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

(orchestral music) - [Kabir] Coming up, explore the life and art of Pablo Picasso at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Go behind the scenes of an exhibit in Columbus (orchestral music) and check out the Severance conducting debut of a soprano from Canada.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome one and all to another round of "Applause," an Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Step into the galleries at the Cleveland Museum of Art and discover the many ways Pablo Picasso created with paper.

From drawings and prints to collages and cutouts, the Spanish-born artist liked to innovate.

Learn something new about Picasso with a look inside the exhibit, "Picasso and Paper."

(upbeat music) - The exhibition, "Picasso and Paper" explores Picasso's lifelong fascination with paper as a material and the way that it was at the core of some of his boldest experimentation from his childhood through his last studio.

And so he used traditional techniques, things like printmaking and drawing, but then he also used paper for things like collages, sculptures, experimental photography.

And we can see really clear connections between these works using paper and some of his best known works, some of his most iconic paintings that really defined his career.

(upbeat music) Cleveland is well known to anyone who has any interest in Picasso for the Cleveland Museum of Arts painting "La Vie," which is considered the masterpiece of Picasso's Blue Period.

It's an intentionally sort of vague and mysterious composition.

Picasso deliberately left the subject up to the viewer's interpretation.

And what's really wonderful with this exhibition is that you can see how Picasso really wrestled with the composition.

He considered several different groupings of people, considered the subjects in different poses before he settled on the final composition.

Many of the transitions in Picasso's biography centered around the women in his life.

And so the Rose Period followed at a moment when he met Fernande Olivier.

The summer of 1906, Picasso and Olivier traveled to a village called Gosol.

They were both really deeply affected by the sort of ochre tonality there.

And Picasso began to incorporate that into his work.

Literally the coloration that he was seeing around him, but also, you know, the warmer tone that his life had taken on with a new love interest in it.

(string music) So within the history of modern art, Cubism is considered one of the most central movements.

It was really the one of the first movements to challenge the idea of straightforward representation and the idea of objective perception.

The idea that an artist's job was to represent something truthfully to the way it appeared in nature.

And so instead of doing that sort of straightforward representation, Picasso and another artist who he was working very closely with, Georges Braque, they worked very closely together to break down the subject matter that they were looking at into hinging geometric planes, to look at their subject matter from different angles within the same image.

And often to do that by dissolving the subject into geometric shapes like cubes.

(string music) The works in this gallery all relate to Picasso's painting, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which, you know, most artists, art historians today would consider one of, if not the most important painting created in the 20th century.

And it was a painting where Picasso really found himself as a Cubist and sort of started to work out these ideas that clearly had been, you know, circulating in his head and kind of percolating for over the course of a year or two.

He spent many years working on the painting and so its final version, it depicts five women.

Their bodies are fragmented into geometric shapes.

And this was inspired by Iberian and African sculpture that Picasso was viewing at the time and actually had started to collect himself.

One of the reasons that it's especially interesting and controversial that the women are addressing the viewer directly is that they were immediately recognizable at the time as prostitutes.

Picasso's original title for the painting was actually "The Philosophical Brothel" and he was encouraged to change it because the style of the painting was controversial enough.

He eventually settled on "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which referred to a red light district in the city of Barcelona.

(string music) Collage was really central to Picasso's development of Cubism and especially once Cubism for him entered its sort of second stage, which is called synthetic Cubism.

He starts to incorporate found materials into his work using these found materials in geometric shapes that overlapped and sort of hinged to each other to break down a recognizable subject and give the person looking at it these sort of minimal visual cues so that we can put together what the subject is without straightforwardly depicting it.

This gallery is devoted to Picasso's Neoclassical Period, and one of the things I like about it is I feel like it's really surprising and unexpected for Picasso, which shows a side of Picasso that people might not be aware of or have seen before.

Picasso started to create portraits of his friends, other artists, his social circle, and they have this amazing degree of precision to them, this incredibly confident line.

And he would actually begin by drawing in graphite, but then erase the graphite and enhance the faint sort of ghost of the line in charcoal.

And so they have this precision, but also this sort of boldness to them.

One of the great highlights of the exhibition is the collage that you see here Picasso's "Women at Their Toilette."

And he created it around 1937.

And it was actually originally intended to serve as a design for a tapestry that was not realized until many decades later because he kept the collage in his studio for many years.

What the collage depicts is, as usual, the women in his life.

We see his wife, Olga Khokhlova, who was actually one of only two women he married during his life, despite the many partners he had.

Marie Therese Walter, who was a much younger woman who he had met about a decade earlier and had a long-term relationship with.

And then Dora Maar, who was an incredibly accomplished surrealist photographer who was a great influence on his work.

We see them in a space that may be the artist's studio with what appears to be a portrait of the artist himself.

The later years are, I think, fascinating and surprising for how the sheer quantity of works that Picasso produced.

Incredibly prolific bodies of work, just hundreds and hundreds of prints just trying to to preserve his own legacy and think about his own place within art history and the art world.

(string music) - [Kabir] "Picasso and Paper" is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through March 23rd.

Let's make a move to Columbus to learn the ins and outs of putting an art exhibit on view.

Here we spotlight the two artists who curated a show at the Ohio State University's Urban Art Space.

This story is part of our special series, "Behind the Scenes, Art Across Ohio."

- All exhibitions are a process.

They're a different process for each one, but there definitely is a lot of work.

So every show I've worked on, there has at least been work at least nine months in advance to get it to where it's at.

When you're putting together big events, there's always gonna be a team.

And I think, just in general, we have to work collaboratively.

So even when you think about whatever happened before this exhibition, the artists, they work with different people to even get to the point that they are in the install team or even like installing the exhibition.

There are nights and you are, you might be here until two o'clock in the morning.

But it's all for the enjoyment of the audience.

(upbeat music) - I am traditionally a poet and so a lot of me transitioning into this curatorial and exhibition work has been about trying to figure out how I will engage people through physical installations of my work.

And I actually really struggle trying to think visually first.

So when I was prepping for the exhibition I have coming up, "No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters," I wrote into it.

So I wrote all of the different pieces, I wrote them as poems and I was like, okay, how does this show up physically?

And some of them show up physically without any language, but how does this show up physically in a space?

How would somebody engage with this?

How does this make somebody reflect, pause, insert themselves into a story?

How does this make them concerned with the stories of their own family or their own ideas of inheritance?

- When approaching an exhibition and curating, I like to really think about how we can make the exhibition as immersive as possible to really articulate what the topic is.

Especially in my case, a lot of the things I dealt with is Blackness and Blackness is such a complex topic.

And unless you're a part of that community, in particular, you might not understand.

I think oftentimes when it comes to exhibitions, we just think about sight and hearing.

But what happens when we bring together all the five senses and really make you feel like you're a part of the exhibition to help increase understanding.

- "No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters" starts with a story of a family member of mine who had gone missing.

And then I was really stuck on this idea of what it means to be missing and what that means as a Black person, what that means as a Black woman.

What are all of the different ways that we go missing within ourselves?

So again, just this idea, one single idea that is like freaking itself into a million different ways.

And then it hits the visual piece after I've written into it.

- "Tapestry: Narrating a New Thread" was the first exhibition we had at Urban Art Space that we were able to like have a hand in.

And I was able to place where everybody went really considering flow, regardless of all the pieces are in the same space, it's not gonna make sense, there should be a story, it can be a story.

So how do we think of curation as storytelling?

And then going into "Air, Principle, Soul," which was a very ambitious project, 27 artists, it was like, I have to tell this story and I have to immerse everybody in the story.

And from there it's just navigating, working with different artists, working with different organizations, having a vision, and then this past year working with other people to help their vision show.

(upbeat music) - I think so much about the folks who came before me.

For me, that's mostly specifically the women, but I think so much about lineage and the value of the stories of people who have come before me.

And so one of the things that I hope for is that people might have a process of reflecting on their own and maybe having their own kind of investment and the preservation of stories of people they might still have access to and of those embodied archives.

Especially because I think history and retelling is so fickle.

And so there are some things that like are only accessible for you and if they are not archived and they're not preserved, they will be lost.

Some things are preserved through oral storytelling, but that feels especially important to me as a Black person, is to be in charge of like actual documenting and archival of my matrilineage.

So I hope that regardless of how folks identify, that they might have a more vested interest in preserving stories of folks around them.

(ethereal music) - You can't approach each show the same.

Every show is different, every vision is different, every, there's a different story in each show.

So really sitting back and understanding what that exhibition statement is, what the purpose is, the vision, and then going from there.

I think that has been the biggest lesson.

The most rewarding thing about doing this work is to really see the impact it can have on the artists in the show, on the community that's viewing the show or, in some cases, like with like Ajanae or Aris, helping their vision come to light, I really enjoy helping.

I enjoy putting together shows, which, for me, are reflective of a certain experience in the culture.

I think the reactions I enjoy the most are children's because I remember being a kid and going to art shows, I'm like, "Wow."

But like I can't only imagine coming into an immersive space when I was a child.

So seeing the children's reactions are, that's my favorite part about it.

- [Kabir] Here in northeast Ohio, there's a cornucopia of arts and culture to take in.

And each week we serve a full platter of events, stories, and profiles in our free newsletter.

It's called "The To-Do List" and you can sign up online.

Just visit us at arts.ideastream.org.

In the basement studio of her Bristolville home in Trumbull County, Lynne Provance preps pieces of stained glass.

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

(calming 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 a 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.

Goes here.

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 in 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 I 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 and I get that little like a ripping sound.

And then I use my, let's see my running pliers 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.

(sander grinding) 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.

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 the 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 round edge and the 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 can't, 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 every, 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 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 stained glass.

"Now we know why it's so expensive."

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 kind of like a sponge.

Just really fun.

It's fascinating to me.

- [Kabir] Lynne Provance's next stained glass workshop takes place January 16th.

(upbeat music) Be sure to join us for the next round of "Applause" as we head inside the Lakewood workshop of a carpenter pivoting from homemade furniture to handmade guitars.

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

- [Kabir] Plus a rapper from Columbus shares a love song with a funky groove.

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

♪ I see the sunrise looking in your almond-shaped eyes ♪ ♪ Milkshakes with the fries brings them onto the yard ♪ ♪ But angel is 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 ♪ (orchestral music) - [Kabir] It's almost time to turn out the lights on this edition of "Applause," my friends.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

But before we do, let's share the Severance conducting debut of a woman known for her exquisite voice.

Canadian soprano, Barbara Hannigan, is also an internationally renowned conductor.

Here she is leading the Cleveland Orchestra in the first movement of Haydn's Symphony No.

44 in E minor, which can be viewed in full on the orchestra's Adela app.

Enjoy.

(Haydn's Symphony No.

44 in E Minor by Franz Joseph Haydn) (ethereal music) - [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.