- [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(bright music) - [Kabir Bhatia] Coming up, we turn you on to the Art of Fluorescence with the distinct colors of a Cleveland company.

Plus John Batiste wowed audiences at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and you're gonna get a sneak peek.

And the Cleveland Orchestra plays Mahler's final "Adagio."

We've got all that and more in store as we welcome you to another round of "Applause."

I'm Idea Stream Public Media's, Kabir Bhatia.

(soft music) It's an art experience like no other.

Cleveland's Waterloo Arts District literally glows in the dark with works from 50 regional artists, all created with fluorescent paints from Cleveland's own Day-Glo Color Corporation.

Let's go under the black light for the 11th Annual Day-Glo Show.

- It's fun.

Day-Glo's paint's fun.

It's just so magical.

Black light is not something that you experience on a daily basis, and it really is just a little bit of magic.

And we could all use that joy in our life.

- Day-Glo, it's everywhere if you look around, safety vests, tied detergent bottles, clothing, sneakers, traffic cones, hard hats, all sorts of apparel, printed materials.

You don't realize it until you start looking around and see all these bright colors that's mostly Day-Glo.

- I like that for the artists, it gives them an opportunity to experiment and work with a paint that they might not be familiar with, a medium, you know, that might be a little outside their comfort zone.

It's a hard paint to use as an artist because you don't have white, and so you really have to adjust.

And you know, some artists, they sort of made a name for themselves with a particular kind of artwork, and this show gives them a way to sort of step outside of that box and play around a little bit, which is nice.

- We are actually a Cleveland based company that was started in Cleveland, Ohio, and we supply pigments and dyes for all manner of plastics, packaging, printing, cosmetics, all sorts of industries.

- Day-Glo was really came to Cleveland as an art project.

The Switzer Brothers who founded the company- - They were experimenting around with fluorescent materials and they started doing magic shows and then eventually it turned into printing materials.

- Doing posters, advertising for Warner Brothers, which was the way that you advertised movies at the time.

- They moved to Cleveland in the late 1930s to print movie posters for a company called Continental Lithograph.

So that's why they ended up in Cleveland, Ohio.

That eventually turned into the Switzer Brothers, which was the fluorescent company up until 1969, in which they rebranded it as Day-Glo Color Corporation.

- I love that this art show speaks back to those roots of the art that the company started with.

- Yeah, we've supported artists in the Cleveland community for many years.

It's a fun medium.

I think people can make creative things with it.

You can play around with the color themselves, but they're also black light fluorescent so you can color them with UV lights.

There's been art created with Day-Glo for, you know, since the company's probably been around.

- There's a lot of different styles of artwork in the show.

And so I think it shows the public how this paint can get used in a lot of different ways.

And then we also give people the opportunity to create themselves by painting on our community wall and doing workshops.

- I am originally from Erie, Pennsylvania, and that's currently where I live.

Being an Erie person, Cleveland is a city that I was very excited about, and so I recently had an exhibition here.

Now I'm here as the artist in residence for the Day-Glo.

And it's been an interesting kind of point of history.

I'm still learning a lot about the Day-Glo paint and you know, experimenting with it.

But it's exciting.

(bright music) This specific artist in residence, I'll be here on the weekends and inviting people to make with me, and I'm inviting them to make a bug.

Thinking about my practice, I ask people to reflect on a time that they felt squashed like a bug, and when was something that gave them wings to keep going.

And then they get to create.

And the tables in here will be set up as a maker space, and we will be getting to use the Day-Glo paints to paint, and they'll be able to decorate and design their own bug.

The bugs that are donated to me and the archive that I'm growing will be a part of a further exhibition, but they'll also be quilted and finished here and then put up in the space.

The collection and archive that I have will become a swarm or a mass that'll become this swarm of resilience.

- Eric's work is very generous and it is not only healing for himself, which sometimes you see in an artist's work, but also feels like it is extending that hand to other people and asking them about their own need to reflect on their strengths and kind of what gets them through a difficult time.

- I appreciate the show because it has two parts.

It has the community arts aspect as well as the professional gallery.

So seeing a wide skill set can help educate more people on the material, which is why we're all here, which is nice.

- I love to see the artwork.

It's very fun to get artwork coming into your gallery.

It's almost like Christmas morning, you're getting to see what people have made.

But then I just, I love the community aspect of it.

I just love seeing, you know, little kids and just everybody in the space enjoying themselves.

The artists really love that Day-Glo is our company, you know, and feel very proud of that.

So you could, you know, use other fluorescent paint.

But the artist, part of the reason they really want to be in the show is that Day-Glo donates the paint to us.

They can use it even beyond what they've made for the show.

So it allows them to kind of experiment with other work.

But I think people really love that Day-Glo is a Cleveland Company.

- [Kabir Bhatia] The 11th Annual Day-Glo show runs through March 30th at Waterloo Arts.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art, John Batiste recently had his hands on some historic instruments.

- And when you are in the art museum, you have to really appreciate the beauty of creation and the beauty of all the things that we have made.

And I love playing art music in the art museum.

- [Kabir Bhatia] The multiple Grammy winner opened his two live recorded shows on the Holt Camp Organ.

Enjoy the small taste of the concert as John plays the familiar hymn, "Blessed Assurance."

(soft music) (bright music) There's a new theater company in Lorraine spotlighting underrepresented Voices.

On the next "Applause" spend time with Outside Circle Theater Project, preparing for its first production.

Plus a woodworker showcases his respect for the natural world in his furniture.

And we share a toe tapping Diddy from 18th Century Scotland, performed by Leigh Delis.

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

(flute playing) You can watch past episodes of "Applause" with the PBS app.

Every other year in the Queen City, an evening arts festival takes place that really lights up the night.

It's called Blink Cincinnati, and the next one is this fall.

Let's meet one of the artists who participated in the past, Mallory Feltz.

(soft music) - Home is such a broad topic.

It could be a physical structure, it can also just be the idea of being comfortable.

And it's really multilayered and complex, and so there's a lot of room to explore and play in that atmosphere.

And I like to experiment with materials.

So it provided a really wonderful opportunity to think about how materials and objects can be the manifestations of the concept of home.

I also just love building things and working with my hands and taking things apart and figuring out how they work and then putting them back together.

When I was deciding what to do with my career, it was between the arts and science.

And I ultimately decided to go into the arts because it allowed me to not only be creative, but also to use science in order to create my works.

Homage is a piece that really solidified for me that I wanted to focus on this theme of home.

And I was inspired to make that piece because when I first moved to Louisiana from grad school, it was in 2006, and Katrina had happened the year before.

And I wasn't there when it happened, but you could still see the impact and feel the impact of that devastation everywhere you went.

And I just always remembered those blue tarps on people's homes everywhere.

And so that piece was really an honor of what people had to do to try to recover and how it took so much away from everyone.

Imago is a nature center in Price Hill, and it's an organization that I really love.

Their mission is to connect people in nature.

They started a program called Art on their Trails, where they commissioned artists to create works that would be on their trails for a year.

I created the piece called Local Support, which is a collection of Ohio rocks that are wrapped in different colored yarn.

I reached out to local farms, alpaca farms, and sheep farms, and purchased the wool directly from the farmers and used different dying techniques using natural materials like onion skins and avocados and red cabbage to create a spectrum of colors for the yarn.

And took each stone and wrapped each one in little lines, delicate patterns, and then arranged them out on the entrance trail to Imago.

So it's a way of drawing attention to your immediate surroundings and seeing the bountiful possibilities within such a small area.

So the idea is that these rocks are almost like little gifts and you know, people can move them around and create different compositions within the installation or pick up a rock and take it with them while they're hiking and drop it somewhere else.

And since they're all natural materials, the piece will degrade over time and it won't harm the environment.

(upbeat music) When Blink was being talked about as a light and art festival, I saw it as a unique opportunity to challenge myself even more.

Go back to that experimentation that I really like to do.

The fact that the festival was going to be open to everyone, it was in the public sphere, that really intrigued me.

And that's what I want my work to be about.

I want it to be accessible, approachable, and I want people to see it.

For Blink 2017, I created the piece called Easy Breezy.

It was a series of 33 umbrellas outlined in electroluminescent wire.

Motion sensors were connected to it that triggered motors on a select few of the umbrellas.

And so when you would walk down the alleyway underneath these beautiful illuminated lights, some of the umbrellas would move and dance in response to you being with the piece.

(bright music) For Blink 2019, I created the piece called Toy Box, which is a series of seven giant nightlights based on classic toys.

And at the front of each one of the night lights is a motion sensor that would turn the lights on.

So when you walk by them just like a regular nightlight, you know, they illuminate.

And this idea of activation by the audience was important to me.

These seven giant nightlights were installed around Finley Market, a very family friendly area with a lot of activity going on so I knew they would get a lot of activation.

But one thing I noticed when just sitting back and watching people interact with these pieces was a lot of people thought it was a button that made the light turn on and they were wanting that sort of physical activation point.

So I kept that in mind.

If Blink were to happen again, what could I do differently and how could I make that activation be more personal?

For the third time in 2022, I went back to using domestic objects, things that are in our home that maybe we don't think about or are overlooked, but are so recognizable.

And I created the piece, Linger, which is a series of 12 lamps that on there lampshades, there's words and phrases written in glow in the dark paint.

And when guests come and step on the foot pedal, it turns on the lamp, which then charges the paint.

And if they take their foot off the pedal, the light goes dark, but the words glow.

And then over time those words will fade and they'll need to be charged again.

And that's where a really magical moment comes in, where it's making art directly accessible and encouraging your creativity to collaborate with an artist using their creativity.

So Linger is that piece connecting us that says, we all have those internal thoughts and you know, we're getting through this pandemic and we're doing it together.

And it's sort of a celebration piece too, because Blink is happening again and we can be all together.

So I want people to walk away seeing my work, making connections within themselves and their surroundings and other people.

- [Kabir Bhatia] If you'd like to check out the next edition of Blink Cincinnati, it's coming this October.

Children's book author (bright music) and artist Erin Alon Brain, loved to explore the outdoors of Ohio as a girl.

Now she looks to her love of the natural world when creating her own colorful landscapes.

(soft music) - Periwinkle and the absolutely dizzy dazzling day.

It has been a long time coming.

I started it before my first book, "Fun For Anyone," and it actually took me about five years from writing to doing all the collages to put it together.

It is about a little girl who finally, after much anticipation, gets to go in the woods by herself.

So like on an adventure without supervision and just what that means as exploring and experiencing it all to herself without anyone overshadowing that.

I grew up in the country and there wasn't a lot going on, but I kind of found the woods behind our house to be very magical.

So that is the inspiration where we got to run and have all this nature and it was actually very calming.

So I guess I want other kids to be able to realize that if they're feeling overwhelmed or need to get exercise or anything like that, like being out in a park or woods is just like a perfect place to be to experience just an overwhelming sense of like calm.

I don't know how to describe it, it's just rather lovely.

So there's a lot of obstacles that Periwinkle has to overcome.

When they're going along on this adventure with her having this experience, then I think it gives them the opportunity to think, oh, what would I do?

And what is she going to do next?

And how is she going to solve this problem without giving up?

It's not so overwhelming, but it's enough of a challenge where it's meant to give kids a thought process to try to get them thinking about what they would do.

A lot of times people feel like, oh, I have to, if I'm gonna support this, I need to go buy all these supplies.

What I like to do, even with my own kids, and we've done over the years, is to use, to upcycle like cartons, like pop cartons, milk jugs, strawberry containers, and see what they can do with it.

We've, you know, over the years, my daughter and I made fairy houses out of things and you know, just decorating those and that's been a lot of fun.

Or like little storage containers for stickers or washi tape or anything like that.

And it just is meant to get their creative juices flowing and see what they can use without spending a lot of money.

Basically, I have something inside of me that I just have to keep creating things.

And it's evolved over the years where like when I first started in my 20s, I would make little bird houses and I would paint those, or I would just make all these little crafts.

And then I started my wedding invitation business and I did that for like 13 years and that was a huge process.

So then after I did that, I started doing freelance graphic design and I did that for several years.

And then I worked on the books and then I just, I do a lot of collaging now.

So it's just always evolving, but I just have to always constantly keep making things.

(bright music) I was so challenged by trying to come up with, like, I would have dreams, like, okay, you wanna do this, why are you not working on it?

But the story wasn't coming together right away, like I felt like I was forcing it.

And so that's why I set it aside to do "Fun For Anyone" first, because I had that story and that just, you know, rolled right out.

But with this one, the art process, I decided to do it completely differently.

So it wasn't just digital art, it was all these collages, which take an incredible amount of time but it was so worth it.

I love doing author visits, so I'll go into classrooms to do "Fun For Anyone," but then I'll also take this massive collage that is an entire spread, and I've taken it in and the kids just like pour over it.

And it's so fun.

I used to do wedding invitations and so I have like bins of scrap card stock that I didn't wanna part with, you know, like mistakes for printing and stuff like that.

And I'll cut them up and use them for tree trunks and paint over them and all these things.

So it has like little wording throughout and it has little animals throughout.

And so basically they're just going through trying to find like all the hidden things and it makes it more fun.

It just makes it more of an experience.

- [Kabir Bhatia] All good things must come to an end.

Thank you for watching this edition of "Applause."

I'm a Idea Stream Public Media's, Kabir Bhatia.

As we say, (indistinct), here's a lovely performance by the Cleveland Orchestra from its Adela streaming app.

This is "The Adagio" from Gustav Mahler's final Symphony number 10.

Enjoy.

(orchestra playing) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Idea Stream public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.