- [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

- [Kabir] Coming up, a carpenter carves out a new career in Lakewood, making the switch from furniture to acoustic guitars.

A University Heights native discovers her calling in Judaic Art.

And a funky love song sets the groove, courtesy of a Columbus rapper.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome once again to "Applause," my friends.

Thank you for tuning in.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

We start at a studio in Lakewood Screw Factory, where a longtime furniture maker returns to an old passion, music.

However, Freddy Hill isn't just playing his guitars again, he's building them.

(gentle music) - There's an old adage that learning to build instruments is the skill of a thousand steps.

They're incredibly complicated machines.

Visually, they may not look like it, but the inside of a guitar is a very well engineered and complicated piece of machinery to build.

Now I'm staring down the barrel at 50, furniture has been great.

It's kept me afloat.

It's kept a roof over my head, but, you know, it's hard and it's a grind, and I was tired of chasing clients and trying to hunt down work.

And I thought, "If I don't do this now, I never will."

So I just kind of threw caution to the wind and started cutting up pieces of wood.

And I've been very lucky that the very first guitars that I built are guitars that I play.

(wood planer rasping) This is 90% of it.

This is where the art in shaping the sound of the guitar, the bulk of it lies.

You're looking for a level of stiffness that prevents the guitar from imploding on itself.

You've got 180 pounds of tension pulling this way, 160 pounds pulling this way, pushing down here, lifting up here, and the braces prevent this from just imploding.

The problem is the more braces you add, the more you impede the top from vibrating.

It's a physics game, essentially.

(wood thunking) And what I'm looking for here is a consistent tone, consistent pitch that rings evenly no matter where I hit the backside.

What I can do is I can thin that brace down.

Townsend Guitar Company is almost a year old.

We have three very unique products.

We have our own electric guitar design.

(bright guitar music) We have an electric bass design that are completely unique.

(mellow guitar music) And we are doing a very innovative manner of construction with our acoustic guitars.

(upbeat guitar music) I do feel like the 20 years that I spent as a furniture builder have absolutely prepared me to hit the ground with my feet running when it comes to, you know, the individual skills involved in building a guitar, the shaping, the breaking of corners, the meticulous detail, that kind of stuff.

I had started on the violin when I was four years old, started on the piano when I was seven, and I just thought rock and roll was the coolest thing in the world.

So I begged and begged for a guitar, and when I was 12, I got one.

I've never been somebody that just came easily.

It's taken a lot of practice to gain what modicum of competency that I have.

I had a pretty sound background in music, at least for a 12-year-old, but the mechanics of the guitar was completely foreign to me.

But it was something that I was just so enthusiastic about that it wasn't hard to find time to practice.

Just hours would disappear, and I'd be sitting on the edge of my bed playing guitar.

Before I knew it, it was time to go to bed.

I graduated from OU in 1998, and I started grad school at Kent State studying physiology.

And at the time this great little club opened up called Mugs and I was just tending bar.

And after my shift, I would go and sit at a table by myself at Mugs and watch these phenomenal guitar players just tear it up.

And that was a time of my life where I wasn't really sure which direction I wanted to go.

So I kind of threw caution to the wind and threw everything I had at studying the guitar, learning musical theory, learning as much as I possibly could.

I was in several successful bands, and I got to see a large part of the country and had some really great times.

I walked away from music when I turned 30.

I walked away from it completely.

I didn't practice at home, I was just kind of burnt out all the time on the road with the band.

And a friend of mine, a really accomplished furniture maker named Gabe Sutton, gave me a job, part-time job, just sweeping up the shop and running the planer, whatever little menial tasks that needed done.

And that's when I first conceptualized the idea of building a guitar.

I recognized pretty quickly that I didn't have the skillset to do it, and it was far more complicated than I had anticipated.

(gentle music) I was always that kid that would take things apart and figure out how they worked.

And when I discovered that putting two pieces of wood together is not as easy as using a hammer and nails, that it requires a lot of intricacy, a lot of detail, a lot of patience and practice.

I was really just fascinated by the whole mechanics of the whole thing.

And the more I learned, the more interesting I found it, the more challenged I was.

I would say that all the passion I had for music, I transferred completely to design into woodworking and subsisted on it for the next two decades.

And I found that if I applied the lessons that I'd learned early in my musical career about learning how to learn and applied that same concentration to woodworking, I was able to practice different joinery, practice different techniques, and improve my skillset just like if I were practicing guitar.

(mellow guitar music) I really wanna cater to the musicians that are local, the people that are out there playing nightly, people who are passionate about music, and keep it here, keep it in Cleveland.

So since I started my career as a woodworker two decades ago, it's very rare that I don't wake up excited to get to the shop.

For me, that reward is so much more important than anything else.

I can't buy that.

(gentle guitar music) - [Kabir] On Wednesdays, Freddy Hill and the band Clockwork host a weekly jam night at the Spotlight on Cleveland's near West Side.

(mellow music) Let's cross the Cuyahoga River to the east side of town, where Nancy Schwartz-Katz specializes in Judaic art.

In 2023, she received an Ohio Heritage Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.

(uplifting music) - I grew up in University Heights, Ohio, and I'm one of five girls.

And I think I always drew, I liked functional art.

And Jewish art, like what I do now, is a functional art.

And I wanted to really explore being able to draw.

So I transferred to Parsons, which had the best drawing program.

My dad convinced me to take a year out of New York, so I moved to Cleveland.

I received three phone calls in one week, three completely different people had phoned me who had seen my sisters, my cousins, and my girlfriend's ketubot, which are Jewish marriage contracts that I had created in my early twenties as gifts.

And I thought, "Three people, one week, who did not know each other, there's a job here."

So I got a $500 loan, which was a lot of money back then, paid for advertising, and I started my business creating Jewish art.

What I think draws my ketubot apart from other people's ketubahs is that I really work with the couple to create something that's uniquely all about them.

So I'm illustrating the story of their life.

It's that moment right now where they are when they're getting married.

When I meet with them, I take the information of what their interests are, what symbolism, do they want a paper cut?

Do they want a painting?

What shape?

What size?

Do they want a square?

Do they want a rectangle?

And then I stop them and I say, "Okay, so tell me what you'd wanna incorporate in your ketubah, so we have an idea of the design, so let's figure out what we're gonna tell in your story."

Paper cutting's very interesting.

It's like drawing.

Paper cutting has been going around for centuries, you know, invented by the Chinese.

And I have my papers made for me, so I'm able to cut on one side where it's a little smoother and the other side is more porous, so it has more texture to it.

I do a drawing, and then I interpret the drawing for paper cut.

So the lines are continuous and then thicker and thinner depending on how it's gonna be cut.

And I coordinate the imagery from one thing to the next, which is actually similar to my gouache.

Gouache is an interesting material to use.

It's a crossover between an acrylic and a watercolor, so you can get a little thicker and you can really kind of move the paint in a way you can't with watercolor, and you can layer it.

I love that layering effect.

Over the years, I've been creating a social commentaries.

And so every year I try and create something about what's going on in today's world.

(gentle music) Fairmount Temple had caught fire.

So Fairmount Temple knows who I am, and they asked me if I could brainstorm with them for something for their windows.

And I said, "Well, why don't we take this imagery?

I can make this painting, and we could put it on the windows."

And simultaneously, while that is being put up, I won this amazing award.

A day and a half after I received this amazing honor, the war in Israel breaks out.

The brutal murdering of people and the kidnapping of all the hostages.

And I felt such an obligation in my heart to do something to make a difference.

So my friend texted me saying, "Hey, the Jewish Federation wants me to work on this, but I told them I'd only wanna work on it with you because you're the idea girl."

I said, "Great."

So I thought of the ribbon would be an easy way to do this.

And on the ribbon should have all the faces of the hostages and so it needs to be a really big ribbon.

And then bring them home now, which is the statement that is being used over and over again because they need to be brought home.

I mean, they're being abused, it's just such a horrific thing going on that I needed to bring that awareness.

So I wanted the faces of the individuals to really be in a person's face.

I made the children's faces larger, and next to the children's, you'll see a lot of the elderly.

Because these people, these are like our family members.

Well, to start talking about the letter project, I have to talk about my mobile.

I was asked to be a mentor to the Jewish Arts and Cultural Lab.

So they were discussing creation and the meaning of the Hebrew alphabet, which is the Sefer Yetzirah, the pairing of the letters.

And so I envisioned this whole mobile of the letters coming off and being out of like glass, or plastic, or something, and having it then be on a mobile, and it turns.

(upbeat music) So a few years later, I'm sitting in my family room, where we have a ton of books, and I'm looking around, and I'm like, "Oh, what am I gonna do?"

So I'm like, "You know what?

I'm gonna illustrate Lawrence Kushner's 'Book of Letters.'"

So much comes from the Hebrew alphabet.

The Hebrew alphabet builds, the letters build on one another.

So each letter is about living life and about building your life, and what do you want in your life?

And it's okay to make mistakes and move back and try and fix it as anybody, so they're really for everybody.

You don't say anything when you say Alef, that's the first letter of the alphabet.

So I illustrated it as like messy around it with all the letters behind it, and then Alef stands out.

And Bet is beginning, that's the second letter, so you're beginning to go somewhere.

And then Gimel is going, it's like the waves, the water carrying you to Dalet, which is the next letter, which is the door, Dalet, door.

And you're peeking from which door in life do you wanna go through to make a difference?

And then Hay is the fifth letter.

And then what's interesting about Hay is that it starts, it talks about the different kinds of people in the world.

- Nancy's a born storyteller.

She loves going back into history and especially Jewish culture and especially writings from the Torah.

The letters have intrigued her always.

And when each of the letters tell a different story.

- [Nancy] I became fascinated and I fell down this rabbit hole.

I created the series more as like for the layman.

For everybody to understand.

And then, through teaching, I'm able to help people grow and learn.

I had such great mentors.

And so if I can inspire and help people grow and learn something new, then how great is that?

- So Nancy is really a born educator.

She connects with people on so many levels.

So she, in terms of her own paper cutting and her craft, she creates beautiful pieces that are made out of such intricate papers.

Many of them she selects from all over the world, and she likes to share that, the joy of paper cutting with the community.

This is a time where we really need to be speaking together and understanding each other's cultures, understanding each other's histories, and realizing that we need to talk and have a discussion.

And I think Nancy's pieces really beckon that.

- My work is so rewarding to me because I'm able to bring meaning and bring awareness to a larger audience.

It's so important on so many levels to bring awareness of different diverse groups and what they're all about.

You bring awareness, you're bringing respect, and acceptance is important when you have such a melting pot of people as we do in America.

And maybe we could all live together in peace and be supportive of one another and respectful of where we come from.

- [Kabir] If you'd like to connect more to Northeast Ohio's arts and culture community, here's an idea.

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter featuring art stories, cultural events, and artist profiles from the region.

It's called the To-Do List, and you can sign up online at our website, arts.ideastream.org.

This is a fascinating story from our friends at Milwaukee PBS.

Michael Meilahn is a renowned glass artist who comes from a family of Wisconsin farmers.

Both his family farm and his art studio center on the essential American crop, corn.

(gentle music) (gentle bright music) - I grew up on this farm.

My or my dad's uncle I believe had the farm at one time.

My dad grew up here, and we were milking cows.

I grew up on a dairy farm.

He delivered milk house to house within glass containers.

And that was part of my job as a little kid growing up is I'd run bottles to the house.

But Dad wanted me to go to college.

The only one that went to college and I happened upon the art studio.

Of course I took some art classes in high school, but as a fast track to a class through the art department.

And they were throwing pots, and I thought, "Well, I can do that.

I'm not afraid to get dirty," so, and that's how I ran into, they offered glass at that particular college in 1964.

When I left college, there were several opportunities out there where I could have done this or that, including teaching at the college level.

And I chose to, at that time, I chose to come back to the farm specifically because I wanted to raise my family on a farm where I had the freedom to roam, so to speak.

So I chose basically to come back to the farm and farm to make art.

(water dripping) It's what I finally really did when I focused specifically on making art from a motif that I understand or a symbol that I understand, which is the ear of corn.

You gotta get the top of the corn.

Okay.

(air whooshes) So the lay of the ladder work that I started, that I'm making now, I have a piece called Primordial Shift.

(upbeat music) - The exhibit behind me is called Primordial Shift.

It's an amazing blown glass installation that gives our guests a chance to delve into genetic engineering, especially around corn.

I mean, that was the original intent of the exhibit.

But it's been an amazing opportunity to talk about genetic engineering, not just of crops but of other organisms as well.

Humans have been modifying crops for thousands of years, but in the past couple of decades that's really sped up with the advent of some of the new technologies with genetic engineering.

And it's been an amazing opportunity to really look at what those technologies are and the type of questions that we need to be asking about both the pros and cons of technology.

- I planted my first genetically seed in 1995, and that's when I made the decision to make work strictly about agriculture and how it affects our world environment.

When I started working, it took me a while to get into making something that would represent that whole concept.

And so when I started making these very large pieces of corn, it's based on some of the, you make it larger for that shock reaction.

If you make it big, people can't ignore it.

So by doing so, I'm using that as a technique to make people think about what they're looking at.

And a lot of the work that I do have will have little, small objects that make you think, "Well, what is it?

Why is that there?"

And there's several things that come into play with that is that that's what art is supposed to do.

(upbeat music) This is part of a later piece called Corn Hanger series.

And the whole concept here is to take us back in time to an arrowhead as hunter representing hunter or gather as all of us are a part of that at one time.

We have that same DNA.

So this particular section is the kind of a mechanical part, this one and this one.

And that represents the Industrial Revolution, which was a big jump in history.

But the real big jump came in selective breeding is where they got really good at crossing one variety with another, all hung on a glass bar, which represents the fragility of our food systems.

If I'm a contemporary artist, I'm making work that's about our time.

And our time is really, my time, is really about how do I make enough food to produce and feed the world.

I'm a part of that.

And so that's always on my mind.

My grandfather had a 60-acre farm, and my dad had a 200-acre farm, and when I started farming and just recently retired, we were running 2000 acres, but 40 bushel is where it started.

And when I retired, we are getting upwards of 300 bushels to the acre.

(gentle music) ♪ Mmm ♪ - It is a very complicated situation to try to do both professions really well.

But the timeframe was right because farming is seasonal.

And so I had this opportunity in the winter with the slow months.

(water dripping) (steam hisses) Funny thing is, is that so often I couldn't wait to get back into the studio.

The downside to that is I had to drop what I was doing in the spring and by the time I got around to the next year, it was like, what was I doing then?

But the best thing about it is that I never tired of making art simply because I had a break from it.

I came back fresh and that's really how I got to the point where I am with my work.

(gentle music continues) (vocalist humming) Okay, turn it off.

(flame whooshes) (door squeaks) - [Worker] Yeah.

(upbeat music) - [Kabir] For 15 years, the Finding Voice Workshop has been a platform for poetry in an unexpected place.

On the next "Applause," residents from a men's shelter in Cleveland share how writing helps them make connections.

Plus a Columbus artist captures nature, water, and light in her award-winning work.

And listen for the amplified Americana of Angela Perley.

All that and more on the next round of "Applause."

♪ Dust off the old space heater ♪ ♪ I'm coming down ♪ ♪ I've got $37 to my name ♪ ♪ And I'm kicking this town ♪ - [Kabir] We're gonna groove on outta here, guys.

Thanks for taking part in this round of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia, turning the spotlight over to Columbus artist Ebri Yahloe.

This is "Almondz."

(light upbeat music) ♪ I see the sunrise looking in your almond-shaped eyes ♪ ♪ Milkshakes with the fries brings them all to the yard ♪ ♪ But I aint jealous at all ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm the one you call when you need some ♪ ♪ When you need some cut ♪ ♪ Like what it is though ♪ ♪ What's up ♪ ♪ What's up ♪ ♪ What it is though ♪ ♪ Oh, what's up ♪ ♪ What's up ♪ ♪ What it is though ♪ ♪ What's up ♪ ♪ What's up ♪ ♪ What it is though ♪ ♪ What's up ♪ ♪ And you know that you're special to me ♪ ♪ A blessing to me ♪ ♪ Confessing to me all that you need ♪ ♪ Things I provide with ease ♪ ♪ That's my steeze ♪ ♪ Dropping seeds as we climb our stocks to the top ♪ ♪ We build bonds ♪ ♪ Residual love is the outcome ♪ ♪ I found someone to make my night shine like day ♪ ♪ Swing my way ♪ ♪ Hang off of every word you say ♪ ♪ My creme brulee ♪ ♪ This sweet tooth is here to stay ♪ ♪ And oh my God ♪ ♪ I'm scrambling, rambling, gambling ♪ ♪ I took a chance with it, uh ♪ ♪ And would you look at that ♪ ♪ Mm, mm ♪ ♪ I finally won and I'm cool ♪ ♪ As long as you think I'm the one ♪ ♪ We'll be smooth ♪ ♪ As long as I know you the one ♪ ♪ I hear the angels sing ♪ ♪ That it's meant to be when we speak ♪ ♪ Me and you, white sand in the hammock on the beach ♪ ♪ K-I-S-S-I-N-G ♪ ♪ K-I-S-S-I-N-G ♪ ♪ And when you smile ♪ ♪ The heavens rain down with the sense of independence ♪ ♪ Like you are the only child ♪ ♪ Drives me wild ♪ ♪ I love your style ♪ ♪ I love everything about you ♪ ♪ Ooh, I'm so happy I found you ♪ ♪ Lips like honey got me buzzing ♪ ♪ Calling your mama, my mama ♪ ♪ Your cousins, my cousins ♪ ♪ And honestly ♪ ♪ I was supposed to end this rap a long time ago ♪ ♪ But when I think about you, like water, it kind of flows ♪ ♪ Wave pool ♪ ♪ And I ain't had butterflies since grade school ♪ ♪ You know what you do to me ♪ ♪ And when you look at me ♪ ♪ It's like you looking through to me ♪ ♪ I, I let you peep all my flaws ♪ ♪ And if I showed you my insecurities ♪ ♪ And all my deepest secrets ♪ ♪ Promise me you'll keep 'em all ♪ ♪ Show me what you holding ♪ ♪ I'll help you release it all ♪ ♪ Build up burdens and walls, I'll help them fall ♪ ♪ I see the sunrise looking in your almond-shaped eyes ♪ ♪ The sunrise looking in your almond shape ♪ ♪ I see the sunrise looking in your almond-shaped eyes ♪ ♪ The sunrise looking in your almond shape ♪ ♪ I see the almond shape ♪ ♪ Looking in your almond shape ♪ (light upbeat music) (bright music) - [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.