- [Narrator] 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.

(no audio) And viewers like you.

Thank You.

(no audio) This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

- In this edition of "The Art Show".

Artistic swimming for all.

(lively music) Pottery in rural Appalachia.

(lively music) And the art of aerobatic flying.

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

(lively music) (lively 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.

A summer Olympics staple, artistic swimming merges athleticism with graceful movement and stunning presentations.

But the Rhinestones synchro swim team proves that you don't need years of training to participate in the sport.

Every summer, the group recruits swimmers of all backgrounds to practice at Ziegler pool in Cincinnati's Over the Rhine neighborhood.

The aim, a spectacular end-of-season performance.

Let's dive in!

(gentle music) - To become a Rhinestone, there is no audition process, and it's based on the idea that we can do things as we age and grow up and we can learn and we can celebrate, and we can do crazy things just for the pure joy of it.

My name is Pam Kravetz.

(water splashes) I am an artist and art educator and art advocate in Cincinnati, and my role on the Rhine-stone synchronized swim team is co-creator.

I created the team seven years ago with my friend Carla, and we have been swimming ever since.

We reached out to the community and said, "Come join us.

We want to do this."

And we got swimmers, non-swimmers from the age of probably about 25 to 75.

The philosophy behind the Rhinestones is based in joy.

It's based in the idea that you come any way you can, whether you're a really strong swimmer like our coach Beth, or were on a kid's swim team like me, or our friend that had never put her head underwater before and Beth took us from where we were, pulled us together in a way that celebrates and supports each one of us and our ability.

- I'm Beth Kreimer.

(water splashes) I am an engineer by trade.

I contract at Procter & Gamble and I am the Rhinestones head coach.

- [Pam] Beth has used all of the skills that she's learned from being a synchronized swimmer and taught us those skills and the way of training.

- [Beth] I swam for the Cincinnati Synchrogators from the time I was eight until I graduated high school, and then I went and swim at Ohio State.

And while I was at Ohio State, I also made the second national team in 2002.

- My name is Casey Miller.

(water splashes) I am a photographer and freelance artist around Cincinnati, Ohio.

I am a member of the Rhinestones swimming team where I also do the social media content for them.

The baseline of being able to swim was my starting point with the Rhinestones, so I had nothing prior to everything that our coach taught us.

I have a little bit of a background in partner acrobatics doing lifts and stuff, so I think that they thought it would be a good add-on to the sort of skill set of the team.

So I've been sort of bringing the lifts and a few other fun elements into the team.

We meet at Ziegler Pool over at Ziegler Park every Sunday.

- [Beth] I pick the music for the routine and cut it and choreograph it and then heard the team while we're there.

- [Casey] From the beginning of summer we are just running drills, getting our technique back after we've been not in the pool for all of the non-summer months and slowly incorporating the choreography that we're going to be performing at the Ziegler Parks Adult Swim event at the end of summer.

- For the Olympics, you train eight plus hours a day for years and Rhinestones we do one hour a week.

It's primarily shallow water.

Olympics you cannot touch the bottom at all not a toe.

- [Pam] Okay, truth be told, little secret, the Rhinestones do touch the bottom of the pool.

- [Beth] The fact that people look at us and they're like, "Oh, look, they look like they're having fun.

They look like it's easy.

They're smiling."

And it is work under there.

- [Casey] So it's a very different way of moving through the water.

I was always taught swim as a way to not drown.

In artistic swimming you're swimming to be beautiful, to make these pretty lines, to create these fun shapes, to create patterns with your fellow swimmers.

So it was a unique experience to be introduced to it and have to think of swimming less as just getting from one side of the pool to the other and more to think about what your body is doing while you're doing it.

- [Beth] We have to pick music that sounds good.

We have to pick music that everybody can hear the same and count the same.

Some pieces of music are like impossible to swim to and others are like so straightforward.

There's these clear beats and you can all hear them.

Because when you dive in the water and there's bubbles and it makes it hard to hear you have to still count in your head, and so there's this performance aspect to it because you have to be presentable, you have to smile, you have to convey the theme of the music, and that in itself right there is all performance art.

- [Pam] We also don't want to be the clown car of synchronized swimming.

We want this to look professional and tight, and we take it very seriously.

We bring in the joy, we bring in the laughter, we bring in the silly, we bring in the acceptance, but ultimately we really do want to look good.

- I think that one of the really cool things about being on an artistic swimming team is, I don't know anyone else on an artistic swimming team.

It's something that's truly unique that who gets the chance to do that?

The Rhinestones are different than your average synchronized swimming team because we invite everyone.

Unfortunately, the Olympics has had a little bit of a back and forth on allowing men on the team to have mixed gender teams, and we don't really worry about that.

We invite as many different people as possible.

I'm very masculine presenting, so that would usually deter other synchronized swimming teams, but the Rhinestones welcome it.

- [Pam] I just want us to come and have fun because so many of us have very high stress jobs, outside of the pool is high stress lives.

- Our most recent project this year was a sort of introduction of the team members lives outside of the pool, but introducing it into the pool, and I mean that in a literal sense where we had them jump into the pool, fully dressed in their work attire.

So it was some people in full engineering wear or one of our teammates is a usher at the Aronoff and she jumped in her full usher garb.

It was a really fun project that kind of got to highlight our team both in and out of the pool kind of at the same time, and just have a lot of fun with it.

- [Beth] One thing that keeps me coming back is just that it's joyful.

I get there to coach and we do a new skill, and then the sounds that just come out of the pool, the joy, the clapping, the cheering, it's pretty amazing to see how happy doing this makes the people in the pool.

And I've also heard people say, "It's my happy place.

It's what I look forward to every week in the summer."

- [Pam] We love what we've created kind of very much by accident, and I think the authenticity of the why is what makes it so successful.

(gentle music) - [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.O-R-G.

- Susan Abramovitz has been working with clay since the 1970s.

She currently runs Rock Riffle Run Pottery in Shade, Ohio, where she continues to keep the practice thriving in rural Appalachia.

Susan uses clay that is 350 million years old in her creations, from branded mugs, to garden decor.

In 2024, the Ohio Arts Council awarded Susan an Ohio Heritage Fellowship in the category of Material Culture.

Take a look.

(gentle music) - It was 1969, and I decided I wanted to go into art.

Cleveland Institute of Art was close by, so I applied and I got accepted, and after I was done with my freshman year, I decided to make my career in clay.

It's malleable, it's fun, and you can do a thousand different things with it.

I decided I really wanted to have my own business, and I picked Athens because of the proximity to my natural resources that I needed.

I built my first studio in Athens County in 1978 on Rock Riffle Run Road.

The state of Ohio informed me that my property was in the right of way of a road improvement.

I ended up having to sell my property to the state of Ohio.

In 1984, I found this farm that had a huge shed.

I moved to Shade and rebuilt Rock Riffle Run Pottery.

We're about 50 miles from Cedar Heights Clay Company, which is where the bulk of my materials come from.

The clay that I'm using is about 350 million years old.

That's huge.

It's an amazing thing to work every single day with a material that's 350 million years old.

Nobody gets to do that.

It's pretty cool.

It's like a living fossil.

Ohio is really, really rich in clay, and a major part of the clay industry happened here along our rivers.

It's part of Ohio history.

My pottery is sold throughout the United States, but mostly online.

We have two product lines here.

We have a functional stoneware line and a decorative terracotta gardening line.

I make a lot of garden markers.

We have about 500 different ones, and we sell them to nurseries all over the country.

The stoneware line takes weeks and weeks to make.

It's a much more durable clay.

My ingredients come from all over the world and my glaze buckets hold about 30 gallons, so everything here is dipped and not painted on with a brush.

I really like mugs and we're making logo mugs for resorts, for businesses, and I think out of all the things that I make, my mugs are actually among the most successful.

I make my pieces, and depending on the weather, it takes anywhere from three hours to five days to dry.

After it's dry, we fire it in an electric kiln to about 1,600 degrees.

That produces a piece of pottery that is porous enough to absorb the glaze, but strong enough to handle, and we wax any surface that will be touching any other surface.

That wax repels the glaze, and I dump it in a glaze that is the consistency of crepe batter.

Leave it in there through a count of 10, pull it out, and when I have a kiln load, which is around 300 pieces, then we take it out and we put it in the glaze kiln.

The glaze is made up of things like silica, which is sand, things that melt at high temperatures, the colorants come from all over the world, and we load it into the kiln, turn it on, and raise the temperature to about 2,400 degrees.

And I use these things called standard pyrometric cones that melt at certain temperatures.

So I place them in, look in the spyhole of the kiln, and when they start to melt, then I know I've reached temperature.

It is weather dependent.

When it's sunny and bright and there's a little bit of wind, I get very brilliant colors.

When it's raining and there's no wind, then I end up getting kind of more muted colors.

Firing takes about nine hours to get from your ambient outdoor temperature to about 2,400 degrees.

I turn it off, I wait about three days, and then we unload.

Then it goes on, and it lives forever, as long as you don't break it.

Unloading a gorgeous glaze kiln is the most rewarding thing.

That 350 million-year-old hunk of clay is now what you're gonna be having your coffee out of tomorrow.

That's pretty amazing.

- One of the things I appreciate about Susie is her entrepreneurship, basically.

Like she's very hardworking.

You know, she's got her studio and she's very generous in how she interacts with various people.

Susie makes her studio very much available to young artists.

I mean, being that we're in a college town, young ceramicists have been able to work at Susie's studio.

The Ohio Pawpaw Festival, this is gonna be its 27th year, and it's really the first festival celebrating pawpaws.

The pawpaw is North America's largest native tree fruit, and it's related to 2,100 tropical fruits.

The Pawpaw Festival has this community marketplace, and one of the things that we do is we don't allow imported products.

We like to have a good mix of the arts.

We've been working with Susie for decades now.

- I have been making logo mugs for the Pawpaw Festival since its inception, but every year, I make logo mugs that they sell out of their merchandise store.

They're great people to deal with, and I do a lot of special events with the logo mugs, so it's kind of fun.

- Being a self-made artist is not the easiest thing.

I mean, a lot of people are great artists, but to actually be able to have a business and survive for as long as Susie has, I mean, I think her work ethic and her creativity basically have really lent it to her, you know, successful business over the years.

- I've been doing this for 50 years.

I think my job is sort of to pass on the tradition that I'm part of.

We usually do camps in the summer, Girl Scout troops, just people who come in and wanna learn.

It's a very neat thing to watch, it's like magic to watch this lump of clay just turn into something beautiful.

Everybody likes that.

It's hands on.

You can be doing anything with clay at any skill level.

It's very inviting.

It's also been a privilege to be female living in America at this time because these opportunities were not available for me 100 years ago, and so this is a great time to be a potter and a female in Ohio.

It's really cool to be a part of this.

- [Rodney] Did you miss an episode of "The Art Show?

Not a problem.

You can watch it on demand at cetconnect.org and thinktv.O-R-G.

You'll find all the previous episodes, as well as current episodes, and links to the artists we feature.

(lively music) - Art in the air?

It's definitely a thing at Red Stewart Airfield in Waynesville, Ohio.

In season 13, we learned more about the sometimes dizzying art of Aerobatic flying.

This segment was recognized with two 2024 Regional Emmy Awards!

Let's head back to the airfield for another look at this gravity-defying craft.

(lively music) (airplane engine rumbling) - One of the great things about flying, when you're up there, climbing, descending, loops, rolls, it's fun.

You can just do what you think you want to do.

(airplane engine rumbling) And like other mediums, it has certain things that it does well and it has certain limitations.

You know, managing the airplane's energy to do what you want it to do is a fun challenge, and every day is a little bit different.

My name's Emerson Stewart, and I'm a flight instructor at the Red Stewart Airfield.

I grew up right here.

I was, I think I went for my first airplane ride when I was four days old, and started flying a glider when I was 13, soloed it when I was 14, soloed an airplane and got my glider rating when I was 16, and I've been flying ever since.

My Grandpa Red was the fellow that started the airport, back in 1946.

It was a pretty simple little place for a while.

The thing that makes the airport unique is that we're still doing the same thing we've always done, with the same equipment we've always done it with.

We started off with little light airplanes in the '40s, and we're still using the same sorts of little light airplanes.

Part of what makes the place special is the people who work here are excited to make the place go and want to be here helping to make the place continue.

(rain pattering) - Red Stewart Airfield is awesome.

It's uncomplicated.

It's in the middle of a cornfield and years ago, they decided to put a little grass strip of runway in there.

You show up, you make sure the airplane's ready to go, you jump in, turn the key, and you're flying in next to no time.

- Guess the obvious thing is it's a grass strip.

It's very low tech, it's old-fashioned airplanes.

Most of the airplanes out here don't even have an electrical system.

You've got to hand-start them.

It's just pure flying.

My name's Brett Hunter.

I run a little flight department over in Springboro, Ohio, and on the side, I do some aerobatics, including airshows.

- Everyone shares one thing in common, their enthusiasm and passion for flight, and when they arrive here, all of the formalities disappear.

You don't have a battle of egos or anything like that weighing the atmosphere down.

It's fantastic.

Hello, I'm Robert Tico LaCerda.

And I started flying aerobatics back around 1990 or so.

First time I'd been in a small airplane, it was also the first time I did aerobatics.

We did loops and rolls, and loved it from the very get-go.

(lively music) (lively music) (airplane engine rumbling) (lively music continues) (lively music) - Saturday evening of Labor Day weekend, we have an annual airshow.

It's good to get people out, give them a little entertainment, and show them what little airplanes can do.

- It's a unique airshow, in that it's a very up-close and personal airshow.

Accessibility for the performers to the fans and vice versa, I think is unmatched.

- Well, you want to start with something that grabs their attention, something loud and maybe dramatic.

(lively music) (airplane humming) You want to finish with something that grabs their attention, that they remember you with.

(lively music) (airplane humming) Somewhere in the middle, try not to repeat anything.

- [Emerson] Part of the fun with planning it is you figure out what your airplane does well, what it looks nice doing, and you figure out how those pieces can fit together.

- Then during the season, yeah, you'll work on the sequence, and if you're going to add anything new, create something new, you want to practice that individual part way up high, find out where the problems are, where the gotchas are, start bringing it down low where the altitude makes a big difference.

(lively music) (airplane humming) - [Emerson] So, transitioning into, say a dive.

I'm not thinking of it as, you know, "Oh, we're diving now, it's exciting."

I'm thinking of it more, "Okay, I have altitude, and I'm going to trade it, and I'm going to turn it into airspeed."

At the bottom of that dive, you pull back and so now you're converting it back to altitude.

- [Brett] Positive Gs can feel like an elephant sitting on you.

To just lift your arm is an effort, and negative Gs feels like all the blood's rushing to your head, so you actually want to try to relax.

When you're getting started for the year, you're coming off a cold couple of winters, you know, you need to get G tolerance, and you need to make sure that you're in tune with the airplane.

- What this particular aircraft does very well is a knife-edge pass, which is basically you're tilting the airplane up on its side and going along the ground in a knife-edge.

- Well, airplanes are convenient and make it nice to go point A to B, straight line and a little faster than your car, but it's a lot more fun to go see what an airplane can really do, see what you can do.

Upside-down, I don't know, it's just, you can't do that in a car and get away with it more than once, right?

It's a bit of a, like a rollercoaster, but you get to design it, and it's smooth.

- They're going to do it.

Opposing tuck rolls.

Oh, boy, here we go.

Watch.

Light the whip.

- It's fun showing off for the crowd.

We're careful about the way we do things, but yeah, if it makes people smile and entertains them, absolutely, yes, it's satisfying.

- I would describe aerobatic flying as being an art.

I mean, it's a lot of science, right?

But it doesn't feel like that at the time.

It feels like I'm up here drawing shapes in the sky.

(airplanes humming) - It's an affliction, if not an addiction, the airplane thing, for sure.

I wish it were as reasonably priced as gardening, but, yeah no, it gets in your blood and you can't get it out.

It's a constant itch.

(airplane humming) - I like to do aerobatics.

Aerobatics are fun, they're thrilling.

But I like to just go fly around.

Sometimes, I'll just go fly around low and see the sights.

I don't know, I'll go out by the lake and it's kind of fun.

Sometimes, you can find an eagle or something.

(airplane engine rumbling) (gentle 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.O-R-G or cetconnect.org.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "The Art Show".

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) - [Narrator] 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.

(no audio) And viewers like you.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Close captioning in part has been made possible through a grant from The Bahmann Foundation.

Thank you,