No Longer In The Building: Terry Durst, 1955 – 2026

Cleveland artist Terry Durst–who with his late, former life partner Dan Tranberg was an integral part of the artistic energy in the Tremont neighborhood from the late 80s to the early 2000s– was found dead in his home in early April 2026, discovered during a welfare check. He was 70 or 71 years old, depending on whether the birthday listed in his Facebook profile is to be believed. Durst was archived at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve in 2021. Artist, critic, and peer of Durst, Douglas Max Utter wrote this reflection. – Ed.  

A few decades ago I showed up long after dark at a party hosted by Terry Durst and Dan Tranberg. I think it was the Fourth of July, of all things: there were definitely fireworks. The house was in Tremont, on the edge of a bluff overlooking a panorama of industrial might. So, someone was launching bottle rockets out in the back yard, sending them arcing off to explode over the abyss. I cautiously peered through a small, open kitchen window to see some of the action, and at that exact moment one of the home-made missiles misfired, spun around and hit me just above my left eye. It wasn’t as bad as that may sound, but it stung. No doubt many such incidents marred both Bush administrations, but the Durst rocket has been hard to forget.

Terry died in early April, 2026 at age 70 or 71, probably older by far than he once dreamed possible. He loved and detested all sorts of things with deep and abiding passion. He thought baseball was appalling. As an artist, his convictions consistently inspired him to explore the realities of his life and times with intensely worked materials and a subtext of unsolvable mystery. His sculptures seemed beyond the range of ordinary objects. Throughout his artistic life from his 1987 MFA from Kent State University (in sculpture and film) to his 2023 novel The Gable, released by the not-for-profit arts organization Shed Projects, Durst worked his way through sensory experiences with forceful deliberation, sifting and sampling, looking to recreate the world and endow at least some of it with a more profound authenticity. Or that’s how it seems to me, at its best.

He is work was unusual and ambitious. Durst patiently interrogated his materials—everything a crow or a child might find in a vacant lot or a trashy urban greenspace, along with his own psyche and personal history, his own responses and memories, summoning the essence of the world and sticking it on the work in progress like adhesive. In his later works he abstracted the found objects and materials he often used, as his friend and collaborator for more than 20 years, artist (and Shed Projects founder) Jon Gott observes, “almost until they were dust.”

During the years I knew him best, between 2001 and 2005, his work often buzzed with an offbeat cultural energy. A solo show at Lakewood’s brave and wonderful Dead Horse Gallery (2001 – 2004) curated by Kim Schoel and Mindy Tousley, featured pastel colored, enigmatic plastic objects and amply ducted abstract appliances. These hung from the ceiling or squatted improbably on the gallery floor, daring the viewer to grok them. Much of Durst’s work at that stage of his career might have been select artifacts—all that was left of our very own plastic world, recombined by a fanciful time traveler.

Durst could be funny, despite his overall gravitas, or at least playfully ironic. He once spread several square yards of gallery floor with Fruit Loops breakfast cereal, making mosaic portraits of crunchy politicians of the day. The curator of that show was the late Cleveland native Frank Green, a notable performance artist, AIDS activist and critical writer for the Cleveland Free Times and Art in America.

But even twenty years ago, Durst was probably best known for smaller, wall-hung objects, densely briccolaged and painstakingly accumulated, presenting the eye and what you might call the “mind’s hand” with layers of sweat and observation. If there is a model for these sacred-seeming, icon/reliquary sculptural essays, it might be the eons-long labors of the earth itself, which can press a thousand ages into an inch of rock, or even life, piling up wings and leaves, bones and footprints, writing time across the stiffened mud.

Among the largest and most complex pieces in that category is House, a collaborative work by Durst and John Gott, honed, augmented, rethought and refined by the artists through many seasons and harvests of materials. The bottom of a truly old and interesting kitchen junk drawer might yield such a  rich tangle of thread and hair, ribbon and string, liberally sauced with schmutz, then made chewy with shingle, cedar shard, and even some paint. A portrait of a vintage clapboard home, it has one foot in this world and three feet in the next. The actual place, accurately recreated in considerable detail, is the Tremont house where Durst and Dan Tranberg lived together in the early 2000s, the scene of much art, cuisine, financial trauma, love, hate, and even bottle rocket attacks. At the very apex of House, behind a small round window under the eaves, we glimpse a dark haired, tousled figure who might be Dan Tranberg. The work was first exhibited in Steven Mastroianni’s gallery Silver ‘Scuro, in a show featuring both Durst and Gott, insightfully reviewed at the time for CAN Journal by Brittany M. Hudak. It is now in the collection of Artists Archives of the Western Reserve in University Circle.

Durst was a person of strong reactions and great talent, made richer by a fascination with darkness. He was crazy (in 2001) about Mulholland Drive and any other David Lynch creations (as well as Woody Allen films, and the music of Neil Young), and the novels of Don Delillo, especially The Underworld and the Body Artist. I ran into Terry only once in recent years, while he was walking his dog Farley. I wish we had found a time to sit down and talk but that didn’t happen. When I heard he had died, I felt like I’d been hit in the eye with some ill-timed firework, again. Many, many people, artists and others, will remember him and miss him a great deal, for a long time. Hopefully his work will find its way into further public collections and fascinate new audiences.

CAN will post information about any memorial or service as it becomes available.