Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up, we salute the Cleveland Arts Prize Class of 2026 as they're honored for their work on the stage and the studio.

A performance artist, a paper artist, And a master of collage.

Welcome back, my friends, to the show we call “Applause”.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Now let's talk about the Cleveland Arts Prize.

It was established in 1960, and for much of that history, “Applause” has been profiling Northeast Ohio's creative masters, sometimes years before they were recognized with the Arts Prize.

Right here, this is Chris Webb when he was a teenager performing at Playhouse Square.

Now he's the 2026 Emerging Artist recipient of the Cleveland Arts Prize.

We caught up with him in 2025 during the run of his show, “The End of Black Excellence”.

Poetry is the way I express.

It's the way I talk.

It's the way I carry on.

It's the way that I live.

I don't know who I'll be without poetry.

I mean, I do a little acting and everything, but poetry's my thing.

Poetry's what I'm gonna do until they lay me down into the ground.

I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio from the St.

Clair neighborhood.

Matter of fact, my mom still lives in the house that I grew up in.

And I'd say that I am a sponge of all things Cleveland.

I grew up in so many different, like, arts functions and, like, community programs that Cleveland offered.

Whenever there was something that said arts camp, theater camp, poetry camp, anything like that, I made my way down there because I just loved the form of expression that either getting on stage or, you know, writing something that speaks about your community and, you know, the things that you're going through, I loved what that provided for myself, and I loved the effect that it had on others.

There's been beauty in just kind of like following the passion, following the drive and the fire, and, you know, just kind of like forging through whether it gets like the biggest response or whether it's like, that was weird, but I see kind of where your mind's at.

And this play just kind of came out of the blue with everything that has like been backed up inside of me for like the past like couple of years when it comes to the emotions that I feel, the things that I've seen around in the world.

It feels almost as if that young Chris who was writing poetry and doing plays took a break, came back as a man, and now is like speaking again.

I've never felt this much like myself, and it's beautiful.

It's daring.

You know, I used to write poems and be afraid to, like, say them because it reveals so much about me.

You know, I haven't had that feeling in a long time, but I have that feeling now.

I want to make the world pay attention one more time, and regardless of the way that it might look, feel, or whoever's in office right now, I cannot prove myself to be the end of Black excellence.

So my one-person show is called “The End of Black Excellence” and there was a thesis that I wanted to kind of investigate with that.

That thesis was this statement: for a Black man to be heard by America, he has to put on a show.

And that show could be an amazing display of intellect, artistic prowess, athleticism, all of these different things, or it could be the bad side, you know, it could be the in and out of courtrooms, wild stuff, but either way, you know, to get America's attention, a show needs to be held.

So the piece itself is my quote-unquote “Black show” that I'm putting on for the audience, but the problem is that my show keeps failing and messing up in all of these different ways.

And if that show is not excellent, then I will never get America's attention.

That's the end of Black excellence.

Chris was always like a very focused young man.

I just knew that he had talent and I knew he had a passion for poetry and just watching him build his skill set to where, like, it is now today.

And there's things that he teaches me that I'm like, I'm inspired by as well.

And a lot of artists have this ability to share their own story, but I feel like he has this ability to listen and appreciate in a— that's, that's, I'm going to say, rare among artists.

And I think when he performs, you can get a sense of that.

That when he's performing, he's somehow sharing something that's more than just himself.

It was the first moment where he felt like he saw a version of our country that had the potential to love him back.

The character that I inhabit wants nothing more than to get that American dream, get that kind of like success that he feels that he was promised if he works hard enough.

So I'm working hard in this play.

You'll see me scream, laugh, cry, go crazy.

There's music, there's poetry, there's a wild, wild storytelling, there's video.

Like, there's something for everybody.

And I think that the piece, I think that it's resonant to whoever has felt the weight of pressure to excel, you know?

And that's so many of us.

To me, at the end of the day, whether you got a whole bunch of screens, a bunch of cameras, it's still the art of storytelling.

And so, and how do we infuse live performance with multimedia and make it clear for the audience to really be engaged, but also be left with, wow, I've just never seen a show quite done like that, where it infuses all those elements and and that people can really get a message that Chris is trying to convey, but also leave it open-ended to where you can, you can make your own conclusions.

At the beginning, you think this is just going to be some super cool thing, and it is super cool.

You know, there's a little preacher in it, and you're just like, yeah, social justice!

And you're like all excited, and then it slowly turns and becomes so deeply personal.

I failed at trying to be the person that America wants.

And that experience of great art, when someone is so personal, it becomes universal because it suddenly becomes personal for me as an audience member, right?

It feels like he is sharing something that, that I didn't know about myself or about the world.

I had no idea that all of this was inside, you know, that I was holding and carrying and like, you know, like so much to the point where like, you know, I was about to like just burst.

And the way that it came out once I found out that there was, you know, just a freedom to speak, like it helped me to rediscover a voice that I thought was gone, you know?

As producers, we have to be careful about like using, you know, like best or the greatest.

This is one of the best solo performances I have ever produced in my career, and it's a long career.

This is special.

Cleveland is lucky to have this performance here.

Getting back into the driver's seat in the biggest show of my life It's a scary thing, you know, and I feel it.

I definitely feel it.

But I feel like, man, the iron is hot right now.

So I'm trying to leave it all on the stage.

Every year, the Cleveland Arts Prize goes to 3 people, one emerging like Chris Webb, one for lifetime achievement like Dexter Lee Davis, who we'll hear from later, and one at mid-career.

For 2026, that's papermaking artist Aimee Lee.

Ideastream's Dee Perry shared her story in 2016 when Lee was inspired by the Korean tradition of gifting ducks.

In Korea, there's a tradition when people get married that one of the very common gifts they get is they get pairs of wooden ducks, wedding ducks, and they're carved And then they're painted these beautiful colors to signify Mandarin ducks, which are a species that are known to mate for life.

I always grew up seeing them, you know, every kind of household, every married couple has them.

The Korean tradition of offering newlyweds wooden ducks dates back 2,000 years to a time when male suitors offered families live ducks in exchange for someone's hand in marriage.

As a way of paying homage to this custom, Aimee produced a series of Mandarin ducks using another ancient Korean practice, papermaking.

Papermaking in Korea is almost 2,000 years old.

It has a very long history, and it was maybe one of the second kind of big cultures that started to make paper in the world.

And so it started in China and then went to Korea because they were very closely connected.

It came first as a vehicle for religion, for Buddhism, for a way for them to copy their sutras and then be able to disseminate this information.

And then beyond that, they started to realize how strong this paper was, and they realized they could turn it into so many other things.

And you had paper chamber pots, you had paper furniture, you had hats, you had all kinds of things.

The paper Aimee uses to craft her ducks is derived from the mulberry tree.

The plants are grown at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory on East 47th Street in Cleveland, where Aimee teaches the ancient art of Korean papermaking.

We've waited until all of the leaves have fallen, and we're cutting all the way at the base of this plant, and it will grow right back the next year.

So this inner bark, the white bark, is what you want for papermaking.

It's the only kind of public place where people just can come in from anywhere and learn how to make paper in the Korean tradition from scratch.

Extracting the pulp used to make paper is a laborious process.

It starts by steaming the branches so the bark can be removed.

The inner stem is then boiled and the long fibers are removed.

After cleaning, the fibrous material is beaten, creating short strands of pulp that go into a watery solution known as a slurry.

A large screen goes into the slurry many times and in many directions to evenly distribute the fibers and drain off the water.

What's left behind is a thin layer of fibrous material that becomes paper.

Principally, the fibers are lining up, you know, crossing each other hair-like, and with water they wind up and they become like that.

And as they come down, they compress on themselves.

So it's amount of how much pressure, what type of techniques, what kind of fibers, what gives you strength.

Actually, when you compress the fibers and you— the density of paper is actually higher than, like, a wood, because you're actually compressing it and, you know, taking things and making them even denser.

And it's hard to get around that in the sense of how we relate to paper.

But if you were to make a piece of furniture out of compressed— even if it was compressed cotton, it is as strong or stronger than that same density of wood.

After the paper dries, Aimee begins assembling the ducks by first cutting handmade paper into 1-inch strips that are woven together into string.

I use my hands to essentially twist and ply the paper.

It's exactly like making rope.

This is the process known as jisung, and jisung is this very old craft form in Korea of taking these, these strips of paper and then twisting them.

I have to do that for one end of the strips, and then I have to turn it around and sit on the other end so I can finish the entire length of the strip.

And I have to do that then for hundreds and hundreds of pairs so that I get hundreds and hundreds of cords so that I can start weaving.

Traditional basket-making techniques are used to weave the string into a duck.

The process is called twining, which is a basketry and very old process that almost every culture in the world actually has developed.

And so you have to take these paper cords, and I usually start with a knot that ends up giving me 8 different cords come shooting out of a center and just go round and round and round and round until it gets bigger.

And, and to make it get bigger and stay flat, I have to then add more of these ropes, which I usually call it spokes because it is like spokes in a wheel.

And then the pieces that go around, the threads that go around, are called weavers.

I do think the hardest part of making the ducks is making a really smooth, continuous curve.

You know, when I think about potters and the way that they shape things to make them round, or sculptors, and they can kind of control that in a different way, I have to think about how to do that but in a way where you're using building blocks, you know, how do you make Legos that are square look like they're making a curve?

It's the same problem.

I am inspired by what Aimee does I mean, I— and her dedication to the craft, probably 40 to 60 hours in a duck.

And to see the various twists and turns, the nature and the size of each some of the colorations and things like that.

They were all like, wow, this is, you know, for me.

And then knowing, you know, deep down I know exactly what kind of effort and time went into each one of those.

And I've seen her make them, so I know, you know, visually I can, you know, so that educates me before I even see it.

So that was, you know, a treat to see them.

And then to even see them in nests and oddball, like random things that she actually wove the nests just to place them in as kind of a presentation.

You know, it has a light side, a very light side to it.

It has a traditional side to it.

Using these traditional papermaking techniques and sustainable practices are essential to Aimee for many reasons, but especially as a way of connecting to her Korean heritage and her love of history and humanity.

It's important to me, I think, in the big picture, just as a human being on this planet that cares about preserving craft traditions that humans have figured out over hundreds of years.

You know, it took a long time to figure out how to make such a fine and beautiful and useful product.

And also to— it's important for me as a papermaker to round out papermaking history.

There isn't— there hasn't been a lot of information about Korean paper, and there's been a lot more research done in other kinds of papermaking.

And so I just wanted to kind of fill a gap that I saw.

Aimee Lee works in paper, and so does the 2026 Lifetime Achievement recipient, Dexter Lee Davis.

He creates collages layered with paper, woodblock prints, and all sorts of materials.

Ideastream's David C. Barnett shared Davis's story in 2022 when he went back to his alma mater, the Cleveland Institute of Art, to create new work.

Dexter Davis likes to make things.

My father would buy me Tonka toys and stuff like that, but I never really played with the toys that he bought me.

I would make puppets.

And I got more pleasure making things.

I was born in 1965, grew up in Hough, lived in Hough most of my life, moved around Cleveland but always stayed in Cleveland.

I grew up on East 89th Street, was like an area where during the time I was growing up, the riots came.

And also I remember most of the businesses that were there at the time were almost— most of them were Black-owned businesses.

So it was like I was half and half.

There was this part of it that made me feel special to be in an environment that was Black.

Everything was like Black businesses, Black-owned, people like providing for each other.

But then on the flip side of that, as politics change, as social situations change in society, created this whole explosion.

Throughout his career, Davis has overcome major life challenges by making art.

The death of his mother, a destructive apartment fire, A violent mugging, the skin disease vitiligo, and then in July 2020, a road rage attack that could have killed him.

Art was a vehicle, was something that I can use to be able to express myself, pull myself in a whole different world.

It was something that I could go to, to at least try to find a way out of whatever I was involved with.

Davis went to West Tech High School, where art teacher William Martin Jean inspired him to attend art school after graduation.

He enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art, studying with Cleveland Arts Prize winners Kenneth Dingwall and the late H. Carroll Castle, who set Davis on the path as a printmaker.

Printmaking was able to do anything.

I could do all kinds of things.

I could do drawing, I could do painting, I could do all kinds of mixing, even photography.

You can all mix that into printmaking.

To get to the Institute, Davis took an RTA bus from Hough to University Circle.

And it was on the RTA where he met a fellow CIA student, also from Hough, another aspiring artist with a passion for film, Robert Banks.

We go back, back way undergrad at the Institute of Art.

We like art, we like comic books, we like stuff that was off the mainstream.

And he's a movie guy and I love movies too, so we really were talking about all types of movies.

I admired him as a friend.

He was coming from one side of the Hough area, I was coming from the other side of the Hough area.

We pretty much connected after that.

We were both a couple of quirky, you know, kids back then.

Either through making art, talking about comic books, TV shows, music, especially music, and if anything about the neighborhood where we— our families, our upbringing, the things that we grew up on, the things that really excite us about making art, being creative and everything and all that.

And that was definitely a bonding And that was something that's been on and off since back when we first met.

Banks has documented his friend's work on film since the 1980s.

He's a wonderful friend.

So it was like an ongoing, long project that he just documented, documented, documented, and keep it.

You don't know when it's gonna come out, when it's gonna be put together, but he's just a good record taker.

Their longtime collaboration and friendship became an exhibition at MOCA Cleveland featuring Davis's art and Banks's film “Color Me Boneface” The retrospective exhibition came together not long after the road rage attack in 2020.

Davis and a friend were driving in University Circle and almost collided with another car.

The kids got angry and they were like really mad at us, and we— so I told my friend, let's go By the time we were leaving, I had a bad feeling about it.

I said, I think that they're so pissed off they might come after us.

Sure enough, I looked through the back window.

There they were coming behind us.

Then they shot through the car door and got me.

After the shooting, Banks reached out to his friend about continuing the collaboration.

It's been almost, what, 25 years since we started on the project?

So we got back together, we started shooting again.

This was after his tragedy, after him getting shot.

And I was, you know, really upset about that.

That really— I'm still really upset about that.

And, um, I'm thinking, well, he definitely needs this.

We got to really, you know, this anger going on in terms of what's wrong with everything, everything from the pandemic and people getting upset about the social and political strife and all the racism stuff going on, all this, this whole new Trump era stuff.

This is the time to get out there and get mad and get angry, but also just go all the way and not hold anything back.

Davis is sharing his latest work at the 2022 Front International Triennial with an exhibit at his alma mater The show is called “The Less Dead” Dexter has been working in our printmaking studios to produce a series of prints for the show.

He used this as an opportunity to heal through his creative practice.

You ink a plexiglass sheet down and you put like oil-based ink or water-based ink on the surface of the plexiglass.

And then you take a roller and you roll it down.

And then you take any kind of tool you want to like strip away the ink.

Whatever is left, you can see through what's left.

You can see the plexiglass.

And what you do, you take that into a printer and you roll over it, and then it will produce an image on the paper that you put on top of it.

Dexter is a person who has had difficulty in his life, but has consistently had an artistic practice that has both shown his resiliency and shown how art has helped him cope with the difficulties that he's had in his life.

This opportunity for a FRONT showcase at the Cleveland Institute of Art is a high point in Davis's career.

It's incredible.

I mean, I was like, out of all the things that happened to me, I'm happy to be a part of the FRONT or anything like it.

Because it gave me, once again, it gave me a chance to express myself and talk about something that matters to me.

You know, and I hope that people can feel the same way when they come to see the show.

That's one of the main reasons why I think I just see so much in him as not just an artist but as a Black man from the inner city that sort of reached, His work just reaches out to everybody.

It's infectious.

Dexter is an inspiration to me.

Art pervades his life.

Creativity pervades his life.

I think that's made him successful as a person against odds that I think would have crushed many other people.

But the show is about healing.

I want people to walk away with a big smile on their face.

I want people to be happy.

I want people to rejoice, and I want people to just really enjoy being able to have a connection with the art.

On the next “Applause”, visit a Gothic castle that once was a prison.

If you dare go inside the Ohio State Reformatory near Mansfield, it's one of the spookiest sites in the state.

We are in the West Attic, one of the most haunted spots in the prison.

And we unlock a haunting aria from Apollo's Fire.

All that and more on the next round of “Applause”.

It's time to wrap up our look at the Cleveland Arts Prize Class of 2026.

You've met the 3 juried winners of the 2026 Cleveland Arts Prize, which comes with a $10,000 award.

But the board and jury also bestow a few other commendations every year.

First up are former Sherwin-Williams CEO Chris Connor and his wife, Sara.

They're being honored for supporting the arts through their Connor Foundation.

That's him in the center right here on “The Sound of Ideas.” Hector Castellanos Lara is recognized for his work as artistic director of Parade the Circle.

Terry Stewart is a 2026 honoree, CEO of the Rock Hall during a period of many changes from 1999 until 2013.

And sculptor Barbara Stanczak receives a special citation for her work as an educator alongside her husband, Julian, who won the Arts Prize in 1969.

You can read profiles of each of them at Ideastream.org.

I'm Ideastream's Kabir Bhatia.

Thanks for joining us.

Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.