(electronic music) This week on State of the Arts: ballet for everyone, the world from the vantage point of rocks and contemporary portraits.

Stay tuned for these stories and more on State of the Arts.

Hello and thank you for tuning in.

I'm Mary Paul.

When North Pointe Ballet was founded a decade ago, its mission was clear, to make ballet accessible for everyone.

Moved by her son's diagnosis with autism, this Ohio mom and dancer was inspired to offer sensory-friendly performances and a program for dancers of all abilities.

I was always a shy kid and I wasn't super coordinated as far as athletics and sports and that kind of thing.

But I loved that ballet, I didn't have to talk and sometimes I could be a different character and kind of come outside myself.

That's I think how it started, but then I found community with other people who were like me.

They were shy and kind of awkward maybe, but then in the studio, they shined and felt, seen and appreciated and loved and they could be themselves.

North Pointe Ballet is a professional ballet company.

We are also a nonprofit organization with the mission to make classical ballet accessible to our community.

Our Chance to Dance program is open to dancers of all abilities.

They perform at our sensory friendly performances and then they rehearse with the youth cast and then we integrate the company in closer to the performance.

So there's 10 performers of diverse abilities in our sensory-friendly shows.

She has grown tremendously in her confidence, in her ability to just get up on stage without being nervous, feeling so comfortable, being able to talk to a whole lot of people.

She gets to the theater and it's like she's home.

She just whips around and I don't have to worry about where she is except for like, is she gonna run into something?

(laughs) But I have seen her just grow physically with what she can do, just following directions, body awareness, just being able to be more independent up there on stage has been wonderful.

She'll turn on music, she'll be dancing in her room, so it's nice, for her mental health too, as a way to just calm down and have some time to herself.

Good for everybody.

It's good for everybody.

I can't say that I can put an age on it.

We just noticed that Lucas wasn't developing the same way that other kids were and that put a lot of stress on us and our marriage and our family.

So it was a rough couple of years.

Yeah.

And then we got the autism diagnosis when he was five and started kindergarten.

You know, as I was thinking about how to tell my story, it was like, well, I tell stories through dance, right?

Like that's what I do.

"Because of You," it was a way for me to show our community, not just my story, but hopefully everybody can kind of relate in some way.

And as this inspiration to share with our community why North Pointe Valley was founded.

And it is because of Lucas, but also because of my friends and because of what the people around me were able to provide for me in the moment when I needed it.

(gentle music) And it kind of goes through the various stages of, you know, that time of my life specifically when I met my husband and we got engaged and married and then started a family and all of the joyful emotions and the anticipation and looking forward to things.

(gentle music) My son and I had always connected and had wonderful experiences at home, but he was old enough we would start going to the mommy and me classes at the library.

And so that's kind of a reference to the mommy and me class at the library when all of the other little kids were sitting nicely and doing exactly as they were told.

And my son was being the disruptive one and I started to really feel that things were maybe more difficult in certain circumstances.

I challenged the dancers to think of moments in their own life when maybe they reacted in a way that they weren't proud of or judged someone or what do I personally think about a situation when a child is being disruptive?

So making it an individual experience.

So even though there's a lot of dancers dancing together at the same time, what are we all doing inside while we are navigating our life amongst each other on the outside?

(chattering) And then we finished with, okay, we've come to this resolution that it is, it's okay to be who we are and the ballet studio is where we can be ourselves and these people that are with us are different than us but also the same, so let's embrace that community and be ourselves and have fun.

(upbeat music) It's not about me anymore.

It's about this whole community of people who are amazing artists and are amazing humans and that love this mission and we can all put this thing together together.

And I can be a cheerleader on the sidelines for the people who are gonna take on this work and bring it to even more people than I could have reached on my own.

(cheering) For artist, Rani Olson, rocks are poems, memories, mirrors, they are very much alive and listening.

A process-oriented artist, Rani sees art as a sacred mechanism for alchemizing human experience, transforming the invisible into form, emotion into expression, memory into matter.

In her current body of work, she asks a profound question.

What does the world look like from the vantage point of rocks?

(soft music) (soft music) None of this would exist.

None of the plants, us, none of the organic material in life would happen without the existence of these rocks.

This is a rock planet and these are the stories of these rocks.

Maybe all of life is just about rocks wanting to have a different kind of experience.

And we are made up of these rocks and these chemicals and that process is inside of us, those memories are inside of us and then we go back into the earth.

I've been making art my whole life.

I attribute that to my mom.

Growing up, the things that I was most interested in was math and art.

I really loved making sense of structures.

I got into the process of understanding human connection with rocks.

From the vantage point of rocks, how does the world look?

I kept wanting to suspend rocks.

And I finally did it.

That was such a physically aggressive thing.

And so I left the rock part.

I brought harvested clay back in and started creating shapes that looked like rocks that were made from harvested clay.

Well, what if I just allowed the clay to just be clay?

Behind me is kind of where that ended up.

I've had the really fortunate experience of watching Rani put this together.

The lighting was a part of the art and creates not just a sense of mood, but actually changes the shapes of the items in the gallery.

It adds to what you're reading.

We both have a space here in subspace.

We're both practicing artists that share studio spaces in the basement of the Steinfeld Warehouse.

I wonder if it's in the last six months that stuff is so uneasy right now.

People have all different types of working hours, but Rani and I seem to be the ones that are always here in the morning.

So we spent a lot of time talking about art and the things that influence our art.

There was a big connection between process.

Rani is definitely a process- oriented artist who takes a lot of care.

I've been kind of blown away as she's talked about all of the different processes that she's used throughout her practice.

It's the process of me going down these rabbit holes and finding these little mirrors in them.

And I'm not intending to.

This story that I'm understanding about a particular material, I'm really relating to that in my own experience of the concept of permanence or the concept of change or the concept of coming back to oneself.

Art is a mechanism to alchemize human experiences.

The fall of my sophomore year of college, my sister died suddenly, and she was like my best friend and my family.

We had kind of been through everything together.

The grief was debilitating.

It's one thing to process it, and it's another thing to kind of move it into something else.

Art was really the saving grace for me.

It's just been this kind of like side thing that I've done to keep myself excited and interested and sane.

(gentle music) Rani has engaged with people who struggle with addiction.

A piece of that exhibit has to do with recovery.

Her exhibit really asks you, "what is being recovered?

Is it the inner child?

Is it relationships with ourselves or others?"

There are so many answers.

Plaster has this memory.

When it's introduced with water, it heats itself up and then it hardens.

It just immediately transforms back into what its previous self was chemically.

There's something about that that just feels so incredibly poetic to me.

There's some memory that we know.

It immediately goes back into our core.

Even if it's lost again, when we're reintroduced with that again, it is completely accepted.

The cycle just keeps repeating.

She's channeling something, whether it's subconscious or from the cosmic or whatever, that is really what her art is about and using the materials and the process that she goes through.

I'll see her doing something totally new or different, and it's something I've never seen before.

The sweeping video and projection as well as the broom started with my exploration into my ancestry and what is the story of grass.

The broom that's hanging is an Appalachian style broom that I made.

Grass grows up from soil and rocks and then we're flipping it upside down and we're using it to move rocks and move dust and move soil with you forward.

And that it's also like touching back on the earth, the irony of that, like, what are we moving forward?

What can we do as a people to start looking at the things that we're not really looking at?

A lot of the work that I engage in is, I think just being at peace with what is, like learning how to be with discomfort and grief and becoming new again, right?

Learning different ways of being in the world and it's an exploration.

And I think of it like rocks, you know, like they're constantly moving around and shape shifting and doing all of these things.

Like, isn't that true with everything always?

When you think of portraiture, you might imagine a formal setting or pose.

Artist Maya Pinz incorporates vibrant colors and contemporary elements such as digital illustration and printmaking.

In her portraits, she strives to make a personal connection and evoke deep conversation with her audience.

(gentle music) (gentle music) Botanical Bonds is an exhibition I've been working on for a couple years now that explores the intricate relationships between human beings and flora.

So plants, flowers, whatever it may be, and just sort of getting an individual's specific perspective on a plant of their choosing and why they picked it.

So some of them presented a memory, a loved one who passed.

I had one model specifically who was raised on a farm that was growing coffee.

So for him, that was a very special memory and he shared that with me.

So it was like a really rewarding experience to have people share personal memories and be able to interpret them in my own way.

Because one of my favorite things about painting is being able to share stories.

Right now, I'm kind of working on two main series.

The primary series I'm working on is about my family and my heritage, but I'm also playing with themes of just home and what home means to me and what home means to other people.

So they're kind of going hand in hand, but one is a little bit more about me and one has more leeway for other people to share their stories.

(gentle music) I've been doing a lot more research about my family and a lot of conversations with relatives and family members and my family's getting older.

I think as I've gotten older, I have a greater appreciation for family and my heritage and exploring that.

Creative people have been in my family for generations and a lot of them weren't able to necessarily pursue those creative dreams.

So I sometimes feel like a sense of pride or weight in pursuing these themes because I feel like I'm honoring them in a way.

So for this exhibition I'm currently working on, it's been a lot of finding photographs and then hearing stories about them and from there I will do sketches or further research on cultural symbolism and things of that nature.

My art is really a tool for me to understand myself better and work through things that I'm going through as a young woman.

So then I will collect photo references either from memories, family, or from people I know in real life and use them as a conduit to express what it is that I wanna say.

I prefer realism, that's like where I'm comfortable.

So I'll kind of just start with what photo do I want to include in this piece?

And then from there it's about selecting colors and abstracting different elements of the piece to further assert what it is that I'm trying to say, whether that is communicating a feeling or a narrative, a story.

And then sometimes I also have some certain symbols that I repeat in a lot of my work that have a core tie to who I am as a person.

So for me a lot of times that's kind of this like halo element because my first ever series of work I did was unpacking religious feelings I was dealing with as someone raised in the Roman Italian Catholic Church.

Or I do a lot of symbols of houses and birdhouses because that's something from my childhood.

Or I have this like key motif that I use a lot.

Those are just kind of, I pull those in a lot because they're special to me.

The two pieces here are both about ambiguous grief where it's not someone who's died but someone who is no longer in your life for various long list of reasons.

As you have to kind of grieve that person even though they're still here.

And in these pieces they're kind of exploring the way that feels and they're titled Visible Absence and Gone but Still Here.

And they're both about two people in my life who are very much alive but I don't have in my life.

Even though they were very important to my identity growing up they're not in my life for good reason.

If I just recreated this photo I'd be painting these people into the piece and I didn't want to do that.

I don't want to paint them.

And it was me trying to figure out how do I convey that there is a person here but I don't want to see their face.

Like the term ambiguous grief I wanted the people in the piece to be ambiguous.

And I think a lot of people can relate to the idea of there's someone in your life who you love and care about but you can't have them in your life for various reasons.

So I think although these paintings feature me I hope that someone can see it and think about maybe someone in their life that they feel the same way about.

One of the things that my process has evolved is I used to be really self-conscious about what I was making was not sellable.

That because what I was making was so tied to my identity and who I am as a person I wouldn't be able to make money.

But I'm really working on coming to terms with the fact that that's okay and not everything I'm making has to be sellable.

I had someone tell me once after I did an interview like two years ago and this person was like, "you sound like you don't know what you're talking about."

And you know what I've decided that's okay because I don't know what I'm talking about and half the time I don't know what I'm doing and that's like the whole point of why I'm making stuff because I don't know who I am and I don't know what I'm doing.

So I'm just like trying to embrace that and keep trying new things and figure out what I want to make and why I'm making it.

Since an early age Murray Henderson has been creative implementing a cross-discipline "exact abstract" style of painting.

His animated canvases include depictions of athletes, pop icons and wildlife.

The hardest part is I am never satisfied until the last splash that I can stand back and say okay that's it.

It's always in my head I know what I'm gonna do.

I kinda know what the finished product's gonna look like and I pick the colors because I kinda see it in what I think a client would see.

It's not gonna be a normal portrait.

I said it's this style or it's not gonna happen.

People come to me because it's totally different.

They've always been pretty good at getting likenesses.

One day by mistake actually I spilled paint and the paint splattered all over.

A friend of mine said, "Murray, now that's art.

I would buy that.

That gives it the action.

That gives it the emotion."

and I said, "you think?"

Michael actually played on that floor which is very exciting.

And then I added the "Murray Henderson exact-abstract" to it and that's how I came up with that splash.

My very first print that I did was in high school actually and it was of John Lennon.

And it was a realism painting.

So from there I started drawing more faces and more famous people in this exact abstract style.

That's what I think my paintings were always missing when I was doing photorealism is it didn't show the movement.

Splashes, it shows action.

It shows emotion, I believe.

Instead of having like a basketball shot, I wanna have the ball looking like it's exploding or moving.

It makes it more fun for me as well.

So I'm not as worried about getting a splash of paint on someone's face.

I think it actually adds to the painting.

I get it in my head and then I have to draw it.

I sketch it out, usually small just to see.

And then I know where the splashes are gonna go.

I can control where my splashes go now pretty good.

I have got to the point now that I actually can look at something and I know what color it needs.

And it's hard because I could splash for hours and hours and hours.

And sometimes I've overdone it and I've actually had to go back over the painting, which sometimes it works out even better to tell you the truth because it's got a lot of texture to it.

And I like other people's opinions and I'll splash it kind of listening to what other people say.

Some artists won't do that.

Like I like getting people's opinions.

So I've got eight to 10 going at one time, always.

So for the dream collection, I have like four going right now.

The dream collection idea is that we do collaborate with the athletes or celebrities.

And what we do is we actually ask them and collaborate with them far before the painting even starts.

It's we're asking them, what are your iconic moments?

What are your favorite moments?

It might be something that no one else is aware of.

And this makes it more personal for the athlete or for the celebrity.

And then what they do is they collaborate.

They use their football, the basketball, the hockey puck, the actual stick.

We dip it in the paint and I can kind of push them in a direction where I think they should throw the ball.

The splash is gonna hit.

And as soon as we actually unveil it, it's the painting of their dream, their favorite moment.

When you have a dream and you put yourself in the right circle with people to get you to accomplish that dream, it gives me the chills just talking about it.

This to me is a highlight moment in my life.

Shaquem and Shaquill Griffin, they're both high-fiving each other with gold paint on their hands because they said they're artists now.

So now they're NFL superstars and they're high-fiving each other saying, "We've accomplished it, we're artists."

That's a great feeling for me.

They love it.

They're a part of it.

They're not just sitting in a room signing a thousand autographs.

They're actually painting.

They're doing something I don't think has ever been done.

I mean, with another artist.

I do love putting emotion into anything I do.

I mean, I'm a people person.

So I've had people ask me, "Would you come and paint live at a wedding?"

I've painted Elvis Presley.

I've painted people's dogs.

I find the bigger pieces are a lot easier for me to get more detail, believe it or not.

I just worked at one at Fanatics Fest and I had a small face and it took me longer than the big face.

The bigger to me, I think the easier and more exciting.

Art is important.

I remember going to an art show as a child and being told, "You can't go near it."

"Get out of here."

They're getting mad at me as a kid.

I was just interested in seeing their techniques.

I wanted to see how they made things.

So I completely took away my barrier and said, "I want anyone to come up and help me."

And I've got pieces that kids came back numerous times and they'd want to keep helping.

And there was one kid in particular that came up and he said, "Can I draw something on the bottom?"

And I thought, you know, he was just gonna scribble.

He actually drew something that was pretty good.

And I said to his parents, I said, "You make sure that he follows through because he's got a gift."

That really meant something to me because I remember that.

Kids getting into it should be pushed this way, just like sports, just like lawyers, doctors.

If they're artistic and they want to try, let them go.

And it's not all about money.

It's about creating what you believe in, what you want to paint, what you want to do.

And at the same time my accident happened, my 15-year-old stepdaughter was diagnosed with cancer.

So we lost her a year later.

To go through that and an accident, not being able to turn my head and other stuff happening in the art world that was kind of nasty to me, I almost gave it up.

And it was my wife that said, "You get out there into the studio."

Because she could see me, it was something missing in me.

She'd say, "You get out there and you paint."

Courtney, she was kind of splashy.

And I always feel somehow her style comes out in it.

And my studio, it splatters on the ceiling, on the windows, on the door.

It's everywhere.

I went out and I've never looked back.

Thanks for watching this week's edition of State of the Arts.

I'm Mary Paul.

We'll see you next week with more artists' stories.

(upbeat music)