This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by Charles Rosenblum, Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, the State of Florida, and Division of Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, a face painter brings imagination and smiles to life, one face at a time.

Face painting is a walking and breathing art.

It's an easy, temporary way to express and have fun.

Conservation.

Photography.

My love is wildlife.

I show that love through education, and I educate through visual media and storytelling.

Quilts that tell a story.

I could use that as like painting.

And then that's when it just, like, exploded.

And a ceramicists craft.

For me, the emotive quality comes through the touch and being able to hand sculpt something.

It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

[music] Hello, I'm Dalia Colon and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

This first segment was produced by students at St. Petersburg College in partnership with WEDU.

Meet Ashley, a master of face painting who transforms ordinary faces into extraordinary masterpieces from dazzling animals to whimsical characters, she uses everyday brushstrokes to bring creativity and joy to life.

[music] I really have an affinity for art that's just not permanent.

[music] I'm Ashley and I'm an artist, and I'm a face painter.

Face painting is a walking and breathing art.

It's an easy, temporary way to express and have fun.

I like it here.

[music] I would say the thing I enjoy the most about being a face painter is that not every day is the same.

[music] I have my steady gigs where I'm at a zoo.

Hi, how are you doing?

Or I'm at an aquarium.

Where?

I'm at a museum or a birthday party.

Outreach events where it just makes those kids days to just be something like a superhero for a day.

That's amazing to them.

[music] I face painted at a birthday party for a dog.

Once I didn't face paint the dog.

It was the kids at the party.

They all wanted dog designs, but it was a really fun thing to walk into.

[music] Then I get really special ones.

I get maternity paintings.

[music] We decided to do a Halloween themed baby shower, and our theme is kind of like a baby is brewing and there's a witch on it.

So I was going with witchy, and then I decided to let her have full creativity of what she wanted to do with my belly, and she did wonderful.

[music] It just makes everyone so happy.

And I get to express myself.

And in some way I get to help them express themselves too.

[music] I love it.

My God.

It's just always something different and it never gets boring.

And it's always fun and colorful and exciting.

[music] My favorite color is green, so it fits me as a person, so it makes me feel more confident.

[music] I have a very creative family and it's all different types of arts, but my first love, I would say was chalk drawing and the lack of permanence to it.

[music] So the colors are very vibrant.

The animals look like what we've asked for.

It's recreating, you know, realities and it's, you know, using imagination.

And it's fun.

[music] I would say that face painting is a living art.

I mean, you're walking around with it.

You're experiencing that.

You're getting to kind of step outside of yourself.

Specifically, the kids love it.

It just helps them open up.

And it's beautiful to see that if they want to be a tiger.

The minute you show them that face painting that you turn them into a tiger.

I love that.

[music] I'm such a cartoon fan, and I think that's why I connect with kids on that level.

Enjoy it.

Take a picture of it.

It lasts longer.

[music] I get to create art, and that art is fun.

And I get to connect with people and just it makes people happy and it makes me happy.

[music] It's very sad, all the hard work that gets put into it, it's going to be hard for me to take it off after loving it.

[music] Follow Ashley @pineappl_ dres_fac_painting on Facebook and Instagram.

Justin Grubb specializes in wildlife and conservation photography.

When he takes a picture, he highlights the threatened species in need of assistance.

Up next.

Tours and exhibition of his work in Ohio.

[music] I grew up in Worthington, Ohio, and I think it was a great place to grow up to connect with nature.

You know, with the Metroparks being so prevalent in the city.

The Columbus Zoo being right there.

That's something that I really think shaped what I do now is being able to go out and find wildlife and explore.

[music] My name is Justin Grubb.

I am a science communicator, so I do wildlife filmmaking, wildlife photography.

I write articles about wildlife conservation.

I do photo galleries, and that's always been the focus.

Conserving wildlife.

[music] So my background is in wildlife biology.

Going out and taking data.

Doing population viability analysis.

But while I was doing all that, I sort of realized that there was another element to conservation as well.

And that's the storytelling.

That's the connecting with people.

You know, working with the general mass public and getting them to understand how they impact the environment and these species, because conservation really is a people problem.

You know, the animals didn't do anything to get themselves in this situation.

It's what people have done to the environment.

And in order to change that environment for the animals, you have to go to the root cause, which is the people.

[music] And so by doing that, you know, I really got into photos, I really got into video, I really got into writing.

My Love is Wildlife.

I show that love through education and I educate through visual media and storytelling.

[music] So we're sitting at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center, and on the walls here is a photo gallery called Conservation Through A Lens.

[music] Having Justin, who is known for his work with National Geographic, is just I think it's a surprise for Grange Insurance Audubon Center to have him here.

And we're very excited about what his artwork does and how it connects to the bigger stewardship and conservation.

When you look at the center, you'll see photos along the walls that all depict animals that have very unique, interesting conservation programs, initiatives, strategies associated with them.

[music] There's the Hall of Threatened Species, which each photo depicts its own conservation initiative.

[music] But then we've got, you know, the Forgotten Wolf, which is an entire sequence of photos that describe a single conservation initiative from start to finish.

And then there's the Planet Indonesia Gallery, which talks about how an organization in Indonesia is doing conservation work through community development, which is a really unique strategy that I think should be adopted more around the world.

[music] People really connect with a good story.

And so with these photos, they all kind of convey their own little story.

You know, you're getting a snapshot of the animal's life through their eyes, in the moment, in their environment, behaving naturally.

And as a photographer, I live for those moments.

It feels like everything just is still on earth.

And the only thing that matters is you in this animal and you're just trying to capture the moment as it happens.

[music] One of the most exciting things I'd say about the gallery is its interactiveness.

Each photo has a little card next to it that explains its range.

The conservation project associated with the image, but also as a QR code that allows you to connect to a website called conservation through a lens that has more details about that animal.

You can read more about the initiative, and you can even donate to the initiative if that's your thing.

But there's also other really cool elements to this gallery as well.

There is a section where you can draw an animal and contribute to the gallery.

We'll also have a couple film screenings, and there's something that I built called Beyond the Lawn.

It's a biodiversity survey where people can learn how to, like, convert their lawn into usable wildlife space.

[music] No matter where we are in this world, we live on this world with animals, insects, plants and other things, and what we do affects how they live.

And oftentimes we don't make that connection.

And so I'm really excited for people to see the beautiful work and how he captures it, and learn about how they can help make a difference in what we do as humans to help, not have those animals become extinct.

Bringing my work back to Columbus is really exciting.

This gallery brings in a very global perspective on conservation.

And so, you know, you're seeing animals from all around the world, varying conservation initiatives to help protect them from various threats.

But everything that you'll learn about is applicable to what goes on on a small scale like Columbus, Ohio.

And so that's one thing that I want people to walk away with is that everything is very interconnected.

And what you do locally has a huge effect on global biodiversity.

[music] Columbus is an art rich community, and I'm just I'm just excited to see what else is down the pike, because I think there are a lot more Justin's out there.

[music] For more information, go to runningwild.media.

Tour the exhibition fabric of a Nation American Quilt Stories at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in Massachusetts.

This exhibit features quilts from the 17th century to today that help tell the story of our country.

Of the nation's art forms, it's among the most deeply embedded quilts.

Not that we, or even some of the most acclaimed quilters have always recognized that.

Looking around the house, we always had quilts, either maybe on the couch or on the wall, which is crazy to me because I never looked at them as like art objects.

But after leaving a career as a college basketball player behind and realizing another career in photojournalism was not for him, a year and a half ago, artist Michael C. Thorpe began quilting something he'd always watched his mother, Susan Richards, do.

She got a quilting machine and started playing around with it and then started to understand that I could use that as like painting.

And then that's when it just, like, exploded because she showed me everything.

And then I just, like, took it from there.

And it's landed him here in the Museum of Fine Arts as one of the artists featured in the exhibition fabric of a Nation American Quilt Stories.

Thorpe's quilts are normally colorful and joyous, but he made this piece the day after George Floyd's murder.

Basically, I kept coming back to like, what do people think of, like, black men?

And a lot of this came from putting the burden on like, the audience, you know, because everyone was talking about like, black people are always burdened with telling people about the situation, living through the situation.

And I was just like, I want to relieve myself of that and give it to the audience.

I think if we can agree on anything, it's the story of our nation is a complicated one, and we're we're living that now.

Jennifer Swope curated this show and traces how the history of America has been woven together in quilts spanning Centuries.

There's always the incredible story of the American Quilting Bee, where early suffragists came together and plotted to to expand the franchise of voting or to promote the ideas of abolitionism.

And that's deeply baked into the idea of the American quilt.

Quilts told the story of cotton and corduroy, landscapes of rural family life and of trauma.

We have Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi's works Strange Fruit II, which is about the song popularized by Billie Holiday, which is graphically gut wrenching.

Some trees bear strange fruit.

It shows lynched bodies on a tree.

It shows Ku Klux Klan figures, and that will give people pause.

And rightly so.

But artist Bisa Butler's quilt is halting for its shimmering portraits of Atlanta's Morris Brown College baseball team from 1899.

How masterful is this piece?

It's so layered.

It's layered in theme.

It's layered in practice.

I think layered is the perfect word to use.

What I think she really wants people to do is to look carefully at each of these figures and recognize their individual humanity.

And she does that really by creating these portraits in color and cloth.

Here we also find one gallery transformed into a virtual temple.

It features the only known surviving quilts by Harriet Powers side by side for the first time.

She's an icon.

What she was able to achieve is astounding.

A former enslaved woman, powers is considered the mother of African American quilting.

She renders life lessons in this pictorial quilt from the late 1890s, but it was her Bible quilt sewn a decade earlier that made powers a sensation.

After it was exhibited in an Atlanta fair visited by nearly a million people, including then President Grover Cleveland.

These were the offsprings of her brain, as she described them, and they were precious to her.

And she brought such deep thinking, like her whole cosmology is is part of those works of art.

There is nothing unplanned, not deliberate about these two pieces.

As a strong tradition of quilting bees reminds us, quilts are commonly communal efforts.

Gee's bend is an Alabama community that's taken on nearly mythical proportions for a quilting tradition that has passed from generation to generation since the 19th century.

Esthetically, the quilts of Gee's Bend are incredibly special.

People have described the quilts as the product of what we might think of as a school of art, in a sense that it was a tight community.

Community prevails in these works, even for artists like Thorpe, who work independently.

It takes a village to make anything, and literally every piece of fabric I get may come from my aunt's quilt shop, may come from just like a local fabric store, but it takes all these people.

Everybody's like contributing to it.

It feels like there's like a community behind me because I couldn't do it without my mom, without my family, without all these people that make these amazing fabrics that I use.

Allowing for stitches that in time render the fabric of a nation.

[music] Find out more at mfa.org.

Take a trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to meet ceramicist Michaeline Walsh, with her hands.

She sculpts clay into a variety of recognizable objects that are full of meaning.

[music] For me, the emotive quality comes through the touch and being able to hand sculpt something, I feel like my imagery has more to do with relatable objects.

So things that people generally have some relationship to a bird or an ice cream or a gift bow, things that are commonplace and that through that making and touch, there's something unusual or unique or more poetic about the form itself that draws people in and allows them to feel something slightly different, maybe questioning why would this be handmade, as opposed to being slipcased or made from a prefabricated mold?

For clay, there's such a range of possibility.

Not that other mediums don't provide that, but I feel like what I've found in clay is both high touch.

It's tactile.

I can touch it.

I can sculpt with.

Basically starting with a lump, which people have done throughout time.

But it also provides the ability to say something new in a long cultural continuum.

For me, the containment has more to do with that spiritual or psychological or emotional realm.

So the idea of a a sculpture or a form as a container for something ephemeral.

The small form, there's a relationship, and maybe it relates to toys or dolls or objects for the table, or it has some bodily or domestic association.

And I find through making a lot of small forms, what I can do is, is compose with them.

So the idea of moving objects around in relationship to one another is fun for me, in the way that maybe words would do that for a poet.

I feel like images are a way to do that.

So, for instance, putting an ice cream cone with a bird, it starts to play some sort of new symbolism.

And I think by working small, there's a greater ability to do that.

[music] American Dream is a wall meant to resemble the ice cream cones that you might get at Disney World, which to me is this sort of iconic American experience or a slice of Americana that's commonplace and recognizable.

I thought to myself, why are they all just white?

And so I wanted to kind of make a range of tones that might represent just what any child going to Disney World might find and and might relate to.

So they were meant to sort of be literally they are a blend.

I start with a very, very dark clay, and as I cast each one, I'm re-adding amounts of either a lighter tone clay or a white clay, and that range begins to lighten as each one is cast.

So there is a conceptual level to that, but it's also very readable, very accessible.

And then all of them have the same kind of chocolate dipped ice cream quality to them.

The popsicles gave me a chance, sort of a blank slate, to work with color dynamically and figure out different patterns and things that people who work 2D get to do on a flat surface.

I was doing on a three dimensional surface.

The work that I feel the most strongly about is having work that might go in a specific place.

I felt really pleased with the outcome of Our Lady of the Lake Children's Hospital, in part because I felt like it was a culmination of imagery I've been working with for a long time, and yet it was placed in a new way, and it was also working with someone and working with a client really closely to really figure something out that would work well for children, for adults, for a long time.

[music] I did a couple of series of hands.

One was a series of hands that were both my hands, my daughter's hands, and then the hands of some different primates throughout the spectrum.

And I cast them in a series from the center being the largest to the smallest actually being my daughter's hands, and that they were all done in these sort of metallic tones like you would do with a baby shoe or a copper.

They were meant to be a sort of metallic tone.

It was called Kin and Kind.

It was in a series that I also did that was looking at animal imagery in general, and in particular.

I've always had a predilection for the primates as a conservation.

The gift bows were all handmade.

I constructed them using sort of ribbons of clay.

They're glazed.

It was a way to sort of generate gratitude, and people could come and choose a bow to then take home with them.

And some of the bows were sold, and all the money went to benefit the Baton Rouge Gallery.

So it was sort of a way to give back.

And also the gift bow image is such a universal, simple, strong image of gift and generosity.

My glaze palette is very intentional most of the time.

Sometimes there are happy accidents, but I feel like color and the use of color is a way to kind of evoke joy and a sense of celebration with some of the forms.

While the subject matter might be a little bit on the more challenging side.

So I think sometimes color is a way to pull people in.

I do develop my own glazes and then I use some commercial glazes.

It's a bit of a play between bought things and things that have been made in my studio, but I feel like color is also a way to bring out sort of the painter in me.

I really enjoy color theory and color design, and I think it's a way to just play with some of those optics within the work.

I see my work as having more of a universal appeal so that children relate to it.

Teenagers, adults.

It's a tough territory to try to appeal on a universal level, but I feel like when I find a symbol such as an ice cream cone, it has relatability to a lot of people.

[music] To learn more, go to mikey- walsh.squarespace.com.

And that wraps it up for this episode of Arts Plus.

To view more, visit wedu.org or follow us on social.

I'm Dalia Colon.

Thanks for watching.

[music] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by Charles Rosenblum, Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, the State of Florida, and Division of Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

[music]