Three new exhibits anchor spring ’16 at Cleveland Institute of Art

 

Spring 2016 brings mind-expanding shows to the exhibit spaces at the Cleveland Institute of Art’s new Gund Building. Reinberger Gallery is a centerpiece for artworks of all media, but the new building also creates showcase spaces in corridors and atrium areas.

Haven’t seen the new CIA? These exhibits are reason enough to visit. All are free and open to the public.

70th Annual Student Independent Exhibition
On view through March 19, 2016
Reinberger Gallery

The annual Student Art Exhibition (SIE), now 70 years old, is organized, developed and run exclusively by CIA students. The exhibition — wildly new and varied every year — allows students to share their best work with the community. It also gives student organizers valuable training in developing and curating shows.

SIE is traditionally massive, with the work of more than 100 students on display in the Reinberger Gallery and around the Gund Building.

Samantha Konet, a CIA senior double majoring in Drawing and Printmaking, heads the student team responsible for this year’s exhibition. One of the things she values most about the SIE is its boundary-breaking scope, she says.

“For one month, the students are recognized for their accomplishments, and they are recognized together in one space,” Konet says. “The students receive all credit for the time they have dedicated to their studio practices.  And it shows the dedication is present in the image of the institution as a whole.”

SIE engages everyone within CIA during its annual run, but it’s also hugely popular with the community, says Bruce Checefsky, director of Reinberger Gallery. “Often we sell out almost the entire show before it opens.”

Students select acclaimed working artists to jury the show. This year’s trio of jurors: Leta Sobierajski, a multi-disciplinary designer and art director who blends traditional graphic design elements with photography, art and styling; 2006 CIA grad Brooke Inman, who teaches at the University of Richmond (art and art history) and Virginia Commonwealth University; and Jesse McLean, who uses collage and video to explore human behavior, relationships and how emotions are lived in an age of mediated experience.

 

REVEREND ALBERT WAGNER: I Saw Figures
February 12 through May 8, 2016
Brenda Ashley and Gary R. Johnson Corridor Gallery

Born in 1924 in Bassett, Ark., Albert Wagner (1924–2006) was carrying water for cotton pickers by the time he was 10. At  age 17, he moved with his family to Cleveland, where he worked as a dishwasher before starting a furniture moving company. It wasn’t until decades later, while cleaning his basement in preparation for his 50th birthday celebration, that he noticed paint spatters on a piece of wood and was suddenly inspired to make works of art. In the years that followed, he made hundreds of paintings and sculptures to “get the Word out.”

“I saw figures,” he told the Plain Dealer in a 1998 interview. “It was the power of God. He spoke to me through that board.”

This exhibition in the Brenda Ashley and Gary R. Johnson Corridor Gallery features 25 paintings, drawings and works on paper.

“One Bad Cat,” a 2008 documentary about Wagner, told “a classic tale of an artistic ‘outsider’ discovered and embraced by admirers and hangers-on,” wrote Plain Dealer art critic Steven Litt.

Wagner’s work has been heralded in the New York Times, Life magazine, and by the Folk Art Society of America. His works are on permanent display at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Works for REVEREND ALBERT WAGNER: I Saw Figures are on loan from the Cochran Collection; Rita Montlack and. Howard J. Freedman; Janet Macoska; Tina Cassara and Bruce Checefsky.

Cleveland-institute-of-Art-Cook Install 01
AMERICAN REAL: Monica Cook, Ryder Ripps, and Chris Verne
April 1 through May 8, 2016
Reinberger Gallery

To wrap up the spring exhibitions, “American Real” culls work from a talented and diverse trio of artists who address modern self-absorption in bold and unusual ways.

Georgia-born, Brooklyn-based artist Monica Cook creates a world as a tribute to the wounded, newborn and dying, the scarred and disfigured. Cook, a sculptor with a “rococo streak,” according to the New Yorker, produces darkly humorous tableaux vivants of death and ritual, so wonderfully headlong in mood that the viewer is hardly aware of the tender, unconditional love so intricately woven together in a one-of-a-kind form of hyperrealism and fiction.

Cleveland-Institute-of-art-Ripps_Postmasters_2015_04

Ryder Ripps, the New York conceptualist, crosses over new media and the worlds of art, fashion and music, according to the Italian fashion label Diesel. Ripps turns model and Instagram sensation Adrianne Ho into an object in a series of large-scale paintings made from photos distorted in Photoshop. The conceptual dexterity of the paintings is matched by the subjugated homage to the Internet.

Cleveland-Institute-of-art-Cheyennes Mom

Photographer and filmmaker Chris Verene produces “an uncommonly sensitive and affecting form of Social Realism,” according to the New York Times, “that doesn’t come off as voyeuristic, sensational or preachy.” His documentary project, Home Series, depicts his family and others in his hometown of Galesburg, Ill., whose lives were drastically altered in the 2008 economic downturn. His blend of realism and empathy for his subjects pays respect to American lives in lucid photographs filled with humanity, love, pride and hope.
Reinberger Gallery

Cleveland Institute of Art
11610 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44106
216.421.7407

 

Gallery Hours
Monday through Thursday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Friday: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday: noon to 5 p.m.

For more information on gallery shows at the Cleveland Institute of Art, visit cia.edu/exhibitions

 

 

Events

70th Annual Student Independent Exhibition
On view through March 19, 2016

Reinberger Gallery

 

REVEREND ALBERT WAGNER: I Saw Figures
February 12 through May 8, 2016

Brenda Ashley and Gary R. Johnson Corridor Gallery

 

AMERICAN REAL: Monica Cook, Ryder Ripps, and Chris Verne
April 1 through May 8, 2016
Reinberger Gallery