Huge contemporary art exhibition offered in Cleveland

Aug. 01, 2022

Huge contemporary art exhibition offered in Cleveland

Tom Jackson, Jul 29, 2022 10:00 AM

CLEVELAND – People who like contemporary art have an opportunity to see a lot of it at an ongoing festival in the Cleveland area.

The FRONT International 2022 Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is showing off works from 100 artists at 30 different locations through Oct. 2. Nearly all of the exhibits are free.

The exhibit locations are clustered together in five locations: In Ohio City on the west side of Cleveland; in downtown Cleveland; at the University Circle area in east Cleveland, which is home to the city’s main art museums; in Akron; and in Oberlin.

A website at frontart.org offers details to help plan visits to the exhibition, which is named “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows.”

For example, Oberlin, the exhibition site closest to Sandusky, offers exhibitions at three locations within easy walking distance of each other:

• The Allen Memorial Art Museum, 87 N. Main St., open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Fridays and 1-5 p.m. on Saturdays

• The Firelands Association for the Visual Arts, 39 S. Main St., same hours as the Allen Museum

• The Feve, a bar at 30 S. Main St.

Transformer Station, a contemporary art museum at 1460 W. 29th St. in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, is serving as the exhibition hub for the art festival.

A visitor to the site can experience a variety of artworks, including a video installation, paintings, an unusual artwork that uses sound and sculpture. There’s also a small gift shop.

From Transformer Station, it’s only a short walk to Spaces, a nonprofit exhibition space at 2900 Detroit Ave., which asks visitors for a $5 donation but offers excellent works, including an unusual sculptural installation by Haseeb Ahmed, a Toledo native, and very detailed prints and drawings of an imagined utopian city by Dutch artist and composer Jurriaan Andriessen.

FRONT is a contemporary art exhibition first held in Cleveland in 2018; it’s supposed to occur every three years, but the planned 2021 event was delayed one year by the pandemic.