[upbeat music] - In this edition of "WLIW Arts Beat," a youth radio training program.

- Radio is a very emotive thing, and it's still something that can move people to tears, make people laugh, make people get angry.

That's why people tune in.

- [Diane] Pop up ballet performances.

[upbeat music] Computer generated drawings.

- Over the course of several hundred works, he did more than anyone else to explore the parameters of what was possible.

- [Diane] Art in the commercial space.

- Everyone has some connection to art.

So it's really interesting being out and realizing how big art is a part of everyone's life.

- [Diane] It's all ahead on this edition of "WLIW Arts Beat."

Funding for "WLIW Arts Beat" was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Welcome to "WLIW Arts Beat."

I'm Diane Masciale.

We take a trip to Ohio to learn about the radio station WYSO's training program, Dayton Youth Radio.

As part of the program, local high school students are able to learn about radio and share their stories and perspectives on air each week.

Have a listen.

- [Man] I'm not sure why I decided to put on my Superman costume.

- [Woman] My mom would always put me and my brother before her, even for the small things.

- I love my skin, I love being beautiful, I love being black, but not everybody else loves it.

I heard about Dayton Youth Radio through my creative writing teacher.

It was sort of nothing like I expected.

I mean, not that I went in there with negative expectations but I was a little nervous towards the beginning.

I thought my voice was gonna shake but I got comfortable pretty quick.

Through Dayton Youth Radio, I learned that I'm actually really courageous.

I didn't know that I had all of this ambition in me until I went with it, until I flowed with it honestly, and when I did, I felt like it was beautiful.

It kind of made me feel empowered.

- Dayton Youth Radio is a safe place for teenagers to tell stories about their lives and to talk about anything they want and to learn how to use radio equipment.

I put together an eight week program and became the founding producer of this series in 2014.

Public school and private school teachers reach out and invite me into their classroom.

Over 175 teenagers have come through this program, 10 at a time.

That first day is so important to just build trust, and so we can talk about anything.

Once you get past that first hour of being with a new group of teenagers, we form a tribe.

It's an eight week course.

By week three, they start telling me about what they would like to do with this microphone.

You have the microphone now.

You've got it for three minutes.

What do you want to talk about?

They're writing scripts and you have to tell the truth.

It has to be about truth.

Towards the end of the course, we come to WYSO and they do their narratives.

- We talked about how writing for radio is different than writing for someone to read and the importance of still capturing your audience and building a scene for them and making sure that there's enough detail that they can imagine the scene, but not too much that they're lost in it.

My Dayton Youth Radio story was about my transition from male to female and about how I encountered the world differently than a lot of other people, because I happen to be a teenager who's trans.

Through Dayton Youth Radio, I learned that my personal story can have an impact on the people and environment that surround me, and even something as small as a radio story can really open someone's eyes and maybe even change their views.

- [Woman] What were you wearing?

Where were you drinking?

What did you think was gonna happen walking home alone?

- [Man] I guess what I'm trying to say is love is the best bandaid you can use.

- [Woman] It bothers me that he never got to see me perform in color guard.

He hasn't been able to watch me grow up.

- The first year were pretty generic stories, but then I noticed the second year, the students wanted to talk about deeper and deeper topics, and sometimes students would cry in classes.

They talked about the subject that they wanted to do and I had to look at my syllabus and say, "You know what?

"I need more training," because if a student's talking about losing a loved one, and then I'm like, "Well, this is how a microphone works," I wasn't being effective.

So after the second year, I went back and got certified in mental health training for working with adolescents.

I know how to make this place even safer now with my training, and then we could go deeper, and if you look at our series, the stories have gotten more intense, more personal.

- [Man] It was almost like I was living in two different worlds.

At school, I always had a lunch, yet at home, when we couldn't afford milk, my dad told me to pour water in my cereal.

- [Woman] One of the things I dislike about my culture is young marriage.

My great grandma got married when she was only 13 years old.

- My dad who had always had a job had been laid off.

Being laid off affected the way he saw our country, our community.

Now he seemed to be talking about race all the time.

I wasn't trying to tear anybody down.

I was trying to bring light to an issue which is important to me that I don't agree with.

I was actually in Dayton Youth Radio last year and it kind of inspired me to become interested in radio more and also just media at large.

I go to Bowling Green and I major in broadcast journalism.

- Go ahead and pause.

What we can do is... Let's hold off on getting the bike sounds.

Let's just finish it, Because the bike sounds can always just be thrown back in.

Like it's not vital.

I go to Ohio State University and I'm studying journalism.

And then what we'll do if we get everything done before 2:30, we'll just go out, have you sit with the recording equipment, like, in your lap and then just like pedal for like a minute of just like solid bike sounds.

My story was about a father that I did not know.

While I knew through other people, all bad things of course, but it was more of just trying to find out who he was.

I wanna forgive my father, but my grandma doesn't want me to see him.

My grandma has not forgiven my father for what he did to my mom and me.

You know, I was actually thinking about this, like, is this a form of therapy?

And I think what's interesting about Dayton Youth Radio, at least for the stories that we've done, when they're really personal, they always start where it's opening up this wound and it kind of just lets that be, and so it doesn't ever solve it.

It's not trying to solve it, it's trying to get you and kind of kick you to go and deal with your problems, and at least it motivates you to ask those questions that you might not have asked.

Radio is a very emotive thing and it's still something that can move people to tears, make people laugh, make people get angry.

That's why people tune in.

- That's what the listener hears when they hear these stories.

It's a love and passion and an excellence.

Once the class is over, I'm off to the next school and sometimes I'll see the family, like, at the mall, and they say, "Thank you for helping my kid tell that story."

There's a lot of happy endings, I've heard, from some of these stories going on the air.

I'm always in awe and just feeling blessed to do this project with the teenagers.

- [Woman] I understand the value of education and what not having one can do to your life.

- [Man] I'm an aspiring meteorologist who dreams of being on TV one day.

Yeah, I just said meteorologist.

- [Jodon] When you have a dream, you shouldn't let anyone make you feel like you're not good enough.

You have the power to make a difference.

[upbeat music] For Dayton Youth Radio, this Jodon.

- [Diane] Hear more at wyso.org/podcast/Dayton-youth-r. And now the artist quote of the week.

[upbeat music] During the COVID 19 pandemic, Miami City Ballet presented a series of outdoor popup performances throughout the city, called "to Miami with Love."

Each of the new works was inspired by a Miami neighborhood.

We head to Florida to experience one of the performances.

[upbeat music] [cheering] For more information, go to miamicityballet.org.

Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

[upbeat music] At the University of New Mexico, the computer program Art One gave artists the opportunity to use technology to render works of art.

One of these artists was Frederick Hammersley who made over 150 groundbreaking illustrations in this manner.

Here's the story.

[upbeat music] - The movement that started with computers at UNM was really cool.

The program Art One becomes the medium that the artist uses and it's an entirely new medium.

[upbeat music] What happened was a whole bunch of artists took over technology that was meant for other purposes like payrolls and nuclear weapons, and they played with it.

They made something visually interesting and completely unexpected out of it.

[upbeat music] Hammersley was the kind of an artist who functioned well within the limits.

Over the course of several hundred works, he did more than anyone else to explore the parameters of what was possible with Art One.

He was very interested in...

Within a boundary, if the boundaries were clear, his type of art was to move all around to every possible corner of that sort of walled garden, exploring the possibilities, up and down, in and out, back and forth.

It's reducing a visual idea to a set of instructions and computers, that this is still true, computers are very stupid.

They have to be told exactly everything down to the last parameter, and so this kind of thing appealed to Hammersley, working through a language like that.

That was his kind of thing.

He flourished under it.

For the better part of two years, he devoted almost all of his attention to creating art books with Art One.

[upbeat music] Hammersley literally had a great sense of humor.

He was always making jokes.

He often gave his works titles that were... That had a sort of a play on words in them, like "Take a Moment for you," and then in a prominent place in the work would be the letter "U," you know?

And so he was always...

He was looking for ways to use humor to kind of demystify art and make it more user friendly.

[upbeat music] What's going on is that they're taking a line printer that prints numbers, and letters, and math symbols, and they're using those symbols in a new way to take the old meaning out of them and give them a new purely visual meaning within the framework of a page of computer paper.

The big discussion back then was the two cultures.

We have a scientific culture and a literary culture or an artistic culture, and they have nothing to say to each other.

After World War II, this was the cultural debate back then because you have avant-garde art that very few people understand, and then you have avant-garde science, some of which is like top secret.

Where's the meeting point?

Guess what, Art One is the meeting point.

[upbeat music] What I loved about Hammersley's art is its originality, basically.

He had a show of these works in Albuquerque and the reviewer said, "It's sort of interesting "to see something used for tax forms now becoming art," and that's the biggest surprise of this whole thing.

You don't expect it.

You're like, "What's this?"

And anytime an artist gets you to sort of wonder where you are at that moment, then they've succeeded.

They've challenged the way you look at stuff, and Hammersley, he accomplished that.

[upbeat music] Art One can expand our understanding of what art is, because look, the computer that they use did the payroll for UNM, it participated in the Manhattan project making nuclear weapons, it did the scientific and mathematical calculations for the science departments, and guess what, it made art.

It was something...

It was a corner of creativity in a very esoteric and even top secret world.

That's inspiring.

That's a cool thing.

- [Diane] And here's a look at this week's art history.

[upbeat music] In this segment, we travel to Reno, Nevada to see how art is being incorporated into the commercial space.

Through an impactful partnership, businesses and artists are working together to bring art to the community in new and exciting ways.

Take a look.

[upbeat music] - Plumas Bank decided to have a mural painted on our walls because we believe in supporting local artists, and we believe that arts and culture is the soul to our community.

Without art, without culture, you have buildings, but you don't have a soul.

So we were very excited about allowing an artist to bring his talent and a vision to our canvas on the corner so that people could drive by and enjoy.

- The mural at Plumas Bank was really unique because I had never got a chance to paint a bank before, and when they approached me, I thought it was really interesting because I've never been asked by that type of institution to do a mural.

So it was a nice mixing of two industries and it was also my first time painting a corner where it's two walls coming together to make a kind of a sculptural mural.

It's a large landscape piece with a a different landscape in the background, and then there's an anonymous figure holding the the initial larger landscape in the center and it's using the space and that 90 degree corner to create a kind of box to showing that someone's embracing and taking care of the landscape that we live in here in our community.

Mostly with my mural work, I try not to overtly say too much and leave it kind of open and abstract so people could associate what they want with it, and it's nice to make people feel like they're important and their environment and community is celebrated.

[upbeat music] Since the pandemic, I've seen, you know, a lot of businesses look at the model of murals, and look at the model of public art, and see that relationship as a good way to engage with the community and put their best foot forward, and also connect with the local art community, and, you know, there's just an endless amount of opportunities.

- I think it's really important for businesses and local artists to work together to do promotional artwork on their building or just regular artwork in general, some sort of murals.

It's really beneficial for both parties.

I get paid to paint and that artwork draws in customers that make them money, and then at the same time, those people that are coming in might see my art, see my name, and come and want to get some sort of artwork from me too.

So it helps all the local artists get their name out to the general public without having to have like an actual gallery for themselves specifically, which is a lot harder to do.

- To me, one of the functionalities of the art, aside from just the beauty of it, and the outlet for the artist themselves, and being part of the art community is also, you know...

The attractiveness adds to the building, it's a conversation piece.

There are different tours in Reno, whether they're the pedicab tours or even the walking tours of the Midtown Mural Art Walk that happens monthly, and we've always been sort of an end up spot for some of those tours for a place to go eat and drink that has a lot of space for people between us and Pinon Bottle.

So we decided to put this mural on the face of the businesses and now it just gives us more relevancy to be part of that tour in a more profound way.

We run a for-profit company and we want to do things that not only enrich our community but also help to, you know, get people to spend money and create commerce.

[upbeat music] - We have had a very positive response from our clients and we've had very positive responses from non-clients from the community, and that's our goal, and through art and through arts and culture, I believe businesses can help bring a community together.

- Usually on most of these murals, you're approached by random people because you're not in like a specific place like a museum where people are going there because they already like art and they wanna see art.

You're just out in the public having, you know, random people going to the grocery store, the bank, or to pick up their kids, stop and say, "What are you doing?

"What is this?"

And then give you their feedback, and usually it's like, "Oh, my uncle's a sculptor," or, "My mom was a painter," or everyone has some connection to art.

So it's really interesting being out and realizing how big art is a part of everyone's life.

[upbeat music] - Art makes you grow.

It stimulates your brain and it touches emotions that normally you walk through life and you don't touch.

Without arts and culture, your community isn't vibrant and you lose that piece that people want and they look for when they move here.

Arts and culture bring businesses to Nevada.

- [Diane] Find out more about the artists by visiting erictburke.com and facebook.com/EQLDcreations.

That wraps it up for this edition of "WLIW Arts Beat."

We'd like to hear what you think.

So like us on Facebook, join the conversation on Twitter and visit our webpage for features and to watch episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Masciale.

Thank you for watching "WLIW Arts Beat."

Funding for "WLIW Arts Beat" was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[upbeat music]