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Coming up, trumpeter Theresa may channels her childhood into her music.

Award winning artist Jordan Wong takes his imagination outside to play.

And Mason, Ohio, ceramicist Holly Barrett finds inspiration in the city of Havana.

Hello, and welcome to your arts and culture home here in Northeast Ohio.

APPLAUSE I'm your host.

Ideastream Public Media's Career.

Batya.

Cleveland trumpeter Theresa may has been very busy in recent years performing with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra.

Mourning a black star.

And here in Playhouse Square with the Broadway series Orchestra.

A recent health scare forced me to slow down, but that in turn sped up her creativity.

She spoke about it with ideastream.

Amanda Rabinowitz.

For our music series APPLAUSE Performances.

can you talk a little bit about your set up here because you've brought two trumpets.

You have some pedals.

Talk about how you're going to do this today.

Yeah.

So I started creating music for my trumpet and then I also have my flugelhorn today.

Which one of the tunes I'll play today will be on flugelhorn.

And I've been doing a lot of trumpet with electronic beats that I create myself, and I also do trumpet and flugelhorn with effect pedals from Earth Quaker devices.

Tell us about the first song you're going to perform.

Yes, the first song is called Go to the Garden.

It's by a composer named Aristides Garnett.

They composed a piece for trumpet and mixed media.

So it's me playing my B-flat trumpet and then narration to go along with it.

Gather round.

I'm going to tell you a story.

The first person to ever truly love me once said, Somewhere there's a garden, a place so calm and pure that you cannot help but be at peace.

Its gate may be trellis or stone.

It may be intimate.

Whenever I'm doing, I just love hearing the trumpet up and front and center like that.

With those background sounds, it's just such a unique approach to hearing the instrument.

Yeah, it's one of my favorites to play.

Arias composed this piece, I believe it was in 2021, and I purchased a piece from them in 2022 ish, and it's one of my favorites to start program with because it's really calming.

The piece itself is about having a place of solace and of solitude that you can go that will always kind of be our safe space.

That's really important now more than ever.

So I always like to start in the place of calmness.

So for me, that's what that piece does for me.

It comes my physical self, it comes my mental self kind of puts me in a safe space.

I'm just happy to perform.

Even when the world around it grew dark, the garden remained bright and warm because I made it so.

After all, it was my garden and I filled it with beautiful things.

I know the next piece you're going to play is an original that you wrote, and it's called Universal Return.

Yes.

Talk a little bit about this piece.

Yes.

So I. I wrote this just last year.

I composed the beat first and then I composed the full horn part and I wrote it about returning to a part of our younger selves that often gets lost when we reach adulthood.

I think things just become so serious and, you know, for good reason for most of the time.

But I think it's really important for all of us as adults to maintain a sense of creativity and wonder.

I work with kids every week and they are the silliest beings on the planet.

And, you know, they laugh about the silliest things.

They ask a billion questions.

My youngest trumpet student is five years old and the lesson is chaotic but also amazing.

And he asks so many questions and the 130 minute lesson.

And if we were in a world like that and just spent time, you know, laughing and playing play is really important for us adults as well, I think that we would all just feel much better.

And so I wrote a song this the song for myself as a reminder and also for all of us to remember that.

So how do you tap into your inner child?

Yes.

So by creating writing.

Yes.

And writing songs.

Exactly.

Teresa, I know one of the reasons why you went solo is because you had a bit of a health scare last year.

You ended up in the E.R.. Yeah.

What happened?

Yeah, actually, my my partner Emmanuel and I were driving back from Cincinnati.

I performed on a friend's graduate recital at the conservatory.

And on the way back, I had an incredible amount of pain in my abdomen area.

And at first, we just thought it was not anything serious.

And then it progressively got worse.

And I was the pain just also got worse.

And we ended up going to the E.R.

on the way to Cleveland.

We were in Columbus, and I told my partner Emmanuel, that I cannot drive.

So please take over and I need to get to a E.R.

like now.

And so ended up at the E.R.

in Columbus.

And that's when I finally found out I had fibroids and I. I didn't know anything about them until really that moment.

And it just explained a lot of my pain and energy level that I was dealing with for years prior to finding out that I had them.

I'm so glad.

I'm really yeah, I'm really glad to hear that, because that had to affect your breathing.

Yeah, Especially when you're playing the trumpet.

Yeah, exactly.

I realized now that I've had them removed, that I wasn't able to take a full amount.

A full breath, which is pretty vital when you play the trumpet.

So I realized just how much harder I had to work in order to perform.

And I was performing a lot.

But now that I'm able to take a full breath, you know, without my body being super tense and stressed out and no pain, it feels like a dream now.

So I'm glad you're recovered and get back to doing what you love.

I know that that time when you were forced to slow down, how did that affect your creativity?

Yeah, I think it allowed me to create more.

I feel like I'm definitely in a season, a season of creativity, and I'm able to create freely.

And I think, you know, at least half of that is due to the fact that I just feel so much better.

And the other half is because I actually have time to devote to myself and my own creative lanes.

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In 2024, the city of Cleveland awarded seven local artists with close to $3 million to fund public arts projects across the city.

One of the awardees is Jordan Wong, who plans to transform Cleveland's Asia town district with a new outdoor community space.

few years ago idea streams David C Barnett caught up with Wong while he was exhibiting at the Akron Art Museum.

So the 10,000 things is a Dallas phrase that refers to, you know, the universe, the world, pretty much all this in existence.

And it kind of relates also to the to the imagery of of things that are flowing ebbing and flowing and just always shifting.

I love the concept of energy.

I love the concept, the, you know, and visuals of movement, which I think have strong connections to life, to narratives, to human beings and growing.

A lot of the choices I make connect to that.

My grandfather, he would take like computer paper and like, you know, cut it up into like smaller squares and just have like a big stack of it in the kitchen for me to draw on.

I could spend hours drawing.

Well, you know, What were you doing?

Oh, cartoon characters, comic book characters, you know, video game characters, things.

You know, things that I was watching on TV like Sonic the Hedgehog, Dragon Ball, Z.

All of those things.

Yeah.

This is someone called and he's one of the main characters in Journey to the West, which is a classic Chinese novel written long time ago.

And there's a lot of you know, adaptations of this character.

And I grew up watching the Journey to the West.

TV show was made back in the eighties, so my grandmother would record this show and have it on VHS tapes for me to watch.

And the story just fantastical, and it really appeals to your imagination.

Someone asked me recently like, you know, what is the use of rings and halos?

And I think they're a great motif to kind of connect to this idea of the divine or otherworldly, you know, something that is beyond this physical realm.

You know, to have this this like halo or ring kind of like float around around you like 24, seven.

It's just like this really cool man who is, you know, seen.

I like using clouds because I feel like they're great imagery that communicates a wonder, imagination, whimsy and you can use them in all sorts of different ways, you know, whether they're like kind of really fluffy and and playful.

And now that I'm thinking about Chinese and Asian artwork, the clouds are really used, especially images of heaven and things that are divine beyond the realm of what we know.

Yeah, hiding little versions of myself is is kind of been like a new thing.

Just because the works I've been doing recently are just so detailed and there's so much going on that it's like, Yeah, why not get away with?

Well, I think that's like small version of myself and it's kind of become a way to quote unquote sign my, my works.

A lot of the work that I'm doing now and also in the past, the common thread is, is this idea of like perseverance, encouragement, growth.

Now I'm in scoring like again in relation to like those Dallas ideas, the ebbs and flows of life, you know, being being a little softer when when things are are tense and hard and it's kind of finding a balance and maybe bliss.

And in this crazy life that we live in, which, you know, I think applies to not just the times we live now, but in the past and times that we're going to live.

So it's weird how it's like all connected and just always in flux.

Good ideas can come from anywhere, right?

That's why we like to ask for your art story ideas from anywhere in northeast Ohio.

If you've got something you'd like to share, go ahead and send it in an email to arts at Ideastream, dawg.

AM Thanks.

We're off to the Queen City, where Mason, Ohio's Holly Barrett, loves to get her hands dirty making art.

The ceramic artist also loves to collaborate and recently got the chance during a cultural exchange in Cuba.

Clay feels like nothing else.

People say that Clay has a memory.

It remembers how you treat it or the intense that you put into it.

Will come back through a kiln.

It's also the most community oriented art that I've done so far.

Painting and drawing.

I can do anywhere.

I can do it by myself.

Clay really needs a group of people.

If you're firing kilns together or just constant feedback and lifting big £50 bags of material.

I am a multimedia artist, working mostly in clay and illustrative installation.

Currently a resident artist at Queen City Clay in Cincinnati and going to graduate school for ceramics.

I started out in painting and drawing, doing a lot of illustrative ink work.

I've always been drawn to buildings and clean lines and edges and three dimensional things.

And then when I went to university for a bachelor's in studio art, I took an intro to Wheel and handled in class and just dove into it.

And I really liked the tactile nature of it and how messy it was.

I was really drawn to doing vases or things with lids that contain something, maybe contains a story and that kind of pushed me to want to go bigger and bigger with these faces that could hold more imagery or a larger story that I could start to play with and mess with the way it was on a form versus just drawing one image on a smaller surface.

So I started really thinking about pots as a canvas and how much canvas or surface I could get out of them.

Growing up, my I was homeschooled, so my mom read to us a lot as kids and my dad is a writer and I have parents who are editors and English teachers.

And so language was really important to us and folklore and stories growing up.

And so a lot of my early work was based around that and fairy tales and the act of storytelling and kind of those stories that we tell ourselves over and over again and the things that we hold on to.

Part of the reason I'm interested in the storytelling and started to do it on vessels is because you're working in the round.

When you put a narrative on a pot, there's no clear beginning or end.

It's just kind of the cycle and you can choose where it starts or finishes or what pieces you focus on.

Clay has such a fragile but also permanent nature that I think really ties into how we view stories and how they translate over time too.

So combining my interest in illustration and ceramics is really my way of like tying into that kind of narrative tradition of ceramics, but also things that are personal to me.

I've gone from parts to doing more installation work recently, tile work and back splashes.

I've been doing the architectural doors around that's currently on the outside of Queen City.

Clay That was 20 £200 of clay.

It's a lot of surface, and I'm also doing a wall right now for Queen City.

Clay That's specifically mine, and it's for the Queen City Clay community and Tiles about their history and stories.

So it's nine by 12 feet of just fully illustrated tile work and columns.

Porcelain is my favorite clay to use.

I started using it in my senior year of college against the advice of several people who said you need more practice throwing before you really use porcelain.

But I also got a lot of encouragement from people who knew I was like, I want to try it because I think of clay as surface and I'm looking for that kind of monochromatic black and white.

I like the natural background of porcelain rather than having to forcibly paint all of my pots white to start or anything like that.

Last summer, 2023, I was nominated to be one of Ohio's emerging artists via the Ohio Craft Museum in Columbus, and then somehow through that, Donald Collins from the Ohio Arts Council put me forward, I think, or gave my name to Michael Reese, who is running this trip to Cuba.

It's for the Havana Biennial or Biennale, which I didn't know anything about before this trip.

There were maybe 12 to 15 artists from different mediums.

I was the only ceramic artist.

We went to different museums.

I got to meet with the director of the Ceramics Museum of Havana, which is where my work will be once final things go through for the panel.

We also went to Matanzas, which is a little drive east of Havana, where Manuel Hernandez and Lolo have a gallery out there and so Manuel Hernandez is in his nineties, but he is a Cuban ceramicist and his family works with him in Matanzas.

Prior to going, I knew nothing about Cuban art and I knew nothing about Manuel.

I didn't even know his last name until we were there.

So I couldn't find any information about him or what his art looked like.

I just knew I was going to meet this Fay famous Cuban ceramicist and have this experience of a different culture.

He does more illustrative caricature and some comedic work.

He used to be a cartoonist for a newspaper, and so that ties in.

You can see the influence of it in his work.

And that was exciting to me because I like the little bit of whimsy coming in.

And so I introduced myself to him in that Spanish, and somebody else helped facilitate a little bit.

We had just been talking about doing visas and a couple of vessels to put in the museum, and he got excited and he took me out to see these murals that are tile murals on the sides of the buildings in Matanzas.

And there are several stand across the street.

We were kind of just trying to translate for each other, and he expressed interest in doing one of those together.

So that's how it got started, that we'll do pots for the museum, but tiles for Matanzas, just because it's something that we both love is tile work.

I'm making pots right now that Michael will take down to Cuba with him on his next trip, and Manuel will finish them.

And then Manuel is currently working on about 36 tiles that he's starting and going to paint initially.

And then I'll finish those once they come back here.

We both really are interested in ideas of home and the places where people live in that kind of tradition and things that are important to us and just the things that people hold on to no matter where they are.

The biggest thing, especially as somebody working in clay, but just any type of art is you don't want to be limited to any one thing or idea.

I think it's why I was so drawn to being a multidisciplinary artist and doing clay and illustration and other types of work is because you just start learning so much from each medium and how they can interact with another.

And it just feeds itself and it feeds your own work and just keeps growing and growing.

As you find out how much there is that you don't know.

And so it's that same thing going and interacting with other artists in other cultures as you just you're reminded how much there is to learn and how much you don't know and how we all have so many different experiences because of where we come from.

But it's also fun to find those ones that are the same.

Like Manuel and I are, he's from Cuba and an older gentleman and I'm 24 from Ohio, and we've had very similar priorities in family and home and really were able to bond over that.

Cuba has really opened me up to how much I love collaboration, whether it's working on community projects or just working with another artist to open that up a little bit because you can have certain decisions that are just yours and then some that are just theirs and some that are shared.

And I think the biggest advice is to find some connections.

Even just locally, you just plug in somewhere because even not ceramics, but just any art, if you're an artist, you can't do it alone.

You need a support system or people who are going to push you a little bit.

Nobody's going to care as much about your art as you do, but it's helpful to find people who are going to follow your work or just encourage you down the road or connect you with people they think might be interested in you and vice versa.

That's what's kept me going, is just not feeling alone in it.

Taking an art class can nurture creativity, and it can also heal That's what art is.

And your talent and getting things out that are bothering you.

on the next applause, Learn how watercolor is improving mental health with a visit to the MOCA house in Worcester and we share a Golden Hour concert by Cleveland's Wish Queen from the rooftops of Battery Park.

All that and more on the next round of applause All the things you said before about all the things you love about me.

Adding to the broken list of men who it's been real.

My friends.

Thank you for joining us for this round of applause.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia and as we say our goodbyes, here's more from northeast Ohio trumpeter Theresa may.

See you next time.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.