- [Heather] Next, on Curate.

- [Artie] I wanna take a little bit of this person style, a little bit of that person style and then put it together and make my style.

And then I accidentally got good, I guess.

- [Rob] There's definitely an interest in the community to attend live performances if you can do it in a safe way.

Reminds us how important live music is.

- I've been trying to focus more on making art that has purpose behind it in hopes to create change.

- [Jason] This is Curate.

- Welcome to Curate, I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

Thanks for spending a little time with us.

Now the art we feature on Curate is often beautiful, frequently challenging, but perhaps not always practical.

- Oh sure.

It might pull a room together or provide a conversation starter at your next dinner party, but it's pretty rare that it's utilitarian.

That however is exactly what this week's 757 artist brings.

- [Jason] Williamsburg leather worker Artie Shell creates beautiful leather goods that will probably be useful far longer than most of us will.

(guitar riff) - I always wanted to make leather that was more artistic than functional.

Instead of people seeing my items and thinking how many cards can fit in that pocket or how much cash can I fit in that pouch, I want them to look at it and say, "That's pretty."

So I had to blend aesthetics with functionality, but I lean more towards aesthetics.

(peaceful music) When I graduated from college, I was working in construction for my family business.

It was hot in the summers, cold in the winters, and my dad always said, "Use your brain, not your hands."

So I got a job at the credit union.

So I kept moving up and moving up and the next thing I knew, I was just getting tired of the whole atmosphere of banking and going to meetings and no individuality.

So I just started looking for things to do.

I was ordering some planner from another leather crafter years ago and I asked him if he could just send me a piece of leather to make a pocket on the back of my bag with, and he did.

And it was just oddly enjoyable.

That's really what started it.

I researched and researched and watched YouTube videos and I learned how to do edges, I learned how to glue better.

You know, I take a little bit of this person's style, a little bit of that person's style, and then put it together and make my style.

And then I accidentally got good, I guess.

I figured if I were to take those eight hours that I was at the credit union and made leather items that I could make just as much or more.

So I put my two weeks in.

(hammer thuds) If anyone were to come to this house at any given time, you could find almost any sort of crafting or artwork going on.

My wife is an artist-artist, painter, stained glass, pencil, charcoal.

- I'm playing 'cause I worked this morning so I've earned a play now.

- [Artie] She's also a hairstylist, which is an art form all on its own.

One day I looked out in the backyard and my son Mason was stacking up bricks.

And I went out there and he had built a little forge in the yard and that's when I was like, "I think he's serious about it."

What are you working on man?

- It's hot.

- And he just started making everything you could imagine.

And my other son, Nick, does blade work, so he makes pins and duck calls.

What's up, Nick?

- What's goin' on?

- Both sons have acquired a craft that has nothing at all to do with my craft.

It was a lot harder to go out back and build a forge or go research what wood goes in with what and it's just cool that they did something different, but they're still just as passionate about it.

(calm music) I like to be surrounded with things that are pleasing to the eye and Colonial Williamsburg is pleasing to the eye.

♪ You tell me to close my eyes ♪ ♪ And slowly pull the curtains ♪ ♪ I hear you shut the lights ♪ ♪ How I wish you could cut the noise ♪ ♪ How I wish you could cut the noise ♪ - [Artie] I feel fortunate to live in this area because of the history and how accessible the colonial district is.

♪ You head is so up easy ♪ ♪ How I wish I could-- ♪ - If you look at my work, you'll see a lot of flow.

♪ How I wish ♪ ♪ I could cut the noise ♪ - You don't want your eye to just suddenly stop.

And I get a lot of that from architecture in Colonial Williamsburg.

♪ Whoa, whoa ♪ - In a regular, department store wallet, there is one and a half to two ounce thick.

And mine's at least four times thicker.

And a department store wallet can last sometimes 10 years, but I would say, average, mine would probably last 275 years.

I don't know.

♪ Your room is losing-- ♪ - It'll last your lifetime, that's for sure.

♪ I can feel you ♪ ♪ Getting up ♪ - And probably your kids.

♪ I pretend to sleep while you dress ♪ ♪ And all I hear is a noise ♪ ♪ All I hear is a noise ♪ - Well, when I figured out that branding was important, I started with a Facebook page and then I researched in photography.

So then I would take a picture and post it, practice, take a picture, post it.

I just kept going deeper and deeper and deeper.

What I try to do is have it so that someone could imagine them in the photograph.

Anyone could see what the wallet is, but you might as well have fun with a story.

People see the picture and almost instantly recognize that it's a Mascon Leather photo.

So I'm able to do well with a leather and also do well with reach.

Everyone wanted me to do YouTube videos.

What I've found with the video is that I enjoy the creative process because it's so different than photography and obviously so different than leather.

I have so much more area, so many more angles, lights.

It is a lot more creative.

It's a lot more satisfying.

♪ Baby I don't want another ♪ - I think I spill coffee in the first video and people commented that it made it so that it wasn't just this step, this step, this step.

Well, then I realized I'd never took into consideration who my audience was.

I should have known, 'cause that's what I did.

(peaceful music) - Three years ago, you were in a bank.

Now you're crafting leather.

Do you feel like the man?

- I'm blessed, I never expected it.

The fact that my items are sold globally and that people are willing to wait, it's flattering and very humbling.

Makes my decision to leave the corporate world the right decision for sure.

- [Wife] And you're happy?

- Yes, 20 years and now we're finally happy.

- Makes a big difference, doesn't it?

- It's unbelievable.

(music continues) - [Heather] If you wanna follow Artie's amazing social media and web presence, you can access it via our website, WHRO.org/curate.

- Now, it's hard to have a festival in the midst of a global pandemic.

And that has been particularly difficult for the Virginia Arts Fest.

- The arts organization, now in its 24th year, has a long, proud history of bringing world renowned performers to Hampton roads.

- Now, to keep that record going, they've had to get really creative during COVID times.

That, and a little help from a local jazz legend, Jae Sinnett.

(snaps) (jazz music starts) - Well, it's been really exciting, I think, for the staff to actually be able to work on some projects that actually happen.

With the opening up of some of the guidelines and being able to do things outdoors safely, we've really taken advantage of the courtyard where we've done about 20 performances.

The exciting part is, every one of them is sold out.

So there's definitely an interest in the community to be able to attend live performances if you can do it in a safe way.

Everyone that attends, staff, artists, and audience members, everyone wears a mask.

I took mine off for this interview, but it will go right back on again when I'm through.

Well, you see the way the seats are set up, everyone's social distancing.

So you're only sitting close to someone that you bought a ticket with.

We don't have any lines, everyone's staggered in.

There's been some really kind of moving stories from people.

We had one woman come up to us who is a regular festival attendee saying this is the first time she'd left her house since March 28th, which was shocking and sad and kinda staggering.

So for her, it was really, really a moving night.

So I think it's touched everybody and reminds us how important live music is.

When things closed down in March, we were trying to find ways to stay in touch with our audience and our ticket buyers and supporters.

So we went back and took a lot of our past performances, we worked with WHRO and WHRV.

A handful of our chambers and concerts were rebroadcast on WHRO and the classical station.

And then on WHRO TV, we took some of the tattoo performances out of the archive and recut a tattoo performance.

And they rebroadcast the documentary that WHRO made of the Dance Theater of Harlem.

We're hoping to have a somewhat of a normal festival in April and May period, so we're planning for that, but we're also having a backup plan.

So if we can't do that, we'll be better prepared to bring performances.

We were successful in bringing things here to the courtyard, but we can find ways to do it for a larger audience outdoors safely in April and May if we can't be in the halls.

(audience applauds) - One of the great things art does is open our eyes to how what makes us different also makes us relate.

Teaching that lesson to kids is the mission of a Florida not-for-profit organization that brings art outside with a message of inclusion and diversity.

(peaceful music) - This is our 17th year at Embracing Our Differences.

Embracing Our Differences is an arts and education organization focused on promoting the importance of diversity, inclusion, kindness, and respect.

- [Larissa] Favorite picture in this whole exhibit.

Okay, come back here and sit down.

- [Sarah] We try to start at the youngest age possible teaching these important messages of kindness and respect.

And we want the kids to come back year after year so they continue to understand these messages in different ways, through different pieces of artwork.

And that's why these high school docents work with the younger kids and really ask them questions.

They're not there to tell them about the art piece, they're there to see what the kids see and what they think about this art piece.

- I love being a docent.

I do a lot with kids ordinarily, and this, it's just so much fun for me because I love working with kids, I love talking to them.

And then just being able to see the change on their face when I say something that really clicks, that what they're seeing is important and it's making a difference, that is amazing for me.

(upbeat music) - I really appreciate Embracing Our Differences because, for me, it ties into what I want to do as an artist and as far as making art that has meaning and just sending a message and I think Embracing Our Differences allows people to do that.

The piece I submitted in Embracing Our Differences is a photograph of one of the students at the school.

He's a Mexican-American.

And that piece just really symbolized people in search of better opportunity.

In art, my interest has always been painting people and I like to make it more expressive, kind of abstract using many different colors and stuff like that.

But lately I've been trying to focus more on making art that has a meaning and a purpose behind it in hopes to create change.

And that's why I really like embracing our differences because it allows you to do that.

And it's helping me, you know, with different ideas on how I could do that.

- I think the draw for artists from around the world to submit to our exhibit is that they're not able to express themselves a lot of times, especially about this topic of diversity and inclusion.

So we give them that outlet and that way that they are able to really put their emotions out there.

- But in my art class, Antonio is one of the students who is more focused on his artwork during class.

Antonio really gets excited about making art.

And, you know, he was one of the students who had opportunity to submit work to Embracing Our Differences because he really took the time and put in the effort to make a piece more complete.

- I hope to open people eyes with my artwork.

The reason I picked that topic was because other people and my father are going into war to fight for our freedom and they don't wanna kill other people and they don't wanna die by other people.

I hope people really get it.

- Our goal with the exhibit, as well as our year-round education program, is for everyone to start treating others with kindness and respect.

So we want young kids as well as adults to understand that their words matter and their interactions with others matter.

Out of the 16,000 plus submissions, about 9,000 of them were from students in our community in Sarasota and Manatee County schools.

However, the rest of those submissions come from around the world.

And when you go down to the bay front and see the 50 art pieces and 50 quotations that are on display, about half of them are from places outside of Florida.

So it's really exciting to see the representation.

- I think an exhibit like Embracing Our Differences is very important, especially in our community where we have a lot of diverse individuals and we might not know where someone else comes from, what their background is, what they go through.

And this exhibit allows them to see a glimpse of what other people might see.

- [Antonio] When I draw, it makes me feel good.

It makes me feel relaxed like nothing is around me.

I'm only focusing on that drawing.

- With Embracing Our Differences, I'd say that my biggest takeaway has been that all of these people from around the world come and try and make a difference in the community.

- I want people to walk away from the exhibit thinking about how this art can impact their daily lives and how these messages can change their interactions with others in a more positive way.

- John Henry Barlow is a sculptor from Ohio whose work can be found all over the world.

Each piece tells a story and honors the people who dedicate their lives to serving the public.

(slow piano music) - My professional label would be public sculptor.

And I've wanted to do that for a long time because you reach more people by making work for public places.

Of course, I just started out making small sculptures.

That was great fun, but it's like a doll house.

It's all fine to make a dollhouse, but that's for dolls.

You need to make a big, real house in order to use it, to live in it.

So same with sculpture.

A little sculpture is fine for a mockette or sitting on a table, but to experience it with your whole being, you need it to be of a scale that you can relate to it with, climb on it or bump into it.

I've got public sculptures throughout the States, from Maine to California.

I have public sculptures in 27 different countries and there are at least 22 throughout China.

Each different project has a different geography, environment, plants, architecture, function.

So maybe in one context, stone would be most appropriate or stainless steel or like downtown Dayton, the yellow piece, that's powder-coated aluminum.

That street used to be a canal full of water.

Used to transport, create energy, and so on.

So today the street is a canal for vehicles which create eddies in the air as they race by.

So fluid dynamics seemed the appropriate concept for that location.

Paradigm Shift is a mirror stainless steel piece.

Moore Technology Center at St. Clair is teaching new technologies and so we are in a paradigm shift from the mechanistic to the informational or electronic age.

So that piece vortexes up one direction and midway changes and vortexes the opposite direction.

Sometimes depending on the piece, I like to surprise people.

Like if you take the Bronze Tree of Books at the Yellow Springs Public Library.

I started out with this stack of books and made the spiral trunk.

And then they spin off the top.

And then, within the tree, I put what were then contemporary things like a cassette recorder and cassette tapes and audio visual tapes.

And I also made a bookworm climbing through a book.

And then there was a book with the title of my mother's published novel.

Those are elements to discover.

It's that discovery that's really fun.

Public projects tend to take a lot of time in particular because you've got committees and regulations and all that stuff.

And you put a whole package together, it ends up being six months or a year or two years or some such thing.

Let's go to the Common Good, for example.

(sander whirs) I spent a good two years on that project and that wasn't that big.

I had the stone, a very large granite surface plate from Wright-Patt Air Force Base.

I got it for the cost of getting it over here and it sat for almost 20 years, I think.

Well, that's pretty good.

I waited until this opportunity came that I could give it a home.

The impetus for the Common Good sculpture was Tim Reardon, the city manager for Dayton, also Cincinnati.

And after he retired, Tim got to thinking that he wanted to honor the public servants that he had worked with over his career.

There's a committee, we came up with the idea of a bunch of quotes and we decided to run the quotes around the stone so that you have to walk around the stone to read it so as to engage the viewer.

And then the seats, of course, engage you.

There's quotes inside and then you see that you can sit in it.

And because there's an interconnecting hole, you can talk through the stone, which is the idea of communicating breaking through walls.

In public service, it's all about communication and coming together.

It's not a environmental sculpture.

It's more about communicating an idea to the people in the community.

- My name is Tim Reardon and this is a project I've worked on for a couple of years.

The name of the piece is the Common Good.

We had a lot of discussion about what we should name the piece.

And it really just felt, this is what we work for.

This is what we do, we do the common good.

And I wanna start it out just by saying a thank you to all the public servants who do such good work for our city, schools, county, state, and country and world and I just think it's-- (audience applauds) - Take it easy, you're welcome.

- I think it's important 'cause it's a way of embodying energies of that time, which is then communicated with people down through time.

So, you have the Roman period and the Greeks or the Egyptians, all these different energies of that time we get to see because of the sculpture, and creative works that were made.

(engine groans) It enriches our experience of being human, our history in the world.

It shows how our culture got to be what it is.

And those people are communicating with us today.

And I wanna do that with my work.

So that's why I like to build big sculpture.

(laid back music) - [Jason] Go to our website, whro.org/curate to find more amazing content, including all previous episodes from our four plus seasons.

- There you'll also find links to the artists we featured here on this episode.

We're on social media, too.

Follow curate on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

- We're going to leave you tonight with more from the Virginia Arts Festival performance from the Jae Sinnett trio.

- [Heather] This performance took place last fall in the courtyard behind the Robin Hickson center in downtown Norfolk.

It features Jae on drums, Alan Farnam on piano, and Terry Burrell on upright bass.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- [Jason] And I'm Jason Kypros.

See you next time on Curate.

(jazz music)