[piano intro] [upbeat jazz music] ♪ [chime sounds] ♪ - [Roger] When I saw Vernon Pratt's, All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths, it was, oh my God, why have I not seen this before?

I was surrounded by these itty-bitty squares that began to dance on the walls, and in my eyes, and it drew me away and up close, and it became a performance.

You can't help but be moved intellectually and spiritually when you encounter this work.

[upbeat jazz music] - The name of the painting is called "All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536)."

"All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536)."

So basically what it is, it's all the possibilities of filling in square divided into 16 pieces.

- To explain the painting is easy and hard at the same time, sort of like fractals.

Each thing is a component of the thing that's bigger than that.

You have a square that's got 16 divisions.

It's part of a larger panel that is divided into 16 by 16.

That's part of an even larger thing that's 16 by 16.

So this is sort of expanding sense of how little things become big things.

- Everybody talks about Vernon's paintings in terms of squares.

And of course, if it is a square, you'd have to call it a fat square, it's in a ratio of five to six.

Vernon's idea was that it would help keep the lateral progression moving.

It helped, you know you were supposed to read laterally.

- There's 65,536 different ways of filling in by the sixteenths.

That number comes from having two possibilities for coloring each square.

So it's either gonna be black or white.

You have 256 panels of 256 possibilities of filling in by the sixteenths.

So basically it's the combinatorics behind the arts that sort of tells you that if you know that you have 16 squares that you need to fill in, that means that each one of those tiles has two options for it.

So there's gonna be two to the 16.

He definitely had an exquisite mathematical mind.

- I think he felt a certain amusement in it all, and recognized the hideously labor-intensive compulsive nature of it.

But at the same time, he was indeed earnest about what he was doing.

Of course, he never had a chance to see all 256 panels installed.

- He basically painted each panel and then put them away.

And they gradually accumulated in his studio, first, the studio in New York, and then he moved to Durham and continued the project there.

- [William ] The back of each panel actually just reaffirms to me Vernon's sense of humor and imagination, and kind of obsessiveness.

- Vernon had always envisioned this as being 16 panels high, 16 panels wide, and therefore it would've been close to 40 feet tall, and about 50 feet wide.

Unfortunately, there are very few places on earth that have walls that are that shape.

You know, maybe the United Nations.

- He was interested in intellectual perfection, but not mechanical perfection.

He had a strict system, but he wanted to give it a human touch.

- A lot of the enjoyment of this work comes from the sort of randomness of life or way things seem random, and then you realize there's a pattern to it all.

I've explained it to people as it's sort of a glimpse of infinity because we have sub-atomic particles that make up atoms, and then you have atoms that make up molecules, and the molecules make up crystals.

And it goes on from there to you finally have all reality.

- [William] It almost feels like you're climbing inside Vernon's brain, and it feels like you're in a computer and how it works.

And it's just what makes the guy tech, it's a pretty incredible experience.

[maracas shaking] [upbeat jazz music] ♪ - I think Vernon Pratt is one of the great unsung heroes of art in North Carolina.

He straddles a line between science and art in some ways, or mathematics and art.

His real strength, which were the paintings that based on the systematic abstraction approach that he used, were, I think in his own lifetime, certainly never really recognized for the power that they had.

- We served together on a committee at Duke.

I was an undergraduate, he was a professor, and we were trying to examine how the arts could become more important at Duke, because they weren't important at all.

Vernon had a building downtown in Durham, and he owned a number of Andy Warhols, he owned a couple of Richard Diebenkorns.

He was his graduate advisor out in San Francisco.

And I remember going to see him in his studio, and of course the whole place smelled of turpentine.

And he had giant canvases all around.

And it was clear just from the sort of trashiness of the studio that he was there at all hours working on one thing over here, and another thing over there.

- I really think of him as going his own way, very conscious of tradition, but independent and not inclined to do whatever was the trendy thing going on then.

- He liked to paint black and white, and he painted 1,025 shades of black and white, with one being absolute white, 1,025 being absolute black.

But he felt that human eye could only discern 1,025 shades of black and white.

That's the reason why he did it.

How on earth he decided that, I will never know.

- [Roger] Because of the prominence of things like abstract expressionism and things like that, we tend to value this moment of self realization.

And I don't think Vernon was all about that, I think Vernon was after some real deep ways that the universe works, and was really not that interested in self expression.

He wanted people to be able to see his work, and to know how it was done.

- [Huston] He showed in various New York galleries and sometimes in group exhibitions there.

And he had plenty of exhibitions in North Carolina.

- Vernon Pratt, when he was making this work in the early '80s, obviously was in intellectual communication with the artists who dominated the art scene of the day, Rauschenberg Johns, Agnes Martin, Zach Trombley.

You see the influence in the movement of line.

You see it in the repetition of form and image, but it was distinctly Vernon Pratt, who pushed scale beyond anything these other artists had ever imagined.

- He was so multi-dimensional in his talents, and interests, and music was like math to him.

And Vernon would show up at all hours anywhere to play music or listen to music.

- He played the saxophone and flute.

It was a big part of Vernon's life.

And I think it relates to the paintings too.

[upbeat music] - Vernon's death was totally unpredicted.

Still to this day, no one knows exactly what happened.

He was found lying beside the road with his bicycle, but there were no bruises, there were no skid marks.

His wife, Debbie, was saddled with what to do with this huge body of work.

The need to have a place for someone to actually work and create art was no longer there, but the need to store it was there.

So she located a warehouse in downtown Durham, where it remained for several years, until there was a major storm that caused the ceiling to collapse in that warehouse.

And then she had to move it all to a second warehouse.

- I'm sure that seeing his art for a long time was probably painful for members of the family.

So it just kinda stayed locked up, until finally his daughter, Trinity, wanted to clean out the warehouse and found some people who were willing to help.

- We certainly weren't equipped for the amount of work that I saw when I went out there with her to look at the warehouse, which had hundreds, if not thousands of works of art in it, there were drawings, and paintings, and sculptures, and all sorts of things.

It was an entire lifetime of creativity.

- It was like walking in into a totally intact Egyptian tomb with beautiful artifacts laying everywhere.

And somebody's saying, "Please, God, take 'em."

If I could ask Vernon Pratt anything, I would ask him if he ever had an actual expectation that this painting would be displayed.

Nobody does a painting this 1,534 square feet, and actually expects it to be displayed.

[upbeat jazz music] ♪ [upbeat jazz music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - [Man] I feel like this work has a power.

I feel like it has something to say.

I feel like it creates an experience for people.

I would be ashamed to leave it in boxes, again for another 35 years, 'cause that's been about how long it was, since it was created until it was finally put on display.

[upbeat jazz music] ♪ ♪ ♪ [guitar music] ♪ ♪ - The statement can be reasonably made, that my largest work is an ongoing, relentless preoccupation with small structures, whether or not this is adequately and fairly called a psychosis, is for others to judge.

I just know I dream about buildings.

[guitar music] Every assembler of stuff soon confronts a challenge, how are increasingly numerous items, put, displayed, maintained and kept?

1,200 of anything of a certain size does yield substantial logistical challenges?

Where exactly are these things put?

How do they find their place in the life of an otherwise normal household?

Rounded about our house with our buildings, there is often as much of a curious jumble as you see actually in a real community.

Put in chronological order, we have the entire history of American architecture rendered small.

[guitar music] Hillsborough, North Carolina is architecturally and historically resonant, lovely, rich and rare.

Randy and I, with great fortune, were able just over 20 years ago, to secure a lot in this historic district.

And we set upon a course of a designing our own Greek revival house.

We designed first our house, and an adjoining building, in which to keep garden materials on the assumption that the house would be large enough to contain what we then thought was a containable amount of American folk art buildings.

We proved incorrect in that estimation.

And as the years passed, then designed a garden, fancy, a folly, a building with cupola on the top, that itself has become a repository for every so many buildings, that, surely not our surprise, proved insufficient.

A few years after that, we designed and constructed another small Greek revival garden building that is filled with small structures of all types of natures, yielding both a very full cluttered environment as well as visual enrichment.

[guitar music] - I think Steven might have only had one, or maybe two or three when I first met him.

One was on a mantle, one was in a kitchen, and it was a nice sort of lively touch, in room scapes, it could have been just chairs, and tables and lamps.

It was wonderful, it added a little touch of lightness of levity in a certain way.

[guitar music] - 95% of these structures were made by all evidence from about 1870, until probably World War II.

Those years were eras in which American males knew how to, and were expected to, and were trained to make things, whether because they took shop, or they learned it from their father, these were years in which there were fewer commercial products available, years in which if there was a depression, or other financial imperatives, people as much had to make and make do is go out and purchase and gain from an external source.

Making and rendering was not either an alien or a scary concept, things could be made.

[guitar music] We probably have 350 or 400 churches.

America has on its landscape, an extraordinary array of religious buildings.

And we could learn about American church architecture by going outdoors and going across the country.

And we also could actually learn about it by putting in one place and lining up in a row every one of the that we have here.

In a very real way, the beauty is as great when these churches are rendered small as when they're rendered large.

Identifying some of these buildings is often a matter of familiarity or of a happenstance.

Familiarity, we have a rendering of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

So much a part of our architectural heritage.

That's visible, we know that.

We have the Chicago Water Tower still duded up on Michigan Avenue, in Chicago.

We have two renderings by the same hand, actually, and essential duplicates of the Wisconsin State Capital in Madison.

We have two renderings, enormously different in skill and detail of the emblematic first congregational church in Old Lime, Connecticut, one quite tall, one much smaller made from a crate.

Our front hall has had in it forever so many years, an impressive, tall, white, turreted commercial-looking building.

Only by chance, reading through a book of lost American architecture, was it clear that this was the late 19th century, Richardsonian architectural style train terminal, pridefully erected in downtown Milwaukee.

Destroyed with the unparalleled ability of Americans to raise their buildings for vehicular traffic in 1968 to give way to a freeway.

Long gone in Milwaukee, this recognizable terminus does exist in our front hall.

[guitar music] Constraining one's obsessions seems a useful idea, if however difficult.

Working both to constrain and as a further excuse to justify everything else I find, over the years, we have chosen not to pursue or buy doll houses and bird houses, they are different.

We also don't buy cabins.

Americans have made a lot of little cabiny things, often kind of overtly and alarmingly, rustic [guitar music] of 1,200 structures we know something about perhaps 70 of them.

All of the evidence suggest that these were mostly made as an imaginative impulse for the sheer pleasure of making small one's own place.

- What I might wish is that there's one space somewhere that's free of buildings, and maybe have a retreat we could go to, that was a little different.

Maybe that's a silly expectation because when you care about things this much, they tend to invade all the parts of your life.

So as a result, these buildings are in bathrooms, kitchen, bedrooms, everywhere, there's no escape.

So it's wonderful, and sometimes a bit of a pain too, but it's here, and there might be what feels like a little love-hate relationship, but there's not.

I think the love wins out, because it's things that people put a lot of effort into.

And it's nice to honor that, it's nice to know that your home honors the efforts of other people from time's past - The larger question of how over time all of these structures can be reliably, and consistently seen by all kinds of people and large groups remain to be resolved, for this is after all, where we live.

On the one hand it's unrealistic by any measure to think that Randy and I can, till the end of time, continue to open the door and let some church come in.

On the other hand, it's hard to avoid the promise of what might be revealed or seen when that door opens and something else comes in.

How can we gain?

How can we discipline?

How can we learn?

How can we stop?

And then with that last question, we pause and say, "Why stop?"

[guitar music] ♪ ♪