- On this edition of Arteffects, hitting the roads in Reno with Emmy's Flower Truck.

- Flowers are similar to music.

Music lifts you up, music changes your mood, so do flowers.

- [Beth] American Signs Electrified.

- [Tod] This sets up the history of signs.

From the earliest hand carved wood, through the light bulb period, through the neon period, into the plastic period.

(jazz music) - [Beth] An immersive exhibition of Vincent van Gogh.

- [Julien] It's a journey where they can discover a panorama of the main masterpieces in vivid colors, and in a poignant vibrant way.

(soft piano music) - [Beth] And a French hat maker in Virginia city.

- What I'm looking for is to see some satisfaction, some happiness, some excitement in the person's eyes.

And that's my reward.

- It's all ahead on this edition of Arteffects.

(soft jazz music) - [Announcer] Funding for Arteffects is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pierce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, the Nevada Arts Council, Heidemarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

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

You may have seen a green Volkswagen truck around the Reno Sparks area full of fresh flowers, a variety of greenery, and the bright smile of Emily Macpherson.

This artisan has found an eye catching way to help a community show love and appreciation with a gorgeous bouquet.

Whether it's Mother's day, a birthday, an anniversary, or just because.

(slow-paced jazz music) - [Emily] Flowers can be given anytime.

You don't need a special holiday to give flowers.

You can give flowers to lift you up anytime for yourself, for your friends, for your kids.

Flowers have a very, very strong effect on people.

Very similar to music, it lifts you up, it makes you happy, it changes your mood, and just giving them to someone brings a smile and makes their day.

(slow-paced jazz music) My name's Emily Macpherson, and I'm the owner of Emmy's Flower Truck.

We are based in Reno, Nevada.

Emmy's Flower Truck is a mobile flower truck that travels around town.

We are invited by different businesses to come and park at their business, setting up in specific locations, and selling flowers and bouquets.

And this is ammon, and this is a gerbera daisy.

Before Emmy's Flower Truck, I was a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines for 25 years.

(upbeat music) When the pandemic happened, Southwest gave us the option to opt out.

And that meant for the people that were interested in retiring, this was the time to do it.

And they were offering a monetary amount for however long you had worked there.

The money I received, I decided to buy this Volkswagen truck.

(jazz music) It's a 1965 Volkswagen Kombi transporter.

I found it in New Jersey, and this one was interesting to me because of the ability to fold down the sides, and fold the sides back up.

- She's absolutely adorable and fun to drive.

We named her Daisy.

She has a vintage looking license plate with the name flower truck, and she only goes 40 miles an hour.

- [Emily] We do not go on the freeway, we only go on side streets.

- So it's very fun driving her around town.

She gets a lot of attention.

- I saw people around, not necessary in Reno, but other towns, that had different kinds of trucks with flowers.

I've always loved flowers, so it's perfect.

And here we are now.

At Emmy's Flower Truck, we work with hundreds of varieties of flowers.

(gentle music) Tulips are very big right now, and we're doing lots of roses and lots of greenery.

So we do a lot of eucalyptus, we have, it's called Italian Ruscus.

So whatever we choose, is the freshest that we can find, and the most current that we can find.

We trim 'em and make sure we have no bacteria anywhere.

Our flowers last a long time because we do take care of them the way we do.

We do process them in a certain way.

- Creating arrangement involves working with color pallets, and color schemes, as well as different textures and flowers.

We want something that's intriguing, has little pops of color, or little flowers sticking out every now and then.

I like to call it very whimsical or very boho.

And that tends to be our style that we lean towards.

- When we are arranging a bouquet for a client, we take into account the different colors that they love, where they're gonna use it, how big they want it.

And from that, we just do our magic.

We have certain ways that we cut our flowers to certain heights, so you can see all of your beautiful focal flowers.

The people that actually build their own, they spend about 15, 20 minutes, and that to them is their piece of art.

So it's an art form that they've kind of given to me to perfect.

- I love creating an arrangement or a bouquet.

I find that I can pour my creativity into it, and I love seeing the people's faces when I turn it around, especially out on the truck.

- When I started Emmy's Flower Truck, I never envisioned just how much I would learn about flowers, and just how much I would learn from the people that purchase flowers.

Just the love that people bring, and the support that people have for the different small businesses, and the different business owners.

It's quite incredible, it really is.

I never knew Reno like I know Reno now, and I wouldn't be anywhere else.

- To learn more about Emmy's Flower Truck, visit emmysflowertruck.com.

And be sure to follow their Instagram @emmysflowertruck to stay up to date on their next popup event.

Up next, we head to Cincinnati, Ohio, home of the American Sign Museum.

A space dedicated to the art and history of commercial signs and sign making.

The 20,000 square foot museum is a walk through the ages of technology and design, and celebrates more than 100 years of American sign history.

(soft jazz music) - I'm Tod Swormstedt, I'm the founder of the American Sign Museum.

This is my self proclaimed midlife crisis project.

I worked on a magazine for the sign industry for about 28 years.

The magazine's called Signs of the Times.

It actually goes back to May, 1906, and my great-grandfather was the first editor.

So I left the magazine in 1999 to start the museum.

What this is, is just sets up the history of signs.

From the earliest hand carved wood, through the light bulb period, through the neon period, into the plastic period.

(soft guitar music) Well, every sign museum worth its salt has to have a Big Boy.

Now this is an early version of the Big Boy.

If you look at his back pocket here, it's got a three dimensional slingshot.

The later versions, the slingshot was more like embossed to his pants.

The Big Boys now don't have a slingshot at all.

It's politically incorrect.

He's got striped pants, the ones now have checked pants, saddle shoes, and the other other thing is that the Big Boys now are not quite as well fed as this Big Boy.

(jazz music) (folk music) This section here is called the light bulb period, or the pre-neon period.

The light bulb was introduced in the late 1890s.

As soon as the light bulb was introduced, you had light bulb signs.

Now all of these examples here are signs that use light bulbs.

Sometimes they're exposed like on this boot, and this boot is what we call a trade sign.

Trade signs were signs that were in the shape of a symbol, where the symbol represented the business.

Obviously a boot, this was a boot store.

If you look on this side of the sign, you'll see there's a bunch of light bulbs.

If you come on the other side of the sign, you'll see that the letters have neon illumination.

Well, when we found this sign, it had neon on both sides.

But as we were trying to fix some of the broken tubes, we discovered that the sign had originally been a light bulb sign.

So we restored this side back to the way it was originally, and left this side with the retrofit in neon, to show how a sign could be updated with a new technology.

Another type of light bulb sign that has the lights inside the sign is this Kelly Springfield Tires sign.

Now it uses these little glass buttons, we call them.

These are cast glass with a stem on the back that's threaded.

So you screw this into the sign cabinet, imprinted on the rim of the glass patented in July, in 1910.

(fast-paced guitar music) Now we move into the neon period, which really began in the mid to late 20s.

(rock music) This corner of the museum is '50s neon.

If you look at this sign here, this cow sign, this is a great example of what we call animated neon.

Now, the way you do animated neon, is you do layers of it.

If you look at this cow head here, there's three layers of neon stacked on top of each other, and they're flashing on and off in a sequence, one, two, three, one, two, three.

This animation effect is really obvious in the swishing tail.

(rock music) And of course we saved one of Columbus's icons, the Big Bear sign.

This sign was found in Chillicothe, Ohio.

This sign probably dates to late '50s into the early '60s.

(rock music) And then we move into what we call the plastic era, which really kicked in after World War II.

This sign, it's what I would call kind of a transition sign because what happened is, when plastic was introduced, neon held on even to the '60s and '70s.

So you see a lot of signs in the 1950s combine neon with plastic.

The very first plastic signs were just flat plastic sheet.

Then they started doing some early what we call vacuum forming, where the sign face was a little bit rounded.

This Colonel Sanders sign, KFC sign up here would be a good example of that.

Then they started doing a little bit more complicated vacuum forming, where the letters could be actually raised, like this Emerson Television and Radio, you can see Lowe Brothers, and an extreme example of that is the Shell sign.

(slow-paced orchestra music) The American Sign Museum is a history of America.

This sign is a really good example of that.

Now, obviously, it's in the shape of a Sputnik, and it's for a shopping center called Satellite Shopland.

If you remember, the Russians had launched Sputnik in 1957.

That prompted all this interest in rocket ships, outer space planets.

I call it the Jetson's period of design.

This guy opened a shopping center in 1962.

So he took his rough sketch to a couple sign companies to ask them what it would cost to build that sign.

And they just kind of looked at him in scans, this guy is nuts.

So he ended up actually building the sign himself in his garage.

The globe is actually two half globes of plastic.

All these spikes, and all the letters, he did himself in his shop.

(jazz music) So let's take a walk down main street.

(jazz music) We'll walk past this McDonald's sign from Huntsville, Alabama.

This was built in 1963.

(jazz music) We have a policy that we don't like to repaint signs.

We will restore the neon on a sign, but we like the patina of a sign.

The irony about this sign is, this was for Earl Scheib.

Earl Scheib was a cheap place to get your car repainted.

Kind of a precursor to Maaco.

Any car, any color, in 1995.

So when we got this sign, that globe was completely stripped of paint.

This ring was gone, the cars were gone, so we completely restored this sign, which is very unusual for us.

The only thing we did leave that was original was the bullet hole.

Here's where the bullet came out, and a little tougher to see is where the bullet went in.

It's right at the ring level.

Right here is where the bullet went in.

(jazz music) Every sign museum's gotta have a McDonald sign.

That's an American icon, but so is Howard Johnson's.

This particular sign was built in 1958, and came from upstate New York.

Now there's a little story behind those characters on the top.

Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair.

When Howard Johnson started opening up his restaurants, he wanted to particularly cater to families.

So his ad agency in their wisdom, picked the nursery rhyme to highlight on the top of the sign.

We're often asked if we have more signs, well, yes we do.

Most of these have been restored.

Sometimes when we get a sign and it is in working condition, it's not likely that it is.

But we do have a working neon shop which repairs a lot of the glass for the signs.

We even send from Ohio.

This Roby's Nite Club sign is from Toledo, the Sterling Rubber Products is from Central Ohio, and we even have a sign from Columbus, the well known Rife's Market.

Signs are everywhere and I don't think people really think about who actually made or designed that sign.

So if you come to the museum and you leave with a new appreciation for the people that made these signs, then I would say we've accomplished our mission.

(fast-paced jazz music) - To learn more about the American Sign Museum, visit americansignmuseum.org.

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

Local neon sign collector Will Durham, who was featured on Arteffects in season two, currently has how many neon signs in his collection?

Is the answer, A, 120, B, 130, C, 140, or D, 150.

And the answer is C, 140.

Imagine van Gogh is an immersive exhibition that provides you with the exciting opportunity to step into the famous paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

We visit Boston, Massachusetts to see what it all about.

- [Director] For the last two of his brief, 37 years, Vincent van Gogh moved to the South of France.

There in the blazing sun, and mid flower-filled fields, his own life as an artist bloomed.

- You can see in his paintings that there's a lot of positivism, probably to balance with what he experienced in his everyday life.

- [Director] Speaking to us from France, Julien Baron, is the co-director of Imagine van Gogh.

Illuminating a one time subway power station, projections of van Gogh paintings splash across this cavernous space.

- People can dive into van Gogh masterpieces.

It's a journey where they can discover a panorama of the main masterpieces in vivid colors, and in a poignant vibrant way.

- I think it's a feeling experience.

- [Director] Annabelle Mauger is the show's co-director.

In conceiving the installation, she's concentrated on van Gogh's end of life work.

That's when, struggling with ill health, the painter produced the bulk of his paintings as he traveled throughout Provence.

- [Annabelle] Those last two years was when he really decided to be a painter.

He really was the painter of all those landscape around him.

Vincent van Gogh paint a dreaming landscape but he also paint people like you and me.

- [Director] Built as an immersive experience, Imagine van Gogh is comprised of 57 HD video projectors, rendering the artist's work on more than 20 towering screens accompanied by a soundtrack of classical music.

(classical music) But what you won't see here are van Gogh's works, strictly as he painted them.

Instead, it's van Gogh in pieces.

Faces rather than figures, flowers rather than fields, and just a sense of the sea.

- [Annabelle] When you look at all those details, what you will see is that Vincent van Gogh was painting with very straight brush strokes.

Sometimes it could be very violent, but at the same time, when you take just a little distance with those details, you will see that this painting is curved all the times.

It's very soft.

- So as you're doing this are you mindful of changing van Gogh's work?

- I'm very aware of that.

I'm always remembered that I'm not an artist, I'm a director.

The artist here is Vincent van Gogh.

- [Director] The show is one of a number of immersive van Gogh exhibitions touring the world.

It's made pop possible because 130 years after his death, his work is now in the public domain.

And it's made popular by social media, and shows like Netflix's Emily in Paris.

- [Lady] This is incredible.

I feel like I'm actually in the painting.

- Imagine van Gogh can be a launching pad.

Mauger says, "A way to enter into the war world as van Gogh captured it before seeing the real artwork."

- [Annabelle] It's another way to experiment art and culture.

And then if you like it, you can discover more like reading books, go to the museum.

Yesterday I was in the Harvard Museum.

I saw one of the self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, it was such a surprise, and I was very happy to discover it.

- To learn more about Imagine van Gogh, visit imagine-vangogh.com.

Now let's step back in time and head to Virginia city.

Home to wooden walkways, stories of the silver rush, chili cook-offs, and cowboys galore.

It's difficult to picture a cowboy without his hat, and the craft of hat making is alive and well in this historic town.

Using time tested tools and techniques, Pascal Baboulin creates unique hats of all shapes and sizes.

(folk music) - I am a hat maker, I make my hats here in Virginia city.

I am from France, originating from the French Alps, not very far from the Swiss border, and I came to the United States in 1998 as a student.

Always been a big fan of history, and I came to do my master's degree in history, came to study the French immigration during the Gold Rush.

I met my wife who was from Virginia city, and she took me up here.

By looking around, you feel like you are diving in history.

Being in Virginia city and being also a big history buff, I thought it would be nice to bring to the town a craft, something more historical but more so traditional.

I did intern to a hatmaker in Arizona.

I only had the basics when I was working back in France, but it's mostly here in the United States that I learned the main techniques.

We're gonna start by taking his head measurements, followed by also his head shape, as the hat has to be comfortable and a perfect fit from the beginning.

We are using some very old tools, and I think my oldest tool is from the 1890s.

It's actually an old tool that comes from Paris, and it's called a Conformateur.

It's this little crazy machine that I put on the person's head, and that's gonna give me the shape of the customer's head.

What we are looking for is a perfect balance, or perfect symmetry between hat and face.

I deal with all hat stretchers, we deal with hat blocks, we deal with an old brim sizers.

When I think about it, and I think about all the people that have been touching or using those tools before me, you can get slightly emotional.

It feels like we are keeping alive an old trade, and we can be proud of that.

(folk music) We're using this very old classic American felt, which is made of beaver.

It's usually a blend of beaver and rabbit fur.

The beaver has always been used in the hat industry, and that's going back to the trappers long time ago, when people were doing their conquest of the West.

Actually, many of the trappers were from Europe, and most of them were from France.

They realized that the characteristic of the beaver felt were perfect for hat, as it does make the hat durable, and sturdy, but also waterproof, and this in a natural way.

I start with a blank, which has a pretty ugly form, it's a pretty basic shape.

The first thing is gonna be the steaming.

(folk music) From there, it's gonna be blocked.

(folk music) From there, we gonna be pressed ending to get a very beautiful texture.

And it's after that, that we gonna re-steam the hat after we trim the brim.

And we're gonna start to sculpt, we're gonna sculpt the crown.

The sculpting, it's my personal touch, and I don't use any blocks that are pre-made, pre-shaped.

So it's my creation, for the person.

This is why perhaps I get that shininess in my eyes because you know, I like to think that there's an artistic side to it.

- This is the first custom made hat I've ever had.

There's no doubt in my mind that there's artistry involved.

A lot of these skills are going away, and it's a nice feeling having something quality made by a craftsman.

- To see some satisfaction, some happiness, some excitement in the person's eyes, that's my reward, that's what I'm looking for.

Mixing the hat making and my passion for history is obviously the cherry on the cake.

What I feel like I'm doing right now, is like living history.

Voila.

So Virginia city, it's a perfect place for me to be, and I completely feel like I fit here.

(folk music) - To learn more, go to visitvirginiacitynv.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 Rafealli, with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, the Nevada Arts Council, Heidemarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(folk music)