[Presenter] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by: The L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, The Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, the Sutphin Family Foundation, the Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by: And viewers like you.

Thank you.

[Rodney] In this edition of "The Art Show," creating a place for reflection and healing, (bright music) forming molten glass into functional beauty, a creative outlet for military veterans, and an artist's collaboration with materials.

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

(bright music) (bright 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.

In the early hours of August 4th, 2019, shots rang out in the Oregon district of Downtown Dayton.

A mass shooting had claimed nine lives, injured dozens of others, and ripped a massive hole through the heart of the community.

Area residents soon adopted the motto "Dayton Strong," refusing to let violence rob them of their trust in humanity and faith in a better future.

Five years later, the Seed of Life Memorial was dedicated to honor the victims of the tragedy.

Imagined by a team of four Dayton artists and built by members of the public, the memorial will be a permanent place for the community to remember, reflect, and heal.

Here's the story.

Well, it was a tragic night and the first thing we thought was, how can this happen here?

A young man opened fire in the Oregon district.

He killed nine people and injured dozens more in 34 seconds.

In that moment, everything changed for the worst.

As I watched the shooter walk down the side of the building, fully armored, as he entered onto the curve, he just started shooting.

So I'm like, "This cannot be real."

He walked where we was at.

Me and him was face to face as he had the gun.

As my father was right here, my father was shot five times and not one of those bullets hit me.

Never knew that would've been my last night with my father.

I know that many of us are hurting right now and are uncertain of where we go from here.

Nan Whaley, who was mayor at that time, she pulled a few of us together and said, "We need to do a memorial.

Not to mark the tragedy, but to help heal our community."

And we felt like we needed to do a national search because we wanted to get the best that we could.

I knew that being community-based is that it's gonna take some special talent to put this together.

Terry called me.

He had a vision of a way we could contribute to healing.

And being an artist that believes in frontward facing work to serve community, he was talking my language.

I had worked with Terry and Sierra separately on different projects, and they are amazing artists and they also are community artists.

And so I felt like we aligned in our overall artistic mission.

As we started on the project, I brought to the team's attention that I really do think that we should add James Pate.

And from the moment we met with him, he jumped right in and began to contribute to the process.

[Terry] He's got a unique outlook and history and understanding of the local culture much as anybody.

I was sort of like, what was it, Ringo, the drummer that came to the Beatles after they was?

Yeah, so I was like Ringo Starr.

Yeah, I wasn't the original drummer, you know what I mean?

(laughing) Out of 61 applications and a national call for art, which included designers, architects, public art firms, our winning design is awarded to these four Daytonians.

So they are Terry Welker, Jes McMillan, Sierra Leone, and James Pate.

Thank you.

So I felt like we had the dream team.

We're all very different from each other, but we all love and respect each other as well.

We each bring something different to the table creatively.

My part was to lead the mosaic that the community would create.

Day one.

[Jes] We modified the seed of life to represent nine seed shapes for each of the victims, as it is a symbol that represents all life and death as a cycle and as an idea that there's more than just us.

[Terry] We begin by taking two-inch by two-inch ceramic tiles and breaking them into three or four pieces but the tiles get put back together.

So when you think about the analogy of a broken community being put back together, it's like sometimes we get broken, but we can get fixed.

Having the mosaic events where we have over 5,000 people participate, created that bonding, sharing opportunity.

In the end, it's not just four artists, it's four artists and 10,000 hands.

The message I was sending, if you lost anybody to violence, come and place a tile down in honor of your loved one.

Because I didn't want it to make this seem that it was just about us.

I had people that came from all over the state of Ohio, some from out of state to come and place a piece in honor of their loved one and just in the support of the families.

While we were doing it, we had to take it one day at a time.

It taught me more about grief than I've ever known, and how grief is the universal language.

From the moment we're born, we experience loss.

It really is a glue that binds us all together.

My work came in with interviewing families.

They were quite grateful that we were all present at some of those sessions, that they could talk to us and see us.

They could see that we cared and that we remembered because that was the one thing they said.

It seems like people forget.

They'll forget our loved ones.

They'll forget.

They won't remember.

And that's why my piece was entitled "Re-member The Seed."

For them, that was their word they said over and over.

The bench itself, we call the Unity Bench.

Instead of having a number of individual benches, this is one bench that we all sit together on.

The Unity Bench really became a key element.

The featured component of the memorial is nine growing seed-shaped structures that represent the nine people who were killed that morning.

And altogether when it comes together, it took on a different appearance.

It looks like an eternal flame to me now.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the tragic event that is burned in our hearts and minds.

And so it is only fitting that today we dedicate this sacred space.

At the unveiling, for me to just see the parents, the relatives, did they have peace?

And was this a place that they would come to and sit and remember their loved ones?

And also for our survivors, did they feel seen?

It's been five years.

Five years.

That's a long time to hold something and bring it across the finish line for peace and healing.

I kept saying that this marks the end of the process, but I soon realized the completion of the memorial was just the beginning.

The memorial to me, it shows the resilience of Dayton, Ohio.

[Jes] I hope that it serves as a sacred ground for healing, for life, and I hope that people love it and cherish it.

There's a lot to discover.

All the symbols, all the words that are in the mosaic, the poetry that's engraved in the steel rings, and knowing that there's 5,000 people that did it.

My big hope is that it causes people to pause and think, what can I do to change the world moving forward with a tragic event like this?

To know that it's possible to move on and make your life better.

We can reclaim our joy and our happiness.

[Rodney] 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.

Did you know that glassblowing is a team sport?

Meet Christa Harmon and Gwen Jones, who converted an old Standard Oil service station in Delaware, Ohio into their studio and gallery space.

Take a look.

I get to play with lava on an almost daily basis, and that's my job.

(laughs) So started glass in CCAD in '93.

I had a friend call me up and he asked me if I could help him with some punties and bits, and at the time I had no idea what that meant, and so I went down to the hot shop and helped him out and that was it.

So I took glassblowing the next two years as much as I could.

I had to drop out in '94, worked in a tattoo and piercing studio for six years.

That's when I met Gwen and then with her support and encouragement, started getting back into glass again.

Shortly after that our son was born so when it came down to it, it was easier for her to go back to work because it was much more stable.

And so then I was a stay-at-home parent.

We talked about opening the shop probably for as long as we've been married, which is over 20 years.

So we just decided to open up the shop.

And in the shop I do most of the business stuff.

I do all the marketing, the website, the sales, all of those things.

And then I also assist in the glass blowing so I'm kind of at an apprentice level.

Glassblowing is a team sport.

If you wanna make more complex things, you have to have other people.

That's just really all there is to it.

And stop please.

Beautiful, thank you.

You know, you can do things by yourself, it is more limiting just because you don't have enough hands or enough heat.

There are a multitude of factors that come into that but I mean, when you do stuff by yourself, it has a tendency to be more simplistic.

As soon as something gets into two gathers or more, it can get a little unwieldy for me.

And plus also since transitioning, I'm not as strong as I used to be, so the things I was able to do before, I can't do anymore.

(gentle lilting music) I'm just very fortunate.

I have a lot of support and a lot of people around me that help make this happen.

It's kind of strange being in Delaware and sort of being isolated and being trans and being in glass.

There's not a whole lot of us that are like that.

So there are some non-binary folks and there's some trans folks and then we'll see how things play out in the future.

Glassblowing's a very white male dominated thing but I've seen people try to take strides in making sure it's more equitable for everybody across the spectrum.

And to kind of be a part of that I think would be nice.

Glass is a really immediate process and that's one of the reasons why I love it.

You can make something and when you put it away in the annealer, you're done for the day.

It's not like painting or drawing or clay.

Clay, especially where you have this time where you can go back in and kind of noodle something.

You have to make decisions and you have to make them right away.

You're not forcing the glass into what you think it should be doing, your talking to it and you use the tools to talk to it.

How you use those tools is like just how you talk to anybody else.

If you use the tools aggressively or you use them in a manner they're not supposed to be, then the glass is probably not gonna do what you want it to do.

It's kind of alive.

I guess it goes back to the whole teamwork thing.

You are a team with the glass.

You kind of have to know how to speak to it for it to do what you want it to do.

And if it doesn't like what you have to say, it's not gonna do it.

(gentle lilting music continues) It used to be a Standard Oil service station.

It was built in late 1930s.

I really enjoy taking buildings and putting them back into their original look as much as I can.

So when I saw the space, all I could see was just what it could be.

We're in the gallery space now and we're hoping to have a gallery for emerging artists, glassblowing students from CCAD or OSU or some of the other local places.

It's always interesting to see which people respond to what things.

Some people walk in and they will immediately head for all of the red glass, or other people will walk in and they'll immediately look at the perfume bottles.

And those will remind somebody of their grandmother's perfume bottle collection.

And it's nice to see that little personal connection.

And then when they buy a piece of glass and they take it home, that's a piece of glass that they're gonna have for many years.

And some of them, they'll even pass that piece down to their children.

So it's nice having a little piece of pretty, beautiful things that can go into the next generation.

(gentle bright music) I'm definitely more of what you would call a craftsperson though, not necessarily an artist.

And I'm okay with that.

That's kind of where my happy place is.

I'm most happy making those sort of things.

If I can make things that are nice- Very gently.

There you go.

Beautiful.

If people resonate with the things that I make and they want to take it home and they feel happy about that, then I've won.

To me, that's the end of the day, that's the goal.

(gentle lilting music) If you crave 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.

Started in 2018, #Paint 22 provides free art activities for military families in the Tampa Bay, Florida area.

Their goal is to raise awareness of the suicide rate of military veterans while providing a creative outlet for those at risk.

Here's their story.

(gentle rhythmic music) I started off just drawing and then I started off water coloring and I'm more focused on photography now, so I do a lot more abstract painting and photography work as my personal artist.

I've seen a need for #Paint22 in the community when I was in the military.

I was always creating, drawing on my downtime, poetry, and sharing that with other veterans, whether they did poetry or not, you know, they would write and we would collaborate, so we would have those good moments, you know?

And seeing that we had our individuality still and creativity, and that's what I wanted to share to other veterans.

I was really focused on Mission 22, where it was more physical, the pushups.

And so I was inspired by them and I wanted to give another outlet.

There's a lot of these organizations that cater to veteran suicide, there's more physical.

But there's no art, there's no painting activity, you couldn't find anything where you can express yourself.

So that's where I found #Paint22 to be more helpful for the veterans.

22 is the amount of veterans that take their life from suicide.

So that is a daily average and it does fluctuate.

It is actually higher now, it's around 25 to 26.

We hope to lower that by providing that other outlet where they can express themselves.

I was in the United States Air Force.

I joined when I was 17 years old.

I was still in high school and probably too young to really make an important decision like that.

I was in the job of logistics and then they put me in base supply where I used to just give anything that people needed for their deployments.

So when I actually left the Air Force, I was in a space where I was really depressed.

I was homesick, but also I was feeling really unappreciated in the military as well, just to be honest with you.

(bright music) Working with Belicia and #Paint22, she actually taught me the business aspect of being an artist.

So before, it was mainly like, I used to think of an artist as the starving artist.

And she taught me that putting my stuff in the right place is gonna catapult me into the perfect area.

I actually do art classes where I'm teaching people how to make seashell crowns.

And I recently did a mermaid swimming class for disabled veterans, actually even just for veterans period.

It was actually done through Wounded Warrior Project.

And we bought the mermaid tails.

And if anyone knows, mermaid tails are not cheap.

And so Wounded Warrior actually paid for the veterans to get mermaid tells as well.

And we taught 'em how to swim like a mermaid.

So three of those mermaids came in and had pain in their body, said after the class that they felt better, as well as one person actually got a mermaid gig after taking the class.

So it's great.

I think a lot of times when people are committing suicides, especially veterans, a lot of times it's because we've lost our mission in life.

You know, when you're in the military, you have a mission.

You feel important.

When you take that away, 'cause I think that's what I felt, and you take away purpose a little bit.

And so when you're doing your art, there's almost a sense of purpose.

I went into the Navy.

I joined as a undesignated seamen.

I did stay with deck department, so I became a Boatswain's mate.

And I am still currently serving in the reserves, 20 years now.

And then got deployed during my reserve time.

My experience in the military has always had its ups and downs.

I think my hardest moments in the military are leaving my kids.

And there was a lot of crying, which made me feel very, not a good mother in a sense.

So I think that would be the most challenging times for me in the military.

But what I will say though is that I feel like my experience in the military has exposed me to such a variety of individuals and personalities, which has helped me immensely function outside of the military.

This is my Military Mother Pillow.

I created it with the thought of my service in mind.

So I created it because of leaving my children at such a young tender age.

So this is really a baby's pillow, but instead of it being soft and small, it's actually hard and made of ceramics and still very fragile.

And the reason I made it, I really wanted to highlight my experience and my relationship with my kids and realize that I will never get those small, precious moments back with them because of my separation.

But in it, I still found something really beautiful in this pillow.

#Paint22 has allowed me the opportunity to not only explore my motherhood in the military, and it also allows me to express my identity as a woman service member because it's also veteran-led and it's woman-led too.

So to me that fits a level of understanding that I don't always have to express or communicate 'cause sometimes I don't have the words to communicate those experiences.

So it's just very refreshing for me to be in a space with an organization that I don't have to add that extra layer, I can just go straight into creating and expressing.

I appreciate the military for what it's done for me.

I respect the people that are still in the military and continue to serve.

I just really want the message to be out there to have your family time, you know, have that camaraderie with your family so they know what you're going through and you can have that peace, you know?

[Rodney] If you miss an episode of "The Art Show," we've got you covered.

It's available to stream 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.

Up next, we traveled to the American Folk Art Museum in New York City to learn about Lonnie Holley, a contemporary artist based in Atlanta.

As part of the recent exhibit "Material Witness," some of Holley's work was on display and his creative collaboration with materials examined.

Let's watch.

I'm Brooke Wyatt, and I'm the Luce Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum.

This is "Material Witness: Folk and Self-Taught Artists at Work."

"Material Witness" focuses on, of course, the materials and the substances like clay, wood, rock, stone, metal that artists work with to make the objects that are in this museum's collection.

Lonnie Holley's working in Atlanta, currently making large scale paintings and sculptures, and he's also a sound artist and musician.

In that work, he's very collaborative working with other artists.

For "Material Witness," I wanted to highlight how Lonnie Holley collaborates with materials that he uses.

The sculpture on view here is called "Cleaning Up After the Games."

Holley has manipulated wire to create these silhouette forms that repeat throughout the piece and put those together with a plethora of found objects.

Upon close inspection, you can identify a metal dust pan, a plastic bottle, some plastic cutlery, all manner of fiber and fabric.

Some pieces of artificial flowers or greenery worked together to create this form in space.

Lonnie Holley has transformed what some people would consider trash into a work of art that has its own kind of life and that invites viewers to interact with it in space.

It was exciting to show also a painting of Lonnie Holley's that dates from 1991.

It's not a painting where you see those silhouette forms that Holley returns to so much, but you do see the way the artist has applied paint to this composite or plywood surface.

And I see it as very sculptural the way that he moves around the picture plane in terms of the composition and his use of color and form.

I wanted to think about a relationship between Lonnie Holley working in paint, Lonnie Holley working with sculpture and found objects because crossing those different domains is so fundamental to his process.

(gentle upbeat music) And that wraps it up for this edition of "The Art Show."

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) [Presenter] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by: The L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, The Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, The Sutphin Family Foundation, the Wohlgemuth Herschede 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.