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

(gentle music) - [Kabir] Coming up, guitar class is the top pick at this Tuscarawas County school.

The ancient art of caustic painting excites an artist in Columbus, and the Cleveland Orchestra ponders the hereafter in the music of Richard Strauss.

(upbeat music) Hey guys, welcome back to another round of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

(gentle guitar music) We start in New Philadelphia, where a guitar class is arguably the most popular place to be.

When Chad Roberts started the program more than 20 years ago, he taught just a handful of students, but today, more than a hundred fill the classes every semester.

(gentle guitar music) - I always tell kids the first week of school, people buy the guitar 'cause they, "Oh, that looks awesome.

That's gonna be fun.

I'm gonna impress my friends, impress girls.

I'm going to make music, make my favorite music."

And then they try it and realize, "Oh boy, this is hard."

♪ They're livin' it up at the Hotel California ♪ - I just thought it was just like a couple chords makes a song, you know, but there's so many different ways you can play it and there's so many different styles of music and it's like, it's just like goes so in depth.

I just didn't really, I didn't really know that when I started playing it.

- My dad has played since high school.

He and my sister, my older sister, they both knew how to play before I did and tried to teach me, but it was a lot harder than I was expecting.

So I kind of wimped out at home until this class.

- I had been inquiring that type of stuff.

And I've always kind of liked rock music.

And one year my parents got me an acoustic guitar for Christmas.

So that's kind of what prompted me to start seeking out how to play the guitar.

- I knew I kind of wanted to do something, I didn't really wanna do the band.

And when I was going into high school I saw that guitar was there.

So I kind of got into that, and I'm really glad that I did that.

♪ But you can never leave ♪ (upbeat guitar music) - Mr. Roberts started with just a few students, a few guitars, and over the years has done a lot to get extra instruments into the program.

He has revamped his classroom space to make it more appropriate for guitars.

And now it is a situation where he teaches all day long and his classes are pretty much full all day long.

Everyone from seventh grade up through seniors in high school.

- We have seven periods a day of guitar, at any time I might have 150 to 170 kids a year involved in learning how to play an instrument, many of which have been with me since, you know, that are seniors in high school have been with me since seventh grade.

Learning and improving and learning the great skill of playing the guitar.

So, this semester I've got two different middle school beginning level classes, two different high school beginning level classes.

And then we have two different guitar ensemble performing groups and then an advanced guitar ensemble group.

Arpeggios louder.

Yeah, we start with a foundation of basically two different types of guitar playing.

Students learn how to manually manipulate each of their individual fingers on individual strings.

That's like playing melodies, playing lead parts we call that.

And then we also learn how to strum the guitar strings and play different chords with different rhythms.

So we start kind of learning both skills at the same time.

- As a guitar player, like it's kind of a rare thing to have a class for it in a school.

I can imagine it would be kind of difficult to actually be able to play anywhere without these classes as a teenage guitarist.

♪ The most loneliest day of my life ♪ - I know it's unique because when we talk to other principals about courses and schedules and we say that we have a guitar course, nobody else has a guitar course that I've spoken to.

It's one of a kind and it gives the kids a great opportunity to get involved with the school.

It helps build self-esteem, confidence.

♪ I am a one way motorway ♪ - My first ever experience with like performing was here and was with Mr. Roberts.

It really helped my confidence, and like built like my character I feel like, 'cause Mr. Roberts helped me and he was talking to me and he is like, "You can do this."

And ever since then I've been able to, you know, continue and grow and get better and I'm very thankful.

- I've really enjoyed how Mr. Roberts is always pushing us to learn like harder material and improve us and we're always learning new things, and we're always preparing for the next concert and things like that.

So we're always on our feet and it's always just really fun and I like being here with all my friends and it's just a good class, yeah.

- Students love his class, you know, this gives some students their purpose for coming to school.

It's an outlet.

Students who maybe don't feel like they fit someplace else fit with guitars.

And then they have developed this cohort of guitar lovers and guitar players, and all students are looking for a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging.

And guitar class has provided another opportunity for some of our students to find that.

- There's a lot of opportunities to do solos, or play the bass, or sing.

And it definitely stood out to me how much you can kind of make a class your own.

You can play just in the ensemble and kind of not stand out or if you want to take advantage of those extra opportunities, you can also do that.

- Music helps me a lot, like being able to play the guitar, 'cause it's very emotional for me, at least.

Like being able to pick it up and just play how I feel and it helps me in a lot of different like situations, and I'm really thankful for it.

- Are you doing it as written?

A lot of kids nowadays just don't have patience.

They don't have patience to learn a new skill because it takes time, it takes lots of failure before you can be successful.

Having it every day in class, they don't have a choice but to tackle those struggles and possibly fail.

And the most important part, getting to the other side of failure and seeing success and developing a skill that if they didn't have this class, I'm not sure they would get otherwise.

So I think it's more than just about music.

I mean, music's certainly the heart of it, and it in itself is definitely worth our time.

Giving students the skill to recreate and to connect with music is invaluable to them as a person.

But along with that, they're learning a lot of life skills as well.

- [Person] All right, good.

- Not bad, not bad.

- Woo.

- [Student] Yay, yay.

- Do it again.

- [Kabir] That story came to us as a suggestion from Ohio's Tuscarawas County.

Why not suggest a cool art story from the county you call home?

From Richland to Summit to Ashtabula, email story ideas to arts@ideastream.org, and thanks.

February 1st is the birthdate of the poet laureate of Harlem, Langston Hughes, born in 1901.

Back in 2023, an art exhibit celebrated Hughes' time in Cleveland and his friendship with artist Elmer W. Brown.

Enjoy this Emmy award-winning story about their collaboration on a long forgotten children's book.

(gentle music) - [Sabine] Langston Hughes, a noted poet, author, and activist, was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

- Elmer Brown was a well-known African American artist and illustrator.

He worked at the Karamu House, he was educated there, also at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

He didn't graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Art, but he made some important murals here in Cleveland.

And also he was the first African American to work at American Greetings.

It was at Karamu House that he came into contact with Langston Hughes.

- Between 1936 and 1939, sometimes called the Cleveland Years, Langston Hughes had a close connection with Karamu House and even premiered three of his plays here during that time.

He got to know the people, the Black artists who were active at the Karamu House, including visual artist Elmer W. Brown.

Brown and Hughes developed a friendship.

It was around then in about 1936 that Hughes and Brown got together to create a children's picture book.

Hughes wrote 21 poems, and Brown created illustrations.

The "Sweet and Sour Animal Book" contains 21 poems.

And for each of the poems except one, there were two illustrations that were done by Brown.

They are lovely, whimsical versus about various animals for children that literally have the sweet and the sour in them.

"A lion in the plane roaming free is happy as ever a lion can be.

A lion in a zoo shut up in a cage, lives a life of smothered rage."

Scholar Michelle H. Martin, who wrote the book "Brown Gold," the definitive book of African American children's picture books really feels that this is an illusion specifically to the plight of African Americans.

(gentle music) I think one of the reasons that Hughes still resonates today so much is because in spite of such adversity, there is that optimistic thread and expressed in such a poignant but very direct way.

- Langston Hughes tried very, very, very hard to get the book published for many decades.

- It seems like publishers liked it, but objected to things like the expense, and perhaps racism was a factor in it not being initially produced.

And the fact that nobody knew about them and that this wasn't our story to sit on, that we really needed to get the story out there.

It kind of lit a fire that I just knew I needed to get the story out there so that people could know that this amazing Cleveland artist worked with this internationally known author.

For me, it's a great footnote in the history of Cleveland art as well as children's literature.

- When I first heard about it, it was like I felt like I had been let in on the secret.

- Currently under curation is a program that it's run by the Cleveland Museum of Art, and it's through the Cleveland Foundation's Arts Mastery Initiative.

And it is meant to give teens real world experiences of doing exhibitions, community based exhibitions, but really upping the bar, having them really high quality exhibitions.

But it really is about this real world experience.

(gentle music) - Oh, it's so cool, like this is the first time I'm seeing the pictures up on the walls.

- [Sabine] So what this exhibition is doing for the first time is looking back to that approximately 1936 manuscript and using those drawings, bringing Hughes' verses and Brown's illustrations back together on the walls in the gallery.

- It's like you're walking into the book, like you're holding a part of history that not only a part of history that everyone knows about, one that no one knows about.

Part of what I appreciate about his art is that in the pictures, you can tell it's like drawn for children.

It's these very animated cartoonish pictures.

But then if you look at pictures like his World War II picture, his painting, it's a completely different style.

- He was involved in a style of art making that was oriented to representing people in ways that would be accessible to the general population.

- This has a really important place in the history of children's literature, as one of the very first, if not the first children's picture books both illustrated and written by African American artists that doesn't depict them in a racist or stereotypical way.

- The fact that Langston Hughes wanted to create a book for children that did not have the kinds of racist stereotypes that so much children's literature throughout the 20th century had.

And so to have this kind of material and connect that to the backstory was really, really very important.

(gentle music continues) It deals with educating children from the standpoint of humanity.

The kinds of things that children need to learn are the kinds of skills that they will engage as they grow up as adults.

Learning about how it is that life isn't necessarily fair, sometimes you have disappointments, sometimes you have triumphs.

The fact that you have to be self-reliant and learning about that is something children's books do.

And so "Sweet and Sour" is really important in providing those kinds of lessons.

(gentle music continues) - I think it is delightful to behold.

It is such a thrill to get the story out there.

It's been many years in the making, and hopeful that it finds a bigger platform.

- [Kabir] No matter the temperature, there's always something to do in northeast Ohio when it comes to arts and culture.

For an up-to-date listing, along with regional arts news and profiles, check out our free weekly newsletter, "The To-Do List."

Sign up online at arts.ideastream.org.

Before oil paintings and watercolors, there was encaustic painting.

In Columbus, artist Kim Covell Maurer has adopted this ancient art form that utilizes hot wax and blow torches.

(gentle music) - History of encaustic comes out of the ancient Greeks.

They were using wax to just kind of repair and fill the joints of their ships, which then led them to start putting decorative imagery on their ships out of wax.

And so, the idea of how the Greeks were using it, how the Egyptians were using it has always been something that I'm interested in.

Encaustic has to be applied to a porous surface.

So I work with solid wood surfaces.

I will start off my work with layers and layers of wax, just to get it to go into the wood.

It's almost like how an acrylic painter might prime their canvas before they start.

The term encaustic technically means to burn in.

And so for every layer that I put down, I have to heat that layer so that it bonds and grabs the layer underneath.

So there's that component to it.

And I use torches and I use heat guns to do that.

Maybe four or five layers into it, I'll embed a map into that.

And then from there, I continue to build more layers of wax.

(gentle music continues) I'll have different types of things that I'm thinking about from one body of work to the next.

But I would say that one thing that tends to be consistent throughout my work are map shapes.

Underneath the layers of wax almost always are actual paper maps, which people don't typically use anymore.

And then I'll start my imagery.

(gentle music continues) I work primarily with two types of waxes.

One is a hundred percent bees wax.

And so this is how I typically get my wax.

And this comes out of Deer Creek, who makes honey out in London, Ohio.

And they sell it in these really large slabs.

And then, I'll often be gifted or find other types of wax, but it comes in so many different forms.

And then the second type of wax that I use is something that's called R&F encaustic medium.

It's also bees wax.

And what it looks like inside of that package are these little pellets.

There's a little bit of resin in there.

And this is the wax that I use to make my color.

So to make color, I work with, and I'll try to pull this out and see, I work with all of these jars of dry powder pigment.

This would be the type of pigment that any artist making any kind of medium would use.

And so what I do is I melt the medium, and then I sprinkle in however much of the pigment that I want in terms of the color.

When it's cool, I can pop it out of the container and have my own dry cooled cake colors.

And then I usually apply that with a brush.

And then once I've applied it with the brush, then I'll take a torch to it to burn it in.

(gentle music) I tend to work, I would say more on an abstract side of things, but I do have imagery that's identifiable in the work.

And so another common theme for quite a while has been orchids.

And I use them as symbols of strength.

I use them as symbols of resiliency.

I'm really interested in the idea that orchids are thought of as these sort of fragile, delicate flowers, but in actuality, they exist almost at every climate on earth.

And they thrive in almost every climate.

And so I'm very interested in that idea.

And then I have been taking those orchids and pairing them with abstracted images of female anatomy, kind of pairing this idea of strength and resiliency with the female anatomy.

And again, it's a little bit coded, it's a little bit on the abstract side, but for me, there's a lot of political implications that are happening with that imagery.

I have some paintings where I'm really thinking about Greek mythology.

There's kind of a silhouetted image of a siren.

So a siren is half woman, half bird.

And the story is, is that they have these beautiful voices that seduced the sailors to want to, you know, find out who they were and what they were.

And they crashed into the cliffs.

So there's an image of that, and then there's a target image.

And so I, I'm thinking kind of more about this idea of focus.

And so the sirens are really kind of like doing their own thing, focusing on their thing.

And then there's this place in the target that looks like it got smashed, right?

And so for me, that's the ship smashing into their creative act that they're in the middle of.

What inspires me tends to be a lot of different things.

I have been working with encaustic for about 20 years, and I have different bodies of work throughout that timeframe.

And my ideas will change over time, of course, as many artists do.

But there are some things that remain consistent throughout that time.

And most of what appears in my work are these map imagery and they're actual maps that make up kind of the ground of the work, and then I build on top of it.

And so from those maps, I am thinking about shapes and line work that follow what kind of movement I'm making throughout the day.

So that movement might be just sort of a routine from home to work to the gallery, to the studio, or it might be a special trip through texture and through color and through placement, through the composition.

I refer a lot to Earth and sky.

And I'm very interested in how one is looking at the sky and at the Earth themselves when they're moving throughout the day.

But I'm also interested in how the viewer looks at art and my art.

And I want it to be something that causes them to pause and really look at what's being presented to them.

(upbeat music) - [Kabir] Allison Loggins-Hull has the plumb job of writing new music with the Cleveland Orchestra.

On the next "Applause," meet the composer as she takes her residency into Cleveland neighborhoods.

Plus, get to know a Columbus artist who speaks with her ancestors through her art.

And Oberlin's Chris Coles performs a jazz elegy with some of his students.

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

(gentle jazzy music) Let's wind things down as we say goodbye to this round of "Applause."

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

As we close, here's the Cleveland Orchestra's poignant performance of Richard Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration," which can be found in its entirety on the orchestra's app, Adella.

Enjoy.

(gentle orchestral music) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle music) - [Narrator] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.