Neighborhood Fixture: Artist Darla Davis Thinks All Over the Box

About a decade and a half ago, Darla Davis began working on a collage inspired by her recently deceased mother, whom she calls an angel watching over her. When she ran out of pictures to include, she began decorating boxes. And she hasn’t stopped since then.

Davis is a fixture in the Waterloo Arts District, the culture-cluster that runs along Waterloo Road in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood, a miracle half-mile or so that includes among its many offerings several art galleries, a bar cheekily named the Millard Fillmore Presidential Library, Praxis Fiber Workshop, BRICK Ceramic + Design Studio, Six Shooter Coffee, Doinks Burger Joint, the original Citizen Pie pizza place, the colorful Pop Life wellness center, and the anchor institution, Beachland Ballroom and Tavern, along with Waterloo Arts’ eponymous gallery and occasional café (full disclosure: I joined the board of Waterloo Arts this summer).

Davis can often be found hovering around parking lots and sidewalks, particularly during the monthly first-Friday Walk All Over Waterloo events and shows at the Beachland, hauling a bag or pulling a wagon full of wooden, cardboard, and metal boxes, their surfaces decorated with toys, pens, clocks, game pieces, kids’ meal giveaways, and other flotsam and jetsam of a throwaway commercialized culture. Davis turns trash into treasures, plucking discards from dumpsters and discounts from dollar stores and thrift shops, and glue-gunning them into works of playfulness, humor, twisted logic, unanticipated harmony, and oddball charm. Her inspiration? “Pain, struggle, and just life itself,” she says.” Life is its own muse.”

Davis herself is a living study of rescue and recovery. She grew up in Bedford Heights but spent a chunk of her childhood at Bedford Hospital with rheumatic fever, from which she nearly died.

“I couldn’t do any swimming or any kind of activities—gym or anything like that—for three years,” she says. “It was really bad.” She never finished high school. The challenges of her life have included mental illness, substance abuse, and five-year’s worth of a five-to-fifteen prison sentence on a theft conviction. She got her GED and college degree in the reformatory at Marysville. “I’m a psychology major, of course, because I’m mentally effed up.”

“I’ve got issues and tissues, and paper towels,” Davis jokes—indicating her issues go beyond the usual in size and scope. After 27 years of misdiagnosis, she was finally correctly diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, for which she receives treatment at Signature Health, a facility for addiction and mental health services.

“I have a case worker and all that crap,” she says. “She’s about worthless cause—it’s not her faul—-but they give them like 500 clients, and they’re stretched way too thin.” She also gets a weekly shot from Signature to help reduce leg pain.

Davis first began sharing her constructions with her fellow patients at Signature, but as her interest in the work grew, she started to invest more of her time and effort—and money—into it. She began buying materials at Goodwill and Savers thrift stores, and eventually began shopping at Dollar Tree and Dollar General, and couldn’t afford to simply hand them out.

“I got a big, huge messy room with shit all over the place, you know little trinkets that I buy from Savers and stuff,” she says. “I just get it clean and then I go shopping again. I spend a hundred bucks on the half price day which is really 200 bucks and I’m like a little kid when I get home.” She often finds her inspiration for a particular piece from what she finds at the store. Repeated go-tos include time pieces, dominoes—which serve as Davis’ signature, and Hot Wheels toy cars, because, she says, she was a tomboy growing up. Many recent works include cell phones, which she likes and finds other people do, too. “Very ironic—I don’t have a phone but I have a lot [of pieces] with telephones on them.”

“I spend about $200 a month [on materials], so I can’t give them away. It’s way past a hobby. It’s like my lifeline, it’s my escape, it’s my anchor. It’s a way of expressing and letting out my pain and sorrows and all that crap. And good stuff too. And I get to share it with others, and they appreciate it.”

Davis sees the assemblages she creates as part of a continuum of her own creativity. “I was always artistic. I always wrote and stuff. I have a journal and stuff like that and a lot of songs and poems—I even got a book published. So, this is just a different form of my heart coming out.”

On the street, Davis is flexible about price and doesn’t haggle. A regular customer might average about $20 for a Davis original.

“I live here so I sell it here and everybody knows me and so I try to keep it cheap because of the neighborhood, because people don’t have a lot of money here. And the toys that fall off and stuff, I give them to the kids in the neighborhood—they’ll see me walking on [East] 148th and, you know, ‘Bag lady, what do you got?’”

The Beachland—customers, staff, and owners—have proven to be a relatively lucrative market for Davis’ wares. But the customers also provided her with an early and unexpected challenge: What, they asked, was behind each work?

“The hippies at the Beachland all wanted the story! They want stories, like, what’s going on here? So I had to make up these frigging stories. And now I’m making the story as I’m making the boxes, so it makes the story better.”

Sometimes the story is fairly matter-of-fact—and sometimes there is no story. A recent guided tour through some of her pieces yielded succinct narratives.

“This is a fairlyland and fairy crossing—that basically says it all,” she says.

One has a knife attached—what’s that about? “Everybody’s got to eat,” she says without further explanation.

Of one with a timepiece, a recurring motif for Davis, she says, “I just like the watches. And most things are 24-7.”

And then: “This is a vase. Not everything tells a story.”

Davis’ likely largest collector is Jim Amodio, an attorney from Medina who estimates he has purchased about 200 pieces from Davis, most of which he obtained during his many trips to the Beachland for concerts. Amodio keeps them in his office and conference room, as well as his own home, though he admits not everyone in those places has the same appreciation for them. Still, he says, “rarely have I had a client that does not remark about the unusual boxes I have in the office. People really like them a lot.”

“They’re all so unique and eclectic. I like things that aren’t so easy to figure out.”

Among his favorites is a ukelele that, he says, staffers at the Beachland covet because it has a musical theme. “It’s festooned with insects, animals, and flowers. It’s an expression of her personality. I’m amazed at what she comes up with—the wide variety of items that she manages to find and repurpose into one of her works of art or craft.” A rare Davis flat piece that hangs in his conference seems to celebrate Paris, although there are also bears included in the grouping.

One of perhaps Davis’ few commissions was created when a farmer who was a client of Amodio admired the work decorating the office.

“I asked her, ‘Boy, Darla, can you come up with a piece related to farming?’ And she did! The next time I saw her, she had a very nice box that was very appropriate for a person who’s engaged in farming.”

He’s also purchased a piece with a working radio, and another with a working clock.

Amodio often gives pieces away to clients who express interest or have children who are fascinated with the mysterious boxes.

A friend from AA led Davis to North Collinwood 26 years ago, and she began renting a room in the neighborhood just before it began to show signs of rejuvenation with the opening of the Beachland. Despite a few stretches out of the neighborhood during its rougher moments, she has remained a presence, drawing from and contributing to its vibrant, sometimes edgy energy. Davis practically vibrates when she stops to talk or hawk pieces, her bouts of restless leg syndrome that keep her up some nights seeming to radiate out to her whole body.

She loves the neighborhood and says she draws strength from it, but even here, with its culturista clientele, Davis can only break even on her sales. “I don’t get anything over than what I put in. I barely get by,” she says. “Sometimes I lose. But emotionally and mentally, it pays tenfold.

“Sometimes people don’t even have money, but they take pictures and hang out with me and the art. It’s all about the art, you know what I mean? It’s not about my mentalness—it’s about the art. It’s not even about me as a person. It’s just about the art.