Production of Applause and Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

coming up, provocative paintings of the American landscape in Akron.

Latino culture creates community in Cleveland.

And Tchaikovsky's crowning masterpiece lights up.

Severance.

Hello and welcome back to Applause, my friends.

Im Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Now picture this.

You're walking through a major museum in North America, and you see a beautiful landscape from the days before the internet, before television, before even radio.

Back then, American masters painted to document our nation's history.

But a new exhibit at the Akron Art Museum invites people to rethink that history.

Museums have an incredibly important role in telling the story of this continent.

So what I've done with my own work is to challenge the museums that I work with, to tell the story, and to start that story from somewhere else.

I went to college and I actually studied to become an illustrator.

Soon after, I realized that I wanted to be a real painter to actually return to representational art making, because the themes that I was exploring in my art practice had to do with themes that felt very urgent to me, and they had to do with the ongoing impact of the colonial project on my family and my community.

I was also discovering the art history that was made on this continent by settler artists who were looking at Indigenous people as subjects for their art.

And that was my entry point to challenge their work, to challenge the subjectivity of their work and to reverse the gaze it became a very important project for me to really take on the weight of this art history.

He was doing something that others were not doing, and that was intentionally using the colonial gaze to flip the power dynamics in the authoring of art history.

There are specific figures that you can really empathize with, and even when it's talking about the past, talking about the future, talking about imagined scenarios, you just get it.

I was really blown away by Kent's work addressing grand narratives of European art history, European settler colonial practices around the world head on, and to really see Indigenous perspectives front, right and center.

Large paintings have this kind of authority that I think is what I wanted to also invest my work with.

So that's really what I wanted to do with my practice, was to imbue Indigenous experience, you know, historical and contemporary with that same gravitas, that same weight and authority that the European version of this history has.

The painting “History is Painted by the Victors” is what inspired the entire exhibition.

This particular work, I think, truly encapsulates a variety of aspects of what we're trying to do in the exhibition, and that is to look at the power dynamics on the authoring of histories.

So you see in this painting, Miss Chief painting at an easel and depicting Lieutenant Colonel George Custer in the seventh Calvary.

Of course, the romanticized landscape is a recreation of Albert Bierstadt's “Mount Corcoran” very rarely have Indigenous people been given a platform to even visually express their own histories and their own experiences.

Of course, there was a great deal of respect and admiration for the level of skill required, but I also knew that these paintings had the ability and they had the possibility to tell stories, to hold narratives.

And it was these narratives of Indigenous perspectives, experiences both historical and contemporary, that I wanted to express through this very sophisticated language of painting.

There is a resistance in my work in pushing back.

I wouldn't describe it as anger, but I would say that there is a level of challenge to the authority that their paintings had in our museums, telling a very narrow perspective of history.

This painting is titled “The Great Mystery” and it's based on looking at two works within the Hood Museum collection by Mark Rothko.

Of course, with this background from 1953, and then a Cyrus Dallin sculpture, really stereotypical idea of an Indigenous warrior on horseback.

But instead of that, we have Miss Chief with the shoulders raised and really offering a perplexed look at the audience, perhaps asking, “What are you going to do with the knowledge that has been imparted with you?” And also thinking, of course, about reality, about existence.

So humor is an important part of my work.

It's a strategy.

It's a device I'd use to entice people to my work, to soften people with a laugh, to give them a moment, to look at some dark subjects, but also like a pressure valve.

When settlers arrived and they encountered two spirit people, genderfluid people here in North America, they struggled understanding how there could exist a person in a community who was accepted for that and wasn't treated as an outsider or discarded.

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle was created as an alter ego to kind of reverse the gaze and look back at those settler artists and say, well, we're here, I'm here, and I have a voice and I have a perspective, and it's different than yours.

And in creating that character, I wanted a very empowered, gender fluid character that could speak to Indigenous understanding of gender and sexuality.

That was very different from the European idea.

This very binary version of male-female.

And that's the beauty of a character like Miss Chief.

His alter ego, who is a time traveling, shapeshifting trickster.

Miss Chief can bring together people from different time periods.

So in this painting, she's brought together elders, people who can pass along knowledge as well as, you know, very young babies who are the future of their tribes and bringing them all together in this beautiful interstellar scene.

And a lot of these are specific myths that inform native cosmology and native astronomy.

It's so hopeful.

A very wise person that I looked up to an Indigenous senator named Murray Sinclair.

He advised our community, let's not attract more vitriol and hate from our settler neighbors.

Let's build monuments to our own people.

And so that's what I decided to do.

Because I'm a painter, I decided to make portraits to authorize people in my community that I admire.

It's very important that as my career moves forward, that I bring these people from my community and shine light on them.

The boarding school program here in the States, residential schools in Canada.

It was about trying to assimilate Indigenous people into the mainstream culture by taking children and putting them into basically an indoctrination camp where they would be forbidden to speak their language, where they would be forced to learn English.

And most of those schools functioned as labor camps for young children.

So my grandmother was one of those young girls who was put into a residential school with her siblings.

And, you know, that continues to have intergenerational impact in our communities and in our families.

So it really has become an important part of my work to bring these truths forward, because most people in North America know very little about this very important part of the history of this continent that had to do with dispossession.

And, you know, attempts at erasure.

I think in this part of the Great Lakes region, it's really important to have Indigenous perspectives that speak directly to the lived experience of Indigenous peoples in this part of the world.

One of the goals that Léuli and I share is that when people walk away from this exhibition, we hope that they've learned a little bit more about themselves, by the way that they respond to the work.

So I think people are going to have a lot of emotions, but I hope when they come out of it with as a sort of catharsis of understanding that as long as we are working together as a community and acknowledging some of our past, we can build a better future.

There are so many great museums all throughout this continent, and having an opportunity to bring my exhibition to Ohio is super exciting.

People can read news feeds all day long, but there's something about the way a painting also specifically can really grab you.

I think it's unlike anything else.

It's about opening a portal into a whole universe that some people might have never thought about before, but it's been here the entire time.

Kent Monkman “History is Painted by the Victors” is on view at the Akron Art Museum through August 16th.

now from Akron to Cleveland, where a family of artisans brought their traditional Mexican craft of Cartoneria the 2025 residency was a collaboration with a local husband and wife, who opened their home to artists and invited them to create while sharing their culture with our community.

I think of art as a tool.

I think it's a tool to, examine possibilities, and it's a tool to just get things done.

And it's a tool to explore curiosities that you have with the world.

And it's a tool to connect with other people.

And, I think that can be really, really powerful.

Primarily we're interested in, the home as a place where culture and art originate and are nurtured and, cultivated and also making a home for artists.

This house has had a lot of history.

It was a family home, and it was a boarding home.

And then it was a podiatrist office for 50 years.

And upon doing more research, we realized that this is actually the intersection of my my background.

It's, you know, close to Clark Fulton, the largest Hispanic and Latino neighborhood in Cleveland, as well as where my father immigrated.

So this was kind of the perfect direct intersection for us to live in and raise our family.

I think there's an intimacy to it that's really nice.

That you may not often encounter with art.

And I think in terms of that, it creates a certain level of accessibility to it because, because while this is our home and we live upstairs, this space is very much about communal gestures and, a communal sense of place and a communal sense of like, let's experiment and have conversations and honor conversations around ideas.

And that's really kind of like the core of communities and, the core of culture.

I wanted to create a space where you could come and you could see and experience art in a different way.

And we want to be able to engage with the community on a deeper level.

This program with Semana Santa, is a really good example of bringing homes together and kind of looking at art and culture that takes place in the home.

Semana Santa is the term in Spanish for Holy Week.

It is the week leading up to Easter.

It was a title that we kind of just chose for this program to encompass everything that was going along with it.

At the center of it is a man who is an artist in Mexico City with his family, who makes these paper maché effigies.

we are so much more connected than we realized there.

Just different cultures and the ties that we have to each other.

And sometimes the language might not be the same, but the experiences there can be.

And so Semana Santa is a way to honor that, is a way to honor collective celebration.

It's a way to honor collective grief and a way to talk about history in sometimes uncomfortable topics.

But through joy and through celebration and seeing what comes through all of that Its also it's a way to show how artists are really essential to community and how they're kind of the pillar of all of these celebrations and how that's all built around the paper maché making.

I also think that it's really important for people in Clark Fulton and in Brooklyn Center to see themselves reflected back in the art that is being shown here in Cleveland.

Okay, let's do a little more crafting.

But in Cincinnati, our next artist grew up in a family of crafters and has been painting since she was a child.

But after a lifetime of crafting, this artist is trying something new.

My name is Rebecca Barker, and I am an artist.

I paint abstract paintings.

My family were craftsmen.

They made Christmas tree ornaments.

So I grew up with paint and art all over the house.

I also went to art shows from very early age.

So I knew what an artist does.

And I it was the only thing I excelled in, in art, you know, in school.

My mom painted the Christmas tree ornaments from when I was a baby.

And it was something that just kind of took off.

And we had a dairy farm just north of Oxford.

It a family farm, and they had to open houses to sell the ornaments.

And they became very well known for their ornaments.

Many people have the Barker ornaments.

And especially in the Tri-State area here I just grew up in that sort of atmosphere.

I had the art supplies and my mother and father pushing me to be an artist, which is unusual.

They never said, you can't make a living as an artist, but I knew you could because I've seen many of their friends and them make a living that way, too.

So I pursued it full force.

I grew up on a farm, so I loved animals and nature.

My mother was a collector of antique quilts, and she did a little bit of quilting in her spare time, but I, loved quilts, so when I was doing the landscapes, I would put quilts inside the landscapes.

All quilt patterns have old fashioned names, and the quilters know these names.

My favorite is probably called Delectable Mountains.

That is the delectable mountain quilt pattern.

There's one called Grandmother's Flower Garden, which is very traditional.

And I did that for 25 years.

Full time business.

Eventually I did a lot of licensing with that and it took off nationally.

I also started doing the big quilt shows that were all over the country.

So a lot of traveling.

But I also had a lot of mass produced stuff like calendars and puzzles and my own line of note cards and greeting cards.

You pretty much name and I had images on things.

I don't do the puzzles.

They drive me crazy.

But, yeah, it's really an honor.

Of course, they're very different than what I'm doing now because they're realism and there's no abstract to it at all.

It's kind of weird how I totally switched my style.

It got to the point where I wasn't doing new things.

And, my creativity, I thought, was not flowing.

I always like abstracts.

And I said, I'm going to try doing some abstracts, just, you know, see what happens.

At first I thought, this is going to be easy, but it was not.

Abstracts are actually quite hard to do.

They have the same elements as the regular art, but it's different.

You have to leave some of the elements out.

So after a couple of years of practicing with the abstracts, I feel I've developed my own style.

I work in acrylic paint and they're on boards after priming.

I usually start out by putting a layer of gold or colored foils because I like shiny.

Once I've got that down, I'll put a layer of epoxy so it seals everything, and then it also makes it smooth again for me to go ahead and paint over it.

Then I'll come in with all kinds of things, like metallic colored tape and also glitter, along with the acrylic paints and the tapes.

I finish them off, unless there's going to be a realism part added, like birds or trees or nature.

Sometimes I do moons or suns.

After everything's down, I'll put in another 1 or 2 layers of the epoxy, which is a mixing of the two resins.

I pour them and stir, stir, stir and then apply them with the gloved hand and smooth it all out.

And it dries flat.

The main reason I use the epoxy is one.

It looks kind of cool, and it looks like they're under glass and it magnifies the paint just a tiny, tiny bit.

And also, since I'm using tapes and all kinds of materials, collage you might call it, it seals it so it won't come off someday.

I think the style is definitely me.

I feel very happy most of the time and I try to show that in my paintings with the bright colors and the shiny.

And also my love of nature.

I get a lot of inspiration by looking at aerial views of landscapes.

That's where the river's pictures come in.

Or map pictures.

My Cincinnati picture, for example, is probably my most popular painting.

I used to paint in the patterns of the fabric in my quilt paintings, so people would actually think I glued fabric on my work, but I did not.

Occasionally I'll do paintings that repeat that sort of pattern in parts of the painting.

I never start out knowing what a picture is going to look like, especially just the pure abstracts.

They just sort of evolve as I go.

If I hadn't just run out of ideas with the quilt paintings, I think I would have stayed with them.

And that's what I was known for doing.

And I enjoyed the quilters very much.

It was kind of a good thing.

I, myself and other artists I've noticed get kind of stuck and they think, oh, this is what sells or this is what I've done for so long.

So I'm going to keep doing this.

I really encourage artists to try new things because I have done that myself.

I have tried this new style that I'm working with, and it's just so much more creative than it was.

If you just stick with the same thing all the time.

And I'm glad I had the courage to try something new.

next time on Applause, healing through music.

After the loss of her parents, Jessica Shetler-Jones picked up her dad's old guitar.

I found this little melody that I started humming over It really resonated.

Its the most honest song Ive ever written Jessica shares more about the song on the next Applause.

And we meet women finding healing through music in prison.

All that and more on the next round of Applause.

You made me laugh you made me feel safe Well, it's time to put the wraps on this round of Applause.

Im Ideastreams Kabir Bhatia.

We close with music from the composer of “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake,” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Here's the Cleveland Orchestra, led by Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska, with Tchaikovsky's final work, which he considered his finest.

the symphony “Pathétique” Production of Applause and Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.