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Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up, one man's quest for black excellence on stage in Cleveland.

One woman's passion for breaking, shaping and wearing glass in Columbus.

And a quartet of brothers takes a musical ride on the rooftops of Fremont.

Hi, I'm Ideastream Public Medias Kabir Bhatia.

Welcome to another edition of applause.

Now check this out right here.

This is Chris Webb performing at the Idea Center years ago when he was a teenager.

Today, he's a celebrated poet with a new one man show at Cleveland Public Theater, exploring what it means to be black and excellent.

Poetry is the way I express.

It's the way I talk.

It's the way I carry on.

It's the way that I live.

I don't know who I'll be without poetry.

I mean, I do a little act and everything.

But poetry is my thing.

Poetry is what I'm going to do until they let me down into the ground.

I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, from the Sinclair neighborhood.

Matter of fact, my mom still lives in the house that I grew up in.

And I'd say that I am a sponge of all things Cleveland.

I grew up in so many different, like, arts functions and like community programs that Cleveland offered.

Whenever there was something that said arts camp, theater camp, poetry camp, anything like that.

I made my way down there because I just loved the form of expression that I would get in on the stage or, you know, writing something that speaks about your community and you know, the things that you're going through.

I loved what that provided for myself, and I loved the effect that it had on others.

There's been beauty in just kind of like following the passion, following the drive in the fire and, you know, just kind of like forging through whether it gets like the biggest response or whether it's like, that was weird.

But I see kind of where your mind's at.

And this play just kind of came out of the blue with everything that has, like, been backed up inside of me for like the past, like couple of years.

When it comes to the emotions that I feel, the things that I've seen around in the world, it feels almost as if that young Chris, who was writing poetry and doing plays, took a break, came back as a man, and now is like speaking again.

I've never felt this much like myself.

And it's beautiful.

It's daring.

You know, I used to write poems and be afraid to, like, say them because it reveals so much about me.

You know, I haven't had that feeling in a long time, but I have that feeling now.

I want to make the world pay attention one more time.

And regardless of the way that it might look, feel whoever's in office right now, I cannot pull myself to be the end of black excellence.

So my one person show is called The End of Black Excellence, and there was a thesis that I wanted to kind of investigate with that.

That thesis was this statement for a black man to be heard by America.

He has to put on a show, and that show could be an amazing display of intellect, artistic prowess, athleticism, all of these different things.

Or it could be the bad side, you know, it could be the in and out of courtrooms, wild stuff.

But either way, you know, to get America's attention, a show needs to be held.

So the piece itself is my quote unquote black show that I'm putting on for the audience.

But the problem is that my show keeps failing and messing up in all of these different ways.

And, if that show was not excellent, then I would never get America's attention.

That's the end of black excellence.

Chris was always, like, a very focused young man.

I just knew that he had talent, and I knew he had a passion for poetry.

And just watching him build the skill set to where, like it is now, today.

And there's things that he teaches me that I'm like, I'm inspired by as well.

And a lot of artists have this ability to, I'll give you to share their own story, but I feel like he has this ability to listen and appreciate.

And that's that's, I'm going to say rare among artists.

And I think when he performs, you can get a sense of that, that when he's performing, he's somehow sharing something that it's more than just himself.

It was the first moment where he felt like he saw a version of our country that had the potential to love him back.

The character that I inhabit wants nothing more than to get that American dream, get that kind of like success that he feels that he was promised if he works hard enough.

So I'm working hard in this play.

You'll see me scream, laugh, cry.

Go crazy.

Hi.

Yes, yes, yes.

Wait wait wait.

There's music, there's poetry.

There's, wild, wild storytelling.

There's video.

Like there's something for everybody.

And I think that the piece.

I think that it's resonant to whoever has felt the weight of pressure to excel, you know, and that so many of us.

And what I'm about to say next to me at the end of the day, where he got a whole bunch of screens, a bunch of cameras, there's still the art of storytelling.

And so and how do we infuse live performance with multimedia and make it clear for the audience to really be engaged, but also be left with, wow, I just never seen a show quite done like that where it infuses all those elements and that people can really get a message that Chris is trying to convey, but also leave it open ended to where you can you can make your own conclusions by at the beginning you think this is just going to be some super cool thing and it is super cool.

You know, there's a little preacher in it and you're just like, yeah, social justice.

And you're like all excited.

And then it slowly turned and become so deeply personal.

I failed at trying to be the person that America wants and that experience of great art.

When someone is so personal, it becomes universal because it suddenly becomes personal.

For me as an audience member, right?

It feels like he is sharing something that that I didn't know about myself or about the world.

I had no idea that all of this was inside, you know, that I was holding in carry and, like, you know, like, so much to the point where, like, you know, I was about to, like, just burst.

And the way that it came out, once I found out that there was, you know, just a freedom to speak like it, it helped me to rediscover a voice that I thought was gone.

You know, I fell for.

As producers, we have to be careful about, like you saying, you know, like best or or the greatest.

This is one of the best solo performance.

I am ever produced in my career, and it's a long career.

I just want to leave something real.

This is special.

Cleveland is lucky to have this performance here.

Getting back into the driver's seat in the biggest show of my life.

It's a scary thing, you know?

And I feel it.

I definitely feel it.

But I feel like, man, the iron is hot right now, so I'm trying to leave it all on the stage.

The end of black Excellence is on stage now through November 8th at Cleveland Public Theater and the Detroit Shorewood neighborhood.

Let's travel to southern Tuscarawas County.

Where in the Appalachian Hills, you can find the Radko Ranch School of Ceramics, named for award winning ceramicist Tom Radtke.

The school is located on a 19th century farm.

And here's a fun fact it was once owned by the family of baseball legend Cy Young.

I am going to make a plate, intentionally collapse it and throw it over this metal dish over here and they see the big rolling pin.

And then I'm going to alter the form with the rolling pin.

The more.

So that is now 25 pounds of clay.

This little tool is called the Strong Arm and helps save my wrist.

It even has a feature that will open this up for me.

I have to have plenty of water for this phase.

For.

If there is an air bowl, you could have it in its second firing.

And don't you know that's when it pops.

So as I flatten it down, I'm making sure that I don't go too far because then it collapses.

I want this to collapse.

When I want it to collapse.

And that allows me to do make the kind of plate that I want to make.

And then.

Collapse it.

And then throw it on.

And this was my way of altering to get more of a deal, to actually form than just a regular plate.

The Asian esthetic has meant a lot to me because I've had four exhibitions in Bangkok and one on the island of cricket.

That I used to go to the basement of the Cleveland Museum all the time, where they had the best Asian collection.

Just, the subtleness of it, you know, I guess that's what mainly attracted me.

And so when I got out of the military, went to Kansas State, did the functional parts, then to Columbus, started making the big pieces.

I said, I have to capture that Asian esthetic.

And it all started.

I mean, I don't really know exactly that day, but it's what I strive for.

So I'm doing an art festival at Boston Mill Ski Resort in Peninsula, Ohio.

My friend's name is Jack Beecham, and he sees that most people make a 25 inch diameter plate.

It's got some kind of a rise to it, but I'm wanting them to be as flat as possible.

So Jack says, well, if you like flat work, why don't you work with tiles?

About a year before Covid hit, my friend Bob Christy brought me over a bunch of blue liquor bottles.

He says, you want these?

I said, I don't know, put them over there.

Started breaking them, putting them on top of the tiles.

So it's tile, glaze, glass.

And the glaze is the fusion fuzing agent between the clay and the glass.

The glass part of my work kind of took over.

Well, when I look at it, it's the same kind of fascination I have for a blown glass piece.

Too darn bad.

I the tile click be translucent, and you can look through the tile through the glass and have that effect.

But it's it's close enough because with good lighting on it, people think it's glass.

They say, so this is glass.

I know it's clay with glass, fuzed to the surface.

Okay, so this is a good example of the Asian influence.

This is the unfinished circle.

And over there in Thailand, or maybe all of Asia, it means good luck.

But I wanted to do something a little different, not just to use a big brush to create these black marks, but I got little pieces of, blue bottles, and I put them in there because I also wanted to look.

I wanted it to look a little celestial.

And that's why this piece looks like the way it does.

Well, pretty good firing.

Oh, we got some copper reds today.

Well, every time we fire, we never know if we're going to get red, because green is easy.

Just keep the oxygen in the kiln.

But to get red, you need to pull the oxygen out.

So we stuffed the, the burner port with wood oak.

It burns hot, it burns long.

And that's how this one became a red plate.

What I liked about this one also is before I turned it upside down on that metal form, I did the swirl mark here, and, those are always intriguing to me.

So, you see, this is why I like to alter the plates.

I get these beautiful swirl marks, and then it fills in the, the middle aqua.

When people walk into the booth and what gives me a thrill?

They turn around and say, can we touch?

And I say, yeah.

And, they're looking at it for ten, 15 minutes.

And they turn to me and they say, you know, we're having a difficult time picking out our favorite tile here because they're all so different.

It's one cohesive piece as you step back ten foot, but as you come up on it, they really look like especially the glass pieces look like geodes.

Now for the signature.

Oh, hi.

Just taking a break from the show out here at Playhouse Square.

Or is it a painting?

It is a painting.

I'm checking out the PBS app that we've told you so much about, and I get to go through here.

Check out free episodes of applause, as well as our little cousin show.

Applause performances.

You can download the app, check them out yourself, and if you have any trouble, send us an email at Art's at Ideo stream.org.

For those of you who wear glasses or spectacles, as I like to call them, you get to wear glasses all the time.

Well, Columbus artist Alexandra Fresh wants glass to be a more accessible accessory for anyone's wardrobe, no matter how good their vision is.

A lot of times people think of glass art.

They think of either stained glass or they think of glass blowing like the molten lava.

What I always tell people is I'm a glass artist, but I think of each technique and glass as its own medium.

So I might just do glass, but I do fuzed glass and kiln work.

I do the pat of air in the mold making.

I do torch work, I do glassblowing.

All these processes are a different technique, even though they're still using the same medium of glass.

And what's wonderful is because glass is such a versatile medium.

Once you learn one technique, you can start combining it with the others to really make amazing and intricate pieces.

I was really lucky that in my high school we actually had glass classes.

So I'm from originally Norwalk, Ohio, and in 2006 I took a fiber in glass class and I fell in love with it.

So my work is influenced a lot by what would be thought of as a child, you know, the theater and costumes that you would see on stage that aren't part of our everyday life, especially the Victorian era of these like opulent accessories.

Really influenced my work.

And so I started adding those elements of highly decorated glass into my work, first mimicking lace and embroidery, and then now with all of these florals and pieces I've been making.

And then I found for the first time, a glass fashion show.

Laura Donna, her who's an amazing glass artist, organizes a glass fashion show every four years at our glass Art society conferences.

And I did the first one and I was hooked.

So now a lot of my glass focuses on being wearable, so it's sort of taking the art off the wall, off the pedestal, and being able to adorn it and wear it out in public.

When every piece was handmade, you know, everything had amazing detailing.

It had embroidery, it had lace, everything was handmade.

Now everything is such mass produced that we don't have these highly detailed ornamental objects unless you're wearing something that's haute couture.

And even though we love that, a lot of times it's not really accessible to everyone.

So what I like is bringing these, you know, highly decorated detail pieces into the everyday that hopefully anyone can interact with and whether they want to put it in their house or they want to wear it.

It's something that they can use to have something handmade and unique that they can enjoy.

When I'm doing my really lacy glass, like, you can see this fan back here, or you could see on some of the pieces that are behind me, like those big wings.

What I do is I actually, I say I draw with the glass, so I have my rods of glass, and I first cut them down to a little bit more manageable of a size right now, they're about four feet long, which is longer than I need.

So I just square it and I can snap them down or just do one of the seashell, but then eventually I'll build off of it and make a bunch.

First thing I'm going to do is get that connected.

And then what's really amazing is I actually use the frame to really, shape and melt the glass and I move.

And even though the rod might not be glowing bright yellow, it's hot enough that I can actually move it, turn it, and start manipulating it.

So you can see, as I'm heating, I'm just bending that rod.

And I need to make sure it's a really good connection.

So what I'm going to do is I go in here very close to it, and as I melt it, the glass sort of flows from one side into the other.

You can actually see it slowly sink down.

Really nice and tight.

And make sure the glass flows from one piece into the next.

My mother always said I needed to have more patience.

So I feel like every time I do this, I'm laughing because I hear her in the back of my head and I'm like, yep, I chose this.

So now I do tedious things where I have to have patience.

People are like, it's glass, it's fragile.

The one thing I tell people is glass is way more sturdy than you think.

I mean, most of us wear glasses to be able to see every day, right?

And I know I drop that.

I drop my phone all the time and it's still intact.

We use glass so much in our daily lives, but when we think of art glass, we don't think of it in wearable pieces like my hat.

That's also why I started putting on the wearable work on to, a fabric hat.

Because sometimes people are afraid to wear a full glass hat, but wearing a piece like this kind of takes away that fear, and they just put it on like a headband fascinator like you normally would.

I hope that when people see my art that they they have sort of this like fascination of, like childlike excitement, you know, just like when you see those beautiful pieces on stage, the costume and it's sort of like takes your breath away because it's so intricate and detailed.

You know, we don't see that in our normal day of what I wear here when I'm working, which is jeans and a t shirt.

Right.

And I hope people get excited when they see it.

And maybe it sparks a little bit of creativity in them to express themselves more.

And maybe they want to wear a piece like this and dress up their, their own, their own look.

Because I feel like when you wear something really fun that you like, or maybe something exciting that not everyone sees, yes, you might stand out in the crowd, but you're standing out in a fun way that then people, you excite other people and it starts a conversation.

All those amazing pieces used to just be for royalty, just be for the aristocrats.

Now, hopefully it's for everyone.

On the next applause, visit a Gothic castle that once was a prison.

If you dare go inside the Ohio State Reformatory near Mansfield.

It's one of the spookiest sites in the state Hey, guys.

Hope you're doing good today.

Come in for a little visit.

We are in the West attic.

One of the most haunted spots in the prison.

And we unlock a haunting aria from Apollo's Fire.

All that and more on the next round of applause If you want some peace, maybe we should call the bomb It's been real, gang.

Thanks for watching this round of applause.

Im Ideastream Public Medias Kabir Bhatia.

We're taking brotherly love to the next level as we say goodbye.

The Libra brothers took to the rooftops of Tremont and the historic Fairmount Creamery for a recent concert presented by our friends at Great Culture.

Here are the four groovy siblings with their tune For real.

I. Let's do this.

I. Keep.

How do you want?

I feel if you didn't enough to.

Would you still waste another year before you set your life on fire?

Get up.

Let me know.

Go for me.

How do you want to be if you didn't have to wait, you still waste another year before you set your love for fire.

Get up and let me know you're going to come out.

Leave it.

Better.

Be.

For.

Something.

I'm.

I'm.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.