Production of applause and ideastream.

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

Sure.

Coming up, a stirring look at what's lost and what's found at the US-Mexico border.

Art critic Steve Litt shares his thoughts on a very fashionable show, and the Cleveland Orchestra revels in the music of Ravel.

Hello, my friends.

Welcome to applause.

Im Ideastream public media's Kabir Bhatia.

We often hear about artists finding their artistic voice right now in an exhibit at the mall's museum in Beachwood.

Two Arizona artists are lending their voices to those who've been silenced.

Elsewhere.

New Americano the American Dream is a photographic essay of the items and belongings that were carried by migrants and asylum seekers that were confiscated when they were apprehended and taken to a border Patrol facility.

I was the janitor there for 11 years.

I asked, and I was given permission to recover the food, and I started doing that.

I immediately encountered what was also being confiscated and discarded by the government.

Bibles.

Rosaries, family photographs.

So my project is document taking.

All the items that I personally found in the trash when I was working at the station.

This is the largest exhibition of this work, and the first time that I invited another artist, Elizabeth Z partnered up her work.

I just came across a couple of years ago, and when I was introduced to it, I was floored.

I got the opportunity to meet Tom in person, and then Tom went through the gallery space, and I remember to this day how shaken he was.

He kept saying, Elizabeth, I had no idea.

Elizabeth I had no idea.

Within moments it's like, oh my God, this is like the Vietnam War.

By myelin, I mean, it's just that powerful.

Tom called me the very next day and said, we have to do something together.

I just knew in my gut that we have to exhibit together.

We have to bring our two bodies of work to further complete the experience.

I'm originally from Mexico City.

My parents brought me to the US when I was a child, ten years old.

Children being separated at the border had a big impact on me, even though this had been my home for many years.

I always felt like I couldn't call it home.

There was a part of me that had that sense of not belonging.

I started making work about my own experience, about the immigrant story.

So these issues have been at the heart of some things that I'm really, in a profound way, trying to give voice to and find reasons why it's happening and perhaps inform others.

Thinking about migrants who have perished in the desert has been a theme that became the heart of my work.

I was researching and trying to source immigrant documents, much like there are documents of migrants at Ellis Island.

I came upon the website Humane Borders that has compiled a database of known migrant deaths in Arizona since the early 80s.

Part of what they do as they produce what is known as the Arizona migrant death map, which is an essential map of Arizona with many red dots along the landscape where people have died in the desert.

They're meant to inform people, to let them know not to attempt the trek, because eventually people will die.

I sat staring at my screen, horrified.

I scrolled and wept.

I scrolled and wept and never got to even a third of the entirety of the document.

Then I began exploring ways that I could give voice to the document.

A document that is a living document of people who no longer have life.

What I've done is I've printed the document in its entirety on silk.

I leave them mounded on the floor, thinking of the collapsing of the body.

That collapse in mountain.

That can probably speak to what happens in those last moments.

I print them on silk, thinking of the fragile substrate that it is thinking also as we move around them.

They move with you.

It is almost like they're pretty, which is something that they no longer have.

My mom is from Mexico and in Oaxaca.

The people consider corn as a gift from the gods in Mexico.

There's a saying, see, in my night, babies without corn, there is no country.

And so I'm thinking of the different ways in which corn is significant.

I also think about it in terms of food as something that's being very accepted.

We all love Mexican food, but maybe not all love Mexican people.

My documents were deemed invalid when I applied for my passport for the first time in 2019.

So issues of belonging, issues of identity and erasure all flooded me at one point, and I had to prove my identity.

And I've been thinking about paper and documents and the validity of papers, or the weight of papers.

And when I saw corn husks, I knew immediately I want to make cyanotype prints of these documents that were deemed invalid to give them back what was taken from them when they were deemed not valid.

My hope is that this experience allows the viewer to tap into their own sense of humanity, what that is and how we treat each other with dignity and respect.

To have people to tap into their better self.

Chills ran up and down my spine.

I'm a grandson of immigrants.

Fortunately, they didn't have to come through the desert.

It's a beautiful exhibit.

It's a heartbreaking exhibit.

I feel like I need to go home and cry for an hour.

That's just a very heavy, moving.

Tragic reflection of the United States of America right now.

And our inhumanity to words.

I've been really moved already by the reaction of people.

And I can see already that sense of humanity and the care for another human being has really already been present.

And I'm really grateful for that.

Elsewhere in Yo Americano, the American Dream is on view at the Mall Museum through February 16th.

Recently on applause, we took you inside the Cleveland Museum of Art's special fashion exhibit, Renaissance to Runway The Enduring Italian Houses.

The show spotlights contemporary designs alongside centuries old artworks, idea streams.

Art critic Steve Litt paid a visit and now offers his take on the exhibit.

Can high fashion be fine art?

The Cleveland Museum of Art is making that point with its big fall winter exhibition, Renaissance to Runway.

The great Italian houses the show was organized by Darnell Jamal Lisboa, the museum's fashion curator.

And the central point that the show makes is that during the postwar era, when the great Italian fashion houses were beginning to recover from World War Two, they drew inspiration from Italian Renaissance art.

So the museum is making that point by showing works of Italian couture next to works from the Renaissance that are in their permanent collection.

Also on view are banner size reproductions of famous Italian artworks, including examples by Sandro Botticelli and Giorgio Vasari.

Those artworks are displayed with works by fashion designers from many of the famous houses, including Gucci, Pucci, Capucine, Miss Sony and Max Mara.

The exhibition, though as great as it is, has some moments where it falters, including the awkward placement of some wall texts and labels.

It's too easy, for example, to walk by the introductory text, which explains what the show is about.

However, I think most visitors will not notice those flaws.

It's a highly entertaining exhibition, and it shows that fashion is getting more serious attention at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

That's good for the institution and for its audience.

You can pay a visit yourself and see Renaissance to Runway in person at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The show runs until February 1st.

If you go, be sure to dress sharp.

We have a lot more to offer online and on demand.

For instance, our tours inside the museum's fashion exhibit or behind the scenes look at public art in Cleveland's Asia town, or a spooky visit to the Ohio Reformatory where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed.

All of these applause stories and much more are available and free with the PBS app.

What's on your bucket list?

For me it's mixing paint, washing the car, making sand castles all at the same time.

But for passionate art lovers, something that should be on their bucket list is a trip to the Sunshine State for Art Basel Miami.

It's happening now, so if you can't make it this year, don't worry.

We paid a visit just for you.

Hi, I'm Bridget, and I'm the director of Art Basel Miami Beach.

And welcome to the 22nd year of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Art Basel Miami Beach was cited in Miami Beach 22 years ago.

The main reasons was that it is the geographical nexus point North, South and Central America, and our makeup of the show reflects that.

This year, we have 286 exhibitors hailing from 38 countries.

You have two thirds of the galleries from the Americas.

We have 19 galleries from Brazil this year.

We have galleries coming from Colombia and Argentina, and also Mexico.

I'm here representing my crew.

It's a solo birth of, the honey Queen.

Artists movements from the western portion of the Amazon in the border between Brazil and Peru.

Let's sell paintings to buy land, which is the Amazon forest, to improve people's life.

From the fact that they sell their paintings, they make the money and they reinvest it in their community that way to protect the forest.

You're standing in the Meridian sector, which features 17 large scale projects that are really institutional in scale.

So this is a very international group of works.

This piece was for sale in London, in Venice Biennale, in the Peruvian Pavilion.

I know we have bring it here.

It's a photography, made in the Peruvian Amazonia.

The 13m long photos on the table that they put in the Amazonia and the floor, and they put this 30m tree over this paper.

But when they was just beginning to try to do this, suddenly they become a storm.

And the storm for lighting the sky exposed a piece.

You will see, a lot of very experimental works by our more emerging galleries.

We want to make this show welcoming and enticing for everyone.

We want to make sure that our galleries, that they're able to give their artists the best platform possible with this show, we want to make sure our guests feel welcomed and that they're learning and really able to experience new art in our halls.

So making sure those balances are all in check and people are enjoying and having a good time is exciting.

Actually.

We're going to continue to build on what has been in place for the past 22 years and always work to evolve and make the show more exciting and interesting and efficient as we move forward.

let's head for the hills with an Appalachian artist whose pottery is formed from the ancient clay of southern Ohio.

Potter and Susan Abramowitz is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, who recently won a Heritage Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council.

It was 1969 and I decided I wanted to go into art.

Cleveland Institute of Art was close by.

So I applied and I got accepted.

And after I was done with my freshman year, I decided to make my career in clay.

It's malleable, it's fun.

And you can do a thousand different things with it.

I decided I really wanted to have my own business, and I picked Athens because of the proximity to my natural resources that I needed.

I built my first studio in Athens County in 1978 on Rock Riffle Run Road.

The state of Ohio informed me that my property was in the right of way of a road improvement.

I ended up having to sell my property in the state of Ohio in 1984.

I found this farm that had a huge shed.

I moved to shade and rebuilt Rock Riffle Run Pottery.

We're about 50 miles from Cedar Heights Clay company, which is where the bulk of my materials come from.

The clay that I'm using is about 315 million years old.

That's huge.

It's an amazing thing to work every single day with a material that's 350 million years old.

Nobody gets to do that.

It's pretty cool.

It's like a living fossil.

Ohio is really, really rich in clay, and a major part of the clay industry happened here along our rivers.

It's part of Ohio history.

My pottery is sold throughout the United States, but mostly online.

We have two product lines here.

We have functional stoneware line and a decorative terracotta gardening line.

I make a lot of garden markers.

We have about 500 different ones and we sell them to nurseries all over the country.

The stoneware line takes weeks and weeks to make.

It's a much more durable clay.

My ingredients come from all over the world, and my glaze buckets hold about 30 gallons.

So everything here is dipped and not painted on with a brush.

I really like mugs, and we're making logo mugs for resorts for businesses.

And I think out of all the things that I make, my mugs are actually among the most successful.

I make my pieces and depending on the weather, it takes anywhere from three hours to five days to dry.

After it's dry, we fire it in an electric kiln to about 1600 degrees.

That produces a piece of pottery that is porous enough to absorb the glaze, but strong enough to handle.

And we wax any surface that will be touching any other surface.

The wax repels the glaze, and I dump it in a glaze that is the consistency of crepe batter.

Leave it in there through a count of town.

Pull it out and when I have a kiln load which is around 300 pieces, then we take it out and we put it in the glaze kiln.

The glaze is made up of things like silica, which is sanded at things that melted high temperatures.

The colorants come from all over the world and we load it into the kiln, turn it on, and raise the temperature to about 2400 degrees.

And I use these things called standard parametric cones that melt at certain temperatures.

So I place them and look in the sky holes of the kiln.

And when they start to melt, then I know I've reached temperature.

It is weather dependent.

When it's sunny and bright and there's a little bit of wind, I get very brilliant colors.

When it's raining and there's no wind.

Then I end up getting kind of more muted colors.

Firing takes about nine hours to get from your ambient outdoor temperature to about 2400 degrees.

I turn it off.

I wait about three days and then we unload.

Then it goes on and it lives forever.

As long as you don't break it.

Unloading a gorgeous glaze kiln is the most rewarding thing.

That 350 million year old hunk of clay is.

Now what?

You're going to be having your coffee out of tomorrow.

That's pretty amazing.

One of the things I appreciate about Susie is her entrepreneurship, basically.

Like she's very hard working.

You know, she's got her studio and she's very generous and how she interacts with with various people.

Susie makes her studio very much available to young artists.

I mean, in that we're in a college town, young ceramics have been able to work at Susie's studio.

The Ohio Pop Popoff Festival.

This is going to be its 27th year, and it's really the first festival celebrating in Papa's.

The Papa is North America's largest native tree fruit, and it's related to 2100 tropical fruits.

The Papa Festival has this community marketplace, and one of the things that we do is we don't allow imported products.

We like to have a good mix of the arts.

We've been working with Susie for decades now.

I have been making logo mugs for the Pop Pop Festival since its inception.

But every year I make logo clubs that they sell out of their merchandise store.

They're great people to deal with, and I do a lot of special events with the logo mugs.

So it's kind of fun being a self-made artist is not the easiest thing.

I mean, a lot of people are great artists.

But to actually be able to have a business and survive for as long as Susie has, I mean, I think her work ethic and her creativity basically have really lent it to her, you know, successful business over the years.

I've been doing this for 50 years.

I think my job is sort of to pass on the tradition that I'm part of.

We usually do our camps in the summer.

Girl Scout troops, just people who come in and want to learn.

It's a very neat thing to watch.

It's like magic to watch the slump of clay just turn into something beautiful.

Everybody likes that.

It's hands on.

You can be doing anything with clay at any skill level.

It's very inviting.

It's also been a privilege to be female living in America at this time, because these opportunities were not available for me 100 years ago.

And so this is a great time to be a POC and a female in Ohio.

It's really cool to be a part of this.

Birding inspires art on the next.

Applause.

as jazz musicians and dancers use bird songs to guide their creations.

For the ever Mansi project in Akron.

Birds have been used in art for millennia, I think it's a great way to bring people together.

And it's a great way to bring us out into nature.

And the holiday spirit blossoms with the holly and the Ivy by Late Elise.

All that and more on the next round of applause leave you the.

Holly has what Berry has made us and him and many more sweet Jesus Christ fought for well, we've gone from Cleveland to Beachwood to Appalachia to Miami Beach, and we're back again.

It's like flying Eastern Airlines, but I don't feel jet lagged.

I just feel like wrapping up this round of applause, I'll leave you with a tribute to the fallen of the Great War.

That's anything but solemn.

It's a rousing performance by the Cleveland Orchestra from its Adela app finish.

Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen takes us to the finish line with the music of Maurice Ravel.

I'm.

Sure.

For.

The.

Production of applause and ideastream.

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