- In the special edition of "Arteffects", meet the WILD Women Artists.

- The WILD Women Artists are a group of 13 women artists who live in Northern Nevada and the Sierra Nevada mountains.

- [Beth] Take a look into the whimsical world of artist, Lisa Kurt.

- I think it's extremely important for kids to be exposed to all kinds of art.

- [Beth] Designing 18th century shoes, with a modern approach.

- When you get a design just right, it is amazing because it's beautiful and it's exactly the right thing at that moment.

(bright music) - [Beth] And singing together while being miles apart.

- Even though we can't sing together right now, we can still create music and create joy.

(chorus singing) - It's all ahead on this women's history month compilation of "Arteffects".

(bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

(bright music) Meg and Dillard Myers.

(bright music) The Nevada Arts Council.

(bright music) Heidemarie Rochlin.

(bright music) In memory of Sue McDowell.

(bright music) And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

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

In this episode, we will take a look at past "Arteffects" stories that feature Nevada female artists, in honor of women's history month.

For our first segment, meet the WILD Women Artists.

This group consists of diverse creatives who live throughout the great state of Nevada.

Let's meet some of the group's members and learn how the talented women of this organization, come together to provide a nurturing environment for artistic growth.

(bright music) - The WILD Women Artists are a group of 13 women artists who live in Northern Nevada and the Sierra Nevada mountains.

(bright music) - There are WILD Women Artists in Reno and Truckee, but then we have a whole batch WILD Women from Tuscarora, Elco, Spring Creek and Eureka.

(bright music) - [Katherine] And they are amazingly varied in their mediums and art forms and they are all very accomplished artists in their different mediums.

(bright music) - It's a pretty amorphic group, it's not always the same size.

This year, there's 13 of us, but in the beginning there were maybe five.

It grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks.

(bright music) - They're a bunch of really amazing women and I've been with them for almost since the beginning, about 21 years, I think it is, and we encourage each other.

I think that's the most important thing.

(bright music) - [Sidne] I've been with the WILD Women for 22 years and we try to be a sisterhood.

You know it's easier when the group is smaller, but it's nice to have new blood and young people coming in with different ideas.

(bright music) - I just joined the WILD Women three years ago and so I'm really still honored and proud to get to be a member.

We all really support each other.

And when we get together, people talk about the different projects that they're working on and I get to see people's processes in their studios and stuff like that.

(bright music) - [Kathleen] It's just fun because we have WILD Women who have all different talents and so I've grown to appreciate and understand what they do and how they do it.

(bright music) - [Sidne] It helps me grow as an artist because we all have such different media that we work in.

And when we get together, I learn so much from the people who have other media like Barbara, she's a ceramicist, but oh man, she's got a good eye and she can tell you stuff.

The same with Kristen, who is a lamp glass speed maker and amazing artist.

She just zooms in on call, you know, I learn a lot from my sisters here.

(bright music) - I create strange little creatures and tell stories about them.

That usually involves an object, which leads me to create a whole character around that object.

Often the WILD Women will give me something and that will inspire something.

Susan Church gave me an old rusted lunch box which immediately had to be made into a bar for mice called Squeakeasy's.

(bright music) We do two shows, generally, the one in the fall in Reno and one in Alco during the Cowboy Poetry Gathering and then we get to all come together at this show.

We get to see everybody, that's a lot of fun.

(bright music) - [Katherine] At least once a year, we do a group project where we all do the same thing.

- It's a challenge to come up with new things for every show.

We decided to have a theme called By The Book.

- [Katherine] So like this year, we did the alphabet project for the WILD Women Show and everybody was assigned two letters of the alphabet.

- We made art based on the 26 letters of the alphabet.

(bright music) - [Katherine] Each WILD Woman's letters are like astronomically different from the others.

Like you could never mistake one for somebody else's, it's amazing what, what everybody produces.

(bright music) - We try hard to make what we do a very positive thing for the community and those 26 pieces are to be raffled off and the proceeds from the raffle go to art scholarships for women who are interested in pursuing art as a career.

(bright music) We try to encourage young up and coming artists to continue with what they're doing.

We support the art community here in Reno.

We support the community itself, so hopefully that'll keep on happening, growing the group of women supporting each other.

- See more WILD Women artwork at wildwomenartists.com.

Lisa Kurt is a local artist and illustrator, who you uses her dreamlike art to tell stories that involve people, animals and nature in mysterious settings.

From illustrating children's books to working with mixed media on canvas or wood panels, she creates characters that represent the diversity of life.

- My name is Lisa Kurt and I'm an artist and an illustrator.

Primarily I paint, I do some mixed media work.

I paint primarily in acrylic paint, though I do use gouache and watercolor as well.

And the focus of my work is mostly narrative illustration, narrative art.

(bright music) The way that I paint is I first start with an approach like how maybe a feeling that I'm thinking of, like melancholy or specific situation or something from childhood, a memory perhaps, or a story of some kind.

And it could be my own life, it might be in someone else's, it could be something I read, who knows.

But as I'm painting and as I'm creating that work, other pieces come together and so there are allegories and metaphors that make their way in and weave their way into my work.

Nothing is as it seems in a way and so there's always gonna be more to the story and I don't get very specific in the way that I create that narrative.

(bright music) Narrative art really is storytelling and conveying a story and it could be a number of things.

For example, children's books is one primary way.

Something that has inspired me in recent years has been this sense of responsibility that we wanna show more diversity in books, whether it's female or someone from a different background, heritage or someone of color.

I think that that really kind of struck me because being a girl as a kid, I played in the woods and I was an adventurer and I did anything that a little boy would do.

And I felt like I was a pretty well rounded kid and interested in a lot of things, but I didn't always really feel like media reflected what my interests were and that's really frustrating to feel like you don't see yourself.

This whole idea of diverse books I think is super important.

And I started to really integrate more diverse characters, specifically girls into my work, into my personal work, and thinking about what their stories would be.

(bright music) I recently published my first children's book and the title is called "Sarla in the Sky".

And it's a book that's based on Sarla Thukral, who was the first Indian woman pilot to get her license and to fly a plane.

(bright music) Sarla's story is really fascinating because it was at a time when this is just so unusual, like for women to be pilots really at all, while maybe the greater public and maybe other people were like that's just not something women do.

And it's just super uplifting and I know as a kid, I would've loved a story like that.

(bright music) I think it's extremely important for kids to be exposed to all kinds of art and whether that's music or visual art or performance or whatever it is, the more you're exposed to, I think, gosh, the more richer and more interesting your world is gonna be.

(bright music) - Learn more at lisakurt.com.

Dressing up in beautiful and historically accurate clothing of the 18th century is a passion for Lauren Stowell of Reno.

She found herself searching for historically accurate shoes to compliment the dresses she spent months creating.

When she couldn't find what she needed, this artisan took matters into her own hands and American Duchess was born.

(bright music) - [Lauren] American Duchess is a small company that makes new old shoes.

We take a really old design, something you see in a painting or in a museum and we make it work for modern wear and comfort expectations.

Everything from the 18th century, 19th century and 1920s, '30s and '40s as well.

American Duchess started as my personal blog on historic costuming.

I liked to make things, I liked to make those things for myself and wear them to an event, a picnic or a dance, it's just what I did for fun.

And I thought I'll blog about my experiences so that other people who have no idea how to make a wig or how to do this dress can learn from my mistakes and it's always been about sharing my mistakes and learning that way.

You don't wanna put all this time and effort and sometimes a lot of money into your beautiful dress and then have no shoes to wear with it because it crushes the illusion.

(bright music) - When you're creating these gowns, they are art pieces.

And if you don't have the right shoes, it just kills it.

And when you take those photos of yourself or someone's taking photos of you and you look at those later, you wanna be able to say, "I look like I walked out of a portrait."

- You not gonna achieve that with tennis shoes under your dress.

Believe me, I've seen it.

(bright music) Historic shoes are not like shoes today.

They have strange closures, they have specific toe shapes or lack of toe boxes.

They're very different, so nobody was really making that kind of thing.

And I thought, well, okay maybe I'll have a go and make some shoes.

Not by hand, I couldn't make enough of them to make a living doing that.

I found a manufacturer and we developed a prototype.

I put it on the internet and did a pre-order, did a crowdfunding campaign.

And it funded overnight, like overnight we had enough money to do the production run.

And it was like oh my God.

I woke up in the morning like, "Oh, this is the thing.

Okay, I'm gonna do this, this is what I'm gonna do."

(bright music) Our first design was Georgiana, named after the Duchess of Devonshire.

It was made out of dyable satin.

It was our first go, people were excited about it, I was excited about it and it worked.

We just kept producing like the next one, the next one, the next one.

(bright music) A typical 18th century shoe, the most characteristic hallmark that you might see on those are latches with buckles.

This is the way that 18th century shoes closed.

You have these two straps, you put one strap through here, you stick the prongs through the other one.

You can make them as tight as you want, so you can keep tightening them and it makes your shoes look very pretty.

Historical accuracy is very important.

(bright music) - [Nicole] The basic process starts with looking at original shoes, whether it through photographs.

- [Lauren] It's brainstorming, So we just kind of all get together and go, "what sounds cool?

What have we not made before?

What are the trends in the community?"

A lot of it is research, looking at old magazine ads, catalogs, original shoes and our collections.

- I've gone to a number of different museums and studied things hands on so that way, I have an understanding of how they're constructed and what goes into the internals of them and things of that nature.

All of that research gets done gradually as we find inspirations.

Say we need a boot for this time period and we go and find lots of different examples and pick what ones really speak to us, What we think would translate well to a modern design.

And from there, we do a lot of sketches, a lot of ideations and then actually come up with the formal line drawing and we put little tiny details of this sole should be this many millimeters, this eyelet should be this many millimeters wide, all the little tiny details in there.

So that way, the first sample that we get back is as close as we can get to right.

- There is nobody who knows about historic shoes and how to make them better than Nicole Rudolph.

- When I was at Colonial Williamsburg, I ended up learning how to do women's shoe making in the proper 18th century style, all by hand, no machines, all hands stitched and assembled.

(bright music) - We're based here in Reno and this is where we do all of the design, all the marketing and advertising happens here as well.

We also pack, ship and do logistics out of here, so there's a great big, warehouse attached to this little, tiny office.

We do everything except the actual manufacturing of our footwear.

(bright music) 95% of the world's shoes are made in Ho Jaye, it is in South China.

There are millions of people in Ho Jaye and it's a city that is built for shoe production.

Factories, components, markets, leather producers, just everything you need, so that's where we also manufacture our shoes.

The people that we work with there are amazing.

We produce fantastic shoes in China because I get on a plane and I go over there and I make sure our quality processes are in place and that our materials are good and that our relationship with our manufacturer is good.

(bright music) - [Nicole] They really are into themselves, a sculptural interesting piece of artwork and they should stand on their own before you even put them on your feet.

And then to add that in, to add the whole costume and to add the clothes, the dresses, everything, it just ends up completing the whole thing.

(bright music) - There are so many people in the world that are into historic costuming or their movie costumers or stage costumers, that's a whole market I never even thought about when we started, I was just making shoes for people like me.

It's about helping other members of the costuming community be their best selves in the 18th century or the 19th century to make their most beautiful dress and impression or character.

We wanna create a fun environment to help people have a good time playing dress up.

(bright music) - See more at american-duchess.com.

Barbershop music is certainly unique.

The singers create beautiful harmonies without any musical instruments.

The Reno based High Desert Harmony Chorus and its all female cast have been performing for decades.

While the pandemic make changed their plans, the ladies have found new ways to bring their music to their audiences and in the process have found a renewed sense of comradery and connection.

(bright music) - [Amy] High Desert Harmony is a local women's chorus.

We sing acapella music, primarily in the barbershop style, but other contemporary acapella.

- Just the style of barbershop music takes people back to a time when things were maybe simpler or slower or just really fun.

♪ He promised me affection and protection ♪ ♪ Protection ♪ ♪ I knew my life would never be the same ♪ - Barbershop is an American pastime, it started in America.

When people get together, they sing and you find your part where you can fit in and you harmonize.

♪ I can't recall his name ♪ ♪ Shame, shame ♪ - Barbershop is made up of four parts, there's tenor on the top, there's lead, which is the melody, there's baritone and then there's bass, the lowest part.

- And when you put 'em all together, we create a wonderful sound.

♪ What's his name ♪ ♪ Oh, what's his name ♪ (audience applauding) - High Desert Harmony has about 20 members and they range in age right now from 25 to 83.

(bright music) - [Karen] It's just a really broad array of wonderful singers.

All different walks of life from all over the Reno-Sparks community.

- We are the local chapter of Sweet Adelines International, which is an organization of women singers.

- There are 20,000 members.

Around the world, they cover more than 10 countries.

- It's kind of special to not only be part of a chorus and a group in Reno and Sparks, but also to be connected internationally with all these other singers that are doing the same thing.

(bright music) - [Cynthia] My mother was a Sweet Adeline back in the early '70s and I had gone to a couple of rehearsals with her.

And a few years after she passed, I was trying to find something to do and I went to a function.

And I met some men from the Silver Dollar Chorus, which is the local men's barbershop chorus and got talking to them and they told me that I should go check out High Desert Harmony and I did.

And I walked into the meeting and I was greeted very warmly with open arms and I decided this is what I wanted to do.

Tried out, made it and it's the best thing I've done for myself.

♪ When you wish upon a star ♪ It lifts me up.

It reminds me of times when I've sung with my mom or when I sing with our quartets and the other women on the risers, it's a special feeling you get and you wanna share it.

- It's thrilling to get to put all of your hard work out there on stage.

It may be only last for a few hours, but it's everything that's led up to that moment.

(women harmonizing) (bright music) When the pandemic hit, actually right before everything started closing down, we had made a decision to go virtual.

- We've not been able to meet together and sing together because of the risk of spreading the virus.

And our competition was canceled, that we'd been working so hard for.

And of course we haven't been able to sing in like the art town events, so we've had to make lots of changes and lots of pivots.

But fortunately we have a really great director, who's been able to lead us through this and we're still singing and still creating music.

- We've been meeting every week on Zoom since the pandemic started.

We rehearse for about two and a half hours.

- We all know Zoom and you can't actually sing at the same time, it doesn't work, so we are all muted when we're singing in our own houses.

♪ All is calm ♪ We're doing these virtual choruses, where we record ourselves.

- Everybody just uses whatever device they have.

It's usually an iPhone or a tablet or their computer and they record themselves and then they send that in to me and I edit the audio, make sure everything's lined up correctly and then edit the videos together.

It's been a huge learning curve for me since it's not something I'd done before, but just incredibly fulfilling.

♪ This is my fight song ♪ ♪ Take back my life song ♪ ♪ Prove I'm all right song ♪ ♪ My song ♪ - The first time that Amy did one of our first virtual concerts, I was amazed.

How well we sounded, how fun it looked, how enjoyable it was and that we were sharing something with other people.

This is what we're all about.

This is High Desert Harmony.

- [Karen] I think music is such a great unifying force, both creating music and listening to it.

It doesn't matter who you are, where you're from, what your political background is, where you came from, whether you have a PhD in music theory or have never read music before, music is enjoyed by everyone.

- [Cynthia] Even though we can't sing together on the risers right now, I know we will in the near future.

And when we do, that first rehearsal, is probably gonna be pretty emotional, it's gonna be exciting just to be on the risers with our sisters in song, to be able to hear their real voices, the connection, it's gonna be pretty spectacular.

♪ Fight song ♪ - To learn more, visit highdesertharmony.net.

And that wraps it up for this women's history month compilation of "Arteffects".

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

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

(bright music) Meg and Dillard Myers.

(bright music) The Nevada Arts Council.

(bright music) Heidemarie Rochlin.

(bright music) In memory of Sue McDowell.

(bright music) And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

(bright music)