WLIW Arts Beat

WLIW Arts Beat - May 4, 2020
In this edition of WLIW Arts Beat, an artist celebrates the craft of letterpress; the life and career of Annie Lennox is explored through art; a personalized treasure hunt leads to artistic experiences; a sculptor teaches and creates whimsical and functional works.
TRANSCRIPT
♪♪
♪♪
>> In this edition of
"WLIW Arts Beat"...
the art of letterpress.
>> Letterpress printing, as it
became an art form or a craft,
it -- it still has that limited
constraint of working
with the wood and the metal
and the wood and metal type
and the ornaments.
>> ...the life and career
of Annie Lennox through art...
>> You are first faced
with objects from Annie's past
as a music maker.
And as you move around
the mound, it gets
increasingly personal.
>> ...a personalized treasure
hunt of creative experiences...
>> You open the box,
you take off the lid,
and there it is.
It's this treasure that you've
found -- like a buried treasure.
>> ...and a sculptor shares
her passion through her
whimsical creations.
>> A lot of my work is whimsical
as well as serious.
And I just love to watch people
look at the pieces
that are there and giggle.
That's what I want.
I want them to make it part
of their daily grin,
have fun with it.
>> It's all ahead on this
edition of "WLIW Arts Beat."
Funding for "WLIW Arts Beat"
was made possible
by viewers like you.
Thank you.
Welcome to "WLIW Arts Beat."
I'm Diane Masciale.
Artist Erin Beckloff
loves the tradition and history
of letterpress.
As a professor
at Miami University in Ohio,
Beckloff tries to keep
the craft of letterpress alive
by educating her students and
the public about the art form.
Here's her story.
>> Letterpress printing is
a method of relief printing.
While technology shifted,
letterpress printing
was the method of printing
for over 500 years,
and it's no longer economically
the fastest way to print,
but there's something that
people are still connecting to,
and I think that's why
it's become an art and craft.
My in-laws gave me a small
printing press as a wedding
gift.
So I got this little printing
press, and I didn't know how to
use it, and so I started
reaching out to people in the
letterpress community for help,
because you can search for it
on the Internet,
and there are some videos,
but it's so much better to go
and meet with someone.
And I started to find
that there were other people
that cared about this
and there were other people
that had printing presses
in their basements or garages.
And it wasn't just people
in their 20s and 30s,
it was also people in their 80s.
So, it was fantastic
to find this community
that wanted to help each other.
There aren't really secrets.
It's everyone wants to help
letterpress printing survive,
and so everyone's willing
to help each other out,
be it by finding equipment
or teaching a technique
or learning a new process
or talking about how to mix ink.
Everybody helps each other.
Letterpress printing, as it
became an art form or a craft,
it still has that limited
constraint of working
with the wood and the metal
and the wood and metal type
and the ornaments,
and your collection
tends to influence
your aesthetic as a shop.
If you think of someone like
Hatch Show Print down
in Nashville, Tennessee,
they're using blocks
that might have been used
on a Johnny Cash poster,
and now they're being used
on a contemporary
country music poster,
and to think about
that collection is then
influencingyour aesthetic.
When I started to acquire type,
I became very interested
in wood type.
I love the beauty
of the letters.
I love that so many of the
wood-type fonts were made over
100 years ago and we're still
able to use them today.
I like how big
and bold they are.
And that was just something
I really connected with.
My dad actually makes wood type
the same way
that it was produced
for hundreds of years by all
the wood-type manufacturers.
So, Hamilton Wood Type
& Printing Museum --
Most people have seen "Hamilton"
on a little drawer pull.
That's that group.
They made type using this
pantograph method, which is
a dual tracer and router,
and so you trace the pattern
of the letter or the ornament,
decorative ornament,
and then it cuts the type
out of end-grain maple.
And a lot of my style
and aesthetic came from the fact
that my dad,
Scott of Moore Wood Type,
started making type
the historic way.
And so I started really
exploring how these ornaments
could be used to create form
and solids, and even letter
forms and characters.
And so, I really like to use
my dad's ornaments
as a main component of my work.
But I love the traditional tools
of letterpress printing --
the wood and the metal type.
The metal type's really small
and can get this very crisp
line, and some of the fonts are
only available in wood and
metal.
They never made it to the
computer, which is just special.
And I just love the history
that you know is in every
letter that you're setting.
It's been used before, and so
being able to give it life by
continuing to print with it is
just something that I connect to
as a tool and as my main driving
force of my aesthetic as a
printer.
[ Whirring ]
[ Metal clanking ]
Letterpress printing
in a lot of ways
is almost meditative.
You become one with the press
that you're using, and if it's
your own press especially,
you start to hear and know the
quirks of the press,
and they all have
their own sound.
You know, each press has its own
rhythm and music to it.
And especially when you're
running one of the larger
presses, like my
Chandler & Price C&P
with the flywheel,
you can feel that motion,
and I stand against it,
and you just -- you're a part
of the rhythm of the printing.
And so you're
feeding it the paper,
and it continues to run,
and you hear the "cha-chink,
cha-chink" of the cast iron,
or you hear the little
glitches of the gears.
And it's a wholly
immersive experience,
and it really makes you
slow down because you can't go
faster than the press.
After getting
my very first press,
I had a business for about
a year trying to sell
commercial work, and that just
really wasn't for me.
I tried to do the craft fairs
and the art fairs,
and I just really loved making,
and I really loved people.
And so I came back
to my alma mater,
where I received my undergrad
in graphic design,
and they had a letterpress shop
that was sitting unused.
And so I had the opportunity
to teach a class,
to teach students how to be
letterpress printers,
which, quite honestly,
I was still learning myself
and continue to today.
And I started teaching
letterpress as an elective,
and I had a great -- I mean,
I had great groups of students
for every semester.
So, nine years, every semester,
we've offered letterpress
printing, sometimes
multiple sections.
It's wonderful to watch my
students pull their first print,
because they pull that first
print off the press,
and just kind of a light
goes on.
Watching them discover
how fascinating letterpress
printing can be is immensely
satisfying and joyful for me.
"Pressing On:
The Letterpress Film" is a
documentary about the survival
of letterpress printing, and
specifically the community that
have kept it alive.
It is both the older generation
that held on to the equipment
and the knowledge through a time
when letterpress printing
was not popular,
and also the new generation that
are continuing to keep it going.
So, I would say I'm a member of
the new generation,
and as I became
a part of the community
and started to make these
connections with these 70-
and 80-year-old printers,
I knew that that knowledge
was gonna get lost if we didn't
record it in some way.
Through making the film,
I got to see the way
letterpress had been a part
of all of these people's lives
since they were young.
So, some of the older printers
in the community had become --
had become apprentices when
they were 12 or 15 years old,
with their families.
And so I got to hear the way
that letterpress printing
had driven their life path
and how special it is
to them to know that there's
a young generation that still
cares about this process,
This medium, this trade
that they love.
The printers that held
this knowledge, a lot of it
was never recorded in books.
I've taken on this role
as educator and filmmaker
and created
a shop at a university,
and they seem to connect to it,
and so many of them have gone on
to actually buy their own
presses, which I never imagined.
You know, I -- I love
that it's a part of their lives,
but now they have
their own presses that they're
learning how to use and learning
their presses' quirks.
And I love to see
that engagement and that they
want to continue to help be a
part of the letterpress
community.
Using letterpress printing
equipment is what's keeping it
alive.
Having a wood-type font
sit in a drawer
or behind glass somewhere
isn't gonna keep it going.
When you're continuing
to print it,
it not only is putting
oil back into the wood
and keeping those characters
in good condition,
but by printing it, you're then
sharing it with more people,
which is keeping letterpress
printing alive.
So it's both the use and
the people that are continuing
to keep letterpress going.
>> For more information,
visit erinbeckloff.com.
And now, here's
the Artist's Quote of the Week.
♪♪
At the Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art,
artists are given the space
to display monumental works
that may not find a home
anywhere else.
Singer/songwriter Annie Lennox
is just one artist exploring
her life journey through
an installation at the museum.
Let's take a look.
>> ♪ I've got so little left to
lose ♪
♪ That it feels just like
♪ I'm walking on broken glass
>> She is a singer
and songwriter of soulful
and palpable depth.
Annie Lennox's career can be
easily recorded in awards
and some 90 million albums sold.
But at MASS MoCA,
the Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art,
we find her life lived and left.
>> Annie is Scottish
and is thinking about
the form of a burial mound
as a space where we place
objects after people die.
>> Alexandra Foradas is
a curator at MASS MoCA,
where Lennox approached
the museum a year ago about
creating this installation,
a giant dirt mound crowned
with a piano.
Lennox describes it as,
"A dreamscape of memory
made manifest."
>> You are first faced
with objects from Annie's past
as a music maker,
and as you move around
the mound, it gets
increasingly personal.
>> Lennox has titled the piece
"Now I Let You Go,"
a decidedly definitive title
for someone who continues
to wrestle with her bond
to material memories.
And what material she has.
You'll find David Bowie here,
and her own lyrics.
There are mementos of her work
as an activist fighting HIV
and AIDS in Africa.
Closer to home,
her children's shoes.
>> She wishes that
everyone could have a mound.
This idea that we don't have
a way of metabolizing memory,
of working through the objects
that are left behind.
>> But not all of us can be
as sparkly as Annie Lennox,
whose mound shimmers.
>> Annie talked about the mound
as looking like a performer,
standing under a spotlight
onstage, wearing something
glittery, and that notion of
the mound as a performer,
the knowledge that sharing these
things and being vulnerable
in this way is in its own way,
a performance.
>> MASS MoCA's a place that
people come to experience
full-on.
They wear it like clothes.
>> Joseph Thompson is the
founding director of MASS MoCA.
He opened the place in 1986
in a series of brick factory
buildings that once served
as a textile mill
and later an electronics plant.
Today, it's where art and ideas
are made unlike anywhere else.
Since it doubled in size
two years ago,
this has become the museum where
artists come to create work
that often can't be shown
anywhere else,
sometimes because of size,
often for audacity.
>> This is not necessarily
a perfectly polite place,
where the walls are white,
and the light
is coming in from above,
and the guards are dressed up
in suit and tie.
You get to work for it here
just a little bit.
MASS MoCA rewards curiosity.
>> Is "museum" the right word
for this space?
>> No, this is not a museum.
I don't know what it is.
I mean, we stick with that word
because it's in "MASS MoCA."
It's a center.
It's a lab.
It's two turntables
and a microphone.
>> [ Chuckles ]
Right now, you'll find mammoth
sculptures by late artist
Louise Bourgeois,
a fully immersive and enveloping
series of light installations
by James Turrell,
and more mounds,
these from the mind of artist
Trenton Doyle Hancock.
>> If there's anything that's
our specialty at MASS MoCA,
it's providing space and time
to artists with big ideas.
>> Trent takes us into the
Moundverse.
The Moundverse is a space
that he created, beginning with
Torpedo Boy when he was 10,
who is sort of the Superman
to his Clark Kent.
>> A world all his own,
the Moundverse is charted out
along a Candy Land-like lane
in MASS MoCA's largest gallery,
one nearly the size
of a football field.
The mounds,
according to Hancock,
are depositories for memories
and bits of discarded humanity.
For children of the 1980s,
it's a colorful climb
into nostalgia.
>> Trent is drawing on
everything from
the Cabbage Patch Kids
and the Garbage Pail Kids to
the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
to Greek gods.
He is reaching back not only
into the depths of his memory --
back to his childhood in Paris,
Texas, as the child of a family
of evangelical Baptists --
but also back into mythology.
>> Now 35 years into her career,
artist Jenny Holzer has long
ruminated over language.
>> She is interested in the way
that language is read
differently based on context
and also material.
>> In this installation
at MASS MoCA,
she returns to painting.
Her focus here -- government
documents obtained through
the Freedom of Information Act.
>> The texts are referring
to violence as a wish list
for interrogation techniques,
or they are referring to abuses
obliquely as "treatment."
So it is this kind of, um --
this way of using language
to shield rather than to
uncover.
>> How political is the work?
>> Extremely political.
The work deals, in terms of
its subject matter, with
the lead-up to the attacks on
September 11th, fundamentalism,
and the violent tendencies
that might arise out of it.
And from there, she moves on to
the alleged abuses of detainees
at Guantanamo Bay.
>> At MASS MoCA,
it's a moment of memories,
from the harvesting
to the harrowing.
>> For more about the museum,
go to massmoca.org.
Now here's a look
at this month's Fun Fact.
♪♪
♪♪
Baltimore, Maryland-based
artist Abraham Burickson
is co-founder and artistic
director of Odyssey Works,
striving to challenge
traditional notions
of experience design
and the artist-audience
relationship.
Up next, we check out
the Odyssey Works Box,
a kind of personalized
treasure hunt designed to lead
to creative experiences.
>> Odyssey Works is
a performance company
that makes weekend-long,
week-long, months-long
performances for one-person
audiences.
I started doing Odyssey Works
because I was a poet,
an architect,
and I was concerned with
the fact that you create
a piece of work,
it goes out into the world,
and some people get it,
and other people have
a totally different experience
of it than you were intending.
And I got together
with my friend Matthew, and...
we said, "What if we just found
that one person who got it and
made our work just for them?"
Okay.
>> Okay. Big reveal.
>> What is the Odyssey Works
Box?
It's -- It's a tour through our
work.
>> Here we have the USB drive.
We'll get the audio tour.
>> And all the instructions
are right there.
And we wanted people
to have an experience of our art
that wasn't watching a video
or reading a book.
And that's my favorite,
I have to admit.
Something that was
tactile and human,
something that brought you
deeply into this way of working.
It's its own performance.
So, you open the box,
you take off the lid,
and there it is.
It's this treasure that you've
found -- like a buried treasure.
You have a book, and this book
was made for the piece.
It was a forgery
of an Italo Calvino book.
The stories are symmetrical
and lovely.
It's the Bologna --
everything beautiful,
everything symmetrical --
and it becomes baloney.
The stories fall apart.
They become images.
Even the page numbers fall off.
Messy stuff, our kind of work.
And we wanted to make a piece
that connected the two.
This was the DNA.
Diagrams themselves --
they're our scripts.
That's Carl's diagram --
mind, body over time.
The aim is the exact same aim
that I think most artists have,
which is to create
a deeply-felt experience
just to see the world see you.
>> To see more,
visit odysseyworks.org/about.
And here's a look at this week's
Arts History.
♪♪
♪♪
A sculptor in the Detroit,
Michigan, area
shares her passion
for her work with children
and adults through community
workshops and her whimsical
and functional creations.
Here's a look.
♪♪
>> I'm just a middle-aged lady
doing her thing.
I always had art
involved in my life.
I always had pottery to
fall back on as my hobby,
and through the years, it's just
developed into more and more
and more of a passion,
and now it's my livelihood.
♪♪
I opened my own studio
in September of 2015.
I was fortunate enough
to be one of the first ones
through the door
when they turned PARC into
an arts and recreation complex.
When I do my work,
it's really fun,
and every one is different.
There are no two pieces alike.
A lot of my work is whimsical
as well as serious,
and I just love to watch people
look at the pieces
that are there and giggle.
That's what I want.
I want them to make it
part of their daily grin,
have fun with it.
I think we don't
get enough grins and giggles
because we're always,
in these times,
searching for something more.
"I got to do more.
I got to go more.
I have to be more."
So, for people to pause and look
at a piece that I've created
and get a smile from it,
I think it's better health --
mental health for everybody.
I find my inspiration for my
work in a lot of different
places.
I love making high-relief tiles,
and I also love nature,
so the tiles that I make
are a series of wildflowers
for the Great Lakes.
Fishing.
Fish are kind of my thing.
I like to carve fish
and do those on my lanterns.
♪♪
The other functional pieces
that I make are big bowls.
I have things called
"grate plates" because
you can grate garlic and ginger
and nutmeg in these plates,
and their oil-dipping dishes
kind of go along with that.
So, the work that goes
into my sculptures
and functional pieces --
Almost all of them are thrown
at the potter's wheel,
and then they're all altered.
The Man in the Moons that I
make -- Throw those at the
wheel, then I will create the
face.
And every one's done
individually.
For the big sculptures
and the big carvings,
the lanterns that I like to do,
those can take up to 20 hours
to create.
So, it's weeks of work
that it takes to go into those.
Then they're hopefully dried
properly, and then they get
fired once, they get glazed,
and then fired again.
My favorite thing would be
carving lanterns,
both tall ones and small ones.
I like to draw on them first --
and those drawings can take me
four or five hours --
then carve them,
then embellish them.
So, it's just a labor of love.
I've come up with a vase that
I haven't seen anywhere else,
and it's taking into it
part of my carving
and part of my cutting away,
so it looks kind of like
a lantern, but it's a vase.
There's a lot of people who say
that when you're making,
you get into a zone,
and it's so true with pottery.
You start working,
and you get in a zone.
It just makes life better for
me.
I never thought that I would get
here.
I always knew
in the back of my mind
that this is what I would
eventually like to do,
and just didn't ever see it
as coming to fruition
at this scale.
♪♪
Have known for a long time
that I wanted to teach,
and wanted to teach kids,
and I just decided
it was time to do that.
So we can go right off the seam.
Is that good?
>> Yeah.
>> Those that can attend
the art camps are anybody
from 6 to 17 years old.
I have different camps
for different age groups,
and I have different themes
for each week.
The theme for this camp
was cartoon sculptures,
and so today,
they were making a mug,
and then they were putting
a cartoon character on there.
The kids in camps get
the basic instructions of how to
put the piece together.
After that,
they can do their own thing.
>> I wanted to come to this camp
because it's fun to play with
clay.
>> I like that you can sculpt it
in any way you want.
If you're thinking of something,
you can pretty much do it.
>> I like how it feels.
It kind of feels like slime.
And I like to just play with it
and kind of make stuff with it.
>> I think that you really gain
a lot of life skills
when you're making art,
or when you're making.
And in this day and age
where a 6-month-old
knows how to use a phone,
I think that we're getting away
from knowing how
to use our hands
and knowing how to make things.
And that's what art brings
to the table.
And it goes back to allowing
kids to understand success
and allowing kids
to make their own mark
in the world through their art.
>> I thought it was really fun
to do Mickey Mouse for the mug,
'cause I really wanted to
make it funny and artistic.
>> And the smaller this loop,
the better, because it gets
real fragile.
>> If you want to make
something, she really tries
to make it happen, and she helps
you out with everything.
>> Use this part of your hand,
and roll in on there,
give it a little smush.
Yes, ma'am.
>> I made Bill Cipher
from "Gravity Falls"
and a whistle that's a bird.
>> I made a sculpture yesterday
of Mr. Krabs,
and I made a whistle,
and it was a fish.
>> I'm proud.
I think they turned out
pretty good,
so I'm happy with them.
>> That wraps it up for this
edition of "WLIW Arts Beat."
We'd like to hear what you
think, so like us on Facebook,
join the conversation on
Twitter, and visit our web page
for features and to watch
episodes of the show.
We hope to see you next time.
I'm Diane Masciale.
Thank you for watching
"WLIW Arts Beat."
Funding for "WLIW Arts Beat"
was made possible
by viewers like you.
Thank you.
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