[Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by the L and L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Jr. Foundation, the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, the Sutphin Family Foundation.

Additional funding provided by.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

In this edition of "The Art Show, the art of collaboration.

(bright music) Dazzling treasures from Tudor England.

Exploring the process of photo-gravure.

And the sweet taste of edible art.

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

(energetic music) (energetic 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.

Lance Johnson is an aerosol artist.

Originally from New York City, Lance now calls Columbus, Ohio, home.

We met up with him during a recent collaboration with local high school students.

Let's watch and learn more about his passion for collaboration and how he inspires younger artists.

-(upbeat music) -(bell rings) Welcome to the art studio, everybody.

My name is Lance Johnson.

I'm an artist.

I have three rules when it comes to workshops.

One, there's no mistakes in art.

It's all unique, creative expression.

Don't worry about making a quote unquote mistake 'cause there are none.

Two, we have to support each other as artists.

We're collaborating.

The theme of this week is collaboration, and it's important to support each other as artists, right?

So no clowning somebody for what they've drawn or anything like that, right?

And three, have fun.

Just enjoy yourself.

It's like a art studio.

You guys can talk.

You don't have to be quiet.

And have fun.

All right?

And if you have any questions, I'm here.

(bright music) Hilliard Darby High School reached out to me and they saw my work.

They know I used a lot of words of inspiration and I like to collaborate a lot with artists.

So they reached out to me and they were like, "Hey, we have this idea that we wanna create a piece that represent your style, but also incorporates all the community of Darby."

I was like, "It's perfect!

We can do a wall of inspiration where everyone in the building adds a piece to this collaboration and it becomes a legacy piece for them in the school."

(upbeat music) So I was born and raised in the Bronx.

I grew up in New York.

I was surrounded by graffiti and street art, you know, so I was immersed in it, right?

Didn't realize it was art, but I was immersed in that and it resonated with me.

But when I was 14, same age as a lot of these kids, we did the project with, my mom showed me this documentary about the Harlem Renaissance.

And that was a game changer for me because I appreciated the fact that I saw artists that looked like me.

I had never seen that before.

I saw artists collaborating, musicians, dancers, writers, all types of performers coming together, collaborating and creating, and then making magic.

So that resonated with me.

And that was like the spark that made me say, "Oh, I wanna be an artist.

And I wanna collaborate."

So I love collaborations.

And then getting to Columbus, art brought me to Columbus.

I was working with this company that hired me to come paint, and I discovered the city, and I fell in love with the art community.

The art community is so collaborative here and so vibrant that I was like, "Oh, this is amazing!"

And I decided to stay.

(upbeat music) I always think of canvases as walls, graffiti walls.

And there's always these layers of the graffiti wall.

There's the old graffiti covered by the new, there's the urban decay with the paint chips and everything, and the posters torn, and it becomes a history of that wall.

And that's what I wanted to create with this project, a history of this piece.

So we started with layers.

We started with everybody adding one layer of marker.

We used a lot of Sharpies and each person added something to it.

Whenever I see a canvas, I wanna activate it with markings, so I'll use words of inspiration, I'll maybe write my name.

You can draw a picture on it.

And it becomes the soul of your piece, right?

(upbeat music) And then we would cover it with paint and then add another layer to it.

So it becomes a history.

That wall becomes a history of the school almost, and the legacy of that community.

This is the second part of my process.

Once this paint dries, then I go over it again with spray paint or paint markers.

We have a bunch of different colors.

So we're gonna keep going.

(Lance moving paint) And it's just a process.

And by the end of the week, the piece will be completed.

(Lance moving paint) For me, the most important work that I do is with kids.

I love collaborating with young artists and I'm always looking for opportunities to share my process with them.

Because a lot of young artists are very like worried about making mistakes and everything.

And for me, creativity is about freedom.

And I want them to just enjoy the process and have fun.

Think about how it feels when you create, how it makes you feel.

I don't think about the final project.

I think about the process.

You know, the journey to get there.

(bright music) The most amazing thing about being an artist is you can create something that someone that you may never meet can see and be inspired by.

You know, it's a powerful gift that we all have as artists.

Art connects, right?

Art connects us across cultures, across languages, across borders.

(playful music) I want them to be able to walk by it and see how the community came together and how all the community is represented.

It's sort of abstraction because there's so many different markings, but you can sit there and the piece will evolve over time 'cause you can sit there and look at different, like, "Oh, look at that!"

And, "Oh, I didn't notice that!"

And every time you walk by it, you'll see something new.

And to me, that's the beauty of it.

And then also to inspire the younger generation.

You think about how once these kids graduate, these pieces will still be there and the next generation will come in and be inspired by that project as well.

(bright music) If you'd like to learn more about this or any other story on today's show, visit us online cetconnect.org or thinktv.org.

Now let's take a trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art to experience The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England.

This recent exhibit featured dazzling art created during the Tudor dynasty, including tapestries, portraits, and much more.

Take a look.

(period music) [Narrator] The luxury on view in the galleries is by design as the Tudors intended to send a message with their art.

Tudors had a legitimacy issue.

You know, it wasn't without question that Henry VII should be king.

And so as someone who's trying to project legitimacy, art is an incredibly powerful tool.

[Narrator] Unlike royal life today, the grandeur of these portraits, armor and furnishings wouldn't have all been seen by everyday people back in the 1500s.

In fact, much of this collection hasn't been widely seen.

This is a really rare opportunity to see a lot of works.

We have dozens of lenders to this exhibition, over 90 works of art, and a lot of the loans are coming from collections in England.

So they're coming from the Royal Collection, they're coming from the Victoria and Albert Museum, churches in France, in Belgium.

They're coming from Vienna.

All over the world.

[Narrator] The Tudors' reign started in the late 1400s and includes the infamous Henry VIII, known for his many wives, including two he had killed.

This dynasty also gave way to England's first ruling queens, Mary and Elizabeth.

Mary and Elizabeth really had to rewrite the playbook for queenship in portraits.

By the time Elizabeth becomes queen, she has a number of options at her disposal.

And we see the first in the Hampton portrait where she's holding the carnation.

She's a marriageable beauty.

She's set against this elaborate backdrop of fruit and flowers suggesting her fecundity, fertility, the potential heir that might be the product of this union.

And she's around 34 when that portrait's painted and she has recently become queen.

So then we move forward a few years or decades, and by the time she's in her fifties, she's still unmarried and she really embraces the cult of virginity.

So she's basically saying, all right, I've looked at the market, I don't see anything that's for me out there.

Instead, she decides that she will stay a virgin queen.

And in that sense, she's married to her people.

[Narrator] While these portraits may captivate people today, back in Renaissance England, the tapestries would've claimed the spotlight.

We have two textiles that come from the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which is a historical event in 1520, where Henry VIII met his rival, King Francis I, and we know that Henry VIII, who was a very substantial, large, muscular, 6'2", we think, man, and Francis I, who was a bit on the slimmer side.

Henry really underscored this point by arriving the first day dressed, or undressed as the case may be, as Hercules.

And so from there on, they basically brought together some of the most sumptuous tapestries.

A lot of the tapestries that were present there were actually woven with gold thread, which is why the event took the name the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

So the cope, which is a liturgical vestment that we have in the exhibition, and the tapestry that shows the creation and fall of man, which is one of the series of 10, are both woven with gold thread and were present at this event.

[Narrator] The importance of the textile art of this period can be understood today by taking a closer look at some of the royal portraits.

Each of the portraits is really also, you know, kind of an essay in embroidery, in tapestry, in these luxurious textiles.

So you might be looking at a portrait of a queen and she's standing on a Turkish carpet against a cloth of gold hanging, wearing, you know, elaborate gold net work, wearing incredibly elaborate embroidery.

And so I think when you have the sense of the textile as being really the star of the collection, and then the fact that it's featured in a portrait is the sitter telling you something about what they value and how many resources they have.

[Narrator] The artists creating these works also angled for status.

One example of this is with the portrait of Henry VIII's only son, Edward VI, as a baby.

We know that he was a really frail child, but you would not get that sense from the portrait where he looks like the image of his father really.

He's a very robust, healthy baby holding a rattle as if it were a scepter.

And this we know was a gift that was given by the artist Hans Holbein to Henry VIII.

And what better way to curry favor with your major patron than to give him a portrait of his long-awaited male heir.

We also know that Holbein in exchange was given a gold cup and cover because that kind of gesture would not go unrewarded.

-(period music) -Another portrait in this exhibition carries both significance and mystery.

Seen here is Abd al-Wahid visiting Queen Elizabeth to perhaps discuss trade or more discreetly an alliance against Spain.

The idea of of an ambassador from Morocco traveling that kind of distance in 1600 and speaking face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth is really incredible.

It's also the first portrait of a Muslim person painted in England that we know of.

So incredibly fascinating and amazing picture to have on loan.

[Narrator] The impressive works in The Tudors: Arts and Majesty in Renaissance England may seem like truly from another world, but arguably there are still ways to relate to these works now hundreds of years old.

One of the fascinations with royalty now comes from the idea of celebrity, and royals are so much in the news and, you know, part of social media and conversations that we have in a kind of entertainment venue that I think it's easy for us to enter into that kind of spirit when we're looking at these figures.

But also you can think about the more kind of human aspect of the story.

For instance, the idea of, you know, losing a mother in a young age, or the idea of trying to reinvent yourself.

The stress, you know, I think that Elizabeth had of being the queen and trying to convince people that she wasn't an imposter.

She had the knowledge, she had the intellect, she had the power to be in that role.

I think those are the kinds of things that a lot of us can identify with.

No matter what your status is, that struggle for legitimacy and that desire to be understood and remembered is something that transcends time.

(period music) If you need more art goodness in your life, the podcast, "Rodney Veal's Inspired By," is available now.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more and find show notes at thinktv.org or cetconnect.org/inspiredby.

Our next artist is exacting in her work.

Photographer and printer, Carol Munder, uses a painstaking process called photo-gravure that dates back to the late 1800s along with a toy camera from the 1970s to capture and print haunting images.

Here's her story.

(ominous music) My name's Carol Munder, a photographer, and I use the process photo-gravure.

It's a 19th century process where I take an image that I've photographed and through a process it's transferred to a copper plate.

The copper plate is etched.

And then you print on a gravure press to get the final image.

It's a long process.

It takes many days.

There's different stages of the process that have to be done days ahead of time.

Things have to cure.

I work with raw chemistry, so that's mixed together.

(water running) So normally I soak it, you know, like 24 hours ahead of time because the water, I don't know, slowly goes into the paper and it's absorbed and I can kind of pull it out and almost put it on the press right away.

It's a slow process and I love it 'cause it keeps me outta trouble (chuckles).

-(gentle music) -(camera aperture closes) The softness comes through a camera that I use.

I photograph with a Diana camera and it was originally manufactured in the '70s as a toy.

You could buy it for $3.95 cents at the dime store.

It was sort of like the images were soft-edged and it was something that spoke to me.

My father was a commercial lithographer, so that whole printing world maybe runs in my blood or something, I'm not sure.

But I had in my library of books a chapter in a book on photo-gravure, and happenstance I had even highlighted part of the process in there years and years ago.

So if you're gonna do it, you have to be dedicated.

And I taught myself and I made every mistake in the book and then some.

So for some reason, the first time you sort of ink a plate it needs a second time around to really start grabbing the ink properly.

I don't know why that is.

Today you can go online, you can watch videos, you can do workshops.

It was pretty limited back then on what was available.

And I had out-of-print books that I taught myself, and you're much better off taking workshops if you can because there's a lot of things they don't talk about.

Humidity is a real important factor for it.

And they sort of didn't mention that in the books.

(gentle music) I used to photograph in museums a lot.

I was photographing Etruscan sculptures a lot, really close up through glass so you would get refractions.

You know, you go through a lot of different phases, but now I'm photographing just with these wooden sculptures that we've been finding in flea markets that are anonymously carved, almost like outsider art.

Anatomically incorrect sculptures that are just so soulful.

And I started photographing them 'cause I just loved them, and it evolved over the years.

But now I montage an image because with my camera its limitations are it's a plastic lens.

I'm limited by the size of something.

So I will photograph something that's, you know, six inches big and have to put it into a different environment, and you have to adjust those to sort of play some sort of game of making it.

I mean, it's an unusual world that I'm creating.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) [Announcer] 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 we head west to Nevada to meet Roberta Cota-Montgomery.

This artisan takes cookie decorating to the next level using dozens of frosting colors, flavors, and edible adornments all pulled together with her own creative touch.

Let's explore the delicious process of cookie creation with the founder of The Sugared Squirrel Bakery.

(bright music) As a child, I was very creative.

I loved to bake, I loved to paint, and I made my own doll furniture out of match boxes.

I mean, you name it, I was always creating.

I grew up in Lake Tahoe, lived there for 30 years.

Being able to go out my back door and go hiking and just be in such a beautiful place, it was just really special to grow up there.

My mom is such a nurturer and my dad was an artist, and together they just gave me this environment of do whatever you want.

Do dance class.

They made it happen.

And so I was able to try everything I wanted to.

And, you know, they never said, oh, you can't do that.

They grew up with not a lot.

They grew up in families where they worked in the fields and picked fruit when they were little kids.

So knowing that they came from that and opened successful businesses, and I watched that happen, and then they helped me to do that, is just so awesome to me.

(bright music) My name is Roberta Cota-Montgomery and I am the founder of The Sugared Squirrel.

I was making gifts just for friends and family for Christmas one year, and a couple weeks after Christmas I had people calling and going, "Oh, my friends saw those cookies that you gave me.

They wanna know if you'll make some for their child's birthday or their anniversary."

And by February I got my cottage license and started doing this full-time because I was so busy.

The name, The Sugared Squirrel, came about because my friends and family are constantly telling me how I'm such a squirrel.

I just one thing to the other.

So it kind of fit.

You know, sugared squirrel for cookies.

I'm just all over the place with making things all the time.

I definitely feel like a squirrel most of the time (chuckles).

Usually when I get an order, I'll ask for a theme and maybe an invitation or some of the stationary they're using, and then I go from there.

(playful music) Sometimes I'll go on Pinterest and just look up fashion or things like that.

Most of the time I won't look at other cookies on purpose.

I wanna come up with my own designs.

When I come up with a set, I usually try to tie in maybe like a wedding dress say for a wedding or a bridal shower.

I'll ask if I can see a picture of their wedding dress and then I'll try to mimic the shape of the dress or put in the pattern somewhere on the cookies and I'll try to do multiple designs.

It could be a ring or the flowers that they're using for their wedding, things like that.

(playful music) Just knowing a little bit about them before I design their set allows me to add something of their story into that set.

They're just cookies, but they're also special for that event.

That's part of what I love about making the cookies.

I usually start by making my icing, depending on how many orders I have.

(energetic music) Usually it's about five pounds of icing at a time.

And then I'll move on to my colors.

I fill all of my icing bags.

I usually don't use tips in my icing bags, but if I'm doing a floral or something like that, then I will use a special tip for that.

I always weigh my ingredients.

I don't use measuring cups because it's a little more exact that way.

(machine whirring) Once I roll out my dough and cut out my shapes, I always freeze them for about 10 minutes before putting them into the oven so that they don't spread as much.

I bake all of my cookies on perforated silicone mats.

And that helps them not spread also.

After that, I let them cool for a few minutes and then I transfer them to parchment paper-lined sheets.

Once they're cool and ready to go, then I start decorating.

The way I give my cookie some depth is I try to add texture wherever possible.

(energetic music) I also sometimes will use airbrushing or using a paintbrush with edible color.

(energetic music continues) Decorating is definitely my favorite part.

It does become a family thing sometimes.

Everyone just comes together.

My dad, my mom, my kids, everybody's helping me packaging.

They are the best cheerleaders.

I am Mexican and American, and our culture, I feel like everything revolves around food a lot.

As a family, everything was always cooking and baking and eating and celebrations and just a lot of people together all the time.

I think that all translates into a lot of my work as well, and I love being able to represent my culture in that way.

I definitely think of my cookies as edible art.

I do have a rule though.

I always tell people, "If you're gonna buy the cookies, you have to eat them!"

'Cause a lot of people don't wanna eat them, but that's what they're there for, so you have to eat them.

Part of the fun of it is getting to destroy the work of art, seeing it so pretty and then taking a bite out of it.

(energetic music continues) -(upbeat music) -If you wanna see more from "The Art Show", connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

You'll find us at ThinkTV and CETConnect.

And don't forget "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) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) [Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by the L and L Nippert Charitable Foundation, the Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, the George and Margaret McLane Foundation.

Additional funding provided by.

(no audio) And viewers like you.

Closed captioning in part has been made possible through a grant from the Bahmann Foundation.

Thank you.