- On this episode of "Making," we throw down with some talented ceramic artists at a repurposed crane yard and bring the hammer down with W.F.

Norman to see how their architectural metal works have withstood the test of time.

That's all next, here, on "Making."

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle music) Hello and welcome to "Making," the show dedicated to makers and the artistry of their craft.

I'm your host, Matt Burchett.

Thank you for joining us.

This week, we begin here at Belger Crane Yard Studios; an art complex dedicated to providing studio and exhibition space for artists.

- Belger Crane Yard Studios is a ceramic studio that caters to locals here in the Kansas City community that are at every range of level, whether that's people who are just trying to find clay for the first time or that individual who's a professional.

We have multiple forms of education that is catering to not only adults, but also catering to children.

We have summer camps, four to six week adult classes, we also have date night programming on weekends.

So if anyone wants to just decide whether they want to jump into ceramics and maybe not make a full commitment for a full four week course, they can try our date night programming.

But then our studio itself also houses a lot of people who are just trying to have their own practice here, renting full-time, coming in here and just trying to provide themselves the time to just really develop their ceramic practice.

And we also have an international residency program.

We have people coming from, predominantly the United States, but also elsewhere from other countries coming and seeking our studio out to make all of their contemporary work.

This is a great ceramic studio that actually facilitates a lot of different types of clay.

So we not only have a litany of pottery wheels that allow people to really get practice in making their pottery, but we also have a plaster making facility.

And so that allows people to take a different approach to clay.

Allows them to think more of mold making, whether that's press molding or slip casting.

But we also have a lot of tools and facilities here that allow you to investigate processes like coil building, hand building, using all the different types of clay bodies as well.

So we try to make sure that people are not only just focused on wheel throwing, but we have all the different clay processes available, here on the studio floor.

I think that clay always depends on the person and the process depends on the person, too.

I always just think that a cup is the perfect place to start.

I am biased and I'm a potter, and so I find there to be a really wonderful, beautiful human history within pottery.

And I know that our studio has a really great reputation of being a part of the really incredible Kansas City pottery history here.

And so I always suggest, if anyone really wants to get into figuring out what they want to do with ceramics, to come in here and figure out a way that they can make a cup for the first time; it's the perfect place to start.

So we have four and six week adult courses here at Belger, and so it's really great.

It's a time for adults who want to have a longer extended dive into developing not only their practice, but learn more about the ceramic medium.

They could jump into a wheel throwing course, they can go into a course that's maybe more specified and past the beginner level.

You have everything from hand building and sculpting.

For instance, with Gina Pisto, she'll be going over how to hand build flowers and how to do more sculptural elements when it comes to the clay.

But when it comes to things that will be happening tonight, there's gonna be not only the hand building and sculpting, but we'll have beginners who are on the potter's wheel who are just jumping into clay for the first time.

And so it's a really great opportunity for them to see what it's like to be a potter and what it means to have all the skills to create one.

- [Instructor] But if you put your hand here, - I think there's a lot of things that are really alluring about pottery and ceramics in general.

I think that there's a tactility with ceramics and with clay, actually, more specifically.

The plasticity of clay allows you to have this immediate record of touch that I find really important.

I love that I can find my fingerprints within the clay.

I also love that it gives people a platform to tell stories.

I think that storytelling is one of my favorite things about clay and I am constantly and incessantly writing words on my own work, but it gives everyone in their own way the ability to tell their story, another story, or engage with, all in all, just engaging with other people.

Everyone recognizes ceramics for being this beautiful utilitarian object that provides sustenance to us as human beings.

But it's great when you think about it past that point of sure it can hold liquid, it can hold food, and those are things that sustain us as people.

But it can also sustain ideas and history and a lot of what we are as humans.

So anything from a Greek vessel to a beautiful Mayan pot that shows, in great detail on the surface, the story of everyone that came from that period of time.

I mean, we find that throughout all of pottery and all of history.

And so it's not only just this incredible record keeper, but it's also this great platform to not only show visually how wonderful everything is influencing your day to day, but also just all the stories that you're developing together.

- And this is kind of the ending.

- The Artist in Residency program that we have here at Belger is a wonderful opportunity for individuals to come here to Belger and to Kansas City, be a part of this art studio and really expand their practice.

And as they're here developing their body of work, it's also a time for people here at Belger to get to know that artist and talk with them.

And we all get to exchange information, have this wonderful dialogue that begins to just blossom up in the studio.

Everyone starts trading notes, saying, what clay body can I use to improve this sculpture?

What colors will maybe activate this surface a little bit better?

And so not only do we have this great breadth of knowledge that's coming from the residents, but we privileged here at Belger get to see the passing of all these wonderful artists coming through our studios here.

And so it's just this constant learning through conversation between us, the studio members here and the residency program.

It's a really special opportunity to really get in on this ceramic material.

- Now, the first way, - I think one of my favorite things about working here at Belger, is the ability to have so many conversations that you don't expect.

I feel that it doesn't really matter how long you've been in clay; there's individuals here who are just starting and then there's others who have been here for one, two, three, five decades long.

And there seems to always be an opportunity and a new moment for someone to learn something new.

And I have never had a place before where I get to learn something new and be surprised so consistently.

And so that's a really great thing that I think that we get to experience here.

(upbeat music) (indistinct chatter) (funky music) (upbeat music) - W.F.

Norman started this business in 1898.

They actually started across the street, he and a partner.

There were as many as two dozen tin ceiling companies in the east.

There wasn't one this far out west.

And he had been involved for five years selling tin ceilings for another business, and decided to start his own sheet metal manufacturing business.

We make tin ceilings, which are the original W.F.

Norman product.

140 designs in a 1909 catalog that we still send out, or show online, that are the original designs.

And besides the catalog items where people can look on the website or look in our catalogs and buy things that have catalog numbers, an awful lot of our business has evolved into replicating pieces that are sent to us.

So businesses in New York City, or Philadelphia, or Chicago who have a building cornice that's in disrepair, and some of it's good and some of it isn't, can send to us pieces from their building and have replicated and returned to them additional ones.

Because we have the ability to take a print of what they send us, and make stamping dyes, and send them back new copper or zinc metal to put their building back the way it was maybe in 1885 or 1890.

The earliest parts of the building are the northwest corner that started as a church in 1896.

W.F.

Norman and his partner started across the street, but moved into this building and began to expand it in about 1901 or '02.

They built this office.

They added onto the factory.

Until they had a fire in 1909 that burned the whole building down.

They built it back, added on about another 1/3 in 1925, to its current size.

It's between 50,000 and 60,000 square feet, so it's in the neighborhood of 1/2 a square block.

The office is about the way it was in 1909 or 1910 when they rebuilt it.

And we haven't hardly remodeled it or added on.

It's the furniture, and the roll tops, and the fireplaces, and the beveled glass, and the original tin ceilings.

And so we like to keep it as much as possible the way it is.

We use things here that you see in museums.

Old brakes, which are bending machines, and shears, which are the cutting machines that you see in old machinery museums.

The drop hammers are 120 or 130 years old.

And the power system, you know, the belts and the pulleys, and the power system work the same way as they did early 1900s.

And we can't think of a new machine that would make it better.

We think it's the best way.

The control we have and the way to have the die set, we think it's the best way to make the ceilings.

(gentle music) My parents came to Nevada in 1978, which was the 80th year of the business, and bought it from Franklin Norman, who was W.F.

Norman's grandson.

My dad had worked in the farm implement business for 25 years or so.

He started in his 20s working for a company called Allis Chalmers in Milwaukee.

And then worked for other companies in various states that sold implements for farmers.

So he had, not just a manufacturing background, but a sales and marketing background.

It was probably very helpful in promoting and finding customers for tin ceilings.

The tin ceilings hadn't been made since the 1930s when tin ceilings sort of dried up everywhere because of the Depression, and then scarcity metal during World War II.

They made other things outta sheet metal here, some of which they'd made for decades, and some were new.

We have a whole list of things that were made.

The one we still make is temporary grave markers, which is a metal marker that cemeteries use to mark a grave while the stone is being made.

Those have been made here, it's a product that's been made here since 1918.

But they made shower stalls through the years.

They made and got brochures for home incinerators made outta sheet metal.

Nursery flats, those pans where you put starter plants in, they made those even into our time.

So they made other products.

Staying in business, never were closing down after tin ceilings went out of style.

But the equipment and the stamping dyes were here, and my parents determined that there'd be a market for it in a year or two.

Maybe by 1980 we were making tin ceilings again.

(tin rattling) (funky music) - This may be the greatest thing I have ever made.

(Matt laughing) And we're back here at Belger Ceramic Studio and I'm here with Gina.

And Gina, are you a potter or a ceramicist?

What is your job here exactly?

- I'm an artist in residence here.

I'm a ceramicist.

I wouldn't consider myself a potter so much, but I do know - [Matt] Okay.

- I do know what I'm doing on the wheel.

- Okay, well I'm sure there are fine details between the one and the other, but to the lay person, I guess they all kind of fall under one umbrella of ceramics and pottery, I guess to use to use the terms interchangeably.

- Yeah, we all use dirt, you know?

- Okay.

That's fair.

Alright, well what do we have planned for today?

- All right, so I'm gonna show you how to throw a cylinder.

So I have some clay wedged up and balled up here, and I'm gonna kind of walk you through start to finish how to do this.

- Okay.

- So I'm gonna take my ball of clay.

It's already wedged so there's no air pockets or anything in it.

- Okay.

- And I'm gonna start by just putting a little bit of water down at the center of of the wheel head, and I'm gonna smack it down.

This is my center point.

I'm gonna smack it down as close to center as possible.

- [Matt] 'Cause otherwise it's gonna pull it - [Gina] Pretty good.

- [Matt] One direction or another?

- Or else it's gonna pull it, but this is gonna be the first part of this process, is centering, which there's essentially sort of like two movements that you're doing with your hands.

You're right-handed like I am.

So your left hand is gonna be pushing and then your right hand is going to be sort of pressing down.

We're doing that as the wheel head is gonna be spinning, so that way the clay has nowhere to go but the middle.

So then it'll be centered.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And the next thing that we're gonna do, is we're going to open, so that's where we're making our first kind of entrance into the clay, so we can pull a wall.

To do that, I'm gonna again get some water and this is my center point right here.

And I'm going to kind of slowly start to press down.

When I feel it getting a little bit dry, I just add a little bit more water there.

- Feel a pretty marked difference.

- Yeah, you feel a lot more friction and tension against the clay, when you don't have the water to add some slide to it.

I'm pressing down and I'm probably leaving, I would say, about this much space if you can see.

- [Matt] Okay.

- [Gina] Kind of where I'm pressing down to.

I'm leaving about an inch at the bottom.

I'm not going all the way down to the wheel head.

All right, so now I've kind of done my first enter and then the next motion that I'm gonna do, is with my hands in this hole that I've made, I'm going to kind of curl my fingers back and up.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And that'll be essentially my first pull, so.

- And you're not putting any pressure on the outside at this point?

- No pressure on the outside and I'm curling my fingers.

And then moving up a little bit.

So you can kind of see, this is opened a little bit wider and there's almost like this little lip or this little edge right here, with a bit more clay up here at the top.

The next thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to compress this top rim.

I'm gonna get some water and I'm gonna kind of press with these two fingers, my thumb and my middle finger, and then the thumb on my right hand is gonna press down a little bit just to compress that rim.

And I'm gonna do this same motion throughout the process while I'm throwing right now, to make sure that every time I'm putting stress on the clay, I'm continuing to compress it to make sure it's really tight and it doesn't try to fall apart on me.

- Okay.

- And I think we'll probably call that good.

So I'm gonna show you how I kind of will finish this off on the wheel head before removing it, and then you'll give it a try, if you feel ready and I'll help you.

- [Matt] So now, this shape here, that's kind of the building block for a lot of different things that you do on the wheel.

I mean this is, - Exactly.

- You've gotta get to this point before you can get crazy with it.

- Yep.

Yep.

A cylinder is really the foundational form for everything that you make on the wheel.

Even plates, bowls, everything starts from a cylinder.

When I was in undergrad and I took my first wheel throwing class, I think our first day, we made 18 cylinders.

And for people who had never thrown anything on the wheel, it was a real disaster.

But, - Stuff flying all over the place.

- It's the foundational knowledge, that is what allows you to be able to make all those other forms.

So we have switched positions, so now Matt is gonna give it a shot and throw a cylinder on the wheel.

- All right.

- [Gina] So you'll wanna use some power.

Yep.

I'm making an ashtray more than a cylinder.

That's what we were after, I'm sure.

- May end up a little bit more avant garde than I was looking for.

- Avant garde is good.

It's art, right?

- [Gina] Oh!

- Did we save it?

We might've saved it.

It's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

- Good job!

- Thank you so much.

- You're welcome.

- For showing me all of this.

- This was a lot of fun.

This may be the greatest thing I have ever made.

(Matt laughing) (funky music) (charming music) (rhythmic tapping) (acoustic guitar music) - Somebody orders a given model number.

And if we don't have enough in stock, we have to get out that stamping die which looks just like the finished piece, obviously.

It's a metal, three or four inch thick stamping die.

We stick it on the drop hammer bed, which is the bottom part.

We then pour a top matching reverse die that hooks onto the movable head of the drop hammer, that goes up and down.

We put in, as that top half is up in the air and stopped, we put in a piece of sheet metal flat against the bottom die.

And then we gradually, lightly stamp, and then gradually from higher heights, those two dies together to turn that smooth piece of sheet metal into the design that's been ordered.

- A lot of the machines are still the original machines.

We have five drop hammers that we use to press out the tin.

They've just got a drum that we got rope wrapped around, and that drum will get hot with that rope, from the friction.

So we run water through there.

We have a cistern that cycles water all day long through that hammer, so it keeps it cool.

And it's just a hemp rope that's wrapped about five times, that way the friction will help pull.

When you pull on that rope, it cinches up on that drum, which assists you on pulling.

- The weight of the die and the head of the hammer is about 3000 pounds.

Once they pull on that, it pulls the head up, lets go of the stops that were holding it up a few feet above the bottom one.

And not from that highest height, but from, they can control how high they drop it onto the metal and you don't want to drop it all at once, or it will tear the metal.

Gradually they'll stamp 'em from a little higher, and it'll become the design that they're stamping in the male-female set.

Once they've stamped it, there are maybe two or three inches all the way around that need to be finished and trimmed, so it's taken to a press called a beading machine that puts a perimeter, overlapping channel on the panel where one overlaps the other during installation, and then it's square, all four sides.

It's sort of got a dot and dash with the little nail button every six inches.

And then they take it to a shear, which is a big metal scissors and cut off the excess.

And it's really, from there, it's ready to go.

The biggest traditional size of a tin ceiling is two by four, But we do have designs that are two by two and one by two and one by one.

And then all the cornices and moldings are no longer than four feet.

The reason for the four foot limit is that's the length of the machine, 50 inches or so.

We can't make something eight feet or 12 feet, just by pulling it through.

It's gotta be that one size, the maximum size of the drop hammer.

But it's basically like going to the frame shop with a diploma, buying a frame, but there's also matting between it and the frame.

So the frame is the cornice, the middle, in even increments, is the diploma in the middle and then the matting is what's left over between the two.

And it's not gonna be equal all the way around, but it's gonna be equal on opposite sides.

So if your room is 11 and a half by 16 and a half, you're not gonna get these two by two panels to fit in there, even with the cornice taking up a few inches.

You're gonna, with a drawing, center it and put the cornice in on your drawing.

And then what's ever left, equal and opposite sides, is this small print that you can cut that looks good as a, it's called a filler, but we got this design and some other little flower designs.

They're almost always some kind of generic embossed, but something that no matter where you cut it, it looks pretty good.

And it gets under lapped under the middle piece and overlapped over the cornice and all that, so you really don't see where it starts and where it ends.

- Well, when I started in 1992, I ran a press and I did that for like six years, and then I ran a die grinder for another six years, and then we lost our electrical maintenance guy and I took over for him, 'cause I had experience.

So then I kinda started floating from job to job.

I did several different ones.

Wherever they needed me, really.

My last 10 years here was really interesting, because I did so much different stuff.

- [Neal] I think our employees like working with historic metal and historic products.

We are sent pictures or given pieces to replicate, and I think our employees take a lot of pride in working on a state capital building or a historic hotel.

Seeing, in a photograph, how a building used to look, having before them a damaged piece that they're gonna replicate and really, I really think take some pride in.

As opposed to just making parts and not really knowing where they're going or what the finished product is, I think they take a lot of pride in working on things that are historic and then seeing often the finished product.

- [Brad] We do everything in here pretty much like they did at the turn of the century.

I mean, with the exception of electricity.

It's like you're stepping back in time every day.

- [Neal] These are real tin ceilings; as real as they were 115 years ago.

- I'd like to thank Gina, everyone here at Belger Arts, and all of our other makers for sharing their time with us.

Unfortunately that's all the time we have for this week.

But I hope all of our makers have inspired you to unlock your creative spirit.

We thank you all for watching and we hope you'll join us here next time, to see what we'll be making.

More information is available on social media, or online at kmos.org.

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station, from viewers like you.

Thank you.

It's getting worse!

(Matt laughing) It so sad.

(Matt cackling and wheezing)