Wed 8/5 @ 7PM
In mid-March, the Cleveland Print Room was scheduled to open Shtetl in the Sun, a selection of photos by the late Florida-based photographer Andy Sweet. It was the weekend everything started to shut down, so the exhibit hangs in CPR’s closed gallery — luckily, now viewable online at their website.
Sweet was a Jewish Miami Beach native, born in 1953, who returned home after college to embark with collaborator Gary Monroe on the Miami Beach photography project, to document a culture, which was vanishing on the eve of gentrification. In the ’70s, between its early go-go years of the ’40s and ’50s and before gentrification brought a new wave of luxury hotels, chic night clubs and high-end international boutiques, Miami Beach’s South Beach was a landing place for elderly retirees from the north, many of them Jewish Holocaust survivors.
He spent five years on the project before he was murdered in 1982, and his negatives were lost. They were later found by his family and restored in an ongoing project by his sister’s photographer partner. Many of his images, which — unusual for the era — were in color, became the 2019 book Shtetl in the Sun. This show features a selection of those photos.
Andy’s sister Ellen Sweet Moses and the collection’s archivist Ed Christin will join a Zoon conversation moderated by art historian Sabine Kretzschmar, which will also offer a preview of some of Sweet’s previously unseen works. It’s free; join the event here.
Cleveland, OH 44114