Fred Bidwell

Executive Director

Fred Bidwell (he/him) is a philanthropist, collector, and community leader. After a 35-year career as an advertising and marketing entrepreneur, in 2011 he and his wife established the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Foundation. In 2013, the Bidwell Foundation opened Transformer Station, a contemporary art exhibition space on Cleveland’s West Side. Transformer Station alternates between acting as a venue for exhibitions curated by the Bidwells from their renowned collection of photo-based contemporary art and as a venue for exhibitions organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Fred Bidwell served twice as board president of the Akron Art Museum and is currently on the board of the Cleveland Museum of Art, on the Visiting Committee of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and chairs the board of Assembly for the Arts.

Sarah Spinner Liska

Managing Director

Sarah Spinner Liska (she/her) is a lawyer and non-profit leader, with extensive experience in fundraising, communications, and project management. As FRONT's Managing Director, Sarah leads exhibition planning and development, working closely on partner and funder relationships. Sarah has led important initiatives for FRONT, including making FRONT the first art organization in Cleveland--and the first 'ennial on the continent--to secure W.A.G.E. certification, meeting transparent guidelines for compensating artistic labor. She also led FRONT's accessibility campaign to open access to contemporary art to people of all abilities, securing "All Means All" certification from the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities.

Sarah is admitted to practice law in Ohio and is a member of the Ohio State Bar Association. She chairs the Special Exhibitions Committee at the Maltz Museum, leads the Community Conversations series as a trustee of the Yale Alumni Association of Cleveland, serves on the Johns Hopkins University Second Decade Society, leads the North American Arts 'Ennials Alliance, serves as a Governing Member of Cleveland Institute of Music, and as a trustee of The Sculpture Center.

Sarah holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, where she received the Hans Gatzke Prize, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served on the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. Sarah was awarded a Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at NYU Law School and holds a B.A. in the History of Art and French and an M.A. in Humanistic Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Allison Hope Smith Hernandez

Operations & Digital Media Manager

Allison Hope Smith Hernandez (she/her) is an artist and arts administrator, specializing in exhibitions, project management, and social media. A double alumnus of Kent State University–holding a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in studio art with a concentration in textiles. She previously managed Transformer Station, a contemporary art museum in Ohio City, coordinating exhibitions, managing the Bidwell collection, serving as an artist liaison, and developing digital content. Additionally, Allison worked at the Kent State School of Art Collection & Galleries and Massillon Museum before joining Transformer Station and FRONT teams in 2018. She was the 2022 recipient of the 'Emerging Professional of the Year' Award, presented by the Ohio Museums Association.

Janet Renner

Director of Marketing

Janet Renner (she/her) comes to FRONT with more than 25 years of experience leading profitable branding, marketing and sales initiatives for consumer-packaged goods, e-commerce, creative, and retail businesses. Most recently, she was the Director of Shopper Marketing for American Greetings Corporation, guiding $40 million in marketing investment with Walmart, Target, Amazon, national and regional drug and grocery retailers, and a host of licensing partners including Disney, McDonalds, Sesame Street and Nickelodeon. Prior to American Greetings, Janet held leadership positions at KeyBank and Rubbermaid Corporation. Janet is passionate about volunteering her time to help individuals, small businesses and non-profit organizations benefit from her corporate experience, by helping them grow using big company approaches and techniques. Janet has held fund raising and board positions with The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and Great Lakes Theater.

Magdalena Moskalewicz

Chief Curator

Magdalena Moskalewicz, PhD (she/her) is an art historian, curator, and author. In her curatorial practice, Moskalewicz collaborates with living artists to critically investigate particular histories, localities, and identities with the goal of reshaping dominant narratives, while her academic research focuses on exhibition histories, socialist modernism, and Eastern European art in a global context.

Moskalewicz has worked at collecting, exhibiting, and higher education institutions in the United States and Europe. As Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for The Museum of Modern Art’s global research initiative, C-MAP, she contributed to expanding MoMA’s exhibitions, acquisitions, and educational programs beyond the Western-centric narratives. At the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), she curated the Polish Pavilion titled Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, to wide international acclaim. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she taught curatorial and critical museum studies as well as history of global contemporary art, educating the next generation of socially aware artists and art administrators.

Moskalewicz’s extensive writing practice has addressed art histories, cultural policies, and social activism, including essays in Art in America, Op-Eds in the Washington Post, contributions to exhibition catalogs from the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, Berlin Biennale, and book chapters in Understanding Central Europe (2018), Conceptualism and Materiality (2019), Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (2020), Was Socialist Realism Global? (2023), and Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions (2023), among others.

Asad Raza

Artistic Director, FRONT 2025

Asad Raza (born Buffalo, USA) (he/his) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Diversion, first shown at Kunsthalle Portikus in 2022, diverts a river through the gallery space. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34^th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), later shown at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020) and Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, combines twenty-six trees, caretakers and objects. Schema for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial. Raza premiered the feature film Minor History at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019.

Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For home show (2015), at his apartment in New York, Raza asked artists, friends, and family to intervene in his life, while Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance. With Hans Ulrich Obrist, he curates a series of exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité (Villa Empain, Brussels), Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, New York), Where the Oceans Meet (MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami), and This language which is every stone (IMA, Brisbane). Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU, where he helped organize a labor strike.