- [Narrator] Production of Applause on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation and by Cuyahoga county residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(bright upbeat music) - [David] Coming up, a Cleveland photographer expands her focus as an artist in residence at moCa.

A local maker shows off her esoteric accessories, plus the Cleveland Orchestra showcases a contemporary work by a modern day composer.

All that and more is straight ahead.

Hello and welcome to Applause.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

Amber N. Ford's photography can be seen around Northeast Ohio and beyond.

While currently best known for her portraiture, the Cleveland Institute of Art graduate seeks to broaden her art practice.

And that's taking shape with a residency at moCa, Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art.

- I love photography because it can be both a documentation of what's already around us or you can get very creative and fantastical and create scenes.

I tried other art mediums like painting and drawing and ceramics and things like that and photography is what I loved the most.

And I was the best in and it was what made the most sense for me when it came to figuring out something that would be a career but also still fun.

I get commissioned to take photographs for other people but also I take photographs for myself as well.

And getting hired as a freelancer for places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, most recent VELOX Media.

And I really enjoy that because every assignment is different.

I get to meet new people, go to new places.

Shooting for publications can be difficult 'cause you never know what you're gonna walk into, but that also can be the exciting thing.

I never know what really the subject looks like a lot of the times.

Sometimes I like, I'll try to like look them up and yeah, maybe I can find them on LinkedIn to just get an idea.

But a lot of times like yeah, I'm walking in and it's just like, hey, let's do the thing.

(laughs) Also, I've been able over the last couple years work with some of the larger organizations in Cleveland, institutions.

I just never imagined as a student that now six years after undergrad that I would be working with some of the people and some of the institutions that I'm working with now which is really exciting and really interesting.

(soft music playing) I'm interested as I continue to develop within my artistic practice to be more considered as a contemporary artist or conceptual artist than just a photographer 'cause I wanna be able to choose whatever medium makes the most sense for the concept and idea that I have versus trying to make photography always fit.

Like yes, I can do a lot of photography but sometimes other mediums do make more sense.

And I wanna give myself the time and the space for that experimentation to figure out what works the best.

Like right now for my residency at moCa Cleveland, my end goal is to have an insulation that has both objects and audio versus having a photography exhibition.

MoCa has provided a studio space for me to create work but also a classroom space for me to do as whatever I please.

So what I've decided is to create this kind of prompt within the classroom so that people can read a little bit of my thinking and what I'm interested in and wanna talk about.

And there are prompted questions for people to participate in if they choose to.

I think that grief unites us because it's something that whether we wanna go through or not, we all go through it, right?

We all experience it in some type of degree.

And in that thought, we can also potentially help each other within that process as well.

And I want to encourage people to not just celebrate people when they're gone, but also think about how can we celebrate ourselves and each other while we're still here.

It just really makes me happy that the entire wall is almost filled.

That just solidifies the fact that people did need this.

And I was happy to use this space and opportunity to facilitate that for other people.

Work can come in many different shapes or forms.

And as an artist, I just wanna continue to grow and make things that are are relevant to me and the time, and the people, and the community that's around me.

(soft music playing) - [David] Amber N. Ford's portraiture can be seen at Massillon Museum as part of the exhibition "Missing History of Massillon: Unheard African American Stories."

A former librarian from Sandusky is now a maker who channels her love for crafting into 3D printed jewelry and other quirky accessories.

Right now, she steps in to the Making It spotlight.

- I like anything kind of weird, esoteric, maybe a little culty and stuff that's just misunderstood.

I would've never two years ago said I'm an artist and here we are.

So it's been really interesting.

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Stephanie Sanders-Jacob, I'm the artist behind Rabbit and Rain.

I'm located in Sandusky, Ohio.

I make a little bit of everything.

I mostly make accessories.

So earrings, necklaces, any kind of jewelry, key chains, pins, stuff like that.

Every once in a while, I'll do something like some decor.

I started out making nursery items for my baby's nursery and kind of grew from there.

I've always seen myself as creative but actually probably more as a writer.

I went to school for writing, then I was a children's librarian and I loved it.

And that really inspired me in ways that I never thought I would be inspired.

And it just really opened up a whole new world of like physical art for me.

I started off with my laser cutter and that was a big leap and that really took off and that really steered my business more towards jewelry.

And then as I did that, I started like researching, the laser cutter makes flat things.

I can do a lot of flat designs, but I wanna make 3D objects so what do you get for that?

A 3D printer.

So it was a really big learning step because I went from working on one dimension to having to design in 3D, having to work with a totally different medium.

There's a couple different ways I go about making a design.

Sometimes I will draw with my iPad and the Stylist.

I'm not very good at drawing.

So that's kind of like, it's gonna be something pretty simple for that to work out.

I've commissioned artwork, I've got some amazing friends who are artists.

But one of my favorite things to do is actually go through a 250, 200 year old books and find like public domain little images and just incorporate those into my designs.

I think when I started my business, my main goal was to be able to stay home with my daughter and to be able to just create this environment that was super creative and to show her that women can do this.

We can use our own two hands to make something super cool.

For the future, I'd like to definitely lean harder into the jewelry, I love the jewelry.

It's so special to me and important to me.

And just the way it can change the mood of an outfit, the mood of a person, there's something there that I'm chasing.

And I'd like to move into a design role I think.

That's where my heart lies, is just getting my ideas out there.

It was really surreal watching my business grow.

Whenever anybody buys anything from me, it's just so gratifying and it's so special.

It makes me feel validated but also like I'm doing something purposeful.

And when I get somebody say, "Hey, that is cool "and that is so cool that I'm gonna buy it."

That's amazing and I'm so appreciative.

- [David] Rabbit and Rain is just one of many Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs included in the Making It series.

To discover some more, visit arts.ideastream.org.

Did you know that there are secret tunnels beneath Cleveland's Soldiers and Sailors Monument?

On the next Applause, take a rare tour of this underground labyrinth and learn about the lore surrounding it.

Plus a designer instills her African American heritage into her woodworking.

And Northeast Ohio blues musician, Christine Jackson shows off her beloved CBG, the Cigar Box Guitar.

All that and more on the next episode of Applause.

♪ Now my first love didn't have much to say ♪ ♪ My first love didn't even have a name ♪ ♪ Some say it's foolish to carry on in such a way ♪ Destructive forest fires seem to be more and more common in the Western United States these days.

So much so that a group of concerned artists is collaborating with nonprofits from California and Nevada on the exhibit Forest Fire.

Let's travel to Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada's where the shows on view.

(upbeat music) - Forest Fire in its essence is a conversation starter for a very complicated and troubling topic for the community.

And we've broken it up into three very distinct public engagement platforms.

One is a very comprehensive interpretive exhibit which tells the story of the forest ecology and its involvement with humans.

We wanted to engage the community further by being involved with the local school district.

So with Sierra Watershed Education Partnerships, we created a collaborative relationship with them who have created curriculum for the Truckee Tahoe Unified School District to teach forest ecology - Forest Fire, as a project demanded this sense of multiple partners coming together with different things to offer.

Nevada County Arts Council played a key facilitating role along with the Sagehen Creek Field Station and Llewellyn Studios in bringing together multiple partners including California Arts Council, California Humanities, Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the University of Nevada, Reno.

The list goes on, the support has been amazing.

The exhibition is located at the Truckee-Donner Recreation and Park District's new community recreation center.

It's one of the most public spaces in Truckee.

(soft music plays) - We work with 17 artists.

Four of the artists we have loaned work from and the other 13 artists we commission directly to create pieces for the exhibit because the topics are so unique there was no previously existing artwork for them.

- If you think about the whole forest management challenge, it's really complicated and we all learn differently.

So we need to have different ways to tell a story.

- We said, hey, there's a problem in the forest.

We're having catastrophic fire, but there is a solution.

- By the different media, the variety of media that were used here in this exhibit, it allows people to find what they might resonate to and hopefully allow them to find something that they can connect with.

- [Michael] There is 2D art and 3D art.

We have paintings, we have sculpture, we have textile work.

- We wanted to bring the forest inside.

So when people walked into the exhibit, they knew immediately that they're in an exhibit about a forest.

(soft music plays) Since this is a public space, where it's not a place where people are going to see art, it's a place where people are coming to do other things.

They're gonna pass through this.

So we wanted people to understand the issues whether they spent 30 seconds, 30 minutes, three hours, three days in the exhibit.

We wanted it to be a visceral experience.

So when people walk into the exhibit, the first thing they see is the forest overhead.

So they immediately get a feel for whoa, this is a forest.

And the forest itself is a timeline of the forest ecology, of the chapters, of the story.

You walk into the old growth forest and then you get to what happened to the old growth forest.

And then you get to the forest that we have now and then you get to the hopeful future forest.

So as people walk through this corridor or they get the entire story in one artwork.

Hopefully that makes them stop and go, "What the heck is going on here?"

And leads to a more engaged experience.

(soft music plays) - Although this is a California based project, in many ways it's not, here we are on the edges of California and Nevada.

Certainly the Washoe people, the earliest peoples here would've had no concept of state lines and county lines where in the Northern Central Sierra and Forest Fire relates to swathes of forest in all directions.

- This forest was managed for thousands of years by the people who were here before us.

And the tool that they had, the Washoe had was fire.

In the Fall when they'd leave, they would light the place on fire.

When we have science to support that, we have corded tree stumps and we can get a history of pre-European small intensity fire, short time interval.

Every couple of years, we need to get the process back that these systems evolve with.

- The key message is one that fire need not be our foe, it can be our friend.

And that if we work with fire and with the elements and working across sectors, we can create a sustainable forest system which will survive catastrophic fire.

We're living in an extraordinary time.

I think we'll all agree that science has never been less respected as it is today.

One of the things that artists bring to the voice of the scientist is an emotional perception.

Something that will trigger an emotional response that will enable a deeper understanding that we need in order for science to make headway and improvements and bring solutions.

(soft music plays) - [David] Now it's back to the Buckeye State via the African nation of Nigeria.

Born in Lagos, artist Said Oladejo Lawal, now lives in Columbus where he paints colorful works inspired by his Homeland.

- Generally, inspiration to be an artist came from my dad.

My dad was a painter.

We painted houses which will include interior decoration, cutting stencils doing freezes, borders and stuff.

My dad, he has this writing desk.

And then that thing had drawers where he stashed all his drawings and stencils and when I'm in the house and I would go through the drawers and just look at things and just look at the cuts, the drawings and the color swatches.

It had all these color charts.

They were accordion folded type and you would look at, how look and look and look color.

So color started registering that early.

You wouldn't think it's gonna be useful later in life, who knew.

(laughs) So color started registering very early.

I paint with bright colors.

Intentionally, with bright colors.

There's a school in artistry that I liked, they call them the Fauvist.

They just love painting with colors in their original hues.

They can pick a yellow and just slap it there, red, blue.

So they grade those colors according to their strength.

And they, light and shade.

Yellow becomes the lightest, blue or ultramarine or cobalt becomes the darkest.

And the reds might be in the middle with the orange and stuff.

Some marks you would think that some artists would not retain because I think it's a mystic and paint over.

Those, I leave there and they make the most impact because they trick your mind into thinking the action is still on and on and on and on and on.

Sometimes I do paint in such a way that say, I mostly use flat brushes, which are like chisel heads.

When you make a mark with them, they have a square, angular feel to them.

I can make those angles into rectangles and squares that can be patches that make up a face or make up a painting.

And you sort of see different swatches of squares and you're like, but when you stand back, everything merges and form the picture.

And there are also sometimes I'm listening to say "Vivaldi" which is one of my favorite Four Seasons.

And you're painting and it feels as if the, your hand is being moved by the violin and maybe, maybe not, but it works.

And I have my fun doing that.

I always intentionally want my brushwork to create the kind of effect that brings emotion out.

I take inspiration from life.

I like music.

I don't play any instruments, but I like music.

And I always felt that life even landscape, even general day to day things that we do, there is music behind it.

There's a rhythm, there's a rhyme, there's balance, there's everything in there.

But then when you look at the painting which is a two dimensional thing, you are wondering, how do you fit music into that, other than painting the picture of a musician, right?

So I started playing around with how to present sound.

I always liked to make paintings that you stand in front of it and you're like, you can feel movement, you can feel depth.

You can just sort of be like you're in a concert, listening to whatever the picture is saying.

In Nigeria, there's a lot of dance.

Technically we have party for everything.

There's always a reason to dance.

Weddings in Nigeria, wow, I miss that.

Colors, you see the women dress, you see the young ladies dance.

It's beautiful.

I wanted to present the joyful feeling that you find in an environment where people are dancing and celebrating.

And there's some certain cultures when they dance in Nigeria, they hold handkerchiefs.

And that handkerchief moves with their body, their arms and that handkerchief sort of, it's like a conductor conducting a classical piece.

You follow the conductor's hand, you follow the beat, the redeem and everything.

So I wanted to show all that.

But at the same time, be able to show that in life there are celebrations.

And when the time to celebrate is here, make the most of it.

There are times there are no reasons to celebrate but who would know if you choose to celebrate even though there are no reasons to celebrate.

Who would really, really fault you for it really?

I mean, people might think it's awkward and out of place but that's what you might need for your sanity.

Your world is your world.

What you make of it is yours.

If you choose to have it all blue and sad, it's still yours.

But if you choose to just, yes, in spite of everything, break forth and be the joy for yourself and for others, it affect others.

It's like a reaction that just multiplies.

Gandhi was the one who said that, "Be the change that you hope to see."

My painting is one of my ways of being the change and presenting the change.

- [David] If music be the food of love, play on.

Shakespeare headed right in "Twelfth Night" a few centuries ago.

Fast forward to the 21st century as the Cleveland Orchestra performs a contemporary work by Austrian composer, Bernd Richard Deutsch.

This is another installment from the orchestra's digital streaming app, Adela.

Play on indeed.

(orchestra music playing) Well, we hope you enjoyed this artistic meal served up just now.

Thanks for stopping by.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

We've got another aesthetic buffet in the works for next week, and there's a seat saved for you at our little creative cafe known as Applause.

(orchestra music playing) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Production of Applause on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation and by Cuyahoga county residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.