- In this edition of ARTEFFECTS, a mother-daughter duo create stained glass artwork.

(upbeat music) - [Vanessa] It runs so strong in our family.

There's families of doctors, there's families of lawyers and there's families of artists.

- [Beth] Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm.

(gentle piano music) - One wonderful thing about Pollock's technique is this embracive accident, and embrace of the effects of chance.

- [Beth] An installation that celebrates the Muslim community.

- [Satin] There are things Islam is, and there are things Islam is not.

We're using this space to showcase that and separate what Islam is from ideology, separate what Islam is from culture.

- [Beth] And the meticulous artistry of chain mail.

- I take chain mail and I make it beautiful.

And I make it to where people want to learn about it, to where they want to wear it, to where they want to see it.

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

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] 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 welcome to ARTEFFECTS.

Vanessa Aramanda has been an artist her whole life.

When she started her business, A Glass Fantasy almost 40 years ago.

She could never have known that her daughter Amy would join her decades later.

Let's go into their studio in Sparks and see this mother-daughter duo at work.

(upbeat music) - A Glass Fantasy is a mother-daughter stained glass studio.

We like to focus on pretty much anything, really.

I think we do repairs and customs and hangings to, candle holders, to big installed windows.

- I started the business in 1987, officially.

I was doing glass in like '78.

So I've been doing it a long, long time.

I come from a family of artists.

My dad was a photographer, one of my aunts had her master's from UCLA in art.

Growing up it was normal to be doing art.

And so, actually I grew up thinking everybody could do this.

Everybody could do everything I can do, but I've found over the years that's not the case.

It is a special thing.

And I do believe it's genetic, that because it runs so strong in our family.

And I think like there's families of doctors, there's families of lawyers, and there's families of artists.

It's amazing what comes out of these fingers.

And it's nice to be able to make a living on our own doing things I like, I like what I do.

I like being able to be around to raise our kids.

I did art projects in their schools.

- She was always out here when we were little.

We had a bunch of her pieces hanging in the house.

The studio has been in this garage, which is the house that I grew up in for the last 35 years.

So I've always been around glass.

It's just always been a part of my life.

And I never thought that I would do it.

- I didn't really think about whether the kids would want to do it or not, because I'm firm believer in them doing what they want to do.

But they're so artistic, all three of my girls are so artistic that I'm not surprised that Amy came in the business.

- I started around two and a half or three years ago.

I went part-time at my day job to focus on my button making business and then decided I had all this free time.

And my mom needed help revamping the business for the 21st century and getting online.

In exchange for doing social media and website stuff, she started teaching me.

- [Vanessa] Obviously she thinks the same way I do because she learns so fast, and it just made sense to her.

(upbeat piano music) - It's a big process.

Each piece kind of starts differently.

Sometimes I get an idea and find reference photos and draw them.

I like to do my designing in illustrator.

- Make up a design, make a pattern.

The pieces have to be cutable.

So can't be any inside right angles, because the break is gonna wanna keep going straight.

So you have to be conscious of making cutable pieces.

Picking the glass is really important, and it is time-consuming.

- I feel very fortunate that I joined my mom who has 40 years worth of glass.

So I just look slowly through all the pieces, try not to cut myself, pull them out, hold them up to the light, hold them up next to each other until I find what looks right.

Then you take a glass cutter and you score the glass.

Then you pull it apart and down and it breaks.

- So then you start cutting and grinding, (grinder buzzing) foiling.

- And then solder.

And then I usually edge my pieces in (indistinct) and then solder it again.

And then clean it, and add chain, and then photograph.

- [Vanessa] It's process.

It's a long, arduous, physical process.

- [Amy] I really do love working with my mom, and I feel very fortunate to have joined her in this business endeavor.

- She helped me clean 30 years worth of mess in our studio, (chuckles) and get it organized to where we can actually find the glass we want, so that's really awesome.

And she has brought me kicking and screaming into the 21st century, with Instagram and having a website.

And she's made this a real business.

- I feel very lucky to have joined her, and, one, get to spend this time with her, but to suck up all the knowledge that she has, she has 40 years of experience.

She's self-taught, which means that she's still constantly learning too.

So we're learning together.

But then I feel like I have a leg up over a lot of my peers my age who are teaching themselves or learning off the internet.

Just having this relationship with my mom has been really special.

- To find out more, visit aglassfantasy.com Jackson Pollock's drip painting, "Autumn Rhythm", is one of the artist's most well-known works.

And as a key example of abstract expressionism.

We head to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to look back at the exhibit Epic Abstraction, which features this work and find out more.

(gentle piano music) - We're looking at Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" from 1950.

The painting came into the collection in 1957 and it's one of the treasures of the Mets Modern collection.

Pollock is most remembered as a key figure in American art of the 20th century, for these large scale so-called drip paintings, which he started to do in the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.

These works have a great sense of immediacy for a range of reasons.

One is that, they're large, which relative to your own scale makes you feel a little bit small by comparison.

One of the ways in which Pollock played a key role in changing the very concept of painting, is that he moved the canvas from the easel to the floor.

And he also began working with common household enamel paint.

He liked this paint because it was very viscous.

And so it's the kind of paint that you can throw and it creates these dynamic drips and dribbles and these whips of paint that seems to be captured in space on the picture plane.

In the case of "Autumn Rhythm", some of the paint is thin and elegant and quite graceful.

Whereas other passages are dense and more aggressive and thicker.

And there are passages also of impasto where he's used parts of the enamel paint that have dried and created a kind of skin, a three-dimensionality on the surface of the picture even as the paint registers as flat.

When people first encounter Pollock's work, they perceive it as fully intuitive, improvisational, without any kind of plan or guiding principle.

But in fact, as you look at multiple works by Pollock, you can see that each canvas is distinct and different from another.

If you look closely at "Autumn Rhythm", to the right of center and toward the bottom, as we see it on the wall, there's a little flick of red paint.

It's a little drop of red paint.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it, because it seems so anomalous.

One wonderful thing about Pollock's technique is this embracive accident and embrace of the effects of chance.

The title, "Autumn Rhythm", the word rhythm really wonderfully ties to the sense of rhythm and cadence that's part and personal of his gestural painting style.

And what I love about this work is that this great sense of growth and evolution in a way ties to the change of seasons and the ebbs and flows of nature in the course of a year.

- Learn more at metmuseum.org.

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

The different colors of stained glass is achieved by adding specific metals to the glass.

Which of these metals is used to make a dark green color?

Is the answer A: Copper.

B: Chromium.

C: Gold.

Or D: Cobalt.

And the answer is B: Chromium.

In this segment, we traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah to view the collaborative installation, Ummah.

Located at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

Ummah teaches visitors about the Islamic faith, creates a dialogue and celebrates the Muslim community.

- After 9/11 happened, like a couple years later somebody in our community actually like reported us to the FBI.

They said, you know, suspected terrorist activity.

So these FBI agents came in and interviewed us at our house.

And I kind of stood like outside of my bedroom with the door open, and I kind of like peeked in and listened to them, and they asked a lot of questions.

They were very, very kind, very respectful.

And I remember like being kind of nervous.

I even had like a couple of nightmares where police came and took my parents away.

So I think even though it wasn't like that significant of a thing, it was a little bit nerve, made me nervous.

So after they left, my mom had a conversation with me that I think shaped a little bit of the direction of my life.

She said, Satin, I know that what you saw here today was a little bit scary.

I know, like it was kind of weird having them come here and ask us a lot of these questions, but people are really afraid right now, after, you know, like referring to what happened on 9/11.

So people are very scared.

And so that's why they're kind of going out of their way to just check everything, 'cause they wanna make sure that doesn't happen again.

And people are gonna say mean things to you that might be unkind, but don't ever, ever, ever hate America.

This country has been so incredibly generous to us, and what America means is so much greater than everything that you see right now.

This country is a land for immigrants and I don't want you to ever hate America.

I want you to take care of it the way that America took care of us.

But I remembered that, and it became a theme in my life.

You know, as I like went to high school, and I went to college and it wasn't always about misrepresentation of Islam, it was in maybe another area, but I think a lot of my purpose comes from that.

This is me taking care of my country the best way that I know how, and sometimes that means saying that I am an American, when maybe somebody else questions that.

So, ultimately I think Ummah is about the Muslim community, but as an American Muslim, I believe in a greater community of people of color that all come here to call themselves Americans.

So this exhibition is very, very meaningful to me.

- Ummah is part of the ACME Initiative.

It takes place in our lab space, and this is the first of the lab exhibitions to really engage with our local community.

So these, we're working with Salt Lake City, members of the Salt Lake City community, who happen to be Muslim, to design and conceptualize the entire space.

- Ummah means the collective community of Muslims.

A really big misconception is that Muslims are very alike, but they actually transcend borders.

So Muslims come from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, they speak many different languages.

They have different identities, they have different cultures, different foods, etcetera.

So Ummah is the collective community of people who are Muslim and their ties to another is religion.

So, it's actually a beautiful concept, because it unites people past the things that divide them.

- We love the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

I remember coming here when I was a kid and for them to approach us and say, hey, we are thinking of this idea.

We have an ACME lab, we have fourth graders that come in and they get to have this interactive experience and really have a love for art and different cultures or different themes within the exhibit, or within the museum.

So, we were sold right from the get-go.

We couldn't pass up, even if we wanted to.

And they've been great to us.

- We know that every fourth grader in Salt Lake County will have the chance to come through this museum exhibit.

And, you know, we talked about how when we were in fourth grade, when we went on a field trip, there wasn't anything representing Muslims that we could walk through.

So this is like a very, it's a very significant moment for us, when, you know, we grew up in front of TV that said, you know, red terror alert day, that was the attribution to Islam and Muslims, but now they get to have an experience that's positive.

And I think that is different and it's new, and it's in Utah.

So I think it's a blessing from the Emerald Project to be involved with ACME in this exhibition, we're so grateful.

(indistinct chatter) For the pillar section, obviously we know what the five pillars of Islam are.

So the key is to find pieces that fit the pillar and not build the pillar in a way that fits the piece.

So, we went back to the fundamentals.

So what is the first pillar?

The first pillar is, Shahada, what you recite when you convert to Islam.

What piece would best capture what this pillar is about?

And we try to engage the community a little bit with some of the pillars.

So for, Salat, which is the second pillar.

That's the pillar that obligates each Muslim to pray five times a day.

We wanted to represent Muslims in the community.

So we had some young, younger, or younger Muslims, some of the kids in our community who actually are able to recite it correctly, record those prayers so you can actually listen to them.

For the Ramadam pillar, which is Sawm.

We had our team actually come in and paint.

Paint these clocks that represent from dawn to dusk, which is when we fast for the month of Ramadan.

That one was a little bit more of like, you know, we get to be a little bit more involved with that pillar and paint it and decorate it and design it.

It's a combination of finding the right piece to meet the pillar, and also engaging the community.

- The community section is really, really beautiful to me, because it's literally different people within Salt Lake, within Utah, within different backgrounds who contribute things that represent Islam to them, whether it's their own little handheld Qur'an, or a bracelet, or a Misbaha.

I think it's great that they can literally be a part of the exhibit.

Even if they're coming through, they still have an opportunity to fill out the paper and bring something later on.

So they don't really get to miss the boat on participating.

And the other part of the exhibit that I absolutely love is the Qur'an we have under the glass, because, you know, no matter everything else going on in the world, me as a Muslim I know that is my source.

That is the book, that is the faith that I go back to at the end of the day, and that is my truth.

And that's why it's in the center of the exhibit, because that is the center of our faith, that is the pillar that strengthens us and holds us together.

- If I have a message to share with newcomers to the museum or someone who's maybe never met a Muslim or has had very little interaction with Islam and Muslims, I would say that it is a completely safe space.

The goal is not for you to walk away with this understanding or, you know, one, two, three bullet points as much as it is to hold a space in your mind that Islam is something.

You may not know that something, and that's okay, but know that it is something that may not necessarily be represented in the media.

There are things Islam is, and there are things Islam is not.

We're using the space to showcase that and separate what Islam is from ideology, separate what Islam is from culture.

So it's okay to come here, it's okay to walk away with questions, it's okay to come here and maybe not even change your mind, but the point is that we wanna make sure that everybody feels welcome.

And hopefully you can attend some of our dialogues and programming, so that we can engage in a deeper conversation.

- For more information, visit umfa.utah.edu/ummah.

What do you imagine when you hear the words chain mail?

Do you picture historical pieces of armor that dates back hundreds of years?

Or perhaps the intricate weaving of tiny metal rings?

For Reno artist, Catherine Sweet, she pictures both and so much more.

Here is how she creates beautiful designs of wearable art.

(gentle music) - I have been weaving chain mail for about 20 years now.

I describe my art as wearable art.

Chain mail is a very ancient form of armor.

Chain mail was actually discovered in a Celtic grave over 2,700 years ago.

We have through history now discovered that there are over 1000 patterns of chain mail that are out there.

Chain mail has progressed, obviously from what the Knights and warriors used to wear to now it is this, just this beautiful creation that a lot of people are wearing in jewelry.

I take chain mail and I make it beautiful.

And I make it to where people want to learn about it, to where they want to wear it, to where they want to see it.

And I want people to look at it and say, hey, this is an ancient art form.

This is an ancient form of how people would manipulate wire.

Let's make it beautiful, let's make it contemporary.

The pieces that I create are tops, earrings, bracelets, key chains, necklaces.

I try not to limit myself to just one style or one piece of chain mail.

(upbeat music) When I get my wire, it comes to me on a spool.

And it could come to me in 200 feet, 400 feet, 600 feet.

It can be copper wire, it can be galvanized, it can be iron, it could be bronze, it can be stainless steel.

I take that wire and I hand wrap it around a steel dowel and you make a really tight quail of wire.

(Dremel buzzing) I come in with a Dremel and I will cut that 20 feet of wire.

And what falls off of that dowel are perfectly round links.

You take your links that fall off of that Dremel and you just take two pair of flat nose pliers, and you sit and weave chain mail.

When I'm actually working with the wire and my pliers slip, I gouge my fingers.

I have blisters, I have calluses.

This is something that I do all for the sake of my art.

A piece can take anywhere from an hour to months to make.

And depending on the weave, depending on the wire, depending on obviously the size of the piece, it can take a very long time.

(gentle music) It does take a lot of patience to weave, for instance, a top.

And if you are looking for a certain way to do it or a certain style on that you're trying to get on the top, it is going to take a lot of patience.

Because sometimes you even have to go back and undo what you have done.

It can be very frustrating.

There's been a few times that I've thrown my pliers, but the end result can be absolutely stunning.

What I hear a lot as a chain mail artist is, "That's so beautiful, I could never wear it."

They feel that it's too bulky and too big for them.

When I design a piece, I put on leather straps and it crisscrosses in the back.

The weight distribution is amazing.

And a top may weigh four pounds, maybe five.

When I design it, you don't tell that the weight is there.

And when you feel the chain mail, it's very fluid.

There's no pinching, there's no poking.

It is a metal fabric.

And to be able to take wire and make it into a piece of functional art, just the feeling is absolutely amazing.

- Discover more at facebook.com/niteknd.

And that wraps it up for this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

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

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] 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.

(upbeat music)