In this edition of the Art Show, celebrating the life and work of a poet.

Marking the history of women's suffrage.

And items from home with Light Up the Night.

It's all ahead on this edition of the Art Show.

(funky music) Hi, I'm Rodney Veal and welcome to the Art Show where each week we provide access to local, regional, and national artists and arts organizations.

Everyone knows that Dayton was the birthplace of aviation and home to some of the greatest technical minds of the 20th century.

What many don't know is that Dayton was also the birthplace of a literary genius, the son of formerly enslaved people, writer Paul Laurence Dunbar gave voice to the African American experience.

To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2022, the Dunbar 150 project was created.

The project both shines a spotlight on Paul Laurence Dunbar's literary contributions and shares his life and legacy with the world.

Here's the story.

Well I'm very passionate about working in the community and also I love history.

And so the role as project manager for the Paul Laurence Dunbar 150 ended up being something that fit me very well.

It gave me the opportunity to really interact with the community and connect the community with history, the history of Dayton through the legendary Paul Laurence Dunbar.

The Dunbar 150 is a community approach to celebrating Paul Laurence Dunbar and his life.

Special commemorations began actually in 2020 and it also continues until February of 2023.

So it's been an incredible multi-year celebration of people coming together and several projects have been created and there have been shows and performances and lectures, so many things that have come out of this that have brought people together from all over the country.

Also introducing people to Paul Laurence Dunbar.

There are too many people in Dayton that have not heard about Paul Laurence Dunbar.

So Paul Laurence Dunbar, he was a phenomenon.

So Paul Laurence Dunbar was born right here in Dayton, Ohio in 1872.

His parents were enslaved.

They both moved here to Ohio from Kentucky.

His father Joshua Dunbar escaping enslavement into Canada and deciding to fight in the Civil War.

After that, Matilda Dunbar, his mother, when she came to Dayton, she actually learned how to read.

So education was something that both Matilda and Joshua Dunbar were very passionate about.

When Paul Laurence Dunbar was six years old, he started rhyming words and started putting poetry together and it became very evident that he was extremely talented, naturally talented in that way and he loved books.

A lot of people know him as a poet and he definitely was a poet.

He also wrote in several different forms including short stories, novels, musicals, and songs.

He was a writer that really...

He was an artist.

He was famous all around the world.

He traveled to Europe and all around the United States.

He took part in the world's Columbian exposition in 1893.

There he met Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass connected him to a lot of the pivotal figures in African American leaders during that time, people like Charles Young, actually now General Charles Young who led the Buffalo Soldiers.

His work was appreciated and that's why he went all around the United States and the world sharing it.

Paul Laurence Dunbar is probably the most creative, the most productive and the most loving writer to ever be born in America and he was the first African-American to be accepted by the discipline of American literature.

Dunbar is our genius and I don't wanna see him covered in history.

I feel that Dunbar should be appreciated, cherished.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was exceptional.

He wasn't unusual person, he was an exceptional person.

And on top of all that, he had the determination to work hard at whatever he was doing.

Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote about life.

He wrote about experiences and he wrote in the voice of people.

He wrote in African-American dialect.

And in that way, he just expressed the experiences that people were having and that included themes of love, laughter, sadness, happiness, disappointment.

He talked about issues of justice.

He spoke about religion.

He spoke about families.

He spoke about hatred as well.

He also addressed lynching, which was prominent during the day, and he spoke to empower people.

Through his writings, he spoke to people who were like him not too far removed from slavery, who were figuring out life as freed individuals.

He wrote to encourage them to utilize their gifts as he did.

So the Paul Laurence Dunbar house, it's the last home that Paul Laurence Dunbar lived in and he purchased it in 1904 for himself and his mother.

He had tuberculosis for years.

He needed a place to settle and he had the means to buy a nice place for himself and his mother.

It had everything that was needed and so much more.

And so this property was perfect for Paul Laurence Dunbar and something that he cherished and was able to live out a comfortable life for the rest of the time that he had.

He passed away in 1906.

He was 33 at his death.

That house really did meet Dunbar's hopes and dreams.

The Paul Laurence Dunbar house site is the very first memorial to honor a black man in America.

The home became a historic site in 1936.

The Paul Laurence Dunbar House historic site is located on the west side of Dayton and it's not far from the Wright Dunbar historic district.

So if visitors could take away one fact or bit of information, I would like for that to be that Paul Laurence Dunbar was here.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was in this community and that Paul Laurence Dunbar was an incredible writer, but more than anything that he used what was inside of him and shared that with other people and that's something that people can be inspired to do when they visit.

I think people like Paul are not born every day gifted, brilliant and loving, concerned for others, helpful to others.

He had so many traits that I think they should not be forgotten.

Dunbar should be revered forever and esteemed as one of the better writers in this world, period.

If you'd like to learn more about this or any other story on today's show, visit us online at cetconnect.org or thinktv.org.

In 2020, we commemorated the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred states from denying women the right to vote.

For our next story, we take a look back at how art played a major role in the Women's Suffrage Movement and how these important suffragist stories are being honored today, let's watch.

[Speaker] Suffragists were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the human rights we have today, many of which go beyond a woman's right to vote.

Women of the past can be models for us today.

Their words speak to so many of the events that are happening in the political arena in the United States right now.

When we think about art and the suffrage movement, we need to think about two different eras, the era before we have the technologies that enable us to mass produce and mass distribute pictures and photograph and even to record and share music.

One of the more important artists for the Women's Suffrage Movement in Ohio was Cornelia Cassady Davis.

Davis was a Cincinnati artist.

She was a member of the Cincinnati Woman's Suffrage Party.

She participated in a competition in 1912 for that year's campaign when Ohio women were widely expected to succeed in getting the vote.

Davis created a work that was later reproduced in postcards and posters, let Ohio women vote.

It became iconic for the Ohio campaign.

It's modeled after the state seal and uses elements of that.

One of Davis' competitors in this campaign was Nina Allender.

Allender becomes perhaps one of the most influential suffrage cartoonists of the era through her work for the National Woman's Party publication, The Suffragist.

If I think of art and the Women's Suffrage Movement, there are three stories about the impact of art that come to mind.

The first is from the early 1850s, and it actually has to do with a sculpture by Hiram Powers called the Greek Slave.

This sculpture of the Greek Slave toured the country, and Lucy Stone, who became a national leader in woman's suffrage, saw the sculpture and was moved to spend more of her time focused on women's rights.

A second story has to do with theatrical professional, Hazel MacKaye, and she's the mastermind behind many of the pageants that the National Woman's Party produced.

In connection with the famous 1913 Suffrage Parade, MacKaye created a pageant at the front of the treasury building called the Allegory.

A third story has to do with the Portrait Monument which suffrages commissioned and gave to the country in February of 1921.

It's a bust of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katie Stanton.

The thing about the portrait monument is it spent exactly one day in the rotunda and then was relegated to the basement for the next 75 years, and it took an act of Congress to get it restored to the rotunda.

Women in history in general are overlooked.

Women's stories might at most be a footnote in standard history that you might study in school so it's important that these stories are told.

In 2016, we started a volunteer grassroots effort and we populated a database with sites of importance to the women's suffrage story.

There are more than 2020 sites on the online map for the National Votes for Women Trail.

Along the way, the William G. Pomeroy Foundation in Syracuse, New York recognized the importance of this project and offered to fund over 200 historical roadside markers.

So that made our virtual trail into a physical trail.

The Sewah Studios has been really terrific to work with and we're so grateful for their expertise.

Sewah Studios is America's premier cast aluminum historical marker manufacturer located here in Marietta, Ohio.

Sewah Studios was founded in 1927.

It was really a man's dream to mark the byways and the highways of America with cast aluminum historical markers.

Sewah is really the only known large manufacturer of historical markers in the nation.

This is a niche business.

We make nothing but historical markers.

Sewah's process is really kind of locked in time.

There's really four really core processes.

First, we type set the patterns where we individually lay out every letter, and then we glue them in place just long enough to make an impression in the sand which is our next process, which is the sand foundry.

And this process dates back all the way to the Egyptians.

The sand comes from the Ohio River.

The Ohio River has a perfect silt and clay mixture for the casting process.

We make two molds, put them together, and then in the void we transfer the mold aluminum.

After the casting is made, we bring it into our finishing department where we work down any of the imperfections or the pouring gates and we try to clean it up from a metal standpoint to get it ready for the painting process.

After that, we take it into our electrostatic powder coating process, puts a very hard, durable finish on it.

Next, we then roll on a liquid enamel on all of the letters to get the contrasting view to where you can actually read them and then we do the beautiful hand painted seals.

The votes for women's trail markers design comes from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and they're really kind of a neat combination of a white and the pink, and then some of the more delicate, more feminine looking colors and we really think it's a nice grouping of colors to go on our marker, and they've been well received nationwide.

Another mission of the National Boats for Women Trail was that we wanted to shine a light on underrepresented women.

We're telling the stories that we don't know about of women of color.

[Speaker] One of those women was Julia Galloway Higgins, a highly influential woman in the Dayton community.

Julia began going to the meetings of the Dayton Women's Suffrage Association.

It was a segregated organization.

She would be referred to within the minutes as the colored woman was here today, the colored woman was back again.

Well the colored woman built a booth and she took it to the Dayton Courthouse on Mondays and she began to give speeches on women's suffrage and the women's right to vote.

At that time, she invited women from the WCA, the Women's Christian Association.

Number two, she invited women from the Dayton Women's Suffrage Association to come and give speeches as well.

So what began as a segregated effort, it was through her efforts that it became an integrated effort and likely because of the amount of racism that was endured and faced during that time, she left that organization and it was very evident that her work for suffrage never stopped.

She was able to do that work through the WCA.

And it was later that we found within our family handwritten archives that she organized the Montgomery County Equal Women's Suffrage Association.

Would the Dayton community be different had there been no Julia Higgins?

Absolutely it would be.

Voters rights, the support of women's rights, the support of women's right to choose, all of these were things that Julia worked with and towards within her lifetime.

And here we are again.

So we passed torches.

They are not extinguished.

What was done generations of ago is relevant today.

Learn from it.

Augment it for today's world and society and keep up the fight.

The Art Show is going to be traveling around southwest Ohio.

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Follow the travels of the Art Show on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @thinkTV and CETConnect and check out the Art Show hashtag.

Cincinnati artist Mallory Feltz likes to build things that explore the theme of home.

Using art as a platform for human connection and interaction, her work encourages people of all ages to examine their relationship to objects, people and their environment.

We recently visited Mallory's studio as she prepared her latest interactive exhibit entitled Linger for the Blink experience in Cincinnati using a familiar item found in every home.

Take a look.

Home is such a broad topic.

It can be a physical structure.

It can also just be the idea of being comfortable and it's really multilayered and complex.

And so there's a lot of room to explore and play in that atmosphere.

And I like to experiment with materials so it provided a really wonderful opportunity to think about how materials and objects can be the manifestations of the concept of home.

I also just love building things and working with my hands and taking things apart and figuring out how they work and then putting them back together.

When I was deciding what to do with my career, it was between the arts and science and I ultimately decided to go into the arts because it allowed me to not only be creative, but also to use science in order to create my works.

Homeage is a piece that really solidified for me that I wanted to focus on this theme of home.

And I was inspired to make that piece because when I first moved to Louisiana for grad school, it was in 2006, and Katrina had happened the year before and I wasn't there when it happened, but you could still see the impact and feel the impact of that devastation everywhere you went and I just always remembered those blue tarps on people's homes everywhere.

And so that piece was really an honor of what people had to do to try to recover and how it took so much away from everyone.

Imago is a nature center in Price Hill and it's an organization that I really love.

Their mission is to connect people in nature.

They started a program called Art on their Trails where they commissioned artists to create works that would be on their trails for a year.

I created the piece called Local Support, which is a collection of Ohio rocks that are wrapped in different colored yarn.

I reached out to local farms, alpaca farms, and sheep farms and purchased the wool directly from the farmers and used different dying techniques using natural materials like onion skins and avocados and red cabbage to create a spectrum of colors for the yarn and took each stone and wrapped each one in little lines, delicate patterns, and then arranged them out on the entrance trail to Imago.

So it's a way of drawing attention to your immediate surroundings and seeing the bountiful possibilities within such a small area.

So the idea is that these rocks are almost like little gifts.

And people can move them around and create different compositions within the installation or pick up a rock and take it with them while they're hiking and drop it somewhere else.

And since they're all natural materials, the piece will degrade over time and it won't harm the environment.

(upbeat music) When Blink was being talked about as a light and art festival, I saw it as a unique opportunity to challenge myself even more, go back to that experimentation that I really like to do.

The fact that the festival was going to be open to everyone, it was in the public sphere, that really intrigued me and that's what I want my work to be about.

I want it to be accessible, approachable, and I want people to see it.

For Blink 2017, I created the piece called Easy Breezy.

It was a series of 33 umbrellas outlined in electroluminescent wire.

Motion sensors were connected to it that triggered motors on a select few of the umbrellas.

And so when you would walk down the alleyway underneath these beautiful illuminated lights, some of the umbrellas would move and dance in response to you being with the piece.

For Blink 2019, I created the piece called Toy Box, which is a series of seven giant night lights based on classic toys.

And at the front of each one of the night lights is a motion sensor that would turn the lights on.

So when you walk by them just like a regular nightlight, they illuminate.

And this idea of activation by the audience was important to me.

These seven giant night lights were installed around Findlay Market, a very family friendly area with a lot of activity going on so I knew they would get a lot of activation.

But one thing I noticed when just sitting back and watching people interact with these pieces was a lot of people thought it was a button that made the light turn on and they were wanting that sort of physical activation point so I kept that in mind.

If Blink were to happen again, what could I do differently and how could I make that activation be more personal?

For the third time in 2022, I went back to using domestic objects, things that are in our home that maybe we don't think about or are overlooked, but are so recognizable.

And I created the piece Linger, which is a series of 12 lamps that on their lampshades, there's words and phrases written in glow in the dark paint.

And when guests come and act and step on the foot pedal, it turns on the lamp, which then charges the paint.

And if they take their foot off the pedal, the light goes dark, but the words glow.

And then over time, those words will fade and they'll need to be charged again and that's where a really magical moment comes in where it's making art directly accessible and encouraging your creativity to collaborate with an artist using their creativity.

So Linger is that piece connecting us that says we all have those internal thoughts and we're getting through this pandemic and we're doing it together and it's sort of a celebration piece too because Blink is happening again and we can be all together.

So I want people to walk away seeing my work, making connections within themselves and their surroundings and other people.

Did you miss an episode of the Art Show, no problem.

You can watch it on demand at cetconnect.org and thinktv.org.

You'll find all the previous episodes as well as current episodes and links to the artists we feature.

And that wraps it up for this edition of the Art Show.

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music)