In the Studio

Nicknamed the “first lady of graffiti”, Lady Pink’s work is known for its celebration of women. The Ecuadorian-American artist was one of the first women active on the New York graffiti scene at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, earning her a lead role in the seminal hip hop film, Wild Style, in 1983.

While still at high school Pink began exhibiting in art galleries and by the age of 21 she had her first solo show. More recently she has designed a perfume bottle for Lancôme and turned her signature designs into a clothing range.

Pink’s latest project is to create a 33 foot long mural on the walls of one of the new World Trade Center buildings, built to replace those destroyed by terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. The artist’s creation for this particular space will be based on her Unity Tree design, because she says, “The world has never been the same, but what we can celebrate is all the peacefulness and happiness that we enjoy in New York City with all the nations and nationalities living together”.

New York reporter Tara Gadomski joins Lady Pink over the course of a week to witness her new painting come to life.

What does it mean to be a visual activist? This week, In The Studio meets pioneering non-binary South African photographer Zanele Muholi, who aims to give the marginalised a presence in the visual archive with their striking portraits of the black South African LGBTI community.

Ahead of Muholi’s first major UK retrospective at Tate Modern this Spring, reporter Mpho Lakaje follows Muholi, in Johannesburg and Durban as they work on their ongoing series “Faces and Phases”. This is an evolving photographic record and part of Muholi’s life’s work to map and preserve an often invisible community for posterity. It also serves to address the serious issue of hate crime in South Africa and its neighbouring countries, where the stigma of homosexuality can often lead to rape, violence, and murder.

We follow Muholi capturing images, interviewing participants and hearing their stories before creating their powerful images in black and white, highlighting and celebrating the beauty of black skin.

The Canadian writer Madeleine Thien is working on her next novel, the follow-up to her prizewinning 2016 book Do Not Say We Have Nothing. But she’s finding that it’s difficult to find the internal peace and privacy to begin again, especially after having being catapulted into the public eye after the previous novel’s success.

As the narrative and characters shift and evolve in the author’s mind, there’s much painstaking research and many rewrites to be done. How can Madeleine blend the aspects of past and present which are pre-occupying her at the moment? And will she ever be satisfied enough with the novel to allow it to see the light of day?

Paul Kobrak follows her over several months as she creates different versions of the first draft of the new novel. It’s a process which moves from Berlin in Germany (and a coffee shop which is central to Madeleine’s writing process) to Brooklyn USA (where she teaches Creative Writing to University students) and finally to Portugal's capital city Lisbon, where she hopes to complete it.

Professor Gil Weinberg has created the world’s first robot musician. Shimon is a marimba-playing robot with eight arms that can improvise live music in any genre.

The world is familiar with musical robots that can play programmed music, but Gil has created robotic musicians. This means they are musicians first, and robots second. In real time, these robot musicians come up with fresh ideas designed to inspire human musicians to play music in new ways.

Award-winning jazz composer Kris Bowers (Green Book, Dear White People, How They See Us) is in the studio with Gil, and many of Gil’s students and local jazz musicians. Together, they are exploring how artificial intelligence can push our understanding of what humans are capable of, and examine whether AI can enhance the abilities of musicians. They also ponder the question of whether a robot can truly be as creative as a human being.

Kris is examining three aspects of Gil’s robotic musicians, and taking part in some experiments that are happening publicly for the first time. The first aspect that Kris examines is Shimon’s ability to mirror the playing style of his fellow musicians; through this, Kris will be able to objectively analyse his own playing, with the hope of improving his craft in unprecedented ways. The second is exploring how Shimon has now been given the ability to improvise lyrics in a live rap battle, and the third is Gil’s work in the field of prosthetics. Kris plays with amputee drummer Jason Barnes, whose prosthetic drumming arm holds a stick that Kris can control with the music he plays.

In The Studio enters the endlessly surprising and shape-shifting world of architect, designer and artist Ron Arad.

Born in Israel but based in London for over four decades, Arad’s multi-disciplinary career has seen him design and produce everything from sunglasses to skyscrapers, and from hats to hotels.

A Royal Academician and Professor Emeritus at the Royal College of Art, he has designed for numerous major international furniture and design brands, and his public art work can be found in cities across the world including Tokyo, Milan, Toronto, Tel Aviv and Singapore.

Like the man himself, Arad’s work has always evaded categorisation. His constant experimentation with the boundaries and possibilities of materials and his keen interest in cutting edge technology means that nothing is ever as it seems. What at first glance appears to be a map on the wall, turns out to be a bookcase, a vast mirrored sculpture is in fact a ping pong table, a quartz pendant on a necklace doubles as a magnifying glass.

In this programme, Ron welcomes Edwina Pitman into his labyrinthine studio, filled with prototypes and iconic design pieces, to chart the making of one of his many ongoing projects. Inspired by an object found in a flea market forty years ago, Ron’s idea is to create a string quartet that plays itself. Over the course of a year, he reveals how he and his team work on the technology, the design and the commercial possibilities to make this ghostly vision a reality.

There are very few female film directors in Hollywood, but directing duo Bert and Bertie, otherwise known as Katie Ellwood (Bertie) and Amber Finlayson (Bert), are forging a name for themselves.

Aleks Krotoski joins Bert and Bertie as they direct their latest film, Troop Zero, which stars McKenna Grace and Oscar winners Allison Janney and Viola Davis. The film is set in 1977 in rural Georgia, where a misfit girl dreams of life in outer space. When a competition offers her a chance to be recorded on NASA's Golden Record, she recruits a makeshift troop of Birdie Scouts, forming friendships that last a lifetime.

To get a real insight into the Hollywood system and the role of directors in the making of a film, Aleks joins the Berts on location in Louisiana as they shoot the film, and in the studio during the edit. Not only are the directors both women with young children, but the writers, producers and the majority of the production crew are also women. Bert and Bertie talk to Aleks about how they are proactively trying to change women’s opportunities in the industry through their hiring practices.

Other contributors to the programme include co-writer Lucy Alibar, executive producer Jenny Hinkey and cinematographer James Whitaker.

In the second of this two-part documentary….the pressure is mounting.

Producer Linda Wong Davies and the multinational cast and crew have reached Shanghai and have little more than a week before opening night, so there is a lot to do in a very short amount of time.

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra – who are celebrating their 140th anniversary – have no experience of performing the baroque music required for Handel’s musical drama, Semele.

Shanghai Symphony Hall – a concert hall not designed to house a theatrical set – is about to welcome one through its doors for the first time.

Plus, the lighting and petals are causing a bit of a stir!

With unrestricted access to the making of this cultural event in China, Ella-mai Robey tries to keep up with the action.

The mythological story of Semele - a woman so confident in her own desires and ambition that she attracted the King of the Gods as her lover - became the first-ever baroque opera to be performed in China, just over a decade ago.

Ten years on and a completely re-imagined Semele is back, this time in the city of Shanghai, to help celebrate the 140th anniversary of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

With rare and unrestricted access to the creation of such a cultural event in China, Ella-mai Robey joins the multi-national cast and crew for all the drama involved in taking the show from planning stages to first-night performance.

The production is the brainchild of Lady Linda Wong Davies, founder of the KT Wong Foundation, which aims to foster a mutual understanding between China and the rest of the world through creative projects. Together, with Royal Opera House director Julia Burbach, conductor Maestro Long Yu and a cast including soprano Jane Archibald - they have just six weeks to prepare the production from scratch.

The clock is ticking. Will the arrival of a theatrical set – the first in the history of Shanghai Symphony Hall – prove too much?

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in The Netherlands is one of the most visited museums in the world. It houses the largest collection of works by the hugely popular 19th century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, as well as many paintings by his contemporaries. All of these pictures need to be looked after and preserved for future generations and in this episode, the BBC’s Karl Bos goes behind the scenes to discover the hidden art of conservation.

Once a painting leaves an artist’s studio, it is at risk of physical damage from poor storage, movement or accident and only becomes more vulnerable as it ages and the materials weaken. You can add to the list of dangers past repairs by well-meaning museum staff that have gone terribly wrong. It’s a hard life being a work of art. We meet Senior Conservator at the Van Gogh Museum, René Boitelle, as he restores a badly damaged painting by Dutch artist Jacob Maris and shows us how Van Gogh’s painting The Furrows, is being cleaned.

Saudi fashion designer Arwa Al-Ammari is one of a handful of haute couture designers to emerge in recent years. She has recently begun combining traditional Saudi design with striking modernity and elegant modesty. Her latest line reaches back into the textures, history and geography of her nation and fuses them with the catwalk elegance of Milan.

Arwa's journey into design began as a painter and sculptor and she brought those multimedia disciplines, and attention to detail, to the fashion scene with her brand ArAm Designs in 2013. In 2016 she won the international reality show Fashion Star and remains determined to put Saudi elegance on the fashion map.

Reporter Cyma Aziz visits Arwa at the design table in her workshop as she prepares a new range for the catwalk.