- [Announcer] Production of "Applause," an Ideastream Public Media, is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents, through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

(fast-paced piano music) - [Kabir] Coming up, we meet a group of Northeast Ohio artists whose lives were saved by the power of art.

Plus a creative husband and wife from Columbus are building community with their art.

And the Cleveland Orchestra perks things up with a performance by a pianist from Iceland.

(upbeat music) Welcome one and all to another round of "Applause," I'm Ideastream Public media's Kabir Bhatia.

For many artists, what they create emanates from who they are.

Whether it's music, or poetry, or painting, the art is always a part of the artist who creates it.

But in some instances, the art is even more than that.

It's a saving grace.

Let's hear now from a handful of Northeast Ohio artists who say art saved their lives for the special series "Art Saves."

We begin with Fatima Matar, a painter and writer who advocates for women and humanity through her art.

She came to the US from Kuwait seeking asylum in 2018.

Rebuilding her life in Northeast Ohio, she faced loneliness and depression, but her art is a refuge.

- The winds of the Arab Spring swept over the tiny state of Kuwait, and I found an outlet on social media to call for social and political reform in a country where criticizing the emir or Islam leads to imprisonment.

As a single mother and as a mother of a daughter as well, I didn't feel it was safe for me to continue to live in Kuwait, so I sought asylum in the United States in 2018.

We waited and waited and hoped and hoped, and now we are back at square one.

That feeling of the earth shifting beneath your feet constantly, like, you need something to ground you, and I haven't found anything, not even therapy helped me as much as my art helped me.

So I always say when I'm painting, I'm my best self, or when I'm writing, I'm my best self.

My home as a single mother is called a broken home.

My home is not broken just because a man doesn't live in it.

In my poetry right now, I'm focusing a lot on sexism, misogyny, women's rights, women's freedoms, because unfortunately in America right now, women are fighting so hard to have autonomy over our bodies and our minds.

So in order to focus on women's minds and not their bodies in art, I've started to paint women reading.

Another project is women working.

Ever since I've arrived in the United States, having been worked a lot of manual blue-collar jobs, I've painted a bartender.

I've painted a barista.

I've painted a server.

Third collection I'm working on is called "Doors."

I wanted to focus on domestic violence and sexual harassment at work.

So I wanted the viewer to come close to the canvas and bend down and peer through the keyhole in order to see that image.

We need storytelling as humans, and it's the oldest form of sharing information and creating community.

So all of that I find extremely beneficial and really satisfying.

(gentle music) - [Kabir] Award-winning Cleveland poet and educator Daniel Gray-Kontar is another artist who says that art saved him.

Gray-Kontar lost connection to his artistic side when his day job as the founding director of Twelve Literary Arts consumed him.

A battle between the artist and the art administrator led to a crash, but recently he's experienced a creative rebirth.

(relaxing music) - I became very much interested in Langston Hughes, who my mother introduced me to, and a number of other poets over the years, and so I guess a poet was born.

Twelve Literary Arts was a whirlwind.

We did so much in that period of time.

There were some weeks I was working, you know, 65 hours, you know, 70 hours a week.

My ego got big.

I started to believe that if I wasn't in the room, then it wasn't gonna be done right.

I'm not proud of that person.

I was not making art at all.

I didn't make art for a long time, years, several years, about five, six years.

and I need to make art, right, for my own health.

So I crashed, and then the art resurrected me all over again.

I never considered myself a visual artist at all.

Although I've always had great appreciation for it.

And I have always been a deeply spiritual person, and I've always been an Afrofuturist.

I stumbled upon AI.

I had Photoshop.

I stumbled on AI art-making, and then like, the next thing you know, I'm sitting creating, spending like five, six, seven hours working on this one piece.

It's like 20 minutes had passed.

And so like the joy that I started experiencing creating this stuff, it was just like I hadn't felt anything like it before, and I was like, "Oh, I am an artist.

So art saved my life once again because it's what I'm here to do.

I do it in multiple ways.

But the art is, if it's what you're really here to do, it not only saves your life, but it is your life.

It is your purpose.

- [Kabir] Let's now meet a singer-songwriter from Youngstown saved by her art.

For many years, Susan Wojnar fought a silent battle with schizophrenia.

While on the long road to diagnosis and recovery, her passion for music and writing sustained her through some of her darkest days, - "Ashes, ashes falling down out of a pre-dawn sky."

I always loved reading, loved writing.

And when I initially went off to college, it was to study journalism.

That didn't exactly work out as planned.

(laughs) I got a guitar, and life changed.

♪ It's the end of another day-to-day ♪ The end of the '90s, that's about the time period where the schizophrenia onset happened.

(gentle plaintive guitar music) There was a lot of paranoia.

I was starting to misperceive the world, where it gradually became something where I was experiencing a completely alternate reality.

"Black golem in the corner eyes me with gold-nugget eyes.

Irish folk song on invisible flute lilts through the empty house."

And when I reached a point far enough in my recovery, there was a tangible thought.

It's like, "What you need to do is remember what you used to do.

Remember what you used to be like and move towards that to move away from what this disease has done to you."

♪ My heart don't ever quit ♪ Of course, the old axiom with writers is write what you know.

So I thought, "Well, let me write about what I've been through, what those episodes were like."

I kind of thought I might have a story to tell.

I think the process of publishing the book and doing the presentations and talking to people about schizophrenia and my experience has really helped me somehow.

And I think I'm doing better now than I was prior to the onset.

Yeah, I'm in a very positive place these days.

Music, reading and writing, both given me something to aspire to, something positive to be involved in.

It's been with me the whole way.

I've never given up on either of them throughout the whole journey.

♪ Some have been so ♪ ♪ That's enough ♪ - [Kabir] Our final artist is an assistant professor at Oberlin College.

Michael Boyd Roman works in charcoal to convey the dynamics of power, racial, physical, and even spiritual.

Art isn't just his vocation.

It's been his refuge and even salvation through some very dark times.

(upbeat music) - Drawing helped me kind of stay small and out of the way.

Paper and pencil has been my escape for as long as I can remember, easily.

(plaintive music) This is always a little hard to talk about.

The simplest way to describe it is that I was raised by a bipolar mother who really didn't get a handle on her illness until really about high school for me.

And then my father, who did his best with what he knew, but, you know, by most, by the standards of the time even, could be considered abusive.

And so I spent a lot of time alone.

I probably would've committed suicide as a child.

I mean, I spent some time, you know, hospitalized for suicidal ideations as a sixth-grader, as a rising sixth-grader.

I just didn't see any other way out.

(plaintive music continues) My work has always been about exploring my own relationship with personal power.

I mean, divinity is what I choose to call it now.

It was about seeing yourself with a certain level or a type of power, right?

And then also kind of being a child and feeling very powerless, everything kind of boils back to a sense of reclaiming a sense of personal power.

If you truly saw yourself as a part of the divine, the way you move through the world has to change.

It can't be the same.

(plaintive music continues) - [Kabir] You can dive deeper into these stories with in-depth articles online for this special series "Art Saves."

Visit our website at arts.ideastream.org.

Meanwhile, if you or anyone you know has been saved by art, please let us know.

You can send their story, your story, or any art story idea from Northeast Ohio to our email arts@ideastream.org.

Now, while art didn't save their lives, husband and wife Eric Rausch and Jen Kiko do attribute their success to their artistic connection.

Let's travel to their Columbus studios, where they create art together for the greater good of their community.

(bright music) - When I really think about why I do what I do, community-building is probably paramount above everything else because it brings me a sense of joy to build community as much as it does to create a piece of artwork or to earn the all-important money that needs to be made to support the studio and do all of that.

When we're around each other, we're kind of in our happy place because it's our mental health check-in place.

You know, we're working on clay, and you're having discussions with people, and sometimes that can be, you know, completely essential to your daily life.

- I teach high school art, and I have for a really long time.

This is my 26th year teaching, and I love it, and it's very rewarding, and the kids are amazing.

They need that connection to something.

And being a maker and finding other makers I think is really comforting in terms of like your lifelong journey.

So I try to say that to kids like today.

I said, "If you're not gonna make stuff to sell, that doesn't matter.

You gotta turn to this as part of your DNA and something that you can do and have control over and have fun with so that they can be comfortable in your own skin and for your own mental health."

(bright music continues) - I realized that I think at a pretty young age that if we can take lessons and resources from the generation above us, if they're there for us to take, that's an opportunity.

That's a privilege if you have that to take advantage of.

And then you can pass on knowledge and resources to the next generation, whether or not you have your own kids.

To me, it's one of the main purposes of life, is to build generational wealth for everybody.

(mixer whirring) So what I can do for that is, you know, is pretty much limited to my little circles.

So within the studio, I have a work trade opportunity which allows artists to trade time for, work time for studio time.

And I've employed quite a few people from the work trade opportunity.

I had one person join on as a paid apprentice, Jamiah.

She's now been with me for almost two years, and she's picking up more hours and taking on full responsibility for glazing the stump pottery in the studio, which is a huge part of our cash flow which is so important.

(gentle upbeat music) One thing I learned early on is you don't accomplish great things on your own.

It really happens when you can be part of a functioning team, you know.

It's not about just getting a bunch of people together but, you know, having people work together to see a vision come true.

That's as good as community-building to me.

I think that Jen and I, when we do a collaboration, the very first bit of it is totally unseen to any committee but is the, you know, weeks that we get this idea.

Okay, we have this idea, and we're gonna apply to do a piece for this.

And so we bounce these things off of each other and go really silly sometimes.

And we kind of find which concepts we come back to over and over again.

And then Jen starts to make the composition, and she's the primary artist when it comes to the drawing and making the composition.

She's just so incredibly talented at doing that.

I just love to watch it.

- I like composition and design, and he likes the materials.

So we kind of have to like work together to find something that's gonna work for both of us.

- I have worked with other artists, and there is a trust that's involved with that because you're taking someone's artwork, which is, you know, that's someone's baby, and you're taking it into your hands and trying to help it turn into a fledgling toddler (laughs) and see what happens.

So taking her drawing and putting it into tile is where I become more of the primary artist, but I'm still bouncing everything off of her.

"Hey, we could... You know, here's a couple options.

Which one do you think is best?"

And it just works its way all the way through to the end to where it's a real collaboration.

- We've done a lot of projects together like art projects and like life projects.

We've joked that one of ours was called the "Divorce Project" 'cause we were like, "If we don't get this done, we're going to kill each other."

- Our first piece in the convention center parking garage, our first major public art piece, was a real test of everything.

It's just like going through a renovation or something together, going through the first piece together.

And the joke was and is, you know, if we don't get divorced through this, then we can do anything.

- [Jen] We were figuring a lot of things out kind of like on the fly, and it was very late nights and working in a garage with like a very small child.

With just one small child was still hard, but later there was two small children.

So now it's super fun, super unique.

- But I never feel like when we argue about an artwork that it is anything but constructive because we also have the...

I think the trust is built in that you're not going to... You're not gonna knock this person out at their ankles and belittle them and make them feel bad.

You know, we both are focused on the same goal.

So when we have differences of opinion on color or material, (laughs) it's not quite fun, but it doesn't feel like, you know, it's gonna ruin our relationship.

And I think actually it probably helps our relationship tremendously to be able to butt heads like that a little bit where we're both working together, and it's like, "Ah, you know," and it just helps us communicate really clearly, "Why do you like this?"

- The pros, of course, are that you kind of know people's strong suits, like what you're good at, what I'm good at.

Like, he's really good at problem-solving.

He's really good at reaching out to the right people if we don't know how to do something.

And we kind of push each other to make it better 'cause at the end of the day, both our names are on it, and we don't want it to be unsuccessful or not be proud of it at the end.

(light upbeat music) - Nobody's asking for public artwork to be put in front of them.

It's just meant to be there.

You're walking along.

It's meant to enhance a space, enhance your experience, in my opinion.

I don't know that this is putting aside, of course, memorials and other things that are meant to really bring you to a moment and have you experience something.

(light upbeat music continues) I do think it's important that the first feeling you get is like, "Oh, wow, I like that."

So from far away, we're talking about bright colors or something, just, ah, cool.

And then as you get closer to it, you know, hopefully something of the imagery can capture you and bring you in.

And what the work that we do out of tile and brick, when you get up close to it, there's a whole other level of these micro details that you just can't experience from anywhere but six inches away.

And then, you know, of course, feeling the textures of the piece and, you know, seeing little bubbles in the glaze and all of that.

So, you know, those, it's just kind of like, hey, bring you in.

And then once you get in and see the details, that's also where you could have some meat to the concept of your piece.

So with the Dublin piece, we titled it "In the Neighborhood" because the concept of the piece is to hopefully remind you of the local flora and fauna.

And we do that by giving you a list of everything that's in the piece that you can find because we did some research behind the coneflowers, the goldenrod.

Of course there's sunflowers in there and the cardinals, the male and female.

I do have hope for the world that we live in, but it's a generational kind of hope.

Having two kids that are now just about to turn 11 and seven and being able to show them year after year how if you build on a vision, you might underestimate even what you can accomplish.

You might surprise yourself by what you can accomplish if you just kind of stick to it.

- We're like a little bit old-fashioned of the priority of eating dinner together when we can.

Eric's a really good cooking machine, so that's helpful for me.

So we kind of split up... You know, the morning things he does with kids, and the afternoon I do with kids.

- We live in a kind of typical suburban neighborhood here in Central Ohio, but we have a little yard where we can have different areas where the kids are encouraged to play outside.

We have a bed of rocks just so they can go see what's underneath of them with, you know, observe the trees growing through them.

I pointed out to them how those little whirligigs that fall down, they grow into trees.

And we pick up most of them, but we allowed a few of them to grow so now after five or six years, how big those are.

We've got ruby plants over here, an indigo tree over there, you know, just to get that passage of time and that understanding to them so that no matter what they go into that they have, you know, just these core values of hard work, you know, for whatever that means to you and sticking through with something that you commit to and bringing life into this world through plants and caring for animals.

And all of that, you know, is just really important I think for what is to be an optimistic next generation.

- [Kabir] If you're looking for the latest Northeast Ohio arts news and events info, there's a newsletter for that.

It's called "The To-Do List," and it spotlights artists from around the region and gives you and your family ideas for, well, things to do.

Subscribe to this free weekly newsletter online at arts.ideastream.org.

Here's a look at what's coming next time on "Applause."

Nestled in the heart of Dover, Ohio is a collection of intricate wood carvings charting the history of railroads in America.

Hear the story of the master carver of Tuscarawas County, Earnest Mooney Warther.

Plus we remember late Cleveland Arts Prize-winner painter Michelangelo Lovelace.

And Northeast Ohio trumpeter Dominick Farinacci pays tribute to a beloved cancer survivor, his mom.

All that and more in the next round of "Applause."

(plaintive trumpet music) Thank you all for joining us again for this round of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia sending you on your way with another electric performance by the Cleveland Orchestra.

It comes to us from the orchestra's Adella app and features Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson performing Maurice Ravel's rollicking Piano Concerto in G minor.

Enjoy.

(bright orchestral music) (bright piano music) (bright orchestral music continues) (bright orchestral music continues) (slow contemplative music) (slow contemplative piano music) (bright clarinet and trumpet music) (upbeat piano music) (upbeat orchestral music) (slow piano music) (slow french horn music) (slow elegant piano music) (expectant orchestral music) (slow elegant piano music continues) (slow elegant piano music continues) (slow elegant orchestral music) (fast-paced piano music) (orchestral music swelling) (fast-paced piano music) (upbeat music) (bright music) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" an Ideastream Public Media, is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.