♪ - In this edition of WLIW Arts Beat, art and science combined.

You'll notice that I have an affinity for weird creatures.

Things that I think traditionally are found to be repulsive or disgusting, I think are incredibly fascinating.

The power of printmaking.

A lot of people ask, like, is this an original?

Because the printer does such a good job translating the work.

An innovative glass studio.

You're going to see actual objects being created.

You're going to feel the heat.

You're going to hear the noise of the furnace.

And that is so exciting.

It's all ahead in this edition of WLIW Artsbeat.

Welcome to WLIW Artsbeat.

I'm Diane Michelli.

Tyler Thrasher isn't just an artist, but a citizen scientist who creates one-of-a-kind works of art.

From crystallized insects to moonbeam flora, he loves to explore the curiosities of the natural world and has no plans of slowing down.

We head to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the story.

At some point people started calling me a wizard.

And I think they mean it.

Once you own that, once you're able to back out, whatever, I'm a wizard, people stop questioning it.

You can just do whatever you want.

People are like, well, that's on brand.

I'm Tyler Thrasher.

Describing myself is always a bit of a challenge.

I've kind of summed it up.

Equal parts artist, equal parts citizen scientist.

I think everything else I do kind of falls under that umbrella.

You'll notice that I have an affinity for weird creatures.

Things that I think traditionally are found to be repulsive or disgusting, that I think are incredibly fascinating.

The process of crystallizing something is kind of similar to growing rock candy.

You take a compound molecule and you dissolve it.

So you separate it into its ions and you make a solution.

So you have this like hot water, this sort of soup.

You are just kind of making the environment for this, you know, darn near perfect pattern to form.

I take things like dead insects or skeletons and I just submerge them.

And then as the water evaporates or the vessel cools, these ions come back together and they form that molecule.

From there, it forms this network.

That's what a crystal is, it's a pattern.

They'll form on anything, it doesn't matter.

I just happen to have a thing in between all of that and that system and then they just grow from there.

Nothing dies for my work.

I take insects or specimens that died of natural causes and I crystallize them.

I don't know where to say where I got started, but I guess I can condense it down really quick.

Okay, so let me see if I can do this.

So went to college in Missouri, started caving to fill up my free time, fell in love with caves, fell in love with nature.

I was going to school for computer animation, and I realized, like, right before I was about to graduate, I don't want to do this.

So I just filled my weekends with, like, extracurricular, creative projects.

Growing crystals was one of those.

Found a dead bug in the backyard, grew crystals on the dead bug, shared it online, it went viral, and then I made a bunch of crystallized dead bugs.

Traveled around the country with those bugs, and then that helped fund all the other things I do.

This is Moonbeam Conservatory.

In our shop, we have a little over 13,000 glowing flowers.

So we work with different florists and farmers to get our flora that is dried and preserved, and then we make it glow in the dark.

Almost any color combo you can think of, we have.

When we started making Moonbeam Flora, I had no intentions of making like the world's first glowing flower shop or anything like that.

I just made this glowing flower, and I was like, this is cool, I want to share it.

People kept buying them.

This space became available, and I don't think we knew what this was going to be.

It was just, we're kind of like, hey, we're going to try to make this work.

I like to tell people that the Moonbeam Conservatory has 3 phases.

We get a lot of people in here that just like, they just think it's like a flower shop.

Come on in.

You guys been in before?

No.

Are you familiar with the stuff in here?

No.

Okay, so you're just in time for some pretty cool stuff.

There's the daylight phase, where you can see all the colors and the natural textures of the dried flowers.

And then the second phase is what I call the blacklight phase.

We have these UV floodlights, these blacklight floodlights installed, so we can charge up all the flowers.

And then I usually let the flowers soak up that energy for a couple of minutes.

A lot of the flowers are fluorescent, which means that they are actively glowing and visually vibrating under the black light.

So I will flip off all the black lights and show the third phase of the store in three, two, one.

Nuh-uh.

These glow in the dark.

So how much for everything?

(laughing) - Oh yeah.

What's also really cool is all these little glowing balls on the ceiling.

Those are flower heads.

I grew up very isolated.

I also grew up very bullied.

I really didn't have anywhere to fit in.

Now the people that come to the shop, it's like I made a space for people that I think kind of exists on the fringe a little bit.

I have three assistants.

I have two that make the flowers.

Working here, you never really know what your day is going to look like.

It's kind of nice to have a little bit of that chaos.

There's so many colors.

We can virtually make anything.

So we've made some pigments that I don't think exist anywhere else.

I couldn't have dreamed this job up, but it is definitely a dream job.

We have to create contraptions to get the ideal finish on the flower, like our spinning bucket.

We made this sort of cardboard arena, sort of Thunderdome prison thing, and we put a potter's wheel in the middle with a 5-gallon bucket screwed to it.

We can spin all the flowers and kind of choose the spin rate.

All the extra paint flings onto the cardboard.

It's definitely a collaborative effort.

We all contributed in a way, and so it's really fun to look and go, "Oh, you know, one person did this, one person did that."

What if you were in a field of that and you weren't moving, but you heard it rustling really fast at you?

Would you just take off running in a random direction?

We are so silly and goofy.

There's such an atmosphere of, like, friendship.

It's so fun to get to brainstorm all our crazy ideas.

So I've written a couple of books, and the last book I wrote I co-authored with my friend Terry Mudge, and it's called "The Universe in 100 Colors."

And we spent a couple of years researching very specific, very niche colors, you know, like Baltic Amber, Cosmic Latte, which is the average color of the observable universe.

Just all kinds of really fascinating colors, a hundred of them.

We did rough drafts on every chapter and our editor said they were terrible.

You know, we weren't writers at the time.

My name is Terry Mudge.

I am the founder and scientific director at Stem Cell Science Shop.

It was sort of a store I always wanted to walk into myself.

Our job is to tell the story of everything from a scientific angle.

This is a particle accelerator from the University of Wisconsin.

It was originally called Aladdin, and it would create a very intense magnetic field in the middle which would guide electrons at extremely high speeds.

So this is a film from NASA.

It's from the 60s and it's actually from the clean room when they were building a satellite and so we have the original copy of that film.

Tulsa really is a place where a lot of unpredictable things can happen.

It's just the right size and has just the right spirit.

There's this just really integrated web of people who are just making stuff happen.

I first met Tyler in about 2012-ish and we've been kind of friends ever since.

So we spent two or three years writing the book.

We originally started with this massive list of colors and eventually we had to whittle that down.

We went through maybe five or six rounds of editing, polished them up really nice, turned it into a book.

We have very different writing but I think they complement each other nicely throughout the book.

I think it's really rewarding in that I feel like I'm part of the process of encouraging more people to get interested in science and how things work around them.

We do a lot of events at Moonbeam Conservatory.

I didn't know this concept of a third space.

People call it that.

People come in and treat it like that.

You know, first space is your home.

Second space is your work.

And third space is somewhere that's detached from both of those.

Somewhere that contributes to your life.

Somewhere that fills you up that isn't home or work.

Yeah, right.

Tulsa has a really tight-knit community.

There really is no competition.

We all support each other, help one another.

Tyler's got his art studio and said, "Hey, let's do concerts here and see if people show up."

Each one has pretty much been sold out.

How y'all feeling?

[cheers] All right, you ready?

[cheers] ♪ You know, this is a community event.

Music and art pulling people together.

I'm just happy to be a part of this community.

It's kind of daunting.

When you want something or you have an idea, there's this fear.

What if it does not match my expectations?

What I've learned over and over again is I hope it doesn't meet my expectations.

More often than not, I like what it became more than I originally thought it would be.

Because you don't know.

You don't know anything.

You learn along the way.

To me, that's the fun part.

It's like A to B, everything in between is the good stuff.

(cheering) (applause) (cheering) (applause) I get so many people that come through here that are like, "I'm glad someone that looks like me is doing this, and they're doing it well."

And for me, that gave me a sense of purpose.

We needed more science representation.

We needed more BIPOC artist representation in Oklahoma.

These are the things that fascinate me, and people come in and they share that sentiment, and I don't take that for granted.

The Moonbeam Conservatory has three phases.

The second phase is the glad light phase.

[laughter] It feels like I've been trusted with this narrative, this experience, this resource, and it just, I don't know, it's just kind of humbling.

It just feels really good.

This is something like I've never experienced before.

It's almost like you're transported into a different dimension.

It was a long journey and probably cut a couple of years off of my life.

Just the stress.

But I am very proud of what we've made and the whole journey to getting here entirely worth it.

And it's crazy, I think we just got started.

- Discover more at TylerThrasher.com.

And now the artist quote of the week.

♪ In this segment, we take a trip to Akron, Ohio to meet Joelle Diane Zelman, a fine artist who has found community in printmaking.

As the owner of the studio, Monochrome Canvas, she provides museum quality giclee printing to fellow artists and creates meaningful custom work.

Take a look.

- I went to school for fine arts and concentrated on painting and sculpture.

And so a lot of my work, kind of naturally, as the years have gone on, and I've done more graphic design stuff, has moved more and more digital.

A lot of people ask, like, is this an original?

Because the printer does such a good job translating the work.

That's actually how I got started in doing the print business, because I found that with all these different print methods, nothing really captured the traditional look of a painting or drawing better than a G. Clay print does, and that's because it prints in a wider color spectrum.

Most printers print in CMYK, which is very narrow.

It's literally just four colors.

A lot of my work deals with femininity and health struggles.

I have a piece that I had done of an older woman dancing in a tutu.

I feel like I'm kind of that older woman at times.

I feel like I'm in my 80s trying to get through my day and perform in this way, you know, being a mom and running errands and, you know, lifting babies all the time.

I was doing graphic design for years when I had my kids and I just, I started getting a little bit burnt out of it.

I wanted to do more, more of my own artwork.

And I started kind of going out on a limb and seeing like, if I just create more of the work that I like creating, are people going to be interested in it?

Do they want to buy it?

I started at that time learning about Gicle printing.

I had a company that I really liked to work with, and I was printing with them frequently.

They were based out of Florida, so I kind of had a few orders where I had big orders, but they were taking a while to come in.

I was like, "Man, like, I really need to find a local printer who does this."

And I started kind of looking all over and couldn't find anyone who was doing G-clay printing in the area.

G-clay printers have 12 colors that they print from.

So the color already is just like very vibrant and it can translate that very, very well.

But it also uses a pigment-based ink that it sprays as it prints.

And actually that's why it's called G-clay.

G-clay in French means to spray.

So I thought, you know, why don't I do this?

I have the background, I have the ability, I have the experience.

And I thought, you know, how cool that it would be that not only can I do this and it's useful for my artwork, that I can use this as an opportunity to connect with the creative community here in Akron.

- This consistency, I mean, if you look, these are like, you know, identical.

- Joelle and I have worked together on a number of projects, including a large project called Akron T-shirt Club that spanned over a year and incorporated a number of different artists in publishing their work as limited edition t-shirts.

And I've had Joelle print quite a bit of my work for exhibition.

There's a temptation as artists to do it yourself.

It's a DIY mentality and that's what makes you thrive as an artist.

But when you can do it together and find those opportunities to link up and maximize each other's expertise, that's where true collaboration happens and even better when it can happen in a supportive business environment.

It might take me a year or two years to create a piece and so when I reproduce that piece, I want it to be as good as quality as the piece is itself.

And so that was really what I was looking for and with Joelle, I was able to choose from cold press, hot press, canvas, you know, lots of different papers, lots of different choices so that each piece of work is appropriate to the original, whether it's photography, whether it's multimedia, whatever, we work together to make reproductions that really honor the original piece.

Robur City Prints has the National Alternative Print Show coming up.

They sent out a call to a bunch of artists, but they also specifically reached out to me because I own a G. Clay print company.

So there were artists who submitted work and actually ordered straight through my shop and fulfilled through me so that I could also get those prints into the show.

So this last week I've been really busy preparing my own artwork for the show and then also preparing other artists for this upcoming show that they're putting on.

A lot of the work that I started Monochrome Canvas with the intention of using Giclee prints because it represents my work so well.

So because I use, I like to use a lot of fine lines and watercolors, it just picks up all of these subtle color changes and subtleties of the work that is just really hard to capture and other forms of print.

It's been so cool that my little print company has turned into all these fun, big projects in the city.

To see more from the artist, visit monochromecanvas.com Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

♪ Located at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, the Perry Glass Studio highlights the history and art of glassmaking.

Through immersive glassblowing demonstrations, educational partnerships, and more, the public engages with this evolving art form in a variety of ways.

Let's find out more.

♪ So the thing that's always attracted me about the medium of glass is when it's hot.

♪ When it's being worked, when it's moving, when the artist is literally dancing with it.

♪ What keeps me coming back to it and has kept me enthralled for 30 years now is the molten glass and working with it up close.

♪ I love the history of glass making here in 1608 in Jamestown.

They were blowing glass.

It was the first industry, you know, here in the U.S.

and first export back to England was hand-blown glass.

Here we are, you know, a couple hundred years later still doing it.

There's a big movement in the museum world to have immersive spaces.

And we do have immersive space here.

You're going to see actual objects being created.

You're going to feel the heat.

You're going to hear the noise of the furnace.

And that is so exciting.

People come here and they have a kind of a physical experience.

This theater that we've built, this amphitheater, is a full-on theater with lighting and sound and catwalk, which enables us to present glassmaking to the audience in better ways, more enhanced ways, up-close cameras, dramatic lighting, to really kind of transport them, you know, to another place with this magical material.

And a couple board members at the time, it's about 2009, said we need a glass studio.

The original space was a renovated bank and it had a quirkiness to it which I love.

It had a triangular shape working space which is a little unusual but it was neat.

The initial studio was kind of an experiment.

Let's see what happens, let's build it.

And within five years we were already talking expansion.

Here we are, not 15 years in and the expansion is complete.

Education is our entire mission.

And we're educating the public, we're educating college students, we're educating both visitors and students about glass making processes, about how some of the works of our collection were created, and this is through demonstrations as well as through classes.

We have partnerships with Old Dominion University, Norfolk State University, Governor's School for the Arts.

We also work with Teens with a Purpose and the Boys and Girls Club of Southeast Virginia, Virginia Wesleyan University as well.

We interviewed several architectural firms up and down the East Coast from all the big cities, but it was a local firm, WPA, that really hit it out of the park, and they were also very receptive to our suggestions.

And so, you know, to their credit, I think it really worked out.

We leaned into was the idea that we wanted a more industrial space.

So there are the polished concrete floors, the steel, really a place where things are being made.

And also they're not that fragile or delicate.

It's really robust and strong.

Having this facility in Hampton Roads is very special.

The Chrysler Museum is definitely a gem in this region.

For a city of this size to have a museum of this caliber is really special.

And then tying it to this glass tube, it just makes it that much more.

I hope the legacy of this place to always be a place of learning, but also pushing the edge of what can be done with the material and being experimental, using glass in new ways to create gorgeous memories in people's minds.

For more information, go to chrysler.org/glass.

And here's a look at this week's art history.

♪ That wraps it up for this edition of WLIW Artsbeat.

Visit our webpage to watch more episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Michelli.

Thank you for watching.

♪