(gentle piano music) - [Announcer] 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.

(upbeat music) - [David] Hello.

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

Welcome to Northeast Ohio's Emmy Award-winning arts and culture show "Applause."

In Cleveland's Brooklyn neighborhood, a series of doors opens to the talents of more than a dozen Latino artists from Northeast Ohio.

Let's step inside the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center on Archwood Avenue and discover the Doors to my Barrio Project.

- Doors to my Barrio was started in 2016.

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

And at first I was just thought, what am I going to 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 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.

(speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) - My door for the project, I was actually given Spain as my theme because bullfighter are very common in the Spanish artworks and everywhere.

It's a matador in a purple suit, matador suit and he's kind of like pulling like the little blanket, like when the bull goes by him and I colored it so that it 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, because a big percentage of the people are indigenous.

So it's the Aymara and the Quechua people.

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

So one of the rays is the (speaking foreign language) flag, which is actually also like a national flag and it represents the indigenous people, which I've never heard of that before.

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

- And 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 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 tone shine as the main feature.

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

There's like a kind of like a gasp.

And they're very impressed by like 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 want to have exposure as Latinx people.

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

(upbeat music) - The main population, Latino population, in Cleveland is Puerto Rican.

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

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

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

So I think just being part of it 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 (speaking foreign language).

So it means a lot to me, it feels like I kind of like find my space here.

(speaking foreign language) - [David] An ancient Hindu deity is reborn at the Cleveland Museum of Art this weekend.

After several years of painstaking restoration, a 1500-year-old Cambodian sculpture of Krishna goes on display.

But before paying a visit Ideastream Public Media producer, Mary Fecteau, brings us the story behind this popular cultural figure.

- Krishna sculptures and images have been made in India since the beginning of the making of sculptures in the historical period.

(upbeat Indian music) (vocalizing) And in those early images he's like a hero, he's a family clan hero.

He's called Krishna Vāsudeva, the Hero of Vrishni Clan.

(gentle flute music) It wasn't until really the third and fourth centuries, CE or AD, that Krishna starts taking on more of a series of mythologies that have to do with his youth.

And Krishna was born in order to slay a demon by the name of Kamsa, who had taken over as a wicked and overly powerful king.

But he had to be hidden among villagers of a cow herding class of people, off away from the capital city.

But from the time he was a baby, he started exhibiting miraculous traits.

Like when he would yawn, his mother would look down his throat and see the universe.

(bright twinkling music) She was like, "Oh my God,!

there was something special about this kid!"

He still acts like a normal baby, but then he has superpowers, and he's able to slay demons and protect the people of the village.

The King of the Gods, Indra, becomes furious.

And so Indra takes his most special raincloud and sends a destructive force of rain down on the village.

And then Krishna very playfully says, "I'm just going to lift this mountain like an umbrella," and just says to all the villagers, "Just stay by me, you'll be fine."

- [David] The exhibition Revealing Krishna, Journey to Cambodia's Sacred Mountain is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from this Sunday through January of 2022.

Next week, we'll take you behind the scenes at the Art Museums Conservation Lab, where this ancient sculpture was given new life.

(upbeat music) On the next "Applause," recently, a garden was unveiled in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, honoring 11 angels.

Plus we meet a watercolorist who went from being an engineer to a professional artist.

And we'll reveal the restoration of a masterpiece at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

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

(upbeat music) Vanessa Aramanda has been an artist her whole life.

When she started her business, A Glass Fantasy, almost 40 years ago, she could never have known that one day her daughter, Amy, would join her decades later.

Let's go into their studio in Sparks, Nevada and see this mother-daughter duo at work.

- A Glass Fantasy is a mother-daughter stained glass studio.

We like to focus on pretty much anything, really, I think.

We do repairs and customs, and hangings to candle holders to big installed windows.

(gentle music) - I started the business in 1987 officially.

I was doing glass in like '78.

So I've been doing it a long, long time.

I come from a family of artists.

My dad was a photographer.

One of my aunts had her masters from UCLA in art.

Growing up it was normal to be doing art.

And so actually I grew up thinking everybody could do this.

Everybody could do everything I can do, but I've found over the years, that's not the case.

It is a special thing.

And I do believe it's genetic, that because it runs so strong in our family.

And I think like there's families of doctors, there's families of lawyers, and there's families of artists.

It's amazing what comes out of these fingers.

And it's nice to be able to make a living on our own, doing things I like.

I like what I do.

I liked being able to be around to raise our kids.

I did art projects in the schools.

- She was always out here when we were little, we had a bunch of her pieces hanging in the house.

The studio has been in this garage, which is the house that I grew up in, for the last 35 years.

So I've always been around glass.

It's just always been a part of my life and I never thought that I would do it.

- I didn't really think about whether the kids would want to do it or not because I'm firm believer in them doing what they want to do.

But they're so artistic.

All three of my girls are so artistic that I'm not surprised that Amy came in the business.

- I started around two and a half or three years ago.

I went part-time at my day job to focus on my button making business, and then decided I had all this free time and my mom needed help revamping the business for the 21st century and getting online.

In exchange for doing social media and website stuff, she started teaching me.

- [Vanessa] Obviously she thinks the same way I do because she learned so fast and it just made sense to her.

(upbeat music) - It's a big process.

Each piece kind of starts differently.

Sometimes I get an idea and find reference photos and draw them.

I like to do my designing in Illustrator.

- Makeup design, make a pattern.

The pieces have to be cuttable.

So can't be any inside right angles because the break is gonna want to keep going straight.

So you have to be conscious of making cuttable pieces.

(upbeat music) Picking the glass is really important and it is time consuming.

- I feel very fortunate that I joined my mom, who has 40 years worth of glass.

So I just look slowly through all the pieces, try not to cut myself.

Pull them out, hold them up to the light, hold them up next to each other until I find what looks right.

Then you take a glass cutter and you score the glass.

Then you pull it apart and down and it breaks.

(upbeat music) - [Vanessa] So then you start cutting and grinding... (grinder whirring) foiling.

- [Amy] And then solder.

And then I usually edge my pieces in lead came, and then solder it again, and then clean it, and add chain... and then photograph.

(upbeat music) - [Vanessa] It's process.

It's a long, arduous, physical process.

(upbeat music) - [Amy] I really do love working with my mom and feel very fortunate to have joined her in this business endeavor.

- She helped me clean 30 years worth of mess in our studio and get it organized to where we can actually find the glass we want.

So that's really awesome.

And she has brought me kicking and screaming into the 21st century with Instagram and having a website.

And she's made this a real business.

(gentle music) - I feel very lucky to have joined her and, one, get to spend this time with her, but to suck up all the knowledge that she has.

She has 40 years of experience.

She's self-taught, which means that she's still constantly learning too.

So we're learning together.

But then I feel like I have a leg up over a lot of my peers my age, who are teaching themselves or learning off the internet.

Just having this relationship with my mom has been really special.

- [David] Columbus Ohio artist, Beth Himsworth, has lived in several countries and experienced many different cultures.

Much of what she's gleaned from her travels can be seen in the lush and striking mosaics that she creates.

In this story, we explore how the rhythms and patterns from all over the world are represented in her work.

- As I was living in South America for a long time, I would come home on different visits and my mother was making stained glass.

She kept telling me, "Oh, this is so much fun and you should do this."

And she made windows and lamps.

And I just kept saying, "Mom, no.

I don't follow patterns.

I don't measure anything.

There is nothing about stained glass that attracts me."

(gentle music) My husband and I, when we moved back here, went on a double date with some friends.

And we went to a place that did glass mosaic.

Which was really fun, except that it was with those little tiles.

And I made a tray and I took it and I showed it to my mom.

And I said, "Here, look."

She goes, "It would look a lot better if you made it out of glass."

I was like, "Oh, you know what, it would."

And so she gave me a box of glass and I went down to my basement with a glass cutter and started beating things up and started making mosaic out of it.

And it was just really fun.

(gentle music) I just became fascinated by the colors, the different kinds of translucence, and the incredible possibilities the glass has.

And then eventually I thought, well, I really liked the mosaic, I like working with glass, but I'd like to have it be a little more painterly.

I wanted the colors to kind of blend together better.

And I didn't know how to do that with glass.

So I started getting interested in a fused glass and with fused glass, I was able to overlap and interplay in ways that I hadn't been able to do before.

But it still wasn't quite what I wanted.

And I kept experimenting and experimenting, and then just by chance, I heard about a class by a guy who made the world's largest stain glass window at 4,000 square feet, Tim Carey.

And he is an amazing instructor.

And he shows you how to make your own sheets of glass and how to get the colors to kind of meld together.

So I could add, you know, five, six, eight colors if I want of glass into a sheet and as it melts together, then with frit and all kinds of little pieces of glass, it turns into something completely different.

And so with this whole body of work that we're looking at today, has been made with that technique.

(gentle music) When I try to explain to people that fused glass is warm glass, it's kind of hard to figure out.

They'll say, "Did you blow this?"

And so what's important to know about glass is that this is cold glass.

It is worked cold, it's put together cold, and it always stays flat like that.

This is a piece that my mother made years ago.

And then hot glass, is the typical thing you think of as being in a kiln, you know, with the blown glass and that kind of thing.

And it's really, really hot.

It's around 2000, 2200 degrees.

So what I do, fused glass is called warm glass because my kiln only gets up to 1700 degrees Fahrenheit.

And so at warm, glass is able to, it doesn't melt in terms of being like a really thick molasses type texture.

And so it can bend and move, but it doesn't become an actual liquid that you can blow as in hot glass.

And so in order to make things that have these kinds of characteristics with texture, I have to make a clay mold.

And with the clay mold, then I could lay this on, melt it together, and then I can make things out of it that I want to make.

And so I was talking before about this idea that I wanted to get more texture and more overlap into my glass.

And this was sort of an early attempt at that with fused glass.

Trying to get things on top of each other and things to mold together.

And it's so much easier now with the class that I've taken.

But this was my first attempt at trying to figure how to make glass a little more interactive with an overlapping with the different colors.

So this is warm glass, hot grass, and cold glass.

Now glass, when you put it in a kiln and it melt, it wants to level out.

Glass only wants to be this thick.

And unfortunately when you pile up glass, it will just flow all over the place and drip off the sides.

So it has to have dams.

So these walls that I construct around the piece, and I line so that they won't stick to the dams.

These walls will help the glass to continue to stay in the same framework.

In order to keep this leaf, this part of the leaf, from flowing into that part of the leaf.

You have to put a spacer in it of the clear glass.

So the clear glass will then hold it in place.

So I have to put in a whole lot of different pieces in order to make the shape that I'm looking for.

And then there are all these gaps.

So how are these gaps gonna fill in?

Some of them will fill in okay just by melting.

But I want to make sure that, especially in gaps from one leaf to another, that there's enough of a line there that you can tell which leaf is on top and so on.

So basically what I need to do is to take the glass frit that I made in my grinder.

And then I have to like brush it into the cracks.

So as I brush it into the cracks, then it kind of fills in, in places that where I want it to blend.

It looks pretty obvious like now that I have this fill into the glass, but once it's all melted together, you don't really see it that much.

So I have to check it one last time, make sure there's nothing more I need to do.

And then just close it and we'll find out in about 30 hours, if it came out the way we wanted it to.

Oh yeah, yeah, so far so good.

All came together pretty well.

Now I just needed a piece of glass as a scraper and I'll get some of this paper off.

And then the next step is it's going in my sink to get a bath and get the rest of this off.

And then we'll see how it turned out.

It's kind of heavy.

(gentle music) Now you can't see the top very well because it's in the shadows.

It will be a little bit brighter than that.

And this is a piece that's intended to be frontlit.

So it under a spotlight, I think it'll pop out pretty well.

I see people standing and just kind of staring and they look at how the pieces come together and they look at the negative space and the positive space.

And sometimes I've had art glass artists come in and they'll look at a really long slender piece of glass.

And they'll be like, "How did you cut that?

I don't know how."

And it's because I practiced with a different kind of technique than they're probably using.

And part of it for me is not being a classically or academically trained artist.

I don't have the limitations of this is how it's supposed to be, and this is what you can't do.

And this is what you can do.

So I'm always experimenting and playing around.

And then hopefully I can come up with some things that are kind of unique in that way.

I hope that it encourages them somehow.

I hope that they look at it.

I hope that they feel a sense of, "Oh yeah, this is cool.

This is like life.

And this is something that kind of makes my day feel a little bit better."

I really feel like it's a part of our humanity to be engaged with nature.

It's part of who we are.

And when we live these busy urban lives, we get disconnected from that.

So I really feel that through art, we can get a little bit better connected, and begin to just appreciate a little bit more of the world that we live in.

- [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. Barnett.

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

(gentle piano music) (bright music) (gentle piano music) - [Announcer] 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.

(gentle piano music)