♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ Coming up on State of the Arts, postcard enthusiasts collect pieces of history, timeless woodworking, and Broadway's leading ladies.

These stories and more on State of the Arts.

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of State of the Arts.

I'm your host, Mary Paul.

For over 50 years, the Western Reserve Postcard Society in Cleveland, Ohio has been providing a space for postcard enthusiasts to embrace their hobby, talk about history, and display their collections.

Up next, we meet members of the group.

I probably have one of the most extensive Cleveland postcard collections.

I wouldn't say it's the most, but I'd say I'm up there.

Everybody always enjoys looking at postcards and finding that one that they've been searching for years.

Or someone will say, "You made my day.

"I'm so thrilled that I found this postcard."

My name is Harlan Ullman.

I am the newly elected president of the Western Reserve Postcard Society.

I've been a collector a lot of time, and it took me a while before I joined the club.

I'd probably been a member about 20 to 30 years, probably closer to 30.

I'm Shirley Goldberg, and I welcome to Western Reserve Postcard Society.

Many people that enjoy collecting postcards of every subject matter, even part of their life.

their history, different hobbies that they have.

When I was kind of the, towards the end of my first decade, about eight, somewhere around eight to ten years old, I developed two of the great interests in my life.

The Cleveland Indians, now Guardians, and then Cleveland History.

And that latter one evolved into postcards, and then I found there were a lot of them of Cleveland, with all the various buildings, many of which still exist and many of which are gone.

And that led to an almost lifelong love of postcards.

When I started looking for postcards for my children, then I noticed my stack was getting larger than what I was picking out for them.

Collecting postcards is very educational.

I started my children trying to learn what is grown in America, what the manufacturers were, what the climate was, where the oceans and the rivers are, and to know a bit about geography.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ The postcard, as we know it, was created by an act of Congress, I think it was 1898.

Before postcards, they were called private mailing cards, or PMCs, and they were developed as a quick, easy way to communicate with people.

It was a little, the postage rate was cheaper, and you would have a photo of where you were or something, and the intent was to, people to mail these things, quick little note, the so-called "Wish you were here thing."

But I think what unexpectedly happened was, people didn't have cameras then, and they would use postcards to have pictures of what they were seeing, because they couldn't capture those images any other way.

Then there were also postcards of circus, or different entertainment, or movie theaters that are no longer around, and there's all postcards on those memories.

You were there.

You didn't have a camera at the time, but you certainly could buy a postcard and save it for those years.

That led to what was called the golden age of postcards, which millions of cards were created and bought, and many of which are brand new.

I mean, you find cards all the time from over 100 years old that were never sent.

And the reason was, people bought them, because that was their photo album of their trip.

One might find a folder that consists of 12, or 16, or 18, this one's more like a book, and this was on Rome.

Then the brownie camera was invented by Kodak, and that put cameras in most people's hands.

And that kind of led to the decline of postcards in terms of modern usage.

But the reason the hobby is still strong in some cases, is that people like the history part, the images, the old images, the artwork that's on them.

You can buy a postcard at a postcard show for a few dollars, and you have a nice piece of artwork.

Anybody can afford.

For me as an artist, the postcards are a very good reference for me to create a painting.

My name is Jim Sends.

Well, I've been an artist, seems like almost all my life.

When I would be on the road traveling, I would make postcards to send to my grandkids.

And I'd be looking out the window, and maybe I might see whatever landmark in town that I happened to be in, and then I'd say, "Man, I gotta send this to one of my grandkids."

So that's really how I started doing postcard art.

And I'd been doing postcard art for quite a long time.

The postcards, the finished product starts out in here as a sketch, and then I refine it as time goes on.

I've been to New Orleans three times.

Okay, so I've done some paintings of New Orleans.

I've been out west a lot.

It took my wife and I 30 years to visit all 21 of the Spanish missions.

I sketched and painted each and every one of them.

Everybody has a different specialty that they might want to collect.

I never declared it, but I think now that I think about it, I have started a collection of carousels, things like that that I can use as a reference, but create an original piece of art myself.

This is one of the holy grail cards of Cleveland.

It's certainly the holy grail card of amusement parks.

Puritas was the lesser known of the parks, and I go to postcard shows and I always hear people saying, "Do you have Puritas Park?"

This photo here of the original or first carousel at Puritas Springs Park, and this is that very same photo made into a postcard.

And it's hard to find postcards now.

They used to be in a pharmacy or drugstore or a five and ten.

Well, where are the five and 10s?

They're not around anymore.

Where are those postcards?

They're in somebody's shoe box by now.

Probably your shoe box.

Or an album or an album.

I think the nostalgia is something that people will always be interested in.

People want to— they want to see where things were.

They want to see what it was like for their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents.

It'd be a shame to see the hobby become extinct.

And I don't think it will in my lifetime, but a lot of things people think are going to be there forever and not there.

But these postcards will be here for a long time, even when we were gone.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ Luke Jenkins is a sculptor who loves to work with wood.

Combining technologies with timeless craftsmanship, he creates pieces full of pattern and materiality.

We take a trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to see Luke in action.

Those are pieces of plywood.

They have had patterns of termites carved into them and where the light penetrates through the piece of plywood is where both of the carved patterns have intersected with each other.

They both get carved about halfway into the plywood.

So wherever they meet is where light comes through.

Those all come from a bunch of termites that I caught during the last warming season.

And right here in the shop, actually, which is extra, extra terrifying.

♪ INTENSE MUSIC ♪ My name's Luke Jenkins and I run In Bloom Studio.

I do a lot of woodworking that can either take the form of sculpture or furniture.

♪ INTENSE MUSIC ♪ We're here in my workshop.

I make my own stuff.

I do client work for commissions as well as just fabrication.

So I have a full wood shop with a laser cutter in the back and a big CNC router in the front.

So I do more traditional woodworking as well as digital fabrication where things are designed on a computer and then they're kind of cut out by machines.

[ SAW BUZZING ] I would love to try to like recreate termite patterns and how they eat wood, which I'm really interested in because it's not— its not linear, and it's not really that logical.

It's this weird hybrid of like seeking and then just like eating as much as you can really fast.

And then seeking again and eating as much as you can really fast.

♪ HARP MUSIC ♪ I want to kind of make these portable termite capturing devices.

It could be this technical and this kind of like pseudo scientific or it could turn into something else, you know?

I don't really know what it means yet.

I just know that I'm very interested in it, and the same thing happened with the thermally modified wood, which is like I'm super interested in it.

Why does no one use it for furniture and art?

I need to study that.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC ♪ The wood is thermally modified ash.

That basically means that the wood is heated up to around 415 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and all of the resins and sugars are kind of caramelized out of it.

So you could take this wood that's normally an interior grade wood and put it outside in South Florida weather for over 30 years without, you know, painting it or putting any oil on it or anything like that.

So, I was really interested in a material like this that could kind of go in between interior and exterior.

This grouping of the vessels, I made thirty-six of these bowls or vessels and they were meant to kind of just house either different finish samples or different materials within the wood to see what would happen just leaving them outside.

And these were the ones that I had metal interact with the wood.

This one was steel wool.

So that rusted out.

This one was aluminum.

This was brass.

♪ STRING MUSIC ♪ They're two separate pieces.

They're both called day one and they're thermally modified wood and they've all been sanded to 3000 grit, which is a really high grit, like a lot higher than you normally sand wood at and it makes it almost like polished.

That one has wax on it additionally as well.

And after that, after they were made into these like kind of like fetish objects through the ultra finishing of them and they were perfect.

I put them outside and let them get rained on.

They're called day one because they just they spend 24 hours outside.

This is a kind of representation of that shift from high fine woodworking highly finished into exterior where it just interacts with the elements and you can't really protect from that.

And that's not really the point of this wood anyway.

You know, I'm not trying to protect anything.

I'm just letting the environment to its thing.

And you know, the wood kind of just becomes an index of the environment that it's been in.

♪♪ LO-FI MUSIC ♪ Whenever we're cutting something on the CNC router and we're cutting all the way through it, we put a piece of like a sacrificial board underneath it to cut into.

So all of these patterns that are in the wood right now are previous projects that we've cut.

Some of them, you know, really kind of organic and flowing, and some really, really rectilinear.

♪ LO-FI MUSIC ♪ This body work that I think a lot of people knew me for is just carving into plywood.

And that's something I started doing when I first opened the shop up.

I really wanted to just start making work that was about CNC routing, and the plywood seemed like a really good place to start because it's an industrialized material.

So it's very highly controlled already.

And I started carving through the different layers in different ways.

And that led to this kind of like gouging pattern that is, when at first glance, it looks like it was done maybe by hand, but then either if you are a woodworker yourself and you understand like, you know, gouging, a lot of the gouges are like way too long for like a hand tool to make.

Well I wanted there to definitely still be some noticeable sign that it was made by a machine somehow.

And I like that aspect that there is still like a sign of how it was made within it.

And I guess that's kind of like a back to my roots in furniture design is, you know, part of that craft of, you know, there being some indication of the process that you use to make it.

♪ LO-FI MUSIC ♪ Termites are near and dear to my soul as a woodworker.

They, you know, they terrify me, and they're invasive and we all hate them.

And we're all kind of terrified of them in a lot of ways.

And that grossness is also something that I'm very attracted to, in kind of exploring that and understanding it.

And then seeing how it relates to me and how I can translate that relationship I have into physical objects.

If there are already termites in here, which there probably are, because it's South Florida, then I may as well be studying them.

You know, it's a way to control your fear in some sense as well.

I think that's definitely something that has been consistent in my work is this kind of like unknown thing and trying to control it and understanding in some way.

Part of the fun in woodworking is doing planning beforehand, but also leaving enough wiggle room kind of in the middle of the process to allow you to still go down a different avenue or make slight changes in the piece that will bring you to like a new solution, or a new object, or a new thought.

Jonathan Capps has spent the better part of the last two decades mastering the craft of glassblowing.

The students at the Ohio State University and beyond, are the recipients of his vast knowledge, and award-winning creative talent.

In his space at Columbus Glass Art Center, John talks about his practice.

In the hot shop at Sherman Studio Art Center on Ohio State University's West Campus, he showed us how he fluidly moves between traditional techniques while constantly pushing the boundaries in the goal of creating new designs.

I like to tell people the story I give is that I switched sports.

For me, the experience of blowing glass really translated well and trying to perfect a craft.

Just like on the field, where we're trying to perfect the craft of baseball through repetition and muscle memory and those kind of things, that was my first kind of connection to the material itself.

It was through this sort of obsessive compulsive drive to perfect or try and learn this craft.

It's very difficult material.

That was 22 years ago, 23 years ago now.

In a simple way, we're basically taking sand, silica, soda lime, several other ingredients.

At its basic, basic level, we're essentially superheating sand, okay, to a melting point of about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

And then to make it a liquid and then bringing it down to a working temperature of about 2100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Which you wouldn't think 300 degrees makes up that big of a difference, but it really does.

And that's what we work the material at.

♪ AMBIENT TECHNO ♪ What I love about this material is that it kind of hovers in this gray zone.

Is it a solid?

Is it a liquid?

It acts a little bit like both.

What I find interesting and what I teach my students is that glass is happiest when it's a liquid.

That's when it's most stable, actually.

When you think about it a little bit, yeah, okay, that seems simple.

When you drop a piece of glass, it shatters, right?

When you drop a gob of glass, it just thumps and it stays together.

So when we're in the studio, we get to work with the material when it's at its absolute happiest state.

I'd like to say that I have a very regimented process, but it's pretty asymmetrical.

I'll use my sketchbook.

I'll go into a design format and then bring that to the studio.

Oftentimes, I kind of have a vague idea, but then use the studio as the sketchbook.

I think prototyping and experimentation, it's almost like a structured improv.

You kind of know where you're going with it, but then the material might tell you something.

There might be a happy accident.

Usually, one thing leads to another thing, leads to another thing, and the practice that I'm involved in, it's sort of an ongoing research where I rarely get the thing out of the oven and say, "This is it!"

I get the thing out of the oven and say, "Okay, now what's next?"

You know?

And that's kind of how that works with me.

What drew me to glass is, One, it requires teamwork.

So this connection to community and to a reliance on others to make something work.

I'm a people person, and I like the energy of the glass studio, where we're feeding off of each other.

Whether I have my assistants helping me or whether I'm helping somebody else, we're all invested in the success of this thing that we're making.

I find that so inspiring and it really drives everyone to want to do well.

I like working with others.

I like collaborating.

I'm inspired by the energy that students bring to the classroom and to the hot shop.

It keeps my energy up as I age.

When I'm in the studio with students, it feels like coaching.

It feels like coaching.

Essentially, you're inspiring students to have the confidence to do something they never thought that they could do, or to interact with something that seems a little scary at first.

As a coach, that's what you do.

You try to inspire students to have the confidence to take that first step.

Once they take that first step, it's typically a snowball effect and you can't get enough of it.

I couldn't make something like the bomb pot by myself.

I think that's pretty obvious.

In baseball, you each have your part, but it's not one person on the field with any team sport that's going to win the game, if you will.

Without the assistants being just as invested in the work as I am, it's not going to come together.

I would say to get to where we were with that team for the bomb pop, Santi has been a student of mine for a couple of years now.

Ben was a student of mine and now has graduated and is getting into his own career in glass.

We're looking combined in that studio at least six to seven years of experience just with my assistants and then tack on another 20 plus with me.

It takes a while.

It's not an overnight thing, but I guess you could say that with any craft, with any material, you know?

♪ ETHEREAL MUSIC ♪ You know, you kind of, once you start something, you can't stop.

So there's the adrenaline junkie in you, in me at least, right?

That's the anxiety that keeps me hyper focused.

You know, it's almost like if I don't have that fear, if I don't have that anxiety of if this isn't done, it's not going to, if we don't finish this now, it's not going to make it.

That keeps me focused.

It's like the world quiets.

It's a way— I love those moments because I could see as a viewer, maybe it's wow, that's too intense.

But when you're in the moment, everything goes away.

That's when my mind's the most quiet.

I don't have to think about, you know, is there bread in the fridge or whatever in that moment, you know, it all comes back when it's done.

But in that moment, that's when my mind is quietest.

And I think that for me, that's another, I guess, part of this process that I am drawn to.

♪ ETHEREAL MUSIC ♪ I guess the training that we do or the repetition to get a technique down, you just sort of let that take over and you have to trust your hands and trust what's going to happen.

Does it always work out?

No.

And, you know, I guess that's the not high stakes part is that that the studio isn't necessarily going to go away.

Hopefully I can come back and try again.

But, you know, I don't know.

It's those moments of intensity.

It's the moments of perceived chaos, you know, looking in that when you're in it with the team, knowing everybody's on the same page.

I'm getting chills talking about it, knowing that we all know what's going on and knowing that everybody knows their place and their role in that moment is just the highest high that you could have.

And when that thing does come off at the end and go into the oven is like, it's like the best drug.

In this next story, we travel to the Big Apple, New York City, to attend the final dress rehearsal of Broadway's leading ladies.

Speaking with actresses like La Chance and Helen J. Shen, we learn about this one night only concert event that celebrated some of the remarkable talent on Broadway.

So wonderful to be in the energy of this space, like with these iconic performers is truly something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

It's really great.

It's so special because, first of all, it's the Broadway leading ladies.

And these are mostly friends, people I've worked with throughout the year.

So it's nice for us to all come together and celebrate.

I just want to be able to get through my songs without crying.

I don't know if you just saw the rehearsal, but I couldn't keep it together.

I get so emotional.

These are all women that I look up to and respect so much, and I think they're insanely talented.

We're in the green room with all of these amazing women and every woman who comes into the room, I just go, because it's just icon after icon.

We're celebrating that art is important, that women's voices are important.

This is a testament to how impactful art can be for people.

It's so worth it to follow love, truly, because that's all I did as a kid.

I was like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

And then I was like, oh, it's maybe it's musical theater.

And here we are today.

And I just followed my heart.

I follow love, and that has been so rewarding.

I would like them to be inspired by what they saw and go out and research the shows that they just heard from and the people who sang and the people who inspired us singers, who are here tonight and who inspired us, Follow your dreams, and it's possible.

It really is.

Work hard and be kind, all of the above, yeah.

You can create the destiny that you want.

You don't have to have someone else tell you what it is.

Go and get it.

You have the idea in your mind.

I'm a true believer that if you can see it, if you have an idea about it, or an idea for it or an aspiration towards it, then that means that you can achieve it.

[ SINGING ] And that's all we have time for today.

Next week, we'll be back with a new set of stories from the art world.

Until then, I'm Mary Paul.