The Ohio City neighborhood seems to have it out for local artist/arts promoter Loren Naji.
In the early 2010s he had a studio/gallery of West 25th about a block south of the West Side Market where he fabricated his large-scale sculptures and hosted legendary art parties — until a cranky neighbor sicced the city and fire department on him for everything from serving wine and beer at openings (a shocking thing that has never happened at any art opening, right?) to not having exit signs in precisely the right place. When they started to hassle him for having insufficient parking, he packed up and moved to the St. Clair/Superior neighborhood.
Now Ohio City has bitten him on the ass again. Those who drive regularly past the West Side Market area may have noticed that his large globe sculpture, located on a small plaza across from the West 25th and Lorain RTA station since 2011, vanished sometime last summer. As part of the installation agreement with RTA, Naji still owned the hollow sculpture, which doubled as a time capsule, filled with items contributed by the community, to be opened and its contents shared in 2050.
It appears that as part of the construction around the massive new apartment/retail development INTRO on the southeast corner of West 25th and Lorain, Naji’s sculpture, titled “They Have Landed,” was destroyed and trashed.
“A friend of mine drove by and called me and said, where’s your ball, it’s missing,” recalls Naji. A little investigation revealed that workers had torn the ball from its foundation and threw it, and all its contents, in a dumpster. The sculpture was bolted to the ground in an eight-foot foundation with six-foot rods going into the ball, he says, so it couldn’t be stolen. But when the attempt was made to move it, it broke apart and all its contents spilled out. He believes this happened last August.
They could easily have done it lifted it out without breaking it, he says.
“There was a plaque on it with my name on it, describing the ball. So they knew my name; a large construction company could have Googled my name and got a hold of me. There aren’t many other Loren Najis. They should have found me and said, we need to move your sculpture. I knew how to open cap, go inside of ball, remove the four bolts. Then it could have been lifted off.”
Naji has already been in touch with a lawyer to consider his next steps.
“I still own it, and nobody told me anything. I don’t know who’s responsible right now. It could be the city of Cleveland, it could be RTA, it could be Panzica construction, or the developers, Harbor Bay from Chicago. It’s one of those four or some of them or all of them who are responsible for trashing it and not letting me know.”
Naji is known for ambitious groundbreaking projects such as his Moon Cube in the Waterloo Arts District in 2014, and another large hollow sphere he called EMOH, made out of wood from demolished houses. He lived inside it for a month while competing in the 2016 Grand Rapids Art Prize, where he finished in the top 20 out of 1,400 entries. Having a public sculpture by an artist of his stature adjacent to a new “luxury” building should’ve been seen as another asset enhancing the neighborhood’s ambience. Destroying it adds to the city’s reputation for disregarding its history and the things that make it unique.
