- In this edition of ARTEFFECTS, stunning and realistic bronze sculptures.

- I'd like to create the fantasy whether it be in movement or color.

- [Beth] Clever caricatures - [Francis] He did over the span of a lifetime, tens of thousands of caricatures.

And he did them in a very modernist style.

- [Beth] An artist's path (speaking in foreign language) - [Beth] And the deeper meaning behind interactive public art.

- Over the years, I have come to realize that my passion truly lies in interactive public art.

- It's all ahead on this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

(melodious instrumental music) - [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Raffealli.

The June S. Wisham Estate.

Carol Franc Buck.

Merrill and Lebo Newman.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

Meg and Dillard Myers.

The annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

And by... - Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan.

And this is ARTEFFECTS.

Meet Reno artist, June Towill Brown.

She creates realistic bronze sculptures of people and animals.

Each piece takes hours to capture the realism, personality and story of her subjects.

(melodious instrumental music) - My style is more realism.

I'd like to create the fantasy whether it be in movement or color.

I want people to see my pieces and know what it is.

So I like to do a series of three.

And the reason is, I would get very bored doing nothing but Native Americans or horses.

So that allows me to create a story for my collectors.

Right now I'm doing the wild animals, which consists of 80 giraffe, then ostrich, and right now I'm working on the lion, the male lion.

When I start, I will create a storyboard and the storyboard will have different images, and this case is the male lion standing, running, close up of the face, and then I will work out a wire armature, so I get the proportions right.

So from the proportions then I start bulking out, then I'll apply the clay on top of it.

And I have to put all the clay on first, like the crumb coat of a cake, and it starts giving me the energy of the image.

Then I must do the face.

I have to have some concept of the face where the eyes are going, And to me that gives it the soul.

It's rough until you start the final process.

Final process could be so detailed that you're using a fine brush.

So once the clay is done and I'm happy with it then I will get it to the foundry.

I sculpt in a clay that never hardens which allows me to have molds made.

From the mold it is now cast into bronze.

So after the mold is completed, they break the mold.

And that way my clients know that it's a limited edition.

See, many of my pieces have color on them.

It is not paint.

It is a color patina, and that's applied with a heated torch, heating up the metal and then they apply the types of acid and they build up the color, and it really brings even more dimension to the piece.

There's one that I've done is Lady Hawk, and she's a mythical and she's holding a hawk.

And it started with wanting to do partial nude and not be offensive and have that flow.

Many times you'll see my pieces that are contrapposto, meaning counter balance.

And just like the Statue of David, you see that s-curve and which is very central if you will for the eye, the eye moves around the art, and that's what people seem to gravitate to.

And I wanted her to be more of a, that coloration neutral but I wanted the hawk stand out, so he was black patina.

The town of Incline Village was having a 80 foot roundabout created where Mount Rose and Highway 28 meet right at the Lake Tahoe.

And I was selected to create eight life-size animals, The largest being the bear.

There's a mule deer.

A coyote.

A bobcat.

A blue Jay.

And squirrels.

At the time when this was being done, three million people would enter that intersection, so I know that there's a lot more people that are visiting it.

There is a passion when you're sculpting, regardless of what it is.

When you lose yourself and all of a sudden four hours go by and you don't even notice.

That's the passion.

That's the excitement that I enjoy.

You get into it.

It's just not picking up clay and going forward.

And that to me is exciting.

(melodious instrumental music) - To see more from June, visit her website, junetowillbrown.com.

The installation Cuban Caricature and Culture: The Art of Massaguer.

Features the modernist works of caricaturist and publisher Conrado Walter Massaguer.

We travel to Miami, Florida to stop by the show and learn more about the artist's lasting impact on visual culture.

(melodious instrumental music) - My name is Francis Luca and I'm the Chief Librarian here at the Wolfsonian, Florida International University.

I'm the curator of this installation that's looking at Conrado Walter Massaguer, a Cuban publisher, art director, illustrator, and caricaturist.

He was born in Cuba in 1889, he actually left and fled with his family when the Spaniards invaded during one of the independence wars.

And so he grew up kind of by bi-culturally and then multiculturally.

And so I think for that reason he was influenced not only by the artwork in Cuba, but what was happening in the modernist movement all around the world.

He actually introduced the modernist aesthetic to Cuba with a lot of art deco designed covers for his magazines, "Sociale" was one of his most important magazines, and that one aimed at an elite audience.

So this was designed to get the who's who of Cuba interested in modernism.

He had an entire section in Sociale Magazine called Massa-girls, which is a play on his name, sounds like Massaguer, Massa-girl.

And what he was doing with that was showcasing this new woman that had suddenly appeared first on the American scene, and then he helped import into Cuba.

He loved beautiful young women.

He was a little bit of a machista in that way, but he wasn't so thrilled about their being so outspoken and liberated.

That I think was a little bit threatening to him as well.

So you sort of see that little bit of ambivalence in these kinds of portraits.

He was also very famous for his caricatures.

In fact, that's how he's mostly known today.

And he did over the span of a lifetime, tens of thousands of caricatures, and he did them in a very modernist style.

He said the best caricatures were done on the sly with a furtive hand, where you're just sketching them and they don't even know that you're sketching them.

Some of his caricatures got him in a little bit of trouble.

He was not shy of expressing his disdain for certain Cuban presidents.

You look at Machado sitting in the chair, not so handsome, and then you look at the portrait that's being done and it's, oh, he's young and handsome.

That's a completely different individual.

Massageur spent a lot of time working for the tourism industry in Cuba, which began in 1919.

Since this exhibit focuses exclusively on the work of Conrado Massaguer, I wanted to sort of show him in the context of some of the other contemporary caricaturists from Latin America and so it's called Caricaturas.

Once Castro's revolutionaries seized power, Massaguer continued to live in Cuba though in relative obscurity until his death in 1965.

Here is someone who was the cultural ambassador for all of these visitors, especially from the United States and all of a sudden there are no visitors from the United States.

After 1959 he ends up working in the the Cuban National Archives just spending out his remaining days there.

To me, the most important thing about this exhibition is the fact that we can showcase this artist who was well known, well-renowned in his period, but has sort of been eclipsed because of more than 50 years of strange relations between Cuba and the United States, and his artwork is reflective of this early of period, this period of warm relations and cordial relations.

- Head to wolfsonian.org to find out more.

And now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

What inspired Salvador Dali to create the memorable melted clocks in the persistence of memory?

is the answer A: A broken clock.

B: Camembert cheese.

C: Hanging laundry.

Or D: Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Stay tuned for the answer.

In this segment, we travel to Cincinnati, Ohio to meet artist Ahmad Darouich.

Born in Syria, we hear about his journey to the United States and his passion for painting.

(melodious instrumental music) (speaking in foreign language) (gunshots) (speaking in foreign language) (indistinct chattering) (speaking in foreign language) - And now let's review this week's art quiz.

What inspired Salvador Dali to create the memorable melted clocks in the persistence of memory?

Is the answer A: A broken clock.

B: Camembert cheese.

C: Hanging laundry.

Or D: Einstein's general theory of relativity.

And the answer is B: Camembert cheese.

Reno based artist Nicole Ashton creates large scale interactive public art.

These works of art have a deep meaning intended to captivate and inspire those who interact with them.

Let's meet this multimedia artist and experience some of these stunning art pieces.

- I'm certainly am an artist who works in all mediums.

But over the years, I have come to realize that my passion truly lies in interactive public art.

It can reach the masses.

It is there and lives on, will outlive me and will still be making an impact.

Interactive public art is something as small as a little painting on a wall.

Something that grabs your attention, draws you into it or something as large as a monument.

Something that you can go, touch, feel, get inside of, be a part of it, move things around, and anything that makes you feel like you are a piece of art.

Public art doesn't work without people.

Curiosity kind of opens up to their own dreams, gets the mind going in, and hopefully spark something creative in all the people that go to see it.

All of my sculptures, they always start with a dream and it's more like they're a machine instead of art.

If I don't take the time to sketch it out, write things down when I wake up, I'll have the same dream the next night.

That gets repetition.

So I finally just gave in and I was like, all right I'm gonna follow this.

I'm gonna do this every morning.

And that's how transcendent souls came about.

That was my first solo piece that I worked on that was that large of a scale.

It was a crash course in structural engineering.

How to figure out taking a model, this is big, to something that's 28 feet tall, and thinking about all of the structural engineering needs and wind load.

Transcendent Souls really is about the progression of our own souls going through the steps and acknowledging our faults, our strengths, and doing everything in a manner of grace.

As long as you believe in what you're doing and just keep going, do it step-by-step, that's process has worked for me.

As You Wish with the project after Transcendent Souls and it is all about going in with the intention knowing what your heart's desire is, what your wishes.

In that I was kind of pulling for myself all my doubts.

The fear of not having funds to buy the materials and how it's gonna work.

But when you're in that process and you've gone that far you'll do anything you can to make it happen.

Dreamcaster is an opportunity to look into all of the what ifs.

So it's really important when you're doing a large-scale piece to do a maquette, so you can get a better idea of what your bill process is going to be.

I've become the person that thinks about things like shipping and building.

So how do you make it fit into a box?

Where are you gonna separate it?

How's it gonna get loaded?

That part of the process is really a good place to start.

The pieces all going to be all reclaimed with the exception of structural steel inside the framework of those hexagons of the dome will be individual dream casters.

They're meant to all be different.

The top of the dome will have another crystal and this time we're gonna go dig it out ourself.

Anybody can do this.

It's all about just having the drive and the will to do it.

And I hope that that's what everybody who experiences it walks away with.

Public art for me, it's meant to inspire.

It's meant to excite.

It can even be meant to get you angry, meant to push you to make a change.

Hopefully it just gets their wheels turning and they go off and they do amazing things.

- To see more, visit nicoleashtonart.com.

And that wraps it up with this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

For more arts and culture, or to watch past episodes visit pbsreno.org/arteffects.

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan, thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS was made possible by, Sandy Raffealli.

The June S. Wisham Estate.

Carol Franc Buck.

Merrill and Lebo Newman.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

Meg and Dillard Myers.

The annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

And by... (melodious instrumental music)