This episode of Across Indian is made possible Through a grant from Iconic America and by viewers like you.

Thanks.

It's time again.

Hoosiers for a trip across Indiana.

We'll meet the man known as the Brush Master, whose hand-painted sign are approaching legendary status in Indianapolis.

We'll investigat the state's insect, the firefly, and we'll meet a woma who escaped a horrible situation and found safety and a home in Indianapolis.

Welcome.

we're here at the Sculpture Trails in Solsberry, Indiana.

I'm here with Sam Oliver who did a story about this Sam, where in the heck did you even hear about it?

In my time living in Indiana, I've met so many awesome creative professionals, I just love seeing what creative people can do with their imaginations and just making cool stuff.

I wanted to shed some ligh on those creative professionals.

so I went online, I searched, and I found this place called the Sculpture Trail, and I was just struck by the beauty of the sculptures and the fact that they are, just in this humble, down to earth environment and accessible and free to everyone.

had to come check it out.

All right, well, let's let you check it out.

Here's the sculpture trails So I had an old teacher that told me.

He said, pouring.

Aluminu is like taking a drink of milk.

Pouring bronze is like having a beer, and pouring iron is like having a shot of bourbon.

And he's right.

So you like bourbon?

Yes, I do.

Awesome.

It takes a special kind o person to make this type of art.

We're at sculpture trails.

My name is Gerry Masse, the founding director and I guess this is my big, crazy mess.

This big, crazy mess attracts Hoosiers across Indiana, as well as 3D artists across the nation.

All to the small town of Solsberry.

We are pretty much in the middle of Indiana, about 50 miles south of Indianapolis 15 minutes west of Bloomington.

Inside, these molds are one of a kind works of art that will eventually find their home along the sculpture trail and outdoor museums.

Nestled in the woods with ove 180 cast iron sculptures along three miles of well-maintained hiking trails, the one thing about the trails is it'll always be here, open and free.

So bring your families out when you have nothing to do.

It's a great place for a walk.

Enjoy nature, and it's a good place to see some sculpture that has been made by artists that are still alive and kicking and want to make more.

While many come her just to walk the trail, tonight during his team of artists are putting on a show.

Tonight is our biggest event of the whole year.

When we cast iron, we will usually do it at nighttime because it's really dangerous and we really don't wan the public around when we do it just for liability.

But at the same time, we want to show the public what's going on.

So this one night of the year we call fire at night is the one time we let the public come on out and celebrate with us the end of a month of creating cast iron with artists from around the world.

You can come out early and carve some scratch blocks and make a relief sculpture.

We have a bowl molds that you could carve into it and create a cast iron bowl.

Of course, there is a lot to see and just hang out and watch.

So a lot of folks love that.

And this will be probably our last for, putting us over 30,000 pounds of metal.

So the whole month.

So that's a lot of metal fo a bunch of young artists to be casting out in the middle of nowhere.

It's fun to watch.

So what goes into making on of these cast iron sculptures?

So an artist will show up with a talent, and they show up and say, hey, we want to cast this in iron.

So we will take sand molds and build a mold around it.

They will pull the pattern out, but the mold back together, and then we'll create a gating system where the metal can be poured and vented, and then boom, we turn it into metal.

Now, once it's metal, they still have, you know, hundreds of hours to grind it, chase it, finish it, get it installed.

So even though it's cast it still has a long way to go.

Everyone you see in orange shirts are actually interns.

All of these artists have been here for weeks preparing molds for today's event.

So our interns program an internship program.

They get to come in.

They get to build a piece, and if it gets into the exhibition, it can be on showing for two years.

I have the experience of around 60,000 pounds of sand, mold making, multi-part mold making the big brown for young artisans money.

So that's our big goal, i to reduce their financial burden and give Actually 15 tons of experience.

You know, I make sculptures, a lot of my buddies make sculptures, and I was literally, putting them out on the property kind of to store them a little bit with the intention o maybe we'll create some kind of a museum, and it sure has blown this community up.

Everybody is really excited about sculpture trails, and we're excited for the next 20 years, whether we promote it or not.

Everybody's showing up.

Artists keep us lions of.

It's become one of these things as just growing and growing and growing without us involved at all.

It's just the beast of started.

Like we never even sat down and decided to do this.

It just exploded into something.

Want to get involved?

Gerry says there are several ways we can help.

The best thing to d if you want to get involved is, go right into the website.

Sign up with the contact list.

Volunteer list.

Throw a dollar in the donation box.

But some sticks off the past, you know?

And, make sure you follow us on Instagram.

Were still out here on th Sculpture Trails, Im here with the founder of this place.

Gerry Masse Tell me a little bit about the sculptures you were pouring in that story and where they are right now.

Well, a lot of those pieces ar scattered all over the country.

A select few are installed here, they're scattered out along the trails.

So I heard they're in the back.

Back like that's further away right there.

Yeah.

We're getting really big.

We're going to be roll that one.

In fact, we just installed sculpture number 200.

What.

There's 200.

And so why would you want to have all of this are out here in the middle of nowhere?

That's a fabulous question.

And if I could catch u to myself and ask myself that, I would like to know also.

That's a great answer.

There's one over here.

growing up out here, I never got to see anything like big, large sculpture.

I didn't learn about meltin metal until I went to college.

And seeing as we were melting metal every week making sculptures, and I thought, I got to bring that back home.

It's open sun up to sundown every day.

So come on out for a walk on the trails.

Very cool.

up next is a story about another artist who puts art out in the unexpected places.

In a way.

We call it the hood.

We'll meet Jasper, Mississippi Travis, aka the Brush Master.

Kyle Long has the story.

All right.

It was during the late 1990s that I first encountered the unique hand-painted signs of Jasper, Mississippi.

Travis also known as the Brush Master.

Some people call me the Brush Master.

Until recently, the Brush Master was totally unaware of my interest in his work.

I was out taking pictures and you were there, and you were kind of messing with me a little bit.

He was like, do you know the artist that painted them?

I'm like, yeah, I know him.

Like, oh, can you introduce me?

The visual landscape of my hometown was dominated by commercially manufactured signs bearing dull corporate logos.

It felt generic, cold and lifeless manufacturered signs they just to the point.

And that's it.

They don't have any abnormalities.

It gives a character.

The brush master signs were different.

The colors were bold.

The use of space was unorthodox.

His signs were filled with eccentric details that bore the mark of human touch.

But this one is still here, though it is disappearing.

Mississippi did a lot of beauty salons, barber shops, and these silhouettes became one of the trademark way that I would identify his work.

No one paints a silhouette like the brush master.

As you can see, it.

Born and raised in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

The Brush Master began painting and drawing while caring for his mother.

It was a little different from Mayberry.

It was still raw.

She was an artist and encouraged her son to pursue art.

I had to do, you know, hold her hand to.

Then she started telling me, I want this or I want that drawn.

And and I started drawing and I liked it.

Later life took Mississippi to Chicago, where he began painting in and on neighborhoods.

His mastery of the brushwork busines would soon lead to Indianapolis.

I painted, a place called frogs, frogs records on college and, other ones, 38th street men's club.

And it wasnt even on 38th Street, but that was the name of it.

But I remember those were the first.

The 38th Street Men Club.

The club was located at 18th Street and College Avenue, 20 blocks south of 38th.

The idiosyncrasies of the sign and the club's location brightened my day every time I passed by, until one day when it just disappeared.

A few months later, I spotted the sign propped up against the wall on a small building.

And on that day, I took my first photo of a brush master sign.

For the next year I traveled through big and small neighborhoods across the city, photographing his work from Haughville to Mapleton Fall Creek, from Keystone Avenue to Martindale, Brightwood for almost 20 years.

These photos gathered dust in an old shoe box in my bedroom closet.

At the peak of his activity.

The brush master's work covered an enormous stretc of the Indianapolis landscape.

I knew I had to make a living in some kind of way so I got up and did this grind.

Every time I was painting one place, 4 or 5 other people would ask me, hey, can you do this for me?

Can you do that for me?

And I'm like, I was ready for that.

You know, cause it was basically supporting myself.

Around 2016 I started sharing the photos on social media in hopes of connectin with the brush master himself, and I discovered that I wasn't the only one who appreciated his work.

My social media post sharing his art went viral.

That eventually led me to the Brush Master's home.

How are you guys doing?

Good to see you.

You too.

We were talking about bringing your cake.

But I don't know if it's sweets or what.

There were abnormalities in your work.

Is that intentional?

Do you know that?

Sometimes, yes.

Sometimes it is.

You see the use of quotes, Mac.

It's not in quotes, but cheese is in quotes.

We call it the hood.

They have to have varieties of business in one place because you know of survival.

He does want to include messages of peac and social justice in his work.

This neighborhood has been plagued by violence.

Obviously it says nonviolence.

Juice on the bottle.

And that's one of the things that makes his work so appealing, is that there there are eccentricities in th spelling and in the lettering.

It has that handmade element be something, you know.

That's what I wanted to promote.

Despite his rising fame in Indianapolis, the Brush Masters wor is becoming scarce in the city.

The rapid spread of gentrification throughout Indianapolis has erased much of Mississippi's art.

When new developments go up, th Brush Masters work comes down.

The world is going to change anyway.

I just have to change with it.

My mom told me, keep doing what I do.

In my eyes.

The brush master has become a modern day John Henry.

One man with a brush taking on an entire industry of mass produced, machine printed signs, one wall at a time.

As long as I'm living then I'm going to always paint.

Every year, Rasheedas Freedom Day is celebrated in Indianapolis, in the neighborhoo known as Martindale Brightwood.

I had the honor of learning why a film was made of her story.

It's like a family reunion.

Kind of.

Oh, my grandchildren have children.

There's a feeling in the neighborhood that is coming.

Her day.

That's a freedom day.

Every year she tells the story.

I am JoAnna LeNoir.

My entire family, my mother, my brother, my two sisters and my oldest daughter moved to Indianapolis.

Since 1964.

JoAnna has celebrated her family's escape from hell.

We called it Rasheedas Freedom Da because my mother was set free.

Walk with me.

Rasheedas freedom day caught the attention of the Harrison Center and filmmaker Dija Henry.

It's just so powerfu what stories can do for people.

That's really what pushes me to make film.

Rasheeda was a mother of four in the 60s.

Struggling to get by in Saint Louis.

Should be better off at the neighbors.

Her second husband.

An abusive alcoholic.

He was just evil and ignorant.

By the time I was 14, I just absolutely hated him.

JoAnna the oldest of Rasheedas, three children, wanted a new life for her mother and siblings.

My brother and sister at that time did not know what was going on.

She had seen her stepfather physically abuse her mother.

He had come into our live when I was younger than Sheila.

I don't remember where my mother met him.

I remember that he'd been a soldier.

She was beautiful.

I think my mother was just young and didn't know what she was looking for or how to find what she needed.

She was just bullied into everything.

And I don't think she knew how to fight back.

Soon things would get worse.

JoAnna would be raising her own child at the age of 15.

The emotional, physical and later sexual abuse had taken its toll, and JoAnna had decided it was going to be over one way or another.

They sent me to live with a neighbor for a little bit after my baby was born.

The weeken that my mother brought me back home, my mother's husband had been drinking and I could see.

I could just see what was coming.

Glad you're back.

I called my mother on her job, and I told her that , uh If she didn't come home and leave right away that I was going to kill her husband.

I just wasn't going to take any more.

I meant every word that I said.

And.

We took off.

They fled by bus to Indianapolis with what they could carry.

And they've been here ever since.

Came right to that house right there that night.

We all sat out there on the porch, and we cried for a few minutes, and we talked about, you know, what?

All we done left and all the things we left.

And mama came out and said, but now you got to do now is look to the future to see what you have, because you will never have t worry about being misused again.

Columbia Avenue in Martindale.

Brightwood seemed like Paradise.

The following day, my brothe went over there to Fall Creek, came back and said, y'all, come on, I don't found us a lake.

I was.

Almost everybody on that block had children.

Adults played hide and seek with us.

And, you know, it was just it was just fun.

Neighbors soon became family.

How are you doing beautiful?

I'm wonderful.

How you doing?

All right.

And the very next summer, the first Rasheedas Freedom Day happened.

We had the first one, the 14th of July.

A year after we came.

Rasheeda later marrie a man that knew how to love her and all of her children.

She had met another man and he was one of the kindest people I've ever met.

And he was very good to her, and he loved her very much.

And he showed it.

He showed us her children that he loved her.

It's a pleasure to meet you today.

Rasheeda freedom day continues to grow.

Yeah.

If you don't belong to the family, you would feel a part of the family.

We've been getting phone calls all morning.

Well, what you need, wha we got to bring with you guys.

Just bring a ass, that's all.

Just bring ass.

And for those in the neighborhood and this family, JoAnna's escape has been an inspiration.

It gave me, like, a stronger connection with my family, because seeing all the stuff that we've been through in the history of it, it makes me want to be closer with.

She know probably everybody on the block.

Everybody loves her.

If you meet her, you say, oh, she's a good person.

She's a person who's not going to take too much.

She'll let you know.

I don' think we're going to ever stop getting on each other's nerves.

But thank the good Lord.

We still just as tigh as the day mama brought us here.

And thanks to Dija Henry's film, even more people know about Rasheeds Freedom Day.

Miss JoAnna for a long time, didn't tell people what it actually was celebrating.

So I see this circle of freedom as she tells her story.

She's getting freedom.

As we told the story through film.

Those who watched i would stand up and tell us that because of this story, they felt free to tell their own story of survival.

It's a wrap!

There are parts of it that will probably be painful to me until I die.

Maybe if somebody else hears what I went through, that they would have the courage not to stay as long as I did.

And put up with as much as I di before they would make a move, because I wouldn't want anybody to suffer that.

Our final tale is about something we see every summer on those Indiana nights.

Some call them lightning bugs.

Some call them fireflies.

Producer Jeremy Sage tells us just how lucky we are to have them Indiana has the best fireflies.

Also known as lightning bugs.

They're actually beetles, of course.

When I moved to California, I made my girlfriend a fake jar of them every year to remind her of the Midwest.

Unaware how much of a romance language I was really using.

Let's travel across Indiana to learn more.

First, stop a Firefly expert with the Indianapolis Zoo.

Fireflies produce bioluminescence.

They produce light in darkness with their own bodies.

And that's something that very few animals d in the terrestrial environment.

Their mating song is sung in light.

All of that has quit a lot of undertones of passion.

It's something different, and that has something sort of magical it.

The fireflies glow began as a way to alert predators, telling them, hey, if you eat me, you'll regret it.

But as evolution evolved, th warning sign took on a new use.

Males and females started using their glow to talk to each other, let them know they are available.

Are there any type of flashes that are more popular with the ladies?

That's a well, not.

I don't know about the human ladies with female fireflies.

Some of the most popular flashes seem to be the ones that are very fast, so a lot of the spee of flashing a number of flashes seem to indicate, you know good quality and male fireflies.

The one that keeps flashing and keeps going because it's very rare for a female firefly to pick the first male she will see flashing.

It's usually about no singl male persistence, persistence, and being in the right place at the right time.

Here's how to spot the three most common fireflies you might see in Indiana.

One of the first flashing fireflies in Indiana is the spring Treetop Firefly, and their flash pattern is fairly simple.

They have a lot of rhythm because the Firefly with no rhythm is a dead firefly, but their pattern is a flash.

One to flash, one to flash.

Probably the most common fireflies in Indiana, even here in Indianapolis.

And it's called the Big Dippe because it has a flight pattern mixed with a light pattern.

It does a long and then silent silence long, and it does that a few times.

And because they have a low flight, they're very easy to catch.

And they also fly fairly low so a child can get them as that Firefly goes the wiggle dancer.

It's usually described as a flicker or a strong flicker, which is something like that.

Nothing to the Says Fireflies.

So the state insect will actually glow orange because it looks like a flicker of a candle.

So it's very yellow orange.

You like that and it has a kind of very orange glow.

The Says firefly i Indiana's official state insect.

We travel now to West Lafayette with a concern of a student in her teacher.

Made it all happen.

Well, I always believed in the teachable moment.

And when Kayla borrowed, you know, one of my books, it was a guide to the 50 states.

And she came back two days later and said, as a seven year old, very soft spoken young lady, we have a problem.

And I was taken aback because it appeared that a lot of other states, a vast majority, they had their own state insect.

So, out of curiosity, I asked, what would it take to create a state insect for Indiana?

So then that kind of spurred on this project.

I would spend four years, a lot of work, a lot of letters, postcards, petition signatures.

We persevered.

That's wha the kids wanted to do each year.

No, we don't want to give up.

At the time, I was more excited to skip school, but talking to legislators was good.

We finally got to our governor.

He was very interested in the letter that my student wrote to him with all the facts they had researched and vetted with the Purdue entomologist, and he wanted to come up and meet the Firefly kids, as he called them.

This way, when I see fireflies around, I get excite that I was able to achieve that.

This little bugs are representing Indiana.

The logic behind the Say Firefly is that it was discovered by Thomas Say someone who lived in new Harmony, Indiana.

Thomas Say, the father of descriptive entomology in the U.S., moved to new Harmony, Indiana in the 1800s, which was an educational Mecca for scientists and lived the rest of his life there.

We traveled to this historic small town to discover a fallen firefly festival.

Fireflies in new Harmony.

When the fireflies flicker, complete with lightning bug lectures, Firefly drinks, fireflies, glow worm dances, fireflies, and a tour into the woods to see what they call natural fireworks.

And the fireflies flicker, as Thomas Say is no longer with us.

But what about his namesake insect?

How are they doing these days?

In the early 19th century, it was considered to be one of the most common fireflies.

Now, as I look for it now, I rarely find it.

For some time there are so rare I thought they were gone.

The flashing fireflies like to live in darkness.

Of course, there' different stages to the night.

We all know that there's the golden hour.

And then there's like the twilight.

And then it gets dark.

And fireflies know that as well.

They've evolved for those different.

Lots of different nighttime.

So.

So depending on light pollution in the area, they might not be there all.

The state of Firefl has that sadly, that potential that we might have overlooked its demise.

It was considered common.

It's clearly not too common now.

And if we continue to treat environment the way we are, we might lose the state insect in its home state altogether.

As a flicker.

As it turns out I had the right flash pattern.

After all, that girlfriend married me.

We are back home again in Firefly country.

However, due to habita loss, toxic chemicals and light pollution, there are fewe fireflies now than in the past.

So the next time you see one, make a wish upon their star that the children of the future will always dance to their silent love songs.

All right, have yourself a good Firefly tour.

and thats it for this trip.

Thanks for joining us in Solsberry Indiana.

We'll see you next time.

This episode of Across Indiana is made possible Through a grant from Iconic America and by viewers like you.

Thanks.