The recent news of the permanent cancellation of the FRONT International Triennial and the local art-focused CAN Triennial, both scheduled for 2025, provoked a conversation in the arts community about whether this would leave a hole in northeast Ohio arts programming and whether something was needed to fill that hole.
As a result of that chatter, local artist/education/arts activist Liz Maugans spearheaded a meeting, which took place at Negative Space Gallery in AsiaTown on Friday February 23, to talk about creating a new event and what it might look like. The meeting attracted about 40 people, mostly older, mostly involved with the visual arts community, including many with decades of experience as curators, gallerists, educators and events organizers.
There wasn’t much consensus about what such an event might look like, what need it was fulfilling, where it might happen, when it might happen, who might be involved or what it might encompass.
Should it be in one location or multiple spaces? Should it be a one-weekend blowout, or run over a period of months or be a series of events? Should it have an education component or be focused on sales opportunities for artists or be oriented toward promoting the arts community? Should its audience be the local community or should it look at promoting Cleveland arts to the outside world? Should it just focus on visual arts — the primary hole left by the triennial cancellations and the main focus of most of the people at the meeting — or should it engage a spectrum of arts and culture, which, some pointed out, existing arts festival of various sizes already do? The Ingenuity Festival was mentioned as a major event which incorporates most of what discussion participants suggested, but other events, including FireFish, the Waterloo Arts Festival, Cain Park Arts Festival, Rooms to Let, and the Tremont Arts and Cultural Festival, also cover much of this ground.
All of these ideas were raised and bandied about. Liz started by suggesting colonizing an unused space such as the abandoned Dave’s store on Payne in Asiatown. For a weekend? A month? Permanently? Mindy Tousley, executive director of Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, tossed out the idea of guerrilla installations in vacant lot by anonymous artists, followed by a big reveal. Tents, Tower City, the subway level of the Detroit-Superior Bridge (used for a pair of Ingenuity Festivals that everyone agrees were magical), and studio tours such as the former NOVA and Sparx in the City events were proposed. Tousley suggested looking at former events to figure out why they stopped.
“We did NOVA; it stopped,” she said. “We need to think about why things in the past didn’t do what they wanted. We need to figure out why they didn’t work to get to something that will work.”
Artist Loren Naji suggested a permanent sculpture garden or an art tailgate party, selling art out of the backs of cars. “Cleveland needs more fun, more weirdness,” he said. One younger participant suggested that to attract young people the event needs to be interactive and have a gaming component.
While several people offered that an event should include a range of arts, it was clear most of the focus here was on the visual arts. “You can’t be all things to all people,” one person said.
It was also clear that there was a lot of discontent about existing efforts to fund and promote the work of artists, such as Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s distribution of the arts tax largely bypassing artists. Several people brought up the amount of work, as well as resources, that a new event would take, probably requiring a large volunteer network, with artist/educator Linda Zolten Wood saying, “We’re tired of always volunteering.”
Clearly, these ideas need to be distilled and honed for something viable to emerge. But the main question that needs to be answered is whether this discussion is just a spontaneous outburst in response to the cancellations of the triennials or if there are ideas, energy and resources — and, mostly importantly, a hole in current programming — to justify a new event. As Tousley said, “What are our goals? That will determine what you do and how you do it.” Generating a board with pros and cons and dividing into smaller work groups were suggested as next steps.
Stay tuned.
2 Responses to “Does Cleveland Need a New Arts Event? by Anastasia Pantsios”
Hank Wait
Little discussion about music and musicians it seems.
Cynthia Penter
Listening today to this week’s City Club Forum about the new consortium of Theatre cohorts and how they are changing their organizations through collaboration and what they are exploring. I highly recommend everyone in the arts community to give a listen and think about new ways we all can connect to create opportunities to work together for a range of outcomes.