(upbeat electronica music) - Hey, out there, Akronites!

Welcome, once again, to Around Akron with Blue Green, and wow, do we have an amazing show ahead of us today!

I'm gonna check out a boutique.

I'm gonna head up to Kent and check out an art gallery and cultural center.

I sit down with a local, fine oil painter, Danny Ratcliff, and I'm gonna check out this place, Klein Seafood.

Now to kick this show off today, I'm gonna head over near Copley Circle and check out a new place called The Sassy Sunflower.

And with a name like The Sassy Sunflower, I got to see what that place is all about.

(mellow guitar music) - I'm a full-time art teacher for Akron Public Schools, 24ish years, something like that.

I'm also a single mom to an 18 year old ornery kid, musician, who is quite often found downstairs in the man-cave.

I also run an entrepreneurs group for new, women entrepreneurs.

I support about 10 other female artists here.

That's the mission of The Sassy Sunflower, which is to support people who are just getting started, or just starting to be comfortable in their own shine of their own success, so I try very hard to uplift those people, and so I'm kind of on 24-7.

I work work work, but it's not work.

It's life and it's fun, and it's what I enjoy.

So, I'm grateful for my life.

(upbeat instrumental music) First and foremost, what I know about this building is it used to be Just That Twist, which was run by a local woman named Janet, and she is beloved by this community.

She set up the foreground for everything for me to be here.

When I first moved in, she gave me a tip of the hat, which just really meant a lot because the community loved her and loved her shop.

And the community doesn't really have any shops like this, so I think they were kind of thirsty for it a little bit.

This house has always just been very charming and pretty, but has a story.

And that's why I came in the first time was I wanted to know what the story was with this house.

Why is this house a shop?

And what does it look like inside?

And when I got in the first time, I think, like everybody, they come in and they just look around and all the woodwork, and the creaky floors, and the floors that go this way and that way, and you know, there's just, there's life here.

And you feel that people were here and touched this place.

So, and that's what my shop is all about.

So I was excited to get into this building that's from mid 1800s.

It's had many updates done to it, but nothing that has taken the charm away from it, which is something that I love.

(upbeat instrumental music) My one, big, sassy family.

They are the only reason that this works.

I support about 10 other female artists and people come in and say, what, how, what is this?

Is this a consignment shop?

And I feel like, ew, that's bad words.

That puts a bad connotation to it.

No, it is not a consignment shop.

I have built relationships with the ladies that work here and I'm proud of them.

Some of them have come into art later in life.

One of an Akron Public Schools, retired art teacher decided that five years before she retired, she wanted to be an artist.

Even though she's an art teacher, you know?

She just couldn't find what it was she wanted to do and she's now our glass artist, and she does classes, and she's pretty incredible.

And then I've got a new mommy.

You know, she's got, I say new mommy, but she's got five kids, so some of which are hers, biologically, and some of hers are hers by choice.

And she's my creative partner, Stephanie, and she and I have built several businesses within this business.

We now have Stephy Jo Fashions, and SJ Earrings, and fun, fun jewelry, and Sassan Snark.

So, we're developing a community of working artists here that probably have other things going on in their life, but this is the one thing that they really love.

And so we work hard together and we play hard together and we just, we help lift each other and work together to make this place, called The Sassy Sunflower.

(upbeat instrumental music) Everyone asks how The Sassy Sunflower name came about.

It's actually my nickname.

My great uncle, who was a big farmer in Tennessee, used to tease me, and along with all of the boys on the farm would tease me, and he would say, your sassy as a sunflower, but mean as a rattlesnake.

You know, you got to get mean when all the boys are picking on you.

(woman chuckling) So, but it stuck.

And he always called me sassy sunflower.

So, what better name for a shop?

(woman laughing) You know?

(upbeat instrumental music) Sunflowers were a huge part of my life.

I did a lot of gardening with my grandma, so I learned very early that if you put something in the ground it would grow.

And so when my grandma was out back, and I grew up in the city during the school year, but during like, summers and whatnot, I would go to the farm.

So that's where the farm came in.

But with my grandma, she always had these gardens, and always had flowers, and so she was working out back one time and she was planting things, so I brought a little bowl of marbles and I started planting the marbles.

And instead of saying to me, no, honey marbles don't grow.

She planted sunflowers where the marbles were and the marbles grew into sunflowers.

And it's just one of those things that is dear to me and makes me feel good to think about it, and I'm tearing up.

(woman laughing) Sorry.

(upbeat instrumental music) - Next up, I'm gonna head up to Kent and check out Standing Rock Cultural Arts Center.

Now this place does so much in Kent that I can't put it in five or six minutes.

It should be an actual documentary.

Let's go see what they're all about.

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Jeff] Standing Rock Cultural Arts began as the North Water Street Gallery in 1992.

I'm one of the founders, along with Mary Gilmore, who started the North Water Street Gallery.

She was an art student at Kent State, and both of us had noticed that there was an abandoned building at 257 North Water Street that looked like it could potentially be an art space.

And she knew a lot of artists from Kent State, and I knew a lot of artists that were traveling in shows because they did jewelry and ceramics, and we thought, wouldn't it be nice for all of the artists that we know just to have a home where we could have rotating art shows?

So we talked to the landlord at the time and it was definitely affordable when we put both of our incomes together, and so we started renting out 257 North Water Street in October 30th was our first art opening, 1992.

(upbeat instrumental music) So we incorporated Standing Rock Cultural Arts in 1999.

That name came from Adrian, who was a local bartender at the time.

She thought Standing Rock would be a good name because there's a Standing Rock that has a long history in Kent.

It's a rock in the river that relates to native tribes coming there to have council.

Whenever there was a dispute, they would sit on this rock.

They would pass the peace pipe.

It's about a mile from here in the river.

It's very a huge rock.

So we became Standing Rock Cultural Arts, and our mission was to build community through the arts and provide arts access for all.

And then we've been doing that ever since 2000, when we got our nonprofit status.

We'd be getting Ohio Arts Council Grants every year and other grants to help fulfill our mission.

(upbeat instrumental music) - Standing Rock has also helped obtain funding so there can be murals painted within this overall arts district of Kent, and we have had two murals that we were able to fund and commission artists to paint for us.

And one is actually at the site of this building right here that we're located at a 300 North Water Street.

That particular mural is the May 4th Memorial Mural, and that was made by Emily Buckingham, made to honor the four victims who tragically died on the May 4th, 1970 shooting at Kent State University.

The first mural though that Standing Rock has actually commissioned was the Love Mural that's actually a block away from us, at the side of the building of Scribbles Coffee Roasters.

The mural was actually done by Edwin George and it's just known as Love Mural to celebrate love.

(upbeat instrumental music) It's important to have a place like Standing Rock Cultural Arts to just serve as a nice, creative hub for the overall community, either with artists on their particular medias that they work with, or just with anyone who is a fan of the arts and loves the arts, just so they can check out like what other creators are doing while there might not been an opportunity to provide the experience necessary.

And that's like, that was the hope, or as the overall goal of something like Standing Rock Cultural Arts to promote art, music, and even cultural events and activities throughout the many years it has been around.

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Jeff] So, when we started getting more grants after 2000, after we became a nonprofit, we started to develop new programs as well.

One of the first programs that we developed back in 2003 was the Standing Rock International Short Film Festival.

And at that time we were still doing super eight movies and we showed 16 millimeter films, as well as videos, VHS videos at that time.

We would collect films from all around the world and we would screen them at the Kiva Auditorium on Kent State's campus, which was a nice place to do it.

And we actually had a super eight projector that worked, and we had a 16 millimeter projector that worked, and we used all these different mediums.

So that program developed into something that happens every year at the Kent Stage now.

(upbeat instrumental music) We had to move in 2014, we had a good run at the place at 257 North Water Street, but eventually the building was condemned.

A lot of exhibitions, including Mark Mothersbaugh, a member of Devo, showed his work there several times and a lot of great artists throughout the years there.

We were given notice that we had to move.

And fortunately, someone took pity on us and opened up the space that we're in right now at 300 North Water Street.

Previous to us being here, it was a storage unit with six separate storage places in here, and the landlord said, I think this would be a nice spot for your gallery.

We talked to them about the rent.

It ended up being twice as much as what we were paying over there, but we were able to get the support from our community to kick in the extra money we needed.

We put in bamboo floors, we put in solar power, we put in a new lighting system, and we held our first art show here in November, 2014.

We look forward to another 29 years of bringing art to the community and celebrating the spirit of creativity here in Kent, Ohio.

(upbeat instrumental music) - Next up I visit local artists, Danny Ratcliff.

By day he's a contractor.

By night, or when he find time, he's actually a fine, oil painter.

Let's go see what Danny Ratcliff is all about.

(upbeat instrumental music) - As a child, as a young kid, my brother was good at art, drawing pictures, and he was six years older than me.

Of course, I want to emulate what my brother does, so I started drawing.

(upbeat instrumental music) I work with charcoal, pastels, and oil.

Those are my three mediums that I put my most emphasis on.

And oil painting, it's just something I began experimenting with on my own.

I gravitated toward it through the education that I got from my high school teacher, Mr.

Wise.

We learned to paint with poster paints, and poster paints was really a very much like oil paints, except there is a water base and they're not as rich color wise as oils, but you can get, you can do many of the same things.

You can mix and get the similar colors and effects.

And the only difference is, for the most part, it's not oil based.

So it was a lot of learning that I picked up from that because it enabled me to manipulate and learn color before I even began to do oil painting.

Oil painting was a different monster because it didn't dry fast.

It took a long time to dry and it and took a different process, a different thought process to get good results.

(upbeat instrumental music) Oil paint is far more than just a color that you lay inside the lines.

It's more like a medium that you would you with the process of thought, like a sculpture.

There's a richness to oil paints, and there's also a similar richness to acrylic paints, which is also a painting medium that I've experimented with because I liked the way that it does dry.

But it's not as, it's not the same as tempera paints, or poster paints, because they don't mix the same way.

You lose a lot of the ability to get harmony and realistic color saturation with acrylic paint that you can get with oil paints.

Oil paint, you can get true, realistic color saturation, but it's a completely different thought process because it doesn't dry fast.

You gotta be patient.

You gotta know how to layer it.

You gotta know how to apply it.

Some of the most profound and beautiful works of art are abstract.

In order for me to truly understand how to be a good painter, I studied with abstract instructors almost exclusively when I first went to Cleveland Institute of Art and declared my major.

And it was by way of me understanding how to use and manipulate paint as a means to an end by itself without ever applying it to realism.

And that was a very powerful lesson, but alongside that same lesson, I studied portrait painting.

(upbeat instrumental music) Operating track hoes and Bobcat heavy equipment to laying brick, block, and stone.

It's a block of anywhere up to 65 pounds per block.

And we also pour concrete, so we are really there where the rubber meets the road.

So we're really, very physically involved in the work that I do.

We're always in the background.

We represent what's behind you, you know, what's in the shadows.

What the horizon looks like.

You know, what's the landscape of a city looks like.

That's what we represent.

We are those who build and construct and rehab all types of things that are man-thought, but rarely ever advertised as a form of art.

Well, the way I work, the way I paint is like a construction worker.

And the reason why I can get amazing results is because the fusion of both education of art and the education of construction work.

(man chuckling) I feel connected to old school, the Michelangelo, and the Leonardo da Vinci's, and those guys, people know them for their art, but they were construction workers.

You know?

(man chuckling) They were builders, and sculptors, and laid stone, and their work, their art, was not considered art.

They were just simply called craftsmen.

They did all of these things.

It wasn't just, they went to art school to be a painter.

That was just one of their things that they could do.

And that's where I am.

I am that, I am that new reality, or old reality (man laughing) of a very physically structured mindset towards making art.

(upbeat instrumental music) - Now to wrap this show up today, you guessed it, Klein Seafood.

Now, if you need fresh, seasonal seafood in Akron, you're probably coming to Klein Seafood.

Let's go see what this place is all about.

(moody instrumental music) - My dad would take me on a truck.

I remember being in the truck on deliveries.

We used to do a lot of wholesale, and then we pick up fish in Sandusky.

I remember taking fish to Craftsman Park.

I was pretty little.

I was probably four or five, six years old.

We'd take a thousand pounds of yellow perch out there for a weekend for a big, big fish fries on a Friday night.

By the time I was eight, I'd be down the street.

And it was around the corner.

When I was eight years old, I'd be there half a day.

I couldn't really take a whole day.

(man chuckling) (moody instrumental music) Uncle Joe started in the late twenties, really.

And he was delivering cottage cheese up to Sandusky.

He started bringing yellow perch back and selling it here.

And that's when, how he'd started.

And it back then he was delivering statewide in the forties and fifties, Cincinnati, all over.

But back then it was blue pike, and blue pike became extinct 'cause they over fished it.

And every once in a while, we'll get a walleye that looks like a blue pike, which was smaller.

It's real blue looking, but they were smaller.

Bigger than a sauger but smaller than a walleye.

And those, that put him out of business in about 1956, 57.

They overfished it, because he was delivering.

His was all wholesale.

He did a little bit of retail, but mostly wholesale is what he did.

So, back then they had these different clubs that were around.

There's a bunch of German clubs in town here.

They would do a, call it club style.

Cut the fins off in the back, they'd take the fin off top and bottom and leave it whole, and fry it like that.

(moody instrumental music) Just over the years I've dealt with different people.

And oh, probably we started going direct probably around 2002 or 4.

When I started getting a lot out of Boston, Virginia, we'd been dealing with for probably at least 50 years, where they'd come right up to us every Sunday.

They come twice a week now, Sundays and Wednesdays out of Virginia.

And then we get the Boston truck one or two times a week.

Usually once on Thursday, sometimes Thursday, Saturday, sometimes Tuesday.

Depends on the holidays.

Just different people I've dealt with.

Guys that sell mussels.

The guys that sell ocean perch, cod, you know, just all kinds of different purveyors up there that we deal with.

Probably two to four days by the time we get it.

It's pretty good out of Boston.

Virginia is similar, maybe a little bit longer, but pretty similar.

(upbeat instrumental music) I think people think that you could just go get fish, you know, no matter what, any day and have it fresh sometimes.

They think you can get anything any time, and you probably could, but you'd pay a whole lot of money for it.

Every day getting something, where we get stuff two, one, two, three times a week is a lot.

Even that's a lot.

So, to get it every day, there's some that think that.

It's not a hard business.

It's hard physically.

A lot of of physical labor.

You gotta be here, and you see what I did this morning, put all this in, and it takes time.

(mellow instrumental music) We have dinners, a certain amount of dinners.

We used to have walleye on the menu.

We can't do that anymore.

Just got too expensive.

We also do fish by the pound, like a pound of clean shrimp, or a pound of scallops, or smelts, half pound, whatever.

We cook by the pound also.

That widens what the variety that they can get.

We'll do a whole white bass, or walleye, flounder, or whatever, buffalo.

It doesn't doesn't matter.

So we do sell a lot of that.

That's very big these days.

It seems like a lot of people eat out, so yeah, we're busy with that for sure.

(mellow instrumental music) We cut all the fish, and they buy the whole fish, we cut it.

No charge.

The only thing we charged for is heads and bones.

We do sell those now.

And some people, they want those cuts.

We charge a dollar a pound to gut 'em, but we clean the fish the way they want it.

Now, we do that.

Sometimes people want fish cleaned.

A lot of fishermen will bring 'em in and we clean 'em for 'em.

Give us a couple of days and we get 'em done in a day.

It's usually a day.

But, you know, we do that.

(mellow instrumental music) That was good.

You learn different people and you know 'em over years, and their grandparents, and sometimes their great grandparents I've known since I was a kid, literally.

Knew many families, kids I went to school, their fathers and mothers.

Yeah, it's neat to be a part of it.

(mellow instrumental music) - Thank you once again for watching this episode of Around Akron with Blue Green.

Now, if you have any questions or any comments, you just want to drop me an email, you can reach me at www,aroundAkronwithbluegreen.com or you can catch me on social media.

Thank you and have an amazing day.

(man singing) (upbeat electronica music) Head up to Kent, the Standing Rock Cultural Arts Center.

That car was a little loud.

More than what I can list in five or six minutes.

Now you're gonna check out.

(man jabbering) Okay, get that one again.

Okay.

(man sighing) Next up.

That's a wrap.

(upbeat electronica music)