In this edition of "The Art Show:" a free-spirited venue kicks off their new music series, (uplifting playful music) photo-realistic drawings of the Great Depression, prints made from nature, and stunning pop-up floral flash art.

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

(cheerful creative music) (cheerful creative music continues) 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.

Today, we're coming to you from The Brightside in Dayton and I have two beautiful guests here to tell us all about this fantastic venue.

Carli Dixon is the co-owner and general manager of The Brightside and really put her creative stamp on making this space a reality.

Libby Ballengee is The Brightside's music booker and promoter.

You might also know her as Dayton's music insider through her long-running music blog.

Carli, Libby, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you for having us.

So before we get into the nuts and bolts, tell me what is The Brightside?

The Brightside, at a very just basic level, is a really approachable, affordable, and flexible event space for private and public events with things like free parking and really nice amenities.

But at a more philosophical level, it is kind of a welcoming to the West side and the East side, to the North side and the South side.

Our town, like any town, has the possibility of divisions and things that make us feel like we're different from one another and this is a place where we welcome you to The Brightside.

Where everyone feels welcome, we hope, and that is the aesthetic and the environment that we hope to create here.

What's really great about The Brightside, now, this question is: what made you decide to undertake the huge endeavor?

I mean, a rehabbing, this old building.

I mean, this is a lot.

And so, and why'd you do it?

Dayton was in a real place of decline and we attempted to just, "Oh, let's relocate somewhere else.

Let's do something else with our time."

We realized very quickly, this is our home.

This is the place where as working artists we were supported and able to make a living and we decided to go in full force and support it.

And the best way for us that we've found, after trying all sorts of volunteer programs and et cetera, was to own some real estate.

And that that's really where it began.

Did we think that we were gonna be renovating this building?

Not necessarily.

It was part of a three-building plat and it was just along for the ride.

We thought we'd sell it to someone else, but then friends and people that we know in the community, "Hey, I could use some space."

"Hey, how about I'll take some space.

Well, how hard could it be?"

And so our philosophy for the first five years was how hard could it be?

(Libby and Rodney laughing) So, yeah, it was hard but doable.

And it was through baby steps and through really just responding to the community and the needs people had.

Was music and performance a part of the original vision, and Libby, did you step in for your role to do that?

(Libby laughing) Is that how this happened, how did music become the thing?

Well, I started booking shows a few years before I met Carli.

And so, I was working with a venue in Riverside, and I had some shows in Troy and small shows at bars, which, really, it's overkill to have a promoter, (Rodney laughs) but, you know, I was always really seeking a space downtown that was a bigger venue that had a space for a promoter.

So people always talked about opening spaces like this, like a mid-tier room, and, you know, didn't materialize it.

It's very difficult from a building standpoint, but there's a lot that's really hard about all of this.

And so, you know, it was just kind of fishing around and that's how we got connected, because, you know, I definitely put it out there that I was looking for a mid-tier room, space to be doing concerts, and I'm so glad that we got connected.

And then yeah, we were doing concerts, and kind of we said, "Yes," to everything the first year.

-(Rodney laughing) -We had pro wrestling- -Oh my God, that's right.

-We had drag and burlesque, we had freak shows.

We just kind of said, "Yes," to everything.

And then we were shut down after the first year for COVID.

And so, we have rode that roller coaster a little bit.

Last year, we had the up and down with masks and vaccines.

And so, you know, now, we kind of felt like we got to a place of like, "Okay, now I think we're really, really doing this again."

And Carli generously offered me the official position of music booker and promoter, so....

I love that and so kind of in that same vein, tell us about your new music series, 'cause your, but not who's coming, because that would be stale in a month, -(Libby laughing) -so you want to kind of keep it a little mysterioso, but share with us what's the next part of the journey, now that we're coming out of COVID, with the music scene?

We're kind of adopting at performing arts schedule, so it'll be September through early May.

And it's really going to be part of, you know, bands that are up-and-coming that you haven't heard of yet, but you will soon.

And you're going to get to see them before it's hard to get a ticket at one of these big places.

And so, what we're really trying to do is something curated, that is very thoughtful and stuff that we really think that the Dayton community, whether it's our history of loving funk music, or the alternative rock we're known for, we're discovering new, whether it's national touring.

But we're also discovering new with our local bands, we've been blessed to be able to host the Battle of the Bands, but lots of local showcases.

But again, some of those touring acts that are up-and-coming that we've actually been able to see some of the bands that we've performed now graduate to the Levitt Pavilion, so... You told me about that as well, yeah.

It's all kind of part of that ecosphere and cycle that we're excited to be part of.

So what has the community response been to The Brightside?

We've had fantastic support.

I would say for our private events, and people in the private event community, we have a very robust booking schedule that is filled up with a lot of private events.

So the amenity that we've built into the space to support that side of what we do, has just received a glowing response.

From the standpoint of the public events, anytime the community does make it here, the first thing most everybody says is, "I never knew it was there.

(Rodney laughing) How long has this been here?

This place is amazing."

So once we get people here, they're part of our family.

They really become part of this place.

And they're a kind of permanent fixture in the things that we do.

It's just getting everybody here.

So the big thing is getting the word out.

I love it.

And so I'm kind of curious, what's your vision for the future of Brightside now that you're up and running and COVID's kind of a little bit in our rear-view mirror?

I really want to have a space where independent artists feel like they can exercise their creativity.

And I want that to be a community staple that people really feel like they have access to.

And that when there's an event here, they cannot miss it because it's so cool.

And we don't do events constantly.

We do have the private events.

And so when we do have a public event, it's something that's really special and we hope that you join us for it.

I love it.

And I cannot thank you enough for hosting us here at The Brightside.

It's a fabulous space.

I know I'm a fan.

I'm a fan-boy.

And thank you so much to my two beautiful guests, Libby and Carli.

It's all been great times.

Thank you.

Thank you for all the support.

You're welcome.

-Appreciate it.

-Appreciate you.

(playful creative music) 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.

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based artist, Joel Daniel Phillips believes a return to realism in art could help Americans trust each other again in this era of fake news and misinformation.

Armed with a pencil, he's created a series of photo-realistic drawings based on images from the Great Depression.

As you watch our next story, you might find yourself asking, "Is this real?"

(old-timey jazz music) So I moved to Tulsa five years ago for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

We subleased our space in San Francisco, and said "We'll back in a year and we're just go do a year of, you know, experimenting in Oklahoma."

Oh, no!

(laughs) I know!

Like a pro.

(laughs) You get to Tulsa and there are people on the sidewalk saying, "Hi, how are ya?"

And you're like, "Oh my God, this is wild."

It's a whole different space and it really did welcome us with open arms.

I think I am officially a Tulsa artist.

That's a strange thing to say out loud.

"Hi mom.

I'm from Tulsa now!"

I play on the Tulsa City Saturns.

I'd never played baseball in my life, actually.

Yeah, so I showed up and immediately took a ball to the throat and then drank some more whiskey and said, "I love this, this is amazing."

I think everything else I do has ego involved.

I don't know.

(old-timey jazz music continues) I believe that there's a conversation that we are all sort of having collectively right now as a society about what truth is.

We're in the era of fake news.

-Fake news- -Fake news- -Fake news- -False news- -Deepfake videos- -Misinformation- Fake vaccine cards.

(crank clicking) How do we wrestle with this moment?

How do we learn to believe each other again?

Why does realism matter in an art world that has in most ways moved past it?

(gentle violin music) And I want to create an experience in which the viewer walks into a room and goes, "Oh, wow, look at that photograph."

And they step up closer and they realize it's not a photograph, it's a drawing.

And then they have to ask themselves, is this a real image or is it not?

(old-timey newsreel music) [Announcer] Is this real?

Realism in the era of fake news.

Starring Joel Daniel Phillips.

You know, I think that black and white simplifies things.

Whether it's a hand or an oyster shell, it's all there.

But it removes the complication of color.

So it allows me, when I'm working, to really sort of hone in on what I feel like is the meat-and-bones of a thing.

"Killing the Negative" is a collaborative series of drawings and poems in response to censored government photographs from the Great Depression.

We have a tendency to think of it as a time in which everyone was sort of equally screwed.

And the reality of the Great Depression was that it actually had a similar socioeconomic breakdown to what COVID has had for Americans and people all over the world.

(subdued woeful music) A couple of years ago, I was on a photo blog and I stumbled on this photograph.

And then there was this big black dot in the middle of it.

Somebody had taken a hole-punch to the original film negative.

I stumbled on this whole set of photographs that were censored during the Great Depression.

Most people in America have seen the famous photograph by Dorothea Lange, "The Migrant Mother."

That photograph was commissioned by the U.S. government during the Great Depression to bring attention to the plight of migrant workers who were by and large leaving Oklahoma and Kansas.

What folks don't know is that there was a man in a darkroom who was deciding what was seen and what wasn't seen.

And his name was Roy Stryker.

Roy Stryker's boss told him, "Your goal is to show America to Americans."

The point of these photographs was actually to sell the New Deal.

Here's a problem.

Here's this woman on the side of the road needs your help.

And Congress needs to vote for that and we need to fix this problem.

There were eventually about 270,000 photographs that were shot, of which, approximately 100,000 were killed, whether they were hole-punched or thrown away.

So I fell in love with those images.

(hopeful banjo music) "What rain must come for black men to wet?

What sound makes us fall?

The deep rivers of my hands, dry creeks my forehead.

To Arkansas heat I long to forget."

[Joel] I found that image the first time I went through the archive.

And I was like, "Oh my God, this image is as powerful as 'The Migrant Mother' photograph and I've never heard of it.

How is that possible?"

There's a visible interaction between this African-American agricultural laborer and the photographer who was a white man.

"Who are you to pause my sunup with your whiteness and picturebox to demand stillness in a land that little rewards idle?"

Joel and I are both Tulsa Artist Fellows.

And so one day I happened to be passing by his studio and the door was open, and I saw the initial studies of this project.

I was immediately struck by the gentleman's facial expression.

And I said, "These images, these people need narratives."

I said, "They need voice."

"Everyday, the sun is angry.

This coat tired as my hope, starving little ones on my brow harvest a dream buried in dust.

Good day, sir."

(upbeat funk music) This is number 60 in the "Killing the Negative" series.

He's an oyster shucker and he's sitting on the front step of a weathered building shucking oysters.

I think this actually might be the largest drawing I've ever made.

It changes the way you interact with it.

It becomes like there's a person in the room instead of an image in the room.

I think that looking at historical images sort of forces you to wrestle with the complexity of our history and how it could've gone a different way.

It wasn't predestined.

I don't know if it fixes anything.

(laughs) I wrestle with that a lot actually.

Yeah, I wish I could say like, "Yeah, I believe in art and its ability to change the world."

Some days I do.

Some days I don't.

I do it, which maybe tells you that I do as much for me as for anyone else.

You know, this is my way of wrestling with these questions.

And if, you know, even if it doesn't result in somebody else rethinking or reconsidering something, at the very least I've wrestled with it, and I've learned something from it and I think that's valuable.

(bat cracks) (cheerful creative music) 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.

Now, let's travel south to the Florida Keys.

Artist Lisa Lee Herman practices the traditional Japanese method of fish printing called gyotaku.

Let's watch to see how she turns the catch of the day into a timeless work of art.

You can live anywhere on the planet and do this style of art.

He's gorgeous.

Yep.

[Fish Holder] If you dip him down like this.

Yeah.

Looking down.

My name is Lisa Herman.

I'm a marine artist here in the Upper Keys and I'm the owner and operator of Gallery of the Arts.

The Keys is definitely an influence on my art, hands down.

I mean, you can't ask for a better color palette than what we have here.

(calm ethereal music) I really like where the horizon line, I'm just in love with it.

I mean, you get to see it so often here, and not being in the Keys, whenever I leave the Keys, I don't realize how rare it is to see that horizon line, you know?

And it's just so comforting to see that.

So whenever I feel like painting, I feel like that's got to be there for me.

It stabilizes it.

And when you look at the horizon on the ocean, it never looks the same.

There's something simple and, you know, primitive about it.

It's cool and I think that's what brought me into the gyotaku process.

It's very straightforward.

It's very clean.

Gyotaku is very interesting.

Originally, it started back in the 1800's in Japan, and it was a way fishermen could record their catches, basically, before cameras existed.

And because of this interesting layout and how they recorded it, it started to turn into its own form of art.

This is neat.

He's cute.

Each fish has their own little characteristics and personalities.

Where like this guy's little character, he's missing a little part here and a little part there.

So each time I do it, I get a little bit more familiar with the fish, and I make sure I pull up all those little different dorsal fins in there to make sure their tail's like as fanned out as it can.

I try to capture the fish like, as lit up and excited as it is in the wild.

This one's perfect sized.

I like to get a picture of the exact fish that I've printed so when I come back to the gallery, I can make sure all of its little spots, all of its eyes are exactly the way this one looked.

Some of the mutton snappers have really, really cool, teal, like blue, around their eyes.

And I always want to make sure I want to get it just right.

It's like their little signature.

Each fish that I do gyotaku prints of, 100% will be something that everybody can share and eat.

I'm not ever going to take a fish that has just the purpose for printing.

It has to be utilized beyond that.

So when I am doing that, I'm thinking about, you know, this fish, we're going to eat it afterwards.

So I only use very non-toxic water-based acrylic paints.

I do it traditionally where I use a very, very black acrylic paint and I always do the fish in black.

And when I pull it off, after that I do the embellishments.

Some clients want just the eye embellished, some clients want the whole fish embellished in color.

Some want it just black and white as is.

So there's a lot of different stages and ways you can do these fish.

Every time you pull that paper off, it's like a big surprise.

Yep.

Perfect.

As I was exploring doing the gyotaku on fish, I thought, you know, it'd be really cool to do it on other nature.

One of my friends has a big beautiful butterfly garden so I asked her if she ever finds any of the butterflies that passed on, didn't make it, let me, you know, see if I can somehow make them live on forever.

And I got my hands on a couple of butterflies and they turned out magnificent.

I do use different inks instead of the paint.

The paint was a little bit thick on the butterfly.

So I use just sumi inks.

And now it's, I mean, I've tried dragonflies, bumblebees, different leaves, different seashells.

(gentle ethereal music) I'm always experimenting with different style canvases.

Like, I love my stretched white canvas, but there's something exciting and challenging about painting on oyster shells.

I've painted on sand dollars, the swordfish, and now doing the gyotaku is very, very interesting where it's not your basic plan.

You know how to go about it.

Some different shells, some different bills, they kind of tell you what they want and you kind of explore what that shape is and what that can house for that specific piece of nature.

(calm ethereal music continues) (upbeat playful 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.

Our last story takes us to New York City, where a new kind of pop-up street art has taken the city by storm.

And it smells as lovely as it looks because it's crafted entirely of flowers.

Check it out.

(gentle music) Flowers were always part of my DNA.

I come from a family of gardeners, but I went from landscape and horticulture to the flower world and here I am.

The flower flash was something that was kind of bopping around my brain for a while.

It didn't have a name.

It was sort of more this vague idea of how to take flowers and fuse them in an urban city environment.

So it finally got to the point a couple years ago where I was very satisfied with business, things going super well, and kind of needing to feel creatively energized again, but also feeling the need in my own way to give back.

I'm clearly surrounded by flowers on a daily basis, as are my clients, and we tend to get immune to how beautiful they are and what an expression of joy they are to people.

And it's really about taking that which is so beautiful and ephemeral and kind of merging it with the texture and the grit of our urban city life and creating something that's very spontaneous, very fleeting, and sort of abstract.

We spend a great deal of time, you know, really finding locations that feel New York first.

So that combined with the season, what's looking good and also, the flower flashes are an accumulation of old flowers in the flower market, stuff that's left over from the studio and stuff that's left over from events, so we have to work with that as well.

These flashes happen very quickly.

We plan it to a certain extent, then we just do it and see what happens.

There's a little anxious energy, you know, it's usually dark.

A lot of times it's cold.

(upbeat hopeful music) The flowers are for New Yorkers.

They are for the people, and I want people to take them and interact with them.

Obviously, take a picture, but take a blossom, take some home.

New York is New York.

All these people piled on top of each other.

To me, you know, the two biggest luxuries in the city are nature and space, so the more that we can have these kind of soft moments of just beauty and joy for no other reason.

"Thank you!

Yes."

[Lewis] Even if it's for an hour or ten minutes, its job is done.

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

You'll fund 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."

I'd like to thank our friends at The Brightside in Dayton for hosting "The Art Show" today.

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(cheerful creative music) (cheerful creative music continues) (cheerful creative music continues) (cheerful creative music continues) (cheerful creative music continues)