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

- Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.

- [Ortiz] In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, a woodworking duo up-cycles discarded logs.

- [Robert Bocik] That's kind of how it started.

We just started, you know, cutting up small pieces and shipping 'em to other woodworkers.

We'd have stacks of boxes in our living room waiting for post office to pick 'em up.

- [Ortiz] What it means to be a recycling designer.

- [Tesnakis] Being able to be a product with a message that enriches people's lives, gets passed down in families, gives me so much joy.

- [Ortiz] Portraits full of meaning.

- [Thomas] I want people to feel that sense that it's not just me choosing and plucking a woman from some obscure place and thinking about them, that these are relationships that are built.

- [Ortiz] And a renowned caricature artist.

- [Kascht] Caricature is not cartooning, it's not illustration, it's not a comic strip.

Caricature is a very specialized form of portraiture.

- [Ortiz] It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

(upbeat music playing) Hello, I'm Gabe Ortiz, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

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

Funktionhouse opened its doors in St. Petersburg in 2011.

It's here where owners Zoe and Robert worked together to give new life to unwanted logs by transforming discarded pieces to works of art and functional custom furniture.

(guitar music playing) - I'm Robert Bocik.

- And I'm Zoe Bocik, and we own Funktionhouse, Urban Lumber and Furnishings Company.

Funktionhouse started with an idea in 2010 to use something renewable, resourced.

So we came across the term "urban lumber," and that really sort of struck a chord with us.

We came across a log, and he had a small little chainsaw, and we went in our backyard, and from the minute we cut that log open to see what was inside, we were hooked.

- I think another thing that, that hooked us is posting some of these things online that we didn't even know what they were.

"Hey, we found this cool tree and it looks pretty."

That's kinda how it started.

We just started, you know, cutting up small pieces and shipping 'em to other woodworkers.

We'd have stacks of boxes in our living room, waiting for the post office to pick 'em up.

We, we work with, with a lot of arborists to acquire trees that are coming down.

A lot of times trees have to come down cause they're taking up somebody's driveway or pulling up their house foundation.

And through working with them, we like to get 'em and turn 'em into something better than wood chips.

First, there's usually a phone call from an arborist or a homeowner or a contractor to take a tree down.

And we will acquire the tree, get it over to our yard.

And then from there, it goes onto the saw mill.

(saw mill grinding) And we'll mill it appropriately, depending on the species of the wood.

Some you can cut thicker, some gotta be thinner.

And then it goes to our kiln drying process.

And then from there, it goes off to Zoe.

So I kind of tell people I make it flat and she makes it pretty, but there's so much more to it than that.

- We choose, at that time, which slabs go into our sales area.

So, a customer can come in and look through all our beautiful slabs and lumber that's available and purchase something for their own work.

Or Rob and I will meet with a client that has a specific idea of something they might like me to build for them.

(wheel creaking) (saw whirring) So, when the slab comes to my shop, I'll meet with a client, and we'll go over design.

We'll figure out what color of wood they're looking for, what style they're looking for.

Do they want rustic?

Do they want natural?

Do they want something really, really refined?

I'm flexible.

I can do just about anything a customer is looking for.

You could see when a customer comes, I will work and sketch out with them until I understand exactly what dimensions they're looking for, and what their specific needs for their space is.

So, I'm kind of the guide along the furniture and art journey here for our customers.

We've had some clients that have really stood out over the years, and one story in particular was a couple that was moving to Gulfport here to build their retirement home, and there was a magnificent mango tree standing in the middle of the property.

And they were so upset to have to cut it down, but it had to come down.

- [Morfit] Well, our experience with Zoe and Robert were that these were two young, creative people that were reinventing themselves after a corporate life and had come up with this astonishing concept of building furniture out of reclaimed wood that people brought them.

- It all evolved from meeting them and seeing what they could do, and then we thought about this big mango tree that we were gonna have to cut down.

It kind of evolved out of that.

Well, maybe you guys could build us a table a dining room table.

Maybe you could put a coffee table together.

It all happened sort of organically.

- It was also clear when you looked at the mango tree that we were talking about a lot of wood because we were, had a trunk on the mango tree, was three or four feet in diameter.

- And all the way through the process they were absolutely fantastic.

- [Zoe Bocik] Well, our Funktionhouse journey has had incredible ups and downs.

Like any small business, jumping into this we couldn't have foreseen some of the hurdles we'd have to cross, but also some of the really wonderful moments that we've looked back on.

Connecting with our clients has been amazing.

Meeting other woodworkers who support us, and we support them.

Growing as a business and as an artistic endeavor in our art community here in St. Petersburg has been extraordinary.

- Where does it go 10 years from now?

I don't know, I'm gonna be 55 this year, so 10 years from now, I want it to stick around.

I'd like to see it stick around.

And I think my dream would be who can take this over?

You know, is there there's somebody available to take this over and keep this process going?

- [Ortiz] For more information, visit funktionhouse.com.

Kathleen Tesnakis is part of the sustainable fashion movement with her design company Ekologic.

A recycling designer based in Troy, New York, she makes clothing and accessories in an eco-friendly way.

- [Tesnakis] Yeah, so, you know, I don't know, see I'm still not getting, no, I gotta go to red.

This is the, that's, that's the one.

I am Kathleen Tesnakis, and I am a recycling designer.

I am part of the slow fashion movement and the fashion revolution.

And what that means is we are manufacturing and designing clothing and accessories in a sustainable way.

(upbeat music) Well, I was trained as a textile and fashion designer at Syracuse University, and I started thinking, how can I be a designer when I am really against over-consumption?

How can I create products when I know what the impact of the textile industry is having in our environment?

And it was a real sort of disturbing question for me.

And then I had a Eureka moment.

It was February 14th, Valentine's Day, in 1996, and I fell in love with transforming old garments into new objects.

By doing that, I was able to make new things without dependence on chemicals, negative byproducts.

And I was literally taking things destined for the landfill and transforming them and giving them life that we now know customers of ours have products that are 20 years old.

Ekologic is my design company.

I founded Ekologic, and it's actually called echo as in a reverberation, and we think ecologically is the way you should think.

That is the company that I designed to do this recycling system that I've created.

We take in post-consumer materials in the form of old sweaters.

These sweaters actually come from my community in the New York City Metro area.

And then I bring them back to Troy, New York, and then we begin washing.

I do have secret, you know, recipes on how I do that.

Restoring, enhancing the fabric, deconstructing to make actual pieces of fabric that you see here.

And then we hand-cut and collage each product, we make like a painting.

So right here, this is the process that I call, it's my painting, where I, I take my bits of fabrics and collage them together into these new pieces.

You can see, this is the beginning of my concept.

I'm gonna try to make three sizes of a similar, a similar color, but then each one will have different elements.

So that's what you see here.

There's two blues, two greens, and I have the accent, the top, this part.

She is hand cutting the pieces.

There's no other way to do this, it's just like hand cutting.

Each piece has to be inspected and marked accordingly.

And this actually allows us to really inspect the level of quality of everything that we're putting together.

Right now it's being laid on the trays for sewing.

(sewing machine whirring) (upbeat pop music) I like a real classic line.

I'm trying to create things that people are going to wear year after year.

I'm not so oriented into trend as opposed to individual style.

So the clothing that I make, sort of like the piece that I have on, is all done like a painting.

This is a one of our kind texture.

We're only able to make one of these, and that's what a lot of our customers who know our work, they're looking for those, you know, needle in the haystack pieces.

Although all of them, I have to say, are really beautiful.

Our work is a little sporty.

It's definitely shout-out pieces.

Our customers are inspiring me daily.

The stories that they bring to me tell me we're on the right path, and it's important that companies like mine exist and keep pushing the envelope.

I love the diversity of our customers.

I love the fact that they're the warriors on the ground that are creating parks in Brooklyn and taking care of the environment in Colorado.

And, and even we have customers with disabilities that our mittens work well for.

So being able to be a product with a message that enriches people's lives, gets passed down in families, gives me so much joy.

When I walk into my studio, that's what I feel.

And that's how the clothing is made.

And that's the intention we're putting into the world.

And I can honestly say everyone in this room is operating under the same principles and is making products, like paintings, with love.

- [Ortiz] To see more clothing and accessories, visit ekologic.com.

In her textured paintings, New York based artist Mickalene Thomas explores race, gender, identity, and sexuality.

Head to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio to see an exhibition of her work.

(bright music) - [Zimmerman] Mickalene Thomas, she was born in 1971 in New Jersey.

She's based in Brooklyn.

A lot of her work deals with the gaze.

Also with thinking about her gaze as a queer Black woman and what that can bring to a conversation about art history.

What's been absent, and how she can kind of claim spaces for, particularly in the show, women of color, Black women, who, when she was looking at art history, she wasn't seeing women that looked like her.

Women who looked like the people who were heroes and idols and mentors to her in her life, her mother, her family, her friends.

So it's really about inclusion and empowerment.

- [Goodson] The gaze is that art historical practice, primarily of men looking at their female muses.

And there's kind of ownership that takes place, mostly that we're aware of through this sort of art historical lens.

Mickalene has sought, I think very consciously from the beginning, to turn that concept of gaze on its head.

So that basically the gaze doesn't denote ownership, it denotes collaboration.

- [Thomas] It's the first time that my work has given, been given this platform to present the sitters forward, put them forward, put them in front.

To sort of really celebrate them in a way where you can see the various bodies of work that has come out of each sitter.

And how my relationship is with them.

And how I'm investigating and looking through different tools and materials.

And I think a lot of times, you know, there's this idea or lack of understanding that these are real women, right?

And I want people to feel that sense that it's not just me choosing and plucking a woman from some obscure place and thinking about them, that these are relationships that are built.

- [Zimmerman] So the first gallery is devoted to her mother, Sandra Bush, which was her first muse in grad school at Yale.

She was asked by a professor, a photography professor, to make a series of work about someone she had a difficult relationship with.

And she and her mom had a very fraught, estranged relationship, and so there was a lot of, kind of, healing and rekindling the relationship through that series and as time went on.

Her mom at one point was an aspiring model, so was very confident, beautiful, statuesque, and subsequently informed, I think, Mickalene's interactions with her sitters.

The next gallery is devoted to Mickalene herself.

And she talks about how thinking about self portraiture, and using herself as a subject was really vital to think about how she was depicting others.

So to kind of put herself in that position was really critical to think about, thoughtfully, about what it means to be a subject.

- [Thomas] So all of those photographs came from sort of this search of who I was in identity and breaking down stereotypes of Black women in mass media.

It's about visual play, and it's about visual manipulation and desire, right?

And women are beautiful, and I'm attracted to women.

You know, it could be my libido lust, I don't know.

But yes, sexuality, desire, all of those things that I put in paint, in my painting is very important to me, right?

Because it's how I see the women in my life.

It's how I want the world to see them, you know.

And it's putting them on the same platform of sort of the ideology of beauty.

Also validating and seeing and and allowing people to see us.

So we can be seen, so we can represent ourselves and say, "We are here, and we're, we're, we're present."

And so often, there's so many other images to look at us as the other, in a negative light, right?

So for me, it's a, it's a way of celebrating, celebrating who we are.

I think that it is important as an artist to, whether it's personal, conceptual, whatever your genre or theory you're working from, whatever that basis is, is to find how it impacts the world.

For me, it's all about trying to inspire and make young girls, when they walk into spaces like these, that they feel a sense of themselves and that they can see themselves, right?

They see that, they feel that they're represented.

- [Ortiz] To learn more visit, mickalenethomas.com.

John Kascht is a renowned caricature artist born and raised in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

His works can be found in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and in publications across the country.

Learn how he uses this specialized form of portraiture to find the true essence of a person.

- [Kascht] There's a conception, and it's a misconception, that caricature is about distortion.

What makes people think of distortion is that it's very exaggerated, it's very amplified, but there's a big difference there.

I'm amplifying in the direction of what makes that person unique.

My name is John Kascht and I'm a caricaturist.

Caricature is not cartooning, it's not illustration, it's not a comic strip, caricature is a very specialized form of portraiture.

Like all portraitists, caricaturists are interested in nailing the likeness.

What it is is a investigation into exactly what makes a person unique.

And you, you find the things that make you different from everybody else, and then those things get amplified, and the more of the nuances that make that person unique that I can observe and then get into a drawing, the more complete the likeness is.

And the, and the greater the recognition on the part of the person looking at it, where they say, "Yes I recognize that person."

I was very much that kid in the back of class drawing the teachers, and the thing about me is I never stopped.

I'm still kind of drawing the teachers or the authority figures anyway, but now it's politicians, performers, you know, that kind of thing.

I've drawn primarily celebrities, or, you know, notable public figures.

So when I'm drawing an idea that I have, I usually do very quick thumbnail sketches just to kind of start mapping out the, the way the piece could look.

I draw on vellum, transparent vellum, so that if I have something in a sketch that I like, I'll slide it under a fresh sheet, draw over the top of it, and keep the parts I like, don't keep the parts I don't like, until eventually I've got the fully realized sketch that I want to paint from.

I use watercolor and paint in light layers of glaze.

Ideally, if I have 16 hours to 20 hours on something, obviously each piece has its own requirements, but 16 to 20 hours is a great amount of time for me, for an average piece in my style.

- [Byrd] The Waukesha County Historic Society Museum was founded in 1914, so we've got more than a hundred years behind us of celebrating what this region, what Waukesha County, has to offer in the world, and what impacts we've made in the world.

Making Faces is our feature exhibition.

The artist, John Kascht, is originally from Waukesha, City of Waukesha, graduate of Catholic Memorial High School, just a mile and a quarter down the road from here.

And so a really lovely way to celebrate someone from this part of the world and, and to really take and appreciate his accomplishments.

The wonderful nature of the work that John does is that he, as the artist, gets to retain very often the original that he makes.

And so he's been kind of sitting on this incredible back catalog, 30 years worth of work.

- The exhibition here is a collection of about a hundred-ish pieces that are my favorites.

- [Byrd] Bill Murray is one of the large format prints, and we put him kind of front and center, right inside the gallery space as you walk in.

So we really start with, just in general, what goes into his caricature and portraiture work, things like body language, and also what the process is to get to a finished product.

And really take people on that journey from appreciating what this art form can be when it's done to the expert level that John's able to achieve on through its multiple iterations and kind of uses.

My favorite piece is the first piece of work he ever sold.

It's a political cartoon that he sold to the Waukesha Freeman.

- One day I just went down to the Waukesha Freeman offices with a bunch of my drawings of the teachers, of family members.

And I just, I went in and asked to see the editor 'cause I had in my mind that I wanted to do political cartoons because that's where I was seeing caricature work.

Jim Huston is his name.

He was the editor of the Freeman at the time.

I think because he was puzzled he agreed to meet with me.

I was 14, and, amazingly, he said I could submit cartoons to them.

He, and in retrospect, I realize, he did me a great favor, a great service there professionally.

He took me seriously at that age.

And I started identifying myself as a professional.

- And to, to start with that piece, and to be able to see everything that's come after that, is just this incredible story of what a lifetime of work can do.

- My favorite things in the exhibition actually are the sketches because to me that's where the creativity really is.

The likeness is happening or it's not, and when it's not, boy, it can be tough.

But then when I finally capture it, it just really still, to me, feels like a miracle when that person is looking back at me from the paper.

With caricature, you think of, you know, big nose, big chin, big ears.

That stuff's all part of it, but so are nuances like a person's particular skin tone.

Do they slouch?

Do they sit up straight?

How, do they use their hands a lot?

Are they more contained and don't reveal much?

All of those nuances convey ultimately who we are on the inside.

I'm still amazed that how we hold ourselves outwardly says so much, and says so accurately, who we are on the inside.

I feel in some ways, I'm trying to learn about myself one person at a time.

- [Ortiz] Explore more of his art at johnkascht.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of WEDU Arts Plus.

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Gabe Ortiz.

Thanks for watching.

(dramatic music) - Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.