- In this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

A Reno Art Battle.

(soft music) - [Bernardo] I'm giving them for the first time something that they never saw it before with abstract art.

(soft music) - [Beth] An art class that heals.

- [Emily] Art is experiencing your talent and getting things out that are bothering you.

- [Beth] A lively art walk.

- We have rotating visiting artists from all over the Keys, south Florida and beyond.

We've got live music, food vendors, local craft beer, a couple of great wine and drink vendors as well.

- [Beth] And we see the creation of one iconic Reno sculpture.

- We're building it because we love to build big art.

We're building it for first the Burning Man community, and then the community of the world at large.

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

(soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by: Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidemarie Rochlin, 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."

At The Generator in Reno, artists battle it out to win over a crowd with their artwork.

It's a battle not only in creativity, but theatrics and fun.

The question is, can they do it in only 20 minutes?

- [Crowd] Four, three, two, one.

- Let's paint.

My name is Alysia Dynamik, and I'm the executive director at The Generator.

So Art Battle is a speed painting competition.

12 artists compete in three different rounds.

The Art Battle organization puts on regional competitions and so the people that win at these local competitions can be invited to go on to compete at a higher level.

I reached out to the Art Battle organization about becoming a host of the event and it just went from there.

- My name is Bernardo.

I focus on chromadepth 3D Art.

I'm an abstract artist.

- My name's Bridget Grace.

And I am a multifaceted artist, painting and drawing, but I'm also a florist and designer.

- [Bernardo] Art Battle is, like, it's a fun little show.

- Artists come together and compete for two rounds of 20 minutes, so the winner of the first round competes against the winner of the second round in a final round, and then they select a winner from that set of competitors.

- [Bernardo] You have 20 minutes not to do your best, but to do something that makes people entertained.

- My first battle was actually all the way back in 2015.

This was my third time in the competition and I won this last time.

So it's been a really wonderful opportunity.

- I did two runs last year.

I saw a couple of years ago some people doing this and it's like, huh, that's interesting.

And then since I'm a member of The Generator, they said, like, "Hey, we're doing this.

Would you like to do it?

Apply."

I was like, "Uh, okay, let's do it."

- [Alysia] I select 11 artists beforehand.

I try to do a good mix of folks that are part of our community.

We have a lot of repeat painters, which is certainly encouraged.

I try to also invite new people every time.

It's about participation and opportunity for people to get to do things in the art world.

To start, we have to have six easels in the space.

We usually kinda try to set the space up a little bit more of a party atmosphere, turn our lights off in the space.

We put up colored lights, things like that.

We get all the materials together.

We provide paint, we provide canvases.

Then our artists start to arrive and then we start.

- I had a little bit of a technique each time I came and I wanted to do something that was, like, interesting and different.

And for this last competition, I decided to do a life drawing.

It was an approach that I don't think a lot of other artists had taken 'cause I had decided to ask someone in the audience at random to be the model.

- Since I use chromadepth 3D glasses, I like the reaction of people when they see through the lenses.

The perception of reality in this short moment is changed.

I'm offering them or I'm giving them for the first time something that they never saw it before with abstract art.

So for me it's like, yes, I cannot even win, but I touch your heart or some way, you know, like, some art feeling inside of you.

- I'm gonna spend the first five minutes on the composition in the sketch and the second five to seven minutes on background layers and not worrying about the details.

And then the last few minutes really focused on details.

- In the first Art Battle that I did, I did, like, a couple of practice runs, but then I realized that when you're over there, there's other factors going on.

You feel the pressure, you know, like, you're seeing people and they say like, oh, this is cool, or this is not, there's the music.

So I don't believe that it's something to practice about.

It's just something like, dude, just go and do it.

Then when you blink your eyes, like, all right, I have 10 minutes, you blink again, like, all right, I have five.

So it's like you have to keep focus on the time itself.

- The last few moments of the Art Battle are really crucial because I think that's where you really have the opportunity to do something unexpected and wow the crowd with something.

It's really important to take a step back and look at the work from further away.

Oftentime, especially under a time crunch, you get very focused on, like, a small amount of the piece, and, you know, it's the pressure.

Like, your heart's racing.

You're like, is this good enough?

You're starting to look at the other folks' pieces, and kinda scale them up against each other.

And it's really just a moment of, like, vulnerability.

- With 20 minutes, you don't have time to think, so you can't be over there like, Steve, you know, you're not in the Olympics.

(chuckles) - Amazingly, they really tend to bust those things out in that 20 minutes.

It's a fast amount of time for these artists, but they really do a great job.

So at the end of the 20 minutes, the audience all votes.

The Art Battle organization has a text-based platform where they can both vote and bid because all of the paintings are for sale.

And then they give us the top two.

Then we do the second round, same thing.

And then in the final round we have the four artists paint, voting, bidding.

And then they tell us the winner.

Tonight's winner is Bridget Grace.

- Yay.

(crowd cheering and applauding) - [Alysia] Amazing job, Bridget.

- For me, I was able to meet people and find other people that were interested in the same things I was, and that was really inspiring to my creative journey.

- I don't think that it's something that you should have any rivalry, or it's like, I'm not gonna talk to you.

This is an art battle.

It's like, dude, we're doing art here, you know, like, the art world should be fun.

- I think it is really important for people to know that there are access to the arts in our town and community, and that it's okay to take a chance and get to know people.

And even if you're not competing in the Art Battle, going to the Artown events, going to The Generator, donating to people who are promoting these types of events, artwork in our youth and schools.

I hope that we can just continue to spread that artistic nature throughout Reno, and, you know, I'd love to see it grow and continue.

- To keep up with The Generator's Art Battle events visit their website at therenogenerator.com/events.

In Wooster, Ohio, people can come together and heal through art at MOCA House.

Made available through the National Alliance on Mental Illness, art classes become a means to which participants can find a road to recovery.

(soft music) - Art is a way of expressing ourselves.

Sometimes it comes out a little different in what we think, but then it's like we're looking at an abstract and we can see something in that.

That's what art is, experiencing your talent, and getting things out that are bothering you.

My husband's always very surprised when I come home with something.

Look what I made today, you know, look what we did.

And he knows that I'm happy here.

I'm very happy here.

You know, at one time before I came here, I would've been afraid for anybody to know I had a mental problem or bipolar, but today I think people are realizing there is hope and it's nothing to be ashamed of.

I didn't ask for it, but I'm dealing with it and I'm doing it through MOCA.

- MOCA House is the place where people who are working on their mental health recovery come to have social opportunities, activities, to work on life skills.

And so one of those life skills that we encourage is art.

In that art program, people can express the feelings of depression they may have, or the anxiety symptoms that they have, and they can get encouragement from each other through the art process.

- I came in one day when they were having art and at the time I can do art by myself, but I was having a problem in a group setting, but Jackie put me on a little table by myself and I eventually, now I'm sitting right with everybody else.

- When Emily first started, she came in and she was very tearful, very depressed, and she moved here from another state and she really didn't have anyone.

She didn't have any friends here.

- I mean, it was a big move, Maryland to here.

I'm a breast cancer survivor.

I was in a group with breast cancer people.

I didn't have that here at the time, and I just felt totally lost when I got here.

- [Connie] Sometimes, you know, we don't know what's going on in somebody's life before they come to art class.

- [Group] Right.

- Right?

What is watercolor?

It's paint and water and you've gotta get that paint to move to make it work.

Okay?

I really believe in art therapy even though I am not a trained art therapist, but I see when people are doing art, they lose themselves in it.

I like to say your soul.

And lots of times some of the trauma that's going on in your life gets swallowed up in your art.

So art here can be beautiful, but it can also show some other aspects of our lives that are going on.

We're just gonna close our eyes.

Put your feet flat on the floor.

Make sure your rear end is flat on the seat of the chair.

And then remember what we do.

We take some deep breaths and a way to remember the kind of breath we wanna do is we breathe in through our nose like we're smelling a rose, and then we breathe out.

- [Emily] If I have anxiety, I know to deep breathe.

I know to meditate.

They give us tools here.

It's like a toolbox we have and we just open this toolbox up and get it out.

And it helps us.

It reminds us we do have the tools, we just have to use them.

This place makes me feel happy and I'm not lost anymore.

- For more information, visit namiwaynehomes.org/moca-house.

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

In downtown Reno City Plaza lives the Space Whale, a community-built art piece originally constructed for Burning Man.

What year did the Space Whale appear in downtown Reno City Plaza?

Is the answer A: 2011, B: 2013, C: 2015, or D: 2017?

And the answer is D: 2017.

Every third Thursday of the month, the Morada Way Arts and Cultural District in Islamorada, Florida has their monthly art walk.

Featuring a wide array of artists, this landmark event brings the community together and showcases creativity in its many forms.

(cheerful music) - Welcome to Morada Way Arts and Cultural District.

We have our monthly art walk every third Thursday of the month from 6:00 to 9:00 PM.

We have a couple of resident galleries like Jessica Ann Art and Limelight Studio and Gallery as well as Morada Way Clay behind me.

And we have rotating visiting artists from all over the Keys, South Florida, and beyond.

We've got live music, food vendors, local craft beer, a couple of great wine and drink vendors as well, like Islamorada Wine Co. And it's a very fun, family friendly event.

Every month come rain or shine, no matter what.

We even had one right after Hurricane Irma that was more of a community potluck.

And from there we try to have events as they come up and create a space for artists to come and have affordable studio and gallery space.

So it's all about a home for artists and creation.

(cheerful music) - This is how I live and it's a lifestyle.

And, of course, we had to make a shirt.

(soft music) - I really like working with the theme of the sea, the fish, the turtles.

It's my first time presenting my art, and presenting it to the people here on the island in Islamorada and I like it a lot.

- I only use the ones that I rescued from the sea 'cause they can't stay in the sea 'cause they're polluters.

So I get them.

All my friends who fish find them for me.

Friends who live in a house by the sea.

Yeah, they come, they get washed up in storms and things.

And I'm Brazilian originally, so the cultural influence and inspiration that I use is colorful.

Colorful, colorful, colorful.

So that's what I use in my work.

(soft music) - My name is Randy.

I am a scuba instructor.

When I was scuba diving and catching lionfish, I was like, we need to do something more with the lionfish spines.

We need to do something more interesting.

So I was like, well, I'm gonna take this on and see if I can make something that appeals to more people.

That, you know, love of the ocean comes out in what we wear, and that's what the whole purpose is.

Make it so people wear it, talk about it, teach more people about it, get everybody underwater and teach them about lionfish.

(soft music) - I retired after 43 years of teaching and stuff.

I retired here in the Keys.

And I started picking up pallets and scrap woods and stuff.

And I made furniture and I still make furniture and stuff.

And I paint all the sea creatures, all the birds and everything here in the Keys.

The sailfish broke water and when he did, the sun hit him.

And you could see the silvers and you could see the golds and you could see all the blues and stuff.

So it was kind of like somebody showing you a snapshot.

All of a sudden you got that kind of, you know, in your mind, that was it.

(soft music) - My name is Keith Ousley, and I go by Keith Paints, but I try to focus on marine conservation artwork here in the Keys.

I learned to paint from painting graffiti when I was younger, and when I moved to the Keys, I had to change it to something more professional.

So I kinda transitioned into canvas work and it still has the inspiration with a little bit of street art behind it.

(soft music) - I love the daylight, but there's a magical undercurrent that happens at night here for sure.

High chroma is something that I've always really been interested in, kind of a trance.

Similar to looking at that kind of, like, that tarpon light at night growing up here.

The tropical nature, the plants, the flowers, the fish, you look at a fish on a reef and it has the most neon colors.

I don't think you really find colors like that anywhere else in the world other than kinda these tropical regions, you know.

So, yeah, here is the best.

(soft music) - For more information head to moradaway.org/art-walk-info.

An iconic symbol of downtown Reno, the Space Whale is a 40 foot sculpture created by Burning Man artists and community volunteers in 2016.

In this segment, we go back to The Generator to see the creation of this work of art.

- The Space Whale is a larger than life model of a humpback whale mother and calf.

It's 42' tall, so when it's set up in front of you, you'll actually feel like you're in front of a real humpback whale.

- It's Tiffany stained glass combined with about 34,000 pounds of steel.

It's designed to appear as if it's flying above you through the air.

The mother is actually diving down with the baby coming up to nuzzle the mother.

This behemoth sculpture is primarily built out of tessellated triangles of steel.

So big steel bars with balls at their interface.

And then there's stained glass panels that cover the entire piece.

There's about 200,000 pieces of stained glass.

Imagine the sun moving through this glowing, radiant light creature as it flies through the air casting over the surface, like this giant cathedral to nature.

- We're building it because we love to build big art.

We're building it for first the Burning Man community and then the community of the world at large.

We would like to travel with the Space Whale to several different countries installing it.

Sometimes for art festivals, sometimes more guerrilla installs where we think it's important to have an environmental message displayed.

We started with a plan on a computer and now you have to figure out how to take a CAD 3D image of a whale and build it in real life so that we could actually match coordinates and start welding out the internal structure for the whale.

- [Matthew] We went back and forth for quite some time in engineering to get this project to stand.

- [Kelsey] So each individual sphere that is built on a CNC, we place those in an X, Y, and Z grid, hold them in the air, measure everything out from that point, and then weld everything into place on the Space Whale.

And we slowly triangulate out these shapes that form the inside of the whale.

- [Matthew] We called on Andy Tibbets from Portland to help us figure out how to fabricate this whole thing.

We decided on our steel type and kind of a sphere rod method to build it.

Then we had to source a mill so we could make our own balls and we started designing it here.

- There's several types of spheres that you can buy, ball bearings are architectural features.

Ball bearings are an alloy we can't weld to build.

The weld will crack.

Architectural features aren't structurally strong enough for the loads that we're gonna be dealing with.

So we're manufacturing our own spheres right here on site.

(lathe whirring) And there's a finished sphere.

So all the spheres are made from bar stock and we got the same size diameter bar stock for the size sphere we're making.

This four-inch piece of bar stock came 20 feet long and weighed 900 pounds, and we sliced those up into four-inch sections that can be turned on the lathe.

Between the small inch and a half all the way up to the big four-inch it's gonna take 1,500 spheres to complete the whale.

- Right now in the warehouse, the Space Whale is positioned on its side so I can be working about 20, 25 feet in the air.

This project has some unique challenges versus anything else I've worked on because I've learned that metal is not forgiving.

Hitting a piece of metal is like nothing else.

It's gotten me a lot of bruises throughout the last couple months.

So anytime I'm climbing around in there, I'm earning not only some welding burns, but some really solid bruises.

We have never had a project quite like this where with the glasswork we can invite all these new people in to work with us and we can teach glass working, which is something that a lot of people apparently have interest in.

It's really fun to have people of all ages coming from in and out of town.

"I've heard of the Space Whale, and I've heard you're accepting help.

I wanna build just one panel."

And so there's gonna be a couple hundred sets of hands that have built these panels all over the Space Whale.

And that just makes it a really powerful piece for us.

- [Matthew] We have a huge number of volunteers, and the volunteers put in so much time and energy and effort and person hours.

You know, we have to raise $160,000 for this project.

Our volunteers come here every day and work 12, 14 hours to make this crazy dream happen.

- By having as big of a warehouse as we have here, we have the luxury of building the entire form out, making sure everything looks right and fits right.

We are test fitting all of the glass panels and then we'll remove them again for transpo so that they're safe, and then cutting it into pieces and planning for transpo afterwards.

I think it's important for Northern Nevada to know about the Space Whale and about The Generator, and about our art collective here because I think it's something to be proud of as a state.

I think that Burning Man started this transformation of Northern Nevada as an art community, but it's gone beyond that now.

We are an art hub to rival other big cities in the nation, and that's really important for people to start recognizing.

See the more diverse, more interesting side of Reno than just, you know, the casino community that brought tourists here 20 years ago.

We now have a thriving art community that we should be really proud of.

- Learn more at 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, Heidemarie Rochlin, 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.

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