Age: 23 • Lives and creates: Cleveland • Learned: BFA with illustration concentration from Cleveland Institute of Art
Story by Amanda Koehn
Stories of people and places in our city, overlapping across space and time, are at the heart of Alyssa Lizzini’s drawings.
Her layered ink pen drawings build off the interconnectedness of social and spatial worlds as she collects personal stories from all over Cleveland. Together, they reflect on the social fabric of the city and its communities, she tells Canvas.
Raised by her grandparents in Old Brooklyn, they would drive Lizzini around the city to the places where they grew up. They would tell stories of relatives and people they knew in different parts of town.
“It made me aware of how there are a million different stories that have happened, that are happening now and that will happen,” she says. “I’m interested in the simultaneousness of all of this and the overall complexity and how, as one person, we can never fully wrap our brains around everything that is happening in the world. I’m really interested in creating that complexity through the overlapping line drawings, and also recording stories from different people I meet along the way of discovering more things that are happening around me.”
Being fascinated by drawing for as long as she can remember, she says near the end of high school at Padua Franciscan High School in Parma she began to college search. While she initially looked at many non-art schools in order to pursue a more “practical” career, talking with her family helped her realize art was worth pursuing.
“It’s something that I love, and I feel like I had to let myself choose that as a career,” she says, adding although her family wasn’t particularly artsy, they were very supportive of her.
She attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she concentrated in illustration. Intrigued by ethnographic research, she also took sociology classes at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
For her Bachelor of Fine Arts project, Lizzini volunteered and visited different Cleveland neighborhoods to meet and interview residents and record their stories. They became the subjects for portraits, with their stories incorporated into the drawing series.
Drawing while talking with people in a specific location and observing what’s happening around them creates a “new layer of connection,” she says. She also loves the “immediacy of working with an ink pen.” It’s not a medium you can erase, so once she draws a line, it’s there to stay.
“That’s taken a lot of learning and many years of drawings to be comfortable with,” she says. “But I really like that it forces me to be 100% authentic in my drawing. It’s exactly what I’m seeing and what I’m recording – it’s never something that I can kind of play with after the fact.”
Lizzini graduated from CIA in 2022 – the same year her “Strata (Map of Cleveland)” piece received the Board Grand Prize at CIA’s Student Independent Exhibition, considered the top award.
Today, she works as auxiliary programs coordinator at Ruffing Montessori School in Cleveland Heights, in addition to creating new work. She says while navigating work-life-art balance can be challenging – sometimes requiring late nights – she’s grateful for her job and the artistic achievements she’s reached recently. Her BFA project started her on a path of community engagement being core to her work, which continued through her recent “Field Drawings” project. After receiving a Satellite Grant from SPACES, for “Field Drawings” she led drawing workshops with community members between July 2022 and July 2023. Their drawings were then exhibited at Cleveland Public Library Main Branch, on view until sometime in January 2024.
Additionally, she was asked by LAND studio to create a mural, which went up at Public Square in downtown Cleveland early in November. “Our Garden” shows Clevelanders gardening, highlighting community gardens – inspired by those Lizzini volunteered at – and connecting them to the literal and figurative seeds people plant in neighborhoods when they garden.
Next up, Lizzini is set to teach more drawing workshops at the New Orleans Museum of Art for a couple days in December. She’s also working on a new body of work.
“Over the summer, I did a bunch of neighborhood walks and would kind of go up to people on their front porch in different neighborhoods and ask them if I could draw them,” she says. “So, I’m working on some larger pieces now that are portraits of people on their front porch.”
The people and scenes Lizzini depicts are vivid and inviting. Each person seems like someone you would want to meet, living vicariously through her drawings of them, the places they call home and the stories they tell her.
“I try to give myself lived experience that I can draw from, and I try to kind of force myself to meet people,” she says. “Which is very difficult because I was very much a socially anxious kid. Doing this kind of work is maybe my way of making up for it now as an adult and really putting myself out there.”
See more
• Alyssa Lizzini’s “Field Drawings” project with workshop participants is on view into January 2024 at the Cleveland Public Library Main Branch (4th Floor International Languages Department Gallery), 325 Superior Ave., Cleveland.
“Traversing drawing and illustration, Alyssa captures the interplay of people and places within urban environments through intricately layered compositions. Her work offers a window into diverse neighborhoods, rich stories and the sociocultural fabric of the city.”
Nicole Condon-Shih, associate professor, Cleveland Institute of Art
