Hallowed Owls: The continuing legacy of Robin VanLear

Robin Van Lear—visionary creator of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s iconic Parade the Circle—did not stop creating when she left the Museum in early 2020.  This year, as a featured event in Cleveland Public Theatre’s Pandemonium gala September 6, she presents Hallowed Owls—a performance with dancers, instrumentalists, poets and singers. It takes place in the former St. Mary’s Orthodox Church, which CPT will renovate in the coming year. Performances of Haunted Owls will continue for two weekends in October. If that doesn’t keep VanLear busy enough, she’s also on the hunt for a new studio because her landlords at the former Coventry School—the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Library—are kicking her out.  To mark the occasion, Henry Adams interviewed the artist about how she built Parade the Circle and her remarkable career. –Ed.

An interesting parlor game is to ask, who is the greatest living artist in Cleveland today? And part of the fun of the game is that some of the most notable contestants don’t immediately come to mind since they’re doing things that often don’t fit into familiar categories of media such as sculpture, painting, and drawing. Consequently it’s easy to leave them out. Indeed, in some cases their names even raise questions about what we mean when we speak of “creating a work of art,” and whether their zany talents can be fully encompassed within the usual meanings of the word “artist.”

Certainly one of these figures to be considered is Robin VanLear, who invented and created the framework for Cleveland’s most successful community arts festival, Parade the Circle, as well as the chalk festival for all ages held annually on the walks of the Fine Arts Garden of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Not to speak of dozens of other memorable art events.

With an annual attendance of about 50,000, Parade the Circle is certainly the biggest event of its sort in Cleveland, and significantly up-stages just about everything else. Equally important, it’s an event that brings together community groups of all sorts: African-American, Hispanic, Anglo—sculptors, painters, musicians, and poets: you name it—that don’t usually work together. It is inclusive, not divisive. Not to mention the creativity of the masks, costumes, giant puppets, stilt-walkers and other attractions, which for sheer visual excitement set a high mark for their artistic excellence—even in comparison with the masterworks of the ages that are on view inside the museum. It’s an experience that richly deserves the epithet “Amazing!” It makes one proud to be a Clevelander.

At the same time, Parade the Circle raises interesting questions about how we should define the role of an artist. While Robin always gives the event a remarkable spark of excitement, her most remarkable gift is not for self-expression but for drawing out the creativity of others, for striking an artistic spark in all people.

Robin grew up not far from Boston in Dedham, Massachusetts. Her father was a rocket scientist with a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her mother was the valedictorian of her high school class but never went to college and had great talent as a craftsperson. Theirs was a highly motivated family. Her brother is in marketing; her sister designs costumes for the theater. Robin herself always knew that she wanted to be an artist, and as a child put on theatrical performances in the back yard. Her family encouraged her, although Robin always bounded from one artistic interest to another and was so high strung that she regularly threw up before musical performances. She studied music, painting, and English literature. She read the plays of Shakespeare, and at one point wrote a beatnik version of Romeo and Juliet.

At Mount Holyoke, Robin majored in studio art and mathematics, and then afterwards went to the Vancouver School of Art, later renamed the Emily Carr School of Art, and from there to the University of Santa Barbara, where she earned her MFA in sculpture and performance art—the school’s first degree in performance art. In this period, she was also a very avid competitive skier, but that came to an end when she was buried in a mini-avalanche, broke her leg in seventy places, and nearly died.

In Santa Barbara, Robin became involved in a variety of performance events. The most notable of these started as a birthday parade for a local artist and then was moved to the summer solstice at the request of the art museum, which premiered a performance of ancient Chinese instruments on that date. Soon the parade grew so large that the museum thought it was too much to handle, so a nonprofit was created to stage the event annually. She drew in community groups of every description. It was her engagement with this project that led to her employment at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Robin VanLear’s arrival in Cleveland came at a particular moment in the history of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), just before the retirement of Director Evan Turner and due in large part to the brilliant then-assistant director in charge of education and public programming, John Schloder. Working with him in Cleveland were several remarkable talents, all now retired from the museum: Tony Birch, Katie Solender and Marjorie Williams. At that time, the museum was widely viewed as elitist. Could there be some way for the museum to reach out more broadly to the community?

Penny Buchanan was retiring from the education department and the CMA was conducting interviews at the annual meeting of the College Art Association for someone who could conduct museum tours. On a whim, Robin, whose parents were living in Cleveland at the time, popped in to say hi during a break in their interview schedule. She introduced herself and the conversation soon turned to the events and parades she had organized in Santa Barbara. Could something similar be done in Cleveland? Yes, indeed, but what was the target audience? The end result of all this talk was that Robin agreed to take the job leading museum tours, but that Schloder, with the support of Evan Turner, parlayed this job into a commission for her to organize a parade to celebrate the museum’s 75th anniversary, which was just coming up.

The parade was initially conceived as a one-time event, but to make sure that it wouldn’t be a flop, Robin asked the museum for a year in advance to practice. The first year was rag tag. It had about 125 people in it and only a few more watching. But it quickly became apparent that something wonderful was taking place. By the second year, that of the 75th anniversary, the parade had grown five-fold, from 125 to 625, and the audience had grown by an even larger multiple. At this point, University Circle Incorporated came forward with a proposal to join forces with the museum to stage the event annually, and it has become a Cleveland institution. Today the parade enlists about 1,000 participants and draws an audience of about 50,000. In some years it has drawn as many as 80,000.

The challenge of community events is to produce a product, rather than just talk, and also to develop something that truly has community input, rather than being dictated from above. It needs to combine hard work and fun. How do you make a costume that looks like a hippopotamus? How do you make a costume that looks like Monet’s water lilies? It takes a special sort of talent to figure out how to accomplish tasks like these and then share them with people of all ages from all walks of life.

To start with it requires a lot of diplomacy to find art teachers, schools, community art programs, and community groups that are interested in participating. Then you need to mobilize this work force, and come up with a concept that’s artistically vital, which allows everyone to play a creative role. An English class at Coventry Elementary School, for example, celebrated Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils. Everyone made a daffodil costume and then recited the poem as they strolled the circle.

The creations for the parade invariably include costumes, masks, and floats, and follow a small set of rather simple rules: no words or slogans, no motorized vehicles. The result was an odd combination of madcap creativity and impressive discipline. The variety of costumes and the range of the participants was somewhat mind-boggling.

As the project developed into a festival, more and more groups joined the fun: poets, musicians, food vendors, and so forth. In addition, as the project grew, experts were brought in to provide advice and instruction in particular fields such as making giant puppets and stilt-walking. Often this entailed cultural exchange with artists of  South America or Africa. No attempt was made to homogenize the style of the costumes, and the parade offered the opportunity for distinctly African-American, Mexican, Caribbean, and Anglo modes of expression. What’s striking is how with a bit of guidance seemingly ordinary people can fabricate visually stunning and stunningly original creations.

Oddly enough, one of the program’s biggest enthusiasts was the museum’s late curator of decorative arts, Henry Hawley, an exemplar of elite taste and in many regards somewhat to the right of Louis XIV in his approach to modern life. As he repeated to me more than once with regard to Robin: “No one else could have done it.”

Just a few months after the first Parade the Circle, Robin also organized a chalk festival which brought both professional artists and hundreds of small children to make chalk drawings on the walkways of CMA’s front terrace. This was the second chalk festival staged in the US, after the first in Santa Barbara. She brought this idea with her and there are now dozens of chalk festivals on the East Coast and in the Midwest which were inspired by Cleveland’s.

Robin currently is in the process of being evicted from her studio, an otherwise empty building that once housed the Coventry Elementary School, just a block from Coventry Road. She needs a new studio by the end of September. Seemingly unphased, she is pushing forward with plans to create an installation with performance, titled Hallowed Owls, at the Cleveland Public Theater (CPT), which just honored her with their Premiere Fellowship.

The work has evolved over the last few years, during which Robin has been brainstorming oversized costumes inspired by birds of prey. She decided to focus on owls for her first foray in this genre. The installation will transform the decommissioned St. Mary’s Orthodox Church on the CPT campus into a stylized vision of a woodland throughout the seasons of the year. The Iconostasis, visible through hanging foliage of dyed silk, flips the environment placing the woodland inside the Nave instead of without. As Robin describes it, the performance begins and ends in winter as everything ultimately does. Dancers, a poet, a vocalist and a musician will enliven the transformation. Her installation will be on view Saturday, September 6, for CPT’s Pandemonium fundraiser. Additional performances bringing the installation to life will begin on October 2 for two weekends– 7 and 8 pm Thursdays through Saturdays, and at 2 and 3 pm on Sundays. Reservations are strongly suggested. It’s something not to miss.