Final group of project highlights announced

New commissions by artists including A.K. Burns and Tony Tasset in addition to an ambitious expansion of Canvas City Downtown Mural Program

July 14–September 30, 2018

Press and Professional Preview Days: July 12–13, 2018
Cleveland, Ohio

FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art announces final group of project highlights for its inaugural edition, titled An American City, running July 14 through September 30, 2018. Further exploring the theme of An American City, these projects reflect the interest of contemporary artists to interact with the urban landscape with works addressing such salient topics as gentrification and community equity. Via both temporary and long term interventions, these projects variously examine, track, and build alliances between communities and histories, offering a portrait of An American City in flux.

Together with highlights already announced for institutions and unconventional spaces, these projects contribute to FRONT’s multi-part presentation that investigates the significance and meaning of staging a large-scale international triennial in the contemporary context. FRONT and its partner sites throughout Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin will bring together more than 70 local, national and international artists connecting Great Lakes region to broader global, political and economic networks.

Preview Day registration is currently open at frontart.org/VIP
 

The Dispossessed
A.K. Burns at Transformer Station
A.K. Burns will stage a sculpture made of crushed and painted chain-link fencing on the grounds of the Transformer Station. The historic building was acquired by the Bidwell Foundation and turned into a contemporary art space. This transformation was part of a first wave of gentrification in the Hingetown neighborhood of Ohio City. Situated at this epicenter, the sculpture will be in critical dialogue with various modes of local ‘revitalization.’ Chain-link fencing is ubiquitous, found on the periphery of construction sites, and empty lots throughout the neighborhood. Set in relief against the shifting fortunes and economies of Hingetown this work reflects not only on the role of fences locally but more broadly on how it is used to criminalize the movement of certain bodies. The Dispossessed desires to remove and re-envision these divisive constructions—displacing the fence from its partitioning function. Bent and up-ended, the newly dysfunctional object becomes a potentially beautiful form. 

Human Right
Stephen Willats at Transformer Station
Since the early 1960s, English artist Stephen Willats has situated his pioneering conceptual art in participatory works that unfold beyond the conventions of an object-based art world. In particular, his work Human Right examines the relationship between personal narratives and social conditions in Middlesbrough, a mid-sized and post-industrial city not unlike Cleveland. Willats’ work is a complex constellation of interviews, large-scale photographs, system diagrams, and a series of seven films shown in shop windows surrounding the gallery during the piece’s original installation. Rather than a Cleveland-centric work, Willats’ Human Right gives voice to a population who, through their community efforts, effect change.

Judy’s Hand Pavilion
Tony Tasset at Toby’s Plaza, Case Western Reserve University
In a project jointly developed by FRONT and the Putnam Collection of Case Western Reserve University, Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset will place his commissioned work, Judy’s Hand Pavilion, on Toby’s Plaza at Case Western Reserve, an open space made possible by the support of alumna Toby Devan Lewis, a local author, art curator, and philanthropist. Judy’s Hand Pavilion is a writ large representation of the hand of the artist’s wife, who is a celebrated contemporary abstract painter. Indulging in the pleasures of verisimilitude, scale, and a lustrous finish, the work critically examines the artistic traditions of appropriation, pathos, and pleasure.

Sharon Lockhart at the Julia and Pollock Gallery, Cleveland Clinic
In 2017, Lockhart represented Poland at the 57th Venice Biennale with her multidisciplinary project, Little Review, organized with National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland. Created with young women from the Youth Sociotherapy Center in Rudzienko, Lockhart’s project in Venice comprised translations, a film and a series of photographs, as well as educational workshops. Little Review draws its inspiration from the work of Janusz Korczak (1878/79–1942), the Polish-Jewish educator, orphanage-director, and children’s rights advocate. Similar to Korczak, Lockhart’s goal is to provide a forum for children’s voices, both past and present.

Jan van der Ploeg at Cleveland Clinic
Jan van der Ploeg will design an interior wall painting in a high traffic corridor in the Cleveland Clinic’s Miller Pavillion, a crossroads for patients and visitors to the hospital and medical research institution. “His paintings expand the best of contemporary non-objective work in their sheer boldness and fearless scope, the entirety of the painting’s dynamics are always greater than the architecture that supports them.” Michelle Grabner, FRONT Artistic Director.

Canvas City Downtown Mural Program, Downtown Cleveland
FRONT will revive Cleveland’s 1973 City Canvases program, a public art project conceived by the former Cleveland Area Arts Council to stage large-scale murals. In homage to the historical role that public art has played in Cleveland, FRONT will reprise Julian Stanczak’s iconic 1973 abstract mural on the same twelve story wall on Prospect Avenue and Ninth Street that was its original home. This work will act as a catalyst to introduce additional abstract paintings by contemporary artists: Odili Donald Odita, Sarah Morris, Heimo Zobernig and Kay Rosen. The Canvas City Downtown Mural Program will evolve over time, with Stanczak’s historical mural executed first, and others to follow over the next three years. FRONT will create an augmented reality experience for the unexecuted designs, so that visitors will be able to experience the proposed painting when visiting each of the five sites, all grouped together in the space of a few city blocks.