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Coming up, a Lakewood photographer gets his kicks on route 66.

A bead weaver mimics the moths and butterflies of central Ohio.

And a Grammy winning vocalist makes her chamber fist.

Cleveland debut.

Woof woof Hello, and welcome to another round of applause I media stream public media.

Kabir Bhatia, the US Postal Service has created stamps honoring presidents, historical figures, even Elvis.

In 2026, a well known highway out west gets the spotlight for its Centennial Route 66.

Lakewood photographer David Schwartz spent 22 years documenting the Mother Road, and his photos caught the attention of the postal service.

The very first photograph I ever made on route 66 was Twin Arrows, Arizona.

And that's two giant arrows that are stuck in the ground.

They're basically telephone poles with the, you know, the arrows cut out with plywood.

But it's it's an icon that's been there forever.

And I made it a goal to make my first photograph there, kind of symbolic of landing on the road.

You know, the arrows in the ground.

And it was so amazing to be there after all this time of dreaming of this road.

In 2004.

On the first trip, I traveled like Arizona, New Mexico, California, and just really started to fall in love with it.

The scenes along the highway were incredible.

Seeing all 14 had signs rusting away in the desert, and then getting to know some of the people that along the way that have spent their lives there and are passionate about, you know, their businesses and the people that they meet on the road.

It just really captured me.

So I've taken 42 trips now over 22 years.

And comparing the first trip to this last present trip, it's it's very different.

Now, if we go back to the earlier days, one, it was a lot harder to travel then there wasn't signage.

It wasn't all ingrained in my head on how to travel.

But you could only follow a guidebook, basically.

So it was harder to travel and you can get lost very easily.

And I was just kind of at my own free will to stop and, you know, make a photograph whenever I wanted.

There wasn't any schedule to it at all.

This feels like a creativity of all my own when I'm out on the road and finding locations, and sometimes I'm scouting them and figuring out on an app when the sun's just right.

So there's kind of like this planning and mathematical thing that goes into it and then, you know, showing up there and hoping the weather gives you a blessing.

And, and you end up with a great shot.

There's certain spots that if I'm driving by there, unless it's absolutely horrible light, I'm probably going to stop and make a photograph.

There's just certain places on the road that I'm really in love with that I just always want to photograph.

And then there's people, you know, I can't always visit everybody that I know along the road, but I have some really great friends that I must stop and visit every time.

I can't pass by them without, you know, stopping in and saying hello and seeing how their little slice of route 66 is going.

To.

Be.

Say.

So here we have a night at the Monger Mosque.

And this motel was built in the 40s and they were celebrating their 70th year in business.

It was the, second or third generation owners that were there at this point.

And they had been there since 1971.

They had a huge celebration.

So it was a really fun evening celebrating the motel and the and the folks that owned it that have been there forever.

Bob and Ramona.

And I just love, I just love the light.

It was just the right time of day.

Sun was already down.

It was blue hour.

But, the blue kind of had this nice sort of cyan ish sort of color going on to it as well.

And it just came together beautifully.

It's interesting.

On the road, new things rise up and, you know, people come on board with new ideas in it.

Route 66 sort of way.

And it's it's an amazing thing to see somebody celebrating the road with their own unique ideas.

And then there's those places that get hit by the wrecking ball, and Walmart goes out for a Walgreen's.

And it's, you know, it's heartbreaking to see these icons of the road get lost, because once it's gone, it's not coming back.

It's just constantly been growing and evolving and making photographs and starting to do some fine art prints.

And then one day the phone rings and I pick it up, and the person on the other end says they represent the United States Postal Service, and they've been searching for a photographer to, use for the Centennial stamp collection that they're creating.

And they love my work, and they wanted to work with me.

So after I pick myself up off the floor, I said, all right, let's do it.

And.

They kind of came to me already prepared with some stuff that they had seen on my site that, well, you know, we saw these and we feel like these might work.

What else do you have?

So I did a deep dive into my archive and probably gave them way too many photos.

But, you know, it's like you got to think about, okay, how does this translate on a stamp?

And then you have to think about, all right, we want to represent each state.

And then you also want to show a wide view of what route 66 is.

It was an interesting process.

So it was a lot of fun.

The people I worked with there were fantastic.

And I was honored because they felt that I had taught them a lot about route 66 along the way.

And.

I'm ecstatic.

One of the biggest things to me is that I want to bring route 66 to the masses.

I want people to get out there, travel the road, experience America, at a slower pace, see the places, meet the people and and support it and help it thrive.

And I feel like this really makes that opportunity happen by allowing, you know, the whole United States to see route 66 on stamps.

So I, I'm I'm grateful.

I'm just really grateful.

Look for the stamps commemorating the centennial of route 66 later this year.

It's time to exit route 66 and make our way to Central Ohio, where an artist finds inspiration in the natural world of her home in Columbus, specifically Michael Hickman.

Romaine is attracted to the moths and butterflies native to the Buckeye State.

I'm a bead weaver, so that means I sew little tiny seed beads together with a needle and thread, one bead at a time to make beaded glass fabric.

And then I make jewelry out of those pieces of fabric.

When I was a little girl, I played with all my dressy great grandmother's, like mid-century costume jewelry and loved it.

Fell in love for life.

And as I got older and I loved jewelry, I'm very working class, as was my great grandmother.

So I learned how to make it.

And so I was making earrings, making jewelry, a little bit of this, little bit of that, and started reading some craft magazines.

One of them is called the Lapidary Journal was very popular then.

And they did a feature on a woman who uses the technique that I'm using now to make hats, handbags and these huge, like, beaded sphere necklaces.

And they were crazy.

And I was like, this is very interesting.

So she had a tutorial in the back of the magazine for how to make a flat weave like.

And so I picked it up and tried it, and immediately I was like, oh yes, yes.

So I got really fascinated with this technique and then eventually learned to make some components that are reverse engineered from some antique components, and started developing my own line of jewelry.

And then as time goes on, I start pushing it to see how far it can go.

Making flowers, making floral jewelry.

Making some stuff like that dimensional.

And then eventually it becomes the problem of how do you make jewelry that doesn't spend most of its life in a box or a drawer?

And that means that it would have to be a successful object as well as a successful piece of jewelry.

How do you harmonize those things?

There's a component of meaning to it that's necessary.

There's there's a narrative and a story that's important.

And so I started considering I'm a native Ohio girl, I wanted to do something that was about my home.

And so I started looking at the native moths and butterflies in Ohio and how I could depict them and their habitat and make these very cool, wearable, lifesize giants of moths and stuff.

One of the things that's very interesting about trying to get these done, like I get these little, you know, eye patterns down or whatever, and then trying to figure out how to do this without getting too, too literal because too literal.

It looks geometric.

It doesn't look natural.

So when the back off and become more painterly, more impressionistic about how to get a good rendering, but also try to hit that uncanny valley thing so that while you were wearing it, somebody might have that moment of, or do you have a bug on you?

What I'm usually doing is reference photographs of, like these, these moths and butterflies, and I will usually choose one, particularly for the specific markings, because there are wide variations and markings in nature.

And I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this one's markings.

And then another one, it's usually for the position.

So it's like oh his wings are spread just so, but it's just enough that you can see his underwing.

And then I make a drawing that is measured to scale, and then I am roughly drawing the markings and stuff, and then I start making a pattern.

And the first one is usually awful and but it gives me a place to start.

So I will go over and over again until I have it refined to something that I was like, okay, this marking is right.

This, you know, the ones that have protective eye marking shapes or whatever, they have to kind of look like they're looking at how like so trying to get that right.

And sometimes I'll have to do little tiny studies of like just that section.

And, and until it's like pretty correct.

And then once I get an upper wing pattern I replicate it real quick.

So I have both wings.

And then I usually have to do the lower wing pattern, that black which moth of mine.

I think I made 19 different iterations before I figured out how to get it done.

This one.

The finishes are what makes it very blingy, right?

But the color, if you let the finish speak for itself and it's very like hyper real.

But once you are just looking at those kind of like orange blush moths beige color scheme, that is actually what the moth looks like.

So, you know, and then also when you hold these things up to the light and the light comes through them, that changes a lot.

This is one of the pleasures of working with glass, is that it is a living material that takes a lot of different aspects of the light and uses them.

I get to have a lot of conversations with people about the wonder of the place we are.

You don't have to travel the whole world to see wonders like they're there, right underneath our feet.

And then it becomes a conversation about leave the leaves, plants and native plants like figure out how to cultivate.

Even in our human spaces, a place where we get to share our world with these things that belong here and are awesome.

Are you someone who wants more from your arts and culture scene of northeast Ohio, but you're not sure where to go, what to do, who to talk to?

Well, look, no further.

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Actually, what we have here is real, and it's curated by human beings just like you.

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In 1995, the Bosnian war came to an end with what's known as the Dayton Peace Accords, signed here in Ohio in observance of the accords 30th anniversary.

And artists from Sarajevo took flight in the heart of downtown Dayton.

I grew up in Boston, actually, small industrial town called Tuzla.

And the one thing I always kind of knew was that I wanted to explore the world.

And the opportunity showed itself when I realized that there is such a thing as a high school exchange program to the United States.

I was 17 years old when my parents said yes to this idea of me going abroad for a year.

So that's how I came to the United States.

The former Yugoslavia at the time was going through lots of problems and conflicts.

But nobody in Bosnia believed me.

Nobody I knew believed that there was ever going to be a war.

I fully came to realize that my town and my country is in a major war.

And my parents pretty much insisted that I stay now.

Now, looking back, it's almost difficult to digest the fact I had a passport of a country that no longer existed.

Everything I imagined my future was going to be is also gone, and my present is non-existent.

For a while I was waiting for the war to end so I can go back home.

But then I also realized that, I maybe should find also ways to, kind of immerse myself in and, the life, in the United States and Cork and School of Art.

It was really crucial.

That was really important to me to really find a place to belong to.

It's really about a place where you can find that sense of belonging on a deeper level.

The great thing about moving to New York in 1999, which now seemed so far away, and we had this incredible creative energy with artists of so many different disciplines from filmmakers to musicians to visual artists, and we all kind of tried to find ways to work together and to create this energy together.

Being an artist in New York for a long time, I really had that like one great mission that we all kind of dream of while being in art school, which is to live off your art and to exhibit galleries and for people to want to purchase your work.

But once you accomplish that, you realize that art can have even a stronger message and can be even more powerful than just, being a commodity.

So I designed a postage stamp that was really about celebrating peace.

It was a bird of freedom painted over the view of Sarajevo from above.

And everybody loved the stamp.

And the mayor of the stamp, the postmaster loved the stamp.

And then I got a phone call that the postage stamp was censored, that it was banned.

But I realized at first, I mean, I was upset, obviously, but then, that censorship, actually answered the question that I've been asking myself ever since I graduate art school, which is, is visual art still important?

So I decided to create a sculpture of this bird that was painted because I wanted an object in space that I really want to extend kind of my hand to the public and really speak the language that the public will understand.

I designed the sculpture as just two strips of metal that are shaped into stylized, bird like two messages or two hands connecting.

Let's talk about this thing called freedom.

And let's have this conversation.

As people who have experienced war and who know what turmoil is and who know what it feels on, looks like to lose your freedom.

And the first installation, That freedom, was actually presented at the Sarajevo City Hall in 2015.

It was just newly rebuilt city hall that was burned down in the war.

So after the first installation of Think Freedom and 2015, for me, that opening that evening was really going to be it that was going to be like, you know, mine and and a statement from those kids that worked with me.

About how he felt about our, you know, our world and ourselves and, everything that was going on around us.

But the next morning, I woke up and Associated Press actually published the photograph from the installation as The Global Image of the day.

And then, another amazing thing happened, and which is that the Vatican embassy asked me to donate one sculpture so they can gift it to the Pope as their present.

As the Pope, Francis was coming to Sarajevo for the first time in 2000 and.

And maybe the power of this piece is really about connecting all those pieces from different cities and messages from different cities into one.

So we've been in now 26 cities.

Now, ten years later, we're in Dayton, Ohio.

Bringing this installation to the Dayton Arcade is sort of a match made in the heavens, if you will, because we have all been very excited about the renovation of this historic building.

And when you think about the architecture that dome in the rotunda and all the light that floods in and the reflections across the room, you can just envision these birds installed and seeing the shadows and the light dancing.

Think freedom is a site specific installation.

And I started where he was young architects and architecture students in each city that I go to, a student of fine arts and design, because I really don't see myself as the sole author of this installation.

Being in Dayton in this moment is really special to me because it is happening not just on the 10th anniversary of Think Freedom, but also on the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accord.

I know that for me personally, there's that initial awestruck moment.

You know, where wow, this is just incredible.

It's different than looking at even a beautiful, flat visual piece of art because it's 3D and it has movement and it changes with light and it's so grand in its scope.

And I think that we should go internally and think about what freedom means to us, especially during a time where that comes into question.

I think it's incredible to understand that, not every peace agreement has last 30 years.

Not every peace agreement, and peace accord has had that that kind of impact, on not just one nation, but the whole region as like this Bosnian who's also American and who's also Bosnian and also American.

I think it's wonderful, to maybe for the first time in my life have those two things completely connected to, like, these sculptures are connected on wire and to have this, understanding with the work, both worlds are coming together.

the transformative power of art.

On the next applause.

An abandoned parking lot is now a gathering place in Cleveland's Asia town.

if you focus on creating things for children, for kids, it actually brings the family together and therefore, you know, unites the community.

And we unite at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

As two pianos go toe to toe.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

Thanks for stopping by and watching applause with me.

Kabir Bhatia, your excellent host.

And speaking of excellent, let's say goodbye with a performance by Grammy winning vocalist Fleur Barron, she recently made her chamber first Cleveland debut in University Circle.

(OPERATIC SINGING) (OPERATIC SINGING) (OPERATIC SINGING) (OPERATIC SINGING) (OPERATIC SINGING) (OPERATIC SINGING) (OPERATIC SINGING) It would.

Production of applause and ideastream.

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