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Sasharjohns work timer6/8/2023 ![]() DeVille has also created an installation within The Sculpture Center about the legacy of Black settlements and the salt mines 2,000 feet under Lake Erie, speaking to the geological abstraction of preservation, labor and migration. Responding to Hughes’s “The Dream Keeper and Other Poems” (1932), DeVille’s sculptures are figurative installations made from mannequins, domestic objects, and the cast faces of surrounding neighbors they reflect many of the ideas and images that circulate across the poems, including beauty, stars, imagination, song, love and darkness. The Dream Keeper (2022) is a series of sculptures located in Quincy Garden in partnership with Karamu House, the oldest producing Black theatre in the country, where Hughes presented many of his staged and musical works. Hughes’s beliefs about the capacity of dreams to affect the conditions of this country and the Black world at large are referents for a body of public artwork by Abigail DeVille, made in collaboration with residents from Cleveland’s Fairfax community, where Hughes lived as a teenager. Including her architectural paintings, like Untitled (brigade) (2005) and eye of (Thoth) (2021), alongside works by Danny Lyon, Isamu Noguchi and Jacob Lawrence, the exhibition comments on the fortitude of organized bodies and thresholds across cultural media, geographies, and time periods. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, Julie Mehretu also worked within the permanent collection to curate an exhibition titled “Portals,” featuring the artist in a reflective dialogue between her own practice and the work of others. The work is dense, pulling you in to read and reread all its many parts, from a sculpture by Doris Salcedo positioned on the floor within a tire to a painting by Raquelín Mendieta fastened to the top of a wooden palette. Repurposing fine art as a defense system, the installation is constructed as a future action through an agreement that creates an opportunity for activists, organizers, or residents to borrow and activate this “barricade” during civic protests. The installation includes a selection of thirteen works from the museum’s collection, placed among locally sourced objects like street signs, vehicles, construction debris, and fencing. Drawing on the work of anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin, the piece reimagines the role of the museum in times of crisis. The entire performance felt ceremonial, like a glorifying exhale.Īhmet Öğüt’s installation Bakunin's Barricade (2015–2022) at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin is an inquiry into institutional collections as a social form. The next piece invited the audience to join in with their own gleeful shouts, dance and rhythmic claps. A brass band ushered participants into the Old Stone Church with a rendition of Civil Rights anthem “This Little Light of Mine.” Inside, the hushed moaning of vocalist LaToya Kent swept down from the balcony, while various musicians hummed away at instruments and electronic boards, many having travelled with Raza along Lake Erie. A multi-day boat trip from Buffalo, New York to Cleveland’s harbor marked the beginning for Asad Raza’s performance work Delegation (2022). It's a fitting opening for an exhibition featuring several community collaborations as well as activations of public commons, historic sites, and cultural institutions, and with several outstanding performance elements. ![]() Within an exhibition focusing on healing and the civic potential of artistic processes, these records make visible the art and practice of revision, and stand here as a critical exchange on what it means to bear witness to the ephemeral. At Transformer Station, a private museum owned by the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Foundation in the rapidly changing Ohio City neighborhood, visitors are greeted by a series of archival reproductions of drafts of the poem from which the exhibition takes its title, Hughes’s “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams” (1957), showing the delicate changes the poet made to his now-famous lines. The poetic invocations of Langston Hughes ground the 2022 Front Triennial, an exhibition spanning over thirty sites across three cities in Northeast Ohio-Cleveland, Oberlin and Akron.
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