[Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by: The L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, The George & Margaret McLane Foundation, additional funding provided by: and viewers like you.

Thank you.

In this edition of "The Art Show": a collaborative where artists with challenges can flourish, (bright music) painting impressionistic portraits of jazz legends, contemporary art inspired by comic books and graphic novels, and artisans give new life to vintage ski lift chairs.

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

(upbeat energetic 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.

Since 2016, Vulcan's Forge Performing Arts Collaborative has been bringing challenged and unchallenged artists together in fellowship.

in partnership with other area arts organizations, Vulcan's Forge not only provides an outlet for the creativity of these artists, but also compensates them for their time and talent.

The end result is a community of artists who want to expand their worlds by reaching out and sharing with those who have differences.

Here's their story.

(gentle music) There is something inside all of us that wants to create and the arts helps bring that out.

It overcomes our limitations and it helps us fulfill ourselves.

Getting past the disabilities, the little boxes we put one another in, the labels we put on one another.

Art kind of transcends all of that.

My name is Juan Miller and I'm the Executive Producer of Vulcan's Forge Performing Arts Collaborative, and also Chairman of the Board.

Basically, we are a production company for people with disabilities in the region.

We serve challenged artists with the help of unchallenged artists.

Our idea is total inclusion.

We hope to bring the art of challenged artists to Cincinnati public with both challenged and unchallenged artists alike.

Push, pull, expand, retract, expand, retract, other side.

Push, pull.

I'm a creative person, I'm a creative soul.

I enjoyed the workshop.

It's also fun and inspiring for me because I'm seeing people with various types of disabilities and to watch them, the enthusiasm, they were living!

And that to me was what it was all about, to enjoy life.

What caused me to work with Juan Miller and others to create Vulcan's Forge is very simple.

A recognition that I was not being valued for the talents and skills that I have.

That my friend, Juan, was not being valued for his talent and skills that he has and that there are thousands and maybe even hundreds of thousands of people like us, who are not being recognized, who are being overlooked for what they can bring to this world.

And Vulcan's Forge is working hard to open up those doors of opportunity.

♪ I want you to see me, I want you to see me ♪ ♪ I want you to see me, I really hope you can see me now ♪ Wheels On Fire was kind of a brainchild of mine.

I'm not sure exactly where I'd heard first about Dancing Wheels but I thought their mission and our mission was so right on-point with one another.

I had to find a way to bring them to Cincinnati.

They have been performing for 40 years now, I think this is their 40th anniversary and they are headed by Mary Fletcher.

I know her mother was a dancer, and so she always wanted to be a dancer, and didn't let her disability stop her.

(bright music) (audience cheers) We see ourselves as an umbrella organization, trying to bring together various groups that serve disabilities, together into a cohesive performance art.

We also would like to be able to teach people the arts and drama and writing and theatrical production and those kinds of things, farther down the line is where we see ourselves going eventually.

Not even the sky is the limit and the possibilities for any and everybody, especially in the arts, if you can believe it, you can create it.

There's an audience out there for it and we would like to take your art and bring it to that audience.

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.

Now let's meet a Florida artist who celebrates music on canvas.

She paints portraits of iconic jazz singers and musicians in an impressionistic style.

Here's her story.

(pensive music) My name is Lisa Martin Smallwood, a.k.a.

Liasi.

I'm originally from Philadelphia.

Currently, I'm living out here in Tampa Bay and I am a visual artist.

I work with different mediums such as ink, pastel, and acrylic.

The style is more like impressionistic.

It's like I'm making a suggestion, okay?

And I'm going to give a little bit of detail, but I'm not going to go into it completely.

I'm going to create an illusion to the brain of like, okay, wow, you know, oh, he's really blowing that sax or that trumpet or, you know, playing that piano like my Nina Simone.

I love Nina, you know, and the shades that I use suggests that it's abstract, but at the same time it has a surreal feel to it.

I can paint a painting and make it look like a photograph, but I like to experiment and to project, you know, the feeling that it gives me.

(cheerful jazzy music) I think what really separates Lisa from other artists is that she really adds depth and passion into her artwork and I think also the use of colors to capture the ambiance and give the viewer that in depth expression so that they feel like that they're actually a part of that piece.

[Lisa] Is Jason here?

Okay.

Hey, Jerri.

[Jerri] Hey, how are you, Lisa?

[Lisa] I'm good.

I got my Aretha Franklin piece.

Jason, how's it going?

Excellent.

How are you?

I'm good.

Oh, this looks magnificent.

Thank you.

My favorite Art Place is one of my favorite places.

I love that piece.

You and me both.

I wish she was singing to us right now.

Well, you know, I would sing, but I don't do that.

(Lisa laughs) They have welcomed me into this establishment.

I mean, to see the whole production is like to me, a class trip.

And they work on my art.

They treat it great.

They do my reproductions.

Now, why are you rotating it?

Basically so the highlights from the shiny of the metallic.

Right.

I first met Lisa while she was doing a live painting exercise in our gallery in St. Petersburg.

We had a musician playing there and she was painting him live as he played.

And I was just blown away by what she did.

So we talked her into coming here.

She showed me some of her artwork, which I fell in love with immediately, and we just kept talking about artwork.

We hit it off right away.

She ran into a situation where she needed a framer to have a piece fixed up, and she came out to visit us and met the team and saw our operation and was very impressed.

[Lisa] Oh, that looks good.

We should save this and then we'll get a shot.

So once we get the artwork captured and the color correct, then we can spread it out onto a myriad of things, depending on the venue of where the artwork is going to be sold at or displayed.

♪ R-E-S-P-E-C-T ♪ [Jason] I knew we'd get her singing.

(Lisa laughs) The music actually, I don't know, it's just like in me, you know, every guitar note you plug or whatever it's like every stroke for me, you know, and that's how the two come, you know, together.

Lisa is from Philadelphia, and Philadelphia has a music scene unlike any others, and her father was in the music world.

And you can just tell that it's in her blood.

So when she paints musicians and performances and that type of stuff, it just, the paintings sing.

You can see the music, you can feel the energy, you can feel the emotion that comes out.

And I think that that's one of the things that makes her such a successful artist and makes that her paintings of musicians so popular.

So my father, Dowell Smallwood Jr., he was a drummer, a native from Philadelphia, and he played with Johnny Stiles and The Manhattans, which was a jazz group back in the 1950s into the '60s.

My father was a great guy and he has really inspired me and he always encouraged me to continue to paint.

Just the memories and the stories that he would tell me.

I try to put myself there for that moment.

Some of the paintings that I have painted are a lot of times are memories.

It could be his memories that he shared with me.

And I'm just painting it out and laying out, you know, everything in my mind, in my heart that I felt during that thought process, of, you know, processing his story.

I think Lisa's artwork really has a very poetic vibe to it, and she's actually able to capture those poetic expressions, which creates a real synergy with her work.

You can just look at it and begin to just talk about it in a very poetic manner.

Oh my.

Oh, this is so beautiful.

I hope that my artwork can hatch a memory.

Art is very therapeutic and I just want people to enjoy what they're looking at and, you know, open that box of memories.

(energetic 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 #TheArtShow hashtag.

"Beyond the Cape" was a recent exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.

It soared beyond caped superheroes, to explore how contemporary artists are influenced by graphic novels and comic books.

Let's take a look.

(smooth music) They have an urgency about them, there's something very topical.

So the exhibition "Beyond the Cape" is really looking at those artists who are inspired by comics but in different ways.

They are about the environment, politics, race relations.

There are many artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol who are influenced by comics, by pop culture.

But in this you'll find our artists who really are telling a story that's sometimes quite deep, quite dark.

Kerry James Marshall is looking at the streets of Chicago.

William Wiley's tapestry is looking at the shooting of a man who the police thought he was pulling out a gun, but in fact he was pulling out his wallet.

I'm finding right now in this moment, just kind of seeing my work against these other artists' work, is that they actually are speaking clearly without holding back about what is actually important to them and what's actually happening in their period of time that they are living.

My name is Mark Thomas Gibson.

I'm originally from Miami, Florida.

I am an artist.

I'm also an assistant professor at Temple University, Tyler School of Art.

I kind of play with pop culture.

I play with comics, I play with history, I play with like a little bit of everything.

This book had a lot to do with this idea of utopia.

Once I actually start engaging with the practice of drawing, then I'm starting to formulate whatever my actual answer is about that subject.

In this case, this one was utopia and so by the end of it I actually come to an answer for myself and I don't think I could have actually find that type of answer any other way.

Every page is an individual drawing, 350 of them that tell the narrative of my main character.

I use as my protagonist a werewolf character, which is the idea of someone who has been traumatized but then becomes a traumatizer.

I think about that a lot in America, how we have a lot of that.

That kind of continuously, it seems to happen where people become traumatized by either being economically oppressed or seeing a loved one murdered or seeing culture act and respond to them as an other when they are actually a part of the fabric of this country.

And then that gets passed on, like to your kid that gets passed on to the community.

Some of them become paintings, some of them do not.

Most of them do not.

But in this case, this would later become "Library One and Two."

I wanted to kind of show an area that had been lived in and kind of overgrown in thought.

My main character in this narrative that this comes from, don't really know even what time period it is that he's in.

So you have a sword and kind of a hilt, a kind of a spear.

You have like books that are kind of contemporary.

So there's "Utopia" of course.

And then there's "Beloved" you know, by the great Toni Morrison.

I think about books that I've read growing up that told me something or made me think about relationships around slavery, relationships about American expansionism, all of these things that we kind of think about when we're talking around America as these kinds of cannons of like who are we?

What are we?

Part of what I figured out in the whole utopian thing was that it really kind of comes down to communication, so you have to actually work with each other to actually navigate what it is that we want.

This exhibition I think is yet another good example of what we have been pretty good at here and that is to break the boundaries between these silos of art forms where you have the graphic novel, the comic, and you have fine art.

Well here you have this sort of blending of the two.

And it was kind of hard because when you would have that kind of influence in your life and you'd go to an art school per se, they say, oh, that's not art.

And they would throw that aside or kind of demean it or demote it.

Many people throughout history actually worked within illustration, worked within political art, worked within caricature.

It's really kind of embedded in our practice.

And if you go all the way back to Lascaux and look at those like caves, I mean there's some caricature kind of going on in that as well.

So that way in which we kind of think through narrative and sequential art, it's always been present.

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.

Our last story takes us west to Truckee, California.

let's visit three peak designs, where artisans upcycle a staple of their alpine winter landscape into works of art.

Let's watch.

(light music) Three Peak Designs is a company where we source and refurbish vintage ski lift chairs.

So we source chairs, most of them from the 1970s and kind of bring them back to life or people's homes.

I think repurposing things in general is a nice way to reduce waste, but also give life to something that might seem like it's run its course.

And so I think it's just a unique way to kind of bring a product back to life and also use it in a different way.

The ski chairs, as everybody knows, are connected to skiing.

And people in the Tahoe community and outside of the Tahoe community and other ski towns are obsessed with skiing.

And so if they can have something that represents that sport for them year-round and at their house, I think it's something that is pretty powerful.

(cheerful music) We had seen some people doing this in Colorado, and my business partner Ben had thought maybe his woodwork would lend itself to a project like this.

I had just moved to the Tahoe area, wasn't working yet and he asked me if I had access to any ski chairs.

So I just started emailing around town, got a hold of a couple, turned out they looked pretty cool and we finished them up and so we turned it into a business.

The business is mainly set up here in Truckee, Tahoe and we do a lot of the fabrication and installation here in Truckee, Tahoe.

But the woodwork is done in San Francisco where my business partner lives.

Ben does all of the woodwork, the new slats and the wood designs in his shop, and then we bring all of those up to Tahoe and I then install them here on location and then deliver them to the customer's house, which is mainly been in the Tahoe area, but has been as far as Bozeman, Montana.

When we get these chairs, they are what we like to call "in their raw form" so they have definitely been weathered over three to four decades.

So all of the paint is chipped off.

There is a decent amount of rust on these, and there's a lot of work to be done if they want to be brought into the home as a statement piece.

So what we do is we strip it down to the raw metal and its original form, and then powder coating.

So what they're doing there is spraying a powder onto the chair and then baking it in a massive oven essentially to get that paint powder to stick.

And the powder coating, the color you see on the chairs is all done in Marina, at a powder coating shop.

Our ski chairs have lived on the mountain for over three decades, and they aren't really just an object, they have a lot of memories tied to them, they're kind of a unique place, you can meet new people, I have no doubt that people have met their husband or wife on a ski chair.

Just being outside, being refreshed by the outdoors is something that you can kind of associate with these ski chairs.

And it also brings some of that nostalgia for people that have been skiing their entire lives, introducing it to their families, I mean all of that is happening on a ski chair.

And after so many years, these chairs are now moving into their, we'll call it their retirement, so they're getting cleaned up, we're bringing them into people's homes for functional art, is kind of what we like to call it.

(upbeat music) It's kind of amazing to watch these chairs end up on the front porches of people's homes, this sport is that important to people that they want to show that this is something they care about, and that this is a skier's home.

I've been skiing and snowboarding since I was in eighth grade, so working on something like this and tying my passion with the small business that I'm running has been really, really great.

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 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.

(upbeat music) [Announcer] Funding for The Art Show is made possible by: The L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, The George & Margaret McLane Foundation.

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.