- [Narrator] Funding for The Art Show is made possible by the L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, the Sutphin Family Foundation, the Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

- In this edition of The Art Show, painting boldly.

(uptempo music) A historic stained glass studio.

(uptempo music) And sculptures along the shore.

(uptempo music) - It's all ahead on this edition of The Art Show.

(uptempo music) (uptempo music continues) 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.

The creative path of Cincinnati artist, Jimi Jones, has been shaped by community, mentorship and a life spent taking in the world around him.

Jimi draws influence from jazz, Black history and Afrofuturist imagination to create bold, expressive paintings.

Let's step inside his studio to learn more about his journey and art-making practice.

(upbeat jazz music) - I knew from early on that I wanted to be an artist.

There's no doubt about it.

Now, of course, I was too young to know what a artist was, but I knew I wanted to draw because I got the reactions from people was so astounding.

My dad was in the Korean War, but he was in the occupying force of Japan.

So while he was there, he did a series of kimonos, drawings, when he was a soldier.

So I spent my whole entire life's career trying to replicate those kimonos that I saw my dad do.

I was a football player in school, so if you know anything about football or athletics in the high school situation, you don't do much work.

So anyway, General Electric was looking for engineers.

So it sent out a message to 300 schools or 300 students from the different schools in this Cincinnati area to join this engineering training program.

So I tried the engineering training program and I actually beat out over 300 kids to get a job at General Electric being an engineer in engineering training program.

I worked first in drafting there.

I moved up to the engineering department and I learned how to do numerical-controlled design.

Doing this numerical-controlled design, you would mathematically make a machine move.

So it's almost like futuristic.

I went to evening college to just learn about how to do design, so I can help General Electric with its open house.

When I got to evening college, the evening college instructor got sick.

So the day school instructor took over and he took over and he says, "Jimi, you know, you ought to be a designer."

And I says, "No, I'm in engineering school and I'm gonna make lots of money, so no, I can't go to your design school."

And so, my wife says, "Well, Jimi, one day you're gonna wish you had taken the opportunity to go to day school at UC."

That decision was big because I ended up quitting General Electric and going straight into design school and I have never looked back 'cause it's been an adventure the whole trip.

That design school led to my stay at Procter & Gamble.

The neat thing about my travels was I'm hopelessly a Cincinnati person, but traveling all over the world gave me a visual look.

I got to see all the great museums in the world, including The Louvre.

So I saw Mona Lisa, I saw it up close before she had all this protective stuff all around her.

I saw museums in Rome.

I went to the Vatican and I went all the way down to the catacombs of the Vatican.

By going to Paris and seeing The Louvre and seeing some of those great, great paintings that were there, it gave me a sense that art can be larger scale than what I was thinking.

By opening the door to The Louvre and seeing those gigantic great paintings, it changed me.

So I decided to do bigger paintings when I got home.

I really love the marriage of design and art.

At one time, I think all artists were both designers and artists and, then for some reason, they split off and one became a little bit more commercial and the other one was more artistic.

My goal is to bring those two together and keep 'em together.

I am a person who is constantly curious about the world in which I live in.

That's the whole point.

I was not put here just to make a painting for people just to look at the one time.

I was put here to show people that the world has more layers to it than you see with your eyes at first.

If you take the time to look at the world and peel back those layers, it's so many of 'em.

The Neo-Ancestralists was a movement that was formed by three artists, Tom Phelps, Ken Leslie, and Jimi Jones.

And our purpose was to take ancestral art, which is African art, and combine it with new art or Western European art.

Our goal was to combine the two elements together and come up with something different.

Our goal was just simple survival.

Since we could not show in the modern museums at that time, we decided to create our own environment and that's what it was for.

Right now in Cincinnati and in the world, we're under great stress politically.

So whatever is on my easel right at this moment is a direct reflection of what's going on outside my door.

So the painting I'm working on right now actually tells the story of what's going on in the world.

And so, it's the most important thing.

Paintings throughout my tenure as a artist have all reflected different moments of time, but there's none more pressing than right now.

It's not being the top dog in the show.

It's about being right here, baby, doing my art.

So I want to be remembered as just another person that worked really hard and loved it so much that that's what he wanted to be remembered as.

As a person who loved what he did and knows why he's here.

I know why I'm here.

My goal is to be here and to help people younger than myself see themselves in this world that they live in because it's so big you can get lost.

My goal is to make them stop for a second, look at some of my art and try to understand that's how complicated life is, is the way my paintings are put down.

My paintings, some people say were they illustrated?

No, my paintings are not illustrations.

My paintings are not easy to understand.

I give you some easy stuff in there because I don't wanna be too crazy, but they're not easy to understand.

But they make you stop if you've got the time.

If you've got the time to sit there and look, or time to listen to me, you will start understanding more about, not only my heart, but the world in which you live in.

That's all.

- 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.

Next, we head to Middletown, Ohio, where a stained glass studio tracing its roots to the 1800s continues a stunning artistic tradition.

BeauVerre Riordan Studios, originally situated in Cincinnati, is the oldest documented, continuously operating stained glass studio in the United States.

Today, the studio practices traditional stained glass and art glass techniques in a historic facility.

Take a look.

- [Jay] We're the oldest continually operating studio in the United States.

- [Linda] Stained glass was started when the peasants couldn't read.

The true stained glass window was created to teach 'em their Bible stories.

William Coulter started the studio in Cincinnati and he took on a partner named Finagin.

- They sent for GC Riordan from Ireland because he was a noted glass artist.

And GC ended up buying the studio and it was called Riordan Studios.

In 1955, John Riordan, who succeeded GC, 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 that dated back to the 15th century.

So Walter traveled all over Europe, learning the trade.

Riordan heard of him and Riordan sent for him to come to the United States.

I owned BeauVerre 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 asked, "Is there any chance you could carry the studio on?"

So we merged the studios.

That's how we became known as BeauVerre Riordan Studios.

BeauVerre was my studio.

BeauVerre is French for "beautiful glass."

The 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 prize 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 gonna 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 'em, 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, new work.

We repair, we sell finished product.

We sell glass and lead to make product.

There were people that 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, this is where the canal builders lived.

And after the 1913 flood, 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 G.C.

Murphy's bought this and turned into a five and dime store.

Jay wanted it to look like the old studio when Riordan had it.

- [Jay] So it starts out with a rough sketch.

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

- [Jay] I always wanna make a site visit, whether it be to the church or your home and see what your tastes are and colors.

Then we'll do a finished drawing.

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

- [Linda] We cut all the glass and, on the pattern, we make sure all the glass fits within each piece and then we start leading.

The only surprise I think we have for people is we said, "Do you want a stained glass window or an art glass window?"

So that's always confusing to people because everybody calls everything, stained glass.

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

And that's a true stained glass window, where art glass, the glass comes, so it's already colored and we cut it up.

So, obviously, the stained glass is gonna be much more expensive because it's all hand done.

These windows were put in the fifties.

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

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

We have to make up our own pattern.

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

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

We take 'em apart and we clean 'em and then we start reassembling them.

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

We're just putting it back together.

Re-leading it, soldering it, puttying it 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.

- [Linda] We give tours and we tell people the history of the building, the history of the studio, the history of the windows, and teach 'em 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.

It makes people feel all warm and fuzzy and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is so beautiful."

(upbeat music) - Did you miss an episode of The Art Show?

Not a 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.

(upbeat music) Lake County, Ohio, wanted to bring art out into the open and they found the perfect way to do it.

Professional sand sculptor, Carl Jara, took to the beaches, creating four incredible works that had visitors stopping in their tracks.

This story is a part of an annual series produced in collaboration with Ohio's public television stations that takes us behind the scenes of the arts.

Let's meet Carl and hear more about his creative process.

(dramatic music) - I hate this material.

I hate sand, I hate it with a passion.

It is just, it gets in all your equipment.

It gets in your clothes.

It gets in your house.

It gets in your car, it's everywhere.

It's an obnoxious material.

(Carl chuckles) But for an artistic medium, man, you can't beat it.

(uptempo music) (uptempo music continues) I am a competitive sculptor.

I've been competing in master level events since 1997 and now I have this burning thing that I have to just get off my chest.

So I'm gonna make a piece.

(Carl chuckles) I dunno what to say.

Ugh.

What I strive for with what I do in sand sculpture is, especially if I'm doing a contest piece or something related to where it's not a commercial piece specifically, I really try to just describe the world around me.

There are a lot of times if you were to go back through my portfolio, I'm pretty sure you could just pinpoint the exact moment in time that those things occurred because I'm trying to describe, in a fashion, the world without it being too blatant and too raw.

You know, I'm not trying to give the news.

I'm just trying to give an impression of what's going on.

To me, that's really what I strive for in my work.

With the commercial work, I'll give people what they want.

You know, you're paying for sculpture, I want to make sure that you get what you paid for.

(mellow music) (water gurgling) The Lake County Sand Sculpture Trail this year, it's just kind of a cool idea that the Lake County Tourism Bureau had.

They wanted to introduce public art out into their community.

So they're really investing in this idea of putting an artist out, working, talking, people can watch.

So we developed this idea of the trail and it's just a series of four pieces all the way along the coast of Lake Erie and Lake County is Osborne Park out in Willoughby, at the far western end of Lake County and then Headlands Beach State Park, which is kind of in the middle.

Fairport Harbor, which is slightly to the east of that.

And then all the way out on the eastern edge of Lake County is Madison Township Park.

For the first three pieces that I did, I really wanted the pieces to kind of relate to their geographic locations.

Osborne Park is sort of a celebration of the future Osborne Beach.

They're planning on building a breakwater and a pier out and that's gonna naturally build the beach for them.

And I incorporated that into a postcard with the future children playing at the future Osborne Beach.

The piece at Madison Township is more about the location.

In that area, you have one of the highest concentrations of wineries in Ohio, so we're just kind of celebrating that fact.

Osborne's very quiet and intimate.

You have to get up and look at it and Madison is just this huge thing.

You almost can't step away far enough to see.

The third piece at Fairport Harbor was really more about kind of celebrating the idea of the lighthouses and the Lake Erie monsters.

They've got two lighthouses in the area, and I thought it'd be kind of fun to play with the lighthouse, but then I find architecture to be a little stiff on its own.

So I thought I'd add in the Lake Erie monster to go with it just to kind of tie in with the local lore and legend.

Now, what I'm doing here at Headlands is a completely different animal.

That's something more meaningful to me and about the current times that we live in.

(uptempo music) So having good material is absolutely the first and foremost thing.

Having good sand to work with, a sand sculptor can work with any sand.

You know, we pride ourselves on that, but I've bit my tongue a few times.

I've had beaches that were so bad, my sculptures were about three inches high and 16 feet across and I couldn't get any taller than that 'cause it just collapsed out.

The sand here at Lake Erie tends to be rocky.

It tends to be very round.

And you'll find that on almost any beach, you're gonna get rocky, round particles.

So the sand that I use here is a glacial till.

It's a very, very sharp, very fine grain, almost crystalline in structure.

It hasn't been washed and eroded.

So it's not rounded off.

As a result, the particles will cling more like Velcro together.

They'll jam together and stay that way.

So when the water evaporates, I'm left with a matrix of material, not a bunch of failing covalent bonds.

(Carl chuckles) I think tomorrow I bring an extra length of hose.

We're a little tight on the hose today.

I just, I wanna make an oval, but I wanna make an oval that'll eat up about a quarter of this pile.

So I'm kind of mentally going through in my head and I gotta think about that size and I'm thinking about the three sculptures I just finished up 'cause they're the same size.

And even though I've done this for 34 years, this is still the part that I am most likely to screw up.

Now, I don't carry around a lot of tools.

The guy who taught me carried enormous, enormous bag of tools.

Think I realized quickly that I didn't need an enormous bag of tools to do this.

I've got a couple of these small trowels that have worn down over the years that work really nice for all of your little detail work.

I've got some larger trowels to do larger cuts.

I'll work with a shovel if I need bigger cuts.

And then, if I'm doing some really tiny things, I have just a single tool or two for really tiny detail work.

I figure if I have more tools than I can hold in one hand, I got too many tools, and the fewer tools I have, the fewer tools there are to leave in the pile.

Okay, I think we're ready to get off this pile.

(Carl groans) Here you go, magic moment.

(Carl laughs) (material rumbling) (tool scraping) (liquid gurgling) (spray can hissing) (people chattering) - [Beach goer] Looks like magic.

(spray can hissing) - There are times when it's like it's, I have to walk away from an area if it's not working and there's always a million other places to step onto and work.

(uptempo music) (people chattering) People always say, "Oh, you'd be so much fun to bring along on vacation."

Actually, no I wouldn't because I don't like going to beaches.

I will go into the mountains.

If I'm going on vacation, I'll go find a stream.

I'll go find some trees, I'll go find some shade.

(Carl laughs) Anywhere that has no sand is good for me.

(uptempo music) (uptempo music continues) (upbeat music) - If you crave more art goodness in your life, the podcast, Rodney Veal's Inspired By, is available now.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more and find show notes at thinktv.org or cetconnect.org.

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

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(uptempo music) (uptempo music continues) (uptempo music continues) (uptempo music continues) (uptempo music continues) (uptempo music continues) - [Narrator] Funding for The Art Show is made possible by the L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, the Sutphin Family Foundation, the Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by, and viewers like you.

Closed captioning, in part, has been made possible through a grant from the Bahmann Foundation.

Thank you.