Event details provided by the entities featured. Compiled by Sammi Fremont and Jamie Insul.
Transformer Station
“New Histories, New Futures” | Through Sept. 12
“New Histories, New Futures” features three contemporary Black artists addressing the present and the past. The exhibition, presented by the Cleveland Museum of Art and on view at Transformer Station in Cleveland’s Hingetown neighborhood, focuses on art by Johnny Coleman of Oberlin, Antwoine Washington of Cleveland and Kambui Olujimi of New York City. In the exhibit, Coleman creates an immersive installation including sculpture, sound and projection that centers on a family’s harrowing history moving through the Underground Railroad. Washington subverts the stereotype of the absent Black father through portraits of his own family painted in a style showing homage to artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Olujimi’s work showcases paintings and video of weightless, floating Black bodies to imagine a future where political resistance can result in complete freedom.
Transformer Station is at 1460 W. 29th St. in Cleveland.
BAYarts
“We Not Linkin’” | Through Sept. 18
Inspired by the lack of connection, understanding and the divisiveness demonstrated throughout 2020, Cleveland Heights-based artist Davon Brantley created his new show “We Not Linkin’” to take viewers through a narrative of his life and what he grapples with. Brantley uses self-portraits that reference religious paintings and Renaissance and Baroque portraits to flip the traditional expectations of these styles, as people of color were not typically depicted in the work of those eras. In “We Not Linkin’,” on view at BAYarts in Bay Village, Brantley shares his experiences with colorism, racial stereotyping, meditations on death, life, sexuality and masculinity. Brantley turns negative expectations for people of color on their head, and instead takes viewers through a series of religious-like self-portraits aimed to consecrate rather than demonize.
BAYarts is at 28795 Lake Road in Bay Village.
YARDS Projects
“Uplifters: New Beginnings from Old Things” | Through Sept. 25
Nostalgia in art is normally frowned upon. It may even be seen as a gimmick to make people like art simply because it’s familiar and gives off a sentimental vibe. But coming out of the last pandemic year, “Uplifters” at YARDS Projects in Warehouse District of Cleveland seeks to use the old to create new possibilities. The artists of “Uplifters” work to innovate and adapt materials from the past to create contemporary work, celebrating innovation and looking ahead to a more promising future. The exhibition features bright and colorful work from artists Eleanor Anderson, Andy Dreamingwolf, Amber Esner, Connie Fu, J. Leigh Garcia, Amber Kempthorn, Loren Naji, Edward Parker, Ron Shelton, Judith Salomon, Stephen Yusko and Jonathan Wayne.
YARDS Projects is at the Worthington Yards apartment complex, 725 Johnson Court in Cleveland.
Current
“Mouse House Party” | Through Sept. 30
The Akron Art Museum and Current commissioned “Mouse House Party,” a collective art project featuring work by over 150 contemporary Northeast Ohio artists. The project by Liz Maugans, an artist, curator and director of YARDS Projects, asked artists to fill a mouse hole-shaped frame, drawing on how their art helped fill the emotional holes felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. On view at Current’s space at the 78th Street Studios in the Edgewater neighborhood of Cleveland, the show was born during the height of the pandemic and has a goal of offering local artists the opportunity to share their work and demonstrate the complex creativity of the region.
Current is a stand-alone gallery at the 78th Street Studios at 1300 W. 78th St., Suite 101 in Cleveland. More information about the exhibit can be found at bit.ly/36DsOXN.
Cleveland Museum of Art
“Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900-1940” | Through Dec. 26
In the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibit “Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900-1940,” prints by urban realists represent an era filled with demographic, social and economic changes to the country’s cities. With New York City as a hot spot of change – including vibrant new communities of immigrants from Europe and Latin American countries, and Black Southerners who migrated north – artists responded to the lives of residents. Using advertising and mass media techniques with their depictions of the lower classes, immigrants, working women and social elites, artists from the Ashcan School broke norms and zeroed in on observing the interactions between individuals and the places they inhabited. The prints featured, consisting of CMA’s holdings and those of a local private collection, not only show social and economic tensions of the past, but viewers may see many of the same themes that still persist in America’s cities today.
“Ashcan School Prints” can be viewed in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery of CMA, 11150 East Blvd. in Cleveland. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with “A New York Minute: Street Photography, 1920–1950,” on view in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery through Nov. 7.
Fawick Art Gallery
“Eighty-Six Reasons (for asylum admission)” | Aug. 30 – Sept. 24
“Undesirable behavior” – chattering, dispassion for domestic chores, even novel reading – was often deemed as hysteria in women during the Victorian era. With that diagnosis, many of these women were sent to asylums. Northeast Ohio artist Kimberly Chapman’s exhibition at the Fawick Art Gallery of Baldwin Wallace University tells the stories of these mistreated women. Encompassing a collection of porcelain sculptures and large-scale tintype images of the artist as the asylum patient, the exhibition details why women were sent to mental asylums and the botched diagnoses and treatments they received. Chapman is known for tackling issues like silencing women, domestic abuse, refugee crises and American school shootings through her delicate, ethereal porcelain sculptures.
Fawick Art Gallery is located in Baldwin Wallace’s Kleist Center for Art & Drama, 95 E. Bagley Road in Berea. An opening reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Sept. 10.
Immersive Van Gogh Cleveland
Immersive Vincent van Gogh exhibit | Sept. 9, 2021 – Jan. 2, 2022
The globally popular immersive Vincent van Gogh exhibit will make its Cleveland debut this year and into the next. The digital art experience aims to mesmerize viewers by transforming a still-secret local space, utilizing architecture, history and community to create a unique art experience with the Dutch painter’s works. The city of Cleveland is working with the exhibit to incorporate the city’s rich history as a part of the show. The experience includes 500,000 cubic feet of projections, 60,600 frames of video and 90 million pixels, according to its website. Before the exhibit opens, existing ticket holders will be emailed information about the name and location of the venue.
