[Announcer] Funding for the art show is made possible by The L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, The Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, The Sutphin Family Foundation, The Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by and viewers like you.

Thank You.

(light music) In this edition of "The Art Show", weaving history and memory through art.

(uplifting music) Experience, the show behind the show, (uplifting music continues) and an immersive floral exhibit dazzles.

(uplifting music continues) It's all ahead on this edition of "The Art Show".

(zany music) (zany music continues) (zany music fades) Hi, I am Rodney Veal, and welcome to "The Art Show", where each week we provide access to local, regional, and national artists and arts organizations.

Columbus artist, Aminah Robinson, didn't just create art, she built a world, a living, breathing tapestry of history, memory, and community.

Through her work, she honored everyday Black life, tracing connections from Ohio, to Africa, and beyond, and now her legacy is on the move.

The exhibit, Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir, is traveling across the country, sharing her powerful storytelling with brand new audiences.

This is more than an exhibition, it's a homecoming.

Take a look.

[Aminah] I never thought I was young because I've always thought I lived in the timelessness.

I knew what I wanted to do.

The Springfield Museum of Art has been so honored to be the first stop on the tour for Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir.

So this opportunity came to us through the Columbus Museum of Art, and through the Art Bridges Foundation As an artist, Aminah was unconventional.

She found art in every aspect of her life.

She could walk down the street and pick up a leaf, and see the beauty.

Aminah Robinson holds a central place in our community here in Columbus, and especially at the Columbus Museum of Art.

When Aminah passed away in 2015, she entrusted her life's work to the museum, and now we're fortunate to be stewards of her home studio, her archives, all of the work that remained, as well as her writings, and her library.

The title of this exhibition, Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir, is a perfect title for this exhibition.

Aminah's work focused so much on exploring her history, her past, her communities, her family, her family's histories, and the way that she communicates to the world is through her works of art.

[Deidre] I would describe her as regal, yet humble, as deeply thoughtful, but also engaging, as a genius who recognized the genius in others, as someone who lived in the moment and was ahead of her time.

So the four different sections were childhood home, and then ancestral home, and then spiritual home, and journeys home, and Deidre organized artworks that she felt belonged in each of those sections.

The really big RagGonNon pieces, the panoramic pieces, I really wanted on our most visible wall, and so it was a lot of moving pieces around, and trying to understand how to tell the story and keep things in some chronological order.

We had an opportunity through Art Bridges Foundation to create an exhibition based on works that were in our permanent collection, and Aminah Robinson's works rose to the surface as the first idea.

So instead of 240 works, we have 60 works, and 60 works come out of our permanent collection.

This we decided to create about home, her search for home in every aspect of her life.

Because of the value of the work, and the delicateness of the work, we are working closely with Columbus Museum of Art and their courier, making sure that the work is handled carefully, uncrated exactly as it needs to be, and recreated.

Aminah's work is a really important part, because she made work for seven decades, and her work is so deeply rooted in African storytelling and ideas around community, ideas around resourcefulness, and scrappiness, and resilience, and I think their stories need to be told.

Robinson's art, rooted in history and storytelling, offers a powerful entry point for engaging younger audiences.

Where Aminah started, like she really does credit her early upbringing in Poindexter Village, which was a publicly funded housing complex, one of the first of its kind in Columbus, Ohio.

So some of her early influence, as far as her art making, came from her family, and from the Poindexter Village community in Columbus, Ohio.

She was an artist, but didn't see herself as an artist.

She said, "I'm just walking through life.

I just walk."

She enveloped her community, and she became her community, and when she expressed it in her art, and in her writing, we knew she was ahead of her time, and she did seven decades of work.

We did not know how important what she was doing then would be to us now, but she knew, because she also created her future for us to be able to live in.

[Jennifer] I recall hearing an interview where she talked about how she had spent a lot of time in the public library, and even worked in the public library for a while, and she became absolutely mesmerized by maps.

I don't know, sort of a bird's eye view, looking over a street scape, or a city, or something like that, so you know, paying attention to all those signs, and the people that she sees on the streets I think is really fascinating, and definitely very Aminah.

When Aminah traveled, she was known to have an intention.

She would learn the language before she left in order to be able to communicate with the people she would encounter.

When she would go into the spaces, she would sit in the quarters outside.

She would just become part of the community.

She had gone to Egypt.

She had gone to Africa, but in this particular case she was in the Middle East.

She was in Jerusalem, Herzliya, and she sat in the quarters, and watched the people, the diversity of the people.

I think there's such a strong sense of community, which I think tends to be such an important part of African American culture, but she radiates that sensibility, and I think that's really evident.

Aminah was such an inspiring presence.

She really is a larger than life presence, and you would feel that when she would come into the museum, and you'd have the opportunity to meet her.

As part of this exhibition, A Street Called Home, that piece I walked by every day in Columbus is here, and it's highlighted at the Springfield Museum of Art.

I think she would be so humbled and proud, but not proud in a haughty way at all.

She would have believed that a dream of hers had come true, something she set intention upon actually came to life, and her whole life was about nurturing others, nurturing community, giving voice to all of humanity, not just one group, not just one race, creed, color, none of that.

She was about bringing people together, uplifting people, giving voice to people, and I think she believed, and it's true that her art did that, and the fact that she could continue that legacy through this project, I think she would be very, very happy.

If you'd like to learn more about this, or any other story on today's show, visit us online at cetconnect.org, or thinktv.org.

Ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of a theater performance?

Scenic designer Kelly Mangan invites us to experience the show behind the show at Bowling Green State University.

Let's check out how the students and faculty in the Department of Theater and Film make the magic happen for audiences.

This story is a part of a series produced in collaboration with Ohio's Public Television Stations that takes us behind the scenes of the arts.

(classical music) The shows that we've been working on in the scene shop all semester long started off with a show called "John Proctor is the Villain".

It took place in a classroom setting.

The second show that we did was an opera called "Cendrillon", and it is the Cinderella story, but told in a little bit more modern way.

And then the final show that we did this semester was the musical, "Heathers".

My name is Kelly Mangan.

I am a scenic designer, scenic artist and prop coordinator in the Department of Theater and Film.

Before you start designing for a show, you kind of have to become the director in your head too.

You have to know the script backwards and forwards.

I don't sketch as my first ideas.

I start cutting apart little pieces of paper, and gluing them together.

For "Cendrillon", we talked about the fact that the entrance from outside into the living room was really, really important for everybody that came to the house, so I put that up on a series of platforms so that all of the audience could see what was going on.

This is the first floor of the Wolf Center.

This hallway houses the scene shop and the costume shop.

We'll start here with the scene shop where we build all of the scenery for all of the shows.

We usually try to have about a month and a half of really dedicated build time for each of the shows.

We don't always get that.

Sometimes we have to build a show in a month.

Sometimes we get two months to build a show.

A lot of times we're overlapping.

We might be building three different shows in each of the shops.

The students do almost all of the work in the scene shop.

The Shop Foreman and the Technical Director are there to make sure that it's done right and safely, but the students are hands on all the time.

We don't have any problems with students cutting the wood, measuring the wood, looking at the drawings.

They all know how to read floor plans and elevations of the work that we're gonna do so that they can know how to build their own cut lists.

They know the tools that are appropriate for those cuts.

Then after it's built, it all has to be put back together so that we can sort of test fit it.

Then it all comes back apart again, and gets laid down on the floor to be painted.

In the back of the scene shop, we've got a dedicated paint room where we can use that space to mix paint, do samples, and basically prep for all of the stuff that we have to do for scenic art for a show.

When you're painting, especially like wood grain, it's funny, because if the Director walks in, and you're only half done, most of the time you'll get this comment of, "Is that what it's gonna look like?

", because a base coat for wood is really ugly.

It's bright.

It's not what you expect it to be.

That big brush that can do that blend doesn't get into all of the nooks and crannies, and so you have to get out smaller brushes, and the process is not always pretty.

You have to trust that there are steps that you follow.

You put your base coat down.

Well, even before that you have to put another base coat down, because we reuse flats all the time, and so I might be painting on a flat that's one of them is blue, and the other one is yellow, and the other one is purple.

I have to get that back to sort of a general color, and so I base coat usually with white or cream, and then I'll start with the bottom coat of the art finish.

(hammer bangs) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) In this costume shop, costumes is not just what you think of in terms of a garment.

It's hair, it's makeup, it's jewelry, it's shoes, it's hats, it's all of that stuff that is about the actor and what they wear.

Students will build in the costume shop as much as they do in the scene shop.

They get their hands on all of the stuff that we do.

The students will pull garments that we have in stock and hem and do the alterations.

Tech week is actually the most, I think, exciting part of all of it.

You know, we get to see all of the planning that we've done for weeks and weeks and weeks come to fruition.

This is standby for light cue 15, sound cue C. Plus, it's perfect for right now.

We're reading "The Crucible" in class.

Yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather- ♪ (indistinct) ♪ [Kelly] And then opening night is a little bittersweet because it's on its own.

It's like sending a kid out the door to go to kindergarten.

It's like you got no more control.

What's cool is listening to the audience, and listening to the cast and the crew after the show talk about how proud they were.

They say you shouldn't go home whistling the scenery, because it's not about the scenery, it's not about the costumes, it's not about any of those things individually.

It's about how it comes together for the whole show.

If you crave more art goodness in your life, the podcast "Rodney Veal's Inspired By" is available now.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more and find show notes at thinktv.org, or cetconnect.org.

A recent installation by artist Rebecca Louise Law dazzled visitors to the Cleveland Public Library.

Made up of over 500,000 botanical objects like flowers, pine cones, and seed pods, the installation, titled The Archive, was assembled through a hands-on collaboration between the artist and the local community.

Let's watch.

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) People were really sort of in awe of the scale of this, something so big, yet made up of so many tiny pieces.

First impressions were, it's incredible, way bigger than I imagined, way more immersive.

I was overwhelmed.

We've had many great exhibits in this space, but by far, this is the largest exhibit.

Rebecca Louise Law has just been on my artist's crush list forever.

Rebecca is an artist from the UK She lives in Wales now.

She is best known for these installations that are stringing flowers, but she has a pretty extensive artistic practice with lots of materials.

Early in her art career, she was trying to sort of paint the world as she remembered it as a child, and she wasn't able to capture that feeling with paint, and she started working directly with flowers.

One thing that drew me to her is how she involves the community in the creation of her works, and also her stance on sustainability.

This installation uses over 500,000 flowers, 100,000 are from Cleveland, and they were saved from the landfill.

Some of the flowers in the archive are actually from her father's garden, and they've traveled all around the world over 20 plus years.

People were bringing them.

We are saving them from funeral homes that were gonna throw them out, grocery stores, drying them, and then stringing them, and then the other 400,000 are reused from past installations that Rebecca has done.

Rebecca has really wanted to look at sustainability when it comes to her work.

She's wanted to look at how to get that sort of emotional sense of the natural world that we're in.

Once this installation is done, she keeps them for the next one, so that's why it really is the archive of her artistic practice, and even when she came, I mean I knew she was into sustainability, but she was saving every single petal, all the crumbs, like nothing was going to waste, which was just amazing to see it as part of someone's artistic practice.

The archive here is called The Archive, because it has flowers from every single project she's worked on all over the world, so we have a bit of every single one of her projects here, so this is sort of the archive of her projects here at Cleveland Public Library.

I mean, these are many, many years of exhibits that are part of this installation, and then the hand of Cleveland residents in bringing their own flowers.

It's a really cool, collaborative effort.

(bright music) She really believes that her art speaks to everyone, that she liked what we did in Cleveland where you bring folks from all different generations, older folks and younger folks, to work on her exhibit.

Rebecca came to town and taught us how to string them on the copper wire, and we divided them into different types, different colors.

We had volunteers helping immensely to string up all them on the copper wire.

It was really cool.

I mean, seeing everybody learning how to take these flowers and wrap them, and put them together, and then understand what the larger picture was going to be when it ultimately was done.

Then we took all the completed strands and put them in a blast freezer, which preserves them more, make sure there's no pests, which is really important for the library.

We have never worked on such a project with so many community volunteers that are so involved and passionate and part of a project.

What was one of the really great things about the volunteers is when they've come to see the exhibit, you will hear people say, "Oh, I worked on those."

They can see, you know, "Did I string the pine cones, or was I making the clouds of baby breath?"

All of a sudden I'll be like, "Oh, I remember working on that table," and I like some of the stories that both people were sharing at the tables of the Cleveland volunteers, but then also Rebecca will say, "Oh, that's from my father's garden."

This strand, that was one of the her strands I worked on, and it's here now, and it's like part of the whole story.

There's like fungus in there.

There are these pods that look like birds, and you see things, and you think, "How has that been here this whole time, and I haven't seen it?"

So you do have that sensibility going through here that like your different days, your senses are like attuned to different things, so even though I get to see this most days of the week, it's a different experience most days, so that's really special too.

[Erin] We had over 200 volunteers.

It was a very amazing team effort to pull it off.

We worked with a local fabricator called Mercer Works.

They created this wooden structure here.

They have a whole team of people down in Kent, Ohio who worked on this.

If you zoom in on these, they're all strung on copper wire.

What's really amazing about this is that you can see the hand touches.

Every single piece of this project was touched by human hands so many times throughout this project.

(soft piano music) One of the bonuses of bringing it inside has been, we've been bringing more people back into the library, which is really important for us.

[Tiffany] The way that Rebecca's piece fills the space was just really special.

It's like that great marriage between a great idea, and a great concept, and a great execution in a beautiful space.

So to have something that people are drawn to, that people are talking about on social media, and they want to come into our institution and see has been really a big plus for us.

After COVID, you know, just getting people back in our library buildings, and frankly back in public spaces, and in downtown at, you know, the level that we used to be, it's been work, and I'm so happy that the library's been able to be part of that sort of reactivation and re-energization.

(soft piano music) Every time I talk to folks about libraries, they still have the general stereotype of us sitting around shushing people, and the general stereotype of what a library is, (soft piano music) but libraries are so much more than that, right?

We are the community living room for so many folks who may not have an opportunity to see an exhibit like Rebecca Louise Law.

(soft piano music) I'm especially excited to be able to come to this installation in the winter when I'm like craving some prettiness, some greenery, some pretty flowers, those kinds of things, and so I love how this is, they're preserved in a beautiful way that you can see 'em throughout the year.

(soft piano music) (soft piano music continues) (soft piano music continues) (soft piano music continues) (soft piano music continues) (soft piano music fades) If you miss an episode of "The Art Show", we've got you covered.

It's available to stream at cetconnect.org and thinktv.org.

You'll find all the previous episodes, as well as current episodes and links to the artists we feature.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "The Art Show".

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(zany music) (zany music continues) (zany music continues) (zany music continues) (zany music continues) (zany music continues) (zany music continues) [Announcer] Funding for the Art show is made possible by The L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, The Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, The Sutphin Family Foundation, The Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by, and viewers like you.

Closed captioning in part has been made possible through a grant from The Bahmann Foundation.

Thank you.