WTIU members.

Thank you!

>> BRANDON: Coming up.

>> ASHLEY: Listen in on a surprising festival in Winchester.

>> BRANDON: Learn about a unique Hoosier clothing tradition.

>> ASHLEY: Experience Indiana's diverse natural history enrichment.

>> BRANDON: And see how one Hoosier artist expresses himself one piece at a time.

>> ASHLEY: That's all on this episode of... >> TOGETHER: "Journey Indiana"!

♪ >> BRANDON: Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Brandon Wentz.

>> ASHLEY: And I'm Ashley Chilla.

And we're coming to you from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

With 13 indoor galleries, and the 7.5-acre Sports Legend Experience, the Children's Museum of Indianapolis educates and inspires 1.27 million visitors every year.

>> BRANDON: And we'll learn more about this outstanding museum in just a bit, but first, we're headed to Randolph County, where producer Jason Pear brings us the sounds of the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Festival in Winchester.

♪ >> Welcome to Winchester, county seat of Randolph County, and home to about 5,000 Hoosiers.

It's also, believe it or not, home to an annual Hawaiian Steel Guitar Festival.

>> There was a man by the name of Charles Moore, who was a resident of Winchester, Indiana.

He was a steel guitar enthusiast, and he made what were called Holiday Steel Guitars.

And he created a newsletter for enthusiasts, basically, different things related to steel guitar and news and happenings and things.

And eventually what ended up happening was he held his first steel guitar convention as a way for musicians to kind of gather together and exchange knowledge about the steel guitar, and he ended up having it in his basement in Winchester, Indiana.

It was right in his house.

We're still continuing that tradition here.

♪ [ Applause ] >> Moore's festival was born in the mid-1970s.

The instrument it celebrates was born nearly a century prior.

>> The Hawaiian steel guitar started back in 1885.

It originated then, with this young boy of 11 years old.

He was walking along the tracks.

His name is Joseph Kekuku.

And he saw this metal bolt down there.

So he grabbed it.

And he had this guitar with him.

He slid it over the strings.

That sparked this new style of playing the guitar.

♪ Soon after, like, towards the turn of the century, there were many locals who were moving to the mainland.

And with them, they brought their Hawaiian music, and this new instrument that later was called the Hawaiian guitar.

Well, it went across the nation, and soon Hawaiian music was chic.

>> Over time, Hawaiian music and culture, fell out of fashion, but that all changed in the 1970s.

♪ >> What was happening was the Hawaiian Renaissance.

That included the language, culture, music.

>> It was likely this Renaissance that inspired Charles Moore to build instruments in the first place, and along with fellow enthusiasts, a club and a festival.

Holiday Steel Guitars, essentially a hobby for Moore, are no longer produced.

The club and festival, they are still going strong after nearly five decades.

>> There's a few different components to the festival.

One is our daily performances, where we encourage players of all skill levels to come, perform, play what you want.

We have backup musicians ready to support you.

We also have a seminar on Friday with our guest artist.

And then Saturday night, we end up having our luau, and that's basically, you know, dinner, show, kind of like they do in Hawaii, right?

>> The guest artist in 2022 was musician and teacher, Alan Akaka, who, like Joseph Kekuku, discovered the steel guitar almost by accident.

>> I grabbed my dad's Martin guitar, and I grabbed the barrel out of my clarinet case.

And I started sliding over the strings while picking, and my dad says, do you know what you are playing?

I said, slide guitar.

And he says, no, that's called the steel guitar.

That was 40 plus years, almost 50 years ago.

And now I'm kind of leading the charge for steel guitar still in Hawaii.

>> And one of the folks leading the charge in the Midwest is Mark Prucha, a student of Alan's.

>> So I'm from the Chicagoland area.

I grew up in Naperville, Illinois, and I went to Hawaii a lot with my family.

And one of the trips I was there, I met Alan Akaka.

I ended up taking lessons there, and then when I would be back home, I would be taking Skype lessons with him to learn steel guitar.

Steel guitar is a very difficult instrument to learn when starting out, because you don't have normal frets like you would on normal guitar to keep notes in tune.

So you really have to rely on your ear.

So you are using the steel bar, and then kind of lining it up over fret markers on the fret board, but the frets aren't raised or anything to give you that pitch.

You just kind of have to rely on your ear.

It's also a lead instrument.

So you've got to make sure that you know the chords of any song, and that you can play over it and do fills, and all that stuff.

It's a very challenging instrument to learn.

♪ >> It's not only playing the right notes.

It's what you do with those notes.

It's the crescendos, the decrescendos, the speeding up, the slowing down, this push and pull.

It's like the waves.

On the steel guitar, I can do that.

It's got to come from here.

Not only from here.

I mean, anybody can play notes.

But there's a feel to the music.

That's what I love about the steel guitar.

I can share my emotion through the instrument, coming out from the speakers to the audience.

And actually cause them to laugh, to cry, to want to clap, to want to get up and dance.

That's what the Hawaiian steel guitar can do.

♪ [ Applause ] >> ASHLEY: You know, after five years of doing this show, I really shouldn't be surprised about the things that we find in Indiana, but a Hawaiian Steel Guitar Festival certainly surprised me.

>> BRANDON: Yeah, it would almost be hard to get any farther from Hawaii than Indiana.

[ Laughter ] Want to learn more?

Just head to the address on your screen.

>> ASHLEY: Earlier, we had the chance to learn a little bit more about all the things that the Children's Museum of Indianapolis has to offer.

♪ >> Since 1925, the Children's Museum of Indianapolis has worked towards educating children throughout the Midwest.

>> We really want to be a place that is safe for families to come and have conversations and learn more about one another, and to just have a great environment that is not something they are going to get anywhere else.

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis is the largest children's museum in the world.

We have a collection of over 130,000 objects that allow us to create these exhibits that have stories that people can connect to.

They can see that object and come in as a family, kids and adults together, and see how they connect to those stories.

Really, the range of what we offer, from science to the humanities, to the arts, is something that puts us even outside of children's museum territory.

We are really for families to come and learn together about a lot of different topics.

♪ >> From outer space to more earthly affairs, the Children's Museum has a large assortment of exhibits that teach everything from the sciences to team work.

>> Often, people are surprised that despite being a children's museum, we have actual paleontologists, like myself, at our museum.

So we are not just people showing you these fossils.

We're actually the people that go out and dig up the fossils ourselves.

We transport them all the way back to our museum, and then we prep them, getting them cleaned up, all that rock off, so we can study them ourselves and learn more from them, and then share them with the public.

The Dinosphere is an area where we display different environments to try to recreate where and when the dinosaurs lived to make you really feel immersed in the world that they were living in.

So not only will you see a bunch of skeletons of your favorite dinosaurs, but you will also see the kind of plants that were around at the time, and you will hear the sounds of different insects and animals from the time as well.

♪ I absolutely love seeing when kids have lightbulb moments when they are asking us their questions at the window.

It's one of my favorite things to see a potential future scientist kind of having their moment, learning of what the possibilities are for their future.

>> We've heard lots of stories of kids who tried drawing for the first time here, and now they are professional artists.

We have kids who have picked up a tennis racket for the first time here, thinking they didn't even know anything about it, but they have the chance.

And now they want to go take tennis lessons.

I mean, the idea that we are sparking that moment of curiosity, and they can see a path beyond what they have done here is exactly what we all hope for.

That is the ultimate goal.

>> BRANDON: So Ashley, you used to work here.

What's it like being back?

>> ASHLEY: It's bringing back a lot of memories.

You know, the great thing about the museum is that they keep adding things.

So every time I come back, it's like coming to a new museum.

There are obviously the old haunts, the theater, that I used to work in that I know really well, but I was really surprised walking in today, there's all kinds of new things to explore.

>> You can learn more at childrensmuseum.org.

>> BRANDON: Up next, producer Jason Pear takes us to Monroe County, to learn about the Hoosier tradition of senior cords.

♪ >> There are lots of traditions that seniors have.

It's a really momentous time in anyone's life.

They are finishing high school.

They are finishing college, and there are all kinds of rituals and traditions associated with that.

But senior cords are fairly unique to Indiana.

We're finding that there may have been a little bit of overlap with neighboring states, but it was mostly an Indiana tradition.

It started, apparently, in the 1920s with male college fraternity members.

The idea was that when they were approaching their graduation, there were rituals associated with that senior year, and one of the rituals was that the freshmen had to find the seniors on campus, steal their pants, and decorate them.

And then the seniors would, of course, wear those pants, and it was a big honor to have these cords.

By the 1920s, men could mostly buy things ready made.

And we do have advertisements from the 1930s and '40s, telling young men, hey, we have senior cords available at our department store.

Come and buy your pair and get ready to decorate them.

And some stores, like Resnick's, for example, actually sponsored competitions.

$100 for the best pair of senior cords.

So men, by and large, did go buy their senior cords, and they would have them decorated.

When women started wearing senior cords -- which seems to have started happen at least around the 1940s, in many cases women were still making their own clothing.

So many of the women's clothing pieces that we have, for one thing, they are a little more varied.

They are not just pants.

They are skirts.

They are dresses.

We even have some vests.

We have a couple of hats that are decorated as senior cord clothing, but a lot of those pieces were handmade.

♪ By the 1940s, it became a high school tradition.

Baby Boom generation, 1950s, definitely 1960s, is when it was the real hey day of senior cords, because it was a huge generation of teenagers with the time and resources to be able to purchase and decorate cords.

And so that is, by far, the bulk of the pieces that we have.

♪ So those early cords, the designs tend to be made in ink, and they are usually just two colors, like black ink on cream-colored cords.

However, post World War II, there were some new materials that were invented.

Acrylic paint became accessible, and all of a sudden that gave artists a lot more options.

And the symbols started to morph into things like what are some events that were meaningful to me?

What clubs do I belong to?

Like, Home Economics Club, Future Farmers of America.

You also see things like books listing the subjects that they are taking in school, and they wanted to represent all of those things.

♪ The tradition did continue after the '60s.

So we do also have some pairs from the '70s, and even a couple from the 1980s.

But it was definitely starting to fade away by then, and from the surveys, as best we can tell, the reason was that they were starting to become controversial.

So schools tried different kinds of policies, but some ultimately decided just to get rid of the tradition all together.

There were a lot of people who did keep their senior cords because, you know, it had their friend's names.

It was something that was made just for them.

It was a really special memory, and so we know that there are a lot of people who still have these cords in their closets.

♪ We all wear clothes, but not everyone thinks much about what they wear, cares about what they wear.

But it definitely is a medium for self-expression, and these cords are an amazing example of that.

And it was a particular time in life where people had a reason to care about what they were wearing.

So that means that we have a wider range than normal of examples from different kinds of people, but it absolutely is a fantastic example of self-expression.

It's also a really interesting example of kind of amateur art, and not just making clothing, but actually decorating that clothing.

And you know, what skills did people have?

What were they experimenting with?

What was so important to them that they wanted to show on their clothing.

There are really incredible examples of that.

♪ >> BRANDON: You can find out more information at the address on your screen.

>> ASHLEY: Up next, producer Nick Deel takes us to Wayne County to explore the Joseph Moore Museum.

>> In the late 1800s, when Joseph Moore began teaching at Friends Boarding School in Richmond, Indiana, there was little for students of science to physically experience.

>> He felt that people learned by seeing, touching, and doing.

>> And so he went about collecting the specimens needed to help his students explore the natural world, in Richmond and beyond.

>> He collected incredibly broadly.

So he collected fossils.

He collected animals, live animals.

He collected artifacts, archaeological artifacts.

>> Soon the school, now Earlham College, felt it was time to expand.

>> By 1889, the college built a new building, and they gave him an entire wing for the Joseph Moore Museum.

And that's when it became not just for teaching the college students here, but a space that the whole community was welcome to come.

>> Many of Moore's finds are still on display.

The Randolph mastodon, assembled from two skeletons, was found in farms and wetlands across Indiana.

In 1889, the president of Earlham College brought Ta'an to the museum.

Her's are one of only two Egyptian mummified remains in the state of Indiana.

Also in 1889, Moore collected this fossilized skeleton of an extinct giant beaver.

It's still the most complete in the world.

>> There's a presence, and it just has a full body effect to be right there with a giant beaver.

And for many really rare, unique specimens, you wouldn't get to see the original.

Our museum, in the spirit of Joseph Moore, is learning from the real objects.

>> Today, the Joseph Moore Museum houses some 55,000 specimens, spanning a mind boggling 450 million years of history in Eastern Indiana and Western Ohio.

>> When you come here, you understand this specific spot in Indiana, in the U.S., in the world over time.

So you can see a collection of what lives here now, birds, mammals, things that you might see outside, but you also can see what was here 12,000 years ago in the Ice Age.

There were mastodons here, walking the same land that you are walking now.

There -- even further back in time, we also have deposits of Ordovician fossils.

450 million years ago, before big, like mastodons existed, So you can see throughout time what was happening here right in Richmond.

>> Now, more than a century afte its founding, the museum continues to be a place where students learn not just about the natural world, but how to present it to the public.

>> This is a very unique model for a museum.

The students are and have been for so many years, learning so many pieces of how museums are run.

What is the role of a museum in its community, in the world?

What are the ways that museums do great good in their community, and what are the ways that museums need to be really careful?

So students are learning how to build exhibits.

They are learning how to design exhibits, how to understand what you want to share and how to share it, and then actually doing that piece.

The museum also has a large collection of live animals, that students can learn and teach the public about.

>> I want to be a veterinarian.

It's important to know how to handle animals properly so that you don't hurt them, and they don't get hurt.

But you also learn about educating people about animals while holding them.

And here's the proper way to pet them.

Here's how you don't hurt them, all that stuff.

And it's kind of also just fun.

>> While these displays are an impressive example of the history contained at the Joseph Moore Museum, they are only a fraction of what is available for students to explore.

>> So students who want to do a research project are going to be going from the original specimens, and that holds a tremendous amount of information.

I can tell you that the way that things are colored, sometimes things are just that color, and other times it's the way light interacts with it that makes the color.

It's structural color versus pigmentation color.

So I can tell you that this hummingbird has a red throat and then I can show you that it actually -- it doesn't look like it until the light hits it just right, and it's really different for students to read about it, than actually see it and do it.

Seeing, experiencing, and doing.

Just as Joseph Moore intended.

>> ASHLEY: Brandon, when you were little, would you have enjoyed a museum that had lots of dead bugs and bones and all of that?

>> BRANDON: I would say definitely the giant mastodon and the mummy.

>> ASHLEY: Well, it's a place that I definitely think my son would thoroughly enjoy going.

So maybe I was -- I was hoping you would as well when you were a kid.

To learn more about the Joseph Moore Museum, go to jmm.earlham.edu.

>> BRANDON: And finally, producer Jason Pear takes us to Bloomington, to learn how an artist is using ancient techniques and found materials to create beautiful mosaics.

♪ >> Mosaic happened to me through chance.

♪ It was sort of chance that I became a tile setter.

And mosaic -- it's broad enough, it's expressive enough, it's a medium that's big enough that it now is sort of -- it's the thing that I do.

♪ The way that I got started was going to thrift shops.

The easiest way to acquire colors is to find ceramics in lots of bold, colorful designs.

Take them home, bust them up with a hammer, apply mortar on to a substrate, and stick the ceramic pieces on the mortar.

People bring in plates and dishes, and I have lots of crockery from that.

Since I was a tile setter, I acquired lots of materials through tile setting, and occasionally will buy boxes of tiles if I need, like, particular colors.

The contemporary mosaic end of the spectrum relies mostly on stones and Byzantine or Italian glass.

There are glass companies in the states, actually Kokomo, Indiana, has one of the premier glass companies in the world.

I actually use a lot of their material.

Otherwise shells.

I mean, just found objects.

Like I said, that's what makes mosaic fun, is that you can find lots of your material out in the woods or on the beach.

And I do that when I go to the beach.

I bring home lots and lots of shells.

The two ends of my world are tile mosaics, and what I would call contemporary mosaic.

The tile mosaic lends itself to more machining, working with prefabricated materials, cutting them or breaking them up with hammers and reassembling them, and then grouting them.

Contemporary mosaic is done with traditional tools.

So a hammer and hardie, which is essentially a chisel and a log.

Just the same way that it's been done for several thousand years.

Those materials, when they are cut into cubic or geometric forms, are then embedded in mortar and are typically not grouted.

♪ Most of my impulses nowadays are on internal states of consciousness.

My own experiences in trying to create some kind of tangible object that, like, works those experiences out.

The emotion that comes from the use of color and the use of line patterns.

You could also argue that my work does not have a theme.

It's just life.

I'm also a young artist.

So I would say a lot of my work up until now has been pretty exploratory.

♪ I have one son.

He's done lots and lots of drawings, and on occasion, there's one that I'm really blown away by.

And so on three occasions now, I have sort of what mosaicists might say is eternalized his drawings by translating them into mosaic.

If I see something he's done that would make a really great subject for mosaic, I've used it.

♪ As an artist, I'm producing a tangible, visible object, that if I create it and it sits here hanging on my walls, it's incomplete, because it requires not only a creator, but someone who receives the creation.

So, yeah, I rely really heavily, and really hope that people who see my work are receiving something from it, whether it be joy or some kind of inspiration themselves.

That feedback loop is super important to me.

♪ For me, the most fundamental, basic level, that's why I do what I do, is it's something that I love, and I'm putting the love that I have into it.

And I'm hoping that I can keep doing that until I'm an old person.

That's -- that's really what I hope to do.

It's not super big ambitions or anything like that, but I just want to be able to keep doing this until I'm old.

♪ >> BRANDON: Alright, so making t mosaics I am not so sure I would be good at that, but I feel like I would be pretty good at making the pieces to make the mosaics.

>> ASHELY: Yes, you have a good eye for that kind of thing, and feel like your hand would be, you know, adept at the tools.

>> BRANDON: At the breaking, not so much the creating.

But what are you going to do?

>> BRANDON: To learn more, head to omosaico.com.

>> ASHLEY: And as always, we'd like to encourage you to stay connected with us.

>> BRANDON: Just head over to Journey Indiana dot org There you can see full episode a suggest stories from your neck of the woods.

And before we say good-bye, let's see what kind of trouble we can get into here at the museum.

>> ASHLEY: I have a feeling we can get into a lot!

♪ >> ASHLEY: All right, Brandon, are you ready to see who can hit more baskets?

>> BRANDON: I have to tell you since the last time we shot baskets, I have not practiced.

>> ASHLEY: And neither have I.

So let's see how this goes.

Oh!

Robbed, I tell you.

Robbed.

We're going to break everything here.

They are going to kick us out.

♪ >> Yes!

There we go.

I think that's where we end.

>> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.

Thank you!