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On September11, the ARTcade will lose one of its most innovative galleries when groop gallery closes after of drawing hundreds downtown each month for opening receptions and events for the last two and a half years.
While this will be a loss for the ARTcade, it will not hamper the artistic endeavors of groop collective founders Mike Moritz and Abe Olvido. Moritz and Olvido were producing multimedia events and performances all over Cleveland when they were offered an ARTcade space in April 2002.
“The arrangement was ideal,” Olvido says. “We got a break on the rent because the work we exhibited was not going to sell, as it was experimental and experiential. In exchange, we brought people into the space; we were ultimately marketers for the ARTcade.”
The ARTcade was established in 2001 when Art Metro gallery owner Joan Perch moved her space from the Flats to the Colonial Arcade. Her goal, and the goal of building's landlord, was to create an urban center for art. While several galleries have come and gone since the ARTcade was established, groop gallery has become a fixture in the mall-like setting. While two and a half years may not seem like an especially long time, it is in Cleveland, where financial support for small artist endeavors is hard to come by, and artists and gallerists simply get tired of working two jobs or going into debt to put on exhibitions.
“When we tell people that we have a downtown gallery space, they immediately think we must be trust-fund boys,” says Moritz. “But that's simply not the case; we use our hard-earned money to put on exhibitions and to produce our events.”
However, it is clear that the money and the time groop spent at the ARTcade have been worthwhile. In 2003, Moritz and Olvido produced 24 art events — 12 exhibitions in their gallery, as well as 12 productions outside the space
“It was intense,” says Olvido, “but we love the energy it created; we're still experiencing a kind of reverberation from what we did last year.” Energy seems to radiate from Moritz and Olvido, yet their greatest collective skill is their ability to foster collaboration. “The only prerequisite [for] working with us is enthusiasm,” Olvido says.
This cooperative spirit has led them to form alliances with people from all areas of the arts community, and they have experimented with filmmaking, dance, sound, light and performance. Collaboration was embodied in the full-blown happenings, or formations, which took place twice during the gallery's tenure. The formation series was part atmospheric, with colored lights and ambient sound, and part performance, with people carrying out a series of out-of-context, and at times mundane, acts in the midst of crowds of befuddled but thoroughly engaged onlookers. The happenings also served as backdrops for other creative people, like alt-rockers Baked Mice, who shot footage for a music video during one formation installment.
Moritz and Olvido also exhibited work by emerging and established artists at their ARTcade gallery, giving them solo shows. In April, their space was the site for veteran artist Laila Voss's Chalking performance, and the following month they mounted Rising Bound, new works by fourth year Cleveland Institute of Art student Charmaine Spencer.
While the groop guys believe that having the gallery space drove them to produce monthly exhibitions and projects, they are confident that they will continue to create large and small-scale artworks and productions. This seems highly likely, since they have commandeered spaces all over Cleveland, from the downtown cityscape — where they projected their logo on to the bland façade of a building — to the City Club, where, during a panel discussion on the local arts scene in 2001, they and several co-conspirators — dressed in white shirts and dark pants — marched into the venerable auditorium, lined up against a wall and stared blankly across the room.
And they have gained credibility within the mainstream art community. This summer, groop collaborated with Ken Chapin of Move Art Audience to present Faster/Higher, a happening on a grand scale, at MOCA .
The ARTcade will no doubt lament the loss of groop; groop, however, will continue to expand, expound and explore the boundaries of contemporary art outside of the constraints of four gallery walls.