(melodious jazz music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Strout Family Trust, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

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

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

Hair has played a significant role in the lives of African-Americans since first arriving in this country four centuries ago, it's deeply rooted in black culture.

How it was worn was an indication of one's social status and background.

On view now at the Kent State University Museum is an exhibit which looks at this long fraught story, it's called Textures, the art and history of black hair.

In early African culture, a person's hair was a symbol of power and their place in society.

Kings, soldiers, expected mothers and peasants were identified by their hairstyle.

The transatlantic slave trade that brought thousands of Africans to this country, changed that.

(upbeat music) - Black hair's been discriminated against since the time of slavery.

One of the things that was critical in how our hair was treated is what we were taught about our hair.

Slave masters at that time would actually refer to black people's hair as wool instead of hair.

And it was a way for them to be able to rationalize why they treated black people the way in which they treated us.

So they dehumanized who we were as black people along with not only our bodies, but also our hair.

- Just hold on and suck in.

- [David] Ridiculed and demeaned for having coarse thick hair, enslaved Africans hid their hair behind wigs and head wraps.

- If you had a head wrap on it was quote unquote, automatically, you were also a slave.

And the head wrap also served as a way for black people to have a quick solution for their hair.

Because back in those times, they didn't have the amount of time that we have for grooming, they didn't have the correct utensils for grooming, and so the head wrap became a way for them to be able to spend a little bit of time on themselves.

- [David] Some states enacted laws requiring African-Americans to wear head wraps.

- The tignon law basically said that any freed black woman still were required to wear a head wrap, even if you were free.

If you left the house, you had to have a head wrap on your head.

And what they were to do was trying to discourage the white men to be attracted to the black women.

- [David] As a way to assimilate in a world where straight Caucasian here was valued over course black hair, African-Americans began to treat their hair.

- Black people, started straightening their hair during slavery.

The first type of hair straightening that they would do is they would use clothing irons, like the old clothing iron that you will put on a stove to heat it up.

And so the woman would place her head down on the table and straighten her hair out with the clothing iron.

That was something that was required of many of the people that worked in the house.

- [David] As the need for black hair products grew, entrepreneurs like Madam CJ Walker introduced products that promoted hair growth and the straightening of black hair with the use of a hot comb, the device was heated and ran through your hair to untangle it, making Walker the first black woman millionaire in the US.

In 1909, inventor, Garrett Morgan created the first hair relaxer to chemically straighten black hair.

- Black people were given tools to now maintain their hair.

So no longer were they using a clothing iron, but by this time, the French had invented a straightening comb that can then be put on a stove, and then you could use the straightening comb to straighten your hair.

So Madam CJ Walker and others, they sold these combs, they would sell a set.

So it would be the comb along with a hair pomade and cleanser and other things.

And so they began to really, start giving tools to black people so that they can take care of the hair.

- [David] Some praised these products while others criticized them, insisting that they furthered the stereotype that good meant having straight hair.

♪ When I fall in love ♪ - The idea of straightening hair was even debated back then.

So while Madam CJ Walker and others were building these amazing businesses for the black economy, there were people such as like Marcus Garvey was an activist who was totally against the idea of straightening the hair.

And he was even said to have said something such as, take the kinks out of your mind and not out of your hair.

- [David] In the 1960s, the debate over black hair came to a head as African-Americans confronted issues of social injustice and discrimination, and a hairstyle known as the Afro appear.

It was a symbol of black power and challenge the notion of Caucasian like hair as a standard of beauty.

- We were straightening our hair, we were doing what we were told in order to be employable, right.

But then once the civil rights era came and the Black Power movement came about, black people had gotten to a point where they were just like, I'm not doing this anymore, I'm gonna just be me.

And society looked at it as a way to quote unquote rebel, but really what it was was it was black people saying, I am proud of who I am and I am no longer gonna assimilate to the standard of beauty that you said that I have to live up to.

(calming music) - [David] In the 1980s and 90's, actresses and singers like Janet Jackson, Cicely Tyson, and Whoopi Goldberg, popularized black hairstyles, like braided hair, cornrows, and dreadlocks.

- Back then they called them big box braids and goddess braids is what they would call them.

And that was a huge influencer from Jamaican, reggae music.

There was a lot of reggae artists that were coming out.

Patra was one of the ones that was a very famous reggae singer, and everybody wanted to have their hair like Patra and including myself.

- [David] Wearing these African-American inspired hairstyles often came at a price.

In 1981, a court ruled American airlines flight attendant, Renee Rogers, was not to wear braids to work.

Years later, that ruling forest Hyatt Regency employee, Cheryl Tatum, to resign after she refused to remove her cornrows.

More recently, high school wrestler, Andrew Johnson was forced to cut off his dreadlocks or forfeit his wrestling match.

- Black people unfortunately are still having to fight against discrimination regarding their hair, and that's the reason why we have things such as the CROWN Act.

The CROWN Act was established in 2019, came out, I think, early July of 2019, and it was a law put in place by California.

They were the very first ones and now around the nation, you'll see other states are starting to adopt the same CRWON Act.

They put that law in place because black people were going into schools, they were going into institutions, such as employment, executive positions in corporate spaces, and we're being told that they had to change their hair in order to work in these spaces.

But things are starting to change, which is amazing.

And the reason why they're starting to change is because people are saying no, no, no more.

(upbeat music) - [David] Today, a number of films about black hair, like "My Nappy Roots", "Bad Hair" and "Nappily Ever After" have given rise to the natural hair movement, causing African-Americans to think about the issues surrounding how they wear their hair.

- What's happening today is kind of like a smashup of things.

About 40% of women, black women are wearing their hair in its natural state.

The other 60% of black women are wearing their hair straightened and/or wearing a weave or wearing a wig.

And in many ways we are trying to still figure ourselves out.

I think at this particular time in our history, many times black people are still trying to figure out our identity.

- The Kent State University Museum is located on the school's main campus in Kent, Ohio.

The exhibit textures the art and history of black hair runs through August of 2022.

With the help of some Kent State golden flashes, hundreds of outdoor sculptures across the state of Ohio are being discovered.

Everything from sailors and soldiers to Moses Cleveland, to the wind wave in the city of Marion, the effort is led by the Ohio Outdoor Sculpture project.

Take a look.

The sculpture center of Cleveland started Ohio outdoor sculpture to identify and record Ohio's outdoor figures and make the data available online.

The project began in the early 90's as the Save our Sculptures project.

It was a federally funded program administered by the Ohio Arts Council.

- So the Save Outdoor Sculpture was an attempt to inventory all of the works around the country to see what they needed and perhaps initiated some local funding.

And it was put together with an appreciation of the fact that sculpture around the country was not being properly maintained and conserved but rather was suffering various funded decay.

- [David] But before adding any objects to their inventory, Save our Sculptures had to first define the term, outdoor sculpture.

- [Bill] The idea is that it's a work art that's there for contemplative purposes.

But you started asking more, what is it work art and what is really the deciding factor?

And we're pretty much going for things that are going to be contemplated for the one reason or another.

- We just have a block that has names on it, not gonna make it... That sort of thing.

Like a rock with a plaque on it, it's not gonna make it, because it doesn't have like kind of that design element, I think behind it that we're looking for.

But there are definitely some things that straddle the line, especially like found objects.

There's cannons from the civil war that people have situated places.

And sometimes they're arranged artistically and there's landscaping around them.

They've named the canyons, there's plaques with it.

And so those might make it...

But sometimes they're okay, here's a piece of artillery, we'll stick it in front of this building.

And then that might not qualify for our criteria.

They're outdoors because we're just doing the outdoor sculptures.

- [David] Initial funding for Save our Sculptures went to five arts institutions across the state.

- Pretty much Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, with Toledo, Dayton, Youngstown.

There's a band of counties that had no representation at all.

We've been trying to identify sculptures in those counties that had none.

I was pretty sure that there would be some, even if it was again, your World War I Doughboy or a veteran park of some kind, but we didn't know.

- [David] After the completion of the original 1990s grant, the Sculpture Center of Cleveland organized hundreds of maps, photos, articles, and information into an online searchable database of nearly 1500 objects.

It's one of the few repositories of its kind in the country.

- You into the Ohio Outdoor Sculpture inventory you will see one or more photographs of the sculpture in question, a title, a description, where it's located.

There'll be a map with a little data on it showing where it is, and then there'll be other information about its composition and who made, and a number of other important things.

So it becomes a real good resource for studying outdoor sculpture in Ohio.

- [David] Recently, Ohio Outdoor Sculpture has worked to expand the number of sculptures on their website by sending interns from Kent State University's Library and Science Information program in search of new works of art.

- We have had other individual interns at various times around the state working on this, but it was this semester really that we took it on as a major project with the high school, they call it the Library School in Kent State University.

And these five individuals who are finishing their graduate studies and library science came together as a team to tackle the counties in Southeast Ohio that were not represented at all in the Ohio Outdoor Sculpture database.

- Most of us started off initially just getting on Google and trying to do some just general searches, getting just basically basic ideas and then building off of those from there.

If you see something that might be, okay, this courthouse apparently has something.

You maybe look around there more, you might wanna contact the historical society in the town ask them.

- [David] Uncovering lesser known sculptures, meant traveling to rural parts of Ohio.

- Sometimes just looking at Pinterest or that sort of thing would show pictures of things, it wouldn't have a whole lot of information, but okay, there's something there.

I encountered things from Wikipedia.

If you found an artist, you could look up the artist's name and maybe it lists the artists some other places there.

There's different kind of means to access it depending on what information you do have to build from.

- [David] Often they came across a piece that wasn't on their radar.

- Once we got kinda a list of some leads, okay, I've got enough things, I think it's worth a drive out there to check these out.

When you go there, you've got five items on your list and you're run into 10 more.

And so that's kind of how the rest of them get on the list, 'cause when you just bump into them, when you're out there getting pictures of the things that you do know about.

- [David] In discovering additional pieces of art, they've also discovered just how strong a connection a city can have to their outdoor sculptures.

- I think outdoor sculptures, more so than a lot of other different kinds of art have a real symbolic and community sort of power to them.

They are very public... Because they are out there in the public they're public symbols, they become...

Which is why I think people feel strongly about them positively or negatively because they're almost representing us in some way, representing in what we care about, and our past and our future, things that we are interested in.

And so they tell us, they tell the world something about ourselves, which is why I think they have importance and it's why it's important to keep track of them and make sure that they are maintained.

- [David] You too can help track down sculptures as part of Ohio Outdoor Sculpture effort to identify and document state sculptures.

They welcome residents to submit photos, maps and other information about pieces currently not in their inventory, as well as updates about others in the collection.

And now let's hit the road to a museum located in New Bedford, Massachusetts for the exhibit Uncommon Threads, the works of Ruth E. Carter.

She's an academy award-winning costume designer whose work can be traced from Spike Lee's earliest films to the Wonderland of Wakanda featured in the film "Black Panther".

- [Reporter] This is one of Oprah Winfrey's ensembles from the film "Selma" by director Ava DuVernay.

One of countless costumes, Ruth Carter has designed over her 30 plus year career.

- We had Oprah's character who was Annie Lee Cooper, who had a scene where she was gonna attempt to register to vote.

- You worked for Mr. Don down at the restaurant, aint that right?

- Andy Lee Cooper was a domestic so, I first gave Oprah kind of, her uniform.

And then Ava said, "No, I feel like "this is a special occasion for her.

"Let's have her dress up in her Sunday best for this."

- [Reporter] And why would she have had a broach?

- Well, I remember broaches and earrings when I was a little girl in church.

So that's a little bit of my heart in the costume design.

- [Reporter] At the New Bedford Art Museum, this is a collection of costumes Carter, has personally kept over the years, from her work on the "Roots Reboot", to a polyester panoply from the comedy, "Dolomite Is My Name" to Spike Lee's groundbreaking, "Do the Right Thing".

- Always do the right thing.

- [Reporter] How overtly political was your work in "Do the Right Thing".

- We all knew that we were doing a protest film.

This was about one hot day in New York city and the colors in "Do the Right Thing" are very saturated, almost in a surrealistic form that at night you could see these colors almost ignite.

- Carter's career began in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she interned in a college costume shop after a brief spell as an actress.

- I actually could feel how important my wardrobe was to my performance.

- Her job she says is literally in the details, the little things she does in color, fabric, and accessories to manifest a mood.

- The aging of the jacket, the billowing of the pockets, shoes that are run over, all silently tell the story.

- She's like unmatched in the field and just a really, really special thoughtful person.

- Jamie Uretsky is the museum's curator who spent two years sifting through Carter's costumes, sketches, and mood boards.

But her chief inspiration was the designers, Oscar acceptance speech in 2019, for her work on "Black Panther", making her the first black person to win an academy award for costume design.

- "Black Panther" Ruth Carter.

(audience applauding) - Thank you for honoring African royalty and the empowered way women can look and lead on screen.

- I think that her as like a powerful black woman who is just like had her hand in, like over 40 films that are imperative to understanding American history and the black experience.

She makes the experiences of these people feel real.

- [Reporter] When she first started out in Hollywood, Carter says there was a limit to how black people were portrayed on camera.

- Every time a black person was cast, they were a gang banger, or they had their hat turned backwards, or they had a big gold chain.

And there were so many more stories in the community that weren't being seen.

- Carter is now a world away from that time, in the world of Wakanda, the fictional setting of "Black Panther".

Her looks came from deep research into African tribes and influences.

And after the films, Blockbuster success, Carter's designs on Wakanda and culture melded into our own.

- I hate to tell you, but you can't get to Wakanda, it's totally made up (laughs slightly).

But it's kind of an aspirational place.

We want to create that place that you wanna go to because it looks like, the perfect place to experience culture that has not been appropriated or has not been spoiled by colonization.

- [Reporter] Spend some time with Carter and you quickly realize she may be most proud of how much research she's done, tracing the path of indigo from Sierra Leone, through generations of Africans as she illustrated in "Roots".

Noting how tight Martin Luther king Jr kept his collar or sitting down at the Massachusetts Department of Correction to read the letters of Malcolm X.

- Learning was very important to him and growth was very important to him.

When I look at Malcolm X, I can see my intent.

The color palette is very vibrant when he's young dancer in the dance halls.

It kind of washes itself away with the denim in the prison.

And then when he comes out, it's almost like a black and white film.

- [Reporter] A fitting, if not poetic description from a woman who has always been able to dress the part.

- [David] Downtown Cleveland is filled with century old structures that tell stories if you just take a moment to look.

Next time on Applause, we'll hear from an architecture writer who says these banks, hotels, and office buildings are billboards that have messages you might've missed.

And we welcome singer Kyle Kid and guitar player, Marcus Alan Ward, to make some music for us from their respective socially distance spaces.

All this and more on the next round of Applause, Visual artists, Andrew Ian exhibition at Otterbein Universities, Fisher Gallery in Westerville, Ohio, was inspired by every day caution signs as a way to talk about some very difficult topics facing us today.

- We're at the Fischer Gallery here on the Otterbein University campus.

I've got about 30 pieces of artwork that we're installing today.

My name is Andrew Ina, I am a visual artist and also filmmaker.

The show is titled Unintended Consequences.

(vibrant music) I've always worked in the non-objective realm.

I find that there's a lot of power to non-objective or some people will interpret as abstract work.

(vibrant music) You're not locked into an image or a specific association that you will see with representational work.

Whereas I feel like the non-objective work is more of a universal language.

So it can speak in ways that sometimes I feel like the representational work can be limiting.

So this show is actually, it's been a long time in the making.

The work speaks to the sort of nonsensical political and social climate that we find ourselves in over the last number of years.

And a lot of the work is charged in that way.

My work most recently has been focusing on symbolism and more specifically the caution sign or the caution pattern.

And you'll see that as a kind of a common thread throughout the show.

I became interested in how I can kinda subvert the meaning of these patterns and of these symbols, and reorient them in ways where they take on a new meaning or a new life.

This piece is titled, Nothing to See Here.

And literally it's like a pile of discarded caution signs.

I feel like every day, you wake up to the news cycle and it's an overwhelming series of whether it's headlines or stories.

And I don't think a lot of what we've been experiencing the last few years is normal or okay.

I find it hard to reconcile this feeling of wanting to just kind of deassociate yourself from all this, or be desensitized to all this.

But I think it's very important now more than ever to be vigilant and to not look away and to not allow this to be normalized.

(smooth music) So this piece is titled Neither Here Nor There.

And the form that I start with is the safety cone.

And what I've done is taken wallpaper and collaged over the cones in a way to conceal their power or their function.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland and the wallpaper that I used to wrap the cones with was the exact wallpaper that I had in my kitchen growing up.

I thought that this treatment was appropriate to cover these cones because oftentimes those are the kinds of settings where people don't like to get political, people don't like to have those uncomfortable conversations.

So it feeds back into this idea that we're missing a lot of warning signs.

(calming music) - [David] And that's it for today's show, I'm David C. Barnett.

Stay safe and we'll see you next week for another round of Applause.

(vibrant 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.