Mon 12/18 @ 6:30PM
Tue 12/19 @ 6:30PM
Chicago artist Michael Rakowitz will be in Cleveland 12/18-19 on a very strange-sounding mission: to erase the color orange from the city.
But the underlying meaning is not so strange: it refers to the orange cap put on toy guns to signal that they are fake, a cap that had been removed from the toy gun Tamir Rice had been playing with prior to being killed by police.
Rakowitz’s project “A Color Removed’ is described as “a participatory project that responds to this tragedy with the accumulation of orange items in order to prompt viewers to consider how it feels to live in a society where the right to safety has been visually displaced. Clothing, toys, sports equipment, and household items will be catalogued and displayed at SPACES from July to September 2018, and will serve as a forum for fearless listening during FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.”
The project launches with a pair of letter-writing workshops, on Monday at Mac’s Backs in Coventry Village and Tuesday at Guide to Kulchur on Lorain. There participants will write their thoughts about racism and safety asking, “What does it look like when the right to safety is removed?” with some very lofty goals: “affecting policy through the public expression of grief, creating solidarity for a more peaceful city, and collectively redressing extrajudicial force against people of color. These will join the orange items on display during FRONT.
The workshops are free and open to all but space is limited so you must reserve you spot by emailing cvassallo@SPACESgallery.org with “A Color Removed RSVP” in the subject line and the date you will attend in the body of the email.