(soft music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.

(upbeat rock music) - Cruising your way next, "Off 90."

We learn about the history of Red Wing pottery, we listen to the musical messages of a Rochester singer songwriter, and we visit with a multimedia artist in Winona.

It's all just ahead, "Off 90."

(upbeat bluesy music) Hi, I'm Barbara Keith.

Thanks for joining me on this trip "Off 90."

Red Wing, Minnesota, is known for two products, shoes and pottery.

When a man discovered clay on his property in the 1800s, pottery became a big deal in the city.

People used the pottery to store food in the days before refrigeration.

Let's dig deeper into the subject.

- Look at these shapes.

I mean, holy cow.

And the colors.

I mean, I would kill for that canister set over there.

It's gorgeous.

- We are in the Pottery Museum of Red Wing.

I'm Char Henn, and I am the museum director.

We go through 90 years of the history of pottery, stoneware, art ware, dinnerware, and we tell you why it was important and why it is loved.

- You know, I've seen and been to a lot of antique stores, and you just don't ever see all this.

This is just unbelievable.

- Just beautiful.

- Red Wing pottery is ubiquitous.

Everybody had Red Wing pottery once upon a time.

From 1877 to 1967, it was made commercially here in Red Wing.

It started here because a potter about eight miles south of town found clay on his property.

He started making clay objects for his neighbors, and it just grew from there.

Within a few years, the Red Wing Stoneware Company organized and we were often running with stoneware products.

Stoneware was necessary for life before refrigeration and glass and plastics came into being.

- I see lot of beauty in the pieces of Red Wing, but then I also have a very strong appreciation for how it was utilitarian.

- You had to preserve your food.

You had to keep it somewhere.

- This is some of the earliest stoneware made right here in Red Wing.

This is an example of a churn.

This would've been used to make butter.

This is a crock.

In the back, those larger salt glazed crocks were actually called meat jars in the catalog.

So those would've been used for storing meat.

- You put your fruits and vegetables in crocks to store them over the winter.

You put your meat in crocks to preserve it over the winter, and everybody had to do this.

So stoneware was the deal.

At one point, Red Wing stoneware was the largest producer of stoneware in the country.

With the clay being discovered about eight miles south of town, they had workers that would dig the clay and a village actually formed around that area.

Then the clay was brought in on its own rail line.

So you had rail workers.

It would come right through this building where this building now stands, and be taken to the stoneware factories themselves.

One of which is the building across the street which is the last remaining factory building, and that was Minnesota Stoneware.

Then you would have the people who would divide the clay first.

So it was then sized for use.

You'd have the people who would make the items, you would have the people who would glaze the items, you had the people who would set the kilns, who would load the carts for the kilns.

It employed hundreds of people at its peak.

They were very skilled jobs and they were very creative jobs.

These were master artisans at work.

- This way we have some jugs.

These would've been used for liquor or water.

- [Char] There are different kinds of stoneware, and ours started with salt glazed.

They get their distinctive look.

It's a shiny kind of orange peel look from the salt that was thrown into the kiln once the temperature in the kiln had reached 2,200 degrees.

There are people who collect just salt glaze because they are so beautiful.

- And then as we move this way we have a salt glazed bread bowl.

The inside is that brown Albany that Albany slip came from New York.

- So salt glazed had the Albany slip, that dark brown slip, which covered the inside of their pieces making it very dark.

But with the zinc glaze, if you look inside one of these ice waters or a churn, you can see that the inside looks exactly like the outside.

So they could tell when their cracks were clean and you could put also advertising on sync.

- These larger pieces with the decorations were made for advertising.

They might have been used in a window display like the FA Morley bar jug in the back.

- So after refrigeration and glass and plastic became more reliable, the stoneware company had to transition.

One of their earlier transitions was into brushed ware pieces, and they made indoor pieces as well as these outdoor pieces, sun dials, and bird baths, and large planters.

It's called brushed ware because they would have the glaze put on, and then they would brush off so you would see like in these acanthus leaves, you would see the veining of the leaf going through.

So by the middle of the 1920s, about half of the homes in the United States had electricity, and they wanted color in their homes.

So not only did we produce lamps, which you can see up at the top, but they just introduced these glorious variety of colors with the bright yellows, and the deep cobalts, and the burgundy, and it really brightened up the home after the more subtle beauty of the brushed ware.

This is Red Wing's first foray into dinnerware.

The gypsy trail line came out in the mid 1930s, and you'll notice how bright the colors are.

Many people think, why do you have some Fiestaware here?

But this is not Fiestaware, it's gypsy trail and it came out six months before Fiestaware.

But the demand for this bright dinnerware was so strong that it took both of the companies working together to supply the demand.

(soft gentle music) By 1947, Red Wing had stopped making stoneware altogether.

By then, it was all art ware and dinnerware.

Throughout its time from the mid 1930s until they closed in 1967, there were over a hundred dinnerware patterns that were made here in Red Wing.

The women would sit there in a line and they each had their brush strokes that they had to do.

Whether you painted green leaves and I painted yellow flowers, that was all we did.

And then we would move it down to the next person who would put in the blue until the plate or whatever had been painted.

- What I am most impressed with was how many patterns of Red Wing there are, because I've seen Red Wing but I only thought there were maybe, I don't know, five or six.

There are a lot, and the colors, oh they were gifted.

The colors and shapes of everything.

- Yeah, I'm thinking they didn't pay these artists enough.

Oh my God, it's just so beautiful.

All the painstaking artwork that has gone into these pieces I could go home with a big box.

- Oh, I know.

We can't.

Okay, now this would be lovely.

(upbeat bluesy music) - Emily Whitcomb writes songs with messages of healing and inspiration.

Her sometimes sad songs touch on many subjects we don't usually hear about in song.

By singing about the things that are important to her, she hopes to bring awareness.

Let's meet Emily.

(upbeat guitar music) ♪ You were 19 I was naive when you met me ♪ - Growing up, it was kind of a prerequisite to be a musician in my family.

There was always music in the house.

A lot of times it was my sister and I fighting for practice time.

I started with violin when I was four.

Music's always just been a big part of my life, and I've been really grateful to have a lot of opportunities to learn about it, to perform, and to teach others.

I'm Emily Whitcomb, and I'm a singer songwriter living in Rochester, Minnesota.

My music it's influenced a lot by lyric driven artists like Sarah Bareilles, Amy MacDonald, Vanessa Carlton.

I really value having a lot of storytelling components in my songs, and a lot of real life scenarios as well.

A lot of the songs I write are based on things I've gone through in my life, and that's really important to me.

It also helps me, you know, cope with all that life is throwing at me.

I try to keep it positive, but I definitely have a lot of sad songs, but hopefully they're at least catchy sad songs.

♪ We told secrets and regrets about a thing ♪ - She did a really eloquent job of sort of putting the humanity in the lyrics and connecting with people.

Emily has more ideas than my brain would know what to do with.

She's excellent at making the songs her own, and also reaching out to people through them.

- One of my focuses also is on shining lights on subjects that aren't sung about a lot.

So I have songs about PTSD, about breast cancer, about cystic fibrosis, about suicide, and I've been really honored to have been able to perform those songs in different capacities, at different events, and hopefully bring some people healing and hope that go through those things.

♪ Though it's over he's still fighting ♪ ♪ Hides his pain in camouflage ♪ I perform a lot of my music very simply, I think.

I mostly just accompany myself on guitar, sometimes I perform in a duo and there's some harmony with some other small percussion instruments.

- My name is Megan Kleven.

I'm a musician in Rochester, and I'm in a group with Emily called Going Up.

We describe ourselves as an acoustic pop duo.

So we try to play fun acoustic songs, we do a lot of covers, and then we play a lot of originals too.

So she's got a lot of songs that she's contributed, and I throw some in there too.

- Megan is great.

We've been able to collaborate a lot throughout the years.

She's really a fun person to collaborate with because we have such different musical tastes.

We always joke about how when we come to like a practice session, her group of songs that she knows and my group of songs that I know are totally separate.

Like, the Venn diagram does not cross ever.

She and I have had really great opportunities to perform, you know, at the state fair, at the Mall of America, and as well as places around town here.

♪ It was short and sweet when you swept me off my feet ♪ ♪ And I've been trying hard to let you go ♪ On stage in front of an audience is just it's always been something very calming for me.

When you get that chance to perform, to have an audience pay attention to you, it's so special.

I really want to with my music to give everyone an experience, a positive moment, a moment just to escape life a little bit, and whether that is just for one or two people or it is for hundreds of people, it's the same.

My intent is the same.

♪ Your heart's as cold as the place I met you ♪ ♪ I can't believe all the times I let you ♪ ♪ Lie to me, fool around ♪ ♪ Get my hopes up to knock them down ♪ - She writes a lot of her music based on her own personal experiences so there's a lot of honesty in her songs, which as a listener, you can really pick up on and it's really easy to follow the message and connect with her that way.

- I think of songwriting kind of like how sculptors look at a piece of, you know, wood, or clay, or marble or whatever that, you know, they're not creating a sculpture, they're uncovering it.

It's already in there, they're just taking away the unnecessary pieces.

I have this vocabulary, all these words available, they're all out there.

I just need to go into that vocabulary and pick out the song.

♪ We are done ♪ ♪ We are done ♪ ♪ Like the final chapter unhappily ever after, done ♪ ♪ We are done like our last round ♪ ♪ Shots fired, bullets out, done ♪ ♪ We are done like the final chapter ♪ ♪ Unhappily ever after ♪ ♪ Done ♪ ♪ We are done like our last round ♪ ♪ Shots fired, bullets out, done ♪ ♪ We are done ♪ (audience applauds) (upbeat bluesy music) - Anne George collects odds and ends that someday might be used in her art.

Lately, she's been working with paper.

Not by painting on paper, but by shaping the paper itself.

Her childhood in Southeast Minnesota and her later life in big cities influences her art.

We visited Anne in her studio in Winona.

- What I do here is I do this intentional crinkling, and unwind it.

I've been continuing to work with paper for quite a while.

Paper has the memory of how I'm handling it, and I like that quality about it.

What I like about working with this really thin tissue paper is that I wanted to hold onto the wrinkles I put into it.

It's kind of like a muscle memory idea.

My name is Anne George, and I'm an artist.

I'm a visual artist.

That piece is called "A Year Of Sundays," and it's a floor piece of large large-ish paper mache forms.

I had a year's worth of Sunday New York Times that had accumulated from like June 2020 to June 2021.

I wasn't really able to read them.

I was just finding it really hard to confront the news, you know, to read about it.

I was reading it online in bits and pieces, but the physicality of the paper was sort of like I was opening it up and being like, I can't read that.

Like, there's a lot of trauma here.

And when I decided I wanted to make some pieces for the show that were forms, I decided that those papers would make very good interiors, or that become the insides of these forms and it was sort of a way to sort of bury the difficulty contained within these papers.

Well, Houston is a rural community.

I grew up in the town, and I think a benefit of having grown up there was that we had a lot of freedom, and it's also indicative of the time period when children had a lot of freedom to play outside the home.

I went to school in Chicago, I lived in Philadelphia for a couple of years, and I was in Minneapolis for about 25 years before moving down here to Winona.

I like the complexity of large cities.

Coming to Winona two years ago, I'm back in this bluff area, the Driftless area, as it's called now.

I realize how it is sort of just a part of me, like the physicality of this landscape and the lushness in the summers, the textures that are here I think come into my work.

The hanging pieces are a group of drawings of these works on paper that I've been making, and they're hanging from different apparatus that I designed to go for the pieces.

It was a way to get these pieces off the wall.

The things I was doing on top of the paper were kind of grotesque in a way, but there was beauty with the luminosity of the paper.

(soft ethereal music) I've done this many times so I kind of know what I want, and it'll look a lot like these pieces over here.

This is sort of an experimental combination of them because right now they're just tacked up.

I can take them down and rearrange them, put new pieces with them and such, live with them for a while and then see how much I like them.

These are a bundle of things I got at a yard sale.

It's mostly me finding them out in the world, you know, sales, thrift stores on the curb, and they speak to me in some way.

There's something about that material that is already connected to what I'm thinking about, and that's why I'm noticing it.

I like just how these now function as almost like a gesture coming off the wall.

These two newer ones are a direction I've been trying to go lately.

Going from working two dimensionally on the walls to more three dimensional in sculptural ways.

I really find spatial interests are things I like working with.

By going from the wall literally onto the floor in one piece, kind of like sliding down the wall into the floor with new media.

So it's going from 2D to 3D.

Any artwork is not meant to be explicit, but it's really completed when based on what the viewer can bring to it.

I personally like work that is a little difficult, and so when I'm making work, I keep that in mind.

I like it to be challenging and to be something a little different.

(upbeat bluesy music) - Let's take a look at an item from the vault at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona.

- Hello and welcome.

I'm Jon Swanson, curator of collections and exhibitions at the Minnesota Marine Art museum in Winona.

Today I'd like to share with you a work that's seldom seen from our vault.

This is a watercolor, a study of the Brooklyn Bridge by Italian born American artist, Joseph Stella.

He was a painter and illustrator best known for his depictions of industrial America, especially his imagery of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Now since it's a watercolor, a work on paper, we can't have it out full time.

Works on papers such as watercolors, drawing, prints, silver gelatin, photographs, they're light sensitive.

Even though we provide a great environment for it, filtered UV light with both the glass over the work and in our lighting system, light intensity can fade colors over time.

So it's important to put these to rest.

We keep them in the vault for several months shown for only three months at a time, and then put them back to bed.

Stella's fascination with the Brooklyn Bridge began with its first sight of it shortly after his arrival in America in 1896.

He described it as "The shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America."

It was not until moving to Brooklyn and actually living in the Bridge's shadow, that he repeatedly painted this subject many times throughout his career.

Stella began his career as an illustrator, but after travels to Europe and encountering the Italian Futurists, the Spanish Cubists and others, he was quite influenced by their style.

He was also in Gertrude Stein's circle of Parisian artists and writers, and drew influence from them.

He returned to America and continued his fascination with the geometric quality of the architecture of New York.

He had a very strong reverence for industrial America.

When we look at this work, you can see the geometry, the design, how it's almost influenced by stained glass work.

These empty negative spaces between the cables of the bridge look like panes of stained glass.

The intense cabling of the bridge looks like the cames in a stained glass piece.

Reinforcing his reverence for industrial America.

Thank you for taking a look at this work from the vault at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

(slow bluesy music) - Before television and air conditioning, a popular form of evening entertainment was town baseball.

Let's look at teams from Mankato in this short history from the Blue Earth County Historical Society.

- [Narrator] Baseball did not become popular in Minnesota until after the Civil War, although the game was being played in the city by 1864.

The Minnesota State Association of Baseball Players was formed in 1867, and the frontier club became the first organized team in town.

Many of the players were local doctors and businessmen.

In August, the game against St. Peter ended with Mankato winning 61 to 40.

In the following years, most communities formed teams with names like the Sterling Puddlefoot Ball Club, Mito Rip Wrappers, Good Thunder Puzzlers, or Mankato's Okays.

The Baltics, Mankato's best known team, was formed in 1873.

Players often alternated between infield and outfield, but the same catcher and pitcher played every game.

Game day was more than just a game.

The players were often paraded to the field with brass bands.

Following the game, both teams would be feted with post game meals at a local hotel.

Interest in baseball waxed and waned.

It competed for fans with horse racing, bicycle racing, and even foot racing, but baseball lives on to this day.

For more information about historical topics, visit our website at blueearthcountyhistory.com.

- We've reached the end of this episode.

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time "Off 90."

(upbeat bluesy music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.

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