Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up, an Akron artist finds community as a printmaker.

We jump into the what it was time machine for a look back at the handsomest building in Kent.

And a Columbus crooner sings his heart out for a dear friend.

Good morning.

Beautiful.

Did you sleep last Welcome to applause, my friends.

I midia stream public media's Kabir Bhatia.

Don't you hate it when you can't find something you're looking for?

Well, Akron artist Joelle Diane Zellman was looking for a local printmaker to provide high quality prints of her work known as clay.

But she couldn't find one anywhere.

Rather than giving up, she stepped up and follow that old adage, if you want something done right, do it yourself.

Creating art as Joel Diane.

She now prints her work herself and for other area artists too.

print.

I went to school for fine arts and concentrated on painting and sculpture, and so a lot of my work kind of naturally, as the years have gone on and I've done more graphic design stuff, has moved more and more digital.

A lot of people ask, like, is this an original?

Because the printer does such a good job translating the work?

That's actually how I got started and doing the print business, because I, I found that with all of these different print methods, nothing really captured the traditional, look of a painting or drawing better than as a clay print does.

And that's because, it prints on a wider color spectrum.

Most printers print and Cmyk, which is very narrow.

It's literally just four colors.

A lot of my work deals with femininity and health struggles.

I have a piece that I had done of an older woman dancing in a to to feel like I'm kind of that older woman.

At times I feel like I'm in my 80s trying to get through my day and and perform in this way, you know, being a mom and running errands and, you know, lifting babies all the time.

I was doing graphic design for years when I had my kids, and I just I started getting a little bit burnt out of it.

I wanted to do more, more of my own artwork, and I started kind of going out on a limb and seeing like, if I just create more of the work that I like creating are people going to be interested in it too?

They want to buy it.

I started at that time learning about clay printing.

I had a company that I really liked to work with, and I was printing with them frequently.

They were based out of Florida, so I kind of had a few orders where I had big orders, but they were taking a while to come in.

I was like, man, like, I really need to find a local printer who does this?

And I, I started kind of looking all over and couldn't find anyone who is doing clay printing in the area.

She clay printers have 12 colors that they print from, so the color already is just like very vibrant.

And it can it can translate that very, very well.

But it also uses a pigment based ink that it sprays as a print.

And actually that's why it's called Je clay.

It's declared in French means to spray.

I love is like this green could easily just turn into a. So I thought, you know, why don't I do this?

I have the background, I have the ability, I have the experience.

And I thought, you know how cool that it would be that not only can I do this, and it's useful for my artwork, that I can use this as an opportunity to connect with the creative community here in Akron.

It's consistency.

I mean, if you love these are like, you know, I like Joel and I have worked together on a number of projects, including a large project called Akron T Shirt Club that spanned over a year and incorporated a number of different artists in publishing their work as limited edition t shirts.

And I've had Joel print quite a bit of my work for exhibition.

There's a temptation as artist to do it yourself.

It's a DIY mentality, and that's what makes you thrive as an artist.

But when you can do it together and find those opportunities to link up and and maximize each other's expertise, that's where true collaboration happens.

And even better, when it can happen in a supportive business environment.

It might take me a year or two years to create a piece, and so when I reproduce that piece, I want it to be as good as quality as the pieces itself.

And so that was really what I was looking for.

And with Joel, I was able to choose from cold pressed, hot pressed canvas, you know, lots of different papers, lots of different choices, so that each piece of work is appropriate to the original, whether it's photography, whether it's multimedia, whatever.

We work together to make reproductions that really honor the original piece.

River City Prints has the national alternative print show coming up.

They sent out a call to a bunch of artists, but they also specifically reached out to me because I own AG Play Print Company.

So there were artists who submitted work and actually ordered straight through my shop and fulfilled through me so that I could also get those prints into the show.

So this last week, I've been really busy preparing my own artwork for the show, and then also preparing other artists for this upcoming show that they're putting on.

A lot of the work that I started, Monochrome Canvas with the intention of using clay prints because it represents my work.

So well.

So because I use, I like to use a lot of fine lines and watercolors, it just picks up all these subtle color changes and the subtleties of the work that is just really hard to capture.

And other forms of print.

It's been so cool that my little print company has turned it into like, all these fun big projects in the city.

Did you know our sister station, Wksu, started in Kent in 1950, which was just about the time that the Kent Opera House closed.

Coincidence?

Obviously.

Yeah, it's a coincidence.

I mean, it wouldn't be anything else, but I bring this up because I recently changed my shirt and visited the former site of the opera house for another edition of what it was.

Know, this building behind me.

What it was, was a home built for the Kent family in 1883.

Today it's the Kent Historical Society and Museum, and I was just inside learning about the Kent Opera House.

The opera house was built in 1889 for $20,000, and that includes drinks and tip.

It opened with a production of the Stowaways, and over the next 40 years it would host vaudeville, motion pictures and even visits from stars like W.C.

fields, who had actually been stranded in Kent at the train depot when his theater troupe ran out of money.

I asked by the 1950s, it was falling into disrepair and it closed.

Eventually, the opera house building, once called the handsomest building in town, was demolished in 1963.

And today you can visit that spot, which is this bank drive through.

So you might say the opera house finally made bank.

From an ancient opera house in Kent to a very contemporary dance company in Dayton.

It might take two to tango, but it takes a whole lot more when it comes to the Dayton Dance Initiative.

This bold collective is made up of dancers, composers, writers, even visual artists.

Let's step inside the company's studio and watch as they make their way to the main stage.

So how did a describe contemporary dance move?

I've been working on that one for about 15 years.

The things that I noticed between I think, contemporary forms and classical forms, one of the main differences, I feel, is the sense of abstraction.

There can be a concept or an idea within contemporary dance, but it's not narrative based.

It's purely it can be form, it can be pattern, it can be music.

And can be media.

The heartbeat of Date and Dance Initiative is that it is a dancer led, artist led organization.

It began by one former date and ballet dancers, Dream Jocelyn Greene Watson, in which there could be a platform for collaboration between date and local dancers.

We have the date in ballet, which is a beautiful ballet company, and then we have date in Contemporary Dance Company, which is a beautiful black historic modern dance company.

Rarely do they get to be in the same space, collaborate, co-create, cross-pollinate, exchange ideas that are nuanced to their dance, culture.

So dating ballet dancers date contemporary dance company dancers and some dancers from the ballroom world came and collaborated and created around ten original works in which they all dance together.

The first show is at the PNC Arts Annex in downtown Dayton, and the community gave basically a resounding yes!

This is what we want dance in the summer.

And I've been with GDI for four years.

It started after I graduated from Wright State University in 2021.

This was post-Covid.

The year after I graduated, I emailed the date and dance initiative Gmail.

Josie replied and said, yeah, join.

Would you want to help me with this, this, this, this, this.

And essentially I became Die's first intern in addition to a choreographer.

I had a feeling that Dei was going to be this really great place.

And from the get go, that was the feeling.

And the way that we work at Dei is extremely collaborative.

It's one of our three tenets is collaboration.

You kind of know as a dancer going into the process, that the choreographers are going to need help from you to keep things going along.

A lot of times the dancers generate movement in the rehearsal process that ends up making it into the piece at the direction of the choreographer.

It was a pleasure putting out our call for artists this year.

We had a call for interdisciplinary artists, and we had, I think, over.

We had over 50 applicants.

Karen Maynor, for example, is one of my childhood friends.

I saw her application come through.

So it was a pleasure.

And after getting to know these applicants and then getting to know my dancers, I went very much on sort of intuition and instinct as to who would work well together and then who would slightly challenge the other person, but not too much.

The work I created for Dayton Dance Initiative this past summer was Bolero, which is the composer is Maurice Ravel.

It's a very famous piece of music, and I've always wanted to choreograph to it.

And the current artistic director of this initiative, Jennifer Side, or had remembered a year ago, I had told her I had wanted to choreograph my own Bolero, and she approached me this past summer to see if I would want to do it.

And I immediately said yes.

But as a writer, I had never gotten to work with another artist on creating something, and I was really drawn to the Dance Initiative's colab because it was so far outside of my normal artistic practice.

Getting to create alongside a choreographer so someone in a completely different discipline than I, that I'm usually working in, just leaping into the unknown really appealed to me is an amazing way to grow and challenge myself as an artist.

So the collaboration, particularly on Bolero, was one incredible because it was a genuine collaboration.

It was not combative in terms of trying to get a particular idea out there, but it really helped shape the entire work from start to finish right from the get go, knowing that this was going to be a piece of writing that had to work somehow with choreography that really changed the way that I wrote.

I wrote a lot shorter than I normally do.

I was trying to write something that would have a lot of negative space in it, so that we would have a ton of, flexibility and the ability to shape the narrative around what the choreography was doing.

Something that really drew me to Dei is that I'm not a person who comes with, I don't have formal dance training, but I love dance.

It's everything.

Dance can do anything.

It can be classic.

It can be experimental.

It can represent any experience of any lived human experience because it's one of the most human activities that that we do.

I think that if I can create a place where the dancers feel safe and they love each other, that they're going to get on stage and they're going to believe it with their full body and then the audience, we feel that in particularly in the annex, when we're so close, you can feel their breath, you can see the light behind their eyes, you can feel sometimes the body heat coming off and the sweat.

I want the audience to feel lit up inside and inspired.

I also want them to feel a sense of hope in the younger generations.

I have spent time away from dating.

I've spent time freelancing, doing other jobs.

Didi is something that I have always made time for.

I turn things down so that I can do Didi because it it feeds me in a way that no place ever has.

As far as my vision for the future, I want to do one sort of impactful new thing each season.

So just incrementally doing one new, slightly varied thing each year is my goal.

And again, it's to provide more opportunities for the dancers, for the future of date and dance initiative.

I think it's both mine and Jen's hope that we can support an ever growing number of artists.

Every year we have more and more interest.

As you can see, we've got the PBS app up here on our iPhone 900.

This doesn't fit in my pocket.

The screen protector is a blanket.

But if you wanted to go onto this app, you sign up.

It's totally free.

You can get this onto your smart TV, and then you can scroll down, find all the great public media programing, all the great shows from Idea Stream, including.

We've got all of these great shows here, but the best one is applause, the one you're watching now.

And if you want to take a trip down memory lane, you can see past episodes going back, I don't know, decades probably.

There's also a way that you can go in here and see our cousin show applause.

Performances.

So sign up again, totally free if you have any issues, shoot us an email.

Arts at Ideo stream.org.

Artists can find inspiration almost anywhere.

But how about the satellites that orbit the Earth over our heads?

Satellite images of the Earth are used in geographic information systems or GIS, mostly for scientific purposes.

Well, an artist in Ashtabula County is transforming the beauty and complexity of GIS into colorful quilts.

Hi, I'm Deb Burke bio.

I am a mechanical engineer by day and every other waking hour or minute.

I am an artist.

I do art quilts.

I take satellite imagery and create actually from fabric.

These depictions of the art satellite imagery.

I take, hand-dyed fabrics.

All of my fabrics are either dyed with Procyon dyes or shibori or whatever.

Whatever the colors I am needing, I hand dye my own fabric now.

I went to Chicago and bought my quilting machine from a quilt festival up there.

I had done quilting before.

I really wanted to do customer quilting to get a little bit of more money, so I actually started customer quilting.

But then in 2014, I went back to school again and started doing, GIS.

So I'm a professor of geography and geospatial technology.

The GIS in that stands for Geographic Information Systems, which is a part of the overall geospatial approach to mapping and to gathering information about the Earth's surface and GIS involves the computer systems that acquire, store, analyze, and produce data that can then be used to make maps and to be integrated into models about the world around us.

I found some images the satellite images in a class, remote sensing class.

And I fell in love with the colors and the variations and just how bright and cheerful these images were.

Right after I got my certificate in GIS.

I started not working in the field, but I started doing art quilts of the satellite imagery.

Most of my clients do piecing of different patterns that are traditional.

There are a few that do some art quilts, but most of them are traditional piece quilts.

So the art quilt world, you know, they like the traditional quilts.

There are a few, quilt shows that mostly show, your traditional quilting.

Just in the last, probably, I would say 15 years, maybe 20.

The art quilts have become more successful.

And actually now they have more categories and they're more juried into your quilt shows.

I like to do actually go into just the art world itself.

And go into some juried shows of, of different mixed media.

A lot of people say, oh, quilting is dying, but it's really not.

If you look and go Google, there are quilting guilds.

A lot of people don't aren't familiar with them because they think that the quilting world is, you know, very low or.

But if you Google quilting guilds just in your area, you will you'll find quite a few.

And I know we're both fiber artists, although she's a true artist and I just mess around.

I had seen this quilt under construction, and Deb had never been to Yellowstone or seen the Grand Prismatic Spring, which I have.

So to be in her presence when she saw it was just so special.

And of course, I told everyone we saw while she made a quilt like this.

And here we are.

So when I was at Lakeland, my professor, he was very interested and was very good at like remote sensing, and that was one of my favorite things.

During the class time that we, that one of the classes that I took, Deb is one of those students who has multiple talents, and she was working for a company doing mostly SolidWorks engineering.

And so Deb came to Lakeland to get her certificate as an adult already in the workforce.

She wanted to add GIS to her skill set, and that all seemed well and good.

And here's an engineer coming to us and taking classes and and we're off to a great start.

And in one of the classes that I was teaching and remote sensing, it was ten years ago, in spring of 2013.

I remember the day when we were we were doing an introduction to Landsat satellite imaging, where we start seeing all those images with colors on the screen, and we can look at the world through a new lens and a new perception, and we can begin to detect and understand what's going on with things like vegetation and rock formations and so on.

And all of a sudden, Deb clears her space and starts scribbling away on a piece of paper, and everybody else has their nose on the computer screen doing their lab assignment.

So, of course, I asked them, hey, Deb, what's going on?

And she says, oh, I'm doing a quilting pattern.

The first one I ever did was The Painted Desert, and it has been around the country.

It has been in several shows, and I'm very proud of it because people, when they look at it, they say, so how do you do this?

The Painted Desert and the eye of Sahara are or two of my first ones that I've done, and they're very, unique.

They do not have the hand-dyed fabrics, but they're mostly batik fabrics.

But they are one of my, you know, proudest moments, I guess, of of making starting the art quilt world, the GIS quilts, what actually got me inspired for that was I found images in a book that's called Earth as Art.

There's a few of them published, and it's all satellite imagery, from NASA.

So you looking at a satellite image and it's green doesn't mean that it's vegetation.

Sometimes the color red is your vegetation.

Like, during, like, some of the glaciers.

Red will be your vegetation.

So the colors of that really fascinated me.

It's her curiosity.

Ultimately, I think that's impressive.

Her artistic ability is incredible, but certain people have the gift and the talent to interact with the world in a particular way.

We're braving the bitter cold on the next applause.

as we take a polar bear plunge with some daring souls into the chagrin River.

you know, you kind of have to override that panic response and just tell yourself you're okay in the cold water.

And we heat things up with a riveting performance of Rhapsody in Blue by the Cleveland Orchestra.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

Thanks for joining us for applause.

I'm idea streams Kabir Bhatia to play us out.

It's the warm vocals of Columbus crooner Maxwell Rincon.

He's only been on the scene for a couple of years, but people are digging his distinctive sound.

Here he is with an original song for a friend.

Good morning.

Beautiful.

Did you sleep last night?

You were probably smoking cigarettes.

I dreamt about our whole life.

So won't you call me in the morning?

With my heart on my sleeve.

I hope you'll remember me.

And Hello my darling.

I've been waiting for your Call.

Ive been counting down the minutes I cant wait to hear it all Did you do all that you dreamt?

Or will it be another day?

I hope that you'll find your way.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.