‘Crossroads’ shines

‘Crossroads: Still We Rise’ shines a different light on Cleveland’s east side

Fresh art, versatile apps bring depth to the first citywide AR show

Gina Washington’s “I Am” installation includes digital photography and video on site at The Sculpture Center. And if you open the 4th Wall app at the Forest Hill Footbridge in East Cleveland, augmented reality shows her photos across the bridge. | Photos / Amanda Koehn

By Carlo Wolff

Twelve African American artists who believe in Cleveland’s east side deploy augmented reality to highlight, enhance and comment on sites in East Cleveland, Glenville, Slavic Village, Kinsman, Buckeye and Central neighborhoods in “Crossroads: Still We Rise,” an ambitious exhibition by The Sculpture Center of Cleveland.

The purposefully immersive experience, driven by imaginative art, transformative apps and the city’s racial inequities, runs through Sept. 25, both at The Sculpture Center and at 12 outside sites. The artists featured are Lawrence Baker, Donald Black Jr., Marcus Brathwaite, Gwen Garth, Amanda King, Hilton Murray, Ed Parker, Shani Richards, Vince Robinson, Charmaine Spencer, Gina Washington and Gary Williams.

Robin Robinson, who curated “Crossroads: Still We Rise” and worked with Sculpture Center head Grace Chin on what Chin said is the fi rst citywide AR exhibit, selected the artists for their ideology and professionalism. All the works involving the democratizing AR process are commissions.

The exhibition is designed to draw people to view economically wounded, historically resonant neighborhoods with a fresh eye and to foster dialogue about what can be done to celebrate and strengthen them. Its long-term purpose is to generate discussion of the potential of neighborhoods that for too long have effectively been left for dead.

“Still We Rise,” Robinson acknowledges, is profoundly political; it may be the start of something bigger, like a Black arts district, she suggests. At the minimum, she and Chin hope it is the fi rst of many installations.

“We wanted to create a new program for The Sculpture Center where we were bringing art outdoors in a specifi c context,” says Chin, who became the center’s executive director in 2019. “I wanted content that was meaningful and that would create dialogue that refl ected conversations going on in the rest of the country.”

APP APPEAL

Chin also wanted to hitch new technology to new art.

Augmented reality in the gallery is hosted by RazorEdge, a Cleveland-based digital innovation fi rm. It uses iPad Pro cameras and an Apple app.

As RazorEdge’s Ocean Young recently demonstrated with “Listening Eye,” the African spirit vessel that Charmaine Spencer, a Cleveland sculptor, superimposes at the gates of Woodland Cemetery in Central, the Reality Composer app can make it spin and wobble, even get its clay bands to shake.

While Reality Composer creates the interactive AR experience, 4th Wall is the app used on site to publicly access the installations. The artists had to convert their works to JPEGs and PNGs, turning them over to Nancy Baker Cahill, who created the 4th Wall app, for AR use outdoors. There was a major learning curve, says Spencer.

“You have to consider when you’re making your piece what you want the viewer to see in virtual reality and how your piece is going to help that, not putting in anything that’s going to hinder what your vision is in virtual reality,” she says.

Because the technology was unfamiliar, the artists had to work with the technologists, making this project collaborative on yet another level, says Chin. “That was part of the goal because we wanted the artist to have the experience of working in a new medium.”

RISING AGENDA

Robinson, a community activist to the bone, has been living in Cleveland off and on for most of her life. She owns a home in Glenville. She’s tired of the incessant phone calls asking if she wants to sell her house (she doesn’t). She loves her neighborhood, dominated by East

Above: Vince Robinson’s “Rising From the Ashes” (2021) is a photo of the Great Sphinx of Giza and can be viewed via app at E. 99th St. and Buckeye Road in the Buckeye neighborhood of Cleveland. Below: Artist Gary Williams views his oil on canvas “Nubian Graces,” (2021) at the Sculpture Center, and watches the AR elements via iPad.

Charmaine Spencer’s “Listening Eye” (2021), created from clay, soil, glue, paper, burlap, reed grass and hemp, has augmented reality elements viewable via this iPad at The Sculpture Center and on site at Woodland Cemetery via an app. | Photo / Carlo Wolff

105th Street. To the Philadelphia native, “Still We Rise” is more than an invitation to see the eastern core of this troubled city in a new light. It’s an opportunity to shine that light unforgettably bright.

“When I was a child, East 105th Street was like going downtown. My parents wouldn’t send Easter clothes with me because they knew my grandparents would just buy them on East 105th Street,” she recalls of her time there. “Anything else I may have needed, we could get right here.”

It had been about 20 years, after earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, motherhood and a divorce that Robinson fi rst moved to Cleveland around 1979. She then left for Fort Wayne, Ind., with her second husband around 1983. Even more years later, after a second divorce, Robinson returned to Glenville permanently in 2011.

“Coming back, it was just devastating to me,” she says. “I hadn’t seen the gradual progression like people who live here saw, I saw just the devastation.”

She eventually became executive director of Sankofa Fine Arts Plus, a nonprofi t in the St. Clair neighborhood designed to empower African American artists. Sankofa is the name of a West African bird that can turn its head backwards. “The symbology is that you can move forward but always remember your past,” Robinson says.

Sankofa commissions murals and community engagement is one of its key tenets. So is the activism that led to “Our Lives Matter,” an AR overlay on the Cuyahoga County Courthouse unveiled through 4th Wall on Juneteenth 2020, shortly after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. A collaboration among the Sculpture Center, artists Robinson and Gary Williams, and Cahill’s app, it is the direct precursor of “Still We Rise.” The difference is scale.

“I’m passionate about the east side of Cleveland, and as an African American artist in Cleveland, I’m always fi ghting the system that funds art in Cleveland,” Robinson says. “I also am aware of the systematic racism of Cleveland between the west side and east side. I know where the red line is, and it’s in the middle of the Cuyahoga River.”

After many years away, she could see how foreclosures have damaged the east side far more than the west side.

“I’m always dealing with these communities on the east side in my professional capacity,” she adds. “I’m also on the west side as an artist and I work with these organizations as a teaching artist, so I know what’s happening there and not happening over here.”

THE AFRICAN CONNECTION

Vince Robinson, a photojournalist, musician and poet who has been covering the Cleveland scene – and more – for more than 40 years, chose East 99th Street and Buckeye Road for his “Still We Rise” installation. The place is empty, though there are signs it may have been a park, and a catch basin there suggests it’s a drainage site, perhaps under the jurisdiction

Creativity Takes Center Stage at Hawken

Given that Hawken School has always been a haven for creative minds, it’s no surprise that opportunities for students to participate in the arts abound. While many other schools are forced to cut funding for the arts, Hawken’s programming continues to grow and thrive, enabling students to participate at various levels no matter what their age or experience.

A designated arts wing on Hawken’s Lower and Middle School campus featuring four classrooms designed for exploration, creation and performance represents a physical manifestation of Hawken’s commitment to the arts. Beginning in early childhood, music educators work with students to reinforce a love of music and to provide a basis for the development of musical concepts and skills. In third grade, students are introduced to the soprano recorder; in fourth and fth grade, students select a string, woodwind, brass, or percussion instrument for musical study; and from third through fth grade, students can opt to participate in Lower School Choir, which presents an annual musical production. In the Middle School, chorus, strings and band are o ered as part of the curriculum. Students also have the opportunity to be part of the Jr. Hawken Players’ Society through participation in the annual musical either on stage, behind-the-scenes, or in the pit orchestra.

At Hawken’s Upper School, students can select from a wide variety of music, dance and theater courses including Acting Fundamentals, Advanced Acting, Chorale, Concert Band, Creative Movement, Jazz Band, Global Rhythms, Stage Craft and String Ensemble. Outside of the academic day, small performing groups like Hawken Harmony provide additional opportunities for students interested in musical performance.

One of the most popular clubs at Hawken is The Hawken Players’ Society (HPS), which produces at least one play and one musical each year. Open to all students at both the Mastery School of Hawken in University Circle and the Upper School in Gates Mills, HPS productions are largely studentdriven. Under the guidance of adult mentors, students are given the latitude, tools, and responsibility to take full ownership of their role as an artist, whether in set design and construction; props, costumes, or makeup; marketing and graphic design; acting, singing, dancing; and even assistant directing. Hawken students have been the recipient of numerous Dazzle Awards from Playhouse Square over the last several years; most recently, a senior won the Best Actor award for his performance in Hawken’s COVIDsafe, live-stream musical, Songs for a New World, by Jason Robert Brown. Hawken School also places great value on the visual arts, often in collaboration with the performing arts department. An annual Early Childhood Art Show, a Visiting Artists Program, the annual Evening of Art and Music, the creation of artwork to accompany the fourth and fth grade musical, middle school set design, and the Biomimicry Art and Science Forum mark just a number of the many highlights of visual arts programming on Hawken’s Lyndhurst campus.

Visual Arts o erings for Upper School students include Art Fundamentals, Art and Design Principles, Graphic Design, Drawing and Painting, History of Western Art, Photography, Sculpture, Ceramics, AP Studio Art, Animation, as well as several advanced courses in these subjects.

Stirn Hall academic building at the Upper School campus, with its Media and Communications Lab and Fabrication Lab, has opened up a whole new world of creative, interdisciplinary possibilities. The Creative Movement class has worked with Groundworks Dance Company on a collaborative project, which took students to Playhouse Square to perform. In addition, numerous classes including the Design and Engineering and Comedy classes have utilized the new spaces for creative, hands-on projects. The Goldberg Innovation Lab on the Lyndhurst campus provides even our youngest students the opportunity to immerse themselves in the art of creative design.

Visit hawken.edu to learn more about the full menu of arts options available at Hawken. To learn more about visiting our campus, go to hawken.edu/admission or call 440-423-2955.

of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. Visit that intersection, download the 4th Wall app to your smartphone and view Vince Robinson’s photo of the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Vince Robinson (no relation to Robin) traveled to Egypt and the Sudan in fall 2019 on a cultural tour. “It was transformative, it was phenomenal,” he says of the trip, which brought him “a greater level of understanding and appreciation of being African.”

Vince Robinson has added spiritual layers through his terrestrial and philosophical voyages. He also amassed indelible images like the one he captured at Giza, designed as “something to replace what has been destroyed or erased,” he says. “I’m also saving that space, in a sense, with something that is essentially African and relates to us there as well as here.”

Augmented reality “provides opportunities for artists in a very revolutionary way,” he says. “Back in the day, you could express yourself as an artist with graffiti, and when you did that, it left an indelible mark wherever you left your art, and in the process of providing your art you may have defaced something else.” There’s no defacing with AR, which leaves only a virtual trace.

“When you understand how augmented reality works and you’re connected with the right entities, you can put art anywhere,” Vince Robinson says. “It’s a different way of creating permanence – without intrusion.”

BLACK ARTISTS MATTER

Robin Robinson has been trying to establish an east side arts district for African American artists and residents in Glenville. Despite the occasional gallery “popping up in different places, we’re not cohesive enough to say, ‘This is an arts district,’” she says. “We’re kind of forced to be, you know, disassembled – and compete with each other. Why should we have to compete with each other?”

Is “Crossroads: Still We Rise” the seed of a Black artists collaborative?

“It’s not, really,” Robinson says carefully, hedging her denial in the next breath. “I have based a lot of my adult experiences on my favorite film, which oddly enough, is “Field of Dreams” – ‘If you build it, they will come.’ What I want to do with ‘Crossroads’ is have people see for themselves that these neighborhoods are not as forgettable and devastating, only able to be utilized as a resource for freeways, parks or whatever it is that money wants to be. These communities are not surplus.”

Chin says, “One of the goals of the exhibition is for the participants and viewers to take this information and say, ‘What should we do?’ Have people ever been to Central? East Cleveland? Not necessarily. Do people who have driven through Central know that once there were all these magnificent, four-story buildings? They’re gone. It is eyeopening because it’s a little bit shocking. Now, these are some of the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, in Ohio, in the country.”

Central used to be a thriving neighborhood, home to the storied Majestic Hotel, a Black visitor-only haven at East 55th Street and Central Avenue featuring great jazz. The artist Gwen Garth lived there for a time. Her AR work at that spot aims to resurrect the corner’s vitality.

“These communities already have their gems,” says Robin Robinson. “These neighborhoods already have something that they feel ownership for and they feel pride in. I just want other people to see that.” Above: Amanda King’s “Resurrection” (2021) depicts Cory United Methodist Church in Glenville, which has AR elements on site that look to the church’s racial justice history and ahead to the future of the movement and Black children as the next leaders. Below: Gwen Garth’s “A Majestic Vision” (2021), digital drawing and AR, reimagines a vacant Goodwill Industries building as a cultural arts center to serve the Central neighborhood of Cleveland. The site is significant as the historic home to the former Majestic Hotel that once was the area’s primary African American hotel in the early- to mid-1900s.

ON VIEW

“Crossroads: Still We Rise” is on view through Sept. 25 at sites around Cleveland and at The Sculpture Center, 1834 E. 123rd St., Cleveland. To download a map of the locations, visit sculpturecenter.org/crossroads. To view the artwork at any of the locations, download the 4th Wall app on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

Please join us!

Thu Aug 26, 6:30–8pm Opening event

11610 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106

Gallery Hours Starting Aug 27 Mon–Thu 10am–5pm Fri 10am–9pm Sat–Sun 12–5pm

For more information about our programming and current COVID-19 visitor protocols: cia.edu/exhibitions 216.421.7407

reinbergergallery #ciafacultyexhibition

Artwork:

Joseph Minek 853_kpempp_e61dcd_rd , 2016 Unique C-Print

a program of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland Roe Green, Honorary Producer

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Reinberger Gallery

2021 Faculty Exhibition

Aug 26–Oct 10

A tradition that spans more than eight decades, the Faculty Exhibition is a celebration of art, design and their makers. It provides an opportunity for the public to view new, original and innovative works by CIA’s world-renowned art and design faculty.

Also on view: Snickers That Turn Into Livable Joy Ann and Norman Roulet Student + Alumni Gallery Curated by Curatorial Assistant Amani Williams

Our exhibitions are generously supported by CIA’s Community Partners. Visit cia.edu/partners.

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