[Voiceover] 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," poetry is transformed, (bright music) crayon art of a different kind, (bright music) ancient brush strokes bring history to life, (bright music) and smooth moves at the roller rink.

(bright music) It's all ahead on this edition of "The Art Show."

(bright lively 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.

In 2021, University of Dayton graphic design students we're tasked with an unusual challenge, transform the poems of Dayton spoken-word artist, Sierra Leone, into visual art.

Their work resulted in an exhibit called "Walking With Words" that celebrates humanity, community, inclusivity and diversity.

Let's visit The Hub at the Dayton Arcade to learn more.

(gentle music) [Sierra] "Walk with me through a city within a city.

Walls holding a cornucopia of heritage.

Passageways and corridors filled with antique joy and treasured wisdom."

The Hub is really designed to be an immersive, experiential learning platform for students as well as a space for start-ups to really develop and grow.

The Hub is a joint venture between the University of Dayton and Dayton's Entrepreneurs' Center.

And it really creates this unique blend of active businesses who are there every day working, and students coming in to take class on a daily basis, and making those connections.

We want The Hub to be a space for everybody, so the idea of a community artist in residence really seemed like a natural fit.

Sierra Leone is the first artist in residence for The Hub.

And so we were talking to Sierra about doing a piece for us for the opening.

Sierra's work also speaks directly to the city of Dayton.

A lot of her poems, all of the things that she does really talks about space and place, but also can speak to the vision of what we hope the space to become, not just where we are now but where we see this space growing into.

My vision was to write the commission poem (chuckles) but the vision that was a much greater vision was the commission of a body of work, was to work with students, was to form alliances in spaces that I had never been in.

Luckily, Sierra, as that first artist in residence, she has also had experience on her own working in education settings.

And so we thought that that would be a great opportunity for her to come in and kind of work directly with the students on the things that they're learning in class, but also just her life experience as an artist.

The first charge for the students was to create a 24 x 36 poster.

There's a lot more at stake when you are visualizing someone's poetry, someone's inner feelings (laughs) and life's work.

This whole process, for me, has felt very vulnerable.

I think any time a poet is going to put themselves on display, you are so vulnerable.

You are saying to the world, "I'm healed enough for you to look at me, fully, completely, and to judge that."

I gave the students the whole body of work over a weekend.

And I said, "You're gonna read all of these, and then Sierra will come in and tell you the background story and then do a spoken word reading of that chosen poem."

So I feel like that connection for them, with her, and then getting all that background information, it's just great research for the designer 'cause they're thinking about image making, they're thinking about inflection.

When did you audibly hear her get louder?

When did she get softer?

When did she feel abrupt?

When could you see a punctuation or a shift in the line break?

So, typographically speaking, the whole time, they're trying to think about, "Is that bold?

Does a color come to mind?"

And then they had the larger installations as group projects.

So they had to learn what it was like to design independently but as a whole because your work is gonna affect everyone else's work when you're exhibiting it together.

And then what it's like to have to come together under the same pressures and now design this whole new thing with this material that's gigantic, that's more environmental.

She also had a whole nother layer with QR codes, so if you were walking up to the piece, you could hear her deliver it and do her spoken word of the poetry.

And I think it just gave it a whole different dimension of experience.

Walking With Words, it's like, "Oh, how do we move the body through?"

How can you use type and language to move someone through a space?

Extracting those moments, being playful with it in this space was really exciting.

You think of poetry, you think of book, you think of page, you think of something that's very flat.

But this overall exhibit really heightens that to a new level of adding in audio, adding in visual.

You can sense it and you can touch it in ways that you don't typically think about when you think about poetry.

I want you to imagine giving someone a Word document, and this is what you get in return.

I always describe the exhibit as an opportunity to walk with me as a poet, as a practitioner, as an artist and as an entrepreneur.

It's my perspective.

It's my lived experiences and voice.

So, it is a piece of me, every single step of the way.

I think the additional beauty of the exhibit is that it's not just in The Hub.

It flows beyond the walls, and it impacts the rest of the Dayton community.

Walk with me, walk with my words, walk as a Spirit of a Flyer.

And from that space, you leave, and if you wanna visit the Levitt and continue to walk with the words, they can stop by the library and take in how we've gathered, our Gathering Space, as a community.

And from that space, you're traveling over to the Wright-Dunbar District and the Greater West Dayton Incubator.

And from that space, we close the exhibit right in a beautiful space where the art ends, but it begins again with Baba "Bing" Davis.

And so, for me, it is a walk with me, a walk with my lived experiences.

(bright 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.

For many of us, a box of crayon stirs up memories of our earliest art making experiences.

Our next artist uses crayons to create artistic portraits, but the results might not be what you expect.

Let's visit his studio in Granville, Ohio to learn more.

(quirky music) So I've always done art when I was little, but I've also always been really interested in science and math.

So when it came time to go to college, I went the route of physics.

And so that, you know, was my undergraduate degree.

I usually come up with ideas that are somewhat masochistic.

I don't know why, but like I have this idea in my head and then I need to accomplish it.

I don't know if it's gonna work or not, whether it's like sewing human hair onto an umbrella, or just doing something that's ridiculously labor intensive.

I mean, you know, sticking shredded paper back together to form an image, or, you know, stacking 20,000 crayons.

And usually, some of these ideas I have, I just don't see anybody doing them.

I met Chris when I first opened the Sherrie Gallerie.

The Sherrie Gallerie focuses on three dimensional art forms.

And Chris chooses the medium to help express his concepts and ideas.

And that's exactly what the Gallerie is about.

And he calls his works, the crayon works, paintings.

(quirky music) [Chris] I think of it like a photograph made of pixels, but each pixel is actually a crayon.

[Sherrie] He makes all of his own crayons.

Initially, I did look into using Crayola crayons for my first piece.

And I find that they only made like 128 different colors, for the most part.

They were expensive.

I could buy them, they were a dollar a piece.

The material that they were made out of was paraffin wax, so it's a wax that's not gonna hold up over time.

And then, finally, nobody buys light crayons.

So when you bought a box of them, everything was dark.

(crayons clattering) After working on the computer, I'll finally get what I call an indexed photograph, which is a photograph that has a certain number of swatches or colors, and those swatches or colors is what I'll use to cast the batches of crayons.

Then it's just a matter of assembling based on the map that I create.

And then when it's assembled, I'm able to then flip it around.

And at that time, it's usually a little bit of work to fix certain elements, even though everything is usually looks photorealistically correct, there are elements that you sometimes need to enhance.

So I'll pull crayons in and out until it looks or feels right.

(quirky music) [Sherrie] You wanna be close to see what is it?

Oh, my gosh, it's crayons.

And then you step away and you engage in it at a distance to see the image come into full focus.

Even though when you see the pieces, in the end, they feel like you're seeing something that feels very photorealistic.

The closer you get it to it, you realize there's just not that much information.

Your brain is actually filling in all that information for the work.

So the Melodie series, I started several years ago, I created it based on a portrait of my daughter.

At the time, I think she was like 13 or 14.

I got to thinking maybe I could do a pop art type of thing where I could take the same image and just reinterpret it over and over in different ways.

He plans to do 100 in his lifetime.

And I'm currently on number 79.

And it's just a great way of like pushing myself, because I'm not really competing against a lot of people on the planet with this process because it's so ridiculously hard, but I'm competing against myself.

(quirky music) I think just the nature of the crayon is so playful, and everyone starts off being an artist.

And I think crayons, it's the place where people start.

It's affordable and people love them.

And I know when I was a kid, I always felt a twinge of guilt like if to use the beautiful crayons, 'cause they looked so gorgeous when you opened the box.

If you were lucky enough to get 64 different colors, you almost didn't wanna use them because they were just like, there was so much potential there.

It just looked so beautiful.

So maybe that is a little bit of what people think of when they think of my work.

I've been working with the crayons for maybe more than a decade now.

So I've got all these leftover crayons downstairs and I don't throw them away 'cause I've worked so hard to make them, so hundreds and thousands of crayons.

And I thought, well, it would be kind of interesting to see what these crayons would look like if they were melted.

But what I'm using 'em in is like little wax mosaics and creating a series of portraits.

I think I'm choosing mathematicians just because they haven't been represented very much in the art community, as well as my background being in physics.

I feel like they deserve to be part of the contemporary cannon of portraits.

I'm gonna be the one making them.

As long as I'm able to create and have fun as an artist, I think I'll be good.

I don't see myself running out of ideas anytime soon.

(bright 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 head west to Reno, Nevada.

Artist Caroline Young grew up in Hong Kong.

She explores her heritage by painting on silk, bringing to life characters from Asian history, legend and folklore.

Here's her story.

(gentle music) In ancient times in Yunnan province, there lived a magical songbird called the noguello, with the sweetest singing voice.

The people loved listening to it, but none more than a beautiful village maiden who would become lovesick if she skipped even a day of it.

Every morning, she would go into the forest and lose herself in the song of the noguello.

She cherished its memory, and she began to sing like noguello had sung, of the joys and sorrows of her people.

(gentle music) I grew up in Hong Kong.

My parents were expatriate American Chinese living in Hong Kong.

And just like you growing up in the U.S., you hear about Cinderella, you hear about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Well, we heard about Chang'e, we heard about Sisha.

These are people from Chinese history and Chinese mythology.

So when I started painting as a career in Honolulu, there was no one representing the Chinese culture over there.

And so I started painting that.

It became more interesting than just a pretty picture.

It had depth, it had meaning.

And in a way, people were learning about the Chinese culture through my paintings.

(lively music) These stories have been handed down by word of mouth through thousands of years, as long as the Chinese civilization has been in existence.

And because they're handed down by word of mouth, you'll find different endings or different versions of the same story, which is really interesting.

(lively music) (gentle music) Guan Yin is the goddess of mercy.

She's the epitome of beauty and benevolence.

She's said to travel from heaven to Earth on the back of the mighty dragon.

She's also the patron saint of sailors.

When sailors get into a fierce storm at sea, they pray to Guan Yin to save them, and she's seen riding through the waves on the back of the mighty dragon to the rescue.

(gentle music) I take my inspiration from stories that I read, and I do research into the legends and the history.

And as I'm reading the story, an image will pop into my mind, and that is what I paint.

I work in watercolor, acrylic, and gouache.

I actually mix all the three mediums together, anything that's watercolor.

And basically, I water all the paints down till it's a light wash, and I put down multiple layers of light washes to build up the intensity of the color and put in the shading.

I work on silk mostly, it's Japanese silk that's been pretreated so it doesn't bleed.

And the silks take a long time to do.

For instance, in the faces and the skin tones, that takes anywhere between 18 to 22 layers of washes.

For a large painting, if it's a woman, it generally takes me, oh, anywhere between two to three months to do.

And that's working six days a week, between 8 to 10 hours a day.

(bright music) As I'm painting it, I'm always thinking about the story, trying to get the mood of the story into the painting.

Every color I put down affects what color I'm gonna put next.

And so sometimes, what I think I'm gonna end up with is not what I end up with, but it's something better.

I hope that when someone sees my work, they will enjoy the story behind it, appreciate it for much more than just a pretty picture, and understand the culture that's behind it.

(bright music) (bright lively 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.

It's time to dust off your skates and check out some smooth moves at the roller rink.

Our last story takes us to Tampa Bay, Florida to meet a community of roller skaters who live to express themselves through movement.

Let's watch.

(upbeat music) Skating was my first love before my wife, like before I got married and had kids, skating was my first love.

I started skating actually downtown at Central Park.

After that, I've been skating at United Skates for over 30 years.

So, skating is my happy place.

I think it's so corny to say, but skating saved me.

There is a lot of things that I've gone through in my life, just personally, that I had no outlet for.

And I really didn't know how to express myself any other way.

But when I started skating, it was just freeing for me.

Like not only the music, not only just being able to express myself, but finding people that were just so positive, so caring, and just ready to help.

I never experienced that in my life before outside of my family.

Skating makes me feel alive.

Like when I hit the floor, it's like just me on the floor and the music.

Everything else inside your reality just melts away.

Skating puts me on cloud nine.

It's my release on life.

It's my break.

It's my love.

I think roller skating really is an art because everything we do, it's just seen in our movement.

Like, there's no talking involved.

I could see a skater rolling around the floor and I can just feel their energy.

And I feel like when you watch someone who's skating, no matter what style it is, you can interpret everything that person is bringing to the floor at that point.

With roller skating, you put your own twist and flavor to it.

Once you're comfortable on your skates, I just feel like its endless what you can do.

The skating community in Tampa is changing as far as like, there's a lot of different people from a lot of different places.

So we get people from Virginia, people from Chicago, New York, D.C.

So it's just starting to be a melting pot of different skaters in Tampa.

Usually, you go out of state to see different skaters.

So it's just getting to be where you can see a little bit of everything in the house.

The styles of skating, I'll give you a rundown of them.

Fast backwards is from Philly.

They skate fast, backwards, all the time for some reason.

No matter what the song is, fast backwards.

(bright upbeat music) You have JB, which is out of Chicago, James Brown music.

A lot of the music that they have, they take samples from James Brown's music and put that in there.

They do remixes, and they take the original and mix it also.

My main style would be fast backwards and JB.

Loved it ever since I got introduced to it.

[Rashad] The style of that skate is New York/New Jersey style, which is to me, my favorite.

[Al] They do a lot of pivots and turns and spins and stuff like that.

[Rashad] Trains and trios is a part of New York/New Jersey style.

That's when normally trio is three, holding hands, would have a movement all together, unison, one-and-one.

Trains could be from 4 to 15 people, even 20 to 30 people.

(upbeat music) Then you have sliders, which you have two different kind of sliders.

You have Chicago slides, where they're doing more of a split, like they'll come from halfway off the floor, and then they'll go into it, get down low on one leg, and then they'll go into a split.

And then you have a slider that comes from Detroit, where they have all four wheels on the ground, and they'll be turning sideways and sliding across the floor, either with a train of people.

So they do more of the old school, artistic style skating, but I mean, they're very smooth with it.

I don't have a specific style that I do.

I like a little bit of everything.

I just feel like, you know, I wanna be diverse and be able to go to Chicago and do a little bit of JB, go to New York and still be able to get on a train.

I just try to stay diverse.

I don't wanna just do one style.

Skating inspired me to, I guess, just become the man and the husband and the father that I am today.

I mean, I met my wife at the skating rink.

My kids are into skating.

And I wanna have a legacy where people from the Tampa Bay area remember me, say, "Oh, I remember Big Al.

Yeah, he used to skate at United Skates," or, you know, "He used to host a skate party," or as someone that loves skating, and you know, want it to continue in the next generation and the next generation.

I just think it's a real experience in the energy that you get at the skating rink.

You wouldn't see it nowhere else but at the skating rink.

You wouldn't see it at a hockey event, you don't see it at a ice skating rink.

It's just roller skating just has a different energy.

It just feels like you can light up the whole neighborhood just with the energy that's in the rink.

I don't know.

It makes me smile just thinking about it.

The Tampa Bay skate community is very much a family.

I've never experienced anything like it.

[Red] I feel like we all have the same passion, we share the same values, and it all just shines through skating.

So it's something that we just can do together to forget about everything else.

I mean, people are always friendly when you come to skate, because you're here doing the same thing that this other person enjoys.

Whether they're old, young, intermediate skater, beginner skater, it's just for the love of skating, we're always welcoming anybody that wants to come and try it out, and just enjoy yourself.

And I don't think I would never stop even if I get an older age.

I think I'm gonna continue to keep skating.

It's a way of life.

(bright lively music) If you wanna 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 it wraps it up for this edition of "The Art Show."

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

(bright lively music) (bright lively music continues) (bright lively music continues) [Voiceover] 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.