(gentle piano music) - [David C Barnett] Production of Applause on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud Family Trust and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(jazzy horns and drums) Hello, I'm Ideastream Public Media's David C. Barnett and welcome to Northeast Ohio's arts and culture show, Applause.

(funky Motown guitar over cheers of a crowd) At the end of the current season, the Cleveland Indians will become the Cleveland Guardians, named after the city's iconic guardians of traffic statues not far from the stadium.

Already well loved symbols in Cleveland, Ideastream's Carrie Wise has more about the Guardian's history and popularity in this story from 2018.

( car whizzes past) - [Carrie] On an early Sunday morning, Christina Sadowski snaps photos of the large stone guardians on the Lorraine Carnegie bridge.

- They're beautiful, but they are challenging to shoot.

The streetlights are really in the way, it's fun for me because it is a challenge.

- [Carrie] She's capturing new images for her artwork.

As she's already found success, sharing the guardians of traffic and everything from pillows to leggings, to charm bracelets.

- There's something about them that people just love.

And it says home to them.

- [Carrie] The guardians have become icons for the city.

Imagine nearly a century ago, when Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the nation.

- [John] There were calls for a bridge going back to 1903 and eventually in the 1920s, when the city was booming, it's traffic problems were exacerbated.

And so there was a bond issue passed and construction of the bridge began in 1929, just before the crash.

- [Carrie] This wasn't going to be just any bridge.

It was designed to be beautiful.

- They produced a structure that I think was memorable then and memorable now.

- [Carrie] American sculptor, Henry Herring designed the guardians.

You'll find more of his work around Cleveland.

- [John] Herring's other work, If you're looking at severance hall, it's embedded in the building, it's a part of the structure.

It doesn't stand out on its own.

And I think that's what makes the pylons different.

They are monumental structure.

They're figures that rise above the actual structure.

And if you look around Cleveland then and now, I mean, you're not going to find any kind of representational art that is that large.

- Stonemasons carved eight art deco figures in Berea sandstone on four pylons located at the corners of the bridge.

Each guardian holds a different mode of transportation in his hands.

- There's that wonderful photograph of the stone cutters posed on the pylons assembled within the shop where they were cut.

You know, this was prior to their movement and installation.

And all you see is this sort of this masculine pride of the people standing and sitting on one of these pylons and they're pristine, they're clean, and it gives real scale to it.

- [Carrie] The bridge was completed in 1932, but by the seventies, the guardians were threatened with calls for demolition.

- [John] The bridge had gotten old, they were dirty.

There were arguments about, could they be cleaned?

Could they be rescued?

They look, I mean, if you look at pictures of it, they were totally black.

- [Carrie] Ultimately they were cleaned in the 80's and remain highly visible today at the entrance to downtown.

- These just can't be replicated.

- [Carrie] Artist Paul Duda has made a living capturing the beauty of the city and says the guardians have been a part of his work for decades.

- People here feel that the area is somehow fundamentally flawed.

So I wanted to help break down that internalized, you know, negativity about our area.

So people could feel good about their homes.

- [Carrie] Duda says the guardians remind us of the city's history.

- I kind of think that like ruins, like the Roman ruins, you want to preserve all those things that we'll never be able to build again.

Ever.

- [Carrie] The guardians are also a big part of artist Jim Lanza's work, which highlights images of the city printed on wood.

- The grain of the wood becomes part of the art.

And I do things like burning it with a propane torch to give us sort of a vintage look.

- [Carrie] He's seen strong interest in his guardian pieces and has even met people with ties to the bridges past.

- I been lucky enough to meet about, I think, five or six descendants of some of the stone carvers from one of the photos that is pretty popular in Cleveland.

One of the people that I met recently was Bob Hope's grand nephew, actually at an art show in Chardan.

- [Carrie] Bob Hope's father was one of the stone cutters who worked on the bridge.

And in the 1980s, it was renamed Hope Memorial Bridge in his honor.

Decades later, the faces of the guardians seem to appear everywhere you look.

- They're now on, you know, beer bottle labels to t-shirts and a lot of artwork at a lot of the fests that I do.

And I think because of that, people would become more aware of them.

- I think people are now paying attention a little more to what's going on downtown, got some livelihood down here and kind of a rebirth of the city.

- As a kid, Antwoine Washington spent hours drawing pictures for family and friends, but the images and messages he got from mainstream culture told him that art wasn't a viable career path for him.

Still, his passion for painting kept pushing him forward.

And today he's dedicated to changing a number of cultural narratives.

I recently visited Washington's studio and found him working on a portrait of a young girl.

- Looking at a painting of my daughter, and I think the whole premises around this piece is going to be about pretty much like young people making wishes and dreaming outside of their birthdays.

I mean, they dream, I mean, you make that wish on the birthday, but do you actually really follow through with it?

And do you even know to do that?

- Saturday morning cartoons?

That was like some of my earlier influences of seeing those types of things.

But as far as like artists as a kid, it would have to, go to like Ernie Barnes and like the good times paintings and stuff like that.

Just because my grandmother used to watch that all the time.

It was that one painting that they'll always show at the end I think it's at the end of the show when it's going off, that's where I was first really introduced to like, oh, black artists painting.

I would like to do that.

Yeah.

I knew that artists could make money, of course, but I didn't know how.

And so I didn't have that person around me to actually help guide that or even say, "Hey, you have a talent, you have a talent in art.

Don't you know that you can make money from this and you can make a living doing this?"

And so that never really ever came across my mind or even was even encouraged in my neighborhood where I was from.

When you, when you did art, you were kind of looked at as a weirdo in a sense.

And so I would always, you know, practice basketball and come home and draw.

And so people knew that I could do it, but it never really was like, it was like, alright man, put that down.

And let's go hoop, which I thought was, I look back now and said, man, how fair was that to a kid like me.

(chuckles) Coming up I didn't have, I didn't have any like training in art.

I just kind of just like, Mom put the paper down in front of me, crayon.

And I just kinda just always drew.

Doodling and you know, just grabbing crayons and just always like trying to make stuff and drawing stuff.

And I would draw them pictures all the time at a very young age.

And so she was super intentional about just keeping that paper in front of me.

I think art's really a battle between yourself and how you want to express it.

And so it's all about how comfortable you are with yourself and letting whatever is inside, out.

And so that's how I looked at it.

I didn't look at it no other way.

So I felt like this would be probably one of the better ways for me to actually express myself.

And instead of me like getting on social media or something like that and saying something, I can just say what I want to say through a work of art.

- And so I always kept that in my back pocket and always knew when I go to college, I was going to major in art.

And then leading to Baton Rouge is where, when I went to a Southern university, that's where I officially took art school and class.

It was in college.

(birds chirping) - So I was sitting on the couch with my son, holding him and my daughter plays a lot and jumps on my back, but I just changed the facial expressions to be like a lot more like an Africanized mask.

And so I kind of wanted to have that feel too, talking about ancestry and that whole thing of what we come from and all of that.

So I kind of wanted to like have that conversation too.

So that's why you see like these flat shapes and design around the eyes and different things like that.

So I'm kind of wanting to have that feel as well.

This one here in particular was one that I went out on assignment with a photographer and we seen this young man here and his son walking across the street.

And we was like, Hey, we got to get this, this picture.

I mean, this one right here meant a real, I mean a big bunch to me, man, because I was able to put him in a position where showing how much of a Superman fathers are when it comes to like parenting and how warm and how we, you know, how that, how that image looks when you, when you see a father and a child.

- This one actually was inspired by just the whole notion and myth that black fathers aren't present in their children's lives.

Right there said it was a lie to me because growing up, I saw different.

In my neighborhood, even though we were poor, fathers were always around.

And fathers to me, even though I had my father alive in my life.

I had many other fathers coaches and different people within the community that acted as father figures.

To give you a little context to this picture here is that me and my wife make it a point that we go out and take pictures with our kids to make sure that they're able to see us as a family unit and growing, and seeing themselves grow and saying like, Hey, this is how I looked when I was a kid, because when we were coming up, we didn't have those photos.

So we made, we're super intentional about that.

And so we tend to just like take a day, hire a photographer, and then we would go take pictures.

And so with one and this one in particular, I was painting a series, and I said, Hey, I have to paint this picture because this represents my family.

And I have to also show people that I'm not just talking the talk.

I'm walking the walk.

It's a lot of opportunity out here in the arts for people that look like me and we just don't have access to it because no one is exposing us to it, or even telling us about it.

In my short tenure in time around art, I'm like, I can only imagine if I can learn these different things in a short period of time with someone 12, 13, even six, could learn over time.

And so I'm like, let me create something or let me get in front of these young people and let them know, like there's opportunity here, you don't have to run, jump, dunk, dribble a basketball, or catch a football or rap, sing, dance all the time.

This is another way that you can express yourself.

- [David] Antwoine Washington is part of an exhibition called New Histories, New Futures.

It's at Transformer Station on Cleveland's near west side and it runs through September 12th.

Cleveland's theater community recently lost a legendary stage presence.

Actor and director Dorothy silver died earlier this month at the age of 92.

She and her late husband Ruben were part of hundreds of productions over the course of seven decades.

Dorothy had some reflections on the state of the profession she loved when she was part of a panel discussion at the city club of Cleveland, Back in 2016.

- I find all plays, you know, have a tremendous level of excitement because you're exploring often a new world, really in your world.

But I must say it's probably my age.

I am drawn to the marvelous place of the past.

I'd done contemporary plays that I think are significant "Wings" is one of them.

That's a significant play about not just a person who has had a stroke, but, but how society regards that event and how the victim deals with it.

I think it's a significant play, but I can't forget the plays of the past.

That always seem fresh to me because unfortunately, some of our problems never change, perhaps.

And it is thrilling to revisit some of these plays a la the visit, and realize that indeed, we must continue to work on this problem.

Every day.

- [David] Downtown Cleveland is filled with century old structures that tell stories.

If you just take a moment to look.

next time on Applause, we'll hear from an architecture writer who says these banks, hotels and office buildings are billboards that have messages you might've missed.

And we welcome singer Kyle Kid and guitar player Marcus Allan Ward, to make some music for us from their respective socially distanced spaces.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

A new art exhibit in Cleveland takes place in east side neighborhoods at various sites around the city, the artworks appear through augmented reality.

Ideastream Public Media's Carrie Wise has more.

- [Carrie] With my smartphone in hand, I recently set out to see the sculpture center's new outdoor exhibit on view at different sites around Cleveland.

For instance, a Sphinx appears above the green space, along east 99th street and Buckeye road.

In order to see it, I downloaded and opened an app called Fourth Wall, holding my phone as if to take a picture, The artwork appears within the frame.

- It's kind of like a fourth dimension.

So you look through your app through your device and you can see something that you can't normally see.

- [Carrie] As curator Robin Robinson explains, it's kind of an art scavenger hunt.

- [Robin] Augmented reality, or AR, is basically just the invisible image of something that you can only see through your digital device.

So it's a separate experience than just the everyday reality.

- [Carrie] At 12 different east side locations, you'll see the work of 12 different black artists from Cleveland or with Cleveland ties.

The show was called Crossroads: Still We Rise.

- And it's called Still We Rise because we chose six communities on the east side of Cleveland that are depressed, "depressed," kind of socially and economically devastated from a long history of red lining and you know, different things that happen to this side of Cleveland.

- [Carrie] Another art site is the forest hill park footbridge in East Cleveland built where oil Baron, John D Rockefeller once summered.

For the exhibit, photographer Gina Washington's piece appears in front of the bridge, sharing both the faces and voices of her subjects.

- [Woman's Voice] I am a mother.

- [Man's Voice] I am an artist.

- [Another Woman's Voice] I am a person that will rise above the circumstances.

- [Carrie] About a mile or so away off of Euclid avenue, People will discover artist Ed Parker's sculpture of a cluster of guns all pointed down.

- They had a gun collection over at, on Kingsmen and 82nd.

What's that garden over there?

Over at Rudolph.

So I got the guns and started thinking about all of the children that have gotten hurt and kids have gotten hurt and put that piece together.

- [Carrie] For people to make new connections, like I did with Ed Parker, that's something Robinson says she's hoping this outdoor exhibit can foster.

- Look around the neighborhood, talk to some of the neighbors maybe, to community members, you know, interact and actually realize that there's so much commonality that, you know, there's no reason for, you know, the judgment, the pre-judgment of these communities.

- [Carrie] Other sites to visit include Woodland Cemetery and Cory United Methodist church.

- [Robin] It really, in my opinion, speaks for the community itself.

So the things that you perceive and you think is real, you can look at through a different lens and see something totally different.

- [David] The artwork is on view now through September 25th at various east side locations, as well as at the sculpture center in Cleveland.

There was a time when most men in the country wore hats.

They were also quite common among women.

Right now, we pay a visit to a new Orleans fashion designer who grew up watching her family wear hats.

Today, Mimi holiday runs her own hat making business.

It's called Halo Mimi.

- [Mimi] My mother Susan holiday modeled for a famous designer in New Orleans named Yvonne laFleur.

Yvonne laFleur is famous for wedding gowns and dresses and ready to wear, but a large part of what she offered was hats.

I was exposed to hats and fashion on both sides of my family.

So we were talking about earlier, how back in the day wearing a hat completed the look.

And I think as a child, seeing my mom wearing these hats and my grandparents and my aunt in Los Angeles, they were very stylish as well.

And my aunt went to fashion design school in Los Angeles, the same school I went to.

Initially, I went to college for fashion merchandising.

I was going to get into the retail side and be a buyer and a stylist, which I did go into the industry as a stylist for several years before I became a designer.

In 2015, I spent holiday in London and I had access to a quality of hat there that had never seen before.

I purchased a Velour hat from Harrods, the famous department store.

And I was just so obsessed with this hat.

I wore every day for like eight months.

I started doing some research and I found that there was a unique opportunity to be taught by this costume designer who was a milliner for many, many, many years from London that was flying into Fullerton, California and teaching this class.

So it was a rare opportunity to get that kind of experience from that level of talent.

And it was just a three-day class.

And I did that program with her.

I ended up moving back to new Orleans with the intentions of doing a fashion design program because I wanted to create an entire collection of women's clothing and see what I was capable of.

I was making hats and I was making clothing.

Because the hats were, I would make one and sell it and make one and sell it, It was more hands-on.

And I actually enjoyed that construction process more as a designer.

I'm more interested in haute couture and doing something unique, one of a kind, whereas the clothing, that's more, pattern-making cutting and sewing, and then going to production potentially in China or wherever with small, medium, large, there's a lot more money invested in that process as well.

Whereas the hat I could just buy a felt or a straw and make this unique design and sell it.

It was a more feasible approach to starting my business as an independent designer at that point.

I don't work with any poor quality materials.

Everything that I have is premium standard.

So my felts are premium, whether they're made out of coypu, which is actually Nutria, it's an invasive species here in Louisiana.

So that's my first choice actually, because we're helping our wetlands in addition to providing a fashion statement and protection for people.

My felt types that I currently offer are rabbit and coypu nutria, or straw.

And this is an example of a premium felt made out of coypu.

And then I have some mixed media hats too, I make hats out of vinyl record albums and it's more novelty, but people love those.

Kind of fun.

This one's actually a Whitney Houston record.

So it's a fun party prop because if you get it to the DJ in an event, the record will still play.

There's different types of felts.

There's a hood shape and that's just called a hood and that's made out of felt.

And then there's another one that's kind of round with the bump in the middle and that's called a capline.

And the same thing with straw, it can come as a hood or as a capline, it's round with the bump in the middle.

And then I use all these different wooden blocks to make the hat shape.

So with steam and heat I use to make the material more pliable and then stretching it over my block shape.

That's called blocking.

I'm willing to experiment with just about anything.

I plucked some little spikes off of a cactus in my garden, and I made those into a hat trim recently.

I love being creative with using things that are, non-conventional something that surprises people.

I think as a designer, that's probably what's pushed me to do things a little different is to spark curiosity, for sure, yeah.

Dried flowers, I really like using organic materials a lot.

So I have access to silk flowers, which I do use, and those are beautiful, but I tend to, me personally, like to use things they're a little bit more organic.

I even use bugs.

So you can see on the hat that I'm wearing, it has a butterfly on it.

This is a real butterfly and I've used dragonflies and I'm not really opposed to anything.

(laughs) This is called a heavy and it's a little bit more masculine shape with a wider brim.

This is a hat that I wear almost every day.

I love this style and the colors really compliment a lot of different garments because it's so neutral.

Turn of the century, having a hat was a sign of nobility.

Whereas I still think that's a standard for today.

It definitely is a conversation piece.

You know, it makes people more interested, and it does give you kind of a status symbol, but I don't think that it's a requirement for being nicely dressed.

Someone can be elegant, you know, and not wearing a hat, but it's definitely favored.

Brides are wearing masculine style felt hats now, whereas that wasn't trendy really in the past decades, I would love to get into more than just the hat business, like handbags and doing more cut and sew and clothing, but I just would need a bigger team to tackle all of that.

And I think that's in the future for sure.

I would love to diversify.

- [David] And that's it for today's show.

You'll find more arts and cultural programming online at arts.ideastream.org.

I'm ideastream's David C. Barnett.

see you next week for another round of Applause.

(jazzy piano plays) Production of Applause on Ideastream public media is made possible by the John P. Murphy foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud family trust and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga arts and culture.