(ethereal music) Sloss Furnaces was the industrial heart of Birmingham from the late 1800s until the iron industry moved elsewhere in the 1950s and '60s.

(ethereal music continues) The big blast furnaces are quiet now, but the site is a public museum that hosts a unique metal arts residency.

(ethereal music continues) I talked to the metal arts director, Virginia Elliot, about what it means to pour iron at Sloss in the 21st century.

So, Virginia, what is your role here at Sloss?

So I am the metal arts director for our metal arts program here.

Okay.

And what all programs do you offer here?

So we have three main ones.

We have a three-year artist residency where artists will come, they live in Birmingham for three years, they spend most of their week working on Sloss projects and gaining experience and commission work and teaching classes, and then they've got dedicated art time and studios on site.

We have an eight-week visiting artist program where artists from all over the world will come, and their only job is to be here on site for eight weeks making their artwork.

We put 'em up in an apartment downtown and they have a solo exhibition at the end of their residency.

So how many artists in residence do you have per year?

So we have four of the three-year residents, and they are on rotation.

About every year, we swap out.

In the eight-week visiting artists, we do three to four of those a year.

Okay.

And so tell me a little bit about some of your other programs that you have.

So every summer, we do a summer youth apprenticeship program for local high school students, 16 to 18.

They spend eight weeks up here.

Their whole summer vacation, really, up here in the shed.

They get paid, we teach 'em welding, blacksmithing, casting, sculpting.

They learn through mock commission projects for the bulk of their summer, and then their last two weeks, they have to submit a proposal and write an artist statement to design their own sculpture using the skills that they learned during over the summer.

We help 'em build their vision and then help 'em put together an exhibition in the powerhouse on site.

Oh wow.

We host a big reception for 'em.

It's a great time.

Do any of your summer students ever, like, come on to be more full-time or more of an artist in residence?

A lot of 'em will stick around and they'll come help out with pours or they'll work part-time here.

Some of them have gone on to welding school or to engineering school.

The local students... The local alumni will come back and help out a lot.

That's awesome.

And we've had some that have gone to out-of-state colleges to go to sculpture programs or glass programs.

Okay.

And then you also host a metal arts conference?

Yeah, we host the National Cast Iron Conference every other year.

It's an odd number of years.

It's the largest cast iron art conference in the world.

It's been here since about 1988, I believe.

It's been here for a long time.

[Jennifer] Wow.

This past year was the largest one we've ever had.

We had about 600 artists, students, and professionals from all over the world come here to camp in the field for a week, go to panels, take workshops, see performances and exhibitions.

Wow, that sounds like a really intensive, but a great way to, like, build community and, like, foster different connections.

Do the summer students and like your interns and stuff, everybody gets to come and like make connections and meet people and engage in that?

Yeah, we try to make sure that the summer youth students are as involved as possible.

So we invite them to come.

A lot of them will come as volunteers and they'll help work during the conference, and it's a great way for them to meet other artists from outside of Birmingham or outside of Alabama and kind of see what's possible career-wise for them.

That's awesome.

Well, I think I have an appointment to go speak with Ajene now, so could you show me where I might find him?

Yeah, let's head up to the shed.

Okay.

(ethereal music) While Virginia takes me to the artist shed, here's a frequent guest and collaborator at Sloss, April Terra Livingston.

(upbeat music) I think that art is a great means of communication.

It's a great means of education and it's a great place to store ideas.

Hello, I'm April Terra Livingston, and I'm a sculptor.

And I like to say I make houses for ideas.

Whenever I come up with a concept, something I want to communicate, thinking on it, resting on it, meditating on it, it's creating visual poetry in a way.

It's also a way to communicate with people who maybe don't speak your language.

Sometimes you can make a good house for an idea, a beautiful house for an idea.

Maybe you make a really beautiful house and the idea's not so good.

Maybe you make a beautiful house and the idea is fantastic.

But you know, once it's built, it's really up to the viewer.

It's up to the consumer of the idea, you know?

They might get something off of it that's completely different than what you intended, and that's kind of awesome too.

That is also a form of communication.

I think a lot of people believe that, you know, you have to be born creative.

I don't think I was born creative.

I think I was very lucky to be born into a creative family.

So I started early, and I had a lot of benefit starting that early.

It was always part of my life.

It was always like, kind of just like, it's something that you do.

I was without a muse for a really long time.

I actually, I took a 10-year break and I went and traveled and went all over the place.

And when I finally came back, I wanted to go to school.

It was 10 years later, and I wanted to go to school and I wanted to learn.

I got a degree in painting, ceramics, fine art.

And then I applied and I got into a college in Italy.

And I was majoring in painting in ceramics, as you do, and I took a sculpture class.

And some door opened in that sculpture class in Florence, Italy.

If I do sculpture, I can do everything.

I can do painting, I can do photography, I can do clay, I can do paper.

I can do everything.

That's why I chose sculpture.

And I'm so grateful for that class because it just opened up all these opportunities to me.

I like to say, you know, I'm definitely an artist and an activist.

I think, again, art is one of the best ways to communicate ideas and to educate people on making it in materials like, that idea, that message is going to go forward.

It will go, it will last.

I have picked historical figures, maybe who their stories haven't been told.

I also love nature.

I love biology.

I'm an Alabama master naturalist.

And so I make work about endangered species or environmental issues that maybe people don't know about.

I love to go to different communities and learn from the community.

Say, well, what is the problem here, or what is it that you need other people to know about?

And let's make something about it.

Let's make something people talk about, come to and visit, and, you know, let's educate them through this.

I did a project here in Mobile, but it was nice because it was sponsored by the Mobile Medical Museum.

And they were asking for a sculpture that would honor midwives.

I got to interview a bunch of midwives around Alabama and I took casts of their hands and made a sculpture that's like kind of a conglomerate of their hands.

I had sculpted a pregnant belly and I put the hands on the belly, kind of around the belly button, because that's the connection between the mother and the child.

But then this was the support, you know, around the belly, like all these hands.

I did another piece for the medical museum that was on a healer from the Porch Creek Indian Nation in Atmore, Alabama.

Far as I know, in Mobile, it's the only, like, representational sculpture of a living or used to be living woman in Mobile.

I would say that my favorite thing in the world is not art, and it is not iron, and it is not creativity, but it is sharing information.

My favorite thing in the world is sharing information.

I like to give the information I have and I like to receive the information that you have.

And I could do that in any form or fashion for the rest of my life and be totally happy.

I think teaching is important, you know, in the iron community, outside of the iron community.

It is definitely an identity that I feel that has become woven into who I am.

I am a teacher.

I am a student though as well.

I don't wanna be... You know, I am forever a student, forever learning.

I hope, you know, until I die, I get to learn new stuff.

It's wonderful, the people are wonderful, and there's always something to learn.

Still, I learn something like every single time I do it and meet new people who have new methods.

And you can completely nerd out on all the technicals, but you also have the ability to make wonderful sculpture that will certainly outlive all of us.

I've made a lot of mistakes with what I've created, you know, but I've been learning the whole time.

And as I get older and I keep making, you know, I think I've become... I've created a language of sculpture that hopefully will translate the ideas that I want to translate.

(contemplative music) So, Ajene, how long have you had your studio here and what was your introduction to Sloss?

I went through the summer (indistinct) program.

It's an internship where they teach kids how to blacksmith, weld, and cast iron.

At the end, we have a art show.

I did the art show, then whoever's like was the boss at the time asked me to come back, like, to start to work here.

So ever since then, I've been here working.

And did you have any experience working with metal prior to that youth internship?

No, I usually just... I'm just doing kid stuff.

Drawing comics or cartoon characters or something like that.

Well, your work is incredible.

Can you tell us a little bit about this piece?

Is it finished?

Is it still in progress?

It's still in progress.

It's played... It is made out of scrap metal.

I like to use reuse old material, give it new purpose.

This form only weighs 50 pounds, and that's why it can, like, balance on its little thin piece of metal.

I was going for like a levitation or like finding your peace, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm picking that up.

And when I was first introduced to your work, I was really impressed by all of the attention to detail, and I really thought that it was all cast because I didn't quite understand how you could get all of these fine, like the pores and the veins and everything in your figures just by like the hand work.

So I was wondering if you might show us a little bit about your practice today.

-Of course.

-Okay.

While Ajene gets set up, here's more about him and how he got started.

Yeah, when I first started sculpting, I was really fast.

One hour have like a couple of things done.

But I think slowing everything down is way better, especially like nine days where everyone's trying to make a quick reel.

They're like, "I'm gonna make something real fast.

All right, gotta get that real going."

But me, I'm like, I just wanna slow it down.

It feels better that way.

You're not rushing, you're not like stressed out over something that you wanna make, you know?

I'm Ajene Williams, and I'm a resident artist here at Sloss Furnaces.

The weeks went on when I first started as a summer youth kid.

And the last two weeks, I was kind of like, "Maybe I could do this, you know?

Like, maybe.

So then we had our final show.

I came in first place, and then the boss at the time said, "You want me to work here?"

And I was like, "All right, sounds good."

Weeks went by and he caught me at the skate park because I didn't know he was talking about for real.

So he found me at the skate park and, like, drove me to Sloss.

I've been a artist in residence here for 12 years.

Ever since high school, I started off making birds out of wax.

So I really didn't know what I wanted to create yet, so I always animal books.

And I would go home and just sculpt each and every one.

When I first made that, I was like, "Now, this is what I wanna make."

So that piece is kind of sitting down.

He has like a spigot on his heart and he has like a record player.

His hands are on the record kinda like this and it has a crank on the back.

So you crank it up and he kind of like plays it with his fingers 'cause it's like a (indistinct) in there.

So plays it with his fingers.

And it's kind of like, it takes you to do it.

And it's kinda like he's on his own groove.

I started hammering the face is when... We had a conference, right?

And I was like showing off my piece, Space in Time."

I was like, just tell 'em about stuff.

Someone thought I cast my face, like took a mold of it.

I was like, "No, no, I sculpted it."

And I was trying to tell him how I did it.

He was like, "No, why you lying?"

I was like, "What?

Really?

I sculpted it."

So I started blacksmithing the face, so it was kind of like, "Now do you believe me?"

Like, I sculpted it.

That's when I first started doing that, because of that.

I was just like, "That's weird."

I can't believe it.

It was weird.

This piece started as a metal shelf and I hammered it to look like this.

First, it's kind of like just a thought I have, but then once I get to certain steps of the process, I can just trace myself.

So I just take the chalk, put my hand down, trace, and then I use a swage block a lot of the time and then a hammer, get it real close to like the initial shape that I want, and then I can weld those pieces together.

Then I grind it back with a dye grinder.

Yeah, it's pretty long.

I would cast it, but it always takes a team to run it.

I feel like doing it this way, it slows me down.

'Cause cast, you can just do it all in one.

You have to do all this welding, chasing, cutting and cutting it again, and then just welding it again.

Doing it this way, I could just slow everything down.

-Hair?

-Like on the sculpture, like, how did you do the hair?

Oh, it was all welding.

So I just take it just like.

Just keep welding it.

And then sometime I come back with a dye grinder and like scrape it so I can get some like lines into it.

The eyelashes were like used up wire brush, so I took the wire brush, I cut it in half, I stuck them in there.

Since this site is open to the public, I'd be working on something, It's gonna be like, "This is my commission to make that?"

I'm like, "No."

They're like, "Why you making it?"

I just wanna make it.

Once I finish a piece, I'm like, "What am I gonna do now?"

Okay, Ajene, what are we gonna be making?

So we're gonna be making pinky.

So no one really ever taught me how to do figure of work.

So I figured it out by just working on self portraits.

So I take my hand, sketch it out.

And that helps because, proportional-wise, I know I got it right on size.

Do like that.

Let's go off here.

Well... So, first, get you some metal and cut it the same diameter, and then take that same piece of metal, follow the lines which we have here and cut through on both sides, which leaves us a little bit.

And then next, we're gonna take a hammer and whack it just to give it like a little bend.

And then we're gonna weld for the knuckles, then grind that down.

And then we're gonna die grind.

I guess this is not knuckles, huh?

[Jennifer] Yeah, I think it does.

All right.

Well, this is incredible.

This is a really beautiful piece of work.

[Ajene] Oh, thank you.

Sounds easy enough?

Let's do it.

-Now.

-(Jennifer laughs) It doesn't sound easy at all.

You know that's a joke.

(both laughing) Is everybody ready?

-Yeah.

-Okay.

If I'm doing something wrong, just knock me out of the way.

-All right.

-Okay.

Okay.

(grinder whirring) Perfect.

That was fun.

-Yeah.

-(Jennifer laughs) And that's it.

I just want you to slowly rotate it.

Okay, yeah.

All right.

-This is good.

-Yay!

(indistinct) Oh, we still need it.

(laughs) And do I hit it on the actual joint?

[Ajene] Just right in the middle.

You're gonna see when it closes.

Okay so just kind of hit it right there?

-Yeah.

-Okay.

So as soon as it close, we're good.

Okay.

(metal clacking) Perfect.

Brand new jacket.

-It's not... -Oh wow.

-It's clean.

-Look a that.

[Ajene] First person.

[Jennifer] Getting the royal treatment here.

So... Yes.

So now what I want you to do is take it, weld here.

That's a good.

Okay.

Not as pretty as yours.

(both laughing) -That's it, one more time.

-Where that hole is.

Okay.

My finger has arthritis.

(both laughing) Am I like cutting out the nail bed?

Kind of like making it lower?

-Yeah.

-Okay.

(cutter whirring) Oh, and then go on this side for this one.

(cutter whirring) How's that?

Looks good.

-Thanks.

-Nice.

All right.

And this is my finished product.

Excellent, it's wonderful.

That was super easy.

I'm just kidding, it wasn't.

(both laughing) But I had a lot of fun.

Thank you for your time.

And I wanna give you this to have.

(gasps) You will?

Pinky promise?

(both laughing) (contemplative music) (contemplative music continues)