- In this edition of "Arteffects," flow arts and fire.

- I would describe flow arts, fire spinning, as a visual art.

And you're able to tell a story and create shapes that you wouldn't be able to otherwise with just your body.

(ethnic singing) - [Beth] Multicolored collages.

You can mix papers.

I layer them and mix them so it's a little bit like mixing paint.

I have a huge collection of paper, huge.

- [Beth] An author's foray into the world of non-fiction.

- I'm fascinated by untold histories and this book is full of that.

My first phase of research was kind of trying to fact-check family stories like that.

- [Beth] Plus, the creation of a stringed instrument.

- You have a set pattern that you follow, but it's like you drawing a picture of a mountain.

The mountain is there in the background and you have your paint and canvas and it may take the general form or the shape, but there's a lot of ways to express creativity in making an instrument.

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

(upbeat jazz music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, the June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno members, and by... - Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan and this is "Arteffects".

In our featured segment, we introduce you to Cooper Bayt, a Reno man who combines flow arts with fire.

Through his craft, he creates a mesmerizing experience for both his audience and himself.

(dramatic music) - I would describe flow arts as a visual art, much like dance, but you're combining modern dance with prop manipulation.

So it's adding that extra element where it's kind of an extension of your body and you're able to tell a story and create shapes.

My name's Cooper Bayt and I'm from Reno, Nevada.

I am a flow artist and professional fire spinner.

I was gifted a pair of juggling sticks when I was really young and I spent countless hours at the park training.

To think that I had no idea would really kind of take over my life later on.

Controlled Burn, which is a local fire spinning group, had a workshop when I was only 13 years old and so I was able to fire spin for the first time when I was 13.

And my grandma, she was a professional photographer, she actually captured that first time.

She instilled a lot of that fine arts background in me and that beat dynamic.

The first step to creating a fire show, make sure that the area is safe in case anything happens, any drops, nothing's going to spark up.

Secondary, set the space with candles, with torches on the ground in order to create the stage effect.

Third, almost most importantly, is that I'm gonna have I'm going to have a Duvetyne blanket, it's a fire safe blanket, and a spotter that's gonna be right there for me to help me put out my props in order for me to start the next one and keep everything in a calm, collected manner, telling me if I catch on fire or if anything goes wrong.

There are specializ take a juggling club.

And the way you would do it is you would have, let's say, a jar or an ammo container full of white gas, kerosene, or lamp oil, and you actually dip it in and this wick will absorb like a sponge.

When you dip the prop into the gas, that's like a moment of mindfulness, you're counting, you're measuring the amount of fuel that you soak and you hold it there and you let the excess drip out.

And in that moment, you're collecting yourself, you're getting ready, and when you're ignited that poof, that initial rush is like, "Okay, here we go."

Everything just starts to fade away.

You just get that internal rush of fire around your body, the sound of it, wooshing past your head.

It's an amazing feeling.

I love to interpret hip hop dance with creating shapes that are extensions of my bodies with the props.

So it's kind of that mix of dance and prop manipulation very much inspired by hip hop and modern dance.

A lot of it is improvisational when it's just a solo flow performance.

I do also choreograph and write shows with multiple fire artists so it becomes a choreographed dance that is very structured that we all have to hit the certain notes on certain eight counts in order to create the illusion, create the shape that we want the audience to see.

What I get out of flow arts, juggling, fire spinning is the fact that it's good, it's good for my mental health.

It's not so easy to talk about mental health and people's anxiety and fear.

And I think this has been a means that has really saved me in a way to be able to dance like nobody's watching.

You really can get into a meditative state.

It's the flow state that we refer to and it's mindfulness because you're able to move your body in a certain way that you're able to release, you're able to let go of everything else and train relentlessly to give me some kind of purpose in this crazy world.

Like even if it's just as silly as learning a new trick that night, it's doing the problem solving, going through the motions and the failure in order to pick it back up and start again.

And so that translates into my life tenfold.

(techno music) - To learn more about Cooper Bayt, you can find him on the Instagram @cooperbayt.

Marsha Monroe Pippenger's kaleidoscopic collages are paintings made out of paper.

In this segment, we traveled to Dayton, Ohio to see how she brainstorms ideas, gathers her materials, and puts together a remarkable finished piece.

(gentle music) - When I teach about collage, I always talk about the fact that Picasso and Braque are credited with inventing collage in 1912.

And I beg to differ with that always because as far as I'm concerned, any kind of piece work throughout the centuries, taking all kinds of ephemera and discarded materials and fabrics and paper scraps and creating things out of them, for me, that's collage.

I'm Marsha Monroe Pippenger and I'm an artist, I'm a teacher, and I'm a teaching artist.

I'm kind of the artist in residence here at the Requarth Company.

We have seven acres here at Requarth.

The building of course is old, it dates from the 1880s or 1890s.

The Requarth Company moved down here in 1895.

There's a kitchen showroom here now, we have six kitchen designers plus the lumberyard and the lumber staff.

And everyone who works here will bring clients up to meet me and see the studio and they enjoy that, I think customers enjoy that too.

I have lots of room, I have really good lighting, it's all north light, there's great storage.

It's just a really good space, the building, the people, the surroundings are wonderful.

What's my favorite?

My favorite part of art making?

The first favorite part is the idea which often comes from my reading.

Reading books, articles, or a phrase that I hear that will capture me.

And from there, it's gotta roll around in my head a little bit.

I'll make sketches and drawings and I put the drawing on canvas, sometimes it's just scale, sometimes not.

And then the second favorite part is getting in there with the paper.

I start pulling the papers that I think will work and sort of creating a little pile and start moving things around.

I don't commit right away and I use thousands of glue sticks because the nice thing about a glue stick is I can put a dab of glue down, I can put the paper down, I can remove it if I want to, if I change my mind or I want to move it or whatever.

You can mix papers.

I layer them and mix them so it's a little bit like mixing paint.

I have a huge collection of paper, huge.

In the beginning, I use tissue paper and cheap magazine papers and they fade, they don't last so I use mostly handmade papers today; and I do use paper for magazines, but it's gotta be a high quality magazine with high quality inks.

And then sometimes I incorporate other things, bits and pieces of rock or tile or rust.

Yellow's my favorite color.

I'm pretty sure there's a touch of yellow on probably every single piece I've made.

I really like to work big, like 36 by 48, that's three by four feet.

That's it a nice size, I like that size.

I've got these collage tapestries that I've been making and they're bigger, they're four by six, five by seven, five by eight.

But I have leftover collage pieces that have innate nice little compositions, I've been making pendants from those.

So they're about two by three inches, so two by three inches up, as big as I can manage.

The most challenging part about creating a collage might be knowing when it's finished.

I think it's really easy to overdo.

And there are times when I felt like I need somebody standing behind me to tell me when to stop.

You should leave a little mystery.

When you put in all the information, you end up boring people and you need to let the viewer do a little work.

And so I try to keep that in mind, that's one of my mantras, so to speak, for art making is to try and stop just a little bit short of finished, and I think that works.

About five, six years ago, I was asked to design a prayer wall for my church which is Westminster Presbyterian Church here in Dayton downtown.

And I designed it to fit with the architecture of our sanctuary and it's made out of wood.

I had designed it so it looked like it had grown kind of organically.

So it had sort of a random pattern and so you could tuck your prayer into the cracks among the wooden bricks.

And the pastors remove all the prayers about once a month, I think, and nobody reads them, it's between you and whoever you believe in, and they're burned.

Our senior pastor invited people to come up and put their first prayer in the prayer wall, which I did like everyone else.

And I turned around and I looked down the center aisle of the church and people were lined up all the way down the entire length of the sanctuary out into the narthex, and I started to cry.

And as you can tell, it still affects me.

And I started thinking about walls and how walls can be positive.

They don't have to be negative in connotation, that walls can protect and surround.

And so I started a series called Redefining Walls of collages that are abstractions of walls and I've been making them ever since.

I've made literally hundreds of collages relating to that idea of redefining walls.

And it was all because of this serendipity, this blessing that I had that I certainly didn't expect.

There's a quote that I really like, "Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, "and the heart come together."

And so if you can incorporate those three into your work, I think you've done a good thing.

- Visit pippengerart.com to learn more.

And now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

Which year did the foxtrot burst onto the dance scene?

Is the answer, A, 1862; B, 1890; C, 1914; or D, 1936.

(gentle upbeat music) And the answer is C, 1914.

Up next, we head to Florida to meet Arlo Haskell, author of the book, "The Jews of Key West."

We learn about his experience as a writer and historian and listen to stories about the Jewish community in the Florida Keys.

(relaxing piano music) - "Jews headed many of the smuggling networks that emerged.

"To the migrants whose lives were saved "and families restored, these criminal organizations "served a humanitarian purpose.

"A migrant who followed this route, "later told his story under the fictitious name, "Louis Kurland.

"'We lay in the boat like herring in a barrel,' "Kurland said.

"'It was very hot and the heat from our bodies "made it hotter.

"I am ready to go to hell if I have to.

"It cannot be any worse than that day in the boat.'"

(upbeat guitar music) - We're here in Key West with the author Arlo Haskell.

So tell us a little bit about how you evolved as a writer.

- I really came up as a poet and then about 10 years ago, I had started to do a little bit of historical research looking into the kind of literary histories of writers who had spent time in Key West and learned that I kind of loved getting into archives.

In addition to being a writer/historian, I'm the executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar.

I get to make sure that Literary Key West is not just part of the past.

I also, I run a small press, Sand Paper Press, and we publish poetry, a little bit of fiction.

I'm sort of always working on one book or another.

- [Lolo] Your latest book is called "The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, "and Revolutionaries."

- "Jews have thrived in this climate since the 1820s.

"Even where they have been forgotten "or where anonymity was essential to their survival, "Jews have shaped the island we know today.

"Their history is the history of Key West."

I'm fascinated by untold histories and this book is full of that.

My first phase of research was kind of trying to fact-check family stories like that.

- One of the things I found surprising and had no idea about was that Jews were part of the industry of cigars down here.

- The cigar industry is one of the more popular components of Key West history, and it's always told as a Cuban story.

It's certainly a big Cuban story, but actually, in fact, the the cigar industry in Key West was pioneered by Jewish manufacturers, particularly a guy named Samuel Seidenberg who capitalized on a tariff structure that made it financially advantageous to produce cigars domestically in the United States, rather than on the island of Cuba.

- So one of the main characters that features in your book is named Louis Fine.

- Louis Fine was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and he was a real, was a catalyst for the community.

He was not an ordained rabbi, but he was the defacto rabbi for the community.

- So we're here in the Jewish section of the cemetery at Key West and this place sort of is one of the beginnings of organized Jewish life down here.

- This is the place that brings you the furthest back in time as far as a physical place you can visit.

- [Lolo] And in your research, did you see a lot of these names popping up?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I would sometimes come here as a research visit.

I found that it would help me, thinking about the people I was writing about.

- So around the same time as this was established was around when the first synagogue was established, right?

- [Arlo] That's right, yeah.

The cemetery was established in the 1890s and then in the first decade of the 1900s, Louis Fine and others purchased a wood-frame building first formal synagogue.buildinga and then in the first decade of the 1900s, There's a restaurant there today called Sarah Beth's.

And B'nai Zion is the temple that continues in Key West today on United Street.

- [Lolo] And that's the one that opened in the late 60s?

- Into this thriving, multicultural, multilingual community of Key West in the late 19th century, comes a very pivotal figure in Cuban history, Jose Marti, who was the one to kind of successfully crystallize the decades long struggle for Cuban independence.

Jews like Louis Fine, they lent their support to the cause.

He carried this family legacy of having been, his family having been persecuted by the Spanish during Inquisition.

What surprised me is how much that story and others had disappeared even from oral history in Key West.

- Where can people find out more about the Jews of Key West?

- There's a website, jewsofkeywest.com and if you're interested in this history and interested in the book, I would say go to your local bookstore or your local library and ask for a copy.

(upbeat Latin music) - To learn more, visit jewsofkeywest.com.

A luthier is a maker of stringed musical instruments such as violins and guitars.

The ability to craft instruments by hand is an art form that takes years to master, much like the skills developed by the musicians who play the instruments.

In this segment, we meet the artisans who make, repair, and restore orchestral instruments at the Violin Shop in Tampa and Sarasota, Florida.

(bright violin music) - I never thought I would commission a violin because there's always risk you don't know what it's gonna sound like or play like.

But having a violin shop here, I would come and hang out and play the violins, and Derek would crank one out every month or two and I'd play that.

He'd let me take it home and I'd play it.

After about the fourth one, I was like, "You know, this is pretty darn good.

"Make me one just like this."

- I liken the store very much to a wine cellar.

For people who love good wine, you can find some really beautiful treats in there if you look just hard enough.

(melancholy violin music) - I guess my favorite part about being a luthier is knowing that I'm bringing music and happiness into people's lives and doing that for a career.

Dereck and I worked together at another violin shop.

And about six years ago, we talked about it and decided that, Tampa doesn't have a shop, we wanted something of our own.

And we started in a small little, like 600 square foot area.

And now it's turned into two locations, I think we have 14 people with us now and every day is just incredible now.

- Watching Dereck and Ethan work with their customer base and having them be so excited to get them the next product that they really want, it's kind of going to buy a car, you get real nervous and with them, it's just you feel like you're supposed to be there and there's no pressure here and that's one of the best parts.

- I love coming to this place, whether it's just changing strings or getting the next size up violin.

So my son is 12, and continuously we have to come for his violin, and then my daughter plays the cello.

Everybody that works here is really personable, like they care, they care about my kids, about the musicians.

At Violin Shop Tampa, we have a combined experience of about 80 years.

So when musicians come in, whether it's professional level or beginner level, they know that their instruments are gonna be taken care of and it's in the best hands.

We have expert people in restoration, specialists in bows, specialists in the cello and the bass.

So some instruments, they may be from the 1700s or so and they're irreplaceable.

These are items that are almost priceless.

So we have the people here that can repair them properly.

We take care of that instrument very well.

And in the state of Florida, we're one of the only shops that's actively building.

We're consistently producing instruments in our workshop.

- There's a lot of personal creativity involved in making a violin.

You have a set pattern that you follow, but it's like you drawing a picture of a mountain.

The mountain is there in the background and you have your paint and canvas.

And it may take the general form or the shape, but there's a lot of ways to express creativity in making an instrument.

- So when we talk about building an instrument from start to finish, we're talking about we get the raw materials.

And a lot of times, that wood has to come from Europe; so we're very selective with our wood.

That wood usually has to be aged about 15 years or so.

And then from that moment on, there's a couple of things with power tools to get the big work done, but everything's pretty much done by hand.

It takes a lot of time.

The only thing bent on the instrument is the actual rib cage itself.

But the top in the back, that's all done by hand.

The scroll, that's all carved by hand.

So it's not something that you can just order up and it's ready to go.

These instruments are usually ordered about a year in advance.

- Usually from start to finish, it takes about 200 hours, in average, to build a violin.

It can take up to 300 hours to build a cello, and for a double bass, probably four to 500 hours.

If you want to build it properly.

- There are some specialized tools that we use for making violins; carpentry tools, we use saws and chisels and hammers.

Some of the finger-planes that we use are quite specialized.

- [Craftsman] I like using chisels and I don't like using many power tools because it takes the fun of it.

Once the outside shape is achieved, then we can start carving the inside and go down to the thickness that we need.

The thickness is important because from the thickness comes the sound of the instrument.

That's a very, very delicate process that requires days.

- I think that a lot of times people think that music is just the instrument and whatever talent the guy's got up in there, but if you really think about it as much of an instrument as something to play, it's a tool and you can make something really beautiful out of it and that's exactly what they do.

(bright violin music) - [Rick] When you have it that you really enjoy, it becomes like the other woman.

You want to hold it and play it all the time.

So it's a little bit of an addiction.

- A good violin should be one that a good violinist enjoys playing, and after doing this for 20 years, I'm just now getting what I want from my violins.

Before the musician even hits the first note, they notice that it feels good, that the weight feels balanced, the neck feels smooth, it smells good, it's visually beautiful to look at.

And all of those things as an artist, you need to attack or engage all the senses that somebody has, not just their hearing.

If you built the world's most beautiful sounding violin, but it didn't possess the other elements of beauty, it wouldn't be the same.

And that brings me happiness to know that, although I'm not the one personally playing the violin, bringing music and spreading music to the world, but that my hand was involved with that and that that will be passed on for generations.

- For more information, visit violinshoptampa.com.

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

For more arts and culture and to watch past episodes, visit pbsreno.org/arteffects.

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, the June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno members, and by... (upbeat music)