- In this edition of "Arteffects," meet the 2024 Artown poster artist.

- [Steve] I do coyotes, I do wolves, I do Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake.

I mean, it just goes on and on.

There's no schedule or list.

(soft acoustic music) - [Beth] The beauty of improvisation.

(gentle music) - [Beverly] I hope they see me.

I hope they see the best of me.

Because the best of me is in that work.

- [Beth] Independent films for an eager audience.

- Our mission is just to provide the community with stories from people.

(upbeat orchestral music) - [Beth] And an artist finding his voice.

(low hip hop music) - [Dayo] Got this self-confidence in me that, as soon as I get on here, I'ma change everything.

Nobody did it the way I did it.

So when I say Dayo, y'all say go!

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

(upbeat jazz music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

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

For our first segment, let's meet Reno artist Steve Nighthawk.

With a combination of pencils, charcoal and paint, Steve creates beautiful, lifelike art based on the people and animals native to our region.

Steve is also the Artown poster artist for 2024, and his work has resulted in a unique representation of the many different art forms featured during this month-long arts festival.

(soft acoustic music) - [Steve] My name is Steve Nighthawk, and I do artwork.

I am part of the Washoe, Shoshone, and Paiute.

I can remember drawing birds in elementary school.

And you jump ahead, what, 40, 50 years, I'm still drawing birds.

I do coyotes, I do wolves, I do hummingbirds, Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake.

I mean, it just goes on and on.

There's no schedule or list.

As well as doing artwork, I collect art, and as I look around, I'm seeing six different artists here in my living room art gallery.

I pretty much grew up in Reno.

I moved away about 20, 22 years ago to do some archeology work in Oregon.

And I thought, okay, I'm gonna go home.

I didn't really realize what Artown was, but I knew I liked art.

So I got involved doing art shows, going to see other artists, different venues.

And to actually have a poster of Reno, it brings it all home.

The Artown poster is the art piece that's connected to our mountains, our lakes, our rivers, the centerpiece being not just a basket, but the outline of Reno woven into the basket.

The basket is very important to Native people.

The basket is based on a Paiute design.

They've been making baskets for thousands of years and they're world renowned for their work.

And from there I worked out incorporating music notes, a movie reel, piano keys coming from behind, all the way down to dance, Hollywood, ballerina.

And last but not least, the Earth on the bottom.

Some pictures I have to do research of the background, of the main subject.

And that's always fun because when you do that, you learn something that you really never knew before.

This particular picture is a decoy, duck decoy.

The photo is from actual decoys that were discovered in a cave that date back 9,000 years.

So that's the main subject that I used.

And then I also try to use landmarks, In this particular piece, I use Pyramid Lake as the backdrop, the mountain line, part of the beach, and the sky, light to dark sunset.

The picture is always complete once I actually do step back and take a look at it.

I'll just go over it once.

And if it's good, it's good.

And this one is good.

I'm happy, I'm glad.

More than once after I do finish a picture, I'll look at it and I'll think, that is very good.

I can't say that someone else is doing it, I'm doing it, but I'm just amazed at it.

I think as long as I have that, I will be able to continue.

- For self-taught artist Beverly Whiteside, joy is found in improvisation.

When she creates, she uses movement and a variety of media to highlight human connections.

We travel to Columbus, Ohio for the story.

(gentle music) - [Beverly] I started out with wood because I didn't really have canvas.

Let me go back a little bit even further.

I'm really not an artist.

No, I'm just kidding.

(laughs) I started out as a dance teacher, K through 5 in the elementary school.

And I had so many wonderful art teachers in the elementary school.

And it was at Fair Arts Impact when I first caught the fire for visual art.

And it was because of so many beautiful elementary art teachers that allowed me to look at the process, allowed me to come in and play with the other kids.

And I use that word a lot because that's joy.

Sometimes when I go past the playground, you hear this sound, pure joy, just skipping, running, jumping.

Can you imagine that feeling of love and joy doing nothing but playing?

So that's what I do, I play.

I started with just painting chairs, just painting anything on wood that I could find.

I started making the strokes of the paint.

It was just acrylic paint.

That was it, I was gone.

I was hooked.

It's something about the way that paint went across there, and that (sighs) peace and the silence of just that movement pulled me in.

So of course, now I'm painting everything in town.

All over my house, I'm just painting, painting this, painting that.

And I would just go in my room and I would just paint.

And I'm telling you, it was heaven.

My inspiration today comes from everywhere, in my family, in what's going on in the world, the positive, the negative, and my duty to lift, my commitment to lift.

I have more behind me than I'm going forward with now.

And I think time inspires me, the lack of time, the importance of time, and then the ability to treat time as an important factor.

A very important factor 'cause you can't get that back.

"Homegoing" is about...

In the African American families, many of them celebrate homegoing.

It's a funeral.

The minister and some of the nurses and other people in the choir are over here.

Those are my three cousins in the middle, and they're grieving and they're at the funeral.

And then over here, my uncle and my aunt and a couple other people are going to the cemetery.

We're all at the cemetery and we just... And those footsteps that go out that way.

I was at the funeral and I'm sitting there and I'm saying, "I can't let these...

These moments are so important.

Do I sketch something down," which I was doing during the, I was sketching.

I said, "I gotta retell this."

She's 98, she was 98.

I knew her all my life.

I can't let this moment be gone and never talked about or said again.

But I said, "But they will remember this.

If I explain this to them, that's like a picture in time."

You know how you write?

Painting is somewhat like writing because you're trying to get all these valuable concepts in, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

And that's the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Like a book.

I wanna tell stories of the Clotilda, the last slave ship that left going to Benin.

Even though it was against the law to enslave Africans, ships still went out, at least this one.

The last ship was the Clotilda.

I want them to know that that meant something and that the descendants of the Clotilda still exist.

There's a story of my grandma, she was an usher.

She went to like the fourth or the fifth grade, but she did her best.

And she was the head usher at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

I want people to know that that meant something and that all of our existence means something.

It really means something.

I think the most rewarding thing for me, or one of the most rewarding things is that somebody really gets it.

They like it.

Now let me tell you, when I first started doing this, it wasn't very popular.

People didn't really, really like it.

It's like, what is she doing?

You know what I mean?

But I'm telling you, that's why I'm saying time.

If you continue to work and grow, whatever you're growing and doing just gets better if you commit yourself to it.

Because all those little struggles is your strength.

I hope they see me.

I hope they see the best of me.

Because the best of me is in that work.

- Learn more at And now it's time for this week's art quiz.

During the first segment, Steve Nighthawk referenced duck decoys that were discovered by archeologists.

Those duck decoys were discovered inside a Lovelock Cave in Nevada and were created with tule rush, feathers, cordage and paint.

When do historians believe these historical ducks were created?

Is the answer A, 1000 BC to 500 BC, B, 400 BC to 100 AD, C, 200 AD to 900 AD, or D, 1000 AD to 1500 AD?

Stay tuned for the answer.

The Tropic Cinema brings quality movies to Key West, Florida.

From independent films to Hollywood classics, they have become an integral part of the community and are celebrating their 20th anniversary.

(upbeat orchestral music) - [Carla] We hear stories from people saying that they would not wanna be in Kew West without the Tropic.

We have a huge community base.

I'm Carla Turner and I'm the executive director at the Tropic Cinema.

We are a nonprofit.

This year is our 20th year anniversary.

Our mission is just to provide the community with stories from people.

We do all kinds of indie arthouse films, independent foreign language films, stories that they wouldn't, that the community wouldn't hear otherwise.

(bright jazz music) I love to hear people come in and say, "I just wanna walk through.

It's such a beautiful movie theater.

It's such a great experience.

I love the ambiance there."

Our founders just had this, they wanted art deco.

They hired an architect and a designer to come in and guide them on what it would look like and the colors, and we have stuck with it.

We're not gonna let go of our original neon, the neon sign.

People keep wanting us to move to LED.

We're not going to.

We're gonna keep all the original colors.

And yeah, everyone loves it.

Everyone thinks we're old, but we're really not that old.

So the Oscar party's always fun.

It's kind of more of a gift from the Tropic to our community.

It's definitely more of a party.

It's just kind of a thank you for coming in and watching all these films that you've seen all year long.

And we love to do the Oscar ballots and tally that up for the people who are really into it and think they can figure it out.

We're most successful and we draw most excitement by offering events.

So we do a lot of talkbacks.

I think people enjoy seeing the movies and hearing the stories, but they also enjoy having a conversation after the movie about how they felt.

This was really the first year we came back to doing event based programming where we're paying filmmakers to fly in and talk about their films.

We're just gonna dive deeper into that.

We're gonna continue to support new filmmakers coming in and showing their films that haven't been seen yet on our screen as a premiere.

And we're just gonna keep investing, investing in our filmmakers.

- Learn more at tropiccinema.com.

And now let's review this week's art quiz.

During the first segment, Steve Nighthawk referenced duck decoys that were discovered by archeologists.

Those duck decoys were discovered inside a Lovelock Cave in Nevada and were created with tule rush, feathers, cordage and paint.

When do historians believe these historical ducks were created?

Is the answer A, 1000 BC to 500 BC, B, 400 BC to 100 AD, C, 200 AD to 900 AD, or D, 1000 AD to 1500 AD?

And the answer is B, 400 BC to 100 AD.

Tre'on Johnson, otherwise known as Dayo Gold, is discovering who he is as an artist.

In this segment, we take a trip to Ohio to find out more about his craft and the ways in which the music and culture of hip hop influence him.

(birds chirping) - [Dayo] What inspires me to write?

It's really just, I didn't know how to really just get out how I was feeling a lot of the times.

I think I'm a great communicator, but it's just some things I don't quite know how to articulate the best at the current moment.

And I think when I'm just hit with some overwhelming emotions like that, what I've found is the pen and the pad, man.

That's what really helps me get that out.

(soft lofi music) When I started rapping and I saw how you use those, those different formulas within communication, I was like, whoa, this can go way farther than what I even expected.

I think you really just gotta be familiar with the English language.

I was always...

I always loved English class growing up 'cause I loved using different words and articulating myself better than the next person.

But I think when you weave that into your actual hip hop and your raps, that shows your intelligence as well, how you can relate to... You can be saying the same thing, but it means two different things.

And the way you said it or the way you perceive it, that would be the only thing that makes that change.

And I think that is amazing to me.

I think a huge event that really shaped who I am was when I had to drop out of school.

First of all, I didn't really want to.

I didn't want to at all.

I was known for my grades.

So when I had to relay that message to my family, it was like, well, then what are you gonna do?

I felt I was real lost at that point in my life.

But my mom, she's always been there.

She's really the strongest person I know and she really instilled that confidence in me early, like don't let anybody drift you off what you really, really wanna do.

And it was a lot of spur of the moment things going on in my life that really made me just reevaluate who I am.

And when I just stripped that all away and I got just by myself and I could just think for myself, it just came.

It was music, it was always music.

And once I got that, that stereotype of me just being a Black person, you wanna do hip hop out of my mind, it made it definite.

There's this quote, and it stuck with me ever since I read it.

It says, "Hip hop didn't invent anything.

It reinvented everything."

(relaxed hip hop music) It takes everything that's going on in the culture, it takes everything that's going on in politics, and it puts it all in this one place, where anybody and everybody can listen to it.

Hip hop has influenced me in ways I can't even count, to the way I dress, to the way I wear my hair, my conversation, my word choice.

And it's also educating me.

I think that's probably what I got from the most from hip hop.

I really want people to try to grow from the inside, not from the material things that's been going on.

I want that little light bulb to just flicker in your head when you're listening to my music, like I ain't never really thought of it like that.

If I can affect you that way just by my lyrics, by my presence, by me, you know what I'm saying, getting you to hear something you never even heard before, then I won at the end of the day.

One of my nicknames in high school was Tre Day.

So I was thinking of that as a rap name at first, but I'm like, there's so many Tre Days as well.

I can't do that.

But I wanted to keep day in there somehow.

So then when I was on my research, I came across Dayo, and Dayo means joy arrives in Yoruba.

And then that's when it hit me.

What's up, everybody?

It's Dayo Gold.

I'm in goods with some good people.

Gonna go ahead and hold it down.

Let's get into it.

♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Check it, check it out ♪ ♪ It's Dayo ♪ ♪ Listen ♪ ♪ From the Beantown to Cincy ♪ ♪ I know that they've been with me ♪ ♪ Pulling up in the bucket ♪ ♪ In my dream it's a Bentley ♪ ♪ Guaranteed to lose a bet ♪ ♪ If you bet against me ♪ ♪ But I remember days ♪ ♪ That they wouldn't even mention me ♪ ♪ Now the mini-mes like a centipede ♪ - It was two people around me, and I saw Dayo and I was like, "Dayo Gold."

And they just both looked up, they was like, "Yeah, that's it."

I like how people put together what they're saying the most over the top of the beat.

'Cause it's like the beat has its rhythm, but then the rapper has his own rhythm as well.

But the thing is, he has to coexist that within that rhythm that's already laid down.

So that's what I like about music.

It's like a whole story.

♪ I say I been great ♪ ♪ They say oh yeah ♪ ♪ Well let me demonstrate ♪ - When it comes to writing to a song, I think it all depends.

Sometimes it'll be a day where I have to pause the beat.

I know where the beat is going, I'm familiar with it, and I have to just pause it and write.

But then it's sometimes I have to keep the beat going, and it's just on repeat.

And I'm just like, I gotta find what I really wanna say, and then it'll just be a wave that just comes over me, and I just, I can't stop writing.

When I piece together the music and the beat, and it's all coming together as a final project, you feel complete.

You feel like, I feel like I'm doing my purpose.

You gotta strive to be the best, and that's what I do.

I got this self-confidence in me that, as soon as I get on here, I'm gonna change everything.

Nobody did it the way I did it.

So when I say Dayo, y'all say Gold.

(audience cheers) Dayo!

- [Audience] Gold!

- [Dayo] Dayo!

- [Audience] Gold!

- [Dayo] Dayo!

- [Audience] Gold!

- [Dayo] Dayo!

- [Audience] Gold!

- [Dayo] Let's go!

I wanna be the person that no matter what, he was never thinking for himself.

He was always in that head space where whatever he did, it was for the next person.

It was for the next generation.

And I think when people think on that caliber, that's when they push the culture forward.

This is what I came here to do, this is what I was born to do, so this is what I'm going to do.

Once I just kept repeating that every single day I approached the mic, it was more of just like everybody in the room with me.

I'm not in the room with everybody else.

Someone once asked me if my life was a book, what would I title it?

So I didn't quite have an answer then.

But with me going through life, I had to restart all the way over.

I came from a place of nothingness.

It was a low time for me.

But it took me finding myself, it took me taking it day by day, step by step, that it led to my true being.

So after some thought, I figured I'd title it "From Black to Gold."

♪ Uh, nobody but me ♪ - For more about the artist, go to facebook.com/itsdayogold and instagram.com/itsdayogold.

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

If you want to watch new "Arteffects" segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel.

And don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of "Arteffects."

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat jazz music)