At Home with Art: SHED Projects Continues CLE’s House Gallery Legacy

From the early Shaker Heights roots of moCa Cleveland to newsense gallery in Lakewood; to the sunroom, formerly operated by SPACES curatorial associate Thea Spittle in a Cleveland Heights home; to 2602 (curated by Spittle with Deidre McPherson in another Cleveland Heights home, and other sites); to Akhsó Gallery, operated by M. Carmen Lane in the garage of a home near Shaker Square; to Haus Tremont, operated by Patsy Kline; to Eddie Moved, operated in Tremont by Alenka Banco, Cleveland has a long history of art spaces in private homes. SHED Projects, on Pearl Road in Old Brooklyn, continues the tradition. — Ed.

In the late 1960s, B.F. Goodrich recruited Anselm Talalay, research chemical engineer and inventor from New Haven, Connecticut, for a position in research and product development. Rubber was booming in the 1950s and ’60s and the salary and job description they were offering, as the late Marjorie Talalay liked to recount, “were—unfortunately, too good to pass up;” she would often pause in the story to conjure a “gasp!” before blandly saying “Akron. Ohio.”

Excited for the opportunity, Anselm and Marjorie began negotiating a potential move to Ohio. Marjorie did her research and made a list of “move mandates,” the first being that they would live in Cleveland (they ended up in a house on Ludlow Road in Shaker Heights), which meant he would make the daily commute south on the fastest route of the day—State Route 21.

Her second ultimatum for the move from her beloved East Coast continues to shape this city’s cultural discourses and landscapes:

“There’s no contemporary art there, Anselm,” she loved to recall. “I’m going to have to bring it to Cleveland. I must open a contemporary art center.”

In 1968 Marjorie founded what is now moCa Cleveland in a house on Bellflower Road. It was affordable, with enough space, tall ceilings, and light to accommodate the large 1960s canvases of New York art stars like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, which she brought to Cleveland in exhibitions at what was then The New Gallery, just minutes down the hill from Shaker and in University Circle.

The New Gallery changed names twice before settling on moCa Cleveland, as well as changing locations twice before landing at their current home on Euclid Avenue at the corner of Mayfield (just a few blocks south of where it began in ’68). Generations after Marjorie made an old house on Bellflower a new vibrant place for contemporary art, artists and entrepreneurs continue to mine the city’s housing stock to make space for art exhibitions, residencies, and interdisciplinary explorations.

Enter SHED Projects at 3731 Pearl Road. Co-founders Gabrielle Banzhaf and Jon Gott are in their sophomore year of full programming, which begins on March 7 with the opening of Kim Bissett’s (Cleveland) My Father’s Smile, an ongoing project that documents her return to inherited family land and the building of Orange Dog Studio in Rimersburg, Pennsylvania. Presented at SHED Projects and Orange Dog Studio, the work explores, according to the artist, “ancestry, stewardship, and the slow labor of making meaning through place.”

This ethos is exactly what Banzhaf and Gott are working to create at SHED. Gott is an expert in home restoration and Banzhaf brings sound curatorial judgment to a home space that is, quite literally, constantly changing. Built in 1857 and now a residential island on Pearl Road, with a strip mall across the street and church behind them, the pale-yellow abode was also once a dentist’s office, and Banzhaf and Gott work this history and the physical properties of the space into their projects.

Last fall, for instance, Eli Gfell created Coat Room, transforming what was once a surgery room into, according to Gfell, “an uncanny site of repair, [and] reflection, [creating] a haunting presence in the room.” Applying layers of plaster and graphite powder to a raw plaster-and-lath wall, the artist then projected orange light onto the strange sheen made by the well-wrought, “polished” graphite. According to Gfell, the installation “takes on the qualities of a ‘scrying mirror’,” or portal to other worlds, and—one imagines while standing in the surgery room of yore—past traumatic experiences lingering in the surgery room, ghosts of past pain.

Other recent exhibitions include The Broommaker, a three-week residency featuring traditional broom-making by artist and educator Hunter Elliott; Scrub, a site-specific sculpture by R Kauff; Travis Morehead’s Pocket, an immersive installation treating the house as a resonant musical instrument; Survey#25, a group show curated by Malena Grigoli and Colin Martinez; Semana Santa con Familia Linares, a six-week celebration featuring hands-on paper mache and cardboard construction workshops, live demonstrations, and a curated exhibition by Gabrielle Banzhaf featuring works of the Familia Linares and select Cleveland artists. SHED Projects also has the practice of One Piece Viewings, each of which present a single object for a single day of focused consideration.

Prior to opening SHED Projects in Cleveland, Banzhaf and Gott ran a gallery of the same name in their home in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. SHED New Orleans operated from November 2021 to November 2022.

Melding home and art gallery practices is a practical way to make the most of one’s living space, and Cleveland is a place where finding larger, transformable, affordable spaces is possible. In 2000, Kristin Rogers and I embarked on newsense gallery, located on Fry and Detroit in Lakewood, which Rogers continues to run with Pita Brooks-Rogers. The former partnered with the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) as recently as 2023 on the Creativity Works grant program. CIA student-artist El Arvizu gave a talk on their work at the newsense gallery space, which was designed as a white cube within the evolving living space around it. Bringing students to the space gives them the opportunity to experience the depth of productivity involved in literally living with[in] an art gallery/project space.

While a goal of newsense continues to be centered on incorporating art into daily life and practices, SHED Projects’ founders are deeply engaged in excavating the historical space of the home/gallery. Gott drives this objective, and it feeds a curatorial vision that honors the past of the structure itself, merging contemporary art practices with physical structure of the house. In this frame, it brings forth the past and present, making artistic and theoretical engagements part of the future of the house, and hopefully, part of Cleveland’s own art history and greater art community.

The opening reception for Kim Bissett’s My Father’s Smile is 5 to 9 pm on Saturday, March 7. An artist talk will be held at 6 pm on Thursday, March 19.

Eighth Turn is a site-responsive dance performance that activates Orange Dog Studio as a living body, treating architecture, movement, and memory as intertwined forms of knowledge. The invocation dance ceremony is at 2 pm on Saturday, April 4, featuring Celia Romanoski and Malena Grigoli of Orange Dog Studio.

SHED PROJECTS
3731 Pearl Road
Cleveland, Ohio 44109
shed-projects.org
216.266.0589

EVENTS:

Kim Bissett: My Father’s Smile, 5-9pm Saturday, March 7. Artist talk 6pm Thursday, March 19

Eighth Turn Invocation Dance, 2pm Saturday, April 4