- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, a mural project inspires hope at a local jail.

- So the mural is to inspire the kids to follow through with their dreams, that even though they are in a position currently that that's not the ends all.

- The sketches of Michelangelo.

- We get the sense from these drawings that he had everything very well planned out before he started to paint.

- And environmental artists.

- All of my work has burning of some kind in it, and I think it does reflect both sides of creation, creation and destruction, and that's what nature is all about.

- And aerial photography, - Most of the time I probably fly, I don't get any photos worth printing, but who cares?

I'll get the next image the next day.

Every day I get to fly is a great day.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

(upbeat music) Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

For young people at the Falkenburg Road Jail in Tampa, hope can be in short supply, but with a little paint and the help of professional artists, they're making the space and their own futures a bit brighter.

(gentle music) - You are now at the Falkenburg Road Jail, which is our main facility for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.

Presently we house about 3,300 inmates today.

Of those 3,300 inmates, unfortunately we do have 31 juveniles.

Those juveniles are here because they've been either adjudicated an adult, or they're here on adult charges.

So because they're juveniles, they have some protective status and things like that.

So that's why we won't be showing the inmates' faces or their bodies here.

(gentle music) So what brings us here today, you'll see the mural behind me.

It is an attempt to help these kids to realize that even if they are here, or if they're here visiting, that they can make other choices.

(gentle music) - My name is Kiva Williams.

I'm the founder of Mahogany Kids Fine Arts Foundation.

We empower minority youth through music, art, and dance.

At Mahogany Kids Fine Arts Foundation we take pride in giving kids experiences that they wouldn't have outside of, you know, their own network.

I decided to do a mural because I went to the jail for like a leadership program, and the program director told me that they're open to people coming in and doing things with the juveniles.

And I was like, oh my God, an art mural would be perfect.

So I contacted my friend who's, you know, an artist, and I was like, hey, this will be a really cool partnership.

Let's you know, give it a go.

(gentle music) - So the mural is to inspire the kids to follow through with their dreams, that even though they are in a position currently that that's not the end all.

That they still have a bright future ahead of them and that they should look forward to it.

My graphic design background aided me in developing a concept.

So I drew everything out on the computer.

I was able to play with colors.

I wanted it to be bold and fun, something that will really uplift their spirits when they come into the building.

There's two days for the mural.

The first day I'm gonna sketch it out.

I will also create it as like a paint by numbers.

So it's gonna be interactive for the juveniles as well as our volunteers, which hopefully we'll have some of the staff members.

And day two we'll actually get to work.

So we'll start painting and it'll all come together.

- I love the mural and I was in there when the artist was talking to the kids about, you know, what are their interests and what are their favorite colors?

And she incorporated all of it.

So they were so excited when they got the chance to see it on the wall and start painting.

The majority of juvenile offenders that we get are going to be around 14 or 15, and they're mandated to go to school.

So they're either in K through 12 or GED, and their teachers are school board teachers.

So Hillsborough County School teachers, and they follow the same school schedule that the Hillsborough County schools follow.

On spring break they don't have as much to do.

They actually miss being in school because you know, they're engaged, they're doing something.

So they were so excited to be here and be a part of it yesterday, it was really nice.

(gentle music) - Ah, my kids, they're amazing.

They call me Nana Chap.

(gentle music) They're here for different charges, but if you really get to know them, you'll understand that their stories are about the same.

Dad may be in prison and mom is an addict, and many of them are being raised by grandparents, my generation, which is not an easy thing to do, you know?

But to me, this was an opportunity for them to recognize the talents that they have.

And it's something that I talked to them about to pray for, for God to reveal what their talents are.

And yesterday was a wake up call for them, and they were so focused, they were not playing around or joking, they were really focused on what they were doing.

That is beautiful.

And I told them, I said you know, you don't realize it, but you're leaving a little bit of your fingerprint here for the next generation that comes in here.

(gentle music) - So unfortunately, the majority of the kids in the jail are black and brown youths.

So as a mom of three minority kids, impacting minority youth, it's important to me because I have three kids of my own, so I wanna make sure that I'm being an example and someone who the kids can look up to, because I wanna do my part in serve in the community.

- It's important for artists and other people in the community to be involved with our juvenile population because it gives them a feeling of support, and they know that they can do more than just be here, incarcerated without hope.

They can go out and they can get a job, they can continue their education.

There are people out there that are going to give them a chance.

They're not just thrown away because they're in jail.

- They don't have to stay here, they don't have to get into the adult system and things like that.

So we hope that everyone that comes in here leaves here in a better place than what they came.

I think the mural's great.

I'm looking forward to seeing it completed, but this has only been a day.

So two days to get this done is a little feat in itself.

(gentle music) - We're almost finished, we're on day two.

I'm really excited for the finished product.

- What I saw yesterday lifted their self-esteem, and you know it's really good for them to be able to do these things because they're able to release.

- When they came in, they were enthusiastic, they wanted to help, they wanted to be a part of the process, and I feel like they were very proud of their work.

- I think this was amazing for both the youth and the adults to come together, work on something, having good behavior, and just having something to look forward to, to motivate them.

It was amazing.

(gentle music) - Find out more at Michelangelo was a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet during the Italian Renaissance.

In this segment, traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio to see an exhibit of his sketches and get a closer look at his techniques as an artist.

- Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor, and architect, and throughout his career, he worked from sketches.

- We get the sense from these drawings that he had everything very well planned out before he started to paint.

- Emily Peters is one of the curators of Michelangelo, Mind of the Master.

The exhibition features a couple dozen of Michelangelo's drawings alongside replicas of some of his masterpieces, including the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Italy.

- So on the back of this sheet, it's just an array of different limbs and figures, and you can see that Michelangelo would rotate the sheet.

He was, you know, working very swiftly probably, and thinking through some of the different figures on the ceiling.

This hand right here, this arm and this hand, those correspond to the very famous scene on the ceiling of God creating Adam.

And that is God's hand, which you can see here.

- No pressure.

You wanna get the hand of God right.

- You wanna get the hand of God right.

He practiced it many times.

- On the other side of the paper, Michelangelo drew the figure of a muscular male nude, and he worked out the details of the body in motion down to the flexed toes.

- Two of the drawings for the Sistine Chapel that we have are four figures called Ignudi which is an Italian word, meaning nude man.

These were very important compositional elements in the Sistine Chapel, but they didn't have any narrative significance.

Michelangelo used them to kind of punctuate the narrative scenes in the middle of the chapel, and his contemporaries were completely astounded by these figures.

- Michelangelo's focus on the human figure continues to influence art today.

- He was working at a time when artists generally did not study anatomy yet, and also at a time when though artists would sketch from live models, they often didn't sketch from nude models.

Both of those things are really key, even to this day, to art education.

- So which is this drawing here?

- So this is one of two drawings in the exhibition for a commission for a fresco called the Battle of Kashena.

And it was his first big fresco commission for the city of Florence.

It was a commission that he never completed.

However, what we do have are these wonderful preparatory drawings, and it was a moment when he's bringing his vision of the heroic male nude to a wide public.

- It's such a muscular physical drawing and that he might look like he's about to race into battle, but it's almost comical when you see the whole picture.

He's not in battle yet.

He's racing from from bath.

- Right.

So Michelangelo's concept for this fresco was that it was a great battle between Florence and Piza, but he was portraying the moment when the soldiers were called to battle and they were caught in the River Arno taking a bath.

So this really played to his strengths because he could focus on the nude male figure and kind of the rushing aspect of getting ready for battle.

- These drawings have never been seen together in the United States, and they once belonged to a queen.

How did these get preserved over the years to now be on view today?

- Well, it's really interesting.

There are not very many drawings by Michelangelo that still exist, but we do know that this group of drawings was in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden.

She's a very interesting woman who abdicated her throne in the 17th century and moved to Rome, and she loved Italian art.

And then throughout the centuries, those albums were sold to various collectors.

And in 1790 they were sold to the Tyler's Museum, which is a museum in Harlem in the Netherlands.

And they've been in that museum ever since, which is one of the reasons they're so well preserved today and are still together as a group.

- He was using these drawings 500 years ago as working tools.

He never would've imagined probably that we'd be looking and walking through an exhibition of his drawings.

- That is true.

In fact, he was quite secretive.

He knew that other artists were very interested in his design ideas.

He was famous even in his own day.

An artist in particular wanted to see his drawings because it was in his drawings where he was showing some of his invention.

And so he actually came to burn large quantities of his drawings during his life.

We assume based on the way he worked, that he must have made tens of thousands of drawings during his long 88 years.

However, today there are only 600 drawings remaining.

In 1517, he asked a servant specifically to burn his drawings from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

So the ones we have today are really precious.

And you're right, he wouldn't have expected them to be on view in an exhibition like this.

- Was it standard for artists to burn their work at this time?

- Not at all.

It was quite unusual.

And I think it goes back to perhaps a particular personality of the artist who was quite guarded about his work.

And I think with some justification felt that others wanted to look at and maybe take his ideas.

- Visit clevelandart.org to find out more.

For four decades, ecofeminist artist Mira Lehr rendered abstract artworks reflective of nature and our environment.

Through mediums such as painting, sculpture, and video, she conveyed her message to the world.

We honor her memory and artistic contributions in this segment.

(gentle music) - The beauty is very important to me, but I have to take the bloom off the rose.

I'm Mira Lehr, I'm an artist.

All of my work has burning of some kind in it, and I think it does reflect both sides of creation, creation and destruction.

And that's what nature is all about.

It's always related to the environment.

(gentle music) I always drew when I was a little kid.

I never really knew I would be a professional artist.

As I grew older, I decided I was gonna study art history in college.

I was so lucky because at the time I graduated, the abstract expressionists were holding forth in New York and it was a major movement.

So I was right in the middle of this really wonderful scene.

So from then on I did art and I was not really into the environment as much in the beginning.

I just did nature, a lot of nature studies.

But eventually I heard of Buckminster Fuller, a man who was very much about the planet, and I saw an opportunity to work with him.

In 1969, I went to New York and I worked with him on something called the World Game.

And that was about how to make the world work in the most efficient way and doing more with less.

So from then on I was hooked.

(gentle music) I am feeling two urgencies.

One I'm getting older.

That's an urgency.

You know, how many years do I have left?

And the other urgency is how many years does the planet have left?

So we've converged.

Every day I get up raring to go.

The Orlando exhibit, it was called High Watermark because that's where we're at and that's where they felt my career was at.

So that show had very, very large sculptures of mangroves and you could walk through the mangroves and feel you were encased in the roots, the root system.

There's something about being enclosed in the space that makes a viewer very much more attentive to what's happening.

And so I watch people walking through the mangroves and they were all moved by it.

So that's really the first time I've done that kind of large scale sculpture.

I love doing it.

It's a big, the smaller I get and the older I get, the bigger the work becomes it seems to me.

And so now I'm back in the studio and I'm turning to something I'm calling Planetary Visions because I'm doing images of earth masses.

I've also added writing, which some of it is from Bucky Fuller about the planet.

Some of it is just poetry about nature.

(gentle music) I've always felt abstraction is the highest form, even though I like, I like representation.

But to me abstraction gets the essence, the essence of everything.

And you can take it and go on with it.

And it's more spiritual to me.

I think like Cézanne at the end of his life, his paintings became kind of dissolved in light, like light entities.

At the end of Rembrandt's life also, his work became less literal and more also dissolved in light.

So light is very important and that to me is the height of it.

If you have a a light entity in your work, I think it's profound and meaningful.

The light on the big sculpture, yeah, those are special lights that grow corals in the laboratory and the sculpture is a shape of a wave and it's mesmerizing.

(gentle music) You know, if the world pulls apart and people are concerned just with their little everyday existence, I don't see a great future, but I'm hoping there's still time.

The clock is definitely ticking, and I'm not a politician and I'm not a scientist.

The way I can express it is through my art, and that's what I'm trying to do, along with having a wonderful experience, making it.

(gentle music) - To see more work from the late Mira Lehr, visit instagram.com/mtlstudios.

Gordon Campbell is an aerial photographer.

From above, he captures the impressive landscapes of the Eastern shore with his camera.

Head to Virginia to learn his story.

(gentle music) - I love a soft light.

I love when there's a little texture in the sky.

(gentle music) I fly typically at about 40 miles per hour when I'm out photographing.

Very low noise profile.

So when I'm flying down low along the marsh grasses and things like that, you're really not bothering anything.

Even birds just sit there and look at me.

Most of the time I probably fly, I don't get any photos worth printing, but who cares?

I'll get the next image the next day.

Every day I get to fly is a great day.

(gentle music) So I started in high school, became fascinated by developing the negatives, printing in a dark room, things like that.

But to do that, you had to take photos.

So I did a bit of both.

And I took photographs all throughout high school and then college as well.

And then after college, it just snowballed into one thing after the next.

But I did not start flying until after college.

And when I was working just outside of Manhattan in New York City area, flying was a weekend escape for me.

Allowed me to jump in a plane after a week of working and go fly places.

(gentle music) I try to find those areas that are, you know, unknown to other people.

And I sort of like the uniqueness of the Eastern shore.

We're surrounded by water, it's rural, and there was this airfield for sale, used to be called Kellum Field Airport.

Just a fantastic place.

150 acres total property size.

Late 2002, I came down here, I looked at the property, I had an offer in on it the next day.

(gentle music) Fast forward a couple years in 2005, we decided to just make the transition and move on down here.

(gentle music) There's just something to fall in love with for everybody on the eastern shore.

I became fascinated with these barrier islands that line the Virginia coastline.

They are all preserved and none of them have been built on, and they're just left to nature.

And I started photographing them back in 2006.

I thought it was just amazing.

And I wanted to document every square inch of these islands.

I can fly over any island and tell you exactly which island that is just by its shape, its form, how it looks.

And so they all have a unique nature to them.

Sure enough, I saw these photographs.

I said, wow, these are beautiful.

And as I kept doing it, I had a great retail space down in Cape Charles that I was renovating.

I said, this would really make a great gallery.

And I said, I think my aerial photography might be good enough, but I'll make a beautiful gallery.

And if people want to come in and look at my aerial photographs, then so be it.

If they want to buy something, then that's even better.

(gentle music) A year prior to that, I bought the aircraft that I'm still flying, which is called a Dragonfly.

It's designed as the perfect aerial photography platform.

Very maneuverable, very efficient aircraft.

And that's when everything came together.

The building, the gallery, the aircraft, the camera equipment.

And I was able to present something to the customer right out of the gallery that's ready to put right up on your wall.

I literally just took a gamble.

- When we went down to the gallery and saw his incredible photographs, we knew that his images would be such an enhancement to the Barrier Island history and the stories that we try to tell here.

- The Barrier Island Center Museum is a fantastic supporter of mine, and they were the first outfit that did a big installation of my imagery to show people this is what the barrier islands look like right now.

- We use Gordon's imagery to educate and inspire.

(gentle music) - I've covered from New England down to Georgia in this small plane here.

Barrier Islands that are built up just don't have the same charm, and they're just not photogenic the way these barrier islands are.

It's just wonderful that they're protected, they're always evolving, always migrating, and then there's always some erosion as well.

And so photographing them is a new experience every year.

(gentle music) Not everybody's in love with their job, but fortunately I found something that I'm in love with doing and people have embraced it and people enjoy coming into my gallery.

It's purely a hundred percent passion.

And I think, you know, in most careers, you have to have some passion in what you're doing or you're not gonna be successful.

- To see more of Campbell's work, visit ataltitudegallery.com.

And that wraps it up for this episode of WEDU Arts Plus.

To view more, visit wedu.org/artsplus, or follow us on social.

I'm Gabe Ortiz.

Thanks for watching.

(gentle music)