- [Narrator] Production of Applause on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(upbeat music) - [Kabir] Coming up, see how visual art inside a hospital can aid in the healing process as we go inside Metro Health's new main campus, plus sample a health conscious hot sauce that's one man saving grace and meet a former Strongsville Mustang who's riding a political wave with his abstract art.

Welcome back my friends to Applause, I'm Idea Stream Public Media's, Kabir Bhatia.

Metro Health's new main campus hospital in Cleveland, the Glick Center is full of art, designed to be a reflection of the diverse community it serves, each of the building's 11 floors feature artwork at every turn, created mostly by local artists.

(upbeat music) - When all is said and done, there will be over 900 plus pieces of artwork.

About 600 plus of those are unique artworks.

70% of the artwork is by local artists.

And then we've commissioned 30 plus new works of art, and of that 80% of those are by local artists.

So we are in the new main dining space.

It's a wonderful space that embodies the arts and is filled with color and commissioned artwork site specific for the new Glick Center.

The mural behind me was actually the first mural and the second commission piece.

It's by local artist, Lynnea Holland Weiss.

It's called Embrace.

- I often work with a lot of blues and reds and kind of not your typical skin tones, and I feel like the color evokes a lot of emotion and can pull at all different types of feelings and kind of evoke the feeling of empathy with the figures.

Anybody can kind of become that person.

I feel just really honored to have a piece in a public hospital where there's like so many people that are just experiencing all types of things, like really life-changing events often, and it just feels like so meaningful to have work that can like affect people in that experience.

- The pediatric floor has special spaces designed for our youngest patients.

In our existing hospital, there was a beloved tree house space.

We really wanted to work closely to bring that tree house theme to life.

So that's given us a little inspiration for the art in this space, we've commissioned local artist Derek Brennan, to give an odd to that tree house theme, and he's created a beautiful new mural called Through the Canopy.

- Initial idea of just being surrounded and the feeling of being Ian a jungle and having a space that kind of extends.

That was also something that I really liked about how open the tree house is.

You're really able to look out and see the tree tops and the buildings out here.

And then I just wanted to continue that over into the mural, but transport you a little bit into the jungle landscape.

So when kids come in here, they open the, you know, the door and you're kind of entering the space that is just supposed to be fun.

It's supposed to be, you know, a place where they can not think about being in a hospital.

They can just be kids.

It's just gonna be such a fun atmosphere for them.

I'm excited for that.

It'll be really cool to see how they interact with it.

- We've been very mindful and thoughtful about not every space is the same, especially here in a level one trauma center with acute medical surgical units and intensive care units.

And so we've worked in some cases very closely with the care teams in each of those units and following some of that evidence-based design.

- Dealing with trauma patients it's a very specific clientele, and I don't know a lot about art, I am not a connoisseur.

I am nothing, but I knew that trauma patients, we needed pieces that were calming, that were vibrant, that were not dreary, that would just lift people's spirits, bring them hope when they're walking down the halls with physical therapy.

I had a vision that I wanted our past patients or our current trauma survivor volunteers to line the hall when you walked in.

And once you walk in the front door, no matter where you walk, you see past patients of ours.

So as someone who took care of these people, every day I come, I am reminded of my purpose.

I am motivated to do the best that I can do.

And when you're having a bad shift or it's hard, you look at this picture and there it's hope, it's wonderful.

- For our visual art program, this isn't something we can do alone.

We have incredible partners, our art consultants here in Cleveland at LAND studio, and we actually began this process of building our visual art program with them almost seven years ago now.

- Working with Metro Health has been really interesting to understand, you know, what is the personality of the hospital specifically that makes it, you know, what it is.

And so that we make sure that the art reflects the personality of the hospital.

We worked with artists all over the city and you know, we really wanted to showcase a diversity of styles, diversity of backgrounds, all those things because that's what makes Metro Health so special that they care for the entire community.

And it's a really special hospital system that needed a special art collection that reflects that.

- I've been doing freelance photography in Cleveland throughout northeast Ohio for almost 20 years now.

I got a call from LAND studio about the project and I was like, okay, I would love to.

I really just wanted to highlight the unsung heroes per se, of the community that you might not see who worked behind the scenes, had people working like laying bricks at a nearby church up on West 25th here, people in their gardens, the urban gardens here are beautiful, you know, you probably just see that type of stuff just driving by in your car.

So I really wanna just capture that and highlight it and hopefully it can just be an inspiration to people who come into this new space.

- We hope that when everyone walks through the doors of the Glick Center, that they feel welcome, they feel like they belong, and they can find their own stories or shared experiences, that they will feel a sense of hope, healing, community and of course, something we so dearly believe in here at Metro Health and that's humanity.

(upbeat music) - [Kabir] The Metro Health Glick Center is set to welcome visitors and patients in November.

Here's another story about health and healing, but this time we're hitting it with some hot sauce.

This St. Ignatius alum needed to eat better, but he didn't want to sacrifice the heat.

So now he makes his own fermented concoctions.

- Anybody with a pot and a bottle can make hot sauce.

I'm not gonna cut somebody down or I'm not gonna sabotage somebody 'cause they have another hot sauce.

I try and promote other products whenever I can.

I try and promote the restaurants that my friends own, and to me that makes more sense.

(upbeat music) My name is Michael Killik.

I'm the owner of Killik Hot Sauce Company in Cleveland, Ohio.

I'm Cleveland-born and raised.

I went to St Ignatius High School class of '84, then I joined the United States Air Force from '86 to '90, and then I became a Cleveland teacher.

That was fantastic until I had a stroke.

It took me about a year to get back on my feet.

I had to learn to walk again.

I had to learn how to see again.

Since then, I helped open four restaurants in Cleveland and I did that up until I discovered this hot sauce.

And now I've been doing this professionally for two years, and it's the best job I've ever had.

Six years ago, my dad and I both had heart attacks a week apart.

I survived, he didn't.

They had to put a stint in my heart, but I had to change how I ate.

I had cut down on the sodium.

The problem was is I loved hot sauce.

Some brands have eight, 10% sodium, some are even more.

So I started experimenting this fermentation.

I found this recipe, I tried to make it, it was for fermented Fresno vinegar and I totally screwed it up, but this tremendous hot sauce came out of it.

So I thought, well, there's something here.

And then I sent it to the lab and it came back, only had 1% sodium in it and it lacked none of the flavor.

All of our hot sauces only have five ingredients; chilies, onions, garlic, kosher salt and vinegar, that's it.

So a couple years of R&D, I have three flavors now.

So the Delta's the mild, just Fresno chilies.

Our middle flavor is our Eta, it's a verde and it's poblanos and jalapenos.

And then our hottest one is called Zeta.

I take the Delta and right before we bottle it, we add habaneros to it to make the Zeta.

How we make it is we started off with these huge 55 gallon drums and we chop all the veg, mix it with the salt and vinegar and water, and then we cover it up, put a bubbler on it so it can ferment.

We let it sit and then at the end of that time, we blend it up and bottle it.

So it's a very simple process, but it takes time.

Some days you're like, "This is the best job I had."

Some of the other days it's, "Oh my god, what am I doing?"

But it's worth it.

It's a feeling of independence I really have never had.

It's also scary because it's all on you.

The personal reward that I get out of this experience is that I know that 99.9 of the products out there never even make it as far as I've gone because it's a brutal business sometimes.

And at the very end of the day whenever I'm stressed out, I make a new sale or I get to watch somebody's face for the first time when they just smell it and their eyes light up.

And that's what keeps me going.

- [Kabir] If you wanna see what motivates other makers in northeast Ohio, check out our Making It series online at arts.ideastream.org.

(upbeat music) Andrew Ina was born in Detroit before moving to Strongsville with his family as a child.

His artistic passions eventually took him to the Columbus College of Art and Design.

And now Ina is a professor of art at Texas Tech University.

Not long ago, he returned to Ohio for an exhibit of his political-minded work.

(upbeat music) - We're at the Fisher Gallery here on the Otterbein University campus.

I've got about 30 pieces of artwork that we're installing today.

My name's Andrew Ina.

I am a visual artist and also filmmaker.

The show's titled "Unintended Consequences."

(upbeat music) I've always worked in the non-objective realm.

I find that there's a lot of power to non-objective or some people will interpret it as abstract work.

You're not locked into an image or a specific association that you will see with representational work, whereas I feel like the non-objective work, it's more of a universal language.

So it can speak in ways that sometimes I feel like the representational work can be limiting.

I feel like my work has always confronted the viewer.

It's not a window that you go into and kind of like go into a landscape or into a portrait.

The surface is coming to you.

They tend to be bold, they tend to be dynamic, and the surfaces tend to be very rich and tactile and you just kind of wanna put your hands on 'em.

And that's the type of work I tend to make and tend to be attracted to.

(upbeat music) So this show is actually has been a long time in the making.

The work speaks to the sort of nonsensical political and social climate that we find ourselves in over the last number of years.

And a lot of the work is charged in that way.

My work most recently has been focusing on symbolism and more specifically the caution sign or the caution pattern.

And you'll see that as a kind of a common thread throughout the show.

I became interested in how I can kind of subvert the meaning of these patterns and of these symbols and reorient them in ways where they take on a new meaning or a new life.

This piece is titled "Nothing to See Here," and literally it's like a pile of discarded caution signs.

I feel like every day you wake up to the news cycle and it's an overwhelming series of whether it's headlines or stories.

And I don't think a lot of what we've been experiencing the last few years is normal or okay.

I find it hard to reconcile this feeling of wanting to just kind of disassociate yourself from all this or be desensitized to all this.

But I think it's very important now more than ever to be vigilant and to not look away and to not allow this to be normalized.

(soft music) So this piece is titled "Neither Here Nor There."

And the form that I start with is the safety cone.

And what I've done is taken wallpaper and collaged over the cones in a way to conceal their power or their function.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland and the wallpaper that I used to wrap the cones with was the exact wallpaper that I had in my kitchen growing up.

I thought that this treatment was appropriate to cover these cones because oftentimes those are the kinds of settings where, you know, people don't like to get political, people don't like to have those uncomfortable conversations.

So it feeds back into this idea that we're missing a lot of warning signs.

(soft music) So the piece you see behind me is a large scale piece, and it is made up of 50 20 by 20 inch tiles or surfaces.

The framework behind this piece is this idea of taking lots of surfaces of varying characteristics or personalities, as I like to say, and trying to conform them into a system.

So in this particular case, you have a grid and I enjoy the sometimes harmonious moments and sometimes when the pieces don't quite fit together, they don't speak, and yet they're cohesive because they're made to conform to this system.

I love large paintings and larger artworks in general, that kind of visceral interactive nature of it to walk up to it and be confronted by it.

I'm really excited that this space could accommodate a piece of this scale.

I think my sense of urgency to make this work has been escalating because I think that's the responsibility in many ways of artists is to shine a light on things that we may otherwise miss or feel uncomfortable talking about.

And so I hope this work can start those types of conversations and make people comfortable being uncomfortable, as cliche as that sounds, I think that's the function of art.

And my hope is that this work can kind of continue that direction.

- [Kabir] A mural made in the late 1960s may be more important today than it was back then.

On the next Applause, we share the history of John Morell's mural and spotlight it's facelift.

Plus learn how a trans glass maker is making her way through a male dominated trade.

And folksinger Charlie Mosbrook performs with his pal, Kevin Richards.

All that and more on the next edition of Applause.

♪ Alone in Knoxville, it's 4:00 AM ♪ ♪ The bush just left me ♪ Outside of Cincinnati in Loveland, Leslie Lehr Daly took a major detour in her art once the pandemic began, inspired by the faces behind the masks, Daly came up with a unique collaboration.

- My work tends to be a little, I would call it like abstract, organic.

It's not classical in any sense.

It's kind of a derivative of things that I see when I'm out walking or things that I see from the water.

So it's kind of like a riff on an acorn or a riff on coral.

It just depends.

It's things that I see will inspire me and it's like, oh man, I can see me doing this in, you know, whatever format.

I know that the organics world appealed to me, seed pods and tree branches and you know, natural organic things just kind of appealed to me.

We back up to 22 acres of woods, which are great to walk through that have a creek down at the bottom.

With my walks, it's a lot of seed pods or sometimes really interesting branches that have things growing on them.

Even if it's like a really interesting fungal thing it's...

I just find those things really interesting.

(welder buzzing) I have a welder, I have a torch, propylene torch.

I use the propylene torch to heat the steel, to bend it, to curl it, to do whatever.

And the welder obviously to weld pieces together.

If I have a clear idea in mind of, usually I do, when I start working, it's usually not just in there hammering for fun, but usually I'm paying attention to shape and form.

There are pieces that I've done where I have steel as the main component, which may be like a branch of a tree, a limb which kind of grows out and then holds a recycled glass bowl that has this lovely green hue to it that really compliments the steel in color, but also compliments the steel with the opacity of the glass, with the solidness of the steel.

A lot of it for me is experimenting and there's a lot of joy in experimenting with stuff.

And then as you get more comfortable with that medium, it just kind of takes you to different places or you grow and it's use and you push those limits and you know what you can do.

Recently I started a project that was a big departure from my usual work, and that was casting faces for a exhibit that has to do with the pandemic, featuring face masks from the collection of Sara Vance Waddell here in Cincinnati, who's collected face masks from artists around the world.

And I had this light bulb moment when I thought, God, it would really be cool to create actual faces for these masks to go on.

And so I started researching and found appropriate materials to use or reached out to Sara and she was on board.

- I am an art collector.

I collect art by women artists of color.

And during this Covid pandemic, it affected everyone in a different way.

And for me, I wanted to collect masks.

I was seeing on Facebook and Instagram that artists were making masks and they were pretty cool.

Out of me wanting to collect masks, Leslie Daly, the sculptor, got her idea of doing the face castings of live people, which have been pretty, pretty traumatic and dramatic and I was part of that.

My wife and I were part of doing castings with her, so we decided together we should try to have some kind of exhibition and collaborate.

And the mask we wear is the collaboration that came forth.

- I was applying the skin safe silicone to their faces, followed by plaster bandages that would become the mother mold.

And then into that, once that would set up and that would take about 24 hours to dry, into that negative, I would put sculpting compound to create the positive of the face.

And then I would remove the positive and I would paint it and wax it, and then it was ready to go.

There were learning curves to any time you introduce a new medium, a new way of doing things, it's both exciting and frightening.

But when you get to that point where you feel like, I got it and I know enough to get by and keep learning, it's fabulous, there's nothing better.

The relevance of this current exhibition because of COVID-19 and the pandemic, even going forward, we're hoping that this exhibition travels.

We'd like to see it travel because of what we're dealing with, the subject that we're dealing with, the wearing a face mask or the not wearing a face masks is relevant everywhere.

- Some of our masks in the show are protest masks, some are "Black Lives Matter" masks.

And with everything going on right now, we're hoping that this exhibition gives people an outlet to come out to be socially distanced, to have their masks on, to be as safe as possible, but to be able to see some art in art of our times right now, because a lot of these masks are sculptural.

They look like art pieces.

(indistinct chatter) - One thing that I've said is that there's beauty in chaos.

I think the one thing that we have found through all of this is that when the pandemic came to the United States, we found that the regular blue medical grade masks were something that we kind of put our own spin on it.

We started being creative, we came up with more creative ways to express ourselves.

The masks have become an accessory.

And I think because they become an accessory to our everyday lives, what we wear, who we are, we had to express ourselves through those masks.

What I want people to get outta my work is not only joy, but also would love for it to provide conversation.

Have people ask the question, what were you trying to do?

What does this say?

What does it say to you?

And I think when it resonates with someone, I think that's, you know, that's just like the best feeling because that means that they love it, they get it, they enjoy it, and it provides them with happiness and joy when it's in their home or in their garden or wherever it is.

- [Kabir] Let's enjoy now the sounds of 19th century German composer, Anton Bruckner.

He created music up until his death in 1896 at the age of 72.

His ninth symphony performed here by the Cleveland Orchestra, was his final work.

Here's a selection of it's second movement.

(orchestral music) To watch more Cleveland Orchestra concerts, visit the orchestra's Adela app.

And if you wanna watch more Applause, there's an app for that too, the PBS app.

(lively music) Thanks so much for watching everyone.

I'm Idea Stream Public Media's, Kabir Bhatia, please join me for the next round of Applause.

(orchestral music) - [Narrator] Production of Applause on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.