(calming music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on idea stream 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.

(jazz music) - [David] Hello, I'm Idea Stream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

Welcome to Northeast Ohio's arts and culture show, Applause.

Recently, a memorial named the Garden of 11 Angels was unveiled on Cleveland's east side.

It commemorates the 11 women murdered by Anthony Sowell, more than a decade ago.

During the ribbon cutting ceremony, friends and family members remembered those they'd lost.

- Not only have I lost my grandmother, I've lost my mother in the process.

Every woman in this room knows a mother's love.

Every woman in this room knows a grandmother's love, but everybody in this room has also seen the angels overcome all of this, and if they can, so can we.

- My name is Willie W. Smith Jr.

I'm the cousin of Kimberly Yvette Smith.

And this is such a beautiful day for the Smith family.

We could not thank everyone, all the organizations and individuals that help put this together because it was long overdo.

- Before my sister's untimely death.

Cause she died seven months after my mother was found on his property, she knew what happened to her mother.

My grandmother, who will be 84 years old next month, before she perished, knew what happened to her daughter.

That is the silver lining for the Carmichael family.

- [David] The centerpiece of the memorial is a 12 foot black granite statue engraved with Maya Angelo's poem, Still I Rise.

And the names of the 11 women killed by Anthony Sowell.

Placed throughout the garden are subtle reminders of the women whose lives were taken too soon.

- It was really important to the family that the symbolism of 11 was represented throughout the whole development site.

And so actually when you walk up to the memorial through the infinity symbol, we have 11 large pavers that leads you to the eternal flame.

We have clusters of trees in 11, like 11 Magnolias, 11 Maples, 11 different types of bushes and perennials that are on site, all replicated in the theme of 11.

And it's just a subtle way of paying respect and homage to those 11 angels.

- [David] The crimes took place on Imperial avenue in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

- [Interviewee] The Mount Pleasant neighborhood is a strong, proud community that really was the black working class of Cleveland.

- Mount Pleasant's a family neighborhood.

It's a family oriented community, it's built with families in house.

It's the most residential ward in the entire city of Cleveland, we have a lot of industry, we do have Luke Easter Park, which is the largest urban park in the entire state of Ohio.

After that, mostly the land set aside in Mount Pleasant is for housing.

And if you have housing, you have families.

So it's a family oriented community.

- [David] Between 2007 and 2009, Sowell prayed on the neighborhood.

He lured many of the women, some of whom struggled with addiction, to his home, with the promise of drugs and alcohol.

- He really played on society and our most vulnerable population.

He looked for women who were struggling with addiction or other issues associated with it.

And as a community, as a society, as a city, we kind of let these women down.

- [David] Some claim law enforcement could have done more.

- [Matt] Time and again, family members had reported this, to not only the police, but to other organizations and advocacy groups.

We need to listen to women.

We need to watch out for our loved ones.

- The city of Cleveland dropped the ball, and it's simple as that.

They came across Sowell on more than one occasion, they knew he was a predator.

They knew women were going missing in the community.

They didn't do their due diligence as it related to these women, simply because these women were the marginal women.

- [David] A tip from one of Sowell's intended victims led to his arrest.

When police searched the home, they found the bodies of 11 women.

- One of the first things that I know, and I'm not even in law, is that you start to look around and see who are the ones who've done this in the past.

So if they had done that due diligence and saw that Sowell lived on the street and a lot of women were becoming missing in this particular area, then A would have lead to B and B would have lead to C, and, you know, not saying that all the women would have been saved, but there's no doubt in my mind that some of the women would have been saved.

- [David] In 2011, Sowell was convicted and sentenced to death.

He died in prison earlier this year, his house on Imperial Avenue was demolished with a promise from the city of Cleveland to create a memorial that pays homage to the 11 women.

For years, the project stalled.

- A memorial should have been built earlier.

I'm glad that some of the things that the city of Cleveland was doing at that particular time, we've changed, as it relates to when victims become missing.

But I mean, the delay is unconscionable and there's no if ands or buts about that.

And I'm just glad that individuals have stepped up to the plate.

- [David] In 2017, Jackie Gillam of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy stepped in to jumpstart the project.

- She felt, based upon the work that she was doing, that maybe we were best suited as an organization to step in because the local community development organization in that neighborhood at the time was the Buckeye CDC, which is now defunct.

And so she felt we could fit in, slip into that void, work with the family members, work with the community, develop a fundraising strategy to make this memorial happen.

But for Jackie Gillum, this memorial does not happen.

- [David] Unfortunately, Gillum would never see the completion of the monument.

In the summer of 2021, she died of cancer.

- [Announcer] Three, two, one.

(applause) - [David] A decade after Anthony Sowell's reign of terror ended, the Garden of 11 Angels now sits on the very spot where the women were discovered.

- It's 11 women, left one day and never came home.

And this memorial should be a memorial remembrance, not only for those 11, but people in your life, that one day you should say that, every day you should say to your loved one, I love you.

Because they may not come home that day.

- I view this memorial the way it fits into the community.

It's an opportunity to demonstrate to the residents of Mount Pleasant, but more poorly the residents who live on Imperial Avenue, that we value them, that they're not forgotten.

This is a demonstration to the community that we value them.

And that these women will never be forgotten.

(calming music) - [David] A 15 hundred year old statue of the Hindu God Krishna just got a 21st century make-over at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Let's go behind the scenes of a restoration that combines the work of ancient artisans and modern technology.

The Cleveland museum of art has tried for decades to do right by this guy.

He first arrived in the museum in the 1970s, broken into pieces.

Curators tried to put him back together, but didn't quite get it right.

And then about four years ago, a new generation of museum staffers decided to try again.

(upbeat music) - I love the hand, you know, it's so subtle, like that index finger just bends ever so slightly, it never ceases to amaze me.

- [David] It's been a long journey.

The story actually starts hundreds of years ago in Southern Cambodia, near the entrance of a sacred site at the twin peaked mountain of Phnom Da.

It was there where sculptors carved the image of the Hindu God Krishna.

This popular deity was depicted holding a mountain over his head like an umbrella to protect his worshipers from a torrential rainstorm.

- The ritual to make this sculpture sacred, when it was installed.

Part of the installation included putting tokens of gold under the tenant, inside the pedestal.

And so poor thieves looking for gold would topple the sculptures to get the gold.

- [David] Around 1912, a group of French archeologists first discovered the broken pieces.

Those pieces were then bought, sold, and traded a number of times over the next six decades.

For instance, a rich Belgian banker liked the head and torso, but wasn't all that interested in the rest of it.

- So they buried the pieces.

Some of them are used as edgings, you know, for the garden.

- [David] A curatorial crew from the Cleveland Museum of Art dug the pieces out of the garden in 1975.

And they attempted to reassemble the ancient statue.

- It is not easy, these pieces, there's no joints remaining between them.

The angles are difficult.

- [David] And a key piece was missing, the left-hand, which holds the mountain over Krishna's head.

It turns out that that fragment had been mistakenly attached to a different statue, still in Cambodia.

The museum of art conservationists used 3D imaging from Case Western Reserve university to uncover this and discover any other potentially misplaced parts.

- We recently received some files from the National Museum of Cambodia.

And they've been working on preparing their Krishna, which is a brother to this one, also from the same site.

For loan, actually, to us in preparation for the exhibition about our Krishna.

So while they're working on it, they started thinking that perhaps our right thigh, the right thigh that we have on Krishna now, belongs to their sculpture.

So they sent us some photos, some dimensions and measurements, and also some photogrammetry, some 3D images.

So as of now, we are looking at them and it looks pretty promising.

- [David] 3D printing technology was used to create a plastic duplicate of the sculpture.

That made it easier for the staff to see how the pieces went together.

- If you look at his raised hand, the distance between his elbow and his wrist is rather short, and that's one of the reasons that they didn't put the handpiece on in the 1970s.

We have sort of more mounting evidence that it does belong, including the petrographic studies, looking at the type of stone and how they match each other and looking at exactly how that strut fits together.

There is a really good join there.

So we are convinced that it does belong to this sculpture.

- It's that new digital technology that really turned the corner with making the decision that it does belong to the Cleveland Krishna.

- [David] Now getting Krishna's hand from Cambodia happened, thanks to another mythic Hindu figure, Hanuman the monkey God.

The museum acquired this sculpture in 1982, and visitors loved to pose with it.

But in 2015, Sonia Remays found through research that Hanuman, purchased in good faith, had likely been looted from his home country back in the 1970s.

Cleveland museum of art director, William Griswold contacted the Cambodian secretary of state and made arrangements to return the Hanuman sculpture.

- The deputy prime minister and I signed an agreement transferring possession of the Hanuman to the kingdom of Cambodia.

Dignitaries from all over the world, lay garlands of flowers on the sculpture of Hanuman, which we had shipped back to Cambodia just a few days earlier.

- [David] And that goodwill gesture from the museum led to the reunification of Krishna and his hand.

For the past four years, the museum's conservation staff has worked to restore the aging sculpture to its divine glory, a task that can often seem like a complex jigsaw puzzle.

- So these are pieces that were found in a box in storage, and they do come from this sculpture.

It just looked like a bunch of random pieces of rock.

And, you know, as part of my free time, I was sitting and trying to see if any of these pieces came together and you can see here that these fragments do actually fit together into a larger section, which will make it significantly easier to find where they come from on the sculpture.

And so once we can identify, you know, where this goes on there, we can just put them back in and have a little bit more of that original surface intact.

- One of the main challenges is that when the sculpture was assembled in the 1970s, it was assembled with no intention of it ever coming apart again, but over the years since then, the conservation field has moved a little bit farther in the direction of thinking more long-term and making sure that everything we do can be undone by someone else, because we've started to realize that nothing is permanent.

- [David] It's been a long journey, covering thousands of miles and hundreds of years.

- It is overwhelming, honestly, to see these two sculptures reunited together in their correct forms, the legs and feet that were here in Cleveland for so long, to see them now on their rightful body and how it just feels so right.

- [David] And in a time of national and international disagreements and tensions, it's an example of collaboration in the name of art and culture.

The exhibition revealing Krishna, Journey to Cambodia's Sacred Mountain, is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through January of 2022.

On the next Applause, we comb through an exhibit at the Kent State university museum that looks at the history and art of African-American hair.

And we look at the fashions of academy award-winning costume designer, Ruth Carter.

We'll also stop by an exhibit inspired by everyday caution signs used as a way of approaching some difficult topics.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

And now we meet watercolorist Arthur Dillard, based in Bradenton, Florida, who went from being an engineer to a professional painter, take a look.

- My name is Arthur Dillard, I'm a watercolor artist, and I've been doing that for about 20 years.

In essence, I really been doing it all my life, since I was about eight years old.

But professionally I've been doing it 20 years.

And I always had a love for art.

And everybody discouraged me from being an artist.

So you can't make a living doing that, and with thoughts of that, I listened to him for over 20 years.

I was the engineer for 25 years.

I really didn't enjoy being an engineer because at that time, when I graduated in engineering, there were very few black engineers in the state of Florida and I didn't want to leave Florida.

So every job I went to, I was the only black engineer or the first one there.

(jazz music) I got sick when I was 35 and it took them eight years to determine that I had MS. My last job was downtown reign as a project engineer.

And I ended up to start having physical shut downs with MS and it's really ugly.

And then all of a sudden I get real tired.

And it so happened, I saw two art studios down the street.

So I had it good getting the artist space there.

When I started having those physical shut downs, I would go down there for an hour, hour and a half, and then kind of create.

And at that point I ended up start painting again on a frequent basis.

I end up getting this too young, just like I said I've had that studio for over 20 years now.

And everybody told me to say, you're never gonna make a living doing art.

You can't be successful at art, especially in this era, you got to paint trees and beach scenes and things like that.

And I ended up believing that for a minute.

And I ended up hating it, painting those kinds of scenes.

And I stopped painting, when I enjoy painting.

And I ended up doing shows all over the United States in order to survive.

Because at that time there were very little shows in Florida that African-American artists could participate in.

So I ended up fortunate enough to meet some other artists that was going through the same thing I was going through, And we came up with a group of artists, it was about 19 of us.

When I first started, we always kind of remind ourselves of doing like the (mumbles) which a lot of the musicians did back in Atlanta.

They had the National Black Arts Festival there.

They had one in Houston, you would go to Houston.

So because of that, you would always have a circuit.

Even to the day, there's a lot of shows that a lot of African-American artists can't get into, but that's just the bias that we have in this society.

- I first met Art at the Black Arts Festival here in Atlanta almost 20 years ago, about 18 years ago, I think it was 2002.

(jazz music) It was the last day of the Black Arts Festival.

And I went specifically looking for John Coltrane or Muhammad Ali.

And I was about to leave out of the mall and his booth caught the corner of my eye.

And when I went in, he had everything I was looking for.

So his, you know, his black and white pieces are, you know, what he's famous for, but all the jazz pieces and the sports pieces really spoke to me.

And the really cool thing about Art is he's such a great guy.

He's one of my best friends.

And a quick story, when he was staying with me for running a Black Arts Festival, I think it was 2004, the room he was in, I had some pictures out and stuff.

So he actually snuck a picture of my dad out, made a copy of it, went back to Florida, painted my dad boxed.

And so he did this huge color piece of my dad and brought it back the next time he saw me, it was just really cool.

And he also did a picture of my mother after she passed and made prints for all my siblings.

So I gave all my siblings a print of it for Christmas a few years back.

So just a really special guy.

And like I said, one of my dearest friends.

- One of the things in my artist's statement, I always say is that I love painting old people and kids because old people always have a story with the lines and the wrinkles in their face.

It tells their whole life stories.

And I always liked, for my art to tell a story, and kids are so innocent.

One of my two favorite pieces is of my two aunts.

I think those two pieces, because I remember when I was little, we would always go to my mom's hometown in Georgia.

And she and her sisters would always be going to church on Sundays.

And they'd have those huge purses and big hats.

Some of the kids pictures are some of my grandkids.

And the reason I ended up doing them is that, just like I said, I got real sick when I was 35.

I didn't think I was gonna live very long after then.

And I said, God, just let me live long enough to see at least one grandchild.

And, you know, I was blessed to see 12, and three great-grandchildren.

So with that, it's always a blessing to do something you love.

And that's why I tell a lot of young artists that I've mentored over the years when you paint, paint things that you love and you can identify with that.

And with that, people will love it.

(jazz music) - [David] Every year during the holiday season, an origami holiday tree is displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city.

Volunteers from origami USA fold paper into a variety of inventive designs to decorate the tree.

- Origami on the tree, it started with Alice Gray, who was an entomologist here, and she was always into arts and crafts.

- And we used to use her office to have meetings and fold and play and listen to her rather large hissing cockroaches.

And Alice used to make a little tree.

- She decorated a three-foot tree with origami insects and told somebody about how it would be so great if the museum had a holiday tree with origami on it.

- [Ros] And they gave her this humongous treat to decorate, and we all did.

This is an amazing marriage of science and art.

- So this is the 45th tree for the museum.

And it's been a wonderful tradition that we honor and cherish.

We have a whole collection that we've developed.

- And they range from super complex all the way down to super simple.

You can do every snail on them, or an alligator if you want to.

And we have a lot of repeat models that we rearrange in different ways because we bank them.

It's not practical to do over a thousand models every year.

And we always make it look like a different tree.

- We'll also bring in new models because of each new theme may require special models.

One of the stronger themes that we have is based on the dinosaurs among us special exhibition, which means that these are dinosaurs that later developed into birds.

And we're showing the relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

(owl hoots) - And we research different flora fauna, and try to reproduce it in origami.

That's why I had a lot of cute hatchlings and egg nests and other silly things.

And they're really very nice and fun to fold.

- Unlike Christmas ornaments or holiday ornaments, we get much more play and interesting ways of positioning the models when we have floral wire glued to them from two or three different points, they can be standing.

We can twist them in different directions and angle them, kind of looks like they're interacting with one another.

They all hang out together and have a good time.

- Five, four, three, two, one, zero.

(crowd cheers) (holiday music) - The success is the popularity of the tree and people saying, ooh ah, just the little kids pointing.

Wow, wow, it's just great.

It's a labor of love.

I enjoy it, it's magic.

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

For more arts and culture stories, go to arts.ideastream.org.

Thanks for watching, I'm David C. Burnett.

Stay safe, and we hope to see you next week for another round of Applause.

(calming music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on Idea Stream 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.