Sun 7/26 @ noon-4pm
Maybe you’ve seen Jim Lanza’s work at any of a number of the better art and craft events around the area. His manipulated prints on wood, mostly depicting scenes of Cleveland past and present, are eye-catching and evocative. And while the historical ones are based on found photos, 75% of the photos are his own work. He produces the work under the name Foundry Woodprints.
Lanza created a collection of his work for the offices of the Skylight Financial Group in the Historical United Bank Building across from the West Side Market. It’s called The Guardians of Cleveland: Iconic Cleveland Images. Among those images are renditions of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge Guardians of Traffic on seven-foot birch panels.
They’re in a penthouse space with a panoramic view of the city, owned by a private business. But they’ll open the space for one afternoon — Sun 7/26 from noon-4pm — so the public can see the work.
The current work Lanza is doing is only about six years old, but he’s long had a passion for photography. He took some photography courses at Cleveland State in the 1980s, studying with the late Masumi Hayashi. But, like most people whose roots are in the rock music scene, he was mostly self-taught.
“I bought my own equipment and set up darkroom in my kitchen,” he recalls. “I was doing lots of local band shows at the Pop Shop, the old Agora, the Lakeside. I was taking videos at shows even back then. I have all these VHS tapes of the Pagans, Death of Samantha, Shadow of Fear.”
And even back then, he was thinking in terms of merchandising: “Right out of high school I was doing t-shirt line that I would sell to Chris’s Warped Records [in Lakewood], of Ouija boards or Day of the Dead. I would do custom merchandise for bands or record labels.”
In the early ’90s, a friend from the scene, Mark O’Shea, who was road managing for Nine Inch Nails, invited Lanza to go on the road as their merch person. He did that for three or four years in the mid 1990s, then jumped onto the road with Marilyn Manson when NIN became inactive.
“I always kept doing photography when I would travel,” he says. “I would capture a lot of images of buildings, of people. When I was traveling in Europe with bands on a day off I would go and take pictures of places.”
He also did some video on tour with Manson.
“When I started, Marilyn Manson was having all kind of problems with religious organizations,” he says. “I told Tony [Ciulla, Manson’s manager] if you need anyone to document all this crazy stuff… They would march outside, they had people with bullhorns. We borrowed cameras from MTV, and it turned into a documentary.”
But then Lanza got married ten years ago and realized “there’s no way to have a relationship if you’re touring with bands forever.” He turned his attention to utilizing what he’d learned about merchandising. He sold custom work to chains like Hot Topic and Spencer’s “geared to teens, skater punk kids. I would do a ton of custom work for Hot Topic, stickers, word stickers for skateboards, lockers.”
But gradually he started to think about combining his photography and his merchandising.
“I remember being in Austin and going to a store and seeing some prints on wood but they were hand-painted,” he says. “I was thinking, wow, I can maybe figure out a way to have my photography put on wood. I did a lot of experimenting. My own photography is a big part of it. Some of it is collections I have of things, old linen postcards of the 1920s and 30s, images of Euclid Beach or when they were building the Terminal Tower, old Prohibition images. But really the thing I’m pushing is my own photography.”
He’s also pushing how he transforms that photography into a work of art.
“The finishing is what makes it unique,” he says. “I do all the finishing myself. Instead of a paintbrush, the tools I’m using are propane torches, belt sanders, polyurethane. The grain of the wood comes through and becomes part of the art. I get people coming into my booth who are completely confused. They have no idea how these things are done.”
He does about 50 of the higher quality shows in the region such as the Cleveland Flea from May through the end of the year, then spends the wintry months creating new work. He’s done boards of restaurants, cars and hotels including Melt, El Carnicero, Momocho, Portside Brewery, the Metropolitan 9 and the Hilton Garden Inn. He says that his work seems to have a really struck a chord with people.
“The whole ‘Pride of Cleveland’ thing is just insane now,” he says. “I grew up with people making fun of Cleveland. Now it’s so opposite of that. People seem to have a genuine pride of living here. I do shows in other states and I always look to see if other places have it, and they don’t. Chicago does, Pittsburgh does. But I went to North Carolina and made all this North Carolina stuff. It didn’t go that well.”
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Cleveland, OH 44113