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Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up.

Cleveland artists run the streets all the way to City hall while the Cleveland Museum of Art plays host to Picasso and paper.

And later, Liz makes the most of an opera by Mozart.

Hello and welcome once again to another round of applause.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Cleveland is home to so many museums from University Circle to the shores of Lake Erie.

However, there's another local landmark serving as home to the visual arts these days, Cleveland's City Hall.

It's pretty cool.

You know, City Hall has such, like, beautiful architecture.

The walls are beautiful.

Like, it's a space where when you're in it, it feels like a museum itself.

So to have it turn into one like in almost overnight is really cool.

Mayor Bibb, as one of his objectives for me was to create a space where individuals could come to the city of Cleveland and not only do what is necessary, but meet other people, engage with this amazing neoclassical building and incorporate the arts.

So we chose six, you know, local black artists to really showcase and turn city hall into a museum, which is really fun.

It's been just a really wonderful discovery of many artists here and others that just love coming to public space.

Free space, space that is theirs and enjoying art and seeing the different types of work that exist in our community.

So the Transformative Arts Fund is an ARPA funded project that allocated $3 million for public art projects for Cleveland artists, and it netted seven amazing art projects all over the city of Cleveland.

And they're in full swing.

And it's just really exciting.

The awardee for this project is Kumar Aurora.

His project title is For Art's Sake, which is a collective of artists that are really focused on supporting and building the creator economy that got us to get out of our box and think, how can we actually change our city through the arts?

Know what can we be doing to empower creatives around us?

And then most importantly, how do we leave a longer impact and leave something behind?

So that's why it's call for art's sake.

We wanted to make sure that it is for the artists, it is for art's sake.

This activation is Artists Run the Streets, which is a collaborative project between six amazing Cleveland artists.

When I think about artists on the streets, it goes beyond just a slogan.

It really defines what has happening in Cleveland from the rappers and the musicians to the poets to our artists, right?

And the ideas that they are here in our streets and they are here in those communities and we need to promote and highlight them.

For me, artist runs the streets, speaks for itself like a lot of what makes things cool, what makes things relevant is from the point of view of the creative, like, I think we set a lot of the tone for a lot of things and we also make the city as beautiful as we can.

It's a labor and legacy.

Is the national theme aligned with the national theme of Black History Month, which is African-Americans and labor.

And so that theme is really focused on thinking about the contributions that African-Americans have made to the labor force of the United States over the last 200 years.

I come from a blue collar family.

People in my family worked some type of hands on occupation or some type of trade.

So I really wanted to focus on blue collar workers and the fact that blue collar workers make the city run.

And a lot of them are breaking their backs and their hands.

And I remember my days would come home because he worked there for he used to come home with broken fingers, just like working, you know, working on car parts.

You know, there's a lot that goes into making sure this country runs properly.

And I just wanted to acknowledge that the blue collar workers.

The series is the Cleveland Blues.

Each piece is named by occupation, the Construction Worker bus driver, farmer, a painter, the late night cook.

I have people that are documented in capture from school principals to local what I would consider blue collar workers, small business owners within the community.

So it's a wide variety of people.

But I feel that all of these people's labor tie into building the legacy of the city firemen.

He's my brother.

He's been a fireman for approaching maybe 25 years now.

They are tremendous heroes that do not wear capes.

The artists are being paid for their participation.

This is my first photo gallery that I'm a part of and to be compensated and stuff for that is amazing.

It's always nice to be a part of something where they consider how to compensate the artist.

As artists, we always want to showcase our work.

We always want an opportunity to do to network.

But it's nice to acknowledge the fact that we put a lot of work and effort into what we produce.

It is a rarity, unfortunately.

I'm immensely grateful for it because again, it's not something that you see all of the time and I like that the pictures are going to be here for til the end of May.

I can invite people to come by, check them out themselves.

I got to bring my parents.

This is the first time they see any of my work printed.

So that's amazing for me to have them here today.

We really wanted to make sure that there are ways we could make our artists more marketable and also give them the tools needed to really grow their business.

And that's part of for art's sake, is really just making sure that we can give them the runway to grow and become bigger.

The exposure is great because you get to see fans of photography and fans of the people that are in these images and also a part of this event.

So, you know, you got painters, creatives and stuff like that.

So we're all getting out from different people that we don't normally meet.

So that is a great thing because that gives the feedback and also a new audience to reach out to.

This is really amazing to see the work that was put into this by all of the parties and I think it looks amazing.

And just for the city, this is just great.

I really want Clevelanders to understand that there is a deep bench of artists across all spectrums and coming in this space and seeing folks that you may not see in a museum that may not have yet made it to the gallery, but their work is as good.

And so having that opportunity to see that is really kind of just creating a total picture of what we have here in the city of Cleveland.

artists on the streets.

A celebration of labor and legacy is on view at Cleveland City Hall through May 30th.

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The to do List.

You can do that online at Arts Dot Ideastream, dawg.

Now, let's step inside the galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art and discover how Pablo Picasso created with paper from drawings and prints to collages and cutouts.

The Spanish born artist like to innovate.

Learn something new about Picasso with a look inside the exhibit.

Picasso and paper.

The exhibition.

Picasso on paper explores Picasso's lifelong fascination with paper as a material and the way that it was at the core of some of his boldest experimentation from his childhood through his last studio.

And so he used traditional techniques, things like printmaking and drawing.

But then he also used paper for things like collages, sculptures, experimental photography.

And we can see really clear connections between these works using paper and some of his best known works, some of his most iconic paintings that really defined his career.

Cleveland is is well known to anyone who has any interest in Picasso for the Cleveland Museum of Art's painting Levy, which is considered the masterpiece of Picasso's blue period.

It's an intentionally sort of vague and mysterious composition.

Picasso deliberately left the subject up to the viewer's interpretation.

And what's really wonderful with this exhibition is that you can see how Picasso really wrestled with the composition.

He considered had several different groupings of people considered these subjects in different poses before he settled on the final composition.

Many of the transitions in Picasso's biography centered around the women in his life.

And so the Rose period followed at a moment when he met Fernando Olivier in the summer of 1906, Picasso and Olivier traveled to a village called Gozo.

They were both really deeply affected by the sort of ocher tonality there.

And Picasso began to incorporate that into his work.

Literally the coloration that he was seeing around him, but also the warmer tone that his life had taken on with a new love interest in it.

So within the history of modern art, cubism is considered one of the most central movements.

It was really one of the first movements to challenge the idea of straightforward representation and the idea of objective perception.

The idea that an artist's job was to represent something truthfully to the way it appeared in nature.

And so instead of doing that sort of straightforward representation, Picasso and another artist, he was working very closely with George Brock.

They worked very closely together to break down the subject matter that they were looking at into hinging geometric planes to look at their subject matter from different angles within the same image.

And often to do that by dissolving the subject into geometric shapes like cubes.

The works in this gallery all relate to Picasso's painting.

With him was all d'Avignon, which, you know, most most artists, art historians today would consider one of, if not the most important painting created in the 20th century.

And it was a painting where Picasso really found himself as a cubist and sort of started to work out these ideas that clearly had been circulating in his head and kind of percolating for over the course of a year or two.

He spent many years working on the painting.

And so final version is depicts five women.

Their bodies are fragmented into into geometric metric shapes.

And this was inspired by Iberian and African sculpture that Picasso was doing at the time and actually had started to collect himself.

One of the reasons that it's especially interesting and controversial that the women are addressing the viewer directly is that they were immediately recognizable at the time as prostitutes.

And Picasso's original title for the painting was actually the philosophical brothel.

And he was encouraged to change it because the style of a painting was controversial enough.

He eventually settled on Later was a d'Avignon, which referred to a red light district in the city of Barcelona.

Class was really central to Picasso's development of cubism, and especially once cubism for him entered into sort of second stage, which is called synthetic cubism.

He starts to incorporate found materials into his work using these found materials and geometric shapes that overlapped and sort of hinge to each other to break down a recognizable subject and give the person looking at it this sort of minimal visual cues so that we can put together what the subject is without straightforwardly depicting it.

This gallery is devoted to Picasso's neoclassical period.

And one of the things I like about it is I feel like it's really surprising and unexpected for for for Picasso.

It shows a side of Picasso that people might not be aware of or or have seen before.

Picasso started to create portraits of his friends, other artists, a social circle.

And they have this amazing degree of precision to them, this incredibly confident line.

And he would actually begin by drawing in graphite, but then erase the graphite and enhance the fade sort of ghost of the line of charcoal.

And so they have this precision, but also this sort of boldness to the.

One of the great highlights of the exhibition is the closure you see here.

Picasso's women at their toilette.

And he created it around 1937.

And it was actually originally intended to serve as a design for a tapestry that was not realize until many decades later, because he kept the collage in his studio for many years.

What the collage depicts is, as usual, the women in his life.

We see his wife of Over Cock Lover, who is actually one of only two women he married during his life.

Despite many partners he had marriage worked for as Walter, who was a much younger woman who he had met about a decade earlier and had a long term relationship with.

And then Dora Maar, who was an incredibly accomplished surrealist photographer, who was a great influence on his work, we see them in space in maybe the artist's studio with what appears to be a portrait of the artist himself.

The later years are, I think, fascinating and surprising for how the sheer quantity of works that Picasso produced incredibly prolific bodies of work, just hundreds and hundreds of prints, just trying to to preserve his own legacy and think about his own place within art history of the art world.

Picasso on paper is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through March 23rd.

Meanwhile, we're always on the lookout for stories outside of Cleveland.

From Ashtabula to Huron Summit to Tuscarawas.

Email us your art story.

Ideas from across Northeast Ohio to Arts at Ideastream dot org.

I'm thanks.

Let's hit things up with a quick trip to the Sunshine State, where bassist John Lam is a legend in the St Petersburg area.

He's played with the likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.

And now this nonagenarian mentors a new generation of jazz cats.

And I get interested in music.

Oh, yeah.

We had to go to church and all the ladies and men were involved in singing every Sunday.

And I was a kid sitting on the second row.

And I learned from that how to get into the music and feel.

I think that's where it started.

So after high school, I went into the military.

They took me into the Air Force as a tuba player.

I started the military about eight or nine years and got out.

That's when I met Duke Ellington.

John was a wonderful player and got recruited in the sixties to play for Duke Ellington, and he kind of thought Duke was a little bit over the hill at that point.

He was more interested in Miles Davis.

His wife said, Take that gig, and it turned out to be the greatest gig of his life.

They toured all over the world.

They won Grammys.

At first, when they said they were going overseas, I said, No, I can't.

I don't want to do that.

Then Mercer came on is Try it anyway.

You might like it.

So I continued.

I said, okay, I'll try it for a month.

So I went over sort of fell into the musician's habit to he and Buster Cooper, who's a trombone player with Ellington at that same time.

Buster moved here in St Petersburg and John and his wife followed.

They were educators.

John in particular, I know, mentored a lot of the young jazz talent that we have here.

And he continues to do that.

John has got a real spark to him and it's kind of hard to explain what that star quality is.

He'll be out in the audience.

He comes to a lot of music and before long they're going to have him on stage because they hey, John's here.

Everyone's excited that he shows up.

And I think it's that star quality that he brings and the presence that he has and the talent that he continues to show off to the world.

Well, I've known John for the better part of nearly 40 years.

I took bass lessons when I got out of high school from them originally.

That's how I met him.

But over the years, we've worked together on the music scene, and musically he's always been a huge inspiration.

You know, playing with Duke Ellington, he learned all these great tricks over the years and fun things on stage.

He'll come in here and say, Hey, let's play something, you know, slow and melancholy, and he'll start.

He'll stomp it off.

Other times, he's going to sit down at the piano with us and say, Hey, let's play some blues and let's go.

Everyone loves to play with John because they never know, like I said, what to expect.

He can take that song and push it a certain way and make a singer or a trumpet player or whatever kind of follow his his lead.

And it's a it's a fun it's a fun time to watch that happen.

He has a strength still.

He is a force.

He has the ability, the knowledge.

It's all there.

It's all clear.

And we're always happy to see and have him join us on stage.

He's kind of like this wise elder.

If he feels like I need to pull me aside, if I feel like I need something, I'll pull him aside.

He's been a constant supporting figure, not only for me, but for a lot of local musicians.

It's it's incredible, but it's just more than just that knowledge.

You can't some people you can't talk to about the education, they will never know what you're talking about.

You have to be able to communicate it to them in a different way.

And music taught me how to do that and we've been celebrating his birthday since he turned 80.

We did 80, We did 85, and the last one for 90, we had 600 people in the audience to see John perform.

But what we really had was every jazz musician in the area wanted to be part of that show, and we had the best and the brightest, all who were influenced and loved John and were happy to be on the stage.

Success means you've accomplished something, you know.

But to me, I something that I had to keep doing and to survive.

I mean, I had enough, you know, keep me going.

But I wanted this.

But, you know, I wasn't trying to get rich.

I was ready and rich already from inside.

And so it will always be there.

It's a whole being.

Everything, man.

You feel it?

It's there.

All you have to do is just tune in.

Really been a great, great influence, not only in my life, but I know in so many other people's lives.

He's always touched people and I've never had somebody say anything bad.

They've always said John LAMB.

Oh, I love John LAMB.

Everybody I know has said I love John, so I love John.

And John's impact on this community is not that hard to measure.

It's in every jazz performer that I know of his.

He's inside them because he's inspired them.

And you're going to feel his legacy for decades to come because all these guys have learned from him and they're going to take that out into the world.

That's it.

after surviving a refugee camp during World War Two, Audra Scott's came to Ohio and began a new life as an artist.

On the next applause, meet the late Lithuanian American.

As her paintings and drawings receive renewed attention years after her death.

Plus, we honor Ohio's aviation history with the Wright Company factory murals in Dayton and celebrate the one year anniversary of Ideastream Public Media's 24 seven Music channel, Jazz Neo.

All that and more on the next round of applause That almost does it for this round of applause my friends I'm ideastream public media's be bought here leaving you with a lovely performance by Northeastern Ohio's lady Elise.

Here they are with the overture from one of Mozart's most beloved operas, The Magic Flute.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.