Reality (TV) check: Really big challenges, unreal pressure

If there’s a single question that people ask anyone who has ever been on a reality show, it has to be this: Would you do it again? Mark Rubelowsky ’19 answers fast and furiously. “I would one-thousand-percent do it again,” he says. “It was a 10-out-of-10 experience.”

Rubelowsky earned his BFA in Glass at CIA and now makes custom furniture, lighting and artwork at his studio in Geneva, Ohio. He and friends Eli Baylis and Freeland Southard ’05 (who earned his BFA in Ceramics and was once CIA’s Fabrication Studio manager) teamed up on Season 10 of the History Channel series Forged in Fire.

In the 83-minute special episode, Instruments of Death: Masters of the Siege, the trio competes against three other teams to design and fabricate weapons that might be used to storm a castle.

“I have been a fan of Forged in Fire since it came out. I love that show,” Rubelowsky says. “I saw on Instagram that they were looking for woodworkers and metalworkers with limited forging experience who had a knowledge of mechanical movement. I sent in the paperwork, and a couple months later, they told us we were getting on the show.”

Forged in Fire is far from the first appearance by a CIA artist on reality TV. Rubelowsky is in company with at least four others:

• In 2010, Valerie Mayén ’05 appeared on Season 8 of Project Runway, which then appeared on the Lifetime network.
• In 2011, Drawing professor Sarah Kabot competed on Season 2 of Bravo TV’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.
• In 2019, Josette Galiano ’14 brought sparkles and ribbons to Freeform TV’s Wrap Battle, a gift-wrapping competition.
• And early in 2024, glass artist Leana Quade ’03 competed on Season 4 of Netflix’s glassblowing show, Blown Away.

The artists describe their reality TV experiences as wild, rollicking and often harrowing work. They also offer a glimpse of what it means—creatively speaking—to decide that you’re up for anything.

Valerie Mayén

Valerie Mayén ’05 and contestant Alexander Pope at work on Project Runway All Stars. Courtesy of Lifetime.

Mayén is founder of Yellowcake, a line of clothing and accessories she developed after first studying illustration at CIA and then learning fashion design at Virginia Marti College.

Mayén was still a fashion newbie when it happened. She was selling her work off a small independent website when she got a call from the show producers. They wanted her to apply quickly. They wanted copies of her patterns, a carousel of slides, and she needed to go to Chicago for an interview and to meet designer Tim Gunn, the show’s on-air mentor.

As it happened, she was low on inventory, so she made the best of her travel time. “I had nothing to take to my audition,” she says. “I was literally sewing on the Megabus on the way there.”

She wasn’t chosen for Season 7, but she was successful when she was asked to reapply for Season 8—and was still a relative fashion newbie. “I’d only been sewing two years when I was on the show,” she says.

On the other hand, the timing proved to be as good a time as any to throw herself into a huge national TV challenge. She had been freelancing her design, freelancing illustration, and had juggled gigs as a sales clerk, waitress and nanny. “I really had nothing to lose.”

The experience was wild. She arrived in New York for filming only to find the airline had lost her luggage. The next day, she and 16 other contestants went to work right away.

“It was nonstop. It was like fashion camp prison,” she says. “Terrifying but exhilarating. We were all motivated by our adrenaline. I loved it and I’ll never do it again.”

Yet she did do it again. Mayén lasted through 10 of the 14 episodes in Season 8 and placed seventh overall. Then she was invited back for Project Runway All Stars, Season 5, which aired in 2016. She came in ninth out of 13 contestants.

All in all, the national audience did not rocket her to stardom, but it helped spread the word about her work.

“It helped give me credibility and leeway,” she says. “It led to people knowing who I was. When I was first on Etsy, I had clients in Kansas City, New York, Ireland and Kuwait, but not a single client in Cleveland. Afterward, I was definitely more visible.”

Sarah Kabot

One of Drawing professor Sarah Kabot’s most successful pieces on Work of Art was a pair of seat covers from a Fiat that she presented side by side, alluding to car rides she used to take with her father, who had passed away by the time the show was filmed. Courtesy of Bravo TV.

Bravo TV’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist lasted only two seasons, but that was long enough to provide Kabot with a chance to wander well outside her comfort zone. The New York-based show challenged competitors to quickly make artwork to be judged by critics, curators and other artists. Challenges included making good art using a piece of “bad” art, creating work from car parts, and making work to first sell on the street and hang in a gallery.

Kabot applied after a friend recommended her to the producers.

The audition required a trip to Chicago, artwork in hand. Kabot doesn’t vividly recall being nervous, but says, “I’m sure I was. Anything that’s new and different is a little nerve-wracking.”

Her father was ill at the time, too. He lived in Michigan, and Kabot found it challenging to commit to a project that took her away from easy access to him. But she had his blessing. “I said, ‘I have this opportunity. It’s very weird and scary.’ And he said, ‘Well, you should have an adventure.’ I think that was a good lesson.”

Kabot has a strong natural tendency to be reliable and consistent, which usually means planning well. The pace of the show was at odds with that. “But it made me lean in a little bit to being more adventurous and taking new kinds of risks in my work, and to some extent, in my life. That was my big takeaway, that I could do a big, weird thing that doesn’t seem to align with all the other things I know about my personality.”

The entire second season of Work of Art can be viewed on YouTube, so—SPOILER ALERT—skip the next two paragraphs if you want to watch and be surprised.

Kabot finished sixth and was sent home after what the judges deemed to be a lackluster response to the street-art-to-gallery-art competition. “I knew that I was not in the right winning headspace anymore when I started to become more interested in my colleagues and having conversations with them about art and this weird thing that we were doing.”

Still, she says, “It was a great adventure. I surprised myself by doing it, and I am proud I took a risk.”

Quade

Quade—a 2003 alum who started to drop her first name, Leana, when she studied with CIA professor Brent Kee Young—says the competitive spirit has always been a part of glassmaking. “At CIA, there were three of us in my class year, and we were always fighting for attention from Brent.” Courtesy of Netflix.

Making glass art in a traditional hot shop bears little resemblance to making glass art in response to a challenge on a reality TV show competition. Glass artist Quade (she has mostly dropped her first name, Leana) discovered that as a contestant on Netflix’s Blown Away, where competitors respond to glassblowing prompts of increasing difficulty. Quade likens it to trying to cook in someone else’s kitchen.

“They want a gourmet meal, but they only give you hot dogs and potatoes,” she says.

Difficulties aside, Quade was able to make work she was proud of, if not exactly the kind of work she makes on her own.

Her favorite piece was a big red truck she made in response to a prompt to make work inspired by what the artists wanted to be when they were kids.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” says Quade. “I liked sports. I got dirty. And I just remember taking this assessment test in school. It told me I was going to be a truck driver. So I ended up using that as the story. And that was the piece that I was very proud of.”

Season 4 of Blown Away is available for streaming on Netflix. If you want to watch and be surprised to see how well Quade competed—SPOILER ALERT—skip the next two paragraphs.

Quade stayed in the competition through the fifth episode, in which the challenge was to create a “sweet treat.”

“They didn’t want gum drops and they didn’t want suckers,” she says. “So I made some crazy bubble wand with sugar bubbles and it worked. (But) when I got booted, they were like, oh, it’s too busy. When I look back, what I regret doing is fulfilling the assignment instead of creating work that I knew how to make.”

Josette Galiano

Josette “Gigi” Galiano works on a creative package during one of the Wrap Battle challenges. Submitted.

Galiano earned her BFA in Industrial Design at CIA and a master’s from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. These days, she leads research for retail branches of JP Morgan Chase and creates large-scale cut paper installations in her design business, Florette by Josette.

When she heard about the casting call for Wrap Battle, it sounded like it had been conceived with her in mind. “I thought, you know what, you’ve been training for this your whole life, busting out projects under the gun two minutes before they’re due, staying up for days,” says Galiano. “You’ve got creativity-under-pressure. This is all you’ve ever done.”

Contestants were challenged in at least three ways: Solve a gift-wrapping predicament, such as wrapping a backyard grill; do it fast; make it pretty.

The show aired in November 2019, and Galiano had a blast at watch parties with friends and colleagues. She also found it interesting to see how her experiences had been edited.

“They painted some people to seem really nice and you’re like, no, they were not nice, cut the sappy music!” she says with a laugh. “They were a bully on that show!”

The experience was lots of fun, she says, and also grueling.

“We were cooped up in L.A. in a random hotel complex for 30 days,” she says. “We weren’t allowed to talk to any of our opponents offset. They had our phones. It was so strange. By the end of it, you started to think, what’s real?”

Wrap Battle is no longer easy to access online, so there’s no spoiler here. Galiano placed fourth out of nine and she competed on all six episodes. A moment after the judges told her she was going home, she walked off set only to hear that all the contestants would participate in the final challenge. “So I just walked back on,” she says. “We decorated a car.”

Mark Rubelowsky

From left, Freeland Southard ’05, Mark Rubelowsky ’19 and Eli Baylis sketch while competing on Forged in Fire. Courtesy of the History channel.

Thermite is a mixture of metal powder and metal oxide that can be used in metal forging. So Rubelowsky, Southard and Baylis named their Forged in Fire team the “Ther Mighties” to honor the craft of forging—which none of them had a whole lot of experience in.

Before the show, Rubelowsky says, he’d forged one knife in a class. Baylis and Southard weren’t much better prepared, but the three had a great time on set at a 4-H farm in New York—thinking through the engineering and crafting of weapons. The show is now viewable on the History Channel app, so to be surprised—SPOILER ALERT—stop reading here.

In the second of three challenges, three remaining teams competed to design and build their own battering rams with metal tips strong enough to blast through a heavy wooden door as quickly as possible—and they were timed. The team with the slowest time was to be sent home.

The Ther Mighties broke through in 13 seconds, tying with another team for second place, so the judges critiqued the designs and opted to send the Ther Mighties packing. It was a disappointment, Rubelowsky admits, especially since the final challenge was the ballista—”basically, a giant crossbow,” he explains. “We would have killed that.”

And they still might. “We’re currently building a ballista,” he says. The team will be featured on another Forged in Fire episode, date to be determined. Stay tuned.