- 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.

- Hello I'm Idea Stream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

Welcome to Northeast Ohio's Arts and Culture show Applause.

A 52 year old mural in downtown Cleveland just got a facelift.

Back in 1969, artists, John Morrell wanted to promote the goal of brotherhood in racially divided times.

Planners say the painting's message has a new resonance today.

A little over a half century ago, two men met in downtown Cleveland to celebrate what they both hoped would be a new symbol for the city.

- In 1969, my dad was 37 years old and he was a creative director in Cleveland, Ohio.

- In 1969.

My father, Carl Stokes, was mayor of Cleveland at the age of 42.

- The occasion was the dedication of a mural that spoke to their mutual passion for brotherhood and social justice.

John Morrell told the crowd that his work "Life is Sharing the Same Park Bench" was painted to honor Carl Stokes, who was two years into his first term as the first black mayor of a major American City.

Stokes' election in 1967 had brought the eyes of the nation to Cleveland, especially after the devastation of recent racial uprisings across the country.

Here, was a moment of hope.

A moment of optimism.

- The optimism came that he believed in America.

That a black man can become elected in a majority white city.

- The idea to celebrate that spirit came from a guy who originally hailed from Rochester, New York.

Art had been part of John Morrell's life ever since he was a kid.

- He started cartooning when he was in the army.

He did little pictures that are just marvelous.

- He always did Christmas cards every year, and he would hand draw them.

He would hand draw all the birthday cards and anytime there was a holiday, he would do that.

- A job opportunity brought the family to Cleveland in the mid 1960s when the times, they were a changein.

- His personality, in my opinion really came out in the late 60s.

You know, very influenced by the times and having long hair and it was an expressive thing for him.

- John Morrell's outward appearance was emblematic of the thoughts and feelings he harbored inside.

- He had a very strong social justice leaning in, you know, personally in his work and cared a lot about organizations in um that-that dealt with the wellbeing of of, you know, people in need in our community.

- For instance, in the wake of a 1968 shootout between police and a group of black activists led by Fred Ahmed Evans, Morrell created a controversial newspaper ad that portrayed Evans as the victim of what he saw as a questionable legal proceeding.

But then, Morrell turned his attention to another image.

- The mural was created in 1969 when there was a lot of social racial unrest in Cleveland and in cities around the country.

And the message that John Morrell and Mayor Stokes brought forward was about togetherness and brotherhood.

And that's the symbolism of this mural.

- He believed in public art.

You wanted the public to see all art.

He didn't think you should pay to get into a museum.

Everybody should enjoy art and should be able to see it.

People that wouldn't ordinarily see art should see it.

He found the building.

They went in and they asked the owner, "Would you mind if I put this on this wall?"

And the guy's like "okay".

We would just go and hang out on the weekends because it kind of encompassed my dad for the weekends.

And he would ask people to come up.

"You want to come paint?"

and they look around, you know, people would just climb up and slap a little paint on.

He didn't really care if it was perfect.

He didn't, it made no difference to him.

He just wanted people to be happy.

He wanted to explain what he was doing.

- Well, I know that he felt at the time it was important.

You know, when he was painting it, he was getting death threats from people that they were going to shoot him off the scaffolding.

They did not want that black figure on there.

They were literally calling up the house and threatening him.

- The mural was dedicated on June 7th, 1969.

- It was exciting seeing my dad be recognized for something that he had done.

There was dancing.

There was, there was all sorts of fun stuff for a little kid.

And my dad looked happy.

I mean, he was just so grateful that it got there because it, he didn't do it on his own.

He had a lot of support and he got a lot of donations and he had people that wanted to help.

And he, he made sure that everybody knew that strangers helped paint it.

You know, people, people wanted to be part of this and he wanted to make sure that it stayed there and that people loved it.

- But not everybody loved it.

There was even talk in the early 90s of painting over the mural and replacing it with a new image.

- He was upset.

He was beyond upset.

And he was so grateful when they did decide to re redo it and rededicate it.

And he was very proud.

- I think it's a really wonderful example about the sort of integrity and the sort of longevity and the importance of this, this piece.

And it's part of why we're proud to give it its next life again.

- As part of its 10th anniversary, the Public Art Organization Land Studio was able to fund a restoration of the mural, which will include new landscaping and actual benches in the pocket park, that's hosted the painting for all these years.

Alan Giberson, a young artist with a love for old school techniques, was tapped to do the job.

- I've definitely done like restoration jobs.

Like not like this.

This is like, it's almost graphic designing, but it was so pre graphic design.

It's like, it's a head of its time in a lot of ways.

You know.

The line work is really nice for being rough brick.

It's not really hard to paint or anything.

I just like, I just always want stuff to last long and I want to be able to like see it when I'm older.

- The guy responsible for the original mural, won't get to see this newly refreshed version of his most enduring work.

John Morrell died in 2010, in his native Rochester at the age of 77.

But his family will have it to hold on to.

- IT took days just to get the scaffolding up.

And then they put it up in stages.

I am so happy because I had been pushing, trying to figure out a way a little housewife and Rochester, New York can figure out to talk Cleveland into making it better, fix it, paint it.

Don't let it fade away or cover it up.

It's something he was so proud of and it keeps him living.

- He was very proud of that message of racial tolerance.

And it's obviously just as timely, if not more timely today.

- My wife has done this, the mini museum of the house.

(chuckles) So here, this is a original photo on East Hijab, 47 street with my father and myself.

That's me as a baby.

I just really hate that.

Number one, we're still in this situation and we're in even a greater fight today than maybe what we were back in the 60s.

The significance of the park bench still resonates because the fight still continues.

- You'll find more on the Rededication of the Refreshed John Morrell mural at arts.ideastream.org.

About the same time that John Morrell was making his mark in Cleveland, another artist was stirring things up in New Mexico.

In 1968, using a pallet of computer generated letters, numbers and symbols, painter, Frederick Hammersley explored art in revolutionary way.

Take a look.

- The movement that started with computers at UNM was really cool.

The program Art One becomes the medium that the artist uses and it's an entirely new medium.

What happened was a whole bunch of artists took over technology that was meant for other purposes like payrolls and nuclear weapons.

And they played with it.

They made something visually interesting and completely unexpected.

Hammersley was the kind of an artist to function well within limits.

Over the course of several hundred works, he did more than anyone else to explore the parameters of what was possible with art form.

He was very interested in, within, within a boundary.

Even if the boundaries were clear, his type of art was to move all around to every possible q-quarter of that sort of walled garden, exploring the possibilities up and down in and out, back and forth.

It's reducing a visual idea to a set of instructions a-and computers that this is still true.

Computers are very stupid.

They have to be told to exactly everything down to the last parameter.

And so this kind of thing appealed to Hammersley.

Working through a language like that.

He was, that was his kind of thing.

He'd flourished under it for the better part of two years.

He devoted almost all of his attention to creating artworks like Art One.

Hammersley, he had a great sense of humor.

He was always making jokes.

He-he'd often gave his works titles that were, that had sort of a play on words in them.

Like "Take a Moment for You" and then in a prominent place, in-in the work would be the letter U, you know, and so he was always, he was, he was looking for ways to use humor, to kind of demystify art and make it more user-friendly.

What's going on is that they're taking a line printer that prints numbers and letters and mass symbols.

And they're using those symbols in a new way to take the old meaning out of them and give them a new, purely visual meaning within the framework of a of a page of computer paper.

The big discussion back then was the two cultures.

We have a scientific culture and a literary culture or an artistic culture, and they have nothing to say to each other.

After World War II, this was the this was the cultural debate back then because you have avant-garde art that very few people understand.

And then you have avant-garde science, some of which is like top secret.

Where's where's the meeting point?

Guess what?

Art One is a meeting point.

What I loved about Hammersley's art is its, is its originality basically.

He had a show of these words in Albuquerque and the reviewer said, 'It's sort of interesting to see something used for text forms now becoming art.'

And that's the biggest surprise of this whole thing.

You don't expect it.

You're like 'what's this?'.

And any time an artists gets you to sort of wonder where you are at that moment, then they've succeeded.

They've challenged the way you look at stuff And Hammersley, he accomplished that.

(enchanted flute music) Art One can expand our understanding of what art is.

Because look, the computer that they used, did the payroll for UNM.

It participated in the Manhattan project, making nuclear weapons.

It did the scientific and mathematical calculations for the science departments.

And guess what?

It made art.

It-it was something, it was like, it was a corner of creativity in a very esoteric and even top secret world.

That's, that's inspiring.

That's a cool thing.

- [David C. Barnett] 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.

Cleveland artists, Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, have spent their lives creating images of black power and beauty.

The Jarrells work as individual artists and as members of AfriCOBRA, a collective established in 1968 to create art, addressing issues of equality and civil rights.

Wadsworth's new book, AfriCOBRA documents the group's history, origins and its mission.

(upbeat funk music) Art brought Jae and Wadsworth together in the 1960s.

They both studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and began dating.

Jae, studying fashion design and Wadsworth painting.

- She was designing fashions when I met her.

So, and she had a business.

I painted at night and on the weekends.

And Chicago was very important in this movement, in our art.

I had in the past, all been basically creating specially movements, not in a city like Chicago.

It was New York City and things like that.

So what we ended up doing was making Chicago a major city where art came out of.

- The sixties were a tumultuous time in US history, the beginning of the Black Power Movement and the call for civil rights.

Inspired by the movement, in 1965, black poets, musicians, writers, and artists in the New York, Newark area started the Black Arts Movement to create black art for black people.

It soon spread to major cities around the country In Chicago, Wadsworth and other African-American artists collaborated on a large outdoor mural called The Wall of Respect.

It was the first of its kind in the country.

- The first thing happened in Chicago was the, was the wall of respect that went viral.

Not just nationally, but internationally.

And this was the first visual art during the Black Power Movement.

New York opened up the repertory of Black Repertory Theatre without any visual arts.

So what I'm saying is Chicago was the first one to put digital arts during the Black Power Movement that went viral with the Wall of Respect.

- With the success of the Wall of Respect in 1968, Wadsworth and Jae Jerrell, and three other Chicago artists, launched AfriCOBRA.

The African commune of "bad" relevant artists.

As visual artists, they were at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement.

- [Wadsworth] Who formed the collective that we named Cobra in the beginning.

And we, we added some Afri to it to make it AfriCOBRA African Cobra cause that was five founding members who was Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams.

- [David C. Barnett] Themes within the art included African designs and positive messages of unity.

The group embraced the use of lettering, straight lines and bright vivid colors known as Kool-Aid colors to create a black aesthetic.

- [Wadsworth] Kool-Aid colors are a variegation of bright, intense colors with a sensibility in harmony.

Kool-Aid color was representative of what black people was wearing, clothing they was wearing in the sixties.

Real bright colored clothing.

So we chose that as one of that was the first principle we chose.

And we had frontal images, which is, is inspired by African sculpture, which is always a frontal view, never three quarter view, which represents strength and directness.

And we wanted to use positive images.

That's another principle.

- [David C. Barnett] AfriCOBRA held its first major exhibit "Ten in Search of A Nation" at the studio museum in Harlem in 1970.

Its purpose was to educate the public and empower the black community.

Wadsworth remained a member of AfriCOBRA until 1998, eventually finding his way to Cleveland, his wife Jay's hometown.

Over the decades, he began to see a retelling, a revision of the history of AfriCOBRA and sought to set the record straight.

- [Wadsworth] I wrote the book basically to correct all of the uh, improper information out on its own line and everything.

Anything put out about it in writing basically it was not right.

Even, even a member of the group, the guy that was basically the spokesman for the group, he started writing false things about the group, like, you know, uh, drop into members, adding a member that did not exist, did not join the group.

So that's why I wrote the book.

- [David C. Barnett] Some 60 years later, the work of AfriCOBRA artists is being recognized.

In 2017, the Cleveland Museum of Art, purchased a painting by Wadsworth Gerald for more than $97,000.

In addition, the history, ideas and paintings found between the pages of the book, AfriCOBRA, are being taught in art classesaround the country.

- [Wadsworth] 'Cause AfriCobra is, is far more about than just makin' art.

Y-you will read that, you know, we had a political slant with an aesthetic that's about politics, life.

So our history book, arts initiative, not just African American art history it's art history, period.

- [David C. Barnett] And now, let's take a trip to the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts to visit an exhibit focused on New England's connection with transcendentalism and alternative thought.

The exhibit explores the movement's history, while also featuring work by contemporary artists engaged with its ideas.

- New England is dotted with the clapboard shelters of thought.

The Old Manse, where Ralph Waldo Emerson sussed out spirituality in nature.

Orchard house, where Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson threaded, a transcendentalist path.

And Fruitlands, Alcott's short-lived, utopian commune.

- Throughout New England, particularly in Massachusetts, there were a number of agrarian settlements, who lived communally and strive for a better working society on a small scale.

- [David C. Barnett] It's the belief of Sarah Montross, curator of the exhibition, visionary New England at the decor of a sculpture park and museum, that those utopian notions linger here, taking root today via a host of contemporary artists.

- Sarah, this is gorgeous on the surface, but tell me what's happening here.

- [Sarah Montross] So we are standing amid an installation of photography and a floor piece by the New Haven artist, Kim Weston.

Kim designed this array of incredible photographs activated by a Memorial.

You're looking at thousands of red silk tobacco bundles, and each of these signifies a life lost.

So the Memorial is to women and children of Native American descent who suffered much higher degrees of violence, disappearance and death.

Behind us are large-scale photographs printed on metal that Kim took at various pow-wows throughout New England that Kim and her family are apart of.

The spirit energy of the ancestor or the deity who's inhabited by the performers is expressed through Kim's work.

- [David C. Barnett] Here, you'll find the traditional trappings of transcendentalism like Henry David Thoreau's pencils.

But also new sculpture by artist Sam Durant.

It stems from 2016, when the California based artist stationed himself in Concord at the Old Manse.

Duran built the outline of a home reflecting those of Concord's first free black men and women.

The installation became a meeting place for public conversation and is resurrected here along with this sculpture of fused furniture.

A desk, representing 18th century, black poet, Phillis Wheatley morphed with a recreation of Emerson's chair.

- [Sarah Montross] Both of these pieces of furniture that which these writers, these creators, these world builders would have sat and put pen to paper are now being shown in dialogue.

And in fact, supporting one another.

- [David C. Barnett] In gallery upon gallery, artists in the exhibition interrogate utopian ideals.

The vibrant paintings of the late artist, Paul Lafley, are like diagrams for transcendence mantras, while artist Michael Medeiros envision a future world after climate change.

- [Sarah Montross] Utopian thought emerges during particularly contested historic epochs.

And so I do think right now, amid COVID, amid different crises, we are seeing a regeneration of utopian energy.

- [Sam Adams] Who I was interested in, who I found interesting in our collection were invested in social progress.

- [David C. Barnett] Sam Adams is the curator of the companion show, transcendental modernism, which presents artists from the museum's collection who crafted their own 20th century take on the theme.

- [Sam Adams] Overall, I would have to say they're darker.

You know, the show opens with exiles and emigres who are escaping Nazi Europe.

The development of mysticism in their art is different, but it meets up with the same strands from transcendentalist thinkers from the 19th century.

- [David C. Barnett] Adam says for some of the artists, including poet, Gary Rickson, the spirituality comes in the actual making.

- [Sam Adams] For him painting this, is a very charged experience where he's channeling these words that have come to him.

- [David C. Barnett] For more than 200 Years, America's thought leaders, writers, and artists have charted paths to utopia.

But as this exhibition reminds us, none have made it there.

- What is utopia?

- Oh, it's such a great, great question.

Hard to answer.

I think utopia is a concept, a ideal that is never achieved.

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

As we say goodbye, here's a look at the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of music director, Franz Welser-Möst, performing Beethoven's String Quartet No.

10 for harp recorded live at Severance.

It's part of the orchestra's in focus series, available on the Adella app named after orchestra founder, Adella Prentiss Hughes.

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

I'm David C. Barnett.

Hope to see you next week for another round of applause.

(classical music plays) - 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.