FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art Opens Second Edition
FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art Opens Second Edition
Running July 16 through October 2, 2022 at Sites Across Northeast Ohio
(Cleveland, OH – July 14, 2022) — The long-awaited second edition of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art will open to the public on July 16, 2022 and remain on view through October 2, 2022.
Curated by Prem Krisnamurthy, FRONT 2022: Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows embraces art as an agent of transformation, a mode of healing, and a therapeutic process. The title is an homage to the 1957 poem “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams” by Langston Hughes, who moved to Cleveland in his childhood and maintained an artistic connection to the region. The poem—a tender, brutal, and provocative prayer—meditates on the inseparability of joy and suffering:
Two Somewhat Different Epigrams (1957)
I
Oh, God of dust and rainbows, help us see
That without dust the rainbow would not be.
II
I look with awe upon the human race
And God, who sometimes spits right in its face.
Amidst a time of ongoing tragedy and loss, FRONT 2022 explores how artmaking offers the possibility to transform and heal us—as individuals, as groups, and as a society. Spanning over thirty sites in Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, the exhibition bears witness to the region’s past and present scars, from the environmental degradation caused by industrial production to police violence and urban fracture. Yet alongside interlocking public and personal crises, healing is contemporary Cleveland’s biggest industry; furthermore, organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous (founded in Akron) or Art Therapy Studio (one of the nation’s first such independent institutions) represent influential models for collective care. Learning from these and other local precedents, Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows emphasizes collaborative creative processes, working closely with institutions across the region, and connecting artists with local communities. Emerging over multiple timeframes, FRONT 2022 approaches the slow process of curating as a way to leave lasting traces upon civic and cultural infrastructures, while also embracing the ephemeral glimpses of beauty that art—like a rainbow—can still offer.
The exhibition features over 100 regional, national, and international artists working across painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, video, text, performance, and other media. Ongoing exhibitions and public installations work in tandem with online and time-based programs. Starting with how daily practice allows individual artists to cultivate liberation through the everyday rituals of creation, the triennial also demonstrates how aesthetic pleasure—sharing joy through movement, music, craft, and color—can bridge differences between people to bring them together. Finally, the exhibition suggests ways that artmaking can speak with power: showing us how to recognize and reimagine the invisible structures that govern contemporary life.
FRONT 2022 Artistic Director Prem Krishnamurthy said, "After a one-year delay in these challenging times, it’s even more gratifying to witness Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows finally coming to life. The exhibition is a testament to the commitment and collaboration of our participating artists, partners, and communities."
—
Opening Weekend Events:
Thursday, July 14, 2022
All Exhibition Venues Open
Check venue details and opening hours
Martin Beck, Last Night, 10:00am – 11:00pm
BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, OH 44113
Durational film installation
FRONT 2022 Press Conference, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Cleveland Museum of Art, Gartner Auditorium, 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44106
Cory Arcangel, Hail Mary, 12:00–12:15pm
The Alexander McGaffin Carillon at Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106
Live carillon performance
Tacita Dean, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 5:00–6:00pm
Cleveland Institute of Art, Cinematheque, 11610 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106
Special film screening
FRONT 2022 Opening Gala, 7:00–10:00pm
The Madison, 4601 Payne Ave., Cleveland, OH 44103
Ticketed gala dinner and concert with Mourning [A] BLKStar and L’Rain
FRONT 2022 After Party!, 10:00pm – late
JUKEBOX, 1404 W 29th St, Cleveland, OH 44113
Friday, July 15, 2022
All Exhibition Venues Open
Check venue details and opening hours
Martin Beck, Last Night, 10:00am – 11:00pm
BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, OH 44113
Durational film installation
Director’s Brunch Open House, 10:00am – 12:00pm
The Home of Fred and Laura Bidwell, 2900 Detroit Avenue, Level 3
Breakfast at Audra Skuodas Studio, 10:30am – 12:00pm
Oberlin, private residence, address provided with registration
Ahmet Öğüt, Bakunin’s Barricade, 12:00–1:00pm
Allen Memorial Art Museum, 87 N Main St., Oberlin, OH 44074
Guided tour with artist
Cory Arcangel, Hail Mary,12:00–12:15pm
The Alexander McGaffin Carillon at Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106
Live carillon performance
On Kawara, One Million Years,1:00–3:00pm
Transformer Station, 1460 W 29th St., Cleveland, OH 44113
Live reading; to sign up, click here.
Wong Kit Yi, Inner Voice Transplant, 4:00–5:30pm
CWRU Samson Pavilion, 9501 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH 44106
Karaoke lecture-performance followed by conversation with X Zhu-Nowell, Guggenheim Museum
Renée Green, Contact, 5:30–8:00pm
moCa Cleveland, 11400 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106
Exhibition opening reception
Karaoke Artist Party!, 9:00pm – late
Tina’s Nite Club, 5400 Herman Ave, Cleveland, OH 44102
Saturday, July 16, 2022
All Exhibition Venues Open
Check venue details and opening hours
Martin Beck, Last Night, 10:00am – 11:00pm
BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, OH 44113
Durational film installation
Sarah Oppenheimer and the FRONT International Triennial: Transformation at the Transformer Station, 10:00–11:00am
Transformer Station, 1460 W 29th St., Cleveland, OH 44113
Artist talk and conversation
Director’s Brunch Open House, 10:00am – 12:00pm
The Home of Fred and Laura Bidwell, 2900 Detroit Avenue, Level 3
Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis, 524, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Cleveland Clinic, Miller Family Pavilion, 9500 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44195
Video premier and choral gathering
Cory Arcangel, Hail Mary, 12:00–12:15pm
Simultaneous live carillon performances by:
George Leggiero, McGaffin Carillon, The Alexander McGaffin Carillon at Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106
David Osburn, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2747 Fairmount Blvd., Cleveland Heights, OH 44106
Sheryl Modlin, Church of the Saviour, 2537 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
Joe Namy with Djapo Cultural Arts Institute, 1:00–2:00pm
Isamu Noguchi, Portal at The Justice Center, 1300 Ontario St., Cleveland, OH 44113
Live musical performance
FRONT Block Party, 2:00–6:00pm
Cleveland Public Square, 50 Public Square, Cleveland, OH 44113
Public opening celebration
The Hologram: Guided Tour with Cassie Thornton, 2:00–4:00pm
National Museum of Psychology, 73 S College St., Akron, OH 44325
Artist tour
Wong Kit Yi, Inner Voice Transplant, 4:00–5:30pm
CWRU Samson Pavilion, 9501 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH 44106
Karaoke lecture-performance followed by conversation with Prem Krishnamurthy, FRONT 2022 Artistic Director
Reception at Quaker Square, 5:00–8:00pm
Quaker Square, Akron, 135 S Broadway St, Akron, OH 44308
Exhibition opening reception
Asad Raza, Delegation, 6:00pm
Old Stone Church, 91 Public Square, Cleveland, OH 44113
Live musical performance
Akron Art Museum Opening, 7:00–8:30pm
Akron Art Museum, Akron, 1 S High St, Akron, OH 44308
Exhibition opening reception
Sunday, July 17, 2022
All Exhibition Venues Open
Check venue details and opening hours
SPACES Brunch, 10:00am – 12:00pm
Cent’s, 5010 Lorain Ave, Cleveland, OH 441020
Ticketed benefit brunch
Cory Arcangel, Hail Mary, 12:00–12:15pm
The Alexander McGaffin Carillon at Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106
Live carillon performance
Diana Al-Hadid, The Time Being, 2:00–4:00pm
Syrian Cultural Garden, 1191 Martin Luther King Jr Dr, Cleveland, OH 44108
Artist talk and reception
On Kawara, One Million Years, 3:00–5:00pm
Transformer Station, 1460 W 29th St, Cleveland, OH 44113
Live reading; to sign up, click here
Tacita Dean, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 5:00–6:00pm
Cleveland Institute of Art, Cinematheque, 11610 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106
Special film screening
For more information on FRONT 2022 opening weekend events, please visit:
https://www.frontart.org/news/front-2022-opening-events-agenda
—
Featured projects with our Presenting Partners:
Julie Mehretu at The Cleveland Museum of Art
Julie Mehretu: Portals will offer a new perspective on the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collections through an artist’s eyes. The first exhibition of its kind at the CMA, and the first time Mehretu has curated from an encyclopedic museum, Portals will integrate Julie Mehretu’s paintings with works from the museum’s many departments that Mehretu has selected and arranged. This exhibition also lays the groundwork for Mehretu’s soon-to-be-announced public mural commission in downtown Cleveland.
Renée Green at moCa Cleveland
For FRONT 2022, Renée Green (b.1959, Cleveland) has conceived Contact, a sprawling exhibition occupying all of moCa Cleveland’s public spaces, while also radiating outward as a series of programs, workshops, and screenings. Enacting Green’s durational practice of being “in relation”, Contact interweaves and places in conversation Green’s own works with an array of participants including: John Akomfrah, Marcel Broodthaers, Cinematic Migrations Workshop, Derrick Green, Indexing Imaginaries, Gabriel Kahan, Fred Moten, Suneil Sanzgiri, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Mika Tajima, as well as many others.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed at Cleveland Public Library
Kameelah Janan Rasheed will develop two community-driven explorations sited at Cleveland Public Library that show how artmaking can be an ongoing, iterative process that is continuously redefining itself. Anchored by a generative prompt, such as ‘Tomorrow there will be ______’, the group project will invite responses as infinite endings to a single sentence. Rather than content, the artist will provide a protocol for engagement, elevating the voices of young people who are not regularly invited to shape civic futures.
Jacolby Satterwhite at Cleveland Institute of Art and Cleveland Clinic
Installed both as a virtual reality arcade at the Cleveland Institute of Art and as a freestanding sculptural screen outside the Cleveland Clinic’s new BioRepository building, Dawn starts from a question posed to residents of Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood: “What does utopia look like to you?” As the artist’s first public artwork in collaboration with Cleveland communities, it showcases how Satterwhite uses a combination of traditional and digital media to create unexpected new encounters.
Group Exhibition at Akron Art Museum
FRONT 2022’s presentation at the Akron Art Museum will expand upon the triennial’s overall focus upon art as a form of healing. Here, the craft and materiality of artmaking are opened up for their potential healing energies, with particular emphasis on creating transparency around artistic methods and processes. This selection of artists encompasses both local and regional figures as well as national practitioners, including: Chakaia Booker, Seuil Chung, Allana Clarke, Dexter Davis, Theaster Gates, Paul O’Keeffe, Devan Shimoyama, Audra Skuodas, Charmaine Spencer, and La Wilson.
Ahmet Öğüt at The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College
When the Prussian army attempted to suppress the socialist insurgency in Dresden in 1849, revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin suggested an unusual defense: placing paintings from the National Museum’s collection in front of the barricades to protect the protestors. Ahmet Öğüt’s installation at the Allen Memorial Art Museum reprises Bakunin’s (unrealized) proposal using works from the Allen’s collection. Created in collaboration with the faculty and students at Oberlin College, “Bakunin’s Barricade” connects to Oberlin as historical sites of protest and political activism, probing the role that higher education plays in developing new models for society.
Abigail DeVille at The Sculpture Center
Inspired by Langston Hughes’s first book of poems for young people, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932), Abigail DeVille will create a multifaceted sculptural installation that will include DeVille’s own work alongside the work of local collaborators and a wide-ranging selection of borrowed objects. Anchored at The Sculpture Center and branching into other locations in Cleveland, The Dream Keeper will explore the city’s material and cultural histories, guided by the question: Who are the dream keepers in Cleveland?
Sarah Oppenheimer & Tony Cokes at Transformer Station
Sarah Oppenheimer and Tony Cokes are creating a large-scale, participatory work that combines Oppenheimer’s tactile and interactive manipulations of architecture with Cokes’ iconic videos, which investigate representations of race, gender, and class using text and music. Introduced by FRONT during the COVID-19 pandemic and working together for the first time, the two artists are creating an ambitious work that is variously hybrid: part human, part mechanical; part digital, part analog; part Oppenheimer, part Cokes.
Isabelle Andriessen & Jurriaan Andriessen at SPACES
Isabelle Andriessen will present a body of her own performative sculptures—composed of animated synthetic materials that change over time, which have been shown widely in a European context—accompanied by a curatorial selection from the unfinished oeuvre of her father, Jurriaan Andriessen. His visionary work took the form of drawings, paintings, and writings that described a utopian, ecologically-balanced world called Eldorica. Highlighting how intergenerational influence allows for timely ideas to blossom, this installation represents the first time that their work is presented together.
Naeem Mohaiemen at Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic
Naeem Mohaiemen's film Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) is a hallucinatory dream where a man runs through an endless memory loop of the last months of his wife’s life, as he moves through the empty wards of a hospital. An homage to the melancholia within the Bengali films of the late Ritwik Ghatak, the work explores questions of choice and closure within a biomedical context, and will make its American debut at the Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion of the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic.
In addition to these featured projects at our Presenting Partners, FRONT will be offering many other exhibitions and artworks across Northeast Ohio and beyond, including a bluetooth-enabled dancefloor from Swedish architecture trio Dansbana!, as well as a presentation of Chakaia Booker’s work with Curated Storefront in Akron, Cory Arcangel’s algorithmically generated score that will be played at The McGaffin Carillon at Cleveland’s Church of the Covenant and shared globally to a network of performers, a special screening of Tacita Dean’s 150 Years of Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, and many others.
—
Full list of exhibiting artists:
Abigail DeVille
Ahmet Öğüt
Alexandra Noel
Alexandria Couch
Allana Clarke
Alyssa Taylor Wendt
Andrea Carlson
Art Therapy Studio
Asad Raza
Audra Skuodas
Benedict Scheuer
Beni E. Kosh
Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff
Cassie Thornton
Chakaia Booker
Charmaine Spencer
Chauncey Hare
Christopher Kulendran Thomas
Cooking Sections
Cory Arcangel
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Dansbana!
Devan Shimoyama
Dexter Davis
Diana Al-Hadid
Dominic Palarchio
Dr. Lady J
Every Ocean Hughes
Firelei Báez
Haseeb Ahmed
Hughie Lee-Smith
Isabelle Andriessen
Jace Clayton
Jacolby Satterwhite
Joe Namy
John Akomfrah
Judith Scott
Julie Mehretu
Jumana Manna
Jurriaan Andriessen
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Karel Martens
Langston Hughes
Laura Serejo Genes
La Wilson
Leigh Ledare
Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis
Linda D.L. Green
Loraine Lynn
Magali Reus
Maria Hassabi
Martin Beck
Matt Eich
Mika Tajima
Moyra Davey
Naeem Mohaiemen
Nicole Eisenman
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Nora Turato
On Kawara
Paul O'Keeffe
Pedro Zylbersztajn
Renée Green
Robert Reed
Sarah Oppenheimer
Scott Mars
Seuil Chung
Sonia Gomes
Suneil Sanzgiri
Tacita Dean
Theaster Gates
Tony Cokes
Tyler Mitchell
Wong Kit Yi
Yoshitomo Nara
About FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art
Launched in 2018, FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is a free, public, contemporary art exhibition comprising artist commissions, performances, films, and public programs. The inaugural edition brought over 90,000 visitors from more than 25 countries and generated $31 million in economic impact in the region. Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the second iteration of FRONT International will run from July 16 through October 2, 2022. Building on the success of the first edition, FRONT 2022 furthers the Triennial’s commitment to the belief that by supporting creative communities and stimulating new cultural encounters in the region, contemporary art can be an important catalyst for positive social change. For more information, visit frontart.org or follow @FRONTtriennial.
Press Contacts
Hunter Braithwaite
Director, Cultural Counsel
hunter@culturalcounsel.com
Emma Frohardt
Senior Account Coordinator, Cultural Counsel
emma@culturalcounsel.com
Devon Ma
Account Coordinator, Cultural Counsel
devon@culturalcounsel.com
