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

(cheerful music) - [Kabir] Coming up stained glass is her passion, now she's teaching it to others.

Plus, the colorful ideas of a collage artist are on display in Dayton.

And an internationally renowned cellist returns to the stage where she started her career at the age of 13.

Greetings to you, my faithful friends.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

And as you can tell by our logo here, this is "Applause."

In the basement studio of her Bristolville Home in Trumbull County, Lynne Provance preps, pieces of stained glass for an upcoming workshop.

After many years perfecting her craft, she's found joy teaching others the intricacies of what some may think is a lost art.

(calm music) - I was in elementary school and we would go to church in the morning.

And I was just completely enamored with the light that came through the stained glass windows.

And I would just stare at them for the longest time, just watching the light go, okay, and there's a shadow here, and there's a light here, and there's a ray coming through here.

But I never thought at that time that I would do anything with stained glass.

I have been involved with arts and performing and visual arts for almost all of my life.

And I got involved with stained glass about 20 years ago.

And absolutely fell love with doing this particular art.

You know, it's just a different medium.

It's same thinking, but different medium.

And all the mediums are unique and different, and have their own different characteristics.

So one is not really better than the other as far as I'm concerned, but I'm sold on stained glass.

There's just something that's there when I was cutting my first pieces of glass and said, "Oh, this is so cool, you can do this and you're not gonna cut yourself."

It's my art form.

It's my visual art form.

And that's what led me into this.

So each and every piece of glass art is very unique because the bubbles will be different.

The lines might be a little bit different, the texture might be a little bit different.

The lines on here, which is called wispy, I like to use these lines to paint with.

So it depends upon which way I put them and how I use them.

There have been people in the Youngstown Warren area who are very familiar with art and art galleries who have come up to me and said, "You really paint with your art."

And I said," I'd like people to think that."

As opposed to just sticking a color in with a design in geometric shape.

I wanna express myself with the textures and the colors through painting with it in my design.

So that makes me really aware in terms of how I'm designing my pieces out.

That's why there's so many different kinds of glass in my studio, because that's my paint palette.

I work with the Tiffany style, so I'm using foil.

And I work with my glass differently, where the sky is the limit.

I can cut and design and do tiny, tiny little pieces.

I'm gonna trace out my pieces.

So my cutter, I start at the end of the glass, and I press.

(glass crackles) And I get that little, like a ripping sound.

And then, I use my, let's see, my running players, and I line up my score line 'cause that's what this is called, onto my little black line here so that I can see it.

And I snap it.

Okay, this piece right here is supposed to have a straight edge, and it's not straight.

This up here is curved, so, I'm gonna straighten it out.

(button clicks) (machine whirs) Okay, so the edges on here now, you should see some sand on the edges.

Okay, that makes a piece a safe piece.

I love the creative aspect of it.

I love teaching it to watch how people work.

I like collaborations with people.

That to me, is interesting and fascinating because I find people interesting and fascinating.

(jaunty guitar music) So, I retired from teaching in 2015.

And I thought, "You know, just for the fun of it, just go out and check out the art galleries."

And when I came to Trumbull Arts Gallery, my heart fell in love with the place.

So, I signed up to volunteer there.

- Well, Lynne's a volunteer here.

That's how I first met her.

We try to offer classes so people can learn skills and techniques and different media, and she's always wanted to teach a class.

And it took us a while to figure out how the best to do it because of all the machines.

So we discovered this way where she makes the pieces at home and brings them in, and we put them together, and it just worked out really well.

- And she said, "This is the answer.

This is what we're looking for."

So, I am officially a stained glass instructor now out of Trumbull Arts Gallery.

On the ground edge and edges.

There have been people who have been wanting to work with stained glass in the past and never had an opportunity to.

And the workshops that I offer make it easy for them to use safe glass to pick out pieces of art that they think they would like to put into their homes.

And they're very pleased with their work.

And that's the whole point.

- The one I picked is a star, and it has a really pretty blue on the outside of it, and it has a like a white glass and iridescent glass in it.

I'm so excited.

I can't wait.

I have like the perfect place to put it, so I'm super excited to see it.

It's not as difficult as I thought, you know what I mean?

Like, some things you think like, "Oh, that's way too hard.

I wouldn't be able to do that."

And then doing some of the things you're like, "Okay.

I mean, it's really kind of the same thing as any other kind of craft."

Just learning how to do it instead of being so overwhelming.

- You get different designs to pick from.

So everybody gets to pick their own design and their own colors.

I've learned that it looks very detailed, but yet anybody can do it.

The way you wrap the copper, and the way you solder on, everybody uses their own style.

And there's no mistakes in art.

Everybody's piece is unique and creative, and that's that way with any art medium.

- I've enjoyed this so much.

I find it to be very therapeutic and meditative.

It's one of those times that you can just kind of turn your mind off and just kind of focus on what you're doing.

You know, you have to make certain that that copper tape is on correctly, that you're doing the soldering with the lead, that you're doing that just right to fill it in.

And so, I can turn off my mind and not think of, you know, stuff that I have going on in my life.

And I can just focus on me and what's going on right in front of me.

So, I really love that When I'm working with folks.

I like to keep it simple so that their initial encounter with stained glass is, "Wow, this is really cool.

This is a whole different way to think."

We didn't know there was this much work to stain glass.

Now, we know why it's so expensive.

(laughs) But just to watch the creativity of how people work, and what they do, and how they think.

And I just absorb that somehow.

It's kinda like a sponge, just really fun.

It's fascinating to me.

- [Kabir] If you know any artists here in Northeast Ohio, like Lynne Provance, who teach their craft to others, please send us an email about them or about any art story ideas for that matter.

Send to arts@ideastream.org.

And thanks.

Dayton artist Marsha Monroe Pippinger loves paper, whether it's cutting paper, gluing paper, or just mixing paper with more paper, she's all about it.

(joyful music) - When I teach about collage, I always talk about the fact that Picasso and Brock are credited with inventing collage in 1912.

And I beg to differ with that always because as far as I'm concerned, any kind of piece work throughout the centuries, taking all kinds of ephemera and discarded materials, and fabrics, and paper scraps, and creating things out of them.

For me, that's collage.

I'm Marsha Monroe Pippinger, and I'm an artist.

I'm a teacher and I'm a teaching artist.

I'm kind of the artist in residence here at the Requarth Company.

We have seven acres here at Requarth.

The building, of course is old.

It dates from the 1880s or 1890s.

The Requarth company moved down here in 1895.

There's a kitchen showroom here now.

We have six kitchen designers plus the lumber yard and the lumber staff.

And everyone who works here will bring clients up to meet me and see the studio, and they enjoy that.

I think customers enjoy that too.

I have lots of room, I have really good lighting.

It's all North life.

There's great storage.

It's just a really good space.

The building, the people, the surroundings are wonderful.

What's my favorite part of art making?

The first favorite part is the idea, which often comes from my reading, reading books, articles, or a phrase that I hear that will capture me.

And from there, it's gotta roll around in my head a little bit.

I'll make sketches and drawings.

And I put the drawing on canvas, sometimes it's just scale, sometimes not.

And then, the second favorite part is getting in there with the paper.

I start pulling the papers that I think will work and sort of creating a little pile.

And start moving things around.

I don't commit right away.

And I use thousands of glue sticks because the nice thing about a glue stick is I can put a dab of glue down.

I can put the paper down, I can remove it if I want to, if I change my mind or I wanna move it or whatever.

You can mix papers, you know, I layer them and mix them.

So it's a little bit like mixing paint.

I have a huge collection of paper, huge.

In the beginning I used tissue paper and cheap magazine papers.

And they fade.

They don't last.

So, I use mostly handmade papers today.

And I do use paper from magazines, but it's gotta be a high-quality magazine with high-quality inks.

And then, sometimes I incorporate other things, bits and pieces of rock or tile, or rust.

Yellow's my favorite color.

I'm pretty sure there's a touch of yellow in probably every single piece I've made.

I really like to work big, like 36 by 48.

That's three by four feet.

That's a nice size.

I like that size.

I've got these collage tapestries that I've been making, and they're bigger.

They're four by six, five by seven, five by eight.

But I have leftover collage pieces that have innate nice little compositions.

I've been making pendants from those.

So, they're about two by three inches, so two by three inches up.

You know, as big as I can manage.

The most challenging part about creating a collage might be knowing when it's finished.

I think it's really easy to overdo.

And there are times when I felt like I need somebody standing behind me to tell me when to stop.

You should leave a little mystery.

When you put in all the information, you end up boring people.

And you need to let the viewer do a little work.

And so I try to keep that in mind.

That's one of my mantras, so to speak, for art making, is to try and stop just a little bit short of finished.

And I think that works.

About five, six years ago, I was asked to design a prayer wall for my church, which is Westminster Presbyterian Church here in Dayton, downtown.

And I designed it to fit with the architecture of our sanctuary, and it's made out of wood.

And I designed it so it looked like it had grown kind of organically, so it had sort of a random pattern.

And so you could tuck your prayer into the cracks among the wooden bricks.

And the pastors remove all the prayers about once a month, I think.

And nobody reads them.

It's between you and whoever you believe in.

And they're burned.

Our senior pastor invited people to come up and put their first prayer in the prayer wall, which I did like everyone else.

And I turned around, and I looked down the center aisle of the church, and people were lined up all the way down the entire length of the sanctuary out into the narthex.

And I started to cry.

And as you can tell, it still affects me.

And I started thinking about walls, and how walls can be positive, they don't have to be negative in connotation, that walls can protect and surround.

And so, I started a series called Redefining Walls of collages that are abstractions of walls.

And I've been making them ever since.

I've made literally hundreds of collages relating to that idea of redefining walls.

And it was all because of this serendipity, this blessing that I had that I certainly didn't expect.

There's a quote that I really like: fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart come together.

And so, if you can incorporate those three into your work, I think you've done a good thing.

(joyful music) - [Kabir] The art of building pipe organs carries on in Orville, Ohio.

On the next "Applause," see how the instruments come together at the Schantz Organ Company celebrating 150 years in business.

- We're holding on to traditions of craft where people make things actively with their hands.

(joyful guitar music) - [Kabir] Plus, Cleveland blues man, Austin Walkin' Cane shares songs from his new album recorded in the American music mecca of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

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

♪ Live, and work, and die, yeah ♪ ♪ Don't come easy ♪ ♪ Live, and work, and die, yeah ♪ ♪ Don't come easy, yeah ♪ - [Kabir] The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus is dedicated to featuring artists who explore the issues of our time.

Let's head inside the Wex and meet resident artists, Sa'dia Rehman, who looks back on their family's history in Pakistan through their art.

(gentle music) - The title of the show is inspired by my sister's poem.

And you know, obviously, we are working with similar content.

And she often writes about, you know, our childhood in Queens.

But obviously, the family history of displacement was pretty significant in this story.

It was one of the first things that I was thinking about for this show, even before the work.

And then, obviously, as the work was being made by me, it suddenly occurred to me that I should just use this line from her poem.

It spoke to so much, it spoke to, you know, language, it spoke to poetry, it spoke to breath, it spoke to, you know, aesthetic and structure.

And of course, you know, imagery and material.

This is a very specific architectural space, and so it is a vessel-like space.

And so it kind of narrows as we walk towards the two-channel video.

And so, what I wanted to kind of think about, and I think I succeeded, is that I wanted to think about how the viewer kind of walked through the space.

You know, I felt like the objects hold a lot of meaning.

They were placed in areas that obstructed or guided the viewer.

The theme of the exhibition is the history of my own family's displacement from an area on the Indus River due to the building of a hydroelectric dam.

And that dam is still being maintained and continued to be, you know, expanded.

And this displacement kind of happened in the late '60s and early '70s.

And so, many of the family members that were displaced are still living.

And so, I got to go back to Pakistan.

This was not only my family, but also many, many other families that were in that area.

And you know, until this day, they haven't been compensated some of those families, so.

(calm ethereal music) I developed my wall drawing process right here in Columbus.

And I was thinking about while, you know, I was kind of making the wall drawings as an MFA student, I was thinking about erasure.

And so what art traditional materials can be erased?

That's many.

But I was focusing on charcoal, graphite, and ink.

And so, I was directly putting those onto the wall.

And then, you know, using my body and you know, obviously hands to erase those materials.

And so, for this work, I was also thinking about how the wall drawings will disappear after a show kind of is over.

Basically, you know, I would paint over it or you know, the prep team would paint over it.

And so, there would be layers and layers of paint over time on this wall drawing that once was.

And so, really it hasn't disappeared, just thinking about like the history of a wall or a space.

And so, another step further with the raft, which is the wall drawing in the Wexner Center for the Arts, I was also thinking about ways in which the wall drawing could evolve and change without me there.

And one of the things I was experimenting with in the studio is clay.

Because when I went on this journey on the Inus River back in March, 2022, I found that the bottom of this, you know, historical river is covered in silt and clay, it has completely changed the ecosystem of the Indus River.

And so, you know, took clay from Ohio and you know, drew with it directly on the wall.

And so you see the clay kind of drawing and falling apart.

And the drawing that I created on the wall is a mapping of sorts, the mapping of, you know, a village wall or even a mosque formation.

And so, all that has just been drawing and falling apart, falling onto the ground.

Other things that are on that wall drawing are charcoal, and ink, and graphite, and denim that's pressed into the wall that evokes the Indus River.

And then, there's also a structure that kind of holds a security camera that's in the space.

And that structure is a tent.

You can kind of see the tot ropes that extend out of that tent-like drawing.

And those tot ropes are held down by sandbags.

So, it creates a barrier.

The, you know, viewer can't walk up into the space, they can just watch it kind of falling apart.

And you know, the clay kind of falls directly on the floor, but also on the floor you'll see burnt branches.

And those branches are actually from a box elder tree that had fallen over, you know, a three-year period in my yard in Columbus.

And I just, you know, collected it over time and had bonfires with friends where we talked about grief and loss.

(gentle music) I think the reason I make work is I feel like that's the only way I can communicate.

And I am the most happiest when I am creating.

And I think that's a big part of why I create.

And you know, I grew up in a Pakistani-Muslim household.

And you know, the only significant other creative person that I saw was my older sister.

And then, you know, when I went out into the world, you know, the other... You know, New York City, and Jersey, and then, you know, Columbus, Ohio.

I was seeking community and I was seeking people that kind of looked like me.

And you know, were thinking of themes that I was working with.

And when I found those people and you know, those artists, mainly visual artists, it just really touched me.

And I find that my work does the same for a younger generation.

And that, you know, I'm also an educator at the Ohio State.

And so, that is, I think, very powerful and really feeds the work in many ways.

- [Kabir] We're closing up shop (jaunty orchestral music) on this edition of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

But we still have time to shine our spotlight on Cleveland Heights High School graduate and world renowned cellist, Alisa Weilerstein.

Recently, she returned to perform with the Cleveland Orchestra on the Severance stage where she began her career at 13.

Enjoy.

(calm orchestral music) ("Cello Concerto" by Samuel Barber) (joyful orchestral music) (joyful orchestral music) (joyful orchestral music) (logo trills) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.