(wheels screeching) (cannon exploding) - I loved the idea of political cartooning, and that's what's real magic to me, is some shy kid from Northern Ohio can have a voice in our political dialogue with just a piece of art.

(calming music) My mother, she had been a painter.

She was on the more creative side.

And my father was a biochemist.

I seemed to have this strange blend of left brain, right brain.

And I think the reason I really took to political cartooning was because it's kind of a perfect blend between analytics and creativity.

Political cartooning is a negative art.

People will often complain about that.

Say, don't you ever have anything positive to say.

But it's, satire is a negative art.

You're getting a point of view across by ridiculing something else.

There's a couple challenges in that.

Sometimes I believe in something proactively, but it's awkward to do that with a political cartoon.

It's just not a great vehicle for saying something positive.

(calming music) I started The Courier-Journal in 1991, and I had always been kind of skeptical of unions back then.

I'm actually more sympathetic now, but back then, I was more skeptical of unions.

I felt like the UAW had done a disservice to the American car industry, making it less competitive.

And there were a couple decades where American cars were just subpar in terms of reliability to Japanese cars.

In 1991, George H.W.

Bush went to Japan and got a trade agreement for them to buy, I don't know, 80,000 American cars a year.

And so I had a cartoon in the paper that was actually two Japanese guys looking into the hood of an American car.

And it was filled with garbage.

And they said, "What are we gonna do with 80,000 American cars a year?"

And the other guy said, "Fix 'em and send them back."

This is when I discovered that they make the Ford Explorer in Louisville, Kentucky, so.

I discovered that they were manufacturing the Ford Explorer in Louisville, Kentucky after that cartoon.

I hadn't even thought about it.

I'd been at The Courier-Journal for three months or something like that, and I was still pretty shy.

And the uproar, I mean, it was crazy.

We were getting hundreds of phone calls a day.

People were canceling their newspapers.

We had an ombudsman back then.

And the ombudsman was like, "My phone will not stop ringing."

"There's so many angry union members."

So in order to quell the uproar, we agreed to go take, our editorial board agreed to take a tour of the Ford Explorer plant there.

And in exchange, they agreed to not sort of sandbag us and have a big confrontation.

Well, we took a tour and it was, and we were getting, if looks could kill.

We were getting dirty looks the entire time we were on the floor.

It was would've been fascinating had I not felt like I was about to be strangled to death.

It was a pretty good education on how consequential one political cartoon could be, especially back then.

(dramatic music) This cartoon is an illustration, so to speak, of an occupational hazard in editorial cartooning, in that sometimes you put something in a drawing, you don't intend it, but it comes through differently.

And here you can see it's real light now, but I have inadvertently, through the crisscrossing of the steam roller tracks, created an almost perfect Star of David, which would've been very, very unfortunate had it published that way, because people would have thought that I was suggesting that there was some kind of conspiracy of a global cabal of Jewish elites who are doing terrible things to the world, which is, you know, one of these horrible antisemitic theories played into conspiracy theories.

And I would've been probably accused of antisemitism.

And here, I draw it and then I realize it and I go, oh gosh, and I have to, and I change it.

(calming music) I would just define myself as a satirist, because what we're doing is getting a point of view across by ridiculing something else and exaggerating it, which is what the best satire does.

(calming music) One through line throughout my career would be fighting for what I believe is social justice.

That's what motivates me.

Many things, racial justice, or income inequality, or just literal justice.

(calming music) Doing political cartoons right now is really interesting because we're so polarized.

There may be a lot of people that love what you do, but there's always gonna be people that hate what you do.

And that's always been the case.

It's just gotten worse.

You get a lot of reader feedback, you get threats.

People will email something, they'll find your email address and they'll threaten you.

It's usually vague.

It's not explicit, but there's threatening language.

It's actually better now probably than when I was at the Houston Chronicle, because I had a public phone number.

You know, people, it was easy to contact me.

I would get angry phone calls.

(calming music) Political cartoonists, have been, in many respects, the canary in the coal mine for the newspaper business.

There used to be 150 full-time political cartoonists around the country at newspapers.

And we were some of the first to go.

Newspapers just started having to make tough decisions about what they could afford.

And they started cutting obviously reporters and photographers, but most newspapers have more than one photographer and reporter, but only one political cartoonist.

When the political cartoonist goes, that readership no longer has one.

This started happening across the country.

In fact, Texas now, I was the last political cartoonist in Texas when I was let go in 2017 by The Houston Chronicle.

So the second largest state in the country by population has zero full-time political cartoonists as of 2017.

(calming music) As we've gone, so have gone newspapers.

(calming music) The newspaper editors are just under enormous pressure these days from angry readers and cancellations.

There used to be a time when newspapers could ignore cancellations 'cause they would come back.

There was not a lot of other choices.

You can see where an editor would be like, I don't need this trouble, I don't want even want to use this syndicated cartoon, or let alone have my staff cartoonist.

So being a cartoonist today is definitely a challenging political environment.

(calming music) I was born into a Catholic family, went to Catholic elementary schools, Jesuit high school.

So steeped in Catholicism.

But there are no sacred cows.

So when the pedophile scandal erupted in the Catholic church, I was working for The Courier- Journal at the time, and I was doing critical cartoons about it.

This was still pretty early on.

We're about three months in, and the Catholic church was still kind of in denial, and claiming that, well, it's just a small percentage of priests kind of dodging the bigger issue, which is the cover up, rather than making sure that didn't happen again.

They'd move them around and they kept it quiet.

And I think I'd just done like three cartoons at this point.

We had just, my wife at the time, my ex-wife, we had just had our second child, and of course, she was gonna be baptized.

I was Catholic, she was Catholic.

Her parents were very Catholic, her parents were devout Catholics.

I had been doing cartoons critical of the church.

And I was also a member of, probably the biggest parish in Louisville, the Cathedral of the Assumption.

They had had a change in who their pastor was.

He was new and he didn't know.

The old pastor knew who I was and we knew each other, and we had a cordial relationship.

But the new pastor didn't know that the cartoonist for the local newspaper was in the congregation.

On the day that there was a baptism, because it was a large parish, there were I think like nine or 10 parents getting baptisms that day.

And for some reason, he chose that Sunday to address the pedophile story.

And it was the first time he'd apparently discussed it, and he went on to get defensive and essentially make excuses for the church, and attack the media, including that local anti- Catholic cartoonist.

(calming music) I was in the first seat front row, 'cause I was one of the baptismal parents.

And my entire Catholic family was down the whole row, including my very devout Catholic parents-in-law.

And then proceeded to head back after the homily, and get my son baptized and had my name read aloud.

And so there were a lot of people in the congregation who knew that I was the guy who had just been described as anti-Catholic by the pastor.

So I went back and related this story to my colleagues and did a cartoon the next day.

(calming music) Very mixed feelings about a very awkward at the time, but also validating in that political cartoons really do start (censor) up, if you'll excuse my language.

They really do have an impact.

These little one frame things can really cause a lot of trouble.

Good trouble, as John Lewis once said.

Hopefully they're causing good trouble.

(calming music) As I mentioned, I did my first political cartoon from a high school paper at age 14.

And I was like, this is what I want to do.

And I was so obsessively focused on becoming good cartoonist that I was always trying to map out what the next step was like.

I mentioned earlier, my father was a scientist, so when I told him I wanted to be a cartoonist, he had a big belly laugh.

He thought that was hilarious.

And he said, "You could fit the number" "of political cartoonists in this country "into a phone booth.

"Your chances of getting a job as a political cartoonist "are very slim".

Because back, then newspapers used to be the big deal.

And working in a newspaper and becoming one of maybe 125 full-time cartoonists was very long odds.

(calming music) I was born in Ohio, Northern Ohio, and went to Ohio State, 'cause they had the largest student newspaper in the country.

And the funny thing is, Keith Runyon was the editorial page editor of The Courier-Journal back then.

And I was sending him my cartoons through the mail and caricatures.

Daily, every time I did, or weekly at least.

And he was really interested.

And then I called after like a month or two of doing this.

And he said, you know, "I think we've got more cartoons than we need."

"I don't think we can use you."

"I'm really sorry."

And so I was like, crestfallen, 'cause he had been telling me that he was a fan of my work.

And I was like, oh, now what?

And then he calls back like 30 minutes later, he goes, "I'm so sorry."

"I thought you were somebody else."

He said, "I love your work, keep sending it."

And lo and behold, I got an internship in the art department.

And so they offered me a full- time job at the end of the internship.

It was amazing.

Back then, I went from being a college cartoonist, to doing like three or four cartoons a week for a major metropolitan newspaper.

The Courier-Journal was a great newspaper.

The Courier-Journal had been the home to Hugh Haynie, one of the great editorial cartoonist for decades before my time.

And he was still there, but he was approaching retirement, so they were looking for somebody.

(calming music) Every January was contest season at newspapers, because almost all the contests, including the Pulitzer Prize were at the end of January.

I did know that they were submitting my work.

That was the year, the first year I started working in color.

So I think my work probably stood out a little bit from all the others.

Most cartoons in 2004, 2005 were still in black and white.

So I think mine probably popped out a little bit more.

The day that the Pulitzers were announced, I wasn't paying attention.

I was just in my office doing things.

I'm like, I never win contests.

I'm not gonna, I knew it was that day, but I'm like, I'm not gonna pay attention.

My office is about 50 feet from the editor's office.

There's a executive assistant starts yelling for me to come down to rush down the hall.

And he stood up and shook my hand and said, "You won the Pulitzer Prize."

It was, and I was just stunned.

I just, I didn't even celebrate.

I just sat down and I was like in shock.

(calming music) Back then, that was a big deal.

It's still a big deal.

This is just 20 years ago, and the world has changed dramatically.

Back then, winning the Pulitzer was huge.

I liken it to being in the mafia.

You're a made man when you win the Pulitzer.

It's like, it's the big deal, and you can kind of write your own ticket.

You have career safety.

It was a really big deal.

It was fun.

But the business has changed, and it doesn't mean as much.

Obviously there isn't job security.

A lot of Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonists have lost their jobs.

(calming music) A lot of people think that political cartoons are supposed to be funny.

Sometimes I'll do something that's poignant, it's on a serious topic, and people will email me and say, that's not funny.

Well, a political cartoon does not have to be funny.

It just has to communicate a point of view.

It has to communicate an opinion.

I always say, you want a political cartoon to be thought-provoking.

It might provoke laughter, it might provoke anger, but at the end you want it to be provoking thought.

A lot of political cartoons are either personality-driven or issue-driven.

Personality-driven cartoons are much easier.

Issues are a little bit more of a heavy lift.

And I like doing them, and I make sure that they're an important part of my routine.

You want a cartoon to be as quickly digested and understood as possible, so you use recognizable symbols or people.

And that's why the President, or whoever the President happens to be at the time is always in cartoons a lot because it's a foil.

You need a foil, or you need some kind of metaphor for an issue.

And then people start talking about it.

That's really amazing.

Having a little voice that carries through and adds something to the discussion is pretty great.

It's a real challenge to continue doing this for any of us.

There's probably 15 full-time cartoonists right now in the country.

And when they retire, they'll not be replaced.

Usually newspapers have either fired their cartoonist, or when they retired, they just didn't replace them.

We are the dinosaurs, a couple of steps out of the tar pits.

(dramatic music) (calming music) (birds chirping) - These materials come to me.

I didn't make them or create them.

These things weren't even given the dignity of recycling, right?

I mean, it's the lowest of the low.

(calming music) But I see their value and utility, and have woven them into a vocabulary of shapes and forms and ideas that I can play with.

It occurred to me that the Falls of the Ohio State Park, which is located on Exit 0 on I-65, that it sounded kind of existential to me.

If I go to Exit 0, what am I going to find?

Of course, anything I remove out of the river is a bonus.

That's why I'm very free and careless with my own work even.

You know, I just make things and I leave them there, and people can do whatever they want to do.

Some things become focal points for unfocused aggression, you know?

There are a lot of people that come to the river.

There are a lot of people that need to come to the river.

I'm, I guess, one of those people too.

There are other folks that come across that are down on their luck, and are just trying to make do, you know?

Or they're living on the edge of the river because they're sort of on the edge of their minds too.

Now there's all kinds of things that I see happening in this space that has kept my attention and interest.

One of the unique elements, what the river does to help me in this respect is it removes all of the labels.

So I'm not looking at these things as, oh, that's a plastic bottle of Tide, or Cheer, or some automotive lubricant.

These are just colors and forms.

And so I feel like, unlike that $10 piece of cotton paper, a rag paper I had to buy when I was a drawing student.

These things don't have a preciousness in the intrinsic whatever they are.

I like the connection to the John James Audubon work at the Falls of the Ohio.

The very first passenger pigeon he ever drew was at the Falls of the Ohio.

Among my favorite pieces to make are birds.

I've been watching birds forever at Falls of the Ohio.

And the pieces of styrofoam.

In this piece, we have two.

The head is a piece of styrofoam, polystyrene, and so is the body, the white part here.

What made me pick them up is that the river shaped them and tumbled them in the sand, with water, and wave, and created forms that made me think, well, that could be a bird body, or that could be the head of a bird.

When I would visit Falls of the Ohio, I would go and be disturbed by the amount of plastic and the amount of styrofoam that would find, the things that kind of float and are subject to being driven by wind and currents.

And the Falls of the Ohio, it has a unique little geographical aspect about it where all of these materials would wash up on the north side, on the north bank of the Ohio, and to be deposited in this park that is ironically famous for being one of the most important fossil sites.

The Devonian Period, roughly 350 to 400 million years ago, the Falls of the Ohio expose what was essentially the high point of life as it existed then.

There are more creatures that have been described in the fossil rocks locally than in the type site Devon in England.

So it's important in that kind of sense too.

(ducks quacking) Being out in the environment, you notice if you were to make something like this out in that site, you would develop a different kind of affinity for the space that it's in.

And I think that's where I can kind of operate, and give people, let them know that they have an aesthetic dimension, that things are life enhancing.

They can enjoy the quality of their own life if they made something every now and then, you know?

(calming music) All of these shapes were given to me by the river.

For me, I can remember having a kind of epiphanal moment.

I can remember standing on the fossil beds in the summertime when they're most, they're exposed mostly then, and standing at what was the high point of life at this point, and looking past like a 19th century railroad bridge, and seeing a contemporary city on the horizon there across the river, and just feeling this really intense sense of time and place, and purpose and connection.

(calming music) One of my goals is to see how many figures can I keep up in place at one time before the river or people intercede, and either take them or destroy them, which is what happens a lot.

(calming music) It is always fun to have people play along.

People are welcome to play along.

I usually have other materials on site.

Anybody felt like they wanted to add something to it, they could.

It's interesting, the styrofoam figures seem to be the pieces that get singled out for exceptional treatment.

I might have three pieces right in the same site, and then you'll have this absurd figure standing there, and it's the figure that will be like destroyed or smashed to bits.

And the other stuff would be left alone.

What's interesting about Mr.

Potato Head, when I first played with him as a kid, he was a real potato.

And they were real vegetables.

And then he morphed into plastic and became, well a metaphor for what happened to the rest of us from the '60s to where we are now.

(calming music) People ask, how does my art figure into any kind of advocacy for the river?

That is of interest to me.

Over the years, people have kind of projected a lot of environmental stuff upon me, which has been a very interesting thing.

One thing I can definitively say is that in all the years, and this is almost 30 years I've been doing this, I don't think I've changed anybody's mind or altered the amount of plastic being used in the river.

For me, it's never quite been about that.

And it occurred to me that what I was trying to do was reconcile things, and to appreciate and honor the hard won forms that the river was giving me, but at the same time, not overly imposing my will to the point where it was all about me.

People say, "Well, why don't you just expand how you work" "to other places?"

And I've just never found a place that had the kind of resonance that this place does.

(calming music) I probably missed the boat by not jumping on the YouTube bandwagon and taking people along with me on the river.

And it's like, okay, here's the 200th doll I found.

I do consider myself an environmentalist.

Where I disappoint people is when I'm not an environmental Jesus.

I'm not going to absolve you from your sins of all the mass consumption, and absolve you from thinking about these materials, or how they came into being, and what effects they are having in the world.

You can't put that on me to solve that for you.

I'm just an artist reacting to materials.

(calming music) Here's this amazing place on the planet, this power point, this intersection in time and space.

I wish all of this stuff would disappear.

I really do.

I would find something else to do.

But you know, these were the materials that provoked me.

I'm just rearranging what's already in the world.

(upbeat music) - If you know what my art is all about, I'm gonna pray for your demented soul.

I am lucky.

This is not the reason I do art though at 84 years old.

I do art to live fully.

To live, to live.

I like to do possibilities rather than reality.

In my art, scary, bizarre, sexual, funny, violent, macabre, lovely, frightening.

The answer is maybe, possibly, but what's that to me?

It's my art to express, not yours.

My job is to do it and not to judge the reason.

But I do judge it, of course.

But not to find a reason or a meaning.

I judge my work for composition, balance, the use of materials, utilization of color and form and texture.

(upbeat music) - Bob is a very complicated individual, and a lot going on in his mind.

And he is not afraid to put that into his artwork.

(upbeat music) - I think if people understand my art, I worry about them, because it's my private art, it's my private thought.

And if they relate to it, then I worry about their mental health, really, because my art is a bit insane, you know, at times.

It's a reflection of a moment.

- Some of his pieces can be very grotesque, especially in some of his ceramic pieces.

Also a little whimsical as well.

He always tries to incorporate whimsy into everything he does, even though it may be a little dark.

(upbeat music) - I went to the Chicago School of the Art Institute, and I got a scholarship.

And I was taught by European teachers.

So I had the best of the best.

They didn't allow anything in the way of crap from me.

They picked up on any kind of BS that I would try and throw their way, because at that point I was still rebelling from everything, trying to be somebody I wasn't.

So during coffee, because I was incapable of being around too many people, it would freak me out.

I would stay and do my sculpture.

So during that half hour block every day, morning and the afternoon, I would just stay in the studio and work.

(upbeat music) - Bob has always been very politically active, and he tries to incorporate that into a lot of his work.

(upbeat music) - I realize as an artist, I don't need to know what my art is about.

It doesn't entice me.

All I want to know is what the end result is going to be.

And I will take that piece, and I'll work on it all day, on whatever it requires, and then I will take it and put it in a kind of a false light like I've got now, where you've put a light in the background and make it more dramatic.

And then I have a tablet that I write in every night before I go to bed.

I write down, if you do this, can you do this?

Maybe it should be red, maybe it should be this.

And this is what everybody says.

How do you know when it's done?

Well, when you're a professional, you know when it's over.

You know when the next piece forms.

And for me, the next piece comes when I question.

The questions that I ask myself outweigh the questions that I ask about the particular drawing.

I'm asking about another drawing, the next thing, or the next piece of sculpture.

- Bob is a true creative.

He creates his work, whether it's sculpture, or drawings, or ceramics, totally based on what comes out of his mind and what he wants to project.

He doesn't listen to the critics, or people that might find his work a little bit off kilter.

He produces what he wants to produce, and say what he wants to say with his artwork.

I have a lot of respect for an artist that can do that.

They don't care about pricing, or the market, and selling pieces.

They just want to produce the art that comes out of their head is totally unique to them.

(calming music) - I feel that an artist must be political in his approach to his art.

Not all of it.

An artist has always informed the world of what's going on.

And so mine has taken the place of social justice.

We've done 26 years of taking 30 students a piece, and going to Guatemala, and we built brick houses.

And so each student that went with me, no matter what they were from, or who they were, or whether they're men or women, they did brick laying.

They went and visited the poor.

And visiting the poor is an absolute pleasure because they don't know that they're supposed to reject us.

They want to be around us.

They thank us, and they say things like, "My God, how could you come here?"

"We see how you live on television."

"How could you come here and stay with us?"

And I'm thinking, why wouldn't I?

I mean it allows me to be a part of a world that I'm not in.

(calming music) I had just spent six months in the country of El Salvador, carving a what turned out to be a three ton wooden piece in mahogany.

Got real, real bad sick with dengue fever.

But I finished the piece in that six months.

We went over to Honduras and mined the trees.

We cut down nine mahogany trees, and every night we'd bring one across, and then we would, during the day, we would cut it and work it with big saws, like all manual.

And when I was gone, because it was political, during the Salvadoran War, the priest had the peace destroyed.

The priest was a (censored.

(somber music) I was working for a man who was very much in the same identity as Monsignor Romero.

(somber music) In working for the poor, there were death threats on him all the time.

Thank God he died a natural death.

But he was replaced by a Bishop from Spain.

And the Bishop from Spain proudly declared that Jesus was not brown, and that piece was mahogany.

It was stained, but it was still mahogany.

In his great wisdom, he had the piece burned down.

There was a number of discrepancies.

I said, I will take this job if I'm allowed to have six people working for me.

Three must be women.

That was a real problem.

It took a month to solve that.

When we did the piece, the workers each carved a six foot piece, a replica of one that I did, so that they had an idea how to carve, and what to do, and how to use the tools, et cetera.

So then when I was gone, the piece was destroyed.

It was burned down.

One little piece of the corner of the face, which was, almost three feet tall, was kept by the people.

(somber music) When I came back, I was offered to do a giant bronze, large piece, 23 foot piece.

It turned out to be three and a half tons.

So when my president, a real good friend said, "I want you to do this piece", I said, "I'm not doing any art."

"I'm done doing art, period."

"I'm not doing art."

Because when the piece was destroyed, it took a lot out of me.

I got it very confused with God.

I got it confused with wrath.

I got it confused.

And so I turned the piece down.

Three weeks later, my president said, "Now, are you interested in this?"

"You ready to do this piece?"

And I said, "I'm not doing this piece."

And he said, took me over on the side.

And he said, "Bob, you'll do this piece."

And that's why I did it.

I contracted that this horse would be done using the armor that I designed.

And I went over to London and studied in the Tower of London, studied what armor looks like, and how it works, and what it does.

And then I came back and did my own.

And so it's completely symbolic.

It's symbolic in so many ways.

The very top of the piece represents the university symbol of peace.

That shark's tooth bridal was really just a reaction of watching a film on the ocean, and the function of the shark's mouth.

I was wide open to putting things on that were symbolic or had some symbolism for myself to enjoy.

(calming music) The very top knot of the horse, the hair is designed to be in the shape of a pineapples.

It's the universal hospitality image.

There are things all over it.

And those things represent the things that bother you every day so that students would be bothered by things.

And they're represented by little lizards.

The back end of the horse was designed very particularly.

Back end, if you stand at a certain position, you'll see that it's a face coming out of the ass of the horse.

It's the bishop that destroyed my piece.

So you don't wanna really mess with an artist, we'll get you back.

- A lot of artists will work out of one medium, and it's a little unusual to see an artist work in the three mediums that Bob works in.

He became known for his large sculptural pieces working in steel and metal.

And then in his later years, he decided that it was better for him physically to work in drawing and ceramics.

He likes to sit at his studio, at his drafting table, and just draw these pieces.

Some days he'll do several, some days he'll do none at all.

- My early days were very chaotic.

I came from a very violent family, and my escape from my father was to do little clay models.

I had endless blocks of clay and I would do dioramas of circuses, and wars, and all kinds of things that it just allowed me to get away.

(dramatic music) - A funny story about his titles, someone asked him about his long titles.

They are several sentences long.

(upbeat music) He said that at one time, he never titled his work, it was always untitled.

And he went through an audit with the IRS, and they questioned him about why he didn't title his work to be able to keep with up with inventory.

(upbeat music) So to spite IRS, he decided to put these long drawn out titles on all of his work, and he continues to do that to this day.

(upbeat music) - [Bob] My titles are infamous for this reason.

They used to be my, what I considered to be absolutely funny jokes that I would present to my students.

And my students would go, yeah, right.

And I would get no reaction from them.

So I decided that really, they are so much a part of me, I guess, if I was not an artist, I would be locked up, because they're so bizarre.

They're so strange.

(upbeat music) I made my mark as a teacher, and I was very unprepared to teach.

It was a job that just came my way by accident, and I needed a job.

And I turned out I was decent at it.

And when I look at my art, my art is decent in the fact that I do it every single day.

But it doesn't measure that quality that I brought to my teaching.

- I have a great deal of respect for Bob.

He has dealt with student artists for 40 something years, and that's pretty remarkable that somebody can deal with a group of artists that can become very eccentric, and very hard to manage and deal with.

But he did that on a daily basis.

You have to respect somebody that can be that devoted to the art scene, and to the advancement of students.

- You have made my life worthwhile.

You have allowed me to be me.

To have tolerated my idiosyncrasies.

You have endured my jokes, only to find that I use them for my titles now.

That makes it even more confusing for you, 'cause you're looking for the Buick and it ain't there.

You have cared for me, and I will tell you this, many times when I arrived in the classroom with a heavy load of depression.

One of you will call out, "Hey, Bob."

And knowing that I hated titles, it changed the way my entire day was.

I hope I have created the possibility that I was a decent teacher, a decent artist, and a decent person.

(calming music) (metal clanging) - Strike it while it's hot is a blacksmithing saying that is used throughout our language now as a metaphor.

When you take the metal out of the forge, and it's red hot, or even white hot, it is very flexible.

Every second that you delay or work on it, it gets colder and harder.

It's important to work the metal quickly.

I find metal to be a very organic material the way I handle it.

I went to the Museum School in Boston.

I actually studied a variety of things while I was at school, from painting, to dying fabrics, jewelry, and metal work.

Sculpture was my forte.

Blacksmithing has developed into two separate fields.

One is farrier, which is horseshoeing, and the other is more artistic, as part of the arts and crafts movement that took the United States after World War II.

I guess I go into a zone when I'm very much involved in creating the artwork.

I guess you might call it spiritual.

(calming music) (gun firing) (saw whirring) Guns to Gardens is a grassroots movement that's happening all around this country.

I very much think that the gun violence that we have in this country is way out of hand.

And what little I can do to help, I'm very happy to do.

(saw whirring) - Guns to Gardens, Louisville, is an opportunity for people who have guns, who no longer want them to be able to have a way to dispose of them in a safe manner.

Sometimes people will bring a weapon that they have at home that they really don't know much about.

We had one woman a couple of times ago, who found weapons underneath of her couch, and she didn't even know that they were there.

So she brought them in, and in that case, they happened to be loaded.

That's why we have an armorer that works with us.

That gun is checked to be sure that it is unloaded.

(saw whirring) They can bring them, they can see them chopped up.

- I was approached by a local group if I would make their guns into garden hoes.

It's something which I have embraced.

In terms of getting violent guns off the street, it's probably not doing that.

And it's more symbolic.

It's actually quite difficult to dispose of a gun, and have it not be recycled into the general public.

We have state laws that require any government official who acquires a gun through confiscation or otherwise has to turn it over to the state police, and they auction them off in huge lots, often over $100,000 worth of guns to gun dealers.

And many of the guns have been put back on the street to be used in crime.

- [Soni] No other countries in the world like ours that have this many weapons.

There are more weapons in this country than there are people.

One of the primary reasons that people use guns is because they want to take their own life.

And so the more guns that we can help be destroyed, we feel like we're saving lives.

(saw whirring) (calming music) (birds chirping) (upbeat music) - So you may not think of flamenco and blacksmithing as having anything to do with one another, but actually they're deeply historically connected through the Gitano people of Spain.

The Gitanos are the Roma people, or more recently we would've called them gypsies.

When the Gitanos arrived, they had important skills that they had learned on their journey out of the northern part of India in the Inus River Valley over hundreds and hundreds of years.

And one of those important skills that they had learned was blacksmithing.

And one of the populations that was being expelled from Spain that had traditionally been in charge of blacksmithing were the Moors.

So in fact, the Gitanos of Spain were taking on the responsibility for the blacksmithing work that was necessary in that society at that time.

Working in a forge is inherently rhythmic.

Song and dance were already a part of Gitano society and culture, which the work songs of the forge have developed over hundreds and hundreds of years to become a family of palos that reflect this historical work, rhythmic song that is today part of our art form.

Because this was an art form that came out of an oppressed population, especially in the Cante, especially in the snippets of poetry that people sing in flamenco.

But if you sing about it, it's entertainment.

If you sing about it, your meaning is up for interpretation.

So this was not only a way of celebrating within your family, within your community, but it was also a way of speaking out.

(metal clanging) (performer clapping) (guitar strumming) (upbeat music) (performer tapping) (performer clapping) (metal clanging) (calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (upbeat music)