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Coming up.

An indigenous artist gets to the point with porcupine quills.

STEM students study science through jazz.

and the sounds of the Cleveland Orchestra strip down.

Hello and welcome to Applause my friends.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir quirky nickname Bhatia.

Let's talk about Claude Monet, Georgia O'Keeffe, Bugs Bunny.

All of these artists have taken inspiration from nature but seriously centuries before them, ancient indigenous artists drew inspiration from the natural world using these, porcupine quills.

Beth Bush is a member of the Potawatomi tribe in Michigan, and after moving to Cleveland, she needed to reconnect to her people and her culture.

Now she's an award winning quill artist with works featured in indigenous museums across the country.

To me, it's important.

It's a way of me reclaiming what was taken from us.

Well, people are basically historically, as we use every part of an animal that we can.

And a long time ago, not sure who, but someone discovered that if we took the quills off of a porcupine, we could actually weave them, braid them, or sell them down.

Well, it's own.

It's like the oldest decoration that we have.

It was before beads.

It was our first way of decorating, like our moccasins and our coats, our bags.

It was prevailing before the fur trade came.

It's something that we keep alive and continue to use.

These were what we used to decorate not only clothing, but also baskets, household items.

So to understand who you are today, you need to understand where you've come from.

It goes back to my ancestors a lot, and it goes back to the boarding schools.

About four years ago, they found out that there was unmarked graves in Kamloops, Canada, where there was a boarding school.

And I had been just sitting around here and not doing anything culturally.

So when I heard that, it really touched my heart and I picked up my beads again, I had read for a lot of time my dad had passed away.

So I put all my stuff away and then I started fresh and I try to honor their spirit.

And then with that I found out my own late grandma, my grandpa.

They kept it from us, you know, They didn't really tell us about their experience as my grandpa was like a big, big influence on my art.

And he was so proud of me.

And I try to do that for them.

I had a hard life before.

Art is really healthy.

I was thinking about what was taken from them, and then I picked up the clothes.

I put down the beads.

You know, that's my first medium and I taught myself how to work with Porcupine Quills because I wanted that connection.

And I found that, you know, she has really leaps and bounds honed her skill with quill work, and she's willing to do things the right way.

With the quills.

It's such a long process.

The quills I have, I come from Montana.

I trade my earrings for these clothes.

And then I take the quills.

I wash the quills.

I saw the clothes.

I dye the clothes.

I saw the quills again.

And then I choose the best that I like.

And it's just a little tiny bit.

Afterwards, it's really a labor of love.

It's a lost art here, especially in the city in that.

So a lot of young people are discovering it, taking it up again.

They're getting books.

I read books about queer work because so many of our techniques were lost to us through the boarding school era.

And even in these books, they're from like 1919, and they talk about how the examples are deteriorated, so there's no evidence of them.

So we're just trying to bring it back.

She takes her ideas from nature the way it should be done to get inspiration.

I get outside and I get to be with nature.

I started exploring the metroparks.

That in itself is healing.

Cleveland.

And this is where I started my art for real.

I will see something or I'll have a dream, and then I'll put that into my design.

That one.

I made that for my son.

We went to Oklahoma and we were outside for a powwow and there is Greco's just Greco's everywhere.

And they were making these noises.

It was the first time that we encountered them.

They're just everywhere and they're having a great time.

We brought that memory home and I made a map of medallions.

It's like a little piece of that memory in that piece.

She has some very innovative ideas.

She's mixing some modern ideas with traditional ideas, such as her wobbles, her rabbit.

You'll see the twirls of the old rabbits on a lot of the cape, especially in northern Ontario.

I started applying for grants and I won, and that fueled me to make more quality art.

I guess you could say it gave me the funds for it and continued to go to Indianapolis to a market at the Idle Jordan Museum.

And I was awarded the Harrison Alger Purchase Award.

That was awesome.

It's in the museum now.

Other people get to see it, and that's really cool.

I fought the passion for a long time.

Art is expression in slow motion.

You know, I've heard that a lot.

It heals me because it lets me express what I want to in colors and shapes, in lines like the beautiful part that I feel.

I get to share that with everybody.

Sometimes I'm amazed because people like my work so much.

It really floors me.

It's nice to see a young person taking this art form up and using it for educational purposes, also with others.

My main goal is to teach people so they can teach other people.

You know, there's not a lot of people who do it and it needs to be brought back because I know how much that helped me with my depression.

And it's given me self-confidence and I know it can help other people, too.

It's who we are.

It's part of our history.

It's part of our culture.

It's why we work so hard to keep our children involved in it so they understand this is who you are.

This is what your people did.

Long before there were any settlers here.

They say, We walk in beauty.

That's where we try to do a walk in a good way.

That would make our ancestors proud of us.

Recently one of Bath Bush's works was purchased by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Also in the air collection are more than a dozen works by our next artist, Jeanne Lamar.

Like Bath Bush Lamar Honors her indigenous heritage, and she also uses her art for activism to volunteer to double entry like I'm a little boy.

I hope when someone sees my work they feel joy and feel the colors and how exciting indigenous life is and designs.

And these are all created by my ancestors and they were experts in these fields.

She has been committed to rejecting the idea of the vanished American Indian.

She wants audiences and everybody who sees her art to know that Native American cultures are a living and vibrant culture.

There's nothing about us.

In the fourth grade, I never learned about California Indians, and I said, We're all Indians because just me and my sisters were born in the school and we were the ones that were getting beat up.

On when Gene went away to college at UC Berkeley.

She was told by her professor that she couldn't include cultural content in her artwork.

She couldn't paint things that had native relevance or cultural relevance, or it would be considered folk art.

Jeanne has always rejected those types of ideas, and she's been committed to forging her own path.

I went to Berkeley and there was a class of over 500 Peter Sells with this art historian talking, and he made a comment about an artist's work.

And one student in the class said, I object to that.

I don't think you're right about that.

I think it should be this way.

In this way, in this way.

Right away, I felt like, Oh, man, that guy he probably picked out of class.

But Peter Sells welcomed that and thank him for his input and said, yes, that did add to that.

So I finally realized I have a voice because, you know, we're the product of boarding school parents and students and we're told not to talk, say, dance to anything whatsoever.

Well, finally, we get to be recognized.

We finally get to be recognized.

And we're proud of who we are.

We know our own history and nobody can put us away because we had a lot of brave people, because they were so brave, were able to be alive.

Now, no one's coming in.

Murals are so important because they're like a community statement, especially if you can go out with the oral histories and learn some early histories and what really happened to that community.

You can put that image in that community and no non-Indian can come in here and say, No, that's all wrong.

I worked on a mural in the gymnasium on the Susanville Indian Rancherio area with the community.

This is the Indian Rancheria is where we all live.

Most Indian home places are called reservations, but in California they called it the Rancheria.

So this is the beginning of life.

So we heard about the coyote stories and here's Mr. Coyote sneaking around, go looking for food.

We showed sagebrush and the baskets that were made from here.

It comes around here to an era that was ancient from hundreds of years ago, had layers and layers and baskets and microphones.

Then it goes all the way over those to the times.

And the last one was here and then to the bear down.

So there have been a real long tradition.

The old man walking is in the middle.

Now it comes to the contemporary times.

We're still alive.

We're still celebrating our heritage and our culture.

This mural is done in Susanville California on East Larson Street, our ancestors, our future.

So I interviewed all these different people in town because I know they had ancestors here from a long time ago.

We got a lot of comments, people walking by, Oh, this is really nice.

The Indian people I see them standing by their relatives, all of our kids standing in front of their relatives and they take a picture of it.

It's just really nice.

It's really nice.

That's what I like to see.

I respect the fact that murals do need to be changed.

They can't stay forever.

It's not a michelangelo where they have to keep repairing it.

So it reflects kind of life.

The time if we do murals that says we're present here now, that means we're still alive.

In the early 1990s, Jane returned to her hometown of Susanville, where she established the Native American Graphic Workshop.

The graphic workshop is a unique community hub where she brings together youth from the community elders as well as different artists is fun for people to do.

It's a kind of introduction to printmaking, working with the oils, solvents, paper, how to handle press, how to handle the paper.

I got people that do some fantastic work, but they don't even realize that what they're doing is they're doing something beautiful.

If I could do it, they can do it.

I hope I can walk down barriers.

I like how the transparency looks is not heavy, so it's softer.

Then you can bring up some hard lines with a definite imagery.

All of us here either learn from your work with have been inspired by her work, continue to be inspired by the work.

To my ask, or Jamie and Tobi Stump the conference in honor for Jean.

The Nevada Museum of Art is really proud and honored to be able to present this retrospective exhibition of Jean Lamar's work.

It features over 50 years of her paintings, prints, murals, installations.

I'm so grateful for and to give me this opportunity.

I know the museum will be a missed opportunity.

I'm a community artist, political artist, so it's difficult to get into a place as you're looking at Jean's artwork.

You'll see a variety of symbols and motifs appear from time to time.

Sometimes that's a military fighter jets flying overhead.

Sometimes it's sort of this ubiquitous barbed wire that you see throughout the American West.

Sometimes it's an American dollar sign, and she uses all of these symbols in different ways to critique American culture and to critique what has been a dominant culture that's for a long time suppressed Native American cultures in the United States.

Everyone has a hope.

Everything has hope, happiness.

And there.

It might look negative, but there is hope for every little thing.

Or I'm making fun of something.

I would never hurt anybody's feelings on purpose.

That's not not my personality because we're really kind hearted people being positive, being positive all notes that there's there's a way out.

There's.

There's hope.

There's always hope.

I always have that hope.

I hope.

I hope.

You know, every week I tell you about the to do list.

Some of you sign up, but apparently some of you don't want anything to do.

That's fine.

That's fine.

More arts and culture and events, news for the rest of us, I suppose.

But if you want to sign up for our free weekly newsletter, the to do list, visit arts dot ideastream dot org and thanks.

our next story asks the question.

Jazz is music.

Jazz is art, but is jazz science.

Let's find out.

Together in Colombia, students are learning the basics of STEM by listening to playing with and making their own instruments.

That's what happens when you step inside the jazz lab.

Want to give up on something.

It's my passion to work with kids, and especially in a school setting.

It is special to be in school and be able to do a little bit of some different work.

A lot of my experience has been pretty clinical, so getting to engage with kids in a different way and get to teach them some new stuff is is really cool.

I am a this will call a resident musician piano player in the jazz trio that we have every session, along with kind of providing the soundtrack for each school session.

We're also responsible for kind of demonstrating not only the music that we bring, but the science behind our instruments, how they work.

A lot of what we're asking them to do is explore new things, try out different things I've never experienced before new ideas, new concepts.

And so our role is really just support and just interacting with them as much as possible, creating connection and having conversation and they get to do a lot of hands on learning.

So just helping them through it and getting to see how their brains work is is so fascinating.

So it's really just all about creating a safe space for them and creating that connection.

I like to think even as we're playing, we're composing, so even as we meet a new group of students and when we start to gain understanding of their personality, we're composing a new format that works for that particular group of students.

Jazz Lab is broken down into four weeks.

Week one, we deal with acoustic instruments and the science behind making music with acoustic instruments.

We open up as a trio with a couple tunes.

The kids will come around to gather around the piano together, around the bass, to kind of move around the drums, so get a chance to look in, you know, in some cases even touch while we're playing, and then we move into the stem.

Introduction.

Stephanie will introduce the thinking behind why we are actually there with Jazz Lab.

There'll be a few acoustic instruments.

The piano is my favorite because we got to see all the keys and how they got to play it later on.

Eric Payton from Capital University will do a little activity with boom workers where the kids will actually be able to compose using the boom workers.

Week two we're moving into electronic music, so we have Will Roby, who does an introduction with Roland Synthesizer.

So are actually longer and shorter.

So we're moving into electronic filters, oscillators, different pitches, and even sampling.

So the kids all get a Roland SW one synthesizer and they're able to actually sequence their own compositions on the sequencer versus sounding like a like a little boy, like a don't vibrating.

Next, we hit a flat and then it will stop, like move through it together to try to find out which beat was definitely, which was not.

We all got to focus and we got to listen and play and do how it how the value of the high and low looks at the end of the session.

They bring their sequencers to the front and we as the trio, we get to play along with they came up with we three is big time for them because Cosines of Light they bring the VR headsets and they have already programed and recorded a live Jess.

So the kids are able to enter the VR universe and actually sit on stage with the VR musicians at a live virtual reality chess set, and they're able to sit behind the drums, they're able to pick up a few instruments, they're able to play a digital theremin, and once again they're able to play along with the live band with their VR instruments, getting to really kind of explain how sound works and get to see them experience it in a new way is is really cool and has pretty close to home, which is awesome.

Week three when we do VR with COSI is the newest to me, so I'm learning right along with them.

Week four is when we come together and the kids, they make guitars from a kit that is donated by the Past Foundation and they're able to learn about the science behind string instrument, not only how it makes noise, but why the structure works, how it resonates, how it's played, even how it's tuned.

And they're able to design and color and add stickers and decals to the guitar and explain why they made their guitar the way they did.

Honestly, just the most rewarding part is is getting to getting to see them every week.

And once we kind of get to the end, we have a little bit stronger of connection with them and they get to say, Oh, I'm going to miss you and you're not here anymore.

And so it's really special to in such a short time be able to create those safe connections with them.

Jazz Lab gives the students a chance to actually be scientists and actually make high officers make come up with their own thesis about something and see if it actually works out.

Music is important to me because it's like such a life free.

Then it loses you and makes you want to dance and be free.

It makes me feel happy most of all, like I'm on top of the moon.

There's a lot of unique and really important learning that happens with music and with art, with the creative.

You know, you get the creative side of the brain working, and when you combine it with the math and with the science, it kind of creates this just like perfect mesh of all of those things that we want kids this age to learn.

So just being able to to reach as many kids as possible through something like this is definitely our goal and is really exciting that we get to be able to do.

We got kilts aplenty.

Next time on applause, get ready to toss the sheaf, the caber, the haggis, and anything else that isn't nailed down on the next round of applause.

It's a real Highland fling.

At first I thought, well, this is a lot of kilts and stuff, and I like that, you know, I couldn't stop coming back.

So every year I've been back since.

Plus, Apollo's fire shows why it's one of the best Baroque bands in all the land.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

Thanks for watching this round of applause.

I'm idea streams.

Kabir Bhatia.

Now we tied things up with a bow and the strings of the Cleveland Orchestra all by their lonesome.

Here's a work by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, led by British conductor Dame Jane Glover.

from the Cleveland Orchestra's Adella app.

Tata For now, Production of applause and ideastream.

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