- [Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by: The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr. U.S. Bank Foundation, and the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, proud supporter of the arts in our community.

Additional funding provided by... And viewers like you.

Thank you.

- In this edition of "The Art Show," shepherding a new musical through the pandemic.

(upbeat music) Visually communicating feelings about what is happening in the world.

Choosing tradition over technology.

And creating one of a kind furniture from scrap metal.

It's all ahead on this edition of "The Art Show."

(bright music) Hi, I'm Rodney Veal and welcome to "The Art Show," where each week we provide access to local, regional and national artists and arts organizations.

Southwest Ohio is home to a rich theater heritage.

Generations of actors, choreographers and designers have tested their creativity on local stages in churches, schools, storefronts and the occasional bowling alley.

Today I am joined by Broadway composer, Richard Oberacker, who started his conducting career locally at the age of 17 and is currently conducting Cirque du Soleil's production of KA, in Las Vegas.

As a composer and lyricist, Richard is best known for his work on the Tony Award winning musical, "Bandstand," which also garnered a nomination for the 2017 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Book for a Musical.

Richard, welcome to "The Art Show."

- Hey, thanks for having me.

- Can you share with our audience how your journey began as a musical theater composer?

- I actually started writing music when I was very, very young, like in middle school and high school, and the songs I was coming up with were story-based.

They always had a journey.

They had something to say.

They were coming from a character, just because I loved musicals myself and then when I hit college, I found myself actually getting assignments to write musicals and that launched it.

That was really the training ground and then I was out into the industry at large, working as a conductor, which was paying the bills but on the side, what I was doing constantly was writing shows and trying to get them on a stage.

- That's pretty awesome.

And so how influential the local community theater scene was to the start of your career?

Can you talk a little bit about how important that was to you?

- Well, I had been in the local civic theater scene since I was really, really little, just being on stage as a little rugrat actor.

And then when I was 17, I was given the opportunity to conduct for the first time and then conducted all the way through my college years, I was sort of doing double duty in school and also conducting around town.

And what it afforded me was the opportunity to hone my skills without huge stakes.

You know, these are not multi-million dollar budgets.

You're not gonna get fired if you screw up, and so it was a really great training ground to develop not only the conducting skills but truly, Rodney, the important thing that I really learned was the people skills.

I learned how to collaborate, I learned how to be a better person, which is well more than 50% of the job.

I learned how to have a really good time and still maintain excellence and I learned how to motivate people without turning them off.

- I mean, that sounds, you know, how critical that is, especially when you're working in a collaborative environment.

And so I know that you had studied dramatic performances at CCM, and so what prompted the study of dramatic performances and how did that impact your music and your writing, because that's really important?

- It's actually a really good story.

Because I was conducting professionally so early, there I was at CCM, studying as a composition major, because I wanted to write for the theater.

CCM, to their credit, tried to create a new degree program just for me, as an experiment, a composition for musical theater, and part of that line-up of classes they were cobbling together was an acting class, and the head of the acting department took me aside one day and said, "Listen, there's really nothing anybody else is teaching you around here that you aren't already doing professionally as a conductor."

And if you're serious about being a writer, they suggested that I switch majors to become a drama major full-time.

And the reason for that would be that I would learn what the actor actually needs on the page.

And so I would be getting an education in musical theater writing and playwriting by simply being the guy that on the other end would have to receive a script or a piece of music.

You'll be able to speak their language, you'll have empathy for what they need, you'll have empathy for what they go through, how difficult is to be an actor and if I go through all of that, I will be a better writer just by having lived through the fire, and that's exactly what happened.

- That's pretty cool.

I mean, I love the fact that you had to backtrack for two years and then six years of acting but it pays off and so as you prepare to produce your upcoming show, "Bruce," what drew you to the story about the movie, "Jaws" and how do you translate that into a musical theater experience?

- I think it's important right away to say that "Bruce" is not a musicalization of either the movie or the novel, "Jaws."

It's about how the movie was made and it's based on a book called "The Jaws Log" that was written by Carl Gottlieb, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie, "Jaws," and starred as a supporting actor in the movie.

- And it's an idea that I actually had before I even met Rob, well over 20 years ago.

I am a movie buff myself.

The story behind how that film was made is pretty infamous, if you like movie trivia, and I always sort of thought that's a heck of a story that you've got this 26-year-old kid, you know, Steven Spielberg was 26 years old.

- 25 when they started.

- Yeah and he was given the number one novel in America to translate into film, and so the responsibility was overwhelming.

It was also the first film that was ever shot on the open ocean.

It was a lot of firsts, it completely changed the way Hollywood works, it changed the way we go to the movies, it changed everything.

And it's just a great hero's journey.

Somebody who's that young, who has this dream of finishing this film and as he's trying to move towards that dream, like every obstacle in the world is thrown at him.

- So is Steven Spielberg aware that you're doing this musical about this pivotal point in his life?

He knows?

- He does know about it.

We have a lot of channels in and out of different offices in the industry and it's very lovely to know that he knows about it and he is intrigued.

We're working side by side with almost everybody else that was working on the film.

We're very fortunate, the one's that are still with us, Carl Gottlieb being one.

We're working side by side with him.

Joe Alves, who designed Bruce the Shark came up to Seattle and saw our last workshop so it's astounding to be in the room with the people who we made characters and it must be weird for them because there you have Joe Alves in a room watching a very young actor play him in 1974, singing about the creation of this iconic shark.

It was really quite something and his wife was with him and she tapped Rob on the shoulder and said, "Turn around and look at Joe," and he had tears running down his face.

So we kinda knew we're doing something right and we just look forward to sharing it with the rest of the team that was there on Martha's Vineyard that summer because it's a love letter to them, really.

♪ Astounding what can come out of nothing ♪ - [David] We distributed wide release.

- Astounding what would come out of just pushing back - [David] It wasn't done like that before.

♪ Breakthroughs ♪ ♪ Stunning breakthroughs ♪ - [Lorraine] It won three Oscars.

♪ It was new ♪ - [Joe] First feature shot at sea.

♪ The options were few ♪ - [Bob] Groundbreaking special effects.

♪ And I made my choice.

♪ - [Dick] Broke all box office records.

♪ And I found my voice ♪ ♪ And we changed things forever ♪ ♪ Never knowing what we changed would never ♪ ♪ Never be the same ♪ ♪ We changed things forever ♪ ♪ Never knowing what we changed would never ♪ ♪ Never be the same ♪ (soft music) - That's super awesome!

Gentlemen, I love this conversation.

This is so great!

Thank you so much, you guys.

- Thank you, Rodney.

- Thank you, Rodney.

- If you'd like to learn more about this, or any other story on today's show, visit us online at cetconnect.org or thinktv.org.

Artist Sabrina Nelson delves into her exhibition, "Why You Wanna Fly Blackbird?"

based on how black women feel when their home becomes empty after losing a child, here's her story.

(soft music) - I think my medicine is art, my language is art.

I think the term artist means to be responsible for what's happening in the world, how you see it, how you record it.

How you make things that are a result of what you are trying to say.

Whether it's a question you're answering or a story you're trying to tell or here's something I need to make because it's just embedded in me like I have to make something.

Detroit is embedded in who I am.

I've been here all my life since the rebellion in 1967, that's when I was born.

And so everything around me becomes a part of the story I'm trying to tell or the question I'm trying to ask.

My super power is being able to visually communicate how I feel about what's happening in the world.

Nina Simone says, "If you're going to be an artist, it's your duty to reflect what's happening in the world."

And in the world that I live in, from the time I can remember remembering, there's always trauma and hurt and pain.

And I'm not always talking about that, but you can't ignore it.

And on this day I think about, the lives that are lost, that are constant coming at me through different mediums.

And so I'm thinking about homicides and deaths of young people and how I am affected by it.

But I'm talking about death where people aren't considered people, like you don't matter.

You're not important.

So I'm just going to take your life.

I don't care how old you are, I don't care who you belong to and when that person is missing from our communities, not just the blood family is affected.

We are all and we should all be concerned.

You know, a life is a life.

A human is a human.

And so in this work I'm talking about that pain.

The name of the exhibition is "Why You Wanna Fly Blackbird?"

And I got it from a Nina Simone song who talks about black women, like, how dare you try and be happy in your life.

How dare you not expect pain.

Pain is gonna come.

You have to move through it and you have to live.

But pain will be here.

I didn't want the colors to be so seductive that it draws you in as pretty, like, I don't like the idea of my work being pretty.

I want it to be impactful.

I want it to be deeper than just what you see.

And I wanted it to be large enough to have some girth to it.

So these particular pieces are very large drawings.

They're also reliquaries, if you will.

So they talk about like the body, the housing of the bodies that we have, like the home and then what it's like to have a nest with no eggs in it.

Thinking about the empty nest of children who never return.

You know, I don't care how old they are, they never can return.

So I'm just talking about the darkness in that and expressing it with the most eloquence that I can.

The cages will represent empty homes.

That can be the home that they lived in.

That can be the community that they lived in.

How do you deal with that?

You know, that womb that's empty?

And so when we lose these people that are not treated with value out of our communities, how do you deal with that?

So Lavonne is helping me on the dresses 'cause I want to make dresses that will hang from the ceiling, just above the patrons' heads, but the birdcages will be the empty wombs underneath the dresses.

And so, I'm asking him to help me figure out how I'm going to make the dresses which are made out of Japanese rice paper so that they can be sheer enough that the birdcages can go underneath them and the patrons can see them with the lighting and hopefully they have the impact that's in my head and in my heart.

I want people to pay attention to it and to be more empathetic with others' lives.

If you see something happening, and you can do something about it, why wouldn't you?

And so when I look at the homicide rates across the country, they're incredibly high for African American, indigenous, and also Latin American children.

And so if this is all I can say and do about it, I want someone to know that I care, even though they're not my children, I care that they're missing, that they're gone, that there's, you know, somebody should think about doing something about it.

The motion of movement when I'm making these things, like when I did the nest here, you know, the motion of drawing and drawing and drawing, that obsession of movement and what it feels like to do that.

These movements that we do over and over become very much ritual.

Maybe these are all prayers visually to say, I'm sorry that your life has gone, but I want to say that you meant something, that you were important.

Every artist wants someone to look at their work for a long time and I didn't want to make it so obvious and obtuse where it's like, you know, you see people getting killed.

But I think the work and the drawings and some of the paintings that I'm using can be seductive.

So I want people to make sure that they walk away with knowing that I'm in a world, I am affected by it and don't just listen to the news and be in the world and not really take part in what's happening.

Think about what your voice is and what your superpower is, and see what you can do to help.

I want to say something that's important and I want to leave this world with something that someone's learned from me.

My work might be sensual to draw you in and then it's gonna slap you a little bit.

And that's what I hope I show.

- Did you miss an episode of "The Art Show?"

No problem!

You can watch it on demand at cetconnect.org and thinktv.org.

You'll find all the previous episodes, as well as current episodes, and links to the artists we feature.

Sign painter and shop owner Derek McDonald focuses on vintage design.

Based in Reno, Nevada, he chooses to work in the traditional sign painting technique, forgoing the computer for paint, brushes, and pencils.

Here's his story.

(light music) - I describe my work as traditional, vintage inspired, and historic.

I pretty much keep it, for a lack of better term, all old school.

My name is Derek McDonald and I'm a sign painter.

I was the quintessential creative kid that would flip over his math test and draw silly pictures on the back and I was also and still am into old cars.

So I started going to all these car shows and I saw lots of pin striping on motorcycle tanks and hot rods and lowriders.

And I started getting really into that and that led me into the world of lettering signs because they're very parallel worlds and that's basically how I dived into it.

I just genuinely was really into anything with a historic feel or a vintage kind of feel to it.

When I begin to work on a project, the most important step is breaking into my reference material.

I've got really old rare sign painting manuals and trade books and magazines, old yellow page books, they have great illustrations.

I collect vintage matchbooks.

Right now I have over 700 and each one of them has awesome really inspiring artwork on them, I'll jot off three or four sketches, I'll refine it and I make the sign.

Materials I work with vary.

Of course my main thing is paint and that's a very specific paint designed for industrial art.

So it's oil based, it's called Lettering Enamel.

When I work with glass on a storefront window, I try to create almost like a little fantasy world even if it's just one window in one storefront and somebody's just gonna walk by it for eight seconds.

At least I created that little tiny fantasy world for just that short amount of time for that person and they might look at something I made and go, "That's the way they used to do things."

So it all kinda comes back to that nostalgic feeling.

Not only do I go paint glass windows onsite but I'll also do pieces in my shop.

My shop is based right here in Reno.

So let's assume I'm gonna make your traditional wooden sign that's gonna hang over a storefront.

I'll have to go to my scrap wood pile which is in my garage right now.

I've got tons of old sign board.

I'll hand cut the boards, I'll edge seal 'em, prime 'em, and then base coat them.

These were blue collar, get it out the door things back in the day.

Some of these shops were union, and they would have 10 sign painters all in a line and they were knocking out these, and you can see they developed these techniques over years and years and years where they can get a really efficient sign or a really efficient letter painted in a very short amount of time.

There's just a certain feel to some of these signs where you go, "That's a 1930s sign right there."

You'll see these certain characteristics in the letters where they'll pull the brush and flick the brush out at the very end and you'll see these little brush flick outs, that was a speed and efficiency technique.

You only see that in those old vintage signs.

One of my favorite things to work on is old vehicles, up close and personal with old truck doors, doing lettering jobs on old trucks.

I have a buddy who's a vintage truck collector and he bought this truck from an old fellow in Idaho.

It's a 1959 Chevy stepside truck.

So I'm gonna paint Declo Cattle Co. and a big black and white cow, then I'm gonna do the process of aging the sign back.

So the process of creating an aged sign or a distressed sign is a multi-step process.

I kinda thin the paint down a little bit, I put a little bit of talcum powder into the paint, it actually flattens the sheen so it won't be super high gloss and the paint will be kind of deluded so it's not very opaque, so it's already kind of translucent.

Once it's dry, then I just start wiping back with some solvents like acetone or mineral spirits and you start rubbing back on the letters and you follow the same direction that your brush strokes go.

That way you reveal back the actually brush strokes.

What I really get out of the end of the day is creating that nostalgic feeling and when I think I've really nailed that, that's the biggest reward I get.

(bright music) - "The Art Show" is going to be traveling around Southwest Ohio.

You might see this logo in your neighborhood.

Follow the travels of "The Art Show" on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @ThinkTV and @cetconnect.

And check out "The Art Show" hashtag.

Welder Cindy Wynn has been making furniture for the last 30 years out of scrap metal.

Her collection of metal weighs in at 250,000 pounds.

But it allows her to create her pieces whenever inspiration hits.

Here's her story.

(light upbeat music) - I'm Cindy Wynn, I've been making furniture for the last 30 years.

I build furniture out of scrap metal.

I have probably about 200 to 250,000 pounds of scrap metal in my welding studio.

Then I have an idea or the scrap metal gives me an idea and I go out and I start collecting parts and I keep at it until I have the whole design.

Usually I design about 10 to 12 pieces at once so there's pieces and parts everywhere that have a future as furniture, either lamps, tables or chairs, it's usually what I make.

Furniture can be art.

It's not, you know, the functionality.

People think, "Oh well, if it's functional, it's not art."

But I really think it is, because it changes people.

You know, when people, just because you can touch it and sit on it, it doesn't mean it's not art.

I first got started in college.

I took all the basic classes, drawing, painting, and then I glommed onto ceramics for about three years, which is six semesters.

At the end of the sixth semester, our ceramics teacher said, "You guys get all your stuff out of here."

And I thought, well, I'll just take a break and I'll take sculpture 2, which was welding.

I learned how to weld really easily and I was frustrated because that made anything creative.

So I just made my partner a chair as a joke and it's like my brain lit on fire.

An idea can come from the materials, it can come from my head and then I squeeze the materials into my idea or vice versa.

But I study all kinds of furniture, especially 18th century, 18th century furniture has really a lot of amazing details.

I use some glass, some wood, but mostly it's all scrap metal.

I go out into either if I'm up North, I go out into a real scrap yard or if I'm down South here, I go out into my own scrap yard and I look for parts.

I do a lot of welding, a lot of cutting with a grinding desk and a lot of cuttings of torch.

And then welding is the most fun step.

And then the final step is to put a final coat of lacquer on it and take it down to the gallery.

The grinding is still rough, but the cutting, I love cutting, I love welding, I love putting stuff together.

I love the hot metal.

Even when it burns me, I don't mind.

I feel happy.

I'm working on a number of projects.

So what I'm going to show you today is the end of a, it's a series called Lynch Chair and I've learned a new thing about spring steel.

You can't really weld it, so I catch it in a little cage.

So that's the final step on this wrench chair is so it'll still have movement with the spring, but it won't be in danger of breaking.

My most recent commission.

I did the headboard on commission.

I have four panels to carve, the headboards all complete except putting it together and carving the last three out of the four wood panels.

And for speculative, I usually do pedestals, console tables, end tables, a lot of chairs, chairs are my favorite.

Those chairs are really where I think the art is in my work because I make them so that people are very trepidatious when they see them.

And then when they sit down, I can see for an instant everything kind of evaporates and they're back into a childlike state and they start laughing 'cause it moves and it's comfortable.

And it's usually down here it's hot and the chair is cool.

I just like that moment when they, it changes their perception of what furniture is about, it makes them feel differently about furniture and the way people interact with furniture changes when they see my stuff.

(upbeat music) - If you want to see more from "The Art Show," connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

You'll find us @ThinkTV and @cetconnect.

And don't forget to check out the The Art Show" channel on YouTube.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "The Art Show."

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by: The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr. U.S. Bank Foundation, and the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, proud supporter of the arts in our community.

Additional funding provided by... And viewers like you.

Closed captioning in part has been made possible through a grant from the Bahmann Foundation.

Thank you.