- [Narrator] Production of "Applause", an Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

- [Kabir] Coming up, an Akron artist finds inspiration in the colors of Cuba.

We open Doors To My Barrio in Cleveland's Latino community and a Spanish Fandango energizes ChamberFest Cleveland.

(lively upbeat music) (upbeat string music) (upbeat music) Hello and welcome one and all to another round of "Applause".

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

A select group of Ohio artists who were invited to create art in Cuba.

Akron woodcut artist, Meryl Engler, was one of them.

She experienced day-to-day life in Havana and found inspiration.

The resulting artworks are set to hang in the Havana Biennial exhibition.

(person indistinctly speaks) (lively music) - We went to Cuba in March of 2024.

We were there for a week.

We were an old Havana, so it's an older part of the city.

Things are built upwards.

There's not a ton of space.

People have to live really openly and people have to live outdoors a lot.

The weather has something to do with that too.

And, you know, coming out of the winter in Ohio, you're not used to that.

That was really inspiring.

I really liked it.

We split our time between the printmaking studio in Havana, doing a lithograph prints with them with their master printers, and working in the home studio of Abel Barroso, who is a woodcut artist and sculpture artist.

- Moving.

- I myself am almost not a boomerang 'cause I've always just traveled to the next place where I, like, lived.

(hands scraping) I was always, like, slightly let down by my work because I didn't have the time or resources to do the things that were in my brain until I discovered woodcut.

I loved how physical it was.

I loved that I could work really large.

I loved that I could roll it up afterwards and store it easily.

(uplifting music) The woodcut process basically involves carving an image into a piece of plywood.

You're carving onto like the planer surface of the plywood into long grain, not the end grain.

So plywood is the most, like, kind of economical option for it.

You're carving away either, like, the negative space or where light would hit in your image and the thing that's left behind the surface that's left behind gets inked up, rolled ink onto it, and then the paper goes on top of that and transfers onto the paper through pressure applied to it and forms the print.

(uplifting music) When people think of woodcut, they think of black and white, really high graphic western style woodcuts.

And my work is a lot more colorful and layered and I almost think of them as like watercolors in a way.

(uplifting music) I grew up in Southern California, like, right by the beach and that definitely comes into my work in terms of, like, themes around water and movement and how lights move onto water.

I go through phases where I, like, think about the wave a lot and that changes throughout.

I've lived a lot of places and each one I think impacts certain series of my works.

(uplifting music) From a very early age, I knew I wanted to go to school for art and I wanted to go to a place that had a both a really good art program and sports.

So Syracuse fit that bill.

I rode for four years at Syracuse University.

After grad school, I coached full-time in Portland, Oregon.

Wasn't really doing a lot of art.

After a while, kind of reevaluated what I wanted and decided that I wanted to make art a priority and not coaching.

So I applied to an artist residency at Rubber City Print in Akron.

Got it, and was able to move out here for...

It was supposed to be for a year and then COVID hit.

With the pandemic, I decided, "Okay, I'm gonna stay in Akron."

And so I was able to find work and the art scene accepted me and got me into it and I was able to work in there and find shows and continue making work and continue to grow.

I really loved it here, so decided to stay basically.

(uplifting music) (upbeat trumpet music) (people chattering) In Cuba, I really loved getting to just meet the people in general and I was really inspired by their lifestyle.

I've lived multiple places in the US and each one has its own kind of vibe and visual kind of thinking and culture.

Cuba is completely different.

I had never been anywhere in like a Latin American country.

The colors, well, how they painted their houses, the way the sun hit things.

Their combinations of colors that I would never think to put together, like pinks and greens and yellows, turquoise everywhere.

And it made it for, like, a very fun, vibrant kind of city.

When you think of Cuba, maybe it's not as different.

You're gonna find similarities in either people or lifestyle in landscape no matter where you are.

Having the work be some sort of combination between, like, what's happening in Ohio, what's happening maybe in America versus kind of what our experiences were in Cuba.

(people clapping) (people cheering) - Bravo!

(people clapping) - [Kabir] Do you know a Northeast Ohio artist whose work is inspired by international travels?

Please share any artistic story ideas you might have from the region by sending an email to arts@ideastream.org.

Let's take another international journey, this time, via the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center in Cleveland.

Since 2016, Latino artists have been invited to transform old doors into new works of art, representing Spanish speaking nations around the world.

- Doors To My Barrio was started in 2016.

It was just on an idea of from a donation of doors that I received from a friend.

And at first, I was just thought, "What am I gonna do with these doors?"

We kind of came up with the idea behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitars.

We decided that each door would represent a Spanish speaking country.

So the great thing about this year is that we received funding for Hispanic Heritage Month and part of that funding was to commission artists to do some work for us.

And I thought this was a perfect time to kind of bring the project back to life.

And to finish it, we still have several doors that need to be completed so that we can...

The collection will be complete.

I really feel that each door has a story behind it.

And, you know, I have a sentimental attachment to them.

(Mariela speaks in foreign language) (Maria speaks in foreign language) (Maria laughs) (Maria speaks in foreign language) - My door for project, I was actually given Spain as my theme.

'Cause bullfighters are very common in Spanish artworks and everywhere, it's a matador in a purple suit, matador suit.

And he's kind of like a pulling the little blanket, like when the bull goes by him.

And I colored it so that it's looks like the flag of Spain.

Although the colors are inverted.

That was kind of unintentional.

- So I did Bolivia and I wanted to include like the indigenous population of Bolivia 'cause a big percentage of the people are indigenous, so it's the Aymara and the Quechua people.

So I included the two women, they've kind of looking at the Andes, and then I included a sunset.

So one of the rays is the Wiphala flag, which is actually also like a national flag and it's represents the indigenous people, which I've never heard of that before.

So yeah, I've never heard of, like, a flag, an indigenous flag being included as a flag of the country.

- I got Uruguay.

Back in the colonial times, it was a place where the Africans came and it was a place where they came for freedom and that was where they kind of dispute that distributed themselves into America essentially.

So that's where I kind of have all these different melting pots of people in this small little door I have.

A lot of my art is mostly colorful skin tones, like blue, magenta, sometimes green.

So it was different, but it was also really cool to try to do all these different skin tones, but also incorporate those colors around them and have their skin tones shine as the main feature.

- Every time somebody walks into this room, they immediately take out their cameras.

There's a kind of like a gasp and, you know, they're very, like, impressed by the collection.

First of all, they're on doors, you know.

And second of all, I think it's very impressive that we have such talented local Latino artists in our community.

- It was great for me.

It was a great chance to get myself out there as a striving artist.

- It is opening a door up to like the artist itself to this country.

But not only that, I feel like in Cleveland, we wanna have exposure as Latinx people.

So the door is just like a passageway to our culture, which is really beautiful.

- The main Latino population in Cleveland is Puerto Rican.

And we have a growing population of, you know, different Latino cultures, you know, Mexico and Cuba and El Salvador.

So we have all these growing Latino populations in our city and we wanted to celebrate that.

(Mariela speaks in foreign language) - Well, when I came to Cleveland, I couldn't really find my Latinx peeps (laughs) or my people.

So I think just being part of this just means that, like, there is a community here and we're thriving and we're getting our name out there.

And I never really felt part of, like, Cleveland until I started working with Julia De Burgos so it means a lot to me.

It feels like I kind of, like, find my space here.

(Maria speaks in foreign language) - [Kabir] What if there was a free weekly newsletter that not only gave you great art event ideas to attend in Northeast Ohio, but also provided the latest arts news and profiles from the region?

I've got good news for you, folks.

It's called the To-do list.

Sign up today at arts.ideastream.org.

Here's another artist finding inspiration in an international art form.

Alice Blumenfeld is a dancer and choreographer with a passion for Spain's historic art of flamenco dance.

She shares the language of flamenco with Northeast Ohio through her own company, ABREPASO.

Ideastream Public Media's, Carrie Wise, has the story.

(feet thudding) - [Carrie] Flamenco is expressive, it's percussive, and it's powerful both for the audience and the performer.

- One of the things that I think makes it so empowering and powerful and intense is the rhythms.

And in just the posture itself.

The chest is always lifted.

There's a sense of tension.

In the sort of the way we use our hands, there's always this sense of resistance and then it's very much grounded into the earth the way that we hits our feet on the floor.

- [Carrie] The dancing fuses with music, often singing and guitar.

Performing here in Northeast Ohio, Blumenfeld says, she's introducing many people to what it's all about.

- Flamenco, first of all, comes from Spain.

It comes from the southern most region of Spain where there was a really interesting mix of cultures over the last several thousand years.

Flamenco itself is a very young art form, so its roots are very old, but it's very young.

- [Carrie] She was drawn to flamenco in her youth growing up in New Mexico where there's an annual flamenco festival and a national institute dedicated to the art form.

Blumenfeld ended up trading in her ballet slippers for flamenco heels.

- And I just became enraptured in the rhythm and had what in flamenco we call an experience of duende.

Sort of an out of body experience and I just knew in that moment that this was it.

This is what I would dedicate my life to.

- [Carrie] She went on to tour with national companies and even studied flamenco in Spain for a little while.

But as time went on, she says she realized she wanted to find a way to tell her own stories through flamenco.

- I felt a lot of flamenco outside of Spain was just perpetuating the stereotype of the woman in a red dress.

And it's an image that sells, it sells tickets to shows.

And there wasn't really a company that had space for the American artists to tell their stories.

So a lot of companies bring in artists from Spain to set repertory and I was just, like, "There's so many artists here that have so much to say, why isn't there a company that's emphasizing that?"

And then it was, like, "Well, duh, I can be the one to start that company."

- [Carrie] She started a small pre-professional company called ABREPASO, which means opening a pathway.

ABREPASO dancers performed flamenco recently at Cleveland Public Theatre's Annual Community Arts Event, Station Hope.

(feet thudding) (fingers clicking) - An explosion.

(feet thudding) (fingers clicking) Splash.

So the beginning and end of the piece is movement to a poem that I wrote as part of a project called the Solea Project.

So solea is the flamenco form that comes from the word for solitude or loneliness in Spanish.

(feet thudding) Push me aside.

Dignity takes my hand and leads (feet thudding) - [Carrie] This performance makes poetry and choreography centered around dignity.

- I walk with dignity.

So I was thinking about that word and the way that flamenco allows for dignity and sort of reempowers the individual to find dignity if they have been dehumanized in some way.

- [Carrie] The language of flamenco has helped Blumenfeld since she was first introduced back in middle school.

- I think every middle schooler is going through a lot and trying to figure out who they are and, you know, being inundated by society with lots of ideas and just trying to search for oneself.

And so Flamenco really helped me in that moment of my life and has helped me in other challenging moments in my life to find an outlet and also to have community as well.

So one of the really cool things about flamenco is it, it attracts people from all different walks of life, different economic backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds.

And I think that's because flamenco is a hybrid form to begin with.

It drew from many different cultures and histories.

So it still welcomes people from just so many different backgrounds and experiences.

And so I just wanna give people the opportunity to when they need that expressive outlet that Flamenco is here for them.

- [Carrie] While some people in Northeast Ohio may just be learning about Flamenco for the first time, Blumenfeld says she finds this to be a great arts community.

- And it takes a community of people to have flamenco.

So that act of witnessing when you're expressing something very personal, I think is so important to healing and to building community.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Kabir] Here's what's on the horizon for the next round of "Applause".

Photographer Ruddy Roye moved his home base from New York City to Northeast Ohio.

- Cleveland afforded me a space that made me feel like I was a photographer again.

- [Kabir] We show you Cleveland through Roy's camera lens.

Plus Akron band, Easton Union kicks it into high gear with a countrified rocker.

All that and more on the next round of "Applause".

(upbeat music) Let's end with another dash of Spanish flares.

We say, adios, to this round of "Applause".

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia handing things off to Northeast Ohio guitar master, Jason Vieaux, who leads this Sterling Quintet in a Fandango for ChamberFest Cleveland, enjoy.

(energetic music) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (energetic music continues) (graphics chiming) - [Narrator] Production of "Applause", an Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.