- [Presenter] Funding for The Art Show is made possible by: The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Hale, 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, an artist unifies the community through art.

(lively instrumental music) Using reclaimed wood to make beautiful music.

(lively instrumental music) And an artist opens a new conversation on history.

(lively instrumental music) It's all ahead on this edition of, The Art Show.

(lively instrumental music) (lively instrumental 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.

Artist Jes McMillan fell in love with mosaics and community murals.

Her work is meant to serve the Dayton region and beyond through collaboration to create large-scale works of art.

Here's her story.

- I am a mosaic artist and I have grown up all around Dayton.

At age 16 I made my first mosaic on a piece of two by four, two feet by four feet plywood from the neighbor's garage.

I went to school at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and after graduating there, I moved home to Dayton.

Right after that, I met Jerri Stanard of the K12 Gallery and began my journey of turning that process of me creating my own mosaic work into teaching and leading the community to create the work.

I left K12 to found the Mosaic Institute of Greater Dayton to become my vehicle for doing good in the community of Dayton.

I have always had a special place for Dayton in my heart.

It's hard to really describe, I guess many of us Daytonians feel this way about our city.

We have an incredible energy and a movement especially in the arts.

Being an artist activist with the ability to lead a large scale collaborative artwork has made me realize that it's my responsibility to serve my community with my special gifts.

And so I definitely feel a call to be here and to unify my community, my people that I live with every day and experience life with.

The Downtown Dayton Partnership offered its first Art in the City Grant, which we were very lucky to receive.

So we proposed a 12 foot wide by nine foot tall gem, a multi-colored gem that would be created by all the Daytonians in the city that would come out during Art in the City.

And that that finished gem would go onto the sidewalk outside of the entrance to the Dayton Arcade, which is the beating heart of our arts community.

And so we had this great day of unity in our city and then the following night, a terrible tragedy, the shooting in the Oregon District.

We were called probably about seven hours after the shooting and asked what could we do?

What could we provide to bring the community together as a way of healing?

What type of collaborative project could we offer?

And we instantly started working on it.

What does that look like?

How can we do this?

The day before in Art in the City, we had just led our largest collaborative piece, the gem and over a thousand participants walked up to us that day.

And so coming off of that unity and now what do we offer again to this public to bring people together.

We designed the nine doves porcelain mosaic, it was created as a permanent memorial.

Our part is creating the ability for people to come and to heal.

And with this mosaic we have designed it to where all nine doves have been created ahead of time and so those pieces are finished and as participants come up to the mosaic, they can connect with those nine doves representing each of the victims that we lost.

I think that art has the ability, creation has the ability to open us up and maybe even connect where we can feel and love ourselves and give ourselves room for expression and room to feel those feelings and to process.

It can be used to empower.

Art is essential, it is a part of all of us.

We put in a proposal for creating games in the sidewalks in a neighborhood that had no public parks, no green space for the kids to play.

So we proposed creating interactive games all in the sidewalk in the neighborhood to engage them and give them something to do.

So the best part about the project is that we went into Kettering Middle School and created a 29 foot hopscotch with over 80 7th graders.

So you have this giant hopscotch that is a beehive and it has eight games in it.

And then you have 10 bumblebees that are scattered throughout the neighborhood.

And the goal was to create games that would engage people of all ages.

So you can just go and find the bees and you have to find all the bees in the hopscotch.

Collect the letters to solve the secret hidden puzzle of the art piece.

The focus of going into the school and working with those kids was to bring them together and to allow them to see the physical process of these mosaic pieces coming together.

And all the pieces are made out of the same material.

They're all shaped differently, they're all different colors, but we need all of those different shapes and all of those different colors to make this big beautiful mosaic picture.

And so in that process we're able to relate that to them, they are made of the same material.

They are different shapes and different colors and every one of them are needed to create this beautiful unified picture.

And in this process of working together, they can physically see this amazing accomplishment.

And my hope is that this unifying experience might empower them.

As they grow they might see each other and the differences that are there as a reason to connect and the things that make it better to connect, the things that make teamwork the best are the differences that we have.

(lively instrumental music) - [Presenter] 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.

- Meet some friends who decided to turn master woodworking and furniture building skills into an artist collective that builds musical instruments out of reclaimed construction materials, repurposed from the beautiful shores of Lake Tahoe.

Here's their story.

(lively instrumental music) - TYDE Music is a collaborative company that makes instruments in North Lake Tahoe, California.

- We kind of focus on ukuleles and other small portable instruments.

- For the ukuleles we build four different sizes and we have a soprano, a concert and a tenor and a baritone size.

It's a Hawaiian instrument and the Hawaiians called it the ukulele which means I think jumping flee because the way they played it was real quick and it was like a flee jumping up and down.

(lively instrumental music) We use a lot of materials from around the area.

We've started out with the reclaimed woods cause that's what we had available.

We like different grains and different colors of woods to use in our instruments and also tone-wise as well, they all have a little bit different sound.

(lively instrumental music) One of our partners, Cline really turned us on to this building concept that yeah you can go out and you can use reclaimed materials cause they're right in our backyard.

And it's got character it's got a story.

- Our absolute favorite materials to work with are recycled piers out of Lake Tahoe.

Mostly because they're so close to extreme elements of the micro-climates that swirl through Lake Tahoe.

The sun bouncing off of the water and the way that magnifies calcifies and just bakes that wood.

It condenses all the different wood structures then you have winds swirling up as they do in storms that'll just pop off at Lake Tahoe.

They'll grab the sand and sandblast and pit almost like an alligator print onto the wood.

And then the ice comes in and it's breaking apart different places, where the water drips it does it more.

- There's a lot of politics involved in taking something down in the basin of Lake Tahoe.

And luckily our next door neighbor right here is the pier builder on the North shore of Lake Tahoe and so he dismantles them and rebuilds them.

We get to go down with him, pick out materials from the pier that he's dismantling.

- We start very carefully lifting the boards off to try to keep them intact as much as we can.

And we're looking to cherry pick the very most interesting, most lake effected boards that we can.

And then there's the job to stacking them carefully, keeping them from twisting.

- That office view, nothing like it (laughs).

That's the best office, you go out there you get to go check out material that has been weathered for years.

We get to go experience these old piers that are falling apart and they're reborn into an art form that we're like looking for different knots and different textures and different materials to use.

I mean, we even use some of the nails, those aren't all going into the trash.

You know there's so many things that you can think of there your mind kind of is like, what am I gonna do with this material?

Let's make something special and it's a foreign story.

Some people have been on that pier before.

- I think the most accessible pieces we have are when we find those pieces that show the reclaimed or the rough edge and then we put that into an instrument.

So someone does know when they look at that they're like, okay, that's an ukelele but why does it look like it's kind of chipped up?

Or how did that happen?

And when someone looks at one of our instruments and can instantly recognize that, yeah that came from an old piece of wood, an old barn, an old pier or old whatever; I think that's a pretty successful piece of art.

- A lady that came up to us at the Reno Ukulele Fest fell in love with one of our reclaimed instruments.

And we told her the story about it being from the Lake Tahoe pier.

And that's what really touched her heart and she walked away with that ukulele that weekend because her mom used to live up in Lake Tahoe.

And that's what sold the instrument to this lady, it was because it brought up childhood memories and thoughts of her mother.

I wish there was more people like us to actually take material and make art with it and not have it go to landfill and have other nasty things going back into the Earth.

I'm a big fan of just reclaiming wood and getting it locally sourced.

But obviously we can't work with it all the time, some people want that exotic wood and we're not gonna say no to it, that's our clients.

(lively instrumental music) There's a lot of reclaimed materials that people are using and I'm just stoked to be a part of it and I'm excited to build more instruments out of it.

(lively instrumental music) (lively instrumental music) - The Art Show is gonna 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.

Titus Kaphar is an artist who seeks to dislodge history from the past in order to uncover its contemporary relevance.

His aim is to reveal what has been lost and to investigate the power of rewritten history.

Here's his story.

(bell ringing) - When I say shifting the gaze, I'm imploring the viewer to set what feels natural aside for a moment and try a different route through the work.

And when you do that through a painting even a familiar painting, you might find something you never expected to find.

Composition, there are techniques and strategies for guiding the gaze through a particular composition.

I've spent a lot of time studying them, artists spend a lot of time studying them, they work.

I'm shifting it from the strategy of the original artists pathway through the work and trying to find some other way to see, not giving in to what will feel most natural.

What I've been doing is actually trying to separate those black characters from the other characters in the paintings who were oppressing them to give the viewer the opportunity to contemplate these characters on their own terms, on their own merit, without the pressures of this oppression that exists within the compositional structure of the painting itself.

I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this.

There is a reason he is the highest in the composition here.

There is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here.

He's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in this painting.

Painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important, it's coded.

But sometimes because of the compositional structure because of compositional hierarchy, it's hard to see other things.

There's more written about dogs in our history than there are about this other character here, about his dreams, about his hopes, about what he wanted out of life.

I don't want you to think that this is about eradication, it's not.

The oil that you saw me just put inside of this paint is linseed oil, it becomes transparent over time.

So eventually what's gonna happen is these faces will emerge a little bit.

What I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to show you is how to shift your gaze.

When people say that I'm erasing history, they're pointing to the fact that they don't recognize that I'm actually uncovering what was already there.

I'm attempting to make you look at a different part of the painting, not erasing history.

That takes a kind of structural institutional power that I actually don't have.

We can look at institutional structural power and we can look and see the ways in which history has been erased.

It hasn't been erased by some random black dude in Connecticut making paintings and putting white paint on it, that ain't how it works.

(lively instrumental music) I didn't grow up going to museums, my mother worked really, really hard.

My mother had me when she was very young, she was 15 years old.

She worked three jobs usually just to make sure we were taken care of.

I found art very late in my life, I was 27 by the time I realized that this was really what I wanna do.

So I take my kids to the museum every time I have a chance, whether they like it or not.

We were in New York City and we were going to the Natural History Museum in New York.

And as we were walking up the stairs, we came upon the Teddy Roosevelt sculpture that's out front of the Natural History museum.

And Teddy Roosevelt is sitting on the horse looking really strong, boldly holding that horse with one arm.

And on one side of him is an African-American man and on the left side of him is a Native-American man.

And as we were walking up those stairs, my oldest son Sevian he said, "Dad, how come he gets to ride "and they have to walk?"

And it was one of those moments where you as a parent realize this is gonna take way longer than we really have, but you can't pass up those kinds of teachable moments.

And so we sat on the stairs for a little bit and we talked about it.

And in my house history is a really important thing, it's alive.

And we try to help our kids understand that understanding the past is about understanding the present.

That painting, Behind the Myth of Benevolence is about the dichotomy of this country itself, of our country itself.

You have the individual who probably wrote more eloquently about liberty than anyone to ever walk, Thomas Jefferson.

And you have that same individual who values liberty more than life itself withholding liberty from hundreds of people who make his very life possible.

The character in the painting, the woman in that painting is at once Sally Hemings in quotations and at once a stand-in for all of the other black women who were on that plantation.

There are over 300 other enslaved people on that plantation at least 50% of them are women.

And so it's easy for us to focus on that one part of the story and forget that there were other women who were abused in so many different ways.

In that painting it's a literal pulling back the curtain to again, shift our gaze.

We can't just simply demonize our founding fathers but it's also important not to deify them, let's just find the truth in the middle.

The Forgotten Soldier, I've been working with this concept for a little while now.

It came as a sort of fascination of the process of making sculptures.

In this particular work I decided that I wanted the mold to be the finished work.

That is, I wanted you to be able to look in this case at George Washington, one of our founding fathers in his absence, his complete, his perfect absence.

But in his perfect absence is as I said, the pure potential for all of the good things, but the reality of the bad things as well.

In front of that is this figure, this soldier on one knee preparing for battle in profile.

The black figure in the front is about those forgotten soldiers, the ones that were there that participated that for some reason history forgot.

Let's be honest it's not for some reason, it doesn't work with the narrative that slavery makes sense, slavery is good for the nation, black people like to be enslaved.

So we write out those kinds of histories, we just ignore them because they challenge other aspects of what we believed.

My intention is that we see both of these characters at the same time, that there is a visual dialogue between the character who sits in front, this black soldier and George Washington.

We have this tendency to kind of write our history thinking about those people sitting on that horse, but there's a lot of other characters or soldiers on the ground that actually gave their lives for the battle.

In this particular exhibition, we're talking about the black soldiers who were by large forgotten to history, erased from history.

And putting them together I'm trying to say, let's not prioritize either part of the conversation over the other, let's have both of the conversations at once.

(lively instrumental music) - [Presenter] 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 for the artists we feature.

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

Until next time I'm Rodney Veal, thanks for watching.

(lively instrumental music) (lively instrumental music) (lively instrumental music) (lively instrumental music) - [Presenter] Funding for The Art Show is made possible by: The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Hale, 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.