[upbeat music] - In this addition of WLIW Arts Beat.

A place for creative expression.

- [Jamie] We wanted to be able to start a collective and just keep giving homes to more and more artists.

[soft music] [upbeat music] - [Diane] Art colonies inspired by New England.

- These landscapes are all still here around us.

So we very much hope that people when they come to see the show, will also then step outside and explore this wonderful place [upbeat music] - [Diane] Dancing to Shakespeare.

- [Ananda] When you start saying everybody's name, it gets really confusing.

And that's why I think when we watch the action only, it can actually be more clear [upbeat music] - [Diane] Quilted wall hangings.

- There's something deeply spiritual about creating something.

It's the playfulness.

It's the letting your imagination run wild.

- [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.

At Washed Up Key West in Florida, Kasidy Fritts transforms tropical hardwood into pieces that are both functional and beautiful to look at.

He is also one of the founders of a collective for artists of various disciplines.

Here's the story.

[upbeat music] - Hi, my name's Jamie Mattingly.

I am Kasidy Fritts' fiance.

He started Washed Up Key West.

This is his wood shop.

What Kasidy does is he uses local tropical hardwood trees, Cuban mahogany, if we can find Dade County pine, you know, we get it from old houses, Jamaican dogwood, woman's tongue.

He likes to take those, cut 'em into slabs, and once they're dry and ready to go he makes dining room tables, coffee tables, serving boards, charcuterie boards, what he likes to call functional art, art that people not only get to enjoy visually, but can actually use.

And he likes to push the boundaries on it so he's always looking for new and fun ways to use the wood or to mix the wood with resins or other mediums.

It's definitely an eclectic style.

You see a lot of the graffiti outside, a lot of the very bright colors.

We try to bring some of that in, but at the same time he could be very minimal and islandy in his design.

And, you know, just finding a really fun way to marry the two of them together.

[upbeat music] After hurricane Irma happened down here, a lot of big trees came down.

We actually helped salvage a lot of really old historic trees from around town, one of them being the Shel Silverstein home which was destroyed by the giant banyan tree falling on top of it.

Now, banyan trees are not normally a kind of tree that we would harvest to turn into furniture because it's not a hard wood, but we did grab some of the trees and made coasters out of them, and, you know, Key West had sort of dubbed that banyan tree the giving tree.

It is a piece of Key West's history and a piece of literary history and it's been a lot of fun to make.

[upbeat music] It surprises some people to realize that we are super big tree lovers.

We do not advocate for taking down any trees unless they are a danger because of lean or rot damage.

But if that tree has to come down, we wanna be the ones to get in there and take that log.

And we let it dry out for about a year, year and a half.

He slices it into slabs.

We've got wood drying everywhere, all over the wood shop but also all over our house.

At home, we probably have six or seven piles of wood just drying out right now.

Rather than watching these gorgeous pieces of wood go to waste, we now get to let them live on.

And it's a really exciting part of the job.

Kasidy and I both have been extremely lucky throughout this entire pandemic.

We've decided that we really want to start using our businesses for good and giving back more than we've been able to in the past.

So we recently linked up with One Tree Planted, which is an organization that will, for every donation, will plant a tree in your honor.

So we've decided that for every single piece that we sell at Washed Up, we're gonna have a tree planted.

December was the first month that we actually got to do it and we planted 78 trees.

[upbeat music] We wanted to be able to start a collective and just keep giving homes to more and more artists.

So Debie Fritts, Kasidy's mom, is Key West Island Art.

Debie has done a lot of these really cool conch homes, well, she'll ride around Key West and find really funky looking houses and then create miniatures of them.

Kelly Raspa is Concrete Ship Mercantile, and she does a lot of macrame and fiber art.

She makes these really gorgeous unique earrings, gorgeous macrame, and what we would like to say is like more modern macrame.

Nick Soto from Made By Soto is a fine gold and silver jeweler.

He's actually one of the only jewelers down here keeping alive the tradition of cuban hoops, which is, you know, the mixture of gold and white gold and like very intricate designs.

[upbeat music] A couple years ago at our old wood shop, Kasidy had a 20 foot fence and he's always wanted to put up art walls to let artists come and do whatever they wanted.

Just have fun.

And if you walk around the shop, you'll see a lot of those walls that we had that kind of got us started.

What we hope to do for these artists is to give them a canvas to show off their skills so that other businesses around town that are looking for an artist to come to a mural will now see an example of their work.

Our goal is to create the Stock Island Art District.

Stock Island is more than just where the shrimpers and the fishermen take their boats out.

It's an artistic, very creative, beautiful thriving business community.

- [Diane] Find out more at washedupkeywest.com.

[upbeat music] And now the artist quote of the week.

[upbeat music] Up next, we travel to the Cape Ann Museum in Massachusetts to see an exhibit focused on two of New England's oldest summer art colonies.

An assortment of artworks inspired by the region's landscapes are on display.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] As much as artists have always been drawn to, say, the sea, they've also felt the gravitational pull of each other.

Throughout art history, it's been the crux of many in art colony.

- In the case of Cape Ann, it is a place where teachers and art teachers and students and professional painters, amateur painters, all seem to gather and find inspiration amongst themselves.

- [Narrator] Cape Ann has been a draw for its harbors in Gloucester and Rockport, places which have long found a balance between bustling and the rustic grit that defines ages of seafaring.

Martha Oaks is curator of the Cape Ann Museum.

- Here in Cape, we're, it's a very welcoming place for artists and everywhere you look, you can find something that attracts you no matter what medium you work in.

- [Narrator] But many of the same artists who have made Cape Ann their artistic oasis have also found their muse on Monhegan Island.

100 miles up the coast from Cape Ann, it's a picture of stony isolation.

- [Martha] So you find the beautiful rocky coastline, the ocean and crashing waves and unspoiled land.

- When I was there, the summer I stepped off the boat, and literally the first thing I saw was an artist at an easel.

- [Narrator] Oliver Barker is the director of the Cape Ann museum, which along with the Monhegan Museum of Art & History is presenting an exhibition documenting the growth of the two enduring art colonies.

- It's looking at that period of the late 19th century into the early 20th century when artists were searching for their own unique American voice.

And I think perhaps why they were drawn to these two rugged landscapes to try and encapsulate that new sense of American identity.

- [Narrator] Artists began creating art colonies in both locals in the years after the Civil War, when transportation improvements made access to Cape Ann and Monhegan easier.

Both places, Barker says, illustrated the differing dimensions of an America on the mend.

- In recalling that these works were made at a time when Gloucester was in a tayday, it was America's largest sea port.

And I think that you see the working industry of the fishing industries here.

Going to Monhegan for the first time, this summer and sitting on that boat and going out from Port Clyde for 12 miles out into the middle of the ocean, and what impressed me about that experience is that there are people that live their year round and it obviously was a way of life, it still is.

And there's a, to me, it shows a pioneering spirit.

- [Narrator] It was also a spirit of welcoming, Oaks points out, as we tour the show, especially for women like artists, Theresa Bernstein, whose work we find here.

She was a pioneer in her own right as one of the early 20th century's leading artists.

- [Martha] This shows a group of women artists in the Folly Cove neighborhood.

And we see some of the local people or the women who ran the boarding house where artists stayed, the man who supplied her with the lobsters that she cooked to feed the artists.

- But we just long for days like this.

It's here in the fall, right?

- I know.

Eric Hudson, who's painting is shown here.

He's one of the few artists who actually resided in both places.

The story is he would frequently get in a dory or a small boat and actually take his canvases out with him so not as much in this one, but some of the paintings you look like you're actually in the trough of a wave with the artist looking up at these big fishing vessels.

- [Narrator] What carries through these works is an aura of place.

Something that comes from years, if not decades, of familiarity and careful observation as we see in a lifetime of work by Stow Wengenroth - I love works like this, where you can smell the wood almost, you can smell the evergreen.

- [chuckles] Yeah.

What we have here is an early lithograph they did in the 1930s of a Cape Ann scene and then on the bottom of drawing down on Monhegan.

And he was really a master at black and white.

It's just remarkable.

When you look at them, you really think you're right there.

- And as both Oliver Barker and the artists still working in both places today remind us, we still can be.

- These landscapes are all still here around us.

So we very much hope that people, when they come to see the show will also then step outside and explore this wonderful place [upbeat music] - [Diane] For more information, go to capeannmuseum.org.

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

[upbeat music] The Sierra Nevada ballet combine Shakespeare, steampunk design, and dance to create a production that is one of a kind.

In this segment, we travel to Reno, Nevada, to see how the show came together.

[soft classical music] - Well, "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a classically complicated story.

Like it's one of Shakespeare's plays that people always say, "I get confused about this," - But we have interpreted it in a different way to add a steampunk element and then a ethereal element as well.

[classical music] - "Midsummer Night's Dream" has three little sections.

There's a story about a couple, a girl whose father is very, how can we say, male chauvinistic?

He wants her to marry the person he wants her to marry but she doesn't wanna marry that person.

She's in love with somebody else.

And she tells her best friend, Helena, about the fact that she wants to be with this other person.

Now Helena loves the person her father wants her to marry.

So it becomes a little complicated there.

Now they run away, the two people who wanna get married, to the forest, where the other plot happens.

Because it's a story about the queen of the fairies and her husband who have a strange relationship.

They have a good marriage but they're always trying to better themselves.

Like in other words, if one has strong character the other one wants to be stronger.

- When you start saying everybody's name, it gets really confusing.

And that's why I think when we watch the action only, it can actually be more clear.

[classical music] - Ananda spent a lot of time with the actual script of "Midsummer Night's Dream".

So Ananda's very familiar with the dialogue which is very helpful when you're trying to translate something without words.

So we were able to go through the scenes and break down what needed to happen in each scene.

And it's great as a choreographer to have somebody who knows the dramaturgy like that because this is a direct interpretation from Shakespeare.

So it's very important to be able to go back and be like, "Did we hit the marks we needed to in that scene?

Yes, we did.

Let's move on."

- [Ananda] We did the choreography with all of the action from the play, having to change certain things, you know because the dialogue about stuff that happens off stage doesn't work in ballet so it has to happen in front of you.

But basically we did the whole Shakespeare play as a ballet - For us to translate from words to movement is not that difficult.

We use a lot of mime.

- So we will use like, for example, you and I and love.

And so we have hand gestures and pantomime that we rely on but you can also interpret that in the body.

So if somebody's uncomfortable, you can, their body language will change to be able to keep continuing that story on.

[upbeat classical music] - One of the goals of our ballet was to help people understand Shakespeare's work a little bit better, a little bit easier.

And I think with the costuming, that was one of the elements we wanted to bring in, was that the fairies are fairies, the villagers are villagers.

And then the couples are specific couples that do go together.

- [Alex] Ananda had the great idea that all of the humans in this story are all from this steampunk world.

And so when you see any of the lovers or the royalty, they're all part of this world that we've built, that steampunk.

- And because it has like sort of the Victorian style, even though it's outlandish and amazing and whimsical, it still gives us a feeling more of the every day and then versus the magical - The townspeople, we actually kept to a pretty strict palette of more muted tones.

And the reason why is we wanted to give the audience the impression that the villagers are kind of boxed in.

They don't see the colors.

They don't see the other worldliness that's going on.

And so the fairies you'll notice, are dressed very boldly in bright colors.

They're all body painted to give it another worldly effect so that the audience would recognize these are not the same people.

They don't belong together.

Each individual costume has individual elements to it.

So what we tried to do was we tried to imagine what a street child in Victorian times would have worn but then add pieces that they would have looked for to be steampunk.

So for a lot of the children's costumes, we added bustles or petticoats under their skirts, but then also added leather corsetry or leather waist pieces, things of that nature, to kind of give it that industrial element but also really stick to that Victorian theme.

[upbeat classical music] - When you build a ballet like this you want it to all be one cohesive piece and you want it to all make sense.

So that takes a lot of planning with the designers, with the people building the costumes, and then actually trying to take the costumes that you build and make sure they work for the production.

It takes a city, it takes a lot of people to put on a production like this.

And luckily we have a wonderful community here that helped support us in that.

[upbeat classical music] - The extraordinary thing is when they first asked me to do "Midsummer", like last year, and I started thinking about it, I came up with this idea.

I had this vision in my head and watching this ballet and seeing that it looks exactly like that vision has been so amazing.

I'm like, "I can't believe it.

It's real.

That was in my head and now it's real."

And I'm watching these talented people do all this stuff you know, and all of this amazing visuals that I hoped we would have that we do have.

And then the most extraordinary thing for me has been listening to the audience's laughter, not in my scenes, but in the other scenes.

So I can just be there and see the action and hear the like Gaffigan laughter.

One audience member told me, she said, "I laughed so hard I snorted."

And I was like, that's perfect.

That's exactly what we wanted to happen is that people watch the ballet and they just like lose it in their suits [upbeat classical music] - [Diane] Discover more at sierranevadaballet.org.

[upbeat music] And here's a look at this week's art history.

[upbeat music] Renee Wormack-Keels is an Ohio based fiber and mixed media artist who quilts using hand-dyed and commercial fabrics and African prints.

Her textured art quilts are full of meaning.

Take a look.

- My motto is there are no mistakes in quilting.

There are only design opportunities.

[upbeat music] When I was a child, I learned to sew.

You know, those were the days of Home Economics, and I made the little apron and the little blouse that you make.

So I fell in love with sewing.

[upbeat music] As time went on, I think when I was in high school, senior high school, I made a lot of my clothes.

And then when my children came along I started making my children's clothes [upbeat music] Through the years, I kind of got away from it.

And then someone I was on a panel with, we were talking about the things that we liked to do and this person was telling me she was a quilter, and I said, "Well, you I've always been a sewer.

And when I retire, in 25 years or so, I'm going to learn to quilt."

And she said, "Oh Renee, don't wait until you retire.

Let me teach you now."

So I spent about two weeks with her.

learning how to make what is called a log cabin quilt.

I wanted to learn the process.

I wanted to learn the skills because I wanted to learn how to make art quilts.

There are the traditional quilts that you would put on your bed versus the kind of thing that I make now that goes on your wall.

There's something deeply spiritual about creating something.

It's the playfulness.

It's the letting your imagination run wild.

There are quote unquote rules in quilting.

And while I do try to make sure that my seams are straight, my sewing is straight.

my points don't always, you know, match up.

My colors may not necessarily be analogous.

I have put orange and purple together.

I just love the idea of putting different pieces of fabric together and watching how they play together.

[loud trumpet music] I consider myself to be a narrative storyteller quilter.

That is my quilts tell a story, and typically they will tell stories about women's lives.

[trumpet music] What I want people to come away from is not only to be inspired, but to learn about the unsung heroes, sheroes, I guess I should say, the women whose stories are not told.

"Wild Women Don't Have The Blues" is the first of a series of three quilts.

I got interested in blues singers of the '20S, '30s, and '40s, Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith.

And I said, "I'd like to tell the story of these singers in a quilt because sometimes people will never pick up a book and read it, but they might be willing to at least read a quilt that goes on your wall."

[trumpet music] The second quilt is called "Cafe Au Lait and Brown Sugar Divas" because in the entertainment industry, African American women were sometimes segregated according to skin color.

In that quote is a little different fabric.

It's yellow tones, it's light brown tones because I wanted it to sort of mirror the images of the women and and their skin tone.

"Cocoa and Hot Chocolate Divas" is the quote that I created for darker skinned women Hattie McDaniel, Beah Richards, are in there.

So that's how that series of quilts came into being.

[sewing machine stitching] Maybe about 10 or 12 years ago, going through some really deep emotional turmoil and quilting became very therapeutic for me.

[sad music] There's a quilt that I do once a year, and that quilt is for my son who is incarcerated.

[sad music] One of the things that I could not do last year was to go see him.

So one of my pieces is called "Your Blues Ain't Like Mine," and it's blue fabric, it's blue hearts.

Because I hadn't been able to visit him during the pandemic, that made it pretty difficult and painful for me.

[sad music] And as you can tell, this heart is not completely reconnected and that's on purpose.

That heart is reconnected, but this heart is not.

- [Interviewer] Is there a point where you think you won't need to make one?

- I'm hoping so.

Yes.

I'm hoping so.

[sad music] As I quilt, I'm thinking "You're leaving your own legacy of your own stories," and people may not know all of my story but they will know some of my story, and hopefully that will encourage them to think about their own stories as well.

[sad music] [upbeat music] - [Diane] Learn more at metamofosi.org.

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.

[upbeat music] Funding for WLIW Arts Beat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[upbeat music]