A Complicated Kind of Optimism: 250 at Sltwtr

Writing about Sltwtr Gallery’s exhibition 250 on the Fourth of July feels right and hopeful. Have you been to Sltwtr Gallery? Have you been to Loiter? The gallery could be anywhere: It’s artists building community, presenting shows. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the building housing these creative ventures is on Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland.  In the face of all the white economic flight and racism and impoverished thinking that comes to mind when someone says “East Cleveland,” the proprietors put the location right beneath the name of the gallery in promotional material. And even as all that history has created the perception of a zero-sum game that has the players fighting over ever-thinner slices of the meager pie, this kind of hustle, this staking of a claim in the community, in the public dialog—this is evidence of hope and tenacious commitment to the possibility that still is the United States of America. It’s a complicated, nuanced kind of optimism.

Sltwtr opened earlier this year with “Black History Month,” a three-person show featuring photographer Ruddy Roye, painter/gallery director Sylvia Munoduwafa, and composer Benjamin Smith (who you may know from the Splice Cream Truck).

The current exhibition, 250, is also a small group show, this time with works of Lasaundra Robinson, Jennifer Price, Emanuel Wallace, and Benjamin Smith.  As the U.S. celebrates its 250^th anniversary, it asks the artists to respond to the question, “what would this country look like if Black, Brown, and Indigenous people had not been hindered but instead allowed to thrive uninterrupted?”

Holding aside the polite use of the word “hindered” to describe what Black, Brown and Indigenous people endured in this country, it is one of those questions that opens a world of possibility and interpretation. Would we have a world in which White people stayed in Europe and let the indigenous populations of the Americas be? Would we have a world in which White people never captured and shipped Black people to another continent, but instead let them simply be? And would that absence of colonialism have led to a world segregated only by geography, not by force, with people interacting on equal terms in relationships of mutual consent? Would the US exist at all?

The artists in the show focused on their contemporary situations. In the case of Jennifer Price, she focused on joy and simple pleasures. In one canvas, a girl rides a bike, pursued by a flutter of monarch butterflies. It’s not a picture that highlights bicycling in an urban neighborhood, with a backdrop of asphalt and vacancy: the background is universal sky blue with just one puffy cloud, and a blur of pink landscape going by. In another, a woman shows off a beet, freshly pulled from the ground, its leaves still attached. Her oversized and very stylish pink eyeglasses show a sense of style that speaks of joy. In a third, a bucolic scene, woman leans against a tree while reading a book, the title of which—Daughters—alludes to family strength, history and tradition being passed on to a new generation.

LaSaundra Robinson has often showed bust paintings of women with gorgeous, chiseled features and statuesque carriage supporting vividly colorful clothes. They speak of dignity and self-respect. There’s a visible love of the subject, especially in the way light falls on the contours of their skin. There’s an example of that style here, but also a more fantastical and perhaps symbolic painting of a woman in a broad, open landscape. Clouds are scattered against the pink sky, dropping rain, producing no less than three rainbows—not co-centric, but arcing across different parts of the landscape. At the end of one rainbow, a baby with angel’s wings. At the end of another, a yellow layer cake with chocolate frosting.  

Photographer Emanuel Wallace shows six self portraits with the US flag, a series called “Terms of Citizenship.” The images show Wallace against the American Flag, sometimes wrapped in it, sometimes gazing into the distance, wondering, imagining, exploring his relationship with this country, as author James Baldwin famously did. Indeed, in a Facebook post, Wallace juxtaposes video of his process of trimming and framing one of the prints with a recording of  from a 1963 interview, The Negro and the American Promise. Baldwin wonders “what your role is in this country and what your future is in it, and how precisely you are going to reconcile yourself to your situation here, and how you are going to communicate to the vast, unthinking, heedless, cruel white majority that you are here.”  Wallace’s photos similarly explore his relationship to this country. Baldwin’s conversation and life considered other possibilities in the world—places he could go and live—but concluded that he is an American. “That is a fact,” he says.  And that begs the question, how to move forward with all this undeniable context? It’s a complicated relationship, and increasingly so.

Benjamin Smith’s installation, Little Bit, exercises several of the artist’s loves via sound, technology, and even nostalgia, but mostly the local community. In several of his recording projects, Smith embraces community participation—including one involving a pick-up choir of voices from the neighborhood. In this case, he asked people walking nearby the Euclid Avenue gallery, “what brings you joy?” In some 25 interviews, people spoke of family members and family in general, of religious faith, and in a couple of frank, revelatory instances, money. Each of the conversations is edited to a segment of less than thirty seconds, presented on a laptop that invites visitors to push “play.” On the wall above are images of the interviewees. The catch is that they are all shot with cameras from a variety of mostly primitive video games, producing highly pixelated results that look primitive these days. They are emblematic of an era, though, and evoke nostalgia for childhood and simpler times. Yet most important takeaway from this installation– and the presence of Sltwtr on Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland– is that it is about embracing the community, inviting people in, creating a space where people can simply be together, and create.

It’s a pretty simple thing to ask for, and in light of the question—what would the country look like if all the people and cultures that have been used, marginalized and oppressed had simply been able to go about their lives un-hindered—the artists give a pretty simple answer. It’s not some convoluted narration like a sci fi novel, or cautionary scenario like the dystopian dramas that seem to dominate Netflix. It’s just peace, joy, self-respect, and community.

250
June 17 – September 13
Sltwtr Gallery
15011 Euclid Avenue
East Cleveland, Ohio
Instagram: @sltwtrartgallery
216.505.9920