- In this edition of Artifacts, over 100 artists raise money for a beloved arts organization in Reno.

- Being an all-in was like a goal of mine.

Like, oh I, it can be like a real Reno artist if I get invited to do that.

- How wood reacts to natural elements.

- My name's Luke Jenkins and I run In Bloom Studio.

I do a lot of woodworking that can either take the form of sculpture or furniture.

- And musical instruments made out of reclaimed materials.

- We like different grains and different colors of woods to use in our instruments and also tone-wise as well.

They all have a little bit different sound.

(ukulele music) - It's all ahead on this edition of "Arteffects."

(uplifting jazz music) - Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan and welcome to "Arteffects."

The Holland Project is an all ages arts and music organization in Reno.

They recently held their seventh biennial fundraiser known as "All In."

During this event, artists submit work to raise money for gallery programming.

With over 120 artists participating, this event highlights the incredible impact Holland has on our community.

(uplifting music) - [Greeter] Okay!

- "Holland" is really significant to our arts community because it shows a really great snapshot of the artists who are in "Holland's orbit.

- It's an exhibition where we have pieces up for sale that artists donate to us.

- Everybody comes out and they can purchase a piece, first-come, first-served for 100 to $200.

As like a buyer, you're very lucky to catch a really good piece for a really good price.

And all of that money goes towards fundraising for The Holland Project.

- That's an idea, look at this.

- Yeah.

- The Holland Project is an all ages non-profit art and music initiative based in Reno, Nevada.

Our aim is creating and providing all ages access to arts, music programming, workshops, skill-building opportunities, and community-based events.

- I'd say the big focus of most of the events are music and concerts, that gets a lot of people out here.

But it's definitely a notable space for artists locally to be able to show work and to see work, and support.

- The Holland Project first and foremost to me is like just a wonderful community space that is really open to everybody.

The music scene here, we're really lucky.

There's so many venues where it's only 21 and up, but the Holland Project really gives an opportunity for everyone to be part of that experience.

When I first started becoming an artist, I had my first exhibit at their Youngblood show when I was in high school.

- So at whatever age, if you feel creative, they have space for you.

I am a local shop owner.

I own a toy store and a vintage shop.

My friend volunteered a lot at Holland.

We went to a few shows while I was here, and everyone was so nice and welcoming.

I was like, wow, everyone's so sweet and so interested even though I don't know them.

And that was a huge contrast from where I was living at the time.

"All In" is our biannual fundraiser for the gallery space here.

- It's how the gallery gets most of its funds other than grants and other support.

- Money that we raise for the event goes back to keeping the lights on, doors open in the gallery.

It pays artists to come to the space and have their exhibition, and it funds all of the arts programming that we do here at Holland.

- Nick Larson came up with the idea for the Holland exhibition back in 2014.

He was on the gallery committee at the time, and we've done it every two years since.

- This year we had about 140 artists participate, which is the biggest number that we've ever had.

We select artists to be an exhibition who have played a role at Holland in some facet.

- It's a huge mix of artists between younger artists.

We invite folks from our Youngblood exhibition, and just young artists that we know around, and also like professional artists that have been in Holland for a decade or more who are established.

So it's a cool opportunity to have a full encompassing view of Holland's community and who supports Holland and the wide variety and demographic of folks who come here.

- I was so stoked when I got invitation.

Every time like I get an opportunity like this, I'm like, oh my gosh.

I just knew this is the one I really wanted to show.

It's actually a portrait of my friend Starla.

This one was aiming towards anguish and the closeness to nature women inherently have.

It was like November, everything was pretty dead and then we just shot there, and we just like walked around, just shot, and it was just beautiful.

She's such a natural model.

It's amazing.

- So I was asked to participate in Holland.

I've been coming to Holland for years now, and being an Holland was like a goal of mine.

Like, oh I'll, I can be like a real Reno artist if I get invited to do that.

- I'm usually a textile artist, but I'm doing something different.

Whatever it is I'm thinking, I'm just trying to do it.

I am making a bare bench for All In, and now I'm applying plaster.

- Leading up to the event, seeing all the really amazing artwork that folks donated.

These are things that they put their love and time into.

It was really special.

This was probably the biggest exhibition that I've managed and put together so far along with the support of everyone here at Holland.

Everyone at Holland helps coordinating install, helping plan the reception.

So there's months of planning that goes into this event, and the event is just two quick hours, so chaotic.

- It's always a lot of anticipation kind of leading up to the reception.

People start to usually line up 'cause they all are kind of, they're vying for that piece that they want.

'cause like I said, it's first-come, first-served.

So they have like their eye on the one piece that they want and they wanna get in the door and get it before anybody else can - In line, I'm stressed out because you're like mentally preparing.

You're trying to get there early, and if you don't and you see them pick up your piece, it hurts.

It's very much like Black Friday too, where you're like running in and you're just like trying to grab what you want and it's kind of competitive.

- We are limiting it to three pieces per person.

And then if you remove a tag, we're gonna assume you're purchasing it.

So if there's zero, remove a tag list for you to buy.

- I would say we always have around 2 to 300 people that show up throughout the course of the night.

- We gave a guess of about 300, but my guess was between 200 and 1 million.

(uplifting music) - There's other activities happening within the space.

We had a fun interactive photo booth this time, next door, we have a community printmaking lab.

This year, we added a new element to it.

We did a cakewalk during the reception.

Not everybody can always have time to make a piece or send us a piece.

And we have a lot of friend artists who are also great bakers.

So this year we decided to add that.

- Cakewalk people, that got you.

When the music starts, you guys move.

You guys are kind of like musical chairs.

You walk around this square.

When the music stops, you stand on whatever number is closest to you.

I will pull a number from the bowl and that person wins the cake.

- There's so much stuff happening.

I am excited for the tattoo, I'm not gonna lie.

- I have raffle tickets for self.

For $5 a pop, you get a tattoo of one of the tattoos available on there.

So, I've been wanting to get tattoos forever, but maybe this will be a good first one.

- When someone buys my piece, I feel very like, wow.

I like someone like something that I made and it looks very sweet.

- And I'm like always thinking.

I'm like, where are they at?

I'm hope they're gonna love it, and I want to ask them where they're gonna put it.

- I feel like Holland is like one of the pillars of the Reno community.

So many cool people put this together.

- My heart wants to come out.

I literally could not do this without the community I have here.

Plus, I've made so many new friends, which is really awesome through the Holland Project, and it's just something that kind of binds us all together at the end of the day.

Everyone knows what the Holland Project is.

They know it's the spot.

- It's important to support these artists, the creators in our area that help make and keep Reno what it is.

- All ages programming is really important no matter what city you're in.

I think it contributes to like a really vibrant arts culture and makes a really vibrant city.

- To keep up with the Holland Project, visit their website at hollandreno.org.

And now it's time for this week's art quiz.

Public artwork is on display throughout Reno.

As of 2025, roughly how many permanent, and temporary public artworks are managed by the city of Reno?

Is the answer A, 36, B, 185, C, 94, or D, 51?

Stay tuned for the answer.

Luke Jenkins is a woodworker and sculptor in South Florida.

Using a combination of digital fabrication and traditional craftsmanship, his experiments with wood have led to some unexpected results.

- Those are pieces of plywood.

They have had patterns of termites carved into them and where the light penetrates through the piece of plywood is where both of the carved patterns have intersected with each other.

They both get carved about halfway into the plywood.

So wherever they meet is where light comes through.

Those all come from a bunch of tournaments that I caught during the last warming season, and right here in the shop actually, which is extra, extra terrifying.

(offbeat music) My name's Luke Jenkins, and I run In Bloom Studio.

I do a lot of woodworking that can either take the form of sculpture or furniture.

We're here in my workshop, I make my own stuff.

I do client work for commissions as well as just fabrication.

So I have a full wood shop with a laser cutter in the back and a big CNC router in the front.

So I do more traditional woodworking as well as digital fabrication, where things are designed on a computer, and then they're kind of cut out by machines.

I would love to try to like recreate termite patterns and how they eat wood, which I'm really interested in, because it's not linear and it's not really that logical.

It's this weird hybrid of like seeking and then just like eating as much as you can really fast, and then seeking again and eating as much as you can really fast.

I want to kind of make these portable termite capturing devices.

It could be this technical and this kind of like pseudoscientific, or it could turn into something else.

You know, I don't really know what it means yet.

I just know that I'm very interested in it.

And the same thing happened with the thermally modified wood, which is that like I'm super interested in it.

Why does no one use it for furniture and art?

I need to study that.

The wood is thermally modified ash.

That basically means that the wood is heated up to around 415 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and all of the resins and sugars are kind of caramelized out of it.

So you can take this wood that's normally an interior-grade wood and put it outside in South Florida weather for over 30 years without, you know, painting it or putting any oil on it or anything like that.

So I was really interested in a material like this that could kind of go in between interior and exterior.

This grouping of the vessels, I made 36 of these bowls, or vessels, and they were meant to kind of just house either different finish samples or different materials within the wood to see what would happen.

Just leaving them outside.

And these were the ones that I had metal interact with the wood.

This one was steel wool, so that rusted out.

This one was aluminum, this was brass.

(inspiring music continues) They're two separate pieces.

They're both called Day 1, and they're thermally modified wood and they've all been sanded to 3,000 grit, which is a really high grit, like a lot higher than you'd normally sand wood at.

And it makes it almost like polished.

That one has wax on it additionally as well.

And after that, after they were made into these like kind of like fetish objects through the ultra finishing of them, and they were perfect.

I put 'em outside and let 'em get rained on.

They're called day one because they just, they spent 24 hours outside.

This is a kind of representation of that shift from a high fine woodworking, highly finished into exterior where it just interacts with the elements and you can't really protect from that.

And that's not really the point of this wood anyway.

I'm not trying to protect anything.

I'm just letting the environment do its thing, and you know, the wood kind of just becomes an index of the environment that it's been in.

(inspiring music continues) Whenever we're cutting something on the scene CNT router, and we're cutting all the way through it, we put a piece of like a sacrificial board underneath it to cut into.

So all of these patterns that are in the wood right now are previous projects that we've cut.

Some of them, you know, really kind of organic and flowing, and some really, really rectilinear.

This body work that I think a lot of people know me for is just carving into plywood.

And that's something I started doing when I first opened the shop up.

I really wanted to just start making work that was about CT routing, and the plywood seemed like a really good place to start because it's an industrialized material, so it's very highly controlled already.

And I started carving through the different layers in different ways, and that led to this kind of like gouging pattern that is, when at first glance, it looks like it was done maybe by hand, but then either if you are a woodworker yourself and you understand like, you know, gouging, a lot of the gouges are like way too long for like a hand tool to make.

I wanted there to definitely still be some noticeable sign that it was made by a machine somehow.

And I like that aspect that there is still like a sign of how it was made within it.

And I guess that's kind of like a back to my roots in furniture design is, you know, part of that craft of, you know, there being some indication of the process that you use to make it.

(inspiring music continues) Termites are near and dear to my soul as a woodworker.

They terrify me, and they're invasive and we all hate them, and we're all kind of terrified of them in a lot of ways.

And that grossness is also something that I'm very attracted to in kind of exploring that and understanding it, and then seeing how it relates to me and how I can translate that relationship I have into physical objects.

(inspiring music) If there are already termites in here, which there probably are 'cause it's South Florida, then I may as well be be studying them.

You know, it's a way to control your fear in some sense as well.

I think that's definitely something that has been consistent in my work is this kind of like unknown thing and trying to control it and understanding in some way.

Part of the fun and woodworking is doing planning beforehand, but also leaving enough wiggle room kind of in the middle of the process to allow you to still go down a different avenue or make slight changes in the piece that will bring you to like a new solution or a new object, or a new thought.

(inspiring music continues) - To learn more, follow Luke Jenkins on Instagram at In Bloom Studio.

And now let's review this week's art quiz.

Public artwork is on display throughout Reno.

As of 2025, roughly how many permanent and temporary public artworks are managed by the city of Reno?

Is the answer A, 36, B, 185, C, 94, or D, 51?

And the answer is B, 185.

Up next, meet some friends who decided to turn their master woodworking and furniture building skills into an artist collective.

Together they built musical instruments out of reclaimed construction materials from the beautiful shores of Lake Tahoe.

(guitar music) - Tide Music is a collaborative company that makes instruments in North Lake Tahoe, California.

- We kind of focus on ukuleles and other small portable instruments.

For the ukuleles, we build four different sizes, and we have a soprano, a concert, and a tenor and a baritone size.

It's a Hawaiian instrument, and the Hawaiians called it the ukulele, which means I think jumping flea, because the way they played it was real quick and it was like a flea jumping up and down.

- We use a lot of materials from around the area.

We've started out with the reclaimed woods 'cause that's what we had available.

We like different grains and different colors of woods to use in our instruments, and also tone-wise as well.

They all have a little bit different sound.

One of our partners, Klein, really turned us on to this building concept that, yeah, you can go out and you can use reclaimed materials, 'cause they're right in our backyard, and it's got character, it's got a story.

- Our absolute favorite materials to work with are recycled piers out of Lake Tahoe, mostly because they're so close to extreme elements of the microclimates that swirl through Lake Tahoe.

The sun bouncing off of the water, and the way that magnifies, calcifies, and just bakes that wood, it condenses all the different wood structures.

Then you have winds swirling up as they do in storms that'll just pop off at Lake Tahoe.

They'll grab the sand and sandblast, and pit almost like an alligator print onto the wood, and then the ice comes in and it's breaking apart different places.

Where the water drips, it does it more.

- There's a lot of politics involved in taking something down in the basin of Lake Tahoe.

And luckily our next door neighbor right here is the peer builder on the North shore of Lake Tahoe.

And so he dismantles them and rebuilds them.

We get to go down with him, pick out materials from from the pier that he's dismantling.

- We start very carefully lifting the boards off to try to keep them in intact as much as we can.

And we're looking to cherry pick the very most interesting, most lake-affected boards that we can.

And then there's the job to stacking them carefully, keeping them from twisting.

- That office view, nothing like it.

That's the best office.

You go out there, you you get to go check out material that has been weathered for years.

We get to go experience these old piers that are falling apart and they're reborn into an art form that we are looking for different, you know, knots and different textures, and different materials to use.

I mean, we even used some of the nails.

Those aren't all going into the trash.

You know, there's so many things that you can think of, your mind kind of is like, what am I gonna do with this material?

Let's make something special.

And it's a full on story.

Some people have been on that pier before.

I think the most successful pieces we have are when we find those pieces that show the reclaimed or the rough edge, and then we put that into an instrument.

So someone does know when they look at that, they're like, okay, that's an ukulele, but why does it look like it's kind of chipped up?

Or how did that happen?

And when someone looks at a one of our instruments and can instantly recognize that, yeah, that came from an old piece of wood, an old barn, an old pier, an old whatever.

I think that's a pretty successful piece of art.

A lady that came up to us at the Reno Ukulele Fest fell in love with one of our reclaimed instruments, and we told her the story about it being from a Lake Tahoe pier.

And that's what really touched her heart.

And she walked away with that ukulele that weekend, because her mom used to live up in Lake Tahoe.

And that's what sold the instrument to this lady was, because it brought up childhood memories and thoughts of her mother.

I wish there was more people like us to actually take material and make art with it, and not have it go to the landfill and have other, you know, other nasty things going back into the earth.

I'm a big fan of just reclaiming wood and getting it locally sourced, but obviously we can't work with it all the time.

Some people want that exotic wood and we're not gonna say no to it.

And that's our clients.

There's a lot of reclaimed materials that people are using and I'm just stoked to be a part of it.

And I'm excited to build more instruments out of it.

(uplifting ukulele music continues) - Learn more by visiting their website at tidemusic.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "Arteffects."

If you want to watch new "Arteffects" segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel, and don't forget to keep visiting PBSreno.org to watch complete episodes of "Arteffects."

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(uplifting music)