- [Announcer] 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 jazz music) - [Kabir] Coming up, appreciate the empathy and passion found in the paintings of the late artist John W. Carlson.

Plus, take a deep dive into the process of creating choreography with Inlet Dance Theater, and before it's dismantled later this month, take a look inside the stick art of Patrick Dougherty.

Hi there, I'm Idea Stream Public Media's Kabir Batia, and guess what?

I'm the new host of Applause.

Welcome.

Cleveland artist John W. Carlson died suddenly in December 2020.

His legacy is remembered through a pair of exhibitions at 78th Street Studios in Cleveland.

Idea Stream public media's David C. Barnett shares his story.

- [David] As a painter and as a person, John W. Carlson was known for his empathy.

- He had an uncanny ability to make you feel that you were the only person in a room, by truly listening and paying attention to you.

- He always took the time to speak with people at openings.

I mean, he'd see someone even sitting over by themselves, and he'd go over and start a conversation with them.

- John had this superpower to go up to anybody and immediately, within a short period of time, get out of them what their creative passion was.

- The things that he talked about, whatever he put out in the ether, you could feel it.

- [David] Born in Ashtabula, Ohio, Carlson gave up on art school after one year, preferring the steady paycheck he got as a garbage man in his hometown.

- He joked that he had an MFA in being a trash man, but that that influenced his art career because he started to see people in their most human form, and he started to study the landscape around him with a different eye.

- When he painted, he painted how he felt, and it was about, to me, the pain as it relates to what he felt with his son.

- [David] Much of Carlson's empathy came from his own personal grief.

In 2010, Carlson's 26-year-old son Ryan died of a drug overdose in Nebraska.

- He was all torn up because he did not go to collect the body.

He did not go to Nebraska at that time.

And you know, that stuck with him forever.

- [David] In the decade that followed the death of his son, Carlson channeled his grief into art.

- He frequently used charcoal.

He specifically said, it's the fact that it's created by fire.

It's the remnants of being burnt, almost kind of like the symbolic meaning of it is something that he said was also powerful.

- John was one of the most raw individuals that I've ever encountered in the art world.

He was not afraid to talk about his past.

He was not afraid to open up about addiction and then the grief and the loss, and dealing with that, and I think that's why the community felt so connected with him.

- John, in my conversations with him, seemed to think so much and empathize with the emotion of the figures that he was going to depict, what the figures are doing, what their hands, their body language, but also the physical expression.

But even more than that, it's what's going on outside of the figure.

It's the way he's manipulating the materials, the paint, the charcoal, whatever he's doing has an expressiveness of its own, As if you could almost feel the emotion as an extension of the way his hand was moving.

- [David] Carlson and his life partner, photographer Sherry Wilkins, began a movement called American Emotionalism.

- The whole point was to create art that elicits emotion.

The labels, the didactic shouldn't explain everything, that you should feel it.

You should look at a piece and feel it.

It's instinctive.

It's intuitive.

You don't need to have it explained to you.

(cheerful music) - [David] In 2019, Carlson and Wilkins made a pilgrimage to Nebraska so he could see the house where his son had died.

- He had in his mind that it was gonna be, you know, like a horrible place.

And then when we went there, it was like, you know, an average neighborhood with a nice house.

It was totally the opposite of what he had imagined.

I got out to take photographs of the house for him.

He sat in the car alone, and he said that he could feel Ryan's spirit.

- [David] After the trip to Nebraska, a change took place in Carlson's work.

He began adding color.

- I remember going into his studio and seeing the use of bright greens and yellows, and at that time he was just painting a singular portrait of someone.

But then the color palette started expanding, and all of a sudden I was seeing pinks and neons, fluorescents.

- The change to color was, I think, kind of trying to work through the grief and shed some of the heaviness and looking more towards enjoying the color.

(nostalgic guitar music) - [David] Carlson was a musician as well as a visual artist, and the music he loved to play was the blues.

Mixing his passion for music with his grief and then closure over his son's death led Carlson to the most acclaimed work of his career: the blues series.

- [Woman 1] The blues exhibition was his best, most well-received exhibit that we'd ever hosted at the gallery.

- [Woman 2] Yeah, that blues exhibition was just a knockout.

He was the most proud of the work that he created in the blues series.

- It wasn't just about the music.

What he painted was what people felt that created the music.

He wanted you to feel the anguish in the middle passage, the anguish in people who were fleeing slavery.

For me, he painted what his pain looked like and it resonated in the way he did.

- [Woman 2] He was definitely hitting his stride, and it was so exciting.

- After the series, the next question was, "Where do I go from here?"

- On December 20th, 2020, just 10 months after his blues exhibition, John W. Carlson died from an abdominal aneurysm.

He was 66.

- His death was so tragic because it was so sudden.

One morning he'd been playing guitar with his grandson, and then that evening he was gone, basically.

- [David] Even in death, Carlson showed his empathy as an organ donor.

- He donated his kidneys and his liver, so he was at the hospital longer, and what they do is they have an honor walk.

They're taking the body down for harvesting of the organs.

And so it's like the last...

It's like the last walk, the last time that you have with the person.

You go down the halls, and all of the doctors and nurses and everything, you feel supported because your loved one's honored.

His donation, you know, enabled three other people to carry on living.

So it's probably, to me, probably one of the biggest impacts and legacies that he has.

- His legacy, for me, is in the lives he touched, is in our voice as we speak about John.

That is where I think his legacy lives.

- [Kabir] The John W. Carlson retrospective exhibits are on view at HEDGE Gallery and ARTneo, both located in 78th Street Studios through November 4th.

(soft classical music) Cleveland-based choreographer Bill Wade founded Inlet Dance Theater in 2001.

Recently, Wade provided a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process of Inlet's new work, Caliban Ascended.

(audience chattering) (instruments warming up) - There's a lot that happens before that first day in the studio.

My name is Bill Wade.

I'm the founder and the executive artistic director of Inlet Dance Theater.

So the motive for beginning a project is quite varied.

In this situation, the composer came to me and said, "I wrote this ballet, would you consider doing this?"

I kind of did some research, had a couple meetings with them, and I decided I was really intrigued by what he was wanting to say using the framework of the Tempest.

- In the play, Caliban is descended from the witch Sycorax, who was the leader of the island, the queen.

So when Prospero comes, he deposes the queen and captures and enslaves Caliban, who is the rightful heir.

His ascension is his return to his lineage, and to his royalty, right?

Then thinking it through in terms of colonization, it could be the entire culture's return and ascending past that colonial history.

(soothing classical music) - I need to know more about the why.

If I have a really strong why, then you can pursue those things.

I do a lot of research first.

I just start going, you know, "What's the history of that?"

and digging into that, and it's kind of eye opening, right?

And then it makes you, it starts giving you things from different lenses.

There is very much a, you know, listening to who you're working with, with empathy, real listening.

And then after you do that really due diligence on listening, we move into the ideate phase.

So it's ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas.

Try not to quantify what you're doing.

Don't judge what you're doing.

It's like just dumping the whole bin of Legos out.

And it's so big, it just takes a while to dump it all out, and then we can sift through it later.

Crazy ideas, silly ideas, serious ideas, don't place value on any of them.

So after ideating, we start realizing, well, this image really, really resonates.

I have to sit back and think, if I am a non-dancing person in the audience, and we have a pretty broad array of who comes to Inlet concerts, right?

How do we create images that, like, people can really understand what they're looking at?

So that becomes sort of the grid that we use.

This is not about me being an artiste.

That's so twentieth century.

(laughs) I'm like, "No, no, this is about me "having conversation with people rather than "'this is what the dance is supposed to be about.'"

Like, is it really though?

Are they seeing that that's what it's about?

Oh!

I just thought of something.

What if you reach in front of his face and pull his chin up to look at you?

Not that he's gonna see you fully.

There you go.

Nice.

Oh, that was nice, cradling in the elbow.

Yes.

- My name is Stephanie Ruth Roston.

I've been with Inlet, coming to the close of my third year.

We talk about the difference between being a dancer and being an artist, and there's a lot of artistry involved in taking somebody else's movement and mapping it onto your own body, but there's a different type of artistry when you're also involved in the very creation aspect of it.

And so I feel like there's a little bit more freedom for me to make choices within my character or have a bigger stake in the game.

- I've really fallen in love with the multiple diverse vantage points in the room, and it's this whole thing about none of us are as smart as all of us combined.

So combining all of that information...

I mean, I have to drive the process, but I think that their ideas inform and really kind of fill out what this could possibly be.

What might this be?

(dancers laughing and remarking) One of the things that I love is I never know what it's gonna look like at the end when I start.

And I love all of us figuring out what that might look like, and sitting down and talking about different aspects.

You need to listen to your performers because their physicalized experiences are really informative in the process, right?

- Love without justice is like weakness.

Nothing happens.

Justice without love is cruel, is harsh.

- Right.

- And so Caliban's problem is that it's too cruel, too harsh.

They're not even able to be reconciled.

Whereas Ariel's problem is it's too watery, too loving.

- Right.

Too pleasing.

- They're not able to actually get stuff done.

- Make change happen.

Yeah, right, exactly.

All of the minds speaking in the process helps distill what it should be so that the people in the audience don't feel left out.

Because otherwise they're just gonna be like, "Wow, they can sure do things with their bodies "that we can't do."

And that's like, so?

Having said that, you also don't want to water down what you're doing so well.

Technical virtuosity is why we watch the Olympics, you know what I mean?

Some of this movement is really, really wild, but if we dig into it with rigor, then you have that aspect of like, wow, the body is amazing, look what it can do.

You're not removing that from it just because you're having conversation with the community.

Like, don't dumb down your artwork.

Scale it appropriately to who you're talking to, which means you have to know who you're talking to.

I realize that I've stumbled across a model that might be a healthier model than what I've experienced in the dance world.

So my dancers in my company, I focus on them first.

I want to make sure that I'm giving the best that I was given to my dancers because that process is really transformative.

- My name is Mason Alexander.

It is going back to my time as a trainee.

Choregrapher comes in, they have their set vision, and the dancers just do what the choreographer says, which is kind of the normal deal.

As opposed to coming in here and being able to feel like, Oh, I'm not just a body in the room, I am an asset, and I have value here, and I have input.

Being able to be a part of that process firsthand has triggered a lot of growth in me, knowing no matter your title, no matter your experience, you have something to bring to the table.

- [Stephanie] You know, good leadership is empowering others to make choices and to make decisions.

(crickets chirping) (drums beating) (suspenseful percussive music) (rhythmic music) (audience cheers) - People are realizing the more of us that are involved in the process, the more of us that will benefit at the end, with the end result.

The framework is being questioned.

We're all walking through right now in this huge cultural shift.

Part of that is, you know, examining hierarchy.

Talent is universal.

Access to developing it is not universal.

I'm gonna do what I can while I'm here to fix that.

(audience cheers) - [Kabir] Art has been a constant for Raymond Tower while wrongfully incarcerated and in his current daily life.

On the next Applause, see his work up close.

Plus learn how one woman's creative passion for crafting blossomed into a business.

And the Cleveland Orchestra performs the opening bars of a classic comic opera by Ricard Straus.

All that and more on the next round of Applause.

(calming orchestral music) North Carolina artist Patrick Dougherty uses primitive building techniques to create large outdoor sculptures in nature, from nature.

Right now, you can surround yourself in his installation, Tilt-a-Whirl, on view at the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland.

Take a look.

(wind blows) - I just wanted to be a sculptor.

I actually built a house before I became a sculptor and was able to, you know, work out many of my ideas while building a house.

And so I went back to school and so that put me on a good path to making a living and making a life's work out of it.

I always think that people love to look out and see a path that's going off into the woods, you know.

And so there's a sense of that when you see this work.

There are a lot of doors and windows and you imagine, oh, maybe I could go in there.

Maybe I could.

And when other people are in there, they're enlivening it.

So if you see somebody in there, you think, I could go in there too.

The starting point for this one, we looked at a lot of secret insect trails that are in the garden.

If you look on the back of leaves, if you look at the ground, insects make little pathways.

So we took that boring pattern and we laid it out on the ground.

We scale it up, drill a series of holes along the perimeter of that shape, of that plan, set scaffolding around it, and then we use the scaffolding as kind of an exoskeleton, and we pull the shape we want.

So when we wanted this wall to lean way over, we pulled it over initially.

The intertwining of the sticks make a very strong wall that you could use.

And you can feature all kinds of strange architectural details of having walls and flying buttresses and leaning over and leaning one way and then another.

It's kind of a mindless operation in which your eye is connecting with the wall.

And so there's this constant dialogue between what you're seeing and what you're thinking about, how you could improve the look of it and make a much more luxurious wall.

You feel kind of unselfconscious.

You don't really think about what you're doing per se.

You're just kind of locked in to where you think it ought to go.

So I get a big stick like this, and I know it's too long for me to pull through.

So I'll make two pieces out of it.

I can use that top in a different way.

Sometimes I'll bend the thing just slightly because I'm trying to make it a little bit more flexible.

Then I'll drive it down in here like this.

I wanted to cross these through to these pieces because x-ing is also a way to make lines look more interesting.

So if those two lines cross like that, when we stand back, they'll look a little bit better.

It's better to go behind it if you can, to kind of get things down in the midst of it.

Sticks have an inherent method of joining.

If you drag a stick through the woods, you see what I mean?

It entangles and everything.

So we're using that basic entanglement as a way to join this sculpture together.

And also, sticks have a little flexibility, so if you flex the stick and pull it into a matrix, it snaps back and holds itself in place.

So, you know, I've learned to use sticks in lots of different ways.

It's a slow process of building up, the kind of quality of wine.

So we just work at it for hours.

Pretty soon you have something that people really are enticed by.

They really want to be able to come over and explore this.

So when people see this work, they often are reminded of those, you know, that big Mr. Twister or simple, hard and easy.

Trees they've climbed when they were kids, or a walk they took, or the first kiss they had, or something very significant that occurred to them while they were walking in the woods.

So all of those things kind of are promoted when you look at this work.

And so it's got a lot of starting points.

Initially, people evaluated this work as, sticks were found objects.

Now they're connected with environmental issues.

I'm still making the same work, but the context is changing, the relevance has changed.

I think one of the great things about a garden is that people come here for respite and enjoyment and to get away from the world.

And they also connect with nature, which is such an inherent need that we have.

Usually you get about two good years, you get one great year and one pretty good year, and you try to take the piece down while it still looks good because this is a public exhibition and you want it to be serviceable right to its very end.

So close to the two year mark, the garden will start evaluating and say, "Well, maybe it could stay up another month.

"Maybe another month."

And at a certain point, just like some of the flower beds that fade here, they'll say, "Hey, let's plant something new."

- [Kabir] With its unique design and the use of all natural material, Patrick Dougherty's installation Tilt-a-Whirl is in its final weeks at the Holden Arboretum until October 30th.

Well, that was fun.

Let's do it again next week.

As we say goodbye, here's the late John W. Carlson playing the blues.

(melancholy guitar music) I'm Idea Stream Public Media's Kabir Batia inviting you to tune in for the next round of Applause.

(John singing indistinctly) - [Announcer] 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.