Production of applause and ideastream.

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

Coming up, capturing Cleveland's changing neighborhoods in photos.

We open the door to jazz history in Akron.

And a Hudson grad transforms an MTV classic.

Reaching out to Hi.

Welcome to applause.

ideastream public media's Kabir Bhatia How do you tell the story of a city?

One perspective comes from Cleveland property surveys, but six area artists are offering something completely different.

They exhibit improper frames.

Looks beyond structures to examine Cleveland's most important asset, its people.

We are at East 47th and Lexington Avenue in.

And this building originally was a commercial laundry called Ohio Mechanics Laundry, and is soon to be the new home.

I guess it already is of Cleveland Prep room.

Upstairs is where the dark room will be.

So now I'm going to go over and turn on the light.

Voila!

In the, property inventory, this piece of real estate got a day.

This is the property inventory.

We started in 2022 and completed in 2023.

Property inventories, though, aren't new.

They have been around for decades.

To get a better sense of the state of the built environment in a community.

So the property survey was undertaken to get a baseline of where we were in terms of the condition of properties in Cleveland.

And so we surveyed all 167,000 parcels on foot over a period of many months, asking over 50 questions per property ranking them with a letter grade of A through F, and then pictures were taken of the property from different viewpoints.

It's not only tracking sort of the condition of the homes, but it's how do we use this data to stabilize and revitalize the neighborhoods that we all live in and love?

When people look at a city, when people think about a city, they think about the lives lived in that there's a way when people begin to talk about in terms of development in the built environment, that some of that gets lost.

It isn't so much to take away from what is compelling about design and planning.

It is to say in some ways, in our designing and planning, what can be absent is the piece that speaks to how human beings exist in those designs and plans.

I just knew that artists would bring something else to the narrative, to that general narrative.

First and foremost, we are approaching this process as inhabitants of a city.

We all know that like a photograph in a classification of your property based on a grade does not account for the wealth of emotions and attachments that you might be having with a particular type of land, where the particular type of structure the city has been segregated.

How this is some this is imprinting on the lives of the inhabitants of the city.

How do you document about that?

So the exhibition is not called property inventory, but in proper frames.

And these six artists contend with inventory.

But we want to move beyond that.

We want to start thinking about the city together, as well as the the photographic medium and what photography can do to reveal aspects of the city that we live in.

I've been really fascinated by the destruction and degradation demolition of these homes that end up as just this vacant land that becomes a parcel just for.

This is the Wilkins School of Cosmetology, and this is a graduation photo of all the women that was in the school.

The house hosted all of the classes.

Women were able to, like, graduate from it and like, start their own businesses from there.

And open hair salons.

And I'm like, I just think that's really empowering.

Yeah, I just look at it.

I'm like, it's just open land now.

But it's nice to.

So remember, you know.

There's a lot of history in in all of the different neighborhoods.

I feel that you don't really get to experience it as much until you are really there.

Seeing how it's expressed through architecture, you know, the different businesses that are in the different areas.

I feel that you really feel a lot of the influence from, like, all of the different, immigrant communities that have, made Cleveland their home.

So there was this, introduced this idea of property inventory, and it was actually something we were already in the midst of because we had recently purchased this big old house, and we were in the process of literally inventorying the rooms and the structure and the property and the sight of that in order to take on this preservation project, which just it became a certain lens to look at that through and to sort of build a collection like a literal collection that represented this inventory of this structure, this, home, our family home.

With the varying examples that are in this show, kind of extends that notion to where it is like a persons agency come in to that process of like inventorying the place they live or how they value the place they live, or how they value the city they live in or the home they live in.

And it sort of offers various forms of data to sort of interpret that or to observe that through.

Because I think even just like the optics and the scale of how the artists have investigated these things can be a useful tool for how the city might train further surveyors to think about how that data can be collected at all scales and how, like more subjective realities and experiences can find equal footing with what you know, what is labeled as objective data.

I'm not sure what that will yield exactly, but I think the conversation being present is is a start.

I always think about the story behind the superficial view of the house.

This was a family.

This was someone's investment.

What happened in this house?

You know how many lives were impacted by this house?

It just seems so poignant to me to really explore that more deeply.

You know, neighborhoods and cities are always changing, always evolving, but they're created by everybody if they're going to be successful.

And so using this data not only to tell the story, but to help people, write the story that they want to see moving forward.

I think this is a really special opportunity to.

I think that what we're contributing to the conversation is not to put a period on it.

It's not even necessarily to completely just say, this is what you missed.

It's to say, this is other thing, to think about these other things to think about.

What I hope people walk away from it with is a sense that there is more to discuss in order to get where we'd like to go.

improper frames is on view in Hinge Town at the Cleveland Museum of Art's transformer station through May 10th.

now let's head to Akron and visit a hotel with a really swinging past.

It's actually a monument to the hotel, which hosted jazz legends whenever they played the Rubber City.

I paid a visit in this installment of what it was.

Now I'm in downtown Akron and this monument behind me.

What it was was the Matthews Hotel opened in 1925.

This was one of the only hotels in the city that catered to black travelers.

Situated right on Howard Street, it was in the heart of Akron's jazz district, around clubs like the Hi hat and the Green Turtle.

Legends like Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald stayed right here, and owner George Washington Matthews was one of the Rubber City's most successful and civic minded entrepreneurs.

He liked to call his hotel, quote, a business with a soul.

But by the late 70s, as the city fell on hard times, the hotel was closed and later demolished to make way for the inner belt.

And we all know how that turned out.

Years later, in 2011, Akron artist Miller Horns created this monument to the hotel.

Now Mr.

Matthews name had one T in it, but you may have noticed that the monument has two T's in it.

That's because the spelling varied over the years on their sign.

Let's just say that the extra T is for these tires.

What are what are these doing here?

If you've never seen an art exhibit in black light, you're about to.

Let's check out the Waterloo Arts District.

Literally glowing in the dark with fluorescent paints from Cleveland's own Dayglo Color Corporation.

Get psychedelic in this annual exhibit with a story from our archives.

No response.

Dig a little pinch.

Fun.

It's just so magical.

Black light is not something that you experience on a daily basis, and it really is just a little bit of magic.

And we could all use that joy in our life.

They glow.

It's everywhere.

If you.

If you look around.

Safety vest.

Tide.

Detergent.

Bottles.

Clothing.

Sneakers.

Traffic cones.

Hard hats.

All sorts of apparel.

Printed materials.

You don't realize it until you start looking around and see all these bright colors.

That stuff mostly Day-Glo.

I like that for the artists.

It gives them an opportunity to experiment and work with a paint that they might not be familiar with, a medium you know, that might be a little outside their comfort zone.

It's hard to use as an artist because you don't have whites, and so you really have to adjust.

And, you know, some artists, they sort of made a name for themselves with a particular kind of artwork and this show gives them a way to sort of step outside of that box and play around a little bit, which is nice.

We are actually a Cleveland based company that was started in Cleveland, Ohio, and we supply pigments and dyes for all manner of plastics, packaging, printing, cosmetics, of all sorts of industries.

Dayglo was really came to Cleveland as an art project.

The Switzer brothers who founded the company, they were experimenting around with fluorescent materials after they started doing magic shows.

And then eventually it turned into printing materials, doing posters advertising for Warner Brothers, which was the way that you advertise movies at the time.

They moved to Cleveland in the late 1930s to print movie posters for a company called Continental Lithograph.

So that's why they ended up in Cleveland, Ohio.

That eventually turned into the Switzer Brothers, which was the fluorescent company up until 1969, in which they rebranded it as they Gold Color Corporation.

I love that this art show speaks back to those roots of the, art that the company started with, and we've supported artists in the Cleveland community for many years.

It's a fun medium.

I think people can make creative things with it.

You can play around with, the color themselves, but they're also blacklight fluorescent.

So you can you can you can color on with UV light.

There's been art created with Day-Glo for, you know, since the company's probably been around since.

There's a lot of different styles of artwork in the show, and so I think it shows to the public how this can get used in a lot of different ways.

And then we also give people the opportunity to create themselves by painting on our community wall and try to be doing workshops.

I am originally from Erie, Pennsylvania, and that's currently where I live.

Being an eerie person.

Cleveland is a city that I was very excited about and so I recently had an exhibition here.

Now I'm here as the Artist in residence for the day glo, and it's been an interesting kind of point of history.

I'm still learning a lot about, the Day-Glo paint and, you know, experimenting with it.

But it's exciting.

This specific artist in residence, I'll be here on the weekends and inviting people to make with me, and I'm inviting them to make a bug.

Yeah, I think I'm thinking about my practice.

I ask people to reflect on a time that they felt squashed like a bug, and when was something that gave them wings to keep going.

And then they get to create.

And the tables in here will be set up as a maker space.

And we'll be getting to use the Day-Glo paints to paint, and they'll be able to decorate and design their own bug.

The bugs that are donated to me and the archive that I'm growing will be a part of a further exhibition, but they'll also be, quilted and finished here and then put up in the space.

The collection and archive that I have will become a swarm, or a mass that'll become this form of resilience.

Eric's work is very generous, and it is not only healing for himself, which sometimes you see in an artist's work, but also feels like it is extending that hand to other people and, asking them about their own need to reflect on their strengths and kind of what gets them through a difficult time.

For me, I appreciate this show because it has two parts.

It has the community arts aspect as well as the professional gallery.

So seeing a wide skill set can help educate more people on the material, which is why we're all here, which is nice.

I love to see the artwork.

It's very fun to get artwork coming into your gallery.

It's almost like Christmas morning, you know, getting to see what, people have made.

But then I just I love the community aspect of it.

I just love seeing, you know, little kids and just everybody in the space enjoying themselves.

The artists really love the day.

Glo is our company, you know, and feel very proud of that.

So you could, you know, use other fluorescent paint.

But the artist part of the reason they really want to be in the show is that day glo donates the paint to us.

They can use it even beyond what they've made for the show.

So it allows them to kind of experiment with other work.

But I think people really love that.

Day Glo was our Cleveland company.

Yeah.

We.

the 2026 Day-Glo exhibition psychedelic is on view at the Waterloo Arts Gallery March 6th through the 29th.

This next artist is what you might call ambidextrous.

That means they can use their right or left hands with equal skill like I am now.

This is a word I made up after seeing it in the dictionary.

So let's meet Maddie Cano, an ambidextrous artist from Columbus.

I'm Maddie Cano.

I'm a glass artist here in Columbus.

I am an independent artist now.

I just recently have been able to do all of this on my own and build my basement studio.

So I'm officially an independent artist.

I came down to OSU as a business major.

I knew that I wanted to do something art related to kind of on the side, just to keep my sanity a little bit.

So I ended up doing a business and art, both bachelor's degrees at the same time.

Here we are.

I guess now doing glass eight years later and using my business degree than actually to, you know, do my own business as my art.

So there are sometimes when I'm going through a glass door and I'm like, really?

Photo like color matching.

I'll only really like, look at one piece of it and go, okay, that's the one I want.

That's the piece of a peach that actually matches.

So that's what we're going to aim.

I feel like my ADHD, like really doing like was enhanced almost when I found glass because of how much multitasking you have to do.

Like, you really do have to think, like seven steps ahead.

You're like, is this color going to work with this color?

I think that's like the first thing in my life that, like, I've actually been able to like, I don't know, use my ADHD to an advantage.

You know, like, actually able to think multiple steps ahead with, you know, one piece thinking you know, how is this one heat right now going to affect, you know, when I shape it way later on is when I'm thinking about especially like my snake plants with the leaves themselves.

You know, how is, you know, heating the entire piece before I stretch it versus, you know, heating it a little bit and then stretching it a little bit and then heating it a little bit.

All the skills that I've learned in the hot shop are basically the same on the torch.

It's just using that same knowledge of the material, just on a smaller scale.

And hotter.

I think one of the skills that has helped me out the most that I've actually learned is a skill of mine is being more ambidextrous.

I can even put my makeup on with my left hand now, but it's really useful to be able to have, both hands knowing what's going on at the same time.

Any glass in general is going to be a trial and error.

It's any new material that I guess, any new color combinations that you're doing.

My process and my technique is a lot of like finding natural, like kind of plants and kind of just natural inspirations.

Especially lately, I've been gardening a lot and doing my house plants a lot.

It's something about like being able to make glass look real, like plants and being able to kind of study those and see the the color work and seeing like the color patterns and stuff like that.

Like most of the photos on my phone or closeups of plants now.

So yeah.

So there's something about like the being able to see real life in the glass kind of later on.

Yeah.

You're it's a weird blend of real life and glass sometimes.

There's a lot of stuff that it's like, which color looks best, which because I'll look at, like, plants and flowers and stuff and think, you know, okay, I see the color gold ruby here, I see fuchsia here, I see chartreuse around the edges.

But like, it's really until you get those colors together and like, as you're working with them, sometimes they just don't want to work together.

I just had my first, solo market the other day, and so I had my really, really big snake plant, piece there.

But it was so funny, the amount of people that would, like, kind of walk by and just think that I was just selling plants and then they would do this like double take and like step back and be like, wait, those are glass.

As an artist, you can you can't be afraid to make production work, to be able to make a living, whatever it is that sells and, you know, pays the bills, I guess is, you know, it doesn't kill me first.

I guess it's kind of a it's kind of the goal, right?

So as long as I'm not miserable doing it.

And so, I would rather be doing this than be sitting at a desk job.

I'm not going to lie, it would save my shoulder, but it wouldn't save my sanity.

I've been telling my dad that all the time is like I just couldn't sit in a cubicle all day.

That's just who I am.

pro mythology inspires music.

On the next applause as Lady Elise explores an ancient story about an age old dilemma, the loss of memory.

We think everybody wants to be cured.

But what if the person themselves has arrived at a peace?

Let us remember And we sing the praises of an artist whose palette is the stage.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

well, Im Ideastreams Kabir Bhatia saying goodbye with my performance of the Hudson High School alma mater.

What?

We don't have time again.

Every week we run out of time for me to sing.

Okay.

What about Olivia Van Goor?

She also went to Hudson.

Good.

All right, here's Olivia's take on something a little more pop from our friends at the Akron Recording Company.

Michael Jackson's classic Human Nature.

looking out across the night and the city.

Wings and sleep miss I hear voice shake the window.

Sweetie, do sing the signs.

Get me out into the night for walls on hold me tonight.

If this town is just a double.

Let me take a bite.

If they say why, why, darling, that it's you in Asia.

Why, why does you do me that way?

If they say why, why, darling?

That it's you miniature.

Why?

Why does he do me that way?

Reaching out to touch a stranger I lecture cause eyes every way I see that girl she knows I'm watching.

She likes the way I stare.

Looking out across the board.

The city's heart begins to be reaching out I touch her so I'm dreaming of the street.

They see why, my darling, that it's human nature.

Production of applause and ideastream.

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