Brinsley Tyrrell’s Tableau of Art in Action

As Art House continues to celebrate 25 years of art and art education in the Brooklyn Centre neighborhood of Cleveland, a major work by sculptor Brinsley Tyrell, Tableau of Art in Action, has been installed as a gateway, marking Art House as a destination for creativity and community.

This artwork is the beginning of Phase 2 of Art House’s Creative Garden project. The first phase, funded by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District’s Green Infrastructure program, created a green campus with a water-retention basin and plantings that capture, detain, and filter stormwater runoff.

The initial discussions for Creative Garden also imagined educational and artistic elements to enhance Art House programming, while adding a beautiful park-like space to the neighborhood. Among the first suggestions was to commission Brinsley Tyrrell, a Cleveland Arts Prize winner and long-time Art House board member, to design a piece that would define the Art House campus.

Brinsley drew a rough sketch of his concept that I presented to the Board—and they approved. I visited Brinsley a number of times to talk about art, to talk about art-making, and to discuss ideas about the commission. Because Brinsley isn’t as mobile these days, it was challenging for him to create a drawing to life scale for Steve Jordan—blacksmith and fabricator—to follow. But he worked it out—spread on the floor of his front rooms. I also visited Steve at Steinert Industries in Kent as he shaped and welded. The final design evolved organically as Brinsley and Steve kept their conversation going about Tableau as it progressed.

Tableau is about a community of art-making, with people sculpting, painting, photographing, and making ceramic objects. It is set above the height that you would expect of a fence. Both Brinsley and Steve were very intentional about the height—it was important that it could actually be “read” as people drove by. The figures themselves are about four feet high; raised off the ground, the whole piece sits at about five feet.

There are two other artworks which have found their place in the garden. Hector Castellanos, as part of a Creative Fusion program, worked with immigrants to create Gateway, 2022, a metaphor for transition: entering a new life/place. And along the east fence, almost as a processional from the street to Art House’s door is Garden Noir Jardin du Jour, a metal sculpture of a sequence of symbolic forms by Laila Voss, Art House executive director. Originally commissioned by a Cleveland art collector in 2009 and generously donated to Art House, the work features “flowers” and “leaves” that reference cultural symbols across time and place. They are a meditation on domestic life—reinterpreted here to reflect Art House’s mission of creativity and connection.

Phase 1, the green infrastructure component, has already begun to transform the character of Denison Avenue, the busy Brooklyn Centre artery that Art House faces. The two city lots are no longer in a blank, passive state. Rather they are full of life and color, a frontage that welcomes passersby and participants to our programs and events.

The Creative Garden may not be finished and it may be an ongoing project: we still want to raise funds for benches that can convert into tables so we have a robust outdoor classroom and a place for people to just come, sit and enjoy the space. And as I see/experience Brinsley’s work every day, driving down Denison, pulling into the parking lot, looking out the Art House windows as I think about writing, plans, the to-do list and so on, Tableau always inspires.

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