(light music) - [Narrator] Coming up on "ART inc." "The Art of Memoir."

"The Manton Ave.

Playwrights."

- [Narrator] If you want to know what's going on.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (static buzzing) (static rustling) - Today, we have a story about the art of illustration and also the art of memoir.

Judy Goffman Cutler is recapturing her remarkable life's journey by sifting through more than 80 years of memories.

Cutler was once a financially struggling teacher.

Today, she lives and works at this gilded age mansion in Newport where she created the National Museum of American Illustration.

But Judy would be the first to tell you she is not to the manner born.

(computer beeping) (upbeat music) - For years, family, friends, and visitors to the museum had told me I should write a book.

I decided to write this memoir, how a young mother, a suburban housewife from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, found her career and changed her family's destiny.

(light music) Terrific, if I say so myself.

When I founded the National Museum of American Illustration, I thought of this house as a frame, maybe the ultimate frame for the art I had spent a lifetime collecting.

Vernon Court was built during the Gilded Age for a young widow, Anna Van Nest Gambrill.

It's hard to believe this place was built as a summer cottage for only two people, Anna and her son.

(light music) My grandparents landed at Ellis Island around the same time Mrs. Gambrill was building Vernon Court.

I've often wondered what Jacob and Esther would make of this place.

Not in their wildest dreams could they have imagined living in such a palace.

(upbeat music) My childhood was pure Norman Rockwell.

My dad was a contractor.

He built our first home, a ranch house in Westville.

It was a family project.

My mom did the books plus everything else.

After a long day's work, he would pack us up for a group activity, usually sports.

Basketball, baseball, golf, you name it.

I love them all.

Oh, oh, oh, this is my good chapter.

Here we go.

Here we go.

Dear D, in high school I discovered boys, one particular caught my eye.

Larry Cutler.

He wasn't the only boy in the picture.

My dance card was always full, but my diary was also full of Larry.

Did I love him?

Did I hate him?

Do I even like him?

I wrote it all down.

(upbeat music) Larry and I both ended up at Penn, but we went our separate ways.

It was there Alan Goffman swept me off my feet.

On graduation day, he asked my father for my hand.

That September we were married.

I can't believe I did it so fast.

What the hell was I thinking?

Oh my God.

I mean, we didn't know each other at all.

(light music) It wasn't happily ever after.

Like many young couples, we struggled to find ourself.

I was teaching eighth graders.

Alan tried a few different careers.

None of them took.

It was so much fun in college.

(everyone laughs) - [Friend] Much more fun in college.

- It was not fun anymore, I'll tell you that, (baby cries) Money was tight.

I was the breadwinner making $4,000 a year.

By the time Jennifer was born in 1966, we ended up moving in with his parents.

When Andrew arrived in '68, we only had 21 cents in our bank account.

(sewing machine thumping) I had to be resourceful.

I sewed clothes for Jennifer.

Any clothes I bought had to be unisex so I could hand them down to Andrew.

So there was one shirt that I remember and she got, there was a western shirt.

It had snaps down the front and I wore it for one of my school photos.

And then a couple years later, my brother is in that same shirt in one of his school photos.

(upbeat music) - We used to go to flea markets too, and that's how I found my life's work.

Alan's mother suggested I look in their basement to see if there's anything I could use in our new home.

What I found stored away with the old furniture surprised me.

A framed art deco print of Casanova.

The artist's name was Louis Icart.

So I started hunting for more Icarts and I managed to find quite a few.

One day I spotted an ad for an Icart exhibition.

I called up the organizer who promptly offered me $10,000 to buy my whole collection.

That was the eureka moment that made me want to become an art dealer.

Erase that.

Gotta fix that.

(upbeat music) After some trial and error, I decided to focus on American illustrators.

Specifically art created to be reproduced for books, magazines, and posters during the golden age of American illustration.

Some of these artists were household names in their day, but their work fell out of favor.

The advent of photography put many of them out of a job.

Museum curators and auction houses dismissed their work as disposable, tainted by commerce.

Their unpopularity was my opportunity.

- She really saved a lot of these paintings from being destroyed because the illustrators were always looked down on.

She found these paintings in people's basements and attics.

They had cobwebs and mold on them.

- When I began to focus on American illustration, the art dealers never took me seriously at all.

I was a housewife from a suburban farmland outside of Philadelphia called Blue Bell.

(Judy laughs) So I focused on the fact that it was art and I campaigned and I showed them and proved to everybody that it was fine art.

That they were talented artists first and then illustrators.

And at the end of the day it was illustrators who could earn a living.

All right, here we go.

- She was doing mom things and then she just started putting ads in the paper and just calling people.

And then she needed a desk.

So she moved to the basement and she set up an office in the basement.

- [Judy] My first Rockwell sale, I closed in my kitchen.

It was a big moment for me.

My clients agreed to buy two Rockwells for $50,000.

I hung up and started jumping up and down with happiness.

The kids had never seen me behave like that.

- And I started thinking like, what's going on here?

- And they also said I was screaming hysterically.

- I found out after she calmed down five or 10 minutes later, that she sold her first Rockwell and made more money from that sale than she made all year as a teacher.

- Come right in!

- [Jennifer] She opened a gallery in New York.

Then she started doing art exhibitions, traveling.

First they were around this country, then they were international art exhibitions.

- In Japan, there was a traffic jam in front of April Fools, everyone pressing in to try and decode all of Rockwell's gags.

(light music) (Judy speaking foreign language) This is the night before the premier, the first inaugural- - [Videographer] Look at me.

- Exhibition of Norman Rockwell in Europe.

(upbeat music) In Italy, our corporate sponsor threatened to hold my paintings hostage unless I gave him a Rockwell.

I had to convince the prime minister of Italy to come to my rescue.

- We have with us tonight as our guest, one of the rare guests we have on our show.

Judy Goffman, who is the premier dealer in the art of the illustrator.

- She started being interviewed more for TV shows, then she had the exhibitions.

Then she's like figuring out how to set up a museum and then there's a museum.

(light music) (water splashing) (light music continues) - Now we're on Bellevue Avenue.

The first time I saw Vernon Court, I knew it was the perfect place to showcase my paintings, but it took some convincing for Newporters to allow another museum on Bellevue Avenue.

I had to have it and I thought that, you know, I knew it was the right place.

I knew it was the right place.

I just knew, I mean, the pool convinced me, but the building tank was the first thing.

- It was so overwhelming just to walk in and just see the rooms and the sizes of it.

It took a while to get used to the sizes of the rooms.

(birds chirping) - The house needed a lot of work, but I was willing to take that on.

My hope is that here feel like they're stepping into the world that inspired these pictures.

I felt like I was bringing my paintings home.

As a live workspace, it has challenges, but it's a fairytale too.

My daughter, she was married in the garden.

My grandchildren grew up struggling to find a decent wifi signal and I swim laps in the pool every day weather permitting.

(upbeat music) My grandparents might feel out of place here, but my paintings would certainly be familiar to them.

They'd recognize these images from books and magazines.

On every wall they'd see stories of their time.

(light music) - She's really put together a great collection of her favorite paintings that she wants to share.

It's also part of her legacy.

She spent the first half trying to collect and buy and sell and now she wants to leave something back for people to look at and enjoy and appreciate and this is her gift to all of us.

(light music continues) - Wow.

Judy Eve Alpert.

He's come a long way.

- Fun footnote to this story.

Remember the omnipresent Larry of Judy's schoolgirl diary?

They reunited decades later and they've been together for more than 30 years.

(static buzzing) (bright music) (marker rustling) - My name is Jeyden.

- My name is Jasmine.

- [Videographer] What's your name?

- Davian.

- My name is Lindsay.

- The Manton Avenue project is an out of school time playwriting program for young people, ages eight through 18.

And we work primarily in the community of Olneyville with one school, William Debate Elementary School.

We teach playwriting and theater arts here at our clubhouse.

- The students work on their writing skills.

They work on putting a play together.

They work with actors and actresses to perform their play and then they actually, their play is performed in front of a live audience.

- [Videographer] What's your name?

- Napaulette.

- My name is Brianna.

- My name is Sumileyni.

(kids gigglign) - [Meg] The Manton Avenue project was started in 2004.

- I went and saw the first show and I was sitting in the audience, my friend and I, and we just started bawling.

- I thought it was the coolest, colorfullest thing I'd ever seen.

- It was an incredible experience.

- I had never seen young people give direction to adults.

I had never seen young people take center stage.

- And I was just like, I really, really need to be a part of this.

That's awesome.

- [Videographer] Why do you think you were chosen to be a playwright?

- Because my sister is in the playwriting.

Because I'm very creative.

- I like to write horror.

- I don't really know.

- Choosing students can be challenging.

I really look at the whole child.

Who could benefit from an experience like this.

The toughest part is not having everyone part of it.

- She thought that I had a great imagination and she saw a few of my drawings.

- My teacher wants me to have fun here here and learn more.

- I like writing stories because it's fun.

- Because I have a great imagination and I'm creative.

- You can see this moment where they think these are tools, I can build something out of this.

Oh, the pen is mine.

The power is mine, yeah.

And I can make these adults do whatever I want.

(Jane laughs) (light music) (kids shrieking) (upbeat music) - [Teacher] A sweet and a salty, people.

- [Teacher] Process starts with a six to eight week class here at the clubhouse.

- So we start week one, we'll play some theater games, mostly just to get them out of their shell, get back into the swing of things.

And then the first thing that we always do is we write character outlines.

- I have an idea for something crazy.

- They can have any character be anything that they want it to be.

It could be the camera, it could be this light, it could be this stool.

It's their play.

It's their thing.

There's no right or wrong answer.

Because you have to walk around.

So what I want you to do is think of what story you want to tell that you are gonna write about on Saturday.

But I want you to think about it and maybe write down some ideas.

- Usually for a play, I thought it was like a story, but when Miss Nicole said that a play is like people reading your sentence that has dialogue and all that stuff and they add like a whole lot of body movement.

- I'm already closer to my parents.

I'll be with them tomorrow.

- The book that we're focusing on this year is "Salito" by Javier Zamora.

It's a story of a young boy from El Salvador who comes to the United States and he is by himself, but he makes friends with strangers along the way and they help him.

So it's about his sort of harrowing journey.

They're writing their plays based on our condensed version of the story.

(actor speaking foreign language) - [Actor] Everything happened so fast!

- The book is written in the voice of a child.

A child who went through an experience of severely traumatic experience at such a young age.

And a lot of the students in this neighborhood unfortunately have some relationship to a traumatic experience.

Whether that is of their own, of their families, of their friends, and to see themselves reflected in literature I think is really important.

- If everybody wants to, you can sit down on the floor, you can grab a chair, whatever you want.

We're just gonna talk a little about today and to plan.

This is an opportunity for you to think about that story and how it might connect to your own life.

We have a really cool weekend where each playwright is matched with a dramaturg.

Who is their personal playwriting mentor.

- Where do they head to, like specifically inside the building?

- They head to the back door to see if it's unlocked.

- Never giving ideas, but asking questions.

- But what time do you want 'em to leave at?

- 7:30.

- 7:30?

I can't write.

- It's kind of similar to "Salito" because their parents are separated and I have like kind of been separated from my parents.

Kind of not that long, but like a long time.

- Good job.

- Thank you, Sumi.

It's gonna be so good.

- Too.

- That's a very touching one.

We've recruited actors by this point from multiple theater companies here in our awesome city.

And rehearsals begin.

- Tonight we are doing a full run through top to bottom with our costumes and lovely foam core props.

All of our performers are each playing multiple characters each and so we wanna make sure that everyone knows who they are, when they are, and where they gotta be.

For these plays, since they're by kids and they have such wonderful imagination.

It's finding moments where there's comedy, where there's fun.

- And the lines are wonderful 'cause the kids aren't that's just whatever comes from them and they're not edited at all.

♪ America ♪ ♪ Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles ♪ ♪ Bubbles in America ♪ - I feel like we're ready.

I feel like I'm ready now that we ran the whole thing from beginning to end.

(hands clapping) (light music) - Tonight, you're going to see eight incredible plays written by eight incredible playwrights.

- You fool, I never wanna see you here again.

You are a disappointment.

- It was a little bit awkward at first, but then I kind of got into it and I liked it.

- Jeyden's were about like Sammy the strawberry.

- It's time for nighttime when I'm most active.

- It was about kids that were eating healthy foods.

So the Sammy the Strawberry forced them to eat wet fruits and vegetables.

- No!

- Then you better run!

(actors scream) - Everything leads to horror or comics when it comes to Jeyden.

Everything.

(actress screams) (audience laughs) - Lindsay and her brother came over not long ago, a couple years ago and I had no idea until she wrote the play.

(actress speaking foreign language) - We're going to the United States.

- But I don't wanna go.

- Why not, mija?

I think it's a good idea since both of you haven't seen your parents in so long.

- I'm still very scared.

- It really took me a little bit by surprise, the heaviness of some of these stories and how honest they were.

(hands clapping) Find Joshua's phone.

They find Joshua's phone!

and a photo of the kidnapper and... (everyone gasps) It was the police officer!

(everyone gasps) Scene three.

- I think it was great.

- [Videographer] So what was great?

Actors?

The writing?

- [Child] I did like it.

- [Videographer] So your writing was great.

Do you wanna write more plays?

- Yeah.

(actors speaking foreign language) - It felt kind of cool 'cause I don't usually tell my personal stories to other people that I don't know, but like in plays it's fine with me.

(actress speaking foreign language) - [Teacher] Sumi's play really reflected "Solito."

She didn't know her parents until she came over here as a toddler.

- I was amazed that she used our story to do the play.

Just tell me that all those emotions, sadness, and the sacrifices, you know, they are worth it.

Manton Ave. program gave her that extra and that confidence that she needed.

- I actually have seen her become more outgoing and I even see her being a mentor when she's in the middle school or high school.

- [Susanna] I see that she is blooming.

(everyone clapping) - The population at Olneyville is made up of, they are not told that they are leaders, they are not told that they are important.

Society has all of these really negative stereotypes on such a beautiful population of people.

And here that's both acknowledged in spaces made for processing that.

- When they see their child sitting at that desk, especially our families who have immigrated here, which most of them have, and knowing how hard they've worked to come here and to just see their smile and light up.

It's just, there's no words.

There's no words.

(light music) (audience clapping) (light music continues) (light music continues) - [Narrator] Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "ART inc." (static buzzing) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Watch More "ART inc." a Rhode Island PBS original series now streaming at ripbs.org/artinc.