(light music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by The John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(light music) - [David] Hello, I'm Ideastream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

Welcome to Northeast Ohio's arts and culture show, Applause.

Since 1960, the Cleveland Arts Prize has recognized Northeast Ohio artists who contribute to the region's vibrant art scene.

A new exhibit at the Cleveland History Center pays tribute to the talented artists who lived and worked before the Arts Prize existed.

It's called the Golden Age of Cleveland Art 1900-1945.

And it looks back at pass masters who had a major influence in the visual arts.

(light music) - I think that most people don't realize that there was period when Cleveland rivaled New York City as one of the major creative centers of the United States.

And there were a couple of aspects to that.

One of course was simply the wealth of industry in Cleveland, the steel industry, the shipping industry across the Great Lakes.

John D. Rockefeller in Cleveland created the largest fortune in human history so that there was a lot of wealth for patronage.

It's an extraordinary period for Cleveland, but this is the period when it creates an art school and art museum which became one of the best in the United States.

A symphony, this was a place that was supporting artists both in a commercial way and also through art museums and art schools, and that kind of thing.

(audience applauds) The Cleveland Arts Prize was started in 1961.

And I think it was both to draw attention to and also to encourage creativity in the city of Cleveland and the surrounding area.

Most people don't realize the extraordinary creativity of Cleveland as a city in the period from about 1900-1945.

This initiative was started by the Arts Prize and I think that they felt that they should focus on the creativity of Cleveland as a city in the years before the Arts Prize was founded.

And then this exhibition is an outgrowth of that.

This is again an effort to rejuvenate Cleveland as a city.

If we can take stock of what was achieved then, that provides a starting point for moving forward in the future.

The show is just gonna focus on painters and printmakers.

One of the figures who's emphasized in the show is William Sommer who worked as a lithographer at Otis Lithograph, but also in his free time was one of the major modernists, American modernists of that period.

There was an extraordinary variety of approach in Cleveland art in that period, but I do think that through the 1930s in particular, there were aspects of Cleveland art which were a little different from other parts of the country.

One aspect of that is that so many artists in Cleveland came from a German or Austrian or Central European background so that they were looking to places like Munich and Vienna for their model of modern art rather than to Paris.

So that gave a distinct flavor to what was produced in Cleveland.

And Cleveland has always excelled in industrial design.

There are two sides of Cleveland art.

There's modernism and then there's social realism, which was particularly strong in the 1930s at the time of the Great Depression.

And there are a number of Cleveland artists who were not nationally known, but are pretty outstanding in terms of their skill.

And Carl Gaertner for example is a painter who did social realist paintings of factories and industrial scenes in Cleveland.

And I think his work is very strong.

One aspect of a show like this is that there are still many new discoveries to make about Cleveland art.

- [David] The exhibit, The Golden Age of Cleveland Art 1900-1945 is on view at the Cleveland History Center until April 2022.

Rediscovering something long faded from view can make you realize just how important that something was.

Such is the case of painter and illustrator Anthony Eterovich of Cleveland whose career as an artist spans some 70 years.

His work went unseen for decades and was unearthed by members of his family.

Some examples of that work are also part of the exhibition, The Golden Age of Cleveland Art.

(light music) - [Narrator] Anthony Eterovich seen here in a home movie was born in Cleveland in 1916.

He was an art prodigy, started drawing when he was just four years old working in charcoal, oil and watercolors.

At 18, he received a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art, which later became the Cleveland Institute of Art.

In that very same year, he made his first of many appearances at the prestigious Cleveland Museum of Art May Show.

- Anthony as a student was so facile, so skilled at drawing.

This is extraordinary talent, even as early as the '30s when he was in school.

He became so accomplished at this so early that his instructor, one of his instructors, Viktor Schreckengost asked him to take over a class for him.

- [Narrator] Throughout his career, he mastered different styles that were popular at the time.

Early on, he painted as a realist doing portraits.

By mid-career, he produced abstracts.

And later in life, he adopted a style known as photo realism.

The use of bright colors, a bit of whimsy and love of people defined his work.

- There is decidedly a thread.

It's Anthony Eterovich's enormous humanity.

He is a man that loves everyone that's around him.

You don't see many inanimate objects, but you do see a great deal of humanity.

Through all of this work, there's tremendous humanity.

He's a realist artist, he loves the objects and the individuals around him and that never ceased to fascinate him.

He is expressing it in various ways based on the influences that are coming to him at the time that he's doing it.

But he never relinquishes that forward motion.

- [Narrator] His career peaked in 1951 when he won first prize at the prestigious New Year's Show, a national art competition held at the Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio.

Following that success, he sought national representation on the biggest stage in the world, New York City.

What he found though was disappointment.

- Dad did experience frustration with the people that were deciding what will make money, what won't make money, and deciding what was profitable and what wasn't.

He definitely felt moments of bitterness and he was definitely discouraged too at the same time because you would see...

He had his opinions.

And his journal, he didn't hesitate to criticize stuff that he thought was just run of the mill or even garbage.

He would tell you straight out.

- With the absence of hoping that that brass ring, of getting into New York and into the national spotlight would sustain itself and that he could go forward, it's what everyone sought to do and very, very few people 60, 70 years ago especially were able to achieve.

- [Narrator] Anthony Eterovich returned to Cleveland where he continued painting and exhibiting, but with a new wife and family on the way, he sought steady work to pay the bills.

So he began teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

- He had family and students and lots of pressures that way and he loved to paint.

So the idea of having to go out and market himself all the time and schmooze new galleries, I think that it probably became overwhelming for him.

- [Narrator] After accepting another position, this one teaching art at the Cleveland public schools in the '70s, Eterovich's work appeared in fewer and fewer exhibits and shows until one day, his name could no longer be found on the gallery walls of Cleveland.

- I knew nothing about this man.

Many of his colleagues and himself were being pushed to the side as the sweep of the second half of the 20th century moved American art in different direction, but it doesn't mean that it was irrelevant.

It doesn't mean that it was insignificant.

It is significant, it is relative.

- [Narrator] Anthony Eterovich continued painting until his death in 2011.

While prolific with a career spanning more than 90 years, he died relatively unknown.

That was until his work was rediscovered on the anniversary of his 100th birthday.

- We didn't know.

We didn't know he did all this work.

We didn't know that it was so varied.

We didn't know that he embraced so many styles.

- To a small degree went unknown.

He was not totally a cipher.

His career which we've charted in the exhibition catalog is extensive and he had small group shows of this or that.

And he had multiple individual works in various locations.

There are multiple museums that own his work, a single piece.

He wanted people to love what he did.

- So what has been most gratifying was to finally say this is a man that was able to grow and change and embrace different styles throughout his lifetime and execute them magnificently.

- [David] Moving from the past to the present, two visual artists among this year's Cleveland Arts Prize winners draw attention to what we trash and what we treasure.

You'll see how they both explore environmental issues with their work as we now head inside their studios with Ideastream Public Media's Carrie Wise.

- [Carrie] Lauren Yeager works with found objects.

They're mostly items people toss to the curb, but she gives them new life in her midtown studio in Cleveland.

- To try to add value back to that item is a way of recovering it.

At least in our community in Cleveland, everything on the curb is going to a landfill right now.

- [Carrie] Yeager has been focused on creating sculptures with what she finds on the street for the past several years, something that sparked while attending the Cleveland Institute of Art.

On a recent afternoon, Yeager stacks together old plastic planters and boxes, moving pieces around until she either likes the way they come together or they begin to take the shape of classical or modern sculptures.

- I usually will start with maybe a more familiar approach and just say this thing could be a base for something, what could go on it and put similar forms together.

If I have an object that's a cube or square format, then I'll look for other similar shapes and things.

- [Carrie] Many of the pieces Yeager works with are made of plastic, a material she says is prevalent on street curbs.

And plastic is not sought out like old furniture or scrap metal.

- These objects, specifically the plastic ones are gonna last for thousands of years.

So is there a way perhaps through sculpture to repurpose them and add value back to these objects rather than us just piling them up somewhere?

There's not really a solution in practice to recycle them right now.

Sometimes I even think about the sculptures as a temporary way of storing the plastic until there is something else that can be done to repurpose or reuse the stuff.

- [Carrie] While she's not necessarily seeking to make statements through her pieces, Yeager says she is interested in how different people respond to them.

- It allows me to present the sculptures and the components as more like data rather than my aesthetic or my opinion about what I should be representing in art.

It's more like it's a consensus among our entire community.

I'm using the stuff that we as a community have produced and trying to find a way to incorporate your objects into the art rather than just creating with my own vision.

- [Carrie] In Cleveland Heights, artist Corrie Slawson considers the latest news, culture and nature in her mixed media work.

- Something will happen in the world, I'll end up processing it in different ways.

It might be an image that I'd print out from the internet or it might come to me in a magazine or a piece of journalism.

Whatever that is, it's gonna be connected to something that I possibly have from earlier versions of my own work.

My goal is for this to mimic the surface of a piece of paper.

- [Carrie] Slawson fuses together different symbols, shapes and colors, making connections that might not always be considered.

For instance, her recent series Endangered calls attention to animal life threatened or extinct and the interconnected actions and priorities of humans.

- I have many, many, tens of almost hundreds of collages that I built using a combination of internet, National G, photos of animals, photos of endangered species, looking up exactly why they were endangered.

- [Carrie] Modern luxuries such as jewelry make their way into her collages, questioning what cultures value and the effects on the natural world.

- It's beyond just habitat loss and the other human activities that cause these endangers.

What is it about the climate changing that really is present here?

And so the other piece of these, finding the animals or the plants, animals, all of the organisms that were involved in that and then taking Martha Stewart, Vogue, Bazaar, Marie Claire, just magazines that present beautiful things, nature in a beautiful but really manicured, really controlled, really it's not an environment.

It's not an ecosystem the way that they're presented and I juxtaposed these animals with these environments that are concocted by humans.

- [Carrie] Slawson says her art moved into exploration of social issues while she was pursuing her master's at Kent State where she also now teaches.

Through art, she questions systems and cultural norms.

- Who gets to enjoy a nice environment, who gets to ruin it, and who ends up paying the price for that and the justice of it all.

- [Carrie] Just last year, Slawson teamed with others on a production called Feast.

It combined her visual art with dance while collectively critiquing the overconsumption of the Gilded Age and colonialism.

Her work often evolves from prior creations as she considers present-day issues and realities.

- And what I'm doing right now is I'm basically taking so many of the elements from Endangered, from Feast and literally cutting them up.

I have a whole drawer I could show you of just chopped up Xerox copies that I end up screenprinting or putting through the printmaking process, reprinting them, relayering.

So the drawings I made over the winter were just me processing them really emotionally and visually and with color, with really formal elements as they're an emotional response to being in a pretty bleak winter with a lot of isolation.

- [Carrie] While she can't say exactly where she's headed with her latest work, she's once again very much processing life and art simultaneously in her studio.

- I'm working on them in these very technical ways, almost as if the technique is what can make it make sense for me, but I don't have answers up there.

- [David] Corrie Slawson received the 2021 Cleveland Arts Prize as a Mid-Career Artist and Lauren Yeager as an Emerging Artist.

Coming up on Applause, Akron's beloved Tuba Christmas made its return this holiday season as the sound of hundreds of tubas, sousaphones and euphoniums filled the air.

We share the story of Tuba Christmas in the Rubber City with its founder, Tucker Jolly who's led this citywide sing-a-long for more than four decades.

Join us for a special holiday episode of Applause.

(tuba music) Gordon Campbell is an aerial photographer.

From above, he captures the impressive landscapes of the Eastern Shore with his camera.

We head to Virginia for the story.

(light music) - I love a soft light, I love when there's a little texture in the sky.

(light music) I fly typically at about 40 mph when I'm out photographing, very low noise profile.

So when I'm flying down low along the marsh grasses and things like that, you're really not bothering anything.

Even birds just sit there and look at me.

Most of the time I probably fly, I don't get any photos worth printing, but who cares?

I'll get the next image the next day.

Every day I get to fly is a great day.

(light music) So I stared in high school, became fascinated by developing the negatives, printing in a dark room, things like that.

But to do that, you had to take photos, so I did a bit of both.

But I took photographs all throughout high school and then college as well.

And then after college, it just snowballed into one thing after the next.

But I did not start flying until after college.

And when I was working just outside of Manhattan in New York City area, flying was a weekend escape for me, allowed me to jump in a plane after a week of working and go fly places.

(upbeat music) I try to find those areas that are unknown to other people and I like the uniqueness of the Eastern Shore.

Well, it's surrounded by water, it's rural and there was this airfield for sale.

Used to be called Kelham Field Airport.

Just a fantastic place, 150 acres total property size.

Late 2002, I came down here, I looked at the property.

I had an offer in on it the next day.

(upbeat music) Fast forward a couple years in 2005, we decided to just make the transition and move on down here.

(upbeat music) There's just something to fall in love with for everybody on the Eastern Shore.

I became fascinated with these Barrier Islands that line the Virginia coastline.

They are all preserved and none of them have been built on, and they are just left to nature.

And I started photographing them back in 2006.

I thought it was just amazing and I wanted to document every square inch of these islands.

I can fly over any island and tell you exactly which island that is just by its shape, its form, how it looks.

And so they all have a unique nature to them.

(light music) Sure enough, I saw these photographs.

I said, wow, these are beautiful.

And as I kept doing it, I had a great retail space down in Cape Charles that I was renovating.

I said, this would really make a great gallery.

And I said, I think my aerial photography might be good enough, but I'll make a beautiful gallery and if people wanna come in and look at my aerial photographs, then so be it.

If they wanna buy something, then that's even better.

(light music) A year prior to that, I bought the aircraft that I'm still flying, which is called a Dragonfly.

It's designed as the perfect aerial photography platform, very maneuverable, very efficient aircraft.

And that's when everything came together, the building, the gallery, the aircraft, the camera equipment and I was able to present something to the customer right out of the gallery that's ready to put right up on your wall.

I literally just took a gamble.

- When we went down to the gallery and saw his incredible photographs, we knew that his images would be such an enhancement to the Barrier Island history and the stories that we try to tell here.

- The Barrier Islands Center Museum is a fantastic supporter of mine.

And they were the first outfit that did a big installation of my imagery to show people this is what the Barrier Islands look like right now.

- [Representative] We use Gordon's imagery to educate and inspire.

(light music) - I've covered from New England down to Georgia in this small plane here.

Barrier islands that are built up just don't have the same charm and they're just not photogenic the way these Barrier Islands are.

And it's just wonderful that they're protected.

They're always evolving, always migrating and then there's always some erosion as well.

And so photographing them is a new experience every year.

(light music) Not everybody's in love with their job, but fortunately I found something that I'm in love with doing and people have embraced it and people enjoy coming in my gallery.

It's purely a 100% passion.

And I think in most careers, you have to have some passion in what you're doing or you're not gonna be successful.

(light music) - [David] That's it for today's show.

For more arts and culture programming, connect with us online at arts.ideastream.org.

I'm David C. Barnett.

We'll catch you next week for another round of Applause.

(light music) (chiming) (light music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by The John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(light music)