This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, The State of Florida, and Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, art that makes a house a home.

It is incredibly important to have artwork in the homes.

We're really thinking about the impact on mental health and how you interact with the environment.

A children's book author.

But our youngest daughter, she really became involved in helping me lay out the illustrations and come up with the rhyming words.

Come up with the story.

The graffiti movement.

You know, what's the difference between street art and graffiti?

Well, street art has to do more with imagery.

Graffiti is about lettering.

And a mosaic artist.

Mosaic art is anytime you take smaller pieces of a hard material glass, tile, stone to create a picture or an image with those items.

It's all coming up next on Arts Plus.

Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

The nonprofit organization Second Heart Homes works to provide housing for homeless individuals in Sarasota.

But what makes these houses homes are the professional works of art hung throughout the space.

See how artists and philanthropists come together for this worthy cause.

Art Avenue is an international art gallery on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

I love to do many things besides the traditional art exhibits from the artists when they appear here live, but I also love to give back to the community.

However, this is a twist.

I met Megan four years ago and I fell in love with her concept called Second Heart Homes, and we teamed up and it's been nothing but a fun ride ever since.

It is such an incredible feeling to have the community really come together for this event that has grown.

Might as well take it to a thousand, a thousand, thousand.

The art auction plays an integral role in the whole program that Megan has conceived.

We have.

Every year I invite my top 25 local artists to submit one work, donated 100% and the gallery gets zero.

100% of the money goes to Second Heart Homes.

I started doing wood sculptures about 20 years ago, and it's just sort of evolved into something else, and I call it brain candy.

So this piece is created by 93 year old Charles Rosenblum, who was a local Sarasotan.

But he also is quite heavily involved in supporting nonprofits the arts.

Besides all that, as an art gallery owner, I happen to like what he does.

Each piece of wood is hand carved.

Each piece of wood is hand painted, and each piece of wood is hand glued.

The universe helped me get this idea for Second Heart Homes.

I was a waitress and I was going to college getting my master's degree and thought I was going to be a therapist or something like that because I had been homeless when I was four years old, so I knew I wanted to work with the homeless.

And there was a homeless man that was literally living on the sidewalk outside of the restaurant, and he was making these incredible drawings, and it really drew me to him because I wanted to know more about what his inspiration was, what they meant.

And so I sat down on the sidewalk with him, and we became friends for years.

Then one day he went missing and I knew his real name.

So I found him at Sarasota memorial hospital, and I asked what his discharge plans were.

He told me he was ready to get off the streets.

So there was that's how it was birthed.

He was homeless for 25 years and set up his place, started coordinating his outpatient medical care and any kind of appointments he needed, and was really like his concierge support.

And that's how the model was birthed.

I knew once I had him off the streets, if that was impossible, there's more.

Now we're a 500 1C3 not for profit organization called Second Heart Homes, where our mission is to revive the dignity of homeless adults with mental illnesses through housing support and love.

Today we have 12 homes.

We have 68 formerly homeless men and women off the streets who are vulnerable, who need love and support and accountability and a place to call home not just a house, but a home.

I was adopted at the age of six.

I went through 19 foster care houses.

Life after adoption wasn't easy.

It wasn't.

It wasn't good at all.

Abuse was not uncommon.

That led into incarcerations.

And I went homeless with my brother John, and we were homeless together for ten years.

My 45th arrest.

I was sitting in my jail cell, and I just got tired of seeing brick walls.

I got tired of hearing doors slam.

That's when I met Megan.

And, uh, I can still remember getting in the car.

We drove to the house on central.

I was like, can I live here forever?

And she kind of, like, looks back at me like, yeah, yeah, you can.

It is incredibly important to have artwork in the homes.

We're really thinking about the impact on mental health and how you interact with the environment when you've been homeless, sleeping on the sidewalk, and now you have a nice piece of art to wake up to.

There's nothing like that.

It's not even comparable.

I was diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

I would try to draw out everything that goes on inside my brain.

It helps with my mental health to draw and get appreciation for the work that I do.

It inspires me to keep going.

The fact that anybody would even spend a little bit of time looking at my art, and the fact that it's in an art auction.

It blows my mind.

This is not just a mission of helping the homeless.

This is this is a mission about the arts collaborating to help the homeless.

It all started with art.

The gentleman on the sidewalk.

So everything has come full circle.

When Paul asked me to be the featured artist, I just really immediately said, yes, I will do it.

And the reason is in Chinese, which means when you have a life in this.

In in this body.

You you committed to helping people.

You know, this picture can bring money or people look at the picture and then they see a great example in our society and how things get done and how the young just take the lead and start.

This organization is so admirable and it's so inspirational as well.

So I want to present that her truly to the society.

See her.

I just get so much joy that knowing that these art pieces are going to be appreciated by a group of people that have come together whatever way, however way they came together, they are just so profoundly affected by the beauty of their walls and it makes me so happy.

To learn more, visit secondhearthomes.org.

With the help of her daughter, author S.R.D.

Harris writes books for children recognizing the importance of representation.

The pair tell stories that uplift, inspire and leave an impact.

Growing up in northeastern Ohio, I loved books ever since I was a child.

I can remember being in love with books.

I don't remember a time I didn't have a library card and go to the library every week and pile up on books to bring home to read.

Some of my favorite things were poems and rhyming stories, and I still have some of my favorite books from being a child.

I was actually in two children's books.

One is Yoga Is for Me, and then the second book was about nutrition, and that really inspired me to want to be an author.

When I grew up, I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but life took twists and turns to get me here to finally achieve my goal.

My husband and I have always been interested in teaching our children to read really young.

We love reading, so knowing that, I wanted to try to inspire children to have a love of reading and spark that interest in young children.

I chose children's literature.

I think the earlier you can impact a child with a love of reading and seeing books that represent them and celebrate diversity is a positive thing.

It only can make children's imaginations grow broader, brighter, stronger and encourage them to be better readers and better writers.

And with the historic election of Kamala Harris being a girl mom, that really inspired me to try to capture that historic moment.

And so future Ms. President, my first book was born out of that inspiration.

And in this story, Kami's mom wakes her up in the morning with the exciting news that the new V.P.

is just like her.

Kami could not believe that the new Vice president was like her because she knew we had only ever had male VP's previously.

So throughout the story, Cammie gets the idea of wondering what does that mean for her and her future?

And not only does she dream big dreams, she dreams big enough to see herself one day becoming president as well.

All of our children have been involved in the whole process.

My husband's been super involved.

He's the one that actually gave me the title Future Miss President for my book, because I had another title I had been bouncing around.

But our youngest daughter, she really became involved in helping me lay out the illustrations and come up with the rhyming words, come up with the story that she thought would be interesting from a young child's perspective.

So that was very special.

I feel like we worked together really good because I always have ideas and she has ideas, and then we just make them together.

And then sometimes if she's doing something, I feel like I can type things, type words, and I don't always do the pictures.

I feel like she does more of the pictures, but I still help.

I feel like it's just really fun because it's something I can do that's kind of easy to do, and it's not very hard to do it.

I mean, it's hard sometimes, but, you know.

Yeah.

When my daughter and I collaborate on our projects, we sit down and we talk about ideas first, and we talk about the characters, what they should look like, what the setting would be like, what the is the message we want to have the book show.

So each one of our titles has a specific message whether it's healthy eating, accepting yourself, celebrating diversity, dreaming big dreams, all of those ideas we came up with together and we talk about how we want to bring that story to life and how the illustrations should look.

And then she tells me, mommy, that doesn't sound too good.

Let's try this way, let's try that.

And I listen to her ideas, and it's just as much her input as mine in each of the books.

It turns out really well.

I want people to really see what the books mean.

Like their meaning.

To have imagination or their meaning.

To like, dream big and always.

They always have a lesson like you want them to really see something.

Out of the books, I feel like you want them to see they can do anything and they're important.

I like all the books, but if I had to choose one, it's probably Bella loves her umbrella because I love how that book is based on imagination.

Gracie's Grace was inspired by our actual shelter puppy named Gracie, who we adopted during quarantine lockdown, and because we had such an awesome experience with adopting her through our animal shelter, we decided to write a book based on her adoption, and a portion of the proceeds go back to animal shelter.

This was really important to us.

We've been rescuing dogs for 20 years, but because of the great experience we had with char, we just knew that we wanted to have a way to give back to them.

So Gracie was born and had a cheery eye as a puppy.

And in this story it talks about, she wasn't sure whether her physical differences would keep her from getting adopted or not.

And she saw other dogs getting adopted before her, and it made her feel a little insecure.

So throughout the story, it talks about self-acceptance, loving yourself just the way you are, not changing a thing, and truly believing that what's meant for you will happen.

Well, when I first saw her when she had a cherry, I feel like I didn't really care that much.

I didn't care that she was different because she was like a really good dog, and it just depended on how they were not like how they looked.

Because I don't really care about looks as long as like they're a nice, genuine person.

And I mean, well, dog in this case because I feel like she's like important to me.

One of the things I noticed growing up is that there were not a lot of picture books of kids that looked like me.

And in doing the research, I found out that only 12% of mainstream published books have diverse characters.

So it became my mission to write and publish and produce books that I felt were important a missing part in literacy.

And I'd like to disrupt that, change the numbers a little bit, and inspire children to see books that look like them.

I really think representation matters not only to the underrepresented groups, but also for the majority to see these children in a positive light, with family settings, doing wonderful things and making historic moments come true.

It has been a complete dream come true for me.

It's such a thrill every single day to know that I'm leaving a legacy for my family and my children, but also impacting children forever around the world.

To me, seeing it from going from my mind, like literally an idea in my mind to a piece of paper, to a book that process those three steps.

It's like having a baby.

It's like when you see it born, it's the best thing in the world.

For more information, go to srdharrisbooks.com.

Through exhibitions and events, the Museum of Graffiti in Miami presents the graffiti art movement to the public from the early days to the present.

The museum highlights Graffiti's evolution and undeniable impact on the world.

My name is Alan Kett and I'm the co-founder of the Museum of Graffiti.

Allison Freidin I'm the co-founder of the Museum of Graffiti in Miami, Florida.

The Museum of Graffiti is the only museum of its kind in the world.

We give context to the walls that you might see when you walk around this neighborhood.

One of the most important exhibitions that we currently have on display is called Style Masters The Birth of the graffiti Art movement.

And that exhibition takes you from 1970, when this was an art form started by kids tagging their names on the streets of New York City and Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and shows how it evolved from simple print writing on walls and on trains to an art form that started to have style.

And then we go into the emergence of these artists, into the art galleries.

How did that happen?

Why did that happen?

You get to see original works of art created in the 1980s.

And we continue along this timeline to show the emergence of this art form in Miami.

And we go through the 90s, 2000 now as it moves out of New York City, travels across the world.

Here in America, goes onto freight trains and crisscrosses all over the country, and introduces this youthful art form to audiences everywhere.

What separates graffiti from any other art form is the desire for the mastery of letters, how to bend them and tweak them and enlarge them and make them your own.

And so when some people talk about street art and they ask, you know, what's the difference between street art and graffiti?

Well, street art has to do more with imagery.

Graffiti is about lettering.

So what we're looking at here is a site specific mural by differ from Los Angeles.

What we teach about every single day at the Museum of Graffiti is how looking at each one of these walls can give you context clues to where these artists are from.

For instance, in this wall, you can see how defer incorporates inspiration of Los Angeles gang graffiti by taking something that society typically looks at as as bitter or as violent.

He makes it beautiful, and we like to compare this or contrast it to this wall.

By John one.

And John one was a trained painter.

He did huge pieces on the subways in New York City, and it's so important to see how two graffiti writers who are doing the same genre of art can have such a different take.

This is the world's largest art form.

It has practitioners all over the world.

That fact that it's sort of expanding and going around the world and very open to anybody picking it up and adding something to it, has started to change the perception of this being purely a vandals movement to an art form that is celebrated and accepted globally and desired globally.

Communities have woken up and that's where we are today, which is that social norms and cultural norms have shifted just the way that they've done in other areas of low level crimes.

People are opening up and seeing the benefit to including this type of art form within our community.

My personal history.

I'm from New York City.

I started painting in Brooklyn, New York as a teenager in the 1980s.

I painted exclusively, illegally, painted the trains, I painted the walls, and I've gotten arrested.

And it didn't dissuade me from being a participant in this art movement.

As a matter of fact, it made me sort of more entrenched.

And the Museum of Graffiti today is sort of the project that I dreamed of, and I was able to convince artists that normally would not give their artwork to anybody to allow me to have it, because they trusted me.

They know me as a member of the community.

This art form has not been celebrated by museums in the past.

We had to make our own museum.

To plan your visit, go to Museum of graffiti.com.

In this segment, take a trip to Reno, Nevada to meet mosaic artist Elizabeth Wright with stained glass, beads, stone and so much more.

She creates colorful, textured mosaics.

Mosaic art is anytime you take smaller pieces of a hard material glass, tile, stone to create a picture or an image with those items, so anything in that description is considered a mosaic.

I don't think I'm a typical artist in that you don't look in mine and go, oh, she does this one thing.

That's what absolutely pulls me into mosaic, is that I can go in so many different directions, but I use rusty things I find in the desert dishes, pottery, beads, stone.

The biggest thing I use is cut stained glass.

The first thing I think of is what substrate am I going to put it on?

And that substrate is the bottom.

What am I going to create it on?

We were out in the Santa Rosa mountains in Nevada, and I found this big deposit of these flat rocks, and I was like, oh my gosh, these are going to be perfect for mosaics.

But then I get down to my little pieces I'm knitting.

So I hand nip nip nip nip cut cut cut cut cut.

I'm going to use silicone to glue those pieces down, and then I'm going to tape it off.

Here you have this beautiful piece of art you've created, and you're going to take a black grout, and you're going to smother the whole thing of your beautiful piece you've created, which is a little unnerving.

And then you clean and you clean and you clean and you clean.

The cleaning will be toothpicks and Q-tips.

You want to get everything out so you can see every piece of glass in that piece.

So it is a little crazy when you see this process when I'm doing that.

But it's very meditative and it's, you know, I get some good music going and it's just I can just get lost in what I'm doing.

So it's it's a wonderful way to relax.

Katie has over 50 colors of glass to get the the shades and all of the inspiration.

I actually have to mix the glass, you know, almost like a painter where if I put two colors of glass next to each other, they will start to give the illusion of another color.

And cutie also has seven different colors of grout.

And I took the time and you have to tape it off.

Grout one section, pull that off, grout the next section, tape the rest of it off.

It's a really intensive process.

I like that as my art has evolved, I use reclaimed materials literally in everything I do.

It's not about the economics of it.

I feel that the reclaimed materials I use add character to the piece.

So let's say I want to make a sunflower.

You know, you could put it in a simple frame and that's okay, that's okay.

But to put it in a with a rusty piece of metal, we found out in the desert.

And then to put it on an old piece of barnwood just makes that sunflower so much more special.

And it makes it where you can envision that sunflower near an old barn or out in a field.

It's amazing the rusty things we have found in the desert.

And you're like, what is this?

What was this?

But what I see coming from this is, you know, I can see it in my mind.

I see something happening.

And it's not just what people think.

You don't just smash dishes and glue them onto something, not to make it art worthy.

You need to actually cut those into shapes and create things.

And it makes a beautiful, colorful piece.

And I think people really are like, wow, that's those were old dishes.

And they can see that.

But I just think it's also environmentally a good thing to do.

If I'm taking something that's just rusting away in the desert and why not?

And that adds something and it's character.

And I'm also just taking some garbage out of the desert and I'm making something out of it.

It's amazing when you put some cut stained glass and some beads, and it just turns it into this old thing you found in the desert into something very beautiful.

Discover more at elizabethwrightbmosaics.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of Arts Plus.

To view more, visit.

Plus or follow us on social.

Until next time, I'm Gabe Ortiz.

Thanks for watching.

Funding for Arts Plus is provided by Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, The State of Florida and Division of Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.