An American City

FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art announces institutional program highlights for the inaugural Triennial, titled An American City, running July 14 through September 30, 2018, at sites across Northeast Ohio.

Press and professional accreditation is free via the FRONT website.

Preview days will take place July 12 and 13, 2018.
 

Adding to the public art commissions and projects announced in fall 2017, the Triennial will engage the area’s most significant cultural and educational institutions to present a series of exhibitions and projects throughout Cleveland. Working in partnership with curators at each of these institutions, FRONT will debut new commissions and special exhibitions, with a number of national and international artists presenting significant projects and artworks to area audiences for the first time.

“Collaboration is critical to FRONT’s overarching program, and we have worked very closely with the curatorial partners at each institution,” said FRONT Artistic Director Michelle Grabner. By facilitating connections among various distinct cultural voices and institutional frameworks, FRONT aims to inspire intersections and touchpoints to actively renew, redescribe and recontextualize contemporary aesthetic experiences.

Program highlights for the Triennial include artist commissions and major installations presented throughout Cleveland’s most significant cultural and educational institutions, listed alphabetically as follows:

Akron Art Museum
The Akron Art Museum will present an international group exhibition of video, installations, painting and sculpture that examines how consumer culture affects contemporary urban society, featuring work by Nasser Al Salem, Walead Beshty, Nicholas Buffon, Gerard Byrne, Sean Connelly, Jamal Cyrus, Woody De Othello, Maryam Jafri, Li Jinghu, Ad Minoliti, Katrín Sigurdardóttir and Visible Collective. Highlights include:

Gerard Byrne: In Our Time
Irish video artist and photographer Gerard Byrne’s 2017 immersive video installation In Our Time chronicles the daily routine of a disc jockey in the 1980s.

Katrin Sigurdardottir
Katrin Sigurdardottir’s work mines the forms of architecture and archaeology in constructed installations. For FRONT, her project places sculptures made of volcanic clay mined in Iceland, in the Northeast Ohio earth, allowing them to naturally evolve among the local flora. 

Walead Beshty
For FRONT, Walead Beshty will exhibit a suite of photographs made in the abandoned Iraqi Embassy in the former East Berlin, an architectural site evacuated after reunification

Cleveland Museum of Art
Marlon de Azambuja: Brutalismo-Cleveland
For this iteration of his long-standing series of sculptural installations, Brutalism, Marlon de Azambuja will create a work made of materials gathered in Cleveland. This ongoing series celebrates both the legacy of brutalist architecture and specificity of place.

Agnieszka Kurant: End of Signature
Commissioned for FRONT, Agnieszka Kurant will present the newest iteration of her series End of Signature series, combining signatures submitted by employees and trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Art aggregated into a single inscription form that will be displayed on the museum’s facade.

Luisa Lambri
Continuing her investigation of spaces designed by eminent male architects, Luisa Lambri has produced a suite of photographs using architectural elements of the Cleveland Museum of Art as building blocks for her compositions that offer close-valued, painterly impressions of austere modern architectural spaces.

Kerry James Marshall
The exhibition will highlight Kerry James Marshall’s active practice making works on paper, featuring a large-scale 12-panel woodcut print from 1998 that unfolds cinematically, taking the viewer from an aerial perspective of an urban grid into the intimate setting of a home. 

Allen Ruppersberg: Then and Now
For his first presentation at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland-born conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg pays homage to his hometown in a new body of work. Drawing on his interest in vernacular urban forms, Ruppersberg will use local billboards as a tool for rediscovering the city he left for Los Angeles in the 1960s.

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Johnny Coleman
Based on a new installation in and about Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood, Coleman will create an auxiliary presentation at MOCA Cleveland that extends his research and expands access to the stories he has uncovered in the history and heritage of African-Americans within the United States

Cyprien Gaillard: Nightlife  
Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D film and audio installation Nightlife was shot in Cleveland, Los Angeles and Berlin and is a meditation on the ways in which traumatic events of history can be read in urban or “natural” landscapes. 

Lin Ke
Lin Ke is a multi-media artist who will create a digital experience in augmented and virtual reality in the galleries of the museum. Drawing inspiration from the city of Cleveland, the artist will develop the work as one of the Cleveland Foundation Creative Fusion artists in residence for the Triennial.

Josh Kline
Josh Kline’s immersive dystopian installation at MOCA Cleveland is a major component of his 2017 project Civil War. MOCA’s presentation of Kline’s work is a monochrome ash-colored environment, featuring a group of gray sculptures that appear to be piles of concrete rubble that form a dark sci-fi vision of America’s middle-class aspirations as shattered ruins in the aftermath of a near-future civil war. 

Martine Syms: An Evening with Queen White 
Filmed in a single long-take using a 360 degree camera, the work focuses on the performer Fay Victor (as Queen White) in the midst of a set reminiscent of the Motown recording studios of the 1960s. 

Oberlin College
Juan Araujo at the Weltzheimer/Johnson House, Oberlin College
As a Cleveland Foundation Creative Fusion artist in residence, Juan Araujo will occupy the Usonian Weltzheimer/Johnson House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. His FRONT project will explore the symbiotic relationship between the paintings and the buildings he has observed through a diversity of media, sited at the house in addition to an offsite location on the college’s campus.

Barbara Bloom in the Ellen Johnson Gallery, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
Barbara Bloom has conceived an exhibition responding specifically to the Ellen Johnson Gallery, designed by Robert Venturi in the 1970s. She will create one of her signature installations in this complex postmodern gallery, presenting a carefully curated and placed selection of works, all of which depict architecture in some form. 

Cui Jie at the Richard D. Baron ’64 Art Gallery, Oberlin College                                              
Cui Jie’s technical mastery of the painted surface renders complex, architectonically layered works that source hyperbolic combinations of “idealized” urban architecture, finding commonalities that merge a sense of alienation common to both contemporary China and postwar Europe. During the Triennial, she will install a solo exhibition at the Baron Art Gallery.

Press inquiries:
Shawna Gallancy, SUTTON
shawna@suttonpr.com / T +1 212 202 3402

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