Ziggy’s not from around here. He’s an alien who found humanity’s greatest gift to the cosmos. Launched by NASA in 1977, the two Voyager spacecraft explored the outer solar system before rocketing off into deep space. On board each one was a golden record inscribed with the sounds of Earth — natural sounds, human speech, and, most crucially, music. Ziggy found one of the records floating in space, and now he’s come to Earth to ask for more Chuck Berry songs — and find out more about our art.
That’s the premise of Ziggy’s Arts Adventure, a 15-minute kids show produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB). On the first episode of the third season, which recently premiered on WKNO-TV, Ziggy and his friend River decide to repaint the gate of their junkyard arts center. But what colors should they work with?
“Color is something I can work with?” exclaims Ziggy.
It is indeed. Along the way, Ziggy learns that “the more the merrier” is not always the case with colors, but on the other hand, “It’s hard to see what’s special when there’s only one color.”
Ziggy takes to the talk show desk to quiz New Orleans watercolorist Katherine Klimitas about complementary hues and the color wheel. Then he and his non-puppet friend Thimble lead a real elementary school class in a color-by-number exercise. Finally, safe inside his spaceship, Ziggy reports back to his home planet on what a dizzying array of colors the humans have discovered.
It’s all in a day’s work for Clay Achee, who created Ziggy’s Arts Adventure in a “punk rock warehouse” in Louisiana. “I grew up here in Baton Rouge, and as a kid, I was very artsy,” Achee says. “I loved painting and drawing, and I loved puppet stuff, but that wouldn’t come up until way later in my life.”
Achee studied film at the Savannah College of Art and Design. “I was in Georgia and sort of expected to be like a Bruce Springsteen song, where I was free from my hometown, and I was never going back. Then they passed a bunch of tax incentives in Louisiana right when I was graduating film school, so I came right back and worked for a lot of years in the film industry here in different aspects. I was doing a lot of assistant directing by the end. But while I was doing that, I was really sad about not making my own stuff. It was a very strange progression from ‘I miss making stuff with my hands,’ to ‘I loved puppets as a kid!’ to ‘Hey, we have YouTube now and I can learn to do anything!’ And I kind of started making puppets as a hobby. I started giving them as presents. Our friend’s pregnant; here’s a puppet for your kid. Then I was selling them at arts markets, and eventually I started doing this YouTube channel.”
Achee refined the show that would become Ziggy’s Arts Adventure over the course of several years. Things really clicked when he met Chase Bernard, who became Ziggy’s puppeteer. “We were shooting stuff in my garage, and then we moved into this punk rock warehouse in an industrial part of town, where we were trying to shoot very wholesome children’s content.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020, “I’m in my 30s. I’m having a baby, and I find myself in a punk rock warehouse working on a kids’ show without any funding, and I wonder how I ended up there.”
When he reached out to LPB, they were already watching the show. “They asked, ‘Do you think you could teach like a school subject with this?’ And I was like, ‘Is art a school subject?’ … They had gotten a little grant, and they rolled the dice on us.”
Ziggy’s Arts Adventure is fast-paced and colorful. Thanks to production designer Christian Walker — himself a Memphis filmmaker and member of the Bluff City punk rock institution Pezz — the elaborate world of the junkyard arts center is reminiscent of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which Achee says was a big inspiration to him as a budding puppeteer. Ziggy exists in a great tradition of Southern puppetry. Mississippian Jim Henson’s Muppets are an obvious influence, both in craftsmanship and tone. Alabama artist Wayne White was the main puppeteer for Pee-wee’s Playhouse and also was the art director for Peter Gabriel and Smashing Pumpkins videos. “I watch his documentary [Beauty Is Embarrassing] about once a month now!” says Achee.
Ziggy’s Arts Adventure was a hit for Louisiana Public Broadcasting. “We were able to do three seasons, and we’re super proud and excited about the third one. This is the first time that it’s being shown outside the state of Louisiana, thanks to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helped us fund a pilot program. We’re in Memphis and South Carolina,” says Achee. “The Ziggy outreach program has begun!”
This Friday, June 27th, WKNO will host Ziggy’s Arts Adventure Outdoor Music Festival from 5 to 7 p.m. Ziggy (performed by Chase Bernard) will be joined by African drummer Ekpe Abioto, Cazateatro Bilingual Theatre Group dancers, Rozelle Elementary, and the Memphis Youth Arts Initiative Drumline. There will be drop-in mini workshops by local organizations and a kids zone complete with a waterslide. Cherry the Miniature Horse will be on hand to perform tricks, and there will be food trucks and icy treats to cool off during this first week of summer. The big outreach event comes at a perilous time for public television, which is being threatened with a massive funding cut by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.
Achee hopes his show can help turn kids on to art the way his mind was expanded by his art heroes. It’s the culmination of a lifetime’s work, he says, and beyond his wildest childhood dreams. “It’s weird when I think about it that way — what would the little 10-year-old in me say to ‘What would you like to do when you grow up?’ I would like to swim in pools of ice cream! Through the film industry, and through my love of puppetry, there’s a ton of things that I was pursuing in my life that ended up making a lot of sense.”
Ziggy’s Arts Adventure airs Friday at 11 a.m. and Saturday at 6:30 a.m. on WKNO-TV, and online at ziggy.lpb.org.
