadway shows and a lot of different stuff. My husband and I decided to move to Los Angeles. So we moved here, and then a few years after that, we started our company, Sunset Singers, and we kind of started, you know, with one act. We did The Sugar Plums, which is our first act. And then it just expanded over the years. We had, you know, we were performing at Downtown Disney, and they said, What else do you have? So we grew, and we've gone from there, and now we have a number of shows at performing arts centers. And, yeah, it's been a lot of hard but very rewarding work. And you actually perform in many of those, though you won't be at the February concert here, but you actually are out on tour with some of these groups. I do. I perform primarily with the Starlets, but my husband and I, we have two young children. So I am very lucky to be able to go and perform, but I don't get to do all of the shows for that reason. They need me at home some of the time. The Starlets that you'll see are absolutely amazing. We have Whitney, Leah, and Crystal, and they've all been performing with the show for a while. They're uniquely talented, but also their voices blend perfectly together. So it's a really great show. Yeah, it's so energetic. Yeah. And usually the Lakeshore concerts are, well, at least when I was there and for the years I was there, they were generally sold out. So I hope they're doing the same for you. Real quickly, tell us about the event coming up at Lakeshore Community Concerts in Munster. Of course, yeah. February 13th, you can see the Starlets. Make sure you get your tickets. It's a 90-minute show with favorite music from the 50s and 60s, choreography. You get to know each of the singers a little bit, and it's a show I think you don't want to miss. Thank you so much. That's Amy McAndrew from the Starlets, and she's the producer along with her husband, and it'll be at Lakeshore Community Concerts on Tuesday, February 13th. Thank you so much for sharing on Art in the Air Spotlight. Thank you for having me. Thank you. It's good seeing you. Good to see you. Art in the Air Spotlight, a complete one-hour program on Lakeshore Public Media, is brought to you by Macaulay Real Estate in Valparaiso, Olga Patrician, Senior Broker. And as a reminder, if you'd like to have your event on Art in the Air Spotlight or have a longer feature interview, email us at aotaatbrek.com. That's aotaatbrek, B-R-E-C-H, dot com. Did you know that you can also listen to Art in the Air anytime as a podcast at Lakeshore Public Media's website through Lakeshore's app or from NPR? Plus, it's available on demand from your favorite podcast website, including TuneIn, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pandora, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, and many more. If you have a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri, just tell it to play Art on the Air to hear the latest episode. This is Emily Yanyas, Executive Director for the LaPorte County Symphony Orchestra, and you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM and on WVLP 103.1 FM. We are pleased to welcome Brian Byrne to Art on the Air. Since 1981, Brian has served as Curator of Exhibitions and Education for the Midwest Museum of American Art. In 2017, he was appointed as Director-Curator. During this time period, Brian has mounted over 400 exhibitions of regional and national significance and has assisted with the acquisition of a permanent collection with over 6,400 work for this gem of a museum. As Curator, Brian has served as judge and juror for numerous fine art competitions and art fairs. As an artist, he has exhibited his drawings in mixed media installations throughout the Midwest, garnering 15 Best of Show awards. His charismatic personality and his joyful sharing of art knowledge is truly inspiring. Thank you for joining us on Art on the Air. Aloha and welcome, Brian. So good to see you. Thank you, E. I appreciate it, yes. Well, Brian, our audience always wants to know, like, your origin story, you know, and I always like to tee it up by saying how you got from where you were to where you are now. So tell us all about Brian. Well, that's kind of a story. I'm originally from southern Indiana, so if my accent kind of waxes and wanes throughout this, when I speak of home, I mean that extreme southern part of the state. But I really came to northern Indiana from a small town where I was born in Corrigan, Indiana, which is the historical first state capital. So what I didn't realize at the time growing up in this town of about 3,700 people, just 15 miles north of the Ohio River, which was a playground of mine in my youth, it was a collection. It was an open-air museum, a collection of antique buildings, the first state capital, the first governor's mansion, the Posey House, the Jennings House, and all these things that I visited in elementary school. The Constitutional Elm was a big playground for me, and if you've ever seen it, you know it's a big creosoted stump that rises up in an Indiana sandstone structure that was built during the Great Depression. I used to play on that, and it used to be the bridge of my ship as I played Captain Courageous. So I didn't really enter an art museum until I was 18 years old, and I was introduced to the J.B. Speed Art Museum near the campus of the University of Louisville at that time, and I thought, wow, I've never been to a place like this before. I'd been in a lot of antique stores. My family drug me through the Smoky Mountains into the Cherokee Indian Reservation and back, and we seemed to stop at every antique store along the way, and my parents indeed were collectors of those types of things. So objects and museums, I didn't really experience that until my late teens. When I transferred from, well, when I started college, I should say, in 19, I shouldn't date myself, but 1976, the fall of 76, I was at Butler University in Indianapolis. Now, I used to think of northern Indiana as Bloomington. That was about 90 miles north of where I lived, and so by the time I got to the capital city, the new capital, Indianapolis, it was kind of a cultural shock, but I had an English professor who, she wanted us to walk to the Indianapolis Museum of Art through the back gate, what's now called Newfields, I believe, and write papers about objects in the collection, and so my next experience with an art museum was that bigger Indianapolis Museum of Art, and it was an epiphanal moment for a young man. Now I'm 18, going to go on 19, and I thought, wow, I love this environment. I love these objects and how they're displayed and reading some of the narrative that went along the didactic labeling, and I wrote those papers and got a fairly good grade. I wasn't the most eloquent writer at that moment, not all that experienced as a freshman in college, but nonetheless, that sort of cast the die of where I would return to at IU Southeast in New Albany and eventually realizing I had taken some business courses and I was sort of grasping at, what am I going to do? Well, I decided I needed to do something that I enjoyed, even at that young age, now I'm 20, I need to be successful at college and I would be most successful at something that I liked, I even loved, and that was art. As a child, I drew pictures, I entertained myself. I lived in a country setting, so there weren't a lot of neighbors immediately. It wasn't an urban environment. So I was pretty practiced at entertaining myself with pen, pencil, crayon, and so forth, and also building things. So by the time I got to my sophomore year in college at IU Southeast in New Albany, I met a man named Jonas Howard and he really unlocked the door of my career, what would become my career. And so I took that pledge of poverty like a Benedictine monk that I'm going to be an artist and I'll do starving and poor, but I'll prepare myself with all these other skill sets. So I had indeed worked in various capacities in a lumber company, as a carpenter, as a welder, in retail. I even filled in a part-time temporary job for a law firm as a paralegal, before that term was even really invented or became more common. And so I had all these experiences and I thought, well, I can survive, so if I go further north in Indiana to the extreme northern border to make my jump to hyperspace in Chicago, I could survive. So that's kind of my origin story as a young child being exposed to antiques and stories. My family was very much a narrative-oriented family. They loved to tell stories. Maybe that comes from part of my heritage as Irish-Welsh, but nonetheless, music and visual arts became really important to me and I saw an opportunity, I felt, to love what I do and not deplore or working in a situation that wouldn't give me as much of a boost, I guess. Art is certainly a lonely business in the making of it. I've come to realize that, or at least it seemed to be in the late 70s, early 80s. So I knew that whatever I chose to draw, paint, or construct had to be familiar to me, and thus I started to look around me more closely and find my inspiration in friends and families and things that I felt Midwesterners were most familiar with, like black squirrels, pink flamingos, and gazing balls. So back to that childhood, though. Like, you're in elementary school, Brian, and what kind of art possibilities and were you drawing and how was that supported by your family? Because you had mentioned something about building things. So was that a familial activity as well? So how did it all come together? When did you, you know, were you drawing as a child? I was drawing a lot and, you know, imitating all the popular cartoons, you know, tracing the spongy funnies and, you know, getting all the props from friends. But I do remember a grade school art teacher that nearly turned my life upside down, and she did this demonstration drawing and wanted everybody to do this. And I can remember distinctly, and I think this was along about the fifth grade, when formal art classes were finally introduced. And it was pretty devastating. I felt like, gosh, I can't do that. I can draw Ed Big Daddy Roth monsters and cars and lots of cool things. But, you know, this other thing that she was attempting, which I believe now is a landscape, that just didn't figure in. But I had a lot of nurturing from my parents, and not like parents are today. They just let me run wild in the woods and do whatever I wanted to. And so I continued to draw and entertain myself and do the kind of things that I felt like, well, if I couldn't afford this thing, I could draw a picture of it and own it in that respect, which is very consensual. Yeah, very cool. I think by today's standard. And that was very gratifying to me. So, Brian, you are also, in your experience of developing art, have gone into teaching art over the years in various locations. Tell us a little bit about that experience, and I think you developed an art history class that's in use by other people. Yes, that's true. Well, when I first arrived in Elkhart in May of 1981, I was 23, and I had just finished five years of college, so I wasn't really interested in graduate school right away. And Elkhart, the community, had a group of artists that banded together under the banner of the Elkhart Art League, and they taught classes in an old studio facility in one of the city parks. And so I gravitated there and found that they needed someone to teach drawing, so I began teaching basic drawing to adults. But at one point, and this continued even into my early career here as curator, at one point I was teaching a course, and the mother brought a really physically challenged 15-year-old to the Art League and wanted Chad to be a part of this class. I had no experience in college teaching. I was not an art education major. I was a drawing major with printmaking and art history minor. Excuse me, painting and art history minor. So teaching was all just a matter of dealing with people, and I've always followed that golden rule and never ascribed specifically to any dogmatic criterion for spirituality, but I felt like I could let this kid, this 15-year-old, be a part of this human experience in learning to draw, and I had to lay him on the floor, hover above him, so that he could hold his pencil because he was prone to these fits of shaking. He couldn't, and I'm not still to this day familiar with what his particular malady was, but he would look up. I'd set up a still life, and what was interesting was the adults kind of pulled back from this because, you know, this is before the day and age of inclusiveness and learning to deal with physically challenged or emotionally challenged kids, let alone adults. I think there were some adults that were emotionally challenged in that group, but nonetheless, Chad did an outstanding job, and by the end of those eight weeks, people had come together, and, you know, Art became this kind of conjoiner of spirits and souls and minds, and he wasn't treated any differently, and I didn't treat him any differently than I did the adults who could fully stand at an easel and render from looking representationally at this still life. So that was a great experience. It was a great experience, and I never ended up having to repeat that again. I did that for basically two eight-week sessions, and then my next teaching experiences came when I was asked to teach art appreciation in a summer session at IU South Bend, and my greatest experience there, and that was in a lecture hall with 100-plus students who were trying to cram their humanities credits into six weeks and get it done. So you had a lot of students coming from different places, Purdue particularly, and other, to IU, and trying to catch this and get it out of the way, and so I didn't, again, not having really any teaching experience. I taught it basically like an art history course, and so at the end of this, and I assigned the students, I assigned them the role of viewer, so they had to visit one or two museums in the area and write a paper, you know, and that's pretty common practice, but at the time I thought, well, you know, beyond these slides and beyond learning art in a book, you've got to really experience art firsthand. You've got to be in the presence of art to recognize it. I mean, you can look at millions of pictures online and books, but it doesn't replace that spiritual connection. As Father Jenkins just recently said at the opening of the Radcliffe Murphy Museum, I believe that a museum is like that spiritual connecting point, that place, and so they all trooped out, some under duress and some under protest, but at the end of that first, I had this great big mammoth kid who was a Purdue football player come to me and he said, gee, Mr. Byrne, you know, I would have never gone to an art museum had I not taken your class, and I really appreciate it because there were a lot of really cool things to see there, and I'm planning on going back again. I thought, my job is done here. Yay. I'm successful. Beautiful. And so those kind of teachings, I mean, you'd think that then, you know, teaching would become my passion, but I was just using it really to augment my very meager salary as a curator at a small nonprofit museum. So I went on to do that a second summer session, and that was in 86 and 87, and eventually it would lead me to the doorstep and my colleague, another important person in my life, Abner Hershberger, brought me in to Goshen College as an adjunct professor, and again, without eliminating my day job, still needed that biweekly paycheck, but he said, you know, Bryan, we really need an art history course. All of these art majors, most of which are going to become art, public school art teachers, they need more art history, and he said we have a few students who are aspiring to go to graduate school, and we just don't have enough art history in our catalog, and we have to create something, and I want you to create a course in 20th century art and teach it as a special project, and we'll do that for two years in a row, and then perhaps we can bring that into the catalog proper. You know, and this is all logistics, and you just don't show up one day and say we're going to add this course. So I did that and had just, I felt, just great responses, and I did that over a six-year period in addition to, and then I was brought in to, and additionally to the art history to teach figure drawing, take charge of the senior seminar, which is the graduating seniors, and in the absence during faculty sabbatical. So I was really embraced as a full faculty member of Goshen College Art Department, and that being a Mennonite college, the little Harvard of the Mennonite colleges, it was probably the most liberal, but it still had its constraints. It's changed somewhat now, and that was 93 to 99, but great people to work with, great students who were, all their average grade point average was 3.6. They were all very smart and bright. Dedicated. Dedicated, yes, and I had success, and one of them just recently I brought back. He's 50 now, and Douglas Whitmer, who lives in Philadelphia with his college sweetheart, Rebecca Tooth, they married, and he's a very successful artist in Philadelphia. I had another student, Ted Springer, become the studio assistant of a very important woman sculptor in the 20th century, and I can't remember her name, but, and I had other students, you know, they were just, they were very different than what you would expect, the typical perhaps Mennonite college student. They wanted to breathe air in the real world, and in the art world there was some things I felt they needed to know, so I tried to supply that, and I think they kept referring to me as Professor Cool Breeze, because I wafted through the campus just like a cool breeze. Well, and I'm sure what you were teaching, you taught it in a very refreshing way. You're listening to Art on the Air with our guest today, Brian Byrne on Lakeshore Public Media at 89.1 FM and WVLP 103.1 FM. So, you know, I'm going to also, like, I'm going to also take you back to college again, because you said something that I want to know the answer to. So you alluded to a pivotal moment in college that sort of changed everything. Can you tell us, or are you comfortable telling us what that moment was? Sure, sure. It was the realization that, yes, I wanted to be in college, and college was this wonderful experience of opening up to the world, having grown up and supplying my own interest to the world through an old black-and-white TV or listening to the stereo to, you know, my brother's, who's 12 years older, his records from the 60s. I mean, college became literally that door and figuratively that window or that door that opened up to all of these possibilities. When I knew to stay in college, I had to be interested in the subject matter and choose something that I felt I was good at to begin with, but that I could add to, and that's when I met Jonas Howard, and I took my first art class in the spring semester of 1977, and that fundamental drawing class was it. And my most fervent memory of that was we were assigned to do so many drawings outside of the class, the four-hour studio, four hours. So that was one thing that I thought, wow, a class that lasts four hours. What's that going to be like? Well, it was wonderful. So I went out and I was determined to impress Jonas Howard with my drawing skills at that moment in my life, and I went, first I had this old hiking boot, and I set it up, you know, because we had been drawing from still lifes, bones and leaves and chapeleras and ribbons and all kinds of strange things that really were very interesting visually when they're translated into drawings and or paintings. But I thought, okay, well, I'm going to draw this boot, and I spent hours drawing this boot, and it was very detailed, and I thought, man, this is my magnum opus. I'd never done anything like this before, and when he sees this in the next critique, he's just going to fall over. He may have to, you know, call the paramedics or something. And then I thought, oh, gosh, it got down to the day before, and I needed to have four drawings finished. And so I was sitting under this viaduct in Louisville, Kentucky, near the Ohio River, and I was watching these pigeons. I was eating at a restaurant, but I was eating in my car, and I was watching these pigeons under this overpass, and I thought, oh, well, I had my sketchbook. I better knock out some quick sketches, because we talked about gesture drawing and, you know, the quick sketch and all this. So I'm, you know, in my first six to eight weeks of this, not quite midterm yet. So I did. I just drew quickly. So the day came for the critique, and all the class, and this is a class of about 20, and we all get up and, of course, learning to be constructive in one's criticism and not destructive was an important lesson, too. So we were trying to find, you know, the good in everything and not just say, what is that? And that's awful. I could do that or whatever, you know. So we were trying to build camaraderie through constructive criticism, and Jonas was very good at that. And so I went up to the board when it was my turn, and I thought, okay, get ready, everybody. Here's the hiking boot. It's going to cause you all to have thoughts about your role as artists. You know, I'm the greatest here, I think. And then I also put up the three drawings of the pigeons, which had a lot of open air space and what would be called an open composition where the paper or the white of the paper, you know, infiltrated the drawing. Well, Jonas got up there, and he took a look at the hiking boot for all of about five seconds, and he said, these drawings are really what I'm talking about. Your pigeons. And I went, oh. I thought, oh, my God, don't you know, I realized I spent 12 hours drawing that boot, and I spent less than, you know, 10 minutes doing these four drawings, these three other drawings. But that, again, was a great lesson about, I think, as it goes, you know, Van Gogh, they asked Van Gogh once, how long did it take you to make that painting? And he said, well, you know, 15 years, but I painted it in, you know, 10 minutes or something like that. That's a common story throughout the modern art world. It's not the time spent. It's the connection. It's what you do with your time. It's what you do with the materials. It's how you really transcend that material. What emotion happens when you view that? Well, I think you call that the flow, you know. And it took some years to learn that, and much into my post-college career and before I started working on my master's. And, you know, you're distracted as an artist by living, survival. And I think the same thing with students. You know, you feel disenfranchised. You have no money unless your parents are paying for everything. And so I always worked, in the real world, worked and put myself through college. I didn't have that benefit of my parents just paying for everything. So whether that made me more appreciative or whatever, but when it came to studio time, I was very appreciative of that. And it took a while. But finally, I started to sense that I'm in the zone. I guess athletes feel that way at times, writers, anybody that is practiced at performing. There are musicians, everything. Musicians. But it stemmed from that moment of realization in that very first drawing class. And it's what you get out of the time you have. So that's what I – that sustains me as I move towards retirement because my time is waning. But I think I will go back with more of a zeal to get the most out of that flow. And then we always have to, like, balance that with that it's also subjective. And while your instructor embraced those pigeons, there's going to be – if it was a different professor, it might have been the hiking boots. Right, yes. And while Jonas became a really important catalyst in my undergraduate career, there were three other professors. And two of them I did not have the same kind of relationship with. But one of them, a ceramics professor, I'm kind of surprised now that had I had more time, I would have taken more ceramics. And I might have ended up being a potter or a ceramics sculptor. I loved that constructive, that feel of the clay, that messiness. And so – but I never pursued that because I just didn't have enough time. Once I left IU Southeast thinking, I need to go to the mothership in Bloomington and receive my BFA. I have my BFA, then I'll know that I'm an artist. And I said to Jonas, what do I do after I receive my BFA? He said, well, then you're ready to go get your MFA. And I said, and then what will I do? And he said, well, then you can teach. You can teach at the college level. You'll be endorsed. But I went to Bloomington. I spent one semester. It was a horrifying experience. At the time, Bloomington had a real intellectual snobbery with satellite campuses. They didn't really recognize the faculty and the programs. And so when I go to Bloomington, I should have been beginning a second semester junior. And they looked at my portfolio and my transcript and said, well, these courses do not reflect our catalog. We're going to have to take the – you're going to have to repeat these 12 hours. And I went, what? And I was smart enough to know that would take me more time and more money. So I did the art department, although I did take an art history course with a distinguished – who had become a distinguished professor from IU, Bruce Cole of 13th, 14th century Sienese and Florentine painting. He was a marvelous professor, and I got a C in it. But I thought I learned as much in that as any art history course. And I was happy to – I only had two tests. But he lived there for 10 years in Florence. So it was like, again, another window, another door that opened. And then I doubled down on my Spanish because I needed – when I went back to Southeast, I knew I wouldn't get a BFA. I would get a BA in fine arts. And I needed 18 hours of language. And that has stayed well with me in my interest in Latino culture and my annual visits to Mexico. And certainly, Elkhart County is a growing, a huge growing Hispanic population. So I loved learning Spanish in those 18 hours. And so that was another critical juncture. And back to IU Southeast, I went to graduate at least closer to being on time. So that's how you got to be – got your MS in education with the emphasis in art as opposed to the BFA or MFA. Correct. You know, I was here. I had been in this role as curator of exhibitions and education. And I got that shortened down. My predecessor, Jane Prince, said, okay, you're the curator, Brian. So I was really covering two posts. But eight years into this career, maybe longer, I decided I didn't want to wake up and be 40 and not have a master's because I thought, maybe I will leave the Midwest Museum of American Art. Maybe I will go on to that next level up museum, a bigger museum in another city, a more metropolitan area. So I looked around. And at the time, I was dealing with about 3,000 elementary students a year visiting the museum, 87% of which were grades K through 3. I was also building a volunteer docent program and giving monthly lectures to what would become a docent corps of 27. And then I was also raising a teenage son. So I looked around and I thought, an art history degree would do me no good whatsoever here. I mean, this is a really hands-on experience. But if I am to convince classroom teachers that the museum is a great alternative educational resource, and that I know what they're doing and experiencing, and if I had some degree that reflected that, that would really cement our relationship with public schools. And then a burgeoning corps of homeschoolers were starting to develop. And we're talking about early 90s. Maybe that was happening before, but it really wasn't truly organized as I see it is today. So I look and my friend, Neil Boston, an artist who came from Fort Wayne in the same year I arrived in Elkhart, said, You need to do a master's. He said, I'm working on my master's in education. And when I get finished, I'll get an automatic $5,000 raise. I said, Well, I won't. But what are you doing? He said, Well, I do 18 hours in art. And I'm taking printmaking and painting with this professor and that professor, all of whom I knew. Because at that point, I was still known as two things, a curator for this museum and a professional artist. So I thought, Oh, OK. And if I take 18 hours in art and build up my GPA, as he suggested, then I have to take the core graduate level courses in education and finish that 18 hours, 36 hours. So that's what I did. Neil Boston is still a great friend today. He's retired teaching at Concord Junior High School as an art teacher. And so I did that. I followed that path. And it was really rewarding. I found again, the 18 hours in art was a breeze. That was no problem. All A. And Tony Droege was my mentor there, Anthony Droege. But I also took Dr. Susan Hood's 20th Century Art History course. It was all approved for graduate credit, but it cost me undergraduate fees. They don't let anybody do that anymore. One time Bloomington came through. So in the 18 hours of graduate level education, I met Dr. Urbach. What a genius he was. And he said to me, I said, You know, I'm a nontraditional classroom teacher. I've had experience teaching at the college level, but I'm not a public school teacher. I've never been in a public school setting. He said, Well, you're the perfect candidate for this degree. When I was a young man, and Dr. Urbach was probably in his 70s then, when I was a young man living in Lincoln, Nebraska, I did an internship at the local historical society. And in education, I developed some courses, and it was a great experience. And what you're going to learn in this day and age, that tactile kinesthetic, mobile learners, there's teaching styles and learning styles, and the classroom of the museum is the perfect classroom to learn in. I was hooked. I was so hooked. So I went on and graduated with honors in that master's program. And again, today they don't allow, the School of Education doesn't allow people to do it that way. But I got through it in five years, because if you didn't finish it, they lopped off hours in front. And the most disheartening thing was to sit in some of these courses, and I was just observing, like, Oh, I can apply this, or I can do this when I get back to this classroom group that's going to visit, or this with the docent corps. And I just was just absorbing all the best points of those core curricula. But the most disheartening thing were these teachers that would come in, and they'd be there for the first class or two, and then they would never come back. And I'm thinking, these are published school teachers. Why aren't you in here? You're paying for this course. Why aren't you learning this stuff? It's because there was, again, at that time, a feeling that teachers experienced something that the conceptualists at the university level weren't getting. So there was some, I don't know, maybe sometimes animosity between teachers in the classroom and having to go back and fulfill these requirements. That doesn't apply to me, you know. Or that doesn't apply in the real world. But to me, everything I learned, I applied. So I think other teachers did, too. But there was that element of teachers that just felt like, this professor can't tell me how to teach because wait till he, she, or face by these, you know, situations that are difficult to handle, manage. But anyway, that's the master's program I pursued, and I thought it made me a better parent, a better college professor, and a better curator of education in that role here at the museum. You're listening to Art on the Air with our guest today, Brian Byrne, on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, and on WVLP, 103.1 FM. You know, I have a comment about your career in terms of education. Someone like you, who brings so much experience, unfortunately is not recognized in a BFA or MFA program, that you probably bring more to the table about that. And I think it's a failure of the education system to some degree. I mean, the fact that you went off to the MS program, you did, and that worked out for you and everything. But I would think someone like you brought more to the table. Do you want to comment on that? Well, yes, and, you know, not to get down on the whole system, but I don't know of a 26-year-old that can step out of an MFA program and be a communicator or have the kind of world experience that, you know, you put them in a college classroom with 18- to 20-year-olds and really provide them with some kind of experience level that would keep today's students engaged. It's a whole different world, to be sure. And I've met a few graduate students through the ceramics program at Notre Dame. One, Hans Miles, who's just a phenomenal person, came back at the age of 29 or 30 to finish his degree because he decided, well, you know, I have this great job, but I really want to be a teacher, a classroom, a college professor. And he did have the world experience to do that, and I've met a few others along the way. I think that's a lot of credit given to Bill Kramer, who retired after 50 years of teaching ceramics at Notre Dame. But the whole system, and I've had conversations with other professors about this and other retired teachers that, you know, it's just a whole different attitude, a different program, a different world, different expectations. And if anything, what I've learned dealing in a public museum setting, nobody really wants an art history lecture. They want a narrative. They want a story. They want to understand how to meet this object on their own terms, and I think that's important. And so no amount of classroom knowledge can ever make that happen without real-world experience. Again, I go back to you can look at thousands of pictures in books or online. You take virtual tours of the Louvre, but until you stand there in front of the Mona Lisa, you're not really going to know what it's all about. Right, right, because you need to see that artist's hand, whether it's in a brushstroke or, I don't know, it's just really, you're right, you can't duplicate that, you know, online. Well, and that's what led me to creating installations of my own drawings, and that's probably a lengthier conversation we want to go into, but, you know, after 11 years of creating six independent solo exhibits, those were something I called installation, which is like an installation, but it combined both curating and collecting and the design and the actual creative maker part of my personality, and I felt like I wasn't creating art to sell, I was creating things for people to experience. And so were you doing that still, you're still doing that while you're at the museum as well, so I just, I mean, like it's just phenomenal to me how you can balance all of that because you came into that museum and they did not have this 6,400-piece permanent collection. I'm sure you were instrumental in guiding the acquisition and the direction of those acquisitions. I mean, I was just there the other day, and I'm standing right next to an Elaine de Kooning. Yes, there were 224 works in the permanent collection when I rolled off the train in 1981, and today there's almost 6,400. So working with artists and a handful of collectors, there's a lot of accumulators, there's very few collectors, true collectors of art in our region, maybe even in our state, but one in particular, Dr. Stephen Conant, he's a true collector. He probably has as many works of art in his personal care as we do here, and he has helped fill historical gaps, and I tasked him with that about 20-some years ago, and I said, you know, the things you're giving us are things we could never hope to purchase, and so thanks, Steve Conant, and he'll be coming to visit with me in December here and then into the new year. I mean, he just continues to unveil and not dump his ego on my doorstep but bring to us things that are important, elements of 20th and now 21st century art that people need to experience. God bless him, you know, all that he has done for us and the general public of northern Indiana and southern Michigan. The museum is just incredible, so can you quickly maybe go over, because it's quite an experience itself. It's in an old bank, so you go into a vault for some collection. I mean, it's a brilliant museum. Well, I would say that the reason we exist in this public foundation is due to the late Dr. Richard D. and the late Jane Burns. Rather than hang their name on the side of the building, it was a stroke of genius to call it the Midwest Museum of American Art, and the focus on American art went to this day. There's only about 20 museums by that name in the entire country. In our collection, we look at about 200 years. Certainly there were things that alluded the purse strings of the Burns family, even Dr. Conant to this day, but we do have important works. We have one of only two original paintings by Grant Wood in the entire state, donated by a collector in 1981, same year I showed up. I didn't have anything to do with that, but I stewarded it forward. We have the world's largest overbeck art pottery collection, and we have the largest collection of hand-signed and numbered colotypes and lithographs by Norman Rockwell in the country. I don't know anyone else at a public museum that owns 68, and we show 50 of them 10 months out of every year. That's the jewels. Well, you know, you have so much to share with Brian. That was Brian Byrne, the director and curator, long time there at the Midwest Museum of Art. We appreciate you coming on Art on the Air and sharing your art journey. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much. Just such a pleasure. Thank you. We'd like to thank our guests this week on Art on the Air, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. Art on the Air is aired Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, also streaming live at LakeshorePublicMedia.org and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Art on the Air is also heard Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP, 103.1 FM, streaming live at WVLP.org. If you have a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri, just tell to play Art on the Air to hear the latest episode. Our spotlight interviews are heard every Wednesday on Lakeshore Public Media. Thanks to Tom Maloney, Vice President of Radio Operation for Lakeshore Public Media, and Greg Kovach, WVLP's Station Manager. Our theme music is by Billy Foster with a vocal by Renee Foster. Art on the Air is supported by the Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant, South Shore Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. We'd like to thank our current underwriters for Lakeshore Public Media, Macaulay Real Estate and Valparaiso, Olga Patrician, Senior Broker, and for WVLP, Walt Redinger of Paragon Investments. So we may continue to bring you Art on the Air. We rely on you, our listeners and underwriters, for ongoing financial support. If you're looking to support Art on the Air, we have information on our website at breck.com slash aota, where you can find out how to become a supporter or underwriter of our program in whatever amount you are able. And like I say every week, don't give till it hurts. Give till it feels good. You'll feel so good about supporting Art on the Air. If you're interested in being a guest or send us information about your arts, arts-related event or exhibit, please email us at aotaatbreck.com. That's aotaatbreck, B-R-E-C-H, dot com, or contact us through our Facebook page. Your hosts were Larry Bruckner and Esther Golden, and we invite you back next week for another episode of Art on the Air. Aloha, everyone. Have a splendid week. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. You're in the know with Esther and Larry, Art on the Air today. They're in the know with Larry and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart.