Production of applause on Ideastream Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

coming up.

Shutterbugs hit the road in the Buckeye State.

We get a history lesson about displaying art in Cleveland.

and let's jazz things up with a performance by Tracy's top students.

hello.

And welcome back for another round of applause, Let's travel now.

From sea to shining sea, which in Ohio means from Lake Erie to the Ohio River.

the Buckeye State is home to numerous state and national parks, beautiful beaches, and plenty of historic architecture.

So a group of Northeast Ohio photographers shared their favorite spots to capture the beauty of our state.

I love Ohio.

It's a wonderful state.

I love the nature of the parks around here.

And there are some things that are just 20 minutes away that I never realized.

The waterfall here and the beautiful rocks were made from their old barns that are falling down, that are really fun to take pictures of.

Oh yeah, definitely wildlife and birds.

You know, I just love getting in and seeing the detail in the shots.

You know, that you can't really see with your naked eye.

Marble has a special place in Ottawa County on the west side of the Cleveland, and my wife and I enjoy going up there and seeing all the sunsets.

The lighthouse and your heart of the art.

Another great place to go take photographs is Holton Arboretum.

You can get anything from this.

I tried to get the autumn colors, anything from a wildflowers.

This time of year, you can get all the vibrancy of colors spread out like an ocean in front of you.

My main mission here at the Nature Center is to connect people to nature through art.

This particular art show is called Picture This A Road Trip to Ohio.

First of all, it's photography.

It highlights the Western Reserve Photographic Society that meets here at Penitentiary Glen Nature Center once a month.

And then not just photography, though, because I wanted to make sure there was memorabilia involved, because I'd like to do a little interpretive portion to go along with every art show, because how many of you know what all of our state items are like?

Can you name?

What is our state bird?

You know, it's the northern cardinal.

How many people know what the state beverage is?

Tomato juice.

So something for everyone is represented here.

So they can still say, oh, wow, that's cool.

Maybe we should go there and see what our state has to offer.

The idea was just to break it up into the different regions.

So we've got a lot of pictures from all around the state, different themes, be it bridges, transportation, animals and so forth.

So and just beautiful landscapes from all towns around.

So.

So folks coming through can maybe get ideas for where to go on vacation, where to go take pictures and so forth.

So I actually knew that we were doing a show for Ohio.

So I specifically went and traveled to different areas.

This is out of Columbus.

And originally I was going to do the city skyline, and I just happened to go underneath this bridge and saw this coexist sign.

And then I started trying to do different framing things and noticed that I could get these concentric, you know, shapes.

And I was like, wow, that is really cool.

So it's not even a shot that I necessarily went, you know, specifically looking for, but just ended up seeing the story.

I really just love the history of this area.

And the bridges are just fascinating.

Ashtabula has beautiful covered bridges.

I know there's a lot of people that don't even realize that we have that many bridges around here so close by.

It's about 45 minutes.

You can get to them and then spend a day going around to each of the bridges and look around and take pictures.

Yeah.

So this is the Burnett Road bridge, and most of the bridges are named after the roads that they're on.

This was on Thanksgiving Day, and it was a beautiful day.

And nothing's hiding the bridge.

So I was able to get a really neat shot.

And it's starting to do the sunset.

And it's just a gorgeous sky.

This is perfect timing for me.

Some of my other favorite areas are down in the Dayton area, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

And we went down a few times when I was a little guy.

And, and I went back in 20, 24 and, took a bunch of pictures there.

And that's a gem, too.

That's a free museum that, is open to us in Ohio.

And, it's a great place to go visit.

So this is a sculpture, actually in Toledo, and it's called The Beacon.

And this specific sculpture, it is made out of glass because Toledo is well known for their, glass.

And the reason that it's the shape that it is, is because it's meant to look like a, smokestack from a factory.

That was where this park was when they, ripped the factory down.

And when I was taking the shots, I happened to hear a plane overhead and managed to snap the shot when it was just over top of the, tower.

It was really last minute, so I wasn't even sure if I had gotten it.

And, when I got home, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was there.

This is Fairport Harbor Lighthouse.

Each year for the 4th of July, they paint the American flag.

And this year was 200th anniversary of Fairport Harbor Mardi Gras.

So you got the 200 down the side?

I've wanted that for years.

This year, I made a point of paying attention as to when they were going to paint the flag, so I went the same day.

Totally.

Sometimes you just pay attention to get what you want.

You make sure you get there the day that something is going to happen.

And that's probably been one of my favorite images this year, just because everything clicked the right way.

I got my picture of the lighthouse going down for it has taught me how diverse Ohio is.

You know, through the travel that I did.

Really, I got to see quite a bit more than I would have just right around here.

You know, through going to Columbus and Toledo.

You know, I got to see the sights that, I definitely wouldn't have otherwise.

And I think that it's really worthwhile if you get a chance to go travel yourself.

picture this.

A road trip through Ohio is on view through May 10th at the penitentiary Glen Nature Center in Kirtland.

Have you been to Cleveland's first art gallery?

Maybe if you're 111.

They all know.

Art gallery opened years before the Cleveland Museum of Art.

And the building is still there today.

So I paid a visit to dig into more about what it was.

This building behind me.

What it was, was the only art gallery.

Charles Pratt only opened its doors in 1893 to show off his collection of paintings and statues and ivories.

It was reportedly Cleveland's first publicly accessible art space before the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This Renaissance Revival building in Tremont was designed by the same firm that did a lot of buildings on Millionaire's Row, as well as several buildings for the campus of what's now Case Western Reserve University.

But back to the ornate.

Charles died in 1903 and then left the bulk of his collection to Oberlin College, valued then around $250,000.

It became the foundation for the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Later, the building was a gathering place for the city's Polish population, followed by the Ukrainians, then for the Ricans.

In 1988, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and soon after it was bought by Grace hospital.

They turned it into an event space.

So now you can come here and party like it's 1999 or 1893, but nothing else.

If you've missed any of my prior outings to find out what it was, they have a home on our website at Arts that idea stream.org.

People in Northeast Ohio collect all sorts of things coins, stamps, records, antique cars, comic books.

And, how about teeth?

Oh, this one's buttons.

Cool.

Well, a lot of people do collect buttons, and in the process have uncovered a world of history and art in miniature form.

Collectors from across Ohio gather in Sugarcreek, just south of canton, every year for a show and competition.

That's all about the buttons.

Welcome to the world of Putney and I hope you enjoy it.

There's so much to this hobby.

It's fascinating.

I didn't know anything about it, so I gave it a try and discovered it.

You know, was actually a lot more than a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.

You know, everybody has to like something.

I guess that's my thing.

But.

I really, really enjoy it.

It's button collecting is an unusual hobby.

My mother gave me a bag of buttons one night.

I dumped them out and just knew enough to know that I had some old ones.

It doesn't cost you a lot of money to collect clothing buttons.

You can get them at flea markets, garage sales, estate sales.

You can.

You can find everywhere old family members.

And you know, I went to everybody's button box, but a lot of us keep them in folders or in drawers or on shelves.

But I said to myself, I want to enjoy them every day.

And it's quite a conversation piece.

When someone comes over and says, what is that?

The tin of buttons.

When you're a kid playing with those.

And to me, when you go to the show, the beauty and the craftsmanship that is in these buttons, and then you can see the history of it.

There's every kind of button.

If you can think of it, it's on a button.

As long as there has been buttons on clothing, there has been, ladies and gentlemen to that collected them, if for nothing more than to put in a tin and save them for when they needed them.

Collecting buttons is mostly women.

I'll just say that we won't go into ages here, and men maybe 5% collect buttons, but for some reason I just, you know, I'm an artsy kind of guy, so I like buttons.

I really like them.

I would guess there's probably 30 different materials or more.

The buttons have been made out of rubber.

Metal.

Early plastics, celluloid, ivory, carved bone, enamel, black glass, clear and colored glass.

You name it, it's been made.

This button is made in the probably 1800s.

It's hand-painted on ivory in the center, and it's a metal button, and it's encrusted with all sorts of beautiful jewels.

These are China buttons, and China buttons go all the way back to about 1840, and they don't make them much anymore.

It's very similar to glass.

The composition of the chemical composition is very similar.

They are so beautifully well done in artistic.

And some of them may be our memories of people that lived, certainly when during the Civil War, people had early tin type buttons made of their loved ones, and they would wear it inside on a vest.

It wasn't convenient to carry a picture of someone.

This is an early tintype representation.

My favorite is the black glass buttons, and there are so many made because in England, France, and the Americas began to produce a lot of black glass.

It was after Prince Albert died and Queen Victoria went into mourning in 1861.

She had jet buttons made of a hard anthracite coal.

She wore black for the rest of her life till she died in 1901.

So the commoners all were to wear black, but they could not afford jet buttons, so they began to manufacture the black buttons.

There was so much black glass produce that it is economical to purchase.

I collect a little bit of everything.

Goodyear rubber buttons I have a large collection of Goodyear rubber buttons, so Goodyear never made buttons, but he owned the patent for vulcanized rubber.

And so they had to put that patent on and those were hand stamped.

So there's errors.

So I collect those errors because they're rare and they're hard to find.

And this one here is one of my favorites.

So those black marks were hand stamped.

And this one they actually left out an oh it says God here.

And there's no space in between that.

So that is a hard to find button.

It's probably one of my favorite, Goodyear buttons.

Welcome to the showroom.

We call it the showroom because it shows two things that are very near to our heart.

Buttons that are, yes, for sale and competition.

Trays that have been judged and are hung for all to see and study.

About half of the collectors don't compete in our club.

They just love buttons.

And they collect them.

And, you know, they make their own, do their own thing with them.

But I'm drawn to the competitive thing.

I'm kind of a competitive person, so I like to compete.

We can divide buttons into animals, plants, objects, people and other things.

Or we could say any topic that you'd like anything.

If you collect roses.

We have buttons about roses and they're gorgeous.

So any topic but controlled by size.

Got to get that right.

We have a judging sheet.

So the first thing will be the focus of the tray.

So if it's horses a sort of material the first thing you would judge it on is the horses.

Again, if you can tell different breeds of horses to, then you're going to go through and count the number of different materials.

Other material embellishment.

There's just a lot of things involved in the judging.

So and we had 151 trees entered this time.

These lovely flowers all got nice, nice, nice ribbons.

But these did not get ribbons.

But they got something even more wonderful.

They got good notes on why they didn't get a ribbon, how they can improve their tree for next time.

And that's just priceless.

All the dealers are very, very excited to help you.

And if you know the first question they ask you when you go up to the table is, so what's your interest?

What are you looking for?

And then they're pulling stuff out, showing you, you know, they just they're so knowledgeable.

And these are these are my best friends.

It's almost 20 years now that I've been going to meetings.

And you know, I wouldn't have kept going back if it wasn't for that community feeling.

Family, friends.

the 79th annual Hearts Full of Buttons show is April 18th and 19th at the Carlyle in in Sugarcreek.

Let's crisscross the Buckeye State to Middletown between Cincinnati and Dayton, where we find a historic studio dedicated to the colorful art of stained glass.

Artists with both their recording studios continue this ancient tradition the old fashioned way by hand.

Were the oldest continuously operating studio in the United States.

Stained glass was started when the peasants couldn't read the true stained glass window was created to teach them their Bible stories.

William Colter started the studio in Cincinnati and he took on a partner named Finnegan.

They sent for Jesse Reardon from Ireland because he was a noted glass artist, and she ended up buying the studio and it was called Reardon Studios.

In 1955, John Reardon, who succeeded Jesse, heard of Walter Walter was, from Austria.

He was slated to be in a concentration camp when he was a teenager, and to save him, they ended up putting him in a stained glass monastery studio.

They dated back to the 15th century.

Sir Walter traveled all over Europe learning the trade.

We hadn't heard of him, and Reardon sent for him to come to the United Sates.

I own both their studios for 20 years, and every time I went to quote a big job, Walter was there to quote against me.

There was a job that Walter was doing in Cincinnati, and his wife called and said, is there any chance you could help us finish this?

Walter is sick.

When the job was finished.

Walter's wife ask, is there any chance you could carry the studio on?

So we merge the studios.

That's how we became known as Bavarian Studios.

Bavaria was my studio.

Over is French for beautiful glass.

Impossible task was he had 25,000 pounds of glass that had to be moved.

But the most rewarding for me was the archives.

They had over 400 watercolors.

That's one of my prized possessions of the whole career.

Is the watercolors.

What they are is a true representation to the client or church of what the window was going to look like.

I started in my basement, self-taught, and I continued working my job at GE and doing the stained glass.

And then after a while, I was doing both of them for 40 hours.

So I said, what if I opened a studio and got somebody to run it during the day?

We teach classes, we do restoration with new work, we repair, we sell finished product, we sell glass and lead to make product.

There were people that came and came to us and said, we would really love to help restore this building, because this was like part of everybody's lives when they were growing up.

This is where when they were building the Miami Canal, it's where the canal builders led.

And after the 1913 flag, we're real close to the Miami River here.

Came through it devastated everything after that.

A man that owned a department store here took this and turned it into John Ross store.

And then JC Murphy's got this and turned into a five and dime store.

J wanted it to look like the old studio.

When Reardon had it.

So it starts out with a rough sketch.

I think that people that that order art glass from us or stained glass, it's something personal.

I always want to make the ciphers, whether it be to the church or your home, and see what you're.

Taste are and colors.

Then we'll do a finished drawing.

Then you have the opportunity to come and see the full size drawing.

We cut all the glass and on the pattern we make sure all the glass fits within each piece.

And then we start letting the only surprise I think we have for people as we said, do you want a stained glass window or an art glass window?

So that's always confusing to people because every is everything stained glass.

If we're doing a figural window, it's going to be a stained glass window because we will actually take a paint or a stain and apply it to the glass to create faces and hands and that's true.

Stained glass windows were art glass good as the glass come.

So it's already colored and we cut it up.

So obviously the stained glass is going to be much more expensive because it's all hand on.

These windows were printed in the 50s.

Different panels puts together makes one big window in their church.

So we literally have bringing those back here and we start disassembling them.

We have to make up our own pattern.

We put them under water because back years ago, they put red lead in the putty that holds everything together.

So we don't break that or get it in the air.

We take apart, we clean them, and then we start reassembling them.

We aren't actually cutting all the glass because it's already cut.

We're just put it back together re letting it solder and putting it in and cleaning it.

Cleaning takes forever on a stained glass window.

We're such advocates for downtown that we got to meet everybody that loves Middletown.

We give tours and we tell people the history of the building, the history of the studio, the history of the windows, and teach them what they're looking at.

And there's something very inspirational about when the sun comes through a piece of glass, how it makes you feel, makes it makes people feel all warm and fuzzy.

And there's like I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so beautiful.

looking ahead to next time on applause.

Impressionists leave their mark on each other's work.

Learn how Edward Monet and Burton moreso forged a creative friendship at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we share the sultry and soulful sounds of Columbus vocalist Cher Mendes J. All that and more on the next round of applause.

Time to wrap it up, folks.

Thanks for watching this round of applause.

I midia streams Kabir Bhatia as we say goodbye here during jazz Appreciation Month, check out some rising stars from the Tri-C Jazz Fest Academy and get this three of these talented kids are named Aiden on purpose.

Here they are from the 2025 Tri-C Jazz Fest with the Herbie Hancock classic Watermelon Man.

Production of applause on Ideastream Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.