Applause is an Emmy award-winning locally produced TV show that celebrates artists and cultural groups around Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. Each week this on-air arts magazine broadcasts a fresh half-hour of features, performances, on-location reports, and interviews from the studios of WVIZ/PBS ideastream. Special thanks to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College for the use of their Steinway Piano on Around Noon/Applause.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Topics: Arts
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A gem right in our own backyard, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson has been telling stories about the African-American experience for nearly 50 years through a process she calls a Rag-Gon-Non, which pairs drawings and watercolors with everyday objects like buttons, pins, cloth and even music boxes, collected from her travels around the world. And with every new experience comes a new chapter added onto these exquisite pieces that allows these amazing Rag-Gon-Nons to go on, and on, and on...

The mask created by the people of Central African Savanna were never intended to conceal their identities or hide their emotions. Their purpose was more ethereal - to mediate between the living world and the supernatural world of the dead. In the new exhibit, Art and Power in Central African Savanna (which opens at the Cleveland Museum of Art Sunday, March 1st) we get a rare glimpse at these works of art, that governed the lives of this proud people.

The exhibit, Each in Their Own Voice: African-American Artists in Cleveland on view now at the Art Gallery at Cleveland State University was over a decade in the making. The show picks up where the 1993 show Yet Still We Rise: African-American Artists in Cleveland from 1920 to 1970 left off. Like that show, it documented the contributions of northeast artists working in a range of disciplines from painting, drawing, sculpture and prints that was also held on the campus of CSU.

While the outdoor scene remains chilly and gray a new exhibit offers visitors a chance to come in out of the cold for a taste of spring. One of Cleveland's most anticipated flora events each year, Orchid Mania: Orchids Under Glass, is blooming now through March 29th at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. Recently, we sent our ideastream cameras inside for a sneak peek.

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Production of Applause on WVIZ/PBS is made possible by grants from:

The Cleveland Foundation
The George Gund Foundation
The John P. Murphy Foundation

United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc.

The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.