Impart 216: Representation, Repair, Engagement, and Rebranding with Murals in Mount Pleasant, via the Transformative Art Fund

“When I moved to Cleveland in 1979 or ’80, the mural program was just an anti-graffiti program, so it wasn’t nearly the murals that they have now,” says Impart 216 lead artist Robin Robinson. She had frequently visited Cleveland as a child of Philadelphia because she had family here. “It was just people painting over the graffiti, making that community better. My thing has always been the therapeutic part of art, and using art as therapy to heal communities, so that passion or that creed has always led to having community engagement in the murals or the artwork.”

Robinson later lived in Indiana for nearly 20 years but returned to Cleveland in 2011. She was startled by how dilapidated her former neighborhood of Glenville and the East 105th Street corridor had become.

“I came back to Glenville and knew I had to do something,” she recalls. “I have to bring this spark or some hope or some positive voice back to the community.”

Robinson is an award-winning painter, sculptor, photographer, community activist and educator/art therapist who facilitates art therapy related programs for youth and senior citizens in the Glenville community.

For her Transformative Art Fund IMPART216 project, she is working with twelve artists in teams of two to create six murals. The teams are: Alicia Vasquez & Santana Watson; Rickey Lewis & Christa Freehands; Dayz Whun & Lacy Talley; Kwesi Agyare & Dr. Tameka Ellington; Darius Stewart & Lolita Watson; and Nathalie Bermudez & Jurnee Weeams. Their murals will adorn a cluster of buildings including the public library and six retail spaces at the corner of East 140th Street, Kinsman and Union avenues in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. The murals will be highly visible to pedestrians and motorists passing through that corner of the Mt. Pleasant community. The project was awarded $393,397 from the Transformative Art Fund.

Robin earned her BFA from Temple University and Tyler School of Art in her beloved Philadelphia, where she grew up. She also had an early introduction to the power of murals, as The City of Brotherly Love earned the additional moniker of The Mural Capital of the United States because they enhanced the urban environment by peppering it with murals throughout the city. This spring, Robin led 20 artists and members from the Transformative Arts Fund committee on a weekend tour of Philly’s murals to immerse them in Philadelphia’s roughly 6,000 murals on buildings, houses and alley walls.

One of Robinson’s primary objectives is to educate and expose the community to African American and ethnic art to provide the community a visual representation of their own voices through transformative, inspirational, monumental murals that they help create, which ultimately gives them pride of place and ownership. In 2015, convinced of the healing power of art, Robin created the “Urban Renaissance with heART” program for Sankofa Fine Arts Plus, where she serves as Executive Director.

“As a Black artist it is my responsibility to translate the otherwise ignored voices of my community into artworks that are engaging aesthetically while being intrinsically thought provoking and socially relevant,” she has said.

As part of her work with Sankofa and now with her Transformative Arts Fund project, Robin remains dedicated, she says, “to bringing fine art outside of the traditional/restrictive art venues into the urban community in the form of co-creative, collaborative, public art projects and experiences.”

The dozen artists of IMPART 216 include six established local muralists and six artists who have not painted murals before but are interested in learning the process. In addition to learning how to paint a mural, those artists will also be directly involved with the community engagement process and the city government component for design review and approval.

“We’re working with New Point, which is the new Mt. Pleasant Community Development Corporation,” informs Robin. “We wanted to work in Mt. Pleasant because it is a very neglected area that has a rich history but has had a problem identifying and branding itself. Our murals will be a spark to get that identification and rebranding process launched.”

The initial part of the project required repairing portions of the old buildings before murals could be applied. Each were applied with industrial weatherproofing varnish to protect the murals from the inclement weather conditions in Cleveland.

“We’re doing a lot of community engagement with the library and the CDC,” Robinson says “We have distributed a survey amongst the community so that they can give us their feedback, and we’ve had already several engagements to let the community know what we are doing and keep them involved in the decision-making process about the murals.”

Robin says that having serious community involvement helps protect the murals because neighborhood citizens feel ownership. Typically, community members then take care of the surrounding properties such as lawns or buildings around the artwork. To date, none of the murals she has been involved with has ever been vandalized.

The Mt. Pleasant murals will be painted during June and July, and the unveiling ceremony is planned for Saturday, August 16. “We’re thinking about closing down a portion of Union Avenue for a community-wide block party to celebrate the unveiling of the murals,” Robinson concludes. “This project is a spark for a brighter future for Mt. Pleasant and an example for the entire East Side of Cleveland.”

Robin will remain involved in further strategic planning with New Point to continue to identify initiatives that will enhance and revitalize the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood.

Impart 216 Community Fest
East 138 at Union
1 – 5 PM Saturday, August 16
Free

IMPART216: Breathing Creativity into Community
Lead Artist: Robin Robinson
Institutional Partner: Ingenuity
Funding Amount: $393,397