(lively piano music) - [Narrator] 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.

(lively jazz music) - [David] Hello, I'm David C. Barnett.

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

For more than 60 years, the Cleveland Arts Prize has celebrated local artistic excellence.

Two visual artists among this year's honorees draw attention to what we trash and what we treasure.

You'll see how they both explore environmental issues with their work, as we head now inside their studios with Ideastream Public Media's, Carrie Wise.

(gentle piano music) - [Carrie] Lauren Yeager works with found objects.

They're mostly items people toss to the curb, but she gives them new life in her Midtown studio in Cleveland.

- To try to add value back to that item is like a way of recovering it from, at least in our community or in Cleveland, everything on the curb is going to a landfill right now.

- [Carrie] Yeager has been focused on creating sculptures with what she finds on the street for the past several years.

Something that sparked while attending the Cleveland Institute of Art.

On a recent afternoon Yeager stacked together old plastic planters and boxes, moving pieces around until she either likes the way they come together, or they begin to take the shape of classical or modern sculptures.

- I usually will start with maybe a more familiar approach and just say, this thing could be a base for something, what could go on it?

And kind of put similar forms together.

If I have an object that's kind of a cube or square format, then I'll look for other similar shapes and things.

- [Carrie] Many of the pieces Yeager works with are made of plastic.

A material she says is prevalent on street curbs, and plastic is not sought out like old furniture or scrap metal.

- These objects, specifically the plastic ones, are gonna last for thousands of years, so is there a way, perhaps through sculpture, to repurpose them and add value back to these objects, rather than us just piling them up somewhere?

There's not really a solution in practice to recycle them right now.

Sometimes even think about the sculptures as like a temporary way of storing the plastic until there is something else that can be done to repurpose or reuse the stuff.

- [Carrie] While she's not necessarily seeking to make statements through her pieces, Yeager says she is interested in how different people respond to them.

- It kind of allows me to present the sculptures and the components as more of like data, rather than my aesthetic or my opinion about what I should be representing in art.

It's more like it's a consensus among our entire community.

I'm using the stuff that we as a community have produced and trying to find a way to incorporate your objects into the art, rather than just creating with my own vision.

(gentle piano music) - [Carrie] In Cleveland Heights, Artist, Corey Slawson considers the latest news, culture and nature in her mixed media work.

- You know, something will happen in the world.

I'll end up processing it in different ways, right?

It might be an image that I'd print out from the internet, or it might come to me in a magazine or a piece of journalism.

Whatever that is, it's gonna be connected to something that I possibly have from earlier versions of my own work.

My goal is for this to kind of mimic the surface of a piece of paper.

- [Carrie] Slawson fuses together different symbols, shapes and colors, making connections that might not always be considered.

For instance, her recent series "Endangered" calls attention to animal life threatened or extinct, and the interconnected actions and priorities of humans.

- I have many, many tens of almost hundreds of collages that I built using a combination of internet, National G, photos of animals, photos of endangered species.

Looking up exactly why they were endangered.

- [Carrie] Modern luxuries, such as jewelry, make their way into her collages, questioning what cultures value and the effects on the natural world.

- It's beyond just habitat loss and the other human activities that cause these endangers.

What is it about the climate changing that really is present here?

And so the other piece of these, you know, finding the animals, or the plants, animals, all of the organisms that were involved in that, and then taking Martha Stewart, Vogue, Bizarre, Marie Claire, just magazines that present beautiful things.

Nature in a beautiful, but really manicured, really controlled, really, it's not an environment.

It's not an ecosystem the way that they're presented and I juxtaposed these animals with these environments that are concocted by humans.

- [Carrie] Slawson says her art moved into exploration of social issues while she was pursuing her Masters at Kent State where she also now teaches.

Through art, she questions systems and cultural norms.

- Who gets to enjoy a nice environment?

Who gets to ruin it?

And who ends up paying the price for that?

And the sort of justice of it all.

(lively classical music) - [Carrie] Just last year, Slawson teamed with others on a production called "Feast."

It combined her visual art with dance while collectively critiquing the over-consumption of the Gilded Age and colonialism.

Her work often evolves from prior creations as she considers present day issues and realities.

- And what I'm doing right now is I'm basically taking so many of the elements from "Endangered," from "Feast," and literally cutting them up.

I have a whole drawer I could show you of just chopped up Xerox copies that I end up screen printing or putting through the printmaking process.

Reprinting them.

Relayering.

Kind of just so the drawings I made over the winter were just me processing them, really emotionally, and visually, and with color, with really formal elements as an emotional response to being in a pretty bleak winter with a lot of isolation.

- [Carrie] While she can't say exactly where she's headed with her latest work, she's once again, very much processing life and art simultaneously in her studio.

- I'm working on them in these very sort of technical ways.

Almost as if the technique is what can make it make sense for me, but I don't have answers up there.

(gentle music) - [David] Corey Slawson receives the Cleveland Arts Prize as a mid-career artist, and Lauren Yeager, as an emerging artist.

Other 2021 honorees include the band, Mourning [A] BLKstar, Performing Artist, Alice Ripley, and Poet and Performer, Raymond McNiece.

Special prizes go to retired Theater Professor, Dr. Joseph Garry Jr., Club Owner and Music Industry Advocate, Sean Watterson, Philanthropist, Clara Rankin, and the Cleveland Orchestra's Music Director, Franz Welser-Most.

(upbeat music) (happy panpipe music) Up next, we visit Williamsburg, Virginia to meet Culinary Historian and Author, Michael Twitty.

In his work he explores African-American food and the role that it's played throughout history and across cultures.

- [Michael] Food is a vehicle for conversation.

Food is a means by which we can begin to understand ourselves and our neighbors on a much deeper level.

I think when it comes to southern food, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it just came out of nothing.

The reality is that southern food is a result of multiple historical and cultural collisions, particularly between Europe, Africa and Native America.

When it comes to people of African descent, has extremely powerful notes, that food is how we pass on our culture.

Food is how we resisted enslavement and oppression, and food is how we showed our agency.

It wasn't passive.

One of the things that gets me the most concerned is when people refer to African-American Vernacular foodways as sort of like what was given to us.

No, it was what we created for ourselves and for others.

So I think it's incredibly empowering to learn about that tradition from the historic side the way I do here at Colonial Williamsburg.

Field peas, black eyed peas.

We think of them as something you just eat for good luck on New Year's.

Something that fills the bill at a meat and three.

Black eyed peas, your greens, your sweet potatoes and your little meat.

Well, it's deeper than that.

When I went to Senegal, West Africa, I went to Goree Island, which is where enslaved people were prepared for shipment to the new world, including some of my own ancestors.

And the last remaining slave castle, the Maison des Esclaves, they explained to us that black eyed peas were one of the foods that were given to enslaved Africans, cooked in palm oil to fatten them up.

One thing about sweet potatoes is that in the West Indies, anywhere they were boiling sugar, they were really quick energy food.

And when the men would go to the sugar boiling house, the job was to pour the sugar all night long.

Talking about long ladles, molten hot cane syrup that becomes a molasses, and then it becomes, for a minute, into rum, which of course will then cross the ocean by more enslaved people and feed a triangular trade.

But what happens is while they're cooking this syrup down all night, they're dumping some of it over top of a iron pot full of sweet potatoes.

What does that sound like to you?

It sounds like candied yams.

And then they would eat that to keep them up all night 'cause they had to be up all night.

It was a high energy snack.

Every time you eat candy yams now, I want you to think about an enslaved man in that sugar boiling house all night long, making that dish happen as a means to stay awake.

I'm not interested in recipes.

I'm not interested in formulas.

I don't think about food and cooking the way other people do.

I think of it in terms of big black ideas.

The ultimate is to create something that tastes good.

Dude, that's the best black eyed peas ever.

Taste that medicine.

It's not about how much of this or that you put into it or what technique you use.

Black cooking is more about flavor.

It's about spirit and I think it's less about gourmet techniques that require a lot of fancy, 'cause we didn't have that.

Only thing we had was our feeling about the food and feeling about each other.

For me, I think the epiphany moment was, my parents asked me, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

And I said, I wanna be a writer.

I wanna be a teacher.

I wanna be a chef and I wanna be a preacher.

For me, all those elements are conjoined.

This idea of feeding people as a spiritual exercise.

This idea of feeding people as being an educator.

This idea of feeding people as creating a text, that's edible.

All of that to me, it all makes sense.

It's all part of one holistic worldview.

The secret to the best cooking is trying to find things, but everything compliments each other.

It's about, to me, creating communalism among your ingredients and that's how you make the food taste good.

We call our food, soul food.

Why?

It's named after something that transcends life and death.

It's not about our nation.

It's about our spirit and that's what makes me so proud of it.

One of the things that surprises people about me is that I'm Jewish.

I became officially Jewish by conversion when I was 22 years old.

For me, particularly in Judaism, food and faith go hand in hand a very particular way.

Every single part of the Jewish diaspora has its unique recipes and formulas that go hand in hand with the holidays and they tell stories.

They're there for a reason.

It's not just because people like to eat them.

You set it down in a Jewish household.

The springtime we have Passover.

You know, Matzah.

Matzah tells the story of how people who were a precedent slave got their freedom overnight.

How do we make the world a better place?

How can we learn from our mistakes as a human species?

Those are really big questions in Judaism and Torah, and that undergirds a lot of my work, including the work I do with food.

(upbeat classical music) I wanted to write.

The one thing that's important to do is really do your own research, but I think for African-Americans, one of the struggles we have is that it's not easy for us to find out where we come from because when we say that our names were taken and our identities were switched around for other people's benefit, we're not joking.

That's how it happened.

We have to scale a lot of brick walls to get to where other people just hop on back.

For some people they're satisfied knowing that their ancestors came from Germany.

For a lot of African-Americans, they don't know which countries, plural, in West Africa their ancestors came from.

So in "The Cooking Gene" I decided to do all of those pieces.

I wanted to know, my ancestors who were enslaved, what kind of work did they do?

How did they process all these crops into consumables?

And to know that if it were not for certain choices and accidents of history, you might be in their shoes and to have that feeling of gratitude that you're not.

So how hard was it for these folks, our ancestors, our forebearers, to deal with those situations like that and somehow make a way out of no way.

I never say the word slave.

I say slave is an identity, enslave is a condition.

So we don't wanna put on our ancestors a label that they themselves would reject because it wasn't true.

Once you have that roadmap to where things start, you can kind of have a roadmap to where things are gonna go, and for me that's extremely powerful.

- [David] Coming up on the next Applause, a downtown Cleveland mural celebrating diversity was only meant to be temporary when it was painted back in 1969.

A half century later, it's getting a facelift and a new celebration this weekend.

Plus we'll focus on a philosophical and social movement from the 1820s known as transcendentalism.

Also, we take a look at the history of computer-generated art.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

(branches rustling) With the onset of fall, Stick Artist, Patrick Dougherty's outdoor sculpture made entirely out of tree branches may soon leave, and that depends on how the artwork weathers this winter.

Installed in 2020 at Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, we look back at Dougherty's use of primitive building techniques to create what's called "Tilt-a-Whirl."

- I just wanted to be a sculptor.

(branches rustling) I actually built a house before I became a sculptor and was able to work out many of my ideas while building a house.

And so I went back to school and so that put me on a good path to making a living and making a life's work out of it.

(people chattering) I always think that people love to look out and see a path that's going off into the woods, and so there's a sense of that when you see this work.

There are a lot of doors and windows and you imagine, maybe I could go in there.

Maybe I could.

And when other people are in there, they're enlivening it.

So if you see somebody in there, you think, ah I could go in there too.

(branches rustling) (people chattering) Starting point for this one.

We looked at a lot of secret insect trails that are in the garden.

If you look on the back of leaves, you look at the ground, insects make little pathways.

So we took that boring pattern and we laid it out on the ground.

We scaled it up.

Drill a series of holes along the perimeter of that shape, of that plan, set scaffolding around it and then we use the scaffolding as kind of an exoskeleton and we pull the shape we want.

So when we wanted this wall to lean way over, we pulled it over initially.

The intertwining of the sticks make a very strong wall that you could use and you can feature all kinds of architectural, strange architectural details of having walls, and flying buttresses, and leaning over, and leaning one way, and then another.

It's a kind of a mindless operation in which your eye is connecting with the wall.

So there's this constant dialogue between what you're seeing and what you're thinking about how you could improve the look of it and make a much more luxurious wall.

You feel kind of unselfconscious.

You don't really think about what you're doing per se.

You're just kinda locked into where you think it ought to go.

So I get a big stick like this and I know it's too long for me to pull through so I'll make two pieces out of it.

I can use that top in a different way.

Sometimes I'll bend the thing just slightly because I'm trying to make it a little bit more flexible.

Then I'll drive it down in here, like this.

I want it to cross these two, see these pieces, because axing is also a way that make lines look more interesting.

So if those two lines cross like that, now when we stand back, it'll look a little bit better.

It's better to go behind it if you can to kind of get things down in the midst of it.

Sticks have an inherent method of joining.

If you drag a stick through the woods you see what I mean, it entangles and everything.

So we're using that basic entanglement as a way to join this sculpture together and also sticks have a little flexibility, so if you flex the stick and pull it into a matrix, it snaps back and holds itself in place.

So I've learned to use sticks in lots of different ways.

It's a slow process of building up the kind of quality of line.

So we just work at it for hours.

Pretty soon you have something that people really aren't enticed by.

They really wanna be able to come over and explore this.

(branches rustling) So when people see this work they often are reminded of those, you know, the big Mr. Twister, or simple, hard and easy trees they've climbed when they were kids, or a walk they took, or the first kiss they had, or something very significant that occurred to them while they were walking in the woods.

So all of those things are promoted when you look at this work and so it's got a lot of starting points.

Initially, people evaluated this work as sticks were found objects.

Now they're connected with environmental issues.

I'm still making the same work, but their context is changing.

The relevance has changed.

I think one of the great things about our garden is that people come here for respite, and enjoyment, and to get away from the world, and they also connect with nature, which is such an inherent need that we have.

I usually get about two good years.

You get one great year and one pretty good year, and you try to take the piece down while it still looks good because this is a public exhibition and you want it to be serviceable right to its very end.

So close to the two year mark, the garden will start evaluating it and say, well maybe it could stay up another month.

Maybe another month.

And set a certain point, just like some of the flower beds that fade here, they'll say, hey let's plant something new.

- [David] With its unique design and use of all natural material, Patrick Dougherty's installation "Tilt-a-Whirl" will be open year round at Holden Arboretum.

Jackson Pollock's drip painting "Autumn Rhythm" is one of the artist's most well-known works and it is a key example of abstract expressionism.

We head to the Metropolitan Museum of New York to look back at the exhibit "Epic Abstraction" which featured this very work and more.

(gentle piano music) - We're looking at Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" from 1950.

The painting came into the collection in 1957 and it's one of the treasures of the Met's modern collection.

Pollock is most remembered as a key figure in American art of the 20th century for these large scale so-called drip paintings, which he started to do in the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.

These works have a great sense of immediacy for a range of reasons.

One is that they're large, which relative to your own scale makes you feel a little bit small by comparison.

One of the ways in which Pollock played a key role in changing the very concept of painting is that he moved the canvas from the easel to the floor, and he also began working with common household enamel paint.

He liked this paint because it was very viscous and so it's a kind of paint that you can throw and it creates these dynamic drips, and dribbles, and these whips of paint that seem to be captured in space on the picture plane.

In the case of "Autumn Rhythm" some of the paint is thin and elegant and quite graceful, whereas other passages are dense, and more aggressive, and thicker.

And there are passages also of impasto where he's used parts of the enamel paint that have dried and created a kind of skin.

A three-dimensionality on the surface of the picture, even as the paint registers as flat.

When people first encounter Pollock's work, they perceive it as fully intuitive, improvisational, without any kind of plan or guiding principle.

When in fact, as you look at multiple works by Pollock, you can see that each canvas is distinct and different from another.

(gentle piano music) If you look closely at "Autumn Rhythm" to the right of center and toward the bottom, as we see it on the wall, there's a little flick of red paint.

It's a little drop of red paint.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it because it seems so anomalous.

One wonderful thing about Pollock's technique is this embracive accident and embrace of the effects of chance.

The title "Autumn Rhythm."

The word rhythm really wonderfully ties to the sense of rhythm, and cadence that's part and parcel of his gestural painting style.

And what I love about this work is that this great sense of growth and evolution in a way ties to the change of seasons and the ebbs and flows of nature in the course of a year.

(lively piano music) - [David] And that's it for today's show.

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

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

Hoping you can take some time to enjoy the fall weather and we'll see you next week for another round of Applause.

(lively piano music) (graphic whooshes) (gentle piano music) - [Narrator] 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.