- [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," a new artistic director steps into the spotlight.

(bright music) A veteran uses welding as therapy.

Decorating state highways with public art.

And the nostalgia and artistry of vintage games that you can actually play!

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.

Dayton Opera has been a mainstay of the art scene of Dayton for over 60 years, and as the organization moves into the future, Kathleen Clawson steps into the spotlight and takes the reign's as the Dayton Opera's newest artistic director.

Kathleen, no stranger to the Dayton Opera stage has had a multi-faceted career which includes education, directing, and performing.

She has served on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, where she has taught courses in musical theater, and also directing.

Kathleen has worked for the Santa Fe Opera for the past 18 seasons and is the Associate Director of their Apprentice Singer Program and Director of the Young Voices of the Santa Fe Opera.

We are delighted to have her here to talk about all things opera.

Kathleen, welcome to "The Art Show."

- Thanks, Rodney.

It's great to be here with you.

- As someone who is not a stranger to our region, how about for those who don't know, maybe you can share a bit of your personal history with the Dayton Opera?

- Well, it actually goes beyond my connection to the Dayton Opera.

My very first time in Dayton was in my former life as a classical soloist.

It was in 1999.

I came in and was a soloist with the Dayton Philharmonic.

And here, this is what is very, I think, kind of strange.

Is my very first time in Dayton, I was walking around getting to know the city, and I thought, "I could live here."

There was something about it that just felt like home.

How eerie is that?

Almost 20 years later, that's gonna happen.

Dayton is very similar to my hometown, which is Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The university is there, there's an Air Force base.

It's similar in many ways, although Dayton is much greener.

So I think coming to Dayton ever since then.

And in 2009, I was invited by Tom Bankston to direct the "Elixir of Love" for Dayton Opera.

And I guess I did okay because he's had me back every season since then to direct at least one of the productions.

And I've been considering Dayton sort of a second home since then.

I know everybody.

The chorus, they're my dear friends.

I love coming back and working with everybody in the community.

And now to be able to assume this new role, it truly is a dream come true.

And I sort of feel like it's the culmination of all of my skills and interests.

- The Dayton Opera has enjoyed robust support for just over 60 years.

What do you think has been the secret of its success and what opportunities for growth do you see?

- Well, in my tenure working with Dayton Opera and with Tom Bankston, I mean, these are big shoes I'm gonna have to fill.

I'm just gonna tell you, Tom Bankston is a master at choosing great, great singers.

And of using the resources that he has to put on spectacular productions.

And I hope to be able to follow in his footsteps in doing that.

I've already engaged some great artists for next year.

I'm not, well, I can't tell you who they are yet.

- Oh, I know.

- But stay tuned, it's gonna be exciting.

I'm really thrilled.

I've committed to bringing new works to the stage.

I think it's vitally important and a really great way to engage new audiences and bring new people to the art form.

But I also believe that standard repertoire is not standard for no reason.

The great works of art need to be heard and seen again.

So there will a little bit of everything next season and throughout my tenure.

- You have an impressive resume of directing musical theater.

And the southwest region of Ohio has a rather engaged musical theater crowd and they love musical theater.

Do you plan to continue that work while you're here in Dayton?

- Absolutely, I do.

I love musical theater and I also have some interest in perhaps, not next year, but soon producing some of the classic works of musical theater that require opera singers, operatic voices, legitimate voices.

You know, when, when all those pieces were written, there was no mics, people just sang.

And what I would say is musical theater was the gateway for almost every opera singer that I know of.

Nobody just starts out singing opera.

Almost everybody starts out singing musical theater.

So there's a great love and desire among classical singers to do that repertoire.

So I'm absolutely interested in letting that be part of what we bring to the company to the city of Dayton while maintaining our opera repertoire as well.

- So anything else coming up that you wanna share with the audience?

- I think that maybe people don't understand or are not quite aware of how unique this organization is.

To have an alliance between the opera, the ballet, and the symphony is really extraordinary.

The first time that I was able to work with all three groups in Dayton, of course, the symphony is always the orchestra.

But when we did the production of "Aida" several years ago, to have the full ballet in "Aida," it's almost always cut in some ways.

To be able to have the full ballet and to have it performed by professional dancers with the Philharmonic in the pit, it's extraordinary.

The things that we can do with this alliance excite me very much.

And I'm looking forward to finding as many opportunities for us all to collaborate as I can.

- This is my personal bonus question.

If you could cast your dream team of opera singers, living or dead, who would they be and what operas would they perform?

- The number of great singers that I know and want to work with, oh, it's a lot.

So I am thrilled that I'm gonna be able to bring some of those singers to Dayton and introduce them, have my family get to know each other.

So yeah, I have lots of dream teams and you're gonna be seeing them on stage in Dayton.

- That is awesome.

So Kathleen, thank you so much for taking your time out for this interview.

We really appreciate it.

- It's great being here.

Thank you so much.

- 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.

Rod Ford has spent his life turning challenges into triumphs.

He channels his experiences into one-of-a-kind art pieces, bringing scraps of metal to life.

Some call him Robot Man.

Here's his story.

(light music) - When you came back, you're angry, and you always had this burden on your shoulders saying why did you survive?

But I kept on going until you know somebody said you better get some help because you really have a bad attitude.

Come to find out that PTSD influences you for your rest of your life.

(saw whirring) It's the best therapy I ever came across.

You get locked in and time goes away and you're focused, it's the best therapy in the world, absolutely.

(soft string music) My name's Rod Ford and I work in metal and I've been doing it for almost 30 years, 40 years actually.

In elementary school I used to go way by allies and I'd bring stuff home, stuff I'd collect out of other people's trash and do different things with them as a kid.

Looking for a crisp blue flame right there.

So my imagination was always there and it was actually creating different things out of the junk that I brought home.

I got my draft notice in '68.

When I got back from Vietnam, we were treated pretty much as throw aways.

So 35, 45 years of PTSD, finally got some help.

From that point I was driving a semi, I wanted to see what the country was that I fought for.

But I had a wreck up on the pass.

So I was sitting in a hospital bed and going, "Well what do I do now?"

And I thought, you know, I've been collecting junk, treasure, excuse me, it's not junk, for a very long time when I thought, I'm gonna start putting these things together.

And since we walk through life like robots I used that as the theme.

And that's sort of where it evolved and became good.

I'm gonna use that as the hips and I wanna use the spline that's in here to lock it in position.

I built them as things that had happened to me.

Walking through life, we have our little cage that we walk through life in and all of a sudden something will happen that changes that picture.

I'd been going through therapy for years and it was, how can I relate that where I can make a statement there.

He's standing outside a big plate glass that says life on it and that life is facing him.

And he's looking at it, but he knows he can't get back to where he was.

It's all different now and that comes from traumatic experiences and all of a sudden your experience has shifted you from the reality you used to have to where you are now.

(people chattering) They love it.

They come up here and go, "How in the heck did you even come up with that?"

I'm going, I don't know, but as I was building it, it made sense.

Metal talks to me, I don't know.

The trick is trying to put a personality into your metal and trying to make them look like they could just walk off and do it.

So I think I've been successful in doing that.

Find something you love and do it.

Doesn't matter what the critics say, it's for you, you do it for you.

And if other people love it, hot diggity, it's a good deal.

I'm just gonna keep building.

Do what you love to do.

- 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.

The Nevada Department of Transportation's landscape and Aesthetics program strives to decorate the state's highways with creative public art.

Working with architects and designers, the team renders roadside sculptures that connect with the surroundings.

Check it out.

(light music) - Imagine driving through the Nevada desert, and you reach an area where you see beautiful cultural symbols rising from the roadside.

You see a windmill representing the ranching history in this area of South Reno, perhaps you're on the Carson City Freeway and you see symbols that are symbolic of the native American culture there, it's really a beautiful thing to see our community's culture and history represented right there as you're driving.

You can find these landscape and aesthetic features on many of the highways at many of the on and off ramps, maintained by NDOT across Nevada.

Our NDOT mission is ultimately to keep Nevadans safe and connected and landscape and aesthetics is a vital part of that.

NDOT Landscape and Aesthetics Program, is a longstanding program to bring both the aesthetic and environmental and cultural benefits of landscape and the aesthetics to our highways.

- We'll start with analysis of the site, where are we designing and what are we designing for?

We look at the environment, there might be some environmental challenges, like a lot of storm water run-off, erosion.

So we'll look at all these things as well as the culture and the history, that's what we're really after, is to develop this theme that is suitable for the area and in looking for that inspiration through culture and history and the stories that we hear from people in the community.

The next steps are getting help from landscape architects, that takes the theme and the idea that's in our heads and then can translate that into a drawing and a plan.

- When it comes to the Department of Transportation and the public art that we do for them, we'll get some CAD files from the DOT, we really look at the drawings, we have to manipulate it and make it constructable and then we submit that back to them and go, "Hey, does this work for you?"

(bright music) I really like to work with my hands, I like to make things.

I enjoy taking something as rudimentary as a piece of steel and creating something really refined out of it.

The things that we build, they're big.

They are fun to build and oftentimes when we're here in the shop and we're building it and I don't have that sense of place, if you will, because we're here on 4th Street, but when you stand it up and you set it there and you look at what's really happening around and you go, "That's nice, man."

You know, like you can see that from a bunch of different angles, it has a lot of depth, it's good.

I think the most exciting moment for all of us here at the shop is getting it on a crane and then getting it in the hole.

- I really liked this spot here at Damonte.

We wanted to express the ranching heritage and the Reno Rodeo that we all enjoy and coming up with a sculptural piece that represents that with a female Roper and the calf and the ranch style fencing, the steam was really well communicated in a very exciting sculpture here that we're fortunate to have artist and fabricator Paolo Cividino take these unyielding heavy materials like steel, and really bring life to them and movement.

- Besides the aesthetic value of highway landscaping, there's also really tangible benefits including economic benefits.

The landscaping can help peak interest of visitors driving them to stay longer or to visit our communities, helping enhance our communities tourism value, but also highway landscaping can help employ those who might otherwise not be employed on public works projects, such as highway project, that includes landscape architects, landscape fabricators and so many more who really come together to not only provide this valuable artwork but help produce an economic value from that as well.

- We built five state monuments that are at the intersections of all the interstates.

Those were so fun to make.

I was just driving down 395 a couple of weeks ago with my wife, and every time I do, there's a couple of cars, minimum, pulled over and people taking photos of themselves or their family, in front of the monument that we made at Topaz and it feels good, you know, and that monument is really well designed.

Seth Johnson from the DOT designed it, he did a great job.

I think the public art at the end of the day, I think it grounds people, I think it gives people a sense of place, I think it also just, you know, man, like we're going through some pretty rough stuff.

Just being able to look at something, it just sort of gives you the ability to take a breath, right?

I mean, maybe the wagon doesn't resonate with you but maybe it resonates with the other guy and I think that there's something about that.

I think inherently art, music, it is crucial to the wellbeing of our soul.

- "The Art Show" is going to be traveling around Southwest Ohio.

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If you are old enough, some of us, like me, spent our weekends playing PAC-MAN and Centipede, the real deal!

The Replay Museum in Tarpon Springs, Florida preserves the experience of retro arcade games for all generations to enjoy.

Check out this hands-on experience.

(light music) (moves into bright electronic music) - My name is Bobbi, I work the front desk and help handle our event calendar, try to plan some fun events for people to come out and play for.

I worked here for four years, I love it.

My husband and I actually had our wedding here.

So I love it like it's mine even though I just work here.

Bryan and Becky are just big gammers themselves, they love amusements, they love playing games, so I think that they amassed this collection and kinda felt selfish just keeping it all to themselves and wanted to share it with the rest of the world.

- A place like Replay is like a test ground for these games.

We see things break that nobody else sees, we have problems that nobody else will encounter because of the amount of plays that these games get on them.

Longevity is always the goal, we wanna make sure each repair is something that is gonna make the game last a lot longer, hopefully, as opposed to like continually going back in and fixing something.

But yeah, there's sort of a checklist as far as looking for bad connectors because that can just cause things to overheat if there's not a good signal going through.

- [Bobbi] Just cleaning the pinball so that the game will play properly is a big part of it.

- [Stephen] A lot of the older games will switch out to a different style of light bulbs and put LEDs inside of them, so just to take away the heat, it draws less power.

So there's certain things like that to keep in mind.

The designers of the game would put notes in the game, but a well-lit game is gonna be played more, and for that matter, a clean well-lit game.

So it's more like, you know, we got people that come in for the first time and they kinda just start walking around.

And it's kinda hard to say what makes them go up and put their hands on that first game, especially if it's one they haven't seen before.

But I think it always comes down to some part of what they've been through in their life, some part of their history, whether they're into cars or if it's some kind of movie that they're into.

It could be a band that's highlighted in one of these games.

A lot of it will definitely be like the artwork, if you're able to see the game, it's gonna be the artwork.

- I don't know if it's the colors, if it's the imagination.

I mean, the older pinball machines from the '70s, they definitely pop, they're trying to be eye-catching.

Sometimes maybe slightly suggestive in a sexual manner, but these were back in the days when it was a room full of guys playing pinball where there weren't really children involved, maybe not women around.

So you can see the kind of development and change of art kind of moving back from risque art pieces and being more family friendly.

- [Stephen] I mean, you can find out a lot about yourself just by playing games, whether it's just by yourself, you can kind of tell how competitive of a person you are and how well you deal with stressful situations.

- To me it's gaming therapy, it's really relaxing getting to hit the flipper, just to see how much the game has evolved over the years.

I just love it.

- In a place like Replay with the games that we have here, this style of gaming is something where even if you're playing by yourself, you still have a social connection with people whether you hear somebody yelling out of frustration because they just lost a ball, or somebody is like cheering because they just got a replay or an insanely high score.

We definitely have people coming in that are trying to set high scores, Replay is known for having scores that are super hard to beat because of how many people come in and play the games.

- I had a number three, number four for a little bit and I've been surpassed so I gotta have to go chase it again.

- My best high score here is gonna be my (indistinct) Tales of Arabian Nights.

It's 44 million, I got to the wizard mode and rescued the princess.

Part of my high score chase isn't even technically the score, it's more beating the game and reaching that wizard mode, whatever that final objective is.

- My son is in the Navy and now he's up in South Carolina.

I'll send him like a text message real quick and say, "Look at the score I just put up."

And he'll do the same thing.

If he goes out in the community, he's able to play pinball or any of the video games, he'll send me a score back.

So it's a way for us to stay in contact with each other and connect even though we're hundreds of miles apart.

- Seeing the generations actually come together, enjoy and love these games is why I do what I do.

I know we're doing the right thing, I know we're here for the right reasons and we are sharing all this fun with generations to come 'cause we need the younger kids to be interested in this.

If there's any history or future for arcades, we gotta get kids playing, we gotta get kids playing pinball, we gotta get kids playing the retro games 'cause someone's gotta be interested once we're gone.

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

You'll find us at @thinktv and @cetconnect.

Don't forget to check out "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.