NEW WORK–The FRONT Fellows, at Transformer Station: a milestone, or an example that will be followed?

The exhibition New Work: Amanda D. King, Charmaine Spencer, Erykah Townsend, Antwoine Washington at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station, is one ofthe key events in recent efforts by arts institutions, philanthropists and artists to advance contemporary art and support the careers of emerging artists in Northeast Ohio. Coming out of the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art that unfortunately ended operations in 2024, the capstone exhibition was created to showcase works by four award recipients in the FRONT Futures Fellows program, an effort connected to the triennial focused particularly onthe careers of emerging BIPOC artists. In addition to the exhibition at the Transformer Station, the three-year-long program included $25,000 stipends for the fellows and a trip to New York City. The FRONT Triennial, FRONT Fellows exhibition, and even the Transformer Station itself were all spearheaded by philanthropists and collectors Fred Bidwell and his partner, artist Laura Ruth Bidwell, and supported by many other arts professionals including people of color.

The artists who received the fellowships were chosen by a national jury of art professionals. All creatively prompt the viewer to engage with a wide range of aesthetic, cultural, historical, social, and experiential themes. More specifically, the art works explore themes that challenge social constructs around family relationships and social equity, the contemplation of the role of memories in our thinking, or the stages of life. Such critical approaches to content are signal characteristics of advanced contemporary art.

Amanda King’s artistic practice exists at the intersection of culture, community and institutions, and across a range of overlapping artistic practices including photography, multimedia installation, creative collaborations, and conceptual art. Her education in law (JD, Case Western Reserve University), photography and art history (Bryn Mawr University) informed her socially engaged art-making, which is focused on the critique of systems of repression and institutions as well as community-based arts advocacy. Humble Gritis an installation of four separately titled works (including multimedia sculpture, photography and sound) in the form of a poem written in collaboration with and performed by Kisha Nicole Foster.

The most interesting aspect of King’s varied works is how they reference cultural practices in ways that evoke notions of the body and its use to perform, play, strain, endure, and worship in those cultural practices. Objects that are used (sports equipment, benches) are simultaneously stand-ins for the human body. But King’s conceptual strategy joins objects and materials that normally do not go together, such as baseballs and rosary beads, in order to jumpstart in the mind of the viewer associations and meanings one would not otherwise contemplate. That the references are women and girls and the work of Senga Nengudi all point to a gendered understanding of the body and Black women’s experiences. (It should be emphasized that none of the artists in this exhibition copy form, content, or style from other artists or cultures. References they mention are only a starting point for their unique creations). Nengudi’s works are characterized by performing with women’s nylon stockings of various colors that are stretched and pulled, and were interpreted as references to bodily changes associated with pregnancy and giving birth. Along with the fact that this is an installation that one walks around, that involves sound, and that possibly evokes a visceral reaction to the content, italigns with art discourses that see understandings of the world through an embodied experience.

Award-winning sculptor and Cleveland Instituteof Art graduate Charmaine Spencer’s sculpture merges the forms found in precolonial African cultures and nature, along with metaphysical, particularly spiritual, understandings. But far from creating a pastiche, her practice is a starting point for a material and conceptual synthesis involving natural materials such as clay, reed grass, soil, and hair along with manufactured materials such as glass, rope, burlap, and cardboard. Rather than make preparatory drawings or mock-ups, she often composes in the process of making finished work. This allows for the incorporation of spontaneityinto the creation of her work—a practice that many contemporaryartistshave employed to avoid an overemphasis onpremeditation in the artistic process. This is also found in ceramic and woodcarving practices used for centuries in many African cultures such as those of the Yoruba people in Nigeria. Objects emerging from this process of creation are sometimes eerily animate.

Spencer titled the installation of sculptures for this exhibition The Fifth Vessel. It includes five container-like forms, some topped with lids, all of which have a bodily presence. Spencer has created several works in her career informedby African sculpturethat housea spirit or life force. Some sculptures are inspired by ancient Egyptian containers called canopic jars used in mummification practices to store human organs so thatthe life force they contain could live on in the afterlife. Others, like Human,have forms inspired by scarification practices. In these arresting works, as in others not in the exhibition, Spencer framestheir meanings in philosophical terms: the ethical choices, positive evolution, enlightenment, and connections between earthly and spiritual realms.

Artists have longfound inspiration in African cultural forms and practices, but a major shift occurred in the twentieth century. Postcolonial critics rightly argued that while modern artists such as Picasso often misrecognized and distorted what they appropriated, contemporary African diasporic artists, by contrast, often forged a cultural reconnection with the arts of the continent in what the late artist and art historian (and Cleveland native) Michael D. Harris called a “transatlantic dialogue” within African diasporic cultures. That said, great art is not made of references alone, no matter how erudite the maker. It consists always of a response to the present and Spencer’s work is a prescient call to recognize many issues from sustainability to justice.

Erykah Townsend (BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art) makes art that comments critically or satirically on our relationship with popular culture, often drawing on the experiences and consumer products of her childhood—such as television programs, or objects associated with holidays like Christmas—as in her exhibition currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Her practice involves making works by hand, even though some refer to machine-made products. Townsend said that she sometimes “wanted to make art about making art” in the sense that experimentation that goes into making art is akin to children’s play. This is especially true in For Pete’s Sake!that references the award-winning if somewhat controversial children’s book The Snowy Day, published in 1962 by Ezra Jack Keats. It featureda Black child at a time when suchbooks either excluded Black children altogether or rendered them stereotypically. The book depictsa child experiencing an unusually snowy day without reference to race. For Townsend, who has frequently made works drawing on her own childhood, the book evoked memories of her own experiences of joy as a child. Culturally, winter is represented as depressing, but children find joy in it anyhow. Several works, shaped like windows, frame interiors and children at play. They are hung in the gallery like the facade of a two-story house, positioning the viewer as voyeur. The style is childlike: some mimic the crudeness of a child’s drawing while others are airbrushed to make it appear like graffiti on a foggy window. Smaller oil pastels on felt and paper alsoreference playfulness and the unconscious.

Townsend is frustrated by some in the art world who tend to interpret her work only as a message about race or racism, particularly if that work depicts a Black person. She has lots of company. The problem with this tendency, according to artist and cultural critic Coco Fusco, is that art by Black people (even if abstract) is expected to literally represent race, which precludes the non-Black viewer from being able to see the work in a “universal” way—that is, see themselves in it. Darby English, in his 2007 book How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, also addresses this in a broader cultural and theoretical context arguing among other things that this literalism does not allow a fuller understanding of art by Black artists on its own terms. Townsend’s work deftly asks us all to consider our relationship to popular culture in new critical ways.

Like others who studied art at HBCUs, Antwoine Washington (BFA, Southern University) received an excellent education in African American, African, and Western art history, as well as other subjects. That educational foundation continues to inform his current work. His distinctive use of color, for example, is partly informed by the AfriCOBRAmovement (whose famous founding members Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell live in Cleveland) as well as color theory. Washington initially focused on photographic realism, but has transitioned to more expressive painting after having suffered a stroke in 2018. Creative adaptation to his condition also meant changing his artistic practice by thinking of art making, particularly painting, in terms of construction. He lays his canvases flat, then finishes them upright as he builds up the surface.

Washington’s works in his installation Jane and Juneconsist of paintings with heavily layered impasto that are meant to depict memory-evoking landscapes. Memory, grief and longing are also explored in the voicemail recordings of his grandmothers in a sound installation one hears intimately using headphones. Washington’s interest in preserving and documenting history and his references to memories and the spaces in which they are evoked align with the theorization of sites of memory, which some artists and academics explored in the 1990s via  the relationship between history (public, institutional, and fixed) and memory (private, personal, and ephemeral). In Black diasporic communities historically excluded from official history (as in, for example, their lack of representation in public monuments) it was artistic interventions that explored these exclusions and preserved history in alternative ways. Although Washington’s aesthetically appealing paintings andthe sound installation reinforcehis ideas about sites of memory, the paintings seem to be about a wider range of aesthetic issues than what he articulates clearly.

It is clear that New Work has successfully achieved many of its goals by showcasing the work of local Black artists who merit greater recognition by virtue of an innovative initiative found in few if any other cities like Cleveland. Other achievements are questionable. Of course, participation in a high-profile exhibition and support program arguably always helps artists professionally, and many artists of any background would jump at the opportunity. What remains to be seen is the degree to which the careers of these artists benefit in the future.

A bigger question is whether the region will ever again see an effort like this now that FRONT has ceased operations. Fred Bidwell told me that there remains an aspiration to replicate an effort like the FRONT Fellows program in the future with other organizations and funders, as a recent conversation with Assembly for the Arts—an organization aligned with many of the goals of FRONT’s programs—made clear. But he is not sure about the realization of similar fellowship programs in the future given the funding challenges faced by nonprofit arts organizations locally. Bidwell emphasized that a key component of the FRONT Fellows program was professional support for the fellows in the form of travel and connections with international arts professionals. Among the scrapped plans when FRONT wound down was a planned international trip to the Venice Biennale (replaced with a cash stipend in addition to the $25,000 award) and the connections with the professionals who participated in the triennial. Will the legacy of this ambitious and much-needed programming live on only as an important cultural milestone, or as an example that will be followed?