(gentle bright music) >> Speaker: The thing that I kinda say about Metal Point is that instead of you wearing it to adorn to make yourself look amazing, what if you were as precious as these metals that I'm creating you in?

>> Aubrey: It's just a blessing, you know, to have somebody come to you to do something that we get to build from nothing pretty much with our hands.

>> Bryan: But in the end, when you have that car done and the client loves it and other people are just like, "Oh my God," there's nothing better.

♪ Spread it around, ooh ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ >> Bonnie: Lilian Fendig is a very interesting Rensselaer person who was originally from England.

She was a formally trained artist in England, and she eventually moved to Rensselaer, but she brought this marvelous formal training with her to Rensselaer, and so she was a really amazing artist throughout her entire life.

>> Presenter: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

I'll remember the feeling of being here, the feeling that I was a part of a family.

>> Ad Presenter: Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, LaPorte, and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> Presenter: Family, home, work, self.

Of all the things you take care of, make sure you're near the top of the list.

NorthShore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess, and put yourself first.

From medical to dental, vision, chiropractic, and mental health, NorthShore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

NorthShore Health Centers, building a healthy community one patient at a time.

>> Announcer: "Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the John W. Anderson Foundation, and the Indiana Arts Commission.

Making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle serene music) >> Even though I'm the youngest of like, eight kids, I actually was around a lot of adults, and to keep me busy, they showed me how to do a stick figure, and that kind of evolved into like Superman, and Batman, and Wonder Woman, and stuff like that.

And then over the years, it became not much of a academic thing, but more of a cathartic thing.

Whenever I would have bouts of depression, things like that, I actually would create.

It made me feel good that I created something that was beautiful even though I didn't feel great about myself.

And then in like, 1990, I became professional.

And what I was doing from that point on was just creating artwork for the soul, emotional stuff.

More the negative stuff that, you know, women feel all the time, but it was actually on their faces.

Like, you can actually see, it wasn't so much the tears, but the yearning, and let's say about 20 years goes by and I just turned around, I'm like, "I wonder if I can create from joy".

I was always a big fan of Leonardo da Vinci, okay?

And I mean, just his brilliance, and what really got me was that my husband said, "You do these kind of portraits", the ones I was doing in paintings, "Did you ever think of what it would look like with this kind of material?"

And, you know, that was Silver Point because it's really, it starts with silver.

That's what they were using at the time.

I use, I say metal point because I'm using silver, gold, platinum, copper, brass.

You know, I'm using more than just one.

The response I got from the people that I was showing it to wasn't that about me, but about them, and it made them feel good about themselves, and because the thing that I kinda say about metal point is that instead of you wearing it to adorn to make yourself look amazing, what if you were as precious as these metals that I'm creating you in?

I wanna be able to show that beauty with them because if you look at the way I'm creating it, when light shows on it, it almost looks like their soul is coming out.

My driving force I think is the fact that, you know, you don't see people of color.

You see women, but you don't see people of color in this particular medium that is so beautiful to me.

It's so delicate, it's, you know, you don't see people of color being portrayed in delicacy, you know, in elegance, and I wanted to give that, you know, I wanted to give that other alternative.

With the piece that I created here, it's so much more about the community that I grew up in in Harlem, and the greatest thing about that was that I remember kids playing in the street, little girls dancing, boys playing in the street with their cars, mothers in the window, guys on the stoop.

You know, they were either related, or they were good friends.

You get your first haircut, you know, all the things that you could think of when you were a kid that made the community what it was that had nothing to do with drugs, guns, gangs.

That's how my neighborhood was, and so and I know that there's a heck of a lot of neighborhoods out there that's still the same way.

You know, it's just that in the narrative that's constantly being portrayed, I wanted to bring it back to what community really was, and I also wanted people to have a relationship because it's like people have mothers, people have fathers, people have brothers and stuff, and I want them to see something of their family, of themselves in this medium.

And it's like, I want people to understand, no, that Black narrative is not a monolith.

And so coming back to that kinda narrative is so important because that's really simple, and yet special.

When you're authentically yourself, it's a beautiful thing.

If you get a chance to be authentic in who you are, I encourage you to be beautifully authentic, you know, in whatever way you go.

>> You know, in mid 20th century, men dominated the art scene.

Every gallery was mostly full of shows by men and an occasional woman.

Indiana I think was a great place because the Indiana Artist Club, of which she was a member, I think equally was represented by men and women.

But, you know, she was a very independent, really special mid-century woman.

You know, she was no housewife at home taking care of Ralph.

They took care of each other and celebrated the joy in both their lives.

So I mean, she could be a role model for the rest of us girls today, I think.

Lilian Fendig is a very interesting Rensselaer person who was originally from England.

And she met her husband Ralph Fendig, who was from Rensselaer, who was a bachelor, who was in World War II.

She was a formally trained artist in England, and so she met Ralph and they really liked each other, and she eventually moved to Rensselaer and married Ralph.

But she brought this marvelous formal training with her to Rensselaer, and so she was a really amazing artist and prolific artist throughout her entire life.

Actually, when she was in junior high school, she got a scholarship to attend art school, and she was so outstanding that she stayed on and studied through high school.

So she had eventually got a degree in education.

She taught art in schools.

Her skillset was exquisite when she arrived here.

I think they married in about 1947, and she joined the Indiana Artist Club and became a part of the Brown County Artist group, and so she began showing actively in the 1950s and won many awards.

She had 50 years of exhibitions and a very prolific award-winning career.

I think she brought a cultural moment and exquisite works of art to this town that didn't have a lot of art or a lot of artists.

So, you know, you can see this amazing body of work.

Prairie Arts is very fortunate to have a permanent collection.

We've got so many interesting behind the scenes working sketches, and journals, and things like that.

So Lilian's work, when you look at it, it's very traditional work.

I mean, it reminds you very much of representational work from the mid 20th century.

Edward Hopper comes to mind as someone who painted similarly in a representational way.

His work was always a lot moodier to me, and a lot lonelier.

His always seemed to address places that had few or little people.

Lilian's always has kind of a joy about it.

I mean, you can tell that she loved life and she loved the world, and so wherever she traveled, whether it was the dude ranch or Wisconsin, she would be making sketches and coming back to make art about those places.

She traveled back and forth to London many times in her life after she moved to Rensselaer.

So you'll see a lot of English scenes both in the city, and rural, and you can recognize them instantly.

They look so different than the Indiana and American scenes, but I would say she's really a very classic mid-century artist in her style and her subjects.

Just a vibrancy and a joy.

You know, a few of the pieces get a little moody and have some undertones, but basically you can look around and see that she was just celebrating the beauty of the world around her.

When she was in England, she was also an illustrator, and one of the techniques that she learned was called wood engraving, and it's this very, very precise, meticulous form of printmaking where she would take other very dense maple wood blocks, and you would carve into them with wood tools.

We actually have a portfolio of those wood blocks that her husband, Ralph, after she passed away in 1985, bequeathed to the Prairie Arts Council, and we actually printed those blocks.

Ralph was very good friends with Bob Lewis, who was the founder of the Prairie Arts Council, and so when we were initiating the Prairie Arts Council as an organization, Ralph wanted to do something on behalf and in memorial of Lilian.

So he gave us some startup money for our gallery, and so in turn, we decided to name the gallery after her, which was a wonderful collaboration.

The establishment of the Prairie Arts Council became a really good sort of heartbeat for people interested in the arts, and I think we've done a lot to promote what Lilian started to a greater audience.

We started a program called Art Camp, and would have classes, but she's always been a presence kind of in the background of all of what we've done.

(upbeat bluesy rock music) >> For me, I grew up as a kid going to car shows with my dad, and man, I just loved seeing all these custom cars and the metal work that went into 'em, and so I've been kinda doing that my whole life.

And then I met her and she was into it too, so we both kinda like combined stuff, and just started working together, and it just kept growing and growing.

>> I grew up very mountain man native American kind of.

So I grew up doing leather work, kind of just out of necessity, making things to use.

And as I started to do more and more of it, it kinda became a business.

And then when we met, I was doing that, and then I already did metal when I was in high school.

I really enjoyed it.

So I kinda picked up more when I met him, and then I started getting some leather jobs through the steel mill, and then got metal jobs through the steel mill.

And then we got a bigger job working on some shipping containers turning 'em into restaurants.

And then I said, "Okay, you can quit your job now".

So that's how we kind of started combining it together.

>> As a kid, I was more into like muscle car restoration type of stuff, which I still love that.

I love taking something that looks all old and beat up and making it look brand new again.

It's just, it's super rewarding, you know?

But after a while, that stuff kinda gets boring because you already know what the car's gonna look like.

You know, if it's a stock car, you're putting it back to the way it was, and, you know, so it gets kind of dull.

So and I wanted to do more, more custom stuff where I'm making my own thing and doing what I want, you know?

And so it started with that with my dad, and then I just started acquiring a little bit of tools here.

A lot of, you know, reading books, looking at stuff on the internet, and it just kinda, you know, I keep trying to just push and push and, you know, push my skills to where I'm making something from completely just flat sheets.

>> And his family, he leaves out, they're all machinists.

>> True.

So we do that too.

>> So he grew up in a machine shop that was, you know, so he had access to larger tools and things that normal people and kids didn't, and his dad was into drag racing and things like that, so he kinda tagged along.

So it was kind of I think it comes natural to you, you know, you're like, you forget how you got into it.

>> My dad was a tool and dye maker his whole life, so it's just like it's instilled in me, you know?

>> So he measures everything to like the millionth.

>> Yeah.

>> Takes forever to build anything.

>> I can't help it.

That's the way it is, you know?

(upbeat bluesy rock music) I mean, the first step it's gotta get taken down to bare metal and see what you have to work with because to go over something that's already there, it's not the right way to do it, first of all, and it's gonna come back to bite you, and, you know, it's our reputation.

So we wanna do things the right way.

So strip it, fix whatever needs to be fixed, or if we're doing custom stuff, you know, we'll get a rendering made or, you know, sit down with the client, see what he wants, and kinda sketch something out.

>> But we also say what we want too.

>> It's true.

>> We've learned that whatever we put on the street, we wanna be proud of, and sometimes people may not have the same idea of what's cool as we do, and so we've definitely learned that we would rather say no to somebody who may not have the same style guide as us, and so we would rather people come to us because they appreciate our style.

So we- >> Kinda steer 'em.

>> We learn when to say no.

Yeah, we try to steer them, you know, so we learn when to say no and when to like, you know, when the customer's right.

>> [{Bryan] And then it works its way up from there, you know, then we move on to the body shop, paint work, assembly, all the normal stuff to get to something like that.

A lot of hours.

>> I mean, expression is like unlimited.

Really, you can do whatever you want to a car.

I think that's why customizing a car is the coolest form of expression.

You can go as modest or as crazy as you want.

And so I think, you know, we're really into like, the art deco eras and stuff, and so that's something that we like to express a lot, and I think that's something that we carry through in a lot of our design and build.

>> And especially this car 'cause this one's ours, so we're poured into this as much as you can be, so.

(upbeat bluesy rock music) >> Well, you think that people, that they're secrets and I think that's kind of our initial idea of the car scene was that, you know, well how do they build that, or how do they do this, or how do they do that?

But honestly, the deeper we've gotten into it as a business, we've been so welcomed and there's so many bigger builders out there that have really helped us whether it's how to machine something, or paint something, or their techniques, how they got something another way, or how they run their business.

It's been very like, welcoming, which we didn't expect at first.

>> No, it's super surprising.

>> We thought it was gonna be super 'cause there are some people that are competitive and not as welcoming, but you quickly find your people.

It's just a blessing, you know, to have somebody come to you to do something that we get to build from nothing pretty much with our hands, and produce something, and we're getting paid to do it.

You know, to me that's why it's Live Free because we're living free from, you know, we're making our own rules, and we get to do what we wanna do and make a living off of it, which is awesome.

>> I mean, there's nothing better than that, and it makes all the hard work, and all the late nights, and the being upset that something's not working out the way you wanted it.

But in the end, when you have that car done and the client loves it, and other people are just like, "Oh my God", there's nothing better.

(gentle acoustic guitar music) ♪ Can you remember what it's like ♪ ♪ When all the world was filled with light ♪ ♪ Now that you have that in your sights ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around, ooh ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Have you felt joy in your days ♪ ♪ Even though you had your share of pain ♪ ♪ What does hoarding all that joy gain ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around, ooh ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Is your belly up and full ♪ ♪ Have you fed your family too ♪ ♪ Does the table have just a little more room ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around, ooh ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Are your blankets soft and warm ♪ ♪ Does the roof above your head keep out the storm ♪ ♪ Can you save someone else from being cold ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around, ooh ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ It's true about love ♪ ♪ It'll die if it's covered up ♪ ♪ It's got to be all given away ♪ ♪ So we can all feel the heat of it's ray ♪ ♪ Can you remember what it's like ♪ ♪ When all the world was filled with light ♪ ♪ Now that you have that in your sights ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around, ooh ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ ♪ Spread it around ♪ >> Presenter: Doing as much as you can as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> Almost every single professor I've had, I'm on a first name basis.

By building that relationship with faculty, I was able to get involved with research.

It's one thing to read about an idea in a book versus physically doing it and seeing the results.

>> Ad Presenter: Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, LaPorte, and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu, >> Presenter: Family, home, work, self.

Of all the things you take care of, make sure you're near the top of the list.

NorthShore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess, and put yourself first.

From medical to dental, vision, chiropractic, and mental health, NorthShore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

>> Announcer: "Eye In The Arts", is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the John W. Anderson Foundation, and the Indiana Arts Commission.

Making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> Ad Presenter: Did you know that you can find all of your favorite Lake Shore PBS shows online?

By visiting video.lakeshorepbs.org, you can stream a large selection of shows, including "Eye On The Arts", "In Studio", and "Friends and Neighbors".

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(upbeat music)