Age: 23 • Lives and creates: Cleveland Heights • Learned: BFA in Sculpture + Expanded Media from Cleveland Institute of Art
DIY, memory and the color pink are some of the themes James Negron leans into when he’s creating artwork.
The 2024 Cleveland Institute of Art graduate lives and works by the idea that creating art should be accessible to everyone, and as such, dives into mediums and designs that can inspire others to create for themselves.
“I really advocate for its accessibility and having anybody be able to do art because it’s really cathartic, and I think everybody could benefit from those therapeutic qualities that art has to offer,” he says. “For me, fiber is the easiest way to do that.”
Growing up in New Jersey’s Somerset County, Negron says he “fell in love with art” after his father died, using it as a coping mechanism. Encouraged by a high school art teacher, he continued to create and initially entered CIA for painting. He switched his major at the end of freshman year to Sculpture + Expanded Media when he realized he liked “making things with my hands and actually feeling the thing and having it take up space.”
The DIY style and pink tones make Negron’s artwork look and feel inviting while exploring important topics like mental health, gender, familial relationships, memory and the passage of time. These subjects were addressed in his Bachelor of Fine Arts project, “I (Dont) Want To Remember,” for which the namesake piece is pink-stained wood magnet letters on flocked steel, now sitting in his Cleveland Heights apartment and studio.
His focus on pink also serves as a reclamation of the color, he adds.
“Being trans was not easy, and the color pink and anything that was pink was very pushed onto me,” he says. “It was very forced. And after all these years, despite all of that, I still love the color – and I love it just for being a color and not that it represents anything other than, like, my love and adoration for it.”
While at CIA, Negron also did a project with Neighborhood Pets as part of the school’s Creativity Works program for which students apply their creative skills to real-world issues and causes. As Neighborhood Pets helps support local pet owners, Negron held workshops to teach volunteers how to crochet granny squares which he then stitched into dog sweaters. Also sewing dog beds for the Cleveland nonprofit, he created a calendar of pets wearing the sweaters to raise funds for pet aid. A rescue dog owner himself, Negron says he knows firsthand pets can be costly and this project allowed him to use his talents to give back.
Soon after graduating, Negron won a Support for Artists grant to create a body of work for the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center in Cleveland. Focused on his Latin heritage and family through photos, his project included six screen prints on silk.
Receiving the grant helped instill confidence in his practice, he says, and reassured him he could continue creating art even without the resources and supplies he had in school.
Additionally, Negron recently had an installation in “In Touch: A Hands-On Exhibition” at Valley Art Center in Chagrin Falls for which he received the John Bramblitt Award for inspiration and enrichment in art.
“I (Dont) Want To Remember” (2023). Flocked steel, carved wood, magnets, 24 x 24 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Today, he works primarily with fiber, making initial sketches that change in an “intuitive” way throughout the process, he says. Negron is especially into house imagery as the “best metaphorical container for everything that I’m talking about,” as well as hand sewing with various stitching styles contributing to the mood of a piece.
Currently making work without a specific project in mind, at his desk, Negron shows off some “wired readymades that I’m finding at the thrift store” to which he hand sewed patchwork pieces around the frames.
He notes his undergraduate career was very fulfilling in terms of finding a style and subject matter that speaks to him – at least for now – and setting him up for success. However, he’s now beginning to understand the challenges of being a working artist, like finding shows his work fits into and always applying for grants and residencies.
“Between working and trying to keep my practice alive, it’s a lot,” he says.
And as a teaching assistant at the Rainey Institute youth arts program in Cleveland – in addition to working as newsletter manager and development manager for CAN Journal – he is further realizing the importance of making art doable for anyone.
“Especially because I do teach kids and stuff, I know that a lot of art processes are not very accessible and they’re expensive,” he says. “I love fiber arts because anybody can do them.”
Negron’s artistic influences include Sarah Paul, one of his professors at CIA, and his colleague and fellow local artist Gina Washington. He repeats a mantra from Washington that sticks with him.
“What she always says to me, to the kids, to anybody is that she makes art by any means necessary,” he says, “and I absolutely love that.”
– Amanda Koehn
WHAT OTHERS SAY
“James Negron is an exceptional multidisciplinary artist with a fearless approach to material experimentation. From fibers to printmaking to video, I’m impressed with his ability to move difficult subject matter through a wide range of material forms to land on the strongest iterations of that particular thought. He is a deeply sincere and generous person, and I think that really comes through in his work. James is willing to occupy a vulnerable space in order to foster productive dialogue about mental health and healing. Not many artists can do that successfully. It takes an inner strength and genuine capacity for empathy that I have rarely seen in such a young person.”
Sarah Paul, professor of Sculpture + Expanded Media, Cleveland Institute of Art
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