- [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

- [Kabir] Coming up, a painter raised in Grafton falls hard for the skyline of the big city.

Dayton artists remember the tragedy of 2019 through an artistic collaboration.

And a string quartet gets percussive at ChamberFest Cleveland.

(energetic music) Hello, and welcome to another round of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream public media's Kabir Bhatia.

We begin with the tale of a country mouse turned city mouse.

Ashley Sullivan grew up on a family farm in Grafton, Ohio, but at an early age she was drawn to the bright lights of nearby Cleveland.

Today, her paintings celebrate the city skyline.

(light rock music) - I've just always been drawn to the architecture.

I think even when I'm not painting a cityscape, it has a linear kind of architectural quality to it.

Growing up far from a city, you always, you know, you think of the romance and the drama of big city living, and there's nothing that beats just going out in the city at night.

It's just so appealing and compelling to me.

Just sucks you in.

Light is everything in a painting.

I might not capture a photo reference on my iPhone that has the perfect lighting, but that's okay.

I can tweak it and I can play with that, step in and, ah, give it a little spark and a little bit of life and light.

What I'm working on right now, Bonfoey Gallery set me up with a client, and it's in a grand office space, so he wanted a big grand painting.

They're in Terminal Tower, so, of course, that needed to be featured.

It's nice to know the location of it, the importance, you know, that it's going to be in Terminal Tower, so we want that featured.

Knowing where it will eventually live does help inform what I'm gonna give more attention to as I paint, making sure it's definitely the focal point of a somewhat grand painting.

And in the painting, in fact, you see it two times because it's reflected in the river beneath it.

I don't like the brush stroke of the bristles.

I prefer it to be a smooth palette knife look.

So I use a lot of laminated cards, card stock, matte board, all kinds of stuff.

I did some light sketches just to get the framework out because sometimes showing the reference photo I've taken on my phone, there's so much visual information there.

Like the reference I'm working from, it's an inky black sky, just solid and it's beautiful.

But for me, I would never paint it solid navy to black like that.

I want it to have a little more life and breath in it.

It's a big boy.

It's 100 inches wide by 60 inches tall, and it's gorgeous panorama of the city at night just as the lights have come on.

So there's a lot of sparkle and just energy in the air.

It's tied for the biggest that I've ever done.

It's fun working that scale.

It's great standing up.

You can do more fluid motions.

I think it absolutely translates into the painting, showing that energy and life, you know, that I want to capture as part of a city.

(gentle music) I grew up on a farm in Grafton.

It was gorgeous.

Grew up right walking distance to my grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

Had fields, woods, a huge barn to play in and chase barn cats.

It's the same farm that my dad grew up on.

So the whole family compound, he grew up in the farmhouse he currently lives in, which is kind of cool.

My dream as a child was to be an artist.

I had wonderful art teachers growing up.

My mom and my aunts always did craft shows, and they would paint flat figurines or make wreaths.

I saw them doing that when I was too young to maybe take part and then eventually was kind of invited into the club, and we would get together and work on them.

It was usually around the holidays and being included in, you know, the adult level art stuff felt very special.

My uncle Tom is a wonderful cartoonist.

He did "Funky Winkerbean" for 50 years and "Crankshaft" still.

I got to work for Tom, help him out, and actually see the vellum strips he had inked and I got to color them in, use the actual adult felt tip pen or the micron pen and color in Funky's t-shirt.

(upbeat music) I've been basically documenting the change and growth of the city for the last 10 years.

I've got to see Sherwin-Williams go up.

I've got plenty of paintings with the crane on top, and, you know, watching it slowly climb.

And now watching all of these new buildings on the riverfront.

It's totally changing the paintings, and it's changing the lighting.

(upbeat music) You grow up seeing a romanticized beautiful painting of Paris or New York.

You know, the big cities get all the love, and well deservedly, they're incredible.

But I think people in Cleveland or in little bit smaller scale cities love seeing their home treated with the same well-deserved honor and glitz and drama.

So it's nice getting to treat Cleveland as one of those bigger grander cities.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Ashley Sullivan's paintings are showing at the Allen County Museum in Lima this spring and summer.

If you are from Ohio counties like Richland or Huron, Carol or Columbiana, let us know about the arts and culture scene in your neck of the woods.

You can email story ideas to arts@ideastream.org.

Summit County is next up as bright neon lights call our attention to the Akron Art Museum.

Let's step inside the current exhibit "GLOW: Neon and Light" and meet two northeast Ohio artists playing with neon's colorful currents.

(light techno music) - One of the things that I wanted to showcase was how many different working styles there are within this medium.

So there are artists who work with professional neon manufacturers.

We have artists who've been their own neon, and then two artists who even use recycled neon from wherever they can find them out in the world.

And then they combine them into these new compositions.

So it's really beautiful to see all these different working styles, to see artists who are minimalists, to see artists who are maximalists, and then the variety within that.

Max Hooper Schneider, he's taken a helicopter wreckage, suspended it from the ceiling, and from that are all these chains with fluorescent tubes, just the kind of thing you would find in a hardware store.

And then he's created this resin pond with all of this kind of detritus, this material that's embedded in it.

And then there's these plants that are growing out of it, and then all this neon and the neon is activated.

And then there's also these Tesla coils that sort of draw energy, kind of like static electricity from the air.

And once they have enough energy, they activate, they send out these sparks, and then the fluorescent tubes are lit up, and it's loud, (tubes crackle) and it's this kind of bright flashing light and it almost feels like a lightning strike.

- My whole modus operandi, as they say, is from recycled material.

And if the glass is not broke, chances are it still works.

So that can be a challenge to get it to light up because it's always a surprise.

You never know what kind of gas is in it because neon and argon are two different gases and two different colors, and the phosphorus on the inside of the glass is what gives them many of the colors.

When I get glass, I like to take that paint off so I can see the whole thing.

Even with this piece back here, I have removed a lot of the paint that was on those so that those little blue specs can come out, and it gives it a whole nother color in there as well.

So argon is the blue and the many other whites, they're like 10, 12, 14 different whites that you can get.

The cooler colors are argon.

The warmer colors, your oranges, the reds, and the other kind of warm colors are neon, which is why it's so prominent because people want to be able to see that and they can see it from across the street.

This is the "View of the City Through a Keyhole", and it was actually in a different version of this one before somebody brought me the big orange piece, and I took that old piece out because I really wasn't happy with it.

Put that one in there.

I'm going, yes, now it works.

And it's a pretty literal piece.

I mean, you can sort of see what's going on there, whereas this one over here, it's argon, it speaks for itself.

- It wasn't really until the '60s that artists started exploring how you could work with light, how you could manipulate light in different ways.

And one of the first artists to really think about neon was Keith Sonnier.

And he is in our show.

He's from Louisiana originally.

He started experimenting with neon and plexiglass and rubber and mirrors and really started being very playful with them.

He creates these works that are sort of gestural like a drawing, but when you think about it, it's not a drawing at all because you have to bend these to these exact precision.

But he's created a work that's so playful and feels improvisational, but that would've been highly structured in the way that you make them.

- Breakneck Creek, which is a tributary to the Cuyahoga River, is right behind my house.

And I walk back there almost every day.

So I was walking back there, and I came across this sort of horizon of ice in the forest, which I hadn't seen before.

And, you know, it was like these frozen circles of ice around trees, and it just really struck me.

And I just stopped there and listened and watched, and it was sort of like one of those vista moments.

I just was there in that time, in that place, experiencing it.

And what had happened was it flooded and when the water was high it froze.

And so there was this like two-inch layer of ice stuck on the trees and then the water went back down.

And so it was just hovering there in this plane.

It changed the space that I see every day into something other, something new.

There's always something new to discover, and I would hope that the people visiting the gallery for the first time come in and have a similar feeling where, you know, they're taking a bit out of what's normally running through their mind and into a space where they're more focused on the present.

- I want people to think about how their senses are activated and how that impacts how they feel in the space, their memories of the space.

There's a lot of different topics that we're addressing within the show, so I hope that they, you know, engage with those and think about some of the things that we're bringing up.

But, ultimately, I just hope that by activating your different senses, you can really create a positive core memory of this exhibition and your time at the museum.

- [Kabir] The exhibit "GLOW: Neon and Light" is on view at the Akron Art Museum through February 9th.

In the early hours of August 4th, 2019, deadly shots rang out in Dayton's historic Oregon district.

Five years later, the Seed of Life Memorial was dedicated to honor the victims, creating a place for reflection and healing.

- Well, it was a tragic night, and the first thing we thought was, how can this happen here?

- A young man opened fire in the Oregon district.

He killed nine people and injured dozens more in 34 seconds.

- In that moment, everything changed for the worst.

As I watched the shooter walk down the side of the building, fully armored, as he entered onto the curve, he just started shooting.

So I'm like, this cannot be real.

He walked where we was at, me and him was face to face as he had the gun, as my father was right here.

My father was shot five times, and not one of those bullets hit me.

Never knew that would've been my last night with my father.

- I know that many of us are hurting right now and are uncertain of where we go from here.

- Nan Whaley, who was mayor at that time, she pulled a few of us together and said, "We need to do a memorial not to mark the tragedy, but to help heal our community."

And we felt like we needed to do a national search because we wanted to get the best that we could.

- I knew that being community-based is that it's gonna take some special talent to put this together.

- Terry called me.

He had a vision of a way we could contribute to healing.

And being an artist that believes in front work, facing work to serve community, he was talking my language.

- I had worked with Terry and Sierra separately on different projects, and they are amazing artists, and they also are community artists.

And so I felt like we aligned in our overall artistic mission.

- As we started on the project, I brought to the team's attention that I really do think that we should add James Pate.

And from the moment we met with him, he jumped right in and began to contribute to the process.

- [Terry] He's got a unique outlook and history and understanding of the local culture much as anybody.

- I was sort of like, what was it, Ringo, the drummer that came to the Beatles after they was, yeah, so I was like, Ringo Starr.

Yeah, I wasn't the original drummer, you know what I mean?

(laughs) - Out of 61 applications and a national call for art, which included designers, architects, public art firms, our winning design is awarded to these four Daytonians.

So they are Terry Welker, Jes McMillan, Sierra Leone, and James Pate.

Thank you.

- So I felt like we had the dream team.

We're all very different from each other, but we all love and respect each other as well.

- We each bring something different to the table creatively.

My part was to lead the mosaic that the community would create.

- Day one.

- [Jes] We modified the Seed of Life to represent nine seed shapes for each of the victims as it is a symbol that represents all life and death as a cycle and as an idea that there's more than just us.

- We begin by taking two inch by two inch ceramic tiles and breaking them into three or four pieces, but the tiles get put back together.

So when you think about the analogy of a broken community being put back together, it's like sometimes we get broken, but we can get fixed.

Having the Mosaic events where we have over 5,000 people participate, created that bonding, sharing opportunity.

In the end, it's not just for artists, it's for artists and 10,000 hands.

- The message I was sending, if you lost anybody to violence, come and place a tile down in honor of your loved one, because I didn't want 'em to make this seem that it was just about us.

I had people that came from all over the state of Ohio, some from outta state to come and place a peace in honor of their loved one and just in the support of the families.

- While we were doing it, we had to take it one day at a time.

It taught me more about grief than I've ever known and how grief is the universal language.

From the moment we're born, we experience loss.

It really is a glue that binds us all together.

- My work came in with interviewing families.

They were quite grateful that we were all present at some of those sessions that they could talk to us and see us.

They could see that we cared and that we remembered because that was the one thing they said.

It seems like people forget.

They'll forget our loved ones.

They'll forget.

They won't remember.

And that's why my piece was entitled "Remember The Seed."

For them, that was their word they said over and over.

- The bench itself, we call the Unity Bench.

Instead of having a number of individual benches, this was one bench that we all sit together on.

The Unity Bench really became a key element.

- The featured component of the memorial is nine growing seed shape structures that represent the nine people who were killed that morning.

And all together, when it comes together, it took on a different appearance.

It looks like an eternal flame to me now.

- Today is the fifth anniversary of the tragic event that is burned in our hearts and minds.

And so it is only fitting that today we dedicate this sacred space.

- At the unveiling, for me, to just see the parents, the relatives, did they have peace?

And was this a place that they would come to and sit and remember their loved ones?

And also for our survivors, did they feel seen?

It's been five years.

Five years, that's a long time to hold something and bring it across the finish line for peace and healing.

- I kept saying that this marks the end of the process, but I soon realized the completion of the memorial was just the beginning.

- The memorial, to me, it shows the resilience of Dayton, Ohio.

- I hope that it serves as a sacred ground for healing, for life, and I hope that people love it and cherish it.

- There's a lot to discover, all the symbols, all the words that are in the mosaic, the poetry that's engraved in the steel rings, and knowing that there's 5,000 people that did it.

My big hope is that it causes people to pause and think, what can I do to change the world moving forward with a tragic event like this?

To know that it's possible to move on and make your life better.

We can reclaim our joy and our happiness - [Kabir] Next time on "Applause," we're heading for Tuscarawas County.

What happens when you mix reading, writing,, and arithmetic with guitar and bass?

On the next "Applause" students in New Philadelphia strum their way to success with strings definitely attached.

Plus, learn about the art of encaustic painting from an artist in Columbus.

And the Cleveland Orchestra reaches for the heavens with a dramatic work by Richard Strauss.

All that and more on the next round of "Applause."

(gentle orchestral music) It's time to wind things down for this round of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

But before we sign off, let's enjoy a string quartet led by Diana Cohen, co-founder of ChamberFest Cleveland.

This popular summer festival is a family affair thanks to Diana, her dad Franklin Cohen, and her husband Roman Rabinovich.

In summer 2024, Diana led a string quartet in a "Habanera" by acclaimed American composer John Adams.

("Habanera" by John Adams) ("Habanera" by John Adams continues) ("Habanera" by John Adams continues) ("Habanera" by John Adams continues) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.