- [Narrator] Funding for the Art Show is made possible by, The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr.

US Bank Foundation and The Virginia W. Kettering Foundation.

Proud supporter of the arts in our community.

Additional funding provided by, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

- [Rodney] In this edition of the Art Show, meet some trailblazing Queens of the Heartland.

(upbeat music) Sharing your personal art collection with the world.

(upbeat music) And an artist finds inspiration in ordinary objects.

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

(orchestral music) Hi, I'm Rodney Veal, and welcome to The Art Show, where each week we provide access to local, regional and national artists and arts organizations.

When you think of people from Ohio's past who've left their mark on history, some of the names that come to mind might include the Wright Brothers, Neil Armstrong or even Annie Oakley.

But sometimes the historical record is incomplete.

Important stories can be lost to time or even suppressed.

The exhibit Queens of the Heartland aims to help set the record straight.

It's a collaboration between a visual artist and a historian to highlight 30 African-American women who trailblazed change in Ohio and beyond.

Their stories inspire.

Their fight for social change continues.

Let's watch.

(soft music) - I think that it's so important that we know our history.

And that this history is American history.

As an American historian, I really want to focus on telling more truths in our historical education.

And so one of the ways that we do that is to include stories that have been either purposefully erased or simply not told.

The exhibit tells the story of 30 African-American women who all had ties to Ohio in some ways, some were born here, some came here.

But all of these women fought for freedom, fought for abolition, access to education, temperance, the right to vote.

So we're telling this story, this long history of activism by these women in Ohio.

I'm Hadley Drodge, I co-curated the Queens of the Heartland Exhibit alongside artists, Nicole Washington, here at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio.

- My name Nicole Washington.

I'm a visual artist based in New York.

And I created the photo illustrations that compliment the exhibition.

- It was so exciting to collaborate with someone like Nicole who comes at this historical project with a completely new and fresh perspective.

And one of the things we tried to do was to breathe life into these women.

You see these black and white photographs, and what you forget is that these women lived their life in color, just like we do today.

And so Nicole was able to, you know, bring that to light.

- My inspiration and my goal with the images was to show that these women and their work are still relevant today.

So I really wanted to bring them to life and bring them into the future.

I created this little color grid where I was just like, "Okay, based on what I've read about these women these are the colors that are coming to mind."

And so I made a color palette for each woman just so I had like a starting point.

But really when I get the images is when I can get going because I'm like, "Okay, I can like work off of this person stance or this person's expression."

A part of it is doing the research, but a part of it is intuitive and kind of thinking who are these women beyond the words?

Like, what were their spirits like?

What were their personalities like?

And trying to bring that to life so that it draws people in.

An image that's coming to mind was Leontyne Price.

When I was creating her image, I thought, "Ooh I want to like have fireworks behind her" and really like create this image that is a celebration of her, but also she's an opera singer.

And when listening to her, it feels like watching fireworks."

So those are the kinds of things that I would think about during the process.

- One thing we really wanted to do was to make this relevant.

So we translated this history into forms of communication that we're used to seeing today.

For example, each of the panels that features a bio is designed with inspiration from Instagram.

As if this is their Instagram post and their selfie.

Their quotes are hanging from banners from the ceiling and they're designed with inspiration from Twitter.

So these would be their tweets.

And each of the movements that we use to contextualize the women are designed with icons or like emojis that appear on the bio panel.

So you can kind of see what each woman was involved in, whether it was reform, anti-lynching black freedom, suffrage, Africana womanism, and so forth.

- [Hadley] The objects are also very important part of this exhibit.

In some ways, I feel that their spirits are preserved in these inanimate objects and come to life.

We have several garments on display that help us imagine these women standing there before us in the space.

We have letters and archival documents.

We have signed autobiographies and other material objects that really bring these stories to life.

We also want people who come to see it to be a part of the exhibit.

So you can honor your own queens in your life by writing a message to them on the chalkboard.

You can also become, "The queen you were born to be."

as Nicole says, and pose in front of a beautiful backdrop that she's created to help you feel like one of the Queens in the Exhibit.

There's not just one role for an African-American woman, activists, that activism has to permeate every single aspect of society.

And you see that with these 30 women, that their voices were at the Kennedy Space Center and they were at the pulpit and the lectern and writing books and creating kindergarten programs.

And that activism can take any role whatever you feel most driven to do that that's where your voice should be heard.

There's no one right way to do it.

One of the things from a historical standpoint that I was surprised by was at Edmonia Lewis.

She often spoke about being an outsider to American culture.

She had an Ojibwe and African-American heritage.

So I think she was responding to a society that really excluded her saying she didn't want to be a part of it anyway.

But when you look at newspaper records you see her and you can kind of trace her involvement in black power movements.

And that was really exciting.

I was also very surprised to see how many women knew each other and how many women supported each other, and were mentored by each other because it really shows that community and the sisterhood and support that they had.

- One of the things that really struck me while researching these women and creating these pieces, is that so many of these women were at the forefront of movements while at the same time having to fight through so much violence and atrocious behavior.

And so I thought a lot about what it would mean to like live during that time.

Those things really showed how much power these women have.

And it gave me encouragement that, you know if these women can live their lives, and also fight for justice and freedom, then I can have the energy to do the same.

And also it made me feel...

I felt really honored to be bringing their stories to even more people.

Especially during this moment when some of the things that these women were fighting for we are still fighting for today.

- I hope that this exhibit inspires people to do their own research, to delve deeper to see the American stories that have been ignored or repressed.

And to help us tell a more honest history of America.

I think that history is not about things that happened in the past, It's about who we are today and how got to be here.

And if we can understand that better, I think that we could probably come together better as a nation.

- [Rodney] 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.

Get to know the art collectors of Columbus to the Instagram handle @columbus_collects.

The brainchild of local artists and arts administrator Cat Sheridan.

The takeover account is intended to spread awareness of the art of collecting and the satisfaction that comes with filling your home with one of a kind artwork.

Take a look.

(calm music) - So I shepherd a Instagram account that's about two years old now called Columbus Collects.

This was born out of a need to use what I had at hand to help the arts.

How can we talk about the everyday person that has art in their house and help them see themselves as a collector?

I thought to myself, "I have a ton of artwork in my house."

I know what ton of other people that have a ton of artwork in their house.

The first iteration was just reaching out to those people to help demystify the act of collecting art.

(birds chirping) - So I have known Cat Sheridan for a very long time, probably since I was about 10 or 11 years old.

She knows my whole family really well and knows how much we love art.

And we all have a lot of art.

And so she asked if we wanted to do the Instagram takeover for Columbus Collects.

(calm music) There's a ton of family connection to most of the art that I shared because I have a lot of artists in my family and a lot of friends that are artists.

The more I started thinking about all of this the things that we had, all of the pieces that we had, the harder it was to choose.

But what I really appreciated about it is, you know, what constitutes art.

Is it's very broad definition so we have...

I haven't seen my whole family have a lot of functional art things that you use.

(upbeat music) So my teapot I've had since I think close to my first college graduation, around 2003.

It's made by my aunt, Brenda.

She makes beautiful ceramic pieces but her teapots are just amazing and just exquisite.

And yeah, we use her mugs, they sit on the shelves with the rest of our mugs but sometimes I'm definitely intentional about using hers.

(upbeat music) So this is a really beautiful wooden box that's made out of multiple types of what I think there's four or five.

And this was a gift from very close friend of mine, her name is Janie.

Our daughter came to us through adoption.

And so Janie was trying to come up with a perfect adoption gift for Harper and she definitely nailed perfect.

So she had her late husband's father, who's a woodworker, build this beautiful kind of keepsake box or a jewelry box.

It has his name on the bottom and he also puts a little penny embedded in his work.

So it's just really special and, you know, just holds a lot of meaning.

They're just really dear friends and it's just such a special piece.

I honestly don't know how I ended up with this portrait.

So it's my little brother who also went to art school.

He went to Cleveland Institute of Art.

It's a self portrait he did of himself in high school, but it's totally my brother.

Like the look on the face is just my brother through and through.

And I think that's one of the things that I really like about it.

And doing it in high school it's just an amazing piece.

He's just very talented.

(calm music) - So each takeover is asked to have a selfie on the front end and on the backend to bookend their collection.

Just kind of give it a nice hug from both sides.

Beyond that, I'm looking for people to expand their palette and support artists,.

Particularly local, wherever you go.

I think there's something really special about being able to link back to an experience, whether it's like an art fair or you've gone on vacation and there are artisans with their tents and their wares up.

And there's something really kind of amazing about being able to collect an artist on the front end.

And so we were talking how do we kind of span that gap - As a historian, I mostly worked with historical artwork.

When I took the job at Otterbein University in 2014, as a Museum and Galleries Director, all of the artwork that we show for the most part is contemporary artists.

And so I just became much more engaged with the contemporary art scene.

(upbeat music) The wonderful thing about collecting contemporary art is that you have the opportunity to actually meet the artists.

It isn't transactional.

There are wonderful opportunities to have really high quality, original work in a home that people connect to directly and very personal.

I think what Cat is doing to develop a culture of collecting is really important in Columbus.

She's gone one step further in showing the way in which collecting can happen by anybody.

I decided to participate after I watched all of the diversity on the Columbus Collects Instagram site.

People were excited, they were happy to share their work.

You got to hear the collector's personal stories and their connection to the artwork.

And I really enjoyed seeing that.

So I thought, "Well, I have a few pieces that would fit into this model."

So I'd love to share what I have to.

(upbeat piano music) One of the pieces that I'm most excited about having is a piece by Charles Surrey... Chuck Csuri which is these blue and green teapots sort of floating in space.

And it's a, still from an animation.

So it's really a next step, I think, in the way that artists think about space and time.

Everything about it just is to me is about Chuck Csuri and the history of his work.

(soft music) One of the pieces is a watercolor, by an artist who's Canadian.

Her name is Anuveda Gary, and she works mostly in pastels doing more realistic artwork.

But she was working on a series with watercolor and experimenting with water reflection.

And I just love the way in which it's clearly a figural representation but I love the abstraction and how she works with abstraction and reflection in watercolor.

I find it to be just an amazing piece.

(soft piano music) That little word is by Lansing Gangdel who's a Nepali artist.

He was really the first person, the first artist to bring modern art to Nepal.

I met him through his daughter, we were colleagues.

And I just fell in love with his work.

The piece shows a peasant figure resting with his head down kind of almost as though he's nodding.

Nodding off to sleep.

And I selected that piece because it reminded me of the literature, he's also known for his novels, which speak about the ordinary person and the challenges and struggles that the ordinary person faces in the context of Nepal.

So, to me it represented more of his overall ethos.

(soft upbeat music) - I think that collecting art helps people capture moments of time.

- Anybody can collect.

Anybody can acquire original art.

Anyone can afford it.

- The value in collecting is giving your space warmth and giving your space meaning.

And this initiative is to really celebrate the community that comes from collecting art.

(orchestral music) - The art show's going to be traveling around Southwest Ohio.

You might see this logo in your neighborhood.

Follow the travels of The Art Show on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, @think TV and cetconnect.

And check out The art show hashtag.

The saying one man's trash is another man's treasure, is certainly true for Albuquerque, New Mexico artist, Jami Porter Lara While traveling along the US Mexico border, she noticed a large number of plastic bottles left behind by migrants.

These bottle artifacts are now the inspiration for her latest work.

Here's Jami's story.

(soft upbeat music) - What I'm doing by using this ancient method of Pueblo style ceramics is connecting myself to this place.

And what I am doing by using the iconography of the plastic bottle is to connect myself to this place in time.

(soft music) Well, something that interested me about this project, which I sometimes talk about as a reverse archeology where I am using the tools of the past to dig into the present and future, is that it collapses the distance between what we see as an artifact and how we regard contemporary trash.

And I'm really interested in asking questions about what's trash and what's artifact?

What's artifact and what's art?

What is trash and what's art?

And I'm interested in how the way we answer those questions says something about how we regard ourselves as a species.

(soft music) So what we're after here is about a thousand degrees on the inside.

So a couple of years ago, I was traveling with a group of artists down near the US Mexico border in an area where people were still migrating through.

And I was just exploring, walking around, walking up and down Arroyos in the region of the border fence, and it's possible to find all kinds of things that have been left behind by people passing through.

And the main thing that I found were plastic two liter bottles that migrants had used to carry water and then discarded when they were done.

I started to think about the continuity of the culture that had inhabited that area.

And so in that same region, where I was finding plastic bottles, it was also possible to find potsherds, and ruins, and things that we consider to be artifacts.

And so it was in that context that I just started to think about the plastic bottle as a contemporary artifact.

(soft upbeat music) In Mexico, one of the things that we were there to do was to learn how to make Pueblo style ceramics from the guy Hugo's family.

So we were in a little town of Mata Ortiz where these very accomplished expert potters taught us their method, which mirrors the method in which ceramics have been made in the desert in this part of the world for almost 2000 years.

(lively music) It was out of the combination of those experiences that I this image of the form of the plastic bottle made into a ceramic piece in this style that I had just learned came to me.

(lively music) There's a great deal that's beautiful about the components of a plastic bottle.

The bottom is a pentagram and the top is a spiral.

And both of those are forms that we have seen represented throughout human history.

Part of my interest here is in looking differently at the plastic bottles, so that we might be able to see the human creativity that goes into it, as opposed to simply regarding it as waste.

(lively music) One of the things that I'm thinking about is how the things that we make are remaking us as a species.

And so if you think about humans made plastic, the chemicals from plastic are in the environment and now they're in our bodies and our bodies are changing as a result.

We're actually transforming as a species.

In that, we have one more example of how those lines that we believe divide us from nature or from technology that none of those don't really exist.

There isn't a line between what is human and what is natural and what is technological.

So you can see the bottom is like the bottle.

and I'm going to have to work on that a lot more.

(bird chirping) So I spend a lot of time outdoors in places that we call wilderness.

People who spend much time outdoors are familiar with the leave, no trace ethic.

And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about lately, because I think it says a lot about how we regard ourselves in relation to nature.

I think that it's interesting that in the way that we have constructed nature we've written ourselves out of the story.

And as an artist, I bristle at the mandate of leave no trace because I think number one what it says is that the only trace I could be is destructive.

And number two, it completely eliminates the possibility that my existence or presence on this planet can possibly be creative or a contribution.

It's almost as if the best we can be as humans is to do no harm.

And as an artist, I feel like I want to do one better, which is that I want to create something that the earth needs.

(soft upbeat music) There's a way in which this project for me is about grappling what it means to be an artist who makes things in a culture of too many things.

And I'm making things that imitate the things that we have too many of.

So it's this way of placing myself in the center of this predicament.

And I don't know that it's the solution but I'm really interested in the complexity of being right there in the middle of it.

(upbeat music) I think that it's essential for us to be able to understand ourselves as creative and connected beings in order to have the courage to take on the huge tasks that we have ahead of ourselves in dealing with the environmental crises that we're facing.

If we keep telling a story of apocalypse where humans are nothing but ambulatory pollutants, and if the story of nature is just one of decline where before humans arrived on the scene, it was the Garden of Eden, And we've basically fallen from nature never to return.

I'm not sure how we pull out of that nosedive.

I think we need a different story.

And so that's what I'm trying to create for myself here.

At least there's a possibility that what I can imagine or what I can create forms I kind of connection that is important and necessary for the world.

(upbeat music) - [Rodney] Did you miss an episode of The Art Show?

No problem.

You can watch it on demand @ctconnect.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.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for The Art Show is made possible by, The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Junior, US Bank Foundation and the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation.

Proud supporter of the arts in our community.

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.