- In this edition of "ARTEFFECTS," the functional artwork of Roundwood Furniture.

- There's a total joy in being able to provide a second life for something.

- [Beth] Reinterpreting a historic event through dance.

- I was really amazed to see how those movement ideas played out in the elevator.

(bright upbeat music) - [Beth] An imaginative, custom bakery.

- We needed to do some really fun cakes, a lot of sculpted cakes, that is really much like 3D artwork that you could also get to eat.

- [Beth] And take a look at the art of twisting metal.

- Cutting fire pits allows me to bring out my creative side that I didn't even know I really had until just a few years ago.

It's really rewarding to bring people's visions to life.

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

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

Meg and Dillard Myers.

The Nevada Arts Council.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell.

And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and will welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

In our featured segment, Roundwood Furniture is a collective of wood sculptures on the north shore of Lake Tahoe who create one of a kind artistic furniture inspired by nature's designs.

Let's visit the Roundwood Studio and see how they give repurposed material a second life as functional works of art.

(bright upbeat music) - Roundwood Furniture is located on the shore of North Lake Tahoe in Kings Beach, California and is sort of an art collective of individuals that pour heart and soul into building functional art, predominantly one of a kind artistic furniture.

Functional art to me is a beautiful sculpture that functions in a way that you use it everyday in your life as opposed to something that's static and non-interactive, something that provides more than just visual enjoyment and has a three dimensional purpose.

(bright upbeat music) The location of the Sierras and Lake Tahoe in general to me has felt like a cathedral of mother nature's explosive diversity.

And 20 years ago, I was coming out of one backpacking trip out of Destination Wilderness and being completely immersed in the visuals of all these different branches and roots and repeatedly looking at a stump that turns into what looks like a couch, inspired me to start building functional art furniture out of that stuff.

There's nature's uniqueness in each piece.

So the ethos of Roundwood Furniture is basically celebrating the beauty in the organic source of wood.

And we're predominantly repurposing what's available to us that's sustainable and has a story behind it because there's a total joy in being able to provide a second life for something.

(bright upbeat music) If the piece came from up here in Lake Tahoe, let's say, and it saw 60 to 80 years of bright sun and smashing water and sandblasting from the beach, it has character, it has nature's tattoo in it and that makes it absolutely unique to nothing else in the world.

It has its own very identity.

(bright upbeat music) Driftwood is super, super fun to work with because you not only have the piece that's unique but a drastic exposed story of what happened while waves and rocks shaped that piece.

(bright upbeat music) In my beginning years, I actually forged the forest for dead wood and brought that into sculpture.

These days we're working with farmers down in the Sacramento Valley that are replanting English and Claro Walnut from orchards.

So as walnut orchards are being retired and replanted, the 80 year old trees that they're retiring have so much story and beauty rot within 'em that it's a perfect platform for us to try to expose the twisting of the grain and the rolling of the fabric of the wood.

Any character in the wood itself, in the tree, in the slice, in the burl that has a unique fabric to it.

There's these dynamic rarities that we're trying to find that make the peace really draw you in at the end.

(upbeat music) There's something that nature does so well with asymmetry, but balance.

I would say that nature driven furniture design is a central core of how I look at designing pieces.

So not just the wood itself and revering the harmonious vibrance of the wood.

With an epoxy pore process, for instance, I have special tricks at different times to trick that epoxy into behaving more like mother nature does.

So I want bubbling molten, different colors.

You've got fire which is represented by the magma series.

Water which is the aqua series.

Astro series takes care of air and then Terra for earth.

And so you got all those fundamental properties in mother nature, again, sort of nature-driven design.

I think one of my favorite parts in the creative process is it's all about what I haven't figured out yet.

I usually go in with about a 50% game plan.

So I don't mock out to detail anything, kinda like building a song, and you add layers and you step away and you come back in and I really can lose myself and any thoughts in the world to that process.

And I feel like the vibration in me is its happiest it's ever been.

Every piece that comes out of this studio has a three dot logo somewhere on it, and that comes from the ellipsis of to be continued.

So dot, dot, dot, to be continued.

Where that was born from was me realizing that even though this piece is completely done, there's at least three more projects, sister pieces, ideas that were born from building this piece that I'm dying to try.

So this idea is not finished yet.

The piece is done, the idea grows on, that's what, for me, defines me as an artist because that artistic process of learning just never stops.

That's why it's, in my opinion, one of the funnest things you could be doing with your life is creating functional art.

- For more information, visit roundwoodfurniture.com.

Choreographer Ari Christopher created "This Car Up" a dance film and art installation that examines and reinterprets the catalyzing events of the Tulsa race massacre.

We head to Tulsa, Oklahoma to learn more.

(gentle guitar music) - I felt like looking at the story of Sarah Page and Dick Rowland in the elevator was a way that I could contribute to the storytelling and the civic healing around the Greenwood race massacre or Tulsa race massacre.

The film for me is a way to look at all these things and explore different relationships.

(foots thudding) Texture.

Maybe they're friends, they're lovers, they are going somewhere special, secret.

Please remember what we talked about the boat at the pelvis.

- Yes.

- I proposed the piece to the Greenwood Art Project well before COVID was on my radar.

Oh, one other, that one is like a door rather than a scoop.

And then I also needed to find dancers who were already working together and sharing germs, so that we could make our safe bubble for them and they could take their masks off.

And then this time can we also loop.

When you reach the end can you just right away, it should end on a four or a five, wait for the next one or maybe.

And then we met by Zoom for about three hours to rehearse.

They were artists, they showed up and they brought their whole selves, and they were really great to work with.

All I need is for you to enjoy yourself.

- We are, we are.

- Yeah, 'cause this is gonna be a long, it's gonna be a long day, it's gonna be a long weekend.

(upbeat music) - There was a kind of light aired wonderment in the first scene.

We're in all white, there's lots of light, it's about a proposal, it's romantic.

Like Romo was working on her romantic engagement squeal.

And so there's this like lightheartedness that makes that part more fun to engage with.

(woman gasping) (casts chattering) - You're right.

- The romantic windows and the white walls can help bring forward the story that maybe Sarah and David were romantic and the black void, that black box, they almost seem like especially when they're wearing white, they almost seem like ghosts, kind of just suspended in time.

Yes, just like that.

And then in the adversarial section I had a really hard time choreographing for them.

- It can be really touchy to go to that aggressive side.

So that was a big challenge yesterday.

I think it was good to check in with each other.

(upbeat music) - Don't wanna make another piece of art or culture that could be another piece of evidence that Black men are dangerous, but we still have to address it, right?

To be responsible and to tell the story.

Ready?

Punch.

I was really amazed to see how those movement ideas played out in the elevator so differently than in the larger spaces.

It seems to put a magnifying glass and really push up the intensity of those exchanges.

(cast screaming) (gentle guitar music) I'm aware that I'm probably one of the only White artists involved in the Greenwood Art Project.

When we were in the black box we wore whites.

And I think about five years ago.

The dip, the dip.

- Yeah.

- Can you be?

- Yeah.

- That would've made me real nervous and real upset, and question my right to be a part of this.

Now I question more my responsibility to be a part of it.

I remember when my mom.

Okay, so we were walking around the pond at the Greenwood Cultural Center in probably 1988 or '89 and I had been going to school in North Tulsa as one of the only White kids at school since kindergarten.

And she stopped and she looked at me and she said, "Do you know what happened here?"

I said, "No."

And she said, "There was a massacre."

(gentle piano music) And so I looked around and I was like, "Where are the memorials?

Where are the plaques?"

I didn't think it was true, honestly.

I'm interested in it because I'm still processing.

But maybe now it's the contact point and flexing the fingers back.

Dance can't really teach you the specifics of time and date and location and address and all of these things.

So if it keeps its value, it keeps its value because it activates empathy in the audience.

And I wanted to put forward this idea that you could be a little more careful about what you assert to be the reality of things.

(suspenseful music) - For more information, go to greenwoodartproject.org/tulsa-m. Now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

Which scientist inspired the design for the rolling office chair in the 1800s by adding wheels to his chair to get around his study faster?

Is the answer A, Thomas Edison, B, Frank Lloyd Wright, C, Charles Darwin, or D, Albert Einstein?

And the answer is C, Charles Darwin.

Artistic Whisk is a bakery that makes edible works of art.

Located in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The shops cake artists render colorful and creative cakes for a variety of occasions.

Their custom designs are truly eye-catching.

- So our main focus at the Artistic Whisk in our wedding cakes is to always give the clients what they want.

So I usually meet with clients lately on Zoom or Skype to get their design and their ideas.

So most of our outdoor weddings are actually styrofoam cakes.

So fake inside decorated with fondant, edible materials on the outside and then all the cake served, the guest, is actually kept in the kitchen in a nice room temperature room.

So no one knows they didn't eat that beautiful cake on display.

So not only do we do wedding cakes here at the Artistic Whisk, but we also do a lot of celebration cakes, grooms cakes, anniversaries, graduation.

And we get to do some really fun cakes.

A lot of sculpted cakes that is really much like 3D artwork that you could also get to eat.

(upbeat music) - The team here at the Artistic Whisk is kind of something that you've always wanted in your whole working experience.

It's something that I've always wanted in my life, much more like a family team vibe that we have going on here.

- Earlier this year, we all decided to get matching tattoos 'cause we all are kind of tattoo people.

We all did different pieces to a recipe 'cause that's kind of how we are here.

We're a small team, but we're very strong together.

I have sugar and salt, sweet and salty.

- I myself ended up with butter and vanilla beans.

- I have the scales.

- I have baking powder and an egg - Mine is flour or wheat.

- We're all very much friends not only in the workplace, but outside as well.

I think that's what makes us work so well together.

I've never airbrushed anything before I worked here and it very quickly became one of my favorite things to do.

The cake I was just working on with the mermaid scales, that actually uses a stencil.

So it's done much differently, it's much more time consuming, a lot more delicate.

You have to be a lot more patient with this.

And it's done with just a little stencil that you have to actually tape or pin on to the cake itself which the cake also has to be fondant which is much different too.

You can't do this technique on a buttercream cake because it has to be a firm surface in order to use this stencil.

So you pin the stencil onto the cake and then I airbrush certain colors.

For this cake it was different colors, mermaid colors, like a dark royal blue, a lavender color and a deep purple.

So I airbrush and make sure those colors kind of fade into one another.

And then after they dry a little bit, I pull the the stencil off of there and then very delicately I have to go back with a paint brush and clean in between those little lines because the stencil is also very, very fine.

So it's sometimes leaks a little bit of color.

In order to get those very clean, crisp lines you have to go back and clean sometimes a little bit.

- I feel like one of the most exciting cakes that we've all gotten to work on was one that's actually over there.

It's big tiered cake with a bunch of sugar flowers all over it.

That was a big project for all of us, one of our biggest here.

- Each one of these flowers is made petal by petal, that you have to roll out your gum paste first.

We actually use a pasta roller so that we can get it super, super thin.

Then we cut it out with whatever cutter we need to make the specific flower that we're working on.

(upbeat music) After you cut out each petal, then you put it onto a foam pad and then with a metal baller tool you round every single edge, ruffling it, thinning it out even more, making it look more life-like.

Depending on the flower that you're making, some of the pedals have to dry and sit overnight before you can build the flower to itself.

Some of them such as roses, you build them petal by petal onto its little stem, onto the bulb.

So it's really cool to see all of those come to life.

- So everything we put on the cakes usually for the most part is edible.

So our airbrushing is all edible, our hand painting is all edible.

And for the tree stump cake we did use airbrushing and a combination of hand painting.

So just depending on which parts of the cake we were painting.

I would say all the fungi was hand painted.

I would say transporting our cakes is the scariest part of our job.

We have a delivery van now that's just new this year.

If our cakes are very tall or if they're really skinny and narrow, we always drive a wooden down the middle of the entire cake keeping it from tipping over all the way, kind of is another added support each tier, I would say.

So that way it's not collapsing on itself.

We use a plant-based plastic straw so it's biodegradable, it's not regular plastic.

So that's what we do.

- To learn more head to the artisticwhisk.com.

Jim Moffitt of Fernley is no stranger to metalwork.

A few years back this welder found a new passion, transforming metal orbs into unique fire pits, each 360 degree creation different than the last.

- My name's Jim Moffitt, founder and creator behind Twisted Steel.

(upbeat music) I make fire pits out of maybe mine casings, old propane tanks, and just about anything I can find.

(upbeat music) I worked construction most of my life, but I opened a welding shop in 2000 and mainly did fences and some fancy gates and whatnot.

I started creating fire pits in, I believe June of 2014.

The first step of creating a fire pit is that chalk outline which can take anywhere from a day to a week or more.

Then the next step is to grab the plasma cutter and start cutting on it.

(upbeat music) (metal crackling) I can cut one in probably five or six hours.

(upbeat music) Today I'm cutting a fire pit for a client that lives in Tahoe.

Her and her husband are avid elk hunters so we decided to go with two bull elk fighting, elk standing in the trees.

And she also wanted bears, so I added a mama bear, a papa bear and three baby bears to represent their family of five.

(metal clinking) It's really rewarding to bring people's visions to life.

A lot of my clients have no artistic skills at all.

One was an accountant and she just relied on me to bring her vision to life in a fire pit.

When you create something that is basically their idea, there's no feeling like it.

It's hard to pick a favorite, they're all just super fun.

My dragon fire pit had flying dragons, burning up the forest, dragon on the ground with just stars and space and burnt trees as well as living trees.

It was just fun and came together really easy.

Once you start the fire and the fire in the background really makes things come to life.

(upbeat music) Cutting fire pits allows me to bring out my creative side that I didn't even know I really had until just a few years ago.

That looks good now.

I really wasn't sure about this when I started Twisting Steel and started doing this.

And I was in my 50s when I did this and in my youth I had no idea I would end up here and it's really neat to find yourself and find something you love and just go with it.

- You can see more of Moffitt's metal creations by visiting twistedsteelnv.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

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

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thank for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

Meg and Dillard Myers.

The Nevada Arts Council.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell.

And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music)